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Background The operation control and safety protection functions of thorium molten salt reactor-solid fuel (TMSR-SF0) are independently implemented by the distributed control system based on experimental physics and industrial control system (EPICS) and a protection system based on field programmable gate array (FPGA). Since the protection system is set up to ensure the ultimate safety of the reactor, it is the most important part of the reactor control system for the safe operation of the reactor. Therefore, it is compulsory for integrating these two systems to meet the regulatory requirements of nuclear power human factors engineering. Purpose This study aims to realize the real-time communication between the protection system and control system for TMSR-SF0. Methods A distributed control system based on EPICS was designed and implemented to communicate with the protection system. The communication scheme between TMSR-SF0 control system and protection system was designed via the S7plc driver based on EPICS platform, and implemented by constructing the software input/output controller (IOC), configuring S7plc driver, designing IOC real-time database, developing the man-machine interface. Control system studio (CSS) was adopted to implement the display of communication scheme, and communication scheme was tested systematically by pre-set experiments. Results The test results show that the TMSR-SF0 control system can stably communicate with the serial device of the protection system for accurate data acquisition in real-time through this proposed communication scheme, satisfying all technical indexes and requirements of TMSR-SF0 control system. Conclusions The communication scheme of the S7plc driver based on the EPICS platform and the communication protocol defined by protection system can be used to implement scheme for communication between the TMSR-SF0 control system and the protection system, providing reference for similar communication design.