A hybrid reactor design

                In my last few blog posts, I have described some ideas for nuclear power that I think are worth considering for use in the future. In this blog post, I will be writing about what I think would be the best design for a nuclear reactor for the future. My reactor design is a hybrid of the three reactors that I discussed in my previous posts.

                For the design of the nuclear reactor core, it would be a toroid, or donut shape, with three shells. The center would be a combination thermonuclear and inertial confinement fusion reactor. The first shell would be molten fluorine and fuel salts. The second shell would be a circulated coolant molten salt. The outermost third layer would be a layer of supercritical water coolant.

                The plasma in innermost fusion reactor would be spinning which will make the heavier elements, or wastes from the fusion reaction, be centrifuged out to the sides of the chamber for removal. While wastes are being removed, more fuel could be constantly added, eliminating the need to stop and refuel.

                The first shell of the reactor would be the same as a molten salt reactor, but would be able to use much more nuclear waste or depleted uranium as fuel, as the fusion reactor would produce high energy neutrons similar to those produced from a particle accelerator. A lot of the heat from the fusion reactor would be deposited in this layer, as the salt would be very dense. The salt would be continuously circulated and processed to remove wastes and add more fuel, eliminating the need to stop and refuel, which is a major problem with the molten salt reactors.

                The second shell would be the main cooling shell. It would be some other molten salt that would be used to transfer the heat to the power generation part of the reactor. The extremely high operating temperature allows very high thermodynamic efficiency.

                The outermost shell would be a layer of water that would be used for further heat transfer, but also would absorb many neutrons from the reactor, making deuterium and tritium for use in the fusion reaction at the center.

                This design would have most of the benefits of the constituent designs while minimizing the negatives. In my next blog post, I will compare this design to the design of the nuclear reactors that we use today.