Bringing nuclear energy technology to its fullest potential

The TerraPower idea was born out of an invention session at Intellectual Ventures. Lowell Wood and others convinced those in the room to invest in and improve upon the i...
See More dea of a Traveling Wave Reactor (TWR). Once you start this kind of reactor with fissile material (U-235 or Pu-239), it produces its fuel from fertile material (U-238 or Th-232) indefinitely, without reprocessing. This enables fast-reactor fuel utilization without the added complications, costs, and proliferation concerns associated with reprocessing. There is enough depleted uranium sitting around as low-level waste in the US to power TWRs for centuries.

Besides getting up to about 35x more energy out of the same amount of fuel as a traditional reactor, TWRs have passive decay heat removal, allowing them to cool themselves indefinitely with no human intervention or pumps or anything in a loss-of-offsite-power event.

TWRs require high burnup fuel and structural materials, beyond our experience base. Therefore, besides working on core designs, TerraPower is heavily involved in materials and fuel research.

Besides TWRs, TerraPower is also interested in looking at other innovations that can help out the nuclear energy world.