The successes and significant contributions of past GAIN NE voucher recipients have real-world impacts on our energy future. GAIN is proud to provide these nuclear innovators with a single point of access to the broad range of capabilities — people, facilities, materials, and data — across the Department of Energy’s complex and its National Lab capabilities.
Past Voucher Recipients
Future Climate Projections for Dry and Wet Condenser Cooling Options, Energy Northwest
This project will evaluate potential climate impacts in the northwestern United States from climate models and use those results to model plant performance using various cooling options. The results will be used to determine the range of plant performance and cost distributions to help understand the factors that need to influence the selection of a ultimate heat sink for a nuclear reactor in the region.
Horizontal Refueling and Remote Handling Design Review, Boston Atomics
The Remote Systems Group (RSG) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) will perform a three-stage design review focused on operations, the detailed design, and a failure modes and effects analysis. Their experience base is uniquely valuable to MIGHTR and In-Vesel Fuel Handling Machine (IVFHM) development. This project will mitigate the risk of operational complexity by reviewing a critical system.
Improvements to Passive Heat Removal Systems in SAS4A/SASSYS-1, ARC Clean Technology
For this project, ARC will work with Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) to enhance the SAS modeling capabilities for passive heat removal systems, including the generic RVACS model and the DRACS heat exchanger models. These enhancements will enable ARC to recover safety margins and have a better representation of the system’s response during long-term cooling events.
Independent Code-to-Code Verification of Aalo-1 Fuel and Core Performance, Aalo Atomics
Aalo will partner with Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to perform independent analyses on fuel performance using the BISON code as well as thermal-hydraulics using RELAP5-3D. This work will support the independent code-to-code verification to support Aalo’s future licensing efforts.
Metatomic Molten Salt Immersed Hydrochlorination Subsystem Characterization, Metomic
Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) will provide the requisite expertise and spent fuel handling capability to enable the laboratory scale assessment and demonstration. The data generated at laboratory scale would provide confirmation of feasibility and basis for scaling to an industrial scale capability.
Assessment of NuScale SMR Steam Heat Augmentation for Chemical Plant Decarbonization, NuScale Power
NuScale will partner with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to perform a techno-economic analysis of a NuScale plant with a novel heat augmentation system for application to a commercial scale chemical production facility to help understand the functional requirements for the system and determine best ways to integrate with the facility.
Salt to Metal to Salt Heat Transfer in Narrow Fuel Pins, Moltex Energy
The objective of this project is to understand heat transfer for the novel molten fuel salt pin in a molten salt core concept. Heat transfer due to natural convection driven flow is a very complex phenomenon owing to the range of active length scales.
ICP-MS for Analysis of Lithium Isotopic Ratios in Materials Highly Enriched in 7Li, Kairos Power
The goal of this project would be to evaluate performance capabilities of instruments and develop standardized hardware configurations and operating procedures to analyze lithium isotopic ratios to support production of Flibe coolant that is highly enriched in 7Li.
PIE-Enabled Study of Aqueous Corrosion & Zr Hydriding in Cr-Coated Cladding, Westinghouse
The objective of this project is to enhance understanding of aqueous corrosion and hydrogen transport for Zr hydride formation in Cr-coated claddings, as a function of the Cr-coating deposition method (cold spray (CS) or physical vapor deposition (PVD)).
Post-Irradiation Examination to Quantify Irradiation-Induced Bowing of SiGA® Silicon Carbide Composite Structures, General Atomics
This project will address first-of-a-kind (FOAK) experimental post-irradiation examination (PIE) of irradiation-induced bowing response in SiC-SiC structures.