Copenhagen Atomics

Copenhagen Atomics is an organization, which is best described as a half-breed between a start-up company and a political organization. New team members who join the organization must agree to work towards a common long-term goal: Create a MSR-based machine, preferably in a 40 ft shipping container, called the Copenhagen Atomics Wasteburner (CAWB).

The CAWB will use thorium to burn out actinides from spent nuclear fuel in order to convert long-lived radioactive waste into short-lived radioactive waste, while producing large amounts of energy and jobs in present time. Our hope is to be able to optimize the CAWB enough, so that it can start on spent nuclear fuel alone. Alternatively, we will need to add enriched fuel.

The long-term goal is to produce more than one CAWB every day in a central factory, and to be able to recycle the used CAWB’s in a few decommissioning factories around the world. The first version of CAWB will be 50 MWt but our goal is to continue to improve the technology over many generations to achieve higher output, better efficiency and less waste. By making the design modular and an open standard, we hope to achieve many of the same benefits, which fueled the PC industry in its early years.

Leader: Open Position
Headquarters: Copenhagen, Denmark
Reactor type: MSR
Start of operations: Pilot reactor goes critical in 2019
Market entry: Depends on funding and licenses
Employees: Team of 15 in start-up mode
Website: CopenhagenAtomics.com

Achievements in 2014 - Copenhagen Atomics

The team around Copenhagen Atomics reached a joint agreement in the last part of 2014. Until then, most of the work had been undertaken by individual team members all working towards a molten salt reactor based solution.

Goals for 2015 - Copenhagen Atomics

Copenhagen Atomics has 4 main goals for 2015:

1. Improve our simulations in order to verify critical assumptions in our current design.
2. Make chemical lab experiments with fluoride based molten salts to verify our separation techniques.
3. Inform the public about our proposed solution and long-term goal, and improve our presentation material and long-term economic model.
4. Expand our team to include members from Sweden, Norway and Finland.