The US Department of Energy (DOE) has announced a third round of financing for fiscal year 2026 from its Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) programme.
GAIN voucher recipients do not receive direct financial awards. Vouchers provide funding to DOE laboratories to help businesses overcome critical technological and commercialisation challenges. All awardees are responsible for a minimum 20% cost share, which could be an in-kind contribution.
The four voucher recipients in this third round are:
- Aalo Atomics (Austin, Texas) for development of EMRALD modifications to support economic generational risk analysis and design decision capabilities supported by Idaho National Laboratory (INL);
- OrganiCore Nuclear (New York) for design-enabling nuclear data evaluation with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL);
- Raven-Flint Nuclear Corp (Idaho Falls) for domestic uranium conversion by a Zero-F2 process with INLL; and
- Srijan LLC (College Station, Texas) for overcoming the material-growth barrier for fabrication of a novel semiconductor neutron detector for advanced nuclear power plants with Sandia National Laboratory (SNL).
Aalo Atomics is developing the Aalo-1 advanced microreactor to be deployed in a pack (pod). Aalo uses INL’s Event Modelling Risk Assessment using Linked Diagrams (EMRALD) software to perform Generational Risk Analysis (GRA) for reactor availability, economics, and safety optimisation. The current EMRALD capabilities need enhancements to better represent uncertainty quantification, automated sensitivity analysis, and evolving reactor design details needed for engineering trade-off decisions.
Aalo will work with INL to expand EMRALD’s modelling and simulation capabilities enabling Aalo to optimise reactor design, economics, and operational reliability. The project will improve advanced reactor economics, plant availability, and safety analysis capabilities by enabling more sophisticated uncertainty and sensitivity analyses during reactor design. The enhanced EMRALD tools could help reduce regulatory uncertainty, support more economically competitive microreactor deployments, and enable dispatchable nuclear energy systems rather than only traditional baseload generation.
OrganiCore Nuclear is developing an innovative small modular reactor (SMR) that employs low-pressure organic cooling, separate water moderation, and commercially available low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel to enable rapid deployment and achieve large light-water reactor economics at microreactor scale.
High-fidelity nuclear data, particularly Thermal Scattering Law (TSL) data describing low-energy neutron interactions, are essential for accurate reactor physics modelling, safety analysis, and licensing. However, no evaluated TSL data currently exist for the organic coolants used in the OrganiCore design.
OrganiCore will partner with ORNL to leverage its Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), machine-learning-enabled molecular dynamics capabilities, and prior successful TSL validation work for reactor materials to generate and validate the required nuclear data. The project will create critical-path nuclear data needed to support the design, safety analysis, and licensing of organic-cooled small modular reactors (SMRs).
Raven-Flint Nuclear Corporation is developing a novel uranium conversion process that eliminates the need for elemental F2 and F2-derived fluorinating agents, but the remaining technical challenge is establishing pilot-scale mass balance, material control and accountancy (MC&A), and stream characterisation methods suitable for NRC licensing. The US currently relies on a single commercial uranium hexafluoride (UF6) conversion facility, and all Western-aligned conversion plants depend on elemental fluorine (F2) chemistry, which creates significant cost, safety, permitting, and supply-chain vulnerabilities.
Raven-Flint will work with INL to develop an integrated mass balance, MC&A, and supporting stream-characterisation for the Raven-Flint pilot plant. This will use INL’s operating-scale UF6 conversion expertise and advanced radiochemistry and analytical capabilities.
The project will establish a new domestic UF6 conversion pathway that eliminates reliance on elemental fluorine, reducing capital costs, operating costs, hazardous-material inventories, and permitting complexity for future conversion facilities.
Srijan LLC is developing the N800 semiconductor neutron detector using hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) to enable high-temperature neutron detection for advanced reactors. However, current hBN materials contain carbon impurities that severely degrade charge collection efficiency, preventing reliable neutron detection performance and blocking advancement beyond a proof-of-concept stage.
Srijan will work with SNL to grow thick-film hBN using carbon-free precursors such as boron tribromide and borazine, enabling the material quality needed for neutron detector applications. SNL possesses specialized chemical vapor deposition (CVD) reactor facilities and expertise in carbon-free hBN epitaxial growth that are unavailable commercially.
The laboratory’s advanced characterisation capabilities are also essential for validating impurity levels and semiconductor performance. The project will enable next-generation neutron detectors capable of operating at temperatures up to 800°C, significantly exceeding the limits of current He-3 detectors and scintillators used in advanced reactors. The compact, high-temperature-capable N800 detector could improve reactor safety through real-time neutron flux monitoring and autonomous reactor controls while reducing instrumentation complexity and cost for advanced reactor systems.
