Idaho National Laboratory is receiving $7 million from ARPA-E, the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, to test a chloride fuel salt for molten salt reactors. The project is called IMPACT, short for Irradiation of Molten Plutonium Actinide Chloride Fuels and Testing.
INL is one of eight projects selected under the HORNIG program, which focuses on next-generation fuels made from recovered materials. The laboratory will develop and test a fuel salt containing recycled transuranic elements. The work includes irradiation tests, fuel characterization and modeling to gather the data needed to qualify this type of fuel.
Toni Karlsson, INL’s industry relations lead, explained the underlying idea: take transuranic material, which today is considered waste, make fresh fuel out of it and turn it into fuel for a reactor. According to Director Jess Gehin, both the reactors and the fuels of this kind are still at an early stage, but they hold high potential, with up to a hundred times more energy. Moltex Energy USA, based in Wilmington, Delaware, proposes to use this type of fuel in its own reactor.
The eight HORNIG projects receive nearly $45 million in total. The largest awards, $7 million each, also go to Westinghouse, for its PowerBlock fuel, and to Oregon State University, for a low-temperature nitride fuel. Other recipients include Oklo, Standard Nuclear, Sandia National Laboratories and Exodys Energy. The stated goal is to cut the qualification time for transuranic fuels from decades to under seven years.
A second award concerns Texas. Texas A&M University receives $5,377,799 for the TB2-MSR project, a thorium-based liquid fuel salt incorporating transuranics from spent fuel. Natura Resources, a developer of advanced small modular reactors, is joining the team. Texas A&M had previously worked with Clean Core Thorium Energy and INL on producing thorium-uranium fuel pellets.
INL has long been working along the same lines. The laboratory has begun large-scale production of enriched fuel salt for the Molten Chloride Reactor Experiment, the world’s first test of a chloride-salt fast reactor. The Department of Energy then approved cost-share funding for the final phase of the experiment, with Southern Company and Core Power. First criticality is expected as early as 2027.
If IMPACT delivers the hoped-for results, molten salt reactors will be able to rely on a qualified fuel that closes the cycle: recovered transuranics go back into the reactor instead of remaining in storage. For builders, that means a shorter supply chain between reprocessing and power generation.
