Why Bill Gates’ New Natrium Reactor is a Big Deal

This was my PhD dissertation. You have a few inaccuracies. 1. Long term storage is not needed. Seasonal variations in load are managed through timing power plant refueling and maintenance outages. 2. While it can absorb renewable energy fluctuation, the capital recovery of the reactor is also reduced, because the renewables require (mostly) idle backup capacity and extra storage. 3. Control rods are the primary means of reactivity control in PWRs and BWRs. We have a mantra that “reactor power follows steam demand” changing the steam demand is what causes the reactivity insertion that changes power. Boron is used to regulate the average coolant temperature, e.g. add boric acid temperature goes down (the negative reactivity from the acid causes the temperature to lower until the temperature coefficient of reactivity compensates. 4. Natrium reactor can absolutely load follow on the reactor side. It’s been a while since I looked but I remember doing reactor transient analysis on the order of 10%/second. The fuel is metallic so it’s conductive. It is also very porous (looks like Swiss cheese due to the fission product gases) and has a sodium bond inside as well. So the fuel is robust. It gets hot and the core expands rapidly inserting negative reactivity. The reactor’s average capacity factor is ~90% and does have some transients on the order of 5%/min that it can leisurely respond to. The storage slows everything down. It’s amazing. 5. The salt used in the storage system is “Solar Salt” a 60-40 Eutectic of NaNO₃ and KNO₃. It is not chloride based. The reactor can use LiCl to reprocess the used fuel on site, but that’s an entirely different topic. Here is my work: https://repository.gatech.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/fa59d2ba-e48b-4f92-b581-ce5d3f4ac0d5/content

You covered the thermal storage pretty well but left out some of the more interesting parts/advantages. Natrium is a low-pressure/high-temperature reactor, this is the most important aspect of this technology. Low-pressure means no expensive forgings and containment structures that high-pressure water reactors need. This saves a lot of money and improves safety at the same time. High-temperature allows for thermal storage but also separates the power conversion side of the plant from the nuclear side. All the equipment is off-the-shelf stuff that doesn't need to be nuclear certified. This saves a lot of money and allows you to start construction early, like you see in the thumbnail. You can't do this with a LWR. High-temperature along with fast neutrons means much higher efficiency and later waste burning. High-temperature also means cheap industrial process heat, something neither LWRs or renewables can provide. The demand for process heat is double that of electricity alone. This is a huge deal.

The first rule of VPNs is that we never use the VPNs that spend all their money on advertising and which always turn up in the 10 best VPN lists while the best VPNs never appear because they haven't bribed anyone...

The siting of the reactor is interesting- Wyoming understands that it's huge coal reserves are politically unpopular and likely to be sanctioned in the future. With abundant electricity and/or heat, you can refine coal into liquid petroleum products. Those aren't going anywhere soon, so this is a pretty savvy move for Wyoming.

In the case of this reactor, low efficiency in certain scenarios still provides electricity with zero direct carbon emissions. The amazing thing to me is not the reactors themselves. It's why we haven't been building them for the past 20 years or so.

"Slower with every use. So I'm sure Gates is familiar with the problem." And they say Germans don't have a sense of humour... 😂

I THOUGHT Eutectic salts were involved. I worked on a project at a little "Mom and Pop" R&D outfit in the '80s. Plastic containers containing Eutectic salts, irregularly shaped to provide lots of surface area and accommodate surrounding airflow, were stacked outside a house. The melting/freezing points were engineered such a that the salts would phase change at certain temperatures. For heating at night, during the day certain salts would absorb heat, and melt. At night, cold air would be blown across the containers of molten salts.The salts would phase change to solid, and the circulating air would carry the released heat it had picked up from the phase change into the house for warmth. During the day, warm air would be directed across the containers. The salts melted, absorbing heat from the air, and the cooled air would in turn cool the house. It worked in principle, but the salts would "wear out"; chemically break down over the course of many cycles. If I remember correctly, the salts broke down too soon for the process to be commercially viable. The expense of replacing the salts periodically was greater than the cost of conventional heating and air conditioning. Had the salts been more robust, the system might have worked. This is the first time since then that I have heard about these kinds of salts being used at scale for energy storage and transfer. I can only guess that new methods have been developed to enhance the working life of the salts.

The windows joke, hahaha - you make my day Sabine! 😄

"Slower with every use so I'm sure Gates is familiar with the problem" hahahahaha nice

Nuclear Chill Pill sounds like a '90s cover band name.

One thing I like about this video is that you are helping to break an issue I think has sadly affected media around science and tech solutions: that is if it connected even slightly indirectly to someone rich no matter how good of a solution it is; it is bad. Instead you are discussing the positives and negatives of it and giving more considering to it as a technology itself

Windows. 😂 I finally took the plunge and saved two old computers with Ubuntu. It was easier than I expected.

Im surprised the German word for sodium isn't Salzstoff.

Personally I think Germany should be investigating energy produced by beer and sauerkraut. It's a renewable natural resource with explosive potential.

I once worked at the Naughton Power plant. Having trees around anything in that area in the virtual visualization made me chuckle.

I'm just happy someone is still building nuclear reactors...

Love that it's still basically a steam engine.

Sabine, just wanted to say that I'm so grateful for you channel. You're doing a real public service. Thank you!

Great video! One thing that generally astonishes me when it comes to generating electricity in most situations (thermal, nuclear) is that we are always getting energy... to heat up water!!! What about harnessing the energy directly from the heat directly to produce energy? Why not use thermoelectric generators (Seebeck generators)? I definitely am not an expert, but I would love to understand why we haven't moved from a boiling water technology yet...

The problem with liquid sodium cooled plants is they leak, and when sodium meets air or water, it burns, or produces hydrogen which explodes, not a good thing in a nuclear environment. A salt cooled reactor is much better in this respect and retains pretty much all the same advantages of sodium cooled reactors. I am happy to see fast reactors coming online though, we need to fission not store the long term actinide waste so it becomes short term fission products plus energy.