Awarded projects to support the licensing and regulation of HALEU – a crucial material needed to demonstrate and deploy advanced nuclear reactors.
August 30, 2024
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Seventeen Projects Will Support Licensing of HALEU for Commercial Use
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today awarded $17 million to 16 experiment and analysis projects whose publicly available data will assist the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in the licensing and regulation of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) – a crucial material needed to demonstrate and deploy advanced nuclear reactors.
“Many advanced reactor developers require HALEU to achieve smaller designs, longer operating cycles, and increased efficiencies over existing technologies,” said Acting Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Dr. Michael Goff. “The data collected from these projects will support efforts to ensure HALEU infrastructure is licensed and regulated in time for reactor demonstrations and deployments”
These 16 projects are the first to be funded under the DOE & NRC's Criticality Benchmarking solicitation and will cover five topic areas that support the development of data that will be useful to the NRC licensing evaluation process and industry’s licensing submittals pertaining to commercial-scale HALEU operations. The publicly available data developed from these projects will enable efficient future design and safety reviews and help the nuclear industry develop new and novel solutions to address data gaps.
The project teams span six national laboratories and include partnerships with six universities and multiple industry partners.
A complete list of the topic areas and awarded projects can be viewed here.
This joint DOE & NRC project falls under DOE’s HALEU Availability Program which supports the availability of HALEU for civilian domestic research, development, demonstration, and commercial use. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 provided $700 million to the HALEU Availability Program, up to $60 million is made available through this project.
DOE plans to issue two more calls for criticality benchmarking proposals. The second call is planned for early 2025.
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