In addition to its unique fuel cycle, the TerraPower design employs a high - temperature, liquid metal core cooling technology suited to a breeder reactor with «fast» neutron activity, rather than today's predominant reactors whose water cooling
systems slow neutrons.
But when Demos Kazanas at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and his colleagues looked at 18 years» worth of X-ray observations of
neutron stars in binary
systems in the Small Magellanic Cloud, they found that half were
slowing down — at the same rate as the others were accelerating.