Bill Gates just started building the first new kind of American reactor in a dec

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https://www.autonocion.com/us/bill-gates-reactor-liquid-sodium/

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Source: AutoNotion.

TerraPower has commenced construction on the Natrium reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming, following the first commercial non-light-water construction permit issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The facility utilizes liquid sodium cooling and a molten-salt energy storage system to provide flexible power output ranging from 345 to 500 megawatts.

This project marks a departure from traditional water-cooled designs by operating at atmospheric pressure, which eliminates risks associated with high-pressure steam. The integration of thermal storage allows the plant to adjust output to meet grid demand, a capability typically reserved for gas-fired plants. Success depends on establishing a domestic supply chain for high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel and managing the chemical risks inherent to sodium-cooled systems.

So the machine taking shape on a windswept lot outside Kemmerer, Wyoming, is worth a look: a commercial reactor cooled by liquid sodium instead of water,

American nuclear power has a sameness problem. Almost every reactor on the grid splits uranium and uses the heat to boil water into steam, a basic layout that dates to the 1950s and has not fundamentally moved since. New plants are rare in the United States, and genuinely new designs are rarer still.

The company behind it is TerraPower, the nuclear outfit co-founded by Bill Gates in 2008. The plant is called Kemmerer Unit 1, and the design is called Natrium, which is just the Latin word for sodium. On March 4, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted unanimously to hand TerraPower a construction permit.

Read the full article at AutoNotion:
https://www.autonocion.com/us/bill-gates-reactor-liquid-sodium/