Fast-Spectrum Molten-Salt Reactor - Elysium Industries - Ed Pheil @ TEAC8

I'm gonna go down a little bit of a different route from what you were used to seeing in the molten salt reactor community I decided that the best way to go to get the most flexibility and most safely and get something done today it's actually to build a fast reactor rather than the thermal molten salt reactor my name is Ed Pyle I have 32 years of experience operating designing startup testing doing maintenance on reactors I'm chief technology officer and co-founder at Elysium industries our base plan is a thousand megawatts electric 40% efficiency approximately I don't really believe in the small plant low cost we have nuclear plants that are shutting down we need to pass it like new scales operating at twenty nine percent efficiency new nuclear plants for 35 percent efficiency how can you justify that that's going to be cheaper in the long run the plants that are being shut down are the single plants that are low power on their own so how can you say that small plants are going to be cost effective on an operational basis they're not all right the cost of construction per megawatt electric of a small plant is much higher than a large plant we use a chloride fuel salt and a fast spectrum reactor what it allows you to do is get the fuel flexibility just about any fuel that you can imagine spent nuclear fuel low enriched uranium high-enriched uranium waste Navy fuel plutonium depleted uranium thorium any fuel and we consume it basically to 100% existing water reactors burn 4% if you burn the other 96% that's a factor of 24 times as much energy left mess and nuclear fuel we're 25 percent more efficient because we're 600c instead of 300-seat right so that's 30 times as much just in the spent nuclear fuel and there's 10 times as much depleted uranium already mined out there so 30 times the existing plant life for spent nuclear fuel is about 2,000 years worth of fuel just for the spent fuel and if you include the d-u that's already been mine that's 10 times I we looked at both thermal molten salt reactors and fastball and salt reactors the problem that we had with thermal molten salt reactors is the lifetime of the moderator was very short and you had replace it every four years or every eight years and it trapped fission products because so it became a radioactive waste all right the other difficulty with the moderators is it was hard to guarantee in all situations for max power transient power casualty conditions the you had a negative temperature coefficients the graphite moderator actually shrinks and swells with their radiation so that made it even harder to guarantee that you had a negative temperature coefficient we don't have the thermal expansion of graphite with temperature or the expansion and contraction of graphite over lifetime with their radiation to account for in our temperature coefficients and our void coefficients we just have a liquid core there's just a there's just a can full of a liquid that's enough to go critical at a certain temperature and that's it and so that's that pretty much guarantees you have a negative temperature coefficient under under all conditions our core outlet temperature is 600 degrees C approximately and our return temperature is 500 degrees C the reason why we have low temperatures compared to other designs for the volt and salt is we want to build one soon so we need to use existing qualified materials and that's that why we drop the temperature we can still design a reactor at that temperature one of the benefits of the chloride salts is that has lower melting point than the same components of a molten fluoride reactor so that allows us more temperature margin to be able to operate at a slightly lower temperature and get materials this is kind of key we are using existing nuclear qualified materials in our reactor we are not going for something that is not already nuclear qualified there's a lot of work to be done to get to Hassli to get the nuclear qualification it might have a SME qualification but I'm not sure if that's the actual grade that you would actually use or if it fits it within that grade specification my question is they've been tweaked and whether that's in a SME or whether the composition is broad enough to accept it and at this point we don't want to have a power system that is developmental we're not doing supercritical co2 unless it's actually been proven to be both doable which is not yet and reliable it could be supercritical steam - the problem with supercritical steam is it increases the cost of the powerplant but in a coal plant they would go to supercritical steam because it saves them on fuel our fuel doesn't really cost anything so I'm not sure we can justify the supercritical steam if there is a power system that's not developmental that's economic Forest by the time we get our reactor built we will use that but right now we don't want to be working on qualification of a power system that could cause failure of our ability to build the reactors we are capable of building a reactor anywhere from about 50 megawatts electric to 2,000 megawatts electric to gigawatts electric right that's eight loops compact heat exchangers as you see there eight pumps one pump in each loop and full flow pumps all the time basically there's going to be one large turbine or eight small turbines that starts to sound like new scale right new scale has one turbine per reactor plant we can have one turbine per loop if we wish right that allows us to scale allows if the turbine one turbine goes down a lot allows you to stay up at power if you go down to two loops that's a quarter of the power 250 megawatts if you go down to two loops and half the pump flow rate and half the heat exchanger size it's 125 megawatts the reactor is sized for criticality it is just barely critical all the time all right so there's no scale up scale down the flow rate through it determines your power rate a small heat exchanger in a small pump on to that you will get a low power out of it and a low delta T if you put big heat exchangers and big pumps and remove more heat up out of that that drops the temperature going into the core and that raises the power and you get more power out of it so the reactor core above core materials control systems all of those are the same it's the stuff that's outside of the reactor vessel that you change out for different sighs reactor so we can we can build the same reactor vessel for all power levels and so we have one factory that does that we don't have to design different size vessels for the core that's a distinct advantage of putting the heat exchangers and pumps outside of the reactor vessel it keeps the reactor vessel the same if you were trying to do different power levels in one reactor vessel like an integral reactor vessel then you would need to change the size of the reactor vessel to accommodate the larger pumps and the larger heat exchangers and we don't need to do that we just design our reactor with enough piping penetrations with blank flanges or something that we can add additional heat exchangers and pumps onto that to upscale the reactor or to design for a different power reactor and the tank outside of it is pretty much the same size as well it's just a matter of how many exede exchangers and pumps do you'd need to put in that tank reactor types the one that I've been showing is the loop plant the pipes go out of the reactor most of the molten salt reactors and most of the small modular reactors use the one on the right which is an integral plant I like either the loop plant or the modular plant now I'm dating myself here the current definition of Maude's of a plant means you can ship it down the road this is the original definition of modular plant where each compound is a separate module one component is reactor another component is the steam generator and another component is a pump and they are all attached by very short pipes to the reactor vessel so there are not long pipes in between them all the components are mounted right off the reactor vessel and supported by the reactor vessel that significantly reduces the volume taken up by the different components I like the modular plant the best that's where I prefer the head the loop plant is the easiest one to design though at least in the United States like the ap1000 is the loop the third design concept is the integral reactor and that's the common reactor the people were talking about for small modular reactors and a lot of the molten salt reactors are looking at the integral reactor the problem I see with the integral plant is you can't do maintenance on it without doing an enormous amount of tear apart to get at components that are there are going to be maintenance issues you are going to want to look in it you're going to want to inspect it you're going to want to replace components if you have an integral reactor and you need to replace a component low in the core for instance on a thermal reactor if you have to replace the graphite you have to remove the control mechanisms the heat exchangers the pumps all of that to replace the graphite in the core region so instead if you build a modular reactor for instance the control mechanisms are above the core you have direct access to those you lift the control mechanisms off you have access to the core region if you want to work on the heat exchangers they are also accessible from the top and the pumps are also accessible from the top so you don't need to remove a whole bunch of other components to access and replace any one component that is a dramatic improvement in maintenance costs fuel chloride salt chemistry the functions the fuel salt solvent for the nuclear fuel fluorine molecule has a mass of 3537 compared to fluorine having a mass of 19 the higher the mass of the isotope in in the fluid the less that it moderates the neutrons so that allows the faster spectrum so if you have fluoride in it it tends to moderate it and slow it down so chlorine will be able to give you a faster spectrum I can go to any salt mine that mine salt to put on your table to put on as road salt to put in your pool and buy it by the 20-ton truck load two to four hundred dollars for a 20 ton truck load as opposed to something that's very costly like lithium and then you have to enrich the lithium to very high purity and beryllium the hazardous material and so sodium chloride you can eat it as long as you don't have heart problems it's very safe we're gonna end up with somewhere in the neighborhood of 30% heavy metal chlorides in our fuel you need it right so fast reactor the cross-sections are lower higher energies so you need more fissile material you need more fertile material to convert and of his oil to get that it's the working fluid for transporting heat out it needs to prevent the release of fission products most of the fission except for xenon Krypton are chemically down in the chloride salt so there even if you had a leak they're chemically bound they're not going to be a release and you leak it out it would freeze that's standard molten salt technology we use a chloride fuel salt and a chloride intermediate salt one of the primary rules of design is valves leak and heat exchangers leak so when you get a leak of the secondary salt into the fuel salt if you have the same salt that is not going to change the reactivity of the reactor and it's going to dilute the fuel salt when you dilute the fuel salt that shuts down the reactor because there's less fuel in the core at any time you can actually recover the fuel salt if you had different kinds of salt for primary and secondary salt then it's going to be very difficult to separate the two salts and recover your fuel and get your reactors try to backup if you have the same salts in there all you need to do is add additional fertile and fissile and you get back to the same composition that you were at before and are able to start up the reactor so reactor recovery from a heat exchanger leak is much easier and it's also passively safe because it shuts itself down one of the advantages of the fluoride salts is it melts at about 300 degrees seed lower temperatures than fluoride salts of the same composition lithium fluoride beryllium fluoride I think that's only 70 degrees Delta but chloride salts are still lower but I wanted to go to chlorides salts to get that lower melting point to get away from needing highly enriched lithium which is a proliferation problem because lithium enrichment means you get lithium six enrichment which is a weapons material so I'm trying to get away from that and the tritium both lithium and beryllium in a reactor will produce tritium if I have sodium chloride I produce hardly any tritium Argonne National Lab Sandia National Lab have been using fluoride salts in common materials for decades so there's a lot of experience with chloride salts in stainless steel materials so we don't need to do additional development work in that and that includes radioactive materials you can get about three times as much actinide salt in a chloride salt that you can in the fluoride salt and that's important because you don't want your actinides to be plating out on components aircraft reactor experiment actually had a problem with plate out of actinides or fissile materials on structural components and visioning dumping heat in the structural components and caused him to fail we don't want to have played out of actinides in our reactor and the chlorides allow us to get more actinides in without being concerned about plate out of them of the actinide there's a lot of talk about corrosion versus water salts are less corrosive than water if they're pure hot water has a higher corrosion rate than salts even fluoride salts have a lower corrosion rate than hot water does a lot of people think that that the salts are very corrosive because they have experienced with their car corroding in the snow the trouble with corrosion is yep pure water it doesn't corrode if you put salt in that pure water it does corrode same goes for the salts if you have pure salt no water no oxygen in it it does not corrode and it's less corrosive than clean water but if you put water or oxygen in your fuel salts or your secondary salts it will corrode the issue is you need to keep them clean whether you use water or salts but generally water is more corrosive than fluoride salts and fluoride salts are more corrosive than chloride salts it's one of the other factors and allowing us to use existing standard already qualified materials the biggest difference between our reactors and most of the other reactors is that ours is a fast reactor and it uses the chloride salt fast reactors you have much less of a problem with fission products and having to clean up the fission products to keep the reactor operating that allows us to not have massive reprocessing systems to be able to close a fuel cycle massive reprocessing systems equal higher costs when we build up fission product in our reactor it doesn't necessarily shut our reactor down in a thermal reactor it's the fission product build-up shuts the reactor down fairly quickly a fast reactor can withstand a higher fission product loading you have more fission products in there and it makes it easier to clean fission products out if you have a higher concentration of them so that makes our purification system simpler we're not sensitive to the fission product content so if our purification system for some reason needs to be shut down we can still continue to operate the reactor we can probably operate the reactor for decades without the purification system is by intent to not operate the purification system for the first 10 to 20 years at a minimum to build up the fission products to reduce the melting point of the salt you'll notice I called it a purification system I did not call it a reprocessing system a reprocessing system I define as a system that separates actinides from each other and from the fission products we do not do that we can pull out fission products and leave the actinides behind that means we're not pulling actinides out of the reactor as part of our waste stream and we can do that because of the electric potential of the chloride salts the actinides are separate from most of the fission products now there are some fission products that have a similar electoral potential to the actinides and we won't be able to remove those I count that as a benefit because that's like caesium and iodine cesium in particular reduces the melting point of the fuel salt and that's a benefit to the fuel salt if you leave those fission products in with the actinides you can't just walk in and pick up a fuel cell because the radiation levels coming off of it would kill anybody that tried to steal it and in any larger package you would need cranes and heavy equipment and trucks to be able to steal it and that makes it much harder so the fission products make it easy to protect the actinides and the fissile in that material but the bottom line is we can have a purification system that does not have a proliferation concern our purification system removes some of the fission products and not all of them and removes none of the actinides that means the actinides all stay together and they all have fission products still with them so they're radioactively protected so that essentially almost eliminates the proliferation concerns with the molten fluoride fast reactor because we don't worry about counting actinides what are the actinide ratios how much did you remove did you remove any did somebody steal something we don't have that concern because we don't remove a cognized from our reactors we only remove fission products in our reactor we essentially do a mass spec and a raman spectroscopy and figure out whether there's any actinides in there and what level but that's least less than 1% of the actinides come out from that pulling out and that's just a process loss and I expect to be able to get that down much lower with a few other techniques so the uranium and plutonium they're always staying the reactor never come out the waste stream comes out we actually recycle the chlorides back into the fuel manufacturing process the fuel manufacturing process takes chlorides to convert spent nuclear fuel oxides into chloride salts in one chemical step right but you need the chlorides to do that so we might as well just recycle the chlorides out of the waste stream back into the fuel manufacture since the fuel manufacturing is already radioactive the chlorides radioactive no big deal and oh by the way I have somebody that already wants to buy the zirconium off of us - they're radioactive zirconium from spent fuel because they can't figure out how to get it without somebody using the stuff on the inside it's one of the big advantages of only pulling out fission products if you only pull out fission products you can mine the ISO topics and rare earths and helium gas with xenon - Krypton gas to your heart's content without proliferation concerns because you did not pull out the actinides that caused the proliferation concerns so yes you can yeah I pull out the soluble fission products in other words if there's an economic reason to build that system for the medical isotopes and stuff like that I'll do it alright I'm not going to increase the plant fossil unnecessarily if I don't see if I don't need to next I'd like to talk about fuel cycle options the first option is the one that everyone else is using high-ass a low enriched uranium uranium that's enriched to higher than today's enrichment capability of enrichment plants of 5% but less than the limit for low enriched uranium of 20% and that's what most of the advanced reactors are looking at for starting up their reactor it's about 90% fertile 10% fissile between 10 and 20 percent enriched feed-in for HLA you started up reactor is about 20 percent enriched and that decreases with life as you burn in more plutonium uranium 235 is not as efficient as some of the other fissile materials and so we need more of the more enrichment for uranium 235 than we do of say plutonium or uranium 233 but over time we are going to be converting uranium 238 into plutonium so we will be switching over from less efficient uranium 235 to a more efficient plutonium 239 system over time but since we have the low efficiency uranium 235 in there we need to continue to add uranium 235 at just under 20 percent enrichment for some period of time the higher the power of the reactor the short of that time period will be you will be able to use lower and lower enrichment of feed in three kilograms per day of feed-in material that's fixed for all plants that's not special for fast reactor versus the thermal reactor one of the disadvantages of a fast reactor is you need more fissile material to get it critical because the cross section goes down with the increasing energy of the neutron causing the fission so that requires us to have a high fissile inventory in our reactor five maybe eight times as much miss I'll load to start up our reactor the problem with the H Lau is you need to have this high enrichment but I can't drive an enrichment facility because once I get this reactor going for a few years I don't need the h le u anymore so I can't drive the long-term development costs of enrichment facility that can go up to 20% the second fuel cycle type that I'd like to talk about is the plutonium and spent nuclear fuel cycle we can convert spent nuclear fuel into chloride fuels and mix it with plutonium from weapons or reactor-grade plutonium if we use weapons-grade material and we mix it with spent nuclear fuel the plutonium in the spent nuclear fuel will denature the weapons-grade plutonium when you make the fuel and you also mix the fission products from the spent nuclear fuel with the weapons-grade plutonium so you actually protect the fuel immediately when you produce it and then when you put it in the reactor you consume that fuel that is our preferred fuel because it is essentially consuming existing waste people today are spending money to store weapons-grade material reactor-grade plutonium and spent nuclear fuel if we can take advantage of that that reduce our cost of fuel we don't need to pay someone to mine and enrich uranium start with the high SA low enriched uranium starting up with plutonium means we are starting up at our steady-state chemistry right we don't have to worry about changing chemistry through life that also reduces our melting point because we have the plutonium in the fission products so it's a big advantage technically to start with the spent nuclear fuel and in the process we get rid of the waste as well in the United States we have a plutonium management disposition agreement with Russia the United States violated by shutting down the MOX plant in Savannah River that was supposed to convert the weapons-grade plutonium into an oxide make MOX fuel and stick it in one of the see valley authority reactor plants to essentially dilute the plutonium by converting some of the plutonium 239 into plutonium 240 and make a little bit of energy out of that that was supposed to consume 34 tons of weapons-grade plutonium we can put that in our reactor the 34 tonnes will start approximately four of our reactors and it will be in denatured just by mixing with the spent nuclear fuel there's also a total of 53 tons excess weapons-grade plutonium as defined by the DoD and the do-e that 53 tons will start up seven of our reactors instead of just the four for the PMD a agreement United Kingdom has excess plutonium they'd like to get rid of that helps us start up reactors France they do do reprocessing they make MOX fuel and reuse it they can only reuse it once after that there's too many higher actinides in the thermal spectrum the twice burned fuel the MOX fuel is essentially fuel for us and we can use that Japan is shutting down their reprocessing facility they have an enormous amount of reactor-grade plutonium that they have reprocessed intending to be made into MOX and put back into the reactors so we could take that it's basically a megatons to megawatts program for plutonium just like we did for uranium the next fuel cycle I'd like to talk about is the uranium 233 thorium cycle there are two ways this can be used in our reactor if you try to run on a pure uranium 233 cycle in the core as a single fluid reactor or two-fluid reactor with a blanket the advantage of the fast spectrum is the number of neutrons per fission is about 2.5 neutrons versus about 2.3 neutrons for a thermal spectrum so you need one Neutron for fission you need one Neutron for conversion that means you have point three neutrons for absorption in the coolant absorption and fission products leakage out of the reactor control all those things that is very marginal on the right where we're operating the fast spectrum is way higher than the number of neutrons per fission in the thermal spectrum that makes a neutronics much easier to account for leakage absorptions poisons our efficient products in the coolant so I can actually run this reactor on a fast spectrum burning uranium 233 and thorium the other thing I can do is I can start it off on plutonium and uranium and breed thorium into 233 in the blanket you get the advantage that the thorium is going to be a better fissile material than uranium-235 and you consume the the thorium and you have a lower actinide load in the core at any one time from that and you can consume thorium as a fuel if you look at the two red lines on the first curve that's a fission cross-sections yes and a fast reactor you have low fission cross sections but the reason why this curve is on there is it also has the uranium 238 and the thorium 232 fission cross sections so you notice in a fast reactor which is to the right of that red line is where we're operating those two cross sections come up and for uranium 238 we get a top 10% visions for thorium we get about 5% visions that's like having a few extra few free neutrons so it's like a instead of 2.9 neutrons per fission it's 3.1 neutrons per fission in the pure thorium cycle instead of getting 2.5 neutrons per fission for thorium 233 in the fast spectrum you get about 2.6 neutrons per fission because you get about 5 percent of your fissions from visiting thorium 232 directly a little advantages but they all add up in the long run to extra neutrons in a thermal spectrum the protactinium-233 that is created from the thorium 232 will absorb a neutron that loss means you're converting the uranium 233 to uranium 234 which is not fissile you lost that Neutron that you used plus you need another neutron to convert it into uranium 235 and so that hurts your Neutron economy so in a thermal reactor you need to remove the protactinium-233 from the neutrons or have an enormous volume of it to prevent it happened to be near the neutron source is long to be able to make your neutronics work separation of protactinium is a problem if you take protactinium out of the reactor wait seven days and strip all the uranium out from the protactinium right you are essentially pulling all of the uranium 232 out let it sit for another seven days or a month to let protactinium-233 decay which has a 27 day half-life so you can let it go several months the stuff that's removed after that is essentially pure uranium 233 weapons-grade material that is a very easy non chemistry just time differentiated way of week making weapons-grade uranium out of a protactinium that has to be separated to be able to meet the neutronics requirements to do uranium 233 and thorium in the thermal spectrum in a fast spectrum reactor you don't necessarily need to use a pure thorium cycle you can use mixed uranium 238 cycle with the thorium the thorium creates uranium 233 uranium 232 but it also has uranium 238 in it and the uranium 238 denatures the uranium 233 and protects it from a proliferation perspective if you do it with single fluid you also have the fission products in with it and you can do that because plutonium is very efficient so if you burn the two uranium and thorium together with a plutonium fuel and uranium 233 mixed fuel you can still consume thorium and in a proliferation safe manner as far as the flexibility of the fuel system you can use thorium you can use plutonium you can use uranium-235 uranium-238 it doesn't it doesn't really matter you can make them work plutonium is the most efficient fuel for operating a fast spectrum reactor but a fast spectrum reactor is more efficient for using thorium than a thermal spectrum molten salt reactor is because of the extra neutrons that you have it means maybe you don't have to run as complex a purification system you can reduce the cost of purification system because you have fast spectrum because you have 60% extra neutrons to accommodate so you don't have to clean up this fission product quite as much the next thing I'd like to talk about is conversion process of our fuel we take the spent nuclear you'll and we chop it up into two centimeter pieces we don't extract the uranium oxide and fission products from in the Zircaloy tubes we actually want the Zircaloy tubes in there we melt our carrier salt sodium chloride in excess of its melting point and we add another fuel salt component to that aggressive towards oxides then pour vent nuclear fuel segments into the salt pot and they react out to convert the oxides in the fuel the uranium the plutonium the fission products into chlorides the oxides become particulate the noble metals precipitate out as particulate their solids and the gases bubble off so we filter that material off and that is our fuel so that's a single chemistry process step that keeps all the transferee annex the plutonium uranium and the fission products all together in our fuel so there's not a proliferation concern we take that fuel salt and it's ready to be poured into our reactor but you'll notice I said one chemical step right the pyro processing stuff that Argonne National Lab did your stuff has seven chemical steps to do what they did the first thing they do was separate they oxidize it - you 308 and then they separate out the uranium and they separate out lutonium would you prove the business products and then there's I have one hemp one chemical process to get our fuel I don't have to end with the manufacture of solid fuel very simple fuel production process we are working with Idaho National Lab in Argonne National Lab to actually test the fuel conversion essentially proving that we can convert our spent nuclear fuel into our fuel in this process because we are not separating uranium plutonium or fission products from each other so I call it conversion not processing because processing is essentially separation of different materials and we don't do that and this is a low-cost thing so we can afford to do this for the fuel the process that we're using is an existing hot cell it was developed for testing the pyro processing of spent nuclear fuel into new MOX fuel for the FFT F IFR or the prism reactor we're just using a pot for doing that but we're not doing any of the success of steps that separate anything this is not proprietary work this was developed actually in Japan right so it's not us proprietary therefore is not special technology in the United States the technology in Japan was published so it is open to the entire world this material in my mind is not considered pyroprocessing and should be published do you gain generally they have a requirement to publish everything that they do the question here is if this is considered pyroprocessing or reprocessing of any manner it will be essentially classified and not published and we don't actually want that we want anyone to be able to use this we would like anyone that has a fast reactor or chloride reactor to essentially be able to consume spent nuclear fuel because consuming spent fuel and weapons material is a good thing for the entire country notional and only notional molten chloride salt fast reactor to passive safety pumps without electricity I figured that out how to do that haven't done the development pumped draining which means not a free seal and a pump that doesn't need electricity to run and drain faster than a free seal which is the same thing I've identified that this was written earlier this was just shall we say two typos or three typos in a posting and stuff I loathe a Miam and stuff we want to use everything and we can use everything we don't want to discharge fuel we want to minimize proliferations we want to get to 1,300 °c or 2400 F which gives us 60% efficiency in just about any process heat temperature any process you want 1300 C is concrete is made at 1400 C we can get the heat up to 1300 C and then you use electric heat to get to 1400 see to do concrete the last one is don't shut down the natural disaster reactors aren't the problem it's not danger right the danger is people not getting medical care because they don't have electricity I'll skip the summary because I'm out of time okay thank you I have work designing reactors for the Navy for 32 years a lot of my team has followed me out of the Naval reactors program and so we have over 300 years of design experience in our team of actually designing building operating testing maintaining reactor systems so when you talk about real experience designing and operating reactors our team has that in spades because everybody wants to work on advanced reactors and they followed me out of naval nuclear lab to work on an advanced reactor because that's exciting and so that's how we developed the team they saw that I was doing something excited and they followed me

Channel: gordonmcdowell

Views: 57,390

Rating: 4.9457011 out of 5

Keywords: fast spectrum, Molten-Salt Reactor, advanced reactor, advanced nuclear, Elysium Industries, Ed Pheil, TEAC8, Thorium Energy Alliance, Thorium, Uranium

Id: pqVt8cxx-44

Length: 36min 15sec (2175 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 20 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Buttonsinpjs]

I like that there are multiple designs for fluid fuel reactors. One thing he mentions about fluoride salt is that it produces unwanted byproducts during refinement. I don't pretend to understand the chemistry, but it gives me another point of view when comparing the reactor designs.

This design is actually what I had originally imagined when I first heard about MSRs. One big pot with all the fuel inside and very little in the way of reprocessing the fuel.