A New Class of Nuclear Reactors

prunedude tips this quote from a post at Freakonomics about Japan's nuclear crisis: "The folks over at IV Insights, the blog associated with Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures, point out that it was the complete loss of power that disabled the cooling systems protecting the plant's reactors. Which raises the question: Is there nuclear technology that could withstand such a catastrophe? Possibly. TerraPower, an Intellectual Ventures spin-off that also boasts Bill Gates as an investor, is working on a new reactor design called a traveling wave reactor that uses fast reactor technology, rather than the light water technology used at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The two biggest advantages of the fast reactor design is that it requires no spent fuel pools and uses cooling systems that require no power to function, meaning the loss of power from the tsunami might not have crippled a fast reactor plant so severely."

Comments

no one will need more then 640W

[Joe The Dragon]

no one will need more then 640W

Kind of off topic, borderline AC even, but..

[drfreak]

If Bill Gates' life was to flash before his eyes, would it be a blue flash?

Re:Environmentalists would LOVE pebble bed and bre

[spun]

Do you often fantasize about extreme environmentalists? Could you share more of what happens in those fantasies? I mean, get to the good stuff, this part's boring.