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A great technical achievement, Molten Salt Reactor could be entombed

Posted at 3:03 pm November 26, 2017
By John Huotari Leave a Comment

The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment building at Oak Ridge National Laboratory housed the reactor and offices for operating personnel. The facility was constructed in the 1950s for a nuclear aircraft project and was later expanded significantly and retrofitted to accommodate the MSRE. (Photo courtesy U.S. Department of Energy/Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment building at Oak Ridge National Laboratory housed the reactor and offices for operating personnel. The facility was constructed in the 1950s for a nuclear aircraft project and was later expanded significantly and retrofitted to accommodate the MSRE. (Photo courtesy U.S. Department of Energy/Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

 

Note: This story was updated at 8:30 p.m.

Former director Alvin Weinberg once called it the greatest technical achievement at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It was inspired by the campaign to build a nuclear-powered aircraft in the 1950s, and it was the first reactor to ever operate using uranium-233.

Now parts of the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment that are too radioactively “hot” for humans could be entombed in concrete.

For now, the idea is only under study, and there is no guarantee that any part of the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, a nuclear historic landmark that has been dormant for decades, will be entombed.

But it’s one of the proposals being evaluated by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management. The goal is to finish the evaluation by the end of the year.

Jay Mullis, manager of the Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management, presented the proposal to the Oak Ridge City Council and Site Specific Advisory Board in two separate meetings earlier this month. The entombment proposal is one of five items being evaluated as part of a 45-day review started by DOE’s Environmental Management, or EM, program in June. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Front Page News, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge Office, ORNL, Slider, U.S. Department of Energy Tagged With: advanced nuclear reactor technologies, Alvin Weinberg, Atomic Energy Commission, Ben Williams, cesium, DOE, EM, environmental management, fluoride salts, fuel salt mixture, Glenn Seaborg, Jay Mullis, luoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor, molten chloride fast reactors, molten salt, molten salt fuel, Molten Salt Reactor, Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, Molten Salt Reactor Workshop, MSRE, Oak Ridge City Council, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management, Oak Ridge Site Specific Advisory Board, ORNL, Paul Haubenreich, pebble bed high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, plutonium, rem, Roentgen equivalent man, strontium, U.S. Department of Energy, uranium, uranium-233

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