Heretofore little-known Abilene Christian University (ACU), located in west Texas, made history on September 16 when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued its Nuclear Energy eXperimental Testing Laboratory (NEXT Lab) a construction permit for the deployment of the Natura Resources MSR-1 system’s liquid-fueled advanced nuclear research reactor.
ACU president Phil Schubert said that issuance of the construction permit moves the university “one step closer to making that a reality. The performance-driven approach of Natura Resources to advanced reactor deployment has quickly moved them from a relative unknown to a leader in the upstart advanced reactor industry.”
“This is the first research reactor project we’ve approved for construction in decades, and the staff successfully worked with ACU to resolve several technical issues with this novel design,” Andrea Veil, director of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, said in a news release.
The NEXT Lab, under the direction of ACU engineering and physics professor Dr. Rusty Towell, had been experimenting with using molten salts, rather than water, as a coolant. Under Towell’s leadership, ACU has become known for sending its undergraduate physics students to national laboratories to conduct research alongside world-renowned scientists.
Natura founder and president Douglass Robison, upon learning of Towell’s work in molten salt research, donated $3.2 million to the NEXT Lab through his nonprofit Excelsior Foundation. Robison later formed Natura Resources LLC and committed to investing another $30.5 million for the molten salt reactor project, with $21.5 million going to ACU and the rest going to three other universities in a research consortium dubbed NEXTRA (NEXT Research Alliance).
As the reactor reaches high temperatures, heat that radiates through the molten salt is used to generate electricity. Natura says that molten salt, which vaporizes at temperatures far higher than the reactor’s operating temperature, creates an additional level of safety as it remains at a much lower pressure than water-cooled reactors. Any loss of containment would be stopped by the salt solidifying and trapping the escaping uranium.
ACU has built a reputation throughout higher education for its strong commitment to undergraduate research, especially in STEM fields. The other three partners are Georgia Institute of Technology, Texas A & M University, and the University of Texas at Austin. Both other Texas universities have research reactors, while Georgia Tech’s 5MWe heavy-water research reactor, which operated from 1961 to 1995, was decommissioned in 1999.
The research partners, all of which have extensive experience in physics, chemistry, and engineering, agreed to design, license, and commission the research reactor, which ACU will host and own. Under the NRC license, ACU will house the reactor at its Dillard Science and Engineering Research Center (SERC), which was completed in August 2023. The SERC is the first advanced reactor demonstration facility built in the United States not housed at a national laboratory.
The partnership will provide extraordinary opportunities for students and faculty to collaborate on cutting-edge research. As students and faculty work together seeking creative solutions to the complex problems associated with reactor design and operation, this next generation of leaders in nuclear science and engineering will gain real-world experience. In the process, they are seeing firsthand how their innovation and collaboration can impact the world.
Issuance of the construction permit authorizes the research team to begin fabrication of the reactor, which will be done by Zachry Nuclear Engineering. The firm is scheduled to complete the detailed engineering and design of the Natura MSR-1 in early 2025, after which the university team will submit its operating license application to the NRC.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) provides the fuel for the current operating fleet of university research reactors, and its commitment in 2019 to provide fuel and salt for the Natura molten salt research reactor was the impetus for the company to move forward. The fuel and salt needs for this reactor are unique, and Natura and ACU are committed to working with the DOE to finalize details related to their provision.
Robison, now a member of a Texas task force focused on streamlining the lengthy federal permitting process, says his company “made a conscious decision to work with the NRC to license our technology for deployment here in the States rather than taking our technology outside their jurisdiction or attempting to avoid the licensing process entirely.” The NRC, he added, is the “gold standard” of licensing of nuclear reactors.
It took only four years for Natura and its university partners to develop a system that the NRC could license. Once deployed, the ACU molten salt research reactor will provide operational data to support Natura’s 100MWe systems, large enough to power 25,000 homes, and serve as a world-class research tool to train advance reactor operators and educate students about the benefits of nuclear energy.
Ben Beasley, Natura’s director of licensing, noted that the environmental review, completed in March, found that the reactor would have no significant impact on the environment. The just-completed safety review found that Natura’s design and analysis complies with federal requirements and is safe to construct.
The construction permit, though, is just the first step in the NRC’s two-step licensing process. It allows Natura and ACU to build and operate the reactor without uranium. The next step will be the operating license, which will allow the partners to “fuel the reactor and demonstrate the elegance of molten salt technology,” Beasley said
Should ACU and Natura obtain an operating license, it would be Texas’ first new nuclear reactor since the Comanche Peak power plant’s second unit was licensed to operate in 1993. The NEXT Lab reactor is being designed to generate enough energy to power the equivalent of only about 250 homes. Its goal is to create a testing ground for scaling up molten salt reactors to larger, utility-scale units.
The NRC has only approved construction of one other molten salt reactor, a Kairos Power facility in Albuquerque that will use solid uranium. The ACU reactor will use liquid fuel – uranium dissolved in molten salt. Natura hopes to be able to deploy small modular, liquid-fueled molten-salt reactors for commercial use by 2030, though some consider that timeline optimistic.
Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.
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