After helping lead e-book revolution, E Ink co-founder goes nuclear

"Developing, licensing and building the first commercial nuclear plant at our scale is a proposition that costs several billion dollars," he says. "But we can get to a pilot plant for much less, and use that to justify the big follow-on investment. The lifetime sales potential for a breakthrough power plant that is safe, cheap, and eliminates the waste problem is in the hundreds of billions. More importantly, the world needs this. And if we can manufacture in the USA and export to the developing world, it means a lot of new jobs."

As for the high degree of difficulty of designing a new kind of reactor as a startup company, Wilcox says, "I think the peple who know me see this as completely consistent with an overall goal of taking on big challenges, and doing something the world needs. I love science, and with E Ink I was already involved with the movement of one project from MIT out into the world. This is different, but also a repeat of what I've done before." The company doesn't yet have an office, and Wilcox says they're not doing much hiring as they work on honing the design and talking with utilities.

Last month, I noted that Wilcox had joined the board of Harvest Automation, a Billerica robotics startup. He has also made about a half-dozen angel investments.

Another nuclear reactor startup, Terrapower, has raised money from Cambridge's Charles River Ventures. That company is working on a kind of reactor called a "traveling wave reactor," which relies on depleted uranium, a waste product of uranium enrichment, as its fuel.

Here's a video in which Transatomic co-founders Massie and Dewan talk about their reactor design; their segment starts at about six minutes in.