GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH)(nuclear.gepower.com)and Advanced Reactor Concepts (ARC Nuclear) (www.arcnuclear.com) have announced that they are “advancing their collaboration” to develop and license the ARC-100 advanced small modular reactor (aSMR).

Through a newly signed development agreement, GEH intends to license intellectual property associated with its PRISM advanced-reactor design to ARC Nuclear.

GEH has also agreed to provide ARC Nuclear with access to nuclear infrastructure programmes related to quality, safety culture, training, processes, procedures and tools. In addition, GEH will make an in-kind contribution to ARC Nuclear through its agreement to provide engineering and design expertise.

Don Wolf, chairman and CEO of ARC Nuclear, said: “Our work to date with the GEH team has validated our expectation of the synergy of combining ARC Nuclear’s senior engineers — with their ‘deep sodium fast reactor’ operational and design experience.

“We are clearly seeing how the power of this engineering collaboration and GEH’s infrastructure can give us a leap forward in reducing both time to market and development costs.”

The companies announced a collaboration in March 2017 to progress the ARC-100 design for global power generation, with initial deployment in Canada.

They are working to commence a preliminary regulatory review of the ARC-100 by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission through its Vendor Design Review process; and at the same time, a joint GEH-ARC Nuclear engineering team is working to advance the ARC-100 design.