As the DOE's lead laboratories for nuclear reactor technology development, The INEEL and Argonne National Laboratory are organizing and coordinating the Generation IV Initiative.

The Generation IV Initiative will develop technologies that achieve safety performance, waste reduction, and proliferation resistance while providing a nuclear energy option that is economically competitive and ready for deployment before 2030.

Over the next decade, the most promising technologies will be explored until preferred concepts are ready for testing. Argonne and INEEL plan to have one or more reactor designs certified by 2030, in time to replace reactors built in this country during the 1970s and 1980s.

Internationally, the two labs have organized meetings of the Generation IV International Forum. Ten countries have so far joined the United States: the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Canada, Argentina, South Korea, Republic of South Africa, Switzerland, and Brazil.

Generation IV nuclear energy systems would follow three other distinct periods of reactor development. Generation I experimental reactors were developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Generation II large, central-station nuclear power reactors, such as the 104 plants still operating in the United States, were built in the 1970s and 1980s. Generation III advanced light-water reactors were built in the 1990s primarily in East Asia to meet that region’s expanding electricity needs.