Company says goal is to have demonstration prototype ready by the early 2030s Federico Carminati: ‘We have all the essential elements to build a new type of reactor’. Courtesy Transmutex. A Swiss company pioneering “an entirely new type of nuclear energy” in the form of a thorium-fuelled reactor that can reuse existing nuclear waste is hoping to reach a levelised cost of energy (LCOE) for the technology of less than $70/MWh – similar to that of large-scale commercial nuclear power plants.

Transmutex, a startup founded in 2019 by nuclear scientist Federico Carminati, former-CERN scientist Jean-Pierre Revol and entrepreneur Franklin Servan-Schreiber, said a review of data demonstrated that when comparing GW-scale nuclear power plants and the company’s planned Generation IV TMX-Start nuclear plant, the LCOE is “of the same order of magnitude” even with appropriate uncertainties at this stage of the project.

The company, whose goal is to have a demonstration prototype of its thorium plant ready by the early 2030s, said the result took into account a series of assumptions including equipment procurement costs and operation and maintenance cost which are uncertain for any Generation IV project because little to no experience feedback is available.

• Rosatom
• Russia
• International Atomic Energy Agency
• United States
• Uranium
• Argonne National Laboratory
• Switzerland

Source: Nucnet

Date: Thursday, 10 February 2022

Original article: nucnet.org/news/swiss-company-transmutex-pioneers-new-type-of-nuclear-energy-process-2-1-2022

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