Elements needed in the development of the next generation of reactors.

The global need for decarbonization, energy security, and climate adaptation establishes a diverse set of design features that the next generation of nuclear reactors can enable: power peaking at time-scales of hours, days, and seasonal, production of electricity, dry heat, high temperature heat, propulsion, district heating, and other industrial applications, black start, remote deployment, and power scales from a few Megawatts to tens, hundreds, and thousands of megawatts. This future energy portfolio would require a significant growth and diversification of the nuclear energy sector in the United States, which today includes under 100 operating nuclear power plants, powering steam turbines that produce baseload electricity, with many of the plants designed and built over 40 years ago and improved over the decades. Economic competitiveness of the energy products to be provided by the nuclear reactors, management of technical risk, and the development time of bringing new reactor technology to commercialization are elements to be balanced in responding to a broad range of growing energy needs and in establishing the ability to achieve rapid innovation cycles that allow for future adaptation to the evolution of the energy markets. Development of supply chains and work force needs to occur at the same time with development and testing of new technology elements and new business cases. Testing of new technology requires infrastructure, and hence investment in commercial, as well as national and international infrastructure. For example, employment of new fuels or new materials require irradiation testing; employment of new coolants requires scaled experiments that demonstrate the modeling-predicted behavior of safety systems. When data is not available, either the data gap needs to be engineered around, so that margins to failure are large and the data is not needed for demonstrating safety performance, or the infrastructure for generating the data needs to be available for use, or new infrastructure needs to be built. This talk will discuss features of the next generation of nuclear reactors, the type of energy products that they can be designed to provide, and elements needed for the deployment of new reactor technologies and their associated fuel cycles.