
Transatomic Power - markmassie
http://www.transatomicpower.com
======
Animats
Here's a good overview of the state of thorium reactors today.[1] The Shanghai
Institute of Applied Physics has been talking about building a demo unit in
Singapore to be operational in 2015, but that seems to have slipped to
2017.[2]

The article glosses over a big issue - this type of reactor has to be hooked
to a chemical plant which continually reprocesses the radioactive molten salt.
Chemical plants for radioactive materials are historically a huge headache to
operate. Many such plants are now toxic waste sites.

With BWR and PWR reactors, the radioactive portion of the system is simple,
with few moving parts, and the working fluid is water. More complex large
reactor designs have a poor track record. Sodium reactors have sodium fires
(Monju, in Japan, was shut down after one in 1995), helium-cooled reactors
leak helium (Ft. St. Vrain was a real disappointment), and pebble bed reactors
have pebble jams (there's one in Germany so jammed it can't be dismantled.)

[1] [http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/current-and-future-
generat...](http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/current-and-future-
generation/thorium/) [2] [http://www.ornl.gov/ornl/news/news-
releases/2015/ornl-and-sh...](http://www.ornl.gov/ornl/news/news-
releases/2015/ornl-and-shanghai-institute-of-applied-physics-cooperate-on-
development-of-salt-cooled-reactors)

~~~
DennisP
You're correct since you specified thorium reactors, but it's also possible to
build very simple non-breeding molten salt reactors running on uranium.
Terrestrial Energy, for example, is working on one that's designed to reach
production as soon as possible.

Advantages include passive safety, no potential for hydrogen explosions, no
high pressure containment, excellent nonproliferation, and reasonably high
burnup. It's nowhere near what breeders are shooting for, but it's a good
start.

------
apendleton
I 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...](http://www.transatomicpower.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/04/transatomic-white-paper.pdf) ... 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.

~~~
adamcanady
To get this straight, when they indicate 96% utilization of the uranium, they
don't mean converting 96% of the total energy to electricity, as it is assumed
that some will be lost along the way, right?

If the above statement is true, what happens to the remaining 4% of the energy
in the uranium? Is it just not effective to have it in the molten salt, so the
entire batch is replaced? Or does this happen 'on the fly' so to speak?

~~~
alexhill
96% of fissile material converted to non-fissile material, and that energy is
then converted to electricity at normal steam turbine efficiency, 30% or
something. This as opposed to less than 1% for Gen III reactors.

Edit: I posted that fuel handling is a batch process, not continuous – that
might not be true for molten salt, not sure.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> that energy is then converted to electricity at normal steam turbine
> efficiency, 30% or something

It amazes me that we don't have a better way to use the power generated by
nuclear fission or fusion than _heating water_.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Steam is actually a pretty good working fluid, although the fact that we have
200 years of experience with it undoubtedly plays a significant role.

------
aout
So 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.

~~~
MichaelGG
Probably the same reason Germany shutdown its power plants after Fukushima.
Despite Fukushima being a huge success story [1] some people are scared, some
unthinking, almost all irrational and unable to handle probability at all.
Nuclear power seems magical and shares a word with scary weapons. It's not
"natural" for mediocre definitions of natural.

1: Seriously. Fukushima did everything wrong. Huge earthquake and tsunami.
Older design. Then they tried to cover stuff up. And the repair crews showed
up with wrong equipment. More denial. And all that with no loss of life. Just
a bit of "lost" land for a while, and extra costs. So many people freak out
about it, but that US carmaker with the stupid ignition killed more people and
we aren't giving up cars. Fukushima screams "hey, wee couldn't fuck this up,
even given perfect conditions and terrible management". But hey, why take a
rational approach when you can " go green ".

~~~
fossuser
Doesn't it take a while for people to die or see effects from radiation
exposure (unless it's extreme?). Is there a reason to suspect that we won't
see problems from what happened?

Also having land uninhabitable for thousands of years weighs pretty heavily
even if the risk of failure is low.

~~~
MichaelGG
They originally said it'd be a few years, but the JP government is on behind,
so it might take longer to decontaminate. I don't think anyone is talking more
than a decade or few. Countries sell land, so think of it that way, at worst.
The clean up is also super expensive. And, over 1000 people died from
evacuation-related issues. I guess that's just a factor when you move older
people around, for any reason. So, yes Fukushima sucked, but in context, given
the incompetence, it seems very encouraging. Unless we act even more stupid
and get a large disaster, why would it be worse?

From what I've read, the estimates of cancer are really low. But you're right,
there might be a few directly related deaths over the next several decades.

You'd think this would result in an attitude of wanting to push newer designs
and so on, but running away is a more human reaction, it seems. :(

~~~
ptaipale
> over 1000 people died from evacuation-related issues.

As if the fact that a very very large tsunami hit a densely populated area did
not have an impact.

Of course, a lot of people were killed by Fukushima - due to the shutdown of
_other_ nuclear reactors, which necessitated reducing electricity consumption,
i.e. turning off A/C in buildings, effectively killing lots of old and weak
people.

------
yc1010
I 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.

~~~
pavlov
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.

~~~
opo
>...In the preceding ten years, the world had seen a sequence of serious
nuclear accidents: Three Mile Island, Sellafield, Chernobyl...

Considering that it would be illegal to build a Chernobyl style plant in any
other country rather than the Soviet Union, it probably shouldn't be on your
list.

>...The smear campaign was accomplished by the companies and nations that
built and maintained those shoddy, dangerous plants.

But even including the deaths from Chernobyl, nuclear power has been safer
over the last 60 years than all other types of mass energy production: coal,
natural gas or hydroelectric.

>...Blaming Greenpeace makes as much sense as blaming them for climate change.

I think the point the OP was making was that by smearing nuclear (a power
source that doesn't put CO2 into the atmosphere from generating power) the
alternative has usually been to build a natural gas or coal plant that does
put CO2 into the atmosphere when it generates power.

~~~
justatdotin
if only there was like, some alternative to coal and uranium ...

~~~
vidarh
If only those alternatives were actually _safer_ than nuclear.

People die in installation and operational accidents for wind and solar at a
higher rate relative to amount of electricity provided than all deaths
attributable to nuclear.

And hydro has a quite horrible track record thanks to construction accidents
and dam failures (even if you exclude the single worst incident - the Banqiao
dam failure that killed an estimated 171,000 people).

------
alexggordon
It'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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7922216)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UXXwWOImm8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UXXwWOImm8)

[2]
[http://www.whatisnuclear.com/reactors/msr.html](http://www.whatisnuclear.com/reactors/msr.html)

------
Maxels
So 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?

~~~
beefman
The zirconium hydride moderator is a genuine innovation, allowing much higher
core power density than LFTR, and higher conversion ratios without HEU
(assuming their modeling is correct). But like LFTR, you've got loose FPs all
over the place and it's hard to see that being acceptable in anything like the
current culture. Meanwhile, it's hard to see any benefit from MSR.

Edit: There will likely be all sorts of materials issues. None of them
damning. I'd worry more about FPs, tritium fluoride, etc. than the salt
itself.

~~~
DennisP
Why would the fission products be "all over the place?" They're contained in
the reactor core, just like any other reactor.

~~~
beefman
Nope. Gaseous FPs are continuously removed and stored somewhere. Of course
they require cooling while being stored. Any mishap releasing even a tiny
fraction of them would of course be harmless, but in the present culture would
result in a global panic.

Other FPs in the salt are circulated out of the core and through a heat
exchanger. Some ongoing actinide fission there too. Tiny defects in heat
exchangers handling plain water currently cause reactors worth billions to be
abandoned (e.g. SONGS).

Some FPs will plate out and you'll need to replace plumbing periodically. That
has to be done by robots because the pipes will be ultra-hot and deadly within
minutes to anyone nearby.

For what benefit? You improve the fuel cycle by a factor of 50. But the fuel
cycle is < 10% of the costs and material flows of nuclear plant. So yes,
online FP separation is something a mature fission-based civilization would
have. But it is not clear how it helps us, other than to provide a focal point
for a new culture to form (which may be a substantial if illegitimate benefit,
admittedly).

~~~
DennisP
Well ok that's true. On the other hand, removing fission products means you
have a lot less decay heat to deal with upon reactor shutdown. Dump the fuel
to a tank without moderators and walk away.

ThorCon has an interesting approach for dealing with plating and so on: their
design has reactor cores that can be easily swapped out. When one's ready for
maintenance they just cart it away, let it cool for several years, then deal
with it.

[http://thorconpower.com](http://thorconpower.com)

------
auberonx
In the absense of renewables, the promise of more efficient nuclear
electricity production sounds great. It's just that this promise has been
around since the 50s and instead we now have huge amounts of highly toxic
nuclear waste. The potential of wind, especially in the States, is so
significant and threatening to anyone stupid enough to invest their time in
developing nuclear power plants at a time when the price for renewables has
undercut nuclear and coal.

~~~
Zardoz84
So we shouldn't invest on ways to recycle nuclear waste, because they way is
by nuclear reactors ?

~~~
auberonx
This video makes it all look a little too easy. The nuclear industry is with
its back to the wall and for very good reasons. The core message here is:
let's build more nuclear power plants and we can sort things out. We have been
hearing those types of arguments for over 60 years. The technology has left us
with huge amounts of incredibly toxic waste and recycling experts in
France/UK/US still haven't been able to sort this out. So here are wonderboy
and wondergirl telling us they sorted it out. Hm. Who doesn't like a good
miracle.

------
ThomPete
_" Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them
to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value."_

R. Buckminster Fuller

------
outworlder
I am not a nuclear physicist, but isn't this concept proven and well-
understood already?

Now, a sales pitch is indeed a missing piece. Given the regulations, the
nuclear industry is stuck with power plants whose designs date from decades
back.

I didn't see anything about handling the waste heat though. Dumping it into
rivers would be atrocious. Ingesting large amounts of water to use evaporation
towers is also environmentally terrible. I hope they thought of that.

I am all for the responsible use of nuclear power. Greenpeace and the like
made so much noise that the public is afraid of anything called "nuclear". The
media doesn't help, either.

The result is far more deaths every year due to coal and other fossil burning.
Let's do more solar and wind, sure, microgrids and other cool stuff. Nuclear
can provide the baseline power and power for power-hungry industries, such as
aluminium refineries.

~~~
shabble
Waste heat dissipation is a problem for all thermal power generation schemes.
The use of CHP to provide residual heat for nearby residential
heating/industrial use boosts the overall efficiency of the system, but with
higher upfront costs.

------
Twirrim
While it's neat to see more companies jumping on board, what they're looking
at isn't really revolutionary, despite the polished PR on the website. There
are _lots_ of companies, research organisations etc working on molten salt
reactors. Lots of them, including Oak Ridge National Lab
([http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/01/07/nuclear-
po...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/01/07/nuclear-power-turns-
to-salt/)).

On the surface, this seems kind of like launching an IaaS cloud service and
claiming you're introducing something new and innovative.

~~~
jschwartzi
Well, it's not like there would only be room for one company on the market.
The problem with nuclear power is fundamentally a marketing problem, and the
winners in the market will be the companies that can successfully distance
themselves from the disasters of the past. It's going to be less about
fundamentally new technology and more about how well you can market yourself
to people who associate nuclear power with Chernobyl and Fukushima
Daiichi(which is anyone who hasn't studied the subject extensively). You're
especially going to run into problems with the NIMBY crowd. Given their
landing page I would have a modicum of faith that they understand this.

------
dtap
The 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.

~~~
Gibbon1
I think there is a tendency to think of fuel rods as a problem rather than the
solution to a problem, which is raw spent fuel is nasty. The cheapest and
easiest way to deal with spent fuel is to store it for decades while the worst
of the radio-isotopes decay. Fuel rod technology allows you to do that, a
molten salt design doesn't. I'm okay with this argument but is seems to bother
people that you can't recover spent fuel now rather than waiting 25 years so
they cast about for solutions to what is really a psychological annoyance _.

_ See the quest for reusable launch systems like the space shuttle.

~~~
BendertheRobot
The cheapest and easiest way to deal with spent fuel is to store it for
decades

That is insane.

The best way to deal with waste is to recycle it.

~~~
jccooper
Waiting for the hottest stuff to go away is part of the recycling process.
It's just a very slow part.

~~~
gjem97
The funny thing about nuclear waste is that it's not the "hottest stuff" you
have to worry about. The hottest stuff has a very short half life and
disappears relatively quickly. On the other side things like Carbon 14 that
have a multiple millennium half life are not radioactive enough to cause much
of a problem. It's the stuff that has a half life of about 10 to 1000 years
that you have to worry about.

------
JoachimS
What about Spallators? Are they being worked on seriously by anybody nowadays?
I liked the idea of subcriticality and the low radioactive lifespans in the
waste. But how efficient could the be?

And related, is transmutation of waste being worked on?

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_amplifier](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_amplifier)

------
nosuchthing
I'm optimistic with what "modern technology and materials" can improve upon
previous attempts [1]. Yet I hope they drastically over engineer their safety
standards given historical failures.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment)

[2] Fukashima, ect

------
ptha
Perhaps something the countries signing on to the Global Apollo Programme[1]
should be investing in. It's priorities are Renewable/Storage/Smart Grids, but
I don't think we should be ruling anything out, if 2C is the target.

[1] [http://globalapolloprogramme.org/](http://globalapolloprogramme.org/)

------
joss82
We had a fast breeder reactor here in France before, creating energy from
nuclear waste.

Oil/"green" lobbies made it to close:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix)

EDIT: And also terrorists and molten sodium.

~~~
magoon
IANAS but it appears that Superphenix used liquid sodium as a coolant, whereby
Transatomic is proposing a molten salt (not sodium) fuel.

~~~
joss82
Yup, liquid sodium was scaring the hell out of the workers on the site, and
rightfully.

------
Fiahil
I remember a TED talk close to this subject by Taylor Wilson in 2013.

[http://www.ted.com/talks/taylor_wilson_my_radical_plan_for_s...](http://www.ted.com/talks/taylor_wilson_my_radical_plan_for_small_nuclear_fission_reactors)

------
madaxe_again
Thorium msrs could be a panacea for humanity - but they won't get adopted,
because nuclear weapons aren't a byproduct, and that's a drawback in the eyes
of our bellicose political classes.

Edit: you're welcome to downvote the truth, but it won't change it.

~~~
tim333
There are a lot of issues with Thorium apart from the weapons thing.

------
Gravityloss
This is the technical summary: "A lithium fluoride – uranium fluoride fuel
salt, moderated with zirconium hydride, would allow our reactor to remain
critical with a loading of used nuclear fuel."

------
cmpb
Slightly off-topic, but you've got a double "and" in the "Lets be safe"
section.

------
joegaudet
Is it just me, or does the flashy website somehow make them seem less
credible?

~~~
tim333
I hated the website. The first thing I did was click on the Readability
extension to try to make it readable in black and white.

------
pheo
"Fast," "Breeder," or "Salt" reactors breed weapons grade fissionable material
(Ie. Plutonium 239) from relatively un-enriched materials (Ie. Uranium 238 and
Thorium).

Fast reactors make nuclear weapons as byproduct. Thats why we don't use them.

~~~
MichaelGG
You're probably being downvoted for saying that reactors make nuclear
_weapons_. They don't. They might be able to produce materials to build a
weapon, but it's not like they pop out little bombs. Considering some folks
equate "nuclear power plant problem" with "nuclear bomb explosion", this is a
nontrivial distinction.

------
trhway
they don't need to prove that it would work - that is pretty well known. What
they would need to prove for the idea to make any progress toward real-world
implementation is that their good economy of neutrons isn't that good as to
allow say to dissolve additional amount of U-238 (widely available to almost
anybody anywhere) and get Pu-239 on the other end or any similar reaction :)
Their ability to consume very low-enriched U-235 isn't an advantage here as
the typical reactors necessity for the high-enrichment is what blocks and
allow to identify weapons programs around the world.

------
beyti
Peter Thiel in the investment, not suprised.

