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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 03 2021, @10:47PM
The calculation is obviously much more complicated than that.
Time to build, opportunity costs of capital, risk, etc.
Rule of thumb is that a project is worse than another if (all other things being equal) it has a higher: time to start earning, time to recoup, risk, novelty, or government oversight or risk of regulation changes.
That does not mean that this project is doomed to fail or be non-profitable.
Also, this single implementation is almost certain a test bed for a wider strategy.
So on the profit side you would have to factor in the next dozen reactors they intend to build at a much cheaper cost since the test case has been completed.