NANO Nuclear wins DOE GAIN voucher for KRONOS reactor design analysis

NANO Nuclear Energy Inc. picked up U.S. Department of Energy GAIN voucher NE-26-38854 for a KRONOS micro modular reactor analysis that cuts straight to the licensing problem: how much uncertainty sits inside the design’s reactivity, power distribution, and temperature coefficients.

The award funds a collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory on “Uncertainty Quantification and Sensitivity Analysis Support for NANO Nuclear Reactor Design Using ORNL’s Tools – SCALE/TSUNAMI.” NANO Nuclear said the effort will quantify the effects of nuclear data, modeling assumptions, and operational parameters, which is the unglamorous work that turns a concept into something a regulator can actually inspect. For a microreactor, that matters as much as the core geometry. If the uncertainty budget is sloppy, the design package looks soft. If it is built on validated methods, the company can point to margins with a straight face.

That is why the distinction between a voucher and a cash award matters. DOE says GAIN is a private-public partnership framework that gives industry access to national-lab expertise, computational tools, experimental capabilities, site information, and licensing support. It does not hand out direct financial awards. In the September 2024 GAIN round, recipients were responsible for at least 20 percent of costs, which could be in-kind. In practice, this is a technical-assistance bridge, not a commercialization check.

NANO Nuclear said this was its second GAIN voucher as a company and its first for the KRONOS MMR Energy System. The company also said it has completed site-characterization for KRONOS in partnership with the University of Illinois, another small but important step in the long walk from paper design to a buildable plant. The company, based in New York, has been pushing the program through the usual early gates: site work, code validation, and now a more formal uncertainty framework built with one of the national lab shops that regulators know well.

The toolset is not random. ORNL says SCALE is a comprehensive modeling and simulation suite maintained under contract with the NRC, DOE, and National Nuclear Security Administration for reactor physics, criticality safety, radiation shielding, and spent fuel characterization. TSUNAMI-3D, the SCALE module named in the voucher, is built for sensitivity and uncertainty analysis and can calculate sensitivity coefficients and uncertainty from nuclear-data covariance matrices. NANO Nuclear’s director of reactor design, Alisha Kasam-Griffith, called the award “another important achievement” and said the ORNL collaboration will help advance KRONOS toward “construction, demonstration, and eventual deployment at scale.” That is the real test here: whether this voucher helps turn KRONOS into a design the NRC can credibly review, or just a better-informed concept still miles from steel in the ground.