I was referring to all the government reactors at the Hanford site. Yes I know that the Columbia Generating Station reactor is located on the Hanford site. However, that nuclear reactor is operated by an independent utility - Energy Northwest - and is not governed by DOE - it is licensed by the NRC.
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Plutonium-239 is primarily used for making nuclear bombs. Some countries do use it to blend MOX fuel. US spent billions of dollars on a MOX plant construction at Savanah River Site but it was finally canceled by DOE because of high costs. Senator Lindsey Graham was livid about the pork barrel but to no avail.
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Ha. I live a handful of miles from Oak Ridge, also a SuperFund site. Every time they get close to achieving the goal, there’s a headline that says “Oops, and there’s another whole area we forgot about.”
Haven taken the “official tour”, the area is huge - and that’s only the part they let us see. I sometimes wonder if it’s like a North Korean tour: “here, look at all the happy peasants, never mind the vast parts of the country where you’re not permitted.”
Nuclear is very fun, right up until it isn’t.
Likewise, support for nuclear is higher here than other places I’ve lived. I would love to see what the attendance figures are locally for “Oppenheimer” compared to the rest of the country, but I don’t think I can find that kind of granular data.
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Hanford is 580 sq miles. It’s a job creator for the area.
Andy
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I have seen large parts of Hanford. I had a Q clearance for many years. Not much to see because the many facilities are radioactive and in the cleanup process. The DOE Hanford website has all the pictures you ever would want to see about the old stuff and the current stuff. One of the more interesting facilities is the old N-Reactor.
IMO it can not be done by end of 2030 because that means 6.5 years from concept to actual power production.
This small reactors are fully functional packages. There is no need to do concept builds. You set up the right building and security and you plonk the reactor inside. That is the novelty here.
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Show me a site rendering of the Xe-100 reactor project with the sizes of the buildings.
The last nuclear reactor built in WA flamed out in a blizzard of fraud.
Energy Northwest (formerly Washington Public Power Supply System ) is a public power joint operating agency in the northwest United States, formed 66 years ago in 1957 by Washington state law to produce at-cost power for Northwest utilities. Headquartered in the Tri-Cities at Richland, Washington, the WPPSS became commonly (and derisively) known as “Whoops!”,[1][2] due to over-commitment to nuclear power in the 1970s which brought about financial collapse and the second largest municipal bond default in U.S. history.[ }}
intercst
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Support for mass chicken farming is huge in Arkansas. Since many people work in the massive chicken farming industry down there it all now makes sense.
Can we chicken farm in WA as well with popular support? The jobs do not pay well but in Arkansas who cares?
Goof you are casting a slightly green tint in your avatar.
Cute picture. Think it would do in front of a planning commission, or would there likely be hearings and objections and lawsuits and counter lawsuits and inspections and infrastructure brought in…
It may be called ‘turnkey’ but I think reality is a long way from that, still.
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There are chicken farms in almost every state. This mega chicken farm in OR sends the chickens to a plant in WA State for slaughter and shrink-wrap packaging.
When I was growing up in the 1960’s, Arbor Acres Farms in Glastonbury CT was one of the biggest chicken farms in the nation. They eventually sold it to the Rockerfellers.
And here’s a video of the operations of an Alaska turkey farm with a narration from the State’s governor.
intercst
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WA is far from the corn belt. Arkansas has a major advantage in shipping costs.
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The picture is worthless because it has no dimensions or names of buildings or what is the purpose of each building.
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You need to sign a contract before you get dimensions and building names. {{{ lol }}
Surely there’s a planning document on file with the city or town where it’s being located. Perhaps Bill Gates’ site in Kemmerer WY.
intercst
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The same company plans to build up to 12 reactors in central Washington:
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One of the many causes of the WPPSS default is that in exchange for allowing the public bonds, regulators required that utilities implement energy efficiency measures, including things like energy auditing for low income homes.
The program was so successful, the projected electricity demand dried up and the utilities didn’t see a reason to build the plants anymore. The epic level of waste, fraud, and abuse also played a large role, of course.
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LOL! So you can not find a plant rendering with dimensions, but you are sure that they are fully functional packages that can be plonked inside a building.
The fact is that no SMR has started building in the US. The SMR developers are only good a milking the DOE for development funds.
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The following is false reporting:
X-energy, a company building next-generation nuclear reactors, announced Wednesday that it has an agreement with Energy Northwest to build up to 12 of the modular devices in Central Washington.
X-energy is not building anything because they do not have a facility to build reactors. They may be planning to build some nuclear reactors. They are just an engineering company.
The company was founded in 2009 by Kam Ghaffarian.[1] In January 2016, X-energy was provided a five-year grant of up to $40 million, as part of the DOE’s Advanced Reactor Concept Cooperative Agreement to advance elements of their reactor development.[2][3][4] In 2019, X-energy received funding from the United States Department of Defense to develop small military reactors for use at forward bases.[5] Former Deputy Secretary of Energy of the DOE, Clay Sell, was appointed CEO of X-energy in 2019.[6]
In October 2020, the company was chosen by the DOE as a recipient of a matching grant totaling between $400 million and $4 billion over the next 5 to 7 years for the cost of building a demonstration reactor of their Xe-100, helium-cooled pebble-bed reactor design. This is part of the DOE’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, which also awarded the same grant to TerraPower.
(X-energy - Wikipedia)
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There are liabilities for nuclear reactors. The lawyers will get into that one day.
I doubt Bechtel really wants more business in the US. Not much more anyway. Those days are over.
The main issue if there were a resurgence in the US nuclear industry is the relative wealth of the nation. After supply side econ it might be ten years before our relative wealth is in line with a buildout. That window is small because nukes are so expensive.
I get it a nuke in every pot? Or a chicken in every pot? Not quite.