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Open source Molten salt nuclear reactor design
- rpeden 8y agoDo they accept pull requests?
- k__ 8y agoOnly if your changes are atomic.
- baybal2 8y agoLooks quite expensive for me, what it does better than basic BWR on small side, and basic PWR on large side?
- pariahHN 8y agoNot an expert, but one of the big benefits of molten salt reactors is that they aren't really under pressure - no big poof if containment is breached. It's also really easy to halt meltdowns - since the fuel and coolant are a big liquid glob, you can have thermal plugs that will melt above a certain temperature and drain the coolant+fuel into tubes small enough that, even when the small tubes are full, the coolant+fuel in the tubes is below critical mass and the reaction stops. It fails safe and is immune to mechanical failure, unlike control rods in current reactor designs that have to be moved in and out.
- toufiqbarhamov 8y agoIt’s a good system, but the main problem comes from the same source, the fact that you’re dealing with a pool of molten salt. Maintenance on a reactor vessel is never without challenges, but the problems with servicing a molten salt (or something like a Pb-Bi eutectic) are still a financial and practical roadblock to widespread adoption.
- Blackthorn 8y agoThis more than anything else is likely the biggest reason these reactors never took off, they're certainly safer from meltdowns, but now instead of piping water we have to pipe an incredibly caustic molten salt! The challenge hasn't gone away, it's just shifted.
- Gibbon1 8y agoI remember reading about issues with storage of the waste from a molten salt reactor. A problem discovered was the radiation was producing fluorine gas from the metal fluorides.
- DennisP 8y agoNot all MSRs use fluoride salts. At least three companies are working on fast reactors using chloride salts.
- XMPPwocky 8y agoI'd prefer superheated chlorine gas to superheated fluorine gas, in the same sense that I'd rather have an angry weasel in my pants than a grizzly bear, but...
- DennisP 8y agoIt's not superheated if it's just slow emissions from waste, as mentioned above. A pipe leak in the reactor itself doesn't create a lot of gas. It's molten salt at atmospheric pressure. It drips out and solidifies as it cools. An advantage of MSRs is that the troublesome fission products (like iodine, cesium, and strontium) don't leak out as gases, like they do from conventional reactor cores; instead they are chemically bound in the salt.
- toufiqbarhamov 8y agoThat’s both an upside (as you’ve described), and a downside because the already challenging environment of molten salt becomes increasingly radioactive making servicing even harder than the chemical and thermal environment of the salt make it. You also have to carefully monitor the salt, and a lot of the probes and other means of monitoring it tend to rapidly degrade in the molten salt. It’s another issue that feels like the answer involves new materials that have a much longer life in situ, so that the inevitable maintence is infrequent. It’s a very promising technology, but it isn’t mature yet.
- blattimwind 8y agoWhen your coolant can go up to over 700 °C without gassing then you might also be able to cool the reactor using convection only in emergencies, which would do away with the necessity of emergency coolant pumps. On the other hand, working with a big pool of radioactive liquid that will literally explode and catch fire if it comes in contact with water and still catches fire if it comes in contact with air may also be ... challenging.
- DennisP 8y agoYou're thinking of sodium. This reactor uses salt, which is very stable, just like the salt on your kitchen table. The lack of any sort of driver for chemical explosions is one of the advantages of molten salt reactors over light water reactors, in which the water can split into oxygen and hydrogen and cause explosions (as we saw at Fukushima).
- krisoft 8y agoAre you sure that molten salt in water is safe? This guy has beautiful molten salt/water explosions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDRWQUUUCF0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDRWQUUUCF0
- DennisP 8y agoThat's pretty cool but the guy's conclusion is that it's not a chemical explosion, it's just from the water turning to steam. But I'll concede that we shouldn't drop a molten salt reactor in a lake.
- blattimwind 8y agoI was indeed thinking about the NaK (sodium+potassium) alloy (which is used in some molten salt reactors, but not this one). And indeed this reactor design uses LiF (Lithiumfluoride). However, LiF-based salts have the obvious drawback of their high melting points (pure LiF 840 °C, FLiBe 460 °C).
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- griffinkelly 8y agoI'm not an expert in this at all, but a friend of mine from college is; he's working at Argonne National Lab doing liquid sodium research for nuclear reactors--so I know enough as you would talking to a guy over beers about his job. As said above, the chance of a meltdown is slim as sodium is a solid at room temp, therefore you don't have to worry about it ever boiling off. It would have prevented a Fukushima type meltdown, but sodium is extremely reactive and had the sodium touched water, you would have had huge explosions. Their test loop in Argonne had to go through extreme welding checks to prevent possible humidity from getting in. Salt also has better heat transfer properties than water. Interestingly, research in this area really stagnated, and its only recently gotten attention. The US went all in on water due to the nuclear navy.
- DennisP 8y agoThat Argonne reactor uses molten sodium, which explodes when it touches water. The open-sourced design uses molten salt, which is the very stable stuff you probably have in a shaker on your kitchen table.
- jerkstate 8y agoI just checked and my table salt is solid, but then again it's winter time here.
- chinathrow 8y agoSo it's open source but patent encumbered? How well does that go together?
- syntaxing 8y agoYeah, I'm confused about that as well. Are these defensive filings? Are they going to do what Tesla did with their patents?! So many questions!
- captainbland 8y agoI guess pretty good if you live somewhere where intellectual property laws are only loosely enforced.
- colechristensen 8y agoA basic intent of patents is the "open sourcing" of design. You get a limited-time monopoly on your invention in exchange for publicly publishing how it works so others can use it when your patent expires (or before then others can use it by coming to a licensing agreement). There could be a movement to give patents a much better name and work as intended for the public good, unlikely as it sounds.
- asdsad1234 8y agoOpen sourcing your design gives other people a chance to work on your project, improve it. If you design gains traction then you will earn way more from patents.
- kragen 8y agoThis is based on a casual misunderstanding of the meaning of the term "open source". It does not merely mean, as the name suggests, that the source code is available; rather, it means that fairly broad rights to study, use, copy, and modify the source code are granted to the general public. You can correct your misunderstanding by reading the Open Source Definition, written by the group of people who coined the term "open source," immediately after they coined it, to clarify what they meant: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd Patents, on the contrary, specifically deprive the general public of rights they otherwise enjoy, granting a monopoly on them to the "inventor" (or rather the assignee), in exchange, as you note, for publication. They do, as you say, have one thing in common with open source, but in their principal characteristics, they are precisely the opposite of open source, both in theory and in practice.
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- agumonkey 8y agoI chuckled at that thought of `git clone energy`
- paulcnichols 8y agoI think this a great example of why the “great filter” is ahead of us. Our quest for knowledge seems to grow faster than the dampening of our urge for violence.
- pjc50 8y agoCould someone look up what material is being used for the molten salt plumbing itself please? I believe corrosion of these is one of the key issues that's so far prevented their viability.
- sgc 8y agoThere are a number of molten salt solar concentrators in operation. I think materials science has overcome the hurdle.
- acidburnNSA 8y agoI'm a reactor designer and I love the idea of open-source reactor design. It's a wonderful way to add some longevity beyond typical congressional funding cycles to these long-term reactor projects. The national labs may have 2 years of funding on gas-cooled reactors, but then mothball those and move to sodium-cooled reactors, and so forth. The lack of continuity is leads to lack of momentum which leads to stagnation. People even forget stuff and have to rediscover it years later. Also the nuclear industry is small and struggling. Open-source may enable collaboration on a new level that could be really exciting. Th problem so far is that the nuclear industry is really secretive. We like to think we have the best design, and all other designs are goofy. We like to patent things and protect secrets. The nuclear industry started in secrecy, developed in secrecy, and still has a lot of it. But it's struggling so much with cheap natural gas and popular intermittent renewables that it's kind of a do or die situation. Open source is a brilliant step. All that said, reactor projects don't run themselves. Transatomic shut down and open-sourced their design. For it to go anywhere, it needs dozens of well-funded or otherwise highly engaged people managing the project. Nuclear builds are about as complex as projects come and simply open sourcing it won't go far. So the next step here is for the nukes to agree on a particular open source design, fill in a business plan, and start going. In any case it's exciting times.
- stcredzero 8y agoThe problem so far is that the nuclear industry is really secretive. We like to think we have the best design, and all other designs are goofy. We like to patent things and protect secrets. The nuclear industry started in secrecy, developed in secrecy, and still has a lot of it. This is precisely the condition much of the software industry was in, when Stallman came up with Free Software. You could s/nuclear/software/ and the above would have been mostly true. So maybe Open Source is what's needed here.
- Cyph0n 8y agoUsing open source software is nothing like building a reactor based on an open source design...
- vortico 8y agoI imagine this isn't compatible with this open-source license. https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause-No-Nuclear-License.html https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause-No-Nuclear-License.ht...
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- slavik81 8y agoThat's not an open source license. The 6th defining criteria of an open source license is "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor." (https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd)
- vortico 8y agoYou're absolutely correct. Looks like the SPDX license list contains nonfree licenses as well.
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- phit_ 8y agocontext: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/transatomic-to-shutter-its-nuclear-reactor-plans-make-its-technology-public https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/transatomic-to-...
- abalone 8y agoWow, I remember lots of buzz on HN about Transatomic a few years ago and did not realize how much they had to backtrack on their initial claims: - From 75X electricity per ton of uranium all the way down to 2X - No longer re-using spent fuel What happened? And are the competing startups using molten salt doing any better?
- DennisP 8y agoTransatomic claimed to get as much energy from uranium as a fast reactor, without actually being a fast reactor. I never understood how that could be possible and wasn't surprised when it turned out it wasn't. Other MSR startups are doing fine. Elysium, Moltex, and Terrapower's MSR actually are fast reactors. Terrestrial Energy and Thorcon aren't making those claims in the first place. Terrestrial Energy especially is making great progress with regulators.
- thomas 8y agoMy brain read “Malden salt reactor”
- HillaryBriss 8y agoi'm gonna get a used Mac Pro on Ebay, gut it and build one of these inside
- DanCarvajal 8y agoI totally read the title as "Morton Salt".
- senectus1 8y agohow liquid is molten salt?
- jws 8y agoIf I’m reading the charts right in https://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.7343.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.7343.pdf the the salts they are documenting are in the range of whole milk, cold water, and hot water. But there is no better than a 50-50 chance that I’m interpreting that correctly.
- johnNash05 8y agoCan you send me this as an image file as I am unable to open PDF for some reason. You can use this converter: https://www.coolutils.com/TotalPDFConverter https://www.coolutils.com/TotalPDFConverter
- peter_retief 8y agoBrilliant idea, I hope your concept flies. Surely its time for real open science to prosper and the pseudo nonsense science to get restricted to political narratives
- snow_mac 8y agoDon't let the North Koreans or Iranians or any other bad actors see this... It will be nukes for every madman in the world
- m0llusk 8y agoThis could be a good start, but it also seems to be lacking in some critical areas. Existing molten salt reactors have found the molten salt to be more corrosive than expected. This means that components in contact with the flow of molten salt may need extensive engineering for safe operations. Given the history of unexpected leaks it seems there also need to be precautions to avoid and limit leaks and also to respond to leaks when they do occur. On top of all of this one of the subtle problems with nuclear power is the sheer amount of precautions that need to be taken for reasonably safe operation begin to eat away at the efficiency of the whole operation. Just how efficient such a reactor might be over its operational lifetime is an extremely important question that is also not addressed yet.
- wolfv 8y agofrom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatomic_Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatomic_Power In 2018 the company announced that it would be winding down and open source its intellectual property.[5] The company discovered that in 2016 it had made errors in its early analysis and realised that the design couldn't consume nuclear waste. [6]
- abhinav_1941 8y agonice one
- abhinav_1941 8y agoyeah dont let the koreans see this