Holtec International

Founded in Mount Laurel, New Jersey in 1986, Holtec International is a privately-held technology company with domestic operation centers in New Jersey, Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania and worldwide in Brazil, India Japan, Mexico, Poland, South Africa, Spain, U.K. and Ukraine. It specializes in the design and manufacture of parts for nuclear reactors. The company sells equipment to manage spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors.

Holtec is the world leader in storage and transport casks used for spent nuclear fuel. It also specializes in Heat Transfer Equipment Equipment and Services, Decommissioning of Nuclear Power Facilities, Design and Engineering, Civil Construction, and other innovative technologies, including its SMR-300 and Green Boiler technologies.

One other innovative project designed for the US nuclear power industry to safety store its used fuel is Holtec's HI-STORE Consolidated Interim Storage Facility (CISF).

In July 2014, the New Jersey Economic Development Authority awarded Holtec International a $260 million tax incentive to expand operations at the Port of Camden. Those breaks have come under scrutiny.

The Holtec SMR-160, originally named the Holtec Inherently Safe Modular Underground Reactor, is a single loop natural circulation 160 MWe pressurized water reactor with a passive core cooling system without pumps or valves. It uses standard size PWR enriched uranium fuel.

In February 2018, GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy agreed to collaborate on the commercialization of the design. In 2020 an agreement was made to use Framatome commercially available 17x17 GAIA fuel assembly in the SMR-160.

As of 2020, the SMR-160 is in the first phase of a Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission pre-licensing review.

In 2022, the company asked for a "USD 7.4 billion federal loan to enable it to increase capacity for SMR production at its existing manufacturing facilities, to construct and operate four SMR-160s in the USA and to build a new Holtec Heavy Industries (HHI) complex for higher capacity manufacturing of components and modules for SMR-160s."

In December 2023, Holtec announced that it intended to build the first two SMR-300 small modular reactor at Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Michigan by mid-2030. The SMR-300 adds forced coolant flow to the gravity-driven flow of the SMR-160.

In December 2023, the British government awarded £30 million to Holtec to develop its SMR presence in the UK, where it is one of 6 competitors for an SMR contract. At the same time, the SMR-300 (previously sometimes called the SMR-160+) entered the UK Generic Design Assessment process.