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Meet the INL experts supporting TerraPower’s advanced reactor development

Over the next few decades, dozens of coal power plants around the country will reach the end of their operational lives, and will need to be replaced with new, clean energy sources.

The city of Kemmerer, Wyoming, home to a coal-fired power plant that is slated for retirement in 2025, has found itself in the spotlight as the center of a new kind of clean energy project.

Kemmerer is the proposed site of a new sodium-cooled fast reactor plant designed by nuclear innovation company TerraPower. The Natrium reactor could help the community remain an energy town and continue providing jobs to support the local economy, and it could be operating around the end of the decade.

But there’s a long path to traverse between here and there for TerraPower to commercialize its technology, and many private innovators in the nuclear space lack the dedicated facilities needed to take a reactor from the drawing board to the real world. That’s where the National Reactor Innovation Center (NRIC) supports companies like TerraPower, by facilitating partnerships between the private and public sector to enable the technology demonstrations and eventual deployment of advanced reactor projects like Natrium. A significant portion of that work is taking place at Idaho National Laboratory (INL), utilizing its unique expertise and nuclear research and development facilities.

The NRIC team includes a dedicated group of professionals from across INL who specialize in helping the private industry navigate the steps from concept through testing, licensing and construction. They lead research and development activities and consult with TerraPower to execute NRIC’s mission of accelerating advanced reactor demonstration and deployment. 

NRIC has the resources of the national laboratory complex at its disposal to help advanced reactor developers like TerraPower progress toward commercialization. With NRIC’s support, the nation can act more quickly to address the need for clean and affordable energy. For more information, visit nric.inl.gov.

About Idaho National Laboratory

Battelle Energy Alliance manages INL for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy. INL is the nation’s center for nuclear energy research and development, and also performs research in each of DOE’s strategic goal areas: energy, national security, science and the environment. For more information, visit www.inl.gov. Follow us on social media: TwitterFacebookInstagram and LinkedIn.