 Greetings. I'm John McCurgan, Deputy Division Director in the Division of Engineering in the Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research, and I'm very pleased to welcome you to this session on molten salt reactors, Rethinking the Fuel Cycle. The impetus for the session came from the NRC's recognition of the unique attributes of the molten salt fuel cycle, including novel fuel types and the potential for new waste forms. This session will elaborate on the different aspects and considerations of the molten salt reactor fuel cycle from a variety of perspectives. Next slide, please. Let me take a moment to set our stage for today. In the U.S., there are several reactor vendors pursuing a variety of molten salt reactor designs, both thermal and fast spectrum. Additionally, there are a variety of fuel and coolant types being considered, including both fluoride and chloride salts. As a safety regulator, the NRC doesn't advocate for any particular design or technology, but we do seek to be prepared to carry out our safety and security mission in light of whichever technology is submitted. The NRC staff is actively identifying molten salt reactor-specific technology areas that might warrant further assessment with regard to guidance. The NRC staff always encourages early engagement and pre-application activities, so any vendors there in the audience, please reach out early and often. We always welcome that engagement. To explore this topic, we've established a wonderful panel today. Next slide, please. Let me take a moment to introduce our all our panelists. I'll go through the bios. They are available on the web page if you'd like to read them later, but I'll run through them briefly here. I'll start with Dr. Raj Aangar. Dr. Aangar is currently the Chief of the Reactor Engineering Branch in the Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research here at the NRC. He oversees the regulatory research activities in the areas of reactor vessel and piping integrity, probable extraction mechanics, non-destructive evaluation and inspection and advanced reactor materials. Since 2009, he's held a variety of positions here at the NRC, including active deputy division director, senior materials engineer and technical assistant. Before joining the NRC, Raj has held corporate management positions in the automotive industry, where he led development and application efforts and research positions at Patel and the University of Pennsylvania. Raj holds a PhD in Solid Mechanics from Brown and MS in Mechanics and Material Science from Rutgers and an MS in Metallurgy from the Indian Institute of Science. Next, Dr. Patricia Pavier is the National Technical Director of the Multin-Salt Reactor Program for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy and the Group Leader of the Radiological Materials Group at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The DOE Multin-Salt Reactor Program serves as the hub for efficiently and effectively addressing in partnership with stakeholders the remaining technology challenges for MSRs to enter the commercial market. Prior to joining PNL in 2018, she was the Director of the Office of Materials and Chemical Technologies at DOE's NE, responsible for the R&D activities related to the backend of the nuclear fuel cycle. She is currently Chair of the Gen4 International Forum on Education and Training Working Group. She has more than 25 years experience on the backend of the fuel cycle and has worked as a professor, as well as in the commercial industry and as a scientist and project lead for a number of laboratories. She obtained her PhD in Radiochemistry from the University of Paris at Moore State. We also have at Files a graduate of Penn State in Fusion Nuclear Engineering. For 32 years, he's worked at the Naval Nuclear Laboratory where he trained Navy personnel to operate nuclear reactors, helped design startup refueling tests, maintenance and decommissioning six classes of U.S. submarines, including the Virginia and Columbia classes, as well as the Ford class carrier. He helped start up 15 new and refueled reactors as designed and evaluated most advanced fuel cycle reactor types. He's helped the Jupiter-IC Moons Orbiter Nuclear Ion rocket for a 12-year mission to Ganymede, Europa and Io in adaptation of the reactor for moon-based power. Ed is the founder and chief technology officer of Burlesium Industry, developing a fast chloride molten salt reactor. Next, we have Melanie Rickard. Melanie is the director of the advanced reactor assessment division at the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission with over 20 years at CNSC and has held a variety of experience positioned at numerous facets of nuclear regulation, including the development and implementation of regulations, assessing compliance at nuclear facilities and influencing the CNSC's planning for response to nuclear emergencies. Currently, she leads teams that carry out design assessments of advanced nuclear reactors, small modular reactors, and her team cooperates and collaborates with many other groups of scientists and engineers to produce clear, accurate and consistent technical assessments. For this work, as well as for other large, complex projects related to nuclear safety, she is enjoying the challenge of preparing for the deployment of SMRs in Canada. Melanie holds a master's degree in chemistry from the University of New Brunswick. And with that, I think we'll have a great session today. Let me make a few housekeeping remarks. We will be doing some live polling today and we'll make an announcement as the questions come up and present those results and have a discussion towards the end of our session. There is a tab on your screen where you can enter questions. And then also next to that tab, there's another one for the polls, and that's where you'll see the polling come up. We will hold our question and answer segment at the end of the session after all the presentations. I do encourage you to enter your questions as they occur to you during the talks and that will enable us to get them to the panelists and I think we'll have some really good discussion. So that takes us to our first talk from Dr. Raj Aingar and his talk is technical considerations for the molten salt reactor fuel cycle. So with that, I'll turn it over to Raj. Thank you so much, John. Good afternoon to all of you. I'm quite excited today and honored to be part of this panel to discuss important considerations for molten salt reactor fuel cycle. Today, I'd like to share some insights on the technical considerations for the MS of molten salt reactor fuel cycle that gained by our capable and skilled staff. Before I proceed further, I want to acknowledge a staff who conducted a preliminary assessment which we initiated a year ago. A former NRC staff recorded Otores, who is now at PNL, for his vision in charting out the framework for conducting the technical assessment and potential intersections with the regulatory aspects. Jesse calls in for his energy and enthusiasm to compile the necessary information. Wendy read for exceptional technical regulatory skills and experience, and certainly our colleagues from Nuclear Materials Safety and Safeguards, Nick Hansing and my friend Tom Boyce, for proactively preparing the agency to assess advanced fuel cycle and sponsoring this important research effort. As I mentioned, NMS's office had been monitoring both the Department of Energy and Industry activities related to potential licensing and certification of molten salt reactors, understanding the need to build our knowledge base and assess potential technical challenges. Their office engaged with our office, research office, to conduct a preliminary assessment of fuel cycle well over a year ago. To put our initiative in perspective, I wanted to mention that DOE, Department of Energy, Advanced Reactor, Advanced Research Projects Agency established a program called CURY to provide funding for R&D efforts at MSR Fuel Cycle and Electrical Power Research Institute conducted a workshop on the back end of the fuel cycle. This all happened last fall after we had initiated this effort. So I just wanted to put a plug in for our researchers be ready mantra. The objective of our preliminary assessment was to better understand the potential technical and regulatory considerations related to the management of fuel of both fissile and fertile fuel materials for these near term as well as potentially mid-term MSR technologies. We followed a time-honored procedure to conduct this assessment involving mining information related to prior operating experience of molten salt reactors and the associated fuel enrichment production and transportation operations assessing current state of knowledge of fuel enrichment production transportation options considered by various vendors exploring technical issues and challenges related to the back end of fuel cycle and then developing recommendations for our customer office to follow on activities to support their initiatives related to licensing MSR fuel cycle. Next slide, please. Thank you. Our staff looked into mining prior operating experience. And there's a little, very little information. Oak Ridge National Lab has historically led efforts to support various MSR technologies. And they actually built two designs. One was the aircraft reactor experiment established in 1949 at the request of Atomic Energy Commission. The fuel mixture of sodium fluoride and zirconium tetrafluoride was with sufficient uranium tetrafluoride added to make the reactor critical. The advanced aircraft reactor project operated from November 1954 for a total of 96 megawatts. Now, the other one is a more well-known molten salt reactor experiment which was a 8 megawatt thermal single fluid test reactor which operated from 1965 to 1969. So both these were operated by DOE. Oak Ridge developed various techniques and procedures for preparing and handling molten salt since 1953. The molten salt production facility was operated in Oak Ridge reactor chemistry division as an integral part of the molten salt reactor project. The facility operated developed procedures which some of it is available including for handling operations including filling, sampling and emptying engineering test loops. While our staff gained considerable insight regarding reactor operation we did not much information from a fuel cycle perspective as limited information available on the transportation or the decommissioning of those reactors. And certainly there were no commercial transportation packages utilized so we could get that information. NRC has no prior experience of regulating any aspects of MSR to the cycle. So in short the staff did not gain significant insights from prior operating experience related to fuel cycle front and back end of the MSR technology. Next slide please. The I think there's a lag. Next slide. Yes. So there are two major considerations for the front end of fuel cycle MSR. One is the enrichment production blending and the other involving building and transporting the packages of fuel and salt materials to support offsite operations. These present distinct and distinct technical and regulatory challenges relative to uranium oxide based fuels used in current light water reactor technologies. It's not a surprise. You will hear more on the technical details. I want to save on the technical details for Dr. Patricia Padilla. She's got a lot. So I want to save that for her and maybe save some time for a discussion. The fuel salt mixtures will be a combination of fissile and fertile materials of low enriched uranium LEU or either isotopic compositions. Fluorite salt reactors are expected to operate with uranium tetrafluoride and thorium fluoride. Similarly, chloride fuel salts are expected to operate on uranium trichloride invadiance chloride salts. Now, I wanted to go to most of the near-term technologies focused on these LEU low enriched uranium whereas some are looking to do high high assay low enriched uranium for there are while centrifuge model is viable for LEU and I wanted to note that in June 2021, the RC approved license amendment request for their centrifuge for American centrifuge plant to begin production of LEU in early 2022. On the high assay low energy uranium side, DOE and its national authorities are ex-coding various options for the production of high LEU fuel feed material including electrochemical processing or hybrids and extraction processes. These two are very newly not licensed those are reviewed those did want to mention that the issued a report to Congress in December 2021 highlighting the flexibility of the current regulatory framework to accommodate licensing use related value. Now, I do understand we have a regulatory framework just flexible but since these are new technologies and new considerations, we have to assess the technical challenges or considerations for which we need information data coming out of the vendors and DOE about the energy. Many other proposed methods of fuel salt and which may involve considerations of production of uranium and thorium fluoride salts from source materials and certainly they involve various chemical reactivity hazards which we as an independent regulator need to evaluate in assets those so it is while it's possible that increased enrichments of lead and fuel materials will need new safety analysis but it certainly does not I mean we do have a regulatory framework that exists currently. On the transportation side, different approaches may be implemented for transporting one consideration may be independent transportation of fissile and fertile fuel material and non radioactive commercial salts to the reactor site facility where they can be mixed or multiple other considerations. Again these all come we have to use license safety review under 10 CFR part 50 54 or 53 depending on the type of approach used alternatively we could utilize 10 CFR part 71 for approving transportation packages if applicable so the safe transportation of uranium tetrafluoride is not expected to involve new hazards relative to the transportation of exafluoride so that we did understand so that's sort of a good news so I want to highlight the front end operations for near-term MSR designs will involve the management of materials without regulatory precedent which will require safety reviews of different hazards, chemical hazards as an independent regulator however we are engaged proactively to understand the technical issues and considerations for the front end aspects so that it can be we can provide timely decisions for the safety review. Next slide please the fuel fluid fuel MSRs those with fissile materials to solve the clue and solve generate diverse mixture of waste streams like John already alluded to there's a fairly new class and now the full array of efficient products is generally in the circulating fuel coal and salt so the efficient products can be loosely grouped into three categories which can be soluble or such as natural gas or noble gas and noble metals so we do need to understand the implication of these in terms of consequences of these then three main categories of waste could be off-gas streams I talked about off-gas since it's fairly important it's not only a back-end issue it's also a licensing issue as you won't see from her discussions the salt waste streams which is separating some of the more expensive isotopes that could be used such as chloride-37 and lithium-7 we have to consider metal waste streams carbon waste streams and operating waste streams so there are multiple considerations and we are our initial assessment pointed to some information we would really be interested in getting more information and data from our DOE national labs and other entities waste management will likely be as joint pointed out will likely be unique to a particular design so again that is something so we may have to also look into technology-specific aspects so while we can get a technology-inclusive framework we need to be looking into some technology-specific aspect of this now this picture the next slide is the waste forms the waste forms need to consider compatibility with storage materials because these salts can be corrosive and mixture of sodium salt can be even worse so we need to be considering materials compatibility well this is a sort of a low risk issue for storage it could be different for these kind of salt storage salt fluid storage and long-term performance of waste form and canister need to be understood better the dose management of some radio-nuclide will need to be considered such as peryllium 10 for example which is long-lived beta-hemiter with unknown environmental property properties so there are few considerations and another one is a chlorine-26 we have done a very good internal assessment and we hope that will pay the way for additional research activities in support of our partner office NMSS I did want to point one thing on the graphite waste it looks like it may not be a put to issue but we do need to understand the on-site storage of used graphite because it might trigger some new forms of carbon we have not assessed such as carbon protein it is a large percentage of activity in graphite it will be in and on graphite so these are things we need to understand better I wanted to point out that while backend looks so far out one might think why is it important to consider that now but in terms of these advanced reactor non-LWRs it is not just a backend issue some of them are so in the licensing issue so it gives us a holistic view of the entire fuel cycle that we are looking at next slide please this is my summary slide as we highlighted MSR was unique challenges in both front-end and back-end we are prepared to look into that and assess considerations I also mentioned we have a flexible regulatory framework while that may not be an issue we need to know the technical issues involved and NMSS and research are collaborating in future activities and certainly again this is something you have heard multiple times from many people and it sounds like a broken record but I would say that it is important and that we have a continued and expanded engagement with Department of Energy, Industry and other entities to learn and understand these issues better. Thank you so much John Thank you Raj that's great and that actually takes us to our first polling question and so if I could ask for that question to come up I'll read that for you and again that polling tab is off on the right side of your window right next to the Q&A tab and so please enter your questions as they come up and our polling question what do you see as the biggest challenges with regard to the front-end of the MSR cycle and so we look forward to hearing your responses there and while you're doing that I'll introduce our next speaker Dr. Patricia Padier and Patricia's talk is on the fuel cycle of a molten salt reactor so please take it away Patricia Raj, set you up to cover a whole bunch of things so please take it away Thank you so much John for the introduction and thank you Wendy Reed for inviting me to participate in this panel discussion I think it's important so today I'm going to talk about the fuel cycle of a molten salt reactor understand that we have several concepts so I may be completely wrong or kind of right so next slide please so to set up the stage you're going to see here where we are right now in the United States it's a one through fuel cycle we have around the 94 commercial nuclear reactor that produce every year 2,000 metric tons of spent fuel 16,000 metric tons of depleted uranium and we have around the inventory of 84,000 metric tons of spent fuel and the 750,000 metric tons of depleted uranium next slide please so the title of this slide is molten salt reactor renaissance yeah maybe MSR can really contribute to the nuclear energy renaissance because I think one significant potential of MSR it's really improving the sustainability of the fuel cycle so which means that using more efficiently uranium decreasing the amount of waste and some of the concept we will use spent nuclear fuel into their reactors as a reminder a molten salt reactor is any nuclear reactor that employs a liquid halide salt to perform a significant function in core as we said we have so many concepts from the salt fuel to the salt cooled we have two halides chloride and fluoride different fuel uranium, sodium, plutonium HA, LEU we transuranic we can have maybe spent fuel and then the spectrum from thermal to fast spectrum as you see down below the screen I put a few companies and I will leave my colleague Ed who will really go into more details with the different concepts next slide please so I am the national technical director of the molten salt reactor program for one year now and again our vision it's really to be the hub to help these vendors looking at the different technical challenges to really push for the MSR2 and to other commercial markets so we are four group the first one is looking at the salt chemistry it's important to have the thermal properties of salt the second group is looking at the technology development and demonstration looking at radio nuclides release at sensor and instrumentation development the third one focus on material so really first I will say objective is to look at the gaps in the codes and the standard for the stainless steel 316H and finally we have a part with modeling working with another company which is called the nuclear energy advance and modeling simulation it's important for me to understand what are the different species in the region of a molten salt reactor next slide please so this is how I view a generic fuel cycle for a liquid fuel molten salt reactor so I have color code because in the next slide you will see I put the yellow the green like that hopefully you will remember this slide but basically first the most important is to salt the salt the synthesis of the salt having like I said all the physical thermochemical properties in our hands then we are going to fabricate the fresh fuel salt so we are going to use actinite, irinium, plutonium thorium different processes chlorination or fluorination and we will some of the concept will use a potentially spent nuclear fuel and then everything will go into the reactor so the difference with the molten salt liquid fuel is that we are going to release potentially some off gas so these off gas need to be understood what are they need to be trapped and we need to have the right waste form so you see the off gas and then the waste depending on the concept the liquid fuel molten salt reactor can be just thrown away so that will be a spent salt fuel waste or we can envision a salt processing salt processing to get rid of the accumulation of fish and product as an example reusing the used fuel into the reactor the fuel qualification also as I noted here is in my opinion very important we really need to establish the rationale for the measurement ranges and the assentities so for example how pure the salt should be that will depend on the vendors that will depend on what they want to do also the assentities when we measure a thermal properties what is acceptable because these properties are going to help us with the modelling next slide please so remember first the salt synthesis so this campaign is focusing on the thermal properties of salt this is very important it's really something that has been asked by the vendors as you can see it's very small on my screen but you have the fluoride and the chloride salt and you see all these little boxes white with no colours or no letters this is what we miss so I have five national labs working on these thermo physical and thermo chemical properties it's very hard to have really a consensus again with the QA it's very difficult to have a standard some key properties for the salt mixture being evaluated for use in the MSR have not been measured we have a few values in the literature but sometimes it's inconsistent not suitable for use in licensing so I refer to you the report from Billy Ebert and Melissa Rose from Argon that's the first part the salt synthesis next slide please so now we're going to go to the fuel the fuel synthesis before we have the thermo chemical properties that's a key I will say milestone for us you have access now to our thermo chemical properties database as well as the thermo physical properties database you have the link we have fluoride and chloride salt content with different system for the thermo physical properties we have entered the data on melting temperature boiling temperature density thermal conductivity heat capacity viscosity along with the reference and the authenticity so I'm really extremely proud of this group that have been really able to release these databases next slide please so this is what I wanted to say before so the fuel salt for MSR is going to be a combination of the fissile salt as an example uranium trichloride uranium trichloride with a non radioactive effluents or a carrier salt fluoride salt, chloride salt it's likely that the company producing the fuel salt will produce potentially the fissile salt purchase the non radioactive salt from a commercial sources and then combine them to produce the fuel salt mixture depending on the MSR design we may have also a fuel salt that contain a fissile material for breeder MSR and also as I said before we use of a spent light water reactor as a fuel next slide please so fuel qualification again very important I am citing here for you all who are listening to me the report from Dr. Dave Olcomb and his colleague from Oak Ridge National Laboratory the fuel qualification is a process which provides the high confidence that the physical and chemical behaviour of fuel is sufficiently understood so that it can be adequately modelled for both normal and accident conditions so that's really crucial fuel qualification for me is crucial next slide please ok look up so when I prepare the slides of course you know you have your brain thinking and I saw Raj talking about the aircraft reactor experiment and the MSRE but when you look at what we want to do we are realising that oh well we do not have a large scale fuel salt production facilities that has ever been built in this country so that's one gap and again reference your own McFarlane report another one is the purification of your initial salt product depending on the concept I would like to know what the salt how the salt should be pure is it important or not and then production of tonnage scale same question for the fuel salt which will contact the 99 production at tonnage scale fuel qualification again no standard we don't have centralized NQA1 program and sometimes like I said the literature is inconsistent and then Raj mentioned that this is the purification of the salt from where it is fabricated to the reactor so these are the gaps that we have to think about next slide please so we have our salt we have our fuel it's in the reactor and we are going to have some of that so we have regulation in this country the EPA regulation and the NRC regulation unlock solid fuel the liquid fuel salt does contain significant quantities of gaseous fission product thus increasing the release of the fraction of fission gases so we have to take into that into consideration about that the program is focusing right now on the Xenon and on the iodine next slide please so you will see that we have leveraged some of the research that we already started 18 years ago for repossessing facility looking for example as metal organic framework to capture Xenon Krypton or looking at silica aerogel for iodine 129 not only to capture but also to immobilize and have the right weight form the greatest technical challenge that I see for the reactor developers will be in assessing off-gas performance during the reactor operations next slide please so right now the scientists are working on the bench stop in their laboratory as you see we have five national lab involved my goal for next year is really to use a unique capability the liquid salt test loop at Oak Ridge for demonstrating this MSR monitoring system so we will be able to use relevant powers temperature flow rates and then the next time the next step I don't know if Tony Hill is listening to me but Tony Hill is building at Abilene-Christian University a test reactor so I would love them the next step to use the sun salt and the sorbent in a more realistic fashion to see how it's going to behave next slide please weight form so you saw the beautiful graphic done by Brian Wiley so Brian is in my group actually a PLNN and his colleagues it's good very good material and I'm also citing you don't see very well but Joanne McFarnan from Oak Ridge she has written a good report weight form an MSR is going to include those generating during the salt preparation purification prior to re-addition those generating during the operation such as through sampling analysis online processing of gas those generated at the end of the fuel cycling fueling cycle and then at the end of the operation of your nuclear reactor you need to remember that many of the radiological hazards will be similar to those for operation of other nuclear power plants next slide please the storage so storage is I will say crucial because MSR are a liquid liquid fuel and this is a liquid so this is a different from what we have with light water reactor it's going to become more problematic over the time the current US regulation require the ability to store the use fuel on site indefinitely in case we'll never have a deep chemical formation for a repository the allergen gas release from the use fuel so during cooling is problematic the high temperature tolerance of fuel salt will allow to be transferred to air cooled containers luckily without ever using a pool so that's a good thing we will have also radiolysis of fluoride based fuel salt which will result in fluorine gas also in uranium hexafluoride fluorine gas we can have chlorine based fuel salt that do not have an equivalent with the uranium gas species but will produce chlorine gas we need to think also to the chlorine 36 has a large time over 300,000 years beta emitters so that will require containment we will have to point out DO&E has sponsored a development of the dehalogenation method for electro chemically processing the chloride salt as an example to allow for stabilization in iron phosphate glass matrix and UCL3 to be suitable for incorporation into fresh fuel salt so you see sustainability of the fuel cycle trying to really close the fuel cycle so that's already the conclusion I hope I'm on time I know I have 15 minutes so the MSR program again is here to really answer and help solve the technical challenges for MSR it's important for us that they can enter the commercial market I would like to cite really two ARDP risk reduction awardees, Kairos Power which is with the Hermes test reactor it's a reduced scale FHRP test reactor being built in Tennessee license application 2021 construction start 2023, operation 2026 so you see it's going fast there's a strong momentum a faster track the Southern company services also the recipients of this ARDP risk reduction award with the modern chloride reactor experiment first spectrum integrated effect test facilities to be operated and this year provide data to support the development of TerraPower MCFR system and then I'm sorry I have my notes yesterday I was following the T9 session at the RIC which is called RIMG nuclear world in energy electric grid there was a panelist Mr. Arshan Mansour from April and wow this is what he said we expect in this decade to have a fully operational advanced molten salt reactor so that's my conclusion decade 10 years this is the booster there's a momentum and I really can I really think that MSR could help for the sustainability of the nuclear fuel cycle and potentially closing the fuel cycle so with that thank you very much and back to you John my goodness thank you thank you very much for that talk that was wonderful and I understand we may be having some challenges with the live polling but let's see if we can bring up that next question just to get people thinking about that or maybe I'll just read the question and really what we're going to ask about was what you see as the biggest challenges on the back end of the fuel cycle and so we wanted to understand both the front end and the back end and so thank you I think we'll move on to our next talk I think that's Ed File and his talk is on MSRs and closure of the LWR fuel cycle turning liabilities into assets so welcome Ed and please take it away Ed you have to unmute thank you very much I appreciate it so I'm going to mostly talk about the fuel cycle for the Elysium reactor to make sure that I'm not talking about proprietary stuff for someone else our goal was to try to solve a lot of the problems in the nuclear industry for this things like waste what do you do with the waste answer what do you do with those questions passive safety high temperature efficiency and high temperature process heat do we have the slides Ed perhaps you can proceed and I'll reach back to the technicians to see if we can get your slides out for you so one of the things of concern is that the largest part of the greenhouse gases are not really enriching of the fuel but in reality we only see about maybe a third of a percent of the fuel actually being consumed in the reactor so a lot of that energy is kind of being thrown away so we thought it would be nice to actually use all of that so that we don't have to mine new fuel for every reactor core that we try to burn is to try to close the fuel cycle so we intend to use spent fuel recycle in a very simple manner we're on slide three so and another goal is to eliminate the concerns about proliferation and indeed to consume weapons grade plutonium by denaturing it before we consume it we want to have a target of 20 to 40 dollars per megawatt hour we want to have passive safety we don't want any meltdowns we don't want any chemical reactions that might be able to disperse fission products to the public we want to have scalability and modularity so our reactor is the same vessel from 10 megawatt thermal to 3000 megawatt thermal or 1200 megawatts electric and we want a flexible operational environment our fuel is so low cost because we're using the waste and because we don't have to make it into solid fuel that you can literally make money by burning the waste and operated full power and have just the turbines cycle for changes in power and you're still economic in that case one of the other things that drives up cost is refueling so we do not take fuel out of the reactor for at least 40 years and that essentially produces the number of fuel handling evolutions by a factor of 10 over light water reactors next slide please so right now the U.S. has a nuclear waste management and disposition needs we have about 80,000 metric tons probably closer to 84,000 metric tons of stored nuclear fuel there is 60 metric tons of weapons grade plutonium that needs to be gotten rid of and to denature that at a single start-up fuel generation facility and then there's another 700,000 tons or so of depleted uranium that can be used next slide please so we have three main types of fuel the start-up fuel which our main target is for initial operations is to take spent nuclear fuel and convert it to a chloride salt and have enough spent nuclear fuel in it with the low grade plutonium mixed with the weapons grade that becomes denatured or less than 90% pu-239 but also mixed with the spent fuel which is uranium and fission products that will protect the plutonium the second method of start-up fuel production basically just takes spent nuclear fuel and essentially enriches the plutonium to 10 to 15% plutonium that would have to be around 33% plutonium-239 and those so that's already denatured but basically what we do is we take uranium out of spent fuel until the plutonium gets up to the 10 to 15% so we never remove all the fission products we never remove all the uranium from it so it's always still protected and the third type is the feed-in fuel so our start-up fuel we're going to make it a common facility in the United States near a facility that has a category one security capability to make it with the weapons grade plutonium or to enrich it but another section is to build a reactor at existing reactor sites where there is fuel and convert that fuel just convert it from oxide to chloride without taking anything else out of it and that's our feed-in fuel our feed-in fuel only needs about three kilograms per day to maintain the reactor we don't so if you think about on a per year basis a light water reactor adds about 25 tons of new fuel every year we add one ton every year in our reactor so all we do is we change it to a chloride and then we feed in at three kilograms a day for 40 to 60 years in order to eliminate the need for online processing or batch processing of the fuel over those years we have a 1.04 reading ratio to override the fission product poisons that build up and then we don't have to take fission products out of the core either and everything is uniformly mixed in the core the waste streams that we see online is we have noble gases we cover that we intend to use the metal organic frameworks to pull out separately the xenon and the krypton and then separate with a centrifuge any gases like helium or tritium or hydrogen or deuterium things like that and the cover gases are gone which gets fed back to the reactor so it was just recycled online and then stored in the metal organic framework which is going to be at a low pressure so that we don't have a concern over releasing high pressure materials and we don't have a graphite material and super cold fluids to try to trap the noble gases we'd rather to have them being able to be at whatever temperature they want to be without leaking out or having an accident of loss of cooling or loss of pressure and then after 40 to 60 years we'll purify the the cool the fuel by removing most of the short-lived fission products the 100 year fission products so that's one waste stream that we have is 100 year fission products and you will say people say that you have 300 year fission products well in our case we intend to use the cesium and strontium to both lower the melting point over time and to protect the fuel from others handling it or worth that so it stays radioactive at all times even after we clean the fuel up and put it back in so the 1.04 breathing ratio allows us to essentially take the fuel that comes out take the short-lived fission products out of it but then split the fuel in two parts to put it into two different reactors so we've essentially doubled our fuel in about 50 years next slide please oh we've already tested this at INL so we know it works we've taken burned mox and converted it into I'm sorry for the dog in the background this is an example of a fuel conversion container this is just one of the cases that we're doing and I'll talk through it as if it were making the feed-in fuel this is basically a shipping container for processing the fuel cell gets put in on the left the ends are cut off of it and then it's raised up and then one centimeter at a time is cut off and dropped into a vat which has carrier salt in it the two of the carrier salts is sodium chloride and potassium chloride and then the third salt mixed in will steal the oxygen out of the system and replace it with chlorine and then the oxygen then becomes a particulate so this is a single chemical process for converting spent nuclear fuel oxides into fast chloride MSR fuels we just need the one step so normal pyro processing is six or seven steps and we've reduced it to one and we don't remove things like fission products or uranium or anything like that in this process but as I said there's particulates there are fuel cladding for zirconium that is removed and recycled into the light water reactor fuel cladding business and the other particulates are captured like the oxides and the some of the noble metal fission products are captured and then the fuel is over at the the right hand blue section that is where the fuel goes through as a liquid it's cooled and cut into one kilogram of actinide sections and put into a fuel handling cast and from the fuel handling cast it goes into the reactor and as I said you put in about three kilograms a day to keep the reactor and in our case the reactor gets fed fuel when you need to raise the temperature back up to peak temperature because over time as you burn out the uranium and burning fission products the temperature will tend to drop so you just add fuel for it and it will have an argon cleaning system as well one so the start-up fuel version of this is the black sections in the center so this is a feed-in fuel section is the part that I just described but if you add plutonium in or plutonium oxide you can turn it into start-up fuel so the goal is to have everything modularized like this in individual shipping container size boxes and then if you need to make more like start-up fuel then you would just get more of these boxes for making more fuel at a higher rate this is able to do about a one ton a year type rate you need a lot of these for going start-up fuel we hope to get that up faster but the one ton a year is kind of based on one ton a year of the fuel that you need for the feed-in fuel for our reactor so we end up using a tiny fraction of the fuel that a light water reactor for instance uses and we get about 30 times as much energy out of the spent nuclear fuel for doing this so next slide please this is just an example of us basically saying we want to go to where there are already other reactors and build on the same site a facility like on the right at that reactor and consume the spent fuel on site from that reactor without having to transport it to another facility the stuff that actually gets transported to another facility for places where the reactor doesn't exist anymore would go to a consolidated interim storage facility and that's where we would build our start-up fuel production capability because there's more fuel going to be at those locations next slide so I'd like to thank you but basically I guess what I'm saying is the goal here is to take the light water reactor fuel and eliminate that as a long-term waste material and the only waste that we're going to end up having is 100 year fission products that have to decay and the noble gases that have to decay out of that so thank you very much Ed thank you thank you very much for that talk that was wonderful and I do apologize everybody who had some challenges with the polling and we're going to see if we can get that back in operation and maybe we can run through that at the end of our Q&A session but let's move on to our next talk from Melanie record and her talk is a regulatory perspective on the impact of molten salt reactors so thank you for coming in and taking away Melanie I also just want to take a note to say I have a question that's coming up with a doubt so with my doubt that's unexpected as a question so let's just start writing and taking a look at the different approach here with regards to SMRs in general some specific salt reactor with regards to the impact on the fuel cycle next slide please so first is a very brief introduction to the CNSC for those of you who may not be familiar we are a science based regulatory organization and we regularly to prevent unreasonable risk to the environment but how it would take you to address this the CNSC is the authority in Canada that regulates the development and production of the fuel energy of the fuel substances prescribed equipment and prescribed it for anyone in order to prevent unreasonable risk next slide please so our regulatory approach is founded on several principles which are some of which are listed on the slide fundamentally being objective and independent in our decision making and oversight is key it is the foundation for building public trust and confidence in CNSC safety is paramount in all that we do at the end of the food sector for both us and the industry and it is the licensees responsibility to ensure the safety of their operations we review safety case we review the safety cases that are before us and ultimately be my recommendations to our commission on whether or not an applicant should be granted a license any messages about breakup I'll address that for new innovative technologies it is helpful for the regulator to start its work early to be fully prepared in order to execute our mandate and so we've established a number of pre-licensing activities in order to execute this work in order to prepare for the future work next slide please so this is a bit of a busier slide and obviously there is no expectation for you to take all of this in now but certainly we can move it later the purpose of this slide is just to show different stages in our licensing process as well as our licensing activities our pre-licensing activities it's really just to illustrate that there are several steps involved in this transparent disability process for SMRs we have received one application for a license to prepare site for global first power this is regarding the ultra-safety nuclear corporation the ultra-safety nuclear corporation's reactor to be deployed at the top of the board for a site and we are aware and I'm sure the audience is aware as well that OPG has recently announced that they will be submitting an application for this year for a license to construct the GWRX300 reactor assessments of some design specifics for both of these reactors the MR and BWRX300 are being done for the WDR process which is illustrated on the left-hand side of this slide and this process will be elaborated on in a few moments I'm just going to take a really quick break John, how are we coming through the mobility, I'm seeing some text messages is it clear, can you hear me well it was breaking up there for a moment but I think it's audible now so thank you okay, I do apologize for that hearing on the CMSC's experience with SMRs has been informed by a number of diverse activities so as I mentioned we have been involved in better design reviews and we've completed several of those over the span of more than a decade the WDR is no assurance of a future regulatory approval but it does give us an early indication of any potential fundamental barriers to licensing the work that we have done with the SMRs has taught us that we do not have all the answers we therefore regularly engage with international colleagues to share information and insights and I just do a check that we are on slide number 6 I believe we are slide number 6 entitled CMSC's experience with SMRs I'm returning now to my notes so we do engage internationally with colleagues or to share information and insights from our respective reviews to try to address gaps or complementary work we have developed strong relationships with other countries and notably in 2020 and 2019 we have signed MLCs with the O&R, the U.K. O&R and the SMRC in the last year we have had great success we've completed a couple of projects and we've made progress on other projects that we are working on and we very much look forward to working with other organizations reviews conducted by multiple mature and prospective regulators on the development and include that designs or design processes are viable and that we have no reservations with potentially licensing and applicant of a particular technology should provide insight to other nuclear countries particularly nuclear newcomers so it's all of the above that I've just described that has influenced our perspective on the impact of SMRs on the fuel cycle from a design, processing safe storage and winch management perspective understanding that all of these aspects are mutually and this is what I'm going to focus on during the rest of my presentation next slide please so now it appears I'm on slide 6 sorry for the confusion so first regarding design aspects as mentioned we do vendor design reviews and for those in the audience that may not know what this is it is an optional pre-licensing process where vendors and designers engage with the CNSC under a contract we call it a service agreement the review is an opportunity for both the CNSC and the vendor where the CNSC provides feedback from the vendor's efforts to address Canadian regulatory requirements and identifies fundamental barriers to licensing if and early in the process the BDR covers a number of objectives and covers up a number of selected focus areas actually 19 in total and if problems are noted early in these areas there is time for the vendor to resolve them before they become potential licensing issues if and when a license application is to be received by an applicant these technical areas focus areas range from highly technical such as core and pure design to cross-cutting problematic areas such as research and development and management systems the review is carried out independently by CNSC staff with no involvement of the commission member panel and the process is also independent from the CNSC's licensing regime next slide please so currently we're working with organizations to designers specifically regarding BDRs we're looking at both their design and their design processes as part of that specific to molten salt reactors so terrestrial energy incorporated has completed phase one of their BDR and they are currently working their completion of their phase two Moltex completed a phase one review with 2021 and has signaled intention to commence phase two for its stable salt reactor so learn more about the conclusions of these methods and would please see our website we do post an executive summary at the end of every project so that the public and our stakeholders can get a sense of what our conclusions and findings were next slide please so in part based on BDRs CNSC staff have noted that there are areas of course that require further evidence and data in order to support the design and safety needs these relate to for example evidence that materials associated with structures, systems and components can withstand the verified temperatures involved and that there are reliable ways to monitor certain plant parameters and some of these techniques for example will involve the development and testing of sensors that will be immersed in the salt the evidence that is required though in order to support all the claims is the responsibility of the design organization and future applicants and licensees there is a lot of research going on at these institutions at other research institutions in Canada and as we put it abroad as well in order to close the gaps that do exist next slide please so let's talk a little bit more now of what's happening at the front end of the fuel cycle this map illustrates the current distribution in Canada of our front end facilities with our uranium mines and mills that are located in Saskatchewan and on the processing side of the cycle we do everything from refinement conversion and fuel fabrication and those facilities are all located in Ontario which is shown in the cutout here on the left of the slide please note that there is an geographical error in the map on this slide depends on the cutout that has been shifted so those facilities appear to be in Quebec they are very much not in Quebec the facilities are indeed in Ontario next slide please so as SMR concepts and proposals advance in Canada there is a lot of discussion and some of which was already brought up today about novel extraction and reprocessing records that are associated with the spent fuel the runs of power for example is working with one molten salt reactor designer in exploring reprocessing spent fuel and this proposal is in the very preliminary phases with a letter of intent that has been received by the CDC on this matter Canada does not have any prior experience with domestic reprocessing at this time and as such preliminary discussions around Canada's waste policy have begun no matter what inspires any future reprocessing activities must comply with Canada's nuclear non-proliferation policy our regulatory requirements of the CNSC and our international commitments now regarding the second bullet on this slide liquid based fuels are novel as you all know in many ways but in terms of fuel salt manufacturing proposed in some episodes are designed questions surrounding the process where it will be done and potential transport such material do come into play under the MOU that I referred to at the beginning of this talk the CNSC and NFC have recently started specific cooperative activities related to the front end of the advanced reactor fuel cycle as well as related transportation issues lastly the supply chain for high assay low enriched uranium fuels that are being proposed as part of some designs has not yet been made clear so we will move forward for this fuel source will need to be determined if these designs are progressed towards licensing and future operation next slide please adherence to moving out of safeguards adherence to Canada's international safeguards commitments are of course fundamental to our regulatory oversight so that nuclear materials are not used for nuclear weapons purposes the CNSC supports the concept of safeguards by design and in terms of some specifics associated with molten salt reactors there are of course some challenges regarding safeguarding of bulk nuclear material in the form of molten salt versus the traditional salt fuel bundles that we're accustomed to dealing with here in Canada and abroad so those issues are related to material account to significant verification and that that's being worked through now is part of our design review and certainly as these designs towards licensing there will be some advancements in this area the CNSC is a participant in an IE member state support program task on safeguards by design for small modular reactors which aims to identify the key technical challenges and safeguards implementation challenges for safeguards implementation and the steps that can be taken to support safeguards by design principles and to these designs any SMR built in Canada will have to entail a comprehensive safeguards approach that is acceptable to the IE next slide please one quick moment everyone I don't know if I just lost a slide somehow I will quickly pull that up thank you so now just to do a check I'm on a slide that is entitled Waste Management so finally let's turn to the back end of the fuel cycle in terms of the management of spent fuel in Canada's safe and secure management of waste is a national priority and waste producers and owners are ultimately responsible for the management of the waste this is following requirements set up by the CNSC and also in line with the applicable national or international standards at this time when it comes to long term storage of spent fuel Canada continues to work on strategy with a vision that by 2050 key elements of Canada's radioactive waste disposal infrastructure are in place and planning is well underway for the remaining facilities necessary to accommodate all of Canada's current and future radioactive waste the nuclear waste management organization is the organization responsible for developing a solution for the long term management of waste in Canada the advancement of SMR has meant that new forms of waste and new fuel waste owners or new waste owners rather are being considered and as such the NWMO has been engaged with these vendors in order to lay the groundwork to ensure that that their inclusion that they are included in these plans I'd like to include this part of the presentation by noting that Canada is currently modernizing its nuclear waste policy on radioactive waste management and decommissioning under the umbrella of energy has sought feedback from our stakeholders and so this policy is evolving as we speak next slide please so just to summarize the CNSD is ready to regulate SMRs and is increasing our readiness activities in order to perform both effective activities in a timely and safe manner as you heard our experience is informed by a number of different activities processes and relationships including a number of important bilateral relationships that we have with both the NRC the US and the UK through these activities it is apparent that SMRs including molten salt reactors present some challenges and opportunities but the CNSD's risk informed approach allows for the regulation of these non-traditional reactors and with that I would like to thank my audience particularly for your patience with some of the hiccups that I experienced during the delivery of this presentation and with that I thank you for your attention and I will pass it back over to John thanks very much Thank you very much and thanks to all of the panelists some wonderful information I really appreciate your presentations we have a number of questions it was clear that this was a very interesting topic and we received a number of questions I think far more questions than we have time to answer but I did want to run through some of them and we tried to gather them into some themes this first question I'd like to give to Raj Raj if you could we got questions along the lines of what the NRC is doing to prepare for SMR or molten salt reactor technologies I wondered if you could give your thoughts on that Oh certainly and I totally appreciate this question I believe that question not related to the front end or in reactor operations but also the back end in particular the back end issues so as you know we have done a good assessment of molten salt reactor technologies and identified gaps and regulatory considerations for operations we are embarked on this initiative right now which has been for a year now proactively looking at the front end considerations and as well as back end I will tell you the back end is when we understand everybody is enthusiastic about front end because it has to happen in terms of licensing space we all want to know about the operations because that's important the back end is left to the back end normally but in this case because of the variety of types there are different issues that we have not really tread along it is important for us to have this engagement as you know this today is our presentation is the first assessment we have done and Patricia had a lot of great information so I do think this extended coordination collaboration with entities such that we still have to be independent is very critical especially with the back end I mentioned about off gas there are a lot of issues and Dr. Andrew Reed can talk to you a lot about that and these are all handleable because before that we need to understand the issues and see how they can be addressed and fit within the regulatory framework that we have or is it something that we need to revise so I think early engagement pre-application activities that NRC encourages a lot with the specific vendors and then research my office I am saying we have a lot of coordination and collaboration with various entities DOE Electrical Power Research Institute International Regulatory. So those are all we all have to have all of those checked thanks John Thank you Dr. Raj Ed I might turn this next question over to you there was a question about your thoughts or insights on safeguarding the material at your sites and in particular how control and accountability and inventory of the special nuclear material would be handled and perhaps one of the other panelists might want to speak on that too but I will start with you if I could initially have to think about a fast chloride MSR a little bit differently because we don't have a waste stream that comes out that ends up getting stored as a matter of fact we consume safeguardable material of spent nuclear fuel and weapons grade plutonium and consume it so we are actually improving the safeguards picture in respect to light water reactor and excess weapons material so that that makes a little bit different the reactor doesn't take fuel out for 40 to 60 years so you think of a light water reactor taking fuel out every 18 months or so we don't do that for 40 to 60 years so there's not a lot of access to it but as far as actually monitoring the content of the reactor we will have isotopic and elemental measurements of the contents of the fuel salt one benefit is it's all integrally mixed and we also measure the volume because in actuality we put in more fuel or at least 50% as much fuel over the years as we started with so we end up with an extra like 40 or 60 tons of fuel in the reactor by the end of life so we monitor both the volume and the elemental and isotopic content of that fuel and then when it's taken out it stays mixed our purification system doesn't remove uranium separate from plutonium so it always stays mixed and will stay mixed with cesium and strontium as well so it's still protected as fuel in the purification facility which there's only one of those purification facilities the fuel would be shipped from the reactors to a central facility for purification which would be licensed for handling fuel as a fuel production facility would be in the same similar amounts of controls as the United States has done in the past of pyro processing or purex processing so it's kind of more like a fuel production plant in its safeguards controls than it is of an actual reactor because we don't do it very often Thank you Thank you Ed I wondered if any of the other panelists wanted to comment on that Patricia Yes, yes I'm going to talk for Ben CPT is the National Technical Director for Advanced Safeguard for the reactors in DOE NE5 I would like to say that they are developing online monitoring tools to monitor uranium and plutonium looking also at the different composition of the salt so Safeguard by Design is a big topic in this Advanced Reactor Safeguard campaign Thank you Patricia and while I have you maybe I'll get your thoughts on this question the question was while we say molten salt reactor there are really several different reactor technologies based on salts and isotopes could you give your thoughts on the risks associated with that to the diversity You know at the end of the day there will be certainly just a few concepts that will emerge that depends on if I think for example uranium plutonium or thorium right now in this country a lot of I will say capabilities have been developed for uranium and plutonium so it may be more difficult for the thorium even though we have companies that are developing the thorium fuel cycle so that could be an issue then we have of course depending on the concept the fuels that's a high risk which fuel you're going to use some of them are going to use HALEU are we going to have enough HALEU it's another risk and then you look at the waste that is produced some of the concepts will have a I call that spend fuel salt waste without thinking to nothing you have your salt with your fuel inside and you throw that somewhere and over the next generation will think about that no way you cannot do that so that's for me the high risk we need to think to the entire fuel cycle and I'm very happy to have you start thinking and having the people thinking about looking at the entire fuel cycle not the reactor only but the front and the back end so these are the high risk that I see that the reason we have a lot of research done on this on this subject if I might comment here one thing you have to think about with liquid fuels is there are as many or more types of liquid fuel as there are solid fuel reactors so it's an entire doubling of the category of fuel types that we have to understand indeed thank you thank you this is it's a rich area Melanie if I could it looks like Canada is currently addressing some of these issues and we got a question if you could elaborate on the regulations being used for the current design reviews in Canada absolutely thank you for the question so in terms of future licensing and for that matter current licensing since we do have some license applications with us so we certainly have one regarding global first power there are a number of regulations that apply so we do have regulations for class 1 facilities which apply here we have regulation protection regulations we have regulations that relate to waste management etc so those regulations would apply but I think the question is probably more focused on the work that we're doing right now with our design reviews so I'll sort of shift and focus on that a little bit for a moment in terms of design expectations of requirements related to design we have one rather key document that is called reg doc 252 you can find it on our website and that covers up our design expectations and so that is the document that really guides our review and certainly guides our designers in terms of their VDR we also have a couple of really key documents related to safety analysis so we'll determine the safety and probabilistic safety analysis that come into play as well those are numbered 241 and 242 so as I mentioned those are the main ones we also have a series of license application guides that are available for licensees and 112 and 115 are the numbers for those license application guides that are more specific to helping future applicants sort of find their way in terms of what C&C expectations are regarding their licensing process and I will say one thing just since I have the microphone and hopefully people can hear me the document that we have 252 is if you look at the pre-fest it does speak about water cold reactors because a lot of our experience of course has been based on water cold reactors but we really feel that this document is fit for purpose for SMRs because it utilizes a greater approach we also accept alternative approaches so with those two things in mind 252 does seem to be quite appropriate for reviewing SMRs recognizing that in the future we may need to make modifications or additions what have you in order to accommodate some of the specifics of some of these SMRs thank you for the question Melanie thank you for that and I know we're running a little short on time but I wondered if we could take just a moment and my apologies to everyone for the challenges we had with the polling but I was very interested to see I think we did get some results on that last polling question about regulatory challenges if we could flip to that for a moment and I'd like to just open this up to the group I'll give you just two seconds unfortunately to digest that slide and if I could just go quickly through the group and if you could offer your thoughts I'll start with you Raj is there anything it looks like a fairly even distribution I don't know if you have any reaction to the results there for this the challenges that we're facing and I'll ask you to come off mute first thanks John no I'm not surprised at all it's such an even split and I want to tell you we are checking mark on A, B and A, C and D and regarding the consensus codes and standards I don't know how much I mean we know in operations we have codes and standards that are being considered but this is something a good idea to probably explore for the technical community and DOE thanks thank you Raj I'll just quickly just look to the other panelists to see if anybody else wants to offer any perspectives on those results so with that I think we are coming to the end of our time I do want to thank the panelists of course for their wonderful presentations this is clearly an area that there's a rich amount of work that has already been done and rich work that is still yet to be done I again have to put in the plug to any vendors or licensees out there the NRC does always welcome pre-application engagement early and often as you can see there's a huge diversity of technologies embedded in this area engagement with regulators is encouraged and welcomed I also want to take a moment to thank some of our supporting staff Wendy Reed and Jessica Carlson and of course all of our IT support I know we did have some challenges today but I think we worked through them and had a very productive session and so with that thank you all and declare this session completed and hopefully you all enjoy the rest of the RIC so thank you very much and have a great day