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MSRs can do everything except leave the impossibly heat and corrosion resistant lab.

Maybe we should just build them in orbit without containment and let the surface tension hold it together or something.




If you read the article, you would see that the MSR design would allow for recycling of the salt and the extraction of the valuable byproducts.

Also, this reactor is designed to fit onto a 40-foot truck for transport to remote areas and can power up to 1000 homes.


Not sure how that helps if it melts through the floor, the truck, and then the ground when you turn it on. Those are nice improvements, but adding a red paint job to a wingless plane won't make it fly.

Suppose you could use some kind of ablative material, but that would mean short runtimes and constant expensive refits. Sort of like taking that wingless plane and launching it with a trebuchet. Technically makes it fly but not in any way that matters.


According to his patents, the molten salt is the coolant and it would flow multiple stages of salt through the system.

https://patents.justia.com/inventor/matthew-memmott


Hmm so if I understand this right, the idea is to coat the reactor in salt with progressively lower melting points? And I suppose each layer is supposed to extract some specific element.

I'm still not seeing how this prevents corrosion of the system, but I suspect their actual intention is to just run it in short bursts for material production which may be workable to some extent. A transmutation reactor of sorts?


I’m not a physicist but did take some college chemistry, so take it with a grain of salt, but thats kind of what was forming in my mental model.

Industrially speaking, short bursts resulting in spent reactor components might be manageable for recycling, too, so it definitely seems interesting.

I’m curious as to how long it would take for the corrosive action to cause unmanageable defects in the reactor.


But the article is talking about MSR


Only mentions something about making them smaller, not sure how that would solve the core (pun intended) issues.


If you look for the actual design, you will come across a newly published patent in the name of the mentioned researcher.




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