3 ms·

The article is from this year. What about these advanced designs makes them more cost competitive? I think the arguments in the article point out that there

The article is from this year. What about these advanced designs makes them more cost competitive? I think the arguments in the article point out that there are lots of costs associated with these small reactors. Not the least of which is that they require decommissioning sooner than their larger counterparts and that the cost of decommissioning alone can make the reactor non-viable economically. It's not clear how changing the working fluid would reduce decommissioning costs.

DennisP 11y ago
It was written this year, but the reactors it mentions are old. Here's a good rundown of ThorCon's cost projections: http://thorconpower.com/costing http://thorconpower.com/costing It doesn't use any technology that wasn't proven in the 1970s: http://thorconpower.com/features/no-new-technology http://thorconpower.com/features/no-new-technology The reactor cores are in sealed replaceable "cans." They run for four years, cool for four years, and then shipped back to a processing facility. Terrestrial Energy has a similar design: sealed factory-built units with a simple liquid fueled design, based on the Oak Ridge molten salt reactor: http://terrestrialenergy.com/imsr-technology/ http://terrestrialenergy.com/imsr-technology/ Safety is completely passive, based on the inherent physics of the fuel and coolant. It's at atmospheric pressure, with no possibility of a chemical explosion like we saw at Fukushima. Fission products mostly plate out or are chemically bound in the salt. In ThorCon's case, if the reactor lose electricity, a frozen plug of fuel melts, and all the fuel drains out to a tank designed to passively cool it.