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title: "I wonder if 3-D printers will do for nuclear reactors what they have…"
date: 2020-11-27
source: facebook
type: Archer T. Ships shared a link.
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# I wonder if 3-D printers will do for nuclear reactors what they have…

*November 27, 2020 · Facebook*

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[https://www.oakridger.com/story/news/2020/11/23/can-3-d-printing-build-better-cheaper-reactor-faster/6399688002/](https://www.oakridger.com/story/news/2020/11/23/can-3-d-printing-build-better-cheaper-reactor-faster/6399688002/){target="_blank"}
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I wonder if 3-D printers will do for nuclear reactors what they have for guns.\
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\"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.\
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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."\
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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).\"
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