Thorium explained - the future of cheap, clean energy?
Thorium explained - the future of cheap, clean energy? Go to brilliant.org/Undecided you can sign up for free. And also, the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium membership. Thorium is often held up as one of the best paths forward for achieving a mix of cheap, clean energy for our grid. Even former presidential candidate Andrew Yang was pushing for Thorium reactors along with wind and solar. So what is it? Why are there so many people excited about it? And is it really the future of clean energy?
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(6:05) "This is the biggest safety benefit over traditional nuclear reactors we have in use today". 1) You don't have to actively remove graphite from the reactor. Thermal spectrum MSR thorium breeders have a negative temperature reactivity coefficient, meaning if they get too hot, the overall fuel density in the system will drop, which in turn reduces reactivity and cools down the reactor. A continuously operating reactor will eventually find a point of stable activity in a completely passive fashion and doesn't require any operator intervention. That's not the most important safety feature though. The most important safety feature is the second thing you noted, not having to use HIGHLY pressurized water. The primary issue, and the cause of all historical nuclear accidents, (and the single largest contributor to the high cost of nuclear reactors) is highly pressurized high temperature water. You eliminate the need for water, a mountain of nuclear reactor issues just go out the window.
The negative temperature reactivity coefficient is also convenient for load following. -More load -Increase the flow rate of secondary loop to extract more heat energy -The primary loop cools down, increasing reactivity -Increased reactivity then balances out with the increased heat extraction from secondary loop -Load following by design
@@doritoification 100% correct on that. Of course, I think too significant a drop also increases the likely hood of nobel metals precipitating out of the fluid and plating on the inside of the heat exchanger. Still, that's more of an issue of the geometry of the heat exchange and effective management of the chemistry. Still, the inherent thermal/reactivity stability and the ability to load follow is badass. It's so awesome, it feels like it has to be a scam.
@@williamsmith1741 too good to be true haha
@@adolfodef not sure which designs you've been looking at but the graphite in most designs would be permanent and the control rods are the thing you suspend magnetically. Also the freeze plug will be actively cooled by a refrigerant system that requires power so in the event of a loss of power yes it absolutely would melt even if the fission reaction is over, decay heat would be enough. You never want to loose power because although the freeze plug is a fantastic safety feature, it would condemn the reactor to a very expensive ball ache if it were ever used
Doppler broadening is important, but I don't trust any reactor without a significantly negative alpha-mod.
Thanks for covering this. The efficiency of these plants can't be overstated, at least for the Molten Salt variety. We're looking at going from say 4% efficient today, to in excess of 90% with these. Molten Salt plants don't suffer from the disadvantages of having to manufacture solid fuel rods which are both expensive and have to be removed before they are fully spent. They also work at much higher temperatures, so the power plants can be much smaller for the same power output. You also don't need that massive containment building which all traditional reactors need to contain a catastrophic failure.
It's understandable why there's a movement behind the concept.
@@UndecidedMF - Obviously solving the Engineering problems is far from trivial. However, compared to the challenges faced by Fusion they are much less of a hurdle. We know the reactor physics works because of the success of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory experiment. Considering this work was only rediscovered relatively recently, they've made astonishing progress. This is against a backdrop of a regulatory framework in the US that severely restricts what they can do. Hence much of the work is being done elsewhere.
Hello Roger, good comments. I would like to nuance some of your statements: the efficiency is indeed much better in molten salt plants but it is not the parameter driving electricity cost because uranium fuel is still very cheap (in 2020). And you still need an massive containment building, this is mandatory even to protect from external hasards (airplane, etc...). Cheers.
What part of the process are you refering to with these efficiency numbers. The generators for both use the rankine cycle at about 60% efficiency. Are you referring to the usage of the energy in the fuel as supplied to the boiler before making electricity?
Court I think he’s talking fuel. Traditional pressurized water reactors use less than 1% of the Uranium “fuel” we pull out of the ground. Thorium breeders such as LFTR can potentially use 100% of the thorium. This would take your total lifetime energy consumption from about a soda can of Uranium to about a small ball bearing of Thorium. Still though, a Soda can is darn impressive. How many tons of Coal would your lifetime energy be?
I'd like to clear up a common misconception, that the most radioactive materials are the longest lived. This is totally backwards. The most radioactive elements are the shortest lived, decaying more rapidly, and emitting more dangerous particles over a shorter timeframe. I'd happily live right next to something that would take 100,000 years to decay, because the amount of radiation would be barely above the background radiation levels. If I was near something that decays in a matter of weeks, I'd likely take a lethal dose before I'd have a chance to run away. Also the particles being emitted are important too.. some are effectively harmless, others harmful if a source is consumed, and others that will do you serious damage unless massively shielded. Also, when referring to the amount of Thorium available vs Uranium, it's useful to know that for solid fuel, only about 3-5% ever gets used before the pellet is removed as waste, whereas a molten salt fuel can utilize all its potential.
More unstable!?🤔
Well-said. Matt Ferrell mentioned the last point in his video, but the rest were certainly worth bringing up.
dude, please, take a clue, these people are trying to market Thorium, ...do you know how people managed to build Uranium reactors back then?
I'd like to clarify that a half-life of 5,000 years (safe to handle after 20 half-lives = 100,000) can still produce high rates of radio activity due to the characteristics of the decay chain of the waste products. Current nuclear waste has a triple negative: It's long-lived, has long decay chains and is extremely radio active. The Thorium waste decay chains however consist if nearly all short-lived isotopes before decaying into a stable isotope. Which means the waste becomes safe to handle in a much short time, as said in video, around 500 years which means the mean half-life is around 25 years. Possible added bonus of such short-lived isotopes is that if it can be implemented in a safe way, it could even then be used as a heat source.
Paul Freedman is the decay of thorium more intense like described by Alex Read above or comparable?
Not JUST thorium though. Molten salt reactors are what make thorium economical, as well as making it possible to reduce our waste stockpiles by reacting THEM for power as well.
The proposals from Ed Pheil at Elysium are really interesting.
Might as well just use fast breeder MSR's to eat up current nuclear waste. Absolutely no shortage of energy in that fuel cycle.
Both reactors do not work sorry
@@brianevolved2849 I figured the same result , except I’m not sorry!
Alas they do not work.......what I mean by Do not work , is when the yield is low, and maintenance is high ....technically, economically, in practice ..It don't f...ing work. But i would love to be proven wrong! Meanwhile thank science for Elons 4680.
Thank you for the subtitle man, beside English isn’t my mother tongue I also hv some hearing issue. Really appreciate ur contents here, shoutout from Indonesia.
(4:20) What also set's U-233 apart is the fact that it has a fission rate of 90%, meaning 9 times out of 10, when it's hit by a neutron it'll fission. The remaining 1 out of 10 it'll become U-234. If it absorbs an additional neutron, it'll become U-235, which has an 85% chance of fissioning. As such, by breeding U-233 from thorium, you can ensure that you get almost complete burn up of the fuel and you shouldn't generate more than 1.5% transuranics, as opposed to current reactors which leave closer to 98% of the fuel unburnt or converted to transuranics.
Alas they do not work.......what I mean by Do not work , is when the yield is low, and maintenance is high ....technically, economically, in practice ..It don't f...ing work. But i would love to be proven wrong! Meanwhile thank science for Elons 4680.
@@brianevolved2849 What do you mean it doesn't work? Only one has ever been built, Oak Ridge National Lab's MSRE, which was not a breeder, only a MSR running on U-233, and that worked fine with little maintenance over 6,000 hours of experimental operation. So, what do you mean they don't work?
@@williamsmith1741 Dear Wily I was not there and I assume you were not there to see it working. Did it really produce any significant power? I am pleased you have Faith, and 'believe' in what you are told, supposedly occurred many years after the event. Tis most peculiar that NO ONE has managed to get one to work efficiently since.
@@brianevolved2849 Well Briany, it's a fairly well documented experiment. It was never repeated because it was an afterthought pursued by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory based on their findings from the Aircraft Reactor Experiment the Airforce had them do back in the 50's. It wasn't developed because the MSRE was a thermal spectrum fission reactor, and as such can only operate based on U-233 or U-235, and the U-233 fuel cycle can't be used to produce nuclear material for bombs, due to both contamination from U-232 and because of the incredibly low breeding ratios, taking 20-30 years to double the amount of fuel you started with. The focus was always on fast spectrum sodium and liquid metal cooled breeder reactors which could be used to produce ass tons of excess fissile material for bombs and which had the capacity to fission most transuranic. However, if you want to say something has NEVER worked, you can definitely point your finger at fast spectrum reactors. There's been over 20 different fast reactor research projects and reactors that have been built over the last 70 years, and almost none of them worked or worked very well. But fast spectrum technology has always been so enticing, like the call of a siren, that the focus has always been on that technology, and things like the MSRE were dismissed and then forgotten. MSR reactors were only rediscovered back in the early 2000's when Kirk Sorensen, while he was still with NASA, was researching potential reactor designs for a potential power source for a Moon base. He found the MSRE research documents in a locked storage room in the Oak Ridge children's center. You can watch a video on the MSRE produced by Oak Ridge back in the 60's on their KZhead channel called "The Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment". You can read about it in "The First Nuclear Era" by Alvin Weinberg and the technology in general in the textbook "Molten Salt Reactors and Thorium Energy".
@@williamsmith1741 Dera Willi, both you and i were not there, so we do not know how well it worked, or if it worked??
Wow what an excellent channel! I wish I have found this earlier. Thank you Mr. Farrell for the excellent work that you do. Please keep up the good work.
Ive been waiting for your take on thorium !! Great episode!!
Always 10 years time with thorium. 11 since I started watching videos on thorium. Past the point of no return now. Another 10 years then. 2031 doubt I'll be back here.
It should have gone for the head
Same with fusion just that there its 20 years.
Fr! I learned about it in 2012, so frustrating to see where we're at and where we could have been
This channel is so amazing! Thanks Matt for everything you do for us.
The way I heard it corrosion is not such an issue. Makes sense - corrosion is oxidation of metal. As name suggest it requires the presence of oxygen. Because of that a mixture of water and salt is highly corrosive. In such thorium reactor there would be plenty of salt... But no water. Also no other oxygen in any form. You can't have oxidation if there is no oxygen.
Thorium fluoride has Fluoride which is corrosive.
@@Starscream35310 as long as you keep oxygen out of the system it's not. It's simple chemistry - you can't oxidize anything if there is no oxygen around.
@@michazajac5881 it's a basic chemistry knowledge that fluoride is way more corrosive then oxygen.
@Michał Zając Oxidation (as opposed to Oxygen) is the process of an atom/molecule losing electrons. * Oxygen likes gaining electrons, so it oxidizes metals. * Fluorine likes gaining electrons even more than Oxygen, so it oxidizes metals even more. @selva Kumaran You are correct that fluoriNe is more corrosive than oxygen, but a fluoriDe is not so corrosive. With a salt (say sodium fluoride, NaF) in a tube (say steel, Fe), the Na+ is better at donating an electron to the F- than the Fe+ is. So a NaF salt doesn't corrode the Fe tube all that much. To put it a different way, in a choice between Na+ or Fe+, the F- will always choose the Na+. Only at the edge of the tube, and only where a local lack of Na+ may exist, will the F- latch onto Fe+. In general: * Salty water corrodes the most. * Water corrodes more than salt. * Salt, although 'corrosive', corrodes the least. Try taking 3 iron tubes (steel will take forever to show effect) and fill one each with salty water, water and salt (NaCL, table salt is good enough stand-in for NaF if you can't find any) respectively and see what happens!
Ideally we would use LFTR reactors to convert spent rods into shorter lived byproducts as well as creating useful isotopes. By continuously separating out various elements and adding other ones to these outer tanks all kinds of isotopes can be made. like Plutonium-238, and terbium-161, lutetium-177, Bismuth 213
Thanks for making a simplified understandable video on the benefits of thorium molten salt reactors. Although you may have glossed over many of the benefits this technology contains I think you hit enough of the highlights that most people would understand the argument for bringing this technology to maturity. Thanks again for making and sharing this informative video.
thx. for the info. - that was great video - cleared a lot of questions. Thx. again.
You had questions? A pity one of them wasn't how is nuclear renewable when it's adding energy to an already heating climate system?
Thank you so much, Matt, this video is very clear and helped me in understanding the possibilities and limitations of a thorium reactor.
Thank you for making information about thorium available to the general public. There's a lot more to learn, I see from the right-hand column of this page that additional explanation is available.
Meltdowns are the main reason the public doesn't like nuclear reactors, but cost and waste storage are the reasons we're not building more. Seems like that should have been emphasized more.
Fair feedback, but thought I did hammer that home comparing 10,000 years to 500 years. And with next gen nuclear like the traveling wave reactor ... it can actually use that spent waste as fuel, so we can chew through our 10,000 year storage.
@@UndecidedMF I guess it was the presentation. You emphasize meltdowns in the intro but the storage issue more as an additional reason than the main one. Overall the economics is probably the main reason we're not building more.
My guess is that costs would go down if we were allow to recycle plutonium.
@@UndecidedMF Actually, a approximately 86% of the fission product waste produced by a thermal spectrum MSR thorium breeder would be decayed to background radiation levels within a decade (10 years) of being produced, and not 500 years. Only Cesium 137 and Strontium 90, which combined would make up around 12% of fission products, would require around 300 years to reach background radiation levels, both having 30 year half-lives. Also, MSR advocates like to falsely claim that the waste produced by an MSR is safer. This is absolutely false. The waste would be almost entirely fission products, which would be MUCH more radioactive than just plain old used fuel rods, making MSR waste MUCH MORE dangerous than LWR fuel, But because of those stupid high radiation levels, as I previously noted, almost 90% of the waste will be gone in just a decade or so of being produced.
Waste? Do you know how much waste a US nuclear reactor produces over 60 years? Average size being 1,000MW. The size of an Olympic size swimming pool... Over 60 years. It is like 3x3 meter cube per year. 750 kilograms per year. Add in new technologies that reduces that, and recycle that cutting down the half life. Then I'd argue waste is a product of laziness rather than some huge issue so many people make it out to be. When I learned just how little waste is produced? I was dumb founded how much of an issue people made it out to be honestly.
(2:23) "A fuel source that's 3 times as plentiful" implying Uranium. However, we primarily use U-235, which only represents 0.7% of naturally occurring Uranium, not 3-5%. If you were to compare Thorium to U-235, the actual fuel, you'd find that Thorium is 429 times more plentiful. To get U-235 up to concentrations of 3-5%, you have to enrich it, which is an exceedingly expensive process. Thorium requires no enrichment. Also, fission really isn't that complicated. You just have to be aware that there are different types of fission reactor designs, particularly when you're talking about MSR reactors. This is EXCEEDINGLY important, as different reactor types have different benefits and different drawbacks. There isn't any one type of reactor that is "better" than the others. The positive and negative characteristics of different reactors make them better for different applications.
Ya I was kind of bummed out that he spent a moment or two to touch on their level of "rarity". Seemed rather pointless, all of these substances are extraordinarily plentiful, regardless of their perceived rarity. The fuel supply in and of itself, is so much of a nonissue it doesn't even warrant mentioning.
@@MatthewHolevinski Correct. The kicker is, the "rarity" issue applies to "Rare Earth Elements" (REE), which are actually quite common. We could produce all the REE's we need just from the tailings streams of existing mines, like iron, phosphate, titanium mines, etc., and other sources of monozite ores, which is what we used to do before we signed a treaty in 1986. We don't do this now because thorium is a co-product of those REE's , and if you pull out the REE's, you're effectively concentrating the thorium. The treaty we signed in 1986, which was then adopted by almost every country in the world, categorized Thorium as a nuclear source material, and thus regulated by the NRC. After we signed that, if you were a phosphate mine who wanted to sell your tailings wastes to someone who wanted to pull out the REE's, you had to have the same level of NRC licensing as a dedicated uranium mine, which, as you can imagine, is not inexpensive. At that point, the US and most of the west got out of the REE market, letting it be dominated by a country that hadn't signed that non-proliferation treaty, China. So in the end, the single and only reason that we and the rest of the world are dependent on China for REE's is Thorium and our ridiculous regulations around it.
@@williamsmith1741 you mean and the second only reason is we can't do anything with them anymore either, we have no refinement, or manufacturing supply chain... Send china our dirt and they will send us our iphones. Nothing more fantastically glorious and idiotic than shipping essentially dirt across the largest body of water on the planet, god damn i love it. It's ridiculousness at it's finest.
@@MatthewHolevinski Yes, that's true. We've effectively lost all refining capability. However, that can be built back up. The real issue is Thorium as that creates significant liability issues. Not only does it cost a fortune just to get and then maintain a license, you then have to create a permanent storage and sequestration structure to "dispose" of the thorium for the long term. If you don't have every micro-gram secure and accounted for, you'll get sued by Green Peace and other environmental groups. This is despite the fact that thorium is heavy as F & non-water soluble, so it tends to stay wherever it's first deposited. Plus, it has a 14 billion year half life, so it's barely radioactive to begin with. Instead, we just dump all our REE's and the thorium into tailings pits and lakes.
@@williamsmith1741 Oh you don't have to tell me bro, I've read the 10 CFR's. edit: If I was president, the NRC would be the first thing dismantled, along with about every other department of the government, but that's another story.
Thanks these videos are informative and entertaining. You are definitely on to something.
From ph we will definitely advocates what I learned about thorium, thanks so much Mr. Farrell.
The issues for nuclear are: 1. Making it safe. Molten salt has significant safety advantages over pressurised water because it operates at 2-3 atmospheres versus 100 and has walk away safety features not reliant on operators. Most molten salt designs are semi-underground in a pit and don't need heavy containment buildings. 2. Making it affordable and reliable. Small modular reactors (
Wow great intel
Well said my dude Question though... Why would they need any less cooling water than a regular reactor? Just because the cooling loop is salt and not water, the turbine end is still steam which needs re-condensing and to do that you would ideally want to use an open loop of water from a river or ocean source. It takes a lot of coolant to condense steam turbine exhaust no matter what technology boiled the water in the first place
@@doritoification Hi Dominic Adams. The Thorium salts are at a higher temperature so it is possible that you could use air cooling. However, water cooling would give you more of a temperature drop, so you would use water cooling if you can. You would get more useable work out of the system that way. The idea (I think) is that with more efficient heat engines (for example using the super critical carbon dioxide turbine), and the higher temperature the LFTR could be independent from a river. But it would still be more efficient to use water cooling, so people would be tempted to do so if they possibly can. However, if someone can point out something I am missing, I would appreciate it. Warm regards, Rick.
@@RicksPoker I think you nailed it... You would take an efficiency penalty by not using the best cooling solution available. Supercritical CO2 is extremely interesting though. I remember trying to wrap my brain around the diagram of how that works with all the different compression stages but it was a little too complicated for me haha 45% or 50% efficient though of I remember correctly
@@doritoification Because MSRs operate at higher temperature (600-700C) more of their output energy goes into work. In the primary coolant loop salt exits around 650C and returns the reactor at about 580C. Like high efficiency coal powered stations they can be combined cycle, the first step is Brayton cycle where working fluid is gas such as CO2. Brayton exhaust can be used to raise steam for the Rankin cycle if desired. Essentially they are gas cooled, they have to operate dry, water not wanted as it doesn't go well with molten salt.
Very informational! Thorium is a very exciting fuel and I hope the world can get it together and start investing in these solutions
technically and literally speaking, Thorium is less exciting than Uranium or Plutonium ;)
Paul Freedman and that’s why it IS exciting :)
nuclear reactor is always marketed as safe and never fail, that why is back then they managed to build Uranium reactors that world rejects today, ...and as expected now Thorium plays the same card
see the Illinois Energy Prof video on thorium explains why it's not going to happen for some time if ever.
@@turningpoint4238 Hi Jake, Hawtin. That video assumes that Thorium reactors will be built on the fast neutron spectrum, and it ignores the major advantage of Thorium which is the reactors can be efficiently built to use the thermal neutron spectrum. I was totally underwhelmed by that video, it campaigns against Thorium using a straw man argument. Warm regards, Rick.
I used to work for a very large government electrical utility and have an interest in promoting Thorium fission technology. I realized many years ago that electrical utilities need base loaded generation which is currently supplied with coal plants, natural gas plants, oil plants, nuclear uranium plants, hydro plants, geothermal and other fossil fuel electrical plants and supplemented by wind and solar electrical plants. I know that Thorium fission plants can be used to generate electricity until something like nuclear fusion or other technologies in the future.
An amazing channel! Can't believe I "discovered" it so late
I did a whole college essay in nuclear power way back when. I stumbled on thorium salt plants and realized they were far better. I didn't dig into why they weren't being used and lazially settled on money being the reason. Thanks a ton for this video!
Thorium is better economically in almost every way it is three times more abundant making it cheaper to mine it doesn’t have to be enriched again making it cheaper to use and it’s 200x more energy dense honestly the only thing holding them back is the engineering and we already know the design once they hit the market they will be way cheaper
Great job summarizing the issue and the technology.
Thanks Matt. Great info.
I did quite thorough research into thorium a while ago. I expected you to fall into the anti nuclear trap as well. In the end, you came to the same conclusions as I did. Very happy to see that. I have gained a lot of trust in your content through this!
Thank you for an excellent presentation! There are, however a couple of aspects of this technology that I wish you had covered or emphasized more. First, it is my understanding that molten salt reactors are more scalable than 'traditional' reactors which could allow for smaller power production units being built closer to end users thus reducing the need for the expensive infrastructure necessary to distribute energy production. Second, although you did discuss this, I wish you had put more emphasis on the idea that thorium cannot be used for weapons production; that makes this technology far safer to be given/sold to nations that are presently not in the nuclear weapons 'club'.
There are other reactors that can be scaled to smaller sizes, not just MSR, but they all have different strengths and drawbacks. I also wouldn't say that it "can't" be used to make a weapon, but I would say that it's as impossible as you can freaking get, but specifically with thermal spectrum MSR thorium breeders. Gotta be specific. With them, it "might" be possible, but there'd be no way to do it secretly, it would take you over a decade to make just one, and even then it still might not work.
Thank you for making this video! I didn't realize these challenges still existed for thorium energy. I agree, we need to be moving the conversation toward how we can have a better nuclear energy incorporated into our low carbon future. People don't realize that the more intermittent energy sources you have, the more fossil fuel back-ups you HAVE to have. Look at Germany, it's emitting 100 times more carbon than nuclear France. And that's after spending $500 billion on renewable energy! People think we can just keep adding more and more renewables. But if you look at California and Scotland, they have to curtail (switch off) huge amounts of their solar and wind power every day, otherwise they will literally fry their grids. These places have already reached the limit of renewables that they can deploy. To deploy more they would need incomprehensibly expensive grid scale battery systems to be added. Tesla's 100 mwh battery cost $50 million, so a city-sized battery of 8500mwh would cost $7.6 billion. And that's as far as your renewable revolution gets before we all run out of money!
How are you going to switch off your nuclear when the sun/wind are up ,just throw it away with the excess sun and wind
I saw some very misleading figures on engineering explained the other day. Germans larger brown coal use and the fact it is a major exporter of electricity to eastern Europe. Curtailing electricity is expected from renewables, it's not like fossil fuel generators you have to use expensive fuel to run instead sunshines, wind blows and sometimes you have more electricity than required so as to meet peak demand times. There was a nice video the other day on fully charged with a chap from the UK grid showing how easily they are coping with large amounts of renewables. Batteries are only part of the answer.
Tj Grant, The molten salt reactors can be built with Inconel alloys, and molten salt reactors were run for 6 years at Oak Ridge Nuclear Labs. Sure we could spend a lot of time searching for better, modern alloys and test them, but if they could build molten salt reactors in the 1960's we can build them now. Several companies are engineering Thorium reactors with out bothering to search for exotic alloys. See these links for more information: *** www.nextbigfuture.com/2020/03/update-on-copenhagen-atomics-molten-salt-fission-from-cto.html www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/07/moltex-molten-salt-reactor-being-built-in-new-brunswick-canada.html www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/12/thorcon-floating-supertanker-molten-salt-reactors-starting-with-2021-prototype.html www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/04/danish-thorium-molten-salt-reactor-receives-pre-seed-funding.html www.terrestrialenergy.com *** (The last link for Terrestrial Energy, is starting with a Uranium molten salt, but it is open to the idea of using Thorium salts later.) Warm regards, Rick.
Great coverage, thanks.
Thanks for touching on this Matt
Great to see this subject on your post. Since seeing Kirk Sorensen describe thorium molten salt potential several years ago on his Ted talks... if only govt would give it the nod, great to see Andrew Yangs push to instigate it. We need more progressive leaders like him.
Andrew Yang had (has) a lot of good ideas. And I can't tell you how many people kept commenting at me about "thorium" and "molten salt reactors." It was hard to ignore. 🤣
"Progressives" people who are so dishonest as to hide their love of socialism/communism behind that label. A simple visit to the CPUSA or DSA web sites prove this statement. Thorium or the Traveling Wave Reactors, while extremely interesting with great potential, seem to suffer the same problem as Graphene which can do ANYTHING except get out of the lab.
Mike Wurlitzer Well... perhaps you’d be happier with a retrograde ideology? I think not!
@@mikewurlitzer5217 -- While I agree that some advocates for thorium are basically just saying "step 1: shout about thorium, step 2: ???, step 3: profit", I don't see what communism has to do with any of this.
Yes thorium is probably the best alternative, but we have the little matter of politicians and lobbyists who are pushing in other directions, ie, oil, and/or new uranium reactors.
Thank you for helping to educate the populace. Go thorium!
Extremely well put
Amazing video thank you 🙏🏻
Thank you for this video. I've been following the advancement of LSR and thorium as fuel for nuclear energy for years. Something to think about is the US likely not going to be where this technology finds it's breakthrough moments. The public stigma over nuclear energy as a whole has convinced too many who can't see past Three Mile island, Fukushima and Chernobyl to realize the alternative being much safer and much more efficient. Very likely India or China will be where these breakthroughs will be made. Also... The higher temps of LSR gets into the realm of bonding carbon, which means conventional fuels can be made, such as gas and jet fuel.
Excellent video. The U.S. had better get it's act together on Thorium Reactors. Otherwise it will left in the Dust by India and China. It's a fallacy to think renewables such solar and wind will be sufficient. They require storage/batteries since they are Intermittent. Many businesses require electricity 24x7x365. Solar & Wind will not be sufficient even with batteries. Thorium MSR's appear to be the best option. The Federal Govt should be subsidizing this big time. Clearly China & India are. If the U.S. is complacent, we'll be buying yet more things from China/India, namely 4th - Gen Thorium reactors. They have foresight whereas the U.S. is STILL living w/it's past laurels.
Fission requires "storage/batteries" if it makes up a large percentage of the electricity supply, it doesn't ramp up and down well. Solar, wind, batteries and all the other tech that has and is been developed will be able to supply 100% of needs. Thorium is still a way off even with masses of investment (and who is going to risk that sort of cash when renewables are so cheap) and we can't wait.
@@turningpoint4238 Load following is an issue for pressurized water reactors, but due to different operating characteristics,v not so for more salt reactors (MSR). MSRs are expected to have latency comparable to hydro and easily follow demand variations on a grid also supplied by wind and solar as those sources vary supply
Any known nuclear generation technology cannot compete with wind and solar on economics. Even when you add in storage which both RE and nuclear need. Yes, nuclear in a best case situation can load follow to some extent. But when you curtail nuclear output you greatly increase the cost of electricity produced. Almost all the cost of nuclear produced electricity are fixed costs, not fuel costs even when the fuel is uranium. Cut output but the fixed costs still have to be paid. What happens is that you spread those fixed costs over fewer MWh of electricity sold. A reactor running at
@@bobwallace9753 Hi Bob, People who are racist ignore the price of nuclear reactors made in China and India. They have FAR lower costs for nuclear than those built in the USA because the USA has senseless safety requirements. (Nuclear power regulations in the USA require nuclear power to be 12,000 times safer than coal for example. Further, coal pollutes low levels amounts of radioactivity in its waste, which it has got the government to ignore. If nuclear power plants released as much Uranium and Thorium as a coal burning plant is allowed to, they would be shut down.) There are designs for modular nuclear reactors which can be constructed in a factory and moved on site using a shipping container. If you look into modern reactors, you will discover that nuclear power can be much, much cheaper than it has been allowed to be so far. This is a moot point in the USA, but other nations are going nuclear in a big way. China alone will double the number of reactors on the planet by 2050. The cheap power will be a big boost to their economy. Some links: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674927817301181 www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/06/iea-data-shows-nuclear-investment-adds-more-power-than-wind-and-solar.html environmentalprogress.org/the-complete-case-for-nuclear/ www.nextbigfuture.com/2020/02/china-will-surpass-france-in-nuclear-power-generation-this-year.html www.nature.com/articles/s41560-017-0009-8.epdf?author_access_token=aH0zbeyBMKe-ztqdommdNdRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0OyLLEcIVrbwv-XjMBX8LWW5XTAymRsrwwntLZpd13c0rFV4PDemwy7NO5c87YQWrty8K-iySi15WFLB4KmtPeX440qesPTsBvYo0898Wca4Q%3D%3D www.nextbigfuture.com/2020/01/german-nuclear-phase-out-boosted-emissions-by-5-and-caused-over-10000-deaths.html Warm regards, Rick.
@@RicksPoker "People who are racist ignore the price of nuclear reactors made in China and India. " Really? Really? You actually want to believe that? It smells of despiration sweat. Yes, China and India can build reactors cheaper for reasons of cheaper labor and, I suspect, less regulation. However less regulation can lead to failure and sometimes disastrous failure. I'm pretty sure we're only one nuclear disaster away from a rapid closure of pretty much all nuclear reactors. Especially in Western Europe and the US. Public opinion will most likely override any arguments from the nuclear industry and nuclear advocates. Cheaper? Yes, but China and India can't build reactors that compete economically with present day wind and solar prices. Have you noticed how China's new reactor construction starts have drastically slowed? IIRC, China started construction on no reactors in 2017 and 2018. The started construction on three in 2019. That's far less than what was happening in earlier years. Comparing nuclear safety to coal would make sense if the choice was nuclear or coal, but it isn't. The choice is nuclear or RE and RE wins on multiple fronts. RE is cheaper, safer, has much faster installation times, can be built close to demand, and creates nothing like the very long lasting spent nuclear fuel problem. NuScale is the company apparently the furthest along with small nuclear reactors. They have claimed that once they reach economy of scale their SMRs will generate electricity at $0.08/kWh. That is not even close to competitive. China may have twice as many reactors as all other countries combined but that's because the vast majority of non-Chinese reactors are aging out an most will not be replaced with new reactors. I just saw an article about how Hinkley Point B has now been shut down for one of the last times. It's graphite blocks are developing cracks and that reactor, along with other UK reactors, are going to have to be closed for safety reasons in the next few years. Look up some data on the age of reactors. I can't post charts here. Wind and solar are bringing cheap power. Nuclear, without some yet to be imagined breakthrough, cannot. The UK is going to see it's average wholesale cost of electricity rise once the new Hinkley Point reactors come online. The same is true of Georgia ratepayers who get their power from Southern Company when Vogtle 3 and 4 start producing. In fact, rates have already been raised to help pay for the reactors before the reactors entered production. South Carolina ratepayers saw their electricity rates rise 30% to help pay for new nuclear there, even before the project was abandoned. You can't average in more expensive electricity and see the average cost go down.
Excellent presentation
Another reason why many are no longer interested in fission reactors is that there was many advances in fusion reactors in the recent years and ITER should start doing tests soon. The moment we crack fusion everything else will be obsolete.
Thanks for giving a more updated review of fission power's possibilities in the near term. Climate change demands we solve carbon dioxide pollution now. Fusion, while amazing, is simply to far off in the future to help. Investing in modern fission designs can deliver safe, cheep, carbon free energy to go hand in hand with wind and solar in the time frame we need. Thanks again for helping move the discussion forward to action.
India is hugely investing in thorium research.
You can also use all the wasted fuel from Uranium reactors which only use 97% of their fuel. People could use this waste to "DOPE" a Thorium reactor and burn it down to near 99% FULLY USED. Think of Thorium reactors as 233U oxide DETOXIFIERS!!!
A very good summary. Although you read a lot about this over and over, the enthusiasm for this solution has already dwindled a great deal. As mentioned India and China have a Thorium program since over ten years, and wanted to have commercial reactors by 2020 already. Now they expect to reach this within the next 20 years, which shows that there are substantial technical challenges. Apart from the corrosion problems of the molten salt there are also doubts in the meantime whether a thorium cycle is efficient enough to produce energy at reasonable costs. Considering the time pressure with regard to CO2 reduction it is probably wiser to use the usual types of fisson reactors, which also advanced a lot when it comes to safety.
Thorium is the answer, solar and wind are not large scale answers. They do fine in small scales. We use wind and solar for most of the the power (propulsion and electric) on our sailboat, in conjunction with batteries, we get by most of the time. When there is no wind or sunshine, we fire up the diesel. The same is true for the grid, only the scale makes it not work well. Steam turbine power plants take hours to get prepared to produce power, our Yanmar diesel takes seconds to come on line. In grid terms, that means that steam plants need to be kept hot and ready at all times, in order to back up unreliable solar and wind, very costly! If they can produce Thorium Molten Salt Reactors the sky's the limit, and it opens up the possibility of using excess heat and off peak power to desalinate water, a very power hungry endeavor. Thorium could provide power and fresh water to all sorts of places that have very little of either, now. They could be the greatest thing to happen for Africa and other emerging areas, that need clean water and electricity. I think Thorium will be a huge game changer, and "clean" power is only the beginning.
Good video however you could have included some more points. LIFTR reactors will be modular, built-in factories because they are not immense pressure vessels and as you pointed out their resistance to meltdown means the safe area footprint could be vastly reduced. Should they come online the construction time will be much shorter, take up less area and they will be vastly cheaper. LIFTR reactors can also be a direct source of industrial heat ie. cement, fertiliser and whatever else needs high temp and or boil water to create steam-driven turbines for electricity.
SMR and LFTR! Small Thorium reactors that can fit in a the size of a shipping container. Mass produce and put them every where in the world. One per 100k people or so. Add and replace as needed. Free electricity for all.
I've been becoming a huge proponent of smaller scale grids. Like micro grids with solar and distributed storage throughout the homes.
What's the company that is pushing these? I was answering to another comment about them. The small reactors look like the best solution in the future. I bet Elon is trying to fit one of those in his rockets and send it to Mars haha
@meaturama be careful who you call an idiot because you can make yourself look like a fool insinuating that it would be easy to steal from a nuclear facility, or as it wasn't easy to do dirty bombs with more accessible toxic materials... think about that buddy
They’re a nice idea but where did “free” come from?
meaturama Thorium is available for purchase on the internet. It’s not a bomb material. These reactors are designed in such a way, and their physics are such that using them as sources of weapons material is extremely unlikely.
I honestly liked the clear analysis done by you and clarifying the thorium V/S uranium path unlike some guys ridiculing the thorium capabilities.
Great Video!
I've belatedly watched this excellent video (as always) to learn what all the fuss was about thorium, and why nevertheless there is no such thing. Ah ... corrosion in molten salt. I'm a retired PhD metallurgist who specialized in high temperature alloys, which always involves oxidation and corrosion resistance. I got into the weeds on the subject, and from a brief look at some literature came to the conclusion that the problem will not likely be overcome. Materials are stubborn things. The number of elements in the periodic table is limited. You either need natural resistance (such as gold in oxygen), or a protective scale formed by reaction with the nasty stuff (such as jet engine alloys in oxygen). But those jet engine alloys will NOT tolerate even small amounts of molten salt - the offending stuff must be kept out (e.g., fuel cannot contain vanadium, since molten vanadium sulfate will eat up the oxide scale on your turbine blades.)
stainless 304 seams like it'd handle the heat well enough but still would be short service life i think. if they uses sodium chloride. but ss304 isent to good at abrasion if remember correctly. and as is nucks use ultra purified water and still have problems with abrasion, cant Imajin unpurified unfiltered molten salt.
So, the answer lies in the current method to move fluorine. Yes: ELEMENTAL FLUORINE. How are pipes prepared to transport it? Yes - that's a real thing. And therein lies the answer to the corrosion problem. After all - if we already design pipes to move elemental fluorine -- moving a fluoride salt will be a no-brainer.
Thanks for this good overview. However when looking at CO2 emissions you must look at a total life cycle. Extracting minerals, building massive concrete containments and separating and storing isotopes is to be considered. Same applies for large scale solar and wind. We need too think end to end to consider risk benefits and costs
Amen to that.
I agree. This is a metric that is sorely lacking in many fields. For instance, how can we measure the total impact of water displacement for agriculture? It causes tons of water to be displaced. Increased surface area of water meaning more evaporation, and water vapor is in fact a green house gas (though short lived and rapidly changing, it is the predominant green house gas, often omitted because it is assumed natural.) We don't really measure our contribution of water evaporation for that purpose, or at least I couldn't find anything when I was a student with free Google scholar in 2017.
I enjoyed your spreadsheet of THORIUM thank you.
Some feedback: Subtitles or assisting visuals during your monologues would be excellent. In my opinion, having a visual would really outline the value, balance, and clarity of your message. I’m really appreciative for your content, Matt.
(4:32) Only a small portion of the fission products from a thermal spectrum thorium MSR breeder would require longer term storage. The vast majority of fission products from this type of reactor have very short half lives and would have completely decayed away in about a decade. Beyond those, you're only looking at a couple like Strontium 90 and Caesium 137, which both have half lives of 30 years, and thus require about 300 years to completely decay to nothing. Even these shouldn't be considered "waste" as there's numerous industrial and scientific applications for steady radiation sources like these.
strontium 90 can be used in space probes. The heat can give enough energy to keep the probe warm and power it electrically using a thermocpouple process.
@@watchthe1369 It's also a beta emitter and can be used to drive direct electrical current.
Please become a thorium junkie!! We need more ⚡️
I noticed that you withdraw the control rods to slow or halt the reaction. If there is physical damage as in Winscail it should be much easier (safer) to withdraw rather than insert rods in an emergency.
Thorium just caught my eye. Just read an old Shutterbug magazine (July 1997) article called "Hot Glass". Some camera lenses of decades past...especially aerial lenses..had radioactive material...sometimes thorium...made into the lens glass. They said it shouldn't be a problem unless perhaps you sleep with your lens collection under your bed.
Thank you - Indonesia already has a contract with ThorCon for 7x500MWe Liquid Thorium ion molten salt energy converters. Uses Sodium fluoride (not Lithium Fluorine) though...
Thank you for publicising Liquid Thorium ion molten salt energy converters. These can run at a levelised capitalized cost of US$0.04/kWh - Also as a comparison between required land for solar farms and Indonesia's current 3.5GWe contract for the seven x 500MWe Liquid Thorium ion molten salt ThorCon "energy converters" have "As-built" foot prints of 1.1 Ha (65m x 175m) for each 500MWe unit. These will provide High temperature automatically load dependent output (rather than just a constant base load to complement the renewables) at near atmospheric pressure under extremely "walk-away safe" conditions at a capital levelised output cost of less than US$0.04/kWh as well as having the capability of doing a cold/black start while being able to act as a speaker suppler by almost instantaneously dropping or increasing output depending on load and sudden increases on the renewables. And with a 44kW/m2 footprint it is going to be hard to beat by any combination of renewables and battery banks providing 52x7x24 electricity...without destroying our Indonesian forests and jungle for solar and wind farms. kzhead.info/sun/pMiYnKaImZeMpYk/bejne.html
We will see, not holding my breath for this one.
@@mrvaticanrag3946 Nuclear always comes in far more expensive than advertised. When you look at the relative space required for renewables it's not much, especially when connected up with other grids, such as Australia's.
@@turningpoint4238 Nuclear electricity is cheaper than the others
@@raziasrazias7761 Nope.
Thank goodness some people are finally catching-on to this source of safe, abundant energy!
True. Safety is something you engineer. Having in mind this energy source is so clean, it just makes sense to invest on its development to achieve those safety requirements asap and move on. Have you seen the small nuclear reactors some company is trying to sell? They are super cool because they have small radious of potential disaster and they count with many security features that make them super reliable. I would love to see a video about them in this channel.
Yeah, cause this energy source has proven to be safe already, I mean there is clearly no problem with Tritium or corrosion........
@meaturama define safe? Do you use your car? Look up how many yearly deaths are related to cars and how many to nuclear accidents. Are you really going to judge the safety of this technology?...
Diablokiller999 If we follow your logic, 1) the Space Shuttle was unsafe so we should never launch in to space again. 2) Titanic was unsafe so never go to sea again. 3) Tomas Edison’s electric car failed, so never attempt electric car again. Do we want to reverse global warming? Do you think there is a way to reverse global warming that has zero risk?
meaturama When I read your comment I was terrified. Then I thought. Hmmm. The temperature inside the engine of my car is really hot. I looked it up. It is about 4,000 degrees. Wow. That is terrifying! That temperature will burn me to a crisp! Immediately! So how come the inside of my car is a comfy 72 degree?
Good video! The technical complexities and comparable experience with Uranium reactors are probably the biggest barrier here, but there is also a short-term proliferation concern - Protactinium 233 has a half-life of 27 days, and during that time you could extract it from one of these reactors and process it in such a way that you can separate out the Uranium-233 for bomb material. The good news is that once power has been underway for a while, the reactor will have a decent amount of Uranium-232 to make extracting the U-233 much more difficult.
Hi Brett Anon. U233 is a much poorer bomb material than U235 or PL239. Further, NO nuclear weapons have ever been made from the products produced by a commercial power plant, so it is largely a meaningless argument anyway.
The freeze plugs could be cooled by mechanical system that're driven by a safely-operating core (e.g.: the freeze plugs are only cooled when salt is moving through the reactor correctly). There could be a dozen different freeze plug coolers hooked into different parts of the core (so that even if there's random mechanical damage to the core the freeze plugs will melt and the core will drain)
Naturally occurring u235 is usually about 0.7% of uranium.
Guys between all atoms is literally infinite energy. This is what’s known as zero point. The only problem is that the public can’t use it until we attain peace because it’s to powerful to entrust in the hands of humans currently... luckily however the quantum physicists have proven that consciousness is a singularity.... therefore we have all been the same person this whole time. The majority of humanity doesn’t know this though. Once we all figure it out, World peace is gonna be a shitload easier👌 have a good day lads. Btw aliens exist and they already know they are you and there is no death. Humanoid is a 3D morphology that repeats itself everywhere.... so yeah, have a good day lads.
meaturama technically yes... 😑
@meaturama Hi Meaturama. Yes, U235 and U238 are both Uranium. But bombs want about 95% U235, and commercial reactors want about 4% U235. U235 makes up a tiny fraction of the natural Uranium, so to be usable, the fraction of U235 must be enriched. Warm regards, Rick.
u233 fissile (made from Th), u235 fissile. u238 fertile.
meaturama HaHahaha, you have no idea what you are talking about... you’re the idiot. If you knew anything about nuclear you would know that OP was referencing the isotope u235 which is about .7% of all uranium as mined. Most uranium is u238 as OP is referencing. The video (so people like have a chance to understand) leaves out the enriching process where they bring up level of u235 in the mix of u238 from .7% as natural to 3-5% as used in the reactors. Moral of the story, it’s actually you that has no idea what your talking about....:). So come listen and learn.
Nuclear physics is only complicated if you don’t learn it. As is with everything else. Maths takes practice.
111Econ something are more complicated than others , like you said the real problem is THEY DONT TEACH ADVANCED MATH IN HIGH SCHOLL
@@evaristegalois8600 In the US, even the expensive universities have largely become trade schools in which specialization is pursued much of the time. Many students don't learn the various kinds of Math. Those who learn Maths learn too little of finance, of languages, etc. An example: the first sentence above is incorrect. "Maths takes practice" is wrong. It should say that "Maths take practice" or more clearly, the various Maths take practice."
Beautiful
@@danielscheinhaus5210 "Maths" is singular in British English. It's just a subject name, as in "Social Studies is my favorite subject."
Calculate the cost of 5 meltdowns in 35 years? How much does it cost to dispose of nuclear waste? We don't know. It has never been done.
You need to see the videos by Kirk Sorensen on MSR technology. Its been done in the US but was shut down back in the 50s or 60s.
Honestly, the TerraPower reactor is the one I'm most excited about. Nuclear's biggest issue is the waste that's generated. If we have a way of using that waste to generate more electricity, then it is no longer "waste". Of course, I'm guessing that even that reactor won't spend a fuel rod to a non-radioactive state, but it still breads new life into old reactors (most spent fuel rods are kept in a separate pool at the reactor).
It doesn't breed life into old reactors... We want to get rid of all our old reactor designs, they're dangerous as fuck...
You say that Chernobyl, among the three accidents, came down to a failure in the cooling systems. The Chernobyl accident was much more complex than that. The cooling system only failed after the first explosion, which was a result of a series of operator errors and a known design flaw in the control rods.
That's true, but I believe it was the steam explosion that tore the roof of the place and ejected radiation up and out along with the steam. Of course, a containment building might have helped, but that was a big freaking steam explosion. I really don't know. On the whole though, that reactor was just WAY too complex, with WAY too few safeguards, and arguably pretty poor operators.
Molten salt reactors ftw!
This has to be the most underrated channels on KZhead!
Matt, great overview. A critique of thorium reactors is at the link below. Note: a correction to the text in this link - HEU for neutron bombardment is over 20% U235 but not "weapons grade" (90%): Thorium hope or hype.pdf (cleangreensask.ca)
The built a Thorium Reactor back when they made the first nuke one, both ran together.. side by side.. by the military wanted the dirty one.. not clean energy..
Basically ... yep. It all came down to nuclear weapons.
The military wanted the "dirty one" because it was also far and away the PROVEN ONE. It is a debunked conspiracy theory to assert that the only reason the military and civilian power sector use uranium fueled reactor is because the US "wanted bombs". Germany had a large nuclear power sector and no bombs, they could've chosen thorium, they didn't. South Korea, Canada, Japan and several others have large nuclear power installations, they don't have nuclear weapons and were all just as free as anyone else to develop thorium power, they DIDN'T. And they didn't do so not because of some internet conspiracy about plutonium and bombs and that evil USA imposing its will on everyone, they didn't because uranium fueled power reactors are far better understood and researched than thorium and they wanted to produce energy, not an expensive new science project. STOP THE CONSPIRACY NONSENSE.
deslocc124 - The Airforce wanted nuclear bombers that could stay on station for weeks at a time. Steven Weinbergs team knew that Molten Salt reactors offered the only hope of achieving the necessary power in a small and light enough format for that. However, they also realised that it was madness to put Nuclear Reactors into planes, even though both the USA and USSR both did. Curious Droid did a superb piece on both of those. Weinberg knew that Thorium was way better for civilian power production, and he should know since he was in part responsible for our conventional Fission plants. Sadly, the fact that these reactors couldn't produce weapons grade Fissile material, and the fact that politically the established industry would have been wiped out meant that it never stood a chance. How differently the World would have been if it had come to fruition way back then.
@@rogerfroud300 Putin has been boasting of a hypersonic missile that can attack from half a world away. It can only be nuclear powered.
@@jimgraham6722 for decades we've been launching satellites into space with chemical rockets which requires far more velocity than just going half way round the world... I think it's probably just a chemical rocket
Shameful for humanity that we haven't developed Thorium further, it's just too clean and sensical. It's old tech even. It's the future.
Alas Thorium........................ does not work sorry
India is using thorium reactor for decades
@@varnitpatel5386 Nope prove it......Does India have thorium reactor? India has large deposits of thorium, but has not built and operated a commercial thorium fueled reactor for power generation.
@@brianevolved2849 India has a working thorium reactor just not molten salt.
@@homijbhabha8860 prove it name location date it went online plz
A thorium based seed and blanket 60MWe reactor installed in a reactor system at the Shippingport Atomic Power Station outside of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. I operated the PWR from August 1977 to October 1982. The commercial unit was a conversion of the 1957-1974 first commercial nuclear power station as a collaborative effort by Naval Reactors and Westinghouse operated as a PWR. The thorium reactor successfully demonstrated breeding using a movable seed of U233 and thorium blanket. The moderator was a pure pressurized water. The breeding resulted in ~9% excess U233.
Thanks Matt!
Thank you for watching!
I'd rather say fund liftr than fund iter...
Hello there #YangGang
YangGang forever.
Great video
Natural (mined) uranium contains only a fraction of 1% of U235. Natural U is then enriched to 3 to 5% for nuclear plant fuel. You might want to correct your statement at 3:30 min mark.
india is leading the world in thorium energy generation
❤️🌍✌🏻go India
YangGang..!!
from all the research, I'm on board w/ thorium
Yeah, I'm early! Go on with the good work on your channel! :)
Thanks!
@@UndecidedMF great work...................but Alas they do not work.......what I mean by Do not work , is when the yield is low, and maintenance is high ....technically, economically, in practice ..It don't f...ing work. But i would love to be proven wrong! Meanwhile thank science for Elons 4680.
#YangGang #YangWasRight
I have watched a number of presentations by US Nuclear Engineer Kirk Sorensen on the subject of LFTR technologies in the past as he has long been a passionate advocate of the technology and aggressive critic and opponent of chicanery. In one of the early video files I watched, Sorensen located and interviewed some of the surviving scientists who had worked on the USAF sponsored LFTR program in the late 60's and some of their disclosures are quite startling. I agree wholeheartedly with Sorensen's contention that LFTR's are essentially an equivalent to fusion based energy production that we can have now rather than some indeterminate date in the future when productive fusion might be achieved. Furthermore I also agree with his contention that for nations where coal fueled energy production facilities are currently reaching the end of their lives LFTR's are the technology we should be using to replace those coal fueled facilities. Sorensen makes a strong case for extraordinary levels of chicanery within US politics and industry with regard to the fostering and adoption of inefficient and inherently dangerous and dirty high pressure fast breeder reactors. In doing so Sorensen points out that the company which builds the high pressure fast breeder reactors does so virtually at cost and makes the bulk of it's profit from providing enriched uranium fuel for them. Sorensen also points out that the fuel pellets used in fast breeder reactors are relatively inefficient because Radon gas precipitates out of the enriched uranium the pellets are made of and concentrates in their center. This ultimately results in a cavity forming and the material becoming cracked from within thus greatly diminishing the efficiency of the fuel and necessitating the replacement of pellets premature to depletion of their contents. In closing, I encourage people to watch a fascinating presentation disseminated on TED via which a young scientist discusses why LFTR energy production infrastructure is the technology Mars missions should carry with them to the red planet. The speaker contends that LFTR's are lightweight and relatively simple and safe as well as a relatively clean alternative source for energy during Martian dust storms as they are prolonged periods during which solar power would not be available and Thorium is known to be present in relative abundance.
Exciting!
Two things that you did not touch on in this video. Molten salt reactors are much cheaper to build that white water reactors. Also graphite can be used for containment of molten salt. Thanks for this video. I believe that this country really needs to have a serious discussion about molten salt reactors
Thanks for the feedback. So many angles that can be covered.
I believe this country needs to have a serious discussion with some nuclear physicists that actually KNOW about Thorium, and its benefits, and dont use scare tactics aimed at the general public. Really: there are no "safe" methods to generate or recover energy! All have their risks!
Correction: at 3:25 you mentioned mined Uranium contains 3-5% U-235. Mined Uranium actually only contains ~0.7%, U-235. Uranium has to undergo enrichment to get it to 3-5% U-235 used in power plants.
Nice information ☺️
thank you
LFTR, the thorium reactor that I was most excited about. A liquid fueled molten salt thermal reactor. It uses a solid graphite (carbon) as the moderator and the molten salt for the coolant. A moderator slows down the neutrons so they have a better probability of being absorbed. The molten salt has about 1000 degree C liquid range, so it doesn't need to be pressurized. Traditional reactors use liquid water as the moderator (hydrogen) and the coolant. But water only has 100 degree C liquid range. As you said the video, failures can be traced back to using water as a coolant. Until recently, India been trying to use thorium in a water cooled reactor. Which is why they haven't been very successful with their thorium program.
I know you wanted to avoid the detailes nuclear physics, but I thought a certain clarification would be interesting: Although easy to visualize the neutron "slamming" into the nucleus and smashing it into two pieces, the neutron actually has to be SLOWED DOWN for this to work, as you later mentioned. It's actually closer to the neutron floating by and sticking to it, leaving the nucleus no longer balanced. The resulting imbalance causes the nucleus' contents to reshuffle themselves in such a way thay they end up flinging half of the nucleus and a few stray neutrons out and apart. Thus the splitting energy comes from the attraction and repulsion forces within the nucleus, not the speed of the incoming neutron.
If fuel waste from existing reactors is processed to extract all the trans-uranics out of it, then its radioactive danger timeline is likewise reduced. All those trans-uranics with a long half-life could then be turned back into fuel to be burnt up. As long as fuel waste only contains fission products, and the remaining fuel elements are cycled back into the reactor then the dangerous timeline is vastly reduced. In fact most of the common fission products decay to safe levels even faster than stated, like within a few decades. Only a few element isotopes like Cesium 137 and Strontium 90 with half-lives in the 30 year range lead to that 300-500 year isolation period. The main waste benefit of Thorium is that very little of these trans-uranic materials are produced, but even a plutonium breeder reactor could have most of its waste with this shorter timeline as long as the waste is limited to fission products.
Great video my dude, Well researched and you only made a few minor errors which i wont bother pointing out because as you said it's a high level video but I do have to say. ALL nuclear reactors can shut down at the flick of a switch, that's not unique to thorium. For example, Fukushima diichi actually shut down as soon as the earthquake was detected, it had water pumping through the system all the way until the backup generators were flooded and the 8 hours of battery backup was depleted and when the water circulation finally stopped, it was the remaining decay heat which caused the meltdown. Fission had stopped well over 8 hours previously. The reason molten salt reactors are "meltdown safe" is because the fuel is already liquid and can drain into the tank with low criticality and high heat rejecting properties which is a good feature rather than an accident scenario.
@3:28 Uranium ore is about 0.7% U235. We have to enrich it above 3% to make it reactor-worthy, 50% to make it weapon-worthy, and 90% to make it US-grade gun-type nuke-worthy.
Quick correction. In natural uranium deposits the U-235 content is around 0.7% and U-238 is most of the remaining 99.3%. To be useful in nuclear reactors you need to enrich the content of U-235 up to between 3-5% by concentrating it using centrifuges and chemical processes.
Rare earth mining, elements used to a large extent in today's electronic devices, produces A LOT of thorium as a byproduct. In fact, rare earth mining is all but abandon in the US because regulators consider thorium as radioactive waste and require mining operations to dispose of it. like any other radioactive material. Thus making rare earth mining to expensive to be profitable. Well, with thorium reactors, the fuel would be like making trash into energy and would also possibly make rare earth mining profitable.
By the way, the "waste" from a thorium reactor is also very useful in nuclear medicine. As a result, the medical industry might want the material before the waste gets dumped in a disused salt mine.
Worth noting that MSRs can work just as well with Uranium, which we already have infrastructure for and a huge stockpile of for current fission generators.
Exactly, the MSR technology is what's exciting not thorium.
thank you Ed
Isn't he Matt?
Great video. If POC of Uranium-based molten salt reactors are a prerequisite before Thorium-based Molten Salt reactors can be commenced upon, maybe UK-based Moltflex is the first one, with its facility in New Brunswick? Also, I see SeaBorg in Denmark with their scalable, seaborne reactors as very promising.
Something in you latest videos caught my attention... what’s with crickets sound anytime (it seems) there is a renewable power technology shown (solar and wind)? Just curious
Just a clarification, Chernobyl was not a cooling system failure. It resulted from puting the plant in an unstable condition (and poor design) leading to an uncontrolled runaway of the reaction. Pretty much operator error.