Southern Company and TerraPower Prep for Testing on Molten Salt Reactor

[Silence]

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/southern-company-and-terrapower-prep-testing-molten-salt-reactor

[Samg381]

A team of body builders has been tasked with overseeing operations and maintenance.

[Humin]

So how Mr. Cleans are going to be working on this?

[RIPBILLYMAYS]

They expect to begin testing in a $20 million test loop facility starting in 2019. The
team is also scaling up their salt manufacturing process for testing in
the loop. Data generated from the test loop will be used to validate
thermal hydraulics and safety analysis codes for licensing of the
reactor.

After testing, Southern Company and TerraPower plan to develop and
license a test reactor before developing a 1,100-megawatt prototype
reactor by 2030.

tl;dr They plan to build a test reactor probably at a DoE National Lab to collect safety data which will then be used in the application that gets sent to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for commercial approval.

Good luck to them, NRC is slow enough with regular work as it is. I've spoken to Terrapower before and this reactor design is pretty cool, they can shut the reactor down without control rods by removing the molten fuel from the loop and just not having a critical mass. Lots of potential corrosion problems but that's why you build the test facility to collect data.