Nuclear reactors might sometime energy a chemical plant in Texas, making it the primary with such a facility onsite. The manufacturing facility, which makes plastics and different supplies, might turn out to be a mannequin for power-hungry information facilities and different industrial operations going ahead.
The plans are the work of Dow Chemical and X-energy, which final week utilized for a building allow with the Nuclear Regulatory Fee, the company within the US that governs nuclear power.
It’ll be years earlier than nuclear reactors will truly activate, however this utility marks a significant milestone for the mission, and for the potential of superior nuclear know-how to energy industrial processes.
“This has been a very long time coming,” says Harlan Bowers, senior vp at X-energy. The corporate has been working with the NRC since 2016 and submitted its first regulatory engagement plan in 2018, he says.
In 2020, the US Division of Vitality selected X-energy as one of many awardees of the Superior Reactor Demonstration Program, which offers funding for next-generation nuclear applied sciences. And it’s been two years since X-energy and Dow first introduced plans for a joint growth settlement at Dow’s plant in Seadrift, Texas.
The Seadrift plant produces 4 billion kilos of supplies every year, together with plastic used for meals and pharmaceutical packaging and chemical substances utilized in merchandise like antifreeze, soaps, and paint. A natural-gas plant onsite presently offers each steam and electrical energy. That tools is getting older, so the corporate was on the lookout for options.
“Dow noticed the chance to switch end-of-life belongings with protected, dependable, lower-carbon-emissions know-how,” stated Edward Stones, an govt at Dow, in a written assertion in response to questions from MIT Expertise Evaluation.
Superior nuclear reactors designed by X-energy emerged as a match for the Seadrift website partially due to their capability to ship high-temperature steam, Stones stated within the assertion.
X-energy’s reactor is just not solely smaller than most nuclear crops coming on-line right this moment but additionally employs completely different gasoline and completely different cooling strategies. The design is a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, which flows helium over self-contained pebbles of nuclear gasoline. The gasoline can attain temperatures of round 1,000 °C (1,800 °F). Because it flows via the reactor and across the pebbles, the helium reaches as much as 750 °C (about 1,400 °F). Then that scorching helium flows via a generator, making steam at a excessive temperature and strain that may be piped on to industrial tools or transformed into electrical energy.
The Seadrift facility will embody 4 of X-energy’s Xe-100 reactors, every of which might produce about 200 megawatts’ price of steam or about 80 megawatts of electrical energy.
A facility like Dow’s requires an especially constant provide of steam, Bowers says. So throughout regular operation, two of the modules will ship steam, one will ship electrical energy, and the ultimate unit will promote electrical energy to the native grid. If any single reactor must shut down for some motive, there’ll nonetheless be sufficient onsite energy to maintain working, he explains.
The progress with the NRC is optimistic information for the businesses concerned, but it surely additionally represents an achievement for superior reactor know-how extra broadly, says Eric Cothron, a senior analyst on the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, a nonprofit suppose tank. “It demonstrates real-world momentum towards deploying new nuclear reactors for industrial decarbonization,” Cothron says.
Whereas there are different corporations trying to carry superior nuclear reactor know-how on-line, this mission may very well be the primary to include nuclear energy onsite at a manufacturing facility. It thus units a precedent for the way new nuclear power applied sciences can combine immediately with trade, Cothron says—for instance, exhibiting a pathway for tech giants trying to energy information facilities.
It might take as much as two and a half years for the NRC to evaluation the development allow utility for this website. The location may even must obtain an working license earlier than it may begin up. Operations are anticipated to start “early subsequent decade,” in line with Dow.
