While below its 2010 peak, funding for nuclear power research within the Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy increased modestly in a 2012 budget bill recently passed by Congress.
The office will be funded at $768.66 million in the coming year, a nearly 6 percent increase over 2011, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation's Innovation Policy Blog. Within that, the omnibus spending bill includes $67 million in new funds for light water small modular reactor (SMR) licensing technical support and $28.67 million in new funds for advanced SMR research and development. Fuel cycle research and development funding was down a hair, at $187.35 million.
Funding for the office's Enabling Technologies program increased substantially over the previous year, from $28 million to $74.9 million. That money goes toward a wide range of nuclear power research, including fuel cycle and waste issues. Non-DOE researchers take advantage of the program through the National Scientific User Facility, which provides university and industry researchers access to an advanced DOE research reactor, computing power and other facilities.
Many of those research dollars go toward projects at the Idaho National Laboratory near Idaho Falls, although exact details about how the money will be distributed won't be known until early next year.