The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) informed Natura Resources that it expects to complete a safety assessment and issue a construction permit early this fall for the company’s first deployed project. Natura Resources plans to locate the advanced and unique molten salt reactor at Abilene Christian University (ACU). The campus is home to the newly opened Nuclear Energy eXperimental Testing (NEXT) Laboratory. Once completed and if commissioned, the Natura reactor project would be operated at low power for research purposes. The NRC could issue the permit by Sept. 30, according to reports. Graphite-moderated, fluoride salt flowing fluid may be a safer option in nuclear energy compared to a water-cooled reactor, proponents say. If a system fails, theoretically the salt solidifies around the reactive uranium and preventing overheating, according to reports. ACU’s research is working to advance technical readiness levels of critical equipment needed in molten salt reactor operation, including flow meters, flanges, seals, level sensors, salt monitors, instrumentation and other hardware, Towell said. Natura Resources was started only five years ago. With NRC permitting, the company will use the ACU research to continue developing its small modular MSR system to be fabricated on an assembly line and shipped to future customer sites via truck or rail. Nuclear energy is carbon-free, but conventional, utility-scale projects are proving to be difficult to permit and supremely expensive to build. Georgia Power’s expansion to add two new Vogtle nuclear reactor units (3 and 4) took close to a decade and upward of $32 billion. SMR nuclear reactors might be built at a fraction of that cost and with a much smaller footprint from 10 MW all the way to 300 MW, still far below Vogtle 3 and 4’s 1-GW capacity for each Westinghouse AP1000 reactor. The Abilene Christian research reactor will be only 1 MW and not connected to power any load, according to reports. Abilene Christian University’s total enrollment is about 5,000 undergraduate and graduate students, according to U.S. News and World Report. Once revered as a critical hub of a historic cattle drive trail, the city of Abilene is now home to 125,000 residents, home to three universities, an Air Force base and several major facilities in the health care and insurance sectors. Other small modular and advanced reactor startups trying to progress to an operational project include TerraPower, NuScale, X-energy and Oklo. The U.S. Department of Energy recently announced funding of up to $900 million for applications working on SMR projects.
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