20 ms·
Transatomic Power
- Maxels 11y agoSo this is a company with a pretty ui that is advocating the same thing Kirk Sorensen has been advocating for a few years now. I know every time this molten salt vs light water reactor debate comes up, people much smarter than I talk about how the salt is corrosive and there are currently no viable solutions to deal with this. Is there anyone out there smarter than I that can explain whether this company is doing anything different, or if it is just sexy and VC backed?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- apendleton 11y agoThey say the modified Hastelloy-N from the Oak Ridge experiment is good enough, though I suppose people who disagreed with that claim when it was presented by previous MSR advocates would still disagree now. They do also mention in their white paper, though, that it may eventually be possible to replace some of the Hastelloy-N with ceramic composites, which might be better still.
- beefman 11y agoThe zirconium hydride moderator is a genuine innovation, allowing much higher core power density than LFTR, and higher conversion ratios without HEU (assuming their modeling is correct). But like LFTR, you've got loose FPs all over the place and it's hard to see that being acceptable in anything like the current culture. Meanwhile, it's hard to see any benefit from MSR. Edit: There will likely be all sorts of materials issues. None of them damning. I'd worry more about FPs, tritium fluoride, etc. than the salt itself.
- jessaustin 11y agoWild guess on "FP": fission product?
- beefman 11y agoYep. (Sorry, I was on mobile earlier)
- DennisP 11y agoWhy would the fission products be "all over the place?" They're contained in the reactor core, just like any other reactor.
- beefman 11y agoNope. Gaseous FPs are continuously removed and stored somewhere. Of course they require cooling while being stored. Any mishap releasing even a tiny fraction of them would of course be harmless, but in the present culture would result in a global panic. Other FPs in the salt are circulated out of the core and through a heat exchanger. Some ongoing actinide fission there too. Tiny defects in heat exchangers handling plain water currently cause reactors worth billions to be abandoned (e.g. SONGS). Some FPs will plate out and you'll need to replace plumbing periodically. That has to be done by robots because the pipes will be ultra-hot and deadly within minutes to anyone nearby. For what benefit? You improve the fuel cycle by a factor of 50. But the fuel cycle is < 10% of the costs and material flows of nuclear plant. So yes, online FP separation is something a mature fission-based civilization would have. But it is not clear how it helps us, other than to provide a focal point for a new culture to form (which may be a substantial if illegitimate benefit, admittedly).
- DennisP 11y agoWell ok that's true. On the other hand, removing fission products means you have a lot less decay heat to deal with upon reactor shutdown. Dump the fuel to a tank without moderators and walk away. ThorCon has an interesting approach for dealing with plating and so on: their design has reactor cores that can be easily swapped out. When one's ready for maintenance they just cart it away, let it cool for several years, then deal with it. http://thorconpower.com http://thorconpower.com
- alexhill 11y agoThere are certainly solutions to deal with it by designing for leaks as an expected maintenance problem, though preventing them would obviously be preferable. There are numerous operating molten salt reactors around the world, so I guess it depends what you mean by viable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Breeder_reactor_development_and_notable_breeder_reactors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Breeder_reactor...
- InclinedPlane 11y agoNote that this is note exactly the same thing, Sorensen has been advocating a Thorium fuel cycle, these folks seem to be advocating a Uranium fuel cycle.
- dtap 11y agoThe bigger problem than the corrosion is the inability to inspect the system in an efficient way. In a regulated nuclear industry, not knowing the status of the system means it will not be allowed.
- msandford 11y agoGiven that the system has intrinsic safety built in, I'm not sure why regular inspection would be required. Perhaps the NRC does require regular inspections for existing plants, but none of those existing plants are failsafe are they? If something starts to go wrong, it can snowball very quickly into a much worse situation. With a MSR the worst-case scenario (short of terrorism) is that you empty into the dump tank until you sort the problem out and restart. If you make the entire facility's floor the dump tank then inspections are going to be rather redundant. Except perhaps to ensure that the dump tank is intact. But that can be made fairly easy I think.
- Gibbon1 11y agoI think there is a tendency to think of fuel rods as a problem rather than the solution to a problem, which is raw spent fuel is nasty. The cheapest and easiest way to deal with spent fuel is to store it for decades while the worst of the radio-isotopes decay. Fuel rod technology allows you to do that, a molten salt design doesn't. I'm okay with this argument but is seems to bother people that you can't recover spent fuel now rather than waiting 25 years so they cast about for solutions to what is really a psychological annoyance. See the quest for reusable launch systems like the space shuttle.
- BendertheRobot 11y agoThe cheapest and easiest way to deal with spent fuel is to store it for decades That is insane. The best way to deal with waste is to recycle it.
- jccooper 11y agoWaiting for the hottest stuff to go away is part of the recycling process. It's just a very slow part.
- yc1010 11y agoI wish Transatomic all the best but they have an uphill battle :( to convince a populace for whom unfortunately "nuclear power" brings up an image Homer Simpson. aside: I think Greenpeace also has a lot to answer for with their campaign against nuclear power. Thanks to them my children can look forward to a world where a coal plant is build every week and fossil fuel fueled climate change is a certainty.
- pavlov 11y agoHomer Simpson and the three-eyed fish graced TV screens in 1989. In the preceding ten years, the world had seen a sequence of serious nuclear accidents: Three Mile Island, Sellafield, Chernobyl... The smear campaign was accomplished by the companies and nations that built and maintained those shoddy, dangerous plants. Blaming Greenpeace makes as much sense as blaming them for climate change.
- opo 11y ago>...In the preceding ten years, the world had seen a sequence of serious nuclear accidents: Three Mile Island, Sellafield, Chernobyl... Considering that it would be illegal to build a Chernobyl style plant in any other country rather than the Soviet Union, it probably shouldn't be on your list. >...The smear campaign was accomplished by the companies and nations that built and maintained those shoddy, dangerous plants. But even including the deaths from Chernobyl, nuclear power has been safer over the last 60 years than all other types of mass energy production: coal, natural gas or hydroelectric. >...Blaming Greenpeace makes as much sense as blaming them for climate change. I think the point the OP was making was that by smearing nuclear (a power source that doesn't put CO2 into the atmosphere from generating power) the alternative has usually been to build a natural gas or coal plant that does put CO2 into the atmosphere when it generates power.
- justatdotin 11y agoif only there was like, some alternative to coal and uranium ...
- apendleton 11y agoI wish they would be more up-front about the specifics of their technical proposal and how it compares to other proposals, since it was not at all obvious to me at first glance. What I think they're actually proposing (correct me if I'm wrong): a uranium molten salt fast breeder reactor that drives a steam turbine. So, much more ambitious than what's currently on the market, with better fuel utilization. As compared to, say, the Flibe Energy/Kirk Sorensen/LFTR crowd, it's mixed: it sounds like these folks have some new innovations around moderators and salts, and the stuff about consuming existing waste is compelling, but they're sticking with a uranium fuel cycle rather than thorium (though it sounds like they're getting proliferation resistance in other ways), and they're sticking with a steam turbine vs. proposed gas turbines that could yield some more efficiency and compactness in proposed thorium MSR designs. EDIT: looks like I might have been wrong about the neutron temperature; their white paper says thermal, not fast. EDIT 2: the white paper actually has all kinds of great stuff in it, now that I've read the rest: http://www.transatomicpower.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/transatomic-white-paper.pdf http://www.transatomicpower.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/t... ... In particular, it sounds like this is the first planned design, but they offer some potential future variations. They say this design could be adapted to Thorium fairly straightforwardly, but advocate uranium at least initially because of advantages in the existence of a supply chain around it and the availability of uranium spent nuclear fuel. They also mention Brayton cycle gas turbines as a possible future improvement, among others.
- adamcanady 11y agoTo get this straight, when they indicate 96% utilization of the uranium, they don't mean converting 96% of the total energy to electricity, as it is assumed that some will be lost along the way, right? If the above statement is true, what happens to the remaining 4% of the energy in the uranium? Is it just not effective to have it in the molten salt, so the entire batch is replaced? Or does this happen 'on the fly' so to speak?
- simcop2387 11y agoI think it means that they'll be using up 96% of the uranium but the 4% is unusable with this method. That the concentration is down low enough that they're unable to extract energy from it at that point.
- alexggordon 11y agoIt's always interesting to see how these companies can progress in a year[0]. Regardless though, for those curious, there's a great presentation by the CEO, Dr. Leslie Dewan on what TPT does differently[1]. The big selling point for their Molten Salt Reactor (compared to others) is that they designed it to be able to use low-enriched Uranium (fresh fuel, as opposed to spent fuel) and nuclear waste. The downside of this is that it can't produce the same volume of electricity that a normal nuclear plant can, but it's significantly safer, and can't be used to produce weapons grade uranium. For those interested in MSR's this serves as a good starting point too[2]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7922216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7922216 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UXXwWOImm8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UXXwWOImm8 [2] http://www.whatisnuclear.com/reactors/msr.html http://www.whatisnuclear.com/reactors/msr.html
- aout 11y agoSo ok, the website is cool and the technology is said to be something like 99.9999% better. This might be a stupid question but I'm no nuclear engineer not a specialist about chemistry or physics but I wonder why a such "beautiful" idea would not be already used. I've read the related wikipedia article about Molten Salt Reactors and I understand there are several problems about the technology: mostly corrosion and embrittlement. So now I find myself asking this: did they fix those problems? The website copy suggests so. Can somebody explain how? I couldn't figure it out. edit: clearly the team and company have quite legit credentials, MIT nuclear department etc... they must know what they're talking about. I just want to know if they've given details about the solution.
- Difwif 11y agoFrom my understanding it comes down to part politics, part feasibility. When nuclear power first started becoming popular light water reactors were easier to make and their fuel/byproducts aligned with the production of nuclear weapons. As years went on regulation and inertia did a great job of cementing us into our old ways. Today, advances in (material) science have made producing molten salt reactors more feasible. They also seem more attractive now that the public is generally very adverse to nuclear waste and power plant failures. I'm paraphrasing what was explained to me so someone that knows more please chime in. Kirk Sorensen has been a major advocate of molten-salt reactors and gave a great Google tech talk on the subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbyr7jZOllI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbyr7jZOllI
- nosuchthing 11y agoI'm assuming the "Molten Salt Reactor" method is the same principle as the "Sodium Reactor" that was experimented with around 50 years ago? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment
- etangent 11y agoSodium reactor is an example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_metal_cooled_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_metal_cooled_reactor. Molten salt seems to be a different type https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment
- Fiahil 11y agoI remember a TED talk close to this subject by Taylor Wilson in 2013. http://www.ted.com/talks/taylor_wilson_my_radical_plan_for_small_nuclear_fission_reactors http://www.ted.com/talks/taylor_wilson_my_radical_plan_for_s...
- nosuchthing 11y agoI'm optimistic with what "modern technology and materials" can improve upon previous attempts [1]. Yet I hope they drastically over engineer their safety standards given historical failures. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment [2] Fukashima, ect
- ThomPete 11y ago"Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value." R. Buckminster Fuller
- outworlder 11y agoI am not a nuclear physicist, but isn't this concept proven and well-understood already? Now, a sales pitch is indeed a missing piece. Given the regulations, the nuclear industry is stuck with power plants whose designs date from decades back. I didn't see anything about handling the waste heat though. Dumping it into rivers would be atrocious. Ingesting large amounts of water to use evaporation towers is also environmentally terrible. I hope they thought of that. I am all for the responsible use of nuclear power. Greenpeace and the like made so much noise that the public is afraid of anything called "nuclear". The media doesn't help, either. The result is far more deaths every year due to coal and other fossil burning. Let's do more solar and wind, sure, microgrids and other cool stuff. Nuclear can provide the baseline power and power for power-hungry industries, such as aluminium refineries.
- shabble 11y agoWaste heat dissipation is a problem for all thermal power generation schemes. The use of CHP to provide residual heat for nearby residential heating/industrial use boosts the overall efficiency of the system, but with higher upfront costs.
- trhway 11y agothey don't need to prove that it would work - that is pretty well known. What they would need to prove for the idea to make any progress toward real-world implementation is that their good economy of neutrons isn't that good as to allow say to dissolve additional amount of U-238 (widely available to almost anybody anywhere) and get Pu-239 on the other end or any similar reaction :) Their ability to consume very low-enriched U-235 isn't an advantage here as the typical reactors necessity for the high-enrichment is what blocks and allow to identify weapons programs around the world.
- pheo 11y ago"Fast," "Breeder," or "Salt" reactors breed weapons grade fissionable material (Ie. Plutonium 239) from relatively un-enriched materials (Ie. Uranium 238 and Thorium). Fast reactors make nuclear weapons as byproduct. Thats why we don't use them.
- MichaelGG 11y agoYou're probably being downvoted for saying that reactors make nuclear weapons. They don't. They might be able to produce materials to build a weapon, but it's not like they pop out little bombs. Considering some folks equate "nuclear power plant problem" with "nuclear bomb explosion", this is a nontrivial distinction.
- DennisP 11y agoThe question though is whether the fissionable material is usable for weapons in any practical sense. In the Integral Fast Reactor, for example, you end up with a mixture of the four isotopes of plutonium. It's impossible to use that mixture for weapons, and it's much harder to isolate the Pu239 than it is to enrich natural uranium. In some thorium designs, the fissionable U233 (bred from thorium) is mixed with U232, which is also very hard to separate and makes the material unworkable for weapons. (However, this is not true of all thorium designs. Chemically separate the protactinium and it will decay to pure U233.) If you had one of the nonproliferating designs and were silly enough to attempt using it for weapons production, you would need much larger and more sophisticated enrichment facilities than if you just enriched natural uranium. If you get your startup fuel from other countries, you can forgo enrichment facilities entirely, making it very clear that you don't have a weapons program.
- Animats 11y agoHere's a good overview of the state of thorium reactors today.[1] The Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics has been talking about building a demo unit in Singapore to be operational in 2015, but that seems to have slipped to 2017.[2] The article glosses over a big issue - this type of reactor has to be hooked to a chemical plant which continually reprocesses the radioactive molten salt. Chemical plants for radioactive materials are historically a huge headache to operate. Many such plants are now toxic waste sites. With BWR and PWR reactors, the radioactive portion of the system is simple, with few moving parts, and the working fluid is water. More complex large reactor designs have a poor track record. Sodium reactors have sodium fires (Monju, in Japan, was shut down after one in 1995), helium-cooled reactors leak helium (Ft. St. Vrain was a real disappointment), and pebble bed reactors have pebble jams (there's one in Germany so jammed it can't be dismantled.) [1] http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/current-and-future-generation/thorium/ http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/current-and-future-generat... [2] http://www.ornl.gov/ornl/news/news-releases/2015/ornl-and-shanghai-institute-of-applied-physics-cooperate-on-development-of-salt-cooled-reactors http://www.ornl.gov/ornl/news/news-releases/2015/ornl-and-sh...
- DennisP 11y agoYou're correct since you specified thorium reactors, but it's also possible to build very simple non-breeding molten salt reactors running on uranium. Terrestrial Energy, for example, is working on one that's designed to reach production as soon as possible. Advantages include passive safety, no potential for hydrogen explosions, no high pressure containment, excellent nonproliferation, and reasonably high burnup. It's nowhere near what breeders are shooting for, but it's a good start.
- cmpb 11y agoSlightly off-topic, but you've got a double "and" in the "Lets be safe" section.
- joegaudet 11y agoIs it just me, or does the flashy website somehow make them seem less credible?
- tim333 11y agoI hated the website. The first thing I did was click on the Readability extension to try to make it readable in black and white.
- Twirrim 11y agoWhile it's neat to see more companies jumping on board, what they're looking at isn't really revolutionary, despite the polished PR on the website. There are lots of companies, research organisations etc working on molten salt reactors. Lots of them, including Oak Ridge National Lab (http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/01/07/nuclear-power-turns-to-salt/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/01/07/nuclear-po...). On the surface, this seems kind of like launching an IaaS cloud service and claiming you're introducing something new and innovative.
- chillydawg 11y agoThe more the merrier, imo. If they can do a better job at PR, marketing and "branding" than the more stilted organisations doing the same thing, then they can speed up the changing of public perceptions and speed up eventual adoption.
- jschwartzi 11y agoWell, it's not like there would only be room for one company on the market. The problem with nuclear power is fundamentally a marketing problem, and the winners in the market will be the companies that can successfully distance themselves from the disasters of the past. It's going to be less about fundamentally new technology and more about how well you can market yourself to people who associate nuclear power with Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi(which is anyone who hasn't studied the subject extensively). You're especially going to run into problems with the NIMBY crowd. Given their landing page I would have a modicum of faith that they understand this.
- JoachimS 11y agoWhat about Spallators? Are they being worked on seriously by anybody nowadays? I liked the idea of subcriticality and the low radioactive lifespans in the waste. But how efficient could the be? And related, is transmutation of waste being worked on? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_amplifier http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_amplifier
- auberonx 11y agoIn the absense of renewables, the promise of more efficient nuclear electricity production sounds great. It's just that this promise has been around since the 50s and instead we now have huge amounts of highly toxic nuclear waste. The potential of wind, especially in the States, is so significant and threatening to anyone stupid enough to invest their time in developing nuclear power plants at a time when the price for renewables has undercut nuclear and coal.
- Zardoz84 11y agoSo we shouldn't invest on ways to recycle nuclear waste, because they way is by nuclear reactors ?
- auberonx 11y agoThis video makes it all look a little too easy. The nuclear industry is with its back to the wall and for very good reasons. The core message here is: let's build more nuclear power plants and we can sort things out. We have been hearing those types of arguments for over 60 years. The technology has left us with huge amounts of incredibly toxic waste and recycling experts in France/UK/US still haven't been able to sort this out. So here are wonderboy and wondergirl telling us they sorted it out. Hm. Who doesn't like a good miracle.
- beyti 11y agoPeter Thiel in the investment, not suprised.
- madaxe_again 11y agoThorium msrs could be a panacea for humanity - but they won't get adopted, because nuclear weapons aren't a byproduct, and that's a drawback in the eyes of our bellicose political classes. Edit: you're welcome to downvote the truth, but it won't change it.
- tim333 11y agoThere are a lot of issues with Thorium apart from the weapons thing.
- joss82 11y agoWe had a fast breeder reactor here in France before, creating energy from nuclear waste. Oil/"green" lobbies made it to close: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix EDIT: And also terrorists and molten sodium.
- ptha 11y agoPerhaps something the countries signing on to the Global Apollo Programme[1] should be investing in. It's priorities are Renewable/Storage/Smart Grids, but I don't think we should be ruling anything out, if 2C is the target. [1] http://globalapolloprogramme.org/ http://globalapolloprogramme.org/
- Gravityloss 11y agoThis is the technical summary: "A lithium fluoride – uranium fluoride fuel salt, moderated with zirconium hydride, would allow our reactor to remain critical with a loading of used nuclear fuel."