🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE: Could molten salt reactors might just turn nuclear power into the greenest energy source on the planet?
But, as nuclear engineer Leslie Dewan points out, this explosion is also something of a throwback to the post–World War II era. “Nuclear power technology was incredibly new,” says Dewan, who in 2011 cofounded one of the first of the molten salt start-ups, Transatomic Power in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a time of blue-sky thinking, she says, “where they were trying many, many different types of technologies, running experiments, building and prototyping.
Fission is at the heart of nuclear energy production. Fission happens when a free neutron slams into an unstable atomic nucleus and shatters it into two or more “fission products”: lighter elements such as krypton and barium that cluster around the middle of the periodic table. Thanks to Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2, this process also transforms a tiny bit of the original nucleus’s mass into an immense amount of energy.came in.
At the same time, designers were trying out different types of coolant: the fluid that circulates through the reactor core, absorbs the heat being produced by the fission reactions, and carries it out to where the heat can do something useful like running a standard steam turbine to generate electricity. Some opted for ordinary water: an abundant, familiar substance that carries a lot of heat per unit of volume.
Unless the operators managed to restore the coolant flow within a few hours, that trapped fission-product heat would send temperatures soaring past the 325°C mark, turn the water into high-pressure steam, and reduce the solid fuel to a radioactive puddle melting its way through the reactor vessel floor. Soon after, the vessel would likely rupture and send a pressurized plume of fission products into the atmosphere.
Better still, the molten core would trap fission products far more securely than in solid-fueled reactors. Caesium, iodine and all the rest would chemically bind with the salts the instant they were created. And since the salts could not boil away in even the worst accident, these fission products would be held in place instead of being free to drift off and take up radioactive residence in people’s bones and thyroid glands.
The cleaned-up fuel would then be circulated back into the reactor, which could continue running at full power the whole time. This process would not only keep the fission products from building up until they snuffed out the chain reaction — a problem for any reactor, since these elements tend to absorb a lot of neutrons — but it would also enhance the safety of molten salt still further. Not even the worst accident can contaminate the countryside with fission products that aren’t there.
Radioactivity forms when an unstable atomic nucleus sheds its excess energy by firing off a high-speed particle. This allows the nucleus to “decay,” or settle into a more stable form. The type of particle that’s emitted depends on the isotope involved, but primarily is alpha, beta or gamma. The rate of decay depends on the isotope’s half-life: the time it takes for half the original sample of nuclei to decay.
That helped cement the already declining interest in breeder reactors, which made no sense without reprocessing plants to extract the new-made plutonium, and left the world with a nasty disposal problem. Instead of storing spent fuel underwater for a few years, engineers were now supposed to isolate it for something like 240,000 years, thanks to the 24,100-year half-life of plutonium-239.
The reactor’s purification system would likewise offer a solution to the spent fuel issue. It would strip out the reaction-quenching fission products from the fuel almost as quickly as they formed, which would potentially allow the reactor to run for decades at a stretch with only an occasional injection of fresh fuel to replace what it burned. Some of that fuel could even come from today’s 300,000-ton backlog of spent solid fuel.
“The nuclear industry was not in an innovation frame of mind for 30 years,” says TerraPower’s Myhrvold. The molten salt idea was definitely on the Gen IV list. Schönfeldt remembers getting excited about it as early as 2008. At MIT, Dewan and her fellow graduate student Mark Massie first encountered the idea in 2010, and were intrigued by the reactors’ inherent safety. “We both became nuclear engineers because we’re environmentalists,” says Dewan. Besides, her classmate had grown up watching his native West Virginia being devastated by mountaintop removal mining.
This industrial heat is now produced almost entirely by burning coal, oil or natural gas, says Gilleland. So if you could replace all that with carbon-free nuclear heat, he says, “you could hit the carbon problem in a very striking way.”
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