By David Wojick
It is early days, but the nuclear future looms large for Wyoming and the world. To nuke or not to nuke; that is the question.
Many of my readers will have heard of Small Modular Reactors (SMR), which are the hoped-for future of nuclear power. The very first U.S. application for an SMR has been filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and it is in western Wyoming, about as far away from everybody as you can get and still be in America.
It is called the Natrium Plant near Kemmerer, Wyoming. By a wonderful coincidence, Kemmerer is named after a Pennsylvania coal baron and 70 years ago, was the world’s biggest open-pit coal mine. Maybe they can do for nuclear what they did for coal.
At 345 MW, the proposed plant is a normal SMR. Unfortunately, they have thrown in storage capacity which makes it complicated. In fact, there seems to be an important bit of confusion here. The applicant is Terrapower, and they say the nuke plus storage runs 500 MW. But NRC says it is an 850 MW project.
In either case, NRC seems to be going “outside the fence,” as they say. They are asking for comments on the scope of the coming environmental impact assessment.
See https://www.regulations.gov/document/NRC-2024-0078-0006
It looks like the NRC are including the storage facility in their EIS. According to Terrapower: “The project features a 345 MW sodium-cooled fast reactor with a molten salt-based energy storage system.”
I have no idea what a molten salt-based energy storage system is, but neither does the NRC. The point is that this is none of their business. It should not be part of their environmental assessment, as I am sure it would take them ten years or more to get up to speed on this storage technology.
If Terrapower wanted to fill the surrounding rangeland area with truckload-sized Tesla battery packs to store the power for when the wind does not blow or the sun shine, that has nothing to do with the approval of this small nuke.
On the other hand Terrapower says this, “The energy storage capability allows the plant to integrate seamlessly with renewable resources and is the only advanced reactor design with this unique feature.”
So they say it is a design feature of the reactor! I do not see how, but they may have baited their own trap.
NRC is taking comments until August 12 on the scope of their environmental assessment. A nice local article that includes a link to the Federal Register page is here: https://wyofile.com/is-wyomings-first-ever-nuclear-reactor-a-good-idea-the-feds-want-your-input/
As of this writing, there have been just 28 comments, mostly saying we do or do not like nukes. The entire SMR industry seems to have missed the point here. Molten salt storage is not part of nuclear power.
Mind you, my understanding is that the NRC would really like to see a bunch of new nukes. I think their entire budget is funded by a tax on nuclear power. Given that the U.S. nuclear fleet is running on 50 years old, the end of the NRC road is within sight, as it were.
I have a hard time seeing storage as part of the reactor design, but if it is, I strongly suggest a revised design, one the NRC can quickly approve.
In closing I do have to mention that Terrapower is a Bill Gates company. Gates is working hard to make money out of climate change, and this is part of that, but just part. The issue here is nuclear power, not climate change.
But some of the public statements in opposition are hilarious because, to some people Bill Gates is the Devil or a close relative. I agree that nuclear power must be a bit more reliable than certain software that need not be named.
Has the Devil come down to Wyoming? Or is nuclear an Angel? Stay tuned.
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The real issue are Jimmy Carter era executive orders affecting the environmental impact procedure. Legislative and/or new executive orders should revise the procedure to eliminate the nearly endless delays and lack of objective rules.
There’s a guy running for office that just might help streamline this issue.
Don’t get your hopes up. Especially after the last two weeks.
What you’re trying to say is that the American Left, i.e., the Democrats and their supporters in the so-called media, can elect anyone they want to.
No, that’s not what I’m saying. And if that was true, it would have been for more than 2 weeks.
How many “people’s” votes has the Kamal received so far ?
Answer is a big fat ZERO…
Yeah, we get it. The “absentee” ballots are sitting in warehouses in Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee in case they’re needed. Trump won’t win, regardless of the vote.
That seems to be their definition of “Democracy.”
Or maybe they’ll just vote to disqualify Trump post-election:
“it’s going to be up to us on January 6th, 2025, to tell the rampaging Trump mobs that he’s disqualified”
– Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD)
Lets go Brenda
It’s a fact that Trump tends to say/do some strange things- then all the pundits (mostly coastal lefties) pounce on him saying he’s lost- but, IMHO, he’s gonna win- ’cause most of fly over country, filled with, you know, the basket of deplorables, who don’t say much, are gonna vote for him.
My hopes are up now
Special Edition: Dingbat VP Harris Picks Fellow Radical Marxist Walz: Wants To Give Trump A Break?
The Honest Climate Science and Energy Blog: Special Edition: Dingbat VP Harris Picks Fellow Radical Marxist Walz: Wants To Give Trump A Break?
Regarding Tampon Tim,
https://www.distractify.com/p/tim-walz-tampon-bill
Yes, Walz’ political record is about as bad as Kamala’s and is ripe for criticism. Trump is going to be live on Fox&Friends on the Fox News Channel this morning. He’ll probably have a few choice words for Kamala and Walz.
I noticed Walz said he was eager to debate JD Vance, but Kamala did not say she was eager to debate Trump.
Kamala’s handlers need to keep her from going off-prompter. Otherwise, she is going to get herself in trouble.
The main question from the Trump campaign will be: Where’s Kamala?
Kamala won’t do a news conference, and may not do any debates. She doesn’t want to have a “Joe Biden” moment during a debate, or trying to answer a reporter’s question.
Hide, Kamala, hide! Don’t show your stupidity to the American people, if you want to win..
He tried before and leftards from both party’s blocked it.
More important even than permitting this SMR would be to reform the Byzantine regulatory nonsense that adds unnecessary cost and time to any kind of nuclear power facility. I’m not against sensible regulations to ensure safety but the current multi-level regulatory process is waaaayyy over the top.
As for the molten salt storage facility, Terrapower may have put that in their submission as a sop to climate activists in government, which is crawling with them.
While I have serious doubts as to whether human-generated CO2 has any meaningfully negative impact on our climate system, it seems to me that nuclear power is a way to “transition” from fossil fuels used to generate electricity. I’d like to see nuclear compete on an even regulatory playing field but even if not it would spare us the civilization-destroying approach into which climate activists are currently pushing us.
Yes but .. why start in Wyoming, the coal superpower?
Because coal mining needs lots of electricity.
Wyoming is the least populous State. It is 50 out of 51 in persons per square mile.
It seems to mitigate certain risk concerns.
concerns by wimps 🙂
If they can make it work there
They can make it work anywhere
Except in New York, New York
Because there are very few people there to object, most likely.
While oil, gas, and coal have made human civilization livable, they are not infinite resources. Neither are the radioactive ores. It is a matter of time before carbon based fuels will be exhausted, so getting ahead of the curve is sensible.
We need to start on the next technology so in 50 years or so it is mature and ready to deploy (having been field tested) when we need it.
“We” will all be dead and gone before that happens. Where I live, It’s now 35 years later and we still can’t finish an additional 6 mile additional lane on a freeway or even rebuild a 19th century railroad track because of government stalling, concerned citizen lawsuits, voter initiatives and cost overruns due to “studies”.
Meanwhile, in the past 20 years, China has built a terrific infrastructure. Not that I approve of their totalitarianism- just saying, it’s physically possible to do a lot if absurd restrictions are not in place.
And if…
Freedom of speech
Freedom of expression
Freedom of the press
Freedom to congregate peacefully in protest
…are all squelched.
And slave labor is used to make…
Infrastructure construction affordable
Generation components affordable
Cheap crap to sell to foreign nations at slick profits
Stolen Technologies to knock off copy and dump on the open market
Except Freedom of Speech has been derailed by billionaires paying useful idiots a few dollars to demonstrate and destroy public and private property.
Freedom to Congregate takes back seat to Government protecting your health – whether the risk is significant and whether or not you want their protection.
Freedom of Expression has been derailed by billionaires determining whose voices can be heard and who’s voices shall be silenced.
Neither are the resources used to make windmills, solar panels or batteries.
The big difference being the resources needed for the worse-than-useless windmills, solar panels and batteries will probably run out faster than coal, oil and gas. AND that the worse-than-useless windmills, solar panels and batteries CANNOT provide the energy needed, but coal, oil and gas CAN.
SO there is no reason to waste precious resources on worse-than-useless windmills, solar panels and batteries (and on running fossil fuel plants inefficiently on “standby” to back up what we don’t need).
The fact that (ALL) resources are “finite” is not cause to force the adoption of things that don’t work.
“While I have serious doubts as to whether human-generated CO2 has any meaningfully negative impact on our climate system”
There is strong evidence CO2 does have a warming effect, except for the usual CO2 Does Nothing Nutters, but both effects are good news, based on the past 48 years of global warming
(1) Warmer winters
(2) Better plant growth
There is no indication that another 48 years of global warming would suddenly revert to boing bad news.
“CO2 Does Nothing Nutters”
that some people think differently than you doesn’t make them nutters but it makes you unpopular with the insults
And unlikable to the nutters😎
Don’t give a stuff what a RG says, I know he can’t back it up. 🙂
Almost 100% of scientists since 1896 support the theory that there is greenhouse effect and manmade CO2 emissions alone increase the greenhouse effect by a small amount.
The CO2 Does Nothing Nutters would have us believe they are all lying, with an effective conspiracy of scientists since 1896 to create a fake greenhouse effect and fake claim CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
So effective is this alleged conspiracy that almost 99% of skeptic scientists, such as Richard Lindzen and William Happer are part of the imaginary conspiracy.?
These Nutters are deluded people.
Their opinions are counterproductive and they deserve to be insulted.
Because their science denial makes all conservatives appear to be fools.
They ruin the justified conservative effort to refute CAGW by falsely refuting AGW.
Not true, preposterously so. You can’t get 100% of scientists to agree on anything – that is why it is called “science” … science is the search for truth and understanding of how the universe works. Every yahoo who declares that we or he or she knows everything there is to know about anything merely reveals they are charlatans, liars, and/or religious nuts.
You’ve outed yourself.
Still waiting for empirical scientific evidence of warming by atmospheric CO2.
RG is still TOTALLY EMPTY !!
Makes petty call to a fake consensus.. thinks it means something..
NOPE, it doesn’t.
It is just sad, and very pathetic.
“refuting AGW.”
Please provide scientific evidence of AGW.
Please don’t confuse it with AUW like you usually do.
Start by showing the AGW in the UAH atmospheric data.
Do not use the El Nino spike + step, as that is not “A”.
We can wait…. we have been doing so for a long, long time. !
“The CO2 Does Nothing Nutters would have us believe they are all lying…”
Not necessarily that their lying- but that their science is faulty. Perhaps you can understand the difference? When you use the term “science denial”- you’re just like the climate whack jobs who think that EVERY YOU are a science denier.
“Almost 100% of scientists since 1896 support the theory that there is greenhouse effect and manmade CO2 emissions alone increase the greenhouse effect by a small amount.
The CO2 Does Nothing Nutters would have us believe they are all lying, with an effective conspiracy of scientists since 1896 to create a fake greenhouse effect and fake claim CO2 is a greenhouse gas.”
The people that argue with you about this, including me, don’t claim CO2 “does nothing”, rather the claim is that the CO2 greenhouse effect is so small that it has not been detected to this very day.
Thus, there can be a CO2 greenhouse effect that has no discernable effect on the Earth’s climate. And to this point in time, that is exactly the case.
That “small amount” you refer to apparently is very small. So small we can’t find it in the data.
Reading his post, it appears that he thinks ‘nutters’ are evidence of that CO2 does not have a strong warming effect.
Have you noticed that the editor in chief of the most famous Climate/Soft Porn site on line today has serious problems with grammar & thought process?
“There is strong evidence CO2 does have a warming effect”
Then why are you totally incapable of presenting it.
You are a sad little AGW-collaborator.
I bet that some leftist climate howler organization would pay you $1 for each clueless comment denying AGW.
Because you so effectively make conservatives appear to be science denying fools.
You are losing out on a lot of income by not applying for a paid posting posit
There is probably leftist money available for you and fellow There Is No AGW Nutters.
They might require your comments to sound somewhat intelligent, so you will have to hire a ghostwriter.
Again, RG runs away from producing any evidence.
Has a mini-tantrum instead…. Hilarious… and totally expected. 🙂
What a sad little AGW-collaborator.
“comments to sound somewhat intelligent”
As opposed to your tantrum/Tourettes based comments ??
The clear change in Earth’s energy balance this century is due to reduced cloud. So any theory on how CO2 alters the energy balance has to identify how CO2 alters cloud formation.
I have often posted this chart that shows cloud has reduced this century apart from Antarctica and a few latitudinal degrees north of the Equator and ask true believers in CO2 is altering the energy balance to explain how CO2 is reducing cloud at all latitudes apart from two small regions.
?ssl=1
Earth’s oceans are thermostatically limited to a sustainable 30C. This is what regulates the incoming solar radiation. It is THERMOSTATIC. Meaning it only allows enough sunlight to be thermalised to maintain the 30C if the daily EMR is above 420W/m^2. All EMR above this daily average over open ocean warm pools is reflected.
Cloud cover percentage estimates are inaccurate, with changes claimed that are less than the likely margin of error.
The claim of reduce cloud cover in the past two decades is a proxy, with unknown accuracy, for solar energy blocked by clouds.
If clou cover reduction was the cause of post 1975 warming, then the warming would be in the daytime, with cooling at nigt
In fact. there has been more warming at night )TMIN)
Yes, there IS quite good cloud cover data.
What there ISN’T, is any empirical scientific evidence of warming by atmospheric CO2.
You keep proving that.
Just because you are totally ignorant of the effect of clouds, is irrelevant..
… just make you look even more stupid.
Post 1979 atmospheric warming has been totally from ocean El Nino events.
Even you should have figured that out by now.
Land surface warming, mostly from Urban/airport effects on top of the El Nino atmospheric effects.
Didn’t you know that UHI gives a warmer TMin !??
You are the only one mentioning cloud cover percentages. The chart shows CERES radiation data for top of the atmosphere. So a very precise measurement calibrated to ocean heat content for a decade of the 23 years of the CERS data.
The data used to produce the chart shows a 1.1W/m^2 imbalance due to a reduction in SWR and a lesser increase in OLR on average but two regions are the opposite to everywhere else.
You have made no effort to explain how CO2 has altered cloud cover so selectively. No one can offer an explanation based on CO2 “greenhouse effect” to explain that observation so you are not alone but still think CO2 does something – a true climate zealot without an ounce of understanding.
The NRC could be including the energy storage part of the SMR if it is part of the heat sink for the reactor. It is important to keep the power from the reactor balanced with energy and heat removal of the turbine, condenser and any other heat loads. Cooling can increase the reactivity of the core.
That is my best guess, not knowing the particulars of the salt system.
The bit I’ve looked at SMR’s and compared them to gas turbines it kinda looks like
a toss up expense wise. $6Bish for either one. My money investment wise is
on the NGas turbines. The US Navy went down that path back in the ’60’s
and later switched to gas turbines except with carriers and subs..for a reason.
Maybe the reason was that carriers and subs need a lot of dependable power?
The Bainbridge CGN25 was overkill and replaced by I think a Spruance class
gas turbine type. I witnessed her pulling the control rods at low speed and putting up a rooster tail like a hydroplane. I was on the bridge of a ship next to her and I’d never seen anything like that ever. The rooster tail went higher than the bridge and was over 1000ft long. She cracked her stern hull plate several times and they tried different screws ect .unsuccessfully. The subs and carriers staying nuke was about fuel, performance
and with the subs staying submersed. We plane guarded for the Enterprise and when she
went to launch planes at night it was stressful for our commander..we could hardly keep
up at full steam.
“Pulling control rods” does not create acceleration. Control rods are used only to start up the reactor, shut down a reactor, or to compensate for consumption of fuel or production of neutron poisons in the reactor core. Rods also are used to control the operating temperature of a pressurized water reactor such as used in marine propulsion plants. Opening up the throttles on the steam turbines is what causes acceleration of the ship. The reactor adjusts its power level to meet steam power demand.
Thanks for that bit, it was a guy in CIC that commented on the fuel rods.
We were picketing in the area the later became known as GONZO station
after the Yom Kippur war in the 70’s. The upper command decided we
needed to get some practice with our deck guns and the Bainbridge came
along side to take our floating target and tow it. The line shot went astray
and she went to circle around and redo it. The sea was was calm like glass
and her skipper decided to put on a show..that’s when I saw her in full
power. There was only a puff of steam then she got up and launched ahead then circled around…It was one of those things I’d never forget..
Perhaps dependable includes longer deployments with fewer returns to port for refueling?
The planes on a carrier use a lot of fuel, we steamed with a nuke
carrier but there was always tanker in the group for escorts and
aircraft.
…and they need to be deployed, hence no opportunities to refuel, for months on end.
I’d think that other warships do too, no?
The decades-long anti-carbon fuel
nonsensehysteria makes SMRs more appealing. Or it should.But because the climate mongers oppose nuclear, I think the hysteria really isn’t about fossil fuels.
How much water will be needed? Key question out west.
sodium-cooled
Liquid metal such as sodium can be used to transfer heat in the primary coolant system, but water is still necessary for the secondary coolant system for condensing steam after it passes through the turbines. Nuke power plants are otherwise standard carnot cyle steam plants that use a nuclear reactor instead of fossil fuel-fired boiler to produce steam to run the turbine generators.
A nuke plant, just like a natural gas or coal fired power plant, still needs either a body of surface water to absorb the heat of condensation, or else cooling towers that convert the heat of condensation from the secondary plant condensers to the heat released by vaporization of cooling water in the towers.
Hopefully the sodium coolant will be kept away from the water table. The Navy abandoned sodium cooled reactors because even the best designed ships can’t keep the water entirely out.
Not true. Sodium cooled naval reactors were tried then abandoned mostly because of the impracticalities involved in plant maintenance. The sodium coolant never leaked water into the reactor system, which if it did would have had catastrophic consequences on a ship or sub. Sodium metal in contact with water creates a highly exothermic chemical reaction that actually produces a flame and generates a lot of hydrogen gas – ie an explosion.
345MW? How much power is that? Enough for a city of say 100,000 residents?
I use about (A little less than) 2KW/HR (45KWh per day) so using me as reference, 345MW (345,000KW) would serve 172,500 of me
Any Street light in the vicinity? government buildings? sewage treatment facilities? cold weather that requires snow removal from the streets?
Yes, no, no, definitely not
The Reactor uses sodium for cooling and for storage so the storage component is integral to the design and must be evaluated as part of the whole installation.
Not quite.
“The project features a 345 MW sodium-cooled fast reactor with a molten salt-based energy storage system.”
Molten salt energy storage for the times when the reactor does not run??
Energy storage needed to smooth out the thermal load on the reactor to compensate for renewables on the grid. Storage for passing clouds.
The reactor stabilizes itself, which is why it is stated that the energy storage system is not part of the nuke plant. It is simply co-located with the nuke plant.
They should not forget the pipeline for the gas that will be used to keep the molten sodium molten until it is needed
Nukes run nearly all the time (typically >92% up time). So the storage facility most likely would be used to store intermittent solar or wind energy.
Why make things easy when you can make them hard?
Yes. Why the hell do we keep trying to make up for the fatal flaw of wind and solar and simply admit that wind and solar are a really stupid idea and just move on?
I’m so tired of the tail-chasing exercise of trying to fix something that was hopelessly broken to begin with.
The “storage” is heat, as in molten salt contains a lot of heat just due to the heat of fusion, in addition to the latent heat once it’s all melted. The running temperature of the reactor is much higher than a pressurized water reactor (PWR), which means the thermal efficiency of the plant is much higher than the normal 34% or so that can be obtained in a PWR plant.
The secondary steam cycle is supercritical which means that thermal efficiency similar to that of a coal plant is possible.
The Natrium reactor is sized to produce 345 MW of heat continuously. Some of that heat is used to power the steam turbine, and some of the heat gets stored in the separate molten salt pool.
The ability to store heat in the pool means that the reactor can be run steady at some power level and the same time vary the electricity output. This is good because it minimizes certain problems with the reactor physics itself which produces reactivity “poisons” along with everything else. (The neutron poison generation is delayed, which means that controlling the reactor is simplified if one doesn’t try to move the power around.)
The storage pool of heat means that the turbine load can be mostly de-coupled from the generation of heat, which means that one can run the turbine in load following mode and use it to compensate for variations in electricity demand. Load following is the Achilles heel of ordinary light water reactors which mostly cannot do it because of the problems associated with reactivity control.
Safety issues with such an arrangement involve the heat capacity of the storage pool, temperature limits on the pool and reactor systems, and what to do when a leak develops.
The heat storage pool is part of the reactor system, because its temperature varies with total stored energy, which affects the reactor physics. I am sure that is why the NRC cares about it.
I am now retired after working 49 years at a major US nuclear power plant.
Ok, so the storage is integral to the reactor/generator system, not some pie in the sky “we can store it and save the climate” blahblah. That makes more sense
Clearly explained.
Thank you BillR.
This is why I come to WUWT.
Complex topics get clearly explained.
exactly, no other way without spending every second attempting to read published science, often unavailable- better that so many knowledgeable people are here, along with some climate nut jobs for entertainment 🙂
This reported as a demonstration project as I understand it. First of it’s kind?
Yes, with nuclear we do demonstrations first, before deploying the technology. But wind and solar are different.
Conventional nuclear reactors can be used for load following but they are so expensive to build that full output is desired at all times for economic reasons:
Can US Nuclear Power Plants Be Used For Variable Output (Load Following), as in France?
The Honest Climate Science and Energy Blog: Can US Nuclear Power Plants Be Used For Load Following, As In France?
Yes, this is true. The plant I worked at was originally designed for load following, and can maneuver up to about 10% load per minute. However, more than just the economics of the plant investment are at stake. Maneuvering the plant in load following generates lots of waste water as soluble poisons must be varied fairly rapidly in the reactor coolant system, to overcome the Xenon delay problem. I understand that higher enrichment fuel reactors (military) have much larger temperature coefficient and this allows them to be load following with less concern over soluble poisons. But commercial nuclear plants are limited by law on the amount of enrichment to something less than 5%.
The latent heat of fusion that is originally put into the solid-at-ambient-temperature salts to get them melted is really not recoverable for creating steam to power the plants electric generators. If you extracted any of that heat, some of the circulating salts would become solid and this would be a VERY BAD THING in operating the heat exchanger system and in plumbing leading to/from the storage tanks of the plant.
As a matter of fact, at the Crescent Dunes concentrated solar power (CSP) plant, natural gas heaters had to be used when the plant wasn’t converting sufficient sunlight to heat so as to make sure the circulating molten salts did not begin to solidify in the piping.
The heat that is available for use in generating power is the enthalpy of the molten salts due to their mass, heat capacity and temperature differential above the melting point of the salts: ΔQ (usable heat energy) = m * Cp * ΔT, where ΔT is the design operating temperature of the molten salts minus a degree or two above the melting (fusion) point of the salt material.
Well said. I actually meant to say sensible heat. You are correct that the molten salt pool must remain molten to be usable.
There are other fourth-generation MSR plants being built besides the one in Wyoming.
https://www.powermag.com/another-fourth-generation-nuclear-reactor-begins-construction-in-the-u-s/
July 30, 2024
“Construction of Hermes, Kairos Power’s 35-MWth iterative non-power demonstration molten salt nuclear reactor, has officially kicked off in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The effort marks another major step for the burgeoning advanced nuclear industry, which celebrated the groundbreaking of TerraPower’s Kemmerer 1, a pioneering sodium-cooled fast reactor demonstration, in June.
Site work and excavation for the Hermes demonstration commenced earlier this month at the East Tennessee Technology Park Heritage Center (ETTP) site in Oak Ridge, spearheaded by heavy civil construction firm Barnard Construction Co., Kairos, announced on July 30.
When completed as anticipated in 2027, Hermes will become Kairos Power’s first nuclear build. The demonstration molten salt reactor is part of the Alameda, California–based engineering company’s notable “rapid iterative development approach” to developing and marketing nuclear power plant designs based on its fluoride salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor (KP-FHR) technology.”
******************
If any effort is to be made and any money spent to move forward beyond fossil fuel electrical energy, it will be with fourth generation nuclear power technologies like those in the articles mentioned here. The CAGW pushers, with their solar panels and wind turbines, are barking up the wrong tree and wasting their time and the taxpayers’ money if they think it will happen their way.
But i guess that is what happens when politicians listen to the wrong people and take us all down the wrong road.
Yep, we should be following the Yellow Cake Road
Thorium too Bryan.
Unfortunately have yet to see Thorium working at utility scale
I probably should have said the potential for thorium if and when they get a plant working that can run on it.
All for it then😁
Can do!
Remember the Crescent Dunes solar plant fiasco. They stored solar heat in molten salts to produce power at night. Could not make it work. Their salts were not radioactive.
I would rather comment on a working prototype than on a pile of plans.
If it means anything to you George, there was a molten salt reactor experiment that operated for a number of years at Oak Ridge back in the 1960s.
https://www.ornl.gov/molten-salt-reactor/history
“The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment achieved its first self-sustaining nuclear reaction on June 1, 1965. Three years later, on Oct. 8, 1968, it became the first reactor ever to run on uranium-233.
MSRE was noteworthy in at least three respects. Beside running on U-233 and acting as an economic proof of concept for nuclear power, the reactor was fundamentally unlike most modern designs. The fuel did not sit in the reactor core while coolants circulated through; rather, the molten salts acted both as a carrier for the fuel and as a coolant.”
I drive by the site weekly on my way to volunteering at the K25 History Museum on site. Very glad to finally see activity there.
A sodium cooled reactor is new technology in the US, molten salt storage is not new, it’s used at the Ivanpah California thermal solar facility that requires natural gas heat to keep it molten overnight. BTW the Wyoming plant is also going to be a CCGT project, that’s where the the extra 350 MW comes from. This will not be the first SMR in America, NuScale SMR will be with one unit in each Ohio and Pennsylvania both to power AI data centers.
And Ivanpah uses Gas Turbines up to 8 hours a night to keep the salt molten. You Don’t want the salt solidifying
A sodium cooled reactor is new technology in the US
A new civilian technology, maybe.
It certainly would be NEW to the US military.
Google SSN-575.
Here is what Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedZda.org/wiki/USS_Seawolf_(SSN-575) ) has to say about the submarine Seawolf (SSN-575):
“Although makeshift repairs permitted the Seawolf to complete her initial sea trials on reduced power in February 1957, Rickover had already decided to abandon the sodium-cooled reactor. Early in November 1956, he informed the Commission that he would take steps toward replacing the reactor in Seawolf with a water-cooled plant similar to that in the Nautilus. The leaks in the Seawolf steam plant were an important factor in the decision but even more persuasive were the inherent limitations in sodium-cooled systems. In Rickover’s words they were ‘expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair.’
“The S2G reactor was replaced with a pressurized water reactor similar to Nautilus and designated S2Wa, the replacement process lasting from 12 December 1958 to 30 September 1960.
“Although fully armed, Seawolf, like the first nuclear submarine, Nautilus, was primarily an experimental vessel.”
(my bold emphasis added)
So, I stand corrected . . . I should have posted that sodium-cooled nuclear reactors intended for operational use would be NEW to the US military, specifically to the US Navy.
BTW, February 1957 to 12 December 1958 is short of two years of experimental use of a troublesome sodium-cooled nuclear reactor.
Thank you for providing the opportunity to post this.
A “new technology in the US”?!! The Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-2), a sodium-cooled reactor, went critical in 1965 in Idaho. It ran until 1994, when jerks like John Kerry shut down the program during the Clinton administration.
As regards, EBR-2: emphasis to be placed on Experimental, and it should be noted that it only produced about 20 MWe at full power.
Also, EBR-2 ran off-and-on until 1994, not continuously.
OMG, they were experimenting!!
Otherwise commonly known as “not yet ready for prime time”.
I’m asserting, based on lack of any following demonstrated mature technology in the 60 years from 1965 to today, that the experiment was NOT successful.
Why storage at all? Why not put that power into the grid direct and get consumers’ in the region lower electric costs. That would be a far better selling point than these storage boondoggles.
BillR explained below.
a bit more reliable than certain software that need not be named
Yup. Just consider the global internet outage recently. While not directly attributed to MS, that they push out untested software and let the users be beta testers is reckless.
As to the Nuke. Give it a try. But simplify it without the sodium storage component. That can be an add it later. Do it in steps.
If MS actually attempted to fully test a new Windows OS, it probably would not be finished before the next version was fully coded and ready to start its cycle.
The ‘storage’ they are talking about is not battery electric…it is for storing the molten salt, which can be called upon to produce more or less power.
Regarding Terrapower’s molten salt “storage facility” you write: “The point is that this is none of their business. It should not be part of their environmental assessment, as I am sure it would take them ten years or more to get up to speed on this storage technology.” And “Molten salt storage is not part of nuclear power.”
So you know nothing of the terrapower molten salt “storage facility” is but you are confident that it is not NRC’s business. That may be the worst display of ignorance and arrogance I have ever read. Your drawing illustrates even more ignorance. You show a “pressurizer” but Terrapower’s design is a liquid sodium cooled reactor. That is why it is called a “Natrium” reactor, from Latin or ancient Egyptian if you please. It needs no pressurizer. Your drawing omits a condensate system. No steam cycle thermal machine can operate with any reasonable efficiency without one. The function of the molten salt loop seems to be a means for ensuring the separation of the very hot sodium coolant (made hot by the reactor) from water. Water + sodium is flammable and at operating temperatures perhaps even explosive. Hot sodium is very corrosive and has led to frequent leaks and fires among all prior sodium-cooled reactors ever tried over the years. Terrapower is trying to reduce or perhaps even solve this problem and also provide a means for very fast power output spikes needed to accommodate blending of the electricity from their plant with highly variable and unreliable energy produced by solar and wind power. Will it work? Maybe. Maybe not.
You also write: “At 345 MW, the proposed plant is a normal SMR. Unfortunately, they have thrown in storage capacity which makes it complicated. In fact, there seems to be an important bit of confusion here. The applicant is Terrapower, and they say the nuke plus storage runs 500 MW. But NRC says it is an 850 MW project.
So much confusion here. There is no such thing as a “normal SMR.” None any design have ever been built. If by your reported power rating of 345 MW you mean the thermal (meaning heat) product of the reactor is 354 Megawatts, it cannot possibly, in accord with the Laws of Thermodynamics, generate 500 MW or 850 MW of electricity except in very short bursts (perhaps in the process of melting down?) There are three Laws of Thermodynamics. Your statement seems to violate all of them. If by saying “345 MW” you mean electric power output of the overall machine, then you suggest that the SMR can operate at at thermodynamic efficiency of either 71% (at 500 MW thermal) or 43% (at 850 MW thermal). In the thermodynamics of energy production, that is a very big difference. Which is it?
In sum, the molten salt loop of the Terrapower machine is an integral part of the heat removal mechanisms needed to prevent core meltdown. It is clearly part of NRC’s responsibility. In my mind, the major problems with the design are the materials of construction and the economics. Both very hot molten sodium metal and very hot molten salt are very corrosive. Are there materials that can survive such environments for the decades that such a machine must operate to be economical? Maybe. Maybe not. Will several SMRs in a bunch produce electricity more cheaply that a single large reactor? That idea seems opposed to the principle of efficiency-of-scale. If a city disposes of all its passenger busses and replaces them with a very large bunch of Ford Fiestas will the system save money? Of course not. So why will a bunch of SMRs produce electricity cheaper than a big 1000 MW+ (electric) modern reactor? Terrapower seems to think there are appropriate materials and the machines will save money because of construction savings. Maybe. Maybe not.
P.S. The NRC has approved a SMR design by a company called NuScale. They developed a pressurized water reactor design that was to have been tried in Idaho. The project has been cancelled at this point. The reactor would probably have worked well. PWR features are well established and proven many times in many different variations, but it was cancelled because it was too expensive. I expect NuScale is still trying.
The basic idea, as I understand it, is for SMRs to be standardized designs, manufactured in a factory, then transported to the use site. This should mean that the design only need all the scrutiny and approval 1 time, not for every generation plant. Only QC for proper testing of each reactor before it leaves the factory, and probably some oversight for proper final installation should be necessary. The assembly line manufacturer and the elimination of considerable planning and assessment reporting should greatly reduce construction costs.
What always bothers me about the idea is th duplication of material use for each small reactor compared to one large reactor. It certainly wouldn’t approach the wastefulness of umpty ump wind turbines but there will need to be a large number of these reactors if they are ever to produce most of the US electrical generation
From the above article:
“The project features a 345 MW sodium-cooled fast reactor with a molten salt-based energy storage system.”
1) As of January 2022, there were five sodium-cooled fast reactors (SFRs) in operation worldwide. As of May 2024, the BN-600 and BN-800 reactors at Russia’s Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Plant are the only operational SFRs. That should tell you something about the practicality of “modern” SFRs.
2) The Crescent Dunes solar thermal power plant near Las Vegas, NV, employed 1.1 GWh of molten salt energy storage, but was plagued with problems in this system from startup. From Failure Analysis for Molten Salt Thermal Energy Storage Tanks for In-Service CSP Plants, March 2024 (free download at https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy24osti/89036.pdf ) :
“Several failures in molten salt hot TES {thermal energy storage} tanks in commercial CSP plants
have occurred around the world, including the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project in the United
States, causing significant economic loss and mistrust in this CSP technology.” The report concludes with nine recommendations for research that has been “identified as critical to advance toward a more reliable molten salt TES technology.” This is the status of molten salt energy storage as of March 2024. That should tell you something about the current practicality of using such a system in combination with a SFR.
I think there seems to be an information void as to exactly what this new model of SMR comprises.
AIUI what you have is a small 350GWe reactor cooled by molten salt. That by itself is capable of modulating town to about 80MW and up to 350MW, but not very quickly. We are talking hours.
So far its nothing special, but they don’t drive te steam plant from that directly, The aim is to have 850MWe of steam plant coupled to i,t, and in between a large thermal bank of molten salt.
So:
That allows the reactor unit to act more like a gas plant in that it can load follow faster than a conventional nuclear plant can.
It is being sold as a solution to renewable storage, but it isn’t. Therw is no solution to renewable storage except ditching intermittent renewables,.
It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that Gates would include storage to help prop up wind and solar. I have little respect for Gates but if he can move nuclear power forward that is a good thing. Let the CAGW loonies claim a victory for storage being added. In the meantime lets get building a lot of nuclear plants.
I’m glad that Terrapower and others are working to improve nuclear power generation but it’s not a Small Modular Reactor. If it can’t be built on an assembly line in a factory and dropped into the ground as a modular unit, it’s not a “normal” SMR. So far NuScale is the only company to develop an SMR certified by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Their 77 MW reactor is 9 feet in diameter, 65 feet tall, weighs 650 tons, and can be built in a factory, shipped to site, and installed. A 345 MW reactor is much bigger and clearly not an SMR.
The problems that SMRs are supposed to solve are high cost and safety. Anything that’s a custom build, by definition, is high cost. Just like automobiles could only be afforded by the wealthiest Americans because they were all custom built until Henry Ford revolutionized the industry by using an assembly line to dramatically cut costs, SMRs must be built with with assembly line methods. Terrapower’s reactor doesn’t appear to be that.
Work started in June on non nuclear aspects of the facility, so it will be years before we know the actual cost and performance.
The salt storage is alleged to be 500mW for 5.5 hours. The extra cost for that storage versus how often it is used is unknown.
This is a Bill Gates financed green fantasy project that will be producing a small amount of power with some load following capability.
Sodium-cooled reactors have been built and successfully operated for non-commercial uses, such as Hanford’s Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF), now shut down and decomissioned.
With its molten salt heat storage capability for purposes of allowing higher output for relatively short periods, the Natrium reactor is a somewhat different technical animal than was the FFTF.
IMHO, the technology risk factor of the Natrium design is a fair bit higher than it is for either the NuScale VOYGR 77 MWe design or for the GE-Hitachi BWXR-300 design.
Terrapower has published a high level schedule for their Wyoming project claiming their Natrium reactor can go live in 2030.
IMHO, every element of Terrapower’s 2030 schedule is hopelessly optimistic. Which means their estimated cost is likely very optimistic. With a lot of hard work and lots of money to fund their project, Terrapower might get there in 2035 or maybe a little earlier.
In the meantime, I think it likely the first few BWXR-300 reactors will already be up and running by 2030 or 2031, simply because the Canadians have made a firm committment to supplying the financing needed to get their reactor projects off the ground.
Funny that no government regulators ever required that the coal mine have its storage capacity approved before they started mining. It was only the investors who did that.
Interesting, but the cost of molten salt storage is high, and requires heat exchange area to convert the heat in the salt to boiling water. Heat exchanger area is a significant consumer of cash in any power generation method, and it seems the main use of the salt storage is to allow for load variations.
So it’s cheaper to just design for max capacity and actually short the excess electricity to ground if you can’t turn down fast enough at times of lower demand. Although utility companies won’t say that….
A molten-salt storage system uses a salt that becomes liquid when it is heated up to store energy as heat. Since nuclear reactors (even fusion reactors, should they ever become practical and economical) generate energy as heat. The idea is that you store the energy as heat, thermally insulate it so that you don’t lose this energy, and the use the heat to generate steam or however to turn a turbine to generate electricity when it is needed.
A molten salt for this application would probably be one of the nitrate molten salts. (The “Natrium” reactor uses liquid sodium as its heat transfer mechanism from the core, so there are no neutronics considerations for the salt used for storage.) These have already been widely deployed for Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants — i.e., thermal solar. So, their performance is well understood. The difference between a CSP plant and a nuclear plant is that the nuclear plant can be relied on to generate steady power, and the molten salt can be used for load following — storing energy when it is not needed and tapping it when it is. This is much more efficient than using lithium batteries, when done on an industrial scale.
One difference is that the salts in CSP plants are not radioactive.
Note that there is no “pressurizer” in a sodium-cooled reactor, because the system operates at atmospheric pressures. There is no pressure vessel, just a big (usually double-walled) tank to hold everything. The same is true for the molten-salt storage system. Again, everything is at atmospheric pressure (around 14.7 psi).
In that case I find it amazing that they have a way to make the molten salt move from the storage tank to, and then from, the heat exchanger. It must be magic! 😳
For reference, the density of molten sodium is 927 kg/m^3, so each foot vertical distance in a column of liquid sodium will add a bottom pressure of about 0.40 psid.
And the density of the typical molten salt (60% sodium nitrate and 40% potassium nitrate) used for energy storage in power plants is 1880 kg/m^3, so each foot vertical distance in a column of molten salt will add a bottom pressure of about 0.82 psid.