Turbulence shows up everywhere we look: from the flight of airplanes to golf balls, or the fluttering of a flag to the swinging of suspension bridges. Through the eyes of a fluid dynamicist, “smooth sailing” is something of a rare exception. Turbulence is a type of flow characterized by chaotic and rapid changes in the [...]
The MHD pump has two associated questions: Why and How. Why have this pump? Read on. Zihong Guo built this magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) pump to prototype a possible cooling mechanism for the TerraPower nuclear reactor. Almost all nuclear reactors in use today use water as a coolant, but one thing that makes the TerraPower design special [...]
It’s been a while since we’ve given you an update on TerraPower, that traveling wave reactor that we’re developing. Actually, you’re going to have to keep waiting because that’s not what this post is about. What I will do, however, is point you to a great new resource for all your TerraPower needs. What is [...]
On September 12, filmmaker Ondi Timoner’s documentary Cool It premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. In the movie, Ondi’s camera follows Bjørn Lomborg, author of the controversial and best-selling book The Skeptical Environmentalist, as he researches global warming for his new book, Cool It. I had the pleasure of attending the premiere while visiting Toronto. [...]
Our hard work has created quite a buzz. We are still exploring options for aspects of the TWR technology, but want to acknowledge all the interest generated from recent media coverage. The reality is that we are sharing information about our Traveling-Wave Reactor (TWR) design with a variety of U.S. and international organizations and governments [...]
TerraPower’s university collaborations contribute meaningful progress to the design of the traveling wave reactor. We’ve been proactive about introducing future generations of nuclear engineers and scientists to new advanced reactor technology, but this work is appealing to young computer science students as well. In November, Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, visited four [...]
Today Bill Gates talked about our nuclear reactor project, TerraPower, at TED 2010. As an investor in several promising energy projects, Gates said it is our responsibility to pursue technologies that achieve cheap energy with “zero carbon” emissions. TerraPower determined a new type of traveling-wave reactor would be the best approach to meeting the world’s [...]
TerraPower is making great progress on their nuclear reactor design by using supercomputing clusters for computational modeling work. A calculation that takes all day to run on a desktop computer can run in one minute on our cluster. This past year, the TerraPower team has been heavily involved in engineering work and design with a [...]
TerraPower has been selected by the MIT Technology Review as one of its “10 Emerging Technologies 2009.” The team continues to work on their reactor design to one day bring it to market. We have done a bit of support for this project here in the lab, creating mockups of the reactor components in the [...]
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