Prismatic. A New Molten-Salt Reactor Could Halve the Cost of Nuclear Power. Transatomic Power, an MIT spinoff, is developing a nuclear reactor that it estimates will cut the overall cost of a nuclear power plant in half. It’s an updated molten-salt reactor, a type that’s highly resistant to meltdowns. Molten-salt reactors were demonstrated in the 1960s at Oak Ridge National Lab, where one test reactor ran for six years, but the technology hasn’t been used commercially. The new reactor design, which so far exists only on paper, produces 20 times as much power for its size as Oak Ridge’s technology. That means relatively small, yet powerful, reactors could be built less expensively in factories and shipped by rail instead of being built on site like conventional ones. Transatomic also modified the original molten-salt design to allow it to run on nuclear waste.
Transatomic says it can split the difference, building a 500-megawatt power plant that achieves some of the cost savings associated with the smaller reactor designs. Smarter Wind Turbines Help Wind Power Compete with Fossil Fuels. Superficially, wind turbines haven’t changed much for decades. But they’ve gotten much smarter, and considerably bigger, and that’s helped increase the amount of electricity they can generate and lower the cost of wind power. GE’s new 2.5-120 wind turbine, announced last week, is a case in point. Its maximum power output, 2.5 megawatts, is lower than that of the 2.85 megawatt turbine it’s superseding. But over the course of a year it can generate 15 percent more kilowatt hours.
Arrays of sensors paired with better algorithms for operating and monitoring the turbine let it keep spinning when earlier generations of wind turbines would have had to shut down. The technology is part of a trend that’s made wind power almost as cheap as fossil fuels. In 1991, wind power cost 15 cents per kilowatt hour. A new generation of more productive wind turbines that’s coming on line this year could be what it takes to make wind widely competitive with fossil fuels. Santander shuns lending to homebuyers. World business, finance, and political news from the Financial Times. Goldman earnings surge to $2.8bn. Stocks slip as risk rally wavers.