- Location: Harris School of Public Policy, Room 140C
Eleven years ago, we created Muons, Inc. to use DOE Small-Business Innovation Research and Technology Transfer (SBIR-STTR) grants to develop concepts for muon beam cooling for muon colliders and neutrino factories. Using these funds and working with collaborators at national labs and universities, we have generated and developed new inventions for a demonstration muon-beam cooling channel that implies a compelling Higgs boson factory. The DOE funding has allowed us to build a strong staff of creative and experienced scientists and engineers with interests in many aspects of accelerator technology. Three years ago, we started to collaborate with ADNA Corp to develop a new kind of nuclear reactor that uses an internal proton accelerator-driven spallation target. In the GEM*STAR1 accelerator-driven subcritical reactor that we plan to build, the accelerator allows subcritical operation (no Chernobyls), the molten salt fuel allows radioactive volatiles to be continuously removed (no Fukushimas), and the fuel does not need to be enriched or reprocessed (to minimize weapons proliferation concerns). We describe the first proposed GEM*STAR application to turn natural gas into easily marketed synthetic diesel fuel using the Fischer-Tropsch process, where the initial fissile material could be the 34 metric tons of excess weapons-grade plutonium (w-Pu) slated to be destroyed by the 2000 U.S.-Russian Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement (PMDA).
1 Charles D. Bowman R. Bruce Vogelaar, Edward G. Bilpuch, Calvin R. Howell, Anton P. Tonchev, Werner Tornow, R.L. Walter, “GEM*STAR: The Alternative Reactor Technology Comprising Graphite, Molten Salt, and Accelerators,” Handbook of Nuclear Engineering, Springer Science+Business Media LLC (2010).
Supplementary Materials:
Comments on Supplemental EIS W-Pu
Muons, Inc. in 3 Acts
Cost: Free