Scope of work: Under the five-year, $27 million partnership, ORNL will test and evaluate aspects of Kairos Power’s reactor technology, manufacture components for reactor development and testing, and assess the performance of TRISO pebble fuel under conditions relevant to reactor operation.
The partnership includes the following objectives:
- Assessing fuel manufacturing and synthesis methods to evaluate product quality and production methods for TRISO fuel particles.
- Understanding the properties of TRISO fuel pebbles to support a fabrication capability and quality control infrastructure.
- Completing a comprehensive spent fuel pebble management plan to include on-site cask storage, transportation, and final disposition.
- Producing components using advanced manufacturing techniques to better understand how materials that come into contact with the salt, such as ceramics, carbon composites, and metallic materials, perform at extremely high temperatures.
- Enabling remote maintenance systems capable of operating under high temperatures with simultaneous exposure to radiation and corrosive salts.
Hermes demonstration reactors: The collaboration is intended to support the design, construction, and eventual operation of two Hermes demonstration reactors (Hermes and Hermes 2), as well as the subsequent commercialization of Kairos’s 150-MWe fluoride salt–cooled, high-temperature reactor, dubbed KP-FHR.
Construction began on the first Hermes demonstration reactor at Oak Ridge in July 2024, with safety-related construction commencing last May. In January of this year, Kairos Power finalized a contract with the Department of Energy to receive high-assay low-enriched uranium for production of TRISO fuel pebbles for Hermes. The NRC granted a construction permit for the commercial-scale, power-producing Hermes 2 demonstration plant at Oak Ridge in November 2024.
The DOE plans to invest as much as $303 million in risk-reduction funding for these Hermes demonstration reactors via the agency’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program.
Decades of expertise: The continuing Kairos-ORNL partnership takes advantage of ORNL’s six decades of expertise with molten salt reactor technology development.
“It’s exciting to see how our historical lineage in molten salt reactor technology and coated particle fuel are being leveraged with the lab’s more recent advances in additive manufacturing to support Kairos Power in building the first advanced reactor of its kind in our own backyard,” said Chris Petrie, interim section head of Nuclear Fuel Development at ORNL. “Our expertise, paired with Kairos Power’s iterative approach to progressively demonstrating the technology, allows us to learn faster and ultimately accelerate the deployment of more nuclear energy to the grid.”
Ed Blandford, Kairos Power’s chief technology officer and cofounder, noted that the “DOE’s support has been instrumental in helping Kairos Power accelerate our path to technological maturity. By collaborating with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, we gain access to decades of expertise and a unique set of capabilities that we couldn’t find anywhere else. We are pleased to partner with the lab as we work to deploy safe, reliable advanced reactor technology that builds on Oak Ridge’s nuclear legacy.”
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