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Are there any molten salt reactors being built?
Also in 2021, Southern Company, in collaboration with TerraPower and the U.S. Department of Energy announced plans to build the Molten Chloride Reactor Experiment, the first fast-spectrum salt reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory.
How does Molten Salt Reactor Work?
A molten salt reactor (MSR) is a type of nuclear reactor that uses liquid fuel instead of the solid fuel rods used in conventional nuclear reactors. After a fission chain reaction starts in the reactor, the rate of fission stabilizes once the fuel salt reaches around 700 degrees Celsius.
How does molten salt reactors work?
How do thorium salt reactors work?
The liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) is a heterogeneous MSR design which breeds its U-233 fuel from a fertile blanket of lithium-beryllium fluoride (FLiBe) salts with thorium fluoride. The thorium-232 captures neutrons from the reactor core to become protactinium-233, which decays (27-day half-life) to U-233.
What is molten salt system?
Molten salts, sometimes referred to as salt melts, are a family of products used for a wide range of applications like high-temperature process heating, heat treating and annealing of steel, and thermal storage in solar thermal power plants. These salts are composed of fluoride, chloride, and nitrate salts.
Do molten salt reactors produce radioactive waste?
The reactor is unusual in that it has molten salts circulating inside it instead of water. It has the potential to produce nuclear energy that is relatively safe and cheap, while also generating a much smaller amount of very long-lived radioactive waste than conventional reactors.
Are molten salt reactors still used today?
Molten Salt Reactors 1 Molten salt reactors operated in the 1960s. 2 They are seen as a promising technology today principally as a thorium fuel cycle prospect or for using spent LWR fuel. 3 A variety of designs is being developed, some as fast neutron types. 4 Global research is currently led by China.
What happens to fission products in liquid-fuel MSR?
In liquid-fuel MSR designs the fission products dissolve in the fuel salt and are ideally removed continuously in an adjacent online reprocessing loop and replaced with fissile uranium, plutonium and other actinides or, potentially, fertile Th-232 or U-238. Meanwhile caesium and iodine in particular remain secure in the molten salt.
What happens to the salt in a nuclear reactor when shut down?
When the reactor was shut down, fuel salt was drained from the reactor circuit to two drain tanks. A ”clean” salt was then circulated through the reactor as a decontamination measure and drained to a third drain tank. When operations ceased, the fuel and flush salts were allowed to cool and solidify in the drain tanks.
What is the difference between TRISO and molten salt fuel?
SINAP sees molten salt fuel being superior to the TRISO fuel in effectively unlimited burn-up, less waste, and lower fabricating cost, but achieving lower temperatures (600°C+) than the TRISO fuel reactors (1200°C+). Near-term goals include preparing nuclear-grade ThF 4 and ThO 2 and testing them in a MSR.