9/10/2023 0 Comments Energy bits owner age![]() It has consistently flopped as a commercial proposition. And yet the industry, in many respects, looks unready to step into a major role. The warming clock is ticking-another sort of countdown-and replacing fossil fuels is much easier with nuclear power in the equation. ![]() Those who worry about climate change have come to see that it is essential. Nuclear power is in a strange position today. There’s another, more significant similarity: “The industry is hobbled by costs and schedule overruns, as was the launch industry prior to SpaceX.” Managing complex projects-and bringing new vigor to old ideas-is something Muratore’s 40 years in the space industry have taught him a lot about. “A launchpad and a nuclear reactor have a lot in common”-extreme temperatures, and many tons of concrete, and lots of pipes and valves and sensors and controls that must work together with extreme precision. Nuclear power wasn’t on his radar until recently, when Kairos’s executives called him for advice and wound up recruiting him. Then he spent a decade working for SpaceX, Elon Musk’s world-beating private spaceflight company. He spent 24 years working for NASA, where he was a flight controller for the space-shuttle program under the legendary flight director Gene Kranz, of Apollo 13 movie fame. As a boy in the ’60s, he was the archetypal kid who built model planes and joined the rocketry club and never stopped daydreaming about human flight. John Muratore runs this test operation and, as you would expect, is an experienced engineer as you might not expect, he is a space engineer, not a nuclear one. ![]() Engineers stand on top of scaffolding slotting graphite reflectors into place.Īs I tour the facility, however, I soon realize that the crucial technology is not 16 feet tall but about 5 foot 6, balding, with jeans and thick, black-framed glasses. Nearby, welders ready those pipes and valves. In a few days, the test unit’s top will be installed, crowning the device with bristling pipes and sensors. That test will depend on this one in Albuquerque, because molten-salt reactor cooling has not been tried in the United States since the 1960s, when a five-year experiment at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee, proved the idea viable. Kairos is well along, with a permit to build a full-fledged nuclear test reactor already moving toward federal approval, hopefully by the end of 2023. It will remain stable until normal conditions are restored. Most important, even if a local disaster cuts the power to the cooling system and safety systems fail, this reactor will not melt down, spew radioactive material, or become too hot and dangerous to approach. Customers will be able to buy just one, to power a chemical or steel plant, or a few, linked like batteries, to power a city. It will be made in factories for easy shipping and rapid assembly. This reactor will sit in an ordinary building the size of, say, a suburban self-storage facility. Forget about those airport-scale compounds with their fortresslike containment enclosures and 40-story cooling towers belching steam. The scale is unlike that of an existing commercial nuclear plant. The test unit looks surprisingly unimpressive: a shiny cylindrical drum only about 16 feet tall, resembling an oversize water heater. When I glance at a countdown clock behind the receptionist during a visit last May, it says 31 days, 8 hours, 9 minutes, and 22 seconds until the experiment begins. If all goes according to plan, the system-never tried before-will control and regulate a simulated chain reaction. But everything else will be true to life, including the molten fluoride salt that will flow through the device to cool it. In this test run, electricity, not uranium, will furnish the energy graphite-encased fuel pebbles, each about the size of a golf ball, will be dummies containing no radioactive material. There, digital readouts count down the minutes, T-minus style, until power begins flowing to a test unit simulating the blistering heat of a new kind of nuclear reactor. The building looks like a factory or a warehouse nothing about it betrays the moonshot exercise happening within. Around it, desert stretches toward hazy mountains on the horizon. Kairos Power’s new test facility is on a parched site a few miles south of the Albuquerque, New Mexico, airport. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday.
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