America's Energy Department Works With Bill Gates To Test Mini Nuclear Reactors (washingtonexaminer.com)

An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Examiner: The Energy Department is participating in a major push with electric utility Southern and a company founded by Microsoft founder Bill Gates to develop small nuclear power reactors that are less expensive and more efficient than their much larger cousins. "Molten salt reactors are getting a reboot," the Energy Department tweeted late Wednesday, offering a schematic of a battery-like power plant module that "could power America's energy"... The Department of Energy linked to a detailed description of how its Oak Ridge National Laboratory and other federal labs are teaming up with Southern Company, a big coal utility with several nuclear plants, and Gates' TerraPower to test and develop a type of reactor that uses liquefied sodium "as both coolant and fuel."

These liquid-metal reactors are sometimes referred to as nuclear batteries because they are small, self-contained units, which theoretically can be deployed anywhere, although the version being tested at Oak Ridge appears to be one requiring a permanent structure and housing. TerraPower was awarded a $40 million award by the Energy Department in 2016 to pursue the project.
Currently it's in the "early design phase" to assess commercial viability, but testing will begin in 2019, "which will help validate the reactor's safety systems for license certification by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission."

Comments

Hoping this gets done.

[Chas]

Because small, unitized reactors that can be easily dropped into place, and later removed and refurbished could make all the difference in the nuclear industry.

Then, you can strategically drop a reactor wherever you need steady power and encase it in a concrete/steel/lead sarcophagus and only address it again when the core needs replacing. This can help with the issues involved in building large nuclear facilities in danger-prone areas (like California).

Or, if you need more power, you drop multiples in and gang them together.

Re:Hoping this gets done.

[toejam13]

Don't forget that these reactors can be built on an assembly line. That allows for a stable supply chain, a controlled building environment, and the chance for workers to gain experience in assembling the devices. That should dramatically help in stabilizing costs.

Re: Alas, it won't get past the anti-nuke hysteric

[Anonymous Coward]

And too little too late, China is an order of magnitude more
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/12/china-spending-us3-3-billion-on-molten-salt-nuclear-reactors-for-faster-aircraft-carriers-and-in-flying-drones.html

Re: Alas, it won't get past the anti-nuke hysteri

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because in the US, our pride is really REALLY expensive. We take the motto "failure is not an option" to a degree that passes the reasonability mark, and we apply it unevenly.

Nuclear risks are there, I'll never deny that, and they should be mitigated, strongly. But not to the extent they are today. It is unknown how many deaths actually come from coal and oil, per gigawatt of energy derived. But it vastly outweighs the deaths caused by nuclear power, by orders of mangatude. Even if we produced our power requirements 100% from nuclear powers, which have the same average failure rate we've seen, and experienced X number of Fukushima Daichi-sized meltdowns, it would still not mean the same number of deaths we have today.

I'm not going to dive deep into the number of cancer cases, increased frequency and scale of adverse weather events, potential risk with ocean rise, spills and fires, or any other factors that make nuclear power the better alternative, because all of that is debatable (though certainly no one claims it to be zero). Deaths is an easy statistic to compute and attribute.

Nuclear power is the terrorism of energy production. Billions and billions spent to defend against it, when overhead power lines have killed way more and it would have cost less to bury them. Not all deaths are equal in the US in terms of priority.

Re:Every 10 year

[crunchygranola]

Links?

Please mod this guy down - he is simply making stuff up.

Here is a list of every power reactor under construction or planned in the world.

There are a total of five reactors under construction, or planned, with Gross MWe of 210 MW or less (I presume this is the standard being used here for "small scale"). They are located in China, Russia, Argentina an no where else. And only three of these (two in China, one in Argentina) is a Gen 4 design.

There's 3 or 4 going live in the next few years in the US, 4 here in Canada, 2 in S.Korea.

These reactors exist only in your imagination there are no such actual projects in any of these nations.

There are a couple of dozen power reactors operating in the world with MWe output of 220 MW or less, but not one of these is a "Gen 4" reactor. There instead old designs (>40 years old) in Russian, India and Pakistan which would not be commercially viable anywhere else.

Now there is a company called "NuScale Power" which claims to have planned projects, but no actual projects have been announced (at least, that were not later retracted.) A press release does not equate to a reactor under construction, not have a "planned" reactor.

Re:Molten sodium or salt?

[Anonymous Coward]

The "liquified sodium" a major error in the article, and no one has promoted any of several posts correcting it. From this, it is clearly a molten (chloride) salt fast reactor, so it can burn any nuclear fuels. Opponents of nuclear often conflate the chemically stable salts used in MSRs with the reactive sodium metal commonly used as coolant in fast reactors. For MSRs based on fluoride salts, they conflate it with liquid fluorine, which is even more horrifying and wrong. It is a deliberate attempt to confuse people and damage the reputation of MSRs, which are remarkably safe.

Molten salts exhibit exceptional chemically stability, are impervious to radiation, and have very high boiling points, making them an ideal medium for nuclear reactions. The most dangerous fission products which are volatile in conventional solid-fueled reactors, form stable salt compounds in an MSR, and remain trapped even in the event of an accident. In an MSR, there is no pressure or stored chemical energy to be released, so any dispersal of radioactivity is impossible.

Re: Alas, it won't get past the anti-nuke hysteric

[blindseer]

You can't produce nuclear plants fast enough.

Sure we can.

There was a time when the USA could build them "fast enough", and the USA has only grown in population, industrial capacity, and wealth. We can afford to build new nuclear. We can't afford not to. The USA built 99 reactors between 1967 and 1990. That's nearly 5 per year, but they were going online much faster than that at the peak.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...

Just to keep up with the rate of expected closures of old coal and nuclear, and growing electrical demand, the USA will have to build about 2 new nuclear power reactors, of about 1GW capacity, every month. Once we've replaced all the old power plants we will have to keep building them at that rate to replace the ones we build today in 40 or 50 years. This is consistent with EIA projections of 20GW of new natural gas electrical generation capacity this year.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinene...

I have heard from a nuclear engineer that a nuclear power plant takes no more materials or engineering than nuclear power. The only difference is in the paperwork. If we can get all the legal hurdles out of the way then we could be building new nuclear like we did in the 1970s and 1980s.

Nuclear power is safe, clean, reliable, and we can build it as cheap as anything. Even with all the current bureaucracy on building nuclear power it is competitive with wind and natural gas, and it's certainly cheaper than solar right now. It's not as cheap as natural gas just yet but it only takes a spike in demand, and therefore prices, to flip that around. I expect that to happen after a couple years of 20GW of more natural gas power coming online every year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It seems all there is to say against nuclear are easily debunked lies. We will have more nuclear power, that not a question any more. The only questions to answer is how quickly we can ramp up production and what kind of nuclear power we will be building. We can build more light water solid fuel reactors like we have for decades, or we can move beyond that and build molten salt reactors.