High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactors (HTGRs): One Revolutionary Key to an Abundant Energy Future


“The importance of cheap, plentiful, high quality industrial process heat cannot be overstated. Here is a short list of some of the things that you can do with cheap, virtually unlimited high quality process heat:

1. Unlock the trillions of barrels oil equivalent in oil sands

2. Unlock the trillions of barrels oil equivalent in coal and gas to liquids

3. Provide abundant industrial process heat for the production of fertilisers, plastics, and refined fuels

4. Produce vast quantities of split hydrogen and carbon to combine into more conventional fuels; lay the foundation for a possible pure hydrogen future

Those things, and many more – including biomass to liquids and gas hydrates to liquids – will be accomplished by next generation gas-cooled high temperature nuclear reactors.

Since HTGRs can provide abundant heat up to 850°C or 900°C, all of the processes listed above suddenly come within economic reach – once HTGRs are perfected, licensed, and mass produced in factory-built modular units.

Why do we continue to emphasise the importance of HTGRs? Because if the US government had devoted half as much attention to developing and perfecting the mass production of safe, relatively inexpensive, and reliable HTGR modules – instead of wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on intermittent unreliable forms of energy – the ‘energy crisis’ would have been solved by now.

The fact that this has not been done, reveals for a certainty that government is not serious about providing inexpensive, clean, abundant energy for industry and society at large. Government energy policy is instead based upon more corrupt and ideological motivations, which delay the era of energy abundance unnecessarily.”

Originally from Al Fin Energy.