Article is from June but quite relevant given the circumstances, I would think.
Best of luck to them, the more alternatives for energy generation the better. Molten salt has the added benefit of not having to run at high pressures like a conventional nuclear reactor.
Expect “Hopefully, there will be a lot of accidents because we will have a lot of these reactors.” to be quoted ad nauseam out of context.
It’s an interesting concept but they’re starting an uphill race as Denmark has very little nuclear industrial, regulatory experience; let alone public support.
Tech known since 1950. Cheaper and safer than used nuclear tech. Why didn’t they use it in the past 70 years? I missed that point in the article.
>The challenge here, as with all molten salt reactors, is corrosion. Hot molten salt itself is highly corrosive, and this will be a serious challenge to design around for every component that comes into contact with the fuel salt.
>And it doesn’t stop there for Seaborg. … graphite tends to fracture and weaken when exposed to intense radiation with repeated heating and cooling, eventually resulting in what Seaborg co-founder and CTO Eirik Eide Pettersen describes to Thomas Thor Associates as “unacceptable hotspots.”
>Seaborg’s solution is to use another molten salt – sodium hydroxide – as a liquid moderator. Thus, the core design places the fuel salt tube inside a larger tube filled with sodium hydroxide, creating a first-of-its-kind all-liquid reactor that’s remarkably compact. But sodium hydroxide itself is a powerfully caustic base, often used as oven cleaner or drain cleaner; the Seaborg design has to deal with this added corrosive agent too.
>And on top of all that, there’s the freaky phenomenon of “grain-boundary corrosion” to boot, caused by the presence of tellurium as a fission by-product in the fuel salt stream. Tellurium atoms can merrily penetrate through metals, and swap positions with other elements, leading to embrittlement of the metals at their weakest points.
In other words, the title of the article is from an alternate reality, and given how the drawings look like, I even suspect it to be a scammy project. So sad.
Interesting comments under the original:
>paul314 June 15, 2021 10:56 AM
>So at what point do you get steam out of these things? Another loop with water cooling the sodium hydroxide? (And if they really do have all of the corrosion sources under control, that’s pretty mind-boggling. Because there’s also corrosion from the defects introduced when neutrons and other fragments slam into all your structure.)
>I also wonder: does this “lava” weather and turn into sand and dust the way regular lava does?
and this one
> Jay June 15, 2021 06:03 PM
>This whole deployment scenario is utter nonsense designed to distract from the unsolved problems in molten salt reactors. Please just build a prototype demonstrating your new moderator and fuel enrichment cycle. If your modular reactors require economies derived from offshore deployment to be competitive, they are likely uninteresting in comparison to other technologies.
and this one
> Jinpa June 16, 2021 07:36 AM
>”Safe nuclear”, like “clean coal”, is an oxymoron. No energy-producing nuclear device can be safe when it ceases working as originally planned;
8 comments
Article is from June but quite relevant given the circumstances, I would think.
Best of luck to them, the more alternatives for energy generation the better. Molten salt has the added benefit of not having to run at high pressures like a conventional nuclear reactor.
Expect “Hopefully, there will be a lot of accidents because we will have a lot of these reactors.” to be quoted ad nauseam out of context.
It’s an interesting concept but they’re starting an uphill race as Denmark has very little nuclear industrial, regulatory experience; let alone public support.
Tech known since 1950. Cheaper and safer than used nuclear tech. Why didn’t they use it in the past 70 years? I missed that point in the article.
>The challenge here, as with all molten salt reactors, is corrosion. Hot molten salt itself is highly corrosive, and this will be a serious challenge to design around for every component that comes into contact with the fuel salt.
>And it doesn’t stop there for Seaborg. … graphite tends to fracture and weaken when exposed to intense radiation with repeated heating and cooling, eventually resulting in what Seaborg co-founder and CTO Eirik Eide Pettersen describes to Thomas Thor Associates as “unacceptable hotspots.”
>Seaborg’s solution is to use another molten salt – sodium hydroxide – as a liquid moderator. Thus, the core design places the fuel salt tube inside a larger tube filled with sodium hydroxide, creating a first-of-its-kind all-liquid reactor that’s remarkably compact. But sodium hydroxide itself is a powerfully caustic base, often used as oven cleaner or drain cleaner; the Seaborg design has to deal with this added corrosive agent too.
>And on top of all that, there’s the freaky phenomenon of “grain-boundary corrosion” to boot, caused by the presence of tellurium as a fission by-product in the fuel salt stream. Tellurium atoms can merrily penetrate through metals, and swap positions with other elements, leading to embrittlement of the metals at their weakest points.
In other words, the title of the article is from an alternate reality, and given how the drawings look like, I even suspect it to be a scammy project. So sad.
Interesting comments under the original:
>paul314 June 15, 2021 10:56 AM
>So at what point do you get steam out of these things? Another loop with water cooling the sodium hydroxide? (And if they really do have all of the corrosion sources under control, that’s pretty mind-boggling. Because there’s also corrosion from the defects introduced when neutrons and other fragments slam into all your structure.)
>I also wonder: does this “lava” weather and turn into sand and dust the way regular lava does?
and this one
> Jay June 15, 2021 06:03 PM
>This whole deployment scenario is utter nonsense designed to distract from the unsolved problems in molten salt reactors. Please just build a prototype demonstrating your new moderator and fuel enrichment cycle. If your modular reactors require economies derived from offshore deployment to be competitive, they are likely uninteresting in comparison to other technologies.
and this one
> Jinpa June 16, 2021 07:36 AM
>”Safe nuclear”, like “clean coal”, is an oxymoron. No energy-producing nuclear device can be safe when it ceases working as originally planned;
For readers actually interested in the use of molten salts in nuclear reactors, I’ll leave [this here](https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/molten-salt-reactors.aspx).
There is even a paragraph detailing how Seaborg Technologies successfully activated the flow of public moneys toward the investors’ pockets 😉
Also, lithium fluoride, the salt used here for heat transfer, has a LD50 of 143 mg/kg, which might not be so *super-safe* after all.
That headline was designed to make me happy.