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.
I am not sure why the WSJ classifies TerraPower's traveling wave reactor as a small reactor. In conversations with the scientists and engineers, I found out that the very smallest version of the system that looks like it will work as a slow burning converter will produce at least 350-500 MWe. That is a large enough reactor to power an aircraft carrier all by itself.
The question I would ask Mr. Gates if I was doing the interview is what is stopping him from building a TWR. Though the first one might be expensive for most people, for a person who is planning to give away tens of billions of dollars it is a small price to pay to provide the world with an abundant energy source. Even with all of the licensing and FOAK costs, he should be able to complete the task for far less than $10 billion. If his personal wealth is not enough to cover the bill, he could always ask for help from a few of his friends.
What is stopping him?