Refueling is a regularly recurring bother for the nuclear power industry. A group of researchers at Intellectual Ventures, an invention and investment company in Bellevue, Wash., have designed a reactor requiring only a small amount of enriched fuel that could run for decades without refueling. Called a travelingwave reactor, MIT Technology Review says the idea was first proposed in the 1990s. Nuclear reactors based on such designs theoretically could run for more than a century, the publication quotes John Gilleland, manager of nuclear programs, as saying.
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