- Argonne National Lab advances research to strengthen nuclear’s viability
- DOE labs to develop strategy for integrating their work on a national basis
- Advanced simulations quicken pace of tech development, reactor deployment
NEI recently spoke with Jeffrey Binder, associate laboratory director for Argonne National Laboratory’s energy and global security directorate. Binder shared his perspective on the roles the U.S. national laboratories play in keeping nuclear energy competitive technologically and economically.
Q: Operating plants are under a lot of economic pressure today. What’s the long-term solution that will help keep nuclear on the grid?
Binder: The long-term solution to making nuclear energy more competitive is the development and demonstration of a new generation of nuclear reactors. These advanced, what we call Generation IV, reactors will enable expanded use of nuclear energy while meeting the environmental, economic and social requirements of the 21st century, in addition to providing enhanced safety and generating more manageable waste products that contain greatly reduced levels of long-lived radioactive isotopes.
From my perspective, our goals should be higher energy densities at lower operating costs and greatly reduced capital costs resulting from shorter build and qualification cycles for new nuclear plants. The tools that will support those goals range from innovative manufacturing techniques and applications of physics, chemistry and materials science to advanced modeling and simulation. I think that’s Argonne Lab’s sweet spot because we can connect the capabilities of basic science with these kinds of application spaces. Of course, other Department of Energy national laboratories have related capabilities.
Q: How is the department’s Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) program moving research on new technologies forward?
Binder: There is a new entrepreneurial interest in developing nuclear reactors and other nuclear technologies. Some of it is motivated by the need to find low-carbon energy sources, but there’s also the recognition that reliable, high-density energy sources offer many advantages in today’s ever-changing energy landscape. Nuclear fuel, after all, offers an energy density in fissile material that is more than a million times greater than that of any fossil fuel.
In 2016, the DOE initiated the GAIN program to make the capabilities and resources of the national laboratories available to members of the advanced nuclear community that are developing next-generation reactors. Through GAIN, DOE has awarded vouchers to a number of small companies that provide them access to capabilities of one or more national laboratories at no cost.
Q: What are Argonne’s key scientific strengths?
Binder: Argonne has a deep understanding of reactor design and the advanced computational modeling and simulation tools that can help quicken the pace of development and regulatory approval. Our experimental facilities for qualifying materials and components under extreme conditions, such as the Advanced Photon Source, are state-of-the-art. Finally, Argonne has a thorough grasp of the licensing environment and the necessary technical expertise required to make a strong licensing case for advanced nuclear technologies.
Argonne has a unique capability for conducting experimental research with sodium and other liquid metal coolants, just as Oak Ridge National Laboratory is known for molten salt reactor work and Idaho National Laboratory is known for its high-temperature gas reactor technology. But people shouldn’t get the idea that they can go to just one lab and get everything they need. There are aspects of any technology that one or another lab can better support than others, regardless of the reactor type. I say this all the time—we need a national approach to nuclear research because several labs working together can provide a more complete set of capabilities to move any type of design forward. Over the next few months, we will be devoting a great deal of effort to developing a strategy for integrating the capabilities of the DOE labs on a national basis.
Q: What, besides sodium reactor research, is Argonne doing today?
Binder: Argonne makes important contributions to the development of several other types of advanced reactors and fuel cycles. At a more basic level, Argonne has a significant manufacturing science and engineering initiative aimed at developing materials qualified for extreme conditions much more quickly. One outgrowth of that is a facility for observing the effects of radiation damage in situ while it’s happening. People are also looking at innovative manufacturing techniques for nuclear fuels and nuclear materials that would allow faster production of components for nuclear systems that may contain fissile material and also have control systems and sensing capabilities built in. Another area that we are looking into is applying the capabilities of the Advanced Photon Source to observe the microstructural behavior of nuclear materials that have been in nuclear environments, so we can model how they behave.
There is still research to do with sodium-cooled reactors involving advanced materials and components such as pumps and improved sensing and diagnostic systems to afford better control of sodium environments. The fuels and overall fuel cycles for sodium-cooled reactors are also of interest to our researchers.
We have people developing higher-resolution modeling tools for designing various reactor technologies. These researchers have the opportunity to build the next generation of tools. We are also studying machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches. Our ability to store and manipulate large data sets has changed dramatically in the last 10 years, facilitating physical insights that would have been unimaginable only a decade ago.
Q: What are the costs for the United States if we cede leadership in nuclear technology to other countries?
Binder: There is an international component to all of this that we haven’t really discussed, because whether the United States moves forward in its nuclear program or not, the rest of the world will. India, China and Russia are moving ahead of the United States technologically, because they are actually building new reactors and learning from those experiences, whereas we are not.
Argonne has long engaged with the international community in technology development, supporting safety improvements and in nonproliferation efforts to minimize the use of highly enriched uranium, and Argonne continues to be a leader in those areas. We created something called the Nuclear Energy Center for Safety and International Security (NECSIS) to engage the international community around questions of nuclear technology safety and security and to maintain an open window for the international community at the technical level. I think things like that are going to become more important as we go forward.
[Editor’s note: This interview was edited with the assistance of the subject.]