
Open-Sourcing Our Reactor Design, and the Future of Transatomic - areoform
http://www.transatomicpower.com/open-source/
======
webdevatlurk
I have no idea if molten salt reactors are as awesome as this website
represents them to be, but I thought the following point was interesting:

"light water reactors can use only about 4% of their available energy."

They're comparing with 1960s reactors designs, so maybe more modern water
reactors are more efficient. But, it's still amazing to me that there's that
much more energy that we could potentially harness from the fuel.

~~~
comicjk
Currently the fuel is very inexpensive - a tiny fraction of the total cost of
the electricity produced. Most of the cost is the initial capital, and most of
the ongoing cost is the (highly specialized) labor. A new reactor design that
saves fuel is not really what the industry needs.

~~~
lightgreen
According to Wikipedia current uranium reserves will last for 135 years. It
would be 13 years if we increase energy production in nuclear plants 10 times
to replace coal and gas.

So even if fuel is inexpensive now, it can become expensive quite quickly.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium)

~~~
thrower123
I believe Peak Oil was supposed to happen a dozen times now; we keep finding
more when it becomes worthwhile to do additional exploration, and extraction
technology keeps improving. Maybe uranium is different, but I would believe it
when I see it.

~~~
mikekchar
As per wikipedia: "Peak oil is the theorized point in time when the maximum
rate of extraction of petroleum is reached". You can still discover new
sources of petroleum after "Peak Oil", but the idea is that you will never
find enough to increase the maximum extraction rate.

What we see as consumers is conflated by the fact that there are self-imposed
limits on extraction by OPEC designed to raise prices. Due to various
political situations, those limits have been slowly removed. When you see
predictions of "Peak Oil", often they are based on _existing_ production and
not _maximum_ production (and hence are nonsense).

I'm not aware of _any_ literature that attempts to speculate on current
maximum production capacity. Probably it exists, but I certainly can't find
it. Whether we have hit "Peak Oil" already, or whether it will come in the
future, I don't know. A lot of that kind of stuff is politically very
sensitive and oil companies/OPEC are understandably reluctant to be straight
forward with the data.

Finite resources eventually run out. When you don't know how much you have,
it's tempting to assume that because you are finding more, you will continue
to find more. There is no real guarantee of that. It's a risky strategy.

------
acidburnNSA
Site isn't working now, but their GitHub is here [1]. My understanding on this
is that Transatomic started as two young MIT students/grads who did some calcs
on a molten salt reactor, found that they could run on high-level nuclear
waste in a thermal-neutron spectrum, got really excited, and started a
company. They did TED talks and everything [2] and really became this awesome
story about advanced nuclear, nuclear startups, private investment in nuclear
doing exciting new things, and so on. They were heavily featured in a
documentary about advanced nuclear [3] that you can get on Amazon, where we
all got a look in their doors.

Then the trouble started. They (smartly!) asked MIT to do a design review and
a few questions came up on their key claims. Turns out, there were some
calculation or assumption mistakes that showed that it couldn't just run
directly on nuclear waste (you traditionally need fast neutrons and/or
aggressive reprocessing to do this, even in molten fuel) [4]. They adjusted
their copy and moved forward with an adjusted design and new calcs. Eventually
they decided to close up shop and open source their design effort as a soft
closure.

It's highly regular for advanced nuclear efforts to adjust their design and
strategy as they move forward. In fact, I'd go so far to say it happens in
100% of efforts. The only thing Transatomic did that might be a lesson learned
is that they got really hyped up early on in their effort, before they shook
it down with engineering reviews and whatnot.

As far as I can tell, no one is curating progress or roadmaps in the open
source effort. I LOVE the idea of open-source reactor design. It gets around
huge institutional barriers clogging up opportunities for collaboration and
alignment in the nuclear space. Nuclear is traditionally very secretive, and
all these startups promising the world in 2024 without collaboration is
basically a doomed effort. The industry must team up, find overlapping tech
development efforts and facilities, and work together to build a market. Once
they build the market, they can worry about competing in it. Open source can
also transcend traditional funding cycles, like when national labs work on a
reactor for 2-4 years, make tons of exciting progress, and then drop it. If
it's open, universities, international institutions, companies, etc. can all
coordinate on it.

Doing open source reactor design would require a lean and highly-dedicated
non-profit or foundation or something with a handful of nuclear design pros in
it to do the coordination. These projects don't run themselves. It would also
need lots of legal resources to navigate export control space. Everything Adm.
Rickover said in 1953 about academic vs. practical reactors is incredibly
accurate to this day [5], and using open-source philosophy to face these facts
brutally may be essential for progress in nuclear.

If anyone has ideas on how to fund that kind of thing, let me know.

[1]
[https://github.com/transatomic/reactor/](https://github.com/transatomic/reactor/)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlRhcHNJed0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlRhcHNJed0)

[3] [https://www.newfiremovie.com/](https://www.newfiremovie.com/)

[4] [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603731/nuclear-energy-
sta...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603731/nuclear-energy-startup-
transatomic-backtracks-on-key-promises/)

[5]
[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Paper_Reacto...](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Paper_Reactors,_Real_Reactors_\(1953\))

~~~
gomox
Could the essential aspects of a reactor design be patented so that value can
be captured despite innovation being created in the open?

~~~
acidburnNSA
Possibly, as long as participants can still be motivated to working within the
open effort.

Frankly, effective reduction to practice is required 1000x more than
traditional "innovation" in nuclear. Every bright mind in the 1950s was
dreaming up whacky and incredible reactor designs, and everything I've ever
thought of, from spinning vortex/whirlpool fuel to giant uranium gaseous
pistons already has 50-page publications from back then sitting on OSTI.
What's needed is to figure out how to get nuclear technology into a practical
rapid iteration process where we can shake down good ideas vs. bad ideas, and
put some rigor behind cost and schedule estimates.

Otherwise it's just a game of who can get investors/government most excited
about their particular reactor concept, which, without actually understanding,
adjusting, and improving upon what's happened in the past, will struggle
mightily.

~~~
nickik
> What's needed is to figure out how to get nuclear technology into a
> practical rapid iteration process where we can shake down good ideas vs. bad
> ideas, and put some rigor behind cost and schedule estimates.

Sadly this is currently just not possible. You can not get regulatory approval
for a prototype beyond a tiny research reactor (that is unsuited to test real
production reactors). Thus nuclear companies are forced to directly produce to
a production design, and to production regulation and not just that, but also
prove operational regulation and so on.

This comes with incredible cost and it is very much possible that a nuclear
reactor company builds one design and works with it for 20-30 years because
doing any substantial redesign would require a completely new regulatory
process.

Thankfully regulators in Canada and the US have been waking up to the fact
that regulation as currently designed have totally crushed innovation and are
trying to reform. Canada is leading in this and British, US and Canadian
companies all have started to go threw the Canadian regulatory process because
of this. But 40 years of fearmongering and regulation introduced right when
nuclear scare was at its peak are deeply embedded both in the regulation and
the culture of these agency.

------
matthberg
I helped run a TEDx event (I did event branding and ad designs) where Leslie
Dewan gave a talk about this! Unfortunately it looks like the video from her
talk at our event isn't up yet, but I will ask the team if they could have it
posted.

------
nickik
Its cool that they open sourced their design. I thought it was very likely
that they would fail, even more so then most nuclear startups. They made
design choices that were questionable and their claim to run directly of
nuclear waste seemed very surprising. They also seem to be way to optimistic
about the regulatory and business aspects.

For those interested, Terrestrial Energy and Moltex Energy are somewhat more
serious attempts to build molten salt reactors, both are quite different form
Transatomic.

Terrestrial Energy and Moltex both are in the regulatory process in Canada
(the only place a new reactor can realistically be approved) and Terrestrial
Energy is the furthest along of any GenIV reactor in terms of commercial
regulation in the Western world.

This talk by the main designer of Moltex is a pretty nice summation why they
think it would work:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvXcoSdXYlk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvXcoSdXYlk)

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boutcher
Got excited about an open source reactor pattern

