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.
When do the death claws show up?
Based on the history of zoning and industrial accidents in Texas these will go next to residential areas.
Cancer Alley is getting some new developments! Or is that in LA? I think it’s texas, around Houston or something.
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.
Is it easier to secure, monitor fewer, bigger reactors or thousands of* small ones?
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.
Solar, batteries and long-range transmission infrastructure just makes too sense I guess.
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.
Uh, nice, but a similar project is taking place in Ontario, starting up in 2028. 4 SMRs.
How long until they’re driving around with leaking mini reactors in their lifted trucks with their don’t tread on me and blue lives matter stickers?
$120/watt is orders of magnitude worse than Vogtle’s $15+/watt. Salt designs of the 1960s were abandoned due to corrosion issues.
Aalo is pure BS for promising eventual 3c/kwh which would require 50c/watt installation costs. Again, salt (sodium coolant) based that requires material science (always expensive) to limit corrosion. SMRs are a new scam needed because old nuclear scam has worn out.
SMRs are a new scam needed because old nuclear scam has worn out.
Idk about that. Consider the Linglong One (ACP100): Developed by the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), it is the first SMR to pass an independent safety assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 2016. Construction began in 2021, and the core module was installed in 2023.
Definitely a challenge of materials sciences, but to call it a scam? Come on. Coal sticking around as long as it has is the scam.
Linglong One (ACP100) generates up to 1twh/year. $23/mwh in operational costs. At $5.5/watt ($700m) it is very reasonable for nuclear. But all of this is China. 1/3rd materials/construction costs, 1/2 financing costs. Anti-corruption by design, local and national government support supervises/ensures results. In west, we just have politically bribed oligarchist subsidy programs.
The first state to become a nuclear waste land.
I think Nevada bet Texas there by about 70 years.
Given that small scale nuclear is even less cost effective than GW-scale nuclear it appears a good way to burn investor money.
SMR are for site or temporary power, not grid scale. On paper they’re a good fit for data centers and other localized power needs.
Lol, typical American centric article.
Just outside Toronto, they’re building four 300MW small modular reactors, at an existing nuclear plant, using proven designs from Hitachi, and the first one is targeted to come online by 2029 or 2030, eclipsing the Texas projects in scale, timeline, and practicality, but that literally doesn’t even get a passing mention.
Yeah, these guys really have their heads up their asses on this.
The website is called The Texas Tribune. They write articles about Texas. I really don’t know why you expected them to mention Canada.
They are referring to the expert comments here about how SMRs can’t be used for grid electricity, radiation leaks, etc.
They would rather breathe in that clean coal.
The posted headline is literally “Texas become leading ground for testing small modular reactors”.
That inherently implies that places that aren’t Texas, are not becoming leading grounds for testing small modular reactors, bringing those other places into the discussion.
Right now that’s not the headline I’m seeing on the article though, so either they’re A/B testing headlines or OP editorialized.
Fair enough point. And while it’s not the article’s headline, that is the tab’s label when you open it.
People in Texas aren’t known for their intellectual prowess. It’s like the Florida of the western half of the us.
300mw are indeed a much different scale from 10mw.
I wonder if your ire is misplaced… As these are sort of different things. The 10mw reactors have different use cases, they’re not really designed to be installed as part of a power plant, but more for individual on-site uses, like as a reserve power system for a hospital, or as power for a remote mining location, disconnected from the grid.
My point is just, it might make sense to not mention the larger reactors here, as they’re not really the same.
I’m sure Texas will do it in the dumbest most unregulated way possible. It will be a good example of what not to do.
Not winterize them, because the feds can’t tell us what to do, and then have it melt down in the next polar inversion, of which they got one this year again. It’s going to be a regular occurrence now with the global weirding.
budgeted at 17.5c/watt (CAD), that too is a boondoggle before additional Ontario taxpayer corruption.
They’re not in the same game.
So how long until it’s small enough to power a Pip-boy?
Asking the real questions
This should be interesting. Texas can’t even keep its own electric grid functioning all year round.
I know that’s a funny quip and it was true in 2021, but it hasn’t been a problem since that event 5 years ago. Fun fact, Texas is actually the largest producer of wind energy in the nation, and they’re also building out massive solar farms.
The reason most people don’t hear about it, is it’s being done by the same oil and gas companies that are raking in the money. They’re just diversifying their portfolio so they continue to make money.
it hasn’t been a problem since that event 5 years ago.
We’ve been spared any serious natural disasters affecting the grid during that time. No major hurricanes. No big freeze.
The worst event was the 2024 derecho, and that definitely knocked out power here and there. But it was high enough above the treeline to really wreck infrastructure at the ground level.
I’ll note that a huge increase in wind and solar capacity means we aren’t exposed to the same kind of economic pressure from five years ago, either. The '21 freeze came, in large part, due to gas power plants locking up when they were needed, because they hadn’t been weatherized. With less acute demand issues (thanks to new green energy) we haven’t been in a position where gas plants could casually wait for prices to spike before turning on.
Idk it’s a problem still for the people that were charged ten thousand dollars for a week’s worth of electricity, especially if they had automatic withdrawals.
Frankly that’s the customers fault. It’s like taking out an ARM based mortgage. You’re gambling that the rates will stay low and then bitch if they spike. The people that were affected opted in to a variable rate plan to take advantage of lower commercial prices, then started bitching when it spiked. Coupled with automatic withdrawal meant they thought “it would never happen to me!”
Victim blaming. Deregulation of energy always leads to less service for more money, from Enron to now. Especially in texas.
I can’t imagine defending a group that through their own greed failed to do their job and responded by overcharging a thousand times their victims. Talk about losing any credibility.
Like, backyard? Sure would come in handy after hurricanes.
Can’t wait for a hurricane to smash up 5 small truck sized reactors and spread the debris around.
Sounds more like a tornado than a hurricane.
But also, you can fortify these underground and behind concrete in a way you wouldn’t for a Galveston Beach house.
Nice, we’re going backwards…
And who will handle the waste product? And who will pay for handling the waste product?
Taxpayers, or no one. It only stays toxic for a half million years!
It appears, Texans.
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.
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.
Natura’s research reactor is designed to first prove the LFMSR concept at megawatt scale, then be converted to prove that MSR reactors can reprocess existing nuclear waste as a percentage of its fuel. Which means we could take all of the current stockpile of nuclear waste and re-burn it to the point that it’s 90% consumed (instead of 5% consumed today) and leave a waste product that decays to safe levels extremely quickly (tens of years).
I’ll believe it when I see it. This is the state that fracked everything and then spread its radioactive, pfas-infested fracking waste all over the land. Now they’re building elementary schools on top of it.
Given the track record of a lot of projects, they’ll store it on site because actually dealing with it costs money, until it leaks and then they’ll disappear and a bunch of people get horrible diseases and the federal government will spend everyone’s tax dollars to clean it up.
Get out, oil shill.
Nuclear energy has their own shills.
Shut up and get some sleep.
Get lost, nuclear apologist.
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