Pressurized water-cooled reactors (PWRs) have benefitted from billions of dollars of research and development and millions of hours of operating experience over the past 50 years. While this R&D provides a strong foundation for NuScale technology, what enables NuScale to truly stand out is its cutting edge testing at state-of-the-art facilities worldwide, including:

Information obtained from these tests is used to validate our thermal-hydraulic and design computer models used to predict the thermal efficiency, performance, and safety of NuScale’s SMR.

NIST-1 Integral Testing Facility

NuScale has designed and built an exclusive access, one-third scale, state-of-the-art, electrically-heated prototype test facility, the NuScale Integral System Test (NIST-1) facility located at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon. The NIST-1 facility provides NuScale with a tremendous advantage for modular prototype testing. The one-third scale prototype replicates the entire NuScale Power Module and reactor building cooling pool. It provides an electrically heated core to bring the system up to operating temperature and pressure. Stability testing ensures that throughout the expected operating conditions, natural circulation is stable.

The facility has demonstrated the viability of NuScale Power’s SMR, and provides an enhanced representation of NuScale’s current reactor design. NIST includes a new data acquisition and control system and extensive instrumentation additions which will provide the measurements necessary for safety code and reactor design validation.