User:Ntouran/terrapower

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.

Objectives
Objectives of the company include:
 * Exploring significant improvements to nuclear power using 21st century technologies, state-of-the-art computational capabilities, and expanded data
 * Evaluating the impact of new concepts on the entire fuel cycle, from mining to spent fuel disposal
 * Pursuing an independent, privately funded path

People
The TerraPower team includes 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.

The Traveling Wave Reactor
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 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 100 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.

International Outreach
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.