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Mass-producible integral fast reactor modules can power every country on earth for nearly a millennium with waste products already at hand. That’s the pitch that Tom Blees has made to the Climate CoLab at MIT. If Tom’s pitch garners the most votes, the push to get the first PRISM built will get a lot more traction in the US, and with the public.
The PRISM is an unusual case. Since the EBR-II was shut down in 1994, GE had it sitting on a shelf with a small group of engineers combing over the design and tweaking and optimizing it, piece by piece. It was a low priority at GE and these guys laboured in obscurity, with a succession of people moving in and out of the project over the nearly two decades. But with all that optimization of every part of the system, the PRISM is now so ready to build that GE could make an offer to build them for the UK, right NOW. Such an offer, especially from a company as conservative as GE, displayed an enormous amount of confidence in its readiness to build the PRISM. This design process that’s lasted since the early 90s is why we call PRISM the best reactor never built.
Anyway, here are some more details. Please BNC readers, do register and vote. This really is worth 5 minutes of your time!
Vote for Tom Blees to give a talk at MIT on how
“Integral Fast Reactors Can Power the Planet”
In a proposal for MIT’s Climate CoLab, Tom Blees, president of SCGI, explains that “Mass-producible integral fast reactor modules can power every country on earth for nearly a millennium with waste products already at hand. “
The goal of the Climate CoLab is to harness the collective intelligence of thousands of people from all around the world to address global climate change.
Tom’s proposal has made it into the final round of judging and is now being voted on by the public. If it either garners sufficient votes or is supported by the judges, Tom will be invited to present the proposal at an MIT conference in November 2013. Previous winners have sometimes been given the opportunity to present their proposals to the UN and the US Congress.
If you’d like to read the proposal and support it with your vote, you can find it here. On the right side of that site you will see a link to vote, which requires a brief registration procedure:
- Make sure to put at least 8 characters in your password.
- No spaces in your screen name.
- The bio and photo are entirely optional, you can disregard those fields.
When talking with people about Integral Fast Reactor technology, people often ask where they might find a brief written explanation. Tom’s proposal on the MIT site is a great place to direct friends and acquaintances who might be interested in learning about it. The proposal provides a succinct overview of both the technology itself and the grand vision of what its use can mean for humanity. Besides introducing them to the IFR concepts, directing them to the proposal on the MIT site (via personal email, Facebook, etc.) will also give them the opportunity to support the proposal and increase the likelihood that the message will reach a much wider audience.
Filed under: Hot News, IFR FaD, Nuclear | 5 Comments »
