Mea culpa

Turns out there are some significant errors in my early post about the new TerraPower nuclear plant that Bill Gates is co-funding in Wyoming. Here is a more accurate version:

Nuclear power is back

Usually, discussions of decarbonizing energy production involve solar, wind, tidal and geothermal. But nuclear power generation doesn’t generate greenhouse gas (though the large amount of concrete in conventional nuclear power plants does). Nuclear power generation has gotten a bad name with Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima.

While there is debate about whether the famous nuclear power reactor accidents to date have really endangered many lives, there’s no doubt that solid fuel light water nuclear power reactors have an image problem.

Bill Gates is hoping to overcome that image problem by co-funding a next generation nuclear power reactor. Gates’ company, TerraPower, has announced the siting of a 345 MW demonstration plant in Kemmerer WY. The plant will be a Natrium plant design, which:

“ . . . uses a sodium-cooled fast reactor as a heat source. This heat from the reactor is carried by molten salt from inside the nuclear island to heat storage tanks outside the reactor building, where it is utilized as needed for generating electricity or industrial processes. The net effect is that the overall plant can load follow, thus increasing the revenue and value of the plant while maintaining the optimum constant reactor power. At the same time the cost of the overall plant is reduced since many of the systems outside of the nuclear island need not be nuclear safety grade. The Natrium reactor enables these abilities because it operates in much higher temperature regimes than the light water reactor, thus pairing well to the temperature requirements of the molten salt heat transfer medium.

“Natrium reactors are uranium fueled . . . Both the demonstration plant and the first set of commercial plants will run on high-assay low-enriched uranium. Natrium plants will not require reprocessing and will run on a once-through fuel cycle that limits the risk of weapons proliferation. Natrium technology will, nonetheless, reduce the volume of waste per megawatt hour of energy produced at the back end of the fuel cycle, by five times, without any reprocessing because of the efficiency with which it uses the fuel.“

The cooling system design is failsafe, not requiring any power from an outside source to safely shutdown during an emergency.

The cost of solar and wind power is declining. If the TerraPower pilot in Wyoming is successful, it should reduce the cost of nuclear power generation, and also address the intermittency issues of solar and wind. It is expected to complement, not displace solar and wind power generation.

So while fusion power is always a decade away, fission power may be experiencing a renaissance now.

https://www.terrapower.com/natrium-program-summary/#:~:text=Natrium%20reactors%20are%20uranium%20fueled,%2Denriched%20uranium%20(HALEU).