IMSR: Terrestrial Energy's Integral Molten Salt Reactor -by Dr. David LeBlanc @ TEAC7

really we are talking about molten salt reactors and liquid fuel is really the key to that it's the foundation for the advantages of molten salt reactors solid fuel it's it's a complex challenge is the best way to put it you make the slightest change to a solid fuel change a spacer or type of cladding and you're looking at years of testing to make sure it functions properly our radiation damage limits that burn up in solid fuel and then decay heat removal we can shut reactors down Fukushima shut down no problem but it's the heat that's generated from all the radioactivity would call that decay heat that extends for days and weeks and months getting rid of that from solid fuel elements is the true challenge to making reactors safe solid fuel reactors liquid fluoride fuel salts though the fuel is just unaffected by the radiation very strong ionic bonds that's dramatically of course simplifies fuel qualification the fuel is the coolant and not just in many many ways that's a bit there's a lot of tangents we could go on here but it really simplifies decay heat removal because your heat source is mobile mobile and you're operating at low pressure with very very high boiling points so there was a lot of liquid fuel reactors looked at in the 50s and 60s but really only these fluoride salts proved practical advantages I'll only have one page here we could probably do 10 or 20 but safety it's that inherent safety that passive decay removal the fact that the liquids can naturally circulate so that they can be moved to other areas to deal with them or within the reactor itself can naturally circulate to move the heat around they're operating like we said at low pressure and there's no chemical driving force within the reactor there's nothing that could generate hydrogen like water zirconium interactions just in a sense nothing pushing its way out which is a very good starting point and very important in any solid fuel reactor accident our caesium and iodine though both volatile so the many years of production are in that fuel pin just waiting to get out with molten salt reactors cesium becomes a cesium fluoride it's stable within salt and iodine becomes a state form of iodine and again it's it's reasonably safe stable within fuel salt and that gives us great safety advantage reduce capital cost and inherent safety can really simplify the entire facility so all these things including the low pressure operations so thin walled vessels then wall piping very high thermal efficiency compared to existing reactors superior coolant in general we need smaller pipes smaller heat exchangers than than current reactors and very important no complex refueling mechanisms and that's I'm Canadian our CANDU reactors are great but my god the complexity of the refueling operations they're long-lived waste issues and they're an ideal system for consuming existing transionic wastes in spent fuel is really plutonium and the other ones Emery seemed neptunium that's the problem in spent fuel 96% of it is relatively harmless unused uranium that's not really anyone's problem there's three percent that are fission products but that's a quite manageable problem because they're not as long-lived as the transionic which is only 1% but many reactors molten salt reactors included can take that transfer annex and turn them in useful energy in law when we talk about the waste we do produce even burner designs and I'm going to go back and forth between this idea of burner and breeder well even the burner designs can see almost no transgenics going to waste and then reaso sustainability and low fuel cycle cost thorium breeders the MSR breeders it's obvious resource sustainability for millions of years but even the burners are they're extremely efficient on uranium roughly one-sixth the needs of light water reactors if you choose the burner group quickly on the US historic timeline first envisions in envisioned in the late 40s in the 50s that became a leading candidate for a very quite well-funded aircraft reactor program the Navy gave birth the light water reactor the Air Force in a sense gave birth to the molten salt reactor a huge knowledge base developed and a successful aircraft reactor experiment test reactor operated in 1954 at what still might be the highest temperature of our reactor 860 degrees just met as a short-term test that evolved in the 1960s and 70s into the MSB our molten salt breeder reactor or what you do what you'd call the thorium breeder at the time World Thinking was there is very little uranium in the world we found a lot through extensive efforts during the war but back then people thought well we need breeders by the 1980s so it's going to be either sodium fosters or the alternate technology was the molten salt breeder the thorium breeder so that really started to dominate research efforts in the United States and the molten salt breeder reactor program had a very successful eight megawatt thermal molten salt reactor experiment in the mid-1960s the late some minor issues uncovered but very very successful reactor 70s though falling of the political acts the program was cancelled in the mid-70s and we won't get into all the different reasons and there is a lot of different reasons some fascinating work continued at Oak Ridge that's where the the work was being developed for molten salt reactors on a burner design called the D MSR and I'll get back to that a little bit later so that's a picture of the molten salt reactor experiment that may you've seen many times just in a sense a simple tank graphite as the moderator so you just have rods of graphite with spaces in between for the fuel salt to flow in this case a simple pot and a pipe leading out to a heat exchanger externally this is from what we call the Gen 4 program a world collaboration of what are the best advanced reactors to work on for the future molten salt reactors were chosen as one of six Gen 4 reactors this is from their program guide this is really the 1970s version graphite moderated on-site chemical processing so you can be a breeder you have to pull fission products out rather quickly to be able to be a breeder reactor the freeze plug which you've heard about before dump tanks to deal with the decay heat I think others will go into this as well so I won't say too much the only change in the gen for being 2002 helium Brayton cycles were kind of all the rage most of my colleagues that we're talking about these are maybe back to steam now or co2 is interesting as well but that that's not what I'm going to be talking about but that's what you'd probably call the textbook textbook reactor summer your current world events as I chose said chosen as one of six Gen four designs widespread grassroots support which has definite pros it can have cons as well the funded us efforts a lot of my colleagues at Oakridge and elsewhere they're looking at a cousin technology which is traditional solid fuels not like light water reactors but graphite based reactors but replacing helium coolant with molten salt so the same Flibe salt as a replacement for helium and there's a lot of advantages of that but really when you when you really look at things it lacks a lot of the major potential benefits that true molten salt reactors have european efforts are focused on a fast spectrum version getting rid of graphite that's an admirable goal it gives you many advantages but a lot of challenges in that route and even they are looking at quite a long development horizon china as you've already heard really has led I wouldn't say led the way but really change the playing field by their program roughly a half billion dollar program looking to build both a salt cooled reactor first and quickly followed on by that of a true molten salt fueled reactor quite like the first demonstration of the msre India keeping it options open we had a very interesting conference there a couple years ago they had a lot of efforts going in the 1970s that many of us weren't aware of and as you've you've heard and will hear several startup firms worldwide so why the renewed interest light water reactors have served the world well but there's really only incremental improvements possible going to small modular reactors with light water that's that's definitely some benefits there but nothing that's going to be a true game changer and it's the passive safety of molten salt reactors that really opens the possibility of true cost innovation and that's really needed if we are going to build these by the hundreds thousands molten salt reactors open up the possibility reducing rule the nuclear waste profile and the ability to consume existing waste they can be configured as factory fabricated small modular reactors and when you're talking about while modern molten salt reactors it's quite logical to first look to the past now I'm going to get quite technical here and those that you can understand probably have heard me talk about this already so I'll zip through this so you can ask me questions later but a lot of challenges for that textbook design from the 1970s all online fission product removal do not estimate the difficulty of that much simpler than than processing solid fuels but still a great challenge tritium control molten salt reactors using enriched lithium and beryllium as their carrier salt will produce a fair amount of tritium and stopping tritium has this annoying habit of going right through hot metal walls so tritium control was always a big part of early work reactivity coefficients again how you always want the reactor to power down if the temperature gets hotter they were the needed negative term but only calculated to be quite weakly negative the use of highly enriched uranium which I don't really want to get into too much but that word alone and a thorium breeder by definition involves that as soon as you say those three words you're going to get a lot of doors close in your face off gas handling we talked a little bit about xenon and Krypton coming out and those can have daughter projects that we have to keep an eye on so that is a challenge noble metal fission products tend to played out on surfaces that can give you a challenge nothing insurmountable of course and then long-term corrosion and radiation damage Oakridge developed very good materials for these a lot of testing but proving that for 50 60 years of current reactors is a challenge and that if you're using graphite if you want to talk about replacing graphite that is maybe harder than you think so why graphite if you're looking at well what should a modern one why should we use graphite because it does indeed present challenges there's disposal issues that varies greatly when we're finished with the graphite as a moderator it we'll be modestly radioactive chlorine 36 is something that can be involved so it varies greatly by regions depending on regulations for that it's largely a perception issue there's not much radiation involved here but still of importance it does add theoretically a chemical potential but in fact it's almost no added safety concerns there's no something called Vigna energy with some of you might have heard of that was the cause to start the Windscale fire in in the UK but that's not an issue at higher temperature reactors like molten salt reactors graphite is near impossible to burn the Windscale fire was not graphite burning it was the metallic uranium and metallic aluminium cladding that was really burning and Chernobyl was well it was a mess of a design to begin with but that was basically a nice furnace that had everything was blown apart air blowing through in 2,000 degree plus molten khorium the molten the the molten form of the solid fuel driving reactions there why graphite II does give you many large advantages it's the only unclad moderator that's possible to use with the molten salts graphite enables you can protect all your structural materials all the metallic structures etc from high Neutron fluence by a method we call the under moderated outer zones you can't do that with the five spectrum reactors more thermal spectrum aids the reactor control things it just slows things down in general long Neutron lifetimes makes your power truly scalable from large to very small massive reduction in the needed fissile material to start their reactors and if we're using low enriched DM low-energy uranium as your fuel salt it's a surprisingly low theoretically down to about one percent probably two to four percent is a more practical region so why a thorium breeder thorium breeder it is a very admirable goal and we groups like this should continue the effort it's a very simple message to the public it will give us potentially millions of years of resource but the breeder approach does represent many you Niq challenges especially online fuel reprocessing and not unfortunately will lengthened development time and long development times mean private funding is extremely hard governments will not lead any more nuclear development but they will follow they will follow private capital so we know now that uranium is quite abundant yes if you look at the red book it says there's only 80 years at current use but if you look how much there's probably 30 years of copper if we need more the price might rise a little bit but then there's more lower grade ores so there's there's a lot of uranium out there so do we need to go straight to a breeder because an MSR burner which you know I'm going to be pitching here that can simply use low enriched uranium as the fuel as the Makeup fuel and the startup fuel and use it much much more efficiently than current light water reactors the MSR burn approach immediately removes many of the big challenges from the breeder approach to greatly simplify things and shorten your development period the last major work of Oakridge was on a burner design the denatured molten salt reactor which I'll talk very briefly about here they called it the 30-year once-through design so using the same salt you start up with low enriched uranium trickle in a little bit more loner its uranium every year originally mandated to increase anti proliferation features so you're starting with the legal limit of low enriched uranium 20% only to be able to put in as much thorium as possible I view in this case thorium it's like a fuel additive it makes your fuel economy better if you well get back to the pros and cons of thorium or not there's no salt processing just add small amounts of low enriched uranium a low power density core gave a full 30 year lifetime out of the reactor but that made it quite big 8 by 8 meter core and about a 10 by 10 meter reactor vessel similar fizzle starting to a light water reactor uranium new means depending on whether you look to recycle the uranium at the end of the 30 years was either 1/6 or 1/4 of the uranium needs what about a tenth of a cent a kilowatt hour for fuel costs that's modern modern day numbers about 1/9 the transionic waste of and that's assuming you didn't do anything with plutonium except put the salt to geological storage much better reactivity coefficients than the breeder the breeder was calculated to be just slightly negative a French reworking of things were worried it might actually be slightly positive but the the burner approach was a nice strong negative and it's really cool reactor physics of why that is the case if you want to pester me later I want to kind of debunk some burner myths because these aren't thorium breeders and some wills will raise problems and I hear this if it's not a breeder it's not sustainable well but when you really look the breeders are extremely sorry the burners are extremely efficient on light low enriched uranium so you theoretically could reap replace every light water reactor coal and glass gas plant with burners and see little if any need to increase current uranium mining and current uranium mining as a drop in the bucket compared to other mining we won't have millions of years worth like thorium but easily thousands is even if you allowed the price of uranium to rise tenfold it's just an enormous potential reservoir of uranium the Emmis the other myth I would say is a myth is the MSR burner means you're making plutonium waste therefore it solves nothing the burners produce a lot less PU waste because I won't get into the physics but we burn up so much of it right in the reactor if we're running up this way and we have the ability after a long period of time we can do this a decade later we can recycle the plutonium and all the rest and Mercia neptunium and just put it in other fuel sources so we have the same ability as MSR breeders or the the sodium fast readers to close the fuel cycle so you're really only having fresh fission products and maybe some relatively harmless unused uranium as your waste but that's a nation's choice if a nation wants to go right to the once-through cycle there's a lot of real solutions now salt caverns are an excellent place to put spent fuel if we ever choose to do that way another one is ms burns require uranium enrichment and I will concede that point that yes but if we're running the world using burner type reactors because we do it so much more efficiently already we need so much less enrichment we don't really need to increase the the current enrichment facilities and you're not going to really uninvent a technology I won't really anyway just quick mention there's an interesting synergy with CANDU reactors they use natural uranium there are actually quite good producers of of plutonium and we could use that as a fuel source for burner reactors so you could have a fleet expansion without enrichment issues solved just by going to the burner approach fission product removal we don't have any need for on-site processing we may choose to process the salt once we're finish it but like I say that's a nation's choice tritium control we're not giving up on enriched lithium or beryllium but with the when you're not a breeder not trying to save every last Neutron we have the ability to use non fly carrier salts that really knock down the tritium production by about 99% reactivity coefficients the burner designs just in it's it's really between uranium 233 and plutonium and uranium 235 just far superior reactivity coefficients off gas management we don't have to pull the gases out really really quickly what like you want to do with a bur breeder design but it just gives us more options which again I'll go into too many details highly enriched uranium use we're not using that everyday uranium is always denatured any PU present really quickly builds up to a lot of 240 and a lot of 240 to both those make it and virtually if not literally impossible to use in weapons the remaining challenge I would say are really materials related noble metals tend to played out in heat exchangers we always knew you're not going to talk about going in and fixing a heat exchanger if you have a problem you're replacing the entire tube bundle a little tricky if they dry out there's a heat source their long-term corrosion and radiation damage of the metals we use high nickel alloys Hastelloy n even some stainless steels performs superbly but proving a 30 to 60 year lifetime is going be a challenge to the regulator to the investor etc graphite replacement it gives you very strong its lifetime is limited by the power density and if you want to change it so this led to a very long four decades with Oakridge this seal or swap so you have a limited lifetime if you use it at a high power density so you seal the reactor for the lifetime with a low power density or do you go to a more economically viable high power density and then plan to replace graphite so early work yeah let's make them smaller and just rule just replace the graphite every four years but that is far more difficult than many might and manager later work at Oakridge said no let's go to low power density very large cores but then higher capital cost there's more fuel more fuel salt bigger building all that so what is our inter integral molten salt reactor as you would have guessed of course it is a the idea is a burner design a lot like the 1980s dmsr we want to integrate our primary systems into a sealed reactor vessel planned in a variety of sizes from 80 megawatts thermal up to 600 megawatts thermal using off the self steam turbine technology maybe in the future it'll be co2 or healing but we feel initially at Steam small modular factory fabrication is allowed we have the ability to look at alternate salts and new off gas systems and a new passive decay removal we prefer in situ not really going with dumb tanks we won't really get into it except I'll just show you what we're up to and thorin use we have not yet decided we haven't ruled it out or ruled it in there's actually a remarkably long list of pros and cons whether we use thorium and in a burner design it's really thorium is just replacing uranium 238 as a better fertile so we'll either use it and use more nineteen point nine or ten percent enriched uranium or if we don't use thorium then we go to really low enrichments in the in the fuel we have what we call a seal and swap approach so the many technical challenges are addressed in our technology simply stated our primary vessel is meant to be a perfect permanently sealed system of course pipes going in and out for coolant salt etc with an economically high power density much less than a 30-year lifetime so after a seven-year design light an identical MSR imsr core unit replaces the old unit for an indefinitely long plant lifetime we build in redundancy on our heat exchangers so if we have a failure of one we can continue with the remaining and continue it's quite limited lifetime of seven tiers so basically sealed for lies plus replaceable is what we're talking about so the core unit I won't get into too much details and quite obviously we're we're we're not always showing every last little bit or maybe even misdirecting in a sense I also tend to call this the 2014 version we we had a deliverable of a pre conceptual design report we had to make the most conservative choices we can we are now into a stage our second phase of development where we can make some changes so there has been changes which of course I won't tell you about but the basic idea is graphite in the bottom of the reactor vessel these sort of orange wedges six of them three shown are the heat exchangers each separately and each heat exchanger has a pump motor you can't see the impeller but it would be just inside there very simple impellers because it's very low pressure drops very low power that's only ten kilowatt pump for the smallest unit each has its own Inlet and outlet for secondary coolant salt so a secondary coolant salt is taking the heat away from the reactor but the fuel salt everything radioactive is staying in there off gas we have a lot of options which I won't get into but fuel salts push through the heat exchangers down through the annulus up through the core up through a chimney and then repeats that cycle and up in here that's a big gas plenum space so we can pressure changes volume changes as we feed in more fuel etc we're showing a flow driven shutdown rod the pump stops that rod will drop by gravity and an independent secondary shutdown system of a a neutron absorber injection which is thermally based that goes within sort of the next layer of containment we have what we call a buffer salt minor which I'll talk more about but this is a big thick roughly about a meter thick of just pure simple salts fluoride salts nice cap here that we can remove to exchange the unit showing the next level then we start to get into like thick concrete you can create concrete for all kinds of to make sure you drop down radiation levels to next to nothing big steel plates that are not shown that can be removed when we have to remove this replaceable core unit the facility itself could be of course multi unit plants we typically always show two silos though these are identical so that the operation principle is the first unit were arrives by this the smallest unit can likely we're kind of pushing weight restrictions but the smallest unit can be completely factory fabricated the larger units just by weight issues might have to come in pieces where we put them together in here the first unit is installed and that will run for seven years with this other silo just empty when that seven year period is up however just before the second unit can come in which is installed into the second silo so when we shut down that first unit we don't have to do anything with it quickly we have a full seven years for to die down the radiation levels we don't want to touch it for a while the fuel salt its liquid it can be taken out at any time but we have seven years while the second unit operates then just before the third unit that's when we can drain all the fuel salt lift it out and out and out to long-term storage silos and it's it's quite low levels of radiation by that sort of a bit of a peer comparison other small modular reactors this is not apples to apples comparison but just kind of shows the the size of units that need to be shipped this is meant to be our largest unit three and a three point six meters wide roughly about twelve meters tall compared to the new scale they're 50 megawatt electrical unit or 160 megawatts thermal em power unfortunately isn't really been on the Shelf by the end they were at a bit of a higher our level but it just kind of shows a comparison of size this shows between our different core unit sizes down to the 80 megawatt thermal and this is with the most conservative choices the most conservative heat exchangers so in the future these these sizes can be improved or reduced a bit of a comparison with a small light water reactor the AP 600 that hasn't been built and they went right to the larger but and with our largest unit so it's more power the AP 600 but just showing like you almost need magnifying glasses for the lot of the components whereas the 70 foot tall steam generators and everything foot-thick steel etc gives you an idea the other the other thing is well that light water reactors can do is they have big wet steam turbines high the the steam conditions we're looking at are denticles to coal-fired plants so either super heat or supercritical steam very compact units but challenge is solved with the imsr that sealed for life offers enormous regulatory advantages to accelerate development the spent vessel is now it's repurposed to be a storage of the mildly radioactive graphite we don't have to worry about the airborne release if we're looking at swapping graphite or or heat exchangers etc we have a long cooldown time before moving material lifetime and corrosion we anything that's touching those radioactive salts we really only have to prove the seven-year lifetime and we allows evolution of design with ease and maybe not as obviously as obvious but there's a razorblade analogy here to attract potential business partners they know that it's not just how many reactors you build but if we build these there's business for decades and decades on replacement core units very quickly on our concepts of decay removal and again in the future things may be slightly different but that buffer salt is meant to be a solid during normal operation which which is also a good insulator any solid can be so out by the time you're getting out to concrete that has really shielded amount of heat that's transferred but if we lose all pumps this salt is chosen to be at a melting point just a little higher than normal operation so if all the pumps stop and of course you'd always have natural circulation to steam but if we assume there's absolutely no other heat removal then the buffer salt starts to melt that draws heat away from the reactor and of course if the salt is the coldest on the outer edge of the reactor and hottest inside that's going to set up natural circulation and we get a couple days in the smallest unit before all the salt or almost all the buffer salt is melted then a water jacket that's protecting the concrete from get ever getting too hot that can take over sort of the heavy lifting for very long term and there's a lot of reasons you can look at radiant heat straight up these are completely walk away safe but there's a lot of engineering work to prove that to the regulatory bodies satisfaction so the bottom line we deliver hot clean salt that can be used directly for a process heat we can add a steam generator for process steam and the most well obvious you'd is that adding a turbine generator for power we feel as the simple approach easiest achieve regulatory license and public acceptance cost innovation is the end result the fuel costs are almost trivial less than a couple tenths a kilowatt hour that's including enrichment everything hourly cost estimate work was at $2 a watt electrical or sixty cents a watt thermal for the largest unit for the smallest unit about at about 32 and a half megawatts electrical about $5 watt condom is a scale when you try to shrink them our Canadian government would love us to go even smaller but we kind of resist going any smaller so our phase one we've had detailed cost engineering work as added to confidence our phase two work will expand this enormous leap so design simplicity is the key but of course much work ahead pump development salt selection and validation heat exchanger design the nitty-gritty of things valve and disconnect systems steam generation all quite solvable issues but some good old-fashioned engineering to do quickly a bit of a business update so we were founded in January 2013 but most of us has been involved for this many years before that I met Simon Irish at one of these conferences that forgive us a second or third but this really brings people together so the directions of our company myself as chief technology officer I'm not sure if Simon and his ride yeah he'll be here sometime today Simon Irish our CEO has been very very excellent League IDing our corporate ship through sometimes of course shark-infested waters doing an excellent job Canon Brian arse our CFO I think is here somewhere in the room or if not wheeling and dealing out in the hallways who McDermott is chair of our board and Dave Hill a fifth director I'll mention those fellows more we are of course building proprietary molten salt reactor technology we hope to have the first commercial unit demonstration unit in one hour early next decade our team consists of over 28 directors employees consultants and advisors mentioned some of the main sort of management team Paul McIntosh who is Oh Paul Paul's here in the room Rob bodnariu Rotenberg Mike Edwards I'll mention him again later Brian Mercer Chris Popov the main team but we're rapidly expanding we've completed phase one are all our seed financing our deliverables of the pre conceptual design formed our management team form the company to grow into the larger company that we are now becoming quickly on milestones I won't read off some early milestones Dave Hill was senior executive management positions of both Argonne Oak Ridge and Idaho National Lab on our board Hugh McDermott former CEO and president of atomic energy of Canada very early adopter so to speak has been incredibly helpful for us and very very involved completed our seed financing of piles patent in 59 countries completed the pre conceptual design report in all its glory in the fall public knowledge in September entered agreements with Canadian nuclear laboratories that's up in Canada initial collaborations with Oak Ridge that our first stages are complete we're Nago we want to do more and University of Tennessee very lately thing this this isn't very update but Jeff Merrifield former NRC commissioner Mike Mike Edwards on our advisory board but transitioning to a being a full-time employee I'm not sure if that's official yet or not if it is it's only been a day or two former the senior design engineer of the M our at Babcock Wilcox he's been enormous ly helpful to date Paul Blanchard James Ranch formal former CEO of Bechtel nuclear joined the advisory board and let's just say stay tuned for details if this was a few weeks from now I'd have a lot more interesting things to announce potentially but I can't really say about them but that ties into what we what I consider our biggest surprise things have been going quite well but I think our biggest surprises our reception within the existing nuclear community we kind of expected indifference from light water folks or fast breeders that has not been the case this is a well blatant self-promotion here but a good example of that is nuclear news the American nuclear society publication they chose the 10 advanced reactors in the world of course with the u.s. North American by us but we're chosen as one of those and that was only about two months after we in a sense came out publicly and like I say just a lot of people are coming to us and that's been it's been an amazing experience to to go through so phase two development in this year and next year into early 2017 we're expanding our team more strategic technical partners again like a safe was a few weeks we'd probably have more announcements we could make more National Lab work in North America and Europe goal in this second phase is to really complete three files that will help us secure the major funding to actually get the reactor built so the design specified to the conceptual design standard ready to go then to the engineering blueprint stage licensing we want to go through the first phase of the vendor design review with in Canada by the end of this two year period to finish it that gives you a report card initial report card and economics really proving out we there's a lot of money involved to proving these these early cost estimates so just kind of ending up here we feel this as a new paradigm for nuclear energy a new economic profit proposition of being cost competitive we feel will be extremely competitive with coal and even cheap current natural gas scalable it's a energy resource to rival fossil fuels fuels accessible heat and electrical energy secure reliable portable grid independent energy these can be built and established either as traditional grid units or and more remote users and we feel it's a new social proposition as well that passive safety it's a completely different narrative to the concurrent nuclear safety nuclear power today is safe but it has cost them a lot to be that safe and it's a very hard message to to get across to the public but with new technology and with passive systems that should be a much better narrative for a smaller more manageable waste put print the possibility of virtually no long-term nuclear waste the burners do not need to process during use it's it's probably going to be the case in most users will choose to then reprocess take all the plutonium americium put it in another fuel source and it gives you an amazing long-term waste profile and just exemplary proliferation resistance that's why the denatured molten salt reactor was developed in the first place so we really feel it has the potential to change the game and energy production so we often throw contact details this is going to change very soon people are still signing we're moving into new office space we're very happy about signing the lease today so lots happening the story is different every week topics yeah the question was how the use of graphite compares with trans Atomics ideas of using zirconium hydride as a moderator it's a quite different situation graphite is it can be used without cladding the zirconium hydride has to be clad with something so it's I won't say too much they have a lot of challenges to to go through it's a more compact moderator but you go to any nuclear engineering textbook if you list out moderators hydrogen doesn't typically pass graphite heavy water does but I don't want to have heavy water or water as moderator of course that was your company funded from start with conception to today the funding mechanism I always have to hesitate because of course it's a private company I can't stand up here and say we're there's a lot of things you can't say but let's just say it's gone very well it has been completely private investors not a government sent from government not that we wouldn't take it and not that we're actively seeking it but it has been entirely private investors today I think that's about it let's give dr. LeBlanc away thanks Dave you

Channel: gordonmcdowell

Views: 84,150

Keywords: IMSR, molten salt reactor, MSR, Dr. David LeBlanc, Terrestrial Energy, nuclear, nuclear power, liquid fuel, uranium

Id: OgTgV3Kq49U

Length: 38min 30sec (2310 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 12 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Thanks Gordon.

[u/jamessnow]

So, the IMSR is a burner reactor, not a breeder. He talks about the ability to use FLiBe and the ability to use thorium. They could use PU-239, PU-240 to start the reactors. This could come from Candu reactors, couldn't it?