I just today became aware of yet another kind of fusion reactor, called traveling-wave reactors. Per the Wikipedia:
A traveling-wave reactor (TWR) is a proposed type of nuclear fission reactor that can convert fertile material into usable fuel through nuclear transmutation, in tandem with the burnup of fissile material. TWRs differ from other kinds of fast-neutron and breeder reactors in their ability to use fuel efficiently without uranium enrichment or reprocessing, instead directly using depleted uranium, natural uranium, thorium, spent fuel removed from light water reactors, or some combination of these materials. The concept is still in the development stage and no TWRs have ever been built.
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Traveling-wave reactors were first proposed in the 1950s and have been studied intermittently. The concept of a reactor that could breed its own fuel inside the reactor core was initially proposed and studied in 1958 by Savely Moiseevich Feinberg, who called it a "breed-and-burn" reactor.[1] Michael Driscoll published further research on the concept in 1979,[2] as did Lev Feoktistov in 1988,[3] Edward Teller/Lowell Wood in 1995,[4] Hugo van Dam in 2000[5] and Hiroshi Sekimoto in 2001.[6]
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No TWR has yet been constructed, but in 2006 Intellectual Ventures launched a spin-off named TerraPower to model and commercialize a working design of such a reactor, which later came to be called a "traveling-wave reactor". TerraPower has developed TWR designs for low- to medium- (300 MWe) as well as high-power (~1000 MWe) generation facilities.[12] Bill Gates featured TerraPower in his 2010 TED talk.[13]
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In 2010 a group from TerraPower applied for patent EP 2324480 A1 following WO2010019199A1 "Heat pipe nuclear fission deflagration wave reactor cooling". The application was deemed withdrawn in 2014.[14]
The general idea is to use such molten-salt reactors to supplement energy storage systems, when wind and photovoltaic are not available.
Here is a link to a Reuters article about Bill Gates’ efforts on such a project:
