What the Emirates and Gates’ TerraPower will do on advanced reactors
After Microsoft, another company founded by Bill Gates closes an important agreement at Cop28: it is TerraPower, which signed a memorandum with the United Arab Emirates on advanced nuclear reactors. All the details
TerraPower, the nuclear technology company founded by Bill Gates, signed an agreement on Monday with ENEC, the Emirati state nuclear company, to develop advanced reactors in the United Arab Emirates and around the world.
The memorandum of understanding does not contain defined projects, but is part of an encouraging context: on the one hand, in fact, the Emirates intend to expand their nuclear capacity; on the other hand, at COP28 twenty-two countries (including the Emirates) signed a declaration of support for atomic energy with the aim of encouraging its spread throughout the world.
In recent days, during COP28, Microsoft – another company also founded by Gates – announced a collaboration with the United Nations for the creation of an artificial intelligence platform that will help track international progress on reducing emissions.
THE CONTEXT
The United Arab Emirates, a major oil and natural gas producing country, is “seeking a future for clean electrons and molecules that will be brought to reality by advanced reactors,” as said by ENEC CEO Mohamed al Hammadi , during the signing ceremony of the agreement with TerraPower.
To date, the Emirates have a traditional nuclear power plant, which began producing electricity in 2020. TerraPower, on the other hand, has a demonstration project for a small modular liquid sodium reactor in Wyoming, in the United States: it should come into operation in 2030 .
TerraPower's advanced reactor, called Natrium, is designed to be smaller and simpler to build than conventional ones, and also more dynamic: that is, faster in modulating production, so as to be able to support renewable parks and compensate for their drops in generation when the weather is adverse.
WHAT DOES THE AGREEMENT BETWEEN TERRAPOWER AND THE EMIRATES INVOLVE?
The memorandum between TerraPower and the United Arab Emirates concerns the study of the use of advanced nuclear reactors for network storage (Natrium is equipped with a molten salt storage system) and for the supply of clean energy for the production of hydrogen and the decarbonisation of the steel industries.
THE URANIUM PROBLEM
Complicating the Emirates plans could be the fact that TerraPower's Natrium reactors need a particular fuel, with high energy density and high enrichment (up to 20 percent) called HALEU , from High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium . The only country to market HALEU is Russia, through the state company Rosatom.
TerraPower's project in Wyoming has been delayed due to the lack of reliable suppliers of HALEU, but the company thinks that the United States will be able to create a domestic supply chain within about ten years: the company most involved in the production of this fuel is Centrus Energy.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/energia/terrapower-emirati-arabi-uniti/ on Tue, 05 Dec 2023 15:05:36 +0000.