Gates starts building smaller, cheaper nuclear reactors – vopbuzz
Kemmerer, Wyoming: Outside a small southwestern coal town wyomingA multibillion-dollar effort is underway to build the first of a new generation of nuclear power plants in the United States. Workers began construction Tuesday of a new type of nuclear reactor that is intended to be smaller and cheaper than older large reactors and produce nuclear power. electric without carbon dioxide, which is rapidly warming the planet.
Construction of the reactor continues TerraPowerBeing a startup, it won’t be completed until 2030 and faces daunting hurdles. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not yet approved the design, and the company will need to overcome the inevitable delays and cost overruns that have doomed countless nuclear projects before.
But what TerraPower does have is an influential and wealthy founder. Bill GatesTrump, now the seventh richest person in the world, has poured more than $1 billion of his fortune into TerraPower and expects that amount to grow. “If you care about climate, there are many places around the world where nuclear works,” Gates said in an interview Monday near the project site.
“Wind and solar are certainly great and we need to build them as fast as possible, but the idea that we don’t need anything beyond that is unlikely,” Gates said.
While the demand for electricity increases due to new data centers, factories and electric vehicles, there is also new excitement about nuclear energy.
Conventional reactors are huge, complex, tightly regulated projects that are difficult to build and finance. And nuclear energy is prohibitively expensive. Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Georgia, the only two U.S. reactors built in the last 30 years, cost $35 billion; This is more than twice the initial estimates. Gates is assertive that a completely different technology will help. With TerraPower, he funded a team of engineers to redesign a nuclear power plant from scratch.
Today, every nuclear power plant in the United States uses light water reactors, where water is pumped into the reactor core and heated by atomic fission, producing steam to produce electricity. Because the water is highly pressurized, these facilities need heavy pipes and thick shields to protect against accidents. TerraPower’s reactor, by contrast, uses liquid sodium instead of water, allowing it to operate at lower pressures. In theory, this reduces the need for thick protection. In an emergency, the facility can be cooled with vents instead of complex pump systems. The reactor is only 345 megawatts, one-third the size of Vogtle reactors, and requires a smaller investment.
Chris Levesque, TerraPower’s CEO, said its reactors should ultimately produce electricity at half the cost of traditional nuclear power plants. “This is a much simpler plant,” he said. “This gives us both a safety advantage and a cost advantage.”
Construction of the reactor continues TerraPowerBeing a startup, it won’t be completed until 2030 and faces daunting hurdles. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not yet approved the design, and the company will need to overcome the inevitable delays and cost overruns that have doomed countless nuclear projects before.
But what TerraPower does have is an influential and wealthy founder. Bill GatesTrump, now the seventh richest person in the world, has poured more than $1 billion of his fortune into TerraPower and expects that amount to grow. “If you care about climate, there are many places around the world where nuclear works,” Gates said in an interview Monday near the project site.
“Wind and solar are certainly great and we need to build them as fast as possible, but the idea that we don’t need anything beyond that is unlikely,” Gates said.
While the demand for electricity increases due to new data centers, factories and electric vehicles, there is also new excitement about nuclear energy.
Conventional reactors are huge, complex, tightly regulated projects that are difficult to build and finance. And nuclear energy is prohibitively expensive. Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Georgia, the only two U.S. reactors built in the last 30 years, cost $35 billion; This is more than twice the initial estimates. Gates is assertive that a completely different technology will help. With TerraPower, he funded a team of engineers to redesign a nuclear power plant from scratch.
Today, every nuclear power plant in the United States uses light water reactors, where water is pumped into the reactor core and heated by atomic fission, producing steam to produce electricity. Because the water is highly pressurized, these facilities need heavy pipes and thick shields to protect against accidents. TerraPower’s reactor, by contrast, uses liquid sodium instead of water, allowing it to operate at lower pressures. In theory, this reduces the need for thick protection. In an emergency, the facility can be cooled with vents instead of complex pump systems. The reactor is only 345 megawatts, one-third the size of Vogtle reactors, and requires a smaller investment.
Chris Levesque, TerraPower’s CEO, said its reactors should ultimately produce electricity at half the cost of traditional nuclear power plants. “This is a much simpler plant,” he said. “This gives us both a safety advantage and a cost advantage.”
