In Abilene, about 200 miles west of Dallas, Natura Resources is building the nation’s first advanced liquid-fuel research reactor in nearly 40 years. The project is housed at Abilene Christian University, where a $25 million research facility was completed in September 2023.
Natura has raised $120 million in private funding and received another $120 million from the Legislature.
Natura’s technology uses molten salt as both fuel and coolant — a design last tested at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1960s. The company is first building a 1-megawatt research reactor in Abilene, intended to demonstrate to regulators and investors that the technology works and is safe.
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Aalo Atomics is taking a different approach. The startup, founded by Canadian-born engineer Matt Loszak and based in Austin, is designing a sodium-cooled fast reactor, a technology that uses solid fuel, like conventional nuclear plants, built specifically for factory mass production.
Each unit would produce 10 megawatts, enough to power roughly 6,000 to 7,000 homes in Texas, and the reactors will be sized to fit on a standard truck. Aalo’s commercial model would consist of five of these units, totaling 50 megawatts.
Loszak said the company plans to activate its first 10 megawatt test reactor within about five months, after completing prototype testing at the end of December, as part of its effort to move toward commercial deployment.
Is it easier to secure, monitor fewer, bigger reactors or thousands of* small ones? Accidents are still going to happen and I know which scenario makes more sense to me. Especially in light of Trump’s recent push to deregulate nuclear energy, kill the EPA, and pretty much any other kind of sensible management efforts of technology that is great until something goes wrong then it quickly becomes a multi-generational clusterfuck.
Solar, batteries and long-range transmission infrastructure just makes too much sense I guess.
A moot point when we don’t build new ones anymore.
But the big appeal of the molten salt reactor is that it doesn’t require continuous manual interventions.
Sure. Obviously.
But that’s WOKE, so we hate it.
Nuclear definitely has a role to play. Integrating SMRs into our global shipping fleet would eliminate the enormous waste and emissions of bunker fuel, for instance.
And areas that don’t have reliable sunlight or wind (far north/south regions) or that require high steady output in confined areas (large factories, urban centers, major metro arteries, etc) can see real benefits, relative to gas or coal power.
It’s a technology we should have invested more heavily in 60 years ago. Obviously, Texas will fuck it up. But that’s not an indictment of the technology, just the capitalist dipshits that run the state.