Posted on 05/23/2025 5:32:49 PM PDT by Blood of Tyrants
Home | Politics Tags: trump | nuclear | license Trump Seeks to Fast-Track Nuclear Licenses, Overhaul Regulatory Agency Trump Seeks to Fast-Track Nuclear Licenses, Overhaul Regulatory Agency (AP)
Friday, 23 May 2025 02:57 PM EDT
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President Donald Trump ordered the nation's independent nuclear regulatory commission to cut down on regulations and fast-track new licenses for reactors and power plants on Friday, seeking to shrink a multi-year process down to 18 months.
The requirement was part of a batch of executive orders signed by Trump on Friday that aim to boost U.S. nuclear energy production amid a boom in demand from data centers and artificial intelligence.
Licensing for reactors in the U.S. can take over a decade at times, a process designed to prioritize nuclear safety but which has discouraged new projects.
"This is going to turn the clock back on over 50 years of overregulation of an industry," U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who heads the White House Energy Dominance Council, said in the Oval Office.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
Just approve a design and let them build it and ensure that the design is sound. Perhaps we will see thorium reactors.
Trump is 100% correct. When nuclear plants were started in the 70s, they could be managed by 200-300 people. Now it takes 2,000. If there 3-4 on a site, they can share resources and be more efficient but single plants can’t be profitable.
But the journey of 1000 nuclear reactors starts with one step.
I watched the signing and discussion. Very interesting.
A judge will be found who will find that he doesn’t have the authority to fast-track anything, or touch the regulatory agency.
Cool. Shoulda been done ages ago.
I want a mini nuke plant in every town.
Make it so.
I worked on nukes that had multiple reactor units on one site. The first unit was the slowest to construct due to design issues/conflicts. The redesign solutions were incorporated into the other units which ultimately reduced the time to construct those units.
But as I have stated multiple times here on other Nuke threads, IMHO, the biggest problem was each plant was a unique building design.
Standardization needs to happen to resurrect nuke plant construction and get rid of the architectural features
About time.
If you want to see what works take a look at France of all places.
Standardized designs for the most part if I remember right. One-off designs for each installation are killers and Expensive.
Waste fuel is recycled into fresh fuel. We can do it too. Carter killed that effort.
These guys plan on once licences and their factory is at full scale it will take 90 days from first shovel to first watts to the AI beast.
Sodium cooled using fuel that is meltdown proof it’s so safe we let graduate students play with it. TRIGA fuel is what the reactor that is under UT Austin JJ Pickle uses. No need for water cooling towers molten sodium is not enough for dry cooling. Five reactors feed one power turbine. Five year fuel cycle. If you add a sixth reactor you can run them all at 84% of full power most of the time and drop one offline for refueling and the other five run at full load while the offline one is fueled up once it’s back you.can cycle to another one for refuel and so on.
10 megawatts is what a medium sized AI datacenter would use, and 50 for a large one ,plans are for 500 megawatt AI centers so this group once it cuts its teeth will scale up to 100 MW in clusters of five or more. 10MW is also what a good sized college campus would us or a large hospital complex like MD Anderson or Parkland DFW. Added plus is the dry heat condenser towers are plenty hot enough for
district heating or adsorption cooling too you get three times the waste heat vs electrons with any thermal steam cycle. 10MW is also what a large master planned golf course community would use think form a Co-op with home owners as the investor owner’s, for a fixed share of the output in electrons, and district heat/ cooling. You invest in a 80 year owners.share in the modular reactor from day zero. With modern virtual power plant software and smart meters it’s super easy to buy and sell in real time electrons to the grid or.other individuals or retail power.providers.
This group has their factory open and its first reactor in nonnuclear testing exciting times.
Here is their latest update. They point out in another release that they are using sodium because it allows for zero psi passive cooling and decay heat removal. Sodium also lets them switch from TRIGA moderated thermal spectrum fuel to metallic uranium or plutonium fuels in the fast spectrum should the USA ever get to reprocess fuel to close the fuel cycle and use 100% of uranium energy vs less than 1% of U235. The five year fuel cycle becomes. 20+ years with a breed ratio of 1.1+. Sodium is not just the future it’s the past...The first reactor to make power for the grid was USA sodium cooled fast reactor we stupidly walked away from that tech because Carter and Clinton wanted to hurt the USA by denying us unlimited fission power for tens of thousands of years using uranium we have already mined and is sitting in waste containers. Traitors the both of them.
https://www.aalo.com/post/announcing-the-aalo-pod
I expected this to occur this year...anticipating it....I bought three different nuke-type stocks. The three advanced between 12 and 30-percent yesterday in value, and by the end of the year....I figure a 100-percent gain on each (minimum).
I agree. But whose design do we use? And is the design going to be patented? Will the second and subsequent builders get royalties or sell a license?
“Not so fast!” —District Judge Shake Mah Booty, Obama Appointee.
To give an idea of scale. This is UT Austin one of my Alma Mater’s they have one of the largest microgrids in the nation that powers,heats and cools the 240+ buildings on campus.
It’s 138 MW total CHP and 62 MW peak electrical. That means a single Aalo pod with 6 modular power modules could run the whole show with the N+1 design they propose for 99.999 up time they would meet the current 99.999 up time of the existing CHP. Why so high research needs uninterruptible power or you lose animals, cell culture lines. Irreplaceable research data that must be run 24/7/365 with electricity and climate control. That burn natural gas by the gigaBTU all that could and should be replaced with nukes the most value is the “waste heat” nukes throw off by physics the AC load is the biggest energy user on that campus and they already ha’ve the adsorption chillers powered by steam in place it’s an easy away to nuclear steam for them and of course directly using it for centralized heating. The power turbines are gas you swap those for nuclear steam and Bob’s your uncle.
https://utilities.utexas.edu/chp/about-carl-j-eckhardt-combined-heating-and-power-complex
https://alcalde.texasexes.org/2018/06/how-ut-runs-the-largest-microgrid-in-the-us
This is the way...fast spectrum reactors with 20-60 year core lifetimes in a breed and burn regime. Never needs to be fueled it’s plug,play, years and years later replace the whole module refurbish the turbines. I would bet UT Austin who some of the people at Aalo went too is looking hard at this tech for campus use. Texas A&M me already signed up to get a pod on its campus for CHP testing and use.
[”Aalo is also exploring future iterations of its technology that leverage fast spectrum reactors—a design that allows nuclear waste to be used as fuel.
“Nuclear waste is like taking a bite out of a sandwich and setting it aside,” Loszak said. “Most of the energy content is still there after you put it through a normal reactor.”...
By tapping into spent nuclear fuel, fast reactors could create a closed-loop fuel cycle while further reducing refueling requirements. For data centers, this could result in an AaloPod system that remains operational for the entire duration of a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA), eliminating mid-term refueling costs.
“That could be a game-changer,” Loszak emphasized. “Refueling is a cost factor, so eliminating it for the full PPA term makes nuclear even more attractive for data center operators.”]
Give the job to the US Navy.
Most of their ships run on nuke power and they have lots of them. US Navy techs have current knowledge on how to operate the reactors.
That is where most of the nuclear power stations get their techs and engineers.
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