MILES O’BRIEN:
Dissolving uranium in liquid offers several safety benefits. If the fuel gets too hot, the liquid expands and the uranium atoms become too dispersed to sustain a nuclear chain reaction. It turns itself off.
And in the event of a station failure like Fukushima, the liquid fuel flows into a larger tank, where it cools passively without the need for electricity. At Oak Ridge they successfully operated and tested a molten salt reactor for four years and it worked.
However, building a reactor that can withstand something as corrosive as a very hot salt bath is a major engineering challenge. Oak Ridge’s funding ended before they could work on it. The corrosion problem is therefore the focus of early testing for Leslie Dewan’s startup Transatomic.
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