53154160Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, who is also the owner and advocate of Nuclear-startup TerraPower is in talks with Japanese technology company Toshiba to develop a small nuclear reactor.

The team of Terra Power and Toshiba will focus on nuclear traveling wave reactor technology(TWR),which is a new type of small nuclear reactor design that can use the waste byproduct of the enrichment process i.e. It can consume depleted uranium as fuel. TWR’s have been under development since the 1990’s, but TerraPower is one of the first companies to have come up with a implementable design for this technology.

The core benefit that this design will offer is that reactor will not have to be refueled or have its waste removed till the time it is dead, which is easily about a couple hundred years.

Using waste uranium reduces the amount of waste in the overall nuclear life cycle, and extends the available supply of the world’s uranium for nuclear by many times. TerraPower CEO explained that the As per TerraPower CEO, the operation of a traveling wave reactor can be demonstrated in less than ten years, and commercial deployment can begin in less than fifteen years.

Let’s hope that the combination of two technology giants helps meet power needs of the world’s poor without contributing to global warming.