

Intellectual Ventures Nuclear Invention Touted as Safer and Cheaper


The “traveling wave” reactor would run on a raw mineral (uranium, or possibly thorium) rather than on processed fuel.

Significance: Traveling wave reactors, if they work, could be fueled without making the same enriched radioactive materials used to make atomic bombs — the very source of proliferation fears — and could even use the waste byproducts of fuel processing for other, conventional reactors.


Target markets: Outside the US. — Proponents say emerging countries could possibly fuel their economic growth with CO2-emissions-free nuclear energy, without worsening the nuclear weapons-proliferation problem.

The Big Question: Will now-nuclear nations help poorer ones dispose of the radioactive waste (and how), or will that be the developing country’s problem?

Timeframe: Decades away.


Background: The traveling wave reactor was first suggested in the 1990s by Edward Teller, a scientist credited with inventing the hydrogen bomb. The broader category of breeder reactors, an older idea, all operate on the principle of using the atomic reaction to convert raw radioactive material into “fissile” material whose atoms are then more easily split in the reactor. In a traveling wave breeder reactor, the conversion process travels through a store of raw fuel, converting it and using it as it goes.


Eric Engleman wrote about IV’s nuke invention in “A brain reaction” in the Puget Sound Business Journal August 15, 2008, and provided the data for this post.

Categories: Policy
Denis Du Bois