On Friday, Chris Levesque, the president and CEO of TerraPower, the company developing the new plant, spoke at a Greater Cheyenne Chamber of Commerce luncheon. He offered information about the company’s next-generation nuclear power plant, called Natrium, which is slated to become operational in 2030.
Nearly 20% of American energy is powered from nuclear sources. However, domestic nuclear power plant construction began to significantly drop off in the 1990s due to high costs, regulatory and safety concerns, competition from other energy sources and aging infrastructure.
“The U.S. is really overdue for innovating nuclear energy,” Levesque said. “So, that’s why TerraPower was created.”
Founded by Bill Gates in 2008, TerraPower sees this project in Lincoln County as an investment in demonstrating the innovation in the nuclear power industry, growing domestic energy production and increasing geopolitical power.
The $4 billion project is expected to generate 345 megawatts of electricity (MWe), with the possibility to store up to 500 MWe for five or more hours. Based on average American household energy consumption, 345 MWe could theoretically power around 285,000 homes at once.
In 2020, TerraPower won a $2 billion grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to help realize the vision of the Natrium plant. The rest of the funds, Levesque said, will be sourced from private donors and Gates himself.
What brings this project into the next generation of nuclear power is demonstrated both in the ways the energy is created, using sodium-cooled fast reactors, and how it is stored, using molten salt energy.
Instead of pumping water through the reactor to remove the heat, TerraPower will melt metal sodium, which has a low melting temperature, and use the liquid metal to cool the reactor.
The energy is created through breaking uranium atoms to release heat, similar to the way coal plants generate heat through breaking a hydrogen molecule. Sodium has been used as a coolant since the 1950s, but Levesque said the way they are doing it, using sodium-cooled fast reactors, will be safer, more efficient and more economical.
Natrium will also have molten salt storage, which is a technology already used at many solar farms today, to bring more flexibility to how much energy the plant can offer to the grid. As energy transitions to renewable sources, it can be difficult to meet the fluctuating demand throughout the day, since sources like solar or wind can be unreliable when there is no sun exposure or wind blowing. Batteries allow energy to be stored when it is not needed and transported to the grid when the demand is higher than production at that point in time.
Levesque shared the importance of leveraging the resources in Kemmerer that were available to the coal industry that preceded it. This includes the local labor and expertise, the cooling water available from the Hams Fork River and grid connectivity.
Earlier this year, TerraPower submitted a 3,700-page application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. If this and future applications are approved, the plant could be operational for 80 or more years.
“So, we’ll be around in Wyoming for the rest of the century at least,” Levesque said.
While he noted this is an important step toward increasing domestic clean energy production, Levesque said it is also important for national security. He said electricity demand in the U.S. and other developed countries will triple between now and 2050 to power the growing demand for electric vehicles, data centers and artificial intelligence.
“Because data security and energy security really go together, we need to add a lot of electricity generation in the U.S., or we’re going to see more data centers be built overseas ... so, electricity security, energy security and data security go really, really closely,” he said.
When one attendee asked about how they will manage the hazardous nuclear waste, Levesque said they will store it in fuel waste containers in the short term, but will store it in a geologic repository in the long term once the U.S. government identifies an ideal location for that.
He said he does not advocate reprocessing some of the used fuel because it is expensive and could be used adversely if it falls into the wrong hands.
When asked about sourcing for the site, Levesque did not directly address where they will be sourcing their supplies. He noted that sodium is fairly simple to make, but the U.S. market has declined when sourcing nuclear-grade pumps and heat exchangers. He said he hopes this investment will stimulate the domestic supply chain.
The energy produced at this plant will be sold to PacifiCorp, known as Rocky Mountain Power in Idaho, Utah and Wyoming, and Levesque said a price has not been set.
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