ThorCon

ThorCon is a company developing a molten salt fission power plants that utilize thorium and uranium dissolved in molten salt as fuel to generate reliable, emission-free electric power. The company was founded in 2016 and is based in Stevenson, Washington.

The 500 MW nuclear fission reactor is encapsulated in a hull, built in a shipyard, towed to a shallow-water site, ballasted to the seabed. It is a scale-up of the successful United States Oak Ridge National Laboratory Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE).

ThorCon is walkaway safe, in the event of overheating the reactor shuts itself down, and passively handles the decay heat. It has three gas-tight barriers between the fuel salt and the atmosphere, in the event of a primary loop rupture, there is no dispersal energy and no phase change. The spilled fuel flows to a drain tank where it is passively cooled, radionuclides including Sr-90 and Cs-137, are chemically bound to the salt.

In 2019 ThorCon signed an agreement with Indonesian state company PT PAL Indonesia to conduct development studies and construction of a ThorCon reactor. The thorium molten salt power plant is currently designed to be a 174x66 meters floating facility which is expected to be built by Daewoo Shipyard & Marine Engineering in South Korea. PAL Indonesia will build the reactor and supporting components designed by ThorCon.