Not all startups succeed, not all projects that seem promising come to fruition. That is the case of Transatomic Power founded by Mark Massie and Dr. Leslie Dewan in April 2011, a Nuclear Startup that aimed to create their own concept of Nuclear Reactor much more efficient than conventional ones. But for this type of failed projects there is always a lifeline, in this case it has been open source, since now the project has been released and survives despite the closure of this business.
It is not the first time that we talk about open source projects Outside of software or hardware, freedom expands further as we have seen in other LxA news, such as in biology projects, F1 projects, etc. This time it is a nuclear physics project, something much more serious and that seems quite closed in principle, but after this precedent it will no longer be so. Now the proposed nuclear reactor has been opened to everyone. The project was not built within the deadline they promised and they had to close operations on September 25 of 2018, but not everything has been thrown away, their designs are now under the rules of open code so that they can move forward and improve what they already had. As they have well declared since this ceased company, they remain enthusiastic and optimistic about a great improvement in the future of nuclear energy, opening this technology to everyone, both researchers and developers.
This has been said through their Twitter account, putting the design of this reactor back in the spotlight. The reactor they are developing is one of the transatomic type, that is, it uses molten salts instead of light water as in conventional thermal reactors. East reactor type uses liquid fuel instead of solid fuel, which makes maintenance easier. They also produce a lower amount of nuclear waste per year, being about 4.8 tons compared to 10 tons per year for conventional ones. And if that seems little to you, they are significantly safer against accidents and they work at atmospheric pressure and it has not been a hundred times this as the others ...