Baby steps - new reactor design being funded

It's not LFTR but it's pretty durn close - from Gigaom:

Nuclear startup Transatomic Power scores seed funding from Founders Fund
Science is becoming cool again in Silicon Valley and that means the reemergence of funds from Silicon Valley for “tough problems” like energy innovation, though at a much smaller level than the cleantech boom of years past. On Tuesday, nuclear startup Transatomic Power announced that it has closed a seed round of $2 million from the Founders Fund’s newly-launched science-focused fund FF Science.

The Founders Fund is the firm behind some of the more successful Internet startups out there including Facebook, Yammer and Spotify, but also some science-focused companies such as Climate Corporation, Space-X and satellite startup Planet Labs. The fund, which was created by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and his partners, promotes this manifesto: “we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

Transatomic Power was founded in 2011 by MIT nuclear scientists Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie, and the company is at the early stage of developing a molten salt nuclear reactor, which can use nuclear waste as a power source. Molten salt reactors were first developed at Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL) in the 1950s and 60s, but Dewan and Massie have developed created new designs, and new materials for the older tech.

The technology is good. These designs are inherently safe and operate at normal air pressure (as opposed to boiling water under very high pressures). If a coolant breach happens, nothing goes Ka-Boom, a fusible plug melts and the stuff drains into a shallow tank - end of problem.

We have several tens of thousands of years worth of known resources in the earth's crust right now - Thorium is as common as dirt.

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on August 6, 2014 8:59 PM.

Words fail - Dr. Ben Pitcher is an idiot was the previous entry in this blog.

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