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.
That’s such a small, manageable concern compared to the damage that is done by fossil fuels.
Nuclear waste is a bigger threat to health than carbon dioxide in fact. That is truly a wrongheaded opinion, and one that you likely got from smelling the farts of the nuclear industry that has been on a decades long pr campaign to influence the weak minded.
Coal power produces 100x more nuclear waste than nuclear power.
You need to publish the methadology behind that number, as it’s clearly bullshit manufactured by the nuclear industry to justify their business over fears of melt downs that would spread nuclear waste all around the world.
The nuclear influence agents are very active and aggressive, it has a strong effect on weak minds.
You clearly have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about.
It is, unless it’s distributed in a plume because Texas environmental regulators suck.
That’s what the NRC is for.
And they have enough people to maintain and inspect the hundreds of thousands of reactors that are going to be built, if those small reactors work?
Well they don’t do any maintenance. And considering the plant only gets built if the NRC says so, I think they’ll manage. NRC doesn’t fuck around. It’s also not a good look to Trump’s base to deregulate nuclear safety; they’re historically the ones more worried about that.
Nonsense. We can just let the Free Market handle it
not hundreds of thousands. they are too expensive to be that common.
Haha that’s a good joke.