Magical Trade
Monday, June 27, 2022
  • Home
  • Trade News
  • Email Whitelisting
  • Privacy Policy
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Trade News
  • Email Whitelisting
  • Privacy Policy
No Result
View All Result
Magical Trade
No Result
View All Result
Home Trade News

Bill Gates’ TerraPower aims to build its first advanced nuclear reactor in a coal town in Wyoming

by
November 17, 2021
in Trade News
0
0
SHARES
0
VIEWS
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

RELATED POSTS

Man in custody after Rudy Giuliani was ‘slapped’ in the back, police say

Fund manager names one trend that will ‘affect all industries’ — and reveals how he’s trading it

Kemmerer, Wyoming, is a frontier coal town. It was organized in 1897 by coal miners and still employs people in the coal and natural gas industries today.

Photo courtesy TerraPower

TerraPower, a start-up co-founded by Bill Gates to revolutionize designs for nuclear reactors, has chosen Kemmerer, Wyoming, as the preferred location for its first demonstration reactor. It aims to build the plant in the frontier-era coal town by 2028.

Construction of the plant will be a job bonanza for Kemmerer, with 2,000 workers at its peak, said TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque in a video call with reporters Tuesday.

It will also provide new clean-energy jobs to a region dominated by the coal and gas industry. Today, a local power plant, a coal mine and a natural gas processing plant combined provide more than 400 jobs — a sizeable number for a region that has only around 3,000 residents.

“New industry coming to any community is generally good news,” Kemmerer Mayor William Thek told CNBC. “You have to understand, most of our nearby towns are 50 miles or more from Kemmerer. Despite that, workers travel those distances every day for work in our area.”

The town of Kemmerer, Wyoming. The statue is of J.C. Penney, as Kemmerer is home of the first Penney store, William Thek, the mayor of Kemmerer told CNBC.

Photo courtesy William Thek

For TerraPower, picking a location was a matter of geological and technical factors, such as seismic and soil conditions, and community support, said Levesque.

Once built, the plant will provide a baseload of 345 megawatts, with the potential to expand its capacity to 500 megawatts.

For reference, 1 gigawatt, or 1,000 megawatts, of energy will power a midsize city, and a small town can operate on about 1 megawatt, according to a rule of thumb Microsoft co-founder Gates provided in his recent book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.” The United States uses 1,000 gigawatts and the world needs 5,000 gigawatts, he wrote.

It will cost about $4 billion to build the plant, with half of that money coming from TerraPower and the other half from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program.

“It’s a very serious government grant. This was necessary, I should mention, because the U.S. government and the U.S. nuclear industry was falling behind,” said Levesque.

“China and Russia are continuing to build new plants with advanced technologies like ours, and they seek to export those plants to many other countries around the world,” Levesque said. “So the U.S. government was concerned that the U.S. hasn’t been moving forward in this way.”

Once built, the plant should provide power for 60 years, Levesque said.

How TerraPower’s reactors are different

The Kemmerer plant will be the first to use an advanced nuclear design called Natrium, developed by TerraPower with GE-Hitachi.

Natrium plants use liquid sodium as a cooling agent instead of water. Sodium has a higher boiling point and can absorb more heat than water, which means high pressure does not build up inside the reactor, reducing the risk of an explosion.

Also, Natrium plants do not require an outside energy source to operate their cooling systems, which can be a vulnerability in the case of an emergency shutdown. This contributed to the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, when a tsunami shut down the diesel generators running its backup cooling system, contributing to a meltdown and release of radioactive material.

An artists rendering of a Natrium power plant from TerraPower.

Photo courtesy TerraPower

Natrium plants can also store heat in tanks of molten salt, conserving the energy for later use like a battery and enabling the plant to bump its capacity up from 345 to 500 megawatts for five hours.

The plants are also smaller than conventional nuclear power plants, which should make them faster and cheaper to build than conventional power plants. TerraPower aims to get the cost of its plants down to $1 billion, a quarter of the budget for the first one in Kemmerer.

“One important thing to realize is the first plant always costs more,” said Levesque.

Finally, Natrium plants produce less waste, a problematic and dangerous byproduct of nuclear fission.

‘Times are changing’

The Kemmerer plant still faces a couple of hurdles, including federal permitting.

“There’s a comprehensive licensing process overseen by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that, frankly, is expensive,” Levesque said. “There are many, many reviews.”

Also, the fuel that the Natrium plant uses is called high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, which is not yet available at commercial scale.

The existing fleet of nuclear reactors in the United States runs uranium-235 fuel enriched up to 5%, the Department of Energy says, while HALEU is enriched between 5% and 20%.

“Sadly, we don’t have this enrichment capability in the U.S. today,” Levesque said. “And this is an area of great concern of the U.S. government and specifically the Department of Energy.”

But it’s coming, he said. “I’m really certain that we’re going to establish that capability” in another public-private partnership, similar to the way the Natrium power plant demonstration is being built.

Once built, the plant will be turned over to Rocky Mountain Power, a division of Berkshire Hathaway Energy’s PacifiCorp, to operate.

There, it will become part of Rocky Mountain Power’s decarbonization plan.

Coal-fired plants like the Naughton facility in Kemmerer “have benefited our customers for decades with very low-cost power,” Gary Hoogeveen, president and CEO of Rocky Mountain Power, said Tuesday. “And we appreciate that. But times are changing.”

“External requirements from the federal government, state governments, regulatory agencies are going to require that we change, and we’re going to need to decarbonize,” he said. “As we go down that path, we see the Natrium project as being incredibly valuable to our customers.”

Wind power is also a part of that effort. So far, Rocky Mountain Power has built 2,000 megawatts of wind-power capacity in Wyoming, and that’s going to grow.

“Wyoming is a tremendous wind-resource state,” Hoogeveen said. “We expect to build many more thousands of megawatts of wind capacity in the state.”

But the nuclear power plant in Kemmerer will be a key bridge for the state, Hoogeveen said.

“It is a great spot for absorbing the intermittency of the renewable resources and using the storage that’s built in that is so incredibly valuable to us,” he said.

ShareTweetPin

Related Posts

Man in custody after Rudy Giuliani was ‘slapped’ in the back, police say

by
June 27, 2022
0

A man was taken into custody Sunday after he was alleged to have slapped former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani...

Fund manager names one trend that will ‘affect all industries’ — and reveals how he’s trading it

by
June 27, 2022
0

For decades, globalization has been an established part of the global economic system, but fund manager Dan Katz believes its...

These global stocks look oversold — and analysts are expecting a rebound

by
June 27, 2022
0

Market watchers have been reluctant to call the bottom on the sell-off in global stocks this year, but some assets...

Asia-Pacific markets gain as investors monitor recession fears

by
June 27, 2022
0

A man walks past the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE), operated by Japan Exchange Group Inc. (JPX), in Tokyo, Japan, on...

Russia Defaults on Foreign Debt for First Time Since 1918

by
June 27, 2022
0

Associated Press EXPLAINER: What's the impact of a Russian debt default? Russia is poised to default on its foreign debt...

Next Post

November 17th COVID-19: New Cases and Hospitalizations Increasing

Despite Jamie Dimon blasting Bitcoin as 'worthless,' JPMorgan just set a new price target for the crypto of $146,000 — here's how to jump in

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

email

Get the daily email about stock.

Please Enter Your Email Address:



By opting in you agree to our Privacy Policy. You also agree to receive emails from us and our affiliates. Remember that you can opt-out any time, we hate spam too!

MOST VIEWED

  • Forget Tesla — this auto stock is the one to buy right now, analyst says

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Fund manager believes FAANG is dead — says now it’s all about MANTA

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Bank of America names its top global tech stocks — including one it says has upside of 100%

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • ‘Conviction sell’: UBS says avoid these global stocks amid rising headwinds

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • These are the global stocks to own if stagflation hits, according to Credit Suisse

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Home
  • Trade News
  • Email Whitelisting
  • Privacy Policy
All rights reserved by www.magicaltrade.net
No Result
View All Result
  • Email Whitelisting
  • Home
  • Privacy Policy

All rights reserved by www.magicaltrade.net