Indonesia Innovation Agency and Thorcon Agree to Build Experimental Molten Salt Reactor

39 thoughts on “Indonesia Innovation Agency and Thorcon Agree to Build Experimental Molten Salt Reactor”

1. Yeah, and CANDU has online refueling… The online record for CANDU is on the order of 610 EFPD continuous – CANDU have planned maintenance outages every 2 years..

   You are looking at subsets of coupled equations for figuring costs, assuming your accounting for all of the terms in that equation, making an assertion on a blog that the reactor rendered in SolidWorks has a distinct advantage over the LWRs we have. What can I say we’ve been having this dance for years. The facilities licensed to handle fluorides don’t have licenses to generate power or fabricate fuel. You’re lumping all these things into one reactor type that you want to make thousands of and put in everyone’s backyard. It’s comically naive. Always has been… that’s why I contribute here

   • would be nice to delete this comment – duplicate of a response to Brett. Posted to the main thread though a glitch.

2. I’d define “perfect nuclear power” as requiring direct conversion to electrical energy, as well as aneutronic reactions to preserve reactor components. I love heat engines, and sometimes you really do need shaft horsepower, but even the best of them are complex, expensive, and inconvenient.

   Dense Plasma Focus technology operating on the B11 + H reaction holds this possibility. I wish the federal government would fund Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, and assist it directly through national labs, instead of funding Boeing incompetence through SLS.

3. Indonesia may be giving the siting/ops approvals, but Thorcon basically plans to build in South Korean shipyards, so regulatory movement over there is also on the critical path.

   • Even if the reactor should not be loaded with radioactive material in South Korea?

     • Depends on how antsy South Korea is feeling. While the buildout of the carrier ships/barge/thorcon module without fuel loading would meet some people’s minimum critera for “non-nuclear”, the thorcon module’s reactor vessel will need build certification if nothing else.

       Also, since the build line is in korea, that also likely means module refueling/refurb is also occurring there, so you will need certifications for radioactive fuel handling regardless.

   • South Korea is an advanced nuclear nation, they went down the wrong path not long ago,eshewing nuclear for coal, gas,and renewables, but with a change of government they are back on track.
     A shining example is the Barakah plant, four 1400MWe APR-1400’s, two grid connected, third grid connected soon to be in commercial operation and the fourth to follow. Quick to build and inexpensive. these are like giant oil wells as they throw of money daily in the gas and oil they don’t use allowing greater export.
     Abu Dhabi UAE,they also have some solar as they have cheap land ,great insolation, but the nuclear plants are more reliable, working 24/7.

4. I note how the article avoids the word “thorium”.

   • That is noticeable. Mind you, one nice thing about a molten salt reactor is that you can continuously alter the fuel composition. They could start out with mildly enriched Uranium, and then transition to Thorium.

   • In the Economic Advantages section
     Thorium cuts Uranium Consumption and improves proliferation resistance.

   • Is it not pure thorium. It’s mixed, I think they start with enriched uranium and then they add some thorium going forward.

     • Well, sure: The thorium reactors work by breeding an isotope of uranium, U233, in the first place. The U233 fissions producing power, and provides the neutrons necessary to breed more U233 from the thorium. To get them started they need some uranium “kindling”, as it were, or you’re a long, long time ramping up the power level.

       • kindling – ramping power up

         True in a sense that you understand the mile high concepts well enough to over-extend them to absurdity without being absolutely wrong.

         • Not absolutely wrong is my very favorite sort of absurdity.

   • No, the story mentions the thorium.

5. For decades now, the only thing the nuclear industry has really needed was for governments to get out of the way, and reliably so.

   Mind, in the US part of “getting out of the way” will have to be stopping financially punishing baseline power producers by purchasing non-dispachable “renewable” energy, and giving it grid priority. You can’t economically run a baseline plant if you have to dump the power every time the wind gusts or the sun comes out from behind a cloud.

   • exactly… stop picking favorites… if anything the nuclear power should be guaranteed a floor and make them econmical and quit the obsessions with solar and wind as large scale grid replacement. Nuclear and hydro and geothermal were always the best bets.

     • Nuclear and hydro, with unit cost on the order of $10B/ea (cost of a Ford-class aircraft carrier), cannot be financed by operating companies with market cap of $40B (Exelon) or OEMs with market cap of $70B (GE), just to sell power at $30/MWh wholesale. The ‘de-regulated market’ which applies to most of the US grid doesn’t allow pushing financing of builds to the rate-payer. Customers near Vogtle have been paying for units 2 and 3 for a decade now in that old-school regulated market.

       The market is very complex – a patchwork of subsidies where operators are paid for capacity and generation and green feels. Complexity is only added – the ‘market’ is not actually a market. If the market were to have it’s way, most generation would eventually be 500MWe-class natural gas turbines even if solar panels were free. Construction of hydro and nuclear plants is a state endeavor all over the world. Here in the USA there is the expectation that corporations should finance these things for a nebulous business case and ESG…. it’s not working out very well, but alas, there is no actual crisis.

       • Nuclear is crazy expensive only because of the regulatory issues; You can’t finish a plant on schedule, you could be 3/4 done and have to tear it down and start over when they change a regulation. And it’s highly over-regulated relative to the actual risks, which is why it’s by far the safest power source.

         Companies like Thorcon are trying to get things switched over to a model where reactors are a mass produce commodity, not every reactor being a one off. But they’ll need the regulations to be locked down to pull it off.

         • Are bridges ‘crazy expensive’ because of ‘regulation’ or because they are mechanical devices built on the civil engineering scale, requiring expensive engineering materials such as 50-yard beams with 9-foot sections (in 2022), or prestressed forms of similar length? Eiffel tower vintage bridges used thousands of plates and rivets and were also enormously expensive to build, and we maintain them at great expense. To say the nuclear plant is expensive due to regulatory issues is not correct – they are expensive because they are complex mechanical systems built on a civil engineering scale in small production runs. Tell me how the immense cost of steam generators made of 9-foot diameter forgings and tube sheets with 6,000 Inconel tubes is proportional to regulatory burden. If they didn’t have to certify the materials because of regulation, where would you suggest they skimp? A gigawatt heat exchanger costs what a gigawatt heat exchanger costs – ThorCon can’t escape that reality. While the n-th of a kind savings (learning curve) would eventually be realized in continued serial production of any reactor, there is every reason (inflation, unions, OSHA, paternity leave, etc.) to believe US labor could never approach the quoted sub $3/watt-installed of the Chinesium systems. We’re just to top heavy of a system – it’s expensive to live here.

           • You’re just blowing off the effects of having to stop in the middle of building a plant to change it to meet new regulations, rather than getting to finish it to the regulations it was designed to. And of totally over the top safety precautions that have made nuclear both wildly safer than other sources of energy, AND wildly more expensive.

             http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html

           • Off topic, Scary, how do you rate the Czechs who want to put spent fuel from VVER440s in a low pressure, heavy water pool reactor for district heating? There’s plenty of fissile left for that, there’s down time in summer to swap the fuel assemblies out, but do you think the cladding would hold? (The economics ought to work, with Euro gas at current rates, and the fuel just sitting round in spent fuel pools.)

             • Don’t the Chinese have a district heating reactor? Could work out well for them if security is less of an issue in China than in the USA. For the Czechs, a pool ceases to be a pool when it becomes a reactor and is a reactor. As for D2O: PWR spent fuel pools are generally borated (HCBO3) over 2000mg/kg because most of the fuel can still support multiplication factor over 1.0 with water more dense than the 720g/cc in mode 1 (operation at 300C Tavg). It might be a mistake to think of spent fuel assemblies as fungible like logs of wood to a camp fire. The plan to keep the last 3 German reactors beyond April 2023 involves dumpster diving the spent fuel pool to try to piece together cores partially consisting of previously discharged assemblies. The key to being able to do it is to have those discharged assemblies characterized for use in core simulator code and shuffling to a licensable arrangement where the hot rod is less than 153% of average rod power in normal operation. They will likely be able to get another effective full power year where the last new fuel they loaded is reactive enough to achieve full power with the balance being garbage.

               Uses for spent fuel are limited. It would be better for Europe to take the log out of their eye, stop letting social justice dominate their energy markets, and buy the fuel they need to keep warm this winter – from Russia.

               • H3BO3 not HCBO3

           • Bridges are a terrible analogy, Scary; bridges are cheap. Of course, if you’re going to build a 25-kilometre long bridge over an arm of sea with moderate-to-heavy ship traffic, four road lanes each way, plus two rail lanes, it adds up, but if you’re crossing a creek you might not even need an engineer.

             • I think a better analogy would be dams.
               Ignoring the aspect of producing electricity, and high capital low running costs. What really makes a nuke plant like a dam is that the potential for external damages far outweighs the cost of damage to the dam/nuke itself, if the worst happens.

               The difference is that a dam, and for that matter a bridge, HAS to be built on a civil engineering scale. The design is almost always FOAK because it is so site dependent. Nukes don’t have to be like this.

               Oh. And the way the western world seems to have lost the technology for how to build big civil engineering projects for any sort of reasonable price is a whole new, and even more depressing, subject.

               • Yes, dams are a good example. Don’t know how I got on bridges – apparently bridges are easy peasy lemon squeezy.

                 I personally have no love for hydroelectric power – I think it is a big compromise to mess with the landscape on such a big scale, but most of them are probably built with intent for flood control, so that probably has immense value and the electricity is gravy.

                 Wonder what the EROI is on the cubic kilometers of concrete – maybe the dam harvests as many watts as it took to make the cement within a decade or less. Who knows. Shows how remote ‘net zero’ actually is. We’ll be getting close when they use microwaves to make clinker.

             • Noted. My frame of reference was the Delaware Memorial Bridge outside my window that cost quite a bit to build in 1949-64. The authority is currently spending $77M to resurface the roadway in 2022, so I figured it would cost several billion to scratch build such a thing.

               I’m pretty sure interstate highway expansion and bridge maintenance is insanely expensive in the USA. Projects allocate hundreds of millions of dollars for expansion.

         • I’m hoping they can push a shift away from instance-based regulation and instead toward design-based regulation. They certify a design, then every instance of that design is auto-approved pending inspection that the instance matches the design.

           • You’ve described what the NRC does through standard design process:

             https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/large-lwr/design-cert.html

             Everything besides Palo Verde (System 80+) and the Vogtle 3,4 AP1000 (under construction) predates the standard design process. Anything we build in the future will be a generic design.

   • In the existing Business Model, customers are locked into buying the machined fuel from the same supplier and paying whatever they are charged.

     With liquid fuel, the customers buy minerals that meet the criteria necessary. And, they can buy from lower cost suppliers. That is why ‘the Industry’ is not getting behind liquid fueled reactors.

     • About 15% of the cost of the fuel is in the fabrication/assembly. That includes all that goes into mining/refining/manufacturing the cladding/structure and making fuel pellets under NQA programs (10CFR50) that ensure quality and traceability. The remaining 85% of the cost is split between buying yellowcake (37%), conversion to fluoride (7%), and enrichment (41%). With recent projections for power pricing in the PJM market, including subsidies required to ‘make a floor’ where nuclear power is in the black, the total cost of fuel is 9% of expected revenue from generation (not including capacity payments or other devices). Source: I do this.

       • In other words, operators are not ‘raked over the coals’ buying fuel… Any cost ‘saved’ by using floride for fuel (and more) would be spent handling and protecting workers/public from the constant off gas and corrosive radioactive lava, I mean molten salt.

         • Actually, one of the advantages of molten salt reactors is that they’re supposed to be able to run continuously, with no downtime for swapping rods, because you are continuously removing neutron poisons from the salt, and the salt being a liquid doesn’t accumulate radiation damage.

           The rods in conventional reactors can only run to a tiny “burn up” percentage for this reason; They accumulate isotopes that poison the reaction, they get structurally compromised by radiation damage and build up of gasses.

           So there IS substantial fuel savings here, even if fuel isn’t the current chief expense. I believe the current chief expense of nuclear reactors is actually interest, due to how long construction gets dragged out before they start producing power and revenue.

           • Dupe above… sorry.

             Yeah, and CANDU has online refueling… The online record for CANDU is on the order of 610 EFPD continuous – CANDU have planned maintenance outages every 2 years..

             You are looking at subsets of coupled equations for figuring costs, assuming your accounting for all of the terms in that equation, making an assertion on a blog that the reactor rendered in SolidWorks has a distinct advantage over the LWRs we have. What can I say we’ve been having this dance for years. The facilities licensed to handle fluorides don’t have licenses to generate power or fabricate fuel. You’re lumping all these things into one reactor type that you want to make thousands of and put in everyone’s backyard. It’s comically naive. Always has been… that’s why I contribute here

             • There needs to be a substitution of ‘you’re’ for ‘your’ in there… between autocorrect and voice to text I appear to write at the level of a West Virginia 5th Grader

             • I’m not trying to do a total system analysis here. Just discussing various parts of the picture.

               There are a lot of potential sources of saving in liquid salt reactors. There are some potential extra costs relating to salt corrosion. I really don’t know how it would balance out, but the potential for savings are vast. Just not on the fuel front, because the cost of fuel for nuclear isn’t that great, it’s the capital cost and interest carrying.

               The real concern, I think, is that in the US the regulators are perfectly capable of piling on so many regulations that make no sense that NO reactor design can be cost effective. And they never, EVER, roll back regulations that turned out not to be needed.

               By rights we should be the leaders in reactor technology. We should be the leaders in a lot of areas of technology. Our pathological regulatory systems stifle us in a lot of areas, though, and probably none more than nuclear technology.

               In a comment stuck in moderation, I linked to an online book, “THE NUCLEAR ENERGY OPTION” by Bernard Cohen. In chapter 9 he goes over the reasons why we were capable of building nuclear plants economically in the early 70’s, while a decade later the same sized nuclear plants cost ten times as much. They all revolve around regulatory issues, either directly or indirectly. Pathological regulations.

               • We are by far the leaders in nuclear energy. Our regulations are stringent, but new designs have advantages that new designs are allowed to flourish. NuScale is building the Carbon Free Project in Idaho,and time from first concrete to grid connected is 40 months.
                 The plant always produces power as each module is refueled separately,it was predicted to produce cash flow 8 years before operations, and right on time the cash flows.
                 The government is kicking in $1.5 billion to help with first of a kind costs, power should cost $..05Kwh,but very flexible so it will ramp up and down to account for unreliable wind and solar.

6. “this Rp 17 trillion ($1B) project can be realized as long as the Indonesian government can provide support in the form of legal certainty.”

   Shop for a government that will let us do what we cannot in any country with an actual nuke program… did Indonesia not do what the WHO recommended in 2020? I imagine IAEA would be involved – deferred to actually.

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