Editing Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (section)

== Shutdown and Legacy ==

The MSRE was shut down in December 1969 at the direction of Milton Shaw, Director of Reactor Development and Technology for the Atomic Energy Commission. Shaw strongly favoured the competing Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor (LMFBR) programme and withdrew funding from the MSRE programme over the objections of Alvin Weinberg and the ORNL team. Weinberg was subsequently removed from his position as ORNL director in 1973 — an event he attributed directly to his advocacy for thorium and molten salt technology.

The MSRE data and reports were archived at Oak Ridge, largely unread for decades. The 1,500+ technical reports generated by the project were not widely distributed. Science journalist Richard Martin discovered that some ORNL research documents had ended up in the Oak Ridge Children's Museum. Kirk Sorensen, stumbling on a copy of ''Fluid Fuel Reactors'' in 2000, began digitising and publishing the ORNL reports online, triggering the modern revival of interest in LFTR technology.

The MSRE site at Oak Ridge has been undergoing decommissioning since the 1990s. The radioactive salt residues remaining in the drained reactor system have posed ongoing remediation challenges.