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.
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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.