TerraPower Developing Nuclear Reactors that Run on Depleted Uranium
Perhaps the uranium industry’s fear of peak uranium is unfounded. Intellectual Ventures is preparing to spin off a company called TerraPower to develop nuclear reactors that run primarily on depleted uranium. While most nuclear reactors use enriched uranium, the depleted variety has many advantages— most importantly, a smaller amount of uranium is required to create the same amount of power.
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Since less uranium is necessary, the risk of nuclear proliferation is reduced, as is the amount of toxic waste created. According to TerraPower, available supplies of depleted uranium could be used for centuries— maybe even thousands of years.
The company’s reactors will vary from only a few megawatts (enough for industrial sites) to multi-gigawatts (enough for large cities). TerraPower may also use thorium to power future reactor sites.
Photo Credit: CC-Licensed by Flickr user bionerd
Ariel,
I’m Pablos, I work at the lab at Intellectual Ventures. MIT Technology Review has listed the TerraPower reactor as one if their “10 Emerging Technologies 2009″ and a bit more detail has been released. Here’s the article, with a diagram of the reactor and a little video explaining how it works:
http://technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=specialsections&sc=tr10&id=22114
I read your blog every day, thanks for keeping it up.
pablos.
This is great. Guess what? I can pay for it. I found the cure for crime, the cure for drug addiction, and even a cure for sexual perversion. These are all related ecologically, these three compulsions. Here it is and any dope can do it right now with three five piece packs of Wrigley’s chewing gum: 150 mg of healthy adult male facial skin surface lipid pheromone. The pheromone is generally passed in kissing (kids kissing their father on his face). It is essentially the chemical device to provide one with ‘unconditional paternal love and approval’.
The stereochemistry of the many strange components (some known to be pheromones in other species yet!) strongly suggests that these seven hundred or so puppies communicate. One of them, sebaleic acid, is found nowhere else in nature and marks each of us as human. Neat huh? Wait till you see your first crack prostitute emerge, find a nice husband, and have a baby. They’ll name it after you! It’s great!
Smaller is o.k. Much of our power is lost in transmission lines so if you can make smaller reactors that are safer and located in each suburb you reduce this loss.
You also cluster these reactors on the grid in such a way that it makes our power systems more tolerant to failures and any kind of malicious attacks be it cyber-terrorism or physical attacks of terror.
I’ve always thought that the way many “green” leaning people rejected nuclear power outright was wrong. I do agree that implementation needs to be extremely careful, but whether it’s nuclear waste that has to be contained or carbon dioxide that’s causing the green house effect, every power source has its pros and cons. But research has to go forth in all areas including nuclear and where the right nuclear technology makes sense it should be used.
Compared to everything but solar and hydro (which have their own severely limiting considerations) nuclear’s per pound efficiency is too high to ignore.
Why does this sound too good to be true?, Quinn has already taken it to the next level…but why stop there, I’m thinking disposable reactors for every home, the size of a pin head, available from your local pharmacy.