A new 1 megawatt thermal nuclear molten salt reactor will be built in 2026 and will be lowered into a cement encased trench in a new building in Texas.
Rusty Towell of Nature Energy showed the new facility.
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Is this reactor used for instruction? It’s tiny at 1 MWt the electrical output will be at best 350kw unless they’re going to use it for heating. I guess salt as the moderator is different I wonder what the chemistry will be.
fixed to Abilene
Why salt? Can’t they use something more inert like lead?
That is a thing, but at operating temperatures lead has an annoying tendency to start gradually dissolving most metals.
It’s Abilene, Texas not Abelin
Buckle of the Bible Belt.
Home of Abilene Christian University
Brian, you should do a story on the lawsuit these guys brought against US government with last energy Brett kugelmass. I haven’t dug into it
Jesus and nuclear power. Send it!
The technology of MSR’s is simple, clear and understandable. Building one is not a big deal. But from the beginning there are two problem to solve.
1. the material of reactor chamber’s walls and pipes. Nickel? If fluorine is involved, this could be probably the only solution as NiF3 makes a defensive layer on the surface. Too bad, that it is not resistant to abrasion what comes from the flowing hot molten salt.
2. reprocessing. The fuel must be reprocessed periodically and as U233 is highly radioactive, it is quite challenging.
I don’t know of any development in these two points.
There’s also a third, which is tritium handling if there’s lithium in the salt.
It’s not like the tritium is difficult to extract, or terribly hard to store. It basically extracts itself, and we’ve had better than half a century to learn how to handle it.
Consider it a plus, because fusion researchers need it, and while in storage it gradually converts into Helium 3, which is pretty valuable.
Yes. As I recall, the magic number is about 12. If you need a ton a year of helium 3, and can produce a ton a year of tritium, then all you need is storage of about 12 tons. Every year, you deposit about a ton of T, and withdraw a ton of He3.
I looked it up. The magic number is actually about 18. So you need to be storing 18 tons of gas, if you want to deposit and withdraw a ton per year.
The Molten Chloride Fast Reactor reduces the problem list to maybe reprocessing (removing fast corrosion and tritium handling issues). And actually reprocessing for transuranics doesn’t necessarily need to be a problem (read the world-nuclear.org link below).
Isotopically separating the 35Cl (36Cl is a problem isotope generated from 35Cl) to just leave the 37Cl (which just makes stable 38Ar) is an issue.
https://www.terrapower.com/future/
Some more reading on them
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/molten-salt-reactors
https://gain.inl.gov/content/uploads/4/2024/05/01-Chlorine-Isotopes-Separation-for-Fast-Spectrum-MSR.pdf
It is the most feasible of the molten salt reactor designs I’ve seen yet.
I’m pretty sure one of the ideas of molten salt reactors is that the fuel won’t be reprocessed periodically, but instead a system will continuously extract fission poisons and waste. For the volatile waste products that’s pretty straight forward; They naturally migrate to the gas space above the salt, and this can be assisted with an inert gas bubbler.
Makes sense. Molten Salt reactors have long been kind of the fission “holy grail”. but your right about degradation of metal materials in such environments. I see an interesting comparison with this technology, and controlled fusion. This technology has “problems popping up”, but I believe they can be solved. But fusion? That’s been ten years away, since the early 1950’s. Perhaps we’ll figure out controlled fusion eventually. But at 63, I doubt I’ll live to see it. But fission? We know how that works.
We just have to “tweak it”, so it work’s, very, very well. Doable.
MSR is not a ‘holy grail’; it is a meme propagated/promulgated by industry outsiders who are befuddled by the mystery of “why don’t we just use a bucket” for the reactor.
I give SOME credit to these people, as they understand that fission is as simple as getting a bunch of material together in a ‘pile’, and reasoning by extension that a bucket of homogeneous halide is the most simple form of a ‘pile.’ This thought is like a scab on their brains they can’t stop compulsively picking at, and no explanations for their lack of adoption (materials problems, horrendous dose problems, etc.) are accepted. Together with other tenants of the faith, such as “excessive regulation” and “the incompetence or inability of the big players to get it done” form the nukebro religion.
How much for the reactor? What are fuel costs? What are operating costs? We’re not talking rainbows and unicorn farts here.
It might be my Firefox, Opera, or Brave browser. But it seems there’s no there there for this headline… RUOK Brian?