A three-person startup in the heart of Kendall Square is trying to reinvent the nuclear power plant to make it safer and more efficient with the help of $2.5 million in new venture funding.
"If we can develop a new type of design that directly addresses those problems, then we can develop a type of power that will be more acceptable," said Leslie Dewan, chief executive of Transatomic Power. "We felt that in order to properly address climate change, the world needs more nuclear. There's so many hurdles to broader adoption."
Transatomic is developing a "molten-salt" nuclear power plant, which Dewan says will be meltdown-proof and will be able to extract more power from nuclear fuel. The system is based on gravity, liquid fuel and a fail-safe in case of a complete power failure. Transatomic's power plant can also run on existing nuclear waste.
"Having a power plant that will burn waste and make electricity, that's a no-brainer," said Ray Rothrock, chairman of Transatomic and a venture capitalist who started his career as a nuclear engineer.
The government has said nuclear waste could be stored at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but the project has stalled as Republicans and Democrats find themselves on opposite sides of the issue.
"The utilities want very much to get this waste off of their sites," Dewan said.
Transatomic uses liquid fuel, which Dewan says makes their design more efficient than existing nuclear plants.
"There are some inherent problems with using solid fuel, and that's primarily because you can only keep that solid fuel in a conventional reactor for three or four years," she said.
The uranium rods wear through their metal containers well before the energy is spent, she said. Liquid fuel can be kept inside the reactor indefinitely. Dewan said 96 percent of the energy in liquid fuel can be extracted, compared to 4 percent for solid fuel.
The $2.5 million in venture funding from Founders Fund, Acadia Woods Partners and Armada Investment, comes on top of $2 million in funding secured last summer.
Transatomic recently began experiments with the help of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to test components for a prototype power plant. The company hopes to start construction by 2020.
Dewan and her co-founders are part of a new generation of nuclear engineers. Dewan and Rothrock said high profile accidents such as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island drove a generation of potential nuclear engineers to other industries. Now, a new wave of engineers is coming.
"There are, by last count, about 43 nuclear innovation companies in the United States and Canada and about $1 billion of private capital has been applied," Rothrock said. "University nuclear engineering departments are bursting at the seams."
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