Nuclear Power Turns To Salt

By Forbes (James Conca) - Today, the United States Department of Energy announced that its Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee is partnering with Canadian nuclear company Terrestrial Energy Inc. (TEI) to assist with TEI’s new Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR). The engineering blueprint stage for this GenIV reactor should be reached in two years. The reactor should come online in less than ten.

Think of it: a nuclear reactor that

• is cheaper than coal
• creates much less waste and few long-lived radioactive elements
• uses almost all of the fuel which lasts 7 years between replacement, and can be recycled easily
• is modular, from 80 MWt to 600 MWt, able to be combined and adapted to individual needs for both on and off-grid heat and power
• is small enough to allow fast and easy construction, and trucking to the site
• operates at normal pressures, removing those safety issues, and at higher temperatures making it more energetically efficient
• has the type of passive safety systems that make it walk-away safe
• does not need external water for cooling
• can load-follow rapidly to buffer the intermittency of renewables
• cannot be repurposed for military use and has strong proliferation resistance
• can last for many decades
• uses a liquid fuel

 Now that is different!

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