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Wyoming coal plant chosen for Gates-backed advanced nuclear reactor project
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An advanced nuclear power venture founded by billionaire Bill Gates said on Tuesday it has chosen a town in Wyoming as the site to build a $4 billion demonstration plant that will get half its funding from the U.S. government.
TerraPower's Natrium plant will be built in Kemmerer, a remote western Wyoming town where the Naughton coal plant is due to shut in 2025. Pending permits, the 345 megawatt plant will open in 2028, which is the timeline mandated by Congress.
The project will get about $1.9 billion from the federal government including $1.5 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure bill that President Joe Biden signed this week. The bill included about $2.5 billion for advanced nuclear reactors.
"It's a very serious government grant," said Chris Levesque, president and CEO of TerraPower, which is partnering with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy. "This was necessary because the U.S. government and the U.S. nuclear industry was falling behind," he told reporters.
https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2021-11-16/bill-gates-4-billion-high-tech-nuclear-reactor-set-for-wyoming-coal-site
TerraPower
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Founded: 2006
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Headquarters: Bellevue, WA
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CEO: Chris Levesque
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Founder: Bill Gates
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Parent organization: Littelfuse
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Chairman: Bill Gates
Timeline
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September 2015: TerraPower signed an agreement with the state-owned China National Nuclear Corporation to build a prototype 600 MWe reactor unit at Xiapu in Fujian province, China from 2018 to 2025.
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January 2019: Project abandoned due to technology transfer limitations placed by the Trump administration.
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October 2020: Chosen by the United States Department of Energy as a recipient of a matching grant totaling between $400 million and $4 billion over the next 5 to 7 years
Technology
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Developing a class of nuclear fast reactors called Traveling Wave Reactors.
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The TWR concept places a small core of enriched fuel in the center of a much larger mass of non-fissile material, in this case depleted uranium.
Summary
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American nuclear reactor design and development engineering company headquartered in Bellevue, Washington.
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TerraPower is partly funded by the US Department of Energy and Los Alamos National Laboratory
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Primary investor is Bill Gates (via Cascade Investment)
Other Notes
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Wyoming has a number of uranium recovery facilities
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Wyoming Senator John Barrasso is the ranking member of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources
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https://www.nrc.gov/info-finder/region-state/wyoming.html