 All right, we are going to go ahead and get started. Good morning, and welcome, thank you so much, Caroline, and welcome to session TH24 titled Paving the Way for Advanced Manufacturing and Nuclear Components. I'm Angie Buforda. I'm the branch chief of the Vessels and Internals branch in the division of new and renewed licenses in the NRC's Office of Nuclear Ractor Regulation. And we've also got the folks from the Vessels and Internals branch, my staff, who are the rock in ensuring that we continue to be at the forefront of advanced manufacturing for the NRC. And in terms of acronyms, I'll just, when I say AMTs, that's Advanced Manufacturing Technologies. Of course, you guys know that. So I'll just use that acronym from now on. So this is our first in-person RIC in four years. So it's pretty monumental for the NRC to get back to a more normal way of doing business. So it's good to see friendly faces out in the crowd. Firstly, let me do some quick procedural logistics. Firstly, Wi-Fi. The code is rick capital RIC 2023. And so you can use that to log into the Wi-Fi here at the Marriott. Also, please go ahead and silence your devices if you haven't done so that we don't disrupt our esteemed panel here. So the way that we'll format this is we're going to do, each presenter will give their perspective. And then we will have a Q&A session after the panel presentations. And it's going to be conducted through electronic means. So hopefully, people actually have scanned the QR code. Actually, I'll go back. Dude, can we get it? Yeah, so that's the QR code. If you haven't scanned it, go ahead and do that so that you would be able to ask a question during the Q&A session. And if you've been around during the RIC, and it's the same QR code for the entire RIC, so you just would have to log in with whatever your email address that you signed up for the RIC for, and then this particular session. Lastly, is feedback from this year's RIC can be provided through the same platform by selecting the Feedback tab. And we are looking to see how this hybrid RIC has worked for folks. So we do really appreciate that feedback. I'll just start by saying the NRC considers AMTs to be a very important step forward in our industry. They haven't been used traditionally in the US nuclear industry and haven't been formally standardized or codified by the nuclear industry. And so when we talk about AMTs, that includes new ways to fabricate components, new surface treatments, new methods to join components, and other processing techniques to provide a performance or operational benefit. We see the potential of AMTs in the nuclear field to be pretty considerable. They have the capability of producing high quality components faster than traditional manufacturing methods. Incorporating AMT fabricated components and processes could enhance the performance of the current operating fleet and advanced reactors. AMTs have the potential to provide replacement parts for obsolete components relatively quickly. And lastly, AMTs might provide certain repair capabilities. The NRC has adopted a proactive engagement strategy to identify any technical or regulatory issues early in the development of AMTs in an effort to expedite our acceptance of these technologies. Because the staff were aware of advances in AMTs, and particularly of industry plans to incorporate specific AMT fabricated components, the NRC issued the initial AMT action plan in 2017 and a revision to that in 2020. I do want to note that the work related to nuclear fuels, such as we're discussed on Tuesday session, new fuels, licensing readiness, including it did include advanced manufacturing processes, but that was addressed separately from our action plan here. The format of an action plan reflects the quickly focused effort that was developed to address AMTs. And the tasks within the AMT action plan reflect communications with industry and identifying efforts in order to efficiently and effectively address the incorporation of AMTs. As one example, the five AMTs selected for examination, which John will cover in his presentation, those were based on ones that were going to have the most near term application. So now that the action plan has been completed, the work has moved from NRR, from the licensing group, to the Office of Research under the user need request process. But we're still reflecting the feedback that we get from industry. So I'll end saying that the last few years have seen significant advances in AMTs in the nuclear industry, most notably with the installation of AMT fabricated components at two plants, specifically a thimble plugging device and channel fasteners. The NRC foresees continuing advances in AMTs, including the potential for further application to safety significant and pressure boundary components. So to discuss the future of advanced manufacturing technologies, we've assembled this esteemed panel of technical experts that are bringing varied perspectives on the issue. They bring a vast experience on AMTs in addition to their each unique perspective. And I'll touch on each one as we go through. It ranges from regulatory to research and development to industry. I'm looking forward to hearing from each of them and hopefully there will be a lively discussion. And so with that, I'd like to go ahead and kick it off. We're starting with Dr. John Wise of the NRC. With over 12 years of experience at the NRC in a number of positions, John brings regulatory perspective in his presentation of NRC activities under the AMT action plan. John is a senior technical advisor in the NRC's division of new and renewed licenses. And his current work focuses on materials issues regarding long-term plant operations and aging management. He has additional experience at the NRC as a technical reviewer for reactor facilities and spent fuel storage and transportation systems. I'll give it to you, John. All right, thank you, Angie. I guess it's on me to advance the slides. Yeah, you can go ahead and move in. Yep. All right, thanks, Angie. First of all, I would like to first state that I'm speaking on behalf of the NRC project team that has been exploring the use of advanced manufacturing technologies. And this team has done a lot of great work over the last several years to prepare the NRC to review these technologies. And that's what I'm going to talk about in the next few slides. And as Angie introduced, these technologies aren't... We defined AMTs of technologies that aren't traditionally used in the nuclear industry or in the codes and standards. However, the NRC is certainly open to their use. And so I'll talk a little bit about our activities to allow the implementation of those technologies even outside of the code space. The AMT Action Plan, as Angie introduced, is positioning the NRC staff to essentially support efficient, effective, regulatory reviews. Again, in the absence of guidance in the current codes and standards. And the idea is not to be in a position where the staff in the NRC finds themselves in a reactionary environment, where we find ourselves having to evaluate AMT proposals as they come in in applications. We'd rather act in a proactive position where before we see those applications, we've done the ground work to understand the technical concerns, regulatory concerns, such that we can conduct, again, effective, efficient reviews when those applications come our way. And as Angie said, in our initial AMT Action Plan, we did focus on some particular technologies that you see there on the right-hand side of the page. And those were technologies that, through our engagements with the community, those that are most likely to appear in the near term in nuclear applications. And so the Action Plan is divided into these three focus areas, first, technical preparedness, and what that involved are essentially looking at these technologies and national laboratories preparing technical letter reports to essentially define the state of the art, the characteristics of these AMTs that are most relevant to safety, and potential knowledge gaps that may have to be addressed before they are implemented. And the NRC prepared parallel technical assessments to sort of build on those reports to put the technical information into perspective regarding how do these technologies compare to current manufacturing technologies? And to the extent those differences propose, yeah, introduce some uncertainties, you know, how manageable are those uncertainties? And so following that, there's a parallel program to develop guidance to the staff to review these technologies. And those take the form of both generic guideline documents for reviewing such technologies. And when I say that, I mean things like how should the staff approach reviewing what's an appropriate qualification program, verification program, for example, or even a performance monitoring program perhaps. And so we've developed guidelines for the staff to guide them through such reviews, what their expectations should be when they are presented with an application for a new technology. And we also produced documents that are very technology specific, which again build on those generic guidelines and take into consideration the information from the technical letter reports. And finally, a very important aspect of this plan has been communications because our success in an effective regulatory review is going to depend on making sure we are aware of the latest information. We're looking at the right things and we're asking the right questions. And so with that, we are regularly engaged with the industry, codes and standards committees, research organizations to achieve that goal. And at the same time, our staff to be prepared will need to be trained to understand these technologies and how we approach these in application reviews. And so that's been a very important part of this action plan as well. So ongoing activities, we started by saying these are AMTs that are not typically captured in current codes and standards and we are working towards that end is taking some of these technologies out of the AMT space and getting them into code space such that they can be readily adopted by the nuclear industry. And so we're participating in those standards committees and Dave Radlin I'm sure will be giving you a nice update on the activities in that space. And in the previous slide, I talked about those five initial technologies that we focused on for the initial action plan, but we're expanding those to consider additional technologies as well. And so we're looking at additional technical assessments and guideline documents. And in addition, we're performing other assessments that are supporting these reviews such as the assessing the effectiveness of NDE technologies to adequately characterize these new materials and processes as well as evaluating the implications of what these new technologies, you maybe find yourself with microstructures that are unique with respect to what you would traditionally find and what are those implications with respect to long-term performance? And so finally, I'd like to leave you with, we're planning public workshops. So I'm gonna put a plug in for you to keep up the date with what's going on in that end. So right now, I think I can safely say that there's a fairly solid plans for holding a public workshop in late October this year on AMTs. And I'll just look back, back in 2020, the NRC hosted a very successful four-day public workshop, over 275 participants from all over academia, regulators, industry, and we're planning on holding something similar this October. And so what I'll do is I'll ask you to keep an eye on that website where you're gonna see all of the updates on our activities on the NRC website. And so finally, I'm just gonna leave you with references. So I talked a lot about the AMT Action Plan and the various technical and guideline documents we've been creating, and those are all publicly available and they're all publicly available on that website in the previous slides. So both generic guidelines, as well as those that are very specific to those initial technologies that we were looking at. And with that, I'll turn it over to Chris. All right, thank you, John. Now we're gonna turn the stage to Dr. Chris Hulvannick. You might recognize Chris as a former staff member at the NRC and now has moved over to DOE. He brings another important perspective from the Department of Energy's advancement, excuse me, advanced materials and manufacturing technology office, which researches, develops, and demonstrates next generation materials and manufacturing technologies needed to increase US industrial competitiveness and to drive economy-wide decarbonization. Chris is the technology manager within that organization responsible for the oversight of programs at the manufacturing demonstration facility located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, as well as portions of the materials for harsh service conditions portfolio and additional metals-focused initiatives. And like I mentioned, prior to his employment at DOE, he was a materials engineer at the NRC where he evaluated material performance and degradation issues. So with that, Chris, I'll turn it over to you. Great, thanks Angie. Yeah, as mentioned, I have a former staff member here and it's great to be back at the RIC and it's great to see a lot of familiar faces. I'm Chris Ovanek, I'm a technology manager at DOE's advanced manufacturing and materials technology office, which I'm just gonna refer to as Ampto because if you try to keep saying that over and over again, it becomes increasingly difficult. Given this crowd, I'd imagine that most people are familiar with the DOE's Office of Nuclear Engineering and that's a separate part of the organization which I'm not here to represent today. Our office has a little bit of a different focus. Our mission is to advance energy related materials and manufacturing technologies to increase domestic competitiveness and build a prosperous economy. So we're not focused on one industry specifically. We focus overall at the entire domestic manufacturing base. So we obviously support and do research in the area of power generation but you may be surprised to know that we're also looking at automotive applications, aerospace applications, industrial machinery, things of that nature. So my perspective is gonna be a little bit less focused on nuclear and more focused in general manufacturing. I'm not going to any further detail in our organization but if anybody has any specific questions we can always catch up after the panel and I can explain the aspect of the organization that I'm representing. So anytime I talk with an industrial group or I talk to a manufacturers, one of the questions that always comes up is what do we need to do to qualsert our process and what do we need to do to generate enough data to get our component into the field? And this usually causes a lot of confusion and one of the reasons that it causes a lot of confusion is this qualsert hierarchy figure that I have shown here. So when we talk about qualsert it means different things to different people. So the lowest level, lowest consequence would be where you need to do an internal qualsert and the manufacturer has the authority to do that review and field the component. As you get one level up and the consequence of failure increases usually you have a customer or an OEM that invokes additional requirements on you and there will be some nuclear components where that's the case and then the highest level that I think we're going to spend the majority of the time talking about for the next hour and a half or so is where the consequence of failure is significant and you need to go through consensus codes, consensus standards and a regulatory body to transition that component and actually go through qualsert. This gets more complicated as you look across the manufacturing base because as you go from manufacturing sector to sector there's not only multiple levels of qualsert but there's multiple paths. So there's no one unique path across the manufacturing base. The nuclear industry has the advantage that the NRC usually lays out those paths pretty clearly and who has the authorities. So the nuclear industry has an advantage there. The other further complication that I'd point out is depending on what industry you're in and you're talking about qualsert, you might not have one, you might have up to a three and what I mean by that is that depending on what your application is you may need to quality your material, quality your process and then certify your component. So this might be a multi-phase process. The last thing that I want to point out on this slide before going forward is as you're entering the qualsert the one thing that I would strongly encourage everyone to focus on is understanding your authorities. So often the organization with the engineering authority isn't the organization with the approval authority and you should identify who has the approval authority for your industry so that you have a better understanding of what requirements and data packages that you need to transition to technology. So for nuclear the majority of the time that's gonna be the NRC unless they invoke ASME code. So as we start to talk about what it takes to transition or adopt an AMT the first thing that anybody should expect is that it's gonna be technically rigorous and it's gonna be a technically sound process and as John showed all the references and material that they're starting to put together they're well on the road to do that. One of the other things that's important to recognize as well is know where you are in the design phase or know where you are in your maintenance cycle because it's gonna take some amount of time to go through this process if it's the first time through and you need to make sure as you're looking at using an advanced manufacturing technology that the time scale to get through QualCert supports your application. The same thing goes for economic viability. If it's your first time through QualCert it can be quite costly and the data you need to generate could be expensive and you should recognize that and go into that with open eyes. The final thing there is your stability of the QualCert process and some industries this ability is higher than others. The NRC is very transparent so you should have a level of stability of what the QualCert process will look like as you try to transition some of these components. I've talked a little bit already about some of the challenges going into this so I'm not gonna dwell on these last few bullet points too long but if you're looking at a historic QualCert process for an AMT it's important to recognize you're probably gonna have to augment that in some way and the reason for that is that there are gonna be some knowledge gaps and maybe some lack of understanding of the physics in some areas which is gonna require you to produce some additional data sets. The other thing is you should be prepared to use some engineering judgment and I questioned what or not I should even bring this up and we could probably spend the next hour talking about engineering judgment but when I bring it up here I don't mean somebody's opinion. This is a technical position based on technical data where you're leveraging operating experience and experience in other industries to make an informed decision. So this is when you maybe have 90% of the data and you need to leverage past experience in other industries to help make a decision. And then the last thing I'd like to point out on this slide is there's a lot of people doing a lot of really good technical work and there's a perception sometimes that if you do good technical work and you generate the data that a path to QualCert is just gonna manifest itself in front of you and your process is going to basically just transition seamlessly and I'd warn people against that. Somebody is gonna typically need to shepherd the QualCert process whether that's an engineer that you have devoted to doing that or if you go through an industrial group that's gonna help you shepherd the QualCert process if it's the first time through for a given application. So I'm gonna, in these last two slides here transition a little bit and talk about the importance of AMTs and how it's a national need. So the plot I'm showing here on the right that you probably can't read the axis of what it's looking at is number of industrial facilities versus time and years and what we're showing is that since 2000 we've about 40% of our foundries and about 20% of our forging facilities have either permanently closed or gone offshore. So our domestic manufacturing base our capacity to make some of these near net ship components has been decreasing. This was highlighted last year where various agencies responded to an executive order to look at our supply chains. The DOE's response pointed out that a common risk and vulnerability to a lot of our systems are large metallic near net shape components. And when I'm saying near net shape components I'm primarily talking about castings, forgings, some additive components, PMHIP which I think we'll talk about here in a few minutes and things of that nature. And when I'm talking about large we're talking about over 10 tons. And the situation for those components is even a little bit worse because not only are we limited capacity to produce them domestically but our allies overseas have limited capacity as well. So this is an emergent area of national need which AMTs have a role in solving. So AMTO has been investing in near net shape manufacturing for a long time now as well as various other manufacturing techniques but our biggest investment right now in near net shape manufacturing is at the Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at Oak Ridge where they're doing a fair amount of additive as well as hybrid and digital manufacturing. And right now we're producing parts on the order from a few pounds to hundreds of pounds even up to thousands. And our biggest system there today we're laying down about 100 pounds of metal per hour with a max capacity of about 5,000 pounds and that's before machining. So after machining it's less than that. While that system is gonna continue to advance and just point out that like we're still not at that point where we're meeting the national need for these large components of over 10 tons and 10 tons plus and AMTO intends to lean forward into that space over the next few years and look at AMTs to help argument the manufacturing base there and devote additional resources to that. So I think I'll finish up with that and I'm probably just about out of time and I'll hand it back to Angie. Thanks Chris. Next we've got Dr. Dave Ruddland and Dave is filling in for George Rawls who is would have represented excuse me, represented as me. So Dave will be making George Rawls' presentation. George's presentation that we're gonna have Dave give reflects a code perspective on AMTs. It's important to understand the gaps between traditionally fabricated techniques and AMTs that exist in codes and standards and how these are being addressed. Dave is currently a senior technical advisor for nuclear power plant materials in the division of new and renewed licenses in the NRC's Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation. Dr. Ruddland provides technical expertise, advice and support on a broad variety of issues related to the materials aging, structural integrity, inspection and performance aspects of nuclear power plant components. He is currently the NRC representative on the ASME special working group on additive manufacturing. Dave? Thanks Angie. So yeah, so I'm gonna be talking about ASME's perspective in here. And ASME over the last several years is working hard in a variety of different areas to develop standards for advanced manufacturing techniques. And one of those efforts is the special working group on additive manufacturing which I'm gonna be talking about today. So the work that I'm gonna be discussing here is part of that special working group. George Rawls who is a former Savannah River employee is, couldn't be here today. So I'm gonna be giving his perspective. He is the chairman of that special working group. Both Dave Gandhi and myself sit on that committee. So I will do my best to try to give the information that he wanted to give. But I do need to point out that you can see on this slide his email address. So if there's any questions on his slides, please email him. So ASME has been, like I said, been working in several areas to develop codes and standards for advanced manufacturing. And the purpose of this special working group was to develop the framework for code cases that can be used for the construction of components using advanced manufacturing. The group is right now working on two separate code cases. The first is looking at one for direct energy deposition with wire. And the other is laser powder bed fusion for both for low temperature applications. These code cases will contain the technical requirements and qualification necessary to procure those materials. The goal is that once those approve from the special working group, then the book sections will use those and modify them based on their quality assurance or conformity assessment types of requirements. Currently the special working group has talked with ASME boiler pressure vessel code section two, section three, section eight, as well as getting ready to talk to B 31. I should point out that right now our plan is to have requirements in the code in the 2025 edition. And hopefully these code cases will be published before then. The boiler pressure, boiler pressure vessel code section three, division one is in the process of working to incorporate direct energy deposition into a mandatory appendix into the 2025 edition. In support of those code cases, the group has developed criteria documents for laser powder bed that includes the needed requirements, qualification information, design information, fabrication information and things like that that were used to support the development of these code cases. As you can see on this slide, the left shows all of the different topics that are in the design criteria document for a laser powder bed fusion. That document has been published as an ASME pressure technology book, it's BTP 13. The group is currently working on the development of a similar document for direct energy deposition and you can see that a lot of the topics that are going to be considered in that criteria document are very similar to those that were developed as part of laser powder bed. You'll see some additional in the powder area, of course, that are focused on control of the powder quality of the powder and things like that. There are these differences, but then what the goal is going to be is to take the direct energy deposition criteria document and make a revision to BTP 13. That will include that information as well as test data and other information used in support of the code case. In the development of these code cases, the group has been focused also on the development of or the gathering of available data for each of the techniques. This particular plot shows some fatigue data taken for laser powder bed fusion. It's hard to see the axes on here, but this is a strain range on the vertical axis and cycles to failure on the x-axis. This data is the data that is the gray circles or ASME weldament data used in one of the book sections. The solid line and the dash lines represent the mean two and three standard deviations of that data. The colored symbols represent a variety of different materials manufactured with laser powder bed fusion. In all, there are 295 load control tests and 22 specimen types and 400 data points. And what we see from this data is there's not a lot of right now laser powder bed data in the low cycle fatigue area, but for the most case, the trends from that data seem to match relatively closely to the weldament data taken at ASME. There are some areas that the group is continuing to look at, which includes, again, the low cycle fatigue data as well as some of the higher cycle fatigue data that seems to be deviating from the trends. In addition, the group has gathered strength data on direct energy deposition. This plot shows a variety of different data. Again, the axes are a little bit hard to see, but the y-axis is either the yield strength or ultimate strength, and the x-axis is temperature. The solid lines represent the section two limits. There's a yellow solid line and a red solid line that represent the yield and ultimate strength limits, respectively. The data points are a variety of different data. And what this shows us is the data from the trends are well bounded by the section two limits and the trends in temperature are relatively predicted well also. There are some data, if you look closely at some of the data in the ultimate range are unbounded and the group is looking into that data a little bit more to try to understand those differences. As a last point, I think I wanted to point out that the gathering of data is difficult because a lot of times process procedures and data are proprietary. And at ASME, we're not really interested in the processes of procedures and what's proprietary about it, but more about good products. And so the group is looking and working with manufacturers and the developer of test data to find a good way of being able to make some of this proprietary data more generally available for the development of code cases and qualification in areas like that. And I think that's it for me. Thank you, Dave. Now we're gonna move to another. Dave, Dave Gandy, who brings an industry perspective on AMT applications to nuclear power plants. It's incredibly important for the NRC to maintain communications with industry and to understand the industry's plans and perspectives regarding how they plan to use AMT fabricated components so that the agency is prepared to address AMTs. Dave is a principal technical executive in Epri's nuclear materials area where he's responsible for technical oversight of major projects on advanced manufacturing, powder metallurgy, advanced welding, additive manufacturing, supply chain, and next generation erosion wear resistant alloys. Mr. Gandy is recognized as an ASM International Fellow, is a member of the ASME boiler and pressure vessel code and holds 14 US patents and has also authored over 235 journal articles and technical reports. So we're pleased to hear your presentation, Dave, thank you. Okay, thank you. Good morning, good to see everyone. Certainly nice to see a lot of familiar faces. What I'd like to discuss today is some of the recent advancements in manufacturing that we see that will be applicable to both SMRs and to advanced reactors. Specifically, I wanna talk about two projects that we're currently working on and collaborating on with the US Department of Energy and the Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Center in the UK, as well as a number of other collaborators around the country and around the world. So three of the technologies I'm gonna talk about are electron beam welding. We'll talk a little bit about powder metallurgy and hot isostatic pressing and then we'll discuss diode laser cladding. Each of these we believe will be applicable to advanced reactors and to small-module reactors. So I just wanted to share a little update on where we're at with some of the technology and what we've been doing in these programs that I just mentioned. So first of all, electron beam welding. Well, what's new about electron beam welding? It's been around for decades now. So probably back into the 60s, we were doing electron beam welding. Well, the big difference today is that we're actually able to now, for the first time, utilize this for thick section activities. So if you're talking about a steam generator, you're talking about a reactor pressure vessel, those kind of thicknesses we can certainly address. So that's really where a lot of the focus in our efforts have been in recent months. We have shown that on a two-third scale reactor, this is, if you look at the schematic in the center of the slide, this is actually the lower section of the new scale reactor. At two-third scale, which is a demonstrator we've been working on, we've been able to prove that in about 47 minutes you can go an entire diameter, full circumference around that, and perform a full joint weld, full girth weld to join two different components. So we know that the technology allows you to significantly reduce the overall welding time and it can provide you good quality. We believe that you can really reduce around 80 to 90% of the overall welding time if you can compare that to conventional sub arc or GTAW type applications. The other real key activity that's came out of this is the ability to eliminate a keyhole. What's a keyhole? At the very end of electron beam welds, if you turn the electron beam off, you're gonna end up with a hole that actually penetrates whatever component you're trying to weld on. So if you're welding on a plate, typically what you'll do is you'll put a runoff tab on the plate and it really doesn't matter if you end up with a hole at the end of it. But if you're doing a circumference weld, you gotta be able to fill out that keyhole in some capacity, whether you're actually just stopping and welding in that out with another process. Or in our case, we came up with what we refer to as slope out welding, which allows you to gradually slope out and still maintain indie quality for that application. So for the first time, we're able to do full circumference welds. And what you see in the upper left hand side of the slide is actually that lower portion of the schematic, which joins a flange to a shell and then to an upper, to a lower head. This is actually flipped upside down. So we've done a number of these welds. We feel very confident with where the technology is. Obviously, how do we take this forward? And as Chris was saying, get this accepted by industry and do the qualifications around it. Section nine currently accepts electron beam welding already. Section three also accepts electron beam welding. So there is some, has been a lot of discussion around the fact is can we use this for SA-508 materials and actually weld those with no preheat? So if you're welding these components, typically you're welding them in a vacuum system. So you've got a vacuum chamber that you're actually doing the welding in. We believe that obviously you can do that without preheat. We've demonstrated it without preheat. And if you look at section three, it does suggest that you use preheat, but it doesn't indicate that you have to use that. So we feel the technology is very ripe and very prime to be utilized for low alloy steel applications and we do not see any issues with hydrogen. So let me step to the next slide. One more slide on this. This is another section where we're showing some segments that we're actually doing welding in, as opposed to doing girth welds. We're actually doing vertical welds like we used to do 30, 40 years ago before embrittlement issues were a concern. Well, with the technology we're using with electron beam welding, it's a togenous. You're not actually putting any filter material in it. So those issues with embrittlement go away. So this is some work that's ongoing at the Nuclear AMRC. We're actually joining these large transition sections and making one full diameter component and then welding that to other applications. One other thing I did wanna mention is that we are trying to set up a system at BDXT in the U.S. to actually do welding. This again is under another every DOE project we're in. We're trying to do a modular chamber so you can actually stack and destack the chamber that the weld is actually being performed in. That has started, the setup of that system has started as of a few months ago. We hope to be in a position that we'll be doing some test welds probably July or August timeframe of this year. So things are starting to really move forward on that and we're pretty excited about bringing electron beam welding technology to the U.S. for thick section. The second area I wanted to mention was powder metallurgy and hot isostatic pressing. So we've done a lot of work on stainless steels and nickel-based alloys over the years. We feel pretty confident about those alloys in terms of properties and corrosion resistance and all the other things that are necessary to complement forging technologies and other technologies that are being used today. More recently we've been trying again to focus this on thick section components like reactor pressure vessels that are made from low alloy steels. We've been using air-melted powders which are much less expensive than VIM or vacuum induction-melted powders. And the reason we've tried to do that is again to lower the overall cost of actually manufacturing components. You see a large component down in the center section. This is one of those shell sections, transition shells segments that I showed you just a few moments ago. We've tried to scale this up with the intention of getting above 100 foot-pounds toughness or 135 joules. We've been able to show in the laboratory very consistently and with witness specimens that actually go through the overall process where we're putting this into a large furnace that we can produce those fantastic toughness properties. However, we've not been able to duplicate that and scale up results to date. We're currently moving to VIM powders now which are a little more expensive, maybe two or three exit at the times of the cost of air-melted powders but we're trying to move that to allow us to get to that 100 foot-pounds. We believe that we can increase our properties maybe by 20 or 25, 30 foot-pounds by going to VIM processes. Once all of that's done, then we've got to scale that up and demonstrate it again on very large coupons. What you see in the middle there is about a 5,000 pound component. The goal of this would be eventually to manufacture things like upper and lower reactor heads and steam plenum parts for the new scale reactor and then there's other reactors systems that we could certainly work toward. So anyway, we've been working toward that, still not totally there where we need to be. We feel very confident we'll get there but low alloy steels have presented a little bit of an issue simply from the amount of oxides that are formed in the atomization process which then transfers over as you start to move toward consolidating these two prior particle boundaries. The last technology I wanted to mention was diode laser cladding. Again, this is one of the technologies we're working on with the Department of Energy and the Nuclear MRC. What we're looking to do is can we actually clad the inside surface of a reactor like the new scale reactor? By the way, the new scale reactor is clad inside and outside. So if you're trying to do that, we think there's probably today about two Olympic swimming pools worth of cladding material that wouldn't be necessary to accomplish that task. So we're trying to reduce the amount of cladding material that's used, the volume of material that's used while still providing good corrosion resistance and actually speed up the overall process. As you can see from the right hand side of the slide, the overall laser time and cladding, the lower head, this represents the lower head, would be about 19 hours. The overall process time set up and all the other things was around 24 hours and we reduced it down to about 200 pounds of material. Pretty substantial change. Now it took processing and actually setting up a number of computer programs to run this, but we were able to very consistently show we could put down material and provide a good clad surface that was on the water of about three millimeters in thickness. So those are three of the technologies we've been working on. I think some of the advanced manufacturing will actually be used in a very near future for small module reactors and hopefully for advanced reactors as we start to move forward. We feel very confident in what we've developed so far. Not saying we're there totally at least for the powder metallurgy part, but I feel very confident by the end of the DOE project that we'll get there in terms of application there. Again, I do want to emphasize for powder metallurgy we are there for stainless steels and nickel base alloys and they can be utilized for applications. We are working currently with ASME to try to bring forward some of those new advanced manufacturing technologies and certainly will be interested in talking with you about those that you have an interest in the future. And with that, I think I'll turn it back to the chairman. All right, thank you so much, Dave. Last but not least, we've got Dr. Kurt Turani. He also brings an industry perspective, which is particularly of interest to us as the ultra safe nuclear corporation is a developer and fabricator of AMT components. Kurt leads the core division of ultra safe nuclear corporation that's responsible for development and delivery of nuclear fuel and core structural materials for USNCs advanced energy systems. Kurt was previously a senior staff scientist at Oak Ridge and a national technical director for the US DOE Office of Nuclear Energy. The focus of Kurt's work is on fundamental aspects of nuclear fuel and materials manufacturing, radiation effects and behavior. Kurt, please, thank you. So I guess maybe digesting a little bit what some of the speakers have been talking about. We're talking about advanced manufacturing. It is a multi-headed beast. There is additive as a subset of it. You saw what Dave Gandhi showed, which are different techniques for welding and joining. So it's really not a single thing, not a single stop. It's a part of an integrated manufacturing and assembly integration process. And it presents challenges, but it also presents a lot of opportunities given the flexibility that exists in advanced manufacturing space. I'm Kurt Turani as kindly introduced. I work for Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation and we are developers of high-temperature gas called microreactors. And our goal is to vertically integrate all that manufacturing and deliver hardware. So I'm not gonna talk about the reactor, I'm gonna talk about the fuel, the part that I'm responsible for, and kind of show you what's our fuel manufacturing process. To the left are the processes for manufacturer of Triso fuel particles. Now, if you go to enough workshops, you walk away with the illusion that Triso is a commercial thing and you go buy it, it's not. And that's why we're manufacturing it ourselves in our radiological facilities. It's essentially involves getting uranium feedstock dissolving it in an asset, making gel spheres, and then converting them in high-temperature furnace and then go into a fluidized bed, a particle coating furnace, and make Triso particles. That's a conventional manufacturing technology. Been around since 60s, right? Now, this is a good example of how we're using a very unique additive manufacturing technology and bringing it as a part of our overall fuel manufacturing process. So if you look at step four, top right of the figure, we are printing silicon carbide. We are printing silicon carbide. So we start with a computer-assisted drawing file, a CAD file. It can be a simple shell as I've shown over there. It can be a much more complex geometry. Again, we use amongst the various methods of doing additive manufacturing, we use a powder bed process. It is binder jet additive manufacturing. So there's no laser, there's no beam, there's no vacuum, it's use spraying glue. So a fancier way of saying it is binder jet on a powder bed, okay? And we're printing successive layers of silicon carbide. So what do we get? We get a partially dense silicon carbide shell, right? Now, in step five, we kind of marry conventional manufacturing and additive for a very special kind of case of manufacturing nuclear fuel. We simply pour those fuel particles into that shell. And then we go through a densification step. Now, usually when people think densification, it's sintering, right? You heat things up and vacancies move and you densify your part. We're asking them what we're doing. We're doing infiltration. We're doing chemical vapor infiltration. So again, a technology that's been around for a long time, you flow a reactant, in this case, metal trichlorosilane. It decomposes, it deposits silicon carbide. And you're essentially filling the pores inside your silicon carbide structure with more silicon carbide, right? So the final product is shown at the bottom right. That's our fully ceramic micro-encapsulated fuel form, which comprises tricep fuel particles embedded encapsulated inside of a silicon carbide matrix. So that silicon carbide shell that we additively manufactured is now a part of the integral silicon carbide. And inside that block is tricep particles. This technology was developed really early on. BinerJet was being worked at MDF, Manufacturing and Demonstration Facility that Chris was talking about, AMO was supporting it. And we really developed a lot of this technology under the Transformational Challenge Reactor Program under DOE&E. So those patents that you see, there are patents associated with additive manufacturing of silicon carbide and this chemical vaping infiltration. Myself and a few other folks, we licensed that technology from Oak Ridge National Lab and brought it to UltraSafe to commercially deploy it. So it's a success story of early state technology at the Department of Energy Facilities coming into commercial space. So let me go to the next slide. Our focus is essentially deploying this technology at large scale. Again, we want to vertically integrate all of our manufacturing and deploy it at a large scale. This is our facility. This is our non radiological pilot manufacturing facility. It's in Salt Lake City, Utah, where we do a lot of additive manufacturing of silicon carbide along with other ceramics. The system that you see on the top is a very large powder bed system. It's a 160 liter binder jet additive manufacturing system. It's I think the biggest powder bed system that I'm aware of. It's 0.8 meters by 0.4 meters by 0.5 meters. And so we can print these silicon carbide shells that I talked to you about under order of 10,000 per print. It takes about a day to manufacture that. And or you can print other non-fuel bearing components or structural components. Below it, you see a large chemical vapor reactor that again is co-located with this additive manufacturing system. It's a silicon carbide chemical vapor infiltration system. It's a 150 liter system. And then when we make these parts, we take those binder jet printed porous silicon carbide parts and we go to a chemical vapor process and densify them. We do apply this technology to other ceramics. Again, additive manufacturing of ceramics is there, but you don't commonly hear about it. So we're pursuing it for a very specific nuclear commercial application. We're applying it to other ceramics such as zirconium carbide and zirconium oxide. We use zirconium carbide for some of our nuclear space systems and we use zirconium oxides for some insulator components adjacent to our cores. Now, to be successful, I think you've heard it from a lot of the colleagues here. You gotta have a manufacturing technology and you gotta have data. And we're again very fortunate because we manufactured this, additively manufactured silicon carbide material and did a lot of testing under the DOE National Lab infrastructure. Specifically, if you go to the Transformational Challenge Reactor TCR program website, you'll see there's been a lot of testing unirradiated and irradiated. So there was a lot of tests done in reactor, going to different displacement doses and we measured properties, characterized material and that's really key enabler of us being able to adopt this technology for our application. You can see here, essentially on the top left, you can see the large 160 liter powder bed system doing binder, additive manufacturing. These are quite common, again, technologies and systems that are becoming commercially available. To the right is the chemical vapor infiltration capability. It kind of gives you a feeling. That guy is six foot four, so I just wanna, it's a big system, so it shows how, again, we kind of co-locate these two systems to be able to manufacture additive manufactured silicon carbide. There are a lot of opportunities that come along with when you bring in advanced manufacturing. Obviously, you all know, we shouldn't do advanced manufacturing for the sake of doing advanced manufacturing. You should do advanced manufacturing because it makes sense, well, why? In this case, it is economically a lot better than casting these silicon carbide cups or manufacturing them by pressing. This is a far more economic way of doing this. So, maybe not common, you don't think usually that additive can save you money, but it certainly does in this case. The other thing that's happening in that powder bed system, we print about 10,000 of these shells. Just to give you an idea, our core takes about 180,000 of these finer pellets. So, in about 18 prints, we make essentially enough silicon carbide shells for a core load. Now, when we upload the CAD file into the printer, every one of those shells has a distinct unique dot matrix code. So, if you look at the bottom right, you can see there's a dot matrix code printed into the part. It's inherent to the part. It's a part of the integral part of that part. And so, essentially, what does this mean? This means that we track our entire manufacturing process throughout the life cycle. From the moment we print it, from the digital CAD file, to the moment we print it, to the moment we put triso particles in there, we know we put exactly this many grams with three significant digits of triso into that cup. It was Michael Gibbons on March 14th that did the infiltration. So, we track it throughout the life cycle. And that dot matrix code will actually, when it goes in a reactor, it's gonna survive. Silicon carbide is extremely radiation tolerant material. There is no way that's gonna go away. So, maybe 20, 25 years from now, somebody on the back end will be able to scan that and kind of get all that information. But I think that's one of the key things about being able to integrate things that you couldn't do with conventional manufacturing that's quite attractive. We haven't talked much about it here. Additive manufacturing presents a lot of opportunities and generally advanced. It's 2023. There's a lot more sensing techniques out there that you can combine with your manufacturing. Additive, you're kind of seeing this part come to life. You can observe it throughout this manifestation and you can collect information from it. And by collecting that information, whether it's visual, whether it's other signatures from your machine, whether it's environmental, you can use those data streams to assist and ascertain the quality of your part. So then there's a lot of good opportunities there. We are certainly, again, benefiting from what's been done in the national lab system. We're kind of taking advantage of those technologies. But there's a lot of activity there on how to get those big data streams and use that as a part of your quality assurance and qualification process. That's it. Thanks, Kurt. So we've moved on now. We would like to do some Q and A if you guys are down to get some hard questions here. I've got one to start with. And I will open it to the whole panel and let folks volunteer. But what is, in your mind, the main technical obstacle to the implementation of AMT for nuclear applications? And how do we overcome this obstacle? Who wants to start? I guess I'll give it a shot. The regulator will give it a shot and we'll kick it over to the people that really know what they're talking about, all right? So, but we see this, it's evident in the guideline documents that we've been preparing is, well, what do you do when there's not a lot of data? And so, the main technical obstacle really is we're dealing with technologies where there's just not a lot of data, not a lot of operating experience. And so, we tried to shape our guidelines for our staff's review of such technologies of, in light of the lack of data, well, what's needed to appropriately qualify a component and validate its properties. But also, you know, allowing some flexibility. If there's little, if the data is somewhat limited, are there other avenues by which that application can be implemented? For instance, you know, when there's less data, perhaps there's opportunities for increasing the amount of in-service inspection, for example. And so, I would say it's probably not a surprise to anybody and I think it's already been mentioned today by, I think the lack of data and I'll just kick that over to our remaining panelists to get your perspectives. So, the data topic I think is an interesting one because as we talk about data, there's a lack of data that maps to requirements. But it's both a challenge and an opportunity because there's an abundance of data. It's just how we use it. Lots of times we finish producing a part, you know, we have gigabytes and gigabytes of data and it's not always organized in a way that it can be consumed and it's not always organized in a way that somebody can use it to make a decision. So, I think one of the obstacles we have to overcome is being more rigorous and purposeful of how we, when we collect data to collect it with a purpose. So, one of the things that I see is huge amounts of data being collected for a part and lots of times it's used for process optimization, but there's missed opportunities to use it for lot release, to use it for quality control, to use it for to support qualsert and that's not always happening. But that opportunity's there and along with that is gonna be another challenge of creating that technical basis to show that, hey, we can have the thermal history to this part and this thermal history of the part maps to the microstructure and the microstructure maps to the properties. But there's a lot of chains that need to be connected in there that at this point aren't. So, I'd say it's both a challenge and an opportunity. Yeah, if you look at data, there's a lot of different kinds of data. And if you look at material property data, whether you're talking about traditionally manufactured or advanced manufactured, you need data, right? I think it's extremely important. And a lot of times it's hard even sometimes to get data for traditionally manufactured materials and it all stems back again to the proprietary nature in which the developers use like I mentioned when I was talking. And the need for companies to be able to keep their intellectual property is extremely important to them. So as an industry, I think, we need to try to find ways that we can gather this kind of data that's needed for qualification that's needed for development of criterias so that we can share that and use that. The code, ASME code is working on processes to do that. But again, it needs to have cooperation with the vendors and those that are developing the data in order to be able to get that data and to work out those plans to be able to use the proprietary data. And like I mentioned, it's not a concern at least in code space, what's in the process, whatever's in the process and the procedures and what's proprietary about that is not as important as having good quality data and being able to get that and share that. So I'm gonna move on to another question because I'm gonna direct this at Dave Gandy. So what engineering products in nuclear power plants have the greatest potential for improvement? So that might be cost, time or design by transitioning to AMT processes. I didn't want to start with you, Mr. Gandy. Yeah, so certainly as we move forward in space where we're using a lot of additive components, we're using a lot of powder metallurgy components, we're using different joining processes. I think the components that I see that really will benefit from this at least initially are things like valves and pump housings where we can manufacture those pretty quickly. We don't have to have them necessarily sitting on the shelf. We've already got them digitized so we know what we need to produce. We can produce something very quickly and get it out in the workspace. More longer term, I still think things like we've been working on in terms of the powder metallurgy side where we can actually manufacture very large components like reactor pressure vessel heads or steam generator heads or other things that might certainly come into play also. Well, bolts are something that's pretty easily manufactured though with conventional processes and you don't have to have a lot of sophisticated equipment to do that. We're talking about, what I'm talking about are more complex parts that would need to be fabricated such as a valve body or a pump housing or so forth. And bolts are very, they're not a shortage, they're not difficult to get a bolt where a lot of times I think these additive processes or advanced manufacturer processes are well suited for those cases, like Dave talked about or cases where components aren't available anymore from the OEM. Is that directed to me? Whoever, whomever. Sure, yeah. Sure, the question was, do you see these advanced manufacturing technologies directed at new components that didn't exist before or are they gonna be replacing the traditional components at traditional manufacturing? I think the essence of the question is, what are the key items that these technologies shine? It really depends. When I was in the national lab system, I tried to ask myself that question. It's really hard to answer that question. It's really, you gotta look at it from, what is the conventional manufacturing capability? What is the cost of that? What is the regulatory requirements on the part? Can I easily bring in an advanced technology and take advantage of it? What is the availability of data? So it is, it's exciting because now we're kind of seeing what pops up. I mean, you saw the examples that Dave has shown, very large steel structures that has a meaningful impact on a specific design. You see what we're doing, which is tiny low silicon carbide cups that has a very meaningful impact for us. So it is really hard to say because it's a multifaceted problem. Certainly though, it presents an opportunity and we want to ease it in in areas where the regulatory and licensing burden is not immense and the data burden is not much and work our way up to it. So if you can, I can give you an example. If you want to have a heat exchanger, do you have a, do you meet section three, it's going to be shell and tube essentially if you want to be in a nuclear business. So what if you do something additive and then you encase it inside of a vessel that meets that requirement? Can you sit down articulate this effectively and work with a regulator to make sure you're all on the same page? I think there's a lot of opportunity there. It's hard to point out obvious things. I think it's really the developers that will see that multifaceted problem and opportunity. I think in areas like fuel filters and stuff where there's a very complex geometry, it has a big advantage. I think my concern at least is when we go to some more structural components, if we're using these advanced techniques to come up with very unusual designs, it limits inspectability, which is going to be, I think, important for these larger components as we move forward. And John, do you want to follow up? Yeah, I just wanted to provide a little perspective, maybe at a little higher level. One of the opportunities for using AMTs maybe as plants age, we're talking about plants operating to 80 years now and perhaps, who knows, maybe even longer. There may be opportunities for the use of AMTs unique to address potential long-term issues. When I say that, I mean, as I've already been said, AMTs being used to essentially provide components on demand. You might imagine a reactor that is approaching a very long extended life, 80 years and who knows, maybe even longer. Plants may find themselves increasingly in a situation where they need to start replacing parts that there simply is not a supply. And so AMTs offer a unique opportunity to address that need. And to use it in another example, not on the reactor side, but on the spent fuel storage side. Right now, the United States has about 3,500 spent fuel storage canisters sitting outdoors all around the country. Those are stainless steel canisters. And the question, and most of them, the oldest ones are 20 to 30 years old now, but they're gonna be out there for a while longer and the question arises, what happens if those are inspected and somebody sees an indication that needs to be addressed? The most cumbersome solution would be to take the fuel out of those canisters which nobody wants to do. The preferred solution would be to find an in place potential repair mitigation process. And a couple of years ago, I had an opportunity to visit the Sand and Oafry Power Plant as they were essentially doing a demonstration of using a cold spray technique for potentially remotely applying a protective layer over a top, a fabricated indication in a canister. And that's getting a lot of interest from the storage community now and Oafry in particular has done extremely a large amount of work at developing that technology and there's been a lot of advances in that and a lot of great work. Okay, thanks John. And everyone for your contributions to that. So Dave Rutherland, I'm gonna direct this next question to you. Considering the many industries working on AMT processes and the pace of technology advancement, how do we develop harmonized manufacturing, qualification and testing standards? That's a really good question. I think it comes down to collaboration and cooperation. This special working group that Dave and I sit on has several members of the team that we sit on has several members from aerospace, from NASA, from the welding societies that have tried to or have successfully developed these kinds of standards. And so we brought those people in to help us use lessons learned from their development in order to develop a very more harmonized type of criteria documents. So I think that's really important. I think taking lessons learned and being able to openly collaborate with those folks that have either begun developing or are also developing these types of documents. Sure, I'll maybe add to that Dave. I think what's going on in ASME is really the most you can do to try to harmonize them. And if you try to baseline what's going on compared to traditional manufacturing techniques, I mean there's lots of places where our traditional techniques aren't harmonized, right? So I think if we baseline it against then, against traditional techniques, you'll find there'll probably be areas where we successfully harmonize them and probably areas where we don't. Also coming back to who your approval authority is, when you're talking about different avenues, there's different approval authorities which means you have different risk tolerances as well. So if you're going through and you're setting out guidelines or standards for something with a very high risk tolerance or a very low level of rigor and criteria that you'd want to invoke might necessarily be the same. You'd make some trade off between cost schedule and performance and that'll manifest itself somewhere in the codes and standards. So I think what's going on now is probably the best you can do, keep the lines of communication open, try to leverage other people's technical basis to the best that you can. But there'll be areas where they don't harmonize. Yeah, and if I can just add on to that again, I think it comes a lot from, again, the proprietary nature of some of the vendors and how, especially even in their qualification processes, they keep those very secret. So it becomes difficult to be able to take off my ASME and put in my regulator hat to know that these are all very good processes and all very good procedures when there are so many proprietary aspects to them. Thanks. Let's bounce over to you, Kurt. What are the biggest challenges to receiving regulatory approval for AMTs technologies or techniques? Yeah, I think my experience with the regulator is that they publish a process. You better read it, you better follow it. You can't be upset afterwards because you didn't want to read it. If you follow the process, it becomes a dialogue and feeling any information gaps and you can navigate that. Now, the requirements are very clear. In God we trust, everyone else bring data. And so that's the hard part. And the part, it was addressed in the first question you asked about what are the biggest challenges everybody said data. I kind of want to keep piling on that and raise this concern that most of these components for nuclear applications, not all of them, but a lot of them, you know, there needs to be some irradiation data, whether it's neutron irradiation, gamma irradiation. And that's a huge risk that we're all facing right now. There is very limited irradiation capability. I don't want to name names of reactors, but there was reactors available five years ago that all of a sudden have disappeared. So we've got a few jewels in this country. They're old reactors and any day some pipe or some pump can go out and I'm not sure if we're going to bring them back up. So I think we're all kind of facing a huge collective risk. The computational methods are useful, but I don't think we're at a point that you can bring a Monte Carlo calculation or molecular dynamics, but that's great. I don't need to see that 15 DPA irradiation assisted corrosion or swelling data. So the process requires data rightfully so and there's a big challenge to getting that data and there's a huge risk of not even being able to produce that data, I think that's a big one. Yeah, if I could just jump in and I agree with you, it's not just in Bertelman data, it's high temperature creep fatigue data and even in traditionally manufactured, that's difficult data to generate. It takes a long time and so we've been doing that for the traditionally manufactured materials for quite some time and so now for these new materials, how long is it going to take us to do that? Yeah, that's right. Okay, this one is for Chris. You had indicated that DOE was planning to lean into this domain of large component production over the next few years. Can you provide more specifics on the plans that DOE is developing to support production of larger scale nuclear components using advanced fabrication techniques? Sure and in the next week or so, we should have a lot more public information coming out. Right now, our plan wouldn't be to necessarily target nuclear specific. We'd target the entire industrial base and we'd look for the highest impact applications. So if those high impact applications happen to be nuclear, that's great. If they happen to be like industrial tooling, that would be great for us too. I certainly think that there's opportunities in nuclear. I think those opportunities would largely depend on where you are in the life of your reactor or the life of your facility. So if you were to look at larger components to be replaced in legacy systems, I don't think that they'd necessarily be the same components and same advanced manufacturing techniques that you might use if you were starting fresh and design phase. So if you're not gonna replace a reactor obviously and an old in a legacy system, but as Dave showed, you're looking at new manufacturing techniques now that could be incorporated to do it in the next generation. So we're not planning also to down select pre-screen components nor are we planning to pre-screen advanced manufacturing techniques. So we foresee that there'll be a lot of things that come forward and I'll maybe focus on maybe two of the more traditional rather than the advanced, but right now as you're looking at some of the foundries, the technology and the foundries, some of them are fairly outdated. There's lots of opportunities there for smart manufacturing automation and also things such as there's industry now working on actually additively manufacturing the molds instead of the actual components and that lowers a lot of your qualsert barriers because it's support equipment that you're using that has huge time and huge time benefits and also cost benefits. If you look at the forging industry, a lot of the open dive forging now is really not automated and it's a lot of go-no-go gauges and things like that. There's a lot of opportunity there to increase your throughput as well. The only reason I bring up those two examples is because I think in this crowd, some of the advanced examples probably come to mind a lot faster, like some of the large DED capabilities and the other thing that I'd like to point out too is hybrid. We haven't really talked much about hybrid processing today, but sometimes we all know it, but we forget that after you print or you manufacture some near net shape component, you need to machine it, you need to heat treat it, you need to inspect it, you maybe need to do some kind of finishing on it and there's lots of opportunities to either combine those processes or to automate those processes, so that would all be of interest as well. Okay, thanks, Chris. Next question, and we, okay, we've got just over nine minutes left, so I'll try to run through a couple interesting ones. Dave Gandy, what if any technical challenges remain in with PMHIP and EB welding technology development activities? Are they primarily related to scaling up the technology for SMR use? So the technologies that we're working on as I indicated are, you know, we're looking at them for small-modge reactors, but that's just certainly the project we're working on. We feel certainly they could be utilized for advanced reactors, they could be utilized for components in existing light-water reactors, so, you know, I don't really differentiate where the technologies can be used. In terms of what, what are some of the issues or things that we see might cause us problems in the future, I think powder manufacture is something that we really need to focus on as a nation to improve powders for, not only for PMHIP, but certainly for additive components, particularly in the ferritic side of things, but we all know that you get prior particle boundary issues for nickel-base alloys, you get those for low alloy steels, regardless of whether you're dealing with AM or whether you're dealing with PMHIP, so that's one of the areas that we've not talked much about, at least from the supply chain side of things that I think really needs some focus by industry and by the US at this point. So in this next one, I'm gonna, I'm gonna gear to the end of the table there, so between Dave and Kurt, is there industry interest in using AMTs for non-safety related applications to gain operating experience? We've talked about data. Absolutely, there's interest in trying to utilize this for non-safety applications. Certainly, we've talked a lot about trying to get this into a secondary system within an existing nuclear power plant system. We feel that's paramount that we get some experience there, get people familiar with the technology and understand that it can be utilized, but to date, we've not seen that, we have talked some with Chris about that and hopefully we'll get something in the plant here in the near future. Fully concur as a greater approach, you build that knowledge and confidence and experience. Okay. All right, I'm gonna throw this one out to the whole group and get volunteers. So while the panel here today represents mostly US interests, what can or have we learned from our international counterparts in AMT development and implementation? Any? So at least in code space, I know that again, there has been a lot of participation from some international folks, especially those that have a lot of direct experience with additive manufacturing, for instance, Rolls-Royce. They've done a lot of work internally. They've done a lot of work in data development and have been willing to share that information. So we've learned a lot of lessons from them in the development of the ongoing code cases. Yeah, so I'll echo that. At least from the powder metallurgy and from the electron beam welding side, we've been working quite a bit with the UK. We've been working some with the Koreans in that area, the DED side of things. We're working with the Koreans. There's a lot of technology around the world that can be applied here in this space. I would like to say at least for the electron beam side of things, we are getting ready to launch another project that's focused on deployment of electron beam welding. So we think we've got to the point that we know the technology, we know how to apply it, we know what's necessary to get good welds and how to qualify it. The question is, how do we get industry educated around the process? How do we get manufacturers to take the technology and utilize it and feel comfortable with it? So that's where we're getting ready to head in the very near future. That's very much an international program. There's gonna be a lot of folks engaged in that from Japan to Korea to UK and all over Europe and the US. I think that bears witness that this is truly an international activity. Thank you. Let's see, we do have a few more minutes. Kurt, a question directed towards you. Machine learning has a great potential to accelerate the extremely time-consuming simulations and physical testing. Are there any plans to increase the use of machine learning techniques in this direction? Yeah, the dream is very much there and it's about machine learning techniques are available, readily and they can be used and you can choose whatever flavor and apply whatever flavor that you want. You gotta feed the beast with big data. So you gotta feed it on your manufacturing side. That's the easy part. You heard Chris say, I got a gigabyte of data for every part I make. But then you gotta feed the other side too, right? All it does is correlating X and Y, multivariable correlation. 1950s methodology, we've got fast computers today, it works. You can supply it a bunch of X but you gotta supply it Y too. And again, it goes back to, do you have high quality data to correlate that observations with? So there's no way we keep running into this need for data. And you have to have large data. You can't have limited data set. It's very expensive, very time consuming to generate that material test data. And you have to have data from a variety of parts that behave in very different ways. If you make a lot of good parts, you're not gonna see, there is no correlation. Everything results in a good part. So that's the hard part. But I think the methodology is really well understood. There's a lot of folks working on it. And if he can find ways, NDE is a good example. It brings that opportunity to feed that performance data part and generate rich data streams. Okay, thank you. Okay, well, I will try to squeeze in one more question. And I will open this up to the panel. For advanced non-light water reactors, what types of components will require advanced manufacturing technologies to fabricate them? You know, for example, without EMTs, it'll not be possible to economically, excuse me, manufacture these components. Are there any that you can think of? I'll give you some examples. It's the specialty components. So for instance, you look at an impeller in a pump or a blower, it's a first of a kind, let's say a helium system. We heard about the heat exchanger example. You can convince yourself, you can make it work. We looked at our insulators at the bottom of our core, and it's not just a simple insulator. It's something that you have to be able to gas moves through it, it's got to flange up to the bottom plate. It's got to keep the bottom plate under certain temperature. It becomes a safety-related part. It needs to flange up with the graphite blocks. So all of a sudden, you kind of identify these high-value components that don't really exist, and you ask yourself, hey, can I use additive to make parts and generate enough data to build the confidence to use them? Okay. Well, thank you. Well, folks, we've reached the end of our time for this session, but I really want to thank the panelists. I think this has been an enlightening discussion and fascinating presentations, and I just also want to thank those in the audience. If we weren't able to get to your question today, we've got a list of contacts for the NRC. We also have a link to the NRC's public site for AMT information, where you can get the latest and greatest on AMTs, including the documents that we developed under the AMT Action Plan. We, like John mentioned, we planned to do a workshop in late, mid to late October, and so more to come on that. Stay tuned. And this concludes our panel session for advanced manufacturing. Thank you so much for your participation.