Last week, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho Operations Office approved a key safety document for the MARVEL microreactor at Idaho National Laboratory. The approved document, called a Preliminary Documented Safety Analysis (PDSA), marks a major milestone toward building and operating the microreactor for research, development and end-user demonstrations.
MARVEL, the Microreactor Applications Research Validation and Evaluation project, is a sodium-potassium-cooled microreactor developed at INL to produce 85-100 kilowatts of thermal energy and approximately 20 kW of electricity. The PDSA outlines a dry initial criticality configuration, a near zero-power experiment that will generate essential data on reactor physics behavior. This configuration is a foundational step on the pathway to full power operation.
“This is more than just a regulatory requirement — it’s a blueprint for the future of advanced nuclear,” said INL’s Abdalla Abou-Jaoude, MARVEL microreactor lead. “By receiving approval for our safety documentation, we are now able to share this template with developers to learn from our process and streamline their own timelines.”
“This is a pivotal moment,” added John Jackson, national technical director for the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy’s Microreactor Program. “We’re proud to play a leading role in helping to make microreactors commercially available.”
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