Nuclear startup shifts focus to molten chloride reactor

MIT Technology Review : TerraPower was founded six years ago with a primary focus on traveling wave reactors , which use nonenriched or depleted nuclear material. The reactors are a variant of sodium-cooled fast reactors, which have not had much success commercially. The company has always been questioned for focusing on that technology, and industry experts say they’ve seen nothing from TerraPower to suggest they’ve made any progress. However, last week Jeff Latkowski, TerraPower’s director of innovation, gave a talk at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s 50th anniversary celebration of the first demonstration of a molten salt reactor. In a molten chloride reactor—a type of molten salt reactor—the liquid material is used as both the coolant, which transfers the heat from the nuclear reaction to water, and the fuel itself. Latkowski did not detail the company’s design, but he highlighted many of the technology’s benefits and indicated that the company was still committed to investigating traveling wave reactors.