They’re going to WHUT?!

Now THIS is thinking outside the box!

Today I learned that the University of Illinois is planning to build a microreactor to deliver electricity & *district heating* to the Urbana Champaign campus.

I believe this would be the first nuclear district heating in North America?@ChiBuildings https://t.co/iEvpJXvCWv pic.twitter.com/Iv7GZsKMNj

— michael ⚛️🪙🏗🚇🚸 (@cornoisseur) January 31, 2023

I guess it all started back in 2021, when the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign sent a letter of intent to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) has informed the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that it intends to construct an Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC) Micro Modular Reactor on its campus. The university said the submission of the Letter of Intent is the first step in the NRC’s two-step process to license the new research and test reactor facility.

UIUC’s Grainger College of Engineering (and its Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering), in collaboration with USNC, is spearheading the new reactor deployment. In a joint statement, UIUC and USNC said the project team has spent the past two years engaging with the university and surrounding community; local, state and federal governments; and potential industry partners.

Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC) is a company that has developed something called the Micro Modular Reactor (MMR) Energy System, a linkable battery-like system, which is what the project at UIUC is built around.

The Micro Modular Reactor (MMR) Energy System is a 4th Generation nuclear energy system that delivers safe, clean, and cost-effective electricity to users anywhere. MMR is being licensed in Canada and the U.S.A. and is the first “fission battery” in commercialization. An orderbook has been established for first users. Demonstration units are scheduled for first nuclear power in 2026.

It sounds really revolutionary and the University’s plans are to utilize an existing coal-fired power plant for the new reactor. That should make Green weenies happy if they can get past the “nuclear” part and too bad if they can’t.

…The university plans to re-power partially its coal-fired Abbott power station with the USNC Micro Modular Reactor (MMR) Energy System, providing a zero-carbon demonstration of district heat and power to campus buildings as part of its green campus initiative. The project team aims to demonstrate how microreactor systems integrate with existing fossil fuel infrastructure to accelerate the decarbonisation of existing power-generation facilities.

…USNC’s MMR is a 15 MW thermal, 5 MW electrical high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, drawing on operational experience from reactors developed by China, Germany, Japan and the USA. It consists of two plants: the nuclear plant that generates heat, and the adjacent power plant that converts heat into electricity or provides process heat for industrial applications. The USNC system is designed to be simple, with minimal operation and maintenance requirements, and no on-site fuel storage, handling or processing. The MMR uses TRISO fuel in prismatic graphite blocks and has a sealed transportable core.

While it might be upsetting news to some of the students or people who are new to the area around the school, the University ran a nuclear reactor on campus for many years…

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has a long history of groundbreaking nuclear energy, power infrastructure, and operations research. In fact, the university successfully and safely ran a nuclear reactor on campus for 38 years from 1960-1998, and its fuel was safely stored on-site until 2004. That site is now in Greenfield status.

…and, being the ultimate wonky engineering types, they are all in on the project. Thankfully, it is, in fact, still moving ahead at the glacial pace that these things creep. The NRC project page keeps track of all the paperwork, updates and approvals. The Regulatory Engagement Plan for the project was finished and submitted to the NRC in late August of last year.

Pretty exciting!

Some of the feedback the NRC is sending to the school is fascinating, too. I don’t have the first concept of what they’re talking about from a technician’s expertise, but as an interested observer watching the beginning of a process where the rules might have to be devised as one goes along? It’s neat. This is a new technology. It’s interesting to read how NRC staff is working within guidelines that they have for older, larger facilities that are capable of producing as much power, seeing what applies to this newer, smaller reactor and then schooling the academics what they need to submit. I imagine there’s going to be an immense amount of back and forth.

Big learning curve for everyone involved. There’s going to be a ton of that coming down the road. A whole host of universities and companies are exploring different types of advanced micro-reactors.

First-of-a-kind research reactors, demo reactors, and research facilities are being developed and sited on university campuses to support the broader deployment of advanced reactors. At the 2021 ANS Winter Meeting and Technology Expo, during a December 2 panel session titled “Research Reactors in Support of Advanced Reactor R&D,” several of these planned projects were discussed in detail—including a molten salt reactor in Texas and a high-temperature gas–cooled reactor in Illinois.

…The plan to site a molten salt research reactor on the campus of Abilene Christian University (ACU) in Texas was represented by Douglass Robison, of Natura Resources, a for-profit company that provided the funding needed to jumpstart the Nuclear Energy eXperimental Testing Research Alliance (NEXTRA), and professors from each of the four universities that are part of the consortium: Tsvetkov, of Texas A&M; Rusty Towell, of ACU; Steve Biegalski, of the Georgia Institute of Technology; and Derek Haas, of the University of Texas at Austin.

…UIUC plans a gas-cooled microreactor: Caleb Brooks, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), described the university’s plans to site a Micro-Modular Reactor (MMR) from Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation next to the university’s Abbott power plant where it will provide both electricity and steam to meet the campus’s substantial power needs.

…MIT investigates salt reactors: Charles Forsberg, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described the work being performed under a three-year DOE Integrated Research Project in MIT’s research reactor and at North Carolina State University to understand molten salts in irradiation conditions.

…Wes Hines, of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, described the Fast Neutron Source (FNS) nearing completion in UTK’s new nuclear engineering building that uses a neutron-generator–driven “highly flexible subcritical core to replicate the neutron spectrum of any fast reactor.”

Who knew? And Caleb Brooks of UIUC sounded really prophetic at the conference where all these plans were discussed.

…Looking beyond the university community, Brooks added a note of urgency. “If advanced nuclear can’t be done on budget and on time, we will lose the public on it,” he said. “If we don’t capitalize on the alignments in D.C. and the windfall of funding for nuclear right now, I think enrollment numbers at the universities will drop drastically again. . . . This is the time that we need to go, and we need to deliver on the promise of advanced nuclear. I think we’re running out of time.”

This past year may have just swept away a good part of the resistance and, if we’re really lucky, bought them the time they need.