English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
Esperanto
French
German
Greek
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Urdu“Nuclear power plant” may summon a dated mental image of a distinctively flared cylinder, complete with a plume of white steam rising above it. That’s the familiar perception of a nuclear reactor’s cooling tower. However, today’s nuclear power industry has a profile far more complex than that.
At the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, world-renowned nuclear experts are working with industry partners to develop tomorrow’s nuclear power plants. Their motivation is clear: Nuclear energy can drastically reduce U.S. dependence on greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels. This is important for the nation to meet its rapidly rising power needs without producing new carbon emissions.
Nuclear energy is the nation’s most reliable source of carbon-free power, according to Argonne’s Director of Chemical and Fuel Cycle Technologies Mark Williamson. Williamson leads the laboratory’s nuclear chemical engineering team, which conducts research and development in used nuclear fuel recycling, fuel fabrication and safeguards for next-generation nuclear energy systems.
“At Argonne, we can focus on everything from solutions that lower capital investment and operating costs for nuclear power plants to developing long-term management of used fuel to identifying and mitigating the risk of nuclear material proliferation as other countries deploy their own nuclear systems.” — Mark Williamson, Argonne National Laboratory
“Nuclear is responsible for about 20% of total U.S. electricity and 50% of the country’s carbon-free electricity,” said Williamson. “More impressively, since 1992, U.S. nuclear reactors have produced power — carbon-free — at 92% capacity per year. That is far better than the capacity of gas and coal.”
Nuclear scientists and engineers like those at Argonne are working closely with industry to move the U.S. beyond dated perceptions and vocabulary of the science and its potential. They talk today about standard, small modular reactors and micro reactors; fast reactors and advanced reactors such as liquid metal, molten salt, and gas-cooled reactors.
Argonne’s researchers have a multitude of historical experiments and an abundance of established expertise upon which to draw. They also collaborate with industry partners equally devoted to innovating and improving nuclear technologies. With encouragement and funding from DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE), Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy, and others, companies such as the ones listed below work with experts at DOE national laboratories to create a new silhouette for the U.S. nuclear landscape.
Partnerships with Power
ARC Clean Technology
Argonne has worked with ARC Clean Technology for more than 10 years to provide expertise in reactor core physics, safety analysis, shielding calculations, source term calculations, primary system equipment sizing and overall primary system layout in support of their ARC-100 reactor. Recently, Argonne was part of a new project award with ARC Clean Technology to develop a U.S.-based sodium cooled reactor that has a long-lived core with an advanced power conversion system. The project could lead to many “small reactors” that can operate economically and efficiently, providing safe, viable energy resources worldwide.
Oklo, Inc.
Argonne has worked with Oklo Inc. for a number of years in the area of code validation and verification. Recently, data from Argonne’s Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop (METL) facility and Thermal Hydraulic Experimental Test Article (THETA) pool-type sodium facility helped Oklo acquire experimental data for validation of reactor thermal hydraulic and safety analysis codes used in their license application to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
They also work with Argonne on several projects to investigate used nuclear fuel recycling, which provides a sustainable source of fuel, may help lower the cost of fuel and introduces sizable cost-savings on hazardous waste storage. The work also includes developing advanced sensors that allow for early detection and diagnosis of necessary plant repair and maintenance and security.
TerraPower
TerraPower partners with Argonne to advance the development of TerraPower’s sodium fast reactor and molten salt energy storage technology, Natrium™. The collaboration with TerraPower focuses on supporting the Natrium project in methods development for reactor design and licensing, fuel qualification by providing data from historical irradiation and transient tests, experiments for qualification of structural materials in high-temperature sodium environment, and fuel handling system component testing at Argonne’s METL facility. Innovative designs, such as Natrium’s reactor-plus-storage design, can provide clean, firm and cost-competitive power to grids that are using increasing amounts of renewables.
Terrestrial Energy
Terrestrial Energy USA, Inc. is developing an Integral Molten Salt Reactor© for U.S. market deployment. Argonne’s Molten Salt Research Facility has extensive capabilities to measure properties of the molten salt fuel used in the reactor. Instead of trying to do complex testing on their own, Terrestrial Energy relies on Argonne for the facilities, tools and expertise to measure properties such as heat capacity and thermal conductivity. This information supports the licensing needed to commercialize a nuclear power plant and presents a safer, more efficient, carbon-free way to produce electricity.
Westinghouse
Westinghouse is a company pursuing liquid lead-cooled fast reactor technology. It turns to long-time partner Argonne for historic data and capabilities as well as for contemporary modeling and simulation of fast reactors. Westinghouse is using the same suite of fast reactor computer codes supported by the DOE-NE’s Fast Reactor Program and is looking to extend the scope of this collaboration beyond computer modeling to include development of ad-hoc experimental infrastructures. In addition to performance and efficiency, Westinghouse is committed to demonstrating the safety of this type of fast reactor technology.
X-Energy
X-energy and Argonne are collaborating to bring smaller, high-efficiency/low-waste nuclear reactors online by 2030. Leveraging Argonne’s expertise and its unique ability to provide highly detailed computational fluid dynamics simulations of the thermal hydraulic performance of their Xe-100 reactor design, X-energy engineers can model the reactor’s fuel burnup rate, thermal efficiency and waste output with increased precision. This increases safety and reduces development time. Once operational, the Xe-100 may provide reliable, carbon-free, on-demand electricity to the power grid at multiple scales — including locally — with less stress on the grid and lower upfront costs.
Opportunities for innovation
Other nuclear industry partners also rely on the DOE’s complex of national laboratories and DOE-NE’s Fast Reactor Program. This helps them expand their ability to test new designs, validate software codes used in licensing, and improve operations and maintenance procedures with cutting-edge machine learning and artificial intelligence tools.
“The licensing of U.S. nuclear systems is considered the gold standard throughout the world,” said Williamson. “We work with industry to help decrease the time and cost of that licensing process.”
Argonne’s unique and powerful nuclear facilities, such as METL, THETA, used fuel recycling and molten salt technology development labs, provide resources and expertise industry partners need. These are supplemented by world-class DOE Office of Science user facilities, such as the Advanced Photon Source, the new ATLAS Materials Irradiation Station, and the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility.
In one example among many, SHINE Technologies and Argonne received federal funding to study the chemistry and technologies underpinning nuclear fuel recycling. This work will address multiple challenges for the nuclear industry. For example, it could help them gain the maximum benefit of the fuel used and help the U.S. meet its nonproliferation goals. It could also reduce the amount of waste produced and potentially transform the need to store that waste for long periods of time.
“At Argonne, we can focus on everything from solutions that lower capital investment and operating costs for nuclear power plants to developing long-term management of used fuel to identifying and mitigating the risk of nuclear material proliferation as other countries deploy their own nuclear systems,” said Williamson. “There are so many opportunities for innovation.”
The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility provides supercomputing capabilities to the scientific and engineering community to advance fundamental discovery and understanding in a broad range of disciplines. Supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program, the ALCF is one of two DOE Leadership Computing Facilities in the nation dedicated to open science.
About the Advanced Photon Source
The U. S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory is one of the world’s most productive X-ray light source facilities. The APS provides high-brightness X-ray beams to a diverse community of researchers in materials science, chemistry, condensed matter physics, the life and environmental sciences, and applied research. These X-rays are ideally suited for explorations of materials and biological structures; elemental distribution; chemical, magnetic, electronic states; and a wide range of technologically important engineering systems from batteries to fuel injector sprays, all of which are the foundations of our nation’s economic, technological, and physical well-being. Each year, more than 5,000 researchers use the APS to produce over 2,000 publications detailing impactful discoveries, and solve more vital biological protein structures than users of any other X-ray light source research facility. APS scientists and engineers innovate technology that is at the heart of advancing accelerator and light-source operations. This includes the insertion devices that produce extreme-brightness X-rays prized by researchers, lenses that focus the X-rays down to a few nanometers, instrumentation that maximizes the way the X-rays interact with samples being studied, and software that gathers and manages the massive quantity of data resulting from discovery research at the APS.
This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.
Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System
This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, under contract number DE‐AC02‐06CH11357. This research used resources of the Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System (ATLAS), a DOE Office of Science User Facility.
Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America’s scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.
