On the SMR front, Moltex is back in the news. This is the company that is partnering with NB Power to develop a SMR project in NB. There’s nothing very new to me here, but their claims have gotten bigger, as I recall anyway. They’re probably too big, in fact, but just for fun let’s get them on record in this thread and see how things pan out.
https://www.thechronicleherald.ca/bu...-waste-313709/
“Moltex believes its technology has the capacity to solve the climate change crisis on its own. In time, says Moltex, it could deliver affordable electricity with no carbon emissions while reducing the world’s stock on nuclear waste.
“The opportunity here is so big,” said Moltex CEO North America Rory O’Sullivan in an interview. “The GDP increase for the host nation would be $1.5 trillion and it would create hundreds of thousands of jobs. That opportunity is too big just for Canada.”
Moltex is one of a handful of companies around the world that is working on technology that would convert the waste from nuclear plants into electricity — another is Bellevue, Wash.-based TerraPower, founded by Bill Gates.
Some environmentalists believe nuclear power is key in battling climate change because it produces energy on-demand, whereas renewables like solar or wind are sporadic. This new technology would mitigate the downside of nuclear power by consuming nuclear waste.”
Here are a couple of links on the technology from their site.
https://www.moltexenergy.com/ourbreakthrough/
https://www.moltexenergy.com/stablesaltreactors/
"In a Molten Salt Reactor, the gases are not produced and the reaction takes place at atmospheric pressure, so explosive release of radioactive products is not possible. Also the reaction slows down as the temperature rises, and so the system is self-damping. The net effect is to simplify the engineering massively and thereby to significantly reduce the size and cost of the reactor. The SSR will be one eighth of the cost of a current nuclear reactor of the same output and cheaper even than coal or gas."