Extra Basket for DOE Nuclear Design Eggs

The recent post on X-Energy highlighted a windfall of government funding for its graphite encased spheres of nuclear fuel to be used in its high-temperature gas cooled nuclear reactor.  X-Energy is not the only nuclear reactor developer to win a cost-sharing grant from the U.S. Department of Energy under its Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program.  The DOE appears bent on giving nuclear power a boost and has awarded a similar grant to TerraPower LLC, a nuclear reactor developer based in Bellevue, Washington.  Just as lucrative as the funding for its competitor, Terrapower received $80 million in initial funding.  Then over the next five to seven years, the DOE has pledged to budget an additional $3.2 billion to match investment by the two companies. 

It is shaping up as a coolant contest with TerraPower engineers putting their trust in sodium to keep its fast reactor under control.  The X-Energy reactor is helium cooled.  TerraPower calls theirs the Natrium reactor and has teamed up with GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy to perfect the design, which has its origins in the 1950s at TerraPower’s predecessor Intellectual Ventures.  Beside the sodium fast reactor, the Natrium system features a molten salt energy storage system.

TerraPower has made some tweaks to the original traveling wave reactor that is a type of nuclear fission reactor.  In the original design after the reactor is started zones form in the reactor core with the fission reaction ‘traveling’ from one region to the next.  TerraPower proposes to breed uranium into plutonium just like in the original design and use that plutonium for the fission fuel.  However, the Natrium design the breeding step stays near the center of the core while spent fuel is taken from this area and new fuel is added at the periphery.

Even with alterations TerraPower engineers expect the Natrium rector to offer the same economy of operation as expected from the original design.  The design relies on low-cost depleted uranium as feedstock with just a bit of enriched uranium as a ‘starter’ for the nuclear reaction.  The Natrium is also more efficient with greater fuel burn-up than achieved by light-water reactors that are currently in use.  This means less radioactive waste that requires expensive long-term storage sites.  Of course, such economies remain estimates as a sodium-cooled fast reactor has yet to be put into operation.

So far Congress has appropriated $160 million to support the DOE’s program.  This falls far short of the $3.2 billion that is the DOE’s ‘aspiration’ budget.  Should Congress disappoint, TerraPower can turn to its well-healed founder Bill Gates to make up at least part of the shortfall.  In the least the DOE initial investment of $80 million will give the U.S. government an option on Terrapower’s fast reactor and novel core configuration.  If Congress fails to follow through, private investment may make up the difference.  The country could then reap the returns of receive lower cost nuclear power just by having putting its tax ‘eggs’ in more than one basket.    

 

Neither the author of the Small Cap Strategist web log, Crystal Equity Research nor its affiliates have a beneficial interest in the companies mentioned herein.