Gen IV reactor approved

[koralis]

Molten Salt/pebble bed, designed to avoid catastrophy even with earthquakes, etc. Glad it's finally moving forward. The world needs it now more than ever with all of the new AI datacenters sucking up power like there's no tomorrow.

MSN

Tennessee-based Kairos Power’s nuclear plant design features a graphite-moderated pebble-bed reactor with fluoride salt as its coolant. It uses tri-structural ISOtropic (TRISO) particle fuel, which is “randomly packed” in pebble form inside the reactor.
...
With the recent approval, the NRC has given Kairos the go-ahead to build a power plant that will eventually supply power to the grid. Dubbed Hermes 2, the power plant will be sited next to Hermes 1 and will feature two 35-MWth reactors with a combined generation capacity of 20 MWe. Hermes 2 will replicate complete plant architecture at a reduced scale while supplying carbon-free energy to the grid.

 

[pax]

Solar and wind are fine to some degree but you need that large base production that is more reliable and also smaller footprint than wind...

 

[koralis]

Solar and wind are fine to some degree but you need that large base production that is more reliable and also smaller footprint than wind...

Yeah. The intermittency problem is a big deal and why the coal/gas plants can't shut down. This fission reactor is solid enough to be the first new reactor design licensed in a LONG time. Seems like over the past 5 years we're actually making headway on fusion too, which would be great.