José Reyes predicted his future in his high school yearbook, which reads “I will be a nuclear engineer,” right next to his photo.
“My father was in the Navy, and he would bring me books he picked up during his travels,” Reyes said. “One of them was about the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I was fascinated by the work they did to harness the power of the atom to benefit society. It sounded exciting, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do, and I did it. But I never for a minute imagined that I would start a nuclear energy company and change an entire industry.” In 2007, Reyes cofounded NuScale Power, the first company in the world to develop a small modular nuclear reactor, or SMR. Today, dozens of companies are working on their own versions of the technology.
NuScale’s SMRs combine the traditional components of a nuclear power plant to fashion a simpler, prefabricated facility consisting of compact, factory-built power modules. Though SMRs produce less power than full-size reactors, their small footprint allows them to be sited at locations that aren’t suitable for huge, conventional nuclear stations, such as off-grid areas, industrial sites, as replacements for aging fossil fuel plants, and in combination with renewable energy sources. The energy output of NuScale plants can be adjusted by incrementally adding power modules, each of which produces 77 megawatts. (One module could power all the homes in Corvallis.) A NuScale plant can accommodate up to 12 modules, enough to produce 924 megawatts of electricity.
NuScale also created one of the industry’s most reliable safety systems, which shuts down and cools the reactors without the need for external power or human intervention.
There has never been more urgency to bring SMRs online to counteract the accelerating impact of climate change, says Reyes. At the same time, the energy landscape has changed considerably since NuScale was established.
“Not many years ago, when we were first approached by data centers, they needed 50 to 100 megawatts of electricity,” he said. “But that’s changed dramatically as they’ve grown to become huge operations that require enormous amounts of electricity. Our SMR represents a solution that produces adequate power but without producing greenhouse gases. We expect data centers to become a big part of our plans.”
Reyes recognizes the College of Engineering’s culture of collaboration and its entrepreneurial spirit as important reasons for NuScale’s emergence.
From the very start, when he obtained the initial research grant in 2000, to the launch of NuScale in 2007 and through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s design certification in 2023, Oregon State has always been extremely supportive, particularly through the use of its world-class testing facility. “Even though we were attempting to do something completely new, they always gave us total support,” Reyes said. “It’s been wonderful to work in an environment that’s so creative and innovative, and which guided us through the process of moving an idea from the laboratory to the marketplace.”
Of the many NuScale milestones that Reyes and his colleagues have reached, one in particular stands out in his memory. The research team had built an electrically powered, one-third scale SMR prototype in Oregon State’s Radiation Center. They needed to know what would happen in the event of a reactor leak.
What followed would form the basis for NuScale’s safety system to cool a reactor core in the event of an emergency shutdown.
“We opened the safety valves to simulate a reactor leak and we watched the pressure in the containment vessel rise and hit a peak,” he said. “Then, all by itself, the pressure came down and the system self- cooled. In that ‘Aha!’ moment, I recognized that we had something special in terms of a very safe nuclear design, and that we had accomplished something in the lab that could be transformational.”
Reyes also came to realize that he had benefited from a different kind of transformational experience during his 30-plus years as a member of the College of Engineering faculty: teaching.
“Because of my teaching experience and because I consistently tried to become the best teacher that I could, I’ve been able to effectively communicate to different audiences the technology behind NuScale, what it’s capable of, and what a positive impact it could have on society,” Reyes said. “That’s a direct result of Oregon State’s determination to develop its faculty.”