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from the safe-like-ms-windows-and-real-estate-doing-fission-together dept.
Wyoming has selected billionaire Bill Gates's company TerraPower LLC and Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway's owned power company PacifiCorp to build the nation's first Natrium reactor. As reported by Reuters:
TerraPower, founded by Gates about 15 years ago, and power company PacifiCorp, owned by Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway (BRKa.N), said the exact site of the Natrium reactor demonstration plant is expected to be announced by the end of the year. Small advanced reactors, which run on different fuels than traditional reactors, are regarded by some as a critical carbon-free technology than can supplement intermittent power sources like wind and solar as states strive to cut emissions that cause climate change.
"This is our fastest and clearest course to becoming carbon negative," Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon said. "Nuclear power is clearly a part of my all-of-the-above strategy for energy" in Wyoming, the country's top coal-producing state.
The project features a 345 megawatt sodium-cooled fast reactor with molten salt-based energy storage that could boost the system's power output to 500 MW during peak power demand. TerraPower said last year that the plants would cost about $1 billion.
[...] Chris Levesque, TerraPower's president and CEO, said the demonstration plant would take about seven years to build.
"We need this kind of clean energy on the grid in the 2030s," he told reporters.
Also seen over at ZeroHedge.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Thursday June 03 2021, @08:20PM (6 children)
Where's thorium, is it dead?
You can't make thorium go boom, so the US military has no interest in it. Guess who spends the most $$$ on atomic energy research? The folks who like the biggest boom for the buck.
Relationship status: Available for curbside pickup.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 03 2021, @09:05PM (4 children)
The simplest answer is that thorium is a completely new fuel cycle. Because of that it faces hurdles, not some conspiracy. It's almost impossible as it is to get new nuclear reactors approved that simply use the old traditional fuels, much less something totally new.
(Score: 5, Informative) by PinkyGigglebrain on Friday June 04 2021, @08:55AM (2 children)
just a warning, im writting this from memory and it's late. Some of this might be wrong or outdated. Any one who knows better plese chim in wiht corrections/clarifications.
There are several comercial power reactors in India and China that already use Thorium fuel, but they are just the well known Light Water Thermal Reactors design, only difference between them and the ones at Chernobyl and Fukushima is the fuel that is being used.
From the stand point of how a reactor works it really doesn't matter what fuel you use. Only that the fuel is rich in elements that will undergo fission when hit with neutrons at the right energy range. The Carbon moderated Light Water Reactors currently in use in the USA and most other places was developed by the US Navy because that design worked best for their needs, in subs and ships with pretty much the whole ocean to dump the waste heat into and a safe place for a meltdown if anything happened to the ship. Sea water at over a thousand PSI is not going to have any problems cooling a still fissioning mass of Uranium if the sub or ship sinks to the ocean floor.
The main reasons the LWTR design is so prevalent isn't because it really good, or that it can produce Plutonium for weapons like some have claimed, even an MSR can do that if you use a Uranium fuel cycle. No, the LWTR is in use today almost solely because the US Navy had already put all the money and time into developing it for Naval vessels. The commercial power plants just copied the existing designs, scaled them up to meet their larger power generating needs and ran with it. One of the reasons why there were so many problems over the years with those Gen 1 and 2 reactors is that pretty much all that was done to the Navy design was to scale it up, no one thought about redoing all the math to account for things like neutron embrittlement of the metals used in the reactor vessel and pipes. So we ended up with cracked pipes and coolant leaks.
Another factor to the slow development of alternative reactor designs in the USA is that the early regulations and laws covering how the reactors be built and operate in the US pretty much locked out other designs like MSRs, the CANDU (which can also use unrefined Uranium), and other non Light water or solid fuel design concepts. Additionally the MSR design hit a road block relating to the Floride metal salts used being very corrosive in their liquid form. Many of those alloys that can survive long term use didn't exist or weren't suitable due to cost or weakness in the 1950's
This "Natrium" concept, based on what I've read in the past, isn't a MSR. It still uses a solid fuel like conventional LWTR but instead of light water it uses molten Sodium for a working fluid/coolant. The big advantage of using Sodium or Floride salts in an MSR, is the working fluid is under effectively zero pressure, just ambient pressure plus a some PSI to move the working fluid around. Which means that it won't instantly boil away into super heated steam if the containment system fails and it loses pressure, which is what happens when a conventional LWTR fails. Think "pressure cooker". The use of Sodium as a coolant does not prevent the core from melting down into a self sustaining fisioning mass of Uranium like a true molten salt reactor would, the Sodium coolant just makes it less likely.
Only thing that is really "new" in nuclear power, at least in that it is now becoming better known in teh USA and getting investments is the Molten Salt Reactor design that was actually developed in the 1950's by the US Air Force for a nuclear powered bomber concept. The thing about a MSR is that it also works with any fissionable fuel and there have been many developed that use U/Pu and Thorium fuel cycle.
Oh, and a side note: The Thorium fuel cycle was considered during the early stages of the Manhattan Project, it was rejected partially because the U-232 and U-233 created was considered unsuitable for building a bomb at the time when compared to U-235 and Pu-239.
Good night.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 04 2021, @01:11PM
There is a major, major error in your post:
"The Carbon moderated Light Water Reactors currently in use in the USA and most other places was developed by the US Navy..."
Wrong moderator, and no, Western reactors do no use the same design as Chernobyl. Chernobyl was graphite (what you call carbon) moderated. Western reactors since nearly forever are basically all light water moderated. Water is the moderator AND the coolant. CANDU reactors use heavy water instead, but there never were a lot of those built, and they are pretty much extinct at this point.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday June 05 2021, @09:51AM
The vast majority of nuclear power reactors in the USA are either BWRs (Boiling Water Reactors) or PWRs (Pressurised Water Reactors) which use light water as the primary coolant and the moderator. They are not carbon moderated. The RBMK design in the Soviet Union, of Chernobyl fame, was carbon moderated and light water cooled.
Bill Gates' and Warren Buffet's Natrium reactor is effectively a fairly standard Fast Reactor by the looks of it. They run on plutonium (ie nuclear waste) and don't require a moderator because they run on fast neutrons. Because of the energy density of the core they need a liquid metal coolant. Water or gas (e.g. CO2) don't have the heat capacity for it. In fact, they say that sodium (natrium) is the coolant but in previous fast reactors it was often a sodium/potassium eutectic. We even had two here in the UK at the Dounreay [wikipedia.org] site.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday June 05 2021, @09:14AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 05 2021, @11:16AM
Yes, yes you can. US military has no interest in it because it already has more than enough of better so why bother? If you want thorium, move to India. They have thorium reserves but no uranium and so their reactors are probably going to be thorium based in the future, unless magic happens on the fusion reactors or battery storage. Anyway, here's something about bomb production from Thorium,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power#Possible_disadvantages [wikipedia.org]