#terrapower

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Meta is going nuclear! Mark Zuckerberg just secured 6.6 Gigawatts of power enough for 5 million homes—to fuel the future of AI.

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

TerraPower, a Bellevue-based nuclear energy company founded by Bill Gates, announced plans to build a new reactor called Natrium—cooled by liquid sodium—at the site of the Naughton coal plant.

The plant was one of four scheduled for closure that were under consideration for TerraPower’s Wyoming Advanced Nuclear Demonstration Project.

“We think Natrium will be a game-changer for the energy industry,” Gates said in a June virtual appearance in Wyoming. “Wyoming has been a leader in energy for over a century. And we hope that our investment in Natrium will allow Wyoming to stay in the lead for many decades to come.”

Nuclear power generates electricity without the direct combustion of fossil fuels, which releases greenhouse gases. And Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, has been one of America’s most high-profile proponents of nuclear power to help the nation reach net-zero emissions by 2050. In his virtual appearance, Gates promoted Natrium as a safer, more flexible and less-expensive reactor than those cooled by water in conventional plants.

TerraPower’s Wyoming project is projected to cost nearly $4 billion. Taxpayers, under contract terms, pick up half that, matching private sector spending dollar for dollar.

Congress already has allocated most of the nearly $2 billion to the Energy Department to spend on TerraPower, much of it in the infrastructure bill signed into law Monday by President Joe Biden. The company’s CEO, Chris Levesque, calls it the largest public investment in an advanced nuclear power project in the nation’s history.

The Energy Department’s contract stipulates the Natrium reactor must be operating by 2028—lightning speed in the nuclear world. A partner in the project is Rocky Mountain Power’s parent company, PacifiCorp, controlled by Berkshire Hathaway, a holding company led by Gates’ billionaire friend Warren Buffett.

The 345-megawatt TerraPower reactor is designed to generate electricity around the clock and would be coupled with a molten-salt system to store heat and enable the plant to surge up to 500 megawatts for over five hours—enough electricity for about 400,000 homes.

The project would employ 2,000 workers during construction and 250 others to operate the plant. TerraPower officials hope this project can be replicated at other U.S. coal plants.

Natrium is the Latin word for sodium, which would be used as a coolant. This plant would use enriched uranium fuel, which involves processing that increases the percentage of uranium 235-isotopes that can sustain fission.

Levesque, Terrapower’s CEO, says advanced materials and computing will create a reactor that is “walkaway safe,” and produces less waste. The plant could quickly flex power generation to help keep the grid in balance as more solar and wind projects come online.

A traveling wave reactor is a type of Generation IV nuclear reactor that much of the nuclear industry anticipates can convert fertile material into nuclear fuel via nuclear transmutation in tandem with the burnup of fissile material. This particular design is very different from other kinds of fast-neutron and breeder reactors in their ability to utilize fuel efficiently without costly and impractical enrichment or reprocessing of uranium. TWRs instead directly use depleted uranium, natural (unenriched) uranium, thorium, spent fuel removed from light water reactors, or potentially a combination of these materials. 

The "traveling wave" name refers to the fact that fission will not occur throughout the entire core, but remains confined to a boundary zone that slowly advances through the core over time. Theoretically, TWRs could run self-sustained for decades without having to remove and replace spent fuel from the reactor. 

Some have criticized this implementation of the fast breeder reactor design as particularly difficult, especially given the fact that typical fast breeder reactors are already hard to build. Many have lauded the goal of addressing the global energy poverty with TWRs but have pointed out that its overall cost of construction is competitive with conventional nuclear power, and that isn't as low as fossil fuels. Bill Gates has invested deeply into the development of TWRs not, as he stated in an interview, because he "expects to make a ton of money on it," but because this Generation IV design is "very attractive from an economic point of view."

Image: Conceptual design of the TWR.

"Their new technology is still in development, but boasts the ability to turn nuclear waste (depleted uranium) into vast sources of power.  TerraPower projects their traveling wave reactor (TWR) to turn an 8-metric-ton canister of depleted uranium into 25 million megawatt-hours. That is enough power for 2.5 million households for an entire year."