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.
Voucher recipients in this third round include:
- 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
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.
