Posted on 06/03/2021 12:13:22 AM PDT by blueplum
Power companies run by billionaire friends Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have chosen Wyoming to launch the first Natrium nuclear reactor project on the site of a retiring coal plant.
TerraPower, founded by Gates about 15 years ago, and power company PacifiCorp, owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, said on Wednesday that the exact site of the Natrium reactor demonstration plant was expected to be announced by the end of the year....
...The project features a 345 megawatt sodium-cooled fast reactor with molten salt-based energy storage that could boost the system’s power output to 500MW during peak power demand. TerraPower said last year that the plants would cost about $1bn....
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
The Republicans also voted for the EPA clean air acts. Coal plants are being shutdown due to the costs of retrofitting the stacks to capture actual pollution. Coal plants put out massive amounts of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, lead, Mercury and ash particulates in the extremely harmful 2.5 microns and smaller size that get into people lungs and lodge permanently. My lake house is on a lake where you cannot eat the Bass or Stripers due to unsafe levels of mercury the lakes watershed is in the rain shadow of two former large coal plants 100% of the lead and mercury in the water and food chain in that lake is from the decommissioned coal plants exhaust SMU did an extensive study complete with isotopic fingerprinting to the coal ash piles and stack Emission. Good bye and good riddance to dirty coal plants. Convert them to burn clean natural gas or spend $100 million to put full stack scrubbers that use ESP precipitation for PM2.5 then acid gas scrubbers for SOx & NOx, then bag house hepa with charcoal filters to grab the lead and mercury in the stack gasses. All of that is needed to bring coal to just clean air act compliance which is still an order of magnitude more polluting than burning natural gas which has zero lead,Mercury, sulfur or particulates. Nukes are the cleanest power source they release trace amounts of argon, krypton, and tritium gasses which are diluted to part per billion levels by the time they reach the plant gate. Solid fuel “wastes” are 96% fuel that can be recycled into new fuel the remaining 4% is short lived fission products and long lived fission products. Both of which should be turned into a borated silica rock and put down a 5 km still shaft into solid geologically stable Granite that has been in the same spot for a billion years or more. The silica waste rock should be placed from 5km to 3km and the top 2km cemented in with alternating layers of bentonite and cement. The geothermal gradient is such that at those depths the rocks are hotter than the waste heat from the wastes which means there is no thermal drive mechanism to ever have the waste migrate up bore.
This must be a pilot program. $1 billion isn’t much for a nuclear power plant.
Even at $1 billion for a 500 mw peaker plant and 345 mw baseload solar is kicking it’s butt. Residential panels are down to 15 cents per watt in 10,000 watt quantities. Tesla is going to make a fortune selling powerwalls with second life cells from decommissioned Tesla car packs. Studies have shown that second life cells lose 2% per year and have a 15 year life at daily cycling. Solar on the roof plus Tesla powerwall means never having to pay a utility company ever again. At 15 cents per watt the payback is under 5 years with the panels having a capacity life warranty for 25 years and a hail rating too.
https://m.alibaba.com/product/62313907859/product.html
Even the IEA has acknowledged that solar is now the cheapest power source on earth.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-is-now-cheapest-electricity-in-history-confirms-iea
The actual IEA report with all the hard math and data.
https://webstore.iea.org/world-energy-outlook-2020
Twofer with Yellowstone?
Chlorine 37 salt for a fast neutron spectrum operation fosters a high burn-up and runs with low octane fuel.
The US lost the lead in the nuclear race decades ago. We’ve been frozen in judicial Hell for so long that even China has better, more modern nuclear power reactors.
At this point, I’d be thrilled in the US just licensed and built 1,000 CANDU-NG reactors. We’d be all set for power for the next 100 years.
CANDU reactors have huge capital costs due to the hundreds of tons of heavy water needed to run one. At $300 a kg it’s a hundred million or more in D2O up front at the turn key cost for a CANDU. Graphene shows real promise to slash that cost.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15215
CANDU reactors can also burn down to uranium per levels the remaining fuel in spent LWR “waste” no reprocessing needed the Koreans are going to use the DUPIC cycle burning LWR waste in their CANDUs it more than doubles the energy per ton of fuel and the waste is not usable at all fire weapons at that point as all of the U235 is gone along with 98% of the PU239 it’s win win.
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