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What will it really take to commercialise a thorium molten salt small modular reactor? I recently visited Copenhagen Atomics’ research and development facility to find out. There, they’ve got nearly a full working system, everything except the nuclear reaction in full scale.

In this video, we’ll get a tour and interview with co-founder and CEO Thomas Jam Pedersen, to tell us all about how it works, advantages compared to big nuclear, their development process, and plans for the future including pricing plans.

Small modular reactors, or SMRs, were meant to solve the affordability and construction challenges that have plagued large nuclear projects. The idea was to borrow the same modularity that’s helped solar and battery technologies come down in price: build components in a factory, scale up production, and avoid expensive, years-long construction on site. But so far, the reality hasn’t lived up to the hype.

NuScale, a US SMR company who I’ve featured on this channel before, have been seen as a frontrunner. But they had to cancel their flagship project after costs more than doubled. The UK’s Rolls-Royce SMR has bold plans to mass produce modular components, but none have been built yet. In China, the Linglong One is under construction, but it’s still heavily site-built. And Russia’s RITM-200N uses some factory-made parts, but also relies on traditional on-site assembly. So even though “modular” is in the name, most of these projects haven’t actually delivered on that promise.

That’s why I’m so interested to see what Copenhagen Atomics is doing. They’re building a molten salt reactor that runs on thorium—not uranium—and they’re developing it from the ground up to be built entirely in a factory and shipped to site. It’s not a downsized version of a big thermal reactor; this is a technology designed at the size it’s meant to be.

Let’s go.

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Bookmarks:
00:00 Introduction
00:33 Background
02:12 The Technology – How Does It Work?
06:08 Development Process
07:09 Maintenance
08:46 Demonstration
10:34 Scale-up & Projects
13:28 Outro

Sources:
Copenhagen Atomics – https://www.copenhagenatomics.com/

The Engineering with Rosie team is:
Rosemary Barnes: presenter, producer, writer
Rita Lippitz-Holzner: Creative video producer http://www.video-gestaltung.de
Javi Diez: editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/javierdie…
Production assistant: Jae Chong

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