 Well, good afternoon everyone and welcome to the session on empowering advanced nuclear deployment with non-power reactors. I'm Commissioner Jeff Barron, and I'll be moderating today's session. We'll be talking about the expanding role of non-power reactors in developing and demonstrating advanced reactor technologies. We'll hear how industry universities and the Department of Energy are working to deploy non-power reactors to gather experimental data, test novel components, refine designs, and demonstrate the ability of advanced reactor technologies to produce electricity and heat energy. We'll also discuss interagency collaboration and NRC pre-application engagement and licensing reviews. To lay the foundation for our discussion, our five expert panelists will each give a five minute opening presentation, because Q&A is the fun part. We'll try to strictly enforce the five minute time limits. That will leave us with about an hour to discuss the issues you and the audience are most interested in. As you think of questions, whether you're virtual or in person, please submit them through the RIC platform. For those joining virtually, once you've logged on, join the session. There is a tab for the Q&A box where you will input your question. For those of you in the room, you may have scanned the QR code for the session from the displays in the foyer. But if not, please take a moment and scan the QR code displayed on the screen to your device. It is no longer displayed on the screen, in fact. So hopefully you did it on the way in, otherwise maybe we could, there it is. So there's the QR code. You can scan that, and that'll get you ready to submit questions for us. The QR code will drop you to a page specific to this session, and we'll have a tab for Q&A where you will input your question. You all are probably already pros at this by now. Questions from both the online participants and those using the QR code will be added to the same queue. To get things started, we have some prepared questions after presentations, but we're counting on the audience to come up with questions to sustain a great discussion. We'll work hard to get through as many questions and topics as we can. For most questions, I'll give each panelist an opportunity to weigh in. Let me start by introducing our terrific panel. Dr. Ashley Finan was founding director of, I'm going to go ahead and advance this. There we go. Dr. Ashley Finan was the founding director of the National Reactor Innovation Center at the Department of Energy. She is now chief scientist for national and homeland security at Idaho National Lab. Anthony Schodl is the manager of advanced reactors licensing at engineering at Westinghouse. Dr. Rusty Toll is professor in the department of engineering and physics and director of the nuclear energy experimental testing laboratory next at Abilene Christian University. Dr. Caleb Brooks is an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the department of nuclear plasma and radiological engineering. And Duke Kennedy is a senior project manager at NRC's division of advanced reactors in non-power production and utilization facilities. Ashley, would you like to get us started? Is this mic working? You guys hear me? No? Okay. Okay. Well, maybe they want us to stand up. Oh, it's not working? Sure. I will cede this microphone. No problem. Go ahead. Working now? Try it. Oh, there we go. Okay. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Great. So thanks for being here today. And thank you to Commissioner Barron for having us on the panel. It's a great opportunity to talk about the National Reactor Innovation Center. And I'm going to speak a little bit about how National Reactor Innovation Center, or NRC for short, is developing demonstration testbeds in order to empower advanced nuclear deployment with non-power reactors. First, a little bit of background on NRC. So NRC is a center established by the Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy, launched in FY 2020, and authorized by the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act. NRC works closely with GAIN to help partner with industry to bridge the gap between research and commercial deployment by leveraging national lab expertise and infrastructure, and helping manage demonstrations to success. And I'll give you some more detail on that. So this is the summary of NRC on one slide. We're really focused on empowering innovators with access to lab capabilities and expertise, and making sure that the laboratories are prepared to help innovators in their projects. I'm not going to go through this whole slide because of our time constraints, but I'm going to highlight two things. So I'm going to speak about demonstration testbeds on the next slide, and I'll focus on that. But on this slide, I want to mention one small advertisement on our addressing cost and markets activities. We have an advanced construction technology demonstration project that's a partnership with GE Hitachi and others, and there's a panel on that tomorrow, TH-23, Constructing our Energy Future. So the panel is about construction technologies, and we're going to have a lot more detail on Enric's work in that area tomorrow, so I hope you can make it. And the other item I wanted to focus on here is the regulatory risk reduction work that Enric has done. Largely, working under an MOU between the Department of Energy and the NRC, we've been able to have two rotational employees from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission join the Enric team, and that's been a huge asset to Enric and to DOE, and to all of the innovators who will benefit from that, because we have the regulatory experts embedded in some of the projects, particularly looking at how can we use non-power reactors and DOE authorized reactors to inform future power reactor licensing with the NRC. So it's been a great opportunity to try to really capture the benefits of these non-power reactor demonstration projects for future power reactors. And then one other important activity we've had in non-power reactor regulatory risk reduction is in doing a NEPA environmental assessment for the Marvel reactor, which is an INL project. It's a very small test reactor that INL is developing, and we were able to pursue an environmental assessment instead of an environmental impact statement under the National Environmental Policy Act, and that's a first of a kind for an advanced reactor, for any nuclear reactor really, and we were able to do it because it's very small, it's DOE authorized and it's in an existing facility, but I think it could be important for future microreactor environmental assessments. So then the focus of what I wanted to share with you is that NRC is developing two different demonstration test beds. So we have existing facilities at Idaho National Laboratory where reactors were operated in the past, and they're no longer operating in these facilities, but we're refurbishing them and refitting them to be able to host industry reactor demonstrations moving forward. So if you look at this slide here, on the left-hand side there are three photos that pertain to the first one test bed, which is smaller. It's called Lotus. It's the laboratory for operations and testing in the U.S. And that's for small, you know, zero power to 100 kilowatt size reactor demonstrations, experimental reactors that might use higher enriched uranium levels. And so that is planned to host the molten chloride reactor experiment under the ARDP risk reduction project. And that is moving along well. It has a DOE process that it needs to follow. It's been through CD0, and it will, it's targeting CD1 by the end of March, which would release us to complete design and begin construction soon after. And then on the right-hand side is the dome test bed. So that's demonstration of microreactor experiments. And I have a more detailed slide on not here. The strategy here is to actually take the dome that used to hold the EBR2, or experimental breeder reactor 2. That was a sodium fast reactor that operated from 1964 to 1994 has since been decommissioned. But we still have this really valuable infrastructure in this dome. So we're establishing a minimum viable test bed for microreactors, up to 20 megawatt thermal, using high assay, low enriched uranium fuels, and generally targeting high temperature gas reactor designs or trisofuel designs for the initial users. So this provides a lot of support equipment and a safety significant confinement for these reactors to go critical for the first time. We completed final design in September 2022, and we've gone through construction RFPs and started doing long-lead procurements and expect to begin construction this year. So I think that's my last slide, and I'll just sum it up by saying that Enric is working very hard to prepare facilities in which industry can do first-of-a-kind non-power demonstrations that will inform their later demonstration projects and ultimately their power reactor projects. Thank you. Thanks Ashley. Thank you Commissioner for having me here today. So my name is Anthony Schodl. I'm the Manager of Advanced Reactor Licensing at Westinghouse. I have just a few slides with you today, but before I get into that content, I want to maybe set the context of what we're going to be talking about for Evinchi Micro Reactor. So I'd like to start with first an acknowledgement and congratulations to the team at Vogel Unit 3 for initial criticality last week. That's a tremendous accomplishment. You know, folks at Southern Company, NRC, Westinghouse, and anybody in the past who has contributed to that event. It's a significant achievement for the industry and not to be understated. And why do I start there before I get into a whole dialogue here on advanced reactors and non-power facilities for future licensing? I start there because it's important to understand where we came from, especially in the spirit of all the conversation you've heard this week about some of the big risks and challenges facing the industry around knowledge retention, personnel, staffing, and making sure that we have the right individuals in both the regulatory agencies and in industry and vendors to deliver the next generation of nuclear reactors. So the expertise and the knowledge gained through the licensing achievement at Vogel Unit 3 getting it to a point where we can say successfully we've reached initial criticality. That's going to go a long way as we transition that knowledge base into the next stage of advanced reactor deployment and licensing. So again, big congratulations. And then the second thing I'd like to acknowledge before I get into the slides and Commissioner, I'll keep it to the five minutes as best I can here. It's for anybody who had the pleasure and the opportunity of listening to Commissioner Caputo this morning with her opening plenary remarks, she really set the stage well for this discussion today. And I think her sentiments were echoed in one of the last technical sessions on risk-informed licensing by former Commissioner Burns. She proposed to everybody listening today this notion of yes, we're following risk-informed performance-based licensing and you're going to be looking for a balance between precedent from your experience from decades of operation from light-water reactors versus the need to innovate to move forward into advanced reactors and finding the right balance. So how does that translate into what I want to talk to you about today? So for the Avinci Microreactor Program, our mission is to bring this new advanced technology to the market globally in the coming years. Part of that, and from our experience on AP1000 and on LWR history, we recognize at Westinghouse the strong value of a robust test program including integrated test demonstrations and to Reavinci Microreactor to this discussion. So to understand where the rest of it goes with deployment model, you need to know a little bit about what exactly is the Avinci Microreactor and what is the potential for market, right? So here on the slide, I'm not going to read all of it to you. These slides will be available as part of the RIC information, but at the fundamental level, the Avinci Microreactor is a heat pipe microreactor focused around passive safety features, largely passive safety features, minimizing moving parts within the reactor. It operates at high temperature using Triso fuel. It's graphite moderated and air cooled. That in a nutshell is Avinci Microreactor. It's designed to operate for beyond eight effective full power years and it can be operated in either an electricity generation mode or a code generation mode for electricity and heat production. So some of the background here, right? So I'll talk a little bit about the background and the development. So eventually started, you know, really within Westinghouse around the 2015 era building off of years of lab development work for heat pipes. And we've taken that technology, heat pipe technology, and we continue to develop it into what we call the Avinci Microreactor today. Ultimately, what you see here on the bottom is, you know, we're looking to, we finally produced the first heat pipe for what we call our nuclear test reactor. And I want to kind of get into that dialogue. So this slide is maybe taken in two parts, right? So the top part is a high-level overview of where we see the test reactor development program going in the coming years. And that sets the stage for future commercial licensing for the technology. So I said a few moments ago, it's important to understand the value of a robust test program. And our test program, Envision for Avinci, culminates in what we call the nuclear test reactor. So Dr. Feyn and talked about the good work that they're looking to do with Dome at INL. That's something that Westinghouse is continuing to follow. And that would be a, you know, an opportunity for a very safe environment to prove the technology that's being developed here today. So you can see that we're doing pre-licensing engagement, building off of the test reactor in both the United States. And then I'll call it vendor design review has been started with the regulator CNSC in Canada. And we continue to explore, you know, avenues to deploy Envision to other countries outside of North America. Talked a little bit about challenges this week, right? So some of the big ones that you've heard in a number of the sessions are, you know, you and everybody else using HALU. That's always going to be one of the topics. So Westinghouse continues to follow DOE efforts and supports DOE and those ongoing initiatives for HALU supply availability, as well as leveraging, you know, our global fuel fabrication capabilities, domestic and abroad, and continuing to develop new partnerships to shore up the front end. But then also transitioning then to the licensing. So we have two frameworks available to us today, part 50 and part 52. You heard a session on part 53 in the future and where that goes. Part of the challenge and where the real engineering and licensing comes in is risk-informing under the existing frameworks that way we can deliver this technology to the industry, to the world, you know, as quickly as safely impossible. So to that end, I would like to highly tout the pre-licensing regulatory engagement that the team at Westinghouse has done and the support through NRC for timely reviews and sticking to the review schedules. And then this is the last slide, but this kind of ties a bow on it for how does the new technology, the eventually heat pipe reactor, how does that look whenever you actually talk about deployment, right? So it's a micro. It's not an SMR. I like to draw the differentiation even though sometimes it's lumped in the same category. So you can work this slide left to right. It's numbered, but starting with the test reactor, we're going to prove out integrated nuclear tests with that test reactor. It's important to acknowledge that we're not going to test everything, right? So that's part of the message that Commissioner Caputo delivered this morning, finding the right balance on what's necessary, what phenomena are important to extract from your test program and the test reactor, do the right size testing. That supports code validation, you know, code V and V for necessary licensing cases. And then it supports ultimately the deployment model for EVINCI where it's manufactured or assembled in a factory, transported to the operating site, operates for the design lifetime before it's transported away for interim storage or decommissioning. So that's EVINCI in a nutshell. Thank you for the time. Hello. It's great to be with you. My name is Rusty Tal. I'm a Director of NEXT Lab at Abel and Christian University, and we're excited to share with you about our project we're working that's sponsored by Natura Resources. NEXT stands for Nuclear Energy Experimental Testing and we're really trying to find global solutions to world's critical needs. I think this audience understands it, but what does advanced nuclear have to offer the world? Well, half the world lives in energy poverty and is in need of energy to raise their standard living. And half of the world will develop cancer during our lifetimes, and so there's a need for new treatments for diagnosing and treating cancer, and a third of the world's population doesn't have enough clean water to meet the basic needs. And so the advanced nuclear has the ability to address all three of these really critical areas, and in particular, molten salt reactor technology is what we're pursuing at Abel and Christian University to address these needs. The mission of AC's NEXT Lab is to provide global solutions to the world's need for energy, water, and medical isotopes by advancing the technology of molten salt reactors while educating future leaders in nuclear science and engineering. We've chosen molten salt reactors because of their very attractive features. They're inherently safe. They're clean. They decrease the amount of waste produced compared to old reactors. They're very efficient in utilizing fuel. They're multifunctional. They can address many needs. They're scalable, so they can go from small size to large, carbon free, obviously reliable. They can use a variety of different fuels, including spent nuclear fuels. The two real key requirements are the key advantages of molten salt reactors compared to currently deployed technology is, first of all, the molten salt is the coolant. There, you're allowed to operate at high temperatures. It improves your thermal efficiency. You're also able to provide industrial heat. While you're operating at high temperature, you're simultaneously at low pressure, and so that's safe. There's no phase transition in your coolant. You have to worry about, and so that makes the reactor walk away safe, and it also enables our second key requirement, which is liquid fuel. We are able to fuel the reactor with salt, uranium and salt form dissolved within the coolant salt, and so we aren't using solid fuel technology. Therefore, we increase the fuel utilization, decrease the waste that's produced. We also have access to those medical isotopes and other useful isotopes used in batteries and other applications, and of course your core can't melt down. To achieve this goal, we're partnering with Natura Resources. It's a company stood up to fund the research at ACU and to help deploy commercially this technology. The goals of Natura Resources and those of NEXLAB are very, very aligned. We hope to demonstrate first, so I think Natura would continue to deploy in the world. ACU and Natura aren't doing this alone. We're part of a research alliance that includes the University of Texas, Texas A&M, and Georgia Institute of Technology. This research group is working on building a molten salt research reactor. It's very similar to the molten salt reactor experiment. It was built and operated at Oak Ridge National Lab in the 60s. Operated very, very successfully for four years showing these pictures of the core and the control room for that molten salt reactor. This is a cartoon diagram of what we're hoping to do. In the picture you'll see on the left fuel handling that receives the fuel and transports it inside of the reactor enclosure in the center cell. That reactor enclosure houses the core where the fission occurs, the salt is warmed, leaves the top of the core, warm, goes through the reactor access vessel, pump, primary heat exchanger, and then back into the bottom of the core. So very simple loop design with a drain tank. In the right-hand side, this cartoon is the secondary coolant where the one megawatt thermal energy is removed through a second salt loop. We're leveraging off of what was demonstrated by Oak Ridge over 50 years ago, and so we're doing a lot of things the exact same way. We're using uranium tetrafluoride as our fuel form dissolved in flyb or lithium fluoride, brilliant fluoride salt. It has a simple loop design graphite moderator. We have a drain tank to hold the salt during a shutdown. All this is put sub-training in a trench and it's designed for a relatively short lifetime. This is not a reactor that's designed to operate for decades, but for to show that we can get a license, we can go critical, and we can learn what we need to to deploy a commercially viable version. We are simplifying our reactor in several ways from the molten salt reactor experiment. We're doing things to make it easier to license that won't, that will also help us to meet our goals. So we're using low and rich uranium instead of high and rich uranium, HALEU instead of the high and rich uranium that Oak Ridge used. We're dropping the power by almost an order of magnitude using simple nuclear qualified commercially available materials like stainless steel 316. There's not a freeze plug in this design. We're simply using pneumatic pressure to keep the salt in the primary loop and we're utilizing anything else that we've made advances over the last 50 years. The building to house this reactor is our science engineering research center. This is a facility on the Abilene Christ University campus 28,000 square feet. It was designed in 21. Groundbreaking happened last year and it will be finished construction later this summer. This is the main feature of the building. When you do a cross section of the building there's some labs, a radiochemistry lab, salt systems labs, etc. on the left but on the right you'll see the research bay that houses the trench, which is really the key feature of this facility. It's a 25 feet deep trench, 80 feet long, 15 feet wide with a 40 ton crane over top. So that allows us to build a small module reactor and bring it in, drop it into place, cover it with a concrete lid and safely operate a molten salt reactor on the university campus. If you take the building and you divide it in the other direction you can see the link to the trench. On the left, bottom left is the reactor enclosure, fuel handling and secondary heat removal are combined in the center and room for future work is on the right of that trench. Moving from cartoons to a real life this is an image of the facility when construction began last year. The first thing of course was to build a big dig a deep hole to build that concrete trench in. This is the four feet thick concrete walls being built up, reinforced floor put on top of it, concrete tilt up walls in place and the rest of the facility being built out around it. So our current status on this is that the Natura Resources Sponsored Research Alliance is leading the way in molten salt reactor or small module reactor development deployment. ACU has built the science and your research center to house the reactor. We've submitted our construction to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last year. It was accepted and documented with an 18 month review time. We're very thankful for and when you think about those together we're the only advanced reactor project that has both a facility under construction and a license under review. And so we're very thankful for the progress that's done by our talented team and our sponsor and happy to discuss and answer questions during the Q&A time. Thank you. Okay thank you so much. Thank you to the commissioner and the panel. It's really an honor to be counted amongst really great innovative projects that are happening. Here I want to talk about the Illinois Microactor Demonstration Project. So I'm the director of that project. It's a collaboration with Ultrasafe Nuclear Corporation and supporting that project is NPR and AECOM. And we aim to deploy on our campus a U.S.N.C. MMR. This is a high-temperature gas cooled reactor technology trisofueled 15 megawatt thermal reactor that we would operate as a research reactor on our campus. So quickly project team at least on the Illinois side is quite strong and a lot of folks active on this project and can't be done by any one person. So great team from the Illinois side. About Illinois just quickly we're conveniently located between Chicago, Indy and St. Louis. Come on out check us out. The University of Illinois campus is a major land grant public institution where we do a lot of research and education and we really aim to be at the forefront of the world's challenges and clean energy is just that. So the University has done a lot position itself as a demonstration site for renewables for for the push towards carbon neutral. But the University is also a major energy user. We're about 60 megawatts of average thermal demand and another 60 megawatts of average electric electric demand. We have we had a supercomputer recently decommissioned that was 12 megawatts alone. So to to decarbonize the 600 or so buildings on our campus that are all fed from districting presents a real challenge for the campus to meet those clean energy goals. Quickly Illinois you may know about the leadership that Illinois has in nuclear but I love to point it out first humans sustained chain reaction up at University of Chicago and then just kind of win after win and nuclear came out of Illinois and even today it's the largest Illinois Illinois is the largest nuclear power producer in the country. On our campus we had a trigger reactor operated very safely for 38 years in the heart of our campus at one megawatt of state state power and has been returned to Greenfield status. So we've seen the whole evolution of research reactor from the design construction operation leveraging it for public engagement leveraging it for education research and then ultimately decommissioning. So quickly on our project focus so we've got two core missions and a cross cutting mission. So the core mission obviously for University is going to be education training and outreach. I think it's undervalued the role that universities have played to engage the public on what is nuclear. All right how is nuclear how nuclear can be done safely and and what fundamentally does those nuclear power mean. So advanced reactors need advanced research reactors particularly for the education piece. If advanced reactors are going to realize their full potential I'm sorry to say there just is not a workforce for that to happen and so at the University of Illinois we want to be part of developing that workforce as raised step in and deploy these reactors. All the way from the undergraduate graduate professional and operator training we want to engage with the public we want to we want to deploy one of these on our campus for people to come see understand witness safe and peaceful use of nuclear power. The second core mission of research so here we recognize that research reactors around the country are do serve a great purpose to irradiate materials. They for in general they play with neutrons and gamemodes and they do that very well. That's not our focus here. Our focus is not about radiating or putting things in the core. Here we're focused on all the enabling and synergistic technologies that have to be developed around the reactor for these these technologies to realize their full potential. So that means how you instrument them how you operate them right how you how you develop out the tools to analyze them and then ultimately the cross-cutting mission which is an umbrella under the education research mission which is to demonstrate the production capability of these devices. So the power generated from the reactor will first integrate with a molten salt loop from that molten salt loop steam will be generated and will integrate with our existing campus power plant. It's a hybrid coal natural gas cogent plant that has the the sole mission of producing a hundred percent of the steam needs for campus and in that process through its cogent mode it also produces a substantial amount of electricity. So through this approach we will demonstrate the ability of advanced reactors advanced micro reactors particularly the MMR to decarbonize existing fossil installations and do so through electricity production district heat. We're looking at hydrogen production and we're open to other high value processes. Again micro reactors represent a total a total paradigm change in the way we do nuclear the way we construct them the way that we operate them at all phases and we want to be a part of the optimization and the development of the the research necessary around the technology to see that realize its full potential. So quickly these I guess this presentation wasn't updated but quickly this just shows the need for the workforce the the colored bar there that shows the number of graduates and undergraduate masters and PhD degrees and you see that the availability of research reactors which is the blue line has not responded to the uptick in in student interest and student engagement and certainly is going to be an issue for the workforce to come. Again around the research and development pieces for this reactor we're not so focused on a rating materials but we're focused on those synergies around the reactor that are going to be necessary to develop out given the paradigm change that we're talking about particularly with micro reactors and then the market demonstration. So people need to see these operated and they need to see these operated in the new markets that are enabled through micro reactors. So micro reactors the the smaller footprint enabling their co-location directly with energy users putting electrons on the grid just isn't very profitable right and if you but if you can jump those transmission costs and you go directly to the consumer there might be a market you can see there the the electricity costs in the US and in the bracket is the percent change just over last year. Electricity is getting expensive and it's this is only the tip of the iceberg. Pretty soon I think there'll be a nice direct market so long as micro reactors can be demonstrated to be able to be co-located with energy need. A little bit of our campus portfolio I already mentioned this but 55 megawatts are so electric and 60 megawatts of thermal. We also have a major fuel utilization need for our campus bus fleet. If you've been to a major campus you know that the that the buses are a critical aspect of the infrastructure upwards of a 3400 gallons of gas a day. It turns out that a micro reactor like the one that from us and see that we are proposing is a is a right size and hydrogen equivalence to decarbonize that bus fleet. A little bit of the site so there you see Abbott power plant directly the box shown directly below Abbott is the site where we plan to deploy the the MMR. The technology itself I mentioned is high high-temperature gas cooled reactor the line diagram here showing the pathway on the reactor side and then the the intermediate molten salt tanks which has the intermediate molten salt loop that effectively helps to decouple the operations of the reactor from the steam that would be sent to Abbott power plant from the steam generator and again deploying these co-located with the energy demand. Our timeline we're looking to submit our construction permit application within the next year and you can follow the project and through a variety of ways and I look forward to the discussion today. Okay good afternoon ladies and gentlemen folks joining us online as well. My name is Duke Kennedy. I'm a project manager in the advanced reactor policy branch. The last 20 years of my career have been devoted to non-power reactors though where I've worked as a student operator. I've worked as a licensing project manager and I've also worked in international safety so very pleased to be here today to share with you my insights as a regulator on this new wave of non-power reactor projects. So I'm going to start with an overview of the activities that are ongoing right now and then end with a couple insights about these activities. So here's a broad landscape of the advanced reactors that are under consideration for deployment in the U.S. One thing I just want to highlight is you can see they're grouped here by fuel types and coolant types and so these are the changes to the technology that we're seeing and we have a number of different companies and entities looking at all these different technologies. I also want to highlight that there is a research reactor project or a testing facility project, some sort of non-power reactor associated with most of these technologies. So this is an area where we're expecting to see a lot of additional research and development activity. So several developers are looking at NRC licensed projects and so we have three of those that are either ongoing reviews or pre-application that's the Kairos Powers Hermes test reactor which is under review now the construction permit application there's the Abilene Christian University reactor that's also under review and as you heard from Dr. Brooks there's the University of Illinois project which is in pre-application engagement and there are also other projects as you heard from Dr. Finan that are considering DOE engagement as a way to perform research and development to further technology and eventually support commercial deployment. So briefly here are two of the projects that I just mentioned the Kairos Hermes test reactor construction permit was accepted in November of 2021. We set an aggressive 21 month review schedule that was based on substantial pre-application engagement and I've got a link to a dashboard here that communicates to the public the status of that review and provides some additional details. If you look at that dashboard you'll see that at this point where the NRC staff is about 75% of the way through its safety review and its environmental review. Dr. Tal has already discussed the construction permit application for Abilene so I won't go into that in detail but there is a dashboard that you can see the current status there as well and I'll just mention about these dashboards in light of the commissioner's comments this morning about enhancing public communication and building public trust these dashboards are really a great resource for people to see what's happening with these NRC projects. You can see the resources expended you can see the progress and safety and environmental reviews you can see a Gantt chart with a breakdown of review tasks you can see a summary of regulatory audits questions that are open for answering about the applicants and also any high impact technical issues so I encourage you to check out these links and see the dashboards that we've developed. Regarding the Illinois project I'll just take the opportunity here to mention that the NRC public website for advanced reactors has a fairly extensive section on pre-application engagement and so you can find a page there related to the Illinois project but you can also find 10 other pages covering advanced reactor projects both non power reactor projects and commercial power reactor projects so this is a great resource of public information and you can also sign up for a listserv on those web pages if you'd like to receive email communications when there are significant documents that are submitted or issued by NRC related to those projects so a good way to stay connected to those projects if you're interested. Okay finally I'd like to just share a couple examples of observations related to a non power reactor regulation and and what we're seeing during this these current reviews and so I've developed four general categories here of observations and because of time I'll just give two examples and the first example I'll talk about is under the lower left section there on experience with licensing reviews of new technologies and see the first bullet says core team review model so this is a review model that we've developed over the last couple of years and that we've implemented in the Kairos Hermes construction permit application review and what it does is it gets together a small group of licensing project managers and technical reviewers that have a holistic view of the safety of the safety review and the project and these this core team is supported by subject matter experts from across the NRC and this this review model has been very successful so far I believe. One example of that is if you look at the guidance for a construction permit application for a non power reactor you'll find that there is not a lot of guidance about the level of technical detail that needs to be included in the construction permit application and so that has been an area where the core team can excel because you have a group of project managers and technical review staff that have a lot of experience with reviewing applications and and using engineering judgment to figure out how to right size the construction permit application review so the flexibility and adaptability of this model I think is going to be very important as this approach is applied to commercial reactor reviews. The second I'd like to mention is maybe doesn't seem so exciting but it's regulatory audits and this process has been used with with great success I believe so far and it's a I would say a streamlined way of getting additional information on an application so the traditional process has been to use requests for additional information and we still use that process however the audit introduces another step where the technical reviewers and the applicants can discuss in more detailed draft questions and also have more access to some of the supporting references that go along with the application that don't necessarily need to be submitted in their entirety as part of the application but where there are important details that do need to be put into the public record so that the NRC staff can rely on those for its decision making so I think the audit process has worked very well in streamlining and it's also been a very transparent process where draft questions are made publicly available some of the audits are held in public meetings and so I think this is a way that we're seeking to enhance efficiency as we go forward with commercial reactor licensing so that's the end of my remarks here is my contact information and again thank you for your interest in the session great well thanks duke thanks everyone for terrific presentations that I think gives us a good foundation for questions maybe we can advance the slide there we go there's the qr code again so please keep the questions coming they are starting to come in which is great and we'll start working through those let me ask a question that really goes to start off to kind of the core of the topic which is how do how do the new non-power reactor projects contribute to scaling up advanced reactor technologies from the research and development stage to commercial operation anyone want to weigh in on that i'm sure other panelists will have more to add but you know if you think about the the opposite moving straight from a concept to a full-scale power demonstration of a technology is not a conventional approach to technology demonstration being able to do some smaller projects in between is how we've generally done this in the past and it it has clear benefits i think maybe we could hear from some of the the folks developing the technologies it's different for each each technology so a molten salt reactor has to achieve different things in their prototype or their non-power demonstration from a heat pipe reactor or another type of reactor so i think that there probably are diverse things that we're going to accomplish with these but the idea is to use a smaller project with lower financial risks in order to retire your most important technology or construction or people risks or regulatory risks so we we have the opportunity to retire regulatory risk technology risk construction risk operations and maintenance risk to provide training opportunities to provide some space for design iterations with new designs when that's necessary so i think really there's a diverse opportunity to to achieve new things from these and i'll pass it on to the other panelists yeah thanks ashley so maybe just say something similar but in a different way and it kind of goes to maybe some of the flavor of what we heard in one of the other technical sessions on on risk informed licensing so think big picture right so if i'm if i'm looking to deploy the technology it's new um heat pipe microreactor in the case of westinghouse eventy um it's it's a new technology um and we're trying to balance the precedent that we have from experience in lwr where it applies but also we're innovating with the new technology and trying to bring this to market so using a risk informed performance based approach on something that's new we can risk inform all day but where's the where's the performance data where is the performance base to draw from whenever i move into the next stage for licensing the uh what i'll call the commercial uh eventy microreactor ultimately intended for power operation right so it then turns the conversation into right sizing the right type of testing like i said earlier in my opening remarks we're not going to test absolutely everything engineers at heart would love to test as much as we can but we're going to test smartly we're going to test what we need to test what we should test to prove the new novel first-of-a-kind aspects of a new technology a scaled test or non-power reactor is one way to do it and for westinghouse that's the culmination of a of a larger uh integrated test program it's not the only test that we do but it's an integrated test so i think that will help go a long way to provide some performance base where some doesn't exist for what technology we're looking to deploy i'll just say that um anytime you have a huge task you can break it up in a series of small steps you're you're much more successful and i think that's one of the challenges is how do you break up building a commercial reactor into a series of smaller achievable steps and and natura resources said let's start with a small research reactor the first step i i think that we've even seen even though the largest of plans that uh awarded billions of dollars from do e to on ardp program those programs have also said oh maybe we don't go straight to commercial we start with a smaller reactor to start with and and demonstrate so certainly i think it's important to to start with the small step um it also gives us a chance to develop the workforce along with developing the uh regulatory path collecting the data you really need to to license a higher power reactor yeah i'd i'd say for um for micro reactors going through a university utilizing the 104 c pathway the benefits of uh the research reactor infrastructure program now university fuel services program uh it's possible that you can deploy a nearly identical reactor in the demo model that can be commercialized right and therefore maybe you benefit from a more prototype friendly licensing pathway you benefit from deris the fuel which is obviously a significant challenge right now uh and you can get your technology out there and you can optimize it you can have it put in place in a in a location that is demonstrating multiple end use applications people can come and see and say yes okay that fits very nicely into what i want to do uh and you know there you go it goes from one to to the first 200 so i think that's the idea for our project is how do these stakeholders align given the benefits of the university research reactor precedent yeah i'll add from the from the regulatory perspective you know the nrc has been focused for a decade several decades on preparing for advanced reactor licensing for non-light water reactor licensing there have been a number of reports over the years to congress internal reports as well about things that need to be done to get ready and these reports um really didn't focus so much on the non-power reactor aspect and some of these non-power reactor projects that you hear about now are have only really come up in the last couple of years so the nrc has been going full speed to get ready for commercial advanced reactor licensing and now we have this wave of non-power reactors and we're able to use it as a opportunity to demonstrate the the viability of some of the strategies and things that have been developed for commercial reactor applications so as an example i mentioned this core team um that that's a strategy that we've been able to use for the kairos fermi's review as well as the abalone christian university review and we've we've been able to learn lessons from applying that model uh to an actual licensing review and so that that gives us data that we can use to further refine how we're doing regulation of advanced reactor technologies to continue to increase readiness for the for um commercialization and for scaling up um and one thing i'll also mention that's a little more behind the scenes is that we have a lot of tools and systems that we use to track data to communicate with the public to organize documents to um to work internally and so we're able to also exercise those systems i think for for these medium scale projects as opposed to going right to the large power reactor projects with those so it's really an opportunity for for us to um get data about our processes and continue to refine them in in preparation for commercial licensing great um this is a question i think both generally and for some of the specific projects uh what are some of the challenges you see for new non-power reactor projects anyone want to weigh in on what are the biggest things they worry about or spend the most time focusing on resolving i can yeah i think it's a a line in stakeholders right uh for commercial deployments you know you've got some economic drivers i think for non-power reactors you have to think creatively how do the stakeholders benefit and that's the university from DOE right from the from the technology from the company's perspective and then ultimately from the community i think all roads for nuclear go through public engagement right and so that public engagement piece as well how do you align those stakeholders um to really bring the project together and that is i think that's a critical piece for non-power reactors um i'll just add that um before we start the project i think we thought uh licensing would be the hurdle um it's still a hurdle but um i think the work that's been done as advanced as the duke talked about uh auditing pre-engagement have been very successful and so i think we've significantly um i would say de-risk that um i think one of the challenges that uh maybe wasn't fully appreciated was the challenge for the department energy to how do you fuel research reactor that has a different fuel form and so that uh continues to be a challenge um i think it has um wanted to do with uh process and um engagement than it does with uh um you know the challenges especially with small uh university research reactors we're not talking about large fuel supplies so it's not tons of material we need um but we we need a clear process on how to to get our hand rules on that so yeah maybe to weigh in here there's there's no shortage of challenges whenever you're trying to deploy something new right so we could probably spend an entire session on challenges right um so i'd like to maybe switch the narrative a little bit to to why do we have confidence that we can deliver this right so playing on the theme that i've posed a couple times now on balancing precedent that's available versus innovation and driving driving a new technology forward to market what's going to make it happen are the people right so we have a tremendous engineering team at westinghouse that works day day in day out with safety at the forefront of everything that they do watching them i have the pleasure to to see the technical rigor and and the self challenging that they bring and why are we doing a test reactor right so we're doing a test reactor to first confirm to ourselves and convince ourselves that this technology is is sound that it's safe that it's reliable that it could be suitable for commercial deployment convince ourselves first that helps us with putting a sound license application in to to share with the regulator ultimately for for approval so yes there are challenges but i think the strong engineering team will find a way to overcome them great any other thoughts on this one all right um ashley and duke can you talk a bit about how nrc and do we have coordinated to share information on advanced reactor technology and regulation and if others want to you know can you weigh in on and provide perspectives on nrc and do e coordination i'll start i can share a couple examples of how nrc and do we have coordinated and shared information after the passage of the nuclear energy innovation and capabilities act the nrc and do we entered into a memorandum of understanding on information sharing that's been supplemented with several addenda over the years and really focuses on sharing technical information to look for technology issues early to look for regulatory gaps and one particular example is the du e's advanced reactor demonstration program as that was looking at the pool of potential technologies to support nrc was part of the process to provide input on on those projects and that continues to be meetings between nrc staff and do e staff related to that program so that the nrc is aware of how those projects are progressing in do e space and so do e is aware of how those projects are progressing in pre application engagement with the nrc so i think that's a that's a really important area for the do e and the nrc need to maintain their regulatory you know independence because they're have very different missions but their missions are are going towards one outcome and so to be coordinated in that i think is is responsible and something that needs to be done so do you want to add thank you duke so i'll i'll just add a couple things to that um one i mentioned during my presentation but at the national reactor innovation center we've been able to benefit from having rotational staff from the nrc on our team embedded in a couple of different areas and and that's been a huge asset and and really valuable i think both to the nrc team and to the nrc we also have a tool called the virtual test bed on which we've had a lot of collaboration with the nrc and that's a platform for using advanced model and simulation tools for advanced reactors which are needed both by the industry but also by the regulator so we've had a lot of close engagement with nrc on that tool and you can find that on that nrc website under initiatives and tools it's the virtual test bed but we've had a great partnership there and then another another item where we've had really strong partnership on sharing information on advanced reactor technology and regulation is in some of our joint webinars so we've had enric tech talks in co-op collaboration with the nrc on environmental reviews and also on pre-application lessons learned and there have been a number of webinars with the nrc on nrc topics from gain as well so there's been a lot of collaboration in this area does anyone want to add okay great i'm going to start interspersing some of the questions we're getting from the audience rusty we've had a couple first of all you what we're going to get through a lot in the next half an hour i think but then you should prepare yourself for an incredible number of very specific questions about your projects because they're coming in and i know people probably come up to you at the end and ask some of those but one of one of them that is um we've gotten a few along the lines of is talked us a little bit about material control and accountability for a molten cell reactor with liquid fuel how are you approaching that well i think it's best to approach it from a small reactor for instead of a large reactor so going back to the first question it's great to start with a small step i think that's it gives an advantage it's going to have to be a different solution it's not simply counting the number of trigger fuel rods as they do at other research reactors so there has to be methods and development there and collaboration and understanding we we do plan on sampling the salt as the reactor operates so we can monitor what's going on and so there'll be atoms of the fuel that's removed from the core while it's operating and taken into a lab and so how do you account for that i think that's uh that's to be it's a challenge we need to specify and so there'll certainly be a different solution than we've had in the past great um we've gotten a number of questions on uh pre-application engagement with nrc um so let's let's talk about that a little bit um you know are there any lessons learned that you think would be helpful for others planning to engage with nrc on new advanced reactor or non-power reactor projects or just how have your experience has been overall what's gone well uh one of the challenges been how do you get the most out of it and that's a question for anyone who wants to weigh in let me let me jump in and start and then i'm glad for everyone but i like i said it's it's been extremely positive to us in the sense that um we'd heard the horror stories um and we'd gotten um uh advice from a from a lot of people that had dealt with uh regulators in a variety of manners um and uh there's been changes there's been improvements clearly that's there i think one of the main ones that has really benefited and surprised us as we engage it is um early engagement is is extremely helpful the pre-submission audits space review has allowed us to submit a much better and more timely construction from it and uh the process we're in now of of answering questions in audit space before we go to rai's is also allowing us to move through the review process and i believe in a pace to allow the nrc to stick to their 18 month review time so um communicate um early and um take advantage of audit space will be my first two bits of advice yeah so i think i even mentioned pre-application engagement and and the importance that westinghouse finds in it um during my opening remarks but i'll say it again so we have had a robust pre-application engagement with nrc um for evincy microreactor um dating back the past two years right so as duke mentioned during his presentation there's you know links available to nrc pre-application pages i'd encourage everybody listening in to go out and and check out all of these pages um the westinghouse page and and what we've engaged on um has been to date 24 um technical white papers um that we've provided and frankly challenged the nrc staff to to to review in a timely manner and they've answered the call right um and part of that is making sure that westinghouse delivers to the nrc staff what we say we're going to deliver when we say we're going to deliver it to build the confidence and the assurance that we're going to do what we say we're going to do and whenever you take back the lessons learned from the white paper or the pre-application engagement it's important not to check the box that you've done it but to take the feedback disseminate it back to the engineering organization the licensing organization and make sure that your future license application reflects what you've learned from it so to us it's it's invaluable in the spirit of de-risking um future licensing endeavors so they sat me next to duke so i'll be careful with my i'm just kidding we found we found nrc to be very open to engagement and we haven't had those spirited conversations or frictions that tend to breed good lessons learned uh to date which is good but uh we i think in our case uh it's been very effective to take them up on their availability for engagement public meetings that correspond with submissions of white papers and topical reports we found to be extremely helpful on both sides um yeah and and just that early and often engagement so i'll add that um enric had a tech talk on this topic and we had guest speakers from nrc and tennessee valley authority um and shine medical technology so that that had some really useful insights if you want a more extended answer to the question and you can find that on the resources section of the enric website but a couple things that um were emphasized in that in addition to what the panelists have already um stated were the value of having a regulatory engagement plan to lay out the communication plan and other um you know goals for the pre-application process and also to have very focused pre-application meetings um with clear topics and agenda um and to maybe aim in some cases to focus those meetings on being able to develop a high quality application that can be accepted for review yeah so appreciate everybody's remarks um um so i was heavily involved in pre-application with advanced reactor companies um while i served as the acting branch chief for the advanced reactor licensing branch and there are a couple observations from that experience one is what everyone says is engage early um the second is that pre-application engagement is meant to tease out the difficult issues with a technology or or licensing action before there before that application comes in so that those those issues can be dealt with as an application is developed or as a reactor design evolves um so it's good to get engaged really early but it's also good to recognize that likely your pre-application engagement plan will change and so you need to start somewhere start addressing these issues but realize that you know circumstances will necessitate change and i think everyone at this table has submitted at least a revision one to their pre-application engagement plan and that you know that's i think that's been um a positive experience uh in in being able to stay flexible with our with our review and to focus resources early where they can make the biggest impact well duke um you you got you and really the agency broadly got some positive feedback which is always nice to hear um i don't want that to go to your head so let me ask a question from the audience that's pushing the agency a bit more um and here it is uh when looking at the nrc schedules that have been posted for these reviews on dashboards and what has been communicated publicly the safety review seems to take only about half the time of the total review schedule it sounds like the staff has made great strides in reducing the safety review but what is the nrc doing to tackle that second half of the review schedule well so we we've developed a flexible review model that attempts to um for example the the advisory committee for reactor safeguards they they review and they review the applications and the nrc staff's review of the application and that's a necessary part of the process that follows the atomic energy act and the regulations um but you don't need to necessarily wait until a safety review is completed before you engage with the acrs before and and you can even um engage with the acrs in a and and chapter by chapter in a safety analysis or in some um way that you can kind of spread out the work so that doesn't come all at the end um but these these processes take time and the staff's detailed safety review is a large chunk of the effort but um it it's building a product that hopefully will make it through those later steps which include the commission hearing and in a in a timely manner so we're we're looking for ways to streamline that and we're getting to the point now with the kairos Hermes review where I think we'll see if some of those the strategies will work for us if or if we need to further refine our our technique that's great um question about um for anyone who wants to weigh in but probably most particularly for those who have uh projects that uh going or soon to be going um will all the data obtained from the advanced test research reactors be shared with the public or at least the reactor design development community what's going to happen with the data that you all develop it when you when you get to the point of of having this operate well I mean uh honestly that's going to be up to um us and our partners uh to decide what happens with that data and obviously some data won't be able to be shared um the export controlled related information that's out of our hands that won't be shared uh to date the university has uh has taken a position that we should make things open to the public to the maximum extent possible and I think we've seen that in our um in our pre application engagement to date and so I think it's it's important uh from a university perspective we we want to maximize that um benefit to uh the public which is kind of in the mandate around research reactors so it in the details of what happens with the data remains to be seen but you know as a university uh we hope to make it as public as possible I think you nailed the response you got it yeah I totally agree the only thing I'd add is in our construction from it we were able to submit it entirely uh in a unredacted version so uh it's 100 transparent um obviously as we move forward export control and other things will will limit that in the future but as far as we can we'll make make things available to public great um Anthony question for you on a Vinci uh is the Vinci expected to be trucked while loaded with fuel or fuel on site and if it's the former so trucked uh what steps are in place to ensure safety and meet safeguards requirements no great question thanks commissioner uh so uh yeah so I went pretty quickly through that deployment model on my slide deck the vision for a Vinci microreactor is that it will be fuel loaded in the in the manufacturing facility or assembly facility um it will be transported as a fueled reactor both to the operating site and then away from the operating site um so both fresh and irradiated fuel right so what are we doing to ensure safety in that regard so um what I didn't discuss earlier was you know there's different stages of licensing for each step of those deployment models on the commercial side of the of the Vinci deployment obviously we're going to be following part 71 requirements in the U.S. and making sure that we work with any international regulatory agencies to ensure you know safety by design um and that includes most importantly I'd say reactivity control during transport right so we have components that will be incorporated as part of the uh of the canister design specifically for transport and shipping to maintain reactivity control great um question on um environmental review um and we got a couple questions along these lines so I'll try to merge them together I guess maybe for anyone who wants to weigh in talk a little bit about how the environmental review is going and the scope of it and are there opportunities to explore uh or alternative environmental review processes um in the licensing space for research and test reactors non-power reactors and didn't you have thoughts about that yeah I'd say that it needs to be right sized right so I've said that a lot and I'm going to continue to say it because I'm a microreactor so and in the spirit of of risk informed again performance-based licensing a microreactor is going to have consequences on radiological consequences on a scale that's different from the 1000 megawatt reactors that's different from the 300 megawatt SMRs it's much more akin to the size of of test reactors um at universities today right so we need to start getting our heads around the philosophy that yes while environmental assessments are are part of the part of the story the consequences and and the siting requirements and the environmental assessments or impacts for a microreactor should be commensurate with the size and consequences duke go ahead duke go ahead so I'll add um that the so the nrc put out a draft uh advanced nuclear reactor generic environmental impact statement which would be a rulemaking and that looks at um topics for advanced reactors that could be treated generically um to try to less lessen the burden for environmental reviews in areas where there are generic issues that can be treated generically in an adequate manner um and just to go on to the microreactor issue in 2021 the nrc staff put out a draft white paper on microreactor licensing strategies and so that talks about some of these these issues that are um related to small reactors that could be fueled transported fueled and so that white paper is available for people to look at but that also discussed relying more heavily on the generic environmental impact statement for treating some of the environmental issues related to those types of reactors I mean currently the nrc regulations would require environmental impact statement for any nuclear power reactor and for any testing facility but for for research reactors there's already the pathway to perform an environmental assessment as that first step of environmental review and just to go a little bit further and in response to the last question um the the nrc staff has put out there was a SECI paper a commission information paper in 2020 about microreactor licensing and deployment issues there was the 2021 strat licensing strategies white paper that I mentioned and then just two weeks ago we gave a presentation at the advanced reactor stakeholders meeting where we brought up some more um considerations related to microreactor licensing and deployment so we're we're looking again at what are those specific issues related to factory fabricated transportable microreactors to make sure that we have the right procedures rules in place to deal effectively with those technologies I'll just add that I think that this is a a question that's vitally important to eventual deployment at scale and speed for microreactors so I'm excited about the the work that nrc is doing to look at generic issues and environmental reviews and also some of the work going on at the lab so I mentioned the marvel reactor at Idaho national laboratory it's 100 kilowatt thermal um research reactor going into an existing facility um DOE authorized not nrc license but it did go through an environmental assessment process and successfully and had a finding of no significant impact which was really important to accelerating that project and lays the groundwork for thinking about that for microreactors down the road and then one more thing I'll know is that for the nrc dome facility we're proposing to pursue an environmental assessment approach with using a plant parameter envelope so setting out the parameters that envelope the likely users of the dome the first several likely users of the dome and we're proposing that to DOE so that we could obtain an environmental assessment coverage a finding of no significant impact if that's the finding that would enable innovators to come in without needing to do an entire additional NEPA review but instead to just verify that they fall within that envelope or to do a supplemental analysis if needed that's not finalized yet but that's an approach that we're proposing and that I think would be really useful so great and the commission is actively working on the advanced reactor geyser so it has not been forgotten that's being actively worked on um let's see the questions are still uh coming in here let me ask um on staffing and workforce um are you concerned about the pipeline of talent for these projects and what are your plans for training and qualifying reactor operators and other staff for your reactor projects so I have um when this is one area where I think that we're we're in a good place um I'm not saying I wouldn't say we're concerned but we're being very proactive and at INL and some of the other labs we benefit from having a pipeline of projects so uh the marvel project that I mentioned will be at Idaho National Laboratory the Pele project through the DOD strategic capabilities office and then further projects with a number of different private sector innovators so we're actually already hiring operators the training takes some time so we're hiring operators now so that we can train them and we have this series of projects coming um so that it makes sense to do that and that's been a really good benefit to the bulk and boon of these number of projects yeah so workforce staffing uh where do we start um so I said earlier that people are gonna make this work right and I still believe it and this challenge on workforce staffing it's not unique to nuclear it's not unique to this industry it's highlighted here because we're all speaking the same language and we recognize as we saw from some of the other presentations that yeah maybe you know maybe the the the current enrollments aren't aren't where we would like them to be and there's potentially going to be a dip but I think it's incumbent on us as industry leaders to develop the team that we have to find the talent that's interested in doing this work and to find a pathway to break down barriers and make them successful with with the toolkit that we have that's what we're doing at Westinghouse and that's what we encourage everybody everybody from the entry level engineer to the senior leader they're all leaders and they all coach and they all mentor and they all develop and they all share information and they all they all work together to row the the boat in the right direction so as long as we keep as long as we keep giving clear direction and helping each other I think we're going to be okay on the staffing part of it specifically to the operator training so that's more of a niche and there may be a more specific question than just finding the right person it's it's how do you train the intended operator for your advanced reactor design I will again highlight that's a great area for pre-application engagement for anybody who has not done it who's considering to do it that's something that we're engaging on now to find you know what's the what's the right you know what's the right path to get them certified what's the right type of training program what's the right level of detail and that's something we continue to engage on rest your field any thoughts you have the addition of students in the mix what they'll get out of this but how are you all thinking about operators and in workforce issues well I think first of all we're trying to address that by involving a lot of students so right now we have 60 undergraduate students working on research projects of course it's not operating reactor but they're involved with the project and that's that shows the interest of the student level obviously enrollment not just at asu but all the research alliance schools are excited about the prospects of advanced reactor and getting to to get hands on experience so we're we hope we're addressing maybe it's early in the pipeline but certainly addressing that pipeline of future operators yeah we fully expect to have licensed student operators and I think that the workforce is a major concern I mean the companies that are here today how many how many people are you trying to hire how many people are in our seat trying to hire right now like in the hires that are made are cannibalized from the other companies that are trying to hire you all know that that's happening right now right we need to develop out a workforce if we're going to be serious about advanced nuclear and these tests for it these projects that we're talking about here are the way that I think we can spur new interest you know it's not playing Tesla in space you know that was that was a big flashy thing that got a lot of enrollments in aerospace but we've got to make these moves to show that there is a future in nuclear uh nuclear industry and so yeah we fully expect to have uh student operators we want to develop those we want to train those but also all of the workforce necessary around the reactor again micro reactors are deployed in a very new way it's not you know on this huge site behind miles of fencing right it's co-located with energy use it's it's getting towards new markets so the all of the infrastructure the human capital necessary around those types of deployants that needs you know that needs to be addressed I think that will be a big challenge yeah I'll add that uh in the nrc and the division of advanced reactors and non-power production utilization facilities we've brought together uh advanced reactor project management staff and non-power reactor project management staff to help cross train and build knowledge and regulatory capability in the staff that we do have so that's been one positive development I think over the last couple of years that's been a conscious decision that's been helping to to build a lot of strength on our bench at the nrc and then we've also spent I would say the last six to eight years maybe 10 years developing and disseminating training curriculum on advanced reactor technologies and so there's a there's a huge wealth of knowledge for the nrc staff to continue to train and and of course we heard from multiple commissioners and the edo about hiring and the event that's coming to this center in May for more job opportunities at the nrc great thanks and we've gotten a few questions along the lines of expressing a concern or a question about how challenging is it for smaller designers or vendors or those who haven't had years or decades of interaction with nrc over the years to start engaging the agency um maybe I'll turn this question over to Rusty or Caleb your your entities aren't small um and and obviously you have a lot of experience but maybe not interacting with nrc uh although with the trick reactor um there would have been there can you talk a little bit about that I mean do you see that as a challenge did you find it hard to make those contacts and start engagement if you hadn't done a lot of that with nrc in the past I spoke about we we thought that might be the challenge and and not to minimize it but certainly that's a concern uh it was from the the smallest organization on the stage uh with the least experience and so uh we did and so um I think that early engagement helps um there's some language um you need to sharpen to communicate effectively um if you look at what acu said we were doing um in the beginning we said we're going to build a research and test reactor it wasn't I think maybe our first drop-in meeting with the nrc where they asked me is it a research or test reactor and I said well I thought it was both and they corrected me and explained to me there are different definitions and we're we're building a research reactor so finding someone that can help with that translation so uh we've we've been uh extremely lucky to find somebody that's able to help us with that translation we've also I'd say um you should definitely um hope that you get project managers at the nrc that um are helpful and uh and we've been very lucky in that area also so yeah in in my case or in our case um I don't resonate so much with the question I think we we surrounded ourselves there's a great licensing team from usnc um brought in Morgan Lewis very helpful of course npr and acom have an excellent track record in uh in engaging and and getting uh applications over the finish line uh with nrc so uh maybe I should have been more intimidated initially but I feel like we had a good a good team around us and uh and a good idea that was worth fighting for I'm glad you weren't um a couple questions we just got in on physical security how are you all focused on physical security particularly in the case of um a microreactor that's small and portable which might go to you anthony is yeah batter out small and portable yeah so I would say we're we're looking at physical security by design right so there's multiple ways to tackle security um and some of this is a flavor of what anybody who's been following what iaa has been doing with with their 3s strategy with you know safeguards security by design um looking to to incorporate that at the early stage of the design process um and and building those those barriers inherent to the design as opposed to creating a design and then figuring out how to make it secure so it's a long-winded answer the details um I'm not going to share publicly right now for obvious reasons uh but I think it's a great question and security by design is is the answer any other thoughts anyone had on security before we were getting close to the end we just have a few minutes left um uh ashley we got a question on um how uh does enric interface with university reactors that's a great question um we have we have folks who have been engaging with some of the university teams to see how we can um support them and help um you know sunday mucky uh is our collaboration manager and he's in the room so he's in front row if you want to catch him afterwards um for more details wave in his hand thank you um and so we we've begun collaboration with university reactors to try to um see what we can do to help but we don't have any active collaborations beyond that right now okay so if I just uh sunday came and visited acu and toured what we were doing and we started dialogue and I'm not sure where it'll go but it's open and so appreciated his his visit and I would also extend that to anybody else that is interested in seeing what we're doing we're we're we're glad going back to the question transparency we're happy to have the visitors come to campus and see what we're doing thanks great um I don't know to what extent this is really in your domain ashley but I'll ask it just because we've gotten a few of them which is uh people interested in updates on the status of the versatile test reactor at INL that that's outside of my area I had that suspicion but I had just enough come in that I decided I'd take a chance and ask I guess I mean I will I will say that the versatile test reactor it hasn't been funded recently folks are aware of that um but a lot of important work was done and all the important work that was done has been carefully organized and stored um for potential future future use and the the configuration manager who has been doing that work is also n rick's configuration manager so that that's where we interface um and I know that she's done a great job on that great well we have about two minutes left are there any that's probably not enough time to launch any more questions into the mix but are there any last comments um not like formal closings or anything but just last thoughts anyone wanted to share from the conversation we've had things that came up and you didn't have a chance to mention but you wanted to yeah duke well on the last question about getting engaged with the nrc so if anybody is um looking to get engaged in pre-application engagement uh you can certainly have my contact contact information I'm not responsible for that area but certainly get you the right people a lot of them are in the room today um and again I don't want to I don't want to make a pre-application engagement an impediment in any way we'll want to welcome people and companies that are interested in and getting started with the nrc so give get in touch with me if necessary yeah not just to piggyback off of that a lot of the discussion today was obviously focused on you know pre-application pre-application engagement here with with nrc given you know given the projects we have going on and the forum um idic knowledge that you know don't don't limit this to a single regulator right so you know we're we talked about looking to deploy evincy microactor globally right um part of our pre pre-licensing conversations um include you know working with um cnsc in Canada and I would say everything as far as the the um the attention and the support that um nrc has provided towards pre-application engagement it's um just the same north of the border here with with cnsc so thanks for that right ashley last last word last last thing is just that um if you know if there was any question prior to this panel about the importance of non-power reactors i hope those have been laid to rest um i've been really excited hearing about the three projects here at the table um and and about all that they can accomplish so thanks to the other panelists here i agree what a great exciting uh area and just a really uplifting and terrific discussion so let's join me at please and thanking our wonderful panelists