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  Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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  A trip abroad
  Hash Hashemian president@ans.org
  In my August column in Nuclear News, I reflected on the importance of ANS’s annual conferences for bringing together our nuclear community at the national level. In September, after speaking at Tennessee’s Nuclear Opportunities Workshop, I focused my NN column that month on the value of state-level conferences.
  Also in September, alongside ANS Executive Director/CEO Craig Piercy, I shifted my focus to another key front in nuclear collaboration, the international stage, by attending the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
  The timing of the IAEA’s General Conference could not have been better; it took place the same week the U.S. and U.K. kicked off a new wave of transatlantic partnerships in the nuclear sector between both government and industry. This fortuitous overlapping gave us a timely and concrete reminder of international collaboration’s unparalleled benefits.
  The General Conference was an expectedly busy event. To cover as much ground as possible, Piercy and I took turns attending either the U.S. delegation meetings with other countries or the General Assembly of the IAEA, where the American Nuclear Society has a seat among other critical nongovernmental organizations.
  We listened to presentations by several of the 180 IAEA member states, including, of course, the United States. Aside from ANS, the U.S. presence at the conference included U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, NRC Chair David Wright, and DOE Assistant Secretary of Nuclear Energy Ted Garrish.
  U.S. representation was further bolstered by an industry delegation that included 65 participants from 32 companies, many of whom used the opportunity to report progress on their plans for the international expansion of their nuclear fleets. Meetings of that industry delegation were coordinated by the Nuclear Energy Institute.
  Aside from the main conference, Piercy and I also attended the embedded meetings of the International Nuclear Society Council. INSC exists to facilitate knowledge-sharing and collaboration between 18 different member nuclear societies from around the world.
  The INSC meetings within the General Conference brought together the presidents and senior members of those societies to give presentations and explore new opportunities. I made a presentation on the state of nuclear in North America, covering the latest developments and deployments in the U.S. and Canada.
  This presentation emphasized the new nuclear lift in the U.S. that is being heavily supported by the Trump administration. I recapped the four executive orders issued by President Trump in May, the recent momentum at the DOE, and how these changes are capitalizing on a broader groundswell in both industry development and public support.
  I also pointed out the success of our neighbor Canada in progressing on the first water-cooled small modular reactor in North America using BWRX-300 technology, which was supplied by an American firm and international partners—a perfect symbol of the value of global nuclear collaboration.
  In all, I have now represented ANS at the state, national, and international levels, gaining useful insight into the work that needs to be done at each. From this vantage point, it’s clear to me that the path forward from the country to the globe is to, above all else, keep working together and supporting each other to bring about the next age of nuclear.
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Microreactors present an opportunity to revolutionize the role of nuclear energy via the development of these technologies in a diverse and distributed energy network for a clean energy future. Because of the limited output of these novel systems, the deployment of microreactors should be focused on high-value applications in order to realize their full potential. This involves understanding the microreactor performance and how it interacts with the preexisting infrastructure. In this work, an energy-diverse embedded grid is modeled using OpenModelica in order to study the impact of microreactor integration under several distinct deployment approaches. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) is used as a prototypic market due to its well-characterized energy ecosystem with available extensive real-time and historical data. The UIUC model recreates the existing chilled-water, steam, and electricity infrastructure, including wind, solar, and cogeneration sources. The infrastructure model simulates the interplay between the three utilities and how different microreactor integration approaches would impact UIUC’s embedded grid. From this study, the deployment of a single microreactor under electric load-conditioning, steam production retrofit, or a hybrid of both is found to be the most appropriate in consideration of their unique advantages toward cost savings and grid resilience. Meanwhile, if grid resiliency is not a main objective, the greatest emissions reduction and cost-savings benefits can be obtained by operating the reactor in a base-loading configuration. This study employed historically low coal and gas prices and provided a conservatively low estimate for the benefits from a microreactor. Given the price volatility of fossil fuels, the benefits of the microreactor are expected to be greater than this estimate. Finally, the modular nature of the modeling framework allows for an extension of the analysis to other similar embedded grids.