In the race to build America\u2019s first small modular reactors, the U.S. Department of Energy has picked its front-runners.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, the agency awarded a\u00a0total of $800 million<\/a> in grants, originally allocated under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, to two projects developing different kinds of 300-megawatt light-water reactors.<\/p>\n These third-generation reactors are shrunken-down, less powerful versions of the time-tested first- and second-generation designs that make up the vast majority of the nation\u2019s fleet of 94 large-scale reactors.<\/p>\n Neither of the third-generation designs \u2014 nor any of the fourth-generation models, which use coolants other than water to reach higher temperatures and which the Trump administration has also invested in \u2014 has yet been approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And $400 million each for the two just-selected projects is likely to cover only a\u00a0sliver of their total costs. Getting the green light on a\u00a0design before a\u00a0reactor is built doesn\u2019t necessarily always work. The first new large-scale reactors built from scratch in the U.S. in a\u00a0generation came online as a\u00a0pair over the past two years but were billions of dollars over budget, in part because construction revealed necessary tweaks to the blueprints that then took developers months to get approved by the NRC. Still, the effort is part of the Trump administration\u2019s push to boost both generations of SMRs in a\u00a0high-stakes, multibillion-dollar bid to reinforce the nation\u2019s world-leading nuclear industry before China, with its rapid construction of new reactors, becomes the No. 1\u00a0fission user.<\/p>\n The federally owned Tennessee Valley Authority will get $400 million to build the first BWRX-300, the reactor designed by a\u00a0joint venture between the U.S. energy behemoth GE Vernova and the Japanese industrial heavyweight Hitachi. Over the past three years, GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy\u2019s design has emerged as a\u00a0leader in America\u2019s SMR race, thanks to GE and Hitachi\u2019s long history of successfully building large-scale boiling-water reactors.<\/p>\n In May, Ontario Power Generation, the state-owned utility in Canada\u2019s most populous province, finalized plans<\/a> to build what\u2019s likely to be the first SMR in North America, one of four BWRX-300 to eventually be built at its Darlington nuclear plant.<\/p>\n Piggybacking off OPG\u2019s effort, the TVA \u2014 among the few entities in the U.S. that mirror Canada\u2019s government-owned utility model \u2014 plans to construct America\u2019s first BWRX-300 at its Clinch River site, just south of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Estimates<\/a> from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggest the reactor will cost significantly more than the far more powerful large-scale Westinghouse AP1000 reactor, which the U.S. finally completed two of at Southern Company\u2019s Alvin W. Vogtle Generation Electric Generating Plant in northern Georgia over the past two years. But the theory with SMRs is that less powerful machines will require a\u00a0higher quantity of reactors, and that the identical design will bring down costs. The Energy Department grant is meant to discount the price tag of that second-of-a-kind unit.<\/p>\n