Bill Gates’ TerraPower aims to build its first advanced nuclear reactor in a coal town in Wyoming
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/17/bill-ga ... -town.html
Bill Gates’ TerraPower has chosen Kemmerer, Wyoming, a frontier-era coal town, as the site where the company will build its first demonstration nuclear power plant.
The plant will cost about $4 billion, half coming from TerraPower and half coming from the United States government, the company said.
“It’s a very serious government grant. This was necessary, I should mention, because the U.S. government and the U.S. nuclear industry was falling behind,” said Levesque.
The Kemmerer plant will be the first to use an advanced nuclear design called Natrium, developed by TerraPower with GE-Hitachi.
Natrium plants use liquid sodium as a cooling agent instead of water. Sodium has a higher boiling point and can absorb more heat than water, which means high pressure does not build up inside the reactor, reducing the risk of an explosion.
Also, Natrium plants do not require an outside energy source to operate their cooling systems, which can be a vulnerability in the case of an emergency shutdown. This contributed to the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, when a tsunami shut down the diesel generators running its backup cooling system, contributing to a meltdown and release of radioactive material.
The Kemmerer plant still faces a couple of hurdles, including federal permitting.
“There’s a comprehensive licensing process overseen by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that, frankly, is expensive,” Levesque said. “There are many, many reviews.”
Also, the fuel that the Natrium plant uses is called high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, which is not yet available at commercial scale.
The existing fleet of nuclear reactors in the United States runs uranium-235 fuel enriched up to 5%, the Department of Energy says, while HALEU is enriched between 5% and 20%.
“Sadly, we don’t have this enrichment capability in the U.S. today,” Levesque said. “And this is an area of great concern of the U.S. government and specifically the Department of Energy.”
But it’s coming, he said. “I’m really certain that we’re going to establish that capability” in another public-private partnership, similar to the way the Natrium power plant demonstration is being built.