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On the Traveling-Wave Reactor T H E NUCLEAR NEWS INTERVIEW John Gilleland: On the traveling-wave reactor erraPower LLC has been The traveling-wave reactor, in concept, would use launched by the company In- depleted uranium to produce vast amounts of Ttellectual Ventures to design a traveling-wave nuclear reactor that energy without the need for enrichment plants and could run for 100 years without refu- reprocessing facilities, which is why billionaire eling or removing spent fuel. So con- Bill Gates is interested in developing it. vincing is the science behind the con- cept that billionaire Bill Gates has bility into an asset,” he said. gotten involved to help finance the Gilleland, who has a long history in project. applied physics, founded and served for Led by John Gilleland, TerraPow- several years as CEO of Archimedes er’s chief executive officer, a team of Technology Group, which develops so- researchers has run computer simula- lutions to nuclear weapons–waste prob- tions and is doing engineering studies lems. The company created a new tech- that have produced evidence that nology, called the Archimedes filter, to a wave of fission moving slowly separate radioactive materials from through a fuel core could generate a nonradioactive materials. He also did billion watts of electricity continu- advanced energy systems work at ously without refueling. Gilleland not- Bechtel after serving as the U.S. man- ed that these new reactors could re- aging director of ITER (originally the duce the amount of nuclear waste by International Thermonuclear Experi- using existing stockpiles of depleted mental Reactor). uranium as fuel. “By extracting cen- Gilleland, a member of the Ameri- turies’ worth of energy from waste Gilleland: “There is enough depleted and can Nuclear Society, talked about the at enrichment plants, these reactors natural uranium to last for millennia without traveling-wave reactor with NN editors would turn a social and financial lia- any reprocessing.” Rick Michal and E. Michael Blake. How does the traveling-wave reactor work? a reasonable-sized core. We looked back at some of the work done The basic concept is to use depleted ura- by Edward Teller and Lowell Wood on the nium as a fuel and to need no more than a How did you get involved in the project? breed/ burn concept. It seemed to us that the small amount of enriched uranium to start a Lowell Wood, an internationally recog- concept had promise, but, quite honestly, it reactor. The reactor would be able to operate nized scientist-technologist, played a major looked like something that could not be for decades without refueling and without role in drawing my interest. Other major readily achieved. But we decided that if we chemical separations. In a certain sense, the players in the project are Nathan Myhrvold, ran into certain problems, we could see if way the reactor works is well known. It’s founder of Intellectual Ventures, and Bill there was a way to walk around them. That the typical breeding concept and standard Gates, the chairman and cofounder of Mi- is more or less what the effort has been physics—U-238 going to 239, to neptunium, crosoft. They looked around at the various about since then. Our mission is to try to and finally to plutonium-239—but with a energy systems and came up with this desire bring the concept far enough along by us- twist, which is the traveling wave. In a sense, to improve nuclear and expedite its respon- ing a serious physics and engineering effort the wave can be visualized as two waves—a sible deployment around the world. When I such that a major nuclear player would con- breeding wave moving just ahead of a burn- was called on in December 2006, I thought sider the concept and then embark on de- ing wave that consumes the bred material. I would come in and tell them what was veloping the traveling-wave reactor for Visualize a cylinder a few meters long wrong with their thinking. But, basically, af- commercial deployment. that contains U-238 or depleted uranium. A ter researching the project, I never left. Ter- nugget of uranium enriched to 10 percent is raPower is the first spin-off of Intellectual Why build a better mousetrap? put at one end of the cylinder and a wave 40 Ventures, and Bill Gates is the principal To provide some background, our group centimeters wide is built up that breeds and owner of TerraPower, although there are looked at renewable sources of energy to burns plutonium and produces a gigawatt of others who have a level of ownership. see if they could be counted on to provide electricity as it propagates from one end to for the needs of the United States and the the other. It would take 50 to 60 years for What convinced you that the traveling wave planet. We advocate the pursuit of renew- the wave to go from one end to the other for could work? able sources of energy, but the fact is that 30 NUCLEARNEWS September 2009 they just can’t provide the electric power that the world will need. That is why we will unfortunately end up burning even more coal, which has its well-known envi- ronmental problems, unless we use nuclear. We felt that the full deployment of nuclear could be achieved if we improved some things, namely the risk of proliferation, the economics of new reactors, the fuel supply, and the waste issue. We decided to form a group and start with a blank slate to see if we could address those things. Have you come up with a design for the re- actor? Preliminarily, yes. We went through the physics reconfirmation of the traveling- wave concept. We looked at what the tech- nology constraints would be and investi- gated the available technologies that could take the required energy densities and sur- vive the material damage problems and so forth. After a lot of work, we came up with something that looks very much like the standard pool-type sodium-cooled reactor. That’s what the engineering firm Burns and Roe is working on for us right now. Do you foresee government involvement in your project? Yes, but not initially. Eventually, we might pursue an industrial partnership to develop the reactor core and the infrastruc- ture needed to convert spent fuel from a light-water reactor to metal fuel for the trav- eling-wave reactor, for example. But we think that by sticking to a private initiative at this time, we can move along rapidly and be somewhat more immune to the ups and downs of government funding. TerraPower has been developing conceptual designs for small as well as large-capacity traveling-wave reactors. The company said that a combination of advances available in Could you talk about some of the research existing component technologies, such as compact intermediate heat exchangers (the light that has been done? tan vertical rectangle and the brown vertical rectangle) and electromagnetic pumps (not We took the existing Monte Carlo–based shown), has enabled it to focus its principal innovations on the design of a core (red) that neutronics modeling tools and rebuilt them. can sustain a traveling wave of fission in multiple kinds of fuel. (Graphic: W. Wayt Gibbs, That project was led by Charles Whitmer, Intellectual Ventures, and Ash Odedra, TerraPower, LLC) an astrophysicist who is also a computer genius. We now have our own tools that are neutrons to the great extent that it is sup- ally converted to plutonium? able to perform three-dimensional analy- posed to? Initially, we are trying to hold the burnup ses. We’ve checked our codes against Re- This is a fast-neutron system, and so it’s down to 20 percent, but with development bus and other codes. Lawrence Berkeley the standard reaction, and the plutonium is we may get to 30 percent and eventually to National Laboratory ran tests to compare putting out the spectrum. At the very high the order of 50 percent with improved ma- results with us, and Argonne National Lab- end, the neutrons are quite fast, and the re- terials or recladding. oratory also provided us with calibrations action is quite insensitive to the presence to check that we’re on the right track. This of the fission products. We cannot do it This leaves you with a lot of U-238. Is the all involved a couple of years of very in- with a thermal system because that would idea that eventually further input of en- tense development. be much too sensitive to the fission prod- riched uranium would convert back to plu- ucts. The multiplication that we get in the tonium? How have you used the code? fast-neutron system is high enough to al- Even if we leave 50 percent of the U-238 It allows us to watch the wave establish it- low both the breeding and burning of plu- as waste, we will have made a huge amount self in 3-D and breed and burn. We have tonium. We have to be able to sustain this more energy than is possible with an LWR tracked about 2500 daughter products. The breeding long enough to convert from a using a once-through fuel cycle. There is code is developed to the point that we can breeding phase to a burning phase. That in- enough depleted and natural uranium to last track very carefully what happens when we volves a very severe environment for the for millennia without any reprocessing. The move fuel rods around and see what would materials.
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