Natrium's advanced nuclear reactor design, which will be up and running as a full scale trial plant in the late 2020s, also stores several times more energy than most grid scale batteries for rapid load response. //
Natrium's demonstration plant will be fully operational and connected to the power grid in its as-yet-unknown location by the mid to late 2020s. Its fast-neutron reactor will use high-temperature liquid sodium as its reactor coolant instead of water.
One of sodium's key advantages is the huge 785-degree temperature range between its solid and gaseous states; water offers only a 100-Kelvin range, so it needs to be pressurized in order to handle higher amounts of heat energy. High levels of pressure can have explosive consequences, and they also greatly increase the cost of the plant, as nuclear-grade high pressure components are not cheap. //
Liquid sodium will transfer an impressive amount of heat away from the reactor at normal atmospheric pressures, with the added bonus that it won't dissociate into hydrogen and oxygen, so Fukushima-style hydrogen explosions are out of the question. It's also non-corrosive, sidestepping an issue that puts a question mark over molten salt reactors.
Like many of the next-generation nuclear reactors under development, the Natrium design will use High-Assay, Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU) as its nuclear fuel. Where natural uranium comes out of the ground containing around 0.7 percent of the U-235 isotope that's split to generate nuclear energy, and traditional Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) nuclear reactor fuel is enriched by centrifugal processes or gas diffusion to contain 3-5 percent U-235, HALEU is further enriched, between 5 and 20 percent. For comparison, nuclear weapons need uranium enriched to more than 90 percent.
HALEU fuel can be produced by reprocessing the spent fuel from traditional nuclear power plants, and its higher grade improves reactor performance and efficiency to the point where it allows advanced reactors to be much smaller than LEU plants. Natrium says it should be four times more fuel efficient than light water reactors. //
The molten salt thermal energy storage attached to the Natrium generator holds ten times as much on-demand energy as the biggest grid-scale battery projects on the planet.
