Presenter: Brent Edgerton, Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering, Mechanical Engineering
Authors: Brent Edgerton (Student), Troy Munro (Professor)
Faculty Advisor: Troy Munro, Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering, Mechanical Engineering
Institution: Brigham Young University
Molten Salt Reactors are a new form of nuclear power that can be remotely operated out of a truck supplying power to small communities. The accident concern is caused by the challenge to transfer heat out of the core. This research modeled current reactor designs and optimized them to maximize the heat transfer out of the core during accident conditions. Passive cooling systems work without human intervention and are much cheaper and simpler than current active methods. Convective fins placed outside the reactor were insufficient and reacted slowly to accident conditions. The first strategy was to move the fins inside the shielding layers. This increased the weight of the core, but provided a 150% improvement to the heat transfer qualities bringing the power total power capacity to 5.8MWt. Since the limiting factor appeared to be the low thermal conductivity of the salt (<1W/mK), conductive panels were inserted into the salt chambers. SiC was chosen for having good thermal qualities (120W/mK) while at the same time being neutronically neutral. The improvement was an enormous 431% increase in reactor power capacity. An additional convective chamber was added in the center of the core’s panels. That chamber was divided into concentric rings of fins. Four rings of convective fins were included bringing the total power capacity of the model to 37.9MWt, a 972% improvement on the original model. This shows that the incorporation of passive cooling geometry is a valuable consideration when designing MSR. Passive cooling is much less expensive than active cooling and needs much less space than traditional cooling systems. These advancements can help private industry afford nuclear investments and will help millions of people have safe access to electricity.