The Rise and Fall of the Molten Salt Reactor

Molten salt cooled nuclear reactors were designed, built, tested, and proven to work in the mid1960s./nThe molten salt reactor experiment at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory built and operated molten salt cooled nuclear reactors in the mid1960s, and they worked beautifully, completely eliminating the need for a water coolant, susceptible to hydrogen separation, and eliminating the need to pressurize the reactor core./nBut there was one very, very serious problem with the molten salt reactor, which led to its demise in 1971./nThe liquid metal fast breeder reactor project was in the president's home state, and the molten salt reactor experiment in Tennessee, which was doing ground breaking work on nuclear reactor safety, was canceled in large part because President Nixon and the power brokers running the Atomic Energy Commission at the time wanted the money spent in California instead.