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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: 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].