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Natrium 'advanced nuclear' power plant wins Wyoming permit
- UltraSane 2y agoIt truly baffles me how humanity has the technology for a nuclear reactor that can actually CREATE MORE FUEL THAN IT USES and no one wants to use it.
- NewJazz 2y agoThat whole "create more fuel than it uses" thing means there are proliferation implications.
- kurthr 2y agoYeah, the breeder reactions are good because they can burn long lasting isotopes, generating short half life and more easily disposable materials, but they also make more of the risky isotopes (those with low critical mass that are more easily/chemically separable). Thorium is quite a bit better about that (not perfect), but it's even less well understood for actual reactor design and production.
- flanked-evergl 2y agoNot in the US.
- NewJazz 2y agoThere are still proliferation concerns for nuclear-armed states. Have you heard of non state actors? Would be a shame if US built a breeder reactor in each state and oath keepers or whoever got a hold of one.
- UltraSane 2y agoThat is not a reasonable reason not to make them.
- flanked-evergl 2y ago> There are still proliferation concerns for nuclear-armed states. States that want nuke tech can just get it from: - China - Russia - Iran - North Korea - Pakistan - UK (soon, ~1 decade) - France (soon, ~1 decade) Non-proliferation is a joke. Always has been.
- flanked-evergl 2y agoActually I would bet money that the UK gives Nuclear weapons capability to Iran in the next 25 years.
- smaddox 2y ago> That application was submitted in March 2024 and is on track for approval in December 2026 Huh? Is this something where there's multiple incremental steps in the process, and that date is just the final approval stamp, or does it actually just take more than 1.5 years?
- bpodgursky 2y agoIt's always fun seeing someone jump into NRC discourse for the first time.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- daedrdev 2y agoI'm pretty sure this is extremely fast for the nuclear industry.
- myheartisinohio 2y agoFeds
- nine_k 2y agoI hope this involves a lot of much faster feedback / modification cycles, and the process ends when all the feedback has been addressed.
- simplicio 2y agoI'm generally pretty open to the idea that the NRC is bad and needs to be reformed, but a year and a half doesn't seem that unreasonable? Especially for a new reactor design.
- pfdietz 2y agoThis is a fast reactor. That is, a reactor in which the neutrons, instead of being moderated down to thermal energies, remain at high energy. The fission cross section for such energetic neutrons is much lower than for thermal neutrons. Therefore, there has to be a much greater density of fissionable material in the reactor core. The lack of a moderator also means rearrangement of the core in an accident is potentially much more dangerous. If the fuel itself rearranges to become more compact, say by melting and flowing, the reactivity could increase. This is not possible in (say) a light water reactor, where such a rearrangement would reduce reactivity. The nightmare scenario for any fast reactor, warned about by Edward Teller in 1967, is a rearrangement that causes the core to become supercritical on prompt neutrons alone (that is, on only the neutrons released promptly at the moment of fission, not on those + the delayed neutrons emitted by some fission products as they decay). A fast prompt supercritical configuration could potentially explode with great violence, greater than Chernobyl. An atomic bomb is a prompt fast supercritical system. I will want to see how the NRC does or does not license their design, a process that has just started. I will not be surprised if their approach ends up being unlicensable in the US because safety cannot be assured by analysis under accident conditions.
- thecopy 2y agoBased on your comment it sounds unreasonable to select this design. It must have some reason to exist?
- pfdietz 2y agoFast reactors do have some attractive features. They have better neutron economy and work better with plutonium. They can achieve breeding ratios comfortably above 1 with the U-Pu system. They produce less actinide waste since the chance of neutron capture not causing fission is lower, and can more effectively destroy actinide waste. Sodium-cooled fast reactors will operate at higher temperature than LWRs, enabling the salt thermal storage scheme they propose to use. In large reactors, these features have not been enough to compensate for the disadvantages and sodium-cooled reactors have not been successful, coming in more expensive than light water reactors for a given power output. France, which had been developing fast reactors, has recently mothballed the effort with no plan to restart before 2050.
- nine_k 2y ago> That application was submitted in March 2024 and is on track for approval in December 2026 Next time you complain that waiting for a code review approval till next week is excruciatingly long, think about these turnaround times. Also this is why we can't quickly build many reactors to ramp up electric generation for millions of new electric cars, etc.
- bryanlarsen 2y agoThe grid connection backlog is about 6 years, so this is considerably quicker than for a renewable energy project that requires a new grid interconnect.
- threeseed 2y ago> why we can't quickly build many reactors No. The reason is that they have not been price competitive with renewables. And so there isn't the volume of approvals that gives regulators experience which in turn reduces approval times. Commercial solar takes months to approve by comparison.
- vlovich123 2y agoLast I checked solar without batteries is roughly the same price per Kw as nuclear. There’s a huge difference in capability though because nuclear is 24/7 peak availability which solar can’t do and if you start building batteries the price increases substantially. I agree on regulatory experience but that comes more from panic over nuclear proliferation rather than any economic reason. Whether or not you view that as a legitimate concern is open to debate.
- vlovich123 2y agoFor anyone arguing about this, please first look at https://www.cis.org.au/commentary/opinion/nuclear-vs-renewables-which-is-cheaper/ https://www.cis.org.au/commentary/opinion/nuclear-vs-renewab... The primary cost of running solar plants is no longer the panels themselves (ie if they drop to 0 the $/KW wouldn’t change a whole lot).
- nobodyandproud 2y agoDid we cannibalize some of our nuclear warheads, in order to get the enriched uranium? https://wyofile.com/fate-of-natrium-nuclear-plant-may-depend-on-turning-bombs-into-fuel/?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiAs5i8BhDmARIsAGE4xHw-dLHcEQpYOl8QVWMqQeUS2sM1N5Ax8Gc1rFTozxhC1abq0Ta4VskaApHqEALw_wcB https://wyofile.com/fate-of-natrium-nuclear-plant-may-depend...
- nine_k 2y agoApparently yes, accoriding to [CNN]. "In the current stockpile, the average duration since a warhead was manufactured or refurbished is roughly 28 years." [DoE]. I suppose some of the aging warheads will be reprocessed as fuel. [CNN]: https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/09/climate/nuclear-warheads-haleu/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/09/climate/nuclear-warheads-hale... [DoE]: https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/us-nuclear-weapons-stockpile https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/us-nuclear-weapons-stockpile (Previous version of this comment was incorrect.)
- nobodyandproud 2y agoThanks. It looks like it meant to be short-term but nonetheless.
- denkmoon 2y agoLiquid sodium certainly is a choice. Very few non-experimental liquid sodium reactors out there.
- gunian 2y agoany idea why the Natrium class wasn't designed to be a breeder reactor? dont know much about the subject but this will have more or less the same runway as gasoline
- ZeroGravitas 2y agoIs this old news or are there two big celebrations recently about being allowed to build the "non-nuclear" bits of a nuclear plant? Following nuclear news would be absolutely tragic if I didn't think it was all a pointless diversion from the real work being done. As such their lack of progress leaves me a bit more ambivalent.
- lucidguppy 2y agoI'm quite ambivalent about nuclear power. On the one hand it's been proven that nuclear power isn't the answer to the energy transition question (https://sppga.ubc.ca/nuclear-is-not-the-solution/ https://sppga.ubc.ca/nuclear-is-not-the-solution/) - on the other hand - it makes up waaay more of my current carbon free energy. For southern states, or states that get a lot of solar power, they shouldn't have nukes. For areas that have plenty of wind, they shouldn't have nukes. For areas with lots of people, they shouldn't have nukes. Areas of seismic activity, they shouldn't have nukes. Research needs to be done on how to lower the cost of interconnect and installation of solar power... like billions of dollars of research rivaling nuke research.