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Thursday, December 4, 2025
Energy Department Selects TVA and Holtec to Advance Deployment of U.S. Small Modular Reactors | Department of Energy
Energy Department Selects TVA and Holtec to Advance Deployment of U.S. Small Modular Reactors | Department of Energy
Energy Department Promises $800 Million for SMRs
The Energy Department has picked the Tennessee Valley Authority and Holtec Government Services to split $800 million for small modular reactors, at the TVA’s Clinch River site, in Oak Ridge, and at Holtec’s Palisades nuclear plant, near Kalamazoo, Michigan.
The TVA wants to build a BWRX-300 reactor, a scaled-down version of GE’s boiling water reactor, which is meant to be easier to build, with simplified safety systems. The first of those is planned by Ontario Power Generation, which eventually wants to build four. The second would be a TVA project. Those two utilities are coordinating closely with the NRC and Canadian regulators.
In May, the TVA applied to the NRC for a construction permit. Ontario Power Generation already has permission to build. Duke Energy is investing to advance the licensing of the reactor.
Holtec, an international nuclear company that manufactures dry casks for spent fuel storage and other nuclear components in a factory in Camden, N.J., has a design for a 300-megawatt pressurized water reactor. The company does extensive work in reactor decommissioning, and bought the Palisades nuclear plant with the intention of dismantling it, but is now on the verge of restarting it, with help from the Department of Energy and the state of Michigan. It wants to build two SMRs on the site, which it would own and operate.
Both the Michigan and Tennessee projects have strong local support.
Safety Evaluation Related to the U.S. SFR Owner, LLC Construction Permit Application for the Kemmerer Power Station, Unit 1, (EPID L-2024-CPS-0000) - ML25329A252.pdf
Safety Evaluation Related to the U.S. SFR Owner, LLC Construction Permit Application for the Kemmerer Power Station, Unit 1, (EPID L-2024-CPS-0000) - ML25329A252.pdf
Natrium Closes in on a Construction Permit
The staff of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has concluded that there are no safety issues in the way of giving a construction permit to TerraPower to build its Natrium plant, a sodium-cooled low-pressure, high-temperature fast reactor.
The staff asserted that its finding was “the first use of a fully risk-informed, performance-based approach to establish the licensing basis for a commercial power reactor.” Although a performance-based rule, like Part 53, would be needed to achieve that milestone.
The term “performance-based” means that the requirements were stated in terms of objectives to be met, but that the NRC did not prescribe precisely how the applicant was supposed to meet them. “Risk-informed” has been a goal of the commission for about 30 years, and means that the attention of regulators, plant designers, and managers is focused on requirements that are significant to safety.
The company has already begun building an accompanying molten salt system that will store energy from the reactor in the form of heat, to produce electricity in varying amounts, depending on grid demand. In current-generation nuclear plants, the electricity-generating system is integral to plant design, and its construction must also wait for issuance of a construction permit. But in the Natrium design, the reactor is de-coupled from electricity generation. The reactor will run at a steady heat output, but electricity production can be higher or lower, allowing the owner to sell into the market when wholesale prices are higher, and withhold production when the grid is flooded with cheap surges of renewable energy.
TerraPower still needs a hearing and a vote by the Commission before it gets a construction permit, and after that, it has to build the plant in adherence with the design and with various quality control requirements. But the finding from the staff, a major milestone, came a month earlier than scheduled, and despite accelerating the schedule it was also under budget. It follows a finding by the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, an independent oversight group, approving the design.
The NRC’s approval is contained in a report of more than 750 pages, of which 13 are a reference list of acronyms and abbreviations.
The project is in Kemmerer, Wyoming, near a decommissioning coal plant. It is one of two flagship projects under the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, launched in May 2020 with a goal of building two reactors by 2027. Natrium now plans to load fuel in 2030 and begin running the following year. One complication is that it needs uranium fuel enriched to nearly 20 percent. The initial plan was to buy that from the Russian state nuclear monopoly, but that idea was dropped after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Western companies, and one in South Africa, are now gearing up to make that fuel.
The Energy Department’s other flagship advanced reactor project, a gas-graphite pebble bed model, is a step behind; that company applied for a construction permit in March.
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