The molten salt reactor concept advocated by Alvin Weinberger, the former director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is back.

"A lot of money, engineering, and hardware are developing salt systems." These companies employ hundreds of employees and are committed to pilot-scale fission and fusion projects that produce clean, carbon-free energy.

This is a message recently sent by Charles Forsberg, the chief research scientist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), retired ORNL researcher and engineer, to the friends of ORNL. The only two molten salt reactors ever built and operated are located at ORNL.

Forsberg put most of his speeches on the Hermes Salt Reactor that Kairos Power plans to build in the East Tennessee Science Park, the old K-25 base in Oak Ridge. The 35-megawatt Hermes thermal test reactor will employ 55 employees and is scheduled to start producing low-cost heat (but not generating electricity) in 2026.

About 100 million U.S. dollars will be invested in low-power demonstration reactors. According to its recent webinar, Kairos Power's ultimate goal is to build a commercial power plant consisting of four salt reactors. By the 2030s, when utilities will phase out power plants that burn carbon-emission fossil fuels, this undetermined power plant will generate 140 megawatts each.

He pointed out that the company, headquartered in the old aircraft hangar in Alameda, California, submitted a preliminary safety analysis report (PSAR) on the Hermes test reactor to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in September as its application for construction permits. Part of the certificate. Construction may start in 2023.

Forsberg attributed the origin of the Hermes reactor concept to advances in ORNL programs, which aimed to develop two types of nuclear reactors-molten salt reactors (MSR) and high temperature gas-cooled reactors (HTGR). The coolant of MSR is liquid salt, while the coolant of HTGR is helium.

Kairos Power's planned fluoride salt-cooled high temperature reactor (FHR) at Oak Ridge is based on the liquid salt coolant tested in the MSR program and the solid nuclear fuel pebbles developed for the HTGR program.

The idea that led to the FHR concept originated in 2002 for Forsberg (at ORNL at the time, now at MIT), Per Peterson (University of California, Berkeley, now at Kairos Power) and Paul Pickard of Sandia National Laboratory (now at retire). They participated in the Fourth Generation International Forum meeting as a member of its Miscellaneous Reactor Subcommittee, which aims to propose and study the concept of alternative nuclear reactors.

They published a paper in the journal Nuclear Technology in 2003, stating that FHR, which can achieve high temperatures under low pressure, can produce hydrogen and electricity more efficiently and safely than other reactor concepts.

The Hermes reactor will have spherical fuel pebbles the size of a table tennis ball, based on the TRISO (Triple Structure Isotropic) fuel developed by ORNL researchers for the HTGR program. In each pebble, coated uranium nitride fuel particles (19.5% rich in uranium-235) are nested inside an advanced manufacturing silicon carbide structure, covered with graphite. The fuel pebbles are designed to contain fission products.

According to Forsberg, Kairos Power (founded by UC Berkeley graduate student Mike Laufer and also CEO) currently employs more than 200 full-time employees, 90% of whom are engineers, as well as many part-time employees, consultants and contractors in its location. At facilities in Alameda and Albuquerque, New Mexico, many people are designing, testing, and assembling a large number of hardware components for the Hermes reactor.

"If the Hermes reactor succeeds," Forsberg said, "we will build a commercial molten salt reactor power plant, because Kairos Power will prove that FHR and fluorine-containing liquid salt, building materials, pumps, power systems, heat exchangers, and meters are affordable and technically affordable. The risk is low."

He pointed out that Kairos (the word means "appropriate or appropriate moment") is one of the few companies that has the financial resources to develop and deploy energy-producing salt reactors. The other American company he mentioned was TerraPower, a company founded by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

China’s SINAP interacted with ORNL researchers and is building a molten salt reactor. It is expected that the reactor will soon begin to operate with a fuel cycle in which thorium is converted into uranium-233 fuel through neutron absorption.

According to reports, Kairos will receive a $629 million share award from the US Department of Energy's Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program to fund risk mitigation and support the development of the Hermes reactor for seven years. The company is cooperating with Materion Corp., ORNL, DOE's Idaho National Laboratory and Electric Power Research Institute. Kairos also signed a cooperative development agreement with the Tennessee River Basin Authority to cooperate in the development and demonstration of the Hermes reactor.

Almost 70% of nuclear power plants in the world have pressurized water reactors, which were co-invented by Weinberg. They run on solid uranium fuel and are cooled by water under pressure. Forsberg said that for a variety of reasons, salt reactors, such as the FHR to be built in Oak Ridge, are more efficient and safer than light water reactors (LWR).

"The HTGR fuel first developed at ORNL can operate at higher temperatures, and liquid salt has a higher cooling capacity than alternative coolants such as water, sodium, and helium," Forsberg said. Therefore, he added that the salt reactor can provide higher temperature heat to industrial customers, such as those involved in chemical synthesis and hydrogen production.

Through passive decay heat cooling, salt reactors are safer than light water reactors.

"Because the fluoride salt has a boiling point of 1,400 degrees Celsius, you can't melt the FHR reactor, and you can't have a core accident like other reactors," Forsberg asserted. He added that because the MSR system operates at low pressure, there is no need for the containment system used in pressurized reactors, which significantly reduces capital costs.

Pebble bed FHR is like ORNL's original MSR in 1955. It is designed to connect to jet engines of the discontinued nuclear aircraft program and can provide high-temperature nuclear heat for today's popular combined cycle gas turbine power plants.

"This capability allows power plants to operate at base load or use hydrogen or biofuels to increase peak power generation," Forsberg said when describing the nuclear air-Brayton cycle. "In the peak power generation mode, the added fuel can be converted into electricity with an efficiency of 70%."

Kairos Power's FHR will use a salt containing fluorine, lithium and beryllium called Flibe salt coolant. Forsberg said that Flibe will be used as the "clean salt" in the Hermes reactor; this coolant will not dissolve uranium and plutonium. TerraPower has partnered with Southern Corporation, a major utility company in Atlanta, and plans to use it later in the decade. The chlorinated salt coolant is used in the molten chlorination rapid reactor.

"Advanced salt systems, such as molten chlorination rapid reactors, burn 25% of uranium, while light water reactors burn only 1% of uranium," he said, noting that such salt reactors will therefore produce less nuclear waste. .

Forsberg said that lithium-containing fluorine-lithium salts will be used in the coating for the fusion plasma break-even experiment that is planned to be carried out by the end of this decade. It will be built by Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a spin-off company of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which recently collaborated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Plasma Science and Fusion to create the world's strongest fusion magnet. He added that the flibe blanket in the proposed experimental fusion device called SPARC will absorb fast neutrons from the burning plasma, generate heat, and convert lithium 7 into fusion fuel tritium.

"If the experiment is successful," he added, "the total output energy will be more than twice the input energy."

In the fight to slow devastating climate change, safer, more efficient, more affordable, and carbon-free fission and fusion power plants may be required, and molten salt may be a key ingredient.

This article originally appeared in Oakridger: The origin of the Kairos Power project's test reactor? ORNL

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