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Liquid-fuelled reactors
Published in Kenneth Jay, Nuclear Power, 2019
Fluids possessing this desirable property are molten mixtures of the salts uranium tetrafluoride, or thorium tetrafluoride, with the fluorides of the so-called alkaline metals (lithium, sodium, and potassium in particular), and of beryllium or zirconium. As compared with aqueous solutions these mixtures have the additional advantages that they are not volatile, and hence can be operated at high temperature without requiring high pressures, and that they are not decomposed by irradiation with the release of an explosive mixture of gases. They are therefore promising reactor fuels.
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Published in Viorel Badescu, George Cristian Lazaroiu, Linda Barelli, POWER ENGINEERING Advances and Challenges, 2018
Two different reactor concepts utilizing molten salt have been identified. In the first one, referred to simply as molten salt reactor, MSR, the fissile material is dissolved in the molten fluoride salt, usually in the form of uranium and thorium tetrafluoride, UF4 and ThF4 (generally 1% or 2% by mole is added). Since heat is produced directly in the heat transfer fluid, MSRs are characterized by no heat transfer delay and a very fast thermal feedback. The layout of the design of a generic Gen IV MSR is presented in Fig. 12.
Safe, clean, proliferation resistant and cost-effective Thorium-based Molten Salt Reactors for sustainable development
Published in International Journal of Sustainable Energy, 2022
The more advanced reactor is the Molten Salt Breeder (MSBR), also started at ORNL, and described in detail by (Robertson et al. 1970). This is a breeder reactor, implying that more fissile material is created than consumed in the fission process, and it consists of two fluids. A representative design is the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR). The LFTR consists of a core and a ‘blanket,’ a volume that surrounds the core. The blanket contains a mixture of thorium tetrafluoride in a fluoride salt containing lithium and beryllium, made molten by the heat of the core. The core consists of fissile uranium-233 tetrafluoride also in molten fluoride salts of lithium and beryllium within a graphite structure that serves as a moderator and neutron reflector. The uranium-233 is produced in the blanket when neutrons generated in the core are absorbed (Hargraves and Moir 2010).