DOE awards $35M to help commercialize national lab technologies

The Department of Energy announced recently it will provide more than $35 million for 42 projects to help move emerging energy technologies from DOE national laboratories, plants, and sites related to grid security, artificial intelligence, nuclear energy, and advanced manufacturing to the marketplace. The selected projects will leverage over $21 million in cost-share from private and public partners, bringing total funding to more than $57.5 million.

A full list of the FY2025 selections is available here.

The awards were made through the department's Technology Commercialization Fund program's Core Laboratory Infrastructure for Market Readiness Lab Call for fiscal year 2025. The annual program aims to improve America's energy competitiveness and security by accelerating the commercialization and shepherding of energy technologies from DOE labs to the private sector.

"The Energy Department's national labs play an important role in ensuring the United States leads the world in innovation," said Energy Secretary Chris Wright. "These projects have the potential to accelerate technological breakthroughs that will define the future of science and help secure America's energy future."

The projects: The FY2025 awards cover 19 DOE national labs, plants, and sites, including seven technology-specific partnership projects with the DOE's Office of Nuclear Energy. The DOE-NE projects include the following:

• A project led by Idaho National Laboratory in partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory to develop a self-guided training platform to support users who access INL's DOE-NE codes, primarily MOOSE and BISON.
• INL will also work to help reduce nuclear power plant operation and maintenance costs by accelerating the commercialization of its Visualization for Predictive Maintenance Recommendation (VIPER), a technology that takes advantage of advancements in sensors, data analytics, machine learning/AI, and human factors.
• Sandia National Laboratories will lead a project to commercialize a sensor fusion algorithm capable of fusing new and emerging sensor technologies using an AI called Deliberate Motion Analytics, which is able to provide reliable detection with low nuisance alarm rates in nuclear power plants, reducing physical security costs.
• A project to commercialize Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's laser technology for lithium-6/lithium-7 isotope separation, with the goal of proving the market viability of the proprietary technology and provide a production route for such isotopes, and eventually HALEU.
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory will fabricate components with improved creep resistance using a new solid solution strengthened alloy developed at Oak Ridge. The lab will test the component in an environment relevant to molten salt reactors to achieve technology readiness level-6 for the alloys.
• An Argonne National Laboratory-led project to develop a liquid metal-cooled fast reactor simulator by coupling ANL's SAS4A/SASSYS-1 advanced LMFR safety analysis code with Curtiss-Wright's commercial nuclear power plant simulator environment 3KEYMASTER.
• An ANL project to advance the commercialization of the OpenMC Monte Carlo particle transport code through the Exascale Computing Project, supporting nuclear safety and analysis code, addressing remaining barriers to market readiness and helping accelerate design and licensing timelines for U.S. nuclear reactor projects.