Small Nuclear Reactors - Natrium
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 19 มิ.ย. 2024
- This video tells about the new exciting sodium-cooled, high-assay-low-enrichment-uranium (HALEU) fueled small nuclear reactor that was one of the winners of the DOE Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program competition and will be built over the next few years. It utilizes molten-salt storage of the heat generated by the nuclear reactor, so it can "follow-the-load". This type of system could be the future of nuclear power. The demonstration reactor is planned to be constructed at a retired coal power plant site in Wyoming, so the electrical generation equipment can be re-used.
I love this guy. He looks like an ex football player that now owns a well respected high end used car dealership and does high energy physics on the side. Excellent teacher too .
Haha, I see it! Maybe he's got a side channel explaining this month's best buy, a 2021 Lexus with only 15,000 miles on the clock...
"This sleek ride was made the year I got the record for passing yards in a season! She's a solid, reliable vehicle. Even more reliable than my O-line! Buy today and I'll throw in my signed rookie card! Oh and by the way, nuclear energy is the safest, cleanest, and most reliable form of mass energy production we have. It's even better than solar and wind!"
He looks like an engineer that continued his education.
I never knew there was such a thing as a "well respected used car dealer" 😄
And yes I really like his videos. He is calm and explains things in a clear ration matter. I really wish more anti nuclear people would listen to people like him. If they oppose nuclear plants i can accept that. But do it from a rational viewpoint. Not an emotional one. Myself, l have problems with the US nuclear industry but that is more of a matter of how it was managed. I think something on the level if the French model is a better system. Especially in terms of plant design.
This angers me.
I never had a teacher like him. Life is unfair.
Thanks for being this awesome with this material.
Thank you!
Well said, I feel the same way😊
Well now you do... Just because we are not in a school doesn't mean the information isn't relevant.
I had one prof like him. Didn't use technology as well, but extensive subject matter expertise and incredibly good at presenting it.
Notes from the whiteboard were how you survived the class, but it was engaging, challenging, and is still useful in my professional life today.
@@jamuojisan
Life will be unfair to those who don't understand Chinese. In a decade or so, after they have subdued Taiwan, HK, and a good portion of the rest of the world.
0:59 Natrium is the Latin word for sodium.. that's why it has the symbol na which is short for Natrium.
Natrium is in fact the word for sodium in several languages e.g. German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, etc...
Good to know!
Well, the Germans and the Swedes saw to that 'Na' prevailed, as mentioned in enwp.org/Sodium#History, but the name has even Egyptian roots, in a natural Na-salt-mix, more clearly stated in enwp.org/Natron#Etymology.
I've always been a fan of salt. With the benefits of 4th gen one must wonder why nations bother with the old technology anymore. Is it just to produce material for bombs?
I used to have a German periodic table in the office. It also had J for Iodine.
@@dingdong2103 Not many people building bombs these days. But a fair number of people know how to build and operate LWRs, while few know how to build Liquid Metal or Molten Salt Reactors. Hopefully, that will change.
I work for a construction company that primarily does work on coal power plants. I hope my generation realizes the potential and benefits from nuclear reactors and can utilize the infrastructure we already have in place. Someday I hope I can work on one of these reactors. Thank you for all of your videos.
You said it: "infrastructure". It's not only turbines+generators, it is also the electrical lines and its general integration into the power grid, and roads, and I'm sure more.
@@johanponken yep, infrastructure is the name of the game, and its what makes nuclear extremely good. It has the smallest ground footprint per TW of energy produced. Current reactors can opperate for months on end, only suffering a comparatively small downtime, Molten salt throrium reactors can essentially operate without interruption as they can breed their fuel continuously. They are the perfect baseload energy production for countries that cannot enjoy uninterupted sunlight most of the year. We also lose a lot of energy over long distances so we kind of need power generation at various points on a territory and can't just plop down a gigantic square of solar pannels and use that to supply an entire contient.
Most of the world live in temperate climates, where MOST of the year is spent under cloud cover with minimal wind and already have dams everywhere a dam is fit to be built. Essentially while renewables work, they need to be built WIDELY over cappacity to actually work as baseloads, and even then during fall/winter, there can be months of almost no uninterupted sunlight and weeks on end of calm winds where even an over-dimentionned network can't help.
Nuclear is the perfect baseload. You can place it almost everywhere, it takes little space to generate a lot of energy, is consistent and works in all conditions. You want to add renewables to the grid so the nuclear plant does not have to run at full power all the time, but its actually much easier to have a grid that can work entirely off nuclear than it is to get one that can work entirely on renewables, at least in the areas of the planet where you don't have 24/7 solar or wind, which is most of the planet.
Most fossil plants can already be replaced by nuclear reactors, it does not take a lot to replace them by either small modular reactors or molten salt reactors, pretty much every scientist and engineer knows this to be the way to go, just that the public is lagging decades behind in their understnading of nuclear.
Yeah it ain't 1986 anymore. Nuke is the way to go until fusion is made stable. I hear it's only 20 years out now.
It’s a no brainer
@@mobiuscoreindustries if the safire project project is true it would be even easy too heh
I'm a simple man. I see Illinois EnergyProf. I click like.
501st like.
And THAT folks is how you convey a complex message to a general audience. The topic is still highly technical but this excellent presentation gives us the best chance of understanding the subject.
I really like the molten salt energy storage, because it doesn't have some of the problems that pumped hydro and battery energy storage systems have. You can also make a combined-heat-and-power system a lot easier.
I have not looked into it too closely, but I hope the reactor design allows for shutdowns, as in losing criticality, Russians tried the liquid metal route with their early subs and I would imagine it's kinda embarrassing retiring a sub because the reactor cooled off and couldn't be restarted. In other aspects they were amazing reactors, just liquid metal was a bad idea. They were not using sodium though.
@@justingrey6008 The video mentions sodium melts at 98C so you could likely re-melt it pretty easily.
@@Whatsinanameanyway13 no doubt, but whatever heat source was applied would need to be external as any control rods or the like would be stuck in the sodium. Doesn't sound like a good time.
But these issues are known so I am sure someone has thought about them a bit
@@justingrey6008 Sodium-Potassium alloy "NAK" has a lower melting point, potentially below -10C though that is with an alloy very high in potassium. A low level of potassium in a sodium system might usefully depress the melting point.
@@justingrey6008 Do you know what metal was used? Lead?
Aside from the fact that the subject material is fascinating, I just like listening to this guy talk. He has such a pleasant voice.
Love to see these videos, complicated subjects given a friendly face,
This is 1950 shit. It will disrupt the entire global economy and throw the world into perpetual war for a century.
It is interesting. The potential is astounding... but the humans are basically useless and dangerous.
We are lucky they let us burn oil.
Be interesting to see a comparison between this and LFTR tech, energy yield, final waste levels etc
Second that. Or 9th.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment
@@darknase looks like they fixed the 1959 14th experiment run problems. Another 26k hours and no incident.
1. Hopefully none of the technology has been forgotten.
2. I would build these early plants in low population areas, or with good shielding.
I always thought that the first experimental thorium reactors should be used for desalination rather than electric.
This is better, and the tech is far more advanced,China after years of work has a 2MW test reactor,while TerraPower is ready with the 345MW with 500MW for 51/2hour storage Natrium system ready to be built in Klemperer Wyoming. I never imagined our NRC would ever license a fast reactor, but Terra Power will try.
@@dennisgarber Typically, coal power plants (which as you know, the idea of this is to build on their area and reuse the existing generation/distribution infrastructure), are away from population centers. Your concern about being away from population centers is already satisfied. Personally, I'd welcome one in my backyard, but I just wanted to answer your question :)
i‘m glued to the screen when a new video is published..
thank you so much from switzerland..
This guy needs to run the Dept. of Energy.
We need reactors to pump water over the continental divide for the western United States. There isnt enough naturally occurring fresh water for the west. The solution is NOT to stop using water and hope for the best. Water is valuable, its worth moving vast distances.
We. Want. Cheap electricity and water!
the problem isn't the lack of water but rather the fact that it's not fresh. you can just use seawater and apply reverse osmosis.
@@Hamstray Yes, and that could be done and powered more locally. Small reactors. :)
In giant _pipelines_ ? AND up and down whole mountain ranges, or would you drill ginormeous tunnels through them? Not sure any of that would be very safe.
Nah, just desalinate the ocean water. Check out what the AEC was coming up with in the 60s and 70s: digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc784269/m2/1/high_res_d/metadc784269.pdf
Anywhere from 100 million to 5 billion gallons a day of freshwater with a sub 10ppm level
China had done that experiment with the world's most expensive multi-decade infrastructure project and it failed spectacularly. And that project is based on infrastructure that already existed for centuries. Now they are looking to do what actually makes sense: sea water desalination.
The United States could not do an infrastructure project on that scale period. Do not try to fight nature, use what it gives you.
I'm in Wyoming, and I think this is great.
Although turning cowboys into nuclear engineers might not be as simple as some seem to think. :-)
I've sent this to several state legislators who seem hazy about exactly what an "atom" is.
I love that we can re-tool existing power plants like this. Great lecture, thank you!
I also like how liquid sodium can be pumped using electromagnetic induction, solid state pumping integrated into the piping.
Love your videos, much love from Norway!
I love these videos and this guy's presentation skills. He also really sounds like The Grand Nagus so that's cool too.
Maybe he is The Grand Nagus.
Inconceivable!
These multi nerd knowledge level comments that I thrive on haha. A comment on a nuclear power video, referencing Star Trek and followed up by princess bride quotes 😂
Love these videos. Please keep them coming.
As a chemistry grad liquid Sodium gives me the shivers. Any kind of leak near water and it's game over.
Water with sodium means violent reaction i.e. explosion. Even a leak into air leads to fire. Fire is not a good thing at all to nuclear plant though a bit better than explosion. Do not use sodium as coolant. Use lead. Simple lead with no Bismuth. You do not want the building up of Polodium.
These are absolutely great videos. Thanks for breaking this stuff down.
I have never seen such a good presentation made on this specific type of reactor. Thank you
Thank you so much for your explanation about small reactors Prof. Ruzic, it was so clear.
Thank you for the amazing presentation, professor.
Glad to hear back from ya man.
These videos are pure gold!
These videos are incredibly interesting! I'll need to find some time to start studying physics. Also, I love it that you always include a section about the economics of each energy source, it's very useful for comparisons.
Awesome stuff again! Thanks professor! More please....
Thank you good sir, this video needs to be watched wide & far, hope some politicians do watch this video
Thanks for another informative video, Professor David!
Great lecture. Thanks.
Your videos are excellent, thank you.
Another Great Video. Thank you Professor Ruzic for all your efforts. You are a wonderfully brilliant person and educator. I have thoroughly enjoyed all of your videos.
Professor Ruzic I love your videos. You make the complex seem simple for the layman like myself. Thanks!!
Great setup with the plexiglass for writing. Thanks for uploading this content, very interesting!
Love this content. Please make more!
Than You for the lectures-all. Wish to see more...
Thank you!
I was so excited to see a new video!
Glad to see your making videos again
This guy is really sharp. Professor you have an excellent delivery and are very pleasant to listen to. Greetings from Arizona
Thanks David!! Really appreciated! Now it's just a matter of educating the masses, and I thank you for doing that part!!
BTW For the first time in 30 years, I was in your city last weekend. Stopped by Papa Dell's for lunch, to see if it was as good as I remembered from the 70's!
Glad you like it, and liked Papa Dell's!
Thank you for this video! It's really encouraging to see that we can have walk-away safe, non-CO2-producing electricity generation that can be used in places (and times) where wind and solar don't fit
I always thought that nuclear + massive molten salt energy storage is a no-brainer. And they scale up amazingly well. You need 80.000 cubic meters of solar salt (sodium nitrate +potassium nitrate +calcium nitrate) at the Tmax of a regular sodium reactor, 550C, to provide 1GW of electric power for 8hours. So you "charge up the battery" in your 8h of minimum demand, keep it for 8h of medium demand and release the energy during the 8h of maximum demand. Basically, you can backup an entire GW of electricity production capacity with 80.000 cubic meters of salt. That seems like a lot but it's a tank of 60m diameter by 30m tall, (ok you really need 2, one for the hot salt and one for the cold salt, or just one with a divider).
When you run the numbers on nuclear and molten salt storage you realize how photovoltaics + windmills + batteries is basically a decentraliased Goldberg machine that may work, but it doesn't make as much sense
You do realize that nuclear power plants are way more complex than a solar / wind installation + battery banks, right?
They're also orders of magnitude more expensive and require orders of magnitude more oversight, the comparison is ridiculous.
Calling solar / wind "Goldberg machines" that "don't make much sense" is quite silly, specially when the alternative you're proposing is a molten salt nuclear plant 😅
Guess what? I can't have a molten salt nuclear reactor at home (and even if I were allowed to have one, I couldn't possibly afford to run it), but I sure can have solar panels, a battery bank and even small scale hydro (if there's a stream running nearby).
Hell, I could eventually go off the grid, by gradually scaling up my renewable installations at home.
Nuclear power makes sense to power industry, but homes can power themselves with renewables + batteries + smart architecture.
Nuclear zealotry is as silly and misguided as anti-nuclear zealotry, don't be one of those people.
@@Goreuncle Not bad, and good advice at the end.
Thanks a lot sir, wonderful presentation
Uranium ⚖️ Thorium
Uranium great for bomb's
Thorium good for making energy
This reactor is definitely an upgrade from the cold war reactor relic we are stuck with now, but considering the negative human behavioral traits, Thorium keep looking better with every news broadcast I watch.
Thank you for these lectures! I wish more people would know and understand nuclear power. So they won't cry and faint in fear just from hearing the word "nuclear". Nuclear is our solution to global warming, and we blatantly ignore it. Please keep these awesome videos going! They are very informative!
Far too many anti nuclear proponents are acting on emotion. Not from as ny rational fear.
Thanks Prof, another great video 👍
Thank you for watching, endeavor to write as soon as for more enlightenment or tips on investing in crypto
+1•4•6•9•2•2•5•9•2•5•6
This guy is awesome, great lecture
Thank you for the informative talk
One of my favorite content producers.
Yessssssss new video can’t wait to put this on at bedtime yesssssss
Wow! Excellent teacher for understanding nuclear technology.
I have a history degree but LOVE these videos. You’re a great instructor.
hello professor, could you talk about the Russian BN800/1200 types of fast neutron reactors and how are those different
thanks for the great explanation in this video
Doing an interview with TerraPower tomorrow. This video was very helpful in understanding their upcoming project. Thank you so much for posting! I will definitely continue to watch your videos. I hope to someday get a masters in Nuclear Engineering and you are very inspiring
Well?? How did it go? Are you a TerraPower Ranger?
Very well done. A few notes: (1) The nitrate salt storage is off-the-shelf from the concentrated solar world. (2) The Natrium nuclear island (NRC-licensed) is extremely small. Most of the plant is outside of the NRC world and can be built to commercial standards. This reduces cost, along with #1. (3) Fossil fuel pollution impacts are not limited to CO2. There are a lot of other emissions, including fugitive methane, acid rain, etc. (4) On the economics, it's not fair to compare Natrium to coal because in the USA at least, new coal plants are a dead letter. It's also not fair to compare current methane prices because methane is set to get a lot more expensive very soon. (5) Industry is saying "we need a fuel." And Natrium seems to be the leading option, along with the GEH BWRX-300. (6) I'd love to see a segment on the BWRX-300 reactor. It's leapfrogging over NuScale Energy.
I like this guy a lot! I’ve watched a great number of his videos on nuclear power.
Nuclear has always been the answer. The molten salt thermal storage is really interesting, allowing for the base load to be more variable and supplement non-dispatch-able power is compelling.
The molten salt is also interesting in how it 'decouples' the two aspects of electricity production. For example, a turbine/generator trip can occur and yet the response on the reactor side can be more measured and has much more time to react. This can have some interesting effects on safety analysis. Still early stages and most of the design data seems to be proprietary at this stage, but something to keep watching.
Very good news, thank you.
Liquid sodium ignites on contact with air and can do so explosively in certain conditions. This is why the sodium cooling loops were often considered the most dangerous part of breeder reactors.
There's no one who can so neatly explain Nuclear + Economics better than Illinois EnergyProf. Watching them makes me yearn to know more and more in this domain!
Thank you, so much. More people need to be educated on this. New nuclear technology is way better than before.
This is really exciting stuff..
Always love that intro.
Great content here, too.
That was really interesting, best of luck Thankyou
Waste and safety are most people's chief concerns with nuclear and this solves both almost completely - not to mention all the other advantages. This seems like the power plant we've been waiting for.
I grew up in Wyoming, glad to see that the state is forward thinking. Thanks - Energy Prof for presenting data in such a clear understandable fashion! Also, if memory serves me right, the soviet's used liquid sodium reactors in their titanium hulled Alpha class submarines.
Liquid metal cooled reactors yes, but liquid sodium no. The reactors used on the super-fast soviet alfa-class attack subs were cooled by eutectic lead-bismuth alloy. The primary reason for this was to make them as compact as possible: Sodium is an excellent coolant, but is not so great as radiation shielding, particularly for neutron and gamma radiation since those are the most penetrating. Lead and bismuth are not quite as good as coolants - in principle either metal alone could work, but the reason why the alloy of both is better is because it has a wider liquid range. Anyway, these reactors could be made much smaller than most because the coolant could also function as the radiation shielding - both lead and bismuth are heavy, dense metals so are highly effective as radiation shielding. This in turn allowed the submarine itself to be smaller than it would otherwise have been if it had used a more conventional pressurised water reactor of equivalent power output. The insanely high power to weight ratio of the alfa-class is what gave it such a high top speed - in fact it was so fast that it could literally outrun every torpedo in use at the time the first alfa-class subs went into service. The UK and USA actually developed faster torpedoes in direct response to the alfa-class.
Great presentation, I worked briefly at EBR II where much of this was developed. I hope they built one at Kemmerer, Wy. to replace the coal fired one. Just be sure it is not over an aquifer or near a river.
This does seem a bit like a sales pitch, I'd be interested to know:
The claim is for a price significantly lower than current LWRs, but sodium cooled reactors have historically been more expensive than LWRs. How has this been achieved, and how reliable are the cost estimates?
SFRs have often been plagued with reliability problems - Superphenix suffered very badly from this. How have you addressed this?
I hope it succeeds, but the nuclear industry does have a history of overpromising and underdelivering.
Your question is legitimate but based on an illusion. Superphenix admitedly had technical problems (24 months stop after 53 months producing), it was a prototype. This is important, prototypes are heavy investments and have a steep learning curve for the exploitation. That is why it was a european project. But it was also stopped for administrative reasons for a really fucking long time (54 months !!!). Then it suffered political issues and non sense. Imagine, closing a plant you put billions in and that is in working just fine ?! It was time to experiment and gain knowledge for the future... In 1996, it had 95% availability...
All in all, the choice of stopping was really hard to comprehend when 99% or more of the population and politician barely get the differences between EPR, BWR, MSR... Now we have a climate crises on our hands, what should we do ?
@@IncHolowind go back to been cave dwellers. We can come back out in about 10,000 years.
I kid of course. I'm just wondering if the environmentalist will kill this project as well.
In this case, economy of scale. These are small reactors designed to be manufactured en masse. Just like Nuscale's SMR (which is a PWR).
The historical problem with Nuclear power is that each reactor was not only under the most regulatory control of any kind of power, every part had to be built custom made (at least here in the US, France standardized their plants back in the 60s).
I suspect that we will see the cost efficiency overtime, as Orgoss put it, Prototypes are expensive, no matter what they are.
@@nathancochran4694 True costs will come down. But will they come down far enough. Solar, wind, and gas in the US have become astonishingly cheap and keep getting cheaper. Sure if you ditch the gas at high enough levels of penetration you have start paying for super expensive storage(or epicly large grid improvements and overbuild). But we might be able to get to 80 or 90% penetration before those costs start getting enormous. And is 20% natural gas really the bottle neck for climate change at that point. Natural gas is also essentially harmless from a safety perspective unlike coal. The obvious choice to handle that last 20% is nuclear. But it might be a better use of money to just use gas and use that money on mitigation or on encouraging less new coal in India. This issue is rarely addressed by the pro nuclear crowd.
French couldn't build the Panama canal,Americans came in studied the medical issues of malaria ,eliminated mosquitos and built the canal.Terra Power is Bill Gates using the info from EBR2.which Bill Clinton moronically cancelled, there are many partners, and computers are more powerful, but you do not want leaks, its explosive when contacting water and our air has water in it.
Love your videos Professor. Hope here in Spain people start changing their mind about nuclear energy, by the moment it doensn´t seem good.
Very fascinating.
It’s great to finally see construction of a new nuclear plant in Wyoming.
So you're actually going to build one. I am looking forward to following the project. Wish I was younger, I'd apply for a job
Very excited to hear more about this plant! Could be our future happening right now.
Build one in CA & I would consider it a success in getting the Green people to approve - in reality never happen.
@@jwarmstrong More likely build in northern Mexico, and ship the power over the border.
@@wwoods66 Low natural gas prices make spending billions on nuclear power a big gamble today..
Tax carbon emissions and those prices get closer though. Someone is subsidizing the waste.
What no one talks about is what happens when you have a fuel element failure in sodium coolant reactor. Cesium boils off at 670 degrees Celsius so if your sodium is hotter than that you get cesium vapor. You probably wouldn't notice it for a long time until it builds up somewhere, and makes an unsafe workplace heat exchanger. You wouldn't notice it till a good distance away from any system leak because it would have to cool down to become solid and settle out. So leaks would make a bigger mess than you would think.
That's really cool.
He is the best Teacher I ever heard. Let’s build these reactors, and do it next to the old coal plants. Thus not wasting infrastructure, that is allready build and paid for. It just makes SO much sense. Give that man a Cigar, and a Nobel price. 🇩🇰🙋🏻♂️🪐👩🏻🚀🇺🇸
David for president, your the best Prof.
Greatest this is one is being built now. We need to begin construction on many more ASAP.
Long term storage of spent fuel is the key to this whole endeavor.
What makes this video even more fascinating is when you realize he’s been mirror writing all the text and graphs so we see it normally
The reason many transuranics have long half life is because they are more stable and thus less radioactive and therefore not a major threat
Exactly! This is the part everyone gets backward and the people who understand this do a terrible job of educating. The same can be said for waste.
Would love to hear your thoughts on using a dissolved fuel liquid metal reactor to enable I/Xe extraction to support load following without the liquid salt heat storage construct.
You are the best
I would have really enjoyed having a professor like you. I did the engineering route and most of us engineers are just dull.
Another great video. Thanks for doing these. Now if we could just get the energy industry to move to this approach. States control the power output from solar and wind to control costs (keep them high); I personally witness this with the California state utilities commision shutting down wind generation at times to keep prices high during the day. This approach would remove that control and provide reasonably priced power in a safe manner.
This makes me wanna move to Wyoming.
Hey Energy Prof...I really love your videos...please keep doing what you do. One question about this new variant of the liquid metal reactor...since it can fission the transuranics, does that also mean that we can somehow use these reactors to process our current store of spent fuel and waste...and make our waste problem easier to manage? ✌
Fantastic video as always. Friendly recommendation to upgrade your mic setup.
Great talk wish you'd addressed the dangers of sodium fires.
He did, you keep the sodium away from water. In this design, the sodium never leaves the reactor vessel.
That's pretty clever.
TY
I never miss any of your videos. They are all very good!!! That said, please do a video on Allen Weinberg. Also explain anything he could have been wrong about. In my view he predicted climate change in the early '50's and offered the safest path to powering the grid and fighting climate change. I am very interested on your thoughts about this.
Many thanks for your good work
As far as I know, the experiment at EBR-II where they tested the automatic emergency shutdown after turning off the cooling systems was in 1986, not 1968, as shown in the documentary move “Pandora’s Promise” which can be found on TH-cam.
you are the coolest
exiting stuff :)
I love your opening sequence, but I always forget to turn the volume down, in the rush to watch your videos.
I wished the world politicians where subscribed to this channel
Smart move by Terra Power due to the speed of getting it commercial, using the incumbents as partners, giving the solid fuel producers a future, using stranded coal generation capacity and making it load following. This is perfect to make an impact now! However, also need to support companies like ELYSIUM and Moltex.
It's nice to see someone talking sensibly about the future of humanity. (Without small nuclear reactors we will end up back in the stone age.)
Yep, and it would take a lot longer to get out of the new dark ages, because all easily accessible energy is gone. SMR is a very generic term, and if the world pick the wrong nuclear reactor again, it might be to late considering how long they held on to the current cold war reactors relic design. I'm no longer holding waiting for fusion, 80 years should been enough. Thorium molten salt reactor seem to check all the right boxes for a fission reactor design.
@@drmosfet New technology would be nice, but I'd be thrilled to be 'stuck' with relic gen3 designs if they were prolific - as in five or ten per state, twenty or thirty in California, that many again in Texas, or more as required. Despite the advantages of gen4, no one really cares how inefficient the current reactors may be, high level waste is hardly a problem since there isn't much, and 70 years of experience operating the current technologies have worked out all the engineering and safety concerns.
Just get us on nuclear, period! If it turns out to be on gen4, super; if it happens on gen3 or a mix, that's great too - we'll continue to develop and transition at the next lifecycle event.
"Construction will finish in late 2020s" - Note however that the reactor can not be turned on until it has HAELU fuel. It used to be that Russia was (and still is) the largest source for this and it is not created in the US in any significant volume. Due to the sanctions on Russia and its uranium, it is being excluded as a source. This means the US or other NATO/friendly sources will have to be created/secured. It may cause delays in the deployment date of the Natrium reactor. Ideally, we would downblend some more HEU (90%+ enriched) to make HAELU from older US nuclear weapons, but I believe that stopped as well.
Terrapower is already behind schedule and will not go operational until 2030 at the earliest.