The Opportunity

Nuclear microreactors are small nuclear reactors that generate up to 20 megawatts thermal power. They offer tremendous potential as a new class of advanced reactors that can operate in markets where small modular reactors and gigawatt reactors cannot.

Microreactors are self-adjusting, compact, scalable, versatile and transportable — providing far greater access to nuclear power than ever before. These factory-fabricated systems can be easily transported by trucks, ships, airplanes or railcars, providing reliable heat and power to a host of places, ranging from residential and remote areas, to military bases, or space exploration missions.

Current microreactor designs are being developed by U.S. industry using traditional material solutions, and these traditional solutions are constraining performance. Innovative material solutions are needed to help realize the full potential of microreactor designs.

What Argonne Offers

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory is home to a multidisciplinary team of scientists and engineers that is working to enable next-generation nuclear microreactors through material innovations.

Capabilities include:

• Advanced surface modification technologies
• Ceramic matrix composite development
• Materials characterization and testing, including ion irradiation and high-throughput examination
• Reactor design and high-fidelity multiphysics analyses to evaluate the benefits of novel materials
• Techno-economic analysis

Enabling these capabilities is a collection of research facilities at Argonne that offer unique tools to enable comprehensive material solution development and demonstration — all under one roof:

• Advanced Photon Source
• Argonne Leadership Computing Facility
• Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System
• Intermediate Voltage Electron Microscopy-Tandem
• Materials Engineering Research Facility

The Argonne team has developed a series of microreactor technologies, including:

• Advanced Moderation Modules allow thermal neutron microreactors operating at very high temperatures to achieve compactness, with reduced neutronic penalty compared with conventional moderator cans.
• Versatile Heat Transfer Modules provide negative reactivity feedback and extraneous moderation, in addition to reduced neutronic penalty compared with conventional heat pipes.
• Advanced Gas Enclosure enables containment of extremely high-temperature working fluids (He and H2). This was supported by a GAIN NE Voucher.

The team intends to secure more support from federal programs to speed up proof-of-concept for material innovations for microreactors in order to attract industry interest and facilitate commercialization.

Meanwhile, the team is also interested in collaborating with industry partners to increase the Technology Readiness Levels of material solutions developed at national laboratories as well as those developed by industry. Such collaborations would: set the stage for industry partners to commercialize these innovative solutions; and form the foundation for a materials innovation center for next-generation nuclear microreactors at Argonne.

The Benefits

Preliminary computational evaluations of Argonne’s key material solutions have revealed multiple benefits, including:

• Lifetime elongation
• Compactness improvement
• Safety enhancement
• Lower enrichment requirement