I wonder if 3-D printers will do for nuclear reactors what they have for guns.
"A 3D-printed nuclear reactor, if built and demonstrated, could open a path to advanced commercial nuclear power stations that produce carbon-free electricity at a cost competitive with natural gas turbine power plants.
That’s the hope of Kurt Terrani, director of the Transformational Challenge Reactor Demonstration Program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. At a recent Zoom meeting of Friends of ORNL, he described the progress the program has made so far toward building a possible 14th reactor at ORNL by 2023.
Unlike other industries, Terrani argued, “The nuclear industry is a dinosaur industry that has failed to adopt any new technologies partly because the United States hasn’t built any advanced reactors for 40 years.”
These new technologies include additive manufacturing (3D printing of parts by building them layer by layer in shapes directed by a computer program) and artificial intelligence (providing a computer with data and training it to identify trends and make predictions based on the data)."
"A 3D-printed nuclear reactor, if built and demonstrated, could open a path to advanced commercial nuclear power stations that produce carbon-free electricity at a cost competitive with natural gas turbine power plants.
That’s the hope of Kurt Terrani, director of the Transformational Challenge Reactor Demonstration Program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. At a recent Zoom meeting of Friends of ORNL, he described the progress the program has made so far toward building a possible 14th reactor at ORNL by 2023.
Unlike other industries, Terrani argued, “The nuclear industry is a dinosaur industry that has failed to adopt any new technologies partly because the United States hasn’t built any advanced reactors for 40 years.”
These new technologies include additive manufacturing (3D printing of parts by building them layer by layer in shapes directed by a computer program) and artificial intelligence (providing a computer with data and training it to identify trends and make predictions based on the data)."