NuScale has negotiated an agreement with the Department of Energy to receive as much as $217 million to help license the company's small modular reactor.
The funding will match NuScale's private investment in the technology and will become available over five years. NuScale beat out Westinghouse, Holtec and others in December to join the DOE's SMR program, which initially envisioned two awards worth as much as $226 million each.
The first funding round went to Babcock & Wilcox mPower, which announced an agreement last spring for $150 million in matching funds over five years, or as much as $226 million if money is available. (Funding for the program in future years will depend on congressional appropriations.) Last month, though, B&W announced it would scale back investment in its SMR to $15 million or less annually after an earlier announcement that the company plans to sell most of its stake in the project.
Both mPower and NuScale are developing light water reactors for scalable power plants that can be built faster and at a lower cost than traditional designs. Where mPower's reactor is larger, at roughly 180 megawatts, and its containment would be assembled on site, NuScale's approach relies on 45 megawatt modules with a combined containment and reactor vessel.
In a release Wednesday, NuScale said it will use the DOE funding for engineering and testing as it pursues design certification in the second half of 2016. From there, the Fluor-backed company hopes to deploy the technology in Idaho by 2023 in partnership with Energy Northwest and Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems.