SAN FRANCISCO -- The Open Group, the vendor-neutral technology and standards organization, announced the formation of the Industrial Advanced Nuclear™ Consortium (IANC).

The Consortium Members will collaborate to enable integrated advanced nuclear heat and power solutions to serve industrial customer needs. Through standardization of interfaces and sourcing terminology and adopting risk-appropriate design practices, the Consortium will deliver open standard framework and business guidelines to encourage competition, lower costs, decrease regulatory risks, and reduce schedule uncertainties. The benefit to the industrial end-users will be diversification of their energy sources with reliable, safe, and carbon-free heat and power.

“There is an urgent need to better leverage nuclear energy to address the application of heat and power solutions. We believe that an open architecture approach can enable cost effective solutions that can be replicated to drive this adoption,” said Steve Nunn, President and CEO of The Open Group. “By bringing together large industrial end users and the supplier community, we can draw on the huge amount of industry expertise in project delivery, reduce cost and schedule uncertainty, and effectively deliver nuclear projects that serve the needs of the industry.”

“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission looks forward to engaging with the Industrial Advanced Nuclear Consortium to embed appropriate nuclear safety concepts in their standardization work and better understand their business needs and plans,” said Mike King, the NRC’s acting Executive Director for Operations. “IANC's input should inform the NRC’s efforts to modernize our regulatory framework, enable innovation, and ensure the safe and timely deployment of advanced nuclear technologies.”

The Consortium will address the business needs through several near-term activities. These include aggregating and amplifying the demand signal for nuclear deployment in industrial applications, compiling use cases and industrial user requirements, and generating the applicable technical standards and business process guides to stimulate the nuclear ecosystem to address industrial user needs.

Working together with technology providers, Engineering, Procurement, Construction (EPC) companies, and the wider industry, the Consortium plans to advocate for aligning and streamlining nuclear regulatory approval and permitting processes with industrial facility project timelines, collaborate across the nuclear ecosystem to standardize interfaces between nuclear and industrial facilities, and promote business models for the delivery of nuclear generated heat and power to reduce costs and improve schedules.