It’ll be years earlier than nuclear reactors will truly activate, however this utility marks a significant milestone for the challenge, and for the potential of superior nuclear know-how to energy industrial processes.
“This has been a very long time coming,” says Harlan Bowers, senior vp at X-energy. The corporate has been working with the NRC since 2016 and submitted its first regulatory engagement plan in 2018, he says.
In 2020, the US Division of Vitality selected X-energy as one of many awardees of the Superior Reactor Demonstration Program, which supplies funding for next-generation nuclear applied sciences. And it’s been two years since X-energy and Dow first introduced plans for a joint growth settlement at Dow’s plant in Seadrift, Texas.
The Seadrift plant produces 4 billion kilos of supplies every year, together with plastic used for meals and pharmaceutical packaging and chemical compounds utilized in merchandise like antifreeze, soaps, and paint. A natural-gas plant onsite at present supplies each steam and electrical energy. That gear is getting older, so the corporate was on the lookout for options.
“Dow noticed the chance to exchange end-of-life belongings with secure, dependable, lower-carbon-emissions know-how,” stated Edward Stones, an government at Dow, in a written assertion in response to questions from MIT Know-how Assessment.
Superior nuclear reactors designed by X-energy emerged as a match for the Seadrift website partially due to their capacity to ship high-temperature steam, Stones stated within the assertion.