Indiana-based small modular reactor startup NX Atomics has partnered with Chicago metal additive manufacturing specialist Sciaky to apply Sciaky's proprietary Electron Beam Additive Manufacturing (EBAM) process to the production of components for NX Atomics' SMR platform. Announced on June 2, the Midwest collaboration becomes one of the first commercial nuclear deployments at this scale of a 3D-printing technique already qualified by Airbus, Lockheed Martin, the US Navy and NASA.
3D-Printing The SMR Supply Chain
"This is what bringing nuclear manufacturing into the modern era actually looks like," said John Warden, CEO of NX Atomics in the announcement. "3D printing opens up the potential for us to produce nuclear-qualified parts faster and at lower cost, where appropriate swap them out through life, and meaningfully reduce the unit cost of every small modular reactor we build."
The economic case for SMRs has long been bottlenecked by long-lead-time forgings and large unit counts for major reactor internals. EBAM can build fully dense titanium, tantalum, Inconel and stainless steel components on demand, allowing NX Atomics to compress lead times and design replaceable parts that don't need to last the lifetime of the reactor — both levers on capex and opex per gigawatt.
EBAM Comes To Nuclear
Sciaky has been refining electron-beam manufacturing since 1939. Its EBAM systems have produced structural titanium and specialty-alloy parts that fly on commercial aircraft, sail with the US Navy and orbit Earth on commercial space platforms and lunar landers, with additive techniques moving from prototype to full-rate production across aerospace and defense over the past decade. The NX Atomics deal extends that production footprint to commercial nuclear power for the first time at this scale.
"Bringing that capability into America's clean energy infrastructure with NX Atomics is a natural next step," said Sciaky CEO John Criso, "and we are proud that two Midwestern companies are leading this transition."
Part Of A Wider US SMR Push
The partnership lands in the same week that Day & Zimmermann signed on to build Deep Fission's underground Gravity reactor in Kansas and X-energy submitted its Xe-100 HTGR for UK regulatory review with Centrica, underscoring how quickly US SMR developers are signing construction, supply-chain and regulatory partners ahead of first-of-a-kind builds. Earlier this month Antares took its Mark-0 microreactor critical at Idaho National Lab, the first new privately developed reactor to reach criticality in the US in decades.
For NX Atomics, an Indiana company that has so far been below the radar, the Sciaky pact is a credibility marker that mirrors how SpaceX-era aerospace companies industrialised additive manufacturing for propulsion before it crossed over into mainstream aviation.
Reporting based on coverage from PR Newswire, World Nuclear News, 3D Printing Industry and VoxelMatters.