Inside the MARVEL micronuclear reactor project at Idaho National Lab

Nuclear reactors have a well-earned reputation for being massive construction projects that frequently run into cost overruns. Plus, once they are eventually constructed, monitoring and maintaining them takes a staff of dozens of trained experts.

But Yasir Arafat believes nuclear power doesn’t have to be this way.

Arafat is the technical lead of the microreactor project at one of the United States government’s preeminent nuclear research labs, Idaho National Lab, and in his role there, Arafat is leading the effort to build a tiny, relatively inexpensive nuclear reactor. It’s more of a nuclear battery, he says.

Arafat grew up in Bangladesh before coming to college in the United States, and he’s motivated by a deep sense of urgency to help the world decarbonize. The effects of global warming are not discussed as some distant future scenario in Bangladesh — climate change is already a part of current daily life. Nuclear energy does not generate any greenhouse gas emissions, and Arafat hopes to contribute to the solution by building a microreactor prototype that can help the development of the industry.

The prototype will be called the MARVEL reactor, an acronym for the name of the project Microreactor Applications Research Validation and Evaluation, and the goal is to have the first one operating by December 2023, making it the first advanced microreactor in the United States, Arafat told CNBC. (These photos show a prototype of the MARVEL reactor which runs with electric heat, not nuclear heat, for the sake of preliminary research.)

The Idaho National lab started designing and modeling the MARVEL reactor project in June 2020 under Arafat’s leadership. If completed, the MARVEL microreactor “will be the first of its kind that will be able to demonstrate how we can really miniaturize a nuclear system into something that is portable and transportable, and also able to deliver heat and electricity to the end customer,” Arafat told CNBC in a video interview in Idaho in May.

Already there are a slew of private companies — including Oklo, Westinghouse (where Arafat worked for a decade) and General Atomics — developing microreactors, and their goal is the same as the government’s: To develop an emissions-free, reliable energy source.

A single microreactor could power a community from 1,000 to 10,000 people, whether that’s a hospital or remote military base. The current electricity grid in the United States is based on a system of generating electricity at a centralized location and distributing it to the end users. But microreactors are a component in a future vision for the electricity grid that is less centralized more resilient against natural disasters.

Beyond being potential clean-energy options for remote locations or small communities, microreactors could be a key part of a future clean energy grid that includes…