Terrapower finally gets a shot to create a demonstration reactor for wasteless nuclear power. I only hope the slated 7 year build time doesn't get delayed.
This is much less expensive than the recently built nuclear power plant in Belarus, the total cost of which was $11bln for a 2GW plant.<p>Let's see how competitive that will turn out to be in 7 years when it's finished.
500MW peak delivery is not _that_ small. But it still puts the cost at planned 2 $/W, whereas solar apparently ranges between 0.82 and 1.2 $/W. It will require quite some political willpower to get this through.
<a href="https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/department-energy-picks-two-advanced-nuclear-reactors-demonstration-projects" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/department-energy-pi...</a> an older article that talks about the TerraPower reactor mentioned in the article, they say that it has to run on 20% enriched Uranium, wouldn't that have the potential to create problems with nuclear proliferation?<p>interesting that only one company seems to be working on a thorium cycle reactor <a href="https://flibe-energy.com/" rel="nofollow">https://flibe-energy.com/</a> . Why don't they invest more into this direction, instead?
The Union of Concerned Scientists report linked from the article makes it sound like a disaster:<p><a href="https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/advanced-isnt-always-better" rel="nofollow">https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/advanced-isnt-always-better</a><p>But it also comes off as one-sided. I know there are a lot of nuclear power fans on this forum. Does anyone have some good links presenting the other side of the argument, that these reactors are safe and/or necessary?
No one managed to successfully build a sodium fast reactor so far. We'll see how they do but I'm sceptical.<p>My layman opinion is that the money would have been better invested in some of the new molten salt designs.