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Transatomic Power Receives Seed Funding From Founders Fund Science
pmaccabe writes "The company aiming to make a Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor(WAMSR) is now getting $2 million from the venture capital firm Founders Fund. From the article: "The Founders Fund is the firm behind some of the more successful Internet startups out there including Facebook, Yammer and Spotify, but also some science-focused companies such as Climate Corporation, Space-X and satellite startup Planet Labs. The fund, which was created by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and his partners, promotes this manifesto: 'we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.'”
Getting the technology is relatively simple. Getting government permission to build it might be a bit harder...
The problem here is that decades of bad press for nuclear power have resulted in almost insurmountable political opposition even when it's clearly a technically superior solution to a whole bunch of problems.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Keep on keeping on until it happens.
Maybe just maybe, six more weeks of payroll and expenses is all you need. How many innovations fell six weeks and a single instance of fortuitous happenstance short of making it. The sinking of the Titanic must've seemed like a miracle to the lobsters in the kitchen.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
TFA says they will use it to study suitable materials and the corrosion issues around the molten salt hanling.
$2 million is enough to re-market the electrical grid as a nuclear reactor that can be 'friended' with other generating stations ("Like Facebook, but with thorium!"). That's when the California billions and billions of dollars will flood in.
$2 million? What a joke; that'll buy what, some office space?
It'll buy some seeds, after all it was *cough* "seed funding."
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
$2 million? What a joke; that'll buy what, some office space?
Yes. This is "seed money". It is just enough to get them started. They are not going to use the $2M to actually build anything. They are going to use it to refine the design while sitting in ... offices. Once they get the design worked out, they will come back for another, bigger, round of funding. That is the way venture capital works.
They should re-position the reactor as a nuclear waste destruction system
I'm not sure that this is really true. The reactor appears to be able to burn already "spent" fuel rods from other reactors but this is not going to result in less radioactive waste but rather more. The dangerous waste is the fission products, not the remaining unburnt Uranium which is practically stable (half lives in billions of years). In this design they will be extracted from the molten salt and will then need to be stored somewhere resulting in an increase in the net waste stored since each fission generates 2 or more daughter nuclei and one common one is an isotope of Krypton, a noble gas, which will undoubtedly take up a lot more volume that than the original uranium fuel pellet it was made from.
a flying car* is not possible.
It's quite possible to build a flying car. It won't be cost-effective to build or operate, because it will need bizjet-sized jet engines for VTOL. Elon Musk once remarked that he'd like to build one "just for fun". I wish someone would, just to shut everybody up. Quadrotors work just fine, after all. Scaled Composites could probably have something flying in a year. Probably not much range, but flying.
Just because Moller has been failing at this for 40 years doesn't mean it's impossible. That's a problem with Moller.
The thing is, the realities of Chernobyl and Fukushima are the realities of ancient, outdated equipment, bad design and unsound engineering.
Operational nuclear reactors have a service life of 30+ years. Any design you can come up with is likely to be obsolete and the equipment in it outdated possibly even between the time it is designed and built, much less for the full service life. State of the art doesn't remain state of the art for long.
As for bad designs and unsound engineering, those don't magically disappear just because time has marched on. Dealing with that takes a focused effort and even if the engineering is done perfectly, if it isn't built, operated and maintained properly it doesn't matter how well it was engineered. Some of the problems of a bad design only become apparent after the unit is built. Some problems are a failure of management. Other problems occur because most reactors built to date are unique designs with minimal commonality so each has its own unique failure modes and any lessons learned cannot be shared or built upon. Even if we decided to build to a common design there are problems there too because any failure modes will now be common to every installed reactor. We also have the problem that our best nuclear technology is apparently kept secret and used in military vessels rather than for civilian applications. Hard to learn when your best engineers can't talk about what they've learned.
The fact is, we can build reactors that don't blow up NOW.
Explosions have never been the problem with reactors that anyone really worries about. The problem is radioactive material leaking out of containment which can occur in a variety of ways. There is NO reactor design we currently possess that can fully eliminate the possibility of a containment failure. Some designs are clearly better than others but all of them carry very serious operational risks in some form or another.
So. Exactly how do we have a "radioactive disaster"?
From the problems you don't predict. From unexpected design flaws. From the black swan events. We have little operational experience with reactors of the sort you describe so there undoubtedly are problems we haven't come across yet. There could be problems with containment materials like embrittlement or corrosion. The design may have flaws we aren't aware of yet. Overlooked/neglected maintenance. Parts of the reactor not being built properly. Improper management of the core mixture. Externalities like natural disasters or wars. Management may take shortcuts in pursuit of economic gain. Etc. There are plenty of failure modes out there and not all of them can be addressed with an improved design.
All the advantages you describe sound great on paper but there are lots of designs that are great on paper but not so great in the real world. Until we've actually tried (and we should) its a little premature to declare that it is perfectly safe.
And a 9.0 earthquake is NOT a "routine event".
Maybe not routine but certainly expected. An earthquake of magnitude 8 or greater occurs on average about once a year somewhere in the world. In a location like Japan it is not merely possible, it is almost certain to occur eventually. Over 80% of the largest earthquakes occur somewhere along the Pacific Rim. Anyone who is surprised that a magnitude 9 earthquake struck near Japan is an imbecile.
The largest nuke mankind has ever set off was 50 megatons. So strap 9 of those bad boys together and that's what you're trying to engineer against. Ask an actual engineer about the logistics of building for something like that.
Well I am an actual engineer. Nobody promised it would be easy. Want to build something dangerous? Better plan for some worst case events. If you can't deal with a natural disaster that was as predictable as a big earthquake/tsunami in Japan then perhaps the activity isn't such a good idea.
'we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.'”
Good.
A more expensive way to get from A to B that uses dramatically more energy, is inherently more dangerous and doesn't really save any time? No, we don't really need that.
A system that allows me to receive information from anywhere on the planet, selectively, sorted and filtered? That sounds like something we actually need.
Just enough to do their detailed due dilligence, finalize their base design, run detailed computer simulations.
Once they are ready to petition the NRC for a license to run a test reactor, they will in the order of US$ 200 million to build the test reactor and operate it for a few years. Assuming the NRC will actually allow it.
Wrong. MSRs could be used to power ships and subs.
The primary reason water cooled reactors were chosen was: The US NAVY was far more comfortable with water cooling than anything else. There was no reactors cooled by anything but water when the US Navy submarine reactor program started. The first MSR research reactor took another 15 years to come to be.
Gas cooled reactors were actually discarded because they weren't as compact as water cooled reactors.
But MSR reactors are about an order of magnitude more compact than a water cooled reactors considering their total secondary containment requirements.
Since the NAVY was willing to spend the equivalent of tens of billions in today's money to get the first reactor done, and by the time the first MSR test reactor showed results, politics killed MSR research, you should watch the youtube video from Kirk Sorensen on this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...