Slashdot Mirror
A Nuclear Startup Will Fold After Failing To Deliver Reactors That Run on Spent Fuel (technologyreview.com)
Transatomic Power, an MIT spinout that drew wide attention and millions in funding, is shutting down almost two years after the firm backtracked on bold claims for its design of a molten-salt reactor. From a report: The company, founded in 2011, plans to announce later today that it's winding down. Transatomic had claimed its technology could generate electricity 75 times more efficiently than conventional light-water reactors, and run on their spent nuclear fuel. But in a white paper published in late 2016, it backed off the latter claim entirely and revised the 75 times figure to "more than twice," a development first reported by MIT Technology Review. Those downgrades forced the company to redesign its system. That delayed plans to develop a demonstration reactor, pushing the company behind rival upstarts like TerraPower and Terrestrial Energy, says Leslie Dewan, the company's cofounder and chief executive. The longer timeline and reduced performance advantage made it harder to raise the necessary additional funding, which was around $15 million. "We weren't able to scale up the company rapidly enough to build a reactor in a reasonable time frame," Dewan says.
That's cost per kW of capacity. Nuclear typically has a capacity factor of 90% - over a year it will produce about 90% of its max capacity. Gas and coal have capacity factors closer to 50%. (gas is typically used for peaking load, since it can scale up and down quickly; it's not run full throttle 24/7). So the $1800 per kW of capacity for gas is closer to $3600 per kW of actual production. Meaning NuScale's $4200/kW is pretty damn close.
It's the same reason why wind and solar appear to do so well by this metric. Onshore wind has a capacity factor of about 22%, solar about 15%. So if you normalize the metric to kW of production (rather than capacity), you end up with wind at about $7500/kW, and PV solar at about $12,300/kW. (PV solar with tracking can approach 30%, which would put it at about $7000/kW.)