The U.S. Department of Energy announced today that it will offer grants, worth up to $452 million over five years, to develop a pair of designs for the miniature nuclear power stations known as small modular reactors.

The grants, originally budgeted by the administration for last year and made available under the omnibus spending bill that Congress passed at the end of last year, are part of a plan to place the first small modular reactors on U.S. soil by 2022. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said today that the program will help the United States gain an edge in the "global clean energy race."

"We can either develop the next generation of clean energy technologies, which will help create thousands of new jobs and export opportunities here in America, or we can wait for other countries to take the lead," he said in a statement.

Nuclear technology vendors and other potential developers will have until Feb. 17 to reply to the grant proposal, which would come with the condition that industry must pay for at least half of the projects' annual budgets.

The draft announcement says the small modular reactors would need to produce 300 megawatts of electricity or less and include so-called passive safety features, which allow them to be safely deactivated in the event of a natural disaster without an operator or power. DOE envisions the units being built in factories and moved to their final destination, cutting down on costs and the length of time it would take to build a new plant.

The grants unveiled today were funded over objections from lawmakers such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee, who repeatedly said last year that she didn't want to put money toward small modular reactors while the United States lacks a permanent storage site for its existing nuclear waste. She and others have also raised fears of costly overruns.

One small modular reactor is being developed by Westinghouse Electric Co., which says it could build 225-megawatt units underground in holes measuring about 100 feet deep and 100 feet wide. The company will apply for a grant, spokesman Scott Shaw said.

Babcock & Wilcox Co. is working on its own design for a 125-megawatt reactor and has inked a letter of intent with the Tennessee Valley Authority to place as many as six of the reactors at the federally run utility's Clinch River site in Roane County, Tenn. Also working on the technology are Corvallis, Ore.-based NuScale Power LLC and New Jersey-based Holtec International Inc.

Paul Genoa, senior director of policy development at the Nuclear Energy Institute, said he expects DOE to fund two separate reactor designs, though the agency's proposal left open the possibility that it would settle on only one project or none at all. He said that follows the model of a recent DOE program for larger reactors, which were designed by Westinghouse and General Electric Co.

Just last month, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved Westinghouse's design for the AP1000 reactor. It could decide within weeks whether to approve its use for two new reactors at Southern Co.'s Vogtle plant near Waynesboro, Ga.

"The idea is, you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket," Genoa said of the small modular reactors. "You want to develop at least two designs, so you have pretty good confidence you'll end up with at least one really good program, and maybe two."