[Black Hills Pioneer] In this sleepy Wyoming town that has relied on coal for over a century, a company founded by the man who revolutionized personal computing is launching an ambitious project to counter climate change: A nationwide reboot of nuclear energy technology.Maybe he can pull it off, but it's ...nuclear power
Until recently, Kemmerer was little-known for anything except J.C. Penney’s first store and some 55-million-year-old fish fossils in quarries down the road.
Then in November, a company started by Bill Gates, TerraPower, announced it had chosen Kemmerer for a nontraditional, sodium-cooled nuclear reactor that will bring on workers from a local coal-fired power plant scheduled to close soon.
The demonstration project comes as many U.S. states see nuclear emerging as an answer to fill the gap as a transition away from coal, oil and natural gas to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Which US states are 'thinking' about nuclear power? Starting a new meme, AP?
Many residents in Kemmerer, where the population of 2,700 is little-changed since the 1990s, see the TerraPower project as a much-needed economic boost because Rocky Mountain Power’s Naughton power plant
The U.S. nuclear industry has been at a standstill, providing a steady 20% of the nation’s power for decade amid the costly and time-consuming process of building huge conventional nuclear plants.
Only one new commercial nuclear project, the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar No. 2, has come online in the U.S. in the past 25 years.
By cooling the planned Kemmerer reactor with liquid sodium, a metal that boils at a temperature much higher than water and solidifies at well above room temperature, TerraPower says its relatively small, 345-megawatt plant, able to power about 345,000 homes, will be safe and less expensive than conventional, water-cooled nuclear plants. The company’s Natrium plant will use a simpler and less expensive system of unpressurized coolant and vents not dependent on electricity to halt fission during an emergency.
The approach isn’t new. Russia has had a commercial sodium-cooled reactor in use at full capacity since 2016 and such designs have been tested in the U.S.
Yeah, they also had Chernobyl.