Washington, DC (PRNewswire). Dr. Christina Back, vice president, Nuclear Technologies and Materials for General Atomics and lead physicist responsible for the Energy Multiplier Module (EM2), an advanced reactor concept, today testified before the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Energy on the efforts to modernize the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to best jumpstart research into advanced nuclear reactors.
“The following four core principles should guide the design of an ‘advanced reactor’ to ensure commercial success. It must produce cost-competitive clean electricity, be safer, produce significantly less waste, and reduce proliferation risk,” Dr. Back testified.
“We believe every worthy advanced reactor concept must address these four core principles jointly. It is not sufficient to excel at one with disregard to the others,” continued Back.
General Atomics describes EM2 as an advanced reactor concept designed to meet the needs of the twenty-first century United States electrical grid. EM2 is a passively safe, helium-cooled, convert-and-burn reactor with a net power of 265 MWe. It embodies advances in plant safety, operability, economics, resource utilization, and security. EM2 capabilities are the result of innovations in reactor physics, core materials, safety-system design, and power-conversion technology.
“If this Committee’s objective is to stimulate the development of new advanced reactors, hopefully defined as we’ve outlined here, we would suggest that it is in this early phase that it would be relatively inexpensive to involve the NRC for early consultations with potentially very high impact,” concluded Dr. Back.
