Abstract
The energy trilemma forms the key driver for the future of energy research. In nuclear technologies, molten salt reactors are an upcoming option which offers new approaches. However, the key would be closed fuel cycle operation which requires sufficient breeding for a self-sustained long term operation ideally based on spent fuel. To achieve these attractive goals two challenges have been identified: achieving of sufficient breeding and development of a demand driven salt clean up system. The aim is to follow up on previous work to create an initial approach to achieving sufficient breeding. Firstly, identification of a salt system with a high solubility for fertile material and sufficiently low melting point. Secondly, evaluation of the sensitivity of the breeding performance on the sort of fissile material, the fissile material loading, and the core dimension all based on a realistic salt system which provides the solubility for sufficient fertile material to achieve the required breeding in a homogeneous reactor without breeding blanket. Both points are essential to create an innovative solution to harvest the fruits of a closed fuel cycle without the penalty of the prohibitively huge investments. It is demonstrated that the identified and investigated NaCl-UCl based systems are feasible to deliver the requested in-core breeding within the given solubility limits of fertile material in the salt system using either uranium as start-up fissile component or plutonium. This result is enriched by the analysis of the achievable full power days per inserted mass of plutonium. These new insights support reactor optimization and lead to a first conclusion that systems with lower power density could be very attractive in the case of low fuel cost, like it would be given when operating on spent nuclear fuel.
Highlights
The current growing interest in molten salt reactor technologies has been recently highlighted by the IAEA: “Initially developed in the 1950s, molten salt reactors have benefits in higher efficiencies and lower waste generation
The results indicate that a system with a radius of 170 cm or more is required to achieve sufficient breeding in a self-sustainable mode over an acceptable operational burnup of at least 60 GWd/tHM
The results indicate that a system with a radius of 3853 is required to achieve sufficient breeding in a self-sustainable mode over 14 ofan cm2019, or 12, more acceptable operational burnup of at least 60 GWd/tHM
Summary
The current growing interest in molten salt reactor technologies has been recently highlighted by the IAEA: “Initially developed in the 1950s, molten salt reactors have benefits in higher efficiencies and lower waste generation. In recent years, growing interest in this technology has led to renewed development activities.” [1]. For the use of molten chlorides, much of this analysis is based on historic reports of the 1970 [2,3] which have been developed in the follow up of the first operation of a reasonable sized molten salt test reactor, the MSRE [4]. The newly growing interest is reflected by a variety of start-up companies formed around the development of molten salt reactors like Terrestrial. We intend to go much further to achieve closed fuel cycle operation, which has already demonstrated for the whole process with sodium cooled fast reactors on a laboratory scale [8]
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