Jacopo Buongiorno, TEPCO Professor and Associate Department Head of Nuclear Science and Engineering, is the MIT project lead on the DOE funded project
Photo: Susan Young
NSE’s Jacopo Buongiorno to collaborate on $1.9M DOE grant to accelerate advanced nuclear technology development
MIT’s Jacopo Buongiorno, TEPCO Professor and Associate Department Head of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Franz-Josef Ulm, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering will collaborate with Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy, Exelon Generation, and Bechtel on advanced nuclear technologies.
The project is led by GE Hitachi (GEH) and funded by a $1.9M grant from the DOE. The focus —accelerating domestic advanced nuclear technology. Specifically, the team will examine ways to simplify the reactor design, reduce plant construction costs, and lower operations and maintenance costs for a small modular reactor (SMR)— the GEH BWRX-300.
"It’s an imperative of the nuclear industry to reduce the cost of deploying new plants,” said Jacopo Buongiorno, TEPCO Professor and Associate Department Head, Nuclear Science and Engineering, MIT. “Our plan is to design a new small modular nuclear reactor that adopts advanced concrete solutions and innovative construction techniques, which are expected to drastically cut its cost and schedule, and make it competitive with natural gas combined cycle power plants."
This is the second group of awards granted by the DOE for domestic advanced nuclear technology projects. The awards are “examples of the private-public partnerships needed to help successfully develop innovative domestic nuclear technologies. The projects will allow industry-led teams, which include participants from federal agencies, public and private laboratories, institutions of higher education, and other domestic entities, to advance the state of U.S. commercial nuclear capability.”
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Jacopo Buongiorno
CANES
July 2018
Department of Nuclear Science & Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue, 24-107 (map)
Cambridge, MA 02139
nse-info@mit.edu