Molten Salt Reactor - Advantages

Advantages

The molten salt reactor offers many potential advantages:

  • Inherently safe design (safety by passive components and the strong negative temperature coefficient of reactivity).
  • Using an abundant supply of thorium to breed uranium-233 fuel.
  • Much cleaner: as a full recycle system, the discharge wastes from the reactor are predominately fission products, most of which have relatively short half lives compared to longer-lived actinide wastes. This can result in a significant reduction in the containment period in a geologic repository (300 years vs. tens of thousands of years).
  • The fuel's liquid phase not only allows for fission products to be separated easily from the fuel, but also from each other, which allows for some of the potentially useful fission products to be collected and sold.
  • There is no need for precise fuel rod manufacturing
  • Since the reactor operates at atmospheric pressure, there is no need for a pressure vessel
  • Can "burn" some problematic radioactive waste (with transuranic elements from traditional solid-fuel nuclear reactors).
  • Possible even in small, even 2–8 MWth or 1–3 MWe. Submarine or aircraft size is possible.
  • Can react to load changes in less than 60 seconds (unlike "traditional" solid-fuel nuclear power plants).

Read more about this topic:  Molten Salt Reactor

Famous quotes containing the word advantages:

    “If the minds of women were enlightened and improved, the domestic circle would be more frequently refreshed by intelligent conversation, a means of edification now deplorably neglected, for want of that cultivation which these intellectual advantages would confer.”
    —Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)

    “There are great advantages to seeing yourself as an accident created by amateur parents as they practiced. You then have been left in an imperfect state and the rest is up to you. Only the most pitifully inept child requires perfection from parents.”
    —Frank Pittman (20th century)

    “If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war?—not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?”
    —Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)