The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and a top electric power research group are renewing an unfunded five-year research agreement aimed at addressing nuclear plant aging and other challenges facing the aging fleet, according to a memo published Wednesday.
In the memorandum of understanding signed last week by both parties, NRC and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) agreed to extend their non-binding research partnership through Sep. 30, 2026. The previous iteration of the agreement, signed in 2016, was set to expire at the end of the month, the memo said. NRC and EPRI signed their first memo in 1997, the commission said in a Facebook post Wednesday.
“The intent [is] to encourage research cooperation on topics of mutual interest to support nuclear safety and security,” an NRC spokesperson wrote in an email Wednesday to Weapons Complex Morning Briefing. “Individual projects may be funded independently.”
Among the six research areas listed under the new memorandum of understanding is a potential R&D project investigating ways to manage aging parts at long-running nuclear power plants. The cooperative research aims to “address and evaluate the status of materials degradation” in reactor components, piping and concrete.
NRC-EPRI teams will also look into issues like plant modernization and probabilistic risk assessment, as well as the renewal of xLPR — a software tool developed by the joint research team and used in reactor coolant system analysis.
The memorandum of understanding doesn’t obligate either NRC or EPRI to assign staff to any particular project, though NRC’s Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research, which manages the commission’s agency side of the co-op, got federal funding in 2021 to support 197 full-time staff.
The office also got roughly $41.5 million in funding in 2021 for contract support to “cove[r] an array of many technical areas supporting the NRC regulatory mission.” EPRI is a “primary partner” supporting the office’s research activities, the spokesperson said.
Wednesday’s agreement was signed by Ray Furstenau, director of NRC’s Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research, and Rita Baranwal, vice president of EPRI’s nuclear segment and former assistant secretary for nuclear energy at the Department of Energy. Baranwal joined the organization in January just days after her resignation from DOE.
