The advanced nuclear reactor company founded by Bill Gates said it will have to delay the demonstration of its novel reactor technology because its exclusive fuel supply arrangement with Russia has been disrupted by the war in Ukraine.
TerraPower, one of the advanced nuclear companies receiving government funding under the Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, was aiming for 2028 to demonstrate its Natrium sodium-cooled reactor at a pilot plant in Wyoming. That target has been pushed back by at least two years, according to Jeff Navin, TerraPower’s director of external affairs.
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“When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, it put a big question mark up for us,” Navin said, according to the Casper Star-Tribune. “We had a plan. It was a very aggressive timeline. We felt pretty confident that we could meet it. But it was all predicated on having our first core load of fuel come from Russia.”
TerraPower’s demonstration plant is planned to be built at the site of a retiring coal plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming.
It’s a setback for the advanced nuclear sector, which faces the challenge of developing the next generation of reactors and proving commercial viability as soon as possible to meet many governments’ aggressive greenhouse gas reduction targets.
Many advanced reactors, including TerraPower’s, require high-assay, low-enriched uranium, a special fuel that’s more highly enriched than the fuel used in legacy reactors operating today but less enriched than weapons-grade uranium.
Russia is the only source of commercially available HALEU in the world, and U.S. advanced nuclear companies had banked on purchasing fuel from there — at least for their initial designs.
“When Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine, that calculus changed dramatically,” Navin told Congress in August.
He and others had warned Congress of the threat to advanced nuclear posed by the war, which even without a U.S. embargo against Russian uranium imports has made doing business with Russian companies untenable.
The Energy Department is working to commercialize HALEU at home, but its programs are just getting off the ground.
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Congress in 2020 directed the Energy Department to facilitate the domestic supply of HALEU, and it just authorized $700 million in new funding for HALEU in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Navin and others in the industry have also sought to secure fuel by taking weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium from the U.S. stockpile and downblending it to the proper level of enrichment, but experts say it would be complicated and likely take years, as well as require additional direction from Congress.
