Nuclear Energy R&D Infrastructure Report for The Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future

Over the past few years a number of important studies have been executed to identify and define the necessary nuclear energy research, development and demonstration (RD&D) infrastructure that must be sustained or developed.
This report is a compilation of work performed by numerous others to characterize the nuclear energy RD&D infrastructure in the United States. It collects and summarizes the key thoughts and understandings achieved in those previous works about the nature, status and needs of the nation’s facilities and capabilities to perform the RD&D necessary to sustain the current fleet of operating nuclear power plants, to cultivate advanced nuclear reactor concepts for future deployment in the electrical energy, process heat, and potentially other economic sectors, to better understand the character of the nuclear fuel cycle, and to protect the nation from the proliferation of nuclear weapons and materials. This infrastructure resides primarily in the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory system, but many important aspects of the RD&D infrastructure are contained within the nation’s universities and colleges who educate students in the areas of nuclear engineering and radiation science as well as in the corporations who develop, design, manufacture and build nuclear power plants and other nuclear facilities.