Staff Reports
RW Monitor
1/23/2015
Canadian-based Terrestrial Energy announced this week that it was entering into a relationship/collaboration with Oak Ridge National laboratory for the possible development of a new line of small molten salt reactors. Nuclear advocates who’ve long pushed for a revival of the molten salt technology, developed at ORNL decades ago, greeted the news with excitement. “ORNL involvement in Terrestrial Energy’s work on its IMSR design is most fitting as it was ORNL that built and demonstrated the first molten salt reactor,” the company’s news release stated. “ORNL is the site of the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) where the reactor operated successfully from 1965 to 1969. Terrestrial Energy’s basic concept builds upon the MSRE operational data generated and then further builds upon ORNL’s Denatured Molten Salt Reactor (DMSR) design, which is the basis of Terrestrial Energy’s IMSR.”
But the involvement of ORNL, at this point, appears to be limited, at least based on comments from the Oak Ridge lab. Terrestrial said it had “entered into an initial collaboration” with the lab as part of an effort to advance the Integral Molten Salt Reactor to the “engineering blueprint stage” in late 2016. Some reports seemed to indicate that the Department of Energy had made an announcement on the project, but DOE and ORNL actually didn’t do any sort of promotion on the new collaboration. Asked for comment, ORNL spokeswoman Morgan McCorkle said the lab’s Nuclear Science and Engineering Directorate had entered into an initial agreement to perform “a high-level review of their reactor design.” Terrestrial Energy is funding the work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, McCorkle said.
ORNL declined to release the entire agreement, citing proprietary issues. But a lab spokeswoman provided this statement of work: “The agreement between ORNL and TEI (Terrestrial Energy Inc.) is a contract executed through DOE’s Work for Others Program that has a singular focus and purpose – that being to conduct at a high-level, a review of TEI’s Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR) design and TEI’s program for its further development. Following this review ORNL will comment on areas that may require additional technical focus, such as heat exchangers and pumps, and will evaluate the selection of structural materials for this reactor concept.”
