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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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DOE OSTI2025

Results and lessons learned from accelerating radio frequency modeling using machine learning [slides]

The “advanced tokamak” reactor concept is a leading candidate for a steady state fusion pilot plant. An advanced tokamak (AT) sustains a majority of the required plasma current with effects resulting from maintenance of the peaked pressure at the device center. This current is augmented by auxiliary current drive sources. These auxiliary actuators may consist of neutral particle beams and/or radio frequency (RF) systems such as lower hybrid current drive (LHCD) and high harmonic fast wave (HHFW) current drive using radio and microwaves from antennas. The primary focus of this work is to develop models of RF current profile control suitable for use in integrated modeling frameworks and for real-time control in experiments. Direct physics models of RF current drive can be computationally intensive. In order to achieve predictive times appropriate for the thousands of calls needed in real-time control of experiments and for use in integrated models, we will apply modern machine learning (ML) techniques to accelerate these models and interpolate their results. To generate the fast and accurate models for use in control level algorithms and integrated modeling we need to replace present models with high dimensional interpolation of their results. We will perform additional simulations across a broader parameter range for EAST and other tokamaks in different physics regimes (Alcator C-Mod, DIII-D, WEST, CFETR, ARC, ITER) and combine them into a larger database for training and testing of the ML models. Further testing of the control level models with experimental current profile data from EAST and C-Mod tokamaks will provide additional confirmation of the control level model before integration in a tokamak control system or integrated modeling suite. ML will be used to optimize the selection of training data consisting of RF current driven at different values of density profile, temperature profile, plasma current, and wavenumber. ML will also be used to facilitate classification of current drive from these input data. The output of this effort will be a validated classifier capable of determining the current drive profiles for HHFW CD and LHCD on a mille-second timescale. This will provide a breakthrough capability enabling real-time control of RF driven current profiles in experiments including ITER ICRF and use integrated modeling frameworks requiring thousands of current profile calculations in discharge simulations.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2023

A review of neutronics and thermal hydraulics–based screening methods applied to accelerated nuclear fuel qualification

This paper reviews the state-of-the-art engineering approach for using thermal hydraulic (TH) and neutronics modeling and simulation (M&S) tools to perform rapid screening studies of novel nuclear fuel concepts within the context of accelerated fuel qualification. Global research efforts have introduced nuclear fuel and material concepts that mark a significant departure from traditional reactor materials. The number of new technologies being considered for development for light water reactors and advanced reactor types has created the need for an accelerated fuel qualification procedure. A key component of this procedure is the rapid identification of the most promising fuel concepts using computational screening studies. Advanced TH and neutronic M&S tools should be leveraged to efficiently determine whether the reactor performance and safety characteristics of a given concept warrant additional studies or whether the concept requires modification or elimination. This paper reviews best practices for performing these TH and neutronics screening studies at various stages during a fuel concept's progression through the qualification procedure. The motivation behind standardizing this approach is to minimize time and resources spent on qualification activities for fuel concepts that could be quickly refined or eliminated from consideration based on their reactor physics and TH characteristics. Adoption of this screening procedure—which focuses primarily on nuclear fuels but may be applicable to other reactor materials—will also help accelerate new material qualification by generating boundary conditions crucial to fuel performance evaluations and highlighting needed areas of separate effects experimentation. This article reviews the motivation behind the introduction of novel nuclear fuel concepts, provides incentive for utilizing TH- and neutronics-based screening studies, describes the screening approach and methodology, and includes discussion on how to interpret screening results to provide recommendations for the continued development of a given concept.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2026

N 2 Onet: a global collaborative network facilitating advances in measurement, modeling, and mitigation of agricultural soil nitrous oxide emissions

Nitrogen (N) fertilizer supports global food production, but its use and overuse drive emissions of nitrous oxide (N 2 O), a potent and long-lived greenhouse gas. Understanding the drivers of N 2 O fluxes remains elusive, making it difficult to predict emissions in time and space and to develop and evaluate ways to lower emissions through management. Major scientific uncertainties underlying the understanding of the drivers of N 2 O fluxes identified in a workshop of N 2 O emissions experts include poor process-based understanding of controls on soil N 2 O emissions in the field; insufficient data to reduce uncertainty in N 2 O budgets from the field to regional scales, including N 2 O emission measurements and importantly, field-scale N balances; and high uncertainty in model predictions of soil N 2 O emissions across environmental and management conditions. To reduce these uncertainties, we present the concept of N 2 Onet, a global collaborative initiative to accelerate advances in N 2 O measurement, analyses, and mitigation. N 2 Onet will serve as an observational network of supersites with multi-scale measurements; a database hub for N 2 O flux and ancillary data; and a catalyst for community building, information sharing, and training. By coalescing and coordinating the global community of researchers, N 2 Onet will provide a roadmap for reducing N 2 O emissions from agriculture worldwide.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2024

Extension of Virtual Test Bed Advanced Modeling and Simulation Capabilities for Fusion Energy

The National Reactor Innovation Center (NRIC) was established to accelerate the deployment of novel reactor concepts. This is achieved by providing physical and virtual spaces for building and testing reactor experiments. The Virtual Test Bed (VTB) represents the virtual counterpart to the physical test beds. It is a collaboration with the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) program with the mission to accelerate the deployment of advanced reactors by facilitating the adoption of advanced modeling and simulation (M&S) tools developed by the DOE. This mission has been carried out by the VTB since 2020 by hosting and featuring dozens of advanced fission nuclear reactor models developed by national laboratories and academia. The charter of the NRIC’s definition of advanced reactors also includes fusion nuclear reactors. As the tools developed by the NEAMS program are increasingly used for modeling fusion energy devices, there is an increasing need to host fusion reactor models on the VTB repository. The VTB will be extended in 2024 to support fusion energy modeling and simulation.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2026

EDS Analysis of FCCI in AFC-FAST Fuel Pins

The Advanced Fuel Campaign’s Fission Accelerated Steady-state Testing (FAST) program uses metallic fuel pins with small diameters to reach a desired burnup more quickly. This enables accelerated testing of advanced fuel designs and decreases the time between idea conception and commercial usage. Post-irradiation examination is critical in this process, especially with respect to the fuel-cladding chemical interactions (FCCI). In this work, energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) is used to track how elements from the fuel and fission products have diffused through the cladding. Elemental redistribution along the fuel-cladding interface is mapped and FCCI region thicknesses are measured. The correlations between geometry, temperature, burnup, and FCCI thickness are presented.

11 - NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2022

An Impartial Perspective for Superconducting Nb$_3$Sn coated Copper RF Cavities for Future Linear Accelerators

This Snowmass21 Contributed Paper encourages the Particle Physics community in fostering R&D in Superconducting Nb3Sn coated Copper RF Cavities instead of costly bulk Niobium. It describes the pressing need to devote effort in this direction, which would deliver higher gradient and higher temperature of operation and reduce the overall capital and operational costs of any future collider. It is unlikely that an ILC will be built in the next ten years with Nb as one of the main cost drivers of SRFs. This paper provides strong arguments on the benefits of using this time for R&D on producing Nb3Sn on inexpensive and thermally efficient metals such as Cu or bronze, while pursuing in parallel the novel U.S. concept of parallel-feed RF accelerator structures. A technology that synergistically uses both of these advanced tools would make an ILC or equivalent machines more affordable and more likely to be built. Such a successful enterprise would readily apply to other HEP accelerators, for instance a Muon Collider, and to accelerators beyond HEP. We present and assess current efforts in the U.S. on the novel concept of parallel-feed RF accelerator structures, and in the U.S. and abroad in producing Nb3Sn films on either Cu or bronze despite minimal funding.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Design Initiative for a 10 TeV pCM Wakefield Collider

This document outlines a community-driven Design Study for a 10 TeV pCM Wakefield Accelerator Collider. The 2020 ESPP Report emphasized the need for Advanced Accelerator R&D, and the 2023 P5 Report calls for the ``delivery of an end-to-end design concept, including cost scales, with self-consistent parameters throughout." This Design Study leverages recent experimental and theoretical progress resulting from a global R&D program in order to deliver a unified, 10 TeV Wakefield Collider concept. Wakefield Accelerators provide ultra-high accelerating gradients which enables an upgrade path that will extend the reach of Linear Colliders beyond the electroweak scale. Here, we describe the organization of the Design Study including timeline and deliverables, and we detail the requirements and challenges on the path to a 10 TeV Wakefield Collider.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2024

New Virtual Test Bed Capabilities: Virtual DOME Model and New Updates to Repository

The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy National Reactor Innovation Center accelerates the deployment of novel reactor concepts by establishing both physical and virtual spaces for building and testing various components, systems, and complete pilot plants. The Virtual Test Bed represents the virtual arm of the National Reactor Innovation Center and is a joint effort with the DOE Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation Program. The Virtual Test Bed mission is to accelerate the deployment of advanced reactors by facilitating the adoption of cutting-edge DOE advanced modeling and simulation tools to design, evaluate, and license reactors. This is primarily achieved by storing example challenge problems in an externally available repository and by developing models to fill the M&S gaps needed for potential demonstrators. Activities conducted this fiscal year focused on developing of a Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments shield model to help accelerate the confirmatory analysis required for the reactor demonstration. This model and workflow will allow developers to leverage advanced modeling and simulation tools to ensure their reactor demonstration concept will meet dose requirements and that the surrounding shield will stay within concrete temperature limits during steady-state and transient operation conditions. An initial model has been developed to evaluate the temperature distribution in the concrete shield during steady-state operation, including neutron and gamma heating effects. Various modeling strategies have been examined to understand their applicability and limitations with different reactor designs to make the workflow as reactor-agnostic as possible and computationally effective to maximize its usability. In addition to describing the Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments shield model and associated results, this report summarizes other accomplishments regarding repository maintenance and improvement and new external models hosted on the repository.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2022

RF Accelerator Technology R&D: Report of AF7-rf Topical Group to Snowmass 2021

Accelerator radio frequency (RF) technology has been and remains critical for modern high energy physics (HEP) experiments based on particle accelerators. Tremendous progress in advancing this technology has been achieved over the past decade in several areas highlighted in this report. These achievements and new results expected from continued R&D efforts could pave the way for upgrades of existing facilities, improvements to accelerators already under construction (e.g., PIP-II), well-developed proposals (e.g., ILC, CLIC), and/or enable concepts under development, such as FCC-ee, CEPC, C 3 , HELEN, multi-MW Fermilab Proton Intensity Upgrade, future Muon Colloder, etc. Advances in RF technology have impact beyond HEP on accelerators built for nuclear physics, basic energy sciences, and other areas. Recent examples of such accelerators are European XFEL, LCLS-II and LCLS-II-HE, SHINE, SNS, ESS, FRIB, and EIC. To support and enable new accelerator-based applications and even make some of them feasible, we must continue addressing their challenges via a comprehensive RF R&D program that would advance the existing RF technologies and explore the nascent ones.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Mesoscale Modeling of the Effects of Accelerated Burnup on UO2 Microstructural Evolution

Accelerating the nuclear fuel qualification process will rely on some combination of advanced modeling and simulation techniques with accelerated irradiation testing and separate effects experiments to enable the development of new fuel concepts in a shorter time frame. One of the key challenges to successfully leveraging accelerated irradiation tests will be understanding the artifacts that may be introduced with accelerated accumulation of dose and/or burnup. This work presents phase field (MARMOT) simulations of the evolution of representative 2D UO2 microstructures up to 40 MWd/kgU. Simulations were performed under both commercial light water reactor fuel conditions as well as those that would be expected for highly accelerated (~10x) burnup conditions similar to those used in the MiniFuel irradiations in Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s High Flux Isotope Reactor. The phase field model was coupled with a discrete nucleation algorithm to model re- structuring at high burnup. The effect of the different fission rates in both microstructures was investigated at two temperatures: 650?C and 800?C. The lower temperature simulations both showed an onset of restructuring at nearly 60 MWd/kgU. More extensive restructuring was obtained in the MiniFuel microstructure compared with that of the PWR fuel. At 800?C, no restructuring was obtained as a result of the thermally activated diffusion of Xe atoms and U vacancies to fission gas bubbles, which reduces the nucleation driving force. These results highlight the importance of using modeling and simulation tools to inform the environmental conditions during targeted accelerated irradiation tests to extract the most useful fuel performance data.

accelerated fuel qualification, Phase Field, Restr↗
DOE OSTI2026

Evaluation of AI-enabled Digital Documented Safety Analysis

The National Reactor Innovation Center (NRIC) is leading a transformative initiative to accelerate advanced reactor deployment by fundamentally reimagining how nuclear safety basis documentation is developed, reviewed, and maintained. Traditional Documented Safety Analysis (DSA) processes for DOE-authorized facilities rely on static, document-centric workflows that consume significant time and resources, exemplified by recent major licensing efforts requiring hundreds of thousands of staff hours and millions of pages of documentation review. These conventional approaches create barriers to the rapid, cost-effective deployment of advanced reactors that America's future energy needs demand. NRIC's DOE Authorization Digital Transformation Project addresses these challenges through an innovative framework that integrates artificial intelligence (AI), digital engineering, and systems-based data management into a cohesive digital ecosystem. This white paper presents NRIC's methodology for evaluating AI-enabled document generation capabilities within this broader digital infrastructure, using the Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments (DOME) facility as a pilot case study. The evaluation will assess an AI tool's ability to generate a Preliminary Documented Safety Analysis (PDSA) through progressive integration stages—from standalone document processing to full digital thread connectivity—while maintaining rigorous verification, validation, and regulatory acceptance standards. By establishing dynamic, traceable connections between design data and safety documentation, NRIC's approach has the potential to reduce both document development time and regulatory review cycles by as much as 50%, while simultaneously improving accuracy, consistency, and traceability. This initiative represents a critical step toward establishing reusable digital infrastructure that reactor developers can leverage to accelerate their path from concept to commercial operation, directly supporting NRIC's mission to demonstrate and deploy advanced nuclear energy technologies.

22 - GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2021

High-throughput design of high-performance lightweight high-entropy alloys

Developing affordable and light high-temperature materials alternative to Ni-base superalloys has significantly increased the efforts in designing advanced ferritic superalloys. However, currently developed ferritic superalloys still exhibit low high-temperature strengths, which limits their usage. Here we use a CALPHAD-based high-throughput computational method to design light, strong, and low-cost high-entropy alloys for elevated-temperature applications. Through the high-throughput screening, precipitation-strengthened lightweight high-entropy alloys are discovered from thousands of initial compositions, which exhibit enhanced strengths compared to other counterparts at room and elevated temperatures. The experimental and theoretical understanding of both successful and failed cases in their strengthening mechanisms and order-disorder transitions further improves the accuracy of the thermodynamic database of the discovered alloy system. This study shows that integrating high-throughput screening, multiscale modeling, and experimental validation proves to be efficient and useful in accelerating the discovery of advanced precipitation-strengthened structural materials tuned by the high-entropy alloy concept.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2021

Accelerate Nuclear Research and Development by Reducing Time and Cost Spend in the Pre-conceptual Design Phase of Advanced Reactor Experiments

The design process of every new concept, such as advanced nuclear reactors or associated experiments, starts with the pre-conceptual design phase. In this phase, the viability of a wide range of design options needs to be assessed quickly, to understand the operating envelope and its feasibility. A variety of physics models (thermal-hydraulics, neutronics, mechanical design, etc.) has to be considered at this very first design stage and optimum component sizes and materials (e.g. heat exchangers, piping, turbomachinery, coolant type, etc.) have to be chosen for a given set of boundary conditions (e.g. heat source, heat sink, flow rate, etc.). Detailed solutions such as provided by high fidelity methods like computational fluid dynamics (CFD), Monte Carlo methods, etc. and even lower fidelity tools such as system or subchannel codes, etc. are usually not used during the pre-conceptual design due to the relatively long time needed to create input models, the computational time to obtain a solution and the lack of flexibility to quickly investigate different combinations of components, individual component sizes and material properties. High fidelity tools are usually only employed in the conceptual design and later phases once a base concept has been identified during the pre-conceptual design stage. The current practice during the pre-conceptual design stage is that analysts collect the needed equations, material properties, closure laws, etc. and create ad-hoc solutions form scratch for every new problem. There clearly is a lack of a flexible scoping tool that can be used during pre-conceptional design before higher fidelity tools (as described above) come into play. To reduce user errors in ad-hoc solutions and increase fidelity and efficiency, this project aims to investigate and develop a user-friendly scoping tool to address the thermal-hydraulic designing needs during preconceptual experiment design, i.e. Thermal-hydraulic Research Universal Scoping Tool (TRUST). The success of TRUST will provide the nuclear engineers with an easy-to-use and affordable calculator for early reactor system design and optimization.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2023

High Power Targetry R&D and support for future generation accelerator

A high-power target system is a key beam element to complete future High Energy Physics (HEP) experiments. The target endures high power pulsed beam, leading to high cycle thermal stresses/pressures and thermal shocks. The increased beam power will also create significant challenges such as corrosion and radiation damage that can cause harmful effects on the material and degrade their mechanical and thermal properties during irradiation. This can eventually lead to the failure of the material and drastically reduce the lifetime of targets and beam intercepting devices. Designing a reliable target is already a challenge for MW class facilities today and has led several major accelerator facilities to operate at lower power due to target concerns. With present plans to increase beam power for next generation accelerator facilities in the next decade and the multi-year time-scale to acquire the knowledge on material behavior under such extreme environment, timely R&D of robust high-power targets is critical to fully secure the physics benefits of ambitious accelerator power upgrades. The next generation of high-power targets for future accelerators will use more complex geometries, novel materials, and new concepts allowing better high heat flux cooling methods. Advanced numerical simulations need to be developed to satisfy the physical design requirements of reliable beam-intercepting devices. In parallel, radiation hardened beam instrumentation irradiation methods for high-power targets must be further developed. Additional irradiation facilities are needed since only a few facilities worldwide offer beams for target testing, and the beam provided may not be appropriate for the specific facility or project. Thus, a comprehensive research and development program must be implemented to address the challenges that multi-MW targets face.

Pellemoine, F.↗
DOE OSTI2025

Path to a single-stage, 100-GeV electron beam via a flying-focus-driven laser-plasma accelerator

Dephasingless laser wakefield acceleration (DLWFA), a novel laser wakefield acceleration concept based on the recently demonstrated “flying focus” technology, offers a new paradigm in laser-plasma acceleration that could advance the progress toward a TeV linear accelerator using a single-stage system without guiding structures. The recently proposed NSF OPAL laser facility could be the transformative technology that enables this grand challenge in laser-plasma acceleration. We review the viable parameter space for DLWFA based on the scaling of its performance with laser and plasma parameters, and we compare that performance to traditional laser wakefield acceleration. These scalings indicate the necessity for ultrashort, high-energy laser architectures such as NSF OPAL to achieve groundbreaking electron energies using DLWFA. Initial results from MTW-OPAL, the platform for the 6-J DLWFA demonstration experiment, show a tight, round focal spot over a distance of 3.7 mm. New particle-in-cell simulations of that platform indicate that using hydrogen for DLWFA reduces the amount of laser light that is distorted due to refraction at ionization fronts. An experimental path, and the computational and technical design work along that path, from the current status of the field to a single-stage, 100-GeV electron beam via DLWFA on NSF OPAL is outlined. Progress along that path is presented.

Shaw, J. L. [University of Rochester, NY (United S↗
DOE OSTI2023

RELAP5-3D Modeling in the OECD-NEA HTTF Benchmark

Prismatic gas-cooled reactors are a technologically mature reactor concept of interest for near- to mid-term deployment. To accelerate the deployment of these reactors, the DOE's Advanced Reactor Technologies Gas-Cooled Reactor campaign is spearheading a thermal hydraulics code validation benchmark based on the High Temperature Test Facility at Oregon State University. This presentation provides an introduction to that benchmark and an overview of some of the RELAP5-3D validation activities stemming from that benchmark.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Updating Nuclear Energy Cost Estimates for Net Zero World Initiative

Energy modeling of decarbonized scenarios in integrated energy systems requires nuclear energy parameters that are critical for forecasting, modeling and cost structure analysis. Using updated real-world data has always been a challenge to estimate current nuclear reactors costs and deployment scenarios. Given this, an updated set of parameters for overnight capital costs and operation and maintenance costs are estimated for the Net Zero World initiative using recent reports that provided a vast set of open sources data inputs. This paper follows the methodology developed in the Net Zero World report and applies the new ranges estimated in the Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear report that address many of the current challenges in obtaining accurate cost data for advanced nuclear concepts. The final goal is to provide new estimates of the overnight capital costs and operational costs for different countries. The present paper improves the earlier capital cost estimations, building on recent literature that aims to obtain accurate data for modeling and simulation to enhance energy system evaluations and support decision-making in areas like de-carbonization and capacity expansion. Finally, the paper compares the new cost estimates with the old cost results.

11 - NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Advanced Reactor Supply Chain Assessment (GAIN Report)

Several net-zero scenario evaluations predict a rapid ramp up of nuclear energy in the coming decades. If this materializes, it will most likely strain the supply chains associated with the potential advanced reactor concepts awaiting deployment. To help assess the current and potential capacities of the various advanced reactor supply chains, the Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) conducted a survey of companies able to produce components for advanced reactors in the near future (namely for sodium, gas-cooled, and molten salt reactors). Using an aggressive nuclear deployment scenario, the objective was to assess the ability of the various supply chains to meet the considerable demand projections for certain key components (vessels, heat exchangers, pumps, graphite, and sensors) and identify potential challenges. While individual companies were unable to meet the most optimistic nuclear deployment rate projections, it was found that on aggregate, a United States-based supply chain projected that expansion could be ramped up to meet a larger future demand of these components. However, meeting projected demand for several more complex items (namely gas or salt heat exchangers) was found to be more challenging. Deploying new reactors at scale necessitates the production of more and more supply chain components, requiring a ramp up in production. Supply chain companies were surveyed, and respondents appeared less able to meet short term demand (next year) versus longer-term demand projections (5 and 10 years). This reflects the need to obtain orders with adequate lead times (can range from 3 to 30 months). Future demand will need to be met by expanding existing capacity. These expansions will require suppliers to raise capital or secure other types of support (federal loans or grants) to invest in facilities, equipment, and workforce. Individual suppliers indicated financial investments could be in the range of $\$ $100 million to $\$ $1 billion for their own facilities (depending on the type of facility). The biggest risk, according to respondents, related to general uncertainties surrounding the future nuclear industry and whether the potential demand projections will materialize into real demand that is actionable from a business perspective. Businesses do not seem willing to take investments risks without clear orders. If businesses are not able to invest to expand the supply, it will either delay the deployment of advanced nuclear technology, or the supply chain will be met by suppliers outside of the United States. This report only focuses on the domestic supply chain’s ability to meet the various projections stipulated here for the specific assessed components (vessels, heat exchangers, pumps, graphite, and sensors). The report does not cover all reactor designs or all components that may ultimately be needed for any one reactor design. It also does not address whether any specific aspect of the supply chain will be cost competitive in the global market, nor how potential state-backed entities could affect the expansion of a United States-based supply chain. The largest challenges in ramping up capacity among respondents appear to be workforce related. This includes workforce availability, experience, training, and turnover. In addition to facility investment, suppliers will also need to invest heavily in long-term workforce training to meet production goals. This issue is not nuclear-specific, and the expansion of any supply chain will likely face similar challenges. While suppliers evaluated expected normal business demand from other markets outside of nuclear, it is possible that other market segments could expand more than predicted and compete for the same suppliers. One potential market that may compete for the same supplier resources is the United States military, as many of these suppliers support both the commercial nuclear sector as well as the Navy with reactors and components. In summary, suppliers in the United States believe that there is a way to increase production in order to begin meeting the demand which will exist for advanced reactors—as long as appropriate investments can be made in the supply chain in an appropriate timeframe. Based on the capacity projections and lead times, investment will be needed to meet the 5-year and 10-year production targets. Therefore, if significant nuclear deployment is to occur in the 2030s, investment and ramp up of the advanced nuclear supply chain will need to begin in the near future for the United States to successfully deploy these advanced reactors with domestic supply chains.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗