The Advanced Nuclear Industry

https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-advanced-nuclear-industry

Introduction

The American energy sector has experienced enormous technological innovation over the past decade in everything from renewables (solar and wind power), to extraction (hydraulic fracturing), to storage (advanced batteries), to consumer efficiency (advanced thermostats).

What has gone largely unnoticed is that nuclear power is poised to join the innovation list.

A new generation of engineers, entrepreneurs and investors are working to commercialize innovative and advanced nuclear reactors.

This is being driven by a sobering reality—the need to add enough electricity to get power to the 1.3 billion people around the world who don’t have it while making deep cuts in carbon emissions to effectively combat climate change.

Third Way has found that there are nearly 50 companies, backed by more than $1.3 billion in private capital, developing plans for new nuclear plants in the U.S. and Canada. The mix includes startups and big-name investors like Bill Gates, all placing bets on a nuclear comeback, hoping to get the technology in position to win in an increasingly carbon-constrained world.

This report introduces you to the advanced nuclear industry in North America. It includes the most comprehensive set of details about who’s working on these reactor designs and where. We describe the money and momentum building behind advanced nuclear, and how the technology has evolved since the Golden Age of Nuclear.

To be clear, this is not your grandfather’s nuclear technology. While developers in some cases are working off of technology designs conceived in our national laboratories during the 1950s and 1960s, the advanced reactor technologies being developed are safer, more efficient and need a fraction of the footprint compared to the nearly 100 light water reactors (LWRs) that provide almost 20% of the U.S.’s electricity today (and 65% of its carbon-free power). New plants could be powered entirely with spent nuclear fuel sitting at plant sites across the country, built at a lower cost than LWRs and shut down more easily in an emergency.

The need for nuclear power has never been clearer. To stem climate change, the world needs 40% of electricity to come from zero-emissions sources, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). While we can and must grow renewable energy generation, it alone will leave us far short of meeting that demand, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have said. This is why the IPCC in November issued an urgent call for more non-emitting power, including the construction of more than 400 nuclear plants in the next 20 years. That would represent a near doubling of the 435 plants operating globally today.

Nuclear power is on the cusp of a comeback. The technology may be the best opportunity we have to address climate change and meet the world’s growing energy needs.

>>10548501

Canada’s Small Modular Reactor Action Plan

https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/energy-sources-distribution/nuclear-energy-uranium/canadas-small-modular-reactor-action-plan/21183

Small Modular Reactors: the next wave of nuclear innovation

Innovation in the nuclear sector plays a critical role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and delivering good, middle-class jobs as Canada moves toward a low-carbon future.

Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) could be the future of Canada’s nuclear industry, with the potential to provide non-emitting energy for a wide range of applications, from grid-scale electricity generation to use in heavy industry and remote communities.

Canada is well-positioned to become a global leader in the development and deployment of SMR technology. With over 60 years of science and technology innovation, a world-class regulator and a vibrant domestic supply chain, Canada's nuclear industry is poised to be a leader in an emerging global market estimated at $150 billion a year by 2040.

Read Canada’s SMR Roadmap Report attached as PDF

Smaller, safer, cheaper: One company aims to reinvent the nuclear reactor and save a warming planet

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/smaller-safer-cheaper-one-company-aims-reinvent-nuclear-reactor-and-save-warming-planet#

CORVALLIS, OREGON—To a world facing the existential threat of global warming, nuclear power would appear to be a lifeline. Advocates say nuclear reactors, compact and able to deliver steady, carbon-free power, are ideal replacements for fossil fuels and a way to slash greenhouse gas emissions. However, in most of the world, the nuclear industry is in retreat. The public continues to distrust it, especially after three reactors melted down in a 2011 accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan. Nations also continue to dither over what to do with radioactive reactor waste. Most important, with new reactors costing $7 billion or more, the nuclear industry struggles to compete with cheaper forms of energy, such as natural gas. So even as global temperatures break one record after another, just one nuclear reactor has turned on in the United States in the past 20 years. Globally, nuclear power supplies just 11% of electrical power, down from a high of 17.6% in 1996.

Jose Reyes, a nuclear engineer and cofounder of NuScale Power, headquartered in Portland, Oregon, says he and his colleagues can revive nuclear by thinking small. Reyes and NuScale's 350 employees have designed a small modular reactor (SMR) that would take up 1% of the space of a conventional reactor. Whereas a typical commercial reactor cranks out a gigawatt of power, each NuScale SMR would generate just 60 megawatts. For about $3 billion, NuScale would stack up to 12 SMRs side by side, like beer cans in a six-pack, to form a power plant.

But size alone isn't a panacea. "If I just scale down a large reactor, I'll lose, no doubt," says Reyes, 63, a soft-spoken native of New York City and son of Honduran and Dominican immigrants. To make their reactors safer, NuScale engineers have simplified them, eliminating pumps, valves, and other moving parts while adding safeguards in a design they say would be virtually impervious to meltdown. To make their reactors cheaper, the engineers plan to fabricate them whole in a factory instead of assembling them at a construction site, cutting costs enough to compete with other forms of energy.

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Small Modular Reactors

Learn about the technology that's the next evolution in nuclear energy.

The Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment

Design work on the MSRE began in 1960 based on earlier work on nuclear propulsion for airplanes.You did know about the experiments on nuclear powered airplanes in the 1950s, didn't you?

This film was produced in 1969 by Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the United States Atomic Energy Commission to inform the public regarding the history, technology, and milestones of the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE). Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Molten Salt Reactor

Like HCQ, MSR nuclear power is a tried and true technology from the past.

>>10548531

Musk has an important role in Space Force, the Lunar mining project and the Mars colony project. He also has a key role in the MAGA movement's Kayfabe to beat the Cabal.

You and I have no idea what he has agreed, what he really will earn for his work, or even who he really is. But given his key role in the DOD with Space Force, I don't see any point in digging him.

Anything that needs to be learned about him, is already being checked out by people with far more skills and resources than we have.

We should focus on the Hollywood pedophiles and the corrupt Federal politicians. These are areas where we can really make a difference. Let's not get distracted.

>>10548716

State governments cannot control FEMA

However, they are free to make any outrageous claims and proclamations they wish to while the inhabitants of that state let them get away with it.

I don't live in Ohio, so I'm sitting back and watching what the locals do about their problem.