Bill Gates’ TerraPower may build its first nuclear reactor
TerraPower, co-founded by Bill Gates, is set to begin its first power plant construction project in Wyoming. It is scheduled to go online in the early 2030s.
A concept rendering of the construction project from 2023.
(Image: TerraPower)
TerraPower has been granted permission to implement its first commercial power plant project in the US state of Wyoming. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued the construction permit after a review process lasting less than 18 months. This is the first US permit for the construction of a commercial nuclear reactor in almost ten years.
The first power plant will be called “Kemmerer Unit 1” and is named after the town of the same name in Wyoming, near which it is to be built. According to TerraPower, it is a sodium-cooled reactor with an electrical output of around 345 megawatts. Unlike larger, conventional nuclear power plants that use water for cooling, this one uses liquid sodium.
The design is complemented by an energy storage system based on molten salts. This can absorb heat and provide additional energy when needed. This allows the plant's output to be increased to up to 500 megawatts for up to five hours, for example, during peak loads in the power grid.
Videos by heise
Conventional large nuclear power plants typically have an electrical output of around 1 to 1.5 gigawatts. Newer reactor concepts, on the other hand, deliberately focus on smaller power classes. They are intended to be cheaper and faster to build, can be combined into larger blocks, and are easier to integrate into existing power grids characterized by fluctuating wind and solar power generation.
TerraPower plans international expansion
The company has ambitious goals for the coming years: “We have to show that the tenth reactor costs only half as much as the first,” says TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque in an interview with Bloomberg. The company plans to build ten or more power plants internationally by 2035.
A prominent US customer will be Meta, which has already secured electricity from several reactors for its AI data centers. In addition to Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are also investing in nuclear power plants. TerraPower co-founder Bill Gates himself has invested over a billion US dollars in the company, according to US media reports.
Kemmerer Unit 1 runs on a special fuel called HALEU (High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium). This is uranium enriched to just under 20 percent, whereas today's nuclear power plants mostly use fuel enriched to around 3 to 5 percent. Developers expect this to lead to more efficient fuel utilization. HALEU is currently produced mainly in Russia, which is why the USA is currently trying to build up its own production capacities.
The technical review process by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission was comparatively short. US President Donald Trump had previously ordered the nuclear authority by decree to significantly accelerate the approval process for new reactors and limit it to about 18 months. This is intended to accelerate the expansion of nuclear energy in the USA. Construction of the power plant is scheduled to begin in the coming weeks and be completed in 2030. Commissioning is planned for 2031.
(mho)
