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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: 4, Interesting) by Sourcery42 on Monday June 21 2021, @04:47PM
You're right. I'm surprised a statement like that got past lawyers and PR people. It certainly wouldn't have from a US based company. Language like that will scare the herd, but humans are notoriously bad at assessing risks.
I've seen enough layers of protection analyses and qualitative risk assessment to know there is no such thing as zero risk. You can make processes where the risk of a catastrophic event is exceedingly low in the life of the facility. Without changing the process, you do that by adding layers of protection, and every additional layer tends to be substantially more complicated (both difficult to maintain and interact with) and expensive than the one that came before it. You can also develop processes that are interlocked six ways from Sunday and regulated to death such that they're very difficult to operate as well as terrible to maintain, aka the US nuclear industry.
I like their approach a lot. They've focused on developing technology to support an inherently safer process, as opposed to trying to engineering risk out of an inherently higher risk technology. Their consequence of failure is a radioactive rock to remediate. Still sucks, but its just a clicking hot rock. Contrast that with a traditional reactor that can spew a radioactive plume over a huge area or meltdown Fukushima style and leak its radioactive water; either is a much more negative and widespread consequence of failure.