Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future

by Johan Norberg

Right now scientists and companies are working on Generation IV nuclear power. It is a summary term for reactors that are so far only experimental. They all have passive safety systems, get hundreds of times more energy from the same fuel and don’t have the same problems with waste. Fast reactors can burn the waste as well. One clever safety innovation is that a fast reactor burns liquid metal fuels. When they overheat, the fuels expand and slow down the reaction on their own. A Chernobyl or Harrisburg disaster would not be possible. The real game changer would be the small, modular reactors that some companies are working on. Bill Gates has invested in TerraPower, which wants to build a travelling wave reactor that uses radioactive waste as a fuel, doesn’t have to be refuelled and cannot melt down. The idea is to have them built in factories, completely sealed and set to run for several decades without human intervention. The reactor could also serve as its own burial casket. If this works, they could just be dropped into a concrete hole – ‘build, bury, and forget’. TerraPower’s founder thinks that we could ‘power the world for the next one thousand years just burning and disposing of the depleted uranium and spent fuel rods in today’s stockpiles’.