#Nuclear reactor meltdown list install

Technology – Transatomic’s design improves on the original molten-salt reactor by changing the internal geometry and using different materials. Ms Dewan now the company’s chief science officer says, “It’s walk-away safe, if you lose electricity, even if there are no operators on site to pull levers, it will coast to a stop.” The salt then cools and solidifies, encapsulating the radioactive materials. In the event of a power outage where cooling circulation would stop carrying away the heat, a plug at the bottom of the reactor melts and the fuel and salt mixture flows by gravity into a holding tank, where the fuel spreads out enough for the reactions to stop. That way the reactor has a built-in thermostat – if it starts to heat up, the salt expands, spreading out the fuel and slowing the reactions cooling the thing off. Molten salt has a boiling point higher than the operating temperature of the fuel. The big problems can be solved by using molten salt, instead of water as the coolant, which is mixed in with the fuel.

Oddly, the nuclear industry and regulatory agencies haven’t come to realize the notion of mixing water and nuclear fuel is the dangerous matter. The inability to do that properly is what has caused the problems at troubled plants. Even after the reactor is shut down, it must be continuously cooled by pumping in water until the whole internal core apparatus is below 100º C. It’s all the other factors that make it daunting.” We’ll get to those daunting factors in a moment.īackground – today’s conventional nuclear power plant is cooled by water, which boils at 100º C a temperature far below the 2,000° C at the core of a fuel pellet. I wish someone would build this thing, because I think it would work. “The technology doesn’t bother me in the least,” he said. Ray Rothrock says the company will face many challenges.

The new reactor design called the Waste-Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor (WAMSR) so far exists only on paper. Yet the design has attracted some top advisors, including Regis Matzie, the former CTO of the major nuclear power plant supplier Westinghouse Electric, and Richard Lester, the head of the nuclear engineering department at MIT. The cofounders, Mark Massie and Leslie Dewan, who we met here in April last year, are still PhD candidates at MIT. The company has already raised $1 million in seed funding, including some from Ray Rothrock, a partner at the venture capital firm Venrock.

Russ Wilcox, Transatomic’s new CEO estimates that it will take eight years to build a prototype reactor at a cost of $200 million. What remains is raising $5 million to run five experiments to help validate the new basic design. Molten-salt reactors were demonstrated in the 1960s at Oak Ridge National Lab, where one test reactor ran for six years. Transatomic, founded by a pair of very smart and innovative young nuclear engineers, has updated the molten-salt reactor, a reactor type that’s highly resistant to meltdowns.

#Nuclear reactor meltdown list install

The second is the design would be factory produced cutting build costs in a huge way and the reactors would be larger than the currently trendy Small Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMNRs) offering the chance to install at existing locations saving on the generation and grid connection costs. That should be nirvana for those alarmed about atomic energy and weapons proliferation.įor everyone else, the first offering is we would see a reduction in spent fuel containment costs and get electrical energy, lots of it, instead. For the anti-nuclear folks the design offers to burn up the existing spent fuel from the world’s fleet of nuclear reactors in a design that doesn’t offer a chance for a meltdown. Transatomic, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff is developing a nuclear reactor designed to overcome the major barriers to nuclear power.