David Gandy: Cutting costs and fabrication time for components

David Gandy, the senior technical executive for nuclear materials at the Electric Power Research Institute, is charged with leading a project to lower the costs and manufacturing time for small modular reactors and advanced reactors. The Department of Energy–funded project is led by EPRI, and its collaborators include the United Kingdom–based Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Center and Oregon-based reactor developer NuScale Power. The testing has focused on producing the upper and lower pressure vessel assemblies for NuScale’s 60-megawatt SMR.

Gandy said that the project team has already produced a 3,650-pound reactor upper head at 44 percent scale and has made other components as heavy as 7,000 pounds. Over the next two years, if the tests still to be conducted are successful, EPRI plans to transfer the technologies to other reactor manufacturers. Gandy expects these new technologies to be available in about five to seven years, once the testing is completed and the necessary approvals are obtained from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and ASME.

Gandy talked about the project with Nuclear News Editor-in-Chief Rick Michal.