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NRC issues first commercial reactor construction approval in 10 years [pdf]
- josefritzishere 8mo agoThis is huge, historic even.
- amanaplanacanal 8mo agoMaybe. There is a long road from "approved" to "operational".
- mayama 8mo agoHow is this fundamentally different from Nuscale approval? Like Nuscale this is also brand new design, sodium fast reactor, that hasn't been commercially deployed and is likely to run into usual ballooning budgets and western nuclear construction roadblocks/delays
- dmix 8mo agoIf there’s more than one approval a decade maybe the odds will be higher it won’t be a bloated mess.
- croes 8mo agoOr you just have two bloated messes
- evilos 8mo agoThey're already building this one. Nuscale didn't break ground AFAIK.
- pfdietz 8mo agoNuscale wasn't a sodium fast reactor. Perhaps you phrased that poorly? Nuscale is a PWR.
- mayama 8mo agoI wanted to emphasise both are untested new designs that are likely to run in to troubles, one is SMR and the other Sodium.
- dopa42365 8mo agoYou know what would be even bigger? Building perfectly safe and fine AP 1000s that already exist many times today and can be built whenever you want to. 0 under construction in the US
- fwipsy 8mo agoTrue but additional context: Wikipedia says that two came online in 2023 and 2024, and two more are partially constructed, seeking additional funding to continue. Lots more internationally.
- muldvarp 8mo agoThe two that came online in 2023 and 2024 are hardly a success story if you look at their history.
- mpweiher 8mo agoWestinghouse plans 10 AP-1000 reactors in the USA https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/westinghouse-plans-ten-ap1000-reactors-in-the-usa https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/westinghouse-pla... Yes, it would be better if they had already started, but the ship is turning.
- ViewTrick1002 8mo agoIt is not. The right wing is instead waking up to reality. Apparently they like extremely cheap distributed electricity. Who could have guessed that. Why MAGA suddenly loves solar power The Trump-led attack on solar eases as the right reckons with its crucial role in powering AI and keeping utility bills in check. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/03/02/katie-miller-solar-power-trump/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/03/02/katie-mil...
- pfdietz 8mo agoSolar also means all those data center jobs (and, really, many general industrial jobs) flow out to low population density red areas.
- WorkerBee28474 8mo agoThe Kemmerer Unit 1 project... would be used to demonstrate the TerraPower and General Electric-Hitachi Natrium sodium fast reactor technology. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor [0] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/advanced/who-were-working-with/applicant-projects/terrapower https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/advanced/who-were-...
- SoftTalker 8mo agoNice, I like the sodium fast reactor concept. Produces less waste, can be passively cooled when shut down, and doesn't run pressurized so reactor vessel can be thinner. Sodium leaks can be nasty, but they can be dealt with.
- jacobn 8mo agoAre there any nuclear alternatives that don't include strapping low grade bombs to the reactor core (PRW/BWR: water separation -> hydrogen + oxygen -> boom, like happened @ Fukushima) or using coolants that instantly start violently combusting when exposed to air or moisture (sodium)? I love the promise of nuclear energy, and I understand that every single engineering decision has tradeoffs, but these tradeoffs just seem so bad? Are there really no better options?
- fwipsy 8mo agoI was also curious. Claude answers: https://claude.ai/share/244fc2f5-1c4d-4e52-b316-e9cc34c8b98b https://claude.ai/share/244fc2f5-1c4d-4e52-b316-e9cc34c8b98b I would be interested in a real expert's critique/commentary of this answer. I like the pebble-bed design because it seems the most intrinsically safe of the three.
- user____name 8mo agoPebble beds are very safe but also very fuel inefficient.
- bokohut 8mo agoAnd the verbiage that many will glance over yet will have the greatest future impacts for all alive is: "...includes an energy storage system..." Todays U.S. meeting "Roundtable on Ratepayer Protection Pledge" with the U.S. President himself leading that meeting garnished commitments from Big Tech as it relates to energy. In time Big Tech Energy divisions will be thing and some citizens will be paying their utilities bill to them.
- jeffbee 8mo agoThere are large solar power stations on the grid in California owned by tech firms so you may indeed already be paying, indirectly, Apple for energy.
- conradev 8mo agoIn Texas and Massachusetts you can actually pick your power provider while paying the natural monopoly for the wires. In time I hope we all can do this.
- ploxiln 8mo agoThis is how it works in NYC, but the wires are almost twice as expensive as the power. (If you add taxes and the numerous weird fees, the total bill is a solid 3x the cost of the power.) It's really all about the grid maintenance and management these days.
- treis 8mo agoWe do this for gas. IMHO you end up paying monopoly rates for the pipes and then stupid game prices for the gas. Maybe the savvy consumer comes out ahead but seems like a net negative to me.
- hvb2 8mo agoIt's not monopoly rates, it's actual utility rates. The only problem here is if the utility is allowed to make a profit. Gas pipes, electric lines and internet connections are like roads in today's society. Can't really live without them. So assuming the pipe maintenance is done at cost, with no money not being spent on the network. What would your better net positive solution even look like?
- burnt-resistor 8mo ago[flagged]
- eli_gottlieb 8mo agoWhat are the substantive safety or environmental objections to the project that TerraPower is bypassing by allegedly bribing the government?
- jfengel 8mo agoI don't know. I guess we'll find out the hard way.
- tw04 8mo ago> pedo Bill Gates Huh? You’re going to need a citation to throw those kind of accusations around. A serial philanderer? Absolutely. But all indications are he was interested in adult women, not even young women. I think the Russian call girls that Epstein set him up with were in their 30s?
- rgmerk 8mo agoTheir hoped-for completion date is "2031". Anyone want to hazard a guess about what their actual completion date for this plant will be?
- willis936 8mo agoNo, but I'm certain the polymarket gamblers do.
- rgmerk 8mo agoI did have the same thought, had a quick look (I'm not a polymarket user) and couldn't find a market relating to this project. Put it this way, if it's in commercial operation by 2031 I'll eat my hat.
- GorbachevyChase 8mo agoIf the DOW needs fissile material, then you might be impressed at how fast things are done. The obstacles are mostly discretionary.
- hunterpayne 8mo agoThere is one, its hard to find. It only has about 19k of volume, so its very thinly traded.
- rgmerk 8mo agoCan you link to it? I'm curious.
- hunterpayne 8mo agohttps://polymarket.com/event/us-grants-license-for-new-nuclear-reactor-in-2026 https://polymarket.com/event/us-grants-license-for-new-nucle...
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- stinkbeetle 8mo agoGreat, hopefully the ship is turning around slowly. I have been hearing from pro-carbon "environmentalists" for 30 years that "we should have built nuclear 20 years ago but doing so now would be pointless". Meanwhile we may have just reached peak-coal today if we are lucky. Well past time to stop listening to anything those grifting charlatans have to say.
- amanaplanacanal 8mo agoThey got what they wanted. They are still successfully killing solar and wind projects. I'll be surprised if this project actually gets built, though.
- hunterpayne 8mo agoI don't think killing solar and wind projects is what the greens do. The problems with solar and wind are entirely due to the laws of physics. They get large advantages in the energy markets in most places. They have been very effective in preventing nuclear though which ironically does so much real world damage to their cause that all the rest of what they do is a drop in the bucket.
- croes 8mo agoOur problem isn’t energy production, it’s storage. Nuclear power plants aren’t flexible enough for sudden changes in energy consumption.
- mpweiher 8mo agoThe storage problem is home-made, because our problem is intermittent renewables that can't produce on-demand. With consistent producers like nuclear there is no storage problem. And of course the Natrium plant has the buffer so it can ramp grid output up and down while maintaining the reactor at consistent power levels.
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- 111111011 8mo ago[dead]
- jacquesm 8mo agoWho wants to bet this will be (1) economically viable to operate (2) delivered on time (3) delivered within the stated budget?
- smallnix 8mo agoPrediction market?
- TheOtherHobbes 8mo agoI will never, ever understand the HN obsession with presenting nukes as a practical and economically viable technology. Wind and solar prices are still dropping hard, battery and storage tech is evolving fast, but - let's build monsters that consistently overrun time and budget, and run on fuel that can only be obtained from some of the least stable countries on the planet.
- klysm 8mo agoGrids need reliability. Battery tech is not close to providing long enough durations to fulfill load with just renewables. I would much rather have nukes than natural gas filling that role.
- jacquesm 8mo agoThis is roughly 1980. We are now in 2025. Battery tech has been increasing massively and besides that we now have HVDC tech which can transport very large amounts of energy from end of the country to another without significant losses. The whole 'baseline power' argument is getting really long in the tooth, it is mostly a matter of dogma at this point. It's not 'nukes' or 'natural gas', it's 'what is the best possible mix for this current moment in time. The problem with nuclear power is that it is so expensive to be on standby that you need to buy their output even when you don't need it. So energy market pricing tends to be dominated by the least effective sources rather than by the most effective sources. If nuclear plants were left to fend for themselves they'd be out of business in a year. More so if you consider the cost of decommissioning.
- pfdietz 8mo agoFast reactors have an extremely serious potential failure mode. In a thermal reactor, reactivity is maintained by a carefully designed lattice of fuel elements and moderator. Disrupt this lattice and reactivity goes down. Thermal neutrons are also highly absorbed by certain neutron poisons with resonances that enable neutron capture at low energy; these can be added to shut down any potential reaction. Fast reactors aren't like that. If fuel rearranges (for example, by melting and flowing into coolant channels) reactivity can increase. A fasts reactor will have ~100 times the "bare core" critical mass of fissionable material in it, so there's plenty of room for serious rearrangement to bring fission material into a prompt fast supercritical configuration. That by itself could give you an explosion. But if the explosion then compresses some other part of the system beyond supercriticality, one could get an even more serious explosion. The possibility with something with a yield in the kiloton range can't easily be ruled out. This would be far worse than Chernobyl. The fast reactor concepts I've seen deal with this by saying "our design can't ever melt down". Color me skeptical on that, and defense in depth says you don't believe such claims when failure could be so catastrophic. Even if regulators can be convinced (or be made to say they are convinced), the first experience that indicates the assumption wasn't true will lead to all reactors of that design being permanently shut down. This would be a serious financial risk to anyone thinking of building them. If I were dead set on a fast reactor I'd look at something like a fast MSR (chloride salt) where such rearrangement could be ruled out.
- jabl 8mo agoNot sure about this argument, do you have any references? In a LWR, if the coolant/moderator boils away, sure, the reactivity goes down. But there is plenty enough decay heat left to melt all the fuel that can then flow into a puddle of suitable geometry and go boom. Hypothetically speaking, at least. I suppose in practice most LWR's use lightly enriched fuel so it's very hard to get enough material close enough together to make it critical, let alone supercritical, without a moderator of some sort. Of course, plenty of research reactors, naval reactors etc. have operated with very highly enriched fuel (90+%?), but even these have AFAIU so far managed without accidentally turning themselves into nuclear bombs. Seems most contemporary civilian fast reactor designs are designed to operate with HALEU fuel, where the limit is (somewhat arbitrarily) set at 20%. A lot higher enrichment than your typical LWR, but still much lower than you see in weapons, and you still need quite a lot of it before it can go boom.
- tzs 8mo agoThey originally were going to build their first plant using this technology starting in 2018 in China, but that got killed by the first Trump administration.