Trevor Hughes
speaker
512 appearances
7 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 14 Aug
Trevor Hughes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
You know, there's a lot of frustration because Wyoming has a lot of coal.
The the coal mines are closing not because they're running out of coal, but because we as a society are moving away from coal in general as a fuel.
And so there's a lot of frustration from folks who say they don't really understand why it is that you're gonna turn your back on such a reliable, affordable form of power generation that has, I mean, literally powered America for generations.
And so there are people who who are looking for sort of the next big thing, the next thing that helps keep them going, because they have been so focused on this coal mine and power plant for so many years.
It really becomes a question of, well, how do we replace those jobs with something else?
What they're building is a small nuclear reactor.
I think many Americans, if you've seen a nuclear power plant, you're you're familiar with sort of these hulking structures, these big cooling towers, these big massive concrete domes that contain the reactor in case of a meltdown.
Natrium's project is small.
It's about half the size of a normal reactor, and it's designed to operate at low pressure because it doesn't use
High pressure steam, it actually uses molten sodium metal.
Natrium is a is an old word for sodium.
And so this power plant is about half the size.
And because it operates at a lower pressure, the idea is that they are much quicker to build, they are much cheaper to build, they're much easier to permit.
And so the backers really envision seeing hundreds of these around the country and potentially around the world in the coming decades.
You know, the big difference here is the construction timeline, which is five years versus ten years.
To build a traditional nuclear power plant in the in this country takes a decade, which is a really long time for a construction project, which means costs escalate and it becomes harder and harder to justify those projects, you know, compared to something like solar and wind, which is frankly much faster to build.
Natrium hopes to get these projects up and running within, you know, maybe five years.
And the idea is that you identify a need, you identify a location, and you can
Build it very quickly with far less concrete, with far less of the sort of surrounding technology that traditional nuclear power plants have.
Now, the technology itself isn't new.
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