Coming Soon: A Nuclear Reactor?With a 3D Printed Core

Over the last year and a half, Terrani and a team of physicists, engineers, and computer scientists at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee have designed and built the components for a gas-cooled nuclear reactor. “What we’re doing is trying to figure out a faster way to build a nuclear system that has superior performance,” says Terrani, who is the technical director for the Oak Ridge Transformational Challenge Reactor program. “Instead of an array of things that all look the same, you can change the design across the core and get your system to respond to the environment.”The TCR team performs neural network analysis of in situ build image data detecting anomalies in the component at specific locations.3D printing will also help nuclear engineers get a better picture of what is happening inside a core once the reactor is up and running. (He declined to name the specific plant.)This picture shows a fuel element with double-walled cladding and cooling channels that incorporate high surface area and helical guides.“One of the most expensive and time-consuming steps for a new structural component in a nuclear reactor core is the cost to qualify the component,” says Nicholas Brown, a nuclear engineer at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Like the nuclear reactor technologies themselves, the process of qualifying them for use is stuck in the 1970s.Terrani hopes that the reams of data generated by 3D-printing parts can speed up the certification process and lower the cost of getting a nuclear reactor online.