Bill Gates explores molten salt reactors, thorium (Bill Gates)

Bill Gates’ nuclear company explores molten salt reactors, thorium July 23rd, 2013 Posted by Mark Halper

Opening the nuclear Gates. TerraPower, Bill Gates’ nuclear company, is now open to reactor types other than its traveling wave design. The traveling wave remains the company’s focus, although Terra has morphed it into more of a “standing wave.”

TerraPower, the Bill Gates-chaired nuclear company that is developing a fast reactor, is now investigating alternative reactor technologies, including thorium fuel and molten salt reactors.

While the company’s “big bet” continues to be on a fast reactor that TerraPower calls a traveling wave reactor (TWR), it is exploring other designs that could offer improvements in safety, waste and economics, CEO John Gilleland told me in a phone interview.

“We are an innovation house, so we like to look at other approaches,” Gilleland said. “Our big bet is on the traveling wave reactor because it fulfills so many of the goals that we would like to see nuclear achieve. But we’re always looking for innovations that lead to better safety or minimization of waste and so forth and so we have several things going there. Although those activities are small, that’s the way large activities get started.”

TerraPower’s interest in alternatives such as molten salt reactors (MSRs) came to light last month when the company’s director of innovation, Jeff Latkowski, surfaced in the audience at the Thorium Energy Alliance Conference in Chicago. The two-day gathering included presentations on thorium fuel and on reactors including molten salt reactors, high temperature solid fuel reactors, accelerator driven reactors, and others.

Latkowski quietly joined the five-year-old Bellevue, Wash., company a year ago to look after alternative approaches to nuclear. “My job at TerraPower is everything outside the Traveling Wave Reactor,” Latkowski told me in an email exchange after the Chicago event.

MSR WITH A PROPRIETARY TWIST That includes MSRs, the design known by its enthusiasts to efficiently and safely produce high temperature heat for electricity generation and for industrial processes. MSRs use liquid fuel that cannot melt down and that harmlessly drains into a holding tank in the event of an emergency. They operate at atmospheric pressure rather than at potentially dangerous high pressures associated with conventional reactors. MSRs augur improvements in waste and a reduction in weapons proliferation threats, especially if they run thorium fuel. Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory built an experimental version in the 1960s, under the direction of Alvin Weinberg.

Another benefit for MSRs, as Gilleland noted, is that “your fuel is not as susceptible to the sort of neutron damage that other approaches are.” In other words, MSRs have a much higher “burn up” – they make greater use of fuel – than do conventional solid fuel reactors.

“We’re thinking about it and trying to work on it and we have a few proprietary ideas that we’re cooking up,” Gilleland said in relation to MSRs. He did provide details of the “proprietary” ideas, noting that, “We like to work on an idea for a while before we run out and tell about it – so we have some ideas which we’re trying to ferret out how good they are.”

Director of innovation Latkowski declined to say whether or not TerraPower has filed any MSR patents. In addition to running innovation and related partnerships, Latkowski also “oversees the development, maintenance and protection of TerraPower’s intellectual property portfolio” according to his company bio.

TerraPower is a spin out of Intellectual Ventures, an innovation and venture capital firm that makes a business out of patents and is known as a keen collector and protector of intellectual property. It is headed by Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft chief strategist and technology officer who serves as TerraPower’s vice chairman.

Patently speaking. TerraPower vice chairman Nathan Myhrvold is CEO of Intellectual Ventures, a company whose business is intellectual property. TerraPower is an Intellectual Ventures spin out. Above, Myhrovld describes the environmental merits of nuclear in 2011.

I asked CEO Gilleland about the extent to which TerraPower bases its MSR ideas on the Oak Ridge design. “Oh everybody goes back to that as a good reference point, and we have considerable departures from it that we’re thinking about,” he said. “So we’re just having a lot of fun with it. That’s how you get good ideas.”

According to Gilleland, MSRs still face technological hurdles, including the avoidance of corrosion in the reactor materials. He also said that TerraPower would want to assure that an MSR could reprocess fuel without having to remove it. Any removal increases proliferation possibilities of waste falling into the wrong hands. (One of the strong suits that TerraPower claims for its TWR is that, unlike other fast reactors, the TWR does not require the expensive and potentially hazardous removal of spent fuel to reprocess into usable fuel).

“We prefer a system where you can leave fuel in the reactor for a long time,” he noted.

THORIUM TOO TerraPower is also investigating the possibility of deploying thorium, a fuel that Gilleland said could trump uranium by virtue of thorium’s wider availability. There is about four times more thorium than uranium in the world.

But Gilleland noted that the attributes of TerraPower’s TWR fast reactor could offset any need for thorium.

The TWR is the design that TerraPower has proposed for converting depleted uranium into plutonium that would burn for about 60 years before requiring refueling. It is a type of fast reactor – a reactor that does not slow down or moderate neutrons as today’s commercial “thermal reactors” do.

What about other nuclear technology alternatives, such as high temperature solid fuel reactors?

“We’re looking at all of them,” said Gilleland. “There’s no one at the top of our list right now.”

He described Latkowski’s innovation initiative as a “skunk works” that’s not a formal division but rather is a framework for encouraging lateral thinking. He likened it to innovative information technology companies that facilitate free thinking time for employees.

“It’s like Google and other places – the best ideas sometimes came from the person doing the backstroke in the swimming pool, or at home thinking,” said Gilleland. “So we want to just make sure that people have a certain fraction of their time for free thinking.”

FORGET THE FUSION One nuclear technology that TerraPower most likely won’t be pursuing is fusion.

“I have a soft spot in my heart for fusion, having run the ITER program and things like that, but it’s something I can’t count on for my grandchildren,” said Gilleland, whose background includes having served as U.S. managing director on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), based now in Cadarache, France. Innovation director Latkowski also comes from a fusion background.

Before joining TerraPower last year, he was chief scientist on the commercialization program at the National Ignition Facility, the U.S.’s massive laser fusion project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

“We’re focused more on fission rather than fusion,” Gilleland said. “Fusion just takes so much more development and so much more time.” Other companies, like General Fusion, Helion Energy, Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, Tri-Alpha Energy and Lockheed Martin might disagree.

So how real are the company’s fission possibilities outside of the TWR?

“If we do things right , we’ll have some interesting things to talk about,” he said.

His interest in broadening nuclear development at TerraPower echoes remarks made in the past by TerraPower chairman and software billionaire Gates. In a 2010 presentation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Gates pointed out that “nuclear innovation stopped in the 1970s”and encouraged the industry to move to alternative nuclear technologies.

Gilleland described reactors such as the MSR as “futuristic” compared to the traveling wave, noting the TWR will come out first. The company thinks the TWR can be ready by the mid-2020s.

STOP CHASING THE WAVE Development work and partnerships on the TWR are progressing, and TerraPower has already made a notable design change. AlthoughTerraPower still refers to its reactor as a “traveling wave,” it has turned it into more of a “standing wave” design.

In a TWR, first proposed in the 1950s, a cylinder of depleted uranium burns slowly like a candle, breeding plutonium (in a breeding “wave”) which fissions and produces heat. But as the World Nuclear Association notes, TerraPower has, “changed the design to be a standing wave reactor, since too many neutrons would be lost behind the traveling wave of the previous design and it would not be practical to remove the heat efficiently.” (TerraPower’s design calls for removing heat with a liquid sodium coolant).

In the new standing wave design, the fission reaction starts “at the centre of the reactor core, where the breeding wave stays, and operators would move fresh fuel from the outer edge of the core progressively to the wave region to catch neutrons, while shuffling spent fuel out of the centre to the periphery,” WNA explains.

As Gilleland put it, “We decided to have the fuel move past the wave rather than have the wave move past the fuel.” (The neutron loss might help explain why Gilleland is attracted to the MSR’s tendency to avoid neutron damage).

“It’s basically the same physics of what we started out with,” he said. “It’s just the practical considerations associated with making the most use of every neutron, and the engineers’ love of keeping the cooling system in one place, and not chasing the wave. It didn’t set us back at all. It was just sort of a natural evolution and one of the variations on the theme we’d been studying all along and then we just finally decided to switch to this standing wave. It just made some things easier.”

TerraPower believes it can start up a 600-megawatt prototype reactor by 2022 and have its first fast reactor ready for deployment by the mid-2020s. To that end, it has entered development partnerships with many international and domestic research groups and companies. The partners include several outfits in Russia, a country that is emphasizing fast reactor development: state nuclear company Rosatom and its TVEL fuel group; the Scientific Research Institute of Atomic Reactors; and A.A. Bochvar Hightechnology Research Institute of Inorganic Materials.

In China, TerraPower has teamed with the China Institute of Atomic Energy, which is developing a fast reactor. Other partners include the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute, Japan’s Kobe Steel.

Domestically, TerraPower is working with, among others, MIT, the University of California Berkeley, Oregon State University, the University of Michigan, Texas A&M University, the University of Nevada and a number of private companies. For a full list see TerraPower’s “partners” page.

It will be interesting to see if any MSR partners begin to appear on the website.

Photo of Bill Gates talking about nuclear and the environment at a 2010 TED talk is by Steve Jurvetson, via TED and Flickr. Photo of Nathan Myhrvold is a screen grab from aTerraPower video via New America Foundation and YouTube.

– NOTE: This version corrects an earlier one that stated the TWR performs online reprocessing. It does not. Its fuel does not require reprocessing. Not only does it not have to remove fuel for reprocessing – an advantage over other fast reactors – it does not have to reprocess at all.. Also, Jeff Latkowski was chief scientist for NIF’s commercialization program, called Laser Inertial Fusion Energy (LIFE), not for all of NIF as originally stated. Corrected July 24 at 3:10 p.m. UK time.

No tags Categories: Economics, Efficiency, Proliferation, Safety, Waste

14 COMMENTS ON “BILL GATES’ NUCLEAR COMPANY EXPLORES MOLTEN SALT REACTORS, THORIUM”

1.

E. Grant on July 23, 2013 at 4:52 pm said:

Good read on the travelling wave reactor versus standing wave reactor design and nomenclature. The effeciency of the design should multiply radiated power and absorbtion and retention of thermal heat.

Where are those numbers?

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Jan Romppanenon July 25, 2013 at 11:09 am said:

Hello, Maybe this gives some idea, http://terrapower.com/pages/technology or maybe this paper: http://new.terrapower.com/uploads/docs/ICAPP_2010_Paper_10189.pdf Reply ↓

stephen B., Ph.D. on July 23, 2013 at 7:00 pm said:

Hi, Mark Thanks so much for posting this! I also thank you for working with me on the WF blogs.

Let’s see where this goes, but it’s quite feasible, given Gates’ extremely deep pockets.

Cheers, Stephen Reply ↓

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Josh Romanoon July 23, 2013 at 11:20 pm said:

Go Thorium! It’s about time this became a reality……or at least a viable option.

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Ed Pheil on July 24, 2013 at 1:03 am said:

My understanding was that TerraPower looked at MSRs early on, but settled on the TWR. Glad to see the renewed interest. Nice also to see high level fusion program folk confirming, my thoughts that fusion is a LONG way off, at least the two best funded versions, by turning back to fission and simplified versions of fission.

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kp on July 24, 2013 at 10:03 pm said:

So, is Intellectual Ventures going to actually make something or are they just going to file a patent with some really broad claims and then troll whoever actually ponies up the time, effort and money to build an actual reactor?

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J. Norwegen on July 25, 2013 at 7:00 am said:

… “TerraPower is a spin out of Intellectual Ventures”.

The biggest patent troll around goes thermonuclear.

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Trend Guardian on July 25, 2013 at 7:30 am said:

There is a very good video explaining molten salt technology here: http://www.trendguardian.com/2012/02/solar-reserve-your-home-powered-by.html?q=molten+salt Reply ↓

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Russ Bownon July 26, 2013 at 2:18 am said:

The above Molten Salt link is not relevant to this article (it relates to concentrated solar energy).

The best 10 min intro is Kirk Sorensen’s excellent TEDTalk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vzotsvvkw Although personally speaking, I think the denatured MSR “Burner” approach, which eliminates the need for online fuel processing offers a much faster route to market due to its simplicity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4brIE0zlKWU Reply ↓

Edwin E. on July 25, 2013 at 8:43 am said:

I guess now I’m going to have to step up my Thorium mining in World of Warcraft to keep up with the demand.

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fulanux on July 25, 2013 at 9:19 am said:

Blue screen of death is about to get a new meaning.

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Christopher Calder on July 26, 2013 at 1:14 am said:

Fusion reactors are running right now in Canada and the USA, but they are cold fusion reactors, not the high temperature variety. Defkalion Green Technologies just did a live test of their Generation 5 Low Energy Nuclear Reaction reactor that was broadcast around the world on the Internet.

For links and overview, Google THE FUSION REVOLUTION Reply ↓

hempenearth on July 26, 2013 at 2:31 am said:

Has no one told Bill about LENR (low energy nuclear reactions)? Just two days ago a live demonstration at ICCF18 showed kilowatts of thermal output power higher than input. No waste radioactive materials to worry about and not huge costs!

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Dr. A. Cannara on July 26, 2013 at 4:13 am said:

Wow, it only took 3 years for Bill to read the letter explaining why MSR was a better choice!…

“Wthat we have politically ignored since the 1960s is the Wigner/Weinberg Thorium-Fluoride, Molten-Salt fission reactor (MSR). We paid for it via DoD for the Atomic Plane project. It was developed, operated for about 4 years, and then shelved by AEC & the Nixon administration – it did not produce bomb-suitable materials for the Cold War and bombers were replaced by ICBMs. We should restart the project with the goal of having utility-scale demonstration MSRs working within this decade. Section 7 & Appendix II of the enclosure have more details, but this is a fine summary: http://tinyurl.com/yb2qgex

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What did Gates know and when did 0he know it? Does he know it?