In Abilene, about 200 miles west of Dallas, Natura Resources is building the nation’s first advanced liquid-fuel research reactor in nearly 40 years. The project is housed at Abilene Christian University, where a $25 million research facility was completed in September 2023.
Natura has raised $120 million in private funding and received another $120 million from the Legislature.
Natura’s technology uses molten salt as both fuel and coolant — a design last tested at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1960s. The company is first building a 1-megawatt research reactor in Abilene, intended to demonstrate to regulators and investors that the technology works and is safe.
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Aalo Atomics is taking a different approach. The startup, founded by Canadian-born engineer Matt Loszak and based in Austin, is designing a sodium-cooled fast reactor, a technology that uses solid fuel, like conventional nuclear plants, built specifically for factory mass production.
Each unit would produce 10 megawatts, enough to power roughly 6,000 to 7,000 homes in Texas, and the reactors will be sized to fit on a standard truck. Aalo’s commercial model would consist of five of these units, totaling 50 megawatts.
Loszak said the company plans to activate its first 10 megawatt test reactor within about five months, after completing prototype testing at the end of December, as part of its effort to move toward commercial deployment.
Lol, typical American centric article.
Just outside Toronto, they’re building four 300MW small modular reactors, at an existing nuclear plant, using proven designs from Hitachi, and the first one is targeted to come online by 2029 or 2030, eclipsing the Texas projects in scale, timeline, and practicality, but that literally doesn’t even get a passing mention.
So how long until it’s small enough to power a Pip-boy?
This should be interesting. Texas can’t even keep its own electric grid functioning all year round.
Like, backyard? Sure would come in handy after hurricanes.
Can’t wait for a hurricane to smash up 5 small truck sized reactors and spread the debris around.
Nice, we’re going backwards…
And who will handle the waste product? And who will pay for handling the waste product?
Natura’s research reactor is designed to first prove the LFMSR concept at megawatt scale, then be converted to prove that MSR reactors can reprocess existing nuclear waste as a percentage of its fuel. Which means we could take all of the current stockpile of nuclear waste and re-burn it to the point that it’s 90% consumed (instead of 5% consumed today) and leave a waste product that decays to safe levels extremely quickly (tens of years).
I’ll believe it when I see it. This is the state that fracked everything and then spread its radioactive, pfas-infested fracking waste all over the land. Now they’re building elementary schools on top of it.
That’s such a small, manageable concern compared to the damage that is done by fossil fuels.
It is, unless it’s distributed in a plume because Texas environmental regulators suck.
That’s what the NRC is for.
Haha that’s a good joke.
And they have enough people to maintain and inspect the hundreds of thousands of reactors that are going to be built, if those small reactors work?
not hundreds of thousands. they are too expensive to be that common.
Given the track record of a lot of projects, they’ll store it on site because actually dealing with it costs money, until it leaks and then they’ll disappear and a bunch of people get horrible diseases and the federal government will spend everyone’s tax dollars to clean it up.
Get out, oil shill.
Get lost, nuclear apologist.
