内容摘要：Russia is the only country that sells the HALEU fuel that some next-generation nuclear plants will r

Russia is the only country that sells the HALEU fuel that some next-generation nuclear plants will rely on, and with sanctions now in place due to the war in Ukraine, TerraPower has now conceded its demo timeline will blow out by at least two years.

Under a joint venture called Natrium, Bill Gates's TerraPower and GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy are building a commercial-scale demonstrator for a "cost-competitive sodium fast reactor with a molten salt energy storage system" in Wyoming. This plant is designed to output a constant 345 MWe in the form of heat – enough to power around 225,000 homes – but its energy storage can stash up to a gigawatt-hour of bonus energy, which can be released on demand to ramp up output to 500 MWe and firm up the energy grid when renewables are dipping.

Natrium, and other rising next-gen nuclear companies, relies on High Assay, Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU) fuel. This is fuel that's enriched by centrifugal or gas diffusion processes to the point where it's between 5-20% uranium-235 – the isotope that releases energy during a fission reaction. That's considerably more than the 3-5% that current nuclear reactors run on, but it's key to the increased fuel efficiency, reduced waste, longer-life cores, smaller, safer designs and at the end of it all, lower energy costs that next-gen nuclear hopes to bring to the market.