Transatomic Power
transatomicpower.com
Transatomic Power
1–10 of 91 posts
Re: Transatomic Power
#2So this is a company with a pretty ui that is advocating the same thing Kirk Sorensen has been advocating for a few years now.
I know every time this molten salt vs light water reactor debate comes up, people much smarter than I talk about how the salt is corrosive and there are currently no viable solutions to deal with this. Is there anyone out there smarter than I that can explain whether this company is doing anything different, or if it is just sexy and VC backed?
Re: Transatomic Power
#3The bigger problem than the corrosion is the inability to inspect the system in an efficient way. In a regulated nuclear industry, not knowing the status of the system means it will not be allowed.
Re: Transatomic Power
#4I wish Transatomic all the best but they have an uphill battle :( to convince a populace for whom unfortunately "nuclear power" brings up an image Homer Simpson.
aside: I think Greenpeace also has a lot to answer for with their campaign against nuclear power. Thanks to them my children can look forward to a world where a coal plant is build every week and fossil fuel fueled climate change is a certainty.
Re: Transatomic Power
#5I wish they would be more up-front about the specifics of their technical proposal and how it compares to other proposals, since it was not at all obvious to me at first glance.
What I think they're actually proposing (correct me if I'm wrong): a uranium molten salt fast breeder reactor that drives a steam turbine. So, much more ambitious than what's currently on the market, with better fuel utilization. As compared to, say, the Flibe Energy/Kirk Sorensen/LFTR crowd, it's mixed: it sounds like these folks have some new innovations around moderators and salts, and the stuff about consuming existing waste is compelling, but they're sticking with a uranium fuel cycle rather than thorium (though it sounds like they're getting proliferation resistance in other ways), and they're sticking with a steam turbine vs. proposed gas turbines that could yield some more efficiency and compactness in proposed thorium MSR designs.
EDIT: looks like I might have been wrong about the neutron temperature; their white paper says thermal, not fast.
EDIT 2: the white paper actually has all kinds of great stuff in it, now that I've read the rest: http://www.transatomicpower.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/t... ... In particular, it sounds like this is the first planned design, but they offer some potential future variations. They say this design could be adapted to Thorium fairly straightforwardly, but advocate uranium at least initially because of advantages in the existence of a supply chain around it and the availability of uranium spent nuclear fuel. They also mention Brayton cycle gas turbines as a possible future improvement, among others.
Re: Transatomic Power
#6So this is a company with a pretty ui that is advocating the same thing Kirk Sorensen has been advocating for a few years now. I know every time this molten salt vs light water reactor debate comes up, people much smarter than I talk about how the salt is corrosive and there are currently no viable solutions to deal with this. Is there anyone out there smarter than I that can explain whether this company is doing any…
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Re: Transatomic Power
#7I wish Transatomic all the best but they have an uphill battle :( to convince a populace for whom unfortunately "nuclear power" brings up an image Homer Simpson. aside: I think Greenpeace also has a lot to answer for with their campaign against nuclear power. Thanks to them my children can look forward to a world where a coal plant is build every week and fossil fuel fueled climate change is a certainty.
Homer Simpson and the three-eyed fish graced TV screens in 1989. In the preceding ten years, the world had seen a sequence of serious nuclear accidents: Three Mile Island, Sellafield, Chernobyl...
The smear campaign was accomplished by the companies and nations that built and maintained those shoddy, dangerous plants. Blaming Greenpeace makes as much sense as blaming them for climate change.
Re: Transatomic Power
#8It's always interesting to see how these companies can progress in a year[0]. Regardless though, for those curious, there's a great presentation by the CEO, Dr. Leslie Dewan on what TPT does differently[1]. The big selling point for their Molten Salt Reactor (compared to others) is that they designed it to be able to use low-enriched Uranium (fresh fuel, as opposed to spent fuel) and nuclear waste. The downside of this is that it can't produce the same volume of electricity that a normal nuclear plant can, but it's significantly safer, and can't be used to produce weapons grade uranium.
For those interested in MSR's this serves as a good starting point too[2].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7922216
Re: Transatomic Power
#9So this is a company with a pretty ui that is advocating the same thing Kirk Sorensen has been advocating for a few years now. I know every time this molten salt vs light water reactor debate comes up, people much smarter than I talk about how the salt is corrosive and there are currently no viable solutions to deal with this. Is there anyone out there smarter than I that can explain whether this company is doing any…
They say the modified Hastelloy-N from the Oak Ridge experiment is good enough, though I suppose people who disagreed with that claim when it was presented by previous MSR advocates would still disagree now. They do also mention in their white paper, though, that it may eventually be possible to replace some of the Hastelloy-N with ceramic composites, which might be better still.
Re: Transatomic Power
#10So ok, the website is cool and the technology is said to be something like 99.9999% better.
This might be a stupid question but I'm no nuclear engineer not a specialist about chemistry or physics but I wonder why a such "beautiful" idea would not be already used.
I've read the related wikipedia article about Molten Salt Reactors and I understand there are several problems about the technology: mostly corrosion and embrittlement.
So now I find myself asking this: did they fix those problems? The website copy suggests so. Can somebody explain how? I couldn't figure it out.
edit: clearly the team and company have quite legit credentials, MIT nuclear department etc... they must know what they're talking about. I just want to know if they've given details about the solution.