The Next Wave

Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold, two leaders in the local tech community, are putting millions of their money behind a technology that could solve our energy problems while offering a solution to the nagging issue of how to handle nuclear waste.

The technology is being developed by TerraPower, a spinoff of Myhrvold’s Bellevue-based invention company Intellectual Ventures. The company is teaming up with Toshiba for initial development work.

TerraPower has invented a new kind of nuclear power plant called a traveling-wave reactor. Currently, nuclear reactors use enriched uranium (U-235), an isotope that accounts for roughly 1 percent of naturally occurring uranium, to generate electricity. After the U-235 is separated out for fuel in the enrichment process, the leftover material is U-238, or depleted uranium, which typically gets sealed in waste containers near enrichment plants.

Unlike the conventional nuclear reactor, a traveling-wave reactor uses only a small amount of enriched uranium, and most of its core is comprised of depleted uranium.

“If you look globally at how much uranium is readily accessible,” TerraPower CEO John Gilleland says, “you can supply everybody on the planet with a U.S. standard of living for many hundreds of years, and some estimate thousands.”

The development comes at a time of renewed interest in nuclear energy in the U.S. In February the Obama administration approved an $8 billion loan guarantee for new nuclear reactors. Since nuclear energy does not produce carbon dioxide, it is considered a way of cutting greenhouse gases. However, there are still concerns about weapons proliferation, possible accidents and the perennial issue of safely disposing of waste, including the leftovers from World War II on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, which Gilleland calls “nuclear junk,” useless even as fuel for a traveling-wave reactor.

 TerraPower is currently researching materials for core construction. Gilleland says he hopes to see the first traveling-wave reactor built by 2020, and to see commercial reactors built later that decade.

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