| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Nuclear Power |
| Headquarters | Bellevue, Washington, USA |
| Key people | John Gilleland, CEO |
| Products | Traveling wave reactor |
| Website | www.TerraPower.com |
TerraPower is a nuclear reactor design spin-off company of Intellectual Ventures that is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington in the United States. TerraPower is investigating a class of nuclear fast reactors called the traveling wave reactor (TWR). One of TerraPower's primary investors is Bill Gates.[1]. In December 2011 India's Reliance Industries bought a minority stake through one of its subsidiaries. Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani will join the company's board.[2]
Whereas standard light water reactors such as PWRs or BWRs running worldwide use enriched uranium as fuel and need fuel reloads every few years, TWRs, once started, use depleted uranium instead and are considered to be able to operate for between 40 to 60 years without fuel reloading.
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Objectives of the company include:[3]
The TerraPower team includes[4] scientists and engineers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Fast Flux Test Facility, Microsoft, and various universities, as well as management with experience at Siemens A.G., Areva NP, the ITER project, and the U.S. Department of Energy.
TerraPower has chosen TWRs as a technology for further development. The major benefits of these reactors are that they can get high fuel utilization (enhancing sustainability) in a manner that does not require reprocessing and could eventually eliminate the need to enrich uranium[5] TWRs are designed to convert typically unusable fertile nuclides such as U-238 into fissile nuclides like Pu-239 in-situ and then shift the power from the highly-burned region to the freshly bred region. This allows the benefits of a closed fuel cycle without the expensive and proliferation-sensitive enrichment and reprocessing plants typically required to get them. All the fuel required for between 40 to 60 years of operation could be in the reactor from the beginning.
TerraPower plans to have a TWR prototype built by 2020 producing electricity for the grid in the several-hundred megawatt capacity range.[6]
The TWR design is still in the research and development phase. Accordingly, the TerraPower management team is meeting with a variety of U.S. and international research, supply, and manufacturing organization to discuss options for its deployment. The company has no agreements for the TWR's construction or operation at this time.
On November 6, 2009, Bill Gates and TerraPower executives visited Toshiba's Yokohama and Keihin Factories in Japan, and concluded a non-disclosure agreement with them on December 1.[7][8][9][9] Toshiba already developed an ultracompact reactor, the 4S, that can operate continuously for 30 years without fuel handlings and generates 10,000 kilo-watts.[10][9][11] Some of the technologies used in 4S are considered to be transferable to TWRs.[8]