A 12-foot-tall slice into the dark gray core of a model nuclear microreactor looms on the shop floor of the new Westinghouse Electric Company factory in Etna. It’s dotted with blank holes missing the control drums to control the rate of the reaction, shutdown rods to bring the nuclear chain reaction to a halt and an array of thin heat pipes to cool the heat produced from the fuel and transfer it to an open-air process that turns the fuel into power. Once assembled, the entire nuclear reactor would fit on the back of a semi-truck.
A scale model of the eVinci microreactor’s core. Westinghouse plans to begin testing within the next few years with the hopes of starting to manufacture eVinci in 2029, producing multiple reactors a year. Photo Westinghouse Electric Company
Such small, transportable and mass-produced “microreactors” are seen as part of the future of nuclear power. And an effort to realize that future is underway in places such as Etna, where Westinghouse scientists are at work developing a nuclear microreactor called eVinci.
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“What’s unique about microreactors and eVinci, in particular, is the fact that number one, they’re very simple systems,” said Jon Ball, president of eVinci Microreactor at Westinghouse Electric Company. “There’s very few components and they can be fully factory fabricated.” Once it’s finished, the reactor would be able to operate for about eight years before it would need to be refueled,
according to Ball.
Nuclear microreactors are the smallest version of nuclear reactors and put out anywhere from 1 to 20 megawatts of power. For comparison, some full-sized nuclear reactors provide more than 1,000 megawatts of power. There isn’t a microreactor tested and ready for market yet, but eVinci is in line.
“You typically don’t think of microreactors in there as something you would put on the grid-like one of the electric grids for any country,” said Mike Ford, associate laboratory director for engineering at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. “What they would tend to be used for is more off-grid applications. They tend to be much more readily moved. Some of them are designed to be transportable. They provide the power that helps mitigate the need to do things like bring diesel fuel to very remote locations, which can be very expensive.”
Demand for electricity in the U.S. is expected to surge in the next decade, in large part due to the rise of artificial intelligence and the expansion of large, electricity-gobbling data centers that power AI. Energy demand from data centers alone is projected to potentially triple by 2028 — consuming up to 12% of total electricity in the U.S., according to a 2024 report from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Microreactors would be ripe for use in remote locations, such as where there are mining operations or offshore drilling, small islands or as emergency power for the hyperscaler industry — the service providers that operate large data centers.
A rendering of a finished eVinci microreactor with the reactor’s core encased in metal shielding. Photo: Westinghouse Electric Company
“In some cases, the sun doesn’t shine, the wind doesn’t blow,” Ford said. “So, you still have to have some kind of backup. And there’s a pursuit of many options for that backup. And that’s coming from nuclear. It’s coming from battery storage. It’s coming from other sources that can provide that backup.”
The microreactor is the next chapter of the Pittsburgh region’s nuclear history that saw the development of the nuclear reactor for the first atomic submarine and the operation of the first commercial nuclear power plant in Beaver County. Innovation in nuclear technology has shaped Pittsburgh’s landscape for decades as a robust, but muted part of the economy. But technologies like eVinci are still untested and face challenges, including cautious public perception, steep costs and uncertain political winds.
“I’ve been working in the nuclear industry for over 30 years, and this is the most exciting time that I have ever experienced,” Ball said. “The amount of interest and need and urgency for nuclear power has never been greater. We’re talking to customers today that if I were to rewind ten years ago, we would have never dreamed — whether it’s the hyperscalers industry, oil and gas. Many years ago it was the nuclear utilities that were interested in deploying nuclear power. Now, it’s industries in these special applications that see the need and the advantages that nuclear can bring.”
Atomic past
Pittsburgh’s nuclear past can be traced back to the giant gray bulb of the Westinghouse Atom Smasher that once perched above their research facility in Forest Hills. The atom smasher was at the heart of the first large-scale program in nuclear physics for a private company.
A view c. 1940 of the Atom Smasher at the Westinghouse research facility in Forest Hills, Pa. Photo: Historic Pittsburgh
When it was built in 1937, people weren’t afraid of the atom smasher, said Leslie Przybylek, senior curator at the Senator John Heinz History Center. “In the Forest Hills community, people thought it was fascinating. And it’s this sort of almost science fiction thing. There’s this great newspaper article where in the beginning it talks about the people doing this work. They’re not like these aliens. They’re not in these silvery suits. They look like businessmen from Wilkinsburg. But they’re doing this wonderful work with atomic research. Westinghouse set a standard at that point.”
By the late 1930s, Westinghouse was doing experiments with the atom smasher to create and measure nuclear reactions for research on nuclear power.
“You have this early, really fascinating period of exploration where they talk about it,” Przybylek said. “It’s out in the community. And it stops in ‘41 when the U.S. enters World War II. To me, that’s really a dividing line. They can no longer talk about it at all.”
By 1941, Westinghouse was producing pure uranium at the facility, according to History Center records. During and after World War II, Westinghouse shifted its nuclear focus to defense — seeking out contracts with the Manhattan Project and lending engineers to U.S. government atomic research facilities, such as Oak Ridge and Los Alamos.
When the U.S. Navy, led by Admiral Hyman Rickover, set out to design nuclear reactors that could power naval vessels, Westinghouse got the contract to develop them. The company purchased the former Bettis airfield in West Mifflin and transformed it into a research facility with more than 2,000 engineers to design the first nuclear reactor for use on a submarine. In 1955, the U.S.S. Nautilus was launched with its commander exclaiming, “underway on nuclear power.” Bettis nuclear reactors powered 11 aircraft carriers and 110 submarines, including 42 carrying Polaris missiles, and became the “leading center for reactor research and development and had a significant role in strengthening the U.S. military power during the Cold War,” according to Patrick Vitale in Nuclear Suburbs: Cold War Technoscience and The Pittsburgh Renaissance.
Meanwhile, the Atomic Energy Commission sought to develop a commercial nuclear industry to generate electricity for homes and businesses. The Rickover-Westinghouse reactor used on aircraft carriers was the best fit at the time. The Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Beaver County became the first civilian nuclear power plant in the U.S. in 1957, sending power to the Duquesne Light Company’s grid. It was decommissioned in 1989. Today, the Beaver Valley Nuclear Power Station stands next to the former plant, generating more than 15 million megawatt hours of power a year, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data. It was the fourth largest employer in Beaver County last year, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry.
Developing nuclear technology has been a huge part of Pittsburgh’s economy for decades. Research facilities settled in the suburbs, attracting a workforce of nuclear scientists and engineers, spurring the growth of white-collar communities, according to Vitale.
The local nuclear industry is “still a strong, but quiet part of the region’s economy,” according to Chris Briem, regional economist at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Research. The Pittsburgh metro area has the fifth-highest number of nuclear engineers in the U.S., according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The cooling dome of Beaver Valley Power Station #1 on the Ohio River in Shippingport, Pa. sits next to the Shippingport Atomic Power Station (bottom of photo). In December 1957, Shippingport became the first commercial, central electric-generation station in the United States that utilized nuclear power. Photo: Historic Pittsburgh
“A large part of what’s considered high technology or technology industries, employment in the region — a lot of that is nuclear power,” Briem said. “A lot of it just isn’t really noticed the way sort of smaller startups are and newer technologies are just because of the nature of its connection to sort of national security issues between Bettis and Westinghouse and a lot of firms that are connected to them. It’s a pretty sizable part of the industrial and technology mix here.”
Microdosing Nuclear
Nuclear power has a relatively low carbon footprint, generating no greenhouse gas emissions when the power plant is operating. Unlike wind and solar, nuclear doesn’t have the same amount of variability — or fluctuations in how much power they can produce on a given day. But building a nuclear power plant is “insanely expensive,” according to Ramteen Sioshansi, professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. For example, two new nuclear units at Plant Vogtle, a nuclear plant in Georgia, were originally expected to cost $14 billion dollars. In the end, the plant took seven years longer than expected to build and cost more than $34 billion.
In trying to study and model the right mix of energy to bring climate change under control, Sioshansi said, nuclear power doesn’t usually factor in because of the high price tag. “When you compare the cost of supplying customers using nuclear and you compare it to other electricity generation technology, it’s very difficult to justify that cost economically.”
That isn’t necessarily the case for microreactors. “Unfortunately, none of these sort of clean energy sources are cheap and nuclear is no exception,” said Jacopo Buongiorno, director of Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “But if you choose your application carefully, particularly the early applications, and then give the industry time to reduce their cost with subsequent deployment and mass fabrication, then I think there is a path forward.”
Bringing in grid power to remote areas via diesel generators is not cheap. “Diesel is very expensive to transport,” Ball said. “You have to store it. And in some of those communities, some of those areas, you have a very small window, maybe a couple of times a year when the weather is sufficient where you can actually transport that fuel.”
The eVinci microreactor’s cost would be “competitive” with transportable diesel, Ball said. “If we had this available today, if it was licensed, there would be a market for it.”
Right now, nuclear power plants are designed and built for each site, every component has to be tested and approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The microreactor technology will be put to the test at the Idaho National Laboratory. The next step after they’re tested is to apply for an NRC license to operate.
Westinghouse isn’t alone. Other companies, such as Holos and Oklo are making different models of microreactors. The first company will start testing in 2026 at Idaho National Laboratory, according to Buongiorno. Westinghouse plans to test in the next few years with the hopes of starting to manufacture eVinci in 2029, producing multiple reactors a year.
Being able to mass-produce microreactors in a factory is an important factor in lowering costs and making them more competitive.
The launching of the USS Nautilus in 1955. The Nautilus was the world’s first operational nuclear-powered submarine. Westinghouse developed the basic reactor plant design used in Nautilus at the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in West Mifflin, Pa. Photo: Historic Pittsburgh
“You cannot afford to have a separate license and a separate independent review of every single nuclear reactor that you put out there,” according to Buongiorno. Instead, companies want to be able to get one approval for the reactor and then they’d only have to get an environmental approval for wherever the reactor would be placed.
Potential sites include on the water. Westinghouse has partnered with CORE POWER, a U.K.-based maritime nuclear innovation company, to develop floating nuclear power plants. Such mobile plants could be placed on a barge or a platform at sea. Today, the Russians operate one called Akademik Lomonosov in the Arctic. “It’s basically brought in and it’s used to power a small town and to provide heat to it up in northern Russia,” Ford said. “And it provides reliable power to that remote location.”
Floating nuclear plants that move across international boundaries face legal and regulatory questions that haven’t been sorted out yet by the various international nuclear regulatory agencies. There’s also ongoing discussion about how to handle the security side of things — nuclear proliferation — at sea. And then there’s the case of public perception and concerns about nuclear waste.
Dealing with nuclear waste
“The more and more nuclear platforms that there are, where does the waste go?” Ford said. “Who bears the responsibility for storing it? How do we move the waste itself around? Things like this are always a concern when you’re talking about nuclear, because then it’s a cost factor, certainly in the business case. But then it’s also a question of what communities are willing to have these things in their backyard and perhaps have used nuclear fuel stored in their area.”
At nuclear power plants today, each site handles its own waste. But with microreactors, there’s the advantage of shipping the waste and consolidating it at one site. For eVinci, they plan to ship the reactor back to a central location to be refueled. When they refuel the reactor, they’ll take out the spent fuel and “store it in casks exactly the way it’s done today,” Ball said.
If the industry grows, the U.S. will have to figure out new ways to deal with waste. In 2002, the U.S. proposed a centralized nuclear waste storage facility in Nevada within Yucca Mountain. Instead of having nuclear waste spread out across dozens of sites across the country, it would be stored in a single place under Department of Energy oversight. The project faced strong opposition from people in Nevada and eventually fizzled out.
“If we see more of these plants being built, there’s going to be more waste,” Sioshansi said. “And we have to, as a nation, figure out — Do we want to just keep doing the status quo? Each of these facilities will keep waste on site. Or do we want to revisit some things like Yucca Mountain — where waste is being consolidated and stored at one or two places under close DOE supervision?”
The radioactive legacy of the Pittsburgh’s region’s nuclear past lines the soil in Parks Township, Armstrong County, where Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp. (NUMEC) buried nuclear waste during its operation as a nuclear fuel processing plant in the 1960s. Cleanup has been started and paused for a decade as crews discovered more contaminated material. An initial contract of $350 million has been set aside for the cleanup and remediation of the site, but it will likely cost more than half a billion dollars in the end, according to the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency overseeing the cleanup. Work is set to begin this spring.
Despite its risks, nuclear power has gained bipartisan support in the past decade. Democrats like that it has low carbon emissions. Republicans like it for its benefits to businesses, energy security and to outcompete China on nuclear energy technology.
“The angles are different, but both parties have supported it in very concrete ways,” Buongiorno said. “I don’t think much is going to change, at least in terms of policy.”
In the private sector, companies have set net zero targets and pushed decarbonization plans. Whether they stick to them over the next four years, could shape the future of nuclear power, he said.
“I think it’s not going to be driven by politics. This mostly going to be driven by the companies, by the businesses — Are they willing to make the investment in clean energy technologies now? Or do they feel comfortable that they can continue to use fossil fuels and delay, postpone those investments?”
