Terrestrial Energy secures funding for reactor project

Canadian company Terrestrial Energy has secured CAD$10 million ($7 million) in Series A funding to support its program to bring its Integral Molten Salt Reactor (IMSR) technology to industrial markets in the 2020s.

Terrestrial Energy CEO Simon Irish said that the funds will be used to support pre-construction and pre-licensing engineering, and to support further engagement with industry and nuclear regulators. "These programs allow the Company to demonstrate to industry the commercial merits of the IMSR design," he said.

Series A funding is a term used to describe a company's first round of funding secured by selling preferred stock to investors, typically venture capitalists. Details on the source of Terrestrial Energy's funding have not been revealed.

Molten salt reactors use fuel dissolved in a molten fluoride or chloride salt. As an MSR fuel salt is a liquid, it functions as both the fuel (producing the heat) and the coolant (transporting the heat away and ultimately to the power plant). This means that such a reactor could not suffer from a loss of coolant leading to a meltdown.

Terrestrial Energy's IMSR builds on work carried out in the USA at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment test reactor operated from 1965 to 1969 and the Denatured Molten Salt Reactor was designed. Terrestrial Energy in January 2015 announced a collaboration with ORNL to develop its IMSR design to the engineering blueprint stage.

The conceptual design stage is anticipated to be completed in 2017, and the company intends to have its first nuclear power plant commissioned at a site in Canada in the 2020s, Irish told World Nuclear News.

Researched and written
by World Nuclear News