The Japan Atomic Energy Agency and Japanese industrialist Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) announced on Thursday a memorandum of understanding with TerraPower, an American company founded and chaired by Bill Gates planning to build a fast neutron nuclear reactor in United States.
MHI will “explore the possibilities of providing technical support and participating in the development” of this fourth-generation reactor, which is supposed to be built by 2028 in Wyoming, according to a press release from the Japanese group.
By collaborating on this advanced nuclear project, MHI also intends to “draw expertise and know-how to contribute to the progress of nuclear innovation in Japan”, he said.
The Japanese nuclear industry is still convalescing and controversial since the Fukushima disaster in 2011. But the Japanese government hopes to revive this sector to reduce the great energy dependence of the archipelago and its significant CO2 emissions.
All of the country’s atomic power plants had been shut down after the Fukushima accident, caused by a terrible tsunami in the northeast of the country.
Only ten Japanese reactors have restarted since, after pharaonic work to improve their safety. Fifty other reactors have been shut down, more than half of them permanently.
At an estimated cost of $4 billion and half funded by the US Department of Energy, TerraPower’s Natrium project involves building a sodium-cooled fast neutron reactor with a power of 345 megawatts.
This so-called “breeding” technology should make it possible to reuse the plutonium from spent fuel.
In 2014, the Japan Atomic Energy Agency and MHI joined forces with the French Astrid breeder reactor project, but it was frozen by France in 2019.
Japan has been interested in this technology for a very long time, having built two experimental reactors of this type on its soil between the 1970s and 1990s, Joyo then Monju.
After several incidents, including a serious one in 1995, the Monju fast breeder reactor was shut down and the decision to dismantle it was taken in 2016.
President of TerraPower since its creation in 2006, the American multi-billionaire Bill Gates, founder and former boss of Microsoft, sees in the new generation nuclear power a means of eventually achieving carbon neutrality in the world to fight against global warming.