You can’t stop decay heat. It’s just molton salt reactors can operate at much higher temperatures and if it loses active cooling passive cooling with just air and infrared radiation while the salt passively circulates could be enough.
Isn’t molten salt just energy storage? Heat up salt when you have excess of energy, take heat out when you need it. The worst disaster there is just the container melting.
No, there are molten salt thermal batteries, but they aren’t the same as molten salt nuclear reactor. In a nuclear reactor the fissile material is dissolved in the salt for some reason, and the molten salt acts as a moderator or something. Apparently its safe because if the reactor power fails, the salt ‘freezes’ which prevents fission from occurring. Seems like complex extra steps to me but what do I know.
thankfully modern ones like molten salt reactors have passive safety, where they stop the reaction if overheating occurrs.
Ah yes, the passive safety of the molten salt spontaneously catching on fire when in contact with air and can’t be put out with water.
Yeah our track history with all the old research molton salt reactors catching fire during regular operation wasn’t encouraging lol.
You can’t stop decay heat. It’s just molton salt reactors can operate at much higher temperatures and if it loses active cooling passive cooling with just air and infrared radiation while the salt passively circulates could be enough.
Isn’t molten salt just energy storage? Heat up salt when you have excess of energy, take heat out when you need it. The worst disaster there is just the container melting.
No, there are molten salt thermal batteries, but they aren’t the same as molten salt nuclear reactor. In a nuclear reactor the fissile material is dissolved in the salt for some reason, and the molten salt acts as a moderator or something. Apparently its safe because if the reactor power fails, the salt ‘freezes’ which prevents fission from occurring. Seems like complex extra steps to me but what do I know.
“Can’t have a meltdown when you’ve already melted the fuel” is pretty much the whole idea there.
And are those modern molten salt reactors in the room with us now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1
2 MW. Fantastic. And only 8 years until it reaches continuous operation. How long will it be before that is anywhere near utility scale?