The photo is sourced from TerraPower
The project involves construction of a 345 MW reactor using liquid metal sodium as a coolant instead of water, which will increase the reactor’s capacity up to 500 MW during peak load hours. The fuel will be high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU), with the fissile isotope concentration between 5% and 20% (compared to 3-5% in the fuel for most modern reactors and more than 90% in the fuel for nuclear submarines). The application for the reactor construction was submitted this year; the project operator is expecting to obtain all the necessary permits by 2026, when the construction of the unit itself will begin.
The US is the world leader in terms of installed capacity of nuclear reactors. According to the IAEA, by June 2024 the country had 94 power units with a total “net” capacity of 97.0 GW), while China and France have 56 reactors with 61.4 GW and 54.2 GW, respectively. However, the reactor construction pace in the United States has slowed down significantly in recent years. If China has connected to the grid 53 units with a total net capacity of 51.9 GW between 2000 and 2024, the United States has only three reactors with a total capacity of 3.4 GW: the second unit of the Watts Bar nuclear power plant (NPP) in Tennessee, in the south, and the third and the fourth units of the Vogtle NPP in Georgia, the south-east of the country.
A low rate of nuclear reactor commissioning has largely been attributed to the shale revolution, which has facilitated gas-fired power plants an access to raw materials. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), US natural gas production increased 97% between 2000 and 2023, reaching 1,061 billion cubic meters. A sharp supply increase amid a shortage of gas transportation capacity often results in negative gas prices on the US regional markets, i.e. when producers are willing to pay extra to the consumers for the very possibility of delivery. All this resulted in a construction boom of gas-fired thermal power plants (TPPs) whose installed capacity in the US more than tripled between 2000 and 2023 (from 162 GW to 543 GW), and whose share in the generation mix increased from 16% to 42%. At the same time, the share of nuclear power generation decreased from 20% to 18% over the same period.
Rapid development of renewable energy sources also reflects cost competition. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the total commissioning of wind and solar generators in the US between January 2023 and May 2024 reached a total of 42.5 GW, surpassing the same figure for gas-fired TPPs (5.4 GW) and nuclear reactors (2.2 GW). The NPP niche under such conditions is balancing the power system in windless and cloudy weather conditions, but this role is also performed by energy storage systems whose capacity additions over the same period reached 11.7 GW in the United States.
