Improve Safety Lower Cost: Demonstrate Nuclear Design Technology With DOE’s Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP) Available to Purchase

Complex nuclear plants have high costs. Documenting and maintaining information contributes a large share of those costs. Improving methods to design, construct and operate nuclear plants lowers costs. Improving design processes could help manage nuclear project costs, birth-to-death. Improving methods that manage design basis information before, during and after construction would not only lower initial nuclear costs, but also provide more complete, accurate information for operations over plant life. Nuclear safety would benefit. The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP) offers a unique opportunity to advance nuclear design methods to improve cost performance. Better design methods could automatically track changes to critical design content reducing laborious effort to update designs, speeding development. They would enhance information sharing. The commercial NGNP project is a significant opportunity to improve commercial nuclear plant safety design. The U.S. DOE should promote innovative nuclear design processes with the NGNP. Providing a single, consistent design framework on a modern data platform would make the NGNP the nuclear industry’s “Go to the Moon” project.