Elysium Industries MCSFR (Molten Chloride Salt Fast Reactor) - Ed Pheil @ TEAC10 

Gord here! I finance travel and video capture and editing with a Patreon campaign. ​www.patreon.com/thorium ...and if you pledge only $1/year that's still a really big deal to me. I need both social reinforcement (many PEOPLE supporting) as well as actual financial support. So whichever you might have to offer, please do pledge something. Quite possibly, for 2020, I won't travel to a single conference. We will see. But I would be perfectly happy working with what I've shot to this point. Frankly, the most important asset I'm missing is not something I could ever get myself... that is laboratory footage. And at this point I expect the footage exists already, shot by everyone doing MSR work. Getting that is a matter of creating a communications piece stakeholders are comfortable letting me slot lab footage into. So if I'm spending any Gord-hours I can simply writing and editing, then I'm not-at-all feeling robbed by Covid-19. My communications with ORNL have been quite positive, and in regards to pieces like this. It is crazy-slow, but good. The very best value I could offer MSR advocates is to help ORNL create and release presentations and interviews like this themselves. They do already create educational and promotional pieces, but not at the volume nor specificity we want. ORNL MSRW went from zero public videos from ORNL MSRW 2017, to 3 from ORNL MSRW 2018, and it looks like we will (eventually) get 9 from ORNL MSRW 2019. Maybe 2020 won't happen, but they're aware that MORE is what MSR advocates want. ORNL sure don't need me to do this, except to get the ball rolling and demonstrate demand. If ORNL (and all National Labs doing nuclear R&D) did this themselves, I could gladly become irrelevant to the creation of these basic video assets and focus more on narrative. It is the narrative videos which tend to have a bigger impact. But I can't create narrative pieces without interviews such as these. (And lab footage.) So, again, if you can do Patreon then head here... www.patreon.com/thorium ... if that doesn't work for you please let me know what mechanism does. Thanks for your support, -Gord

Absolute beast of a reactor designer, he is. I really hope to see Elysium go far!

I've watched almost every MSR video out there; and I'm impressed with this one more than all others. Quite a while back I concluded that fast was the correct way to go, controlled primarily by geometry and temperature. Eliminating the moderators gets rid of so many lifecycle problems. I just wish I had a big wad of cash to back these guys with. It could change the world.

Thanks Gordon. I think Elysium has taken major steps beyond other MSR designs - there's a lot to like about the MCSFR.

been waiting for this update, by far my favorite reactor design. One size, waste burning at high fission products penetration. Chloride salts which have already been approved due to extensive previous use, ya definitely best in my opinion.

My favourite reactor so far. Burns waste and weapons material, liquid cooled and fueled, chloride salts sound simpler than fluoride. I also like it's modular vs integral design. Seems way more serviceable. Thorium can come later.

I have been loving these frequent uploads

Continue the geat work, your videos are really good

Is it just me or does this sound like the best reactor design yet? Are there any major features missing? I mean jesus... It sounds like the best of all worlds.

I hope Elysium and Moltex Energy are both successful.

Great video Ed Pheil as always. Definitely heard some more detail on the reactor design features which was fascinating - like the drain/pump system what a great idea - no freeze plug required! Very exciting design I wish you and your company the very best 👍🏻

This is a great video. There's a lot in here I haven't heard from him before, and I think I've seen all of his interviews and presentations on RU-vid. Thanks Ed and Gordon!

I absolutely love Ed Pheil's designs and watched and re-watched every interview I could find. One question I have always had with this design is this: If the reactor has no moderator, and it is already critical, what is the safety value of the drain tank? Wouldn't it just be draining fissioning fuel into another vessel? Does the configuration or design of the drain tank stop the fissioning somehow? I can easily see the value of the drain tank for maintenance, especially with this new constant-pump, no freeze-plug design.

Imagine if the money dumped into windmills had been spent optimizing and installing this technology!

being able to use up all the existing nuclear waste is a huge selling point.........very hard to argue against that. Even if most new reactors are thorium, having some of these sucking up the spent fuel waste would still be very useful. This design could get the concept of high temp/ liquid salt reactors into operation as a bridge to get acceptance to wide scale use. Although the speaker comes across as very mundane, he actually gives a good impression of technical knowledge and being able to overcome the political and cost problems. In the real world, those are the major obstacles and objections from extremist/marxist greens that are always blocking the adoption of better nuclear technology.

“I don’t trust freeze seals.” DAMN, this guy is hard-core 👍🏼👍🏼

A "burner" of our copious fissile and fertile nuclear waste, low pressure, fewer components, no Wigner effect, no core fires, a modular design for scalable power output and pluggable straight into the existing power grid - all great news for a power reactor. I hope the DOE/NRC looks favorably on this great MCSFR design.

It's great to see another waste burning fast reactor. The Moltex fast spectrum waste burner also uses chloride salts with the fuel held in vertical fuel tubes. Their heat transfer salt is the same chloride salt species but contains no fuel. It has a highly negative temperature coefficient, used with passive cooling to prevent it overheating. It's naturally load following. Heat transfer to heat exchangers is entirely by natural convection. Heat is removed from the reactor by a tertiary "solar" salt. In regulatory terms that's entirely outside the nuclear island. As Ed says, it's all about minimising the regulatory input.

This reactor works very differently from other molten salt designs I've seen promoted. I shouldn't be surprised. The early information I've read on the subject really showed how wide open the possibilities of the concepts that were explored in the Lithium MSR developed in the 1960's. This design falls along the lines of what one article described as an "Actinide incinerator." Molten Salt reactors do not have to breed U233 from Th, nor do they have to be optimized for aviation.

really love MCSFR design. this and MCFR (terrapower) are my picks, though if i had to choose i'd probably take MCSFR. i hope both succeed

sleek design

I'm totally new to this. This design is genius to me. I'm not an academic so it might as some 2045 nextgem sh111t. Did watch the linger video featuring this guy and was amazed. The economics of this is what we need.

I wish I had a couple of billion dollars to invest in helping accelerate these getting built.

Thank you Gordon. I say build one of each. Let's get the ball rolling. And we will weed out the good and the bad as time goes on.

Good luck with what appears to be an excellent, innovative approach. My concern is that the politicians are married to "renewables" and will subsidize them with taxpayer dollars even if they have to cover half the country with solar cells and wind turbines. The environmental impact of disposing solar cells will be swept under the rug too.

let us not forget the ability of these to bring fresh water(desal) to the vast majority of the worlds populations that spend most of the day obtaining fresh water.

Sounds great I want to hear more about this power source!

Excellent stuff.

Ed....has forgotten more...than the rest of these upstart nuclear power guys...GO ED

Very informative presentation on MSRE technology.

This really is fabulous work.

One of the good ones.

The bit where you can consume DU though. Thats what got my ears pricked up! The modular design is great as well. This reactor design really has thought about TCO and the electricity generation side too. Fantastic work

He went over to the Fallout universe and hired a few ghouls to operate the reactor, with one of the more intelligent supermutants doing the heavy lifting. Those people in the photo were just interdimensional immigrants he paid to educate.

The reactor can run on almost anything fissionable. Th232,U238, Pu240, you name it those fast neutrons will split it. Running some UF6 gas in the secondary heat exchanger will allow you to make extremely high purity plutonium 239 if desired, also beryllium lithium fluoride salt can be used to make tritium as well as being a heat transfer medium.

Is there anyway DOD could be convinced to build the first one to consume plutonium from decommissioned weapons in order to expedite regulatory issues?

Badass introduction and establishing of credentials xD

I hate the fact that these things aren't being built at mass scale right now. it makes absolutely no sense.

Am I the first one to read MCSFR as McSafer?! C'mon, people, work the human factors!

This does sound like the best of all the MSR, I can't wait to see the first one in operation in early 2150. I know what you are thinking, that a rather optimistic time frame for the government, but considering the dire strait of the planet, I know the politicians will go full steam ahead.

Just curious, is this a single fluid reactor ? My question is: is it possible to use thorium in this reactor (even with no blanket) as primary fuel in order to produce the fissile uranium 233 to start up thermal spectrum fluorides reactors ?

I'm so glad to hear that Pheil and co. are making progress! It sounds like they've got good answers to the important questions.

A great presentation, I'm anxious to learn more about the design. However, the website is way out of date and contains almost no technical information. I would really appreciate more up-to-date design images and a whitepaper. Please, as a minimum, include PDFs of your presentations.

I know this is an old video, but the YT algorithm only just presented it to me, and while I normally associate Gordon McDowell with enlightening videos advocating Thorium based reactors, but this was something different and utterly fascinating, an actinide consuming reactor that has much the same benefits as a LiFTR but with a better ability to consume spent fuel and or weapons grade material as part of nuclear disarmament efforts. Assuming we can get the metallurgy in place to support these molten salt reactors for half a century plus, why bother building anything else?

Question for Ed Pheil: At 8:48 you stated that "these people are all zombies, they'd all be dead". Is that because of the heat, radiation, or both? I figured just the heat because my understanding is that those metals and below ground structures are enough to contain the radiation but I was hoping you could clarify.

The design on their website bears little resemblance to the presentation. It still shows freeze plugs, for example instead of the continuous flow system.

I really like the idea of the MCSFR, and it's grown on me more than the LMFBR like EBR-2. I realize Ed said that fuel fabrication is 90% of the fuel cost, but does that still hold true for an LMFBR that is running on spent fuel from LWRs? I mean, the fuel is already close to its final useful form that a LMFBR could use, is it not? I realize EBR-2 used its pyroprocessing to make its fuel, but since you don't need to refine Uranium from ore if you're using spent fuel, what's that do to the cost? Roger Blomquist also stated once that they don't remove actinides nor do they remove all the fission products. And would you be running the MCSFR as a breeder to produce new Pu? I thought that was one of the benefits of the LMFBR is that you take your solid fuel out, pyroprocess it and run it right back in or send it to other nuclear reactors (including LWRs) that can't reprocess and reuse fuel? I am ecstatic about the giant steps that seem to be happening. RU-vid apparently got its algorithm fixed because I recently discovered Illinois EnergyProf channel with all his videos on nuclear power and energy. Truly a golden age!

Very good, ..understatement

At last we may see this producing

The best option short term. Please like and share this video, I did.

Fascinating

A lot of intelligent design considerations. I wonder about pump lifetimes and corrosion generally though. I didn't hear anything about that in the talk.

OK, now build one, right now, you can use my backyard

Hope to see such reactors in india , in the future. Best advantage is utilisation of waste nuclear fuel

Deliver _multiple reactors_ to _each_ customer, stagger their starts to provide for downtime scheduling, with no loss of service to the customer.

Ed Pheil what is the life span of the pump? I think that would be what's going to break most often.

The design looks exceptionally well done, and I quite like the modularity. My only concern/confusion is about the necessity with chlorides to separate out the Cl-35 isotopes, as they have a habit of capturing neutrons and then decaying into argon and sulfur. That was what pushed people into using fluorides in the first place, as it was an added layer of complexity and cost. Has isotope separation become cheap enough to be feasible, or is there some other factor at play here?

What materials are the pipework and the reactor made of if the life is expected to be 40 years and working up to near 900C?

It wold worth to add time stamps in description about main sections of the presentation.

My idea is to have a seperate tube in a tube that used lead for a thermal transfer fluid and radiation shield.

So unbolting the top of the heat exchanger will not be a human operation. Or unbolting the pumps with remote processing. The metal thickness on the reactor vessel, and heat exchangers needs to also be monitored. I am pretty sure you can measure vessel thickness with neutron counters remotely operated. Plateing out with noble metals must also be measured daily. Measuring noble metal thickness might be more difficult but heat transfer ability can certainly be measured.

Any news/update about this interesting project ? I have the impression that the clever idea of fast chloride MSRs in general didn' t evolve too much from this video

I didn't t understand, at last, if it possible to build a single 5000 MW th or 2000 MWe reactor as said at about 2:00 min and in which configuration ?

Just waiting for an ipo

How to handle high temperature (melting point) of sodium chloride? Tungsten alloy? Mixing with other low-melting salt?

These various Generation 4 prospects need a massive amount of investment., but provide us with the only way out of the Climate Emergency. Solution. Put a UN administered levy of say 10 dollar cent a litre on aviation kerosene and ship's bunker. This to be disbursed to the top ten contenders, to super stimulate them forward. The levy has to be international or wont work.

The Elysium design indeed looks very interesting. I love the quick change system for the heat exchangers. Are there not even control rods in the core? Just homogenous fuel salt? A cost estimate would be useful. If the thermal efficiency is 40% for the "low temp" 750C version, what kind of efficiency would you achieve with a 1000C reactor?

The question that some people ask like me, is what is the resistance of all construction and thermal transfer materials to the chemical corrosion of salt at very high temperature (700°) over a very long period of time (7 or 8 years)? Is that not the main difficulty for an operational MSR? Do you have some clues and certainty regarding this major question? Thank you for your answer.

Can it be fueled with Thorium as that is unlikely to leave behind radioactive waste.

By the way, I noticed in previuos videos that the T_out reactor was about 650 C (due to material uncertainties) while here is even increased to 750 C. Just curious, what did it change to do that ?

Interesting project, but I still don't understand how they think to get the fissile start-up, considering the uranium and plutonium in LWR spent fuel is at max 1% fissile each (~1% uranium and ~1% plutonium) - you need much more than that. You have at least to separate that ~1% uranium from the rest of nuclear waste stream (to increase the fissile content), or am I wrong?

Do you require funding?

How would we modify the design to serve on a ship, where we need to account for the ship's movement?

Not sure about the 40 year lockdown...what about pump maintenance? I don't know of any pump that can run continually in high temps and radiation for that long without changing out the motor or the pumps.

Missing is how this reactor achieves "NEGATIVE COEFFICIENTS OF REACTIVITY". Thermal expansion from higher temperatures helps by making the reactor core less dense. So a spherical core with angled 'overflow' pipes to accelerate reducing the critical mass might work. But I'm wondering if 'voids' (i.e., boiling of the reactive core salts and holding the bubbles) may be involved? Speculation, a series of inverted cups could hold the 'boiled', salt-based, fuel to quickly and efficiently reduce the critical mass. But this does not address removing the radioactive gas by-products from the cups.

And an other question, which cost penality (for example, per MWe) is there between a saturated steam turbine and a high efficiency super-critical steam one ? Besides costs reasons, I think there is still a reason to go for the higher efficiency system in order to avoid water cooling and ease sites choice

If loss of power occurs for an extended period of time what happens to the fuel in the drain tank?

I heard somewhere that there are 72,000 bombs worth of plutonium in the world as of a few years ago. How long will these reactors last with this amount of fuell? Assume all new powerplants are MCSFR. How many years will it take befpre we need tp swotch tp thorium fuel?? Thank you.

now I like this reactor type best. it can start with steam-heat exchangers, then easily scale up and prove its reliability and economics (don't buy the cheapest steam-turbine, buy a good one; or buy a reliable used steam-turbine, which is still in good condition). Then, later on, a CO2-heat exchanger can be added and a CO2-Brayton-cycle turbine (at least 700 MW_el minimum, because of "gap-losses" of smaller machines!) could be developed. Kirk Sorensen's LIFTER could profit from this development, too. His startup then could concentrate on Protactinium separation and Tritium sequestration. Then the world can easily switch from gas- to ElectricBattery-Vehicles! Not doing it the hard way. Public discussion and politics are so wrong about it. Let the experienced engineers lead technology; not the professors in academia nor the filibuster-experts in Washington! Professors are for answering questions, but You need to ask them the right questions firsthand! They are usually very specialized in their knowledge.

Nanook I do not like this particular design because they are not continuously removing fission products. This means the drain tank must be able to dissipate large amounts of heat from decaying fission products in the event of an emergency shutdown. Much better to use a fuel cycle where you are continuously removing the fission products. Also requires active cooling rather than just a melt plug for emergency shut down. This leaves you open to Fukashima type failures.

I want the factibilty of plutonium/thorium mix with a less plutonium for South america market we have a tlatelolco treaty

Is there a working system operating?

Q: If this is high temp can you use it to break the water molecule to make hydrogen?

How long do you imagine before such reactors become main stream? In this decade, or the next?

I think about the only thing I disagree with is the assumption about the lifespan of fuel sources. I guess if uranium reactors of current design keep going and generating spent fuels they can keep going longer, but it seems to be a big hiccup if the technology really takes off and you have hundreds of of these in operation over the world. I would think having it run in conjunction with thorium-based reactors would be a best of both worlds type of scenario.

What would kill the little people in this diagram? Heat or Radiation exposure?

I would have liked to know, how much of a burden are we adding or taking away from future generation's, regarding storage of hazardous material. And how hot & how long?

I regret to inform Dr. Pheil that there is no such thing as non-bomb grade plutonium. All isotopes of plutonium are nuclear explosives. Having said that, I like his plan for a reactor. It would indeed burn off nuclear explosives which threaten the world. I appreciate that he looks at it from a "smaller is better" perspective, which I don't personally look into, but really in my opinion the main purpose of his reactor, which I think he should give more emphasis to, is the elimination of nuclear explosives. That's what's actually driving the antinuclear movement; they camoflage their agenda by screaming about fission products, which are easy to dispose of. They want to dismantle the means of production of nuclear weapons but this runs counter to the climate problem. Dr. Pheil has noted that there's a lot of plutonium; President Obama has noted that it will take more than his lifetime to address the problem of getting rid of this stuff. I have looked into chloride reactors independently if shallowly and I think it would be a good device as the second stage of a three stage reactor. First an accelerator fissions the offending explosives, which uses protons and releases lots of neutrons. These feed a chloride reactor which amplifies the neutrons and destroy more of the fissionable problem isotopes. These generate a surplus of neutrons which feed a thermal fluoride reactor. All are subcritical and can be turned off instantly by shutting off the accelerator. My plans are back-of-the-envelope sketches and I very much appreciate Dr. Pheil's detailed work.

What produces the start up heat?

It bums me out to understand that I’ll never be smart enough or educated enough to be able to tell whether my man here actually knows what he’s talking about, or is making any bad assumptions.

in a chloride-salt reactor, You ultimately get Tritium-Chloride ( H/D/T-Cl_gas, corrosive, acidic, radioactive) in Kirk Sorensen's LiFTER it would be Tritium-Fluoride ( not less aggressive, corrosive)! Would the structural material of the tank, which could be weakened over time by the (neutrons-) Wiggener-effect, hold up for 40 years? hot Hydrogen (and Tritium too) tends to diffuse into metals and make them brittle. How would You treat the first problem, sequester the off-gases, and handle/store Tritium+He3? I think You need a chemist like Stephen Boyd on Your team! the necessary chemical processing plant would make a small-scale MCSFR uneconomical. So I think ultimately You should go for it like Elon Musk does: full scale, and solve upcoming problems on the run. Make sure, no flood-waters can come close to the drain tank and any firemen in the neighborhood know what a fast-neutron reactor is like!

Yet another old school design. LoL. Still with the same inefficiencies and waste stream issues, plus maintenance issues related to the salt corrosion. And it relies on the preexistence of fuels supplied by larger old school reactions.

how far from the vessle is a health risk?

can this be fueled from mars regolith?

Most impressed by Ed, but I know nothing about the fine details, and they all matter.

#20million4change

Is there any attempt made to educate the anti-nuclear (human) movement about these sort of developments?

I prefer a stirling heat absorbing glass reactor.

“Information not for export” thank god! Stop our technology drain.

i hope all u nuclear engineers collaberate to get as many development ideas into action as is humanly poss. why not use graphene rods to transfer heat from reactor to co2 turbines ? can heavy magnets help with reactor deisgn ?