Environment & Energy

New Brunswick is the only Canadian province, apart from Ontario, with an operating power reactor - they have one Candu, Point Lepreau. That's also where the provincial government is sponsoring two fast reactor start-ups. One is designing the ARC reactor - sodium cooled, metal fuel, based on Idaho's EBR 2. The other is Moltex, the brainchild of a British chemist, using spent fuel actinides dissolved in molten sodium chloride, with the fuel contained in steel rods analogous to the fuel elements of a LWR. The fuel elements are immersed in a pumped fluoride heat transfer salt. Fission gases are held in the top of the fuel rods long enough for shorter half-life elements to transmute, before release into the cover gas. They claim sacrificial base metals in the rods would reduce corrosion to negligible levels.
Not sure how either project is going.