Site visit: How thorium energy can change the future of nuclear power

Copenhagen Atomics is pioneering thorium-molten salt technology for small modular nuclear reactors for assembly line manufacture.

“Only one [molten salt reactor] has ever been built so far, so we know the technology works – but we haven’t shown it works on a big scale and that the price can come down,” says Thomas Jam Pedersen, co-founder of Copenhagen Atomics of the thorium energy technology that the company is prototyping and believes could deliver electricity at a cost as low as $20/MWh.

“And that is a very low price – at least half of what everyone else is putting out there. So it's definitely a revolution when this get gets up and running.”

In an exclusive interview during Enlit on the Road, Denmark Pedersen explained that molten salt is the key to extracting the efficiency gain from thorium as an energy source, of the order of a factor 10 over other comparative technologies.

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With this, Copenhagen Atomics envisages delivering 100MW output thorium energy reactors in 40-foot containers, which could be fabricated on an assembly line at a rate of one per day for deployment almost anywhere.

“We are very proud of the technology we are developing and it’s a new way of doing nuclear energy,” says Pedersen, mentioning in addition to its efficiency other benefits including safety, ability to scale and not least to convert spent nuclear fuel into energy while reducing its storage time down to 300 years from 100,000 years.

Pedersen says that one of the key markets the company is looking at is ammonia, with its requirement for fertilizer production but also its promise as a fuel for large shipping.

But the most immediate requirement is for a country to host a prototype and Pedersen says the preference is for a country with an existing nuclear regulator. He suggests that the UK might be a good option.

“There’s an upside in the UK as there is 140t of separated plutonium and that would give enough fuel for 30GW of electricity for 50 years,” he says.

He notes also that the country with the first test reactor would be likely to get the first power reactors up and running.