The US, Russia, South Korea, China, Japan, Argentina, and France all have concepts under design and component/system testing is underway in several cases. The most advanced situations are in the US, Russian and Chinese programs. US LWR SMR vendors have well advanced design and testing programs and have all announced deployment objectives with commercial utilities or regional state partnerships. The US Department of Energy (DOE) has launched a two-staged program offering $452 million in government grants over five years to support the design and certification of SMRs leading to reactor deployment by 2025. The SMRs to be developed would be less than 300 MWe, with scalable designs that could be manufactured in factories and shipped to utilities. Selected projects will be granted under a cost-shared agreement which requires that industry match at least half of the project’s costs. The first stage was awarded to Babcock and Wilcox in November, 2012, while the second stage funding was awarded to NuScale in December, 2013. Russian activities are numerous, as detailed in Section 1.1.3, and are centered on the delivery of electricity and co­generated heat and/or desalinized water to remote locations, through vessel-mounted reactors or terrestrial installations. The fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers is being expanded as well. China has a two-unit commercial helium-cooled pebble bed plant (100 MWe per unit) under construction.