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A Nuclear Startup Will Fold After Failing To Deliver Reactors That Run on Spent Fuel (technologyreview.com)
Transatomic Power, an MIT spinout that drew wide attention and millions in funding, is shutting down almost two years after the firm backtracked on bold claims for its design of a molten-salt reactor. From a report: The company, founded in 2011, plans to announce later today that it's winding down. Transatomic had claimed its technology could generate electricity 75 times more efficiently than conventional light-water reactors, and run on their spent nuclear fuel. But in a white paper published in late 2016, it backed off the latter claim entirely and revised the 75 times figure to "more than twice," a development first reported by MIT Technology Review. Those downgrades forced the company to redesign its system. That delayed plans to develop a demonstration reactor, pushing the company behind rival upstarts like TerraPower and Terrestrial Energy, says Leslie Dewan, the company's cofounder and chief executive. The longer timeline and reduced performance advantage made it harder to raise the necessary additional funding, which was around $15 million. "We weren't able to scale up the company rapidly enough to build a reactor in a reasonable time frame," Dewan says.
There are around 50 nuclear startups designing 4th generation reactors. Some were always going to fail. In fact most will probably fail. Some will succeed though.
NuScale is the closest to market. Their design has already passed NRC phase 1 review, and it has been certified as meltdown proof. They will be constructing their first 12 reactors in Idaho for Utah municipalities. Hopefully in a decade they will be mass producing them like airplanes.
Being able to reprocess spent nuclear fuel means that there's less of a storage issue for nuclear waste.
I'd rather that money be spent/wasted on failed attempts at getting us off of fossil fuels when the math indicates that the idea might work, than to continue to burn hydrocarbon fuel for stationary power plants.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
claims two orders of magnitude improvements in anything are probably bullshit
Normally I'd agree, but in this case the 10^2 improvement is largely based on the horrific inefficiency of our current fleet of solid-fuel, water moderated nukes, which is something like 0.7%. The vast majority of this efficiency gain is due to the liquid-fuel design (in this case, molten salt), which allows fuel to be reprocessed on the fly, whereas "traditional" nukes use solid fuel rods which degrade over time, and become unusable long before their energy content is anywhere near used up.
Other molten salt designs are under development, such as LFTR, which have similar claims on improved efficiency. The main difference is that this one (WAMSR) was supposed to be able to burn up existing stockpiles of spent nuclear fuel. Apparently that particular trick turned out to be more difficult than they anticipated.
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Processing spent fuel as you suggest is extremely dirty and generates about 10x the amount of original waste, most of it highly radioactive.
People forget the US tried to reprocess fuel for a while, the location is a radioactive superfund site.
molten salt reactors are a interesting idea but are untested
Molten salt reactors are proven technology. They ran one at Oak Ridge for thousands of hours back in the 1960s. There's a ton of info about this online, such as this lecture from a few years ago about LFTR. The Chinese currently have the most active (and best funded) program in this area. With any luck we might see a commercial product from them in the next few years, which could be a real game changer.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
But I thought there were already "breeder reactors" that did this. How was this design different from them?
Old fashioned breeder reactors turn U-238 into plutonium. Although plutonium can be used as reactor fuel, it can also be used to make bombs. Furthermore, these reactors use fuel rods, and pressurized containers, and have the same complexity and safety problems as LWRs.
What makes this reactor different is that it doesn't make plutonium, it burns the fuel that in breeds in situ so no extra expensive reprocessing is needed, and it is an inherently safe design: It can't have a "meltdown" since it is already liquid, and it is not pressurized.
That is the theory. In practice, molten salt reactors don't have a very good track record.
Molten salt reactor