For the primary time in additional than 50 years the US granted permission for a brand new sort of nuclear reactor, an indication regulators have gotten extra open to totally different approaches to producing energy from splitting the atom.
California startup Kairos Energy acquired a building permit from the Nuclear Regulatory Fee to construct its Hermes demonstration reactor in Tennessee. Whereas business reactors in use at present are cooled by water, the Kairos know-how makes use of molten fluoride salt as a coolant.
There’s rising international curiosity in accelerating deployment of nuclear energy as a key a part of the battle to rein in local weather change, however that effort has been hampered by a regulatory course of that has been sluggish to approve new designs.
“It’s possible to license things that are different with the NRC,” Mike Laufer, Kairos’s chief govt officer, stated in an interview Wednesday. The regulatory course of “doesn’t have to be a roadblock.”
Kairos is amongst many firms looking for to commercialize designs that may be in-built factories and put in on web site, an method that’s anticipated to be sooner and cheaper than the massive standard reactors broadly used at present.
Kairos plans to start building subsequent yr on its $100 million challenge and expects the system to be full by the top of 2026. The aim is to show the viability of its design and the molten salt know-how. Molten salts stay liquid at excessive temperatures and low stress, a possible safety advantage over water-cooled programs. Laufer stated the final time the NRC accepted a design that wasn’t water-cooled was in 1968.
Hermes received’t generate electrical energy however is anticipated to pave the best way for the Hermes 2 challenge, which might use two of the identical reactors to provide a mixed whole of about 28 megawatts of electrical energy.
The corporate’s long-term aim is a business challenge that might use two bigger reactors and would have greater than 100 megawatts of capability, although Laufer stated it’s too quickly to say when Kairos could possibly pursue efforts past the preliminary Hermes plant. Huge standard reactors in use at present sometimes have about 1,000 megawatts of capability.
“We’re developing a technology that will be highly scalable,” Laufer stated. “Affordability is really about being able to scale up.”
