Transatomic Power Corporation is one of the new companies that is pushing a different approach to nuclear power reactors than the conventional light water reactors (LWR). The company was founded in 2011 by two MIT students from the MIT Nuclear Science & Engineering department.
In a Transatomic reactor, uranium is dissolved in a liquid consisting lithium fluoride and uranium fluoride. Since the fuel is in liquid form, reaction byproducts can be continuously removed so periodic refueling is not necessary. It will operate at low pressure and produces less waste than a LWR. If there is a loss of power and the cooling system fails, when the fuel mix gets too hot, it will melt a plug and pour into a large chamber where it will cool off naturally.
The company published a technical white paper in 2014 in which they made bold claims for the capabilities of their new design. They said that their reactor could produce seventy-five times as much electricity from a ton of mined uranium as an LWR. They also said that they could burn spent nuclear fuel from conventional LWRs reducing stockpiles of nuclear waste. They raised millions of dollars, got a lot of media attention and recruited some top technical people.
In 2015, Kord Smith, a former a nuclear science and engineering professor at MIT who was an expert in the physics of nuclear reactors decided to check the impressive claims being made by Transatomic. MIT was closely connected to the company and, if the company was making false claims, it would hurt the reputation of the MIT Nuclear Science & Engineering department.
Smith recruited two other MIT professors to join him in an informal review of the Transatomic design. Smith and his colleagues found flaws in the white paper and concluded that the claims violated principles of basic physics. When he asked Transatomic to conducts some tests, the results confirmed that some of their claims were invalid.
As a result of the work of Smith and his colleagues, in 2016, a new technical paper was published by Transatomic that reduced the "seventy-five times" figure to just twice the energy a LWR could produce from a ton of mined uranium and also admitted that the Transatomic reactor design could not burn spent nuclear fuel from conventional reactors. Their reactor design was incapable of sustaining a fission reaction with spent nuclear fuel that would make it practical for producing electricity. Tests from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory did confirm that the Transatomic reactor design would produce about half the waste of an LWR.
Transatomic had originally announced that it would build a demonstration reactor by 2020 but now they are saying that a prototype won't be ready until 2021. The licensing and testing required by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the construction of a new reactor design is about ten years so maybe Transatomic means that they will be ready to begin the NRC process by 2021 because they certainly won't be able to construct and turn on a new reactor in the next four years.
Transatomic says that the founders were not deliberately trying to fool anyone. They say that they were just inexperienced and did not circulate their reactor design for peer review as they should have before making the claims they did in the 2014 paper. That may be true but it is difficult to believe that they didn't understand the basic physics that they were violating. That does not speak well for the instruction they received at the MIT Nuclear Science & Engineering department.
