Imagine building a full-scale Fission with Thorium power plant in a factory and then installing and running it on site within a week. This is possible with a compact 100MW Fission with Thorium reactor the size of a standard 40 ft shipping container. Multiple factories can build this reactor and then ship and install it on site using conventional processes. Typical Fission power plants take years to install and operate. These compact reactors can take days. By utilizing Fission with Thorium, shipping container sized 100 MW full-scale fission reactors can be mass produced in factories all around the world.
How 100MW of Power Fits into a Shipping Container
The entire Fission with Thorium reactor is much more compact than typical Fission reactors for multiple reasons. First, liquid fuels allow for the reactor to simply mix liquids instead of containing solid fuel or control rods, so the reactor itself is much smaller. Second, the compact reactor uses high-temperature and low-pressure liquids, so large pressure containment vessels are not required. Third, Fission with Thorium reactors do not require an additional fast reactor breeder to the system. Fourth, the system is air-cooled, so no cooling towers for water sources are required. Fifth, the waste is easier to contain since it’s less than 1% of the waste from typical Fission reactors. Finally, the freeze-plug emergency shutdown safety system is much smaller than conventional systems. This 100MW compact reactor is currently being developed and is planned to be operational in the next few years.
Progress on a Compact 100MW Reactor
Currently, Copenhagen Atomics (link) is building this compact Fission with Thorium reactor. They are developing each component of the 100MW reactor. The first step is to demonstrate a 1MW reactor with all the components. They must prove that each component and subsystem is functional and can be used in the 100MW design. Next, they will build, test, and deploy the full 100MW system within the next few years. When successful, this 100MW reactor can be mass produced using this design. It can be manufactured in house, or the design can be licensed to factories of all sizes.
Source: copenhagenatomics.com
Fission with Thorium Reactors on an Assembly Line
A key to solving global warming is scaling Fission with Thorium production. Currently, Fission power plants are custom made per site and application, which costs excess time and overhead. These costs make the project’s energy costs too high and investments too risky which leads to slow adoption of Fission power. When a full-scale Fission with Thorium reactor can fit into a shipping container, energy intensive countries can manufacture this product to provide low-cost, carbon-free energy. Industrialized countries are great at mass manufacturing products, so they can build these compact Fission with Thorium reactors to greatly speed up Fission adoption and replace coal, oil, and gas power plants with carbon-free power!
Article Source: https://www.copenhagenatomics.com/technology.php
Fission with Thorium is grateful for your support. Please consider making a donation or sharing on social media.