For the primary time in additional than 50 years the US granted permission for a brand new sort of nuclear reactor, an indication regulators have gotten extra open to totally different approaches to producing energy from splitting the atom.
California startup Kairos Energy obtained a building permit from the Nuclear Regulatory Fee to construct its Hermes demonstration reactor in Tennessee. Whereas business reactors in use immediately are cooled by water, the Kairos expertise makes use of molten fluoride salt as a coolant.
There’s rising world curiosity in accelerating deployment of nuclear energy as a key a part of the combat to rein in local weather change, however that effort has been hampered by a regulatory course of that has been sluggish to approve new designs.
“It’s possible to license things that are different with the NRC,” Mike Laufer, Kairos’s chief government officer, mentioned in an interview Wednesday. The regulatory course of “doesn’t have to be a roadblock.”
Kairos is amongst many firms in search of to commercialize designs that may be in-built factories and put in on web site, an method that’s anticipated to be quicker and cheaper than the massive typical reactors broadly used immediately.
Kairos plans to start building subsequent 12 months on its $100 million undertaking and expects the system to be full by the tip of 2026. The purpose is to exhibit the viability of its design and the molten salt expertise. Molten salts stay liquid at excessive temperatures and low strain, a possible safety advantage over water-cooled methods. Laufer mentioned the final time the NRC authorized a design that wasn’t water-cooled was in 1968.
Hermes gained’t generate electrical energy however is predicted to pave the way in which for the Hermes 2 undertaking, which might use two of the identical reactors to provide a mixed complete of about 28 megawatts of electrical energy.
The corporate’s long-term purpose is a business undertaking that may use two bigger reactors and would have greater than 100 megawatts of capability, although Laufer mentioned it’s too quickly to say when Kairos might be able to pursue efforts past the preliminary Hermes plant. Huge typical reactors in use immediately usually have about 1,000 megawatts of capability.
“We’re developing a technology that will be highly scalable,” Laufer mentioned. “Affordability is really about being able to scale up.”
