Seaborg Technologies is a private Danish startup. It is developing small

molten salt reactors A molten salt reactor (MSR) is a class of nuclear fission reactor in which the primary nuclear reactor coolant and/or the fuel is a molten salt mixture. Only two MSRs have ever operated, both research reactors in the United States. The 1950's Ai ...

. Founded in 2015 and based in

Copenhagen Copenhagen ( or .; da, København ) is the capital and most populous city of Denmark, with a proper population of around 815.000 in the last quarter of 2022; and some 1.370,000 in the urban area; and the wider Copenhagen metropolitan ar ...

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, Seaborg emerged as a small team of physicists, chemists, and engineers with educational roots at the Niels Bohr Institute, CERN, ESS (European Spallation Source) and DTU (Technical University of Denmark) who share a common vision of safe, sustainable and cheap

nuclear power Nuclear power is the use of nuclear reactions to produce electricity. Nuclear power can be obtained from nuclear fission, nuclear decay and nuclear fusion reactions. Presently, the vast majority of electricity from nuclear power is produced ...

. Seaborg Technologies is named after the American

nuclear chemist Nuclear chemistry is the sub-field of chemistry dealing with radioactivity, nuclear processes, and transformations in the nuclei of atoms, such as nuclear transmutation and nuclear properties. It is the chemistry of radioactive elements such as ...

and Nobel laureate Glenn T. Seaborg.

Compact Molten Salt Reactor

The reactor designed by Seaborg Technologies is called the Compact Molten Salt Reactor (CMSR). The company claims that it is inherently safe, significantly smaller, better for the environment, and inexpensive even compared to fossil fuel-based electricity. Conventional nuclear reactors have solid fuel rods that need constant cooling, typically using water under high pressure. Water is abundantly available but its low boiling point is a vulnerability creating a potential point of failure. In contrast, in a CMSR, fuel is mixed in a liquid salt whose boiling point is far above the temperatures produced by the fission products. This enables it to operate stably at a pressure of one atmosphere. Unlike other thermal spectrum molten salt reactors the CMSR does not use graphite as a moderator. Instead it used molten Sodium hydroxide (NaOH) contained in pipes adjacent to and interlaced with pipes that contain the molten fuel salt. This enables a more compact design. It also allows the liquid moderator to be rapidly removed from the core as a fission control mechanism. In the case of an overheating accident, a frozen salt plug at the base of the reactor melts and the liquid fuel flows out of the reactor core away from the moderator into cooled tanks where the reaction quenches, the fuel cools and solidifies, without dispersing in the surrounding environment. The approach mitigates the danger of a failure rather than eliminating all failures.

Deployment

The company intends to deploy its

shipping container A shipping container is a container with strength suitable to withstand shipment, storage, and handling. Shipping containers range from large reusable steel boxes used for intermodal shipments to the ubiquitous corrugated boxes. In the context of ...

sized reactors on barges. Reactors are manufactured at scale in a central facility, reducing costs. Using barges makes them mobile. Single reactor output is estimated to be 200 MWe. Multiple units could be deployed on a single barge. The primary design challenge is in preventing the highly corrosive fuel slurry and moderator from damaging the reactor. The fueling cycle is 12 years. It offers no proliferation risk or military applications. A prototype is scheduled for 2025, and Seaborg Technologies hopes to have regulatory approval in 2026 and to be ready for deployment in 2027.

References

{{Reflist Nuclear reactors Technology companies based in Copenhagen Danish companies established in 2015 Companies based in Copenhagen Municipality