original article:
http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/24/nuclear-power-innovation-technology-ecotech-bill-gates.html
snippets:
Bill Gates announced his plans to fund a viable, next-generation nuclear technology called a traveling-wave reactor.
Traveling-wave reactors have been discussed for decades as a cheaper and safer alternative to typical fission reactors, but until now the supercomputers required to make such technology possible were simply not affordable.
The prototype developed by TerraPower will rely upon Microsoft's supercomputing prowess and a whole lot of computer hardware--1,024 Xeon core processors assembled on 128 blade servers offering "over 1,000 times the computational ability as a desktop computer."
Instead of requiring enriched uranium, it can burn depleted uranium and other low-grade radioactive fuel stocks. It can also burn them for a long, long time. With this new reactor, a long-term reaction is created in which the waste from breeding the fuel is recombined to create more fuel inside the reactor. Theoretically, a nuclear reactor could operate for 100 years without changing the fuel rods, and the resultant waste would be much less radioactive than the waste of our modern-day reactors.
Even if Gates' billions combined with Toshiba's know-how does result in a full-scale industrial version of the traveling-wave reactor, it will be 10 years before one is constructed. The construction process itself will take five years.
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