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What will really determine nuclear energy’s fate is whether the nuclear community can change the conversation about this technology that has proven its worth many times over.

Simon Irish saw that countries around the globe needed to build a boggling amount of clean-power projects to replace their fossil fuel infrastructure, while also providing enough energy for rising demand from China, India, and other rapidly growing countries.

New reactors could also reduce costs by being safer. Conventional reactors have a fundamental risk of meltdown, largely because they were designed to power submarines.

Terrestrial is far from alone. Dozens of nuclear startups are popping up around the country, aiming to solve the well-known problems with nuclear power — radioactive waste, meltdowns, weapons proliferation, and high costs.

At a conference in 2011, Simon Irish, an investment manager in New York, met an engineer with an innovative design for a nuclear reactor cooled by molten salt.

“The Pacific Northwest seems to be a magnet for innovative and traditional nuclear power,” Dr. James Conca, a nuclear expert, recently wrote in Forbes.

Meanwhile, the DOE also announced technical voucher awards to U.S. companies selected under the DOE’s Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) initiative. Included among the companies selected to receive GAIN technology development vouchers is Terrestrial Energy USA ($500,000). Terrestrial Energy USA in a May 2 news release said that it received an award for advanced nuclear instrumentation development work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a U.S.

Terrestrial Energy says its Integrated Molten Salt Reactor can produce heat at around 600 degrees celsius and could supply energy intensive processes such as hydrogen production, desalination and petrochemical refining...[It] is one of several advanced reactor developers leading the charge and hopes to build its first plant in North America in the 2020s.

Terrestrial Energy offered details about a less-conventional advanced nuclear design...touting Terrestrial’s 400-MWth (192-MWe) liquid-fueled SMR. Called the IMSR (Integral Molten Salt Reactor), it incorporates many aspects of molten salt reactor operation researched, demonstrated, and proven in test reactors at ORNL in the 1960s.

The U.S. Department of Energy has selected 13 projects to receive approximately $60 million in federal funding for cost-shared research and development for advanced nuclear technologies.