The US will help Thailand to install nuclear reactors
The United States will help Thailand develop nuclear power through a new class of small modular reactors (SMRs) as part of a program to fight climate change, Vice President Kamala Harris announced on Saturday during a visit.
The White House said the aid is part of the Net Zero World Initiative , a project launched at last year's Glasgow climate summit in which the United States partners with the private sector and philanthropists to promote clean energy. In this case the "philanthropist" is Bill gate who is developing SMRs with the company TerraPower, which has a reactor under construction in Wyoming.
Thailand has no nuclear power and public sentiment on this issue has soured after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011.
The White House said it would offer technical assistance to the Southeast Asian country to implement the developing technology of small modular reactors, which are factory-built and portable. Such reactors are generally considered safer as they do not need human intervention to shut down in an emergency.
The press release specifies that traditional plants will not be supplied, but modern, and not yet existing, SMRs, "higher standards of safety, security and non-proliferation" and will have a smaller footprint than traditional nuclear plants.
US rivals China and Russia, as well as Argentina, are also developing small modular reactors, prototypes of which are in the planning stages. In this way, the USA also secures a possible customer for its cutting-edge technology, cutting out very fierce competitors.
The White House did not provide a timeline but said it would support Thailand, highly vulnerable to climate change, in its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2065.
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The article The US will help Thailand to install nuclear reactors comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/gli-usa-aiuteranno-la-thailandia-a-installare-dei-reattori-nucleari/ on Sun, 20 Nov 2022 12:03:47 +0000.