In Wyoming, Bill Gates moves ahead with nuclear project aimed at revolutionizing power generation

If approved, it would operate as a commercial nuclear power plant.

Molten Salt reactors are. a way forward in the near term but given their safety and efficiency why place it in such a pristine natural ecosystem lime Wyoming?

Exciting stuff. If it is successful, maybe Gates can out-musk Musk. It seems from my totally uneducated opinion that the molten salt concept was tried once and then abandoned due to there not being any technologies for holding molten salts for the long term. Here's hoping they have a solution for that.

Both the US and Soviet navies operated sodium cooled reactors on submarines. The technology is very old and it has a major drawback. When you shut a water cooled reactor down, the water cools but it stays a liquid. When you shut a sodium cooled reactor down, the coolant which is literally a liquid meta, solidifies and your reactor is ruined. In the case of the US Navy, the reactor in USS Seawolf (SSN-575, not the current USS Seawolf SSN-21) was removed at her first overhaul and replaced with a water cooled reactor. The Soviets had to install equipment in their submarine bases to circulate and heat their reactor coolant when their subs were in port and their reactors shut down. Like the US the Soviets only built one class of subs with sodium cooled reactors and never repeated that mistake. There are sound reasons most reactors are water cooled.

Similarly both China and France use high assay low enriched uranium as reactor fuel in their submarines. Again there is nothing new here. Some navies like the US use high enriched uranium as reactor fuel for the simple reason the core will last the life of the submarine. That means no holes have to be cut in the hull to replace spent fuel or there doesn't have to be a big hatch in the hull that reduces the depth the sub can operate at. The French and Chinese apparently accept the limitations of 25% enrichment in order to avoid having to handle and secure weapons grade uranium reactor fuel.

given their safety and efficiency why place it in such a pristine natural ecosystem lime Wyoming?

You have absolutely no proof they are unsafe. Their very principle of functioning makes them orders of magnitude safer than water cooled reactors - they can't "boil off", don't produce highly explosive steam, don't produce even more explosive hydrogen, are less corrosive and work under lower pressures.

"Given their safety" is a pointless question without any proof of them being unsafe.

i didn't take his comment that he was questioning safety. just the opposite.

if it's so safe, why not closer to a larger urban area?

sodium reactors are probably better suited to very small installations where the entire unit is simply left underground with no decommissioning needed. it's a sealed storage after about 30 years of operation.

why wyoming? you need some utility customer for it and the explanation about the retiring generating stations and replacement capacity needed makes sense.

safest generating method around, but the population is still all wiggly thinking about the movie the china syndrome.

but given their safety and efficiency why place it in such a pristine natural ecosystem lime Wyoming?

Maybe because some people are afraid they'd be injected with microchips, Lol

(Yes, people actually believed that!)

Another cost on the environment for the sake of creating artificial super intelligence!

Musk must be so angry at the moment. I guess Musk will be running to China again to giveaway some more Tesla or SpaceX technology, so he can get his hands on a nuclear power plant, too!

I doubt Texas will let him build a power plant there!

given their safety and efficiency why place it in such a pristine natural ecosystem lime Wyoming?

Pristine? Wyoming? Hardly! Fracking, open-pit coal mining in the Powder River Basin and ranching have left Wyoming anything but pristine.

if it's so safe, why not closer to a larger urban area?

The reactor will be sited next to the town of Kemmerer. The town is the site of an open-pit coal mine dating to the late 1800s and a coal fired power plant that is scheduled to shut down. The grid connection is already there and the town will have workers losing jobs at the coal fired power plant ready to come to work at the new power plant. Importantly the town wants the nuclear power plant to be built there.

if it's so safe, why not closer to a larger urban area?

Because in the real world, smaller proofs of concept are implemented before full scale deployment.