by Joe Morris
Many years ago, I suggested to my boss that we hire some graduate students to go through our company’s technical library to scour old projects and technologies from the 1960’s that may have been abandoned because they were ahead of their time. He didn’t take me up on it, but I’ve come across something recently that supported my idea of looking at technologies from the ’60: molten-salt nuclear reactors.
Mention nuclear power as a potential solution to the elimination of greenhouse gases, and you know what the response will be from many of those in the environmental movement. Nuclear power never lived up to its promise of clean, cheap energy. The power plants became big, huge albatrosses because of the costs of providing a safe environment due to the radiation associated with nuclear reactions and the dangerous potential from a meltdown. Not only that, but the nuclear waste products are highly radioactive that remain deadly for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
These reactors are what we call thermal neutron reactors which use solid enriched uranium cores and require what are called thermally generated neutrons. The reactors are cooled by water. They exhibit a positive thermal coefficient, which means the nuclear reaction increases with temperature. Therefore, a significant leak can cause a runaway reaction and an environmental catastrophe like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and the recent Fukushima accidents.
This brings us to the aforementioned molten salt reactors. They are a descendant of a design that was under development in the1960s by the US Air Force for a nuclear-powered airplane. The concept eventually lost out to a different reactor design that never really panned out. Now they’re being revived by a number of entrepreneurial startups. These MSRs, as they’re called, use a molten fluoride salt and uranium (or a thorium/uranium) mixture that acts as both the fuel and the coolant. MSRs exhibit a negative thermal coefficient, so as the reactor heats up the reaction slows down, inherently preventing meltdowns. Because the fuel is a Iiquid, Furthermore, MSRs produce about a hundred times less nuclear waste, and it’s of a different nature that lasts much less time and not as dangerous.
There are a number of startups around the world working on this technology, including a Canadian company that is moving through approvals in the early stages of licensing for a 400-megawatt plant.
I’m not advocating this technology to replace solar or wind power. However, if successful, it can supplement them with a greenhouse gas-free source of energy and become an alternative where the others are impractical. I’m bringing this up as an example of something science and technology can do to prevent global warming, nor can they magically make the effects go away, but they can help us deal with the effects and help mitigate the damage. All we need is the will and an open mind.
Last Updated on 11/05/2019 by Marc Slonim