I am one of the UPower founders. There are two big stories here that most people don't know yet:
1) that a fast reactor can be waste-negative, I.e. transform existing waste to energy.
2) a fast reactor destroys the long lived waste- instead of trying to store waste for a hundred thousand years it's on the order of a hundred.
Both of these are critically important for existing waste but also having an emission free energy source with a closed fuel cycle. No other energy source is better than a hundred thousandth as energy dense and no other energy source could produce clean energy for its own recycling.
It's obviously just a cool technology but more than that it's amazing what that could mean for the environment and remote communities. Even for solar and wind materials mining, these remote mines generally have to burn tons and tons of diesel. That's what we are trying to fight.
Good question, and believe it or not there have been small reactor concepts that failed for not considering that exact point.
Ours is designed to live in essentially a spent fuel cask. These things have been designed and tested to withstand being dropped from a thousand feet, being hit by missiles or airplanes. Seriously check out youtube there are crazy videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBp1FNceTTA
So from the time the reactor leaves our factory, to when it's put underground, till a decade later when it's taken out and shipped back for refueling, the fuel is locked in the reactor which is locked in this uber robust "cask".
This design is a fast reactor which means it can recycle fuel. So beyond its first decade installation we can recycle the fuel approximately 6 cycles before there is any amount of leftover that must be removed. That would be about 70 years, and the volume would be about the size of a basketball (fully glassified) and the lifetime would be on the order of a hundred years. That could be stored at our central facility or another facility, as it would not be weaponizable.
Both of these are critically important for existing waste but also having an emission free energy source with a closed fuel cycle. No other energy source is better than a hundred thousandth as energy dense and no other energy source could produce clean energy for its own recycling.
It's obviously just a cool technology but more than that it's amazing what that could mean for the environment and remote communities. Even for solar and wind materials mining, these remote mines generally have to burn tons and tons of diesel. That's what we are trying to fight.