New Nuclear Energy Reactor Designed By Utah Professor Is Smaller, Safer And Economical

Researchers from Brigham Young University have developed a new system for safe nuclear energy production, reveals a report by KSL.

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To the unaware, standard nuclear reactors use a light-water reaction, where uranium atoms are split to create energy, with the remaining products radiating massive amounts of heat.

They're stored in solid fuel rods and water is run through the rods to keep everything cool enough. If there¡¯s not enough flow of cooling water, rods can overheat and can risk the meltdown of the entire nuclear facility.

However, in the new system developed by researchers, radioactive elements are stored in molten salt instead of fuel rods. While the idea isn¡¯t the latest, it¡¯s a newer version with novel features.

Matthew Memmott, professor and nuclear engineering expert at BYU explains, "Instead of trying to trap uranium inside a zirconium alloy rod, and then putting that inside of a big pressure vessel, and then putting that inside of containment where you're trying to mechanically keep things in place in case something goes wrong. Instead, what you do is you dissolve the fuel directly into a salt that's melted or a molten salt."

According to Memmott, salt fuses to the dissolved fuel chemically, "Instead of having to try and trap the fuel inside mechanically, where these mechanical failures could fail or melt, now we have the salt itself chemically bonding that fuel. Right away, we have a system that's impossible to melt down. There's nothing to melt, and it's not likely to cause any release problems because there's no pressure and there's nothing to push it out,¡± Memmott added.

Moreover, the molten salt nuclear reactor design not just eliminates dangerous nuclear waste, but also turns its byproducts into expensive commodities which can be harvested from the salt and sold.

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For instance, Molybdenum-99 costs $30 million per gram and can only be brought from the Netherlands. It is used in around 20 million medical imaging procedures and scans every year, and this can be extracted easily using Memmott¡¯s design.

Memmott claims that they can go to that salt and apply specific electrochemistry to extract pieces one at a time or even groups at a time. So the so-called waste, which is essentially a mix of uranium and other components can be pulled out and separated and sold, till the point there¡¯s no nuclear waste to be disposed of.

Another aspect of Memmott¡¯s design is that it¡¯s smaller compared to other nuclear reactors. Normal reactors are built over one square mile to reduce the risk of radiation. With its core being around 30 feet by 30 feet. Memmott¡¯s reactor is just four feet by seven feet. And since there¡¯s no risk of meltdown, it doesn't need to have such a large surrounding zone. And despite its size, it can power 1,000 American homes.

Moreover, their approach is extremely affordable too -- costs just three cents per kilowatt hour -- which according to Memmott is the cheapest electricity production source in existence.

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