Transatomic Power was an American company that designed Generation IV nuclear reactors based on molten salt reactor (MSR) technology. MIT alumni Dr. Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie founded Transatomic Power in 2011, and its board directors included E Ink Corporation co-founder Russ Wilcox. Among its backers were the

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

outfit Founders Fund, of which Peter Thiel is a partner. In 2013, the

U.S. Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and manages the research and development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the United States. ...

awarded Transatomic first prize in the ARPA-E Future Energy innovation contest. In 2018 the company announced that it would be winding down and

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

its intellectual property. The company discovered that in 2016 it had made errors in its early analysis and realized that the design couldn't consume nuclear waste. Transatomic Power ceased operation on September 25, 2018.

Reactor concept

Transatomic initial concept was that of a ''Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor'' (WAMSR) designed to digest spent nuclear fuel. The concept was based on the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment reactor that ran at

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a U.S. multiprogram science and technology national laboratory sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and administered, managed, and operated by UT–Battelle as a federally funded research and ...

(ORNL) from 1964 to 1969. It was open to the use of

thorium Thorium is a weakly radioactive metallic chemical element with the symbol Th and atomic number 90. Thorium is silvery and tarnishes black when it is exposed to air, forming thorium dioxide; it is moderately soft and malleable and has a high me ...

uranium Uranium is a chemical element with the symbol U and atomic number 92. It is a silvery-grey metal in the actinide series of the periodic table. A uranium atom has 92 protons and 92 electrons, of which 6 are valence electrons. Uranium is weak ...

as a fuel in its reactors. This design was later updated and corrected, and the claim that the reactor is able to use nuclear waste as fuel was dropped. The latest design is based on a low pressure, high temperature molten salt reactor. Features include: * A planned capacity of 1250 MWth, converting this to 520 MWe of electricity. This is a conservative rating of 41.6% efficiency. * Passive nuclear safety features:

Fail safe In engineering, a fail-safe is a design feature or practice that in the event of a specific type of failure, inherently responds in a way that will cause minimal or no harm to other equipment, to the environment or to people. Unlike inherent safet ...

freeze valve and drain tank and Control rods and neutron reflectors - also actively actuatable. * Lithium fluoride (LiF) fuel salt. This is a departure from the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment, which used an admixture of

beryllium fluoride Beryllium fluoride is the inorganic compound with the chemical formula, formula Beryllium, BeFluorine, F2. This white solid is the principal precursor for the manufacture of beryllium metal. Its structure resembles that of quartz, but BeF2 is hig ...

in its

salt Salt is a mineral composed primarily of sodium chloride (NaCl), a chemical compound belonging to the larger class of salts; salt in the form of a natural crystalline mineral is known as rock salt or halite. Salt is present in vast quantitie ...

to get

beryllium Beryllium is a chemical element with the symbol Be and atomic number 4. It is a steel-gray, strong, lightweight and brittle alkaline earth metal. It is a divalent element that occurs naturally only in combination with other elements to form mi ...

's corrosion control and neutron-doubling effects. Transatomic claims that LiF can dissolve more fuel per unit of salt, compensating for LiF's lack of neutron-doubling and higher melting point. An additional issue is that to minimize tritium production, the salt's ratio of lithium 7 should be enhanced. Currently, Lithium 7 is produced only in small amounts, for calibrating mass spectrographs. A single reactor will require quantities on the order of several metric tonnes. * Moderated by

zirconium hydride Zirconium hydride describes an alloy made by combining zirconium and hydrogen. Hydrogen acts as a hardening agent, preventing dislocations in the zirconium atom crystal lattice from sliding past one another. Varying the amount of hydrogen and the ...

(ZrH), possibly also using lithium hydride (LiH) and

yttrium hydride Yttrium hydride is a compound of hydrogen and yttrium. It is considered to be a part of the class of rare-earth metal hydrides. It exists in several forms, the most common being a metallic compound with formula YH2. YH2 has a face-centred cubic str ...

(YH). ZrH is corroded by molten LiF salt, but an admixture of YH in the moderator may form an anticorrosion barrier of

yttrium lithium fluoride Yttrium lithium fluoride (LiYF4, sometimes abbreviated YLF) is a birefringent crystal, typically doped with neodymium or praseodymium and used as a gain medium in solid-state lasers. Yttrium is the substitutional element in LiYF4. The hardness of Y ...

. * The reactor's vat, piping, heat-exchangers and pumps are to be made of "Modified Hastelloy-N," a corrosion-resistant nickel-chromium alloy developed from experience with the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment.TAP v1.0.1, 2016, section 2.6. There is no published operating experience using this alloy with LiF in a reactor core, and the salt's lack of a redox control component (such as beryllium) to manage corrosion increases the risk. Regulators may delay commercial deployment of Transatomic's reactor by up to two full refueling cycles to validate this choice. With the Transatomic reactor's long fuel-use cycle, this could take a decade, and pose commercial risks.

References

External links

transatomicpower.com
{{Emerging nuclear power markets Nuclear technology companies of the United States Thorium Energy companies established in 2011 Non-renewable resource companies established in 2011 2011 establishments in the United States

Reactor concept

See also

References

External links