Advances in Molten Salt Reactors

Dr. Ho has been working as a reactor thermal hydraulic specialist at ANSTO for 12 years. He has been tracking the evolution of different molten salt reactor concepts for some time. His interest was sparked when he attended the Thorium Energy Conference in Shanghai in 2012. With his colleagues at ANSTO, be wrote a molten salt reactor review paper in 2013 link1 and started recruiting PhD students to conduct research on the topic. Currently there are 3 PhD students, two of which are focusing at neutronic characteristics and one who is looking specifically at the thermo-hydraulic behaviour of the solid-fuel under the supervision of Professor Yeoh, liquid salt design that both SINAP and UCB are working on. Dr Ho also serves as a Vice President of the Australian Nuclear Association (ANA) which strongly lobbies for the development of nuclear power and has delivered talks on the topic of MSRs link2 and fast reactors link3. In the last few years, he has developed ties with UCB, MIT and SINAP, three institutes heavily involved with MSR developments. Prof. Fratoni's research interests are in advanced fuel cycles that maximize natural resource utilization and minimize nuclear waste enabling sustainable nuclear energy. His main focus is on the design and analysis of advanced reactors such as molten salt reactors, fast spectrum reactors, reduced-moderation boiling water reactors, and fluoride-cooled high-temperature reactors. Prof. Fratoni's group also develops computational methods to support reactor analysis, and in particular multi-physics modelling and uncertainty quantification. Additional research areas include accident tolerant fuel, nuclear fuel cycle analysis, geological repository/far-field criticality, and fusion blanket design. Guan Heng Yeoh is a professor at the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, UNSW, and a principal research scientist at ANSTO. He is the founder and editor of the Journal of Computational Multiphase Flows and the group leader of Computational Thermal-Hydraulics of OPAL Research Reactor, ANSTO. He has approximately 250 publications including 10 books, 12 book chapters, 156 journal articles and 115 conference papers with an H-index of 33 and over 4490 citations. His research interests are computational fluid dynamics (CFD); numerical heat and mass transfer; turbulence modelling using Reynolds averaging and large eddy simulation; combustion, radiation heat transfer, soot formation and oxidation, and solid pyrolysis in fire engineering; fundamental studies in multiphase flows: free surface, gas-particle, liquid-solid (blood flow and nanoparticles), and gas-liquid (bubbly, slug/cap, churn-turbulent, and subcooled nucleate boiling flows); computational modelling of industrial systems of single-phase and multiphase flows.

Part A: Fundamentals of Molten Salt Reactor technology

Part B: MSR Fundamentals & Research 1. Neutronics 2. Thermo-hydraulics 3. Materials 4. Chemistry 5. Safety analysis 6. Economics

Part C: Molten Salt Reactor Designs