DOE Leads Effort to Fill Testing Void Created by Norwegian Reactor Shutdown

The shutdown of a 60-year-old test reactor at Halden, Norway, has put nuclear fuels and materials testing in the United States and Europe in a scramble, prompting the U.S. Department of Energy to ask research leaders and regulators to brainstorm a path forward.

The Halden reactor is a 25-megawatt boiling water reactor that began operation in 1959.

Institute for Energy Technology (Norway)

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) organized a “Halden Capability Gap Assessment Workshop” at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) on July 9 and 10, less than two weeks after the news broke June 27 that the 25-megawatt boiling water reactor, which went into operation in 1959, would be shutting down for good. Age and the mounting expense of keeping it operational prompted Norway’s Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to announce it would not be applying for a license renewal in 2020. The reactor had been shut down since March.

Participants at the meeting — DOE, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), INL, nuclear vendors, and representatives from American and European research agencies and test facilities — agreed that no single facility can replicate what Halden has done. But there was consensus that many of Halden’s capabilities exist or may be replicated elsewhere, and that the situation could create new collaborative opportunities.

The effort to develop accident-tolerant fuels for commercial reactors could be particularly affected by any delay, said INL’s Steve Hayes, national technical director of DOE’s Advanced Fuels Campaign. “We need to assess what vendors have been planning in Halden that we have to find a new home for,” he said.

Three DOE-sponsored vendor teams are developing accident-tolerant fuel concepts – Global Nuclear Fuel (a General Electric subsidiary), Framatome (formerly Areva) and Westinghouse. The goal is to get test assemblies into U.S. commercial reactors by 2022. While their activities in the United States are ahead of schedule, all three teams had experiments planned for Halden and must now find suitable new places to conduct them.

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