DOE signs off on Oklo fuel fabrication facility design
The US Department of Energy has approved the Conceptual Safety Design Report for Oklo Inc's Aurora Fuel Fabrication Facility at Idaho National Laboratory. The facility will fabricate fuel for the Aurora "powerhouse" liquid metal-cooled fast reactor plant which is to be located at the same site.
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The fuel will be fabricated using high assay low enriched uranium (HALEU) recovered from used fuel from the Department of Energy (DOE) Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II), which operated at Idaho National Laboratory from 1964 to 1994. Oklo has been granted access to 5 tonnes of HALEU as part of a cooperative agreement with the laboratory that was competitively awarded in 2019. The DOE will retain ownership of the HALEU both during and after its use.
California-based Oklo has a site use permit from the DOE to build and operate a prototype of its Aurora reactor at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). In September, it finalised a Memorandum of Agreement with the US DOE Idaho Operations Office granting access to conduct site investigations at its preferred location, and anticipates deploying the first commercial Aurora powerhouse in 2027. The company has also received previous DOE support to advance the Aurora powerhouse design through the Office of Nuclear Energy's Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear programme and additional funding to demonstrate recycling technologies through the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) initiative.
"We are proud of our collaboration with INL and DOE as we move closer to turning on our first commercial plant that uses this recovered nuclear fuel in just a few years," said Oklo co-founder and CEO Jacob DeWitte said.
Jess Gehin, INL’s associate laboratory director for Nuclear Science and Technology, said the approval of the Conceptual Safety Design Report is a critical step toward fabricating fuel for the first commercial deployment of Oklo's plant: "As the nation’s nuclear energy research laboratory, we are committed to partnering with companies like Oklo to advance fission technologies and deliver clean energy solutions," she added.
The Aurora powerhouse is a fast neutron reactor that uses heat pipes to transport heat from the reactor core to a supercritical carbon dioxide power conversion system to generate electricity. It uses metallic fuel to produce about 15 MWe as well as producing usable heat, and can operate on fuel made from fresh HALEU or used nuclear fuel.
Earlier this year, Oklo successfully completed the first end-to-end demonstration of the key stages of its advanced fuel recycling process, in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory.
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