TerraPower
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| Private | |
| Industry | Nuclear Power |
| Headquarters | Bellevue, Washington, USA |
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Key people
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Lee McIntire, CEO Bill Gates , Chairman of the Board |
| Products | Traveling wave reactor |
| Website | terrapower |
TerraPower is a nuclear reactor design company headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, in the United States. TerraPower is a class of nuclear fast reactors called the traveling wave reactor (TWR). Unlike standard light water reactors such as PWRs or BWRs that operate by using enriched uranium as fuel, TWR uses depleted uranium instead, with an estimated operation period from 40 to 60 years. The byproduct of the Uranium-235 fission can be re-used for other TWR reactors.
In September 2015 TerraPower signed an agreement with the China National Nuclear Corporation to build a prototype 600 MWe reactor unit at Xiapu in Fujian province, China during 2018 to 2025. Commercial power plants, generating about 1150 MWe, are planned for the late 2020s.
TerraPower has chosen TWRs as its primary technology. The major benefit of such reactors is high fuel utilization in a manner that does not require reprocessing and could eventually eliminate the need to enrich uranium. TWRs are designed to convert typically unusable fertile nuclides such as U-238 into fissile nuclides like Pu-239 in-situ and then shift the power from the highly burned region to the freshly bred region. This allows the benefits of a closed fuel cycle without the expense and proliferation-risk of enrichment and reprocessing plants typically required to get them. Enough fuel for between 40 and 60 years of operation could be in the reactor from the beginning. The reactor could be buried below ground, where it could run for an estimated 100 years. TerraPower described the concept of its main reactor design as a "Generation IV, liquid sodium-cooled fast reactor".
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Wikipedia