Presumably it’ll end up like the NuScale one, raise a few billion for design and prototyping and then every 6 months or so increase the target wholesale price by 50% until it makes no sense at all economically to begin primary construction. They’ll reverse IPO along the way and manipulate the stock enough to get insiders paid out while the carcass of a company trundles along.
No. They have Bill Gates as a founder. Bill Gates understands that nuclear is a long game.
> They’ll reverse IPO along the way and manipulate the stock enough to get insiders paid out while the carcass of a company trundles along.
I'm not sure what "reverse IPO" means, maybe you mean they'll be acquired by a SPAC, like NuScale was. I doubt it. Bill Gates founded Terrapower in 2008, he is not looking for a quick buck.
In theory, at least, they have finished their design, had it reviewed by the NRC, and had it approved, so there should be no significant design changes.
But that also applies for the current generation of reactors and nobody can build them to schedule or budget in the USA or Europe.
Yep. NuScale received design certification as well and still ended up with multiple huge revisions. It’s not easy to build any nuclear, much less a FOAK reactor.
But when that fails, you can just siphon up taxpayer money via your connections to the ruling cabal.
> so there should be no significant design changes
The NRC frequently changes requirements for reactors while they're under construction. The NRC does not waive the right to demand changes merely due to prior design approval. This is a novel (for the US) design, so there will be unanticipated changes as the project progresses.
Russia has been operating two sodium cooled fast reactors for decades. The BN-600 and BN-800 are both operating today. The early history of the BN-600 was... interesting, suffering (at least) 14 sodium fires due to leaks. This "Natrium" design is similar; a sodium pool with two sodium loops. They are taking on the additional challenge of storing a massive quantity of molten salt. It's going to take a lot of effort by many steely eyed missile people to make this happen.
Trump issued an EO in 2025 that's supposed to make the NRC more circumspect about requiring changes of approved designs. Then there is all the pull Gates has. Wyoming is no hotbed of anti-nuclear activism. So that's all to TerraPower's favor. But TerraPower will need to fully utilize all the tailwind it can find to make this work.
China have 28 nukes under construction right now, and have built more in the last 30 years than the rest of the world combined.
Even with all that experience and expertise, their questionable environmental policies and questionable worker rights, it still takes them SEVEN years to build a single nuke.
The claim that anyone else can do it faster with zero recent experience isn’t only laughable, it’s downright fraud.
it takes about 5y for latest units. And their env/worker policies are not that questionable in this regard. Heck, Japan did finish it's first ABWR FOAK in under 4y so China is in fact slow here.
The question is rather why China bans inland expansion
China and Russia are about on par in build times now. Korea is next with APR, Barakah having about 8y/unit, W-house and EDF are the slowest for many reasons
The Chinese CAP1400s took 5 years and that's a new design to them. The first NPP was built in 1951 (ish) and took 18 months from blackboard to grid interconnection. Some designs take longer, others are shorter. Some parts of Vogal were rebuilt 3x times due to the federal government changing the design requirements multiple times during construction. Another challenge is that NPPs are built rarely enough that its hard to be a supplier to the nuclear industry so many parts are custom built per project. That doesn't have to be the case. The idea there is a hard limit of 7 years, sorry...that just isn't so.
Wow, that's A lot. Even though there's diminishing returns with more workers, they'd probably build them faster if they weren't scaling out so much concurrently, right?
Seems like we could match a 7 year clip at a much smaller scale. We'll be forced to at some point, but we need to overhaul the regulatory mess and fix the grid first. Hopefully that happens long before battalions of Chinese drones and droids take over the world.
Hmmm. If we do simple extrapolation based on a battery density improvement rate of 5% a year, it takes about 30 years to get there. So it's not as crazy as it sounds - and it's also worth noting that there are incremental improvements in aerodynamics and materials so that gets you there faster...
However, as others have pointed out, the battery-powered plane doesn't get lighter as it burns fuel.
If we do simple extrapolation, a cellphone-sized battery will reach the 80kWh needed to power a car in as little as 180 years.
Expecting a 5% / year growth rate sustained for 30 years is very optimistic. It is far more likely that we'll hit some kind of diminishing return well before that.
Home batteries are being installed at insane rates in Australia at the moment. Very few of them are Powerwalls because Tesla have priced
themselves out of the market (and also Elon’s reputation is toast).
As I understand it (and even if I’m broadly right I’m greatly simplifying) there’s an auction system and if demand is X kilowatts, they line up all the bids to supply in cost order and draw a line at X kilowatts. All successful bidders receive the price bid by the highest successful bidder.
There are rare times in this kind of market where the price does go very high (though not to $1000 per kwh), and those brief periods push average prices up substantially.
In markets where batteries are going gangbusters, they are squashing many of these peaks and thus reducing average prices paid by consumers (though not as much as you’d hope because the majority of retail electricity costs are distribution rather than generation).
Hmmm. If, rather than flying close to sea level, you flew at high altitude (above commercial airliners), and kept it relatively small, I suspect that you could do this and no one would notice unless you told them.
Though at high altitudes the winds are such that it would be less of an airship and more of a steerable balloon.
At really high altitudes air density goes down quickly; this is good for planes but bad for airships because payloads are reduced. Plus, as you say, winds are really really strong: over 200 km/h. https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/250hPa/o...
I have seen many high altitude airship studies trying to hover around, but none have been viable in the end. To go around the world it seems better to just float, as in the comment above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46881679.
As a rule of thumb, if you’re not a researcher in the area ignore any media reports of a study that include the words “in mice”.
Also, there’s a tendency on HN for commenters (mostly software engineers) to think that they are smarter than the scientists who work on this stuff day in, day out. Let me tell you, you, random HN reader are not smarter than random biomedical scientists.
There are legitimate applications - fixing a tiny mistake in the dialogue in a movie in the edit suite, for instance.
Do these legitimate applications justify making these tools available to every scammer, domestic abuser, child porn consumer, and sundry other categories of criminal? Almost certainly not.
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