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OKIsItJustMe

(19,933 posts)
Thu Oct 22, 2015, 10:48 AM Oct 2015

TerraPower Quietly Explores New Nuclear Reactor Strategy

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/542686/terrapower-quietly-explores-new-nuclear-reactor-strategy/
[font face=Serif][font size=5]TerraPower Quietly Explores New Nuclear Reactor Strategy[/font]

[font size=4]The startup is exploring a molten chloride reactor concept, but says it remains committed to traveling wave reactors.[/font]

[font size=3]Among the growing field of startups attempting to bring advanced nuclear reactors to market, TerraPower stands out—partly because it’s well-funded, and partly because of who’s doing the funding. TerraPower is a spin-off of Intellectual Ventures, the technology investment firm founded by Microsoft cofounder Nathan Myhrvold. Bill Gates is both a primary investor in and a vocal champion of the company (see “Q&A: Bill Gates”). The company has also drawn attention because it’s pursuing a novel reactor technology, known as a traveling wave reactor, that is elegant in conception and powerful in potential (see “Advanced Reactor Gets Closer to Reality” and “Nathan Myhrvold: The Wealthy Should Fund Innovation”).

But six years after it was founded, TerraPower has not yet produced a working prototype. Last week, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the company revealed that it is now pursuing a different advanced reactor concept: a molten chloride reactor that uses a liquid as both the coolant, which transfers energy in the form of heat, and the fuel in which the nuclear reactions occur.

“The traveling wave reactor was the focus of our early work, and it’s still the baseline product of the company,” said Jeff Latkowski, the director of innovation at TerraPower, at the Oak Ridge event, a 50th anniversary commemoration of the original molten salt reactor experiment. “But we are looking at other projects that we believe address the three critical areas for nuclear power: safety, the environment, and costs.”

To be sure, this is not the first time that TerraPower has adjusted or augmented its technology strategy. While its terminology has not changed, the company early on modified the “traveling wave” design, in which the nuclear reaction moves like a wave through the fuel, transforming uranium into plutonium, moving to what could be called a “standing wave” design, where the fuel itself is continually shuffled out of the central region of the core. Then-CEO John Gilleland said in 2013 that the company had quietly begun exploring alternative nuclear technologies, including molten salt reactors (of which the molten chloride design is a specific version) and machines that run on thorium, an alternative nuclear fuel that is cleaner, safer, and more abundant than uranium.

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TerraPower Quietly Explores New Nuclear Reactor Strategy (Original Post) OKIsItJustMe Oct 2015 OP
Nathan Myhrvold, patent troll. bananas Oct 2015 #1
Forbes: Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures is "nothing but a glorified patent troll" bananas Oct 2015 #2
Realclimate on Nathan Myhrvold's bad math and anti-science bullshit. bananas Oct 2015 #3
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