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

Every 10 year

[sphealey]

The "mini-reactor" idea comes around every 10 years. And every 12 year someone discovers that the fixed costs of operating any type of reactor that produces enough power to be useful (e.g. a US Air Force or Soviet "remote base" or "small town" system) mean that a somewhat larger plant is much more efficient, and a somewhat larger plant more efficient than that, and so on into the economy of scale argument for power/steam plants around... 1000 MWe (3000 MWt). Which is what tend to get built today.

The basics of power engineering, nuclear engineer, security, and waste disposal are well known and aren't going to be magically 'disrupted' by anything other than Mr. Fusion.

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

[WindBourne]

You are right that the anti-nukes are f%ing insane. However, most of these 4th gen are much cheaper and safer. Add to that many anti-nukes are environmentalists and know that we MUST get CO2 down, and nuke as part is the only solution.

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

[blindseer]

Forbes claims to know how deadly each energy source is to people.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

Nuclear power is by far the safest energy source we have available, that's especially true in the USA. There hasn't been a major incident in the USA with nuclear power since Three Mile Island, and no one died from that. Problems in Japan and with old Soviet reactors are not indicative of anything being built today in the USA. Even so the death count from Fukushima is zero, or so close to it that it's just noise on top of the signal from the tsunami that started it all. A once in a century tsunami that hit a reactor older than Chernobyl is not the metric we should use to measure the safety of nuclear power. Certainly not Chernobyl, a reactor with no containment dome and operated by drunken bureaucrats instead of properly trained technicians.

The question isn't if we should use nuclear power, we don't have much choice not to. The question is how quickly we should be building new nuclear power plants. The nuclear power reactors we have now are getting old and we need to replace them with something. It's going to be nuclear power or the lights will start to go out. Or, at least the lights will go dim. We can build devices to collect energy from wind, water, and sun, but that will never be enough for a society that wants to keep airplanes flying, and explore beyond the atmosphere. In space there is no wind, and even on Mars the sun gets pretty dim.

Using wind, water, and sun for energy might mean survival. Using coal and natural gas will mean continued air pollution. If we are going to keep Earth clean, and go even as far as low earth orbit, then we will need nuclear power.