This is good news, but not because the tech is a great way to replace current designs, though that too. It also happens to be a great way to consume all those urtanium spent fuel rods.
We should have gone there decades ago, and more correctly, we should have used thorium from the beginning. The fact is, we could have. so definately better late than never.
Ship board is sound as well as it allows use of sea water for the cooling end of the operating heat cycle.
Worldchanging Molten Salt Nuclear Energy
July 8, 2022 by Brian Wang
Many countries have built nuclear reactors and different nuclear technologies have been successfully commercialized over the past six decades. There will be multiple winners with new nuclear fission technology and new reactor designs.
The best new nuclear fission technology is molten salt nuclear. This is because reactors would be far more compact than current nuclear reactors. Molten salt reactors can be 20 to 100 times more compact for the same power generation level. If are building something 20 times smaller then you can usually build it much faster and at much lower cost.
Multiple new molten salt and pebble reactor designs will be built. There will be a competition to see which reactor designs will get scaled up to large numbers of units.
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Molten salt and pebble bed reactors will both be able to make walkaway safe reactors. This is because they will have freeze plugs at the bottom. The physical plugs will be designed to melt when the temperature goes higher than what is designed. This will then let gravity drain the fuel into holding tanks where the fuel will naturally cool down. This design does not need any computers or other equipment or human technicians to do anything. It will be automatic safety.
The two reactor designs reviewed here are by Seaborg Technologies of Denmark and Thorcon (American company looking to build in Indonesia). Both companies plan to build molten salt reactors in ships or barges. This will mean they float on water and can easily access water for cooling and operations.
Thorcon is planning to mass-produce 100 nuclear reactors every year from shipyards.
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