Danish start-up Seaborg has a new concept in reactor design that promises clean and reliable power in a small package. Bringing it to market requires

In search of the practical advanced reactor

submited by
Style Pass
2021-06-15 13:30:07

Danish start-up Seaborg has a new concept in reactor design that promises clean and reliable power in a small package. Bringing it to market requires innovation from a technical team growing under co-founder and CTO Eirik Eide Pettersen.

The story of Seaborg’s technology begins around 60 years ago with experimental reactors at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US, which made key achievements that Seaborg wants to scale up and build upon.

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” Eirik laughs, explaining that his technology was born in an unlikely project to create a nuclear-powered aircraft as part of America’s Cold War defence. From the start, Oak Ridge knew their design would have to be small, simple to run and reliable even during aerial manoeuvres as well as take-offs and landings. They developed a 2.5 MWt design in which the uranium fuel was mixed with liquid fluoride salts that could be circulated through a reactor core, where fission reactions would heat it up, and then through heat exchangers which would take the heat away to do useful work. The idea was for its nuclear heat to drive jet engines in place of burning jet fuel.

In the end, such flying power plants were not necessary and for various good reasons never came to be. However, Oak Ridge teams learned enough from the Aircraft Reactor Experiment (ARE) to see potential applications on land and their invention lived on through the 1960s as the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE). This produced three times more heat at 7.4 MWt and it is the research that came with this reactor that forms the basis of Seaborg’s technology.

Leave a Comment