Canadian nuclear tech firm Terrestrial Energy has signed a manufacturing and supply contract with Springfields Fuels Limited—a Britain–based subsidiary of Westinghouse Electric Company—for the design and construction of an Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR) fuel pilot plant.

In an August 3 press release, Terrestrial said that Springfields’ reactor fuel manufacturing facility has extensive existing infrastructure available to support the fuel supply for IMSR development and is scalable to support a fleet of IMSR plants operating in the 2030s. Located near Preston, Lancashire in northwestern England, the Springfields facility is the only site in the United Kingdom for nuclear fuel manufacturing.

The TCR program is leveraging an agile approach—one that is centered around continuously informing the process—to accelerate deployment timelines and introduce performance improvements. Image: Adam Malin, ORNL

Soon after Enrico Fermi’s Chicago Pile-­1 went critical for a brief duration in December 1942, the construction of the first continuously operating reactor, the X-­10 Graphite Reactor, was initiated in February 1943 at Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tenn. On November 4 of that year, a mere nine months after the start of construction, the reactor began operation. This marked the onset of what Alvin M. Weinberg referred to as “the first nuclear era,” during which many reactors of various designs and operating parameters were built and demonstrated across the United States. Forty years ago, the Fast Flux Test Facility was the last U.S. non-­light-­water reactor to reach criticality, and it has since been decommissioned.