I'm Adam from Moltex we've heard from Syd this morning and we've heard from a
lot of other vendors preceding me as well about the advantages of molten salt
reactor technology around the economic viability of the technology at the
moment I've got the rare pleasure of standing in front of a room full of
people who actually probably agree with me in saying that molten salt reactors
are a solution there are many solutions to to what the world faces at the moment
but a really a practical solution that has gathered a lot of affinity and a lot
of focus around the world so the question that I'm going to try and
answer is not technically why is the molten salt reactor perhaps a
better technology or about a variant of a molten salt reactor but more what's
important around what we're trying to do which is the economics so the groans of
the room because I know you're sort of on the technical side I will be talking
more around the economics of the stable salt reactor this is a brief overview
of Moltex technology portfolio we are the proprietary developers of Stable
Salt Reactor technology and when I've got two minutes to explain Stable Salt
Reactor technology what I say is it's the one where we put our fissile salts
into conventional fuel pins we've got those conventional fuel pins into a
conventional fuel assembly and we fuel a conventional nuclear reactor core with a
non-fissile coolant in a full reactor it's very closely related actually to
the precursor to the MSRE which we heard around this morning which was the
aircraft reactor design one of the the pre conceptual ideas that was actually
investigated was to circumvent a lot of the issues around pumping radioactive
salts the technological hurdles and we strove with technological about that
that brings and that was actually just to have your fuel salt constrained
within fuel pins so we treated exactly like you would a conventional solid
fueled reactor that means that today's safeguards are practical for our reactor
it means that current operational processes are deployable in one of our
reactors it's much more conventional for what is a contemporary licensing realm
which is someone who's been looking at solid fuel reactors for the last sixty
years and trying to come up with regulatory arguments
for why they are practical all of this comes down to the first bit
which is rapid deployment so the reason we selected to do this and we didn't
immediately come up with the idea of having our salt contained within
Europeans but the fundamental reason I won't watch lyrical about the
technological side is that it allows us not to avoid all of the technical
hurdles associated with deployment of the first daikon reactor but the hurdles
that remain can be a lot simpler they can be answered with far more
conventional non irradiated testing and we can get to that level with lower
investment lower development costs for the first-of-a-king reactor and the second
really key thing which we like to to talk about is the scale of our power
plant so we're not looking at 100 megawatt classes or below we believe
that actually to try and get investment and the economic feasibility that we
need around the first reactor is to go with a gigawatt scale and in that sense
it's what utilities use it's what they're familiar with you actually
managed to get out a lot more revenue from a gigawatt sized reactor than you
would from a smaller reactor all of your fixed costs they have the amortized over
what your reactor can actually generate and the cost of that energy that comes
out so those two things rapid deployment so short development programs and an
expedient first the kind that means we're not talking about as sudo saying
this morning going to the governments around the world cap in hand saying do
you fancy doing this and we're not hoping that we rerun into someone who is
incredibly affluent down the pub or something like that to try and sell them
on this this concept we're trying to make Molten Salt Reactor technology
investable in the private industry so that is someone faced with a decision
between building an offshore wind turbine array or a first of a kind more
Moltex Stable Salt reactor will actually say that is you know economically
practical I can build it within this time frame I can get to licensing within
this number of years debating in the number of years but we're
fairly confident we can do it in a short timeframe which are going to discuss and
I can get profit back there's a really good net profit value to my first of a
kind so I'm not going to have to build ten fifteen twenty before I become a
profitable business because those those millions hundreds of millions and
billions that people tie up in development they are worth something in
the intermediate time we don't have billions around the world which can be
tied up for ten years and development anymore that's just not the situation
those are the two key things about today we start reactor and now I'll accelerate
through the rest we have three variants say three variants of the fuel cycle
which are we talking about here the SSR-W is our first of a kind
that's a chloride salt fueled reactor it's fueled by spent oxide fuel and
we're going to do the first of a kind in Canada and then we have two later
designs they are the SSR-U which is a conventional LEU fueled five percent
fueled graphite moderated reactor and eventually what would become a
retrofit of that or an extension of that is to get to a thorium breeding cycle so
we're not trying to do it first of all we're trying to break down our technical
challenges into slightly more digestible chunks two other key technologies on the
bottom which make a lot of this possible and grid Reserve is one which we can
conventionally like to talk a lot about but is not fuel cycle related I'll gloss
over that and at this point grid reserve is effectively using CSP technology so
we've heard earlier on around solar salt and the ability to actually store energy
the ability to act as a peaking plant and that it actually effectively used
this as a buffer tank during your operation so that you can deploy your
energy to grid actually when you need it in a modern grid mentality so we
believe base load is dead and that even will actually become something of a
non-requirement in the near future so being able to operate flexibly being
operate with in terms of a CCGT plant something like that is really what we're
talking with grid reserve give you a working example of what i mean you
can build 300 megawatt electric equivalent plant
you could put in say 16... 5 minutes already I'm on slide two... you can put in
energy storage and the solar salts and then you can actually deploy to grid say
a gigawatt Electric for a period of 8 hours in the day and WATSS is how we
convert our spent fuel into sorry oxide spent fuel from water reactors into our
fresh fuel for SSR-W but the reason we're just finishing this here is
because we don't actually separate out the plutonium you're gonna fuel in
plutonium very complex could take a long time don't want to do that for your
first one for us we've got a way around that in the sense that we actually keep
it relatively impure with all of our lanthanide contaminants again liquid
fuel allows you to do that the company background I won't go
through very quickly because this is probably in less interest to you but in
the time we have the company started in the UK in 2014 around the same time as a
lot of other molten salt reactor vendors and the initiator of all of this really
was Dr. Ian Scott and he didn't set out with a particular affinity for even
molten salt reactors to be honest he started off with a very similar
fundamental equation if I can borrow Troels's term from earlier on around how
quickly we need to be able to deploy clean energy around the globe and this
led him back to the original concept of having a static fuel pin filled with
with molten salt as being a a more expedient route to develop so we are
still in the UK I'm still in the UK we have Moltex Energy limited in the UK
we also have Motlex in Canada which I'll talk about in a moment and we also
have Moltex in USA which I will talk about a little less the rest is
readable I think and not much to discuss there so activities this has meant to me
to talk about what we're doing so in the UK at the moment there has been a bit of
a shift in the last year this summer there was an announcement in the
advanced modular reactor feasibility study so another new acronym for for
advanced reactors and this is now to support advanced modular reactors at
an early development stage and really to look into their feasibility
for the UK supply chain for the future of the UK energy economy and export
market as well so we were one of eight vendors selected to carry out this
feasibility study so it's ongoing this year the first phase is effectively the
data exchange and then the second phase this next year will be active R&D which
for the UK is is sort of a pretty progressive step they've also always
been quite conservative in the the advanced reactor field unlike our
friends in the US and in Canada Kewell on the bottom we've been talking
about technology a lot again the reality of economics is we need to start talking
to regulators to do that in the UK the way we do that is through its
feasibility study however in Canada for the last year yes last year it almost
we've been engaged in the vendor design review with the CNSC the Canadian
regulator and the purpose of the vendor design review is really to get early
engagement feedback on our design not just around the licensing readiness but
also about how able we are to actually gather the technical evidence we will
need to get a licensing so it's all well and good talking about a theoretical
test that we have to do at some point in that nor wherever it might be but if
that facility happens to be full for the next five years and you'll have to wait
diligently for your slot behind all the people paying their money then that
all counts against you that's all part of feasibility in all part of the
economics so if we can avoid that path through development we shall so we're
currently partway through phase one it's a two phase review there is a third
phase if you get stuck at any point you can come back phase one is really the
proposal phase two is coming back with the evidence but we intend to finish
this within the next 18 months and that really serves as a basis for the next
slide which is our announcement this year that we've signed an MoU with a
provincial utility New Brunswick Power who are on the Atlantic coast if you're
not familiar with Canadian geography to own and operate the first of the kind
Stable Salt Reactor and it'll be the 300 megawatt equivalents waste burner
we're rightly ready very very excited by this New Brunswick providing an initial
funding we're much funding that effectively
to just set out our development capabilities as best we can in New
Brunswick and to set up our supply chain discussions out there as well so it's
quite a harmonious relationship in that way but we're in the early stages for
that right now so Moltex Energy Canada set up this summer now recruiting and
building in in numbers out there rather than in the UK that's in St. John and
you can see in the map in bottom right-hand corner we've got a a quick
view there of Point LePreau which is where they're currently operating a
CANDU-6 reactor they are looking for a replacement for this in the near
future being the sort of the... hate to say this... the little sister to Ontario
in terms of Canadian nuclear there they they're able to take a little bit more
in terms of innovative steps should we say they want to be seen as
the trailblazers out there and that's why they're looking to develop the reactor
segment so it's a research cluster being set up out there with a focus on the
first of a kind demonstrator so that was the the review of activities how long
would you love to spend on this one? one minute on the next... ok shame because
this was the interesting bit and so I was just going to quickly walk you
through the three variants of Stable Salt Reactor that we have and also try and
paint the picture of economically why are we doing this one first because it's
not always that obvious so the waste burner and was chosen mainly because the
ability to use chloride salts and our ability to approximate our call to a
what I call a pseudo solid analogy that means no new codes development in terms
of regulatory evidence it also means a far simpler argument about materials
which though I can't talk about here in ten seconds I would employ you to talk
to me over if you really want to know after after this session it's a very
unconventional design for a nuclear reactor principally because it's actually
scalable in one dimension the reason we do this is because for the first of a
kind get up and run into get profitable the economic viability we want to be
able to move from the smaller reactor to the larger reactor which is
a gigawatt plant with as few
development steps as possible that means that a utility or an operator can get a
footing with our technology quickly and they can deploy it with conventional Gen2
and Gen3 materials so we're not looking at any new materials
qualification and then they can quickly deploy the rest of their fleet on the
back of that the downside is as I said start you need fuel reprocessing but
because we're doing it in the way where we don't separate out plutonium it
actually makes things a lot more viable in terms of a proliferation but also in
terms of technology readiness we're using technology that's being proven
before in essence so in terms of deployment the fuel cycle relating about
thorium its quickest to market we're using the current materials and we've
got the lowest technology called hurdles we don't have graphite to consider at
this stage for instance and the third one is really the key one it's getting
over that hurdle of commercial advantage and saying that actually the waste
stream liabilities if you add that in as an additional fuel negative cost
effectively it becomes so tantalizing yeah it's so profitable why would you do
something different clearly there's a limited market for this so we're looking
at people with tens of tons of refined waste hundreds of tons of oxide fuel
waste to actually be able to to install waste burning reactors now that's this
please don't feel offended by the the plot there if I haven't noted
your country in the right color it was only meant to be illustrative of the
kind of markets where you can find the fuel for the SSR-W so we're clearly fuel
can be moved around the reason we don't get full coverage on the map leads us to
this so this is the next stage in our evolution so we're not going there
immediately we're going to the waste burner first but where we want to get
to is a 5% LEU fueled reactor it's very closely related people slightly
balk when I say that the the fast epithermal waste burner is very similar
to the graphite moderated thermal reactor but actually it's not too far away in
terms of development hurdles so it kind of piggybacks that it stands on the
shoulders of the one before and there's a change in the salt fuel composition
which brings greater complexity to materials validation and of course we're
introducing graphite as as a sort of fueled absorber and we're moving
slightly higher in terms of temperature also but you can see that we're kind of
stepping our way through the technology building on common platform approach
similar reactors designs similar reactor installation techniques
the deployment of the SSR-U really becomes the next
for us... see that we two more minutes [Laughter]
highlighted here is just really showing all that does it accesses parts of the
world we couldn't access before where really it wasn't viable to transport the
amount of fresh fuel which we were talking about for a reactor and the red
dots there are really where we've already got LEU infrastructure built up
so we're not looking at the HEU fuels 20% fuels really because there's there's
no current centrifuge technology for that and having an enrichment technology
on our critical path is something we want to avoid so we're sticking with 5%
is something which we can we can readily deploy and we get reactors running in
the places that need them but not all of them so finally there is the thorium
reactor you can see the theme in the names at the top
we haven't been very inventive on that front this as you can see is a close relative
of SSR-U and so you'll be building on the SSR-U initial fuel loads for
instance to implement this all we're doing at this stage is changing out our
primary coolant for a thorium fertile coolant moving up in temperature range
again we have an online extraction column or it exchange which basically
strikes both uraniums and protactinium to some degree and is
readily diluted into a U238 iron would in that bismuth alloy in
that way that allows you to run autonomously just on thorium front
what that will allow us to do is build on that first iteration of SSR-U and
you can really then start to build SSR-Th in the areas of the world we're going to
thorium although not maybe an immediate problem in the next 10 years maybe even
20 years in terms of our availability yet we've got a big bank in Kazakhstan
now full of over 5% U235 it does allow us to eventually get to the
places that need it and you know we're looking back at a map now as
Troells earlier on we got into this to really solve the fundamental
equation problem and to do that it takes a mix of all three
that is our roadmap to deployment
[Applause]