Planned facilities designed to establish domestic manufacturing and research capabilities for Triso-X
Triso-X, a US manufacturer of advanced nuclear fuels, has received an $11m (€9.5m) grant from the state of Tennessee to support the continued development of its fuel fabrication campus in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, including a potential second commercial fuel facility and a dedicated research and development centre.
Triso-X, a subsidiary of nuclear reactor and fuel technology company X-Energy, said the award marks a milestone in its efforts to advance US energy security through the country’s first commercial-scale advanced nuclear fuel campus.
The funding was awarded through the Tennessee’s nuclear energy supply chain investment fund, established in 2023 to support nuclear investment, workforce development and site development to expand the state’s nuclear manufacturing ecosystem.
The new facilities are expected to be built at Oak Ridge, next to Triso-X’s first commercial-scale fuel fabrication facility being built and developed in partnership with the US Department of Energy.
Together, the three facilities are designed to establish domestic, commercial-scale manufacturing and research capabilities for Triso-X fuel, the company’s proprietary tri-structural isotropic (Triso) fuel.
TX-1, which is under construction, is expected to be the first purpose-built commercial Triso fuel fabrication facility in the US.
TX-2 is a planned second, larger fuel fabrication facility anticipated to significantly expand capacity.
TX-L is a dedicated fuel fabrication laboratory facility focused on fuel innovation, testing the improvement of Triso manufacturing processes.
When completed, the campus is expected to establish one of the world’s largest commercial-scale nuclear fuel fabrication campuses, with the capacity to produce enough Triso-X fuel to support approximately 55 of X-energy’s Xe-100 advanced small modular reactors. That represents nearly 4.5 GW of new advanced nuclear power capacity, or enough to power 3.3 million US households.
Triso nuclear fuel is a highly robust, advanced fuel form for high-temperature gas-cooled reactors. It consists of a uranium-based fuel kernel surrounded by three distinct layers of ceramic and carbon materials, which form an individual containment system for each particle.
This tri-structural design is said to provide exceptional resistance to corrosion, high temperatures, and irradiation, making it impossible to melt under extreme conditions and containing radioactive fission products effectively.
In May the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the key environmental review for X-energy’s first project, which according to the construction permit application would see it build four of its 80-MW Xe-100 reactors at chemical giant Dow’s UCC Seadrift Operations, on Texas’ Gulf Coast.
Apart from the Long Mott project, X-energy is also advancing Xe-100 deployment with Energy Northwest in Washington state in collaboration with Amazon.
The project, known as the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility, is for 12 reactors producing a maximum of 960 MW of electricity.
