New York, N.Y., April 09, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — NANO Nuclear Energy Inc. (NASDAQ: NNE) (“NANO Nuclear” or “the Company”), a leading advanced nuclear micro modular reactor (MMR) and technology company focused on developing clean energy solutions, today announced that it has been awarded a Gateway for Accelerated Innovations in Nuclear (GAIN) Voucher, NE-26-38854, by U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) relating to its KRONOS MMR™ Energy System titled, “Uncertainty Quantification and Sensitivity Analysis Support for NANO Nuclear Reactor Design Using ORNL’s Tools – SCALE/TSUNAMI”.
U.S. Department of Energy’s GAIN Voucher Award can be found here: https://gain.inl.gov/uncertainty-quantification-and-sensitivity-analysis-support/.
Figure 1 – Rendering of NANO Nuclear KRONOS MMR™ (Micro Modular Reactor) Energy System
“The receipt of this DOE’s GAIN Voucher Award represents another important achievement for our engineering and scientific teams, as well as for our company as a whole,” said Alisha Kasam-Griffith, Ph.D., Director of Reactor Design of NANO Nuclear. “Our collaboration with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory enables us to draw on the expertise of leading scientists, engineers, and researchers to further advance the KRONOS MMR™ Energy System for real-world applications as we progress toward construction, demonstration, and eventual deployment at scale.”
Figure 2 – NANO Nuclear Energy has completed site-characterization for its KRONOS MMR™ Energy System in partnership with the University of Illinois.
As a first-of-a-kind advanced reactor, the patented KRONOS MMR™ Energy System requires rigorous uncertainty quantification (UQ) and sensitivity analysis to demonstrate safety margins, performance reliability, and licensing readiness.
NANO Nuclear, in collaboration with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), will apply the SCALE/TSUNAMI code suite to quantify the impact of nuclear data, modeling assumptions, and operational parameters on key reactor physics metrics, including reactivity, power distribution, and temperature coefficients. ORNL’s analytical tools and expertise, which are recognized by the U.S> Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), will enable development of a validated UQ framework tailored to the KRONOS MMR™ design.
“We are pleased to receive our second GAIN voucher as a company and the first for our KRONOS MMR™ Energy System,” said Jay Yu, Founder and Chairman of NANO Nuclear. “This award reflects the progress we have made in advancing the micro modular reactor through its development stages, and I want to recognize the efforts of our amazing engineering and scientific teams in securing this voucher. Looking ahead, we expect our collaboration with ORNL to generate valuable data that will help inform ongoing development and support the positioning of KRONOS MMR™ for future deployment.”
The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy’s (DOE-NE) Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) program provides the nuclear community with the technical, regulatory, and financial support needed to move innovative nuclear technologies toward commercialization while ensuring the continued, safe, and economic operation of the existing fleet.
This collaboration will strengthen confidence in design margins, create the potential to reduce regulatory uncertainty, and support pre-licensing engagement with DOE and the NRC. The resulting analysis framework will accelerate KRONOS MMR™ design maturation and contribute to commercialization of scalable, advanced microreactor technology.
“NANO Nuclear is continuing to advance the KRONOS MMR™ Energy System toward real-world deployment, and the award of this GAIN voucher provides meaningful support as we prepare the technology for the next phase,” said James Walker, Chief Executive Officer of NANO Nuclear. “Our collaboration with ORNL, one of the nation’s leading research laboratories, builds on an established relationship and will support targeted testing and data generation to inform system development and validation. The support of the DOE further underscores both the technical progress we have made and the strength of our approach as we continue to move the KRONOS MMR™ through its construction, licensing and deployment stages.”
GAIN NE voucher recipients do not receive direct financial awards as the vouchers provide funding to DOE laboratories (in this case ORNL) to help businesses overcome critical technological and commercialization challenges. These vouchers thus grant innovators like NANO Nuclear access to the extensive nuclear research expertise and capabilities across the DOE national laboratory complex.