Jason Deign reports that a company touting a new nuclear reactor design landed CAD$5.3 million ($4 million) last month to complete the first phase of its vendor design review. The Series A funding achieved by Canadian firm Terrestrial Energy, from unnamed investors, added to a March grant of CAD$5.7 million ($4.4 million) from the Canadian government to bring the companys total fundraising to CAD$22.5 million ($17.2 million) so far.
Terrestrial Energy is looking to use the money to commercialize an Integrated Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR) design based on Manhattan Project-related research carried out in the 1960s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee. Unlike traditional reactors, IMSRs have a liquid fuel, where radioactive materials are dissolved in molten salt, which doubles as a coolant, at normal pressure.
Proponents of the technology say it offers significant safety advantages over current solid-fuel reactor designs, since overheating can be controlled more easily. It is also promoted as being cheaper to build and having fewer long-lived waste issues than traditional reactors.
The liquid-fuel approach allows for a far more elegant design, with far fewer engineered systems, [and] greatly reduces construction cost and times, said Terrestrial Energy CEO Simon Irish.
While 41 new reactors have been connected to the grid in the last decade, according to figures from the World Nuclear Association, 22 of these were in China, six were in India and four were in both Russia and South Korea.
In other words, almost 90 percent of new reactors in the last 10 years have gone on-line in countries that already have highly developed and entrenched nuclear industries, and are thus unlikely to have the need or the desire to import novel reactor designs from abroad.
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Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-
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