Microsoft founder and innovation-chasing entrepreneur Bill
Gates has turned heads with his investment in TerraPower, a small startup
seeking a home for a prototype traveling-wave reactor that could go 50 years
without refueling.
The Wall Street Journal featured a story on TerraPower Monday,
quoting Gates as saying "a cheaper reactor design that can burn waste and
doesn't run into fuel limitations would be a big thing.”
Citing his interest in new no-carbon energy sources, Gates has
invested tens of millions in TerraPower, a company formed in 2008 under a
broader organization called Intellectual Ventures run former Microsoft Chief
Technical Officer Nathan Myhrvold. According to the Journal, the company
received an additional $35 million last year from venture-capital firms Charles
River Ventures and Khosla Ventures.
The traveling wave reactor’s design would use a small amount
of enriched uranium 235, with 90 percent of the fuel made from depleted uranium
(U-238). Neutrons released from the fissioning U-235 penetrating the spent fuel
would create plutonium, which itself would fission and generate energy in a
slow reaction that could last years without human intervention. The design is
small, with a reactor core 13 feet tall and 10 feet wide.
The concept is decades old. According to the Journal report,
a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory paper in the 1990s signed by Edward
Teller and Lowell Wood gave the idea further credence and eventually attracted
the attention of Myrhvold.
The 30-employee company headed by former Bechtel physicist John
Gilleland incorporates research from scientists at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology the University of California, Berkeley, and several national
laboratories. After efforts to simulate the concept using supercomputers, the
company drafted a basic design it hopes to make into a test reactor.
According to the Journal report, the company has since
approached power companies in France, Japan, Russia, China and India. Their
project could not be built in the United States at present because the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission does not have a licensing process for that kind of
reactor.