I write a lot about the Hinkley Point C project in Britain because it is the biggest and most complex planned nuclear project in the world today. It has economic, social, security, political, diplomatic and technical complications and involves three nations including one which just left the European Union. Today I am going to write about a entrepreneur who claims that he can deliver nuclear power to the United Kingdom for a third the projected cost of the Hinkley Point C project.
Ian Scott is a retired biochemist who spent twenty five years working for Unilever Plc. a big manufacturer of consumer products. Scott came out of retirement in 2013 to found Moltex Energy LLP, an energy company. He says that his new reactor design is capable of producing electricity much cheaper than the standard pressurized water reactor of type being planned for the Hinkley Point C project.
Scott says that his Stable Salt Reactor (SSR) design can be used to provide stable power to the U.K. grid while burning existing nuclear waste. He needs about thirty million dollars to get his design to first stage regulatory approval from the U.K. nuclear regulation agencies.
The SSR is based on the worked done at the U.S. Oak Ridge National Laboratory on molten salt reactors. It does not require a pressurized reactor vessel which will make it much cheaper to build than conventional power reactors. Moltex estimates that a working commercial model of the SSR can provide electricity at a cost of about forty dollars per megawatt-hour as opposed to an estimated cost of almost one hundred and seventy dollars per megawatt-hour for the electricity produced by the reactor design for the Hinkley Point C project.
A major innovation of the SSR over previous attempts to build a molten salt reactor involve the way in which the fuel is packaged. The fuel for the SSR consists of a mixture of salt, natural uranium and plutonium waste. The mixture is inserted into zirconium clad cylindrical rods which are placed in a bath of molten salt. Convection in the liquid salt bath will carry heat to the turbines. The design will use nuclear materials that have been certified for use in nuclear reactors. The SSRs will have fewer moving parts than conventional power reactors which will lower costs and make maintenance much easier.
The SSR will function at atmospheric pressure. This will eliminate the possibility of accidents such as Chernobyl and Fukushima which were highly pressurized. If a fuel rod ruptured, its contents would be diluted by the molten salt bath. The resulting mess would require work to clean up but would not pose a major threat to the environment and public health.
The constituents of the SSR fuel will be taken from existing stockpiles of nuclear and industrial materials. Eventually, when the stockpiles are used up, the SSRs could be run on thorium as a fuel. Thorium is cheap and widely available. The SSR can also store excess energy produced by renewable energy sources.
While the SSR does have innovative features such as the zirconium clad fuel rods, molten salt reactors are the subject of research and development in other nations such as China. Terrestrial Energy is working on molten salt reactors in Canada. Time will tell whether the molten salt reactor is a better and cheaper choice for nuclear energy than conventional pressurized water reactor designs.
