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so she built one and sailed it down the Charles River with a crew of six. To help recruit
students to her dorm, she constructed a My Little Pony Trojan horse that rolled on
casters and comfortably seated eight. (It sadly passed away in its prime: papier-mch,
rain.) Her father, David, an M.I.T. grad himself, gave her a credit card when she left for
college, and for the first two years, he said, the largest expense category by far was Home
Depot.
When I met Dewan on campus recently, she was stylishly dressed in a black herringbone
blouse, jeans, and silver flats. Her long brown hair was pulled back in a loose braid. She
laughed easily and encouraged me to stop her if, in her enthusiasm, she veered into
jargon.
A nuclear power reactor is just a fancy way of boiling water, she began. Nuclear fuel
typically contains uranium-235, a massive and slightly unstable atom famously capable of
sustaining chain reactions. Under the right conditions, its nucleus can absorb an extra
neutron, growing for an instant and then separating into two smaller elements, releasing
heat and three neutrons. If, on average, at least one of these neutrons splits another
uranium atom, the chain continues, and the fuel is said to be in a critical state. (Criticality
has to do with the concentration of uranium, and whether the neutrons are bounced back
toward the fuel. A Ph.D. in nuclear engineering is helpful for understanding the concept,
as is this video (http://bit.ly/16X8crd) of ping-pong balls mounted on mouse traps.)
Water is pumped past the heat source and becomes steam, which then turns turbines,
generating electricity.
Traditional nuclear power plants, however, come with two inherent problems. The first is
the threat of a meltdown. Even after a reactor is shut off, the fuel continues to generate
some heat and must be cooled. Dewan compares it to a pot on a burner that just wont
turn off; eventually, the water boils over, and the pot gets scorched. If a plant loses all
electric power, it cant pump water past the fuel, which gets hotter and hotter, leading to
disaster.
The second problem facing traditional plants is that the fuel must be manufactured in
long rods, each encased in a thin metal layer, called cladding, that deteriorates after a few
years. The rods then have to be replaced, even though the fuel inside is still radioactive,
and will remain so for hundreds of thousands of years. Unsurprisingly, nobody wants this
trash in their backyard.
Dewan and Massies design seems to solve both problems at once. Its based on a method
that worked successfully at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee, in the
nineteen-sixties. Called a molten salt reactor, it eschews rods and, instead, dissolves the
nuclear fuel in a salt mixture, which is pumped in a loop with a reactor vessel at one end
and a heat exchanger at the other. In the vessel, the fuel enters a critical state, heating up
the salt, which then moves on to the heat exchanger, where it cools; it then travels back to
the vessel, where it heats up again. Heat from the exchanger is used to make steam, and,
the vessel, where it heats up again. Heat from the exchanger is used to make steam, and,
from this, electricity. At the bottom of the reactor vessel is a drain pipe plugged with
solid salt, maintained using a powerful electric cooler. If the cooler is turned off, or if it
loses power, the plug melts and all of the molten salt containing the fuel drains to a
storage area, where it cools on its own. Theres no threat of a meltdown.
To explain the second trickmodifying the reactor to run on nuclear wasteDewan
explained a key subtlety of nuclear physics: a neutron can only split an atom if it is
moving at the right velocity, neither too slow nor too fast. Imagine cracking eggs: if you
bring the egg down too softly on the lip of a mixing bowl, it will not break. In the bizarre
world of atomic physics, the egg will also fail to break if struck too hard. To keep a
uranium chain reaction going, engineers employ materials that slow neutrons to exactly
the speed required to split uranium-235. The Transatomic reactor uses a different set of
materials, slowing neutrons to the velocity needed to cleave uranium as well as other
long-lived radioactive elements in nuclear waste, breaking them down and releasing their
energy. Transatomic can crack plutonium, americium, and curium. Any egg will do.
The environmental advantages are huge. There are no rods to fall apart, so the reactor can
keep working on the uranium. (This was proven at Oak Ridge.) And the Transatomic
reactor can also work off the radioactive byproducts, gleaning more energy and
substantially reducing both the amount and radioactivity of the waste. Todays nuclear
power plants extract about three per cent of the fuels available energy, while Transatomic
wrings out more like ninety-six per cent, according to computer simulations carried out
on industry-standard software.
Transatomic faces a challenging climb. The company hasnt built anything yet; there is
always the danger of a inhibitive engineering problem emerging. If, for example, the
corrosive salt fuel severely limits the life of the heat exchanger, the reactor could prove
too expensive to compete commercially. The most daunting obstacle, though, is the
United States government: it is exceedingly difficult to get permission to build a
demonstration reactor, no matter how good the idea. In many industries, companies
trying to do something hard face what investors call the valley of death: that long,
financially barren stretch between proving a concept with a bit of seed money and taking
the first commercial steps. Ray Rothrock, a prominent venture capitalist who is an
investor in Transatomic and a partner at Venrock, told me that, in the case of nuclear
energy, the valley of death might be a Grand Canyon.
The accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima are partly to blame, but
so is a flaw in the way we approach risk. When nuclear power plants fail, they do so
dramatically. Coal and natural gas, through air pollution, kill many more people every
year, but the effects are diffuse. One recent paper
GARETH COOK