Marotta and 2 co-authors reported in mid-2021 that the molten salt reactor technology first gained popularity in the 1960s, through the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Now, decades later, a technology known as the molten salt nuclear battery (MsNB) is being developed to support the growing need for carbon-free, reliable, independent, and compact sources of small-scale heat and electrical power.
Applications for the MsNB are numerous, and initial units are targeted to support locations such as sensitive Department of Defense bases or installations, which often require frequent shipments of fossil fuels to meet baseload energy demands. Other early applications include facilities that are not connected to a wide electrical grid, such as islands and off-grid industrial sites. A microreactor such as the MsNB can meet this energy demand with long-term reliable thermal and electric power. More specifically, the MsNB microreactor is currently designed to operate continuously for up to a decade. The MsNB is a microscale nuclear fission heat source capable of providing heat to power a small commercial gas turbine on the order of 5–10 MWe.
The MsNB is novel because it is a natural-circulation molten salt reactor that requires no pumps or valves. Natural-circulation power reactors have been
already proven in other reactor designs. Feasibility analysis, scaled experiments, theoretical studies, and computational modeling have shown that the MsNB can provide power reliably, is radiologically safe, and as designed can provide 10 MWe of power for up to 10 years. The MsNB itself is small (a 3-meter-diameter by 3-meter-height right cylinder), transportable, and self-contained—all desirable parameters for remote and critical infrastructure use.
Development of a novel reactor design is a significant effort. The creative engineers working on the MsNB design, led by the authors and with the help of
various student design projects and theses, have recently developed a new testing device that physically validates the MsNB as an improved, more reliable, and cost-effective molten salt reactor for its ability to naturally circulate liquid fuel.
The device projects to save millions of dollars in testing costs and may cut up to two years off the MsNB’s development timeline. The testing device has a cylinder-within-a-cylinder configuration and uses ohmic heating to evenly heat liquid via an electric current and volumetric heating. It acts as a reactor surrogate, duplicating the internal heat generation that would occur within a reactor through fission of fuel dissolved within the molten salt. In the ohmically heated device, heat released during the ohmic heating testing process causes the salt solution within the battery surrogate to rise in the central cylinder. Once at the top, the fuel moves to a heat exchanger, where it is cooled and falls back down the space between the inner and outer cylinders.
This natural circulation eliminates the need for valves and pumps, improving the reliability and simplicity of the reactor design.
[For other perspectives on the molten salt battery (here).]
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