Staff at Kairos Power’s testing and manufacturing facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico have begun the transfer of about 14 tonnes of molten fluoride salt coolant into an engineering test unit (ETU) – a non-nuclear prototype plant built to demonstrate the company’s advanced fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor technology.

The transfer marks the largest transfer of FliBe, a blend of lithium fluoride and beryllium fluoride, since the molten salt reactor experiment in 1969. That experiment, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was designed to assess the viability of liquid fuel reactor technologies for use in commercial power generation.

The ETU is scaled at the same size as the Hermes demonstration reactor planned for construction in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and with similar operating parameters