An energy company co-founded by Microsoft’s Bill Gates has announced plans to start building a new type of nuclear power plant in the US this summer.
TerraPower announced that it plans to apply this month for the necessary permits to begin construction of a next-generation nuclear reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming, in early June.
The Washington-based company has received an estimated $1 billion in funding from private investors, which will be combined with a promised $2 billion from the US government.
The reactor is unique in the world of nuclear energy because it is cooled with liquid sodium instead of water. An efficient strategy, but one that has proven dangerous in some cases due to the explosive reaction of sodium when it comes into contact with water.
TerraPower’s announcement puts the country in a nuclear energy race against Russia and China.
This concept image shows what TerraPower’s nuclear power plant complex could look like when it finishes construction in Kemmerer, Wyoming.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates co-founded TerraPower “to take action on developing advanced nuclear energy to meet growing electricity needs, mitigate climate change and lift billions out of poverty.”
The two superpowers are working to develop and export cheaper reactors, and the Natrium reactor represents TerraPower’s attempt to enter that market, the Financial times reported.
In December, the company signed an agreement with Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation.
This deal will see TerraPower explore using its Sodium reactors to not only generate electricity in the United Arab Emirates, but also to produce hydrogen – a notoriously energy-hungry process.
TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque told FT that they plan to apply for the necessary permits this month to begin construction in June, but regardless of whether or not the company receives approval, they will begin construction then.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is responsible for approving the construction of new nuclear power plants.
The next-generation reactor, called “Natrium,” could be built for half the cost of water-cooled reactors, the standard nuclear power technology that has been around for decades, Levesque said.
Due to the design of the Sodium Reactor, most of the initial construction phase will not necessarily include reactor components, but rather focus on supporting structures.
Another concept image of TerraPower’s proposed nuclear power plant. The large storage tanks are involved in the sodium cooling hardware.
TerraPower scientists are working on the sodium cooling system, an innovative and affordable technology that also poses new dangers compared to conventional water cooling.
The reactor building is located separately from the sodium storage facility, which is intended to reduce the facility’s “nuclear footprint,” the amount of equipment exposed to radiation. In this diagram, the reactor is in the middle and bottom.
According to the company’s website: ‘TerraPower was founded by Bill Gates and a group of like-minded visionaries who decided that the private sector must take action in developing advanced nuclear energy to meet growing electricity needs, mitigate climate change and save billions from the to achieve poverty. .’
Nuclear power does not have the same problems with CO2 emissions as other power plants, especially coal.
But it does bring new problems, as spent nuclear waste is dangerously radioactive for thousands of years.
Liquid sodium cools the reactor while simultaneously storing heat as a kind of “thermal battery,” so the power plant can easily increase or decrease energy production based on the needs of the electrical grid, without having to alter the nuclear reaction.
Liquid sodium produces hydrogen when it comes into contact with water, and hydrogen then reacts explosively. This laboratory equipment is part of TerraPower’s experiments to prove the technology.
The advantage of using sodium over water to cool the nuclear reactor is that it does not boil, even at high temperatures. Water is the conventional coolant for nuclear reactors.
There has not been a sodium-cooled reactor in the US since several experimental reactors were tried in the 1960s and 1970s.
After several failures, including a partial meltdown of Fermi 1 in Michigan in 1966, all of these reactors were decommissioned and most were replaced by conventional boiling water reactors.
In 1995, the Monju nuclear power plant in Japan suffered a fire due to a sodium leak in the cooling system.
The subsequent cover-up, which involved falsified reports and edited video footage of the accident, was so outrageous that government investigator Shigeo Nishimura committed suicide after exposing it.
“If you use liquid sodium as a coolant instead of water, it changes the game,” Levesque told FT, noting that because it boils at almost 900 degrees Celsius, it can run much cheaper than water-cooled reactors.
‘Sodium plants will cost half of what light water reactor plants cost. . . and we are moving quite aggressively with our project,” he said.
The Wyoming reactor will be a demonstration project but will become a commercial energy supplier upon completion, TerraPower said.
The factory should be operational in 2030.