Japanese Companies Invest in British Core Power Floating Nuclear Power

Japanese companies have invested $80 million in British startup Core Power to develop a floating nuclear power plant. About 13 companies, including Onomichi Dockyard and Imabari Shipbuilding, have invested. Core Power has raised about $100 million.

CORE POWER is part of the team that develops an MSR (molten salt reactor) that does not need a fuel assembly (which makes it simpler, cheaper and more efficient), operates at ambient pressure (which makes it safer and cheaper) and runs at a very high temperature (which produces heat more efficiently). A Molten salt reactor was built and tested by the USA in the 1960s and China has recently built a 2 megawatt MSR test reactor.

Because the fuel-salt is liquid, it is both the fuel which produces the heat and the coolant which transports the heat to the power conversion system that makes electric power. Since the fuel and coolant is combined into one and the fuel is always locked into the coolant, the reactor cannot melt-down.

MSRs can be mass manufactured as small modular machines.

A multinational team including Core Power, Southern Company, TerraPower and Orano USA are part of the Molten Chloride Reactor Experiment which aims to see the “world’s first fast-spectrum salt reactor achieve criticality”, to be built at Idaho National Laboratory, backed by US Department of Energy (DOE) funding. Last year Core Power, MIT Energy Initiative and Idaho National Laboratory were granted research funding by the US DOE’s Nuclear Energy University Program, a three-year study into the development of offshore floating nuclear power generation in the USA.

Core Power has stressed the safety benefits of molten salt reactors noting that the fuel and the coolant are mixed in a fuel-salt which is liquid at high temperatures and “using a liquid fuel where the fuel and coolant are the same, has immense implications on the safety of the reactor system, as a loss of coolant accident is impossible. An MSR cannot melt-down, because the fuel is already liquid and since the fuel is locked into the coolant, toxic radioisotopes which are formed in the fission process cannot escape into the environment in the event of an accident”. As Core Power Chairman and CEO Mikal Bøe put it in a World Nuclear News interview in 2021: “A ship may be lost at sea and may sink to 8000 metres on the ocean floor, but even then, it would not pollute the environment” with the MSR fuel “cooling until it’s a solid rock and that solid rock should be entombed inside the reactor vessel”.

Floating nuclear power plants are seen as having future growth potential because they provide flexible location options, being placed at sea from where they can provide electricity or hydrogen or water desalination for onshore use and Core Power says its aim is also to produce “a competitive true-zero emission power system for the future of maritime by 2030”.

25 thoughts on “Japanese Companies Invest in British Core Power Floating Nuclear Power”

  1. Is it just me that thinks that image looks like a toy model? The size of perhaps 4 feet across?

    • The article is pretty disingenuous. The whole point of building an experimental test reactor is to discover the characteristics and various problems of the technology. So they got the heat transfer calcs wrong and never achieved more than 8 of the designed 10MW – who cares? So they experienced a great number of unplanned shutdowns due to electrical faults – that has nothing to do with the molten salt technology. So they couldn’t match the >90% reliability of an operating commercial power reactor – of course not! So seawater is salty and corrosive, and therefore salt is bad. Can be, but aqueous corrosion is a whole different animal to molten salt corrosion. So they learned about a bunch of material incompatibilities – good! That’s what testbed reactors are for! There’s been a whole lot more testing since the 1960s and alloys such as Monel 404 have been found to be suitable. Then they conflate MSRs with the problems seen in sodium cooled fast spectrum reactors, which are an entirely different technology with its own set of problems to solve (and have been solved, if EBR II’s track record tells us anything.)

    • There was no problem with power produced in the reactor. The nuclear side of things worked exactly as predicted. The problems were incorrect measurement of the salt properties plus a heat sink design using a correlation that was slightly off. In any case none of the issues cited are a big deal for an experimental reactor, indeed this is why we build experiments. The article you link to is sadly another hatchet job by an anti nuclear public policy writer. It has not been written or reviewed by a qualified engineer. Just more people with axes to grind.

  2. This sounds good. We need reactors that are walk-away safe, and can be mass produced to reduce the price. It’s even better if they can avoid regulatory issues by floating in international waters and powering a factory that produces something useful, like hydrogen or synthetic diesel.

    I would still like to know the estimated cost per kWh, including the eventual cost to process or dispose of the waste. And I’d like to hear confirmation that it’s truly walk-away safe.

    But still, this does sound encouraging.

    • NuScale is building a reactor in Romania ,and Idaho that is walk away safe,they already have approval from NRC (they still need COL),but grid connected in 2030.
      A regular LWR but much smaller 77MW,and they are underwater and in a vacuum,so if the vacuum is broken, the reactor cools very quickly with no electricity, no added water, no operator action.
      They will have six power modules for 462MW, can cut oliver from each one in a second, by steam bypass valve, or lower the control rods ,which works very quickly.
      So NuScale symbol SMR will be first SMR to market

  3. So we have Thorcon and Daewoo wanting to build MSR power barges docked at piers, while Core Energy is basically marinizing a TerraPower MSR for fixed TLP platform offshore power (or just putting a TerraPowerMSR into ships for a variety of functions, from being a powership docked at a pier, to a semi-mobile desalination or ammonia production facility, to outright conventional commercial shipping like bulkers and tankers). Then there’s France’s DCNS who want to build FlexBlue, basically a french military nuclear submarine missing a propeller that would sit on the seabed providing offshore power.

    At least FlexBlue can be built right now, as it was to use conventional nuclear reactors already in operation with the french navy.

    • No. Common error, TerraPowewr is a fast reactor,so it uses Sodium,a metal ,not salt, as a coolant. TerrraPower is delayed two years because the Ukraine invasion means we will not buy highly enriched U235 from Russia.
      The French could not even draw plans for a nuclear submarine for Australia despite billions of dollars and many years. Macron has treated the nuclear industry harshly, and they are in poor shape.

    • There are and have been hundreds of nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers. Other than a few super-crappy Russian ships they have been safe and big successes.

        • I believe the first USS Seawolf did, but in the 50s the USS Nautilus and the PWR design was considered more reliable and cheaper. There are corrosion issues associated with SWRs, but that’s engineering and cost, not an impossible hurdle.

    • Many nuclear power stations are seawater cooled. Reactors are closed loop systems. Not a big deal really, it just determines the alloys used (eg titanium condenser tubing for seawater). In any case it appears you subscribe to the lie that nuclear reactors are very dangerous. They’re not.

    • Salt water and nuclear go together like peanut butter and jelly. Infinite heat sink and terrific radiation shielding.

      • Peanut butter and jelly sounds gross to the point where I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic.

        • British English and American English differ on this.

          BrE jelly = AmE jello
          BrE jam = AmE jelly

          In the US, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (that’s AmE jelly) is extremely common for children, and for some adults. So the phrase meant they go together perfectly.

          And I agree. An ocean provides a large heat sink and radiation shielding for free. It’s a good combination. And being mobile is a plus.

          • Still sounds gross for non Americans, peanut butter or jam, but not together. And these nuclear devices on salt water sounds gross as well. I presume they will be somewhere near the coast to be useful and the littoral environments will be heated up affecting the organisms. As for radiation shielding, that’s even worse. The radiation shielding is meant to contain the radiations, now the particles in sea water is going to become radioactive isotopes like tritium and being carried far and wide.

            • You do realize that the oceans have 4 billion tons of Uranium. Seawater contains about three parts per billion of uranium. Seawater has 0.5 parts per billion of Thorium. about 700 million tons of Thorium in seawater. There are uranium and thorium in the crust and river runoff and other erosion gets them into seawater.

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