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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: 5, Interesting) by PinkyGigglebrain on Monday June 21 2021, @05:49PM
House yes, car no. (the reactor would be too big for it, but you could charge your electric car while it's at home.)
You could build a self sustaining reactor core with only a few kilos of fissionable fuel. A MSR big enough to power your home wold be about size of a large refrigerator or small car and would probably not need to be refueled for a decade or more if you picked the core was large enough and used the right fuel chain. I'd recommend Thorium, it is cheap, abundant, doesn't produce much waste, wouldn't need refueling for potentially decades and is less regulated than Uranium so it would be easier to get.
The only real technical problem you would need to deal with would be cooling, not the reactor itself but the steam that drives the turbine /generators. If you have a place you can dump the waste heat and re condense your working fluid your all set. A large pond would be perfect, you could even raise Tilapia [wikipedia.org] in it since they love warm water.
MSRs [wikipedia.org] have some wonderful passive safety features that make them a great choice for home power plants.
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