Terrestrial Energy has updated its molten salt reactor design

Terrestrial Energy is rethinking energy. In this video, members of the Terrestrial Energy team explain the benefits of IMSR technology, and explore the business itself.

Atomic Insights took a recent look at Terrestrial Energy The main technical description from Atomic Insights is below.

Terrestrial Energy believe there are fundamental choices that can alter the competitive balance. TEI’s choice has been to design a reactor that is more akin to a chemical reactor, with fuel that is a dissolved reactant in a solution (in this case, a salt solution) where the solution provides the transport mechanism for the heat produced in a strongly exothermic reaction. Of course, the reaction in this case is not a chemical reaction; it is a fission chain reaction.

The hot reactor fluid is circulated through multiple redundant heat exchangers sealed into the same container as the reactor. Solar salt circulates on the other side of the primary heat exchangers to transport the reactor heat to a second set of heat exchangers where water receives the heat and boils into high temperature, high pressure steam.

The salt circuits operate at high temperature but low pressure. Low pressure enables containers that are simpler, cheaper and quicker to produce compared to the containers performing similar functions in a water-cooled reactor.

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