As a big fat cigar, this can smolder for hundreds of years without running out. And then there is very little ash left. How the nuclear reactor that Bill Gates has invested hundreds of millions of dollars on.

Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates is the richest in the world. He has a fortune of nearly $ 50 billion.

Now he spends much of the dream of a carbon-free energy with nuclear power that does not leave any hazardous waste behind.

- To prevent starvation, poverty and misery that global climate change brings with it, we need energy miracle, "said Bill Gates in a speech noted in California in mid-February when he publicly came forward as nuclear hugs.

The company that Bill-Gates investing in and which will reuse the current nuclear waste as a fuel called the Terra Power and is in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue in Washington State on the U.S.A west coast.

Bill Gates is the principal owner of Terra Power, which is developing a sodium-cooled reactor, where a rapid, high energy neutron spurs the nuclear reactions.

Neutrons is so high energy that they can transform old spent uranium fuel for a new reactor fuel in the form of plutonium, once started with enriched uranium.

-    The best hope for clean and cheap energy is a new type of nuclear power plants that use waste from existing nuclear reactors, "said Bill Gates in his speech.

Illustration of Traveling Wave technology.

40 years before it is commercial
TERRA Power formed in 2006 as an offshoot of the innovation company Intellectual Ventures.

Terra Power plans to construct everything from small reactors, a hundred megawatts, to large installations in gigawatt format.

Bill Gates himself hopes to be able to test the reactor in twenty years, and in commercial operation for another twenty.

One of several of the 4th generation
The idea for the TWR reactor was born in the mid-fifties, but yet it has not gone beyond the concept stage.

The reactor belongs to fourth-generation nuclear reactors, where there are other more modern types of reactors, which reached far beyond the drawing board.

- It's a really old reactor, which, although it may work but have not the ability to utilize the fuel as the newer designs, "says Janne Wallenius, Professor of Reactor Physics at KTH.