3D Systems has signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with the Department of Energy's Savannah River National Laboratory to jointly advance 3D printing technology for nuclear energy and national-security applications, the company announced August 27. The agreement pairs one of the longest-running names in industrial additive manufacturing with a DOE lab that has spent the last year building out dedicated additive facilities aimed squarely at the reactor supply chain.

CRADAs are a specific, well-worn instrument in the federal research world: a formal legal framework that lets a national lab and a private company share staff, equipment, and data on a joint R&D program without either side having to bid the work as a government contract. They're how DOE labs typically pull commercial technology partners into applied research that's too industry-specific for a lab to run solo, but too close to national infrastructure for a company to fund alone. This one runs across several fronts at once: new printing materials, hardware and equipment improvements, AI- and machine-learning-driven process optimization, manufacturing systems engineering, cybersecurity, and workforce training.

Why Nuclear Wants Metal Printing

The materials focus tells you where the real work is. According to the release, the partnership centers on high-temperature nickel-based superalloys and radiation-tolerant materials, aimed at components like reactor internals, complex heat exchangers with internal cooling channels, pumps, and valves. Those are exactly the parts where nuclear plants have historically been stuck buying from a razor-thin supplier base, waiting years for forged or cast components qualified to nuclear codes, because the alloys involved are expensive to work with and the certification bar is enormous. Additive manufacturing has been circling this problem in the nuclear industry for years, with reactor vendors and national labs separately exploring AM qualification pathways for reactor-grade parts, but a dedicated CRADA between a major AM OEM and a national lab represents a more formal, sustained institutional commitment than a one-off qualification pilot.

The stated context is small modular reactors, or SMRs — the smaller, factory-buildable reactor designs that DOE and private developers are betting on to scale nuclear power faster than traditional gigawatt-scale plants. Citing the International Energy Agency, the press release projects that small modular reactor capacity could grow to roughly 40 gigawatts under current policies, or up to 120 gigawatts in accelerated deployment scenarios, by 2050 — a range that underlines why the DOE wants a qualified AM supply chain in place now rather than after SMR designs start moving toward mass deployment. If dozens or hundreds of SMR units get built from a common design, the parts that go into each one benefit enormously from having a repeatable, certified printing process behind them instead of one-off forgings.

This is also where the AI/ML piece matters more than it might look on first read. Nuclear-grade printing isn't just about getting the metallurgy right once — it's about proving, part after part, that the process stays inside spec closely enough to satisfy a regulator. In-process monitoring and machine-learning-driven parameter control are the mechanism the industry is leaning on to make that provable at scale, catching porosity or thermal deviations mid-build rather than finding them in a CT scan afterward.

SRNL isn't new to this space. The lab's Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative, which opened on August 7, 2025, according to the release, is the facility this CRADA plugs into. 3D Systems describes the AMC as a "nexus of innovation" where industry, academia, and government work together on technologies meant to advance national security, environmental stewardship, and energy resilience — a space built specifically to pair national-lab nuclear materials expertise with industry partners on qualification work. The press release frames 3D Systems as partnering with SRNL at the collaborative rather than simply buying lab services, which points toward the more consequential kind of relationship: SRNL's materials science and 3D Systems' printer platforms and process software developed against each other directly, rather than the lab buying and testing off-the-shelf hardware.

3D Systems CEO Jeff Graves framed the deal in market terms: "This agreement demonstrates the impact and importance of high-quality 3D printing materials and technologies on key industrial markets." SRNL's Roderick Jackson called it a chance to "deliver groundbreaking additive manufacturing technologies," while Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative director G. Jeremy Leong said the agreement "underscores SRNL's commitment to building world-class research capabilities, leveraging partnerships to enhance its competitive edge and solidify its presence as a leader in AM technologies." Neither the company nor the lab disclosed a dollar figure for the agreement, and VoxelMatters' independent report on the announcement confirmed the same scope — materials, equipment, AI/ML, manufacturing systems, cybersecurity, and workforce training — without adding financial terms of its own.

The cybersecurity and workforce-training threads are easy to skim past next to the materials science headline, but they're standard components of any DOE-industry AM agreement touching critical infrastructure. Reactor-part supply chains are a target profile the department takes seriously on the digital side as well as the physical one, and a lab-industry CRADA is a natural place to build shared standards for how print files, process data, and machine telemetry get secured. Workforce training, meanwhile, addresses the more mundane but very real bottleneck in nuclear AM: there simply aren't many technicians and engineers certified to run qualified metal printing processes against nuclear codes, and that shortage doesn't fix itself just because the technology matures.

What It Means for Makers

None of this touches desktop or prosumer printing directly — nickel superalloy powder-bed systems and consumer FDM machines don't share a supply chain, let alone a price point. But it's worth watching as a signal of where industrial metal AM investment is heading. Government-lab partnerships like this one tend to pull qualification standards, in-process monitoring techniques, and AI-driven process control methods into the broader industrial AM toolkit over time, and those methods have a track record of trickling down into cheaper systems once they're proven at the high end. It's also a reminder that 3D Systems, which has spent recent years diversifying into dental, aerospace, and now nuclear-adjacent materials science, continues to bet its future on high-margin industrial and government work rather than the hobbyist market it helped originate decades ago.

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