UK Funded $4 Million for Micro Nuclear Reactor to Send to Moon by 2029

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Rolls Royce has made nuclear reactors for submarines and is in the second year of a micro nuclear fission reactor design effort. They will use encapsulated uranium fuel aka a pebble bed nuclear reactor. It will have heat pipes to move the heat from the core.

The full sized reactor model and design will be completed at the end of 2023. The reactor will be about the size of a family car. The current model is about the size of a microwave but the actual system will be larger.

What is TRISO Fuel?
TRISO stands for TRi-structural ISOtropic particle fuel.

Each TRISO particle is made up of a uranium, carbon and oxygen fuel kernel. The kernel is encapsulated by three layers of carbon- and ceramic-based materials that prevent the release of radioactive fission products.

The particles are incredibly small (about the size of a poppy seed) and very robust.

They can be fabricated into cylindrical pellets or billiard ball-sized spheres called “pebbles” for use in either high temperature gas or molten salt-cooled reactors.

TRISO fuels are structurally more resistant to neutron irradiation, corrosion, oxidation and high temperatures (the factors that most impact fuel performance) than traditional reactor fuels.

Each particle acts as its own containment system thanks to its triple-coated layers. This allows them to retain fission products under all reactor conditions.

Robust TRISO Fuel Research
TRISO fuel was first developed in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1960s with uranium dioxide fuel. In 2002, the Department of Energy (DOE) focused on improving TRISO fuel using uranium oxycarbide fuel kernels and enhancing its irradiation performance and manufacturing methods in order to further develop advanced high-temperature gas reactors.

In 2009, this improved TRISO fuel set an international record by achieving a 19% maximum burnup with excellent fuel performance during a three-year test at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). This is nearly double the previous mark set by the Germans in the 1980s and is three times the burnup that current light-water fuels can achieve—demonstrating its long-life capability.

What’s Next?
TRISO fuel testing is gaining a lot of interest from the advanced reactor community. Some reactor vendors such as X-energy and Kairos Power, along with the Department of Defense, are planning to use TRISO fuel for their small modular reactor and microreactor designs.

The Xe-100 reactor will generate 220 MWt and 80 MWe. The standard Xe-100 four-pack plant generates 320 MWe and will fit on as few as 13 acres. It will have a safety radius of 400 meters. All of the components for the Xe-100 will be road-transportable, and will be installed, rather than constructed, at the project site to streamline construction. XE-100 will fit in about two shipping containers.

X-energy in 2020 revealed it was working on a 7-MWe Xe-Mobile power generation system, which will use X-energy’s proprietary TRISO-X fuel. X-Energy’s mobile reactor work is in the Project Pele concept.

X-energy is currently focusing its mobile microreactor work around one practical, cost-effective microreactor that can be deployed for use in remote military locations as well as commercial or industrial use. X-energy’s transportable microreactor is designed to generate in the range of 3 to 5 MW and is differentiated to be cost-competitive with remote diesel power.

It seems like the Rolls-Royce reactor is smaller than the X-Energy Project Pele and about be in the 100 kilowatt to 1 megawatt range.

DOE also supported X-energy’s efforts to design and submit a NRC license application for a new fabrication facility. The project would ultimately use high assay low enriched uranium to produce the TRISO fuel pellets and pebbles for future high-temperature gas and molten salt reactors.

China has used the German TRISO pebble bed fuel work to make an operating pebble bed reactor (HTR-PM).

Marvel and Idaho National Labs are also working on the micro-reactor concepts and science.

The US has been looking at nuclear micro-reactors for space missions. NASA has been developing the kilopower system.

NASA’s fission surface power project expands on Kilopower’s work and results, focusing on a 10-kilowatt class lunar demonstration in the late 2020s. The prototype power system used a solid, cast uranium-235 reactor core, about the size of a paper towel roll. Passive sodium heat pipes transfer reactor heat to high-efficiency Stirling engines, which convert the heat to electricity.

NASA and DARPA have other plans to build a functioning nuclear thermal rocket by 2027.

Rolls-Royce has a SMR (Small Modular Reactor) project as well. This would make 470 megawatts of power for 60 years. The UK Government has funded about £210 million of UK Research and Innovation funding towards realizing the SMR vision for a cleaner and more sustainable future.

3 thoughts on “UK Funded $4 Million for Micro Nuclear Reactor to Send to Moon by 2029”

  1. $4M? Might as well write a story about how you can’t buy 3M Hershey bars with $4M.

    $4M isn’t even enough for me to quit working if I managed to embezzle it.

  2. Nuclear power is the only way to the outer solar system. Small reactors would be more cost-effective than RPGs.

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