TerraPower will need special fuel for its Natrium reactor(s). They are using molten sodium coolant, and that usually uses metallic fuel. Most other nuclear plants use uranium oxide in a ceramic form. The Natrium fuel will also have a higher-than-normal U-235 enrichment, called HALEU.
TerraPower, along with Framatome, recently announced development of a facility to manufacture this metallic uranium. Framatome is a French company with a long history in nuclear power. Framatome is partially owned by EDF, the French nuclear reactor operator. The pilot metallisation plant will be built at the Hanford site in Washington state, where Framatome has other nuclear fuel facilities.
Here is a construction start that is more important than Bill Gates’ nuclear toy:
Long-awaited offshore wind hub breaks ground in Brooklyn
BROOKLYN, N.Y. — Elizabeth Yeampierre stood near the edge of the Brooklyn waterfront earlier this week. A vast concrete lot stretched out before her, riddled with weeds and rain puddles, as the Manhattan skyline sparkled in the distance. For years, Yeampierre has fought to transform this vacant expanse into a hub for clean-energy industries — one that could bring much-needed jobs to the surrounding neighborhood of Sunset Park.
Now, that’s finally starting to happen.
On Monday, construction began on an offshore wind facility at the 73-acre lot known as the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal. Equinor, the Norwegian energy giant, will use the site to receive and ship out the enormous wind turbines that it plans to install in the Atlantic Ocean. When completed in 2026, the facility will be one of the largest dedicated hubs serving offshore wind, a crucial energy industry that’s slowly emerging in the United States.
“It’s a landmark achievement, and it shows that we can become a model of a just transition,” Yeampierre, the executive director of UPROSE, said during a ground-breaking event. The grassroots organization primarily serves residents in Sunset Park, a largely working-class neighborhood of Asian, Latino, and immigrant communities.
“An industrial sector that has had a long history in our communities of toxic exposure is now taking seriously our vision of a green reindustrialization,” Yeampierre said.
Later, she clutched a ceremonial shovel alongside New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) and other speakers beneath the blazing sun. Workers here will assemble and maintain the towers, blades, and components used for offshore wind installations, starting with Equinor’s 810-megawatt Empire Wind 1 project near Long Island. Subsea cables will connect that wind farm to the Brooklyn terminal’s new substation, delivering enough clean electricity to supply 500,000 homes.
Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors
April 30, 2024
Even casual followers of energy and climate issues have probably heard about the alleged wonders of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). This is due in no small part to the “nuclear bros”: an active and seemingly tireless group of nuclear power advocates who dominate social media discussions on energy by promoting SMRs and other “advanced” nuclear technologies as the only real solution for the climate crisis. But as I showed in my 2013 and 2021 reports, the hype surrounding SMRs is way overblown, and my conclusions remain valid today.
Unfortunately, much of this SMR happy talk is rooted in misinformation, which always brings me back to the same question: If the nuclear bros have such a great SMR story to tell, why do they have to exaggerate so much?
Here are five facts about SMRs that the nuclear industry and the “nuclear bros” who push its message don’t want you, the public, to know.
1. SMRs are not more economical than large reactors.
2. SMRs are not generally safer or more secure than large light-water reactors.
3. SMRs will not reduce the problem of what to do with radioactive waste.
4. SMRs cannot be counted on to provide reliable and resilient off-the-grid power for facilities, such as data centers, bitcoin mining, hydrogen or petrochemical production.
5. SMRs do not use fuel more efficiently than large reactors.
Despite the claims of developers, it is very unlikely that any reasonably foreseeable SMR design would be able to safely operate without reliable access to electricity from the grid to power coolant pumps and other vital safety systems. Just like today’s nuclear plants, SMRs will be vulnerable to extreme weather events or other disasters that could cause a loss of offsite power and force them to shut down. In such situations a user such as a data center operator would have to provide backup power, likely from diesel generators, for both the data center AND the reactor. And since there is virtually no experience with operating SMRs worldwide, it is highly doubtful that the novel designs being pitched now would be highly reliable right out of the box and require little monitoring and maintenance.
It very likely will take decades of operating experience for any new reactor design to achieve the level of reliability characteristic of the operating light-water reactor fleet. Premature deployment based on unrealistic performance expectations could prove extremely costly for any company that wants to experiment with SMRs.
How can you say these are blanket statements?
For item 4, there is no math because there are no SMR in operation, but you can read my explanation of why SMRs have reliability issues.
I wasn’t going to comment on this list, but since it seems to be a topic of discussion, I should probably throw in my 2 cents, based on my experiences and knowledge of the nuclear power industry.
It depends on what we are talking about. Overnight construction cost, in billions of dollars, for an SMR is going to be less. The physical equipment is smaller, and therefore less expensive. There is less concrete, steel, etc., which makes the entire project less expensive.
If we are talking about the LCOE cost in dollars per MWh of electrical production, then the SMR might be higher. We just don’t know. The LCOE cost was apparently too high for the NuScale UAMPS project in Idaho, and the project was terminated last year before any construction started.
The important question is how many SMRs are we talking about? One or two plants are going to be expensive. Twenty or thirty plants are going to be less expensive per plant. If Elon Musk only made one Tesla automobile per year, that one car would be super expensive. But Musk has factories that make thousands of cars per year. This brings down the price per car, by spreading out the factory costs over a large volume. Same goes for nuclear reactors. The more power plants that are produced, the lower the price per plant becomes. As lessons are learned, the workforce becomes more experienced and efficient at building nuclear facilities. This is exemplified in China, which has gotten pretty good at building nuclear plants quickly and efficiently.
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This is definitely not true at all. Existing nuclear plants in the US and other western countries are already very safe. But the new SMRs will be even safer, by at least an order of magnitude. I am not familiar with the safety designs of each of the several different SMR concepts that are out there, but let’s just say, in general, the new plants take advantage of the passive safety concept. The operators don’t need to do anything in an emergency. The passive cooling systems work by themselves, through simple physical processes like gravity and convective heat transfer.
The NuScale design is typical of this concept. The entire reactor exists in a giant tank of water. If something goes wrong, the water in that tank provides adequate cooling, so the fuel doesn’t overheat and melt. Its as fool-proof as I have seen with a light water reactor design.
There are are few YouTube videos showing how the NuScale safety systems work.
Note: There apparently isn’t any audio with these YouTube videos, but there are subtitles that describe the processes with text.
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This is not an issue because radioactive waste is not a big problem to begin with. We know how to safely handle spent nuclear fuel and other wastes. This is purely a political issue, not a technical or scientific problem.
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There is every reason to believe that SMRs will operate with the same high capacity factors that the large, full-scale nuclear plants currently operate at. Capacity factor for the existing US nuclear power fleet is around 93%. This is better than any other type of power generation, and much better than the intermittent renewables like wind and solar, which come in around 25% to 35% capacity factor.
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This is an irrelevant straw man.
I believe that some of the molten fuel SMR concepts, with on-line removal and processing of the fission products, would be quite efficient in managing fuel resources and minimizing long term waste. Those concepts still have a ways to go before they are demonstrated, however.
I don’t see this as much of an issue. Backup power isn’t hard to provide and datacenters have to have it anyway. The claim is that SMRs don’t need off-grid power, but even if they did, it isn’t all that hard or expensive to provide backups.
The challenge as I see is to connect the dots between bespoke plants and actual modular components. For the promise of SMRs to come true, there needs to be economy of scale, which is to say a pipeline of SMR projects.
