New Tech Is Helping Nuclear Power Make a Resurgence

By Carmen Lillard On Dec 7, 2019

Nuclear power has a lot going for it. It’s carbon-free, can produce big quantities of power from fairly small quantities of fuel, and once plants are constructed, they’re cheap to run. However consisting of the effective nuclear processes at its heart is exceptionally complex, which indicates structure plants is expensive and devastating failure is constantly a possibility. That’s not to mention the highly radioactive waste produced by existing technology.

These aspects, integrated with solidifying public opposition to the innovation following the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe and the emergence of wind and solar as carbon-free options, have actually seen the market’s fortunes fade in current years. This was exemplified by the 2017 personal bankruptcy of Westinghouse, one of the world’s leading nuclear power business.

That depression has triggered issue amongst some professionals, including many who previously opposed nuclear power. UN scientists state increased use of nuclear power is crucial if we are to limit worldwide warming to 1.5 C, a target that’s currently looking ambitious.

Despite this worrying outlook, though, a host of startups are trying to breathe new life into a nuclear industry that was long the province of engineering giants and state-backed industry. In a current report, CB Insights highlighted companies pursuing technologies that could revamp nuclear fission, the process at the heart of today’s plants. At the same time, a number of start-ups think the long-awaited age of nuclear fusion is almost upon us.

Perhaps the most talked-about nuclear power innovation of current years is the small modular reactor. It’s efficiently a miniaturized version of today’s standard nuclear power plants and is based on advances made in structure nuclear-powered naval vessels. By diminishing the size of these plants, the hope is to drastically reduce the big capital costs of nuclear power and decrease the potential effects of a large-scale nuclear meltdown.

NuScale is leading the charge with this innovation and has a task with the Utah Associated Community Power Systems to develop 12 of its 60- megawatt (MW) reactors by 2026, for a overall of 720 MW. The task reached an essential turning point in July after signing contracts to supply more than 150 MW to regional utilities.

But the offer is still far from sealed. MIT Tech Review points out that another little modular reactor manufacturer was in a similar position less than a decade ago, however the strategy fizzled out after they failed to discover enough customers.

And while small modular reactors might capture a greater share of the headlines, according to CB I nsights another innovation seems to be faring better with financiers. They found six companies building molten salt reactors that have received $64 million from endeavor capitalists in between them.

While conventional nuclear plants use pressurized water as a coolant, molten salt reactors instead usage a molten salt, which allows them to run at much lower pressures and for that reason reduces the threat of an accident. More innovative styles envisage blending liquid fuel in with the coolant, which could allow the usage of cleaner fuels like thorium and enable continuous reprocessing of the fuel so plants put on’t have to be shut down as soon as fuel is spent.

Terrestrial Energy has actually raised the bulk of the cash in this area at $39 million and hopes to bring a plant online in the 2020 s. But CB I nsights notes that there’s no previous examples of a start-up building a nuclear plant from scratch, and another popular molten salt reactor business, Transatomic Power, suspended operations in September 2018 when it decided it couldn’t do precisely that.

A number of other unique updates on the fission reactor are likewise in the pipeline, from China’s helium-cooled reactor, due to come online this year, to TerraPower’s “travelling wave reactor,” which will be able to run on invested fuel and depleted uranium.

But the other primary location of enjoyment is nuclear fusion, which guarantees endless clean power with almost no radioactive waste. The innovation is well-known for always being 20 years away from commercialization, but start-ups working on making it a truth are starting to attract serious financing as well as trustworthiness. The UK government’s recent announcement that it would spend $270 million on structure its own blend reactor has provided the field an even larger increase.

One of the leaders is Commonwealth Blend Systems, and they told Bloomberg that advances in superconductors are finally making it possible to build powerful enough magnets to effectively include the raving plasmas needed to produce combination.

More broadly, advances in the underlying physics and allowing technologies are making the possibility of building these reactors significantly less intimidating than before. Christofer Mowry, CEO of start-up General Combination, states many designs are talking about comparable timescales as some of the advanced fission tasks.

Whether these ambitious tasks will make it over the hurdles they face—and whether that will happen quickly enough to avert climate catastrophe—remains uncertain. But for the first time in a long while, there’s optimism about nuclear power once again.

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This post was previously published on singularityhub.com and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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