NOVEL STRATEGIES FOR SAFEGUARDING MOLTEN SALT
REACTORS

There is a continued global interest in advanced nuclear power as a solution for reliable clean energy. However, new nuclear facilities are capital intensive, which is a significant barrier to future growth. Careful consideration during the design phase can reduce upfront costs to avoid expensive, future retrofits that might be required to reach regulatory goals. One key component of the licensing process for nuclear facilities is the material control and accountancy (MC&A) plan. Liquid-fueled molten salt reactors (MSR), one of the proposed advanced nuclear power designs, is a significant departure from contemporary light water reactors due to several unique design features, which could impact the MC&A plan. Prior work has shown that large fissile inventories can make it difficult, if not impossible, to rely solely on material accountancy of the liquid-fueled MSR core alone as an effective MC&A strategy. Potential solutions include a focus on input and output transfers, which would involve discrete item counting, or a performance-based MC&A approach. This work considers the latter by investigating changes in process monitoring signals from liquid-fueled MSRs under material loss conditions. Material losses are shown to induce transitions from a baseline state to a different post-loss state. However, future work is needed to investigate several shortcomings in this process-based approach.