Wyoming site of new nuclear power plant from Bill Gates' TerraPower
trib.com
trib.com
The reactor uses molten salt to cool the core. Unlike conventional reactors the generated heat is not pumped directly into a heat exchanger to generate steam, but is instead pumped into a storage tank. The same tank can then be accessed from outside the nuclear building, which they claim, allows them to build the whole power station component to industrial standards rather than nuclear power plant standards, which is a cost saving.
The more interesting aspect of the molten salt storage tank is that it is effective a huge battery. It can be used to ramp up the power to meet demand without having to touch the core. This means that such nuclear power plants could work well in conjunction with intermittent energy sources (wind, solar, ...etc) without the need for a gas peaker plant. In the past a big problem with nuclear was that it was an all or nothing option, as people thought it was not compatible with other kinds of energy sources due to its inability to react quickly to meet demand. This is very promising.
Also, they aren't pressurized like traditional cores are. Therefore if there was a rupture, a bunch of radioactive material doesn't go flying all over the place.
I remember looking into this a number of years ago and I'm excited to see all of the work come to some sort of mainstream fruition.
The feature is called a negative temperature coefficient of reactivity. Most (all?) water-moderated cores have this feature.
> Therefore things like catastrophic meltdowns are not really a huge issue and cooling is much less of a touchy endeavor.
Meltdowns such as in Fukushima and Three Mile Island are a result of reactor decay heat. In both cases, the fission has already stopped, but the shortest-lived fission products are generating enough heat to cause a problem. Pretty much every Gen-IV concept reactor has provided for passive decay heat removal as well.
Yeah, from reading [0] this seems like to be a big thing to kill even CSP projects.
> Flourine based molten salts are quite corrosive.
Seems like they are going with "Molten Chloride Fast Reactor "[1] which I have no idea what kind of eutectic mixture will make this up (can't find anything besides marketing), maybe its something similar to what I was exploring back in early 2019 with various ionic chlorides with alkali earth metals [2].
[0] https://www.solarpaces.org/wp-content/uploads/Concentrating-...
[1] https://www.terrapower.com/our-work/molten-chloride-fast-rea...
[2] https://gist.github.com/cinquemb/015f8b0775db2381513f0e20186...
Both very cool technologies, if they work out.
Molten salt storage buffer like in concentrated solar.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program
Thorium is what India has in abundance. And we're growing to be the largest consumer of energy in the world (as is China).
The only major thing Thorium has that Uranium doesn't is the ability to do a thermal breeder, thanks the Thorium cycle releasing 2.1 neutrons.
If you are not doing thermal breeder uranium is better at most things.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=WY
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories...
1. Only something like 2% of the land in the county is privately owned. Most land is NP or NFS. Also, the super rich have created land trusts in the name of "the environment" to prevent development encroaching on their estates*.
2. We get millions of tourist per year on their way to GTNP & Yellowstone.
3. People from outside communities drive hours to fill a endless supply of "good paying" jobs fueled by the tourist & ultra-rich. At anytime in the local classified, you'll find 4-5 pages of "help wanted" and maybe only 1-3 "for rent" listing
Wyoming has no state income tax, and the Tetons are beautiful.
This is a misunderstanding of what the EIA is saying. The "net energy export" of Wyoming is coal in gondola cars carried by diesel trains, not electricity.
Wyoming does not have significant grid connectivity other than what you'd expect for a very sparsely populated Western state.
There are some papers about how experts are worse at predicting the success of a nuclear reactor than members of the general public. I have the impression that project timelines don't give the socialization phase enough time and then, when it is constricted, the phase will sprawl.
On one hand, there are a lot of folks who are quite sure they've settled on a set of good techniques to manage nuclear waste. On the other hand, individual communities that might host nuclear sites keep not being convinced that the selected techniques are 'safe.' The environment is such that the US has not been able to officially designate a site for waste[1] (or settled on a plan to reprocess waste or agree to a framework wherein it could participate in a coalition of nuclear states to...).
You can't make all the people happy all of the time but our inability to keep anyone happy any of the time distresses me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
They're also a place with a erratic economy largely dependent on declining commodities and a past and present willingness to accept environmental damage and personal/community health risks for economic gain.
I am not suggesting a nuclear plant should cause any substantial amount of such risks, just that I think the opposition in many places in WY would be a lot more muted than in most other places you could look to place a reactor in the country.
This reminds me of the "legibility" problem in voting. Perhaps in theory it's possible to hold a magic unhackable blockchain-based secret-ballot-preserving cryptographically-secure digital election, but the average voter cannot be convinced of its security without teaching them tons of CS concepts (can you imagine trying to explain trapdoor functions in a voters' pamphlet?). Meanwhile, paper ballots can go into a tamper-proof box with a big lock on it--which has "security" written all over it figuratively, if not literally--and you can record video of every time the box moves and invite observers as you count the ballots. Up until very recently, this was so obviously secure that anyone saying otherwise would be considered a lunatic.
1. Allows you to publish all the ballots afterwards so that any third party can do their own recount,
2. Allows voters to verify that their vote was counted correctly, but does not allow them to prove to a third party how they voted,
3. Allows voters to check before voting that the ballots have been correctly printed.
4. Looks and feels like a plain old fill in the bubble optical scan system to voters who don't want to take advantage of the extra security provided by the above measures.
Here's a paper about this [1]. Wikipedia article [2]. Here's a paper on the coercion resistance of that system [3].
[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...
The Wikipedia article doesn't make it clear what threat model is being considered for this "anonymity-preserving backend".
If in your election you have a major party with an interest in preventing a count from occurring, or intimidating people with the threat of having their vote leaked, then "Don't worry, it uses clever cryptography" might not be enough to convince your jurisdiction to adopt this.
They claim to reduce waste by 80% and consume different grades of uranium[1].
https://www.terrapower.com/a-solution-to-the-nuclear-waste-p...
Edit: It looks like they make the same claims about their sodium reactor as well
On their website I only see the claim about using depleted uranium for fuel on the TWR page. Where do you see those claims being made about this reactor?
Who in the world believes that? Nuclear waste management in the US has been the biggest shitshow ever.
> The environment is such that the US has not been able to officially designate a site for waste[1] (or settled on a plan to reprocess waste or agree to a framework wherein it could participate in a coalition of nuclear states to...).
To repeat, its a major shitshow. The US political system has totally deadlocked itself on this issue with contradictory laws that all make no sense what so ever in the first place. Yucca Mountain was a idiotic nonsense idea form the start.
The US has been collecting billions of fees from nuclear operators that are all sitting an an account for 6 decades now and nothing productive has been done with that money. Its shameful.
The right solution is perfectly clear, build nuclear reactors that can consume waste. But of course that would require any kind of progress on nuclear technology that is not made basically impossible by regulation and hostile political and social environment.
We should be living in the nuclear age right now, but we don't. People in 100s of years will look back and say 'They discovered all the essential technologies in the 60s and they were still burning coal in 20202 what was wrong with them'.
Can you elaborate on that?
As far as I can tell, the main reason Yucca Mountain never moved forward was "Nevadans didn't want it". Which seems like a good enough reason, and that should suffice.
But in terms of the basic idea, if you're going to store nuclear waste anywhere, Yucca Mountain was as good a place as any. That's a big "if", of course, but it's kind of independent of the idea of Yucca Mountain in particular being "idiotic nonsense".
My understanding is cursory, so I'm hoping you can fill in some of the details.
First of all, nuclear waste are actually a future resource. It makes very little sense to put a resource under the ground. It kind of like creating a mine.
In nuclear waste there is not just a huge potential energy resource, but also many other potential resources.
The right approach for any technologically advanced society that is continually progressing from the early days of nuclear energy would simply continue to develop reactor technology that would consume this waste and potentially filter out the useful resources from it.
If you actually do that correctly, the amount of waste left in the end is minimal and even much of that would not need 10000 years of storage.
Now, to get to that point, it might take 50, 100 or maybe even 200 years. During this time however nuclear waste can be stored rather easily above ground just fine. Because of nuclear waste transport regulation, you can not transport it so some waste has been sitting around above ground for 50+ years and it has yet to be a actual problem. This could be improved by simply putting them into a reasonable place and in a storage area.
However, there is some nuclear material that you might want to put away for a long time (most actually from nuclear weapons, not civilian fuel). There are better locations then Yucca Mountain but because of some congress insider baseball it was simply determined that it had to be Yucca and only that. Nothing else could be considered and fuel reprocessing was made illegal as well.
Because of more politics and just to make double sure Yucca would never happen, there are now demands that Yucca should be built so it could be safe for 1 million years. Complete idiocy.
And if humanity still exists in 500 years they are either living in the stone age and have much bigger problems then nuclear waste.
If you simply accept no other solution then deep storage, then we should build a facility for 500 or 1000 years (that is actually technologically more feasible) and then reopen the issue again every 100 years to see if the state of the art has improved.
To make it politically feasible you could by that people in that region an outrages amount of money, as it would still be far cheaper then what they are doing now.
More money is being waste on these things then it would have actually cost to simply push forward the technology to consume most of the waste. This is not even a new concept, old soviet nuclear warheads actually powered a lot of American homes without CO2. But I guess its much better to pay billions to the plant operates to storage the waste and then spend more billions on endless research and building a hole in the ground that you must prove will not change for a million years.
https://www.kuow.org/stories/more-nuclear-energy-could-be-co...
From a whitepaper[1] Bill Gates discussed how the reactor would start with "some" fuel and a bunch of depleted uranium. It would then convert the DU into plutonium (PU) and burn it. Letting it run a very long time without refueling and for lower cost.
On their web site they show a two stage heat transfer system (primary sodium loop and secondary loop) that isolates the reactor's loop from the loop used to generate power. And finally the fact that you gravity feed the control rods in and it stops, while running at ambient air pressure means that things like the explosions that popped the top off the Fukishima reactors can't happen.
[1] https://heep.hks.harvard.edu/files/heep/files/day_4_sess_1_t...
one has to be a BG i guess to get that cycle permitted. I wonder what would happened if for example Iran tried to implement that cycle.
> gravity feed the control rods in and it stops
a bit of delay happened in the Chernobyl case, and the rods just couldn't fit into the channels anymore.
Why would that be an interesting intellectual exercise though? The US has had nukes for 3/4 of a century. What is there to be concerned about in regards to that conversion & the US, so long as it's properly regulated and accounted for. The US has had the trivial capacity to spur mass global proliferation since WW2, it has overwhelmingly chosen not to do that.
See also:
https://art.inl.gov/ART%20Document%20Library/High%20Temperat...
Personally beyond safety my objection to nuclear is more about the centralization and massive potential for corruption.
I’d rather our money was invested in small individually owned energy solutions as much as possible, so that people have control over their own sources, instead of the control being held by massive megacorps and government entities.
Modern designs like molten salt reactors are also amenable to making them much smaller which ties in nicely with your other objections about centralization and corruption. Ultimately we could get back to the 1950s dream of each house having its own small, safe nuclear reactor providing them with independent power.
>each house having its own
I’ll believe it when I see it but even in such a fantasy, I hate to think what it would do to property values to know there were such things in the neighborhood.
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00956292/document
...and that's why this one is also going to be much more expensive and will take longer than projected which makes it a waste of money if you care about things like global warming (which is currently the popular argument of the nuclear Astro-Turf) because all that could be much better invested into renewable energy:
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b8099...
https://www.rethinkx.com/energy-lcoe-executive-summary
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09596...
Not every watt of energy is equal. Energy that is produced intermittently, is not interchangeable with dispatch-able energy. Renewable trail-blazers like California and Germany area already saturating the electricity market during peak production hours. The remaining carbon emissions are occurring when renewables aren't producing. That's a gap that only geographically dependent sources like hydro and geothermal, or nuclear are capable of filling. Or fossil fuels, which is what we're mostly using now.
The problem is that in reality the question we need to solve TODAY is global warming and waiting for "subsequent plants" which may or may not come and be finished in decades while renewable energies advance in light speed compared to nuclear technology, the whole issue becomes ridiculous. And it shows. It already makes no sense to build nuclear reactors. It will make less sense with every subsequent year. The only reason states throw actual money on it is because parts required to build a reactor are also needed elsewhere (military). See UK. I can totally understand that but let's be honest about it and not pretend that it's about fighting global warming or "green" tech because nuclear is neither.
Nuclear power is responsible for more green energy production than solar and wind combined. I'm really baffled as to how one can convince themselves that nuclear power is ineffective in combating climate change.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...
Nuclear power whitewashing won't make it "green". This Astro-Turf crap is fuelled by ignorance of the dirt this technology leaves behind for future generations and greed of a few remaining participants in this dying industry.
The fact that there is yet more nuclear energy out there than renewable and true green energy is no argument for nuclear energy. At some point we had more horses than cars but that didn't make cars worse. This weird twisting is sickening.
I've shown with those studies above that investment into nuclear doesn't only waste money, it actually harms the fight against global warming. Even giving you an actual local scenario. This is investment into the future instead of the past.
If scalable alternatives exist, it'd be good to mention what you plan to use and how you plan to scale it.
> Nuclear power whitewashing won't make it "green". This Astro-Turf crap is fuelled by ignorance of the dirt this technology leaves behind for future generations and greed of a few remaining participants in this dying industry.
The entirety of th US's nuclear waste fits in a volume the footprint of a football field and 10 yards high [1]. Alleging that people who disagree with you are part of some kind of conspiracy is not a good way to make your point.
Nuclear power remains the only non intermittent form of carbon free energy generation, besides geographically limited things like geothermal and hydroelectric power.
If nuclear power harms the fight against global warming, why does France (nuclear power leader) have about 1/5th the carbon intensity of electricity then Germany (renewables leader)?
1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
>The Australian study makes it clear that there’s far more resource capacity than is required. They modeled only 300-meter plus head heights close to grid connectivity with limited height dams and found 250 times as much capacity in the US as was needed.
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/12/13/a-modest-pumped-storage...
>We found about 616,000 potentially feasible PHES sites with storage potential of about 23 million Gigawatt-hours (GWh) by using geographic information system (GIS) analysis. This is about one hundred times greater than required to support a 100% global renewable electricity system.
Maybe someone on HN can convert 23 million gigawatt hours to terawatt hours and compare it to 60.
They ran an algorithm over a terrain altitude map to reach this figure. These aren't actual potential sites for hydroelectric stations. Much of these potential pumped hydro sites are in Tibet, which would be prohibitively expensive to carry out any sort of infrastructure project like this. The subset of these sites that are actually accessible for development is considerably smaller.
In short, it's a lot easier to write a paper claiming 23 million GWh of storage than it is to actually build that storage.
Do you think their algorithm is so inaccurate that only 1% or less of the sites these researchers identified would actually be suitable for pumped hydro?
Also in short, announcing an on-time, safe, profitable nuclear project is easier than actually executing it.
Even the most successful pumped hydro storage facilities are quite expensive, too. The Bath County facility cost $4 billion for 24 GWh of storage capacity [1]. Fulfilling one day's worth of electricity storage for the United States would cost $2 trillion dollars. And that's assuming that all hydro storage facilities will be as cheap as this. In practice, once the optimal sites are developed we'll have to start building hydro storage in more difficult locations. And large areas of the country without mountainous terrain are still either left without storage, or we'll have to ship large amounts of electricity across the continent and spend yet more money on HVDC lines. And lastly, this is the cost of just storing the energy. We also need to build the actual generation capacity.
These kinds of broad, sweeping statements about how much storage potential exists is analogous to people saying we can just continue to use fossil fuels but plant trees to offset carbon emissions and pointing to a study showing that the US has sufficient landmass to do this. Yes, I'm sure the math behind that kind of very high level, coarse-grained calculation is correct. But actually irrigating that much land and relocating whatever it's currently used for is prohibitively diffuclt.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...
Wyoming has some of the US's best territory for wind power extraction. Building wind turbines with that money could proceed immediately and be generating power in only months, without interfering at all with the current use of the land, and with no haggling with residents or regulators over safety now or forevermore.
Solar heating of molten salt reservoirs was tried, and failed because it cost more than photovoltaics. Nukes, howsoever innovative, will certainly cost more than solar heating schemes. Also, containing circulating molten salt turned out to be harder than had been expected. I don't know of any reason why containing radioactive molten salt would be easier or cheaper.
A photovoltaic and wind farm driving heat pumps to boil an underground steam reservoir would be overwhelmingly cheaper and easier to get and keep working, requiring no new tech, if the goal is to provide less interruptible power.
There is really no scenario where this project makes economic sense on its own merits. It has to be driven by unexpressed intentions we can only speculate about. In the past, such intentions have typically involved securing public subsidies.
You’re not informing anyone of something they don’t already know when you say solar and wind are intermittent.
Solar and wind should be thought of as paired with storage.
I linked several studies which clearly demonstrated that investing money in nuclear energy is not only a bad idea financially, it also hurts the fight against global warming because you can spend every $ only once.
I suppose it took a few years to bounce back?
interesting that only one company seems to be working on a thorium cycle reactor https://flibe-energy.com/ . Why don't they invest more into this direction, instead?
I was disappointed that TerraPower in China never got going, bc trade-war. The inside bill's brain episode about it all was great.
lol