Monday, October 12, 2015

Transatomic: rethinking and rebranding atomic energy

Funded by Peter Thiel's Founder's Fund, a startup to watch (Wired):

Transatomic’s technology is complicated. Most nuclear energy technology is complicated, if you’re not a nuclear physicist, but Massie and Dewan’s approach might be especially so. Most of the industry uses light water reactors to generate energy in nuclear plants; but Transatomic uses molten salt reactors, which use nuclear waste dissolved into salt. The concept was first tested in the 1950s at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Recently, a small group—including a group called Energy from Thorium—began campaigning to reintroduce the technology.

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