Design and licensing strategies for the fluoride-salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor (FHR) technology

•Historical perspective and current development efforts of FHR.•FHR Material selection for fuel, structural materials, liquid coolants, and gases.•Safety analysis centers around definition of safety design criteria (SDC).•ANS FHR safety standard will identify LWR GDC applicability.•LBE identification for FHR, and lessons learned from Fukushima for BDBEs.

Fluoride-salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor (FHR) technology combines the robust coated-particle fuel of high-temperature, gas-cooled reactors with the single phase, high volumetric heat capacity coolant of molten salt reactors and the low-pressure pool-type reactor configuration of sodium fast reactors. FHRs have the capacity to deliver heat at high average temperature, and thus to achieve higher thermal efficiency than light water reactors. Licensing of the passive safety systems used in FHRs can use the same framework applied successfully to passive advanced light water reactors, and earlier work by the NGNP and PBMR projects provide an appropriate framework to guide the design of safety-relevant FHR systems. This paper provides a historical review of the development of FHR technology, describes ongoing development efforts, and presents design and licensing strategies for FHRs. A companion review article describes the phenomenology, methods and experimental program in support of FHR.