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  1. This is truly excellent news. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that Terrestrial was planning on licensing in Canada instead of the US. If that is true, what changed?

  2. I would hope that both the Canadian and US regulatory agencies would take the licensing as a challenge to see who can “get there” with the best and the fastest licensing review.
    Perhaps this is too much to wish for, but I see an opportunity for the two agencies to cooperate so that both don’t need to invent the whole licensing process for this new type of reactor from scratch.

  3. Rod – thanks! This is indeed great news. Hopefully the new administration in the USA will decide they don’t want to miss commercial opportunities for new US nuclear technology companies. We need all the various designs working and competing around the world.

    1. @Jeff S

      NuScale Power Modules are definitely advanced, modern designs. I should have been more careful to insert the adjective of “non-LWR” in front of advanced.

      You’re correct NuScale intends to license their reactor with the NRC. Not only have they already spend more than $11 million paying for 43,000 hours of NRC professional staff time, but they have actually completed their license application and submitted it to the NRC.

  4. “The NRC isn’t ready today and will not be ready in FY2019 unless they promptly receive the proper direction and resources from Congress to become ready”

    Yes with direction from Congress the NRC could theoretically extend itself to train up for MSR designs. But institutionally, do the people there want to allow this to happen? Both the NRC staff and the existing commercial industry is light-water through and through. In DoE/NRC testimony in 2014, Peter Lyons as much as told non light-water designs to go play in the grant box, as nothing but light water would be deployed in the near future in the United States.

    Yes Congress could act, should act. What should we expect of politicians however if stories begin leaking FUD from unamed scientists in DoE claiming that MSR vessels will, say, somehow mysteriously corrode away, and need just as much containment (read dollars) as 150 bar light water?

  5. When I questioned the safety of using molten salt fueled reactors for sea vessel propulsion, Terrestrial Energy banned me from accessing their twitter account.

    All I did was point out that salts dissolve more readily in water than ceramic pellets 🙁

    1. The melting temperature of ceramics is around 1400 C., whereas salt is around 800. Below that point it freezes, presumably in a containment vessel. So what was your point exactly?

        1. @benjamin weenen

          I’ll let molten salt experts respond, but I hope you realize that the salts proposed for liquid fuel reactors are NOT NaCl (table salt).

          I don’t know what their solubility properties are, but it’s a pretty good assumption that they are different from the familiar NaCl.

          1. Yes I realise fluorides do not dissolve as readily as chlorides. But dissolve they do. And sodium chloride is indeed the main fuel salt for the Moltex proposal I believe.

            I’m not expert. I just opined sea vessels probably weren’t the best place to site a salt fueled nuclear reactor. No criticism of Terrestrial Energy, of whom I’ve been a fanboy of since its inception.

            Just odd how they were so touchy on the subject of how water and fuel salts might not be a match made in heaven.

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