@@kevinclark2813plenty of people already do. France itself is mostly nuclear and the US and Germany have quite a few as well. There is no issue living nearby
@@kevinclark2813 Actually I would very much like to, as nuclear power plants tend to provide very stable reliable well paid jobs which is kinda something nowdays.
In france, the most common molten salt design use NaCl (yeah table salt) to dissolve U238 and plutonium 239. The corrosion issue is resolved through ceramics coating. working with a fast spectrum vastly reduces the transUranic generation, while allowing to work with used Mox fuel. It also allows to work as a burner for long life waste.
Using a flouride salt instead of NaCl adds a layer of security since a breakage of the reactor will let the fuel solidify into rocks not dissolvable in water. The fast spectrum is in itself a technological challenge. At the very least it means you cannot make a small compact reactor, since the size of the fuel and blanket salt necessary to sustain the chain reaction and breeding increase by a lot.
@@migBdk Uranium chloride is solid or liquid if molten or dissolved in water. Uranium fluoride is gas. Solid or liquid are easier to handle than gas in case of accident.
That's only a test reactor. Notice they never even talked of building power plants with that design... Perhaps it did not work as well as you think it did. There have been dozens of different designs tried as test reactors. Most of them show that other designs are known to work better.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
Another thing is, that all the liquid salts inside and outside the reactor are insanely corrosive at that temperatures. Although there are materials to deal with that, it remains a big headache when it comes to maintenance since every part of the system is contaminated, making any work on the system as a whole a pretty hazardous adventure.
Glad to see someone mention this in the comments. It's much more difficult than the theoretical science makes it out to be. There is much more practicality in simply updating water cooled/moderated reactors like we are seeing with Small Modular Reactors, which are proven to actually be functional, safe, and more affordable.
Copenhagen has claimed that they have solved the corrosion problem by eliminating contaminents in the fuel. They have been running Lithium Fluoride salts through their process loops for years with minimum corrosion problems.
ENGINEER HERE{ The real technical problem that is rarely being mentioned is operational experience with Molten Salt Reactors. Being honest this was something I had missed until it was pointed out recently by James Krellenstein on an interview he did with Decoupled Media here on YT. After they did the MSR experiment at Oak Ridge in Tennessee back in the late 1960s and Early 1970s the entire MSR concept basically was shelved with zero work being done until Kirk Sorenson re-discovered it as part of a project he was doing looking at powering a Lunar base. With the exception of nuclear fusion we literally have millions of hours of operational and maintenance time with all the other forms of nuclear power - gas cooled, liquid metal cooled, pressure water, CANDU.... etc. By comparison we have almost nothing with respect to any of the molten salt types. None of them were ever put into service so NOBODY actually knows what the ongoing operational or maintenance issues actually are. This is one of the most fundamental issues with all technologies. Its one thing to build something its another thing to operate it and yet another thing to maintain it AND EVERY technology goes through a learning phase that never really ends. Think about how much experience we now have with cars and aeroplanes and other technologies.
Wasn't one of the reasons MSR's were shelved (and very quickly, too) was because they couldn't produce weapons grade uranium which the government could use?
Sure but it boils down to that we can't have good, safe, cheap nuclear power because we don't have good, safe, cheap nuclear power. We did have Oak Ridge though and I think the results from that are very promising. China is also building one so I have hope that we will finally see what Thorium can do.
@@cas1652 As an engineer I have to correct or at least clarify your main claims that we can't have good, safe, cheap nuclear power. 1) GOOD as compared to what? because every type of power we use has a number in inescapable side effects. Solar panels are great once they are made but making them is toxic and disposing of spent cells is near impossible. Like nuclear we still haven't found a way to deal with the waste. 2) SAFE as compare to what? Because if you are going to compare nuclear to coal then the fatality rates make coal one of the most lethal substances ever known. Coal mines are some of the most dangerous places any person can work. By comparison do you know how many people have died from nuclear power or nuclear power accidents? 3) CHEAP again compared to what? Yes nuclear is damn expensive to construct but once built its operating costs are quite low because it doesn't require a lot of fuel in terms of mass. Don't get me wrong there are some serious issues with nuclear the most obvious being what to do after wards. Other then the fuel the power stations themselves don't last for ever and cleaning up those sites has proven to be incredibly expensive. *BUT I'D ADD cleaning up so many other industrial sites ahs also been incredibly expensive. PLUS we have barely begun to start cleaning up many of the incredibly toxic sites built in the post WW2 era.* I'm Australian and did you know that Sydney harbour one of our great tourist spots is so toxic that NOBODY is allowed to eat any of the fish or seafood in it. Its all due to a Phillips factory that nobody knew was dumping stuff into the ground water system. I'm not a great fan of nuclear but I also accept we need a a reliable bulk energy system that can back up the renewable systems people want. Sorry but renewables just can't do everything, that's just a fantasy. Plus it will take decades to get all that we need installed. Nuclear is like so many other things. It can be done safely, reliably and cost effectively. THE PROBLEM is the people who's only interest is milking as much money is possible from it. *HAVE YOU SEEN all the crap at Boeing?* That sort of corporate stupidity is rampant through the engineering industries. That's the sort of stupidity that scares me way more than nuclear anything because they DO NOT CARE about the consequences other people have to deal with. That's what you should be calling out - stupid ridiculous corporate greed because its the *REAL PROBLEM.*
@@tonywilson4713 i think i agree with. I just think Thorium will be (even?) better than we have now. 1) good: when the corrosion issues are solved, I expect Thorium to be easier and faster to build 2) safe: liquid salt reactors can be passively safe unlike contemporary designs that rely on active cooling with diesel generators in an emergency 3) cheap: thorium is much cheaper then uranium, both in fuel costs and for the nuclear waste
@@cas1652 I'd agree with all 3 of those points. There's just one major issue with thorium, but it is solvable. RIGHT NOW we have effectively zero experience with Thorium as well as with using MSRs long term. There's a channel called Decouple Media. I don't always agree with either the host or some of the people he has on because like so many of the pro-nuclear crowd they aren't engineers and don't understand what these issues mean or what it takes to deal with them. An exception to that is a guy named James Krellenstein who he's had on a number of times. Jame's family has been involved in the Canadian nuclear industry for decades. So there's a wealth of experience behind what he explains. He's spoken about the pro's and cons of all the different types including CANDU, MSRs and MSRs. A really important interview he gave was on Uranium enrichment. He went through the whole history and why there's now a major issue in that area with capacity. America RIGHT NOW can't even supply its own needs and has to buy enriched Uranium from the Russians. the only enrichment plant in America isn't even owned by Americans its owned by a British, German and Dutch conglomerate. *NOBODY else is even speaking about this stuff, which find even more amazing.* Not even all the pro nuclear clowns are talking about it. NONE of them are saying anything like: _"To get the nuclear industry going we need more mines and more enrichment facilities and better waste disposal."_ I think we will need thorium to help boost the baseload power supply and the sooner we get on and sort it out the better *BUT ALMOST NO ONE IS SAYING THAT.* This is the sort of thing that *as an engineer* I find truly aggravating. There's all these clowns who will never have to do a damn thing DEMANDING people like me solve these f*cking issues for them. Worse they will probably take credit when we do solve these issues.
The chemical process for Kirks LFTR specifically (which is what we're talking about here) does NOT look like what you describe here. There is no fluorine injection, it's basically electrolysis. You put a relatively small voltage across and Protactinium moves from one salt into the other salt while the other electrode is made from Thorium which by this electrolysis dissolves into the salt to replace the Protactinium. The two salts are in separate tanks connected by liquid Bismuth at the bottom which acts as one of the electrodes and allows the Protactinium to travel from one salt to the other. That purely chemical process is possible too like you say but I believe the electrochemistry wins out by simplicity and lack of maintenance needed. The only parts involved are a liquid metal which is not spent and being liquid no structural damage and the Thorium electrode which is destroyed but that is your refuelling process. The only thing you really need to worry about is keeping the voltage of the process at the right level which is in the modern day VERY easy to do. If you only use the voltage which corresponds to the binding energy of Protactinium you only pull out Protactinium, if you use a higher voltage you pull out things with higher binding energy too. The downside is that the process is probably a LOT slower than the purely chemical approach but should be easily able to keep up with the reactor. Flibe Energy TH-cam channel has a nice introduction video of the "Thorium Fuel Cycle"
This won't get enough attention. Every time someone makes the argument against LFTR it feels like they're parroting things they hear from lobbyists instead of doing research and reporting their findings, you know, the scientific method. "But it will be hard, and we can't make good bombs" is the reasoning that will ensure China & India get it working before we do. We'd rather burn platinum than make affordable, reliable energy that has beneficial byproducts like other fuels we need here and in space. Industry doesn't see the big picture if it doesn't generate profit this quarter.
this is why i just ignore most videos about thorium other than 3 hour presentations by people who actually know almost nobody talks about this they just do some Wikipedia search and make a 10 minute video for views its extremely infuriating but oh well china will sell us back our own technology by 2030
@@cpt_bill366 If we can pop energy out like jelly beans...anywhere in the world... and above it or below the sea... which is the potential here, the reason for all these wars.... and bombs largely goes away. We're just left with the megalomaniacs... and we can develop a pill for that.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
this video is a propaganda video with zero real input other than plz stop regulating my industry with shit out of Ayn rand's novel like 'oh those Bad actors'? Is this video a joke or wtf
I literally was looking for your channel yesterday to see if you had posted any new cool videos, and I was so sad there hadn't been for a year. BUT TODAY HE HAS RETURNED, WE HAVE BEEN BLESSED
He has been using his time on another channel of his ( don't remember what is called ) I thought he had abandoned us. Not sure what to think of it. Edit: It's called "Bleak Science"
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
So to make this reactor work, you need a highly radioactive material, combined with a highly corrosive material, at high temperature, mixing with another pretty radioactive and corrosive material, also at high temperature, and you need to remove another material from all of this otherwise the system fails. And then to top it all off you have to get the government involved. Suddenly it all makes sense why this tech has been theoretical for so long.
It is an unfair characterisation of the technology. First, every reactor uses radioactive material, which gets hot, and even more radioactive during operation. Corrosion happens in every industry including the current PWRs. That is being said water is actually more corrosive than salt I see a lot of confusion about this. The removing of materials breaks down to realtively simple chemical steps. I see, also, not a lot of ppl knows that nuclear fuel reprocessing happens in salts anyway, so unless you prefer throwing away 95-96% of the useful fuel as "high level nuclear waste" that no one wants in their backyard or even under their mountain you already on the side of doing this sort of chemistry on our spent fuels. This proposal merely means they cut out the fabrication step and do reprocessing in situ. "And then to top it all off you have to get the government involved" so does in case of building highways, fight crime, catastrope relief, provide security, education, healthcare, pension etc. I don't like the goverment not a tiny bit more than you, but ppl tend to forget what we gain by not living in a complete anarchy. "Suddenly it all makes sense why this tech has been theoretical for so long." The two thing correlates. If it has been pursued when it was first conceived, we would already either perfected or discarded the technology by now.
You forgot to mention that you can run a lifter like molten salt reactor for urainium also.You can pretty much use any fissile or fertile material in there.
Yes, ThorCon plan to use a mixture of 235U and thorium, so the thorium does not turn it into a real breeder it just reduce the time needed before refuelling.
@@seanprice7645 this isn't correct. ThorCon's design is not a modified breeder at all, it's a uranium burner to which thorium is added. You could do this with *any* nuclear power plant: just replace some of the U238 with Th232. In any case this seems a moot point. Last time I heard, ThorCon have been looking away from using thorium because they can't get the necessary fuel: it's just easier and simplier to run with standard low-enriched-uranium. This turns out to be true for almost *any* design that uses thorium: it's just easier and cheaper to use uranium. Which is why there is very little real interest (i.e. outside of the internet) in using thorium in any timescale anyone cares about.
CANDU reactors, a design from the 60's, use non-enriched uranium for fuel currently, and are perfectly cable of the Thorium breeding cycle and fuel re-processing with stuff like MOX cycles.
Which is oen reason they are not looking closely at Thorium yet, they are more interested is using waste fuel from older nuclear plants before they start looking at new fuel types.
Well Thorium molten salt reactors basically do run on Uranium. Uranium 235 (Neutron source to start the breeder reaction), Uranium 238 and Uranium 233. As well as a hundred ( I have no idea ) other actinides. I have high hopes for LIFTER, but doubt America will be able to do it. Unfortunately the bureaucratic state is much like the USSR and nothing is going to get done.
Chinese and indian researcher is quite advanced in thorium tech. India will commission its Prototype Fast breeder reactor in 2024 for our 2nd stage of nuclear programme. In third stage we intend to using Thorium which is present in abundant supply in India instead of nuclear fuel which is imported
@@stickynorth India is not lagging behind in terms of thorium reactor development, but rather pursuing a different and more comprehensive approach than China. India’s thorium programme is based on decades of research and experience, and has the potential to revolutionise the global nuclear energy scenario.
At around 5 minutes, it was mentioned it takes a month to refuel a power plant after 18 months of usage... Depending on the plant, the outage might only last less than a week, with refueling only taking a few days. Other maintenance is way more time consuming in general, from my experience. Usually during refueling all the other work is done, too, taking up most of the outage time
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
Coming as someone who works with typical U-235 LWRs, my biggest question with Thorium is what do you do to start back up the plant when it inevitably shuts down? You can't run it forever, equipment (especially pumps) will need maintenance overhauls at some point or some sensor fails and brings you offline. Is molten salt really going to allowed to solidify in the piping? If so how will you unblock these solid masses of salt to get flow again? I assume a massive amount of heat tracing but haven't seen a commercially viable answer to this.
Just spitballing here, but the nice thing about modular reactors is you can have more than one. So it seems plausible that you could have one shut down for maintenance while others continue to operate.
Run the salt lines inside larger pipe? It's extra containment, and When plant running such could maybe serve as heat exchanger. To warm up salt... instead of feeding water in...feed in steam. Nb unlike water, the proposed molten salts are likely to behave as most materials do and and contract on freezing. Lower chance of burst pipes. And for horizontal runs...there'll likely be a small volume of pipe left unfilled by frozen salt, along which hot salt would be able to flow during a restart.
It's a relatively short circuit and limited quantities of fuel, and the heat is about 400*c to keep the salt liquid, no big deal, if one pump stops I guess you can have a secondary parallel circuit implemented as a back up while you repair the main one. We are dealing here with cheap materials at atmospheric pressures.
As pointed out by LFTR advocate Kirk Sorenson, the current, conventional Cro-Magnon technology reactors work on a razor/razor blade profit model. The money is not made by building the plant. It is made by supplying the custom fuel elements/modules. Thus, I will extend that point to say that there is a lobby against reactors like LFTRs where the "fuel elements" can be supplied in drums and/or bags that anyone can make and are not proprietary. Thus, I predict that thorium reactors will originate in China where there isn't a lobby against that.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant in China has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
The fundamental problem with LFTRs is the same as what killed all previous attempts to make breeder reactors, namely proliferation. Breeders naturally produce weapon's grade material, and with the chemical separation on these thorium reactors it's even worse, because you essentially have pure U233 on tap. Thorium fanboys have long claimed that U232 poisoning prevents this, but this ignores the enormous difference in halflife, which allows the U232 to simply be skimmed off before the Pa233 -> U233 decay has barely even started.
"Skimmed off". You're funny. You skimmed over how hard it is to do just that. Trying to separate nearly identical atoms with only a single neutron weight difference. At best breeder reactors won't get you more than 40%-60% purity. Way south of fissile capable. Gotta hit 92% for the boom. Getting the last six percent takes the most herculean efforts.
"Skimmed off". You're funny. You skimmed over how hard it is to do just that. Trying to separate nearly identical atoms with only a single neutron weight difference. At best breeder reactors won't get you more than 40%-60% purity. Way south of fissile capable. Gotta hit 92% for the boom. Getting the last six percent takes the most herculean efforts.
@@brianhirt5027 There is no need to separate them by weight. Stop repeating that myth. I'm talking about the CHEMICAL separation of U from Pa, which is something a LFTR _already does_ during normal operation. Because Pa232 has a 20.4x shorter halflife than Pa233, 99.99993% is already long gone by the the time that merely _half_ of the U233 is done processing.
@@Dayanto Go argue with Wikipedia & the NRC about the physics. I'm sure they'll be appropriately impressed. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons-grade_nuclear_material
@@brianhirt5027 You separate the U232 from the PA233 before the PA233 decays into U233. Just wait a few months and less than one part per BILLION of PA232 would remain and the PA233 would be down to about 1/8 the original. At that point, very simple chemical separation would allow you to easily produce weapons grade material superior to plutonium. Dumbass.
A lot of them are astroturfed by Fossil and adjacent companies anyway. I bet these so-called "green activists" probably couldn't even tell you the real answer to what would be the best course of action to solve the climate crisis - which is to cut out consumption of underground carbon (fossil fuels) for electricity.
Imagine Greenpeace actually does what their name indicates and we actively build nuclear reactors in the past 20 years. We'd have solved the majority of CO2 from electricity by now.
The biggest problem is gonna be cost. Uranium NPPs already struggle on the market due to their high costs, even in countries that can mine their own Uranium (USA) and Thorium NPPs are going to be even more expensive.
Shutting down a conventional rod reactor every 18 months isn't as bad as having to replace flow structures in a molten salt reactor sometimes as often as every 200 days. The cool thing about water being the moving part in conventional reactors is that unless things go way way off the rails the water is stupid safe and doesn't tear up the pipes. Molten salt reactors just add an absurd step of ALSO moving the fuel around. If you think liquid salt fuel that is liquified by the radioactive fissile action internally is somehow going to "cool off" when it isn't moving through a cooling system or especially if the cooling system fails and you end up with elephant feet inside the reactor system I'll be more than happy to take seed money for my new outlet expander that doubles the amount of power available from 15A to 30A on a conventional household outlet!
YESSS!!!! AN ACTUALLY VIDEO UPDATE AGAIN! I know these videos are expensive to produce subject zero but I love and im very happy you made another of these its been a while sense u uploaded here!
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
I don't think we should discount or dismiss everything China does simply because they are organized around a different ideology than most Western countries. The fact is, serious breakthroughs on thorium technology are more likely to come from China than anywhere else, because of how much their government has directed to be invested in thorium projects. I don't see any other country advancing as quickly as China in thorium development, without similar levels of state direction.
I know right! Like he thinks there have been 3 Chernobyl incidents, 5 Fukushima incidents, and that Three Mile Island was an actual accident and has happened at least twice.
Indeed. There is a reason why the IAEA takes its cues from US Navy Nuclear Program. Thanks to Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, there has NEVER been a reactor related accident.
The major hurdle is money, those that stand to loose their monopoly and those that are funded by the same, through lobbyists. If something doesn’t make sense, always follow the money. Politicians are the winners and humanity is the loser
New to the channel and your voice was so nice and clean, i started getting paranoid about ai voice bs. Went through your archive to make sure, and i gotta applaud your consistency of narration, while also improving in your oration
There are two technologies involved here. 1. A Thorium breeder reactor and 2. a molten salt reactor. The combination (if scientific challenges are met, like the corrosion problem etc.) is in theory awesome, but a molten salt reactor, fuelled with Uranium is so much more efficient than a traditional one (water cooled under pressure), that you could fuel them with nuclear waste (plenty of it available), greatly reducing the waste in volume, as well as reducing the time you have to store it safely. So maybe, we could build some molten salt reactors and in time, add the breeder-unit and switch to Thorium later.
20 years from now a factory in China will be shipping small Thorium reactor power plants every month. 10 years later, the thorium power generation market will drive out all other types of power plants and electricity & heat will be half current prices.
Thanks for the Thorium review, good to see your video. Material Science has come a long way, though I understand maintance on a corrosive system like that will be problematic. I hope it comes about some day, would be nice to have safer energy being produced, at least until we figure out how to tap Zero Point energy like the other cool fantasy aliens do....
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
Partially correct: China approved building a 2 MWthermal thorium molten salt reactor (MSR) 3-4 years prior to last year. It started up in August 2023. It is about 1/4th the size of the Oak Creek test MSR reactor of the 1960's. The key purpose is to see if we now have a suitable "super-alloy" along with a side stream chemical separation process that works well enough to control the corrosion rate to an acceptable level that would allow construction of a future 40+ year operating life power plant reactor in the future. It will be many years before we know the answer to that question. The Oak Creek MSR reactor had a huge issue with corrosion as the daughter products from splitting atoms and the chemical compounds they form are extremely corrosive. The key reason there was never a 2nd generation MSR test reactor was that no known alloy of the day could withstand the corrosion rate of the "in use" circulating molten salt mixture.
Something that immediately jumped out to me about this design is that the chemical processing plant is outside the primary containment vessel, and contains insanely hot, toxic, corrosive, radioactive, and likely chemically reactive molten salts. What happens if part of that molten salt rube goldberg machine springs a leak? I'm assuming that flaming hot radioactive poison salt mix would react to atmospheric oxygen with... enthusiasm. My understanding is that thorium reactors are inherently safe from meltdowns, but it still seems like you could end up with a serious radioactive accident on your hands if anything in there fails. I know that's a concern with the primary steam loop in a traditional reactor too, but while the water is radioactive, it's also water. The shit flowing through these pipes would be massively more dangerous than some radioactive steam...
From what I understand the half life of the chain is only something like 60 days, so long term radioactivity isn't an issue. I'm not a chemist, but I'm not sure oxygen will react strongly; oxygen fluorides would be highly endothermic to create. I also don't know if the byproducts of any such reaction would be gas; if they're solid it won't spread very far. In short, I imagine a major mishapwould just result in a local poisonous spill that while bad is comparable to any other industrial accident.
Why all the pipping?, only what is deteriorated, and this is a technology that requires only cheap alloys and work at atmospheric pressure, so it's cheap and easy to replace. And to keep the heat at 400* in a small circuit is not a big deal.
@@WilhelmGuggisberg Not sure about the cheapness of the alloys. While the issue being addressed is different (i.e. pressure for LWR and corrosion resistance and chemical induced fatigue for MSR), the materials for the MSR are still fairly exotic and therefore relatively expensive, at least so far. The cheap and east to replace part is also questionable, as the big difference in repair costs is whether the particular pipe/part has been directly exposed to fuel/radiation or not, regardless of the reactor type. One of the issues with traditional MSR designs is fuel and/or fission products plating out on piping. Some designs plan for sacrificing all the fuel contact parts on fairly short timeframes kind of like cladding is sacrificed in traditional solid fuel reactors to address this, others have more elaborate schemes. As far as all the parts/piping needing to be kept at high temp, that is only when running. If the reactor is shutdown for repair, the fuel salt would be drained away, allowing the entire active part of the reactor to cool without significant issues. After repair, you heat it up again prior to reintroducing the fuel. Of course if the part being repaired/replaced has been in contact with fuel salts, the cost just spiked significantly.
Good to see you back Sir😄. Try to keep animations simple & easy to render in order to make your production process faster and focus more on the core topic of the video sir. We would love to see more from you🙂.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
Goddamn man, it's been so long since you posted I was worried you got shipped off to the front. It's good you're back, I love yr vids! Do whatcha gotta do homie and take care of yourself.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
"what about energy loss from the dissipation of heat?" The heat goes into making electricity. The laws of thermodynamics mean that if the difference between input and output temperatures is large, then the efficiency of power generation is greater. So very high temperatures are a benefit. You just have to make sure that there's a lot of insulation on the pipes between the reactor and the turbines generating electricity so you don't waste all that heat. Also the high temperature means you can use the Sulphur-Iodine cycle to make hydrogen more efficiently than converting heat into electricity and then using the electricity to electrolyse water.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
The way to test the viability of a substitution and eliminate all the FUD arguments is as follows: (1) Assume the proposed replacement is the entrenched process. (2) Make the case for the actual process as better than the proposed process. This limits the inertia of the entrenched process which shouldn't enter into the question at all. And this technique proves it.
You realize the US had already pioneered Thorium reactor technology on the USS Seawolf(SSN-575)? The main reason why Admiral Rickover rejected it was that it never delivered on the claims. Further, it was an accident waiting to happen should sea water contact the internal components.
A little before 7.0 minutes, you said “the governments are not in the business of solving the problems.”. It is so true for most of the countries, including the developed countries.👍
Yes and Yes. The Chinese Thorium (test) reactor was licensed on June 7, 2023 and is located in the Gobi desert region. It is operational. There is also talk that China might use a Thorium reactor in a future aircraft carrier.
No doubt they will! I think the public cargo/military evacuation ships are probably first before the out and out military applications like aircraft carriers are coming, but they are a coming!@@ltribley
The host of this channel is biased against China. He said "I'm skeptical of everything China does". I don't know, this is supposed to be a science channel, not politics or Chinese hating channel. He decided to ignore the achievements because they are from China. Mind boggling!!!!
Tbf it does also kind of go against the grain of some newer reactor designs, a lot of which are increasinly implementing inherent safety designs and focus on being more simple to build and modular. Thorium has potential, but needs a lot to get going when any development in the nuclear industry apart faces huge scepticism and a hugely uphill battle on all fronts. If China is investing into them, they could set about the base level knowledge and supply chains that let it spread a bit more. Whether or not it's ideal, China is one of the few countries now making advancement in Nuclear power. Doubtful if this will result in positive effects on approval of the technology, seems more likely it will end up as just another way to demonise it counterfactually. Also, to be fair an "infinite fuel cycle" as Thorium could feasibly do failed in the original nuclear rennaisance, although with Thorium it's self-contained within the reactor, it relies on a great deal of ambition and confidence in the future of the technology.
Note that China has ordered 6 more Westinghouse AP-1000 reactors (nominal 1150-1200 MWe) beacause the 4 AP-1000 units they built are running better and more efficient than their own most current designed nuclear power plants. Perhaps the west still knows some things that the Chinese does not know about nuclear power plants.
The biggest hurdles to Thorium Breeders are the high operating temperatures in the fuel cycle and the crazy safety devices and materials needed to safely contain molten Soidium cooling loops and heat exhangers...
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
The fact that the half life of Pa233 is about 10 times longer than Np239 means that breeding enough fuel for another reactor takes about 10 times longer than a U238 fast breeder reactor. India started a project to have the country running on Thorium. They estimated it would take about 70 years to get a full fleet of nuclear reactors running on the Thorium cycle. That was 50 years ago and they're still in the early stages. In the UK Rolls-Royce estimated it would take 200 years to breed enough U233 from Th232 to run the country on Thorium. The time it takes to breed enough U233 from Th232 is the biggest problem.
You start with some U235 in the mix, within 90-120 days, you’ve bred enough U233 to sustain the reaction, and you always introduce new Th232 to keep the breeding going. With the 160KY half-life of U233, you can extract/add U233 in the fuel mix as needed. The burnup rate can exceed 90% because the fuel is constantly being “reprocessed”. So, not only is Th232 more abundant in nature, you can use nearly 100% of it, unlike Uranium. Yes, it’s tricky to keep processing the fuel to remove undesirable isotopes and reintroduce desired ones, but the benefits are huge.
@@geoffstrickler "Burn up" doesn't make sense to me in this context, as we're not talking about a fixed amount of fuel, unlike solid fueled reactors. I think you'll find the majority of potential benefits are the result of MSR generally, not Th specifically. Whether there are potentially "huge" benefits to use of the Th cycle is dependent on where in the world you are. If you have lots of Th and little to no U, then the benefit is obvious. If not, then much less so.
@@richardbaird1452 you’d be wrong about that. Th232 is one of the few isotopes suitable for a “breeder” reactor. As for worldwide availability, Thorium is widely available in basically every country, and is 4x as abundant as uranium. Uranium deposits are limited to a few countries and seawater (low densities so extremely expensive to extract). So, everything you wrong is incorrect.
India faced lots of delays in the process, but the installation of stage 2 fast breeder reactor of 500MW was a huge development. But still it has long way to go, they say we will have fully functioning thorium based reactor by 2047 and considering the economic development in India, it will only incentivize the process and will reduce the possibility of delays like earlier. One major factor in delay of this technology is assassinations of many of our nuclear scientists.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
Facts, facts and more facts... Just look at Visual Capitalst and their section on nuclear power... That alone should snap into focus the realities of the industry... It's as clean as solar, wind or geothermal but almost always available... I am pro renewables but I am also pro nuclear. Whatever decarbonizes the world as fast as possible, I am all for!
The biggest problem with Thorium you hit on at the very start, but decided to go down another road. Thorium reactors are breeder reactors, which means you make more fuel than you consume. This fuel, because you're dealing with fissile materials, means you can skim off some and use it for weapons. I hear a lot of people state that Thorium is "safe" because of the n,2n reaction and no one would try to gather the U233 for weapons because of the dose from those n,2n reactions (and the gammas they emit). U233 has a half life of 160k years, someone that had the patience can easily wait out the n,2n reaction before gathering the U233 for weapons. So, this is why any country that is serious about following the Non-Proliferation treaties will never take a serious look at LFTR and any county that is will be getting a serious amount of scrutiny from those countries that have signed various NPTs. As someone that has a degree in Nuclear Engineering, I can tell you that you are very much less likely to have issues with any governments if you're using "burner" reactors (the typical reactors you see now) than if you're dealing with "converters" (make as much fuel as you consume) or "breeders" (like LFTR where you make more fuel than you consume).
The world does not seem too fazed by North Korea so I doubt that "biggest problem" you mention is de facto the biggest problem. I think the anti-nuclear lobby is in fact the biggest de facto problem to Thorium.
Rule 1: When something sounds too good to be true, it rarely is. One of the many problems with Thorium, that are barely mentioned is the low breeding rate. There simply aren't enough neutrons available to produce an excess of U233.
That's what the lithium beryllium salt is for. Beryllium-9 has the neat property that if you hit it with a neutron, it immediately decays into 2 alpha particles and 2 neutrons. So you multiply the number of neutrons floating around by 2. Which means that by tuning the ratio of beryllium to thorium, you can tweak the breeding rate into something self sufficient. They use a similar trick at ITER to get the fusion reaction to breed enough fuel. Of course this comes with the massive downside that you are now using Beryllium as a fuel, which is pretty rare. Worldwide production of Be is only like 200 tons a year, and ITER alone is eating up 10% of that. If we wanted to use molten salt thorium reactors, we'd quickly run out of Beryllium and the costs would be truly astronomical. As always, the problem with nuclear is pure cost. Not any of the made up problems like activists or a renewable energy lobby, and its not something you can realistically fix by trying alternate fuel cycles. At the end of the day, its just a lot cheaper to build renewables and they have a faster return on investment. Which is why everyone is building renewables and nuclear is left to die a quiet death.
@@harmenkoster7451 "As always, the problem with nuclear is pure cost. Not any of the made up problems like activists or a renewable energy lobby, and its not something you can realistically fix by trying alternate fuel cycles. At the end of the day, its just a lot cheaper to build renewables and they have a faster return on investment. Which is why everyone is building renewables and nuclear is left to die a quiet death." - Sadly I see ALOT of people thinking that nuclear fission power is the cheapest source of energy and that renewables are only built due to subsidies.... I just dont understand where that weird hate boner for renewables come from. Is it because people associate it with the climate activists and taxes?
Well, and then there is the issues of implementation. The US Navy could never get it to work on the USS Seawolf (SSN-575), which is why Admiral Rickover rejected the design.
@@xXYannuschXx I notice this too. Is it the Nuclear lobby and spin doctors at work? While in reality the cheapest electricity (in my country anyway) comes from renewables. And nuclear was heavily subsidised as well.
Sorry, but this is cut short in so many ways. First of all: thorium reactors have been built test wise and they were found to be problematic because of the insane high corrosion due to the salt. This means, that these reactors need repairs after around 2 years. That means draining the reactor, cleaning it, replacing the parts and the starting it up again. This alone is a big reason why it is economical not feasible. The other part is, that any nuclear reactor comes with very high building times, as when compared to solar or wind, you may need a couple of years. The safer and faster return of investment here is clear. All that together makes it hard to find anyone investing in it, if its the government (because of ideological reasons) or private investors, for which the sums are waay to high for that kind of uncertainty. Current already established research is going to make wind and solar probably even cheaper, and energy storing techniques are improved every day, so we can buffer them. I would like to see a video from you about that, actually. Otherwise cool animations!
Indeed. All of these advocates of Thorium reactors seem to ignore that the US Navy has already tested the designs in the USS Seawolf (SSN-575). There is a reason why Admiral Hyman G. Rickover rejected it.
Solar and wind will never work in regions closer to the poles. Heck, go close enough to either pole and the sun will be gone half a year. Wind is not reliable, usually when the temperatures drop, the wind dies down, precisely the time when you need the most energy. The only thing that delivers at times like that is oil and nuclear, to lesser degree hydropower.
I understood because of the low pressure and the auto shut down method, no containment vessel is required. That is one of the great benefits of the product.
EVERY nuclear power plant MUST have a containment to withstand a commercial aircraft collision (ever here of 9-11?). The containment of current reactors meet that requirement as so called Thorium reactors would have to as well
Stop blaming greenpeace. Start blaming simple economics and money. Go and ask a big insurer what it costs to insure your nuclear power plant, ask him what it costs to insure any fossil or renewable power plant. Then go to a bank, and give the bank your cost breakdown and business plan, and compare that to any renewable.
True. The regulation and associated cost to comply are the biggest issue. Investors and power companies are not going to fund the building of a plant that takes 20 years to build with negative returns and historically crazy overages, over simply building a gas plant in 2 years for 1/50th the cost lol.
There's certainly a bit of market failure there. But keep in mind that these plants do not replace renewables, they replace coal and gas at the point where renewables cannot, not without a huge breakthrough in energy storage. Which actually makes it a little worse: if renewables provide the bulk of our power and nukes are only used to make up the shortfall, then the cost per kWh is even worse. But in general, nuclear power isn't that expensive... the problem is the enormous risk associated with regulatory issues, and the large up front investment required. One way to address this is to not treat every nuclear plant as a separate project, but build several. Another way would be for the government to build these, if private parties are reluctant to make the investment. The thing is: we will need either coal / gas plants, or nukes. Renewables cannot as yet provide 100% of our power. With that in mind, it's worth calculating whether it makes sense to build nukes, or to keep some gas plants around, and accept the CO2 they emit (or sequester it). But sadly no one around here seems to be willing to make any actual plans. We're already dealing with an overloaded grid, and politics are more concerned about distributing the capacity "fairly" than with doing anything about it.
These are gen four reactors too, companies don’t want to risk billions on a design only tested by 1-2 reactors at a national lab in the 70s. Which is one of the main reasons they just keep building LWRs (along with all the regulation hurdles mentioned in other comments).
@@nathanj202yes another issue is that most of the Gen IV concepts are created by startups with no established means to actually build a plant unlike say GE or Westinghouse who are focusing on newer LWR designs for the same reasons you stated.
People here citing "regulations" are trying to make that out to be the biggest hindering factor, but you got to remember that regulations are the reason why nuclear energy is the safest form of energy production that it is - even safer than wind energy, actually. What's really hindering Nuclear is corporate lobbies, they're the ones propping up unnecessary/unwanted bureaucratic hurdles to compete against nuclear progress; let's not forget that they fund "green" activists too.
I feel somewhat misrepresented in this video. I am an avid anti nuclear activist, but I never lobbied against Thorium Reactors or Nuclear Fusion or any research projects in Nuclear Fission. I am just against a very badly maintained nuclear reactor (Tihange) built in my vicinity and I know a lot of people in my neighborhood who see things as I do. More research in nuclear energy technologies will make things safer and why should an (let's call it) anti conventional nuclear powerplant activist be against research? I am just against nuclear powerplant companies that cut corners, which unfortunately is a thing. Why should I tolerate that someone is risking the whole landscape I grew up in for a profit margin they should have put in maintaining the powerplant to keep it as safe as possible? So please don't blame it on me that there might not be Thorium Reactors in our future.
This video was doing all right UNTIL, he decided the pull that worn out old trope, the green(peacers), are largely, if not entirely to blame for any problems, real or imagined in the nuclear energy field. And no, I am not with GP, nor do I know anyone that is in that org. But I do know a strawman when I see them, and its appears here@ 7:32
Molten Salt Reactors have already been built and are providing energy in a number of countries including Indonexia, which bought a ship borne MSR from an American company called ThorCon, and China put at least one online last year. India is setting up several and we have a couple pilot projects underway in the U.S. Terrapower is setting up a Natrium (fluoride sal) reactor in Wyoming on the site of a former coal plant and Flibe Energy is constructing one at the Pacific Northwest Nuclear Laab in Hanford, WA. Because of footdragging by the NRC, we are ten years behind China!
Correction, the Natrium reactor is not an MSR. It is a fast spectrum, metallic fueled, liquid sodium cooled pool type reactor along the lines of the EBR-II. The thermal storage scheme uses molten salts to provide wide load following ability, but they not involved in the operation of the reactor itself.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
I decided to watch this to see if the video made some kind of complicated mistake in reasoning. Nope. Turns out to be the same old 'Solar & Wind can't supply enough energy' mistake. Yes, they can supply all the energy we need, more cheaply and FAR more safely than any nuclear option. Not only that, they can make energy production *decentralized*.
The trouble with radioisotopes is chiefly that they do not have addictive toxic effluent pouring out of the exothermic reaction that generates the energy necessary to power technology. Crude oil distillates and the exhaust generated gives humans serious deleterious neurological side effects (they get high) as well as the energy generation. Quite simply put, humanity is a doper, and thorium doesn't get them high, that's why the disinterest.
This idea for Nuclear Power was introduced in the 1970's. Lobbyists convinced the Nixon administration (Bribed) that Uranium has more benefits and the team trying to get Thorium reactors built were shutdown and I believe they were financially ruined. A startup called Copenhagen Atomics are trying to revive this and they have an operational reactor in Indonesia and claim it produces 1 Giga Watt of power a day. (The average family of four in the U.S. uses about 5 kilowatts a day and I use the U.S. because it's normal for us to leave the house with utilities running. People in other nations shut down everything that draws power before they leave their dwellings). I have a feeling Copenhagen Atomics is going to get shut down and bankrupted or their top engineers are going to be unalived. Several powerful entities, including Nations that don't have great human rights track records, have a hold on the entire energy sector and Thorium reactors would end that hold. Also billions of people are employed because of fossil fuels. The petrol industry makes up over 75% of the Global economy. There are people working at McDonald's right now who have no idea they're employed because of petroleum. Replace petroleum and the entire globe crashes. It might be a good idea to look into hydrogen power. You can get a hydrogen generator, hydrogen storage facility and the equipment used to separate hydrogen and oxygen from water for 1/2 million dollars. Buy land away from the city that you can harvest your own produce on. Invest in the hydrogen generator that produces 10 kilowatts a day and make yourself independent and sovereign. Get a well system installed and a septic tank. Thorium sounds great but looking at the insane situation the U.S. Government is putting the entire world in tells me we're going to all he devastated by war. Get your families to safety and invest in making your own electricity.
So, to summarize with a disclaimer of if I've understood this video correctly: The biggest hurdles to Thorium energy are mostly political in nature as opposed to technical or engineering. There are technical and engineering hurdles, but with enough money and time, those can be addressed. But until the political issues are resolved, finding enough money through investment and regulatory hurdles are the biggest issues.
I get what you meant when you said that the nuclear energy industry was plagued by disaster but there have only been 3 nuclear plant disasters and 2 of them were from human error and negligence with one of them being partly from cut corners as well. The other one being Fukushima which was a tsunami. It does come off as you saying there have been numerous nuclear plant disasters which there haven’t been. It is a great video nonetheless
Three that people are aware of. Not on your list is the Kyshtym Disater, which was WORSE than either 3-mile Island or Fukushima. Neither is the Windscale Fire in the UK, nor the Swiss Lucens reactor meltdown. All three of those I listed are never mentioned by the anti-nuclear crowd.
@@davidford3115 The Kyshtym disaster and Windscale fire were both the result of nuclear weapons work, and have nothing to with nuclear power generation. The Lucens reactor meltdown was only a category four incident, with no radiation release outside the cavern which has since been decontaminated anyways. The problem with nuclear power is the cost of building new reactors, not the danger.
@@faroncobb6040 Windscale was not just weapons, it WAS used for power as well. You don't have cartages designated as fuel just for production of weapons grade uranium and plutonium. Regardless, you are trying to downplay the examples I gave because they are inconvenient details and events. The fact that the anti-nuclear crowd NEVER mention them shows how dishonest their arguments are.
@@davidford3115 Pile 2 of Windscale was air cooled, using large fans during operation and with tall chimneys that would provide passive airflow for cooling even during shutdown. There was no provision for electrical generation at all, reactor designs for plutonium production have very little in common with designs optimized for power production.
Thorium reactors have been built and tested using all kinds of different reactor designs. Light water BWR & PWR, heavy water, HTGR (including pebble bed reactors), and of course the Oak Ridge MSR. The USA even built 4 commercial thorium fueled nuclear power plants in the 1960's - 1970's using BWR, PWR, and HTGR designs. They were all technical and commercial economic flops (big time). Meanwhile many of their uranium counterparts work and were economical. It seems that most TH-cam "experts" seem to know nothing about the history and attempts to make the thorium cycle work.
I don't think the uranium mining industry can be particualrly in the way of "building up thorium infrastructure". Thorium is an abundant byproduct of rare earth mining and right now for the most part considered as a nuisance. One of the big advantage of the plan to use thorium is then we talk about material already mined and just sitting in piles as unwanted byproduct.
There seems to be several different designs for thorium reactors but this one seems to put s so many points of failure in the same place and in series so that any failure anywhere, stops everything. It seems unimaginable that it would ever run for very long. People should look at West Valley New York, S,T,U and B plants at Hanford, and the T H O R P facility in the UK to see just how messy it is to recycle fuel. I really don't see how cycling lithium through a neutron field is a good idea, given how everyone gets their panties in a bunch when they announced a release from Fukushima that is a tiny, tiny fraction of what would be produced if you ran lithium through a reactor for a long time. I haven't seen anything that shows the other decay products or fusion and activation products produced in this process. In India thorium reactors are always 5 years away, and always will be. The first time I heard about anyone working on them in India was 1997. It was actually in a conversation about how to control people's exposures to thorium sand beaches. It would be nice if China would update everyone on their progress.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
![[UNCUT] รัฐสั่งหยุดปล่อยคลื่น! แต่หยุดพลังปะทุ “น้องหญิง” ไม่ได้ I คนดังนั่งเคลียร์](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/RmQh47eIiV0/mqdefault.jpg)
![Nuclear Battery - Game-changer or dangerous idea. Everything you need to know. [2024]](/img/n.gif)
Most people don't understand nuclear power plants are safer than coal or oil.
Try living next to one.
It'd still be safer than living beside a coal power plant@@kevinclark2813
@@kevinclark2813 I’d do that in a heartbeat. It beats living next to a coal power plant and being exposed to mercury vapor.
@@kevinclark2813plenty of people already do. France itself is mostly nuclear and the US and Germany have quite a few as well. There is no issue living nearby
@@kevinclark2813 Actually I would very much like to, as nuclear power plants tend to provide very stable reliable well paid jobs which is kinda something nowdays.
In france, the most common molten salt design use NaCl (yeah table salt) to dissolve U238 and plutonium 239.
The corrosion issue is resolved through ceramics coating.
working with a fast spectrum vastly reduces the transUranic generation, while allowing to work with used Mox fuel. It also allows to work as a burner for long life waste.
Using a flouride salt instead of NaCl adds a layer of security since a breakage of the reactor will let the fuel solidify into rocks not dissolvable in water.
The fast spectrum is in itself a technological challenge. At the very least it means you cannot make a small compact reactor, since the size of the fuel and blanket salt necessary to sustain the chain reaction and breeding increase by a lot.
@@migBdk Uranium chloride is solid or liquid if molten or dissolved in water. Uranium fluoride is gas. Solid or liquid are easier to handle than gas in case of accident.
That's only a test reactor. Notice they never even talked of building power plants with that design... Perhaps it did not work as well as you think it did.
There have been dozens of different designs tried as test reactors. Most of them show that other designs are known to work better.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
@@migBdkfluoride, fluoride
Another thing is, that all the liquid salts inside and outside the reactor are insanely corrosive at that temperatures. Although there are materials to deal with that, it remains a big headache when it comes to maintenance since every part of the system is contaminated, making any work on the system as a whole a pretty hazardous adventure.
Glad to see someone mention this in the comments. It's much more difficult than the theoretical science makes it out to be. There is much more practicality in simply updating water cooled/moderated reactors like we are seeing with Small Modular Reactors, which are proven to actually be functional, safe, and more affordable.
Some designs (Thorcon?) want to simply replace the reactor core before its expiration date, thus avoiding altogether any serious corrosion issues.
The corrosion issue has been resolved years ago.
Copenhagen has claimed that they have solved the corrosion problem by eliminating contaminents in the fuel. They have been running Lithium Fluoride salts through their process loops for years with minimum corrosion problems.
Checkout Copenhagen Atomics
ENGINEER HERE{ The real technical problem that is rarely being mentioned is operational experience with Molten Salt Reactors. Being honest this was something I had missed until it was pointed out recently by James Krellenstein on an interview he did with Decoupled Media here on YT.
After they did the MSR experiment at Oak Ridge in Tennessee back in the late 1960s and Early 1970s the entire MSR concept basically was shelved with zero work being done until Kirk Sorenson re-discovered it as part of a project he was doing looking at powering a Lunar base.
With the exception of nuclear fusion we literally have millions of hours of operational and maintenance time with all the other forms of nuclear power - gas cooled, liquid metal cooled, pressure water, CANDU.... etc. By comparison we have almost nothing with respect to any of the molten salt types. None of them were ever put into service so NOBODY actually knows what the ongoing operational or maintenance issues actually are.
This is one of the most fundamental issues with all technologies. Its one thing to build something its another thing to operate it and yet another thing to maintain it AND EVERY technology goes through a learning phase that never really ends. Think about how much experience we now have with cars and aeroplanes and other technologies.
Wasn't one of the reasons MSR's were shelved (and very quickly, too) was because they couldn't produce weapons grade uranium which the government could use?
Sure but it boils down to that we can't have good, safe, cheap nuclear power because we don't have good, safe, cheap nuclear power. We did have Oak Ridge though and I think the results from that are very promising. China is also building one so I have hope that we will finally see what Thorium can do.
@@cas1652 As an engineer I have to correct or at least clarify your main claims that we can't have good, safe, cheap nuclear power.
1) GOOD as compared to what? because every type of power we use has a number in inescapable side effects. Solar panels are great once they are made but making them is toxic and disposing of spent cells is near impossible. Like nuclear we still haven't found a way to deal with the waste.
2) SAFE as compare to what? Because if you are going to compare nuclear to coal then the fatality rates make coal one of the most lethal substances ever known. Coal mines are some of the most dangerous places any person can work.
By comparison do you know how many people have died from nuclear power or nuclear power accidents?
3) CHEAP again compared to what?
Yes nuclear is damn expensive to construct but once built its operating costs are quite low because it doesn't require a lot of fuel in terms of mass.
Don't get me wrong there are some serious issues with nuclear the most obvious being what to do after wards. Other then the fuel the power stations themselves don't last for ever and cleaning up those sites has proven to be incredibly expensive. *BUT I'D ADD cleaning up so many other industrial sites ahs also been incredibly expensive. PLUS we have barely begun to start cleaning up many of the incredibly toxic sites built in the post WW2 era.*
I'm Australian and did you know that Sydney harbour one of our great tourist spots is so toxic that NOBODY is allowed to eat any of the fish or seafood in it. Its all due to a Phillips factory that nobody knew was dumping stuff into the ground water system.
I'm not a great fan of nuclear but I also accept we need a a reliable bulk energy system that can back up the renewable systems people want. Sorry but renewables just can't do everything, that's just a fantasy. Plus it will take decades to get all that we need installed.
Nuclear is like so many other things. It can be done safely, reliably and cost effectively. THE PROBLEM is the people who's only interest is milking as much money is possible from it.
*HAVE YOU SEEN all the crap at Boeing?* That sort of corporate stupidity is rampant through the engineering industries. That's the sort of stupidity that scares me way more than nuclear anything because they DO NOT CARE about the consequences other people have to deal with.
That's what you should be calling out - stupid ridiculous corporate greed because its the *REAL PROBLEM.*
@@tonywilson4713 i think i agree with. I just think Thorium will be (even?) better than we have now.
1) good: when the corrosion issues are solved, I expect Thorium to be easier and faster to build
2) safe: liquid salt reactors can be passively safe unlike contemporary designs that rely on active cooling with diesel generators in an emergency
3) cheap: thorium is much cheaper then uranium, both in fuel costs and for the nuclear waste
@@cas1652 I'd agree with all 3 of those points. There's just one major issue with thorium, but it is solvable.
RIGHT NOW we have effectively zero experience with Thorium as well as with using MSRs long term.
There's a channel called Decouple Media. I don't always agree with either the host or some of the people he has on because like so many of the pro-nuclear crowd they aren't engineers and don't understand what these issues mean or what it takes to deal with them.
An exception to that is a guy named James Krellenstein who he's had on a number of times. Jame's family has been involved in the Canadian nuclear industry for decades. So there's a wealth of experience behind what he explains.
He's spoken about the pro's and cons of all the different types including CANDU, MSRs and MSRs. A really important interview he gave was on Uranium enrichment. He went through the whole history and why there's now a major issue in that area with capacity. America RIGHT NOW can't even supply its own needs and has to buy enriched Uranium from the Russians. the only enrichment plant in America isn't even owned by Americans its owned by a British, German and Dutch conglomerate. *NOBODY else is even speaking about this stuff, which find even more amazing.* Not even all the pro nuclear clowns are talking about it. NONE of them are saying anything like: _"To get the nuclear industry going we need more mines and more enrichment facilities and better waste disposal."_
I think we will need thorium to help boost the baseload power supply and the sooner we get on and sort it out the better *BUT ALMOST NO ONE IS SAYING THAT.*
This is the sort of thing that *as an engineer* I find truly aggravating. There's all these clowns who will never have to do a damn thing DEMANDING people like me solve these f*cking issues for them. Worse they will probably take credit when we do solve these issues.
The chemical process for Kirks LFTR specifically (which is what we're talking about here) does NOT look like what you describe here.
There is no fluorine injection, it's basically electrolysis. You put a relatively small voltage across and Protactinium moves from one salt into the other salt while the other electrode is made from Thorium which by this electrolysis dissolves into the salt to replace the Protactinium. The two salts are in separate tanks connected by liquid Bismuth at the bottom which acts as one of the electrodes and allows the Protactinium to travel from one salt to the other.
That purely chemical process is possible too like you say but I believe the electrochemistry wins out by simplicity and lack of maintenance needed. The only parts involved are a liquid metal which is not spent and being liquid no structural damage and the Thorium electrode which is destroyed but that is your refuelling process. The only thing you really need to worry about is keeping the voltage of the process at the right level which is in the modern day VERY easy to do. If you only use the voltage which corresponds to the binding energy of Protactinium you only pull out Protactinium, if you use a higher voltage you pull out things with higher binding energy too. The downside is that the process is probably a LOT slower than the purely chemical approach but should be easily able to keep up with the reactor.
Flibe Energy TH-cam channel has a nice introduction video of the "Thorium Fuel Cycle"
This won't get enough attention. Every time someone makes the argument against LFTR it feels like they're parroting things they hear from lobbyists instead of doing research and reporting their findings, you know, the scientific method. "But it will be hard, and we can't make good bombs" is the reasoning that will ensure China & India get it working before we do. We'd rather burn platinum than make affordable, reliable energy that has beneficial byproducts like other fuels we need here and in space. Industry doesn't see the big picture if it doesn't generate profit this quarter.
this is why i just ignore most videos about thorium other than 3 hour presentations by people who actually know almost nobody talks about this they just do some Wikipedia search and make a 10 minute video for views its extremely infuriating but oh well china will sell us back our own technology by 2030
@@cpt_bill366 If we can pop energy out like jelly beans...anywhere in the world... and above it or below the sea... which is the potential here, the reason for all these wars.... and bombs largely goes away. We're just left with the megalomaniacs... and we can develop a pill for that.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
@@vxworks66 I didn't even know about that. Is that the chineese one?
He has returned.
I subscribed again on my new accnt just today lmao
this video is a propaganda video with zero real input other than plz stop regulating my industry with shit out of Ayn rand's novel like 'oh those Bad actors'? Is this video a joke or wtf
@@jonilappalainen6056 tf are you on about?
escuse me mam are you on drugs? or are you part of the "bad actors"@@jonilappalainen6056
This. Is. Propaganda.
You are indeed an@@unqualified_engineer
I literally was looking for your channel yesterday to see if you had posted any new cool videos, and I was so sad there hadn't been for a year. BUT TODAY HE HAS RETURNED, WE HAVE BEEN BLESSED
I believe he runs the Bleak Science channel as well, where we get good quality snarky science delivered from time to time.
same!
He has been using his time on another channel of his ( don't remember what is called )
I thought he had abandoned us. Not sure what to think of it.
Edit: It's called "Bleak Science"
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
@@Hi-Im-RubX thanks bro
So to make this reactor work, you need a highly radioactive material, combined with a highly corrosive material, at high temperature, mixing with another pretty radioactive and corrosive material, also at high temperature, and you need to remove another material from all of this otherwise the system fails.
And then to top it all off you have to get the government involved.
Suddenly it all makes sense why this tech has been theoretical for so long.
Good break down on how it breaks down.
These are engineering problems. It isn't theoretical either, a react ran for a number of months in the 60s I believe.
@@antarcticmonkeys Was called the MSRE at Oak Ridge. It was a test reactor and ppl say it was kinda succesful.
It is an unfair characterisation of the technology. First, every reactor uses radioactive material, which gets hot, and even more radioactive during operation. Corrosion happens in every industry including the current PWRs. That is being said water is actually more corrosive than salt I see a lot of confusion about this. The removing of materials breaks down to realtively simple chemical steps. I see, also, not a lot of ppl knows that nuclear fuel reprocessing happens in salts anyway, so unless you prefer throwing away 95-96% of the useful fuel as "high level nuclear waste" that no one wants in their backyard or even under their mountain you already on the side of doing this sort of chemistry on our spent fuels. This proposal merely means they cut out the fabrication step and do reprocessing in situ.
"And then to top it all off you have to get the government involved" so does in case of building highways, fight crime, catastrope relief, provide security, education, healthcare, pension etc. I don't like the goverment not a tiny bit more than you, but ppl tend to forget what we gain by not living in a complete anarchy.
"Suddenly it all makes sense why this tech has been theoretical for so long."
The two thing correlates. If it has been pursued when it was first conceived, we would already either perfected or discarded the technology by now.
Didn't China already built at least one thorium salt reactor?
You forgot to mention that you can run a lifter like molten salt reactor for urainium also.You can pretty much use any fissile or fertile material in there.
Yes, ThorCon plan to use a mixture of 235U and thorium, so the thorium does not turn it into a real breeder it just reduce the time needed before refuelling.
@@seanprice7645 this isn't correct. ThorCon's design is not a modified breeder at all, it's a uranium burner to which thorium is added. You could do this with *any* nuclear power plant: just replace some of the U238 with Th232. In any case this seems a moot point. Last time I heard, ThorCon have been looking away from using thorium because they can't get the necessary fuel: it's just easier and simplier to run with standard low-enriched-uranium. This turns out to be true for almost *any* design that uses thorium: it's just easier and cheaper to use uranium. Which is why there is very little real interest (i.e. outside of the internet) in using thorium in any timescale anyone cares about.
CANDU reactors, a design from the 60's, use non-enriched uranium for fuel currently, and are perfectly cable of the Thorium breeding cycle and fuel re-processing with stuff like MOX cycles.
Which is oen reason they are not looking closely at Thorium yet, they are more interested is using waste fuel from older nuclear plants before they start looking at new fuel types.
Well Thorium molten salt reactors basically do run on Uranium. Uranium 235 (Neutron source to start the breeder reaction), Uranium 238 and Uranium 233. As well as a hundred ( I have no idea ) other actinides. I have high hopes for LIFTER, but doubt America will be able to do it. Unfortunately the bureaucratic state is much like the USSR and nothing is going to get done.
Chinese and indian researcher is quite advanced in thorium tech.
India will commission its Prototype Fast breeder reactor in 2024 for our 2nd stage of nuclear programme.
In third stage we intend to using Thorium which is present in abundant supply in India instead of nuclear fuel which is imported
th-cam.com/video/o_8sQ-h6HAU/w-d-xo.html
India and China are leading this "race"!
And China has already turned on its thorium reactor in the Gobi and announced its thorium fueled shipping fleet!
@@stickynorth India is not lagging behind in terms of thorium reactor development, but rather pursuing a different and more comprehensive approach than China. India’s thorium programme is based on decades of research and experience, and has the potential to revolutionise the global nuclear energy scenario.
Jai 😊
@@stickynorthChina also hacked datas from indian thorium reactor 2 years ago
At around 5 minutes, it was mentioned it takes a month to refuel a power plant after 18 months of usage... Depending on the plant, the outage might only last less than a week, with refueling only taking a few days. Other maintenance is way more time consuming in general, from my experience. Usually during refueling all the other work is done, too, taking up most of the outage time
CANDU reactors are not shut down for refueling at all.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
@@vxworks66 Got any more specific information on that?
Coming as someone who works with typical U-235 LWRs, my biggest question with Thorium is what do you do to start back up the plant when it inevitably shuts down?
You can't run it forever, equipment (especially pumps) will need maintenance overhauls at some point or some sensor fails and brings you offline.
Is molten salt really going to allowed to solidify in the piping? If so how will you unblock these solid masses of salt to get flow again? I assume a massive amount of heat tracing but haven't seen a commercially viable answer to this.
th-cam.com/video/o_8sQ-h6HAU/w-d-xo.html
Just spitballing here, but the nice thing about modular reactors is you can have more than one. So it seems plausible that you could have one shut down for maintenance while others continue to operate.
You can drain the pipes into a heated tank, it doesn't have to solidify in the piping.
Run the salt lines inside larger pipe? It's extra containment, and When plant running such could maybe serve as heat exchanger. To warm up salt... instead of feeding water in...feed in steam.
Nb unlike water, the proposed molten salts are likely to behave as most materials do and and contract on freezing. Lower chance of burst pipes. And for horizontal runs...there'll likely be a small volume of pipe left unfilled by frozen salt, along which hot salt would be able to flow during a restart.
It's a relatively short circuit and limited quantities of fuel, and the heat is about 400*c to keep the salt liquid, no big deal, if one pump stops I guess you can have a secondary parallel circuit implemented as a back up while you repair the main one. We are dealing here with cheap materials at atmospheric pressures.
As pointed out by LFTR advocate Kirk Sorenson, the current, conventional Cro-Magnon technology reactors work on a razor/razor blade profit model. The money is not made by building the plant. It is made by supplying the custom fuel elements/modules. Thus, I will extend that point to say that there is a lobby against reactors like LFTRs where the "fuel elements" can be supplied in drums and/or bags that anyone can make and are not proprietary. Thus, I predict that thorium reactors will originate in China where there isn't a lobby against that.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant in China has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
The fundamental problem with LFTRs is the same as what killed all previous attempts to make breeder reactors, namely proliferation.
Breeders naturally produce weapon's grade material, and with the chemical separation on these thorium reactors it's even worse, because you essentially have pure U233 on tap.
Thorium fanboys have long claimed that U232 poisoning prevents this, but this ignores the enormous difference in halflife, which allows the U232 to simply be skimmed off before the Pa233 -> U233 decay has barely even started.
"Skimmed off". You're funny. You skimmed over how hard it is to do just that. Trying to separate nearly identical atoms with only a single neutron weight difference. At best breeder reactors won't get you more than 40%-60% purity. Way south of fissile capable. Gotta hit 92% for the boom. Getting the last six percent takes the most herculean efforts.
"Skimmed off". You're funny. You skimmed over how hard it is to do just that. Trying to separate nearly identical atoms with only a single neutron weight difference. At best breeder reactors won't get you more than 40%-60% purity. Way south of fissile capable. Gotta hit 92% for the boom. Getting the last six percent takes the most herculean efforts.
@@brianhirt5027 There is no need to separate them by weight. Stop repeating that myth.
I'm talking about the CHEMICAL separation of U from Pa, which is something a LFTR _already does_ during normal operation.
Because Pa232 has a 20.4x shorter halflife than Pa233, 99.99993% is already long gone by the the time that merely _half_ of the U233 is done processing.
@@Dayanto Go argue with Wikipedia & the NRC about the physics. I'm sure they'll be appropriately impressed. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons-grade_nuclear_material
@@brianhirt5027 You separate the U232 from the PA233 before the PA233 decays into U233. Just wait a few months and less than one part per BILLION of PA232 would remain and the PA233 would be down to about 1/8 the original. At that point, very simple chemical separation would allow you to easily produce weapons grade material superior to plutonium.
Dumbass.
Anti nuclear people are halting human progression so much its insane. Also the road to clean, sustainable energy.
Those types of individuals aren't swayed by facts and reason. Only anger and fear.
They've been brainwashed their whole lives and only accept information that confirms their bias.
the dumber people is the one that shout the loudest
A lot of them are astroturfed by Fossil and adjacent companies anyway. I bet these so-called "green activists" probably couldn't even tell you the real answer to what would be the best course of action to solve the climate crisis - which is to cut out consumption of underground carbon (fossil fuels) for electricity.
Imagine Greenpeace actually does what their name indicates and we actively build nuclear reactors in the past 20 years. We'd have solved the majority of CO2 from electricity by now.
Anytime you have isotopes that decay this rapidly, you have intense radiation. This sounds like a real "dirty" process.
The biggest problem is gonna be cost. Uranium NPPs already struggle on the market due to their high costs, even in countries that can mine their own Uranium (USA) and Thorium NPPs are going to be even more expensive.
Thorium is much cheaper and there is less waste which can be more easily stored or reprocess.
For me to use thorium just need a just a little uranium as starter just imagine uranium like the stone to begin the fire in a firecamp
@@cas1652 The fuel isn't the prohibitive cost factor.
Shutting down a conventional rod reactor every 18 months isn't as bad as having to replace flow structures in a molten salt reactor sometimes as often as every 200 days. The cool thing about water being the moving part in conventional reactors is that unless things go way way off the rails the water is stupid safe and doesn't tear up the pipes. Molten salt reactors just add an absurd step of ALSO moving the fuel around. If you think liquid salt fuel that is liquified by the radioactive fissile action internally is somehow going to "cool off" when it isn't moving through a cooling system or especially if the cooling system fails and you end up with elephant feet inside the reactor system I'll be more than happy to take seed money for my new outlet expander that doubles the amount of power available from 15A to 30A on a conventional household outlet!
YESSS!!!! AN ACTUALLY VIDEO UPDATE AGAIN! I know these videos are expensive to produce subject zero but I love and im very happy you made another of these its been a while sense u uploaded here!
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
I don't think we should discount or dismiss everything China does simply because they are organized around a different ideology than most Western countries. The fact is, serious breakthroughs on thorium technology are more likely to come from China than anywhere else, because of how much their government has directed to be invested in thorium projects. I don't see any other country advancing as quickly as China in thorium development, without similar levels of state direction.
I think calling the nuclear industry "plagued by accidents" is a bit extreme.. and that's an understatement..
No it's not. Search "Death rates per unit of electricity production" in Ourwolrdindata. Your welcome
I know right! Like he thinks there have been 3 Chernobyl incidents, 5 Fukushima incidents, and that Three Mile Island was an actual accident and has happened at least twice.
Indeed. There is a reason why the IAEA takes its cues from US Navy Nuclear Program. Thanks to Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, there has NEVER been a reactor related accident.
The major hurdle is money, those that stand to loose their monopoly and those that are funded by the same, through lobbyists. If something doesn’t make sense, always follow the money. Politicians are the winners and humanity is the loser
One of my favorite channels. Glad to see you!
New to the channel and your voice was so nice and clean, i started getting paranoid about ai voice bs. Went through your archive to make sure, and i gotta applaud your consistency of narration, while also improving in your oration
I love your content, keep on strong!
Thorium cycle has a nasty hard gamma ray spectrum that will need some engineering to protect against. Not a game-ender, but important.
put it underground or whatever, not an issue.
Continuing to gloss over this issue and not even mentioning it in most sunshine pumping essays such as "whatever, not an issue", is a big issue.
Great video! Very informative and well written! Always love your animations and visuals!
There are two technologies involved here. 1. A Thorium breeder reactor and 2. a molten salt reactor. The combination (if scientific challenges are met, like the corrosion problem etc.) is in theory awesome, but a molten salt reactor, fuelled with Uranium is so much more efficient than a traditional one (water cooled under pressure), that you could fuel them with nuclear waste (plenty of it available), greatly reducing the waste in volume, as well as reducing the time you have to store it safely. So maybe, we could build some molten salt reactors and in time, add the breeder-unit and switch to Thorium later.
20 years from now a factory in China will be shipping small Thorium reactor power plants every month. 10 years later, the thorium power generation market will drive out all other types of power plants and electricity & heat will be half current prices.
Meanwhile back in reality
Thanks for the Thorium review, good to see your video. Material Science has come a long way, though I understand maintance on a corrosive system like that will be problematic. I hope it comes about some day, would be nice to have safer energy being produced, at least until we figure out how to tap Zero Point energy like the other cool fantasy aliens do....
You don't need StarGate technology.
th-cam.com/video/10Dt4nr5g_c/w-d-xo.htmlsi=4X7ySk6QRXMpWxDl
Powered by Plasmoids
(looks around, see if anyone is watching) (makes some Zero Point energy)
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
Love the videos brother, keep making and I'll keep watching!!!
Glad to see you back!
China approved building a thorium salt reactor last year.
Partially correct: China approved building a 2 MWthermal thorium molten salt reactor (MSR) 3-4 years prior to last year. It started up in August 2023. It is about 1/4th the size of the Oak Creek test MSR reactor of the 1960's.
The key purpose is to see if we now have a suitable "super-alloy" along with a side stream chemical separation process that works well enough to control the corrosion rate to an acceptable level that would allow construction of a future 40+ year operating life power plant reactor in the future. It will be many years before we know the answer to that question.
The Oak Creek MSR reactor had a huge issue with corrosion as the daughter products from splitting atoms and the chemical compounds they form are extremely corrosive. The key reason there was never a 2nd generation MSR test reactor was that no known alloy of the day could withstand the corrosion rate of the "in use" circulating molten salt mixture.
We have missed you
Your channel should have atlast 5mln subscribers to start with
Your videos are always such good quality
Something that immediately jumped out to me about this design is that the chemical processing plant is outside the primary containment vessel, and contains insanely hot, toxic, corrosive, radioactive, and likely chemically reactive molten salts.
What happens if part of that molten salt rube goldberg machine springs a leak? I'm assuming that flaming hot radioactive poison salt mix would react to atmospheric oxygen with... enthusiasm. My understanding is that thorium reactors are inherently safe from meltdowns, but it still seems like you could end up with a serious radioactive accident on your hands if anything in there fails. I know that's a concern with the primary steam loop in a traditional reactor too, but while the water is radioactive, it's also water. The shit flowing through these pipes would be massively more dangerous than some radioactive steam...
From what I understand the half life of the chain is only something like 60 days, so long term radioactivity isn't an issue.
I'm not a chemist, but I'm not sure oxygen will react strongly; oxygen fluorides would be highly endothermic to create. I also don't know if the byproducts of any such reaction would be gas; if they're solid it won't spread very far.
In short, I imagine a major mishapwould just result in a local poisonous spill that while bad is comparable to any other industrial accident.
So everything has to stay above 400° at all time or all the piping has to be replaced?
Why all the pipping?, only what is deteriorated, and this is a technology that requires only cheap alloys and work at atmospheric pressure, so it's cheap and easy to replace. And to keep the heat at 400* in a small circuit is not a big deal.
@@WilhelmGuggisberg Not sure about the cheapness of the alloys. While the issue being addressed is different (i.e. pressure for LWR and corrosion resistance and chemical induced fatigue for MSR), the materials for the MSR are still fairly exotic and therefore relatively expensive, at least so far. The cheap and east to replace part is also questionable, as the big difference in repair costs is whether the particular pipe/part has been directly exposed to fuel/radiation or not, regardless of the reactor type. One of the issues with traditional MSR designs is fuel and/or fission products plating out on piping. Some designs plan for sacrificing all the fuel contact parts on fairly short timeframes kind of like cladding is sacrificed in traditional solid fuel reactors to address this, others have more elaborate schemes.
As far as all the parts/piping needing to be kept at high temp, that is only when running. If the reactor is shutdown for repair, the fuel salt would be drained away, allowing the entire active part of the reactor to cool without significant issues. After repair, you heat it up again prior to reintroducing the fuel. Of course if the part being repaired/replaced has been in contact with fuel salts, the cost just spiked significantly.
Good to see you back Sir😄.
Try to keep animations simple & easy to render in order to make your production process faster and focus more on the core topic of the video sir.
We would love to see more from you🙂.
Me too. I'm so happy. I know these are expensive for him to produce, but I hope he keeps going
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
Glad to see you back
Goddamn man, it's been so long since you posted I was worried you got shipped off to the front. It's good you're back, I love yr vids! Do whatcha gotta do homie and take care of yourself.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
Safer than wind? Curious! I'm not doubting that that might be the case, I'd just love to hear more/read the evidence on that!
A little bird told me... :)
Don't get your hopes up, that's just BS...
Knowing that molten salt needs to be run under very high temperatures, what about energy loss from the dissipation of heat?
"what about energy loss from the dissipation of heat?"
The heat goes into making electricity.
The laws of thermodynamics mean that if the difference between input and output temperatures is large, then the efficiency of power generation is greater. So very high temperatures are a benefit. You just have to make sure that there's a lot of insulation on the pipes between the reactor and the turbines generating electricity so you don't waste all that heat.
Also the high temperature means you can use the Sulphur-Iodine cycle to make hydrogen more efficiently than converting heat into electricity and then using the electricity to electrolyse water.
This video about thorium is very interesting and informative. Plus, you have the the most ASMR voice.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
The way to test the viability of a substitution and eliminate all the FUD arguments is as follows: (1) Assume the proposed replacement is the entrenched process. (2) Make the case for the actual process as better than the proposed process. This limits the inertia of the entrenched process which shouldn't enter into the question at all. And this technique proves it.
the return of the king
Summary of Tech advance in 21st century.
The west: Finding excuses of why it can't be done.
China: Went ahead and already finished it.
You realize the US had already pioneered Thorium reactor technology on the USS Seawolf(SSN-575)? The main reason why Admiral Rickover rejected it was that it never delivered on the claims. Further, it was an accident waiting to happen should sea water contact the internal components.
It's more like this
The west: Already did it but can't seem to do it again due to political reasons.
China: Builds on what the west already did.
A little before 7.0 minutes, you said “the governments are not in the business of solving the problems.”. It is so true for most of the countries, including the developed countries.👍
Great animation. Very well explained 👏
But didn't China just open its first Thorium Power plant last year and isnt it planning a 24,000 TEU cargo ship fleet powered by Thorium SMR's?
Yes and Yes. The Chinese Thorium (test) reactor was licensed on June 7, 2023 and is located in the Gobi desert region. It is operational.
There is also talk that China might use a Thorium reactor in a future aircraft carrier.
No doubt they will! I think the public cargo/military evacuation ships are probably first before the out and out military applications like aircraft carriers are coming, but they are a coming!@@ltribley
The host of this channel is biased against China. He said "I'm skeptical of everything China does". I don't know, this is supposed to be a science channel, not politics or Chinese hating channel. He decided to ignore the achievements because they are from China. Mind boggling!!!!
A very fair take on the situation 👍
Love your stuff! I hope all is well!
Happy to see you back SZS
Tbf it does also kind of go against the grain of some newer reactor designs, a lot of which are increasinly implementing inherent safety designs and focus on being more simple to build and modular. Thorium has potential, but needs a lot to get going when any development in the nuclear industry apart faces huge scepticism and a hugely uphill battle on all fronts.
If China is investing into them, they could set about the base level knowledge and supply chains that let it spread a bit more. Whether or not it's ideal, China is one of the few countries now making advancement in Nuclear power. Doubtful if this will result in positive effects on approval of the technology, seems more likely it will end up as just another way to demonise it counterfactually.
Also, to be fair an "infinite fuel cycle" as Thorium could feasibly do failed in the original nuclear rennaisance, although with Thorium it's self-contained within the reactor, it relies on a great deal of ambition and confidence in the future of the technology.
IF china can handle their nuclear powerplants in the long run, it would serve as popularity boost. E.g. If china can, we can etc.
Note that China has ordered 6 more Westinghouse AP-1000 reactors (nominal 1150-1200 MWe) beacause the 4 AP-1000 units they built are running better and more efficient than their own most current designed nuclear power plants.
Perhaps the west still knows some things that the Chinese does not know about nuclear power plants.
Good to see you back SZ! 🎉
There is also competition form the fusion side (ITER project) who are afraid they have to share their research funding with thorium research.
The biggest hurdles to Thorium Breeders are the high operating temperatures in the fuel cycle and the crazy safety devices and materials needed to safely contain molten Soidium cooling loops and heat exhangers...
Even in China share of nuclear has stagnated.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
The fact that the half life of Pa233 is about 10 times longer than Np239 means that breeding enough fuel for another reactor takes about 10 times longer than a U238 fast breeder reactor.
India started a project to have the country running on Thorium. They estimated it would take about 70 years to get a full fleet of nuclear reactors running on the Thorium cycle. That was 50 years ago and they're still in the early stages. In the UK Rolls-Royce estimated it would take 200 years to breed enough U233 from Th232 to run the country on Thorium.
The time it takes to breed enough U233 from Th232 is the biggest problem.
You can start the process by adding other fissile materials to the mix, that's not a relevant issue.
You start with some U235 in the mix, within 90-120 days, you’ve bred enough U233 to sustain the reaction, and you always introduce new Th232 to keep the breeding going. With the 160KY half-life of U233, you can extract/add U233 in the fuel mix as needed.
The burnup rate can exceed 90% because the fuel is constantly being “reprocessed”. So, not only is Th232 more abundant in nature, you can use nearly 100% of it, unlike Uranium. Yes, it’s tricky to keep processing the fuel to remove undesirable isotopes and reintroduce desired ones, but the benefits are huge.
@@geoffstrickler "Burn up" doesn't make sense to me in this context, as we're not talking about a fixed amount of fuel, unlike solid fueled reactors. I think you'll find the majority of potential benefits are the result of MSR generally, not Th specifically.
Whether there are potentially "huge" benefits to use of the Th cycle is dependent on where in the world you are. If you have lots of Th and little to no U, then the benefit is obvious. If not, then much less so.
@@richardbaird1452 you’d be wrong about that. Th232 is one of the few isotopes suitable for a “breeder” reactor. As for worldwide availability, Thorium is widely available in basically every country, and is 4x as abundant as uranium. Uranium deposits are limited to a few countries and seawater (low densities so extremely expensive to extract). So, everything you wrong is incorrect.
India faced lots of delays in the process, but the installation of stage 2 fast breeder reactor of 500MW was a huge development. But still it has long way to go, they say we will have fully functioning thorium based reactor by 2047 and considering the economic development in India, it will only incentivize the process and will reduce the possibility of delays like earlier.
One major factor in delay of this technology is assassinations of many of our nuclear scientists.
Interesting analysis; appreciated.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
When it comes to public perception of nuclear power, what are the steps that have been taken for nuclear power to be seen in positive light?
Facts, facts and more facts... Just look at Visual Capitalst and their section on nuclear power... That alone should snap into focus the realities of the industry... It's as clean as solar, wind or geothermal but almost always available... I am pro renewables but I am also pro nuclear. Whatever decarbonizes the world as fast as possible, I am all for!
The biggest problem with Thorium you hit on at the very start, but decided to go down another road.
Thorium reactors are breeder reactors, which means you make more fuel than you consume. This fuel, because you're dealing with fissile materials, means you can skim off some and use it for weapons.
I hear a lot of people state that Thorium is "safe" because of the n,2n reaction and no one would try to gather the U233 for weapons because of the dose from those n,2n reactions (and the gammas they emit). U233 has a half life of 160k years, someone that had the patience can easily wait out the n,2n reaction before gathering the U233 for weapons.
So, this is why any country that is serious about following the Non-Proliferation treaties will never take a serious look at LFTR and any county that is will be getting a serious amount of scrutiny from those countries that have signed various NPTs.
As someone that has a degree in Nuclear Engineering, I can tell you that you are very much less likely to have issues with any governments if you're using "burner" reactors (the typical reactors you see now) than if you're dealing with "converters" (make as much fuel as you consume) or "breeders" (like LFTR where you make more fuel than you consume).
The world does not seem too fazed by North Korea so I doubt that "biggest problem" you mention is de facto the biggest problem. I think the anti-nuclear lobby is in fact the biggest de facto problem to Thorium.
I also did not hear any mention of how they take care of xenon, which is produced in the process and kills the reaction.
Rule 1: When something sounds too good to be true, it rarely is. One of the many problems with Thorium, that are barely mentioned is the low breeding rate. There simply aren't enough neutrons available to produce an excess of U233.
That's what the lithium beryllium salt is for. Beryllium-9 has the neat property that if you hit it with a neutron, it immediately decays into 2 alpha particles and 2 neutrons. So you multiply the number of neutrons floating around by 2. Which means that by tuning the ratio of beryllium to thorium, you can tweak the breeding rate into something self sufficient. They use a similar trick at ITER to get the fusion reaction to breed enough fuel.
Of course this comes with the massive downside that you are now using Beryllium as a fuel, which is pretty rare. Worldwide production of Be is only like 200 tons a year, and ITER alone is eating up 10% of that. If we wanted to use molten salt thorium reactors, we'd quickly run out of Beryllium and the costs would be truly astronomical. As always, the problem with nuclear is pure cost. Not any of the made up problems like activists or a renewable energy lobby, and its not something you can realistically fix by trying alternate fuel cycles. At the end of the day, its just a lot cheaper to build renewables and they have a faster return on investment. Which is why everyone is building renewables and nuclear is left to die a quiet death.
@@harmenkoster7451 Thank you! That was new to me. But as you say, it sounds that it's not a sustainable solution either.
@@harmenkoster7451 "As always, the problem with nuclear is pure cost. Not any of the made up problems like activists or a renewable energy lobby, and its not something you can realistically fix by trying alternate fuel cycles. At the end of the day, its just a lot cheaper to build renewables and they have a faster return on investment. Which is why everyone is building renewables and nuclear is left to die a quiet death." - Sadly I see ALOT of people thinking that nuclear fission power is the cheapest source of energy and that renewables are only built due to subsidies.... I just dont understand where that weird hate boner for renewables come from. Is it because people associate it with the climate activists and taxes?
Well, and then there is the issues of implementation. The US Navy could never get it to work on the USS Seawolf (SSN-575), which is why Admiral Rickover rejected the design.
@@xXYannuschXx I notice this too. Is it the Nuclear lobby and spin doctors at work? While in reality the cheapest electricity (in my country anyway) comes from renewables. And nuclear was heavily subsidised as well.
Top notch visuals, as always
Welcomeeeee back ❤ keep working....
India already built it
500MW stage 2 fast breeder reactor, we are working on stage 3.
Sorry, but this is cut short in so many ways. First of all: thorium reactors have been built test wise and they were found to be problematic because of the insane high corrosion due to the salt. This means, that these reactors need repairs after around 2 years. That means draining the reactor, cleaning it, replacing the parts and the starting it up again. This alone is a big reason why it is economical not feasible. The other part is, that any nuclear reactor comes with very high building times, as when compared to solar or wind, you may need a couple of years. The safer and faster return of investment here is clear. All that together makes it hard to find anyone investing in it, if its the government (because of ideological reasons) or private investors, for which the sums are waay to high for that kind of uncertainty. Current already established research is going to make wind and solar probably even cheaper, and energy storing techniques are improved every day, so we can buffer them. I would like to see a video from you about that, actually. Otherwise cool animations!
Indeed. All of these advocates of Thorium reactors seem to ignore that the US Navy has already tested the designs in the USS Seawolf (SSN-575). There is a reason why Admiral Hyman G. Rickover rejected it.
Solar and wind will never work in regions closer to the poles. Heck, go close enough to either pole and the sun will be gone half a year. Wind is not reliable, usually when the temperatures drop, the wind dies down, precisely the time when you need the most energy. The only thing that delivers at times like that is oil and nuclear, to lesser degree hydropower.
Broo, welcome back!
Very imprecise information here as others have stated.
A plane in Turkey crashed just before some scientist were about to explain the Thorium problem...
Get out off the west and look at india as we have fully developed thorium reactor with no waste left
Great video!
I understood because of the low pressure and the auto shut down method, no containment vessel is required. That is one of the great benefits of the product.
EVERY nuclear power plant MUST have a containment to withstand a commercial aircraft collision (ever here of 9-11?). The containment of current reactors meet that requirement as so called Thorium reactors would have to as well
Anti china propaganda huh?
Stop blaming greenpeace. Start blaming simple economics and money.
Go and ask a big insurer what it costs to insure your nuclear power plant, ask him what it costs to insure any fossil or renewable power plant. Then go to a bank, and give the bank your cost breakdown and business plan, and compare that to any renewable.
True. The regulation and associated cost to comply are the biggest issue. Investors and power companies are not going to fund the building of a plant that takes 20 years to build with negative returns and historically crazy overages, over simply building a gas plant in 2 years for 1/50th the cost lol.
There's certainly a bit of market failure there. But keep in mind that these plants do not replace renewables, they replace coal and gas at the point where renewables cannot, not without a huge breakthrough in energy storage. Which actually makes it a little worse: if renewables provide the bulk of our power and nukes are only used to make up the shortfall, then the cost per kWh is even worse.
But in general, nuclear power isn't that expensive... the problem is the enormous risk associated with regulatory issues, and the large up front investment required. One way to address this is to not treat every nuclear plant as a separate project, but build several. Another way would be for the government to build these, if private parties are reluctant to make the investment. The thing is: we will need either coal / gas plants, or nukes. Renewables cannot as yet provide 100% of our power. With that in mind, it's worth calculating whether it makes sense to build nukes, or to keep some gas plants around, and accept the CO2 they emit (or sequester it).
But sadly no one around here seems to be willing to make any actual plans. We're already dealing with an overloaded grid, and politics are more concerned about distributing the capacity "fairly" than with doing anything about it.
These are gen four reactors too, companies don’t want to risk billions on a design only tested by 1-2 reactors at a national lab in the 70s. Which is one of the main reasons they just keep building LWRs (along with all the regulation hurdles mentioned in other comments).
@@nathanj202yes another issue is that most of the Gen IV concepts are created by startups with no established means to actually build a plant unlike say GE or Westinghouse who are focusing on newer LWR designs for the same reasons you stated.
People here citing "regulations" are trying to make that out to be the biggest hindering factor, but you got to remember that regulations are the reason why nuclear energy is the safest form of energy production that it is - even safer than wind energy, actually.
What's really hindering Nuclear is corporate lobbies, they're the ones propping up unnecessary/unwanted bureaucratic hurdles to compete against nuclear progress; let's not forget that they fund "green" activists too.
He's BACK! Your side channel is fun but this one has a solid following.
India : first world ☕☕😂
Worked at GE than two thorium start ups and now with KEPCO.
One major hurdle is what happens if a shutdown is required.
Actually the major hurdle is COST
I feel somewhat misrepresented in this video. I am an avid anti nuclear activist, but I never lobbied against Thorium Reactors or Nuclear Fusion or any research projects in Nuclear Fission. I am just against a very badly maintained nuclear reactor (Tihange) built in my vicinity and I know a lot of people in my neighborhood who see things as I do.
More research in nuclear energy technologies will make things safer and why should an (let's call it) anti conventional nuclear powerplant activist be against research?
I am just against nuclear powerplant companies that cut corners, which unfortunately is a thing.
Why should I tolerate that someone is risking the whole landscape I grew up in for a profit margin they should have put in maintaining the powerplant to keep it as safe as possible?
So please don't blame it on me that there might not be Thorium Reactors in our future.
This video was doing all right UNTIL, he decided the pull that worn out old trope, the green(peacers), are largely, if not entirely to blame for any problems, real or imagined in the nuclear energy field. And no, I am not with GP, nor do I know anyone that is in that org. But I do know a strawman when I see them, and its appears here@ 7:32
We haven't heard from you in a while.....am happy to get u back🎉😮😮🎉🎉🎉❤ science zero for ever✊✊✊😉
Molten Salt Reactors have already been built and are providing energy in a number of countries including Indonexia, which bought a ship borne MSR from an American company called ThorCon, and China put at least one online last year. India is setting up several and we have a couple pilot projects underway in the U.S. Terrapower is setting up a Natrium (fluoride sal) reactor in Wyoming on the site of a former coal plant and Flibe Energy is constructing one at the Pacific Northwest Nuclear Laab in Hanford, WA. Because of footdragging by the NRC, we are ten years behind China!
Correction, the Natrium reactor is not an MSR. It is a fast spectrum, metallic fueled, liquid sodium cooled pool type reactor along the lines of the EBR-II. The thermal storage scheme uses molten salts to provide wide load following ability, but they not involved in the operation of the reactor itself.
This was most informative ! I support thorium generation of electrical energy, I was not aware of all of the problems that you discussed.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
Welcome back! :D
I decided to watch this to see if the video made some kind of complicated mistake in reasoning. Nope. Turns out to be the same old 'Solar & Wind can't supply enough energy' mistake.
Yes, they can supply all the energy we need, more cheaply and FAR more safely than any nuclear option. Not only that, they can make energy production *decentralized*.
what happens if one of these go fop? irrespective of how possible that is, what happens? thorium into the atmosphere? what the effect?
The trouble with radioisotopes is chiefly that they do not have addictive toxic effluent pouring out of the exothermic reaction that generates the energy necessary to power technology. Crude oil distillates and the exhaust generated gives humans serious deleterious neurological side effects (they get high) as well as the energy generation. Quite simply put, humanity is a doper, and thorium doesn't get them high, that's why the disinterest.
This idea for Nuclear Power was introduced in the 1970's. Lobbyists convinced the Nixon administration (Bribed) that Uranium has more benefits and the team trying to get Thorium reactors built were shutdown and I believe they were financially ruined. A startup called Copenhagen Atomics are trying to revive this and they have an operational reactor in Indonesia and claim it produces 1 Giga Watt of power a day. (The average family of four in the U.S. uses about 5 kilowatts a day and I use the U.S. because it's normal for us to leave the house with utilities running. People in other nations shut down everything that draws power before they leave their dwellings).
I have a feeling Copenhagen Atomics is going to get shut down and bankrupted or their top engineers are going to be unalived. Several powerful entities, including Nations that don't have great human rights track records, have a hold on the entire energy sector and Thorium reactors would end that hold. Also billions of people are employed because of fossil fuels. The petrol industry makes up over 75% of the Global economy. There are people working at McDonald's right now who have no idea they're employed because of petroleum. Replace petroleum and the entire globe crashes.
It might be a good idea to look into hydrogen power. You can get a hydrogen generator, hydrogen storage facility and the equipment used to separate hydrogen and oxygen from water for 1/2 million dollars. Buy land away from the city that you can harvest your own produce on. Invest in the hydrogen generator that produces 10 kilowatts a day and make yourself independent and sovereign. Get a well system installed and a septic tank.
Thorium sounds great but looking at the insane situation the U.S. Government is putting the entire world in tells me we're going to all he devastated by war. Get your families to safety and invest in making your own electricity.
So, to summarize with a disclaimer of if I've understood this video correctly:
The biggest hurdles to Thorium energy are mostly political in nature as opposed to technical or engineering. There are technical and engineering hurdles, but with enough money and time, those can be addressed. But until the political issues are resolved, finding enough money through investment and regulatory hurdles are the biggest issues.
I get what you meant when you said that the nuclear energy industry was plagued by disaster but there have only been 3 nuclear plant disasters and 2 of them were from human error and negligence with one of them being partly from cut corners as well. The other one being Fukushima which was a tsunami. It does come off as you saying there have been numerous nuclear plant disasters which there haven’t been. It is a great video nonetheless
Three that people are aware of. Not on your list is the Kyshtym Disater, which was WORSE than either 3-mile Island or Fukushima. Neither is the Windscale Fire in the UK, nor the Swiss Lucens reactor meltdown. All three of those I listed are never mentioned by the anti-nuclear crowd.
@@davidford3115 The Kyshtym disaster and Windscale fire were both the result of nuclear weapons work, and have nothing to with nuclear power generation. The Lucens reactor meltdown was only a category four incident, with no radiation release outside the cavern which has since been decontaminated anyways. The problem with nuclear power is the cost of building new reactors, not the danger.
@@faroncobb6040 Windscale was not just weapons, it WAS used for power as well. You don't have cartages designated as fuel just for production of weapons grade uranium and plutonium.
Regardless, you are trying to downplay the examples I gave because they are inconvenient details and events. The fact that the anti-nuclear crowd NEVER mention them shows how dishonest their arguments are.
@@davidford3115 Pile 2 of Windscale was air cooled, using large fans during operation and with tall chimneys that would provide passive airflow for cooling even during shutdown. There was no provision for electrical generation at all, reactor designs for plutonium production have very little in common with designs optimized for power production.
@@davidford3115why would anti nuclear people NOT mention the accidents you did? Seems like that would help their case, not hurt it.
While this a thorium reactor, it is NOT the LFTR reactor design or cycle process that Kirk was proposing. Why?
Thorium reactors have been built and tested using all kinds of different reactor designs. Light water BWR & PWR, heavy water, HTGR (including pebble bed reactors), and of course the Oak Ridge MSR.
The USA even built 4 commercial thorium fueled nuclear power plants in the 1960's - 1970's using BWR, PWR, and HTGR designs. They were all technical and commercial economic flops (big time). Meanwhile many of their uranium counterparts work and were economical.
It seems that most TH-cam "experts" seem to know nothing about the history and attempts to make the thorium cycle work.
I think the overpromotion of Thorium damaged awareness of Uranium MSRs and hindered it's development.
"cheapest source of energy" ahh hidden comedy gems on TH-cam
I don't think the uranium mining industry can be particualrly in the way of "building up thorium infrastructure". Thorium is an abundant byproduct of rare earth mining and right now for the most part considered as a nuisance. One of the big advantage of the plan to use thorium is then we talk about material already mined and just sitting in piles as unwanted byproduct.
It's probably a byproduct of uranium mining too; if anything, they'd probably be more in favor of thorium power industry than against it.
There seems to be several different designs for thorium reactors but this one seems to put s so many points of failure in the same place and in series so that any failure anywhere, stops everything. It seems unimaginable that it would ever run for very long. People should look at West Valley New York, S,T,U and B plants at Hanford, and the
T H O R P facility in the UK to see just how messy it is to recycle fuel. I really don't see how cycling lithium through a neutron field is a good idea, given how everyone gets their panties in a bunch when they announced a release from Fukushima that is a tiny, tiny fraction of what would be produced if you ran lithium through a reactor for a long time.
I haven't seen anything that shows the other decay products or fusion and activation products produced in this process.
In India thorium reactors are always 5 years away, and always will be. The first time I heard about anyone working on them in India was 1997. It was actually in a conversation about how to control people's exposures to thorium sand beaches.
It would be nice if China would update everyone on their progress.
This is the best channel on TH-cam
Other than "lifter" can you describe "molten salt reactor's" limitations?
Welcome back
How do you make all these cool and detailed models and animations/videos dude?
"Private investors are usually smart..."
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Glad you covered the issues of Thorium. It appears to be a very promising technology that somehow may never see fruition.
th-cam.com/video/o_8sQ-h6HAU/w-d-xo.html
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.