French president says ‘renaissance’ of atomic energy industry will help end country’s reliance on fossil fuels
  • Chris Remington@beehaw.orgM
    0·
    3 years ago

    I wasn’t trying to point out the uranium subject.

    Natrium plants use liquid sodium as a cooling agent instead of water. Sodium has a higher boiling point and can absorb more heat than water, which means high pressure does not build up inside the reactor, reducing the risk of an explosion.

    Also, Natrium plants do not require an outside energy source to operate their cooling systems, which can be a vulnerability in the case of an emergency shutdown. This contributed to the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, when a tsunami shut down the diesel generators running its backup cooling system, contributing to a meltdown and release of radioactive material.

    Natrium plants can also store heat in tanks of molten salt, conserving the energy for later use like a battery and enabling the plant to bump its capacity up from 345 to 500 megawatts for five hours.

    The plants are also smaller than conventional nuclear power plants, which should make them faster and cheaper to build than conventional power plants. TerraPower aims to get the cost of its plants down to $1 billion, a quarter of the budget for the first one in Kemmerer.

    “One important thing to realize is the first plant always costs more,” said Levesque.

    Finally, Natrium plants produce less waste, a problematic and dangerous byproduct of nuclear fission.

    • wintermute@feddit.de
      0·
      3 years ago

      safer, cheaper, less waste, lifespan unknown, ok.
      That doesn’t tackle that uranium is a very limited resource, and this type of reactor even relies on it.

      Anyway, the last three nuclear power plants in Germany will be shut down by December 31, 2022 at the latest.