The Department of Energy has given the go signal to a commercial company to start using nuclear waste to power a new nuclear reactor called Aurora. This is a step towards making use of otherwise unusable waste that is harmful to the environment and humans as well.
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Who is the Lucky Company That Gets to Play
INL has conscripted the nuclear energy startup company, Oklo to gain access to the stock recycled uranium fuel they had in storage. The reactor which will be feeding upon that green glow will be Oklo's Aurora. The Aurora is a unique design by choice since its choice is to move away from the other 96 nuclear reactors that the United States has right now. It will only generate about 1.5 megawatts, a far cry from the 600 to 4,000 megawatts. This is because of the fuel choice they stated "high-assay, low-enriched uranium" or Haleu, which has more energy into a smaller form.
The Aurora Reactor
First announced back in 2019, it promised: "advanced fission clean energy plant design developed to power communities with affordable, reliable, clean power." says the company.
This was built on years of technology, development and countless demonstrations done at the behest of the US national labs and universities which now makes the Aurora possible to land the supply of wasted uranium.
"While heat and electrons are the product, the Aurora powerhouse is the main point for community interaction. We spent years thinking about how it could look, how it would function, and how it would become a point of pride in a community." so says CEO Jaco DeWitte.
Oklo also included solar panels to Aurora's design to illustrate how advanced fission and renewable can work together in a microgrid setting with high reliability.
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What Could This Mean for Waste Materials All Over
If it comes to pass that everything goes well in recycling wasted nuclear material we could see that the repositories used for nuclear waste could be used to bunkers, housings and more human-friendly alternatives. The amount spent for nuclear disposal could be given to other projects that would help humanity more rather than keeping harmful waste that we created in the first place.
Why Approved Just Recently?
As there are hundreds of tons of nuclear waste out there, the natural thing governments tend to do is store them deep underground. This also begs the question as to where and when and it is not going to be cheap. Besides the cost, people do not want nuclear waste buried anywhere remotely close to their proximity in which makes total sense. In the past few years, INL has started to recycle spent uranium as much as they could to meet the fuel needs of the new generation commercial reactors like the Aurora.
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