Small modular reactor startup NX Atomics has announced a partnership with Sciaky, to apply Sciaky’s Electron Beam Additive Manufacturing process, known as EBAM, to components for NX Atomics’ SMR platform.The collaboration aims to reduce both the upfront capital cost and operating cost of SMR deployment by producing nuclear components faster, at lower cost, and in some cases designed for replacement rather than lifetime service.
“This is what bringing nuclear manufacturing into the modern era actually looks like,” said John Warden, Chief Executive Officer of NX Atomics. “3D printing opens up the potential for us to produce nuclear-qualified parts faster and at lower cost, where appropriate swap them out through life, and meaningfully reduce the unit cost of every small modular reactor we build.”
The SMR Cost Problem EBAM Is Being Asked to Solve
The economics of small modular reactors have historically been constrained by long lead times and high unit costs for major components, challenges that have slowed the broader nuclear buildout for decades. Additive manufacturing offers a different production model: faster iteration, reduced material waste, and the ability to produce geometries that conventional manufacturing cannot. For SMRs specifically, where the commercial case depends on driving down per-unit costs across a fleet, those advantages are directly relevant.
Sciaky’s EBAM platform is one of the few metal AM systems with a track record in the most demanding industrial environments. The process has produced titanium and specialty-alloy structural parts for Airbus, Lockheed Martin, the U.S. Navy, and NASA, and has been used in commercial space propulsion components across multiple platforms and lunar landers.
“Sciaky has spent more than eight decades building the metal manufacturing technology that the world’s most demanding industries rely on,” said John Criso, CEO of Sciaky, Inc. “Our EBAM process produces parts that fly on commercial aircraft, sail on naval vessels, and orbit the earth. Bringing that capability into America’s clean energy infrastructure with NX Atomics is a natural next step, and we are proud that two Midwestern companies are leading this transition.”
AM in Nuclear: A Market Sciaky Helped Pioneer
The NX Atomics partnership is not Sciaky’s first involvement with nuclear power. EBAM technology was originally offered as a service to customers in the nuclear, aerospace, and defense sectors before aerospace became its primary application. The NX Atomics collaboration returns the company’s attention to nuclear, though how directly prior work translates to this context remains to be seen.
Sciaky has accumulated a substantial production record in adjacent industries. In 2020, its EBAM systems deposited over 12,000 lbs of titanium, driven by aerospace and defense demand for both prototyping and production. The company describes its systems as the most widely sold large-scale DED metal printers in the world, with parts qualified across multiple domains. For nuclear applications, process maturity matters, but additive manufacturing has yet to achieve broad qualification within the nuclear sector specifically.
SMRs are increasingly central to U.S. energy policy discussions, and construction timelines remain a recognized challenge. Researchers at ORNL have explored whether digital manufacturing approaches can reduce schedule time while meeting nuclear standards, though that work reflects ORNL’s own research agenda.
Construction bottlenecks, qualification requirements, and cost pressure are real pressures on the SMR sector. Whether EBAM can address them in a nuclear context will depend on qualification outcomes, regulatory acceptance, and demonstrated performance under nuclear-specific requirements.
3D Printing Industry is inviting speakers for its 2026 Additive Manufacturing Applications (AMA) series, covering Energy, Healthcare, Automotive and Mobility, Aerospace, Space and Defense, and Software. Each online event focuses on real production deployments, qualification, and supply chain integration. Practitioners interested in contributing can complete the call for speakers form here.
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Featured image shows the Reactor Vela. Image via NX Atomics.
