I'm John Gilleland, the CEO of TerraPower. Bill Gates is the chairman of TerraPower.
I'll guess we'll be a change of pace from your previous discussions. We're a young company founded about seven years ago. We are focused on advancements in nuclear power. Although I've had experience with about every kind of renewable energy you can think of, as well as fusion and other forms of nuclear, I will focus on TerraPower.
You might wonder why a young company has been started to focus on nuclear. The answer to that question lies in discussions that were conducted in 2006. Bill Gates and some of his associates—Nathan Myhrvold—were looking at the efficacy of the myriad efforts the foundation was making in their area of vaccines, medicines, and other ways to help out people. One of the keys that became very apparent is that energy, and particularly electricity, is important for raising the standard of living of people, in turn amplifying the effects of the other works the foundation was doing.
TerraPower is a private company. It is not part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We are a separate company that Bill has started. We first did, however, an assessment of renewables, coal and other ways of achieving this increase in energy, to be made available to the two billion people on the planet who are at some risk because they don't have energy. We were quite neutral about the process.
We looked at renewables, in particular, hoping that would do the trick, but in the end we decided that nuclear power is essential as one of the elements of an energy infrastructure. We decided that we would pursue this. We of course wanted to pursue nuclear because of the concerns we all had for climate change. We didn't want to ruin our planet in the process of accelerating the movement toward the implementation of energy systems.
We decided renewables are important but insufficient, that nuclear is important but that innovation per se has not been the characteristic of nuclear, at least not in the United States for some time. We set about to try to reinvent nuclear from scratch. By that I mean we have now, in this post-digital age, great modelling capabilities that we did not have before—new technologies. We were privileged in TerraPower to try to develop a new energy system, a new form of nuclear, which would have seven key characteristics.
One of the characteristics, of course, is that it would have enhanced safety. We started the company before Fukushima, but we decided that one of our goals would be to achieve what's called inherent safety features in a nuclear plant. It was important for us to come up with a scheme where no on-site or off-site power is required in order for the reactor to keep itself cool and not have a Fukushima-like experience.
We decided that this sort of energy should be available to everyone. We looked for ways to use the 90% of uranium we now throw out as part of the enrichment process. About 90% of the uranium we mine is not used, so we decided that the concept should use that uranium. It should use the uranium fuel more efficiently.
One of our concerns was proliferation of weapons and the materials that make nuclear weapons, so we decided we would have as a goal the development of a system that did not require the risks associated in the long run with enrichment or what's called reprocessing.
We then decided that another goal should be to reduce the environmental impact, which means if you don't do these other things, you have much less waste produced along the way, i.e., you would have a simplified nuclear infrastructure. Lo and behold, we found that the seven objectives we had in mind were indeed achievable. This was a surprise to us, and led to the acceleration of the company into a more serious development phase. We now employ the national laboratories in the United States, the universities, several companies in the United States, as well as institutions in Korea, Japan, and Russia in the pursuit of the necessary technological developments to make this reactor possible.
This reactor is called a travelling wave reactor. The key to its operation is that it can produce power on the basis of using that depleted uranium, we call it, or DU, which is in great supply in the United States and other countries. These are like mines made by man. If you can use depleted uranium as a basic fuel, then all these other objectives fall into place.
So one might ask, what's the catch? The catch is that it requires some materials development and fuel development, but we were stunned to find that's about all it needs. The concept is based on types of coolant and fuels and so forth that have been used before, so the basic technologies are there. Innovation brought us to this point. We now have about eight universities, five companies, and maybe 30 institutions around the world working with us in a coordinated way. Our objective is to have some sort of prototype working in the early 2020s. So far so good. The testing we're doing around the world is turning out very attractively.
Mr. Gates and others are participants, not just investors, in this activity, so we are having, I'll call it, a very good time with an example of nuclear innovation. I'm sure other such endeavours should be undertaken. We're an unusual company. We would like lots of competition, because our fundamental goal in starting this whole business was to try to solve a problem, i.e., the problem of bringing energy to more people as fast and as economically as possible without severe impact on the planet.
You had a few questions. I can either stop for Q and A or I can address some of the questions you sent me via e-mail. What would you like me to do?