Azets has been appointed as administrators of Moltex Energy and is currently looking to secure a sale of the company and its assets. After the directors of Moltex Energy failed to achieve the majority shareholder consent to new investments or the sale of its assets, they resolved to place the company into administration.
The company has two subsidiaries: Moltex Energy Canada and MoltexFLEX. While the company is in administration, the subsidiary undertakings of Moltex Energy Canada Inc and MoltexFLEX Limited will continue to trade as usual and are unaffected. Azets said the decision taken to place the company in administration is in “no way a reflection on the operations of the proposition within the subsidiary companies”.
The strategy of the administrators is to market the business and assets of the company for sale, including the intellectual property and shareholdings of the subsidiary operations. The intention is to seek an acquirer that is well-positioned and suitably funded to develop the technology interests of the company further for the benefit of all stakeholders.
Earlier in March, Moltex Energy Canada validated its Waste to Stable Salt (WATSS) process on used fuel bundles from a commercial CANDU reactor through hot cell experiments undertaken by Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) following seven years of rigorous development.
The WATSS process seeks to convert used nuclear fuel into an asset through an efficient 24-hour chemical process. Moltex has demonstrated that it can extract 90% of the transuranic material in 24-hours, and with greater efficiency over longer periods of time.
The Government of Canada’s Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) and Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency have supported the development of this technology. The development of WATSS was also supported by the Province of New Brunswick and NB Power. Moltex’s collaboration partners include IDOM and CANDU Energy.
UK-based MoltexFLEX said in September 2023 that it had “reached a watershed in the development of its small modular FLEX reactor” and would move from the pre-concept science phase into accelerated product and project delivery. Moltex Energy launched its MoltexFLEX subsidiary in 2022 specifically to work on the FLEX reactor – the latest application of the company’s stable salt reactor (SSR) design. This is the thermal spectrum version of Moltex Energy’s SSR technology, which uses graphite as the moderator. That technology is shared with MoltexFLEX’s sister company, Moltex Energy Canada, which is developing a fast spectrum version (the SSR-W).
In February 2024, scientists at MoltexFLEX published new research on how graphite interacts with the molten salt to be used in the company’s FLEX reactor design. Together with scientists at the University of Manchester’s Nuclear Graphite Research Group (NGRG), the researchers used x-ray micro-CT scanners to investigate how tiny amounts of molten salt infiltrated pores within standard industrial grades of graphite. This was the first time such scanning has been used for this purpose. MoltexFLEX had been working with the NGRG on graphite-related research for more than three years.
