Molten salt reactors (MSR) are one of six advanced reactor designs that fall under the Generation IV reactor classification. MSRs boast a wide range of improvements over reactors in operation today, most of which are Generation II. Although it may seem counter-intuitive, the use of molten salts as coolants makes MSRs inherently safer than current reactors due to lower operating pressures and various other reactor characteristics. MSRs incorporate a passive safety system that can automatically drain and isolate nuclear fuel in the event of an accident while current reactors still rely on active safety systems that require human intervention.

However, MSRs are still in the research phase and have not been commercialised yet. New computational tools are required to predict steady state and dynamic behaviour in MSRs as they are radically different in design from the older reactors. Nuclear fuel and its fission products are contained within the molten salt, and they are in constant circulation in the MSR reactor core. A number of computational tools for MSRs are currently being developed by various research groups around the world.

I am currently in the Advanced Reactors and Fuel Cycles (ARFC) group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). My research focuses on the simulation of particular MSR designs and in- corporating various advanced reactor multiphysics into the system code in order to obtain more accurate simulation results. My goal is to be proficient in working with nuclear reactor simulation codes and to develop the intuition required for such work.