Molten Salt Applications In Nuclear Hydrogen and Electricity Production

Principal Investigator:
Peterson

Molten fluoride salts provide enormous potential for
applications in fission and fusion energy systems. Created using
mixtures of fluoride salts with high chemical stability, including
LiF, NaF, KF, BeF2, and ZrF4, molten salts have properties
similar to water, but boil at temperatures around 1400°C. In
collaboration with ORNL and SNL, UC Berkeley is currently leading
university research in the application of molten salts to cool coated-particle
graphite fuel in a reactor system called the Advanced High Temperature
Reactor (AHTR). The AHTR provides a potentially major advance over
current high-temperature gas-cooled reactor designs, because it
can deliver heat at a substantially higher average temperature,
and can achieve thermal powers approximately four times larger from
an equivalently sized vessel. Multiple-reheat helium Brayton cycles
can provide AHTR thermodynamic efficiencies above 50%. Work on molten
salts at UCB includes studies of fundamental thermophysical properties,
and heat exchanger and system designs for molten-salt applications

Research Sponsors: ORNL, SNL