Non Nuclear Portions of Wyoming's Kemmerer Nuclear Power Plant to Start Construction This Summer.

[NNadir]

TerraPower submits Natrium construction application to the NRC

Excerpts:

TerraPower today submitted its formal construction permit application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the Natrium reactor demonstration project—a milestone submission for the nation’s first commercial advanced reactor of its kind.

TerraPower purchased land in Wyoming near one of the state’s retiring coal plants to deploy its Natrium sodium fast reactor technology. Kemmerer Power Station Unit 1 would operate a 345-MW sodium-cooled reactor in conjunction with molten salt–based energy storage...

...A closer look: Natrium will use liquid sodium as a coolant instead of water. According to TerraPower, the reactor features improved fuel utilization, enhanced safety features, and a streamlined plant layout that will require fewer overall materials to construct. Because of the reactor’s storage technology, it can boost the system’s output to 500 MWe for more than five and a half hours when needed to meet additional grid demand...

... Support for the project: Natrium is one of two advanced reactor demonstration projects selected for competitive funding through the Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. (X-energy’s Xe-100 is the other.) TerraPower received $1.6 billion in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law signed by President Biden in November 2022, which is to be used to ensure the completion of the plant. The company has also raised more than $1 billion in private funding.

Last month, TerraPower announced the second round of contracts for long-lead suppliers supporting the development of the Natrium reactor.

I'm not a sodium coolant kind of guy myself, but this reactor has features of the "breed and burn" concept which will allow it ultimately to run on depleted uranium, if I understand the design well.

Light a Candle, an Innovative Burn Up Strategy for Nuclear Reactors. (Hiroshi Sekimoto)

This will help to generate plutonium necessary if we are to have any hope of addressing climate change.

[Vogon_Glory]

1. Interesting,

This layman was worried that they’d stopped work on the reactor.

As a party-pooper bent on spoiling hysteria about nukes in Kemmerer, having been out that way (howbeit not on the construction site), I’d like to inform the rest of the readers that Kemmerer is way out in the Wyoming boondocks, so there might be other, more dangerous things to throw a tizzy about xe, like other drivers and maybe the odd deer or antelope that doesn’t look both ways before crossing the highway.

[SarahD]

2. Kemmerer trivia.

They pronounce it "kemmer." I guess they found the extra syllable superfluous. There is a very cool.fossil bed national monument just a few miles down the road.

[vanamonde]

3. And, the original JCPenney store

Founded 1902