12 ms·

Wyoming site of new nuclear power plant from Bill Gates' TerraPower

199 points by spenrose 5y ago

SavantIdiot 5y ago
Perfect location: Wyoming is already the biggest net energy supplier in the country [1] so it has the required grid access, and also the 2nd lowest population density [2], next to Alaska (excluding Jackson which has become a mecca for billionaires for some reason). [1] https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=WY https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=WY [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories_of_the_United_States_by_population_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories...
- canadianfella 5y ago
  Why is low population density a good thing?
- jdhn 5y ago
  >for some reason Wyoming has no state income tax, and the Tetons are beautiful.
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    Right, but the same is true with Washington regarding taxes but I don't see quite the same congregation. Never seen the Tetons, would love to.
    - thehappypm 5y ago
      Having spent substantial time in both places, the answer is skiing and weather. While the skiing in Washington State is excellent, in the Tetons it's world-class, possibly in the top 5 best places to ski in the world. And Jackson is substantially sunnier than dreary Western Washington, where all the culture is.
- potiuper 5y ago
  The username is apt. Locating baseload plants closer to where power is used would be more efficient to provide district heating along with lower transmission costs.
- cjonas 5y ago
  Teton county manages to simultaneously have a very low population density, yet feel extremely overcrowded for a few reasons: 1. Only something like 2% of the land in the county is privately owned. Most land is NP or NFS. Also, the super rich have created land trusts in the name of "the environment" to prevent development encroaching on their estates*. 2. We get millions of tourist per year on their way to GTNP & Yellowstone. 3. People from outside communities drive hours to fill a endless supply of "good paying" jobs fueled by the tourist & ultra-rich. At anytime in the local classified, you'll find 4-5 pages of "help wanted" and maybe only 1-3 "for rent" listing
- jhayward 5y ago
  > Wyoming is already the biggest net energy supplier in the country [1] so it has the required grid access, This is a misunderstanding of what the EIA is saying. The "net energy export" of Wyoming is coal in gondola cars carried by diesel trains, not electricity. Wyoming does not have significant grid connectivity other than what you'd expect for a very sparsely populated Western state.
mistrial9 5y ago
tangential plug -- THE FIRECRACKER BOYS by DANIEL T. O'NEILL The story of how we nearly Chernobylized our northwest Alaskan wilderness. O'Neill, a University of Alaska oral historian, builds on his previous studies of Project Chariot, a plan by the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s to use a thermonuclear blast to create a major harbor on the Alaskan coast. We are taken back to 1948, when a science writer at the New York Times gushed that work on the atom would usher in a "new Eden" where man would "abolish disease and poverty, anxiety and fear." Atomic hubris is personified by O'Neill's Faust, Edward Teller, who wanted to nuke the world's ice pack and flood the deserts in what he called "geographic engineering." Teller and others from the military and scientific communities were opposed by a vocal minority of Alaskans, by the first environmental activists (such as Barry Commoner), and by Arctic-loving scientists. (O'Neill delights in describing this last group eating parasites from dead caribou and crawling into dens to take the rectal temperatures of hibernating bears.) Because the stakes in this largely bureaucratic drama were so high, we can forgive O'Neill for demonizing the Atomic Energy Commission as "little boys...with a pathological glee" for setting off explosions. The proposed ground zero was a pristine spot called Tikiraq. O'Neill periodically breaks from the political wrangling to limn in glorious detail the richness of Arctic wildlife and Eskimo culture, rendering absurd the government promises to relocate natives and turn them into "productive" coal miners. For the first time, the Feds (obsessed with Reds) had to consider a people's irreplaceable loss of their "way of life." Federal money for an O'Neill film on Project Chariot disappeared, but this book became his eloquent revenge. Eyebrow and consciousness-raising at its ecological best. Pub Date: July 20, 1994 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chariot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chariot I really enjoy this book.. cannot recommend it enough.. I met the author on the book tour at the time.
- acidburnNSA 5y ago
  Nuclear power plants and nuclear explosives are roughly as related as fertilizers and chemical explosives. Related physics, very different applications.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    But substantially more closely related psychology.
marcrosoft 5y ago
Hopefully it works better than Windows.
- fridif 5y ago
  Hopefully nobody flies a plane into it like on 9/11, otherwise the fallout will be larger than a few city blocks.
  - delecti 5y ago
    Can you point to any planes flying into the many existing nuclear reactors? For that matter, can you point to any planes flying into any buildings other than 9/11?
    - amock 5y ago
      There's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Austin_suicide_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Austin_suicide_attack but I still think it's pretty rare.
      - kfarr 5y ago
        Somehow this didn't show up on my radar back then
        dane-pgp 5y ago
        If that's supposed to be a joke, it's in poor taste.
        kbelder 5y ago
        As many of the best are.
        fridif 5y ago
        I remember the day it happened, a lot of people were suggesting that Glenn Beck's far right rhetoric encouraged the person to do what they did, so Glenn Beck spent his entire 5PM tv block saying that he had nothing to do with far right terrorism.
natch 5y ago
I did not realize that TerraPower is actually a spin-off from Nathan Myrholt’s company Intellectual Ventures, widely viewed as a patent troll. Not sure it’s relevant to anything, but interesting.
- staticautomatic 5y ago
  “Widely viewed” is unreasonably charitable. IV is, in fact, a patent troll.
  - natch 5y ago
    Yes I was holding back. In fact one could go farther and say Nathan is… but again, trying to be charitable, you hit the nail on the head there.
- amckenna 5y ago
  I distinctly remember IV being big in the patent troll space, but I haven't seen anything recently. It looks like in the past ~8 years they have moved on or stopped for some reason.
natch 5y ago
Anyone know why these things are taking so long to build? We’ve been hearing about them for many years now. Permits, materials, sure, but I would think the Department of Energy would help move things along.
- Krasnol 5y ago
  > We find that overnight construction costsbenefit directly from learning spillovers but that these spillovers are onlysignificant for nuclear models built by the same Architect-Engineer (A-E). In addition, we show that the standardization of nuclear reactorsunder construction has an indirect and positive effect on constructioncosts through a reduction in lead-time, the latter being oneof the maindrivers of construction costs. Conversely, we also explorethe possibility oflearning by searching and find that, contrary to other energytechnologies,innovation leads to construction costs increases https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00956292/document https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00956292/document ...and that's why this one is also going to be much more expensive and will take longer than projected which makes it a waste of money if you care about things like global warming (which is currently the popular argument of the nuclear Astro-Turf) because all that could be much better invested into renewable energy: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b809990c#!divAbstract https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b8099... https://www.rethinkx.com/energy-lcoe-executive-summary https://www.rethinkx.com/energy-lcoe-executive-summary https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959652618326829 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09596...
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Yes: every dollar spent on this instead of building out solar and wind sets back progress fighting global climate disruption. No matter how clever your nuke is, solar and wind cost much less. Wyoming has some of the US's best territory for wind power extraction. Building wind turbines with that money could proceed immediately and be generating power in only months, without interfering at all with the current use of the land, and with no haggling with residents or regulators over safety now or forevermore. Solar heating of molten salt reservoirs was tried, and failed because it cost more than photovoltaics. Nukes, howsoever innovative, will certainly cost more than solar heating schemes. Also, containing circulating molten salt turned out to be harder than had been expected. I don't know of any reason why containing radioactive molten salt would be easier or cheaper. A photovoltaic and wind farm driving heat pumps to boil an underground steam reservoir would be overwhelmingly cheaper and easier to get and keep working, requiring no new tech, if the goal is to provide less interruptible power. There is really no scenario where this project makes economic sense on its own merits. It has to be driven by unexpressed intentions we can only speculate about. In the past, such intentions have typically involved securing public subsidies.
aeturnum 5y ago
"The exact location of the new reactor is still up in the air." Yah? Good luck. Siting these things is hard. There are some papers about how experts are worse at predicting the success of a nuclear reactor than members of the general public. I have the impression that project timelines don't give the socialization phase enough time and then, when it is constricted, the phase will sprawl. On one hand, there are a lot of folks who are quite sure they've settled on a set of good techniques to manage nuclear waste. On the other hand, individual communities that might host nuclear sites keep not being convinced that the selected techniques are 'safe.' The environment is such that the US has not been able to officially designate a site for waste[1] (or settled on a plan to reprocess waste or agree to a framework wherein it could participate in a coalition of nuclear states to...). You can't make all the people happy all of the time but our inability to keep anyone happy any of the time distresses me. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  for what it is worth, part of Terra Power's promise is to drastically reduce radioactive waste. They claim to reduce waste by 80% and consume different grades of uranium[1]. https://www.terrapower.com/a-solution-to-the-nuclear-waste-problem/ https://www.terrapower.com/a-solution-to-the-nuclear-waste-p...
  - apendleton 5y ago
    I don't think this project will use the traveling wave technology that purports to do that. They seem to be separate initiatives.
    - s1artibartfast 5y ago
      Interesting, where did you see that? Edit: It looks like they make the same claims about their sodium reactor as well
      - 5y ago
mustafa_pasi 5y ago
There are quite a few interesting aspects about this project. I'll try to summarize as I remember. The reactor uses molten salt to cool the core. Unlike conventional reactors the generated heat is not pumped directly into a heat exchanger to generate steam, but is instead pumped into a storage tank. The same tank can then be accessed from outside the nuclear building, which they claim, allows them to build the whole power station component to industrial standards rather than nuclear power plant standards, which is a cost saving. The more interesting aspect of the molten salt storage tank is that it is effective a huge battery. It can be used to ramp up the power to meet demand without having to touch the core. This means that such nuclear power plants could work well in conjunction with intermittent energy sources (wind, solar, ...etc) without the need for a gas peaker plant. In the past a big problem with nuclear was that it was an all or nothing option, as people thought it was not compatible with other kinds of energy sources due to its inability to react quickly to meet demand. This is very promising.
- a9h74j 5y ago
  Not sure, but IIRC the last I saw from Moltex Energy also had some mention of intermediate heat storage, for similar reasons.
- sandGorgon 5y ago
  Is this thorium or uranium?
  - mustafa_pasi 5y ago
    Uranium
  - socialdemocrat 5y ago
    Thorium it’s just marketing hype. Reactor design matters more than fuel type for things like safety. People get fired up about the large supply of thorium but the fuel is not what drives the high cost of nuclear power.
    - godelski 5y ago
ChuckMcM 5y ago
This is a good sign. At one time it was going to burn previously used fuel rods from other reactors (which simultaneously generates power and cuts down on stored nuclear waste). Not quite a breeder reactor, it does make fuel as it operates and then burns it. From a whitepaper[1] Bill Gates discussed how the reactor would start with "some" fuel and a bunch of depleted uranium. It would then convert the DU into plutonium (PU) and burn it. Letting it run a very long time without refueling and for lower cost. On their web site they show a two stage heat transfer system (primary sodium loop and secondary loop) that isolates the reactor's loop from the loop used to generate power. And finally the fact that you gravity feed the control rods in and it stops, while running at ambient air pressure means that things like the explosions that popped the top off the Fukishima reactors can't happen. [1] https://heep.hks.harvard.edu/files/heep/files/day_4_sess_1_terrapower_for_lassiter.pdf https://heep.hks.harvard.edu/files/heep/files/day_4_sess_1_t...
- trhway 5y ago
  >convert the DU into plutonium (PU) one has to be a BG i guess to get that cycle permitted. I wonder what would happened if for example Iran tried to implement that cycle. > gravity feed the control rods in and it stops a bit of delay happened in the Chernobyl case, and the rods just couldn't fit into the channels anymore.
  - adventured 5y ago
    > one has to be a BG i guess to get that cycle permitted. I wonder what would happened if for example Iran tried to implement that cycle. Why would that be an interesting intellectual exercise though? The US has had nukes for 3/4 of a century. What is there to be concerned about in regards to that conversion & the US, so long as it's properly regulated and accounted for. The US has had the trivial capacity to spur mass global proliferation since WW2, it has overwhelmingly chosen not to do that.
- danans 5y ago
  I wonder what kind of materials they use in the secondary heat exchanger loop piping to keep the molten sodium and steam apart while still allowing heat exchange between the two.
1MachineElf 5y ago
Gates missed his opportunity to give it the poignant name Terror power.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
nhoughto 5y ago
Am I wrong to think this is progress? Always hard to know how likely these things are to actually work out. I was disappointed that TerraPower in China never got going, bc trade-war. The inside bill's brain episode about it all was great.
Link74 5y ago
Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon introduces a new nuclear power project that will be built at the site of one of the state's retired coal power plants. https://www.paycheckrecords.bid/ https://www.paycheckrecords.bid/
cbHXBY1D 5y ago
Similarly, Washington’s Grant County recently signed a deal with NuScale Power for the development of small modular reactors in central Washington. https://www.kuow.org/stories/more-nuclear-energy-could-be-coming-to-central-washington-as-grant-county-explores-small-scale https://www.kuow.org/stories/more-nuclear-energy-could-be-co...
MichaelMoser123 5y ago
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/department-energy-picks-two-advanced-nuclear-reactors-demonstration-projects https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/department-energy-pi... an older article that talks about the TerraPower reactor mentioned in the article, they say that it has to run on 20% enriched Uranium, wouldn't that have the potential to create problems with nuclear proliferation? interesting that only one company seems to be working on a thorium cycle reactor https://flibe-energy.com/ https://flibe-energy.com/ . Why don't they invest more into this direction, instead?
notorandit 5y ago
Europeans are not allowed read that article because the site owner cannot guarantee GDPR compliance.
whereistimbo 5y ago
> Nuclear power plants also occupy much less land than solar and wind farms, which people in Wyoming complain can be an eyesore. lol
19h 5y ago
For the European users: https://archive.is/iHdFs https://archive.is/iHdFs

199 points by spenrose 5y ago

Perfect location: Wyoming is already the biggest net energy supplier in the country [1] so it has the required grid access, and also the 2nd lowest population density [2], next to Alaska (excluding Jackson which has become a mecca for billionaires for some reason). [1] https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=WY https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=WY [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories_of_the_United_States_by_population_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories...

canadianfella 5y ago
Why is low population density a good thing?
jdhn 5y ago
>for some reason Wyoming has no state income tax, and the Tetons are beautiful.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  Right, but the same is true with Washington regarding taxes but I don't see quite the same congregation. Never seen the Tetons, would love to.
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    Having spent substantial time in both places, the answer is skiing and weather. While the skiing in Washington State is excellent, in the Tetons it's world-class, possibly in the top 5 best places to ski in the world. And Jackson is substantially sunnier than dreary Western Washington, where all the culture is.
potiuper 5y ago
The username is apt. Locating baseload plants closer to where power is used would be more efficient to provide district heating along with lower transmission costs.
cjonas 5y ago
Teton county manages to simultaneously have a very low population density, yet feel extremely overcrowded for a few reasons: 1. Only something like 2% of the land in the county is privately owned. Most land is NP or NFS. Also, the super rich have created land trusts in the name of "the environment" to prevent development encroaching on their estates*. 2. We get millions of tourist per year on their way to GTNP & Yellowstone. 3. People from outside communities drive hours to fill a endless supply of "good paying" jobs fueled by the tourist & ultra-rich. At anytime in the local classified, you'll find 4-5 pages of "help wanted" and maybe only 1-3 "for rent" listing
jhayward 5y ago
> Wyoming is already the biggest net energy supplier in the country [1] so it has the required grid access, This is a misunderstanding of what the EIA is saying. The "net energy export" of Wyoming is coal in gondola cars carried by diesel trains, not electricity. Wyoming does not have significant grid connectivity other than what you'd expect for a very sparsely populated Western state.

mistrial9 5y ago

tangential plug -- THE FIRECRACKER BOYS by DANIEL T. O'NEILL The story of how we nearly Chernobylized our northwest Alaskan wilderness. O'Neill, a University of Alaska oral historian, builds on his previous studies of Project Chariot, a plan by the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s to use a thermonuclear blast to create a major harbor on the Alaskan coast. We are taken back to 1948, when a science writer at the New York Times gushed that work on the atom would usher in a "new Eden" where man would "abolish disease and poverty, anxiety and fear." Atomic hubris is personified by O'Neill's Faust, Edward Teller, who wanted to nuke the world's ice pack and flood the deserts in what he called "geographic engineering." Teller and others from the military and scientific communities were opposed by a vocal minority of Alaskans, by the first environmental activists (such as Barry Commoner), and by Arctic-loving scientists. (O'Neill delights in describing this last group eating parasites from dead caribou and crawling into dens to take the rectal temperatures of hibernating bears.) Because the stakes in this largely bureaucratic drama were so high, we can forgive O'Neill for demonizing the Atomic Energy Commission as "little boys...with a pathological glee" for setting off explosions. The proposed ground zero was a pristine spot called Tikiraq. O'Neill periodically breaks from the political wrangling to limn in glorious detail the richness of Arctic wildlife and Eskimo culture, rendering absurd the government promises to relocate natives and turn them into "productive" coal miners. For the first time, the Feds (obsessed with Reds) had to consider a people's irreplaceable loss of their "way of life." Federal money for an O'Neill film on Project Chariot disappeared, but this book became his eloquent revenge. Eyebrow and consciousness-raising at its ecological best. Pub Date: July 20, 1994 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chariot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chariot I really enjoy this book.. cannot recommend it enough.. I met the author on the book tour at the time.

acidburnNSA 5y ago
Nuclear power plants and nuclear explosives are roughly as related as fertilizers and chemical explosives. Related physics, very different applications.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  But substantially more closely related psychology.

marcrosoft 5y ago

Hopefully it works better than Windows.

fridif 5y ago
Hopefully nobody flies a plane into it like on 9/11, otherwise the fallout will be larger than a few city blocks.
- delecti 5y ago
  Can you point to any planes flying into the many existing nuclear reactors? For that matter, can you point to any planes flying into any buildings other than 9/11?
  - amock 5y ago
    There's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Austin_suicide_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Austin_suicide_attack but I still think it's pretty rare.
    - kfarr 5y ago
      Somehow this didn't show up on my radar back then
      - dane-pgp 5y ago
        If that's supposed to be a joke, it's in poor taste.
        kbelder 5y ago
        As many of the best are.
      - fridif 5y ago
        I remember the day it happened, a lot of people were suggesting that Glenn Beck's far right rhetoric encouraged the person to do what they did, so Glenn Beck spent his entire 5PM tv block saying that he had nothing to do with far right terrorism.

natch 5y ago

I did not realize that TerraPower is actually a spin-off from Nathan Myrholt’s company Intellectual Ventures, widely viewed as a patent troll. Not sure it’s relevant to anything, but interesting.

staticautomatic 5y ago
“Widely viewed” is unreasonably charitable. IV is, in fact, a patent troll.
- natch 5y ago
  Yes I was holding back. In fact one could go farther and say Nathan is… but again, trying to be charitable, you hit the nail on the head there.
amckenna 5y ago
I distinctly remember IV being big in the patent troll space, but I haven't seen anything recently. It looks like in the past ~8 years they have moved on or stopped for some reason.

natch 5y ago

Anyone know why these things are taking so long to build? We’ve been hearing about them for many years now. Permits, materials, sure, but I would think the Department of Energy would help move things along.

Krasnol 5y ago
> We find that overnight construction costsbenefit directly from learning spillovers but that these spillovers are onlysignificant for nuclear models built by the same Architect-Engineer (A-E). In addition, we show that the standardization of nuclear reactorsunder construction has an indirect and positive effect on constructioncosts through a reduction in lead-time, the latter being oneof the maindrivers of construction costs. Conversely, we also explorethe possibility oflearning by searching and find that, contrary to other energytechnologies,innovation leads to construction costs increases https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00956292/document https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00956292/document ...and that's why this one is also going to be much more expensive and will take longer than projected which makes it a waste of money if you care about things like global warming (which is currently the popular argument of the nuclear Astro-Turf) because all that could be much better invested into renewable energy: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b809990c#!divAbstract https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b8099... https://www.rethinkx.com/energy-lcoe-executive-summary https://www.rethinkx.com/energy-lcoe-executive-summary https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959652618326829 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09596...
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Yes: every dollar spent on this instead of building out solar and wind sets back progress fighting global climate disruption. No matter how clever your nuke is, solar and wind cost much less. Wyoming has some of the US's best territory for wind power extraction. Building wind turbines with that money could proceed immediately and be generating power in only months, without interfering at all with the current use of the land, and with no haggling with residents or regulators over safety now or forevermore. Solar heating of molten salt reservoirs was tried, and failed because it cost more than photovoltaics. Nukes, howsoever innovative, will certainly cost more than solar heating schemes. Also, containing circulating molten salt turned out to be harder than had been expected. I don't know of any reason why containing radioactive molten salt would be easier or cheaper. A photovoltaic and wind farm driving heat pumps to boil an underground steam reservoir would be overwhelmingly cheaper and easier to get and keep working, requiring no new tech, if the goal is to provide less interruptible power. There is really no scenario where this project makes economic sense on its own merits. It has to be driven by unexpressed intentions we can only speculate about. In the past, such intentions have typically involved securing public subsidies.

aeturnum 5y ago

"The exact location of the new reactor is still up in the air." Yah? Good luck. Siting these things is hard. There are some papers about how experts are worse at predicting the success of a nuclear reactor than members of the general public. I have the impression that project timelines don't give the socialization phase enough time and then, when it is constricted, the phase will sprawl. On one hand, there are a lot of folks who are quite sure they've settled on a set of good techniques to manage nuclear waste. On the other hand, individual communities that might host nuclear sites keep not being convinced that the selected techniques are 'safe.' The environment is such that the US has not been able to officially designate a site for waste[1] (or settled on a plan to reprocess waste or agree to a framework wherein it could participate in a coalition of nuclear states to...). You can't make all the people happy all of the time but our inability to keep anyone happy any of the time distresses me. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

s1artibartfast 5y ago
for what it is worth, part of Terra Power's promise is to drastically reduce radioactive waste. They claim to reduce waste by 80% and consume different grades of uranium[1]. https://www.terrapower.com/a-solution-to-the-nuclear-waste-problem/ https://www.terrapower.com/a-solution-to-the-nuclear-waste-p...
- apendleton 5y ago
  I don't think this project will use the traveling wave technology that purports to do that. They seem to be separate initiatives.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Interesting, where did you see that? Edit: It looks like they make the same claims about their sodium reactor as well
    - 5y ago

mustafa_pasi 5y ago

There are quite a few interesting aspects about this project. I'll try to summarize as I remember. The reactor uses molten salt to cool the core. Unlike conventional reactors the generated heat is not pumped directly into a heat exchanger to generate steam, but is instead pumped into a storage tank. The same tank can then be accessed from outside the nuclear building, which they claim, allows them to build the whole power station component to industrial standards rather than nuclear power plant standards, which is a cost saving. The more interesting aspect of the molten salt storage tank is that it is effective a huge battery. It can be used to ramp up the power to meet demand without having to touch the core. This means that such nuclear power plants could work well in conjunction with intermittent energy sources (wind, solar, ...etc) without the need for a gas peaker plant. In the past a big problem with nuclear was that it was an all or nothing option, as people thought it was not compatible with other kinds of energy sources due to its inability to react quickly to meet demand. This is very promising.

a9h74j 5y ago
Not sure, but IIRC the last I saw from Moltex Energy also had some mention of intermediate heat storage, for similar reasons.
sandGorgon 5y ago
Is this thorium or uranium?
- mustafa_pasi 5y ago
  Uranium
- socialdemocrat 5y ago
  Thorium it’s just marketing hype. Reactor design matters more than fuel type for things like safety. People get fired up about the large supply of thorium but the fuel is not what drives the high cost of nuclear power.
  - godelski 5y ago

ChuckMcM 5y ago

This is a good sign. At one time it was going to burn previously used fuel rods from other reactors (which simultaneously generates power and cuts down on stored nuclear waste). Not quite a breeder reactor, it does make fuel as it operates and then burns it. From a whitepaper[1] Bill Gates discussed how the reactor would start with "some" fuel and a bunch of depleted uranium. It would then convert the DU into plutonium (PU) and burn it. Letting it run a very long time without refueling and for lower cost. On their web site they show a two stage heat transfer system (primary sodium loop and secondary loop) that isolates the reactor's loop from the loop used to generate power. And finally the fact that you gravity feed the control rods in and it stops, while running at ambient air pressure means that things like the explosions that popped the top off the Fukishima reactors can't happen. [1] https://heep.hks.harvard.edu/files/heep/files/day_4_sess_1_terrapower_for_lassiter.pdf https://heep.hks.harvard.edu/files/heep/files/day_4_sess_1_t...

trhway 5y ago
>convert the DU into plutonium (PU) one has to be a BG i guess to get that cycle permitted. I wonder what would happened if for example Iran tried to implement that cycle. > gravity feed the control rods in and it stops a bit of delay happened in the Chernobyl case, and the rods just couldn't fit into the channels anymore.
- adventured 5y ago
  > one has to be a BG i guess to get that cycle permitted. I wonder what would happened if for example Iran tried to implement that cycle. Why would that be an interesting intellectual exercise though? The US has had nukes for 3/4 of a century. What is there to be concerned about in regards to that conversion & the US, so long as it's properly regulated and accounted for. The US has had the trivial capacity to spur mass global proliferation since WW2, it has overwhelmingly chosen not to do that.
danans 5y ago
I wonder what kind of materials they use in the secondary heat exchanger loop piping to keep the molten sodium and steam apart while still allowing heat exchange between the two.

1MachineElf 5y ago

Gates missed his opportunity to give it the poignant name Terror power.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

nhoughto 5y ago

Am I wrong to think this is progress? Always hard to know how likely these things are to actually work out. I was disappointed that TerraPower in China never got going, bc trade-war. The inside bill's brain episode about it all was great.

Link74 5y ago

Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon introduces a new nuclear power project that will be built at the site of one of the state's retired coal power plants. https://www.paycheckrecords.bid/ https://www.paycheckrecords.bid/

cbHXBY1D 5y ago

Similarly, Washington’s Grant County recently signed a deal with NuScale Power for the development of small modular reactors in central Washington. https://www.kuow.org/stories/more-nuclear-energy-could-be-coming-to-central-washington-as-grant-county-explores-small-scale https://www.kuow.org/stories/more-nuclear-energy-could-be-co...

MichaelMoser123 5y ago

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/department-energy-picks-two-advanced-nuclear-reactors-demonstration-projects https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/department-energy-pi... an older article that talks about the TerraPower reactor mentioned in the article, they say that it has to run on 20% enriched Uranium, wouldn't that have the potential to create problems with nuclear proliferation? interesting that only one company seems to be working on a thorium cycle reactor https://flibe-energy.com/ https://flibe-energy.com/ . Why don't they invest more into this direction, instead?

notorandit 5y ago

Europeans are not allowed read that article because the site owner cannot guarantee GDPR compliance.

whereistimbo 5y ago

> Nuclear power plants also occupy much less land than solar and wind farms, which people in Wyoming complain can be an eyesore. lol

19h 5y ago

For the European users: https://archive.is/iHdFs https://archive.is/iHdFs