The federal government wants to help utilities buy large components for up to 10 large nuclear reactors. It’s unclear which, if any, companies might participate.
The Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia is the only one with AP1000 reactors in the U.S. They generate enough electricity to power 1 million homes, but they took 15 years to build and cost $35 billion, double the initial estimates.
The federal government wants to help utilities buy large components for up to 10 large nuclear reactors. It’s unclear which, if any, companies might participate.
Just over a year ago, the Trump Administration issued an executive order meant to accelerate the development of nuclear power in the US. While an entire startup ecosystem has developed around the use of different—and typically smaller—reactor designs, only one of them has been fully licensed so far, and there are no plans to actually build any instances of that design.
The executive order directed the Department of Energy to have three different reactor designs reach criticality in a bit over a year. On Thursday, a startup called Antares announced that a test reactor it had placed at the Idaho National Laboratory had reached criticality, making it the first new design to cross this threshold. Criticality means that the nuclear reactions inside the hardware had become self sustaining; it does not mean the reactor had started to generate power.
Antares is one of a number of companies that is basing its design on a new fuel system called TRISO that takes some of the complexity and safety out of the reactor design and places them in the fuel design. The fuel design is based on tiny pellets with a uranium oxide core. The pellets are surrounded by several layers of carbon that can moderate the energy of both the neutrons and lighter nuclei that are released by fission reactions. All of that is encased in a hard ceramic shell that's designed to withstand the highest temperatures that can be produced by the encased uranium.
Companies say it’s a better way to dispose of the Cold War-era material — and fix a shortage of nuclear fuel. But the plan has also faced criticism from nonproliferation experts.
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