Kairos Power begins work on New Mexico salt production facility
The Salt Production Facility at the company's new Manufacturing Development Campus near Albuquerque will produce high-purity, molten salt coolant for its advanced reactors.
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Kairos Power’s fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor technology (KP-FHR) is cooled by a chemically stable mixture of lithium fluoride and beryllium fluoride salts known as Flibe. The Salt Production Facility will employ a proprietary chemical process to produce large quantities of high-purity Flibe enriched in Lithium-7 that will meet the stringent specifications to be used inside a reactor, the company said. The first-of-a-kind plant will enable future process optimisation and establish the competency to scale up reactor-grade Flibe production for the commercial fleet, it added.
In line with Kairos's iterative approach to development, the new facility will build on the lessons learned from the Molten Salt Purification Plant (MSPP) where the company, in partnership with Materion Corporation, produced 14 tonnes of unenriched Flibe for the company's non-nuclear Engineering Testing Unit-1 (ETU-1). The MSPP, in Elmore, Ohio, was itself the first plant ever built to produce Flibe at an industrial scale. ETU-1 completed more than 2000 hours of pumped salt operations before entering decommissioning earlier this year.
Rendering of the Salt Production Facility (Image: Kairos)
The Salt Production Facility is receiving support from the City of Albuquerque and the State of New Mexico via economic incentives approved in September, and will also use funding from the US Department of Energy's Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program in addition to the "substantial" private investment. It is expected that construction and operation of the facility will create 20-30 full-time jobs. The project’s general contractor is TIC-The Industrial Company, a subsidiary of Kiewit Corporation.
At the same time as the ground-breaking for the Salt Production Facility, Kairos also held a dedication ceremony for its Manufacturing Development Campus, part of which is being built on the site of a former solar panel factory. The campus will host facilities for advanced reactor component manufacturing, U-stamped pressure vessel production, modular reactor construction, fuel fabrication process development, large-scale, non-nuclear testing and more.
"The facilities we are building in Albuquerque will play a pivotal role in deploying Kairos Power's clean energy technology with robust safety at an affordable cost," Kairos Power Chief Technology Officer and co-founder Ed Blandford said. "With the addition of molten salt coolant production, Kairos Power's Manufacturing Development Campus will soon have all the capabilities we need to deliver the Hermes demonstration reactor and establish a credible path to scale up production for the commercial fleet."
Kairos began site preparation work for Hermes, a demonstration version of the KP-FHR, at Oak Ridge, Tennessee in July. The unit is scheduled to be operational in 2026, with a two-unit electricity-producing plant to follow.
