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Comment by rgmerk | Hacker News Reader

Their hoped-for completion date is "2031". Anyone want to hazard a guess about what their actual completion date for this plant will be?

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Presumably it’ll end up like the NuScale one, raise a few billion for design and prototyping and then every 6 months or so increase the target wholesale price by 50% until it makes no sense at all economically to begin primary construction. They’ll reverse IPO along the way and manipulate the stock enough to get insiders paid out while the carcass of a company trundles along.

In theory, at least, they have finished their design, had it reviewed by the NRC, and had it approved, so there should be no significant design changes.

But that also applies for the current generation of reactors and nobody can build them to schedule or budget in the USA or Europe.

> so there should be no significant design changes

The NRC frequently changes requirements for reactors while they're under construction. The NRC does not waive the right to demand changes merely due to prior design approval. This is a novel (for the US) design, so there will be unanticipated changes as the project progresses.

Russia has been operating two sodium cooled fast reactors for decades. The BN-600 and BN-800 are both operating today. The early history of the BN-600 was... interesting, suffering (at least) 14 sodium fires due to leaks. This "Natrium" design is similar; a sodium pool with two sodium loops. They are taking on the additional challenge of storing a massive quantity of molten salt. It's going to take a lot of effort by many steely eyed missile people to make this happen.

Trump issued an EO in 2025 that's supposed to make the NRC more circumspect about requiring changes of approved designs. Then there is all the pull Gates has. Wyoming is no hotbed of anti-nuclear activism. So that's all to TerraPower's favor. But TerraPower will need to fully utilize all the tailwind it can find to make this work.

Yep. NuScale received design certification as well and still ended up with multiple huge revisions. It’s not easy to build any nuclear, much less a FOAK reactor.

But when that fails, you can just siphon up taxpayer money via your connections to the ruling cabal.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/tiny-trump-linked-firm-in-line...

To reference Admiral Rickover's 'Paper Reactor' memo [1], TerraPower is now going to commence transforming their paper design into a practical reactor. Historically, this does not usually prove successful.

1. https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html

No. They have Bill Gates as a founder. Bill Gates understands that nuclear is a long game.

> They’ll reverse IPO along the way and manipulate the stock enough to get insiders paid out while the carcass of a company trundles along.

I'm not sure what "reverse IPO" means, maybe you mean they'll be acquired by a SPAC, like NuScale was. I doubt it. Bill Gates founded Terrapower in 2008, he is not looking for a quick buck.

Reverse IPO is a way for scammy companies to go public by being acquired by an already public penny stock - precursor to the later SPAC shell games to do the same. Basically all of these companies do it (NuScale, Oklo, Terrestrial Energy, etc) so I’m just waiting for TerraPower to do the same.

I hope you’re right and they stay focused on actual engineering instead of financial engineering but many of Gates’ other investments haven’t been so fortunate and went down the latter path. The billions of dollars in taxpayer funds and constantly shifting tech and demo projects gives me a lot of pause though. (MSR! TWR! Fast Reactor! Fujian! Hebei! Idaho! Hanford! Wyoming! UK!)

No, but I'm certain the polymarket gamblers do.

I did have the same thought, had a quick look (I'm not a polymarket user) and couldn't find a market relating to this project.

Put it this way, if it's in commercial operation by 2031 I'll eat my hat.

If the DOW needs fissile material, then you might be impressed at how fast things are done. The obstacles are mostly discretionary.

There is one, its hard to find. It only has about 19k of volume, so its very thinly traded.

Can you link to it? I'm curious.

https://polymarket.com/event/us-grants-license-for-new-nucle...

China have 28 nukes under construction right now, and have built more in the last 30 years than the rest of the world combined.

Even with all that experience and expertise, their questionable environmental policies and questionable worker rights, it still takes them SEVEN years to build a single nuke.

The claim that anyone else can do it faster with zero recent experience isn’t only laughable, it’s downright fraud.

The Chinese CAP1400s took 5 years and that's a new design to them. The first NPP was built in 1951 (ish) and took 18 months from blackboard to grid interconnection. Some designs take longer, others are shorter. Some parts of Vogal were rebuilt 3x times due to the federal government changing the design requirements multiple times during construction. Another challenge is that NPPs are built rarely enough that its hard to be a supplier to the nuclear industry so many parts are custom built per project. That doesn't have to be the case. The idea there is a hard limit of 7 years, sorry...that just isn't so.

> 5 years

Be careful with these figures. I understand they start the clock later than the west does.

Do they? Did japan start the clock later too with it's first ABWR?

We weren't talking about Japan.

We were talking about timelines. Chinese timelines are faster than western but slower than Japanese. So maybe you can expand your thought about how China is counting years differently

Wow, that's A lot. Even though there's diminishing returns with more workers, they'd probably build them faster if they weren't scaling out so much concurrently, right?

Seems like we could match a 7 year clip at a much smaller scale. We'll be forced to at some point, but we need to overhaul the regulatory mess and fix the grid first. Hopefully that happens long before battalions of Chinese drones and droids take over the world.

it takes about 5y for latest units. And their env/worker policies are not that questionable in this regard. Heck, Japan did finish it's first ABWR FOAK in under 4y so China is in fact slow here. The question is rather why China bans inland expansion

China and Russia are about on par in build times now. Korea is next with APR, Barakah having about 8y/unit, W-house and EDF are the slowest for many reasons

Never.

Come April, all the production and construction capacity will be commandeered for the war machine.

flip "2" and "3" in that year

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