90.5 WESA
Summary
A 12-foot-tall slice into the dark gray core of a model nuclear microreactor looms on the shop floor of the new Westinghouse Electric Company factory in Etna. It’s dotted with blank holes missing the control drums to control the rate of the reaction, shutdown rods to bring the nuclear chain reaction to a halt and an array of thin heat pipes to cool the heat produced from the fuel and transfer it to an open-air process that turns the fuel into power. Once assembled, the entire nuclear reactor would fit on the back of a semi-truck.
“You typically don't think of microreactors in there as something you would put on the grid like one of the electric grids for any country,” said Mike Ford, associate laboratory director for engineering at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. “What they would tend to be used for is more off-grid applications. They tend to be much more readily moved. Some of them are designed to be transportable. They provide the power that helps mitigate the need to do things like bring diesel fuel to very remote locations, which can be very expensive.”
Demand for electricity in the U.S. is expected to surge in the next decade, in large part due to the rise of artificial intelligence and the expansion of large, electricity-gobbling data centers that power AI. Energy demand from data centers alone is projected to potentially triple by 2028 — consuming up to 12% of total electricity in the U.S., according to a 2024 report from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Microreactors would be ripe for use in remote locations, such as where there are mining operations or offshore drilling, small islands or as emergency power for the hyperscaler industry — the service providers that operate large data centers.
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