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2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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Breaking ground on a new approach to construction
The drive to Kairos Power’s reactor demonstration site in Oak Ridge, Tenn., is not only scenic—it’s historic. Nearly 85 years ago, roughly 30,000 construction workers transformed orchards and farmland into a key Manhattan Project site. Depending on your route, you may pass by one of the three gatehouses that were once military checkpoints controlling access to Atomic Energy Commission production facilities.
M. Scott Greenwood, Benjamin R. Betzler, A. Lou Qualls, Junsoo Yoo, Cristian Rabiti
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 3 | March 2020 | Pages 478-504
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1627124
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Liquid-fueled nuclear reactors, particularly molten salt reactors (MSRs), have recently gained significant interest in the advanced reactor community. As with all reactors, modeling and simulation are critical to advanced reactor design and licensing and will be required for MSR deployment. However, there are significant gaps in existing simulation capabilities for MSRs, particularly with the unique challenges of liquid-fueled systems (e.g., fission product transport). Furthermore, advanced reactor designers require near-term tools that are readily modifiable to perform design and analysis, including the ability to extend their analysis beyond the primary system to auxiliary systems. Transient Simulation Framework of Reconfigurable Models (TRANSFORM), a Modelica-based, system modeling library developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is an advanced tool that can help meet some of the near-term needs of the advanced reactor community. This paper describes advanced system modeling criteria and presents TRANSFORM to the advanced reactor community by demonstration of system modeling capabilities and support of advanced analysis workflows, i.e., the Risk Analysis Virtual Environment (RAVEN) framework from Idaho National Laboratory, using the liquid-fueled Molten Salt Demonstration Reactor (MSDR) as a reference design.