Back in 2009, Simon Irish, an investment manager based in New York, discovered a way he believed could change the world. Irish saw that countries around the world needed a colossal number of clean energy projects to replace their infrastructure with fossil fuels, as well as provide enough energy to meet demand from China, India and other fast-growing countries. He realized that renewable resources alone, which rely on the breeze and the glow of the sun, would not be enough. And he also knew that nuclear power, the only form of clean energy in existence that could fill the gaps, was too expensive to compete with oil and gas.
But then, at a conference in 2011, he met an engineer with an innovative design for a molten salt-cooled nuclear reactor. If it works, Irish thought, it would not only solve the aging problem of nuclear energy, but it would provide a realistic path to eliminating fossil fuels.
And then he asked himself the question: "Is it possible to develop reactors better than those that were 60 years ago?" The answer was: "Absolutely."
Is it possible to build a home nuclear reactor?
Irish was so convinced that this new reactor would be a great investment that he devoted his entire career to it. Nearly ten years later, Irish became CEO of New York-based Terrestrial Energy. A company that expects to build a molten salt reactor by 2030.
Terrestrial is not alone in doing this. Dozens of nuclear start-ups are popping up here and there, all dedicated to solving known nuclear problems - radioactive waste, emissions, weapons proliferation, and high costs.
Reactors incinerating nuclear waste. Reactors designed to destroy isotopes that can be used in weapons. Small reactors that could be inexpensively built in factories. There are so many ideas.
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Former Energy Minister Ernest Monitz, an advisor to Terrestrial, thinks something new is happening. “I've never seen such an innovation in this segment,” he says. "It's really interesting."
Other reactors, such as the Terrestrial-designed salt-cooled reactor, are automatically cooled if they get too hot. Water flows through conventional reactors, protecting them from overheating, but if something stops this flow - for example, the earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima - the water will leave, leaving nothing to stop the melt.
Unlike water, salt doesn't boil, so even if the operators shut off the security systems and leave, the salt will continue to cool the system, Irish says. The salt heats up and expands, pushing the uranium atoms apart and slowing down the reaction (the further the damage atoms are, the less likely it is that a passing neutron will separate them, triggering the next chain of reactions).
“It’s like a saucepan on the stove that’s cooking pasta,” says Irish. No matter how hot your stove is, the pasta will never be hotter than 100 degrees Celsius, unless the water evaporates. As long as it is present, water circulates and dissipates heat. However, if you replace the water with liquid salt, you will have to heat the whole thing up to 1000 degrees Celsius before your refrigerant begins to evaporate.
All this may sound like fantasy, but it is reality. Russia has been producing electricity from an advanced reactor that burns radioactive waste since 2016. China has built a "pebble" reactor that blocks radioactive elements inside graphite spheres.
In 2015, in order to track startups and public sector projects trying to extract low-carbon energy using a safe, cheap, clean nuclear process, the Third Way think tank began mapping all advanced nuclear projects across the United States. There were 48 points on the map then and now there are 75, and they spread like locusts.
“In terms of the number of projects, the number of people working on them, and the amount of private funding, there is nothing that could be compared without going back to the 1960s,” says Ryan Fitzpatrick, who works on clean energy at Third Way.
Back in the days when Walt Disney released the film Our Friend The Atom, which promoted nuclear power, when the futuristic notion of electricity that was “too cheap to measure” seemed plausible, electrical engineers planned to build hundreds of reactors across the United States.
Why is all this happening just now? After all, scientists have been working on alternative types of reactors since the beginning of the Cold War, but they have not been fully deployed. The history of advanced reactors is littered with the corpses of failed attempts. The salt-cooled reactor was first successfully launched in 1954, but the United States decided to specialize in water-cooled reactors and eliminate other designs.
But something fundamental has changed: Previously, there was no reason for a nuclear company to solicit billions of dollars for a new design as part of the federal regulatory process, since conventional nuclear reactors were profitable. This is no longer the case.
“For the first time in half a century, incumbent nuclear players are in financial distress,” says Irish.
Recently, the US has been betting on conventional water-cooled reactors and it is not playing well. In 2012, South Carolina Electric & Gas received permission to build two huge conventional reactors to produce 2,200 MW of power, enough to power 1.8 million homes, and promised they would be operational in 2018. By paying their electricity bills, people saw that they grew by 18%, which, of course, led to delays in the construction of the reactors. Having drained $ 9 billion into the project, the utilities surrendered.
Similar stories take place abroad. In Finland, construction of a new reactor at the Olkiluoto power plant is eight years behind schedule and $ 6.5 billion behind budget.
In response, these nuclear startups are developing their businesses to avoid horrendous cost overruns. Many of them plan to build standardized reactor particles at a factory and then assemble them together like LEGO at a construction site. “If you can move construction to a factory, you can significantly reduce costs,” Parsons says.
New reactors could also reduce costs if they were safe. Conventional reactors have an enormous risk of melting failure, mainly because they are designed for submarines. Cooling a reactor with water while on a submarine is easy enough, but when the reactor is on land, you have to pump water into it to cool it down. “And this pumping system should never, ever break down, otherwise you will get Fukushima. We need a security system for a security system, redundancy over redundancy."
Oklo, a Silicon Valley startup, has based its reactor design on a prototype that is not subject to degradation. “When the engineers turned off all the cooling systems, it cooled down on its own and then started backing up, after which it worked fine,” says Caroline Cochran, co-founder of Oklo. If these safer reactors don't need all those back-up cooling systems and concrete domes, companies can build power plants much cheaper.
Technology often fails for a long time before it succeeds: 45 years have passed since the first light bulb was introduced to Thomas Edison's patent for an incandescent lamp. It can take decades for engineers to put an idea into shape. It seems to some that all the ideas of advanced nuclear technology have been tried out in the past. “But science has moved forward,” scientists say. “You have much better materials than you did a few decades ago. Chances are it will work out."
A recent study by the nonprofit Energy Innovation Reform project estimates that the latest batch of nuclear startups can supply electricity for $ 36-90 per megawatt hour. Any power plant that runs on natural gas sells electricity for $ 42-78 per megawatt hour.
At best, nuclear power plants can get even cheaper. There are forecasts
Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at Harvard, says that if nuclear power plays a role in the fight against climate change, cutting-edge nuclear startups will grow inevitably and rapidly. “To provide a tenth of the clean energy we need by 2050, we will have to add 30 gigawatts to the grid every year,” he says.
This means that the world will need to build 10 times more nuclear power than it was before the Fukushima disaster in 2011. Is it real at all?
“I think we should try - although I'm not an optimist,” says Bunn, noting that the pace at which we will need to build solar and wind technologies for energy production to move away from fossil fuels is just as difficult.
Great barriers remain on the road to a nuclear renaissance. It will take years to test prototypes and get government approval in any country.
"Ultimately, on a planet of 10 billion people, any amount of affordable and safe energy - be it from nuclear fusion or fission - will find use."
Ilya Khel