...the molten salt nuclear reactor design not only has the potential to eliminate dangerous nuclear waste but turn its byproducts into valuable commodities that can be harvested from the salt and sold.
Molybdenum-99, for example, is an extremely expensive element — $30 million per gram — that can only be bought from the Netherlands and is used in approximately 20 million medical imaging procedures and scans each year. It can be extracted with Memmott's design.
"We can now go to that salt and apply specific electrochemistry to pull out pieces one at a time, or groups at a time. So this nuclear waste — which is really just a mix of uranium and all these different components — we can now pull those out and separate and sell them," Memmott said. "Not only do we have a reactor that's really resistant to accidents, but now we can actually separate out those components and sell them and make a profit from the other pieces and then we're left, potentially, with no nuclear waste."