With permission from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, nuclear company Kairos Power can begin building two test reactors in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Kairos signed a deal with Google in October to provide 500 megawatts of energy for Google’s data centres. This permit is a big step forward for the company.
These high-temperature reactors that are cooled by fluoride salt are smaller versions of what Kairos hopes to build in the end so that Google can get power starting in 2030. Even though the new reactors are just test beds, Ashley Lewis, a spokeswoman for Kairos, told Paehlo World that the company plans to connect the power plant to the grid.
Each of the Hermes 2 reactors will be able to produce 35 megawatts of heat, which will be sent to a 20 megawatt turbine to be turned into energy. Kairos’s commercial-scale power plant will also have two reactors that can make a total of 150 megawatts of energy.
Kairos is different from other nuclear reactors in two main ways: the fuel is made of uranium covered in carbon, and the shells are made of ceramics that are meant to last long enough to hold fissile material in case of an accident. Even better, molten salt, not water, cools the reactor.
The small modular reactor (SMR) startup, which was given $303 million by the U.S. Department of Energy, has been working for years to improve its method for cooling molten salt. Because fluoride salts have very high boiling points, the water can flow with little pressure. That means that if there is an accident, there won’t be any high-pressure nuclear material ready to fall apart if the pumps stop working. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory also says that molten salt reactors can use passive airflow to move salt through the reactor and cool it down if the power to the pumps goes out.
Kairos’ designs are “Generation IV” reactors because they have all of these qualities. This is a classification system made by an international group backed by national nuclear agencies. The way the categories are set up isn’t clear, so it’s not possible to say for sure how Hermes 2 would do on the scale.
For the past year and a half, Kairos has been slowly moving towards getting permission for the design of the reactor. After being checked for safety by the NRC in July and again in August, Hermes 2 passed both tests. The NRC took 18 months to issue the construction permit, which is shorter than the time it took to issue earlier reactor permits.
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Things are now looking up for Kairos to keep its promises. The business claims that it plans to open the first plant for the Google deal in 2030 and finish the rest by 2035. Ten years is a very short amount of time in the world of nuclear power.
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