Big changes are coming to the small town of Kemmerer, Wyoming. A town that was totally dependent on coal is now looking to transform itself into the epicenter of next-generation nuclear technology. Who is behind it? None other than Bill Gates.
From coal to nuclear. Kemmerer is a former mining town with 2,400 inhabitants that has lived off its coal-fired power station for decades. The mine is now closed and the power station, pending dismantling as part of the effort to reduce CO2 emissions.
However, in recent months the local economy has taken a promising turn. The small town in Wyoming was the site chosen by TerraPower, a company founded in 2008 with Bill Gates as its main investor, to build its innovative nuclear power plant. Gates himself He was the one who laid the first stone last June, when construction work began.
The first Natrium plant. Gates He called her “the most advanced nuclear facility in the world.” Kemmerer will be the first of the called Natrium plantswhich promise to be safer, cheaper and more efficient than conventional nuclear power plants.
The secret is your fourth generation modular reactorcooled by sodium and with an energy storage system based on molten salts. It will have automatic temperature control mechanisms and will have a lower operating cost than a normal fission reactor.
The technical details. Using an advanced uranium-zirconium metal alloy with a sodium bond as nuclear fuel, the reactor promises a thermal output of 840 MW. Its electrical output will be 345 MW, but can be temporarily increased to 500 MW to compensate for the intermittency of renewable resources.
That's enough capacity to supply clean energy to about 400,000 homes, but with a plant three times smaller than traditional nuclear power plants and at half the cost, according to Chris Levesque, CEO of TerraPower.
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The economic details. The plant will cost about $4 billion, of which the Department of Energy has provided half. Bill Gates, the main private investor and staunch defender of nuclear energy, as scalable and carbon-free energyhas contributed $1 billion of his own money.
This is significantly less than the recent expansion of Georgia's Vogtle nuclear power plant, which went from two to four reactors for a modest $35 billion.
Taking advantage of qualified personnel. As for Kemmerer, the project is expected to create 1,600 skilled jobs during construction and 250 on a day-to-day basis, especially former workers at the coal-fired power station.
The plant is expected to be operational in 2030. For now, the “power island,” which will house the steam turbines and machinery, is being built as the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not yet given permission to TerraPower to build the nuclear reactor.
Images | TerraPower
