4/20/2009 Colloquium - John Gilleland

John Gilleland TerraPower LLC

Event Info

Title:  The TerraPower Initiative

Date: Apr 20, 2011
Location: 3105 Etcheverry Hall
Time: 4-5pm

Abstract

TerraPower, LLC is a privately funded initiative focused on the development of a new reactor and simplified nuclear infrastructure. Objectives include (1) reduction, and eventual elimination, of the need for enrichment facilities; (2) elimination of any future need for chemical separations-based reprocessing facilities; (3) utilization of natural or depleted uranium as fuel; and (4) achievement of a COE competitive with clean coal plants. Participants include 65 individuals from UC Berkeley, MIT, UNLV, ANL, Burns & Row, CBCG, and Intellectual Ventures.  The reactor is based on the travelling wave concept. The speaker will review the concept and discuss the development challenges.

Speaker Biography

John Gilleland manages TerraPower's nuclear programs, developing technologies and innovative solutions that improve the safety, environmental acceptability, and security of energy supplies. With a long history in applied physics, he guides the Intellectual Ventures' concept fir fission towards the ideal, yet distant, promises of fusion. Gilleland's history in the energy sector has demonstrated his established success in generating ideas and bringing them to fruition to solve great challenges.

Gilleland founded and served several years at CEO of Archimedes Technology Group, created to develop new technical solutions to nuclear-weapons-waste problems. Gilleland assembled talent and built an international organization to carry out a small "Reverse-Manhattan Project". This effort created a new technology that could greatly speed clean-up and open new approaches to commercial spent fuel reprocessing. Called the Archimedes filter, this technology separated radioactive materials from non-radioactive materials in a new way.