The DOE-NE created its NEUP in 2009 to consolidate university support under one initiative and better integrate university research within DOE-NE’s technical programs including SMRs. The objective of the program is to engage US colleges and universities to conduct R&D, enhance infrastructure at these institutions, and support student education. The IRP represents the program directed component of the NEUP program designed to address near-term, significant needs of the DOE — NE R&D programs. The IRP awards are typically for three-year periods and more significant funding amounts.

An ART-related R&D award for three years was made in 2011 with work starting in 2012 to develop the path forward to a test reactor and ultimately a commercial FHR. While not explicitly focused on a small modular reactor design, the results from this IRP will provide input to and allow the ART program to leverage these efforts on work conducted in support of the SmAHTR concept, and thus is included in this chapter. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is leading the three-team project and will irradiate materials in liquid salts at prototypic conditions in the MIT reactor and conduct other experiments to validate reactor models and viability [12]. The University of California at Berkeley (UCB) will conduct thermal hydraulic experiments using simulants to predict heat transfer and accident behavior of the fluoride salt, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison will undertake corrosion experiments on candidate materials of construction. MIT and UCB are to develop pre-conceptual designs of a test and commercial power reactor.