nuclear-news

Nuclear Power Is Hard. Billionaire Bill Gates Wants to Make It Easier

COMMENT. Sodium cooled nuclear reactors are not necessarily safer. Nuclear power: molten salt reactors and sodium-cooled fast reactors make the radioactive waste problem WORSE

Work is starting in Wyoming coal country on a new type of reactor.
Its main backer, Bill Gates, says he’s in it for the emissions-free
electricity. Outside a small coal town in southwest Wyoming, a
multibillion-dollar effort to build the first in a new generation of
American nuclear power plants is underway. Workers began construction on
Tuesday on a novel type of nuclear reactor meant to be smaller and cheaper
than the hulking reactors of old and designed to produce electricity
without the carbon dioxide that is rapidly heating the planet.

The reactor being built by TerraPower, a start-up, won’t be finished until 2030 at the
earliest and faces daunting obstacles. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission
hasn’t yet approved the design, and the company will have to overcome the
inevitable delays and cost overruns that have doomed countless nuclear
projects before.

What TerraPower does have, however, is an influential and
deep-pocketed founder. Bill Gates, currently ranked as the seventh-richest
person in the world, has poured more than $1 billion of his fortune into
TerraPower, an amount that he expects to increase.

At a recent conference in New York, David Crane, the Energy Department under secretary for
infrastructure, said that two years ago he “didn’t really see” a case
for next-generation reactors. But as demand for electricity surges because
of new data centers, factories and electric vehicles, Mr. Crane said he had
become “very bullish” on nuclear to provide carbon-free power around
the clock without needing much land. One problem with nuclear power,
though, is that it has become prohibitively expensive.

Traditional reactors are huge, complex, strictly regulated projects that are difficult to build
and finance. The only two American reactors built in the last 30 years,
Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Georgia, cost $35 billion, more than double initial
estimates, and arrived seven years behind schedule. TerraPower’s reactor,
by contrast, uses liquid sodium instead of water, allowing it to operate at
lower pressures. In theory, that reduces the need for thick shielding. In
an emergency, the plant can be cooled with air vents rather than
complicated pump systems. The reactor is just 345 megawatts, one-third the
size of Vogtle’s reactors, making for a smaller investment.

New York Times 11th June 2024 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/climate/bill-gates-nuclear-wyoming.html

June 14, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | technology, USA