On Wednesday, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it had issued its first construction approval in nearly a decade. The approval will allow work to begin on a site in Kemmerer, Wyoming, by a company called TerraPower. That company is most widely recognized as being financially backed by Bill Gates, but it’s attempting to build a radically new reactor, one that is sodium-cooled and incorporates energy storage as part of its design.
This doesn’t necessarily mean it will gain approval to operate the reactor, but it’s a critical step for the company.
The TerraPower design, which it calls Natrium and has been developed jointly with GE Hitachi, has several novel features. Probably the most notable of these is the use of liquid sodium for cooling and heat transfer. This allows the primary coolant to circulate at far lower pressure, avoiding any of the challenges posed by the high-pressure water or steam used in water-cooled reactors. But it carries the risk that sodium is highly reactive when exposed to air or water. Natrium is also a fast-neutron reactor, which could allow it to consume some isotopes that would otherwise end up as radioactive waste in more traditional reactor designs.
The reactor is also relatively small compared to most current nuclear plants (345 megawatts versus roughly 1 gigawatt), and incorporates energy storage. Rather than using the heat extracted by the sodium to boil water, the plant will put the heat into a salt-based storage material that can either be used to generate electricity or stored for later use. This will allow the plant to operate around renewable power, which would otherwise undercut it on price. The storage system will also allow it to temporarily output up to 500 MW of electricity. //
1Zach1 Ars Praefectus
8y
3,745
Subscriptor
bumppo said:
It sounds like a mechanism to avoid selling power during the point in the day that solar has driven the price down (potentially into negative territory), while preserving the ability to sell most of that power later.
It would be interesting to know how long the storage is designed to sustain that elevated, up-to-500 MW output.
Here are their plans detailed https://www.terrapower.com/downloads/Natrium-Technology.pdf
Power Output – EnergyStorage System100-500 MWe+ for 5.5+ hours, power ramping at 10% per minute
Why clean power is about people, not sacrifice //
We tend to talk about energy as if it’s a niche technical problem; something for engineers, utilities, and climate wonks to argue about at conferences. I’ve been guilty of this myself, spending time discussing reactor designs when I should have been talking about the people and institutions that actually do the reacting. Megawatts, grids, emissions targets, and levelised costs all matter, but they’re not the whole story, and simply not part of the broader story that appeals to most people. Energy isn’t just an input into the economy; it’s the thing that sets everything else in motion. It’s the backbone of civilisation. It’s the foundation of modern human flourishing. Hence, energy is life.
This becomes obvious the moment you look at the data. Wherever reliable electricity shows up, a familiar pattern follows, of higher literacy, lower child mortality, higher incomes, better health outcomes, and more education for women. That’s not ideology, but correlation after correlation, across countries and decades. Energy access doesn’t always guarantee prosperity, but the absence of it certainly guarantees poverty.
It’s also worth remembering something that news headlines rarely emphasise: by almost every measurable metric, including life expectancy, child survival, poverty reduction, and education, the world is far better than it was a century ago. That progress didn’t happen by accident, but because we learned how to produce vast amounts of cheap, reliable energy, and because human societies reacted by building everything else on top of it. The mechanism isn’t mysterious. Energy powers clean water systems, hospitals, vaccines, heating, lighting, refrigeration, agriculture, and the internet. Take energy away, and modern life quickly starts to fall apart.
And yet. Hundreds of millions of people still have no access to electricity at all. Billions cook with solid fuels that damage their lungs. Even in rich countries, people die every winter because they can’t afford to heat their homes properly. These aren’t lifestyle choices, but the consequence of political choices that enable energy shortages.
Psychologists have known for decades that humans are bad at judging risk. We overestimate dramatic, low-probability dangers and underestimate slow, high-probability harms, through a mix of availability bias and negativity bias. This bias has real consequences. Nuclear accidents loom large in the public imagination, even though, measured per unit of electricity produced, nuclear energy is far safer the alternatives.
As I have said before, the uncomfortable consequence is that fear of nuclear energy has often caused more harm than nuclear energy itself.
The front cover is a shot of the 2.55 gigawatt Oconee plant in South Carolina. These three reactors were built for 356 million dollars between 1967 and 1974. That is $1141 per kilowatt in 2024 dollars. Oconee can produce reliable, on-demand, zero pollution, very low CO2, electricity at less than 3 cents/kWh in today’s money. These plants and their sisters have operated for over 60 years, harming exactly nobody from radiation. They are licensed to operate intothe 2050’s.
Between 1970 and 2025, technological progress should have reduced the real cost of nuclear power. Instead the current cost of nuclear plants in Europe and North America is more than $15,000/kW, more than 13 times the cost of Oconee. Thanks to its insane energy density, nuclear power should consume far less of the planet’s precious resources than any other source of electricty while producing nearly no pollution and very little CO2. Instead nuclear is a prohibitively expensive flop.
This little book explains why this auto-genocidal tragedy happened, and what we can do about it. Nuclear’s problems are entirely man-made. What is man-made can be man-unmade. If we adopt the regulatory reforms that this book lays out, the providers of nuclear power will be forced to compete with each other and new entrants on a level playing field, in which case the inherent cheapness of fission power combined with technological advances will push the cost of nuclear electricity back down to its should-cost.
To store heat for days, weeks, or months, you need to trap the energy in the bonds of a molecule that can later release heat on demand. The approach to this particular chemistry problem is called molecular solar thermal (MOST) energy storage. While it has been the next big thing for decades, it never really took off. //
Molecular batteries, in principle, are extremely good at storing energy. Heating oil, arguably the most popular molecular battery we use for heating, is essentially ancient solar energy stored in chemical bonds. Its energy density stands at around 40 Megajoules per kilo. To put that in perspective, Li-ion batteries usually pack less than one MJ/kg. One of the problems with heating oil, though, is that it is single-use only—it gets burnt when you use it. What Nguyen and her colleagues aimed to achieve with their DNA-inspired substance is essentially a reusable fuel. //
The researchers achieved an energy storage density of 1.65 MJ/kg—nearly double the capacity of Li-ion batteries and substantially higher than any previous MOST material. //
One of the biggest fears with chemical storage is thermal reversion—the fuel spontaneously discharges because it got a little too warm in the storage tank. But the Dewar isomers of the pyrimidones are incredibly stable. The researchers calculated a half-life of up to 481 days at room temperature for some derivatives. This means the fuel could be charged in the heat of July, and it would remain fully charged when you need to heat your home in January. The degradation figures also look decent for a MOST energy storage. The team ran the system through 20 charge-discharge cycles with negligible decay. //
Still, we’re rather far away using MOST systems for heating actual homes. To get there, we’re going to need molecules that absorb far more of the light spectrum and convert to the activated state with a higher efficiency. We’re just not there yet.
“We estimate there is enough dissolved lithium present in that region to replace US imports of lithium and more.”
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Tucked beneath the pine forests and farm fields of southwest Arkansas, drillers have stumbled upon a critical mineral jackpot: lithium in the region’s ancient saltwater formations.
The GKG Twin Blessing course comprises 8 lectures, although the last is optional, and the first may not be needed for some audiences. It could be given in a single day seminar, or, in an academic environment, in 7 or 8 separate lectures.
New nuclear capacity won’t show up until around 2030
Meta is writing more checks for nuclear investment, even though the new capacity tied to those deals is unlikely to come online until around 2030. The company says it will need the new power to run its hyperscale datacenters.
Facebook's parent company says it has inked agreements with three outfits - TerraPower and Oklo are developing new reactor technology or building fresh sites, while Vistra is supporting existing nuclear plants. All three will deliver electricity into the grid rather than straight to Meta's own facilities.
I have been writing here for about a decade that wind and solar would inevitably prove to be far more expensive for producing useful electricity than other methods like fossil fuels, nuclear, or hydro. The reasons are not difficult to understand. Wind and solar, due to intermittency, are not capable of powering a full-time electrical grid on their own. To make the grid capable of fulfilling customer demand 24/7/365, wind and solar require large amounts of additional capital infrastructure — dispatchable back-up generation, energy storage, additional transmission capacity, and more. If wind and solar prove insufficient to eliminate dispatchable back-up generation, then you find yourself running (and paying for) two duplicative systems, when you could have had only one. Energy storage as a potential solution to intermittency turns out to be impossibly expensive. If the only back-up generation you can find that works is powered by fossil fuels, then you haven’t even succeeded in achieving zero carbon emissions in the electricity sector. //
In 2025, Louisiana had the third-lowest electricity rates in the United States. The reasons are simple—73% of Louisiana’s electricity is generated by natural gas and unlike California or New York, Louisiana has not attempted to implement carbon dioxide or renewable energy goals through its electricity generation system. //
em
2 days ago · 0 Likes
Can you please boil this analysis down to a soundbite? Voters already believe renewables are cheaper, so that soundbite should include something that slays that belief.
Richard Greene
7 hours ago · 0 Likes
Free electricity with windmills and solar panels.
At night, when there is no wind, you will not pay for electricity.
The hidden costs of powering civilization //
I want to ask you a question we don’t usually think about when we flip a light switch or fill up a tank…and that is, where does the energy actually come from?
Sure, sunlight, wind, and even coal and gas are technically free, they are energy sources just sitting there in nature to be used… some facing more limitations than others. But turning them into power we can actually use to run Santa Claus’ chocolate factory or light our christmas trees? That’s a whole different story.
This is where the idea of primary energy comes in. It’s actually not about the electricity we see listed on our bills, but is really about all the raw energy we have to pull from nature, to process, convert, and deliver before we get anything useful, such as 24/7/365 electricity, every single second we need it. And once you start looking at energy this way, things get a lot clearer.
We often hear that solar and wind energy is “clean” and basically “free” and it does not have thermal losses like a nuclear or gas-fired power plant. But to make this wind and solar energy usable and reliable in the real world, we have to build enormous support systems, mine rare minerals, manufacture components, build storage, upgrade the grid, maintain everything, and then, eventually, dispose of it. It’s not just about a solar panel and a little breeze blowing over a turbine blade.
Now compare that to conventional fuels like coal or gas or oil… they might lose more energy during combustion in power plants or engines, but the upfront infrastructure is simpler, and the systems last much longer, with the average coal or gas plant running for a good 30-60 years, nuclear usually far longer. That is not nothing and this should be considered when speaking of “free” energy.
Understanding primary energy helps cut through the feel-good stats and get down to the physics. It assists in showing us the full cost of electricity (FCOE), time, money and materials used in making any source truly usable…and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
That is why looking at the real problem with the “Primary Energy Fallacy” often used by supporters of grid-scale wind and solar, is worth it! //
The “Primary Energy Fallacy” a term coined eloquently by many, is the idea that all primary energy from fossil fuels must be replaced by an equivalent amount of “renewable” energy. However, those people say, this would not be necessary because more than two-thirds of primary energy is lost as wasted heat during the conversion processes.
The misunderstanding occurs in the belief that wind and solar generate electricity without any losses (a secondary or tertiary form of energy) while coal, gas, uranium may have a high energy content but have “thermal losses” ~60-70% during processing. This PE fallacy argument is used for power generation and also for internal combustion engine vehicles (ICE) in a slightly adjusted form.
- Stated Primary Energy Fallacy 1: “The conversion of gas and coal to power results in a loss of around 60%. This means that one unit of primary energy from wind or solar, replaces two units of that of gas/coal”
- Stated Primary Energy Fallacy 2: “The conversion losses during end use in internal combustions engines ICE are also high. Electric motors are much more efficient. Most car engines ‘lose’ 70% of fuel energy, which means that one final energy unit of electricity replaces three units of gasoline/diesel”
Modern climate politics treats humanity like an invasive species.
We’re told we consume too much, build too much, develop too much, and emit too much. The message is clear: human beings are the problem, and the earth must be protected from us.
But that is not Christianity.
It’s not even close.
For 3,000 years, the Judeo-Christian worldview taught something radically different—that humans are image-bearers designed to create, cultivate, innovate, and build. The very first job description in Scripture is found in Genesis 1:28:
“Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over every living thing.”
To modern ears, “subdue” and “dominion” sound imperial. To ancient readers, they meant responsibility, stewardship, cultivation, and development. The earth was not a fragile deity to tiptoe around; it was a raw, untamed gift meant to be worked, shaped, and stewarded for human flourishing.
And here’s where the climate debate goes off the rails.
If you believe Genesis, then energy is not a moral liability—it is the means by which humans fulfill their mandate. Energy is how you lift the poor, feed nations, sustain families, run hospitals, build infrastructure, and create the conditions for long-term stability and—ironically—environmental improvement.
Yet the climate movement has turned this mandate upside down. It demands sacrifice, limitation, and deprivation in the name of “saving the planet.” The message to the world’s poor is simple: stay poor a little longer so the West can feel environmentally virtuous. //
If you want to solve poverty, you don’t throttle energy. You expand it. You diversify it. You make it abundant and affordable. The cleanest nations on earth became clean because they became rich first. Wealth creates environmental capacity. Poverty destroys it.
The Christian view is simple: the earth was given to humanity to cultivate, not fear. The resources here are meant to be used responsibly, not locked away because climate bureaucrats believe modern prosperity is a moral sin.
The climate debate will never make sense until we recover the foundational truth Genesis established: human beings were meant to build. Meant to advance. Meant to subdue the earth—not as tyrants, but as stewards.
The earth is not a god to appease.
It is a garden to cultivate.
If you want the environment to thrive, let people thrive first.
Climate alarmists don’t just get the science wrong but also demonize the engine of wealth that has brought billions out of grinding poverty; and this “climate colonialism” is “morally unconscionable,” a Christian leader says.
“What I believe we’re seeing in the demand from wealthy Western nations that we fight climate change by reducing our use of fossil fuels is that they are demanding that the poorest nations of the world forego the use of the most abundant, affordable, reliable energy sources that can lift them out of poverty and keep them out of poverty,” E. Calvin Beisner, president of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, told The Daily Signal.
“It is the West saying to the rest, ‘We made it out, you have to stay,'” he noted. “That is just morally unconscionable.”
Jet A and Jet A-1 are kerosene-type fuels. The primary difference between the two is freeze point, the temperature at which wax crystals disappear in a laboratory test.
Jet A, which is mainly used in the United States, must have a freeze point of minus 40ºC or below and does not typically contain static dissipator additive. Jet A-1 must have a freeze point of minus 47ºC or below and for locations outside the United States, this fuel normally contains static dissipator additive. There are other key differences between the manufacturing specification within the United States and Europe/Africa/Middle East/Australasia.
We are writing to express our concerns with a January 30, 2014 article by Rita F. Redberg and Rebecca Smith-Bindman. The article is alarmingly titled, “We Are Giving Ourselves Cancer”, and is accompanied by a frightening cartoon that appears to be a doctor holding an X-ray film, and wearing a gas mask and helmet. The picture and title are the first clues that sensational claims follow, and the article does not disappoint in that regard, though it falls far short in offering prudent medical advice to frightened patients and parents.
The authors only mention in passing that medical imaging can save lives, and quickly move on to assert that there is little evidence of better health outcomes from current scanning practices. They do not mention, for example that the National Lung Screening Trial recently found that former smokers who received CT screening were 20% less likely to die from lung cancer and 7% less likely to die from any cause, compared to those who were screened with lower dose chest radiography. They do not mention the studies demonstrating the clear clinical benefits of mammography, bone mineral densitometry, and CT colonography. They do not mention the hundreds of studies that suggest that the body’s natural defense systems are quite capable of dealing with very low doses of radiation – like those that have existed on our planet since its beginning and those associated with modern medical imaging.
This essay responds to an article by Stanford Professor Mark Z. Jacobson et al, 100% Clean and Renewable Wind, Water, and Sunlight (WWS) All-Sector Energy Roadmaps for 139 Countries of the World. Their controversial WWS roadmap has several interesting features and benefits. //
Several authors have pointed out the impossibility of this Stanford WWS roadmap. Jesse Jenkins and Samuel Thernstrom published Deep Decarbonization of the Electric Power Sector. Mathijs Beckers wrote The Non-Solutions Project of Mark Z. Jacobson.
Misled by Jacobson, climate activists such as Bill McKibben of 350.org calls for world war-like mobilization of nations to effect the $125 trillion WWS roadmap.
This present essay describes a doable, affordable liquid fission (LF) power roadmap to solve the multiple issues of climate change, air pollution, and poverty reduction.
Despite technological and regulatory hurdles, Amazon remains convinced that small modular reactors (SMRs) are the answer to the cloud titan's power woes.
Last fall, the house of Bezos announced a $500 million investment in SMR startup X-Energy. On Thursday, the e-tailer revealed that X-Energy's Xe-100 SMR designs would eventually supply Washington State with "up to" 960 megawatts of clean energy.
"Eventually" is the key word here as construction isn't expected to start until the end of the decade and the plants won't begin operations until sometime in the 2030s.
About six-in-ten U.S. adults now say they favor more nuclear power plants to generate electricity, according to a Pew Research Center survey fielded in April and May. That’s up from 43% in 2020, driven by increasing support among both Republicans and Democrats.
A line chart showing that a Majority of Americans continue to support more nuclear power in the U.S. //
Americans remain more likely to favor expanding solar (77%) and wind power (68%) than nuclear power (59%). But while support for solar and wind power has declined by double digits since 2020 – largely driven by drops in Republican support – the share who favor nuclear power has grown by 16 percentage points since then.
Yes it does.
Seems like a lot doesn't it?
But, we must consider scale.
A 747-400 carries around 63,500 gallons of fuel, which actually makes that gallon-per-second burn rate quite efficient when you think about it.
At cruising altitude (around 35,000 feet), a 747 burns approximately 5-5.5 gallons per mile.
Works out to about 0.2 miles per gallon, which sounds terrible until you consider that the plane is moving nearly 400 people and their luggage at about 550 miles per hour.
Break it down per passenger, and you're looking at roughly 85-100 passenger miles per gallon. //
Greyhound many years ago measured its bus transport efficiency in passenger-miles/gallon. Their goal was to …wait for it… get to and maintain that very 85–100 passenger-miles/gallon number range.
How We Can Make Nuclear Cheap Again Paperback – March 30, 2025
by Jack Devanney (Author)
This book has a joyful message. We can simultaneously solve the Gordian Knot of our time: the closely coupled problems of energy poverty and global warming. The solution is cheap nuclear power, and we can have cheap nuclear if we want it.
Here's the Good News:
1) Our fear of radiation is vastly overblown. A providential Nature has provided us with DNA repair mechanisms that can easily handle dose rates 100's of times above normal background. Dose rates that exceed the repair capabilities of our bodies will almost never be encountered by the public in even a very large release.
2) Thanks to its insane energy density and the resulting tiny resource requirement, nuclear power is inherently cheap, less than 3 cents per kWh cheap. Indeed nascent nuclear in the 1960's did-cost less than 3 cents/kWh in today's money. Nuclear power should consume far less of the planet's precious resources than any other source of electricity, while producing nearly no pollution and very little CO2.
Nuclear's problems are man-made. Nuclear power never escaped from its government sponsored and controlled birth. In the process, it developed a regulatory regime explicitly mandated to increase costs to the point where nuclear power is barely economic, while at the same time convincing everyone that low dose rate radiation is perilous.
But what is man-made can be man-unmade. All that's required is an acceptance of these two providential realities, a change in attitude, a metanoia. With this change, the way forward becomes obvious, and not that difficult to implement.
This little book explains why (1) and (2) are true, and then traces nuclear power's decline into a prohibitively expensive mess. Finally, it offers a way out, a system for regulating nuclear which will force the providers of nuclear power to compete with each other and new entrants on a level playing field, in which case the inherent cheapness of fission power combined with technological advances will push the cost of nuclear electricity down to its should-cost.
Nuclear would undercut fossil fuel almost every where. Fossil would be relegated to a bit of peaking and backup for unplanned outages. Intermittents would be limited to a few niche markets. This would all be automatic. No need for subsidies or mandates. The poor would be immensely richer. Electrification of transportation and industry would explode. Desalinization would take off. Synthetic fuels could become viable. Skies would be clean. All this electricity would require little land and produce almost no CO2. The planet would be cooler. Could there be a more joyful message?
according to LNT, if every human ate a banana a week, bananas would kill 1600 people a year. In the same scenario, SNT kills one person every 2.5 million years.
Now, class, let's get back to basics.
Repeat after me:
It's not dose. It's dose rate profile.
Good.
Repeat after me:
LNT does not say eating a banana is safe or unsafe.
LNT says eating a banana has a 4 in a billion chance of killing you.
Repeat after me:
SNT does not say eating a banana is safe or unsafe.
SNT says eating a banana has a 1 in a billion-billion chance of killing you.
Whether those risks are safe or unsafe is up to you.
Class dismissed.
In less than a few centuries, 250 groundbreaking hydrocarbon processing and refining techniques were discovered. Their impact continues today, benefiting the 8 billion people living on Earth.
Today, over 6,000 products derived from petroleum enrich our lives. They have reduced infant mortality, doubled global life expectancy from around 40 to over 80 years, and made it possible to travel anywhere in the world by plane, train, ship, or car — drastically reducing weather-related deaths to nearly zero. These were all unimaginable in societies before 1800. //
Today, “Net Zero” policymakers setting “green” policies are oblivious to the reality that so-called “renewables” ONLY generate electricity but CANNOT make anything. In addition, everything that NEEDS Electricity, like iPhones and computers, is made with petrochemicals manufactured from crude oil, coal, or natural gas.
Electricity came after oil, as all electrical generation methods, including hydro, coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, and solar, are built with products, components, and equipment made from oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil. //
If we go back 200 years to the 1800s, we find a decarbonized society, i.e., a very different era and a society without products, transportation fuels, and electricity. Fossil-fuel products weren’t widespread, thus lifestyles were less prosperous, health conditions were precarious, and life expectancy was short.
A renewed shift toward decarbonization and zero-emission lifestyles severely restricts the use of fossil fuels, like coal and oil, and could bring us back to a world of more than 200 years ago. That might mean billions suffering again from disease, malnutrition, and weather-related fatalities.
Moving toward decarbonization risks depriving, or delaying access to, the standards of living and products that wealthy, healthy nations take for granted. Today, around 700 million people, which is roughly 9% of humanity, live below the international poverty line. In other words, halting fossil fuel production and use would reverse many centuries of progress.
Over the last 200 years, after the discovery of the products and transportation fuels that could be manufactured out of crude oil, the world’s population has increased from 1 billion to 8 billion. It was more than 6,000 “products” from oil that supported the tremendous growth in population. //
Wind turbines and solar panels can ONLY generate ELECTRICITY.
All the products and transportation fuels demanded by society, all the infrastructures, and the economy are made from fossil fuels.