Nice, I like the sodium fast reactor concept. Produces less waste, can be passively cooled when shut down, and doesn't run pressurized so reactor vessel can be thinner.
Sodium leaks can be nasty, but they can be dealt with.
And the verbiage that many will glance over yet will have the greatest future impacts for all alive is: "...includes an energy storage system..."
Todays U.S. meeting "Roundtable on Ratepayer Protection Pledge" with the U.S. President himself leading that meeting garnished commitments from Big Tech as it relates to energy. In time Big Tech Energy divisions will be thing and some citizens will be paying their utilities bill to them.
In Texas and Massachusetts you can actually pick your power provider while paying the natural monopoly for the wires. In time I hope we all can do this.
This is how it works in NYC, but the wires are almost twice as expensive as the power. (If you add taxes and the numerous weird fees, the total bill is a solid 3x the cost of the power.) It's really all about the grid maintenance and management these days.
We do this for gas. IMHO you end up paying monopoly rates for the pipes and then stupid game prices for the gas. Maybe the savvy consumer comes out ahead but seems like a net negative to me.
Presumably it’ll end up like the NuScale one, raise a few billion for design and prototyping and then every 6 months or so increase the target wholesale price by 50% until it makes no sense at all economically to begin primary construction. They’ll reverse IPO along the way and manipulate the stock enough to get insiders paid out while the carcass of a company trundles along.
No. They have Bill Gates as a founder. Bill Gates understands that nuclear is a long game.
> They’ll reverse IPO along the way and manipulate the stock enough to get insiders paid out while the carcass of a company trundles along.
I'm not sure what "reverse IPO" means, maybe you mean they'll be acquired by a SPAC, like NuScale was. I doubt it. Bill Gates founded Terrapower in 2008, he is not looking for a quick buck.
In theory, at least, they have finished their design, had it reviewed by the NRC, and had it approved, so there should be no significant design changes.
But that also applies for the current generation of reactors and nobody can build them to schedule or budget in the USA or Europe.
Yep. NuScale received design certification as well and still ended up with multiple huge revisions. It’s not easy to build any nuclear, much less a FOAK reactor.
But when that fails, you can just siphon up taxpayer money via your connections to the ruling cabal.
> so there should be no significant design changes
The NRC frequently changes requirements for reactors while they're under construction. The NRC does not waive the right to demand changes merely due to prior design approval. This is a novel (for the US) design, so there will be unanticipated changes as the project progresses.
Russia has been operating two sodium cooled fast reactors for decades. The BN-600 and BN-800 are both operating today. The early history of the BN-600 was... interesting, suffering (at least) 14 sodium fires due to leaks. This "Natrium" design is similar; a sodium pool with two sodium loops. They are taking on the additional challenge of storing a massive quantity of molten salt. It's going to take a lot of effort by many steely eyed missile people to make this happen.
Trump issued an EO in 2025 that's supposed to make the NRC more circumspect about requiring changes of approved designs. Then there is all the pull Gates has. Wyoming is no hotbed of anti-nuclear activism. So that's all to TerraPower's favor. But TerraPower will need to fully utilize all the tailwind it can find to make this work.
China have 28 nukes under construction right now, and have built more in the last 30 years than the rest of the world combined.
Even with all that experience and expertise, their questionable environmental policies and questionable worker rights, it still takes them SEVEN years to build a single nuke.
The claim that anyone else can do it faster with zero recent experience isn’t only laughable, it’s downright fraud.
The Chinese CAP1400s took 5 years and that's a new design to them. The first NPP was built in 1951 (ish) and took 18 months from blackboard to grid interconnection. Some designs take longer, others are shorter. Some parts of Vogal were rebuilt 3x times due to the federal government changing the design requirements multiple times during construction. Another challenge is that NPPs are built rarely enough that its hard to be a supplier to the nuclear industry so many parts are custom built per project. That doesn't have to be the case. The idea there is a hard limit of 7 years, sorry...that just isn't so.
You know what would be even bigger? Building perfectly safe and fine AP 1000s that already exist many times today and can be built whenever you want to.
How is this fundamentally different from Nuscale approval? Like Nuscale this is also brand new design, sodium fast reactor, that hasn't been commercially deployed and is likely to run into usual ballooning budgets and western nuclear construction roadblocks/delays
Great, hopefully the ship is turning around slowly. I have been hearing from pro-carbon "environmentalists" for 30 years that "we should have built nuclear 20 years ago but doing so now would be pointless". Meanwhile we may have just reached peak-coal today if we are lucky. Well past time to stop listening to anything those grifting charlatans have to say.
> Well past time to stop listening to anything those grifting charlatans have to say.
Are you describing the "just build nukes" party here?
Cause we've been waiting a while for this nuke solution to actually ship but every example is far more expensive all while the nuke lovers block solar and wind for the same reasons.
There is no for-profit companies that are in it to save the planet, despite what the brochures say. Unfortunately for non-carbon power companies, their main competition is each other rather then fossil fuel sources.
I don't think killing solar and wind projects is what the greens do. The problems with solar and wind are entirely due to the laws of physics. They get large advantages in the energy markets in most places. They have been very effective in preventing nuclear though which ironically does so much real world damage to their cause that all the rest of what they do is a drop in the bucket.
The Kemmerer Unit 1 project... would be used to demonstrate the TerraPower and General Electric-Hitachi Natrium sodium fast reactor technology. [0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor
[0] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/advanced/who-were-...
Nice, I like the sodium fast reactor concept. Produces less waste, can be passively cooled when shut down, and doesn't run pressurized so reactor vessel can be thinner.
Sodium leaks can be nasty, but they can be dealt with.
And the verbiage that many will glance over yet will have the greatest future impacts for all alive is: "...includes an energy storage system..."
Todays U.S. meeting "Roundtable on Ratepayer Protection Pledge" with the U.S. President himself leading that meeting garnished commitments from Big Tech as it relates to energy. In time Big Tech Energy divisions will be thing and some citizens will be paying their utilities bill to them.
In Texas and Massachusetts you can actually pick your power provider while paying the natural monopoly for the wires. In time I hope we all can do this.
This is how it works in NYC, but the wires are almost twice as expensive as the power. (If you add taxes and the numerous weird fees, the total bill is a solid 3x the cost of the power.) It's really all about the grid maintenance and management these days.
We do this for gas. IMHO you end up paying monopoly rates for the pipes and then stupid game prices for the gas. Maybe the savvy consumer comes out ahead but seems like a net negative to me.
There are large solar power stations on the grid in California owned by tech firms so you may indeed already be paying, indirectly, Apple for energy.
Their hoped-for completion date is "2031". Anyone want to hazard a guess about what their actual completion date for this plant will be?
No, but I'm certain the polymarket gamblers do.
I did have the same thought, had a quick look (I'm not a polymarket user) and couldn't find a market relating to this project.
Put it this way, if it's in commercial operation by 2031 I'll eat my hat.
If the DOW needs fissile material, then you might be impressed at how fast things are done. The obstacles are mostly discretionary.
There is one, its hard to find. It only has about 19k of volume, so its very thinly traded.
Presumably it’ll end up like the NuScale one, raise a few billion for design and prototyping and then every 6 months or so increase the target wholesale price by 50% until it makes no sense at all economically to begin primary construction. They’ll reverse IPO along the way and manipulate the stock enough to get insiders paid out while the carcass of a company trundles along.
No. They have Bill Gates as a founder. Bill Gates understands that nuclear is a long game.
> They’ll reverse IPO along the way and manipulate the stock enough to get insiders paid out while the carcass of a company trundles along.
I'm not sure what "reverse IPO" means, maybe you mean they'll be acquired by a SPAC, like NuScale was. I doubt it. Bill Gates founded Terrapower in 2008, he is not looking for a quick buck.
In theory, at least, they have finished their design, had it reviewed by the NRC, and had it approved, so there should be no significant design changes.
But that also applies for the current generation of reactors and nobody can build them to schedule or budget in the USA or Europe.
Yep. NuScale received design certification as well and still ended up with multiple huge revisions. It’s not easy to build any nuclear, much less a FOAK reactor.
But when that fails, you can just siphon up taxpayer money via your connections to the ruling cabal.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/tiny-trump-linked-firm-in-line...
> so there should be no significant design changes
The NRC frequently changes requirements for reactors while they're under construction. The NRC does not waive the right to demand changes merely due to prior design approval. This is a novel (for the US) design, so there will be unanticipated changes as the project progresses.
Russia has been operating two sodium cooled fast reactors for decades. The BN-600 and BN-800 are both operating today. The early history of the BN-600 was... interesting, suffering (at least) 14 sodium fires due to leaks. This "Natrium" design is similar; a sodium pool with two sodium loops. They are taking on the additional challenge of storing a massive quantity of molten salt. It's going to take a lot of effort by many steely eyed missile people to make this happen.
Trump issued an EO in 2025 that's supposed to make the NRC more circumspect about requiring changes of approved designs. Then there is all the pull Gates has. Wyoming is no hotbed of anti-nuclear activism. So that's all to TerraPower's favor. But TerraPower will need to fully utilize all the tailwind it can find to make this work.
China have 28 nukes under construction right now, and have built more in the last 30 years than the rest of the world combined.
Even with all that experience and expertise, their questionable environmental policies and questionable worker rights, it still takes them SEVEN years to build a single nuke.
The claim that anyone else can do it faster with zero recent experience isn’t only laughable, it’s downright fraud.
The Chinese CAP1400s took 5 years and that's a new design to them. The first NPP was built in 1951 (ish) and took 18 months from blackboard to grid interconnection. Some designs take longer, others are shorter. Some parts of Vogal were rebuilt 3x times due to the federal government changing the design requirements multiple times during construction. Another challenge is that NPPs are built rarely enough that its hard to be a supplier to the nuclear industry so many parts are custom built per project. That doesn't have to be the case. The idea there is a hard limit of 7 years, sorry...that just isn't so.
This is huge, historic even.
You know what would be even bigger? Building perfectly safe and fine AP 1000s that already exist many times today and can be built whenever you want to.
0 under construction in the US
How is this fundamentally different from Nuscale approval? Like Nuscale this is also brand new design, sodium fast reactor, that hasn't been commercially deployed and is likely to run into usual ballooning budgets and western nuclear construction roadblocks/delays
If there’s more than one approval a decade maybe the odds will be higher it won’t be a bloated mess.
Maybe. There is a long road from "approved" to "operational".
Great, hopefully the ship is turning around slowly. I have been hearing from pro-carbon "environmentalists" for 30 years that "we should have built nuclear 20 years ago but doing so now would be pointless". Meanwhile we may have just reached peak-coal today if we are lucky. Well past time to stop listening to anything those grifting charlatans have to say.
> Well past time to stop listening to anything those grifting charlatans have to say.
Are you describing the "just build nukes" party here?
Cause we've been waiting a while for this nuke solution to actually ship but every example is far more expensive all while the nuke lovers block solar and wind for the same reasons.
There is no for-profit companies that are in it to save the planet, despite what the brochures say. Unfortunately for non-carbon power companies, their main competition is each other rather then fossil fuel sources.
They got what they wanted. They are still successfully killing solar and wind projects.
I'll be surprised if this project actually gets built, though.
I don't think killing solar and wind projects is what the greens do. The problems with solar and wind are entirely due to the laws of physics. They get large advantages in the energy markets in most places. They have been very effective in preventing nuclear though which ironically does so much real world damage to their cause that all the rest of what they do is a drop in the bucket.