Date: 4/3/2012
Make that consumers and power companies as well, because these MIT PhD candidates have engineered a way to eliminate waste uranium based fuel by making electricity.
Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie who are nuclear engineering PhD students at MIT, started working their idea called “Transatomic Power” back in 2010, and formed a corporation with the same name last year. Their business model is to license the design of reactors rather than build plants, a huge capital-intensive endeavor.
Here’s the lure – Transatomic Power’s Waste-Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor (WAMSR) can convert the high-level nuclear waste produced by conventional nuclear reactors each year into $7.1 trillion of electricity. Here’s the payoff – At full deployment, WAMSR reactors could use the existing stockpiles of nuclear waste to equal satisfying the world’s electricity needs through 2083.
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[Editor's Note: Although corrosive molten salts are still toxic to humans and there is still nuclear waste produced (albeit less because of greater efficiency at using up the nuclear fuel), the Generation IV molten salt reactor design is much safer than current operating solid fuel reactor designs, which are water cooled. Molten salt reactors run at a higher temperature but lower pressure than water cooled fission reactors, reducing wear and tear on equipment and increasing safety. Because the molten salt bath is the coolant rather than water, there is no danger of hydrogen explosions. If there is a power failure the frozen salt plug melts and the molten salt drains out of the reactor by gravity in to an underground catch basin. No more nuclear meltdowns when there is a sustained power outage emergency.]
