Fluoride-salt cooled, high-temperature reactors (FHRs) combine existing technologies in a novel way, using high-temperature fuels from gas-cooled reactors with a low-pressure molten salt coolant. In the last decade, U.S. national laboratories and universities have addressed key scientific and technical questions for the licensing and deployment of FHRs, and have developed pre-conceptual FHR designs with different fuel geometries, core configurations, heat transport system configurations, power cycles, and power levels. Founded in 2016, Kairos Power, a mission-driven engineering company based in California, has built on the foundation laid by the U.S. Department of Energy sponsored university Integrated Research Projects to design, license, and demonstrate the KP-FHR. This talk overviews the history of FHR technology and the major role played by universities, as well as Kairos Power’s mission to enable the world’s transition to clean energy.
Dr. Edward Blandford is a Co-Founder & CTO of Kairos Power. He is responsible for technology development, experimental testing, modeling and simulation, and process engineering activities at Kairos Power. Prior to co-founding Kairos Power, he was at the University of New Mexico where he was an assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering. Dr. Blandford was also a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He also worked for several years as a project manager at the Electric Power Research Institute focusing on steam generator thermal-hydraulics and material degradation management. Dr. Blandford has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.
