History
Traveling-wave reactors were first proposed in the 1950s and have been studied intermittently since that time. The concept of a reactor that could breed its own fuel inside the reactor core was initially proposed and studied in 1958 by Saveli Feinberg, who called it a "breed-and-burn" reactor. Michael Driscoll published further research on the concept in 1979, as did Lev Feoktistov in 1988, Edward Teller/Lowell Wood in 1995, Hugo van Dam in 2000, and Hiroshi Sekimoto in 2001.
No TWR has yet been constructed, but in 2006, Intellectual Ventures launched a subsidiary named TerraPower, LLC to model and commercialize a working design of such a reactor, which has since come to be called a "traveling-wave reactor". TerraPower has developed TWR designs for low- to medium- (300 MWe) as well as high-power (~1000 MWe) generation facilities. Bill Gates featured TerraPower in his 2010 TED talk.
Read more about this topic: Traveling Wave Reactor
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