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Nuclear inauguration Kairos Powerreceived approvalfrom the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to start twist on two mental test reactor in Oak Ridge , Tennessee . The permit marks a important milepost for Kairos , which in Octoberinked a deal with Googleto allow 500 megawatt of electricity for its datum centers .
The fluoride - salt cool down , high-pitched - temperature reactors are scaled down versions of whatKairoshopes to ultimately build to supply Google with electricity starting in 2030 . And while the new reactor are technically test beds , Kairos intends to plug in the great power plant to the grid , spokesperson Ashley Lewis tell TechCrunch .
The Hermes 2 reactors will be capable of get 35 megawatts of heat each , and they ’ll be connected to a 20 megawatt turbine to work that passion into electrical energy . Kairos ’ commercial - scale might flora will also sport two reactors adequate to of generating a combined 150 megawatt of electricity .
Kairos ’ design differs from be nuclear nuclear reactor in two primal way : The fuel is made of U coat in carbon and ceramic shells , which are intended to be long-wearing enough to contain fissionable material in the instance of an accident . And the nuclear reactor is n’t cooled by water but by liquefied salt .
The small modular reactor ( SMR ) startup , which has received a $ 303 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy , has been working for years to complicate its molten salt - cooling system . Fluoride saltiness ’ extremely high boiling points allow the coolant to menstruate under grim press . That means in the case of an accident , there wo n’t be any high - imperativeness , radioactive stuff await to collapse forth should pumping systems betray . Plus , Oak Ridge National Laboratorysays that , should power to the pumps flunk , molten - salt reactor can rely on passive convection to move saltiness through the reactor to cool off it .
Altogether , those feature of speech are enough to qualify Kairos ’ designs as “ Generation IV ” reactors , a classification system of rules created by an international organization backed by national nuclear agencies . The compartmentalisation system is bothvague and broad , so it ’s severe to tell exactly how Hermes 2 might score on the rubric .
Kairos has been inching toward commendation for the reactor intention for the last year and a half . Hermes 2 pass its safety review with the NRC in July and its environmental assessment in August . All told , it took 18 months for the NRC to publish the twist permission , a comparatively fleet timeline compared with previous nuclear reactor permits .
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Now the pressure is on Kairos to deliver on its promise . The company say it hop-skip to have the first nuclear reactor for the Google deal online in 2030 and the rest dispatch by 2035 . In the world of nuclear exponent , a decade is n’t much clock time at all .
