Reactor reuses nuclear waste

Nov 12 - Marie Szaniszlo Boston Herald

Two Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral candidates are designing a nuclear power plant that would convert nuclear waste from conventional reactors into electricity -- a plant you could walk away from, they said, without the risk of a radioactive leak like the meltdown last year that crippled parts of Japan.

Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie, co-founders of Transatomic Power, have developed the WAMSR, or Waste-Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor, a 400- to 500-megawatt plant that would convert high-level nuclear waste into electric power, at a price competitive with fossil fuels.

"About two years ago, we got really excited about nuclear power because we saw so much potential in the industry to improve the design of reactors and stretch the limits of the technology," said Dewan, 27.

The two researched different designs and settled on a molten salt reactor, Massie said, because other types of reactors have not been economically viable.

They estimate the WAMSR could convert the waste produced by conventional nuclear reactors each year into $7.1 trillion worth of electricity, at 10 cents per kilowatt-hour.

At full deployment, the two said, their reactors could use existing stockpiles of nuclear waste to satisfy the world's electricity needs through 2083, all the while reducing the majority of the waste's radioactive lifetime from hundreds of thousands of years to hundreds of years, thereby decreasing the need for permanent repositories such as Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Most importantly, they said, the WAMSR would differ from conventional reactors like the Fukushima I nuclear power plant -- which melted down after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan -- in that it would not require electric power or water to cool it in the event of an accident.

The WAMSR's efficient modular design also could be manufactured economically at a central location and transported by rail to the reactor site. And utilities could use the profits from the first plant installed to fund construction of additional ones.

Dewan and Massie already have designed the reactor core and are now working on designing the rest of their plant.

With E Ink founder Russ Wilcox as their CEO, their goal is to have a prototype ready in the next five years and a commercial reactor ready within the next 10 years.

mszaniszlo@bostonherald.com