Moltex Energy Gets US$7.5 Million in Crowdfunding for Molten Salt Nuclear Reactor

18 thoughts on “Moltex Energy Gets US$7.5 Million in Crowdfunding for Molten Salt Nuclear Reactor”

1. Most reasonable path is to build an annular low pressure (pump head only) high flow cold water high power LWR with a ‘glory hole’ central test specimen holder. In the center goes a 50 litre crucible of hastalloy that is itself lined with pyrolytic graphite (e.g. stacked & bonded, machined rings/sleeves). This test crucible would hold the various test mixtures from cradle to grave (functions as cask too). The crucible would have a head closure with sample/instrument ports, and an offgas take-off to a lab-scale handler built on a skid. The test specimen would be a net neutron absorber and treated as an immobile control rod. Various organizations would line up around the block to irradiate their salt mix in such a test or to try their fuel handling concept in a lab scale built skid. These cold water reactors offer Neutron flux levels an order of magnitude higher than the huge 10^15/cm2/s in commercial PWR. +500KW/liter in test LWR.

   Could air cool the test specimen in accident condition through the gas gap in the ‘glory hole’. Licensing calculations would show this to be an adequate boundary condition (nat circ air). In operation you could peg the temperature of the test article anywhere desired with gas gap convective boundary condition. Do physics measurements, chemical stability, corrosion, etc. Could be made to have quite a harder spectrum then typical LWR if desired (wire-wound rods nearly touching). All coulda been done 3 decades ago.

2. So what would you have to do to get INL to put some infrastructure in place to do exactly this? What would the various pieces-parts of that infrastructure look like?

3. Thank you, English is not my first language, but you understood the way I meant it. I realise there are drawbacks with the design as well, e. g. loss of coolant accident and as you mention the reprocessing.

4. Their solution isn’t going to placate any of the foes of nuclear fission, because they’re implacable, and don’t CARE about technical details. Their real problem with nuclear fission is that it works, and works well, for supplying reliable energy to an industrial civilization.

   And they hate industrial civilization.

5. What I can see is that we’re throwing insane resources at fusion, and starving fission research, when fission has a proven track record of WORKING, and everything we know about fusion says that, even if by some miracle you managed to get a reactor above breakeven, it would be an expensive, finicky maintenance nightmare.

   A fraction of of the engineering resources which have been thrown away on fusion could have fixed any problems with fission, which is actually a darned good power source even using decades old designs.

   Why does this state of affairs persist? Because fusion is the “perfect” that the watermelons have designated to be the enemy of the good enough fission. They’ll demand we work on fusion instead of fission, until somebody happens to find a way to make it work, at which point they’ll finally notice that it’s expensive and involves radiation, and retire it in favor of some other way to kill fission off.

6. I don’t need a write-up. I GOT their number. They believe they are bypassing one of the major impractical aspects of MSRs by putting the corrosive stuff in tubes. Might actually be more fluid inventory present in this design. They think they’re placating the pragmatic types that want fission products contained, but their solution is not contaiment, nor is it creative/clever.

7. It’s less (radioactive salt), not, (less radioactive) salt. Most of the salt in their design isn’t radioactive.

   Mind, their design sacrifices the continuous reprocessing and 100% availability of a “conventional” molten salt reactor.

   Here’s a semi-technical writeup: https://www.moltexenergy.com/learnmore/An_Introduction_Moltex_Energy_Technology_Portfolio.pdf

8. Bitter about reality, if by “reality” you mean the fact that they’re living in an utterly irrational society. I guess that IS reality, come to think of it.

9. There ya go! Using the noggin; good man.

   Sort of a Versatile Test Reactor™ for MSRs.

10. Someone or some company with resources needs to step up and start organizing the MSR efforts into something cohesive with real funding, not barely enough buy an office and pay half a dozen staff. Gates is funding this type stuff, so maybe he should try to create a coordinating body to sort through the feasibility of various designs and lobby for funding for the worthwhile ones. Any real project is going to need a few billion to really get started.

11. I could fix headlines like this pretty easily: Any time any headline has both the words “nuclear” and “crowdfunding” in it, simply replace it with “Yet Another Harebrained Nuclear Power Scheme Utterly Fails to Convince Any Serious Investor That It’s Real”.

12. Moltex funding numbers are missing some trailing zeros.

13. He’s parallel targeting the military base powerplant market, because that bypasses the NRC entirely.

14. I had always hoped that Kirk Sorensen and his Flibe compnay could have progressed to a working /experimental LFTR by now.

15. More money in private, no question. The exception is huge nonprofit health care companies.

16. That’s lame. Chris Mowrey was slurping down $800k+ base salary running mPower into the ground before golden parachute severance in 2014. Wonder if Moltex can grow this Ponzi.

17. about 150k or 1/10,000th of revenue whichever is more

18. I think this is one of the better MSR ideas, there would be less radioactive salt to handle. I wonder if they can build it one day.

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