By John Stang
The head of a suburban Seattle venture told a House of Representatives subcommittee Tuesday that a new type of nuclear power reactor now in development would dramatically cut the amount of spent fuel generated in operations.
TerraPower, of Bellevue, Wash., is working on a breed-and-burn reactor, which would use depleted uranium — the leftover product in nuclear fuel after the enriched uranium is burned — to continue to power the reactor.
This could limit refueling to once every 20 years to 60 years, TerraPower President and CEO Chris Levesque said of the system, officially called the Traveling Wave Reactor.
Levesque and other nuclear industry representatives discussed upcoming generations of nuclear reactors with the House Energy and Commerce energy subcommittee.
“We have the potential to reduce that waste stream by 80 percent” relative to existing light-water plants, Levesque said.
Maria Korsnick, president and CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute industry trade group, added about TerraPower: “What is being called waste, we consider future nuclear fuel.”
Management of radioactive spent fuel from nuclear power operations is viewed within the industry as one of the primary obstacles to deployment of a new generation of smaller, advanced reactors. The United States has still not figured out what to do with the over 80,000 metric tons and counting of used fuel from its existing nuclear fleet.
The TerraPower program is among a growing number of programs in the United States and abroad to develop small modular and other advanced reactor technologies.
While acknowledging the waste issues in their Tuesday discussions, committee members concentrated on the United States lagging behind Russian and China in developing advanced reactors.
Founded in 2008, TerraPower hopes to get a breed-and-burn reactor — 500 megawatts or less — up and running at a yet-to-be-selected U.S. location in the in the 2025 to 2027 time frame. TerraPower’s 150 employees work in a 65,000-square-foot laboratory in Bellevue.
“Think of it as a log … that burns for 60 years,” billionaire Bill Gates said in a 2010 TED Talk about TerraPower, which he helped co-found.
In his TED Talk, Gates said developing the reactor technology could likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars — with actual construction reaching significantly into the billions. The Department of Energy allocated $40 million to TerraPower’s research in 2016. A year ago, Gates said he would personally invest $1 billion and raise another $1 billion from private investors to go with federal funds to build a pilot plant.
A few years ago, TerraPower began talks with the China National Nuclear Corp., a state-owned economic entity heavily involved in commercial and military nuclear matters. The two reached a formal agreement in 2017 to jointly develop and build a breed-and-burn reactor south of Beijing early in the next decade.
