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You're referring to the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. That was a promising experiment, but the MSRE had thermal power output of 8 megawatts while the "can" in
by philipkglass 5y ago
You're referring to the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. That was a promising experiment, but the MSRE had thermal power output of 8 megawatts while the "can" in the Thorcon design is supposed to output 557 MWth -- 70 times more. The MSRE also operated for a total of 11555 hours full-power-output equivalent, about 1.3 years, whereas these reactor cans are supposed to run for 4 years at full power before replacement. There are reasons to believe that the physics are fine, but there are a lot of things other than physics that can impair an energy technology's journey from laboratory to industry. Still, I wish them luck.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment...
- NumberWangMan 5y agoI think the neat thing about this is that they're starting with a design that, even if something goes a bit screwy, is still safe. They're obviously doing their best to design it well, but also relying on actual tests to see how well it performs in practice, which is something that you can't really do with the nuclear regulatory environment in the USA, if I understand correctly. And part of this document[1] says "if it breaks, send it back". The design allows for replacing a faulty "can" entirely rather than trying to repair it. [1] https://thorconpower.com/docs/domsr20180119.pdf https://thorconpower.com/docs/domsr20180119.pdf