hpr4553 :: Nuclear Reactor Technology - Ep 4 Less Common Reactor Types

Some of the less common historical reactor types.

Hosted by Whiskeyjack on Wednesday, 2026-01-14 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
energy, nuclear, engineering. (Be the first).

Listen in ogg, opus, or mp3 format. Play now:

Duration: 00:17:34
Download the transcription and subtitles.

general.

02 Less Common Reactor Types

In this episode we discuss some of the less common historical reactor types.


These are a mixture of less common commercial types and some experimental or research reactors.

I will cover advanced or future designs in another episode. 


03 Minor Successes

04 Magnox

07 AGR - Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor

10 LWGR - Light Water Graphite Moderated Reactor (RBMK)


14 Historical Oddities or Dead Ends


15 Organically Cooled Reactors

16 Organically Cooled and Moderated

18 Organically Cooled and Heavy Water Moderated

24 HTGCR High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor

28 HWLWR - Heavy Water Light Water Reactor or SGHWR - Steam Generating Heavy Water Reactor


31 Reactors Making a Comeback

32 Pebble Bed Reactors

33 AVR

35 THTR-300

36 South Africa, China, and the US

39 Making a Come Back?


40 MSR - Molten Salt Reactors

41 Slow or Fast Neutron Reactors

42 Fuel

43 Salts

44 Why Some Variants Use Dissolved Fuel

46 History

47 Types of Molten Salt Reactor

48 Pros and Cons

52 Overall


53 Conclusion

In this episode we discussed some of the less common historical reactor types.


As we have seen, there have been a number of different reactor designs which were less commercially successful for one reason or another. 

Some of them may make a come back however, particularly as the basis for a small reactor.


In the next episode we will describe fast neutron reactors.




Comments

Subscribe to the comments RSS feed.

Leave Comment

Note to Verbose Commenters
If you can't fit everything you want to say in the comment below then you really should record a response show instead.

Note to Spammers
All comments are moderated. All links are checked by humans. We strip out all html. Feel free to record a show about yourself, or your industry, or any other topic we may find interesting. We also check shows for spam :).

Provide feedback
Your Name/Handle:
Title:
Comment:
Anti Spam Question: What does the letter P in HPR stand for?