Nuclear reactor design and development company Transatomic Power Corporation said this week it had taken an unprecedented step by releasing a technical white paper that provides and in-depth look at the science underlying the its liquid-fueled reactor design.
“This design is the result of years of open, clearly communicated scientific progress,” said the company's Chief Executive Officer Dr. Leslie Dewan. But the CEO also says that research detailed in the report shows how the company has “demonstrated many-fold increases in fuel efficiency over existing technologies.”
With a $200,000 grant from the Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) Nuclear Energy Voucher program, Transatomic plans to proceed with high-fidelity modeling of its design in collaboration with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, an early developer of the liquid-fueled technology.
Transatomic Chairman Ray Rothrock, a veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist, said the company has achieved “truly remarkable” results in pursuit of reducing waste in the nuclear fission process for commercial applications. That progress is based on the properties of fuel in liquid form, compared to solid pellets loaded into fuel rods. The company's chief technical officer Mark Massie said in a statement that the waste reduction is over 50 percent for U-235 enriched to the industry standard 5 percent. However, the company has demonstrated the possibility of reaching 83 percent waste reduction “using only uranium that regulators consider 'low enriched,'” Massie said.
Traditional “light water” nuclear reactors, named for the material that they use to control their nuclear chain reactions, are limited in the amount of energy they can extract from their solid uranium fuel. The Transatomic design, which instead uses a liquid uranium-salt mixture, does not have the same performance constraints as light water designs. It can therefore extract twice as much energy from its fuel and use nuclear waste as a fuel source, the company said.
Transatomic is aiming for a net negative waste factor, which is defined as a liquid-fuel reactor that produces less waste than it takes in. Subsequent design work will focus on maximizing the energy it can extract from spent nuclear fuel. The work will include developing new tools to model other reactors physics phenomena and completing the overall design of its nuclear power plant.
The company is developing a 1250 MWth TAP Molten Salt Reactor (MSR).