SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Mass-produced floating nuclear reactors use super-safe molten salt fuel
Copenhagen startup Seaborg Technologies has raised an eight-figure sum of Euros to start building a fascinating new type of cheap, portable, flexible and super-safe nuclear reactor. The size of a shipping container, these Compact Molten Salt Reactors will be rapidly mass-manufactured in their thousands, then placed on floating barges to be deployed worldwide – on timelines that will smash paradigms in the energy industry.
[...] [Perhaps] the most impactful change to the business model is Seaborg's proposal to install these reactors on barges, and float them offshore rather than buying up land to develop nuclear power plants. There are several advantages here. For starters, you can manufacture them in bulk at a single facility. Seaborg is looking at Korean shipyards, which are already closely and efficiently connected to supply chains with enormous production capacity.
"If you want us to build not one reactor to start with, but a thousand, we could start by building a thousand," Schönefeldt told Radio Spectrum. "That will take, like, three or four years on these shipyards. So it's basically unroofed in how fast you can scale it."
These barges can be moved just about anywhere on the planet, either moored offshore or on large or small rivers, depending on how big a reactor it is. There's virtually no site preparation required; it's fully self-contained and very easy to connect to a power grid. Seaborg estimates it can service 95 percent of the world's population this way, putting basically no land requirements on a baseload or load-following power station up to a healthy 600 MW, which could supply nearly 100,000 homes.
Some imagineering required.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 21 2021, @04:06PM (1 child)
well, in a sane world we'd have no wars and a working world do council with teeth:
nuclear stuff would go (binding) something like this:
you can build/develop nuclear power if you have a population over 160 million.
you have all raw material and tech yourself.
you don't locate them nearer then 20 km to any border (still debating!)
you cannot locate them next to rivers that cross into other countries dowstream -aka- you own the river from pollu.. err cooling water draw-in site all the way to ocean.
...
some footnotes about max. radiation venting when "opening the can for refuelling" and overpressure from cheaply made fuelrods ... errr... normal wear and tear (which everybody likes to pooh pooh about at session).
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PinkyGigglebrain on Monday June 21 2021, @08:56PM
a few FYIs:
MSR reactors are under zero pressure when inactive, and even when running the pressure isn't that much higher than ambient. The normal operating pressure of the your car's radiator is higher.
MSRs don't use fuel rods, thats what makes them so safe. The fuel salts,usually a metal Fluoride, are liquid at very high temperatures and if there is a leak the fual will harden and seal the leak instead of causing a massive lose of coolant. Also, in order to maintain critical mass needed for the self sustaining nuclear fission you have to keep all the "active" fuel in a container that is the right shape, short and fat, so the neutrons generated have a good chance of triggering another fission event before escaping the core. So if you were to drain the fuel into a couple of tall thin tanks the reactions shut down, same thing if core was cracked open somehow and all the fuel poured out, it would spread out until the reactions heating it stopped, then it would solidify into a mass of non fissioning, easy (comparativly) to clean up solids. One of the most common saftey features of an MSR core is a drain port at the bottom of the core and "freeze plug" made of constantly cooled fuel salts. The plug needs to be activly cooled to prevent it from melting letting the rest of the fuel drain out. So, if the core does manage to over heat or the cooling system loses power the fan keeping the freeze plug stops working and the core ends up draining into a set of tanks that are the wrong shap to sustain the reactions. The core shuts down. On the MSR test reactors at Oakridge the operators would shut down reactors by just turning off the coolant to the freeze plug and letting it melt. Then the core drain into the holding tanks before the staff went home home for the week ends.
What made the accidents at the solid fuel Light Water Thermal Reactors like Fukushima and Chernobyl so disastrous was that when there was a loss of coolant the solid fuel rods melted and turned into mass of STILL fissioning solid fuel that is much more radioactive than the core mass of a inactive MSR. Another danger of the LWTR design is that the coolant water has to be kept under about 70-100PSI (car radiator is at ~15PSI) to keep it from boiling at he temperatures the core is operating at. So when there is even a small leak the water goes instantly to steam and the core loses it's coolant. Like taking the radiator cap off an over heated engine. That doesn't happen with MSRs.
There are several other reactor designs that have similar passive safety features, like the CANDU and Helium cooled Pebble Bed reactors, in both of them the coolant is also the moderator that allows for self sustaining fission. If they lose coolant the core passively shuts down.
Your probably asking your self "if MSRs are so good why aren't we using them already?"
Lots of reasons, a big one being that the US Navy spent the time and money to develop the LWTR design for their submarines and ships. For those application the LWTR is an acceptable choice. When the commercial interests wanted to develop nuclear energy for power plants they just scaled up the Navy's design instead of spending the time and money to develop one of the safer reactor design options. And then the US/Europe implemented regulations and restrictions that pretty much locked out any reactor design EXCEPT the LWTR. The rest of the world followed suit simply because it was the cheaper path to nuclear power. Thankfully some of those restrictions have been revised.removed in the USA and MSR concepts are now being developed and invested in. It should be noted that China is currently leading development of the MSR concept [nextbigfuture.com].
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."