A half hour north of Seattle in Everett about15 black barrels sit in a nondescript storage facilityowned by the nuclear innovation company TerraPower.Each barrel is the size of a large trash can, around110 L, and weighs over 350 kg. What’s held insideis . . . complicated. Just inside the thick shell is a layer offoam padding. Within that sits a heavy-duty container, whichin turn encloses a steel pipe capped on each end. Insidethe pipe is a screw-top aluminum can, which holds a thickplastic bag, which encases a glass vial about the size of a tubeof toothpaste. “It’s sort of your classic Russian doll,” says JeffLatkowski, TerraPower’s senior vice president of innovation.That innermost glass vial holds half a gram of yellowmattera mixture of the radioactive elements uranium andthorium.
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