Born of great promise, an advanced nuclear power effort, severely damaged by initial overpromises, has crashed and burned.
Transatomic Power has shut down operations, after MIT’s Technology Review reported that the principals, two recent MIT PhD nuclear engineering graduates, decided they did not “see a viable path to bringing its molten salt reactor to scale.” MIT grad Leslie Dewan, 33, co-founder and CEO, announced, “We haven’t been able to scale up the company rapidly enough to build our reactor in a reasonable timeframe.”
She said the company will make its entire intellectual property “available for any researchers – private, public or non-profit – who want to continue the work we’ve started.”
The firm, which raised several millions of dollars in venture capital when it announced the company in late 2015, including support from Peter Theil’s Founders Fund, made grandiose claims for the technology, which MIT Technology Review hyped dramatically. Dewan and her colleague Mark Massie claimed that their redesign of the venerable, 1960s molten salt technology, could be much smaller, factory fabricated, burn spent nuclear fuel, and “generate up to 75 times more electricity per ton of mined uranium than a light water reactor.”
“What if we could build a nuclear reactor that costs half as much, consumes nuclear waste, and will never melt down,” Dewan said. Sounds amazing.
Oops. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true, as ancient wisdom has it. Early last year, MIT physics professor Kord Smith debunked the hyperbolic claims, which Technology Review reported. He analyzed the claims, found them to be bogus, and reported that to MIT leadership. Technology Review quoted him, “I said this [75 times more electricity] is obviously incorrect based on basic physics.” He said the error was innocent. “It was just a lack of experience and perhaps overconfidence in their own ability. And then not listening carefully enough when people were questioning the conclusions they were coming to.”
Greentech Media reported that Transatomic is “releasing its patents in the European Union, Russia, and China for its particular version of liquid-fueled reactor designs.” That includes plans to use zirconium hydride as a neutron moderator in the reactor.
Molten salt reactors are nothing new. Nuclear pioneer Alvin Weinberg, long-time director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, championed molten salt reactors in the 1960s, and a prototype 7.5 MW (thermal) ran at Oak Ridge from 1966 to 1969. In his memoir “The First Nuclear Era” Weinberg argued that the reactor was a superior technology to the sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor that the Atomic Energy Commission adopted as its chosen advanced technology to supersede the light-water reactor. He said the molten salt technology was “so elegant and so well-thought out,” but was victim of AEC entrenched politics.
Despite Transatomic’s failure, Ted Nordhaud of The Breakthrough Institute, an advocate of carbon-free electric generation, including nuclear, saw a silver (or uranium?) lining. He wrote, “Yet in failure, Transatomic is itself a proof of concept. For those of us who have argued for a different nuclear future, less centralized and state-dependent, companies like Transatormic will need to fail so that an advanced nuclear industry can thrive…Transatomic’s investors are out of luck, but taxpayers and ratepayers are not. That is at it should be.”
— Kennedy Maize