Kairos Power has a second safety-approved reactor design on the books. The company announced this week that its Hermes 2 reactor—the follow-on to the Hermes demo reactor—has passed a key safety review by the NRC, notching a key milestone on the path to a construction permit.
Build, baby, build: It’s been about a year since Kairos received the same honor for its Hermes demo reactor and seven months since the company received a construction permit for that project—the first non-water-cooled reactor design approved in the US in half a century.
Kairos didn’t wait for the Hermes construction permit before applying for the next step in its development timeline: building Hermes 2, a larger test plant with two reactors, each with a similar scope to the OG Hermes design.
- The two Hermes 2 reactors would share a power system and be connected with a molten salt heat transfer system.
- Hermes 2 will be located at the same Oak Ridge site as the first demo, which should ostensibly simplify the environmental review.
A speedier NRC? When it comes to Hermes 2, the US nuclear regulator seems to have picked up a few tricks to speed up the process. For an agency that’s frequently criticized for its lengthy and expensive review process for licensing new reactors, that’s a big deal.
- The ADVANCE Act, which was recently signed into law, took aim at those review processes and gave the NRC a new directive: Don’t unnecessarily limit the growth of the nuclear energy sector.
“We finished our review of Hermes 2 design nearly four months ahead of schedule, and using about 60 percent fewer resources than expected, using insights from our previous Kairos review,” Andrea Veil, director of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, told ANS.
The faster approval process is a byproduct of the first Hermes design review, which required the staff to amend its considerations along the way. As the agency put it, “much of this guidance was originally developed for completed designs of water-cooled nuclear reactors.”
Up next…The first thing on Kairos’ to-do list is working toward building the Hermes test reactor at its Oak Ridge site. The company recently wrapped testing on its first engineering test unit (ETU 1.0), demonstrating molten salt operations, and has two more ETUs to build and test before breaking ground on Hermes.
As for Hermes 2, there’s more regulatory work to slog through. Before the NRC can grant a construction permit, it has to perform an environmental assessment and take a vote—a process that will take at least until the fall.
Lead Reporter of Ignition
