The Real Obstacle to Nuclear Power
Photographs by Brian Finke
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“WE WERE A BIT CRAZY”
Kairos Power’s new test facility is on a parched site a few miles south of the Albuquerque, New Mexico, airport. Around it, desert stretches toward hazy mountains on the horizon. The building looks like a factory or a warehouse; nothing about it betrays the moonshot exercise happening within. There, digital readouts count down the minutes, T-minus style, until power begins flowing to a test unit simulating the blistering heat of a new kind of nuclear reactor. In this test run, electricity, not uranium, will furnish the energy; graphite-encased fuel pebbles, each about the size of a golf ball, will be dummies containing no radioactive material. But everything else will be true to life, including the molten fluoride salt that will flow through the device to cool it. If all goes according to plan, the system—never tried before—will control and regulate a simulated chain reaction. When I glance at a countdown clock behind the receptionist during a visit last May, it says 31 days, 8 hours, 9 minutes, and 22 seconds until the experiment begins.
The test unit looks surprisingly unimpressive: a shiny cylindrical drum only about 16 feet tall, resembling an oversize water heater. The scale is unlike that of an existing commercial nuclear plant. Forget about those airport-scale compounds with their fortresslike containment enclosures and 40-story cooling towers belching steam. This reactor will sit in an ordinary building the size of, say, a suburban self-storage facility. It will be made in factories for easy shipping and rapid assembly. Customers will be able to buy just one, to power a chemical or steel plant, or a few, linked like batteries, to power a city. Most important, even if a local disaster cuts the power to the cooling system and safety systems fail, this reactor will not melt down, spew radioactive material, or become too hot and dangerous to approach. It will remain stable until normal conditions are restored.
Small and safe is the vision, at least. Dozens of companies and labs in the U.S. and abroad are pursuing it. Kairos is well along, with a permit to build a full-fledged nuclear test reactor already moving toward federal approval, hopefully by the end of 2023. That test will depend on this one in Albuquerque, because molten-salt reactor cooling has not been tried in the United States since the 1960s, when a five-year experiment at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee, proved the idea viable. In a few days, the test unit’s top will be installed, crowning the device with bristling pipes and sensors. Nearby, welders ready those pipes and valves. Engineers stand on top of scaffolding slotting graphite reflectors into place.
As I tour the facility, however, I soon realize that the crucial technology is not 16 feet tall but about, of movie fame. Then he spent a decade working for SpaceX, Elon Musk’s world-beating private spaceflight company. Nuclear power wasn’t on his radar until recently, when Kairos’s executives called him for advice and wound up recruiting him. “A lot of it was the same,” he told me. “A launchpad and a nuclear reactor have a lot in common”—extreme temperatures, and many tons of concrete, and lots of pipes and valves and sensors and controls that must work together with extreme precision.
