Thursday, 3 April 2025
The agreement formally establishes the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as a partner in the licensing, siting, public engagement, and research operation of the KRONOS MMR, while also identifying the university campus as the permanent site for the reactor as a research and demonstration installation.
The university plans to re-power partially its coal-fired Abbott power station with the KRONOS MMR, providing a zero-carbon demonstration of district heat and power to campus buildings as part of its green campus initiative. The project team aims to demonstrate how microreactor systems integrate with existing fossil fuel infrastructure to accelerate the decarbonisation of existing power-generation facilities.
Following initial arrangements, NANO Nuclear will begin the process of geological characterisation, including subsurface investigations, to support preparation of a Construction Permit Application (CPA) for submission to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The company said this preparatory work is essential to understanding the environmental parameters of the site, including critical inputs to safety analysis, to ensure the utmost reliability and safety of the facility, and support NANO Nuclear’s Preliminary Safety Analysis Report (PSAR) and Environmental Report (ER).
As part of the agreement, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will lead the regulatory engagement with the NRC as well as public engagement, support licensing activities including the PSAR and ER, and play a key role in site layout, constructability assessment, and future operator training programmes. NANO Nuclear will oversee plant design, construction, system integration, and commercial pathway development.
“This milestone marks the beginning of site-specific development for NANO Nuclear’s advanced KRONOS MMR technology and represents a defining moment in NANO Nuclear’s path to commercialisation of the KRONOS MMR Energy System,” the company said.
“This is the milestone we’ve been working so diligently towards, transforming design into reality,” said NANO Nuclear Founder and Chairman Jay Yu. “With a site now selected and a world-class university as our partner, we are positioned to be among the first companies to deliver advanced reactor systems within the United States. This isn’t just a research reactor, it’s a proving ground for the future of safe, portable, and resilient nuclear energy. Moreover, this agreement will serve as a foundation for our long-term reactor strategy. Every milestone from this point forward brings us closer to delivering the next generation of nuclear energy to communities, campuses, and industries across the world.”
“The KRONOS MMR project can not only be a national first, it can be a first for academia, enabling students, researchers, regulators, and the public to learn directly from a real-world microreactor development effort,” added Illinois Caleb Brooks, Principal Investigator for the University of Illinois. “This system can be the most advanced nuclear research platform on any US campus, with the potential to enable a new paradigm of nuclear power through education, research, and at scale demonstration.”
NANO Nuclear acquired the Micro Modular Reactor Energy System technology through its USD85 million acquisition of Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation’s (USNC’s) nuclear technology, which was completed in January. At that time, NANO Nuclear renamed the technology as the KRONOS MMR.
The MMR is a 45 MW thermal, 15 MW electrical high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, using TRISO fuel in prismatic graphite blocks and has a sealed transportable core.
USNC had been working on deployment projects at Canadian Nuclear Laboratories’ Chalk River site in Ontario, Canada, and at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the USA. The university informed the US NRC in June 2021 that it intends to construct an MMR on its campus, with the submission of the Letter of Intent being the first step in the NRC’s two-step process to license the new research and test reactor facility. At the time of its purchase of USNC, NANO said it planned to extend the existing collaboration with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, while continuing the licensing process for the reactor with the NRC.
