A failed big nuclear promise

Can't say I had heard of it, but seems Peter Thiel (amongst others) blew a couple of million on a nuclear start up that make some wildly inaccurate claims:

Nuclear reactor startup Transatomic Power is shutting down operations, after deciding it doesn’t see a viable path to bringing its molten salt reactor designs to scale. ...

Transatomic’s current work doesn’t include its initial goal of using spent nuclear fuel to power its reactors, however. Dewan and co-founder Mark Massie launched the company in 2011, while they were doctoral candidates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with the goal of creating a reactor that could use spent fuel rods and thus manage the challenges of safely disposing of this nuclear waste.

This promise helped Transatomic raise $2 million in 2014 from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, and raise another $2.5 million round in 2015 from Acadia Woods Partners, Founders Fund, and Daniel Aegerter, chairman of the Swiss fund Armada Investment AG.

But in 2016, the company was forced to backtrack on its earlier claims, after an informal review by MIT professors found errors in its calculations. As first reported by MIT Technology Review, these errors included its initial claim that its design could produce "75 times more electricity per ton of mined uranium than a light-water reactor” of typical design — a figure that was downgraded to “more than twice” the usual reactor’s output per unit of uranium in a company report from November 2016.