Westinghouse Electric Company’s eVinci Advanced Logic System (ALS) Version 2 (v2) instrument and control (I&C) platform has received approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission through a final safety evaluation report on two topical reports.

The eVinci is now the first and only microreactor with an I&C system approved by the NRC, which opens a path to autonomous operation. The approvals also allow the ALS v2 platform to be used by any reactor currently in the U.S. fleet.

Radiant Industries has announced a $100 million Series C funding round to be used primarily to complete its Kaleidos Development Unit (KDU) microreactor for testing in Idaho National Laboratory's Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments (DOME) facility within two years.

Westinghouse Electric Company has completed the front-end engineering and experiment design (FEEED) for a prototype microreactor at Idaho National Laboratory, the Department of Energy recently announced. The one-fifth scale version of eVinci, Westinghouse’s 5-MWe sodium-cooled heat pipe design, is one of three reactors that could be tested at the National Reactor Innovation Center’s (NRIC) DOME test bed “as early as 2026,” the DOE said.

Radiant Industries announced on June 4 that the safety design strategy (SDS) for a test of its Kaleidos microreactor in the National Reactor Innovation Center’s DOME test bed at Idaho National Laboratory now has approval from the Department of Energy. Radiant hopes to test Kaleidos—a 1-MW high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor—by 2026 and then market portable commercial reactors to power remote locations and provide backup or primary power for critical applications in hospitals or for disaster relief.

The Department of Energy’s National Reactor Innovation Center (NRIC) awarded $3.9 million to three advanced nuclear energy developers on October 23 to design experiments to test microreactor designs in the Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments (DOME) test bed at Idaho National Laboratory.