Private/public sector investment in next-gen nuclear reaction news... Next-gen nuclear reactor company signs deal to build up to 12 reactors in Washington state – GeekWire X-energy, a company building next-generation nuclear reactors, announced Wednesday that it has an agreement with Energy Northwest to build up to 12 of the modular devices in Central Washington. The news is something of a surprise after Maryland-based X-energy in March scuttled its plans to construct its first four demonstration reactors in the state, opting for a deal with chemical giant Dow to build in a Gulf state. The new joint development agreement outlines the construction of the nuclear company’s Xe-100 advanced small modular reactors at a site in Richland, Wash., that is controlled by Energy Northwest and adjacent to Columbia Generating Station — the state’s only commercial nuclear power plant. If all 12 reactors were built, they could generate up to a total of 960 megawatts of power, with the first reactor planned to come online by 2030. The announcement did not disclose what the project is expected to cost or how it will be financed. As the world strives to cut its use of carbon-emitting fossil fuels and slow global warming, there is renewed interest in nuclear power. Companies are developing smaller, less expensive reactors than were built in past decades. Energy generated from nuclear fission, or the splitting of atoms, doesn’t create carbon pollution, but does produce radioactive waste. While wind and solar power installations have been rapidly expanding, power grids need some of their energy from sources that operate 24/7, which could include nuclear, hydroelectric dams, batteries and other alternatives. “Energy Northwest’s mission is to provide the region with clean, reliable and affordable electricity, and X-energy’s innovative advanced reactor technology will be a valuable addition to our existing portfolio of carbon-free electric generating resources,” said Bob Schuetz, CEO of Energy Northwest, in a statement. X-energy is proceeding with its arrangement with Dow in which it will deploy its first Xe-100 reactors at an existing Dow industrial site in Texas. That project is part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP). DOE awarded X-energy $1.2 billion to help fund the demonstration plant. X-energy plans to begin building its four reactors in Texas in 2026, with construction completed by 2030. Following the announcement of the Texas project, “Energy Northwest reinforced its plans to work with X-energy to bring our technology to Central Washington,” said Robert McEntyre, an X-energy spokesman, by email. “We’ve been working with their team since that time to determine the best path forward, and today’s announcement reflects that progress and their desire to be a fast-follower of ARDP.” Washington state’s TerraPower, a next-gen nuclear power company backed by Bill Gates, is slated to build its first demonstration plant in Kemmerer, Wyo., on the site of one of the state’s retiring coal plants. That project is a $4 billion public-private venture with about $2 billion in support from the same DOE program that’s backing X-energy. TerraPower announced last October that it was conducting a feasibility study to explore additional locations for up to five of its reactors. Those locations have not been publicized. While both X-energy and TerraPower have been moving ahead with their plans, both face the challenge of securing reactor fuel. Russia is currently the world’s only commercial producer of HALEU (high-assay, low-enriched uranium fuel and pronounced hay-lou). That source was scrapped after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and ongoing war. On Monday, TerraPower and Centrus Energy announced a memorandum of understanding to “significantly expand their collaboration” in an effort to establish commercial-scale, domestic production capabilities of HALEU. The fuel would be produced at a Centrus facility in Ohio. TerraPower’s CEO last year warned that operation of its demonstration plant was going to slip at least two years to 2030 because of the lack of HALEU. The MOU should help TerraPower meet that new deadline, according to the companies. X-energy previously announced plans to create a fuel production facility in Tennessee to supply its reactors. Nuclear Energy Projects Nuclear power plants account for about 20% of the electricity and half of the carbon-free electricity generated in the U.S. However, plants are aging and economic challenges have led to closures and planned shutdowns. In FY 2021, the Department of Energy made 3 awards totaling $4.6 billion to support development of new reactor types that are expected to bring improvements. The Department of Energy (DOE) supports the research, development, and demonstration of new types of nuclear reactors. In line with that role, in fiscal year 2021, the department made three multi-year awards totaling $4.6 billion to support the demonstration of one small modular reactor and two advanced reactors. DOE awarded the Carbon Free Power Project about $1.4 billion for a small modular reactor plant near Idaho Falls, Idaho. Under the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, DOE awarded TerraPower almost $2 billion for the NatriumTM Demonstration in Wyoming and awarded X-energy about $1.2 billion for the Xe-100 Demonstration in Washington State.
as luck would have it https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-wil...gineering-e65f88c7?mod=hp_opin_pos_4#cxrecs_s We Will Never Run Out of Resources The supply of minerals is theoretically finite, but human knowledge and creativity are limitless. By Marian L. Tupy and David Deutsch July 20, 2023 at 11:50 am ET The world’s population has increased eightfold since 1800, and standards of living have never been higher. Despite increases in consumption, and contrary to the prophecies of generations of Malthusians, the world hasn’t run out of a single metal or mineral. In fact, resources have generally grown cheaper relative to income over the past two centuries. Even on the largest cosmic scale, resources may well be limitless. How can a growing population expand resource abundance? Some of the ways are well known. Consider increased supply. When the price of a resource increases, people have an incentive to find new sources of it. Geologists have surveyed only a fraction of the Earth’s crust, let alone the ocean floor. As surveying and extracting technologies improve, geologists and engineers will go deeper, faster, cheaper and cleaner to reach hitherto untouched minerals. Efficiency gains also contribute to resource abundance. In the late 1950s an aluminum can weighed close to 3 ounces. Today it weighs less than half an ounce. That smaller mass represents considerable environmental, energy and raw-material savings. Market incentives motivated people to search for opportunities or new knowledge to reduce the cost of an input (aluminum) to produce a cheaper output (a Coca-Cola can). Technological improvement drives a continual process whereby we can produce more from less. Innovation creates opportunities for substitution. For centuries spermaceti, a waxy substance found in the heads of sperm whales, was used to make the candles that provided light in people’s homes. Long before the whales might have run out, we switched to electricity. Are you worried about having enough lithium to power all those electric vehicles on the road? Quick-charging sodium-ion batteries are already on the horizon. There is far more sodium than lithium on or near the surface of the Earth. We’re living in an era of dematerialization. Not long ago, every hotel room in the U.S. was equipped with a thick blue copper cable to connect the guest’s laptop to the internet. Nowadays guests use Wi-Fi—no cables necessary. Likewise, the smartphone has minimized, if not eliminated, the need for paper calendars, maps, dictionaries and encyclopedias as well as for metal or plastic radios, cameras, telephones, stereos, alarm clocks and more. Perhaps less appreciated is that apart from a minuscule amount of aluminum and titanium that we have shot into outer space, all of our material resources are still here on Earth. Vast quantities of steel may have been “used” to build our skyscrapers, and copper in power cables, but all that metal could be recovered and reassigned. During World War II, 14,000 tons of silver in the U.S. Treasury’s West Point Bullion Depository were made into silver wire for electromagnets as part of the Manhattan Project. Virtually all of it was eventually returned. Common sense implies that since no physical resource is infinite, the cupboard will eventually grow bare. Given ever-increasing consumption, we will reach a level where all useful atoms are physically incorporated into objects that make life enjoyable. Won’t economic growth plateau or reverse course entirely at that point? You can’t have unlimited growth on a planet with a finite number of atoms. Or can you? This argument has no bearing on any real resource issue. It invokes a hypothetical future when we are mining the Earth’s very core for rare elements and draining its oceans to sustain billions of thirsty humans. This is so far in the future as not to be relevant to any present-day policies or planning. Today, the bottleneck isn’t physical resources but knowledge of how to use them to our benefit. Not just theoretical knowledge but down-to-earth, practical engineering knowledge. We need to improve that as fast as we can. For millennia, learned people and charlatans dreamed of transmuting elements. In 1919 physicist Ernest Rutherford achieved the first artificial transmutation by turning nitrogen into oxygen. Today, transmutation is all around us. Smoke detectors contain americium, an artificial element produced by transmutation. Nuclear physicists achieved the transmutation of lead into gold decades ago, though the process requires far too much energy to be a viable alternative to mining. But the cost of energy is bound to fall. The sun is effectively a nuclear fusion reactor converting millions of tons of mass into energy every second. Someday soon we will be able to capture as much of that energy as we like via super-efficient solar panels. The difficulty won’t be harvesting that energy but getting rid of waste heat by radiating it into space. We may find it more convenient to make our own fusion reactors. All the elements found on Earth other than hydrogen and helium were made by transmutation in various kinds of stars. In the distant future, we could use artificial fusion not only for energy but for artificial transmutation, to make whatever elements we like. All we need is abundant energy and hydrogen, which is plentiful in the water that covers most of the Earth’s surface and is the most common element in the universe. Long before humans have extracted all the useful atoms in the Earth’s crust and oceans, we will develop the technological sophistication to obtain vastly more atoms and energy from asteroids, planets and beyond. In that future, just as has always been the case, the only bottleneck will be the rate at which new knowledge can be created. And nothing prevents us from improving that rate too. Knowledge is the ultimate resource and there are no limits on creating it. Mr. Tupy is a co-author of “Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet.” Mr. Deutsch is author of “The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World.” Appeared in the July 21, 2023, print edition as 'We Will Never Run Out of Resources'.
Past performance doesn't guarantee future results. At any rate, all this innovation is going to require massive subsidies unless we just take the China and route and minimize costs through low regulation. Even then, China's mining and processing is massively subsidized state industries. The private sector actually isn't really great at thinking about long term problems. We are already starting to mine then oceans and there are questions about whether it is better than mining the land. One of the biggest and most accessible high quality nickel deposits are in SE Asian rainforest.
That piece makes the argument that I’ve been saying that those who claim that we need to keep using fossil fuels ignores that technology can do away with our dependence on fossil fuels. As we once depended on whale oil for light we switched to other technologies.
Step 1: Texas doesn't plan ahead for growth or take into account climate change. Step 2: Voluntary cuts and less grid reliability.
if that were true, prohibition of fossil fuels would not be necessary energy cannot be legislated into existence
Actually things like gas lamps for residential lighting were largely legislated out of existence. Whaling is largely illegal with only a handful of countries still doing it and then not for fuel.
