Posted on 06/03/2021 8:14:38 PM PDT by RandFan
A next-generation nuclear power reactor that could bolster the nation’s transition to low-carbon energy will be built on the site of a retiring coal plant in Wyoming.
Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon (R) on Wednesday announced the state will house a Natrium reactor pilot project in partnership with nuclear reactor design company TerraPower, power company PacifiCorp and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
TerraPower was founded by Bill Gates about 15 years ago, and PacifiCorp is owned by Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway.
The project will feature a sodium-cooled fast reactor with a molten salt-based energy storage system capable of producing 345 megawatts of power. TerraPower says the storage technology could boost the system’s output to 500 megawatts of power for more than five-and-a-half hours when needed, enough energy to power about 400,000 homes.
TerraPower says the Natrium technology is more fuel efficient, cost effective and safer than traditional nuclear reactors and could supplement existing renewable energy sources such as wind and solar.
“We think Natrium will be a game-changer for the energy industry,” Gates said during a news conference Wednesday.
“Wyoming has been a leader in energy for over a century and we hope our investment in Natrium will help Wyoming to stay in the lead for many decades to come,” Gates said.
The exact location of the Natrium demonstration plant will be announced by the end of the year. TerraPower’s CEO Chris Levesque said the plant would take about seven years to build, according to Reuters.
“Together with PacifiCorp, we’re creating the energy grid of the future where advanced nuclear technologies provide good-paying jobs and clean energy for years to come,” Levesque said.
“The Natrium technology was designed to solve a challenge utilities face as they work to enhance grid reliability and stability while meeting decarbonization and emissions-reduction goals,” he said.
Wyoming’s governor said the nuclear plant would provide on-demand energy and significantly cut carbon emissions, as well as create hundreds of jobs in the state.
Wyoming is the nation’s top coal-producing state.
Exactly.
Private money is starting to revolutionize the nuclear industry just like it did the space launch industry. (SpaceX, Blue Origin, ETC.).
These generation 4 fission plants are the way forward. They are much safer and they can burn nuclear waste as fuel.
Private companies are also making great progress with fusion reactors. Multiple companies are saying they will pass the break even point in energy production around 2025.
You can’t power an industrial civilization with wind or solar so we will need to develop advanced nuclear energy.
Sounds about right to me.
What does it take to get approval to do this? I would think it is very complex but what do I know.
is there anywhere they can’t pollute and corrupt?
With wind, there are times when not sufficient electricity is generated. During the evening, when solar is not available and wind is insufficient, the nuclear will go on line to make up the full load demand. This will happen at night when all the electric vehicles are in their charge phase. When electric vehicles become the major source of transportation, it is crucial that that source of evening power is available. In ten years, electric vehicles will be a big energy hog to rival electric heating during the evening hours.
During the day, both solar and wind together might not be sufficient. Again, the nuclear will provide the power to make up the demand.
“Nuclear power experts have warned that advanced reactors could have higher risks than conventional ones. Fuel for many advanced reactors would have to be enriched at a much higher rate than conventional fuel, meaning the fuel supply chain could be an attractive target for militants looking to create a crude nuclear weapon, a recent report said.”
This technology was developed at the National Laboratory I worked at, using tax money. Gates and Buffet are able to swoop in, at pennies on the dollar and reap the benefits of our tax dollars. It is breakthrough technology, and does not need pumps or anything that will fail. It is air cooled and cannot melt down.
I am looking at Thorium as the next nuclear technology—before fusion using deuterium and tritium or helium-3. There is a very attractive reaction between deuterium and a light isotope of helium known as helium-3. Helium-3 can be mined on Uranus with the minimum of energy to escape the planet’s gravitational field by rocket. Getting the fuel back to earth my be challenging, but doable.
This reactor actually has the fuel elements themselves expanding to maintain the control of the fast neutrons. More thermal expansion, less interaction, less neutrons created.
The really great thing about these reactors is that you use up the vast majority of the energy locked in Uranium and Thorium instead of that little bit of natural Uranium that fissiles with slow neutrons.
They process the used fuel on site so the most of bad stuff made never has to be moved off site.
As a side note space probes to the far reaches of the solar system need Plutonium 238 to work well but because of shortages they had to use inferior alternatives.This reactor could solve that issue. The Huygens probe which landed on Titan took 7 years to get there but could only send data by battery power . A nuclear powered probed might still be crawling the surface today if Plutonium 238 had been available.
You just gave away their location. Pretty sure Special Forces or the Mossad has all these guys pegged for extermination anyways.
ROFL
That would seem a reasoned take on it.
I note though that the DOE is involved, so I wouldn’t be all
that shocked to find out they facilitated a lot of that sort
of thing.
TerraPower I’m sure had to jump some hurdles. Gates and
Buffet probable not much at all.
That’s off the top of my head too, so take it for what it’s
worth. (bargain basement opinion prices)
Right. Don’t let’s have private companies with profit motivation build it on private property. We need the Department of Energy Administration Bureau to do it. That way we can be sure that the most reliable and safest outcome will result, especially if you want to wait another 100 years for them to start mass production.
He's going to put the spent fuel into vaccines like fertilizer phosphate companies market their waste category 3 toxic fluoride into our drinking water. That will make it easy to find the unvaccinated that way and will eliminate the storage problems of the past.
This is super exciting good news. If you don’t know anything about thorium molten salt reactors, you should read up before shooting off your mouth. It doesn’t matter if you use wind solar hydro and coal, next generation nuclear power will produce abundant and cheap energy enough to obsolete other forms of electricity production. Solar and wind will be good for small scale and local applications while nuclear will eventually supplant natural gas and coal.
Yes that fluoridated water has killed a lot of people in the over 50 years they have been putting it in our water. More than Covid and the flu combined. The only thing that will wake people up to the danger of fluoride in the water will be when we find one single person that has died because of fluoride.
So you are saying there is radioactive gas in Uranus?
Holy runaway conspiracy theories, bully!
Has this been vetted?
Helium-3 is very abundant on the Moon.
It could be one of the “cash crops” that get Space settlement started.
One of the companies I referenced it looking at the Helium-Boron reaction for fusion.
It does seem like the private ventures are making progress, whereas the Government sponsored ventures are taking decades and many billions of dollars with very little progress.
Abundant clean energy will lead to another industrial/scientific revolution that will end hunger and many other problems that have plagued humanity.
Don't know, but, take a wild guess that it will have something to do with exterminating millions, or billions, of people from the planet.
He's one of the "Hitler was an amateur at genocide" crowd.
Are you thinking Helium-3 as radioactive? No is the short answer. The moon is coated with a layor of Helium-3 in the soil as a result of the solar wind. The problem is, the energy it takes to mine it might keep it for use on colonies on the moon.
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