TerraPower isn’t putting all of its eggs in one basket when it comes to securing itself a supply of uranium for the pilot Natrium nuclear power plant it’s building in Kemmerer.
The company founded by Bill Gates has executed contracts and memorandums of understanding with several companies for various parts of its needed supply chain, including high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU) production.
But one of the really high-stakes bets the company is placing is on a novel uranium enrichment process that uses lasers to separate uranium isotopes.
For that, it’s turned to a leader in isotope enrichment technology, ASP Isotopes, which talked with Cowboy State Daily about how it’s taking an old technology in new directions to achieve better, commercial-scale results for enriched uranium production.
One big advantage ASP Isotopes has, said Vice President of Business Development Viktor Petkov, is its blend of longtime uranium experts who were part of the 1980s uranium enrichment program in South Africa.
What wasn’t immediately clear when TerraPower announced its partnership with ASP Istopes is that it is also an American company, incorporated in Delaware.
“Our engineers and our scientists are in South Africa,” he said. “And they have run a number of tests back in the day with uranium, using many different enrichment techniques.”
They have been improving on that over the last 10 years or so, coming up with new approaches for other sectors, as well as a new process the company believes will be suitable for commercial-scale enrichment of uranium not by the kilogram, but the metric ton.
In fact, the company is already using some of these newer techniques in business sectors already.
“We have three main verticals,” Petkov said. “One is the enrichment of stable isotopes that are used in the semiconductor industry. The second is the production of nuclear radio isotopes that are injected into a patients arm before they get a scan for cancer.”
The third, the one the company is standing up now, is the production of nuclear fuels.
Old School Uranium Enrichment V. Lasers
Typically, commercial uranium enrichment has relied on centrifuges to spin the gaseous uranium isotopes at very high speeds, shaking out each isotope into a distinct band according to weight.
It works because Uranium 235 has a different weight than Uranium 238 or any other isotope, allowing a neat separation of just the desired isotope.
Lasers, on the other hand, can be tuned to specific wavelengths of light, exciting only the isotope of interest.
The approach is not really new, however.
“Lasers have been used in the past to produce enriched uranium, but not to a commercial level,” Petkov said. “AVILIS and MLIS were the two technologies we used in the United States between the ’70s and ’80s, but they never managed to get that commercial technology.”
AVILIS stands for atomic vapor laser isotope separation, while MLIS stands for molecular isotope separation.
“Our technology has similarities to those, but it’s proprietary,” Petkov said. “And there are a lot of differences as well between those two.”
The company calls one of its approaches the Aerodynamic Separation Process, or ASP, hence the name ASP Isotopes. That one is more suitable to gasses like silicon, carbon 14,and the like.
The other, called quantum rnrichment, is what will be used to price HALEU for TerraPower and other nuclear power approaches, like small modular reactors (SMRs).
More About That TerraPower Partnership
Petkov believes the approach will likely be much cheaper than the traditional approach to uranium enrichment, and that’s one of the reasons TerraPower was willing to place such a huge bet on the company.
TerraPower has agreed to provide some money to help build the first plant in exchange for 10 years of exclusive supply from the new plant.
That first plant, Petkov confirmed, will be built in South Africa.
“We’ll have exclusivity with them through mid-next year,” Petkov said. “Meaning we will be enriching uranium only for them from the facility that will be built there in Pelindaba.”
Once that one-year grace period is over, TerraPower will continue to have 10 years of exclusive supply from the plant, but ASP Istopes will be free to start negotiating deals with new SMR producers and build other plants, some of them likely in America.
“We still haven’t finalized our supply chain, where the feed stock will be coming from,” he said. “But I think this is something that we’ll be doing very closely with TerraPower.”
TerraPower has signed a memorandum of understanding with Uranium Energy, which is ramping up production of Wyoming uranium to potentially supply TerraPower’s Natrium plant with the uranium it will need to operate.
“We have the ambition and the willingness to build multiple enrichment facilities,” Petkov said. “And the United States is one of the countries where we’re very keen to be in the future.”
Petkov said the timeline calls for producing commercial quantities of HALEU by around 2027 or 2028, just in time for the Natrium Plant’s timeline of 2030 to be operational in Kemmerer.
Not Just Cheaper
ASP Isotopes technology is modular, so won’t take a lot of time to scale, Petkov said.
“When you compare it to a traditional contribute, it takes around 12-18 months to build an enrichment facility,” he said. “It’s much smaller than a traditional centrifuge, and it can start with a smaller quantity of enrichment.
“We can then add modules to expand capacity. It’s just a copy paste of what we already have, just adding some new equipment.”
The initial plant will produce kilogram quantities of HALEU within two years, Petkove said. From there, it can quickly ramp up to metric tons that customers like Kemmerer’s Natrium plant would require.
If ASP Isotopes is successful in this aim, it stands to make a killing in the sector, meeting what is a massive pent-up demand for enriched HALEU.
“If SMRs really become the answer to the net zero question, and tripling nuclear power is the goal of the government from what we know,” Petkov said. “So, there’s currently very limited supply of any HALEU coins from the Western world.”
Petkov believes the world will soon be desperate for the HALEU it can provide, at a cheaper price point than traditional commercial methods.
But there’s also one other added bonus to the technique, Petkov added.
“One end goal for us is to use depleted tails for feedstock,” he said. “These depleted tails are effectively nuclear waste, and there are hundreds of thousands of tons lying in the U.S. and in South Africa and the United Kingdom.”
Using up those depleted tails would get rid of a problem that governments have so far struggled to solve, while further bringing down the cost of HALEU production.
Given that fuel rods for many of the new nuclear concepts would be in use for 50 or so years that would go a long way toward reducing nuclear wastes now and in the future.
“And that’s where we want to be in the longer term,” Petkov said.
Contact Renee Jean at renee@cowboystatedaily.com
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
