Title:

Path Toward a Breeding, Proliferation-Resistant, Thermal-Spectrum Molten Salt Reactor

Speaker:

Dr. David Holcomb

Affiliation:

Idaho National Laboratory

When:

Wednesday, September 25, 2024 at 4:00:00 PM   Add to Calendar

Where:

Boggs Building, Room 3-47

Host:

Steven Biegalski
Steven.biegalski@me.gatech.edu

Abstract

Liquid-fueled, thermal-spectrum molten-salt breeder reactors (TS-MSBRs) offer the potential for affordable, safe, inexhaustible energy with minimal potential for nuclear material misuse and without significant actinide waste generation. Realizing the full set of TS-MSBR capabilities is only now becoming possible with the advent of advanced fuel-salt-processing techniques, improved materials, advanced modeling and simulation tools, and a more detailed understanding of fuel-salt properties. The U.S. TS-MSBR development program ended in the mid-1970s because the reactor class was perceived as too immature and insufficiently important to justify the expense to commercialize. Today’s pressing need for large quantities of clean energy (along with a half century of technology advancement) provides incentives to reconsider the reactor class. TS-MSBRs, however, remain immature and their development will require substantial, sustained resources. This seminar provides an overview a modern TS-MSBR pre-conceptual design and its characteristics with emphasis on maintaining strong passive safety, initiating a breeding fuel cycle with requiring uranium enrichment above 5%, maintaining strong proliferation resistance, and minimizing high-level waste production.

Biography

David E. Holcomb is the Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) technical lead for Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and a Battelle distinguished inventor. He retired from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in 2023 following a 30-year career. Dr. Holcomb’s technical specialties are in MSR design and evaluation, advanced reactor safety, and reactor instrumentation and controls (I&C). Dr. Holcomb previously served as the national technical area lead for both MSRs and I&C for DOE’s advanced reactor technologies program. Dr. Holcomb currently serves as a senior technical advisor to the DOE-NE MSR campaign, serves as vice-chair of the provisional system steering committee for the Generation IV International Forum on MSRs, and chairs the American Nuclear Society’s working group that recently completed the first design safety standard for liquid fueled MSRs (ANSI/ANS 20.2-2023). Dr. Holcomb holds a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from The Ohio State University (OSU) (1992), an M.S. in nuclear engineering also from OSU (1990), and a B.S. degree in engineering science specializing in engineering physics from Colorado State University (1987). He has served as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in the Nuclear Engineering Department since 1995 and is a current member of the nuclear engineering program advisory board for OSU. Dr. Holcomb is also currently an adjunct faculty member at the Colorado School of Mines.

Notes

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