MEITNER FOA

The summary for the MEITNER FOA grant is detailed below. This summary states who is eligible for the grant, how much grant money will be awarded, current and past deadlines, Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) numbers, and a sampling of similar government grants. Verify the accuracy of the data FederalGrants.com provides by visiting the webpage noted in the Link to Full Announcement section or by contacting the appropriate person listed as the Grant Announcement Contact. If any section is incomplete, please visit the website for the Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy, which is the U.S. government agency offering this grant.

MEITNER FOA: Modeling-Enhanced Innovations Trailblazing Nuclear Energy Reinvigoration (MEITNER) Agency Overview The Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), an organization within the Department of Energy (DOE), is chartered by Congress in the America COMPETES Act of 2007 (P.L. 110-69), as amended by the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 (P.L. 111-358) to: “(A) to enhance the economic and energy security of the United States through the development of energy technologies that result in— (i) reductions of imports of energy from foreign sources; (ii) reductions of energy-related emissions, including greenhouse gases; and (iii) improvement in the energy efficiency of all economic sectors; and (B) to ensure that the United States maintains a technological lead in developing and deploying advanced energy technologies.” ARPA-E issues this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) under the programmatic authorizing statute codified at 42 U.S.C. § 16538. The FOA and any awards made under this FOA are subject to 2 C.F.R. Part 200 as amended by 2 C.F.R. Part 910. ARPA-E funds research on and the development of high-potential, high-impact energy technologies that are too early for private-sector investment. The agency focuses on technologies that can be meaningfully advanced with a modest investment over a defined period of time in order to catalyze the translation from scientific discovery to early-stage technology. For the latest news and information about ARPA-E, its programs and the research projects currently supported, see: http://arpa-e.energy.gov/. Program Overview Nuclear reactor plants are complex systems where many types and scales of technologies must work together seamlessly. Design choices at each of those scales and for each of those technologies impact the rest of the system in terms of functionality, cost, and constructability. For nuclear energy to contribute in the coming decades, the next generation of nuclear reactor plants need to simultaneously achieve “walkaway” safe and secure operation, extremely low construction capital costs, and dramatically shorter construction and commissioning times than currently-available plants. To attain these goals, new, innovative, enabling technologies for existing advanced reactor designs are needed. The development of these enabling technologies requires understanding the inter-relatedness of design choices. Thus, ARPA-E encourages a rethinking of how pieces of the nuclear reactor system fit together when developing these enabling technologies. Through the MEITNER (Modeling-Enhanced Innovations Trailblazing Nuclear Energy Reinvigoration) program, ARPA-E seeks to identify and develop innovative technologies to enable the advanced nuclear reactor design community to mature their designs for future commercial deployment. These enabling technologies can establish the basis for a modern, domestic supply chain supporting nuclear technology. As provided in this FOA, ARPA-E will select multiple Awardees (Prime Recipients) to develop innovative technologies using advanced modeling and simulation (M&S) tools and by leveraging expert input to enable advanced reactor systems. The MEITNER Program will establish a set of well-characterized enabling technologies where: • performance and safety have been studied with multi-physics M&S tools; • key cost and performance drivers have been identified for critical development and testing; • key gaps in models or data have been identified, which can be addressed through targeted experimental work; • costs and construction timelines are well projected; and • robust techno-economic analysis (TEA) has been performed and a clear technology-to-market (T2M) plan has been created. MEITNER Awardees will perform key enabling technology development for nuclear reactor systems, components, and structures, moving those technologies toward commercialization. The program will not support development of fundamentally new reactor core concepts nor the design of entire reactor plants. This approach is intended to focus on identifying and developing key enabling technologies for the existing U.S. advanced reactor design community that take advantage of fields adjacent to those that are typically considered nuclear energy research and development (R&D). The MEITNER Program will use modeling and simulation and, optionally, applied science and engineering-based experimental work. The MEITNER Program will require a system-level approach in describing and quantifying how new and innovative enabling technologies fit into a plant design to make the plant “walkaway” safe, quickly-deployable, safeguardable, cost-competitive, and commercially-viable. To facilitate such a holistic view, ARPA-E will establish a separately-funded Resource Team to work with Awardees, as described in Section 2.3 below. The Resource Team will consist of three coordinated sub-teams: a computational modeling and simulation (M&S) sub-team, a techno-economic analysis (TEA) sub-team, and a subject matter expert (SME) sub-team (see Section I.E of the FOA). Through the Resource Team, Awardees will have access to SMEs from both the nuclear and non-nuclear disciplines. These resources will allow Awardees to more accurately place their enabling technologies into the larger reactor plant context. Awardees are encouraged to leverage DOE Office of Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE) programs, such as the GAIN (Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear) initiative (https://www.inl.gov/research-program/gain) and the Nuclear Science User Facilities (NSUF) Network (https://nsuf.inl.gov/), to perform strategic experiments–either during or after completion of the Program. To obtain a copy of the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) please go to the ARPA-E website at https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov. ARPA-E will not review or consider Concept Papers submitted through other means. For detailed guidance on using ARPA-E eXCHANGE, please refer to the ARPA-E eXCHANGE User Guide (https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov/Manuals.aspx).