nuclear-news

GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) and Bill Gates’ nuclear innovation startup TerraPower are ready to demonstrate a “cost-competitive” advanced nuclear reactor system that will integrate a 345-MWe sodium fast reactor (SFR) with a molten salt energy storage system under a unique energy system architecture.

The advanced nuclear technology developed under a joint development agreement is called “Natrium.” It blends the “best of” TerraPower’s Traveling Wave Reactor (TWR) and GEH’s PRISM technology, but it boosts them with “additional innovations and improvements” to ramp up the SFR’s performance and economics and render it competitive in the U.S. and other countries, the companies told POWER on Sept. 2.

Because Natrium leverages “the breadth and depth of the team’s expertise and resources”—which takes into account work on multiple reactor designs and efforts across the nuclear lifecycle—the technology has sped “beyond the research and development phase” and is ready for demonstration.

“The demonstration plant is designed to be delivered in the next seven years,” TerraPower told POWER on Wednesday. “That means the Natrium technology will be available in the late 2020s,” which would make it one of the world’s first commercial advanced nuclear technologies, it said.   …. https://www.powermag.com/ge-hitachi-terrapower-team-on-nuclear-storage-hybrid-smr/