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posted by martyb on Thursday June 03 2021, @07:09PM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 05 2021, @11:16AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 05 2021, @11:16AM (#1142013)

    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?

    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]

    Thorium, when being irradiated for use in reactors, makes uranium-232, which emits gamma rays. This irradiation process may be altered slightly by removing protactinium-233. The irradiation would then make uranium-233 in lieu of uranium-232 for use in nuclear weapons—making thorium into a dual purpose fuel