On March 4 of this year, the U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission made history by issuing itsfirst-ever construction permit for a privately-owned nuclear reactor of a type that is advanced beyond the standard light-water reactors (LWRs) that have been the mainstay of the nuclear-power industry in the U. S. since its beginning in the 1950s. TerraPower, founded by Bill Gates in 2006, obtained the permit to build a full-scale nuclear power plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming. The plant will use TerraPower's sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR) technology, which has the potential to solve or alleviate many of the problems with existing reactors. A recent report in National Review describes how mainly Democratic opposition to nuclear innovation has delayed this type of permit for over fifty years.
Although SFR technology is advanced beyond the LWR approach, it isn't exactly new. In 1950, the world's first breeder reactor using a sodium-potassium mixture as coolant was put into service in Idaho by the Argonne National Laboratory. A breeder reactor is designed mainly to make more nuclear fuel than it consumes by transforming the relatively non-reactive uranium isotope U-238 into the plutonium isotope Pu-239, which can be used either for reactors or nuclear weapons.
A modified form of the breeder approach is used in TerraPower's reactor, in that as time goes on, a small core of enriched fuel breeds fissionable material in its surrounding non-fissionable nuclear material, which can even be obtained by processing existing nuclear waste from light-water reactors. In one stroke, this approach both conserves new fuel and gives us something useful to do with some of the nuclear waste that is now sitting around consuming space and worrying people. The operating parameters of the TerraPower type of reactor can be tweaked to minimize its own waste stream, and avoid producing pure plutonium that would be of interest to terrorists wanting to make their own nuclear weapons.
Another advantage of the SFR reactor is that the coolant is liquid sodium, not water. Admittedly, liquid sodium is not something you want just lying around in your living room. When exposed to air, especially moist air, it tends to catch fire, as the Russians have discovered while operating some of their own SFR reactors, as they have for many years. But TerraPower is going to bury most of the nuclear part of their plant underground and submerge the reactor in a passive pool of sodium. If the nuclear core overheats, the great thermal mass of the sodium pool tends to absorb excess heat until the core self-stabilizes by expansion.
Unlike light-water reactors which have to keep water under high pressures to use it as a coolant, the sodium coolant in an SFR reactor is at atmospheric pressure. This means the containment vessel can be much thinner and still protect the environment from unplanned releases of radioactive material. Although TerraPower's first reactor will cost some $5 billion, the hope is that the new design can be standardized so that such reactors can be mass-produced at much less cost.
Nuclear power in the U. S. has undergone a checkered career, from boom times in the 1950s when optimists claimed it would make electricity too cheap to meter, to the doomsayer times of the 1980s when the Three Mile Island partial meltdown in Pennsyvania in 1979 and the much worse Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986 turned the political winds against it. Ever since then, as Andrew Follett of National Review explains, opponents of nuclear power have tried to obstruct new construction of light-water reactors, and imposed a rigid conservatism that made licensing so-called "innovative" designs such as TerraPower's, almost unthinkable.
Fortunately for TerraPower, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has sped up its approval process, completing the effort for this license in only a year and a half. One of the main issues in building new nuclear plants of any kind since the 1970s has been the morass of regulatory hurdles that companies have had to wade through for many years. It doesn't hurt that TerraPower is backed by one of the world's richest men, but even rich men get bored sometimes. It appears that Mr. Gates has maintained enough interest in TerraPower to bring it to the point of actually constructing a reactor that breaks the restrictive mold of light-water reactors that has held back innovation in the U. S. nuclear industry for decades.
Of course, cost overruns are another bête noire for the nuclear industry, and only time will show whether TerraPower can keep construction of the Kemmerer plant within budget and on schedule. But the simplified requirements for safety and other issues that sodium-cooled reactors provide should make it easier.
This development comes at a time when the U. S. electric grid faces a great challenge: to meet vastly increased demand for power from data centers that are proliferating across the country. The data-center boom took the electric industry largely by surprise, and strains are showing in the form of increased rates in some areas and local not-in-my-back-yard fights.
But if the nuclear industry can get back on track with standardized, predictable designs that produce less nuclear waste, have a greater capacity for meeting peak loads (as the TerraPower design does through the great thermal mass of sodium and auxiliary molten-salt heat storage), and store enough fuel in them to run for thirty or forty years, the future looks brighter for nuclear power than it has in my lifetime, and I'm 73.
As with any innovative design, TerraPower's Kemmerer plant will be under extreme scrutiny. Any accident or mishap, no matter how small, is likely to be seized upon by opponents as evidence that the new design is "too dangerous." So I hope the firm is using an extra measure of caution to ensure that the eggs they are walking on will not break, and the U. S. can look forward to a power-production source that is more reliable than most renewable sources and produces less nuclear waste than existing designs.
Sources: The article "After 52 Years, Democrats' Red Tape Unravels" appeared on the National Review website Mar. 21, 2026 at https://www.nationalreview.com/2026/03/after-52-years-democrats-red-tape-unravels/. I also referred to Wikipedia articles on sodium-cooled fast reactors, TerraPower, and experimental breeder reactors.
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