No clickbait, no BS, just a well-planned presentation for laypeople. Illinois Energy Prof is one of the best channels on TH-cam. MORE! MORE! MORE! Please.
As a retired licensed reactor operator, thank you for the update. I try to keep up on the changes in the industry because people still ask me questions. You present the information that most lay people can understand and I do use your information because of the simplicity. The number of permits, federal, state, local, even the grid operator, is unbelievable. it seem like every three-letter agency that gets a say.
@@bfth121 Seriously. The #1 enemy isn't the number of regulations, or even their strictness, it's the sheer quantity of laws (and interpretations of laws) to navigate.
Hello Prof. David Ruzic. Great video, I always look forward to watching when I see a new upload. Another one I am sure you are aware of is the GE Hitachi SMR BWRX-300 currently being built in Canada. I drive by the construction site every day. As a nuclear engineer working in Canada it is exciting to see a new-style reactor being built in Canada, or any new reactor for that matter. Though the CANDU style is very unique and a pleasure to work on as well.
Here in the Netherlands, we have one major nuclear power plant. Borsele with a capacity of 485 MWe. Construction started in 1969 and the plant was online in 1973. About 5 years later. Building a nuclear power plant in only 5 years is, as we all know now, very very risky. It should take at least 20 years: 15 years for talking and 5 years for the construction. Funny thing... this plant will be in operation till at least 2033. That is 60 years of clean energy.
The French build them fast still --- that is because they use the same (continually improved) design with many of the same workers. The hope is that standardization, and being able to build reactor after reactor at one plant wiht the same workforce, and then ship them to different locations will make the process much quicker once the first few are made.
@@illinoisenergyprof6878 Thanks for your reply. Building the units in a factory will keep the cost down and improve the quality for sure. If they are intrinsically safe, do you need a containment building? Not having this enormous thick concrete dome will also speed up construction and keep cost down.
@@olafzijnbuis They end up selling SMR's in IKEA. The containment building is the last line of defence in a reactor design with water cooling. The water can expand, create hydrogen, disappear etc. and you have gas explosion or melt down. But if there is no pressure that risk i gone and the containment should be unnecessary. They only reason I could see you need it is due to exterior threats, someone running a car or plane into to the facility. But still you won't have a huge blowup, only some solidified salt or pellets which can be controlled.
@@olafzijnbuis i don't see the public accepting no containment building . hell i m surprised they got approval. when you have public hearings every dingbat and conspiracy nut will complain at the hearings. oh yes and realize the biggest dingbat - RFK is now going to be in the federal govt.he is anti nuclear to the core.
The gen IV reactors also produces more manageable waste. It is more radioactive, but decays much faster. Waste from old reactors can also be "burned" up in a gen IV reactor tuned for it.
Thank You Professor David. Hopefully there are no hiccups in the further development of this energy technology. I am 63 years old and my whole life electricity and energy are so taken for granted in this country. I live in upstate central NY, 3 nuclear reactors are still running (Oswego ) 24-7 providing carbon free electricity within 75 miles from me. This country needs to wake up about today and the future energy and electricity needs of this country and the world’s thirst for electricity. Nuclear is the answer to providing it. Looking forward to future videos from you on this subject. Thank You for your past videos on a variety of subjects 👍
Strangely enough, I have no professional need to know anything about nuclear reactors, but this is one of my favourite channels. I could probably listen to this guy talk about anything.
pro-tip: he writes on glass, the video is mirrored. Observe his belt buckle and shirt & coat buttons, compare to how they are in reality. Knowing how he does the magic does not detract from the great content, delivered so that non-technical people can understand it.
SMR is new and exciting tech! I see this type of reactor being a game-changer for interplanetary exploration and settlement. Would be perfect for the Moon, Mars and farther out. Hyper-interesting stuff! Thank you!
Kind sir you are a treasure, keep doing what you like, and I will always keep supporting your channel. You make one of the hardest endeavors known in modern society which is to educate people regarding nuclear energy which is often targeted by the stream of ignorant people whose only purpose is to steer the money away from beneficial projects whether they consciously know it or not.
I can’t even say how happy I was to see a new video from the Energy Prof. This is by far and away the best information on nuclear power and many other scientific fields available anywhere.
Hi Professor, in Australia, the federal opposition has announced they will build nuclear reactors here, most of them taking up land where coal plants are located or were there. The next election in 2025 will be a choice of nuclear future or renewables with gas fired stations as backup. I do hope for Australia to finally become a nuclear nation. It is great to see you back on YT. Have a great new year.
How exciting. It's about time we opened new reactors in America, especially considering all the advances in tech. Looks like people have been hard at work making it happen. Thanks for the video, you're a very good teacher. I get excited when I see you've posted a new video. Hell, I've seen 'em all, and they're all fantastic. This one is no different.
I hope these work out. I worked on the VC Summer AP1000 project that was cancelled in 2017. One of the major problems we had was finding qualified people to build the plants. We had to compete with a sister plant in Georgia at the same time (which did get built but at double the cost and years behind schedule). The problem wasn’t finding engineers as it was ironworkers, carpenters, electricians etc. Many that we did find were in their 50s and 60s. Young people don’t enter those professions any more (and we have fewer young people to begin with). And they don’t want to put up with nuclear requirements such as background checks and drug testing.
Very good points. This is why the smaller, modular reactors may be the answer. All the nuclear parts can be built in one location with one workforce and shipped.
@@illinoisenergyprof6878 And the power conversion side of the plant is the same as a coal or gas power plant, no nuclear specialized workers are needed.
Electric:cars,trains, planes,crypto money,AI and robots. Everyone is inventing and investing in something powered by electricity but very few are talking about from where and how will be produced
There is a giant hole in your description of this process of building and grid connecting a SMR. In the "benefits" section you talk about building SMRs serially in a factory, but in your "How to build a nuclear reactor" section, you do not mention the bit where they actually build the SMR factory. I am genuinely interested in how this bit works, since this is the bit that people haven't done before. Does the NRC regulate the factory production of ready-to-go nuclear reactors? Since this is a manufacturing process, do they need new regulations surrounding serial production and dispatch of complete, sealed reactors? Do those companies actually have factories already? What are the siting requirements in a nuclear reactor factory? There are so many unanswered questions about this I would like to learn about.
Those are really good questions. These first reactors will be built somewhere -- and it is not going to be at the site itself. My guess is that is what turns into the factory. All of the PSAR is about the construction of the reactor, so it covers the "factory".
@@illinoisenergyprof6878 Until I see a submission by one of these companies to a regulator for a SMR factory, I am going to be very skeptical about the M part of SMRs until they break ground on that and not the final site. EDIT: The part about the TRISO fuel manufacturing site near ORNL is a very good start though!
Glad you're back. Seems to me the cost savings of modular construction of reactors is similar to the cost savings of modular home construction vs. stick-built.
Knowing someone who is working on the development of another technology, thermal solar, it is quite a process. It involves simulations and actually constructing parts of the system to test those individually. Then eventually you have everything designed and that takes people who are experts on constructing this type of equipment. Then build it, and hope it works.
2:52 other things that are inherently safe are burning gold powder. above 300 degrees of temperature, the reverse reaction occurs bringing the burning gold powder's temperature down. Similarily hydrogen gas is inherently safe, at 3000 degrees temperature, the reverse reaction occurs enough that it sucks up the heat preventing the hydrogen gas from going hotter. 3000 degrees is low enough that it can't melt tungsten
Whoa, at 6:10 you just misstate what you meant to say: 320 *watts* electric rather than megawatts, and *200* megawatts thermal rather than the 800 that's the combined output of 4 units you're referring to...
I know. Since in the next sentence I said "Megawatts" and I wrote MW on the light board, we were hoping everyone would understand that it must be 320 MW thermal, 200MW electric.
*Illinois Engineering graduate (aerospace) here:* Great to see you back doing more videos Prof Ruzic. The timing is fantastic. I'm Australian but was lucky enough to go to Illinois on a sports scholarship. Right now here in Australia we are having a hell of a debate on what our future energy will be. I do think nuclear has to be considered, but unfortunately our pro-nuclear lobby are just as bat crap crazy as the pro-wind/solar lobby. Neither can be the 100% solution they want let alone the 82% wind/solar or 38% nuclear that they claim. All of the figures are ridiculous but the practicality of either solution kills it at the first hurdle. I hope you won't mind when I point a lot of people towards your TH-cam channel. FYI - for those wondering about the 82% and 38% figures and why they wrong I'll add to more comments below this one.
Why Australia's 82% Renewable energy has issues. The problem with renewables is NOT the issue with inconsistent power that is usually talked about. People talk about that because its the easiest issue to understand. Yes we hear all the arguments. The pro-wind/solar people counter that with we can build more in another place and the wind is always blowing somewhere is the solution. Plus we know the sun will always come up in the morning. The anti-wind/solar people then scream back - _"Who will pay for it?"_ or _"How much will it cost?"_ and the current favorite: _"It will spoil my views so build it somewhere else?"_ The issue we don't talk about much is a technical issue with noise on the AC network and its harder to understand. Whenever someone turns something on or off it generates spikes in the power grid. That seems like it can't be a problem because there's not that much power in a house, a building or even a factory compared to what power stations pump out. However what all that switching causes is noise on the power grid which you can actually see with an oscilloscope (maybe Prfo Ruzic can show this one day). The problem with that noise is that it can also have harmonics in it and harmonics can be very bad on an energy grid supplying a building full of computers or other equipment as it can cause catastrophic failures. I first became aware of the harmonics issue in the late 90s when my employer at the time showed me information he'd been sent by one of his college professors. It showed a noisy sine wave but not with bad noise but it was overlaid with nasty spikes. The problem with harmonics in large multistory office blocks are things like the 100s of switched mode power supplies in all the computers and UPSs. It can get so bad in some parts of buildings that nothing can be plugged except things like water heaters and kettles. This is a far more common issue than people know because its not talked about by anyone outside of those involved in dealing with those issues. The problem with renewables is the way the pump power onto a grid via inverters which do not put out a nice clean sine wave like a traditional generator. Be warned there is an advertising tag used by inverter manufacturers where they claim _"pure sine wave inverter."_ This is totally misleading and the Wikipedia page for "Power Inverters" details this. Even without inverters power generators have to be synched to the grid. The technology that is used for that is incredibly well proven and robust. between the generator is a synchronising relay and a circuit breaker and the synchronising relay wont let the break close until the generator matches the grid and will open if it falls out of sync. The problem is inverters don't or can't use these traditional technologies because they are DC supply being fed into a transistor pack and the control circuit for the transistor pack monitors the grid and tries to match it. The problem is that the transistors only switch on & off with short pulses that create a pseudo sine wave that has small steps in it. There's a drawing of this on the Wikipedia page titles "Power Inverter" right at the paragraph titled "Near sine wave PWM". *The real problem with inverters is they make harmonic issues worse because of the way they put that pseudo sine wave onto the grid.* The TH-cam Channel Real Engineering did a fantastic video on this subject titled "The Problem with Wind Energy" highlighting how this is now a major problem in Ireland and they are nowhere near the 82% Australia wants to get to. This was NOT a problem with previous power generation systems because they were based on large turbines (water or steam) and the physical mass of those turbines had inertia. Its the Inertia of those turbines that hold the frequency of the grid stable. With lots of renewables there's a loss of that inertia which held the frequency of the grid stable. So as Australia tries to go to 82% Renewables with lots of inverters attached to solar arrays, mega batteries and DC output Wind turbines, we are going to smash into the harmonic problem. Yes I am trying to get the current government to see this. Hopefully in the New Year things might change.
Why Australia's 38% nuclear power goal is a phantom. The real issue here is having a basic understanding of what any modern society actually needs in terms of energy. Yes its different for every society because of how their society is structured. The real issue is where did they get the 38% from and how do they think $330 Billion of nuclear can do it. Going back a couple of steps. Right now Australia has around 54GW of EFFECTIVE generating capacity which is a mixture of coal, gas turbine, hydro, a few other minor things and renewables. I say effective because any complex power grid is made up of a mixture of base load, load following and peaking. The coal, gas turbine and hydro are easy to get an estimate of because there's readily available lists that show Australia had 26GW of coal before shutting down a few plants. Currently has around 13GW of gas of which about 8GW is base load. Around 7GW of Hydro of which about 5GW is base load. The renewables is much harder to estimate because we have around 54GW installed but if you divide the Terawatt hours produced & sold to the market by 365 and 24 you get about 11GW. So its feasible to say Australia's renewables is currently equivalent to about 12gw of nuclear at 90% utilisation. Also Australia, and this is how I got very interested in our energy sector, has NOT BUILT and major power stations since before the year 2000. By major mean those power stations with name plate capacities over 1,000MW (or 1 GW). We did up grade a couple the largest of which was around an 800MW addition to an existing power station. I found this out during a project in 2016 about Australia's future energy needs. After the initial shock of finding out how badly Australia was planning its future I looked around the world and found this is very common. Due to a mixture of politics and seriously flawed economics, almost everyone across the developed world stopped building new power stations starting in the 1990s. You can go and look up the lists of power stations on Wikipedia. So Australia's power system wasn't actually designed for the 27 million we have right now. It was actually built for the 20-22 million we had back in the early 2000s. The reason why Australia like every other place that did this hasn't had an energy collapse is because we shipped our largest energy user the manufacturing sector to China. So considering this lets look back to the 38% figure and where it came from. If you take Australia's overall energy production of 273 Terawatt hours and divide by 365 and 24 you get that an energy system with a capacity of about 31.2 GW. Now if you start asking how much nuclear (AP1000 or EPR 2) running at 90% utilisation generates 38% of 31.2 then you get an answer of around 13GW give. If you look at the current costs of AP1000s (from Vogtle) or EPR 2s (from Hinkley Point C) and ask how much you can buy (at current prices) for AU$330 Billion you get a number just under 13GW. So it might be a bit convoluted but it is possible to work out where the claim that 38% of Australia's energy can be done using nuclear at a cost estimate of AU$300 Billion came from. *HERE'S THE PROBLEM* As I wrote earlier our power system was built for around 20-22 million people with a functioning manufacturing sector. it is now just limping along with a population of 27 million with most of that manufacturing sector gone to China. *By 2050 our population is expected to reach 40 million and by around 2090 60 million and our politicians want to rebuild the manufacturing sector that the economists shipped off to China. Added to that will be the demands from transportation and data centres both of which will be massive.* *AT BEST* the earliest Australia would get reactors on line will be 2035 irrespective if is current AP1000, EPR 2 larges scale technology or SMRs the first of our reactors will be finishing their 60year design life at a time when our population will be over 60 million with at least 3 times the energy demand and more likely over 4x the current energy demand. So either the 38% needs to be regarded as about 10% (or less) in the long term or if Australia is to have 38% of its energy be nuclear long term then its going to cost 3, 4 or more times the current AU$330 Billion *PLUS* the costs of grip upgrades. *AND THAT* is all without any consideration of the on going fuel costs, spent fuel storage and most importantly the site decommissioning and clean up costs for which EVERYONE should look at what the British ended up paying to clean up Sellafield.
*FINAL SUMMARY* YES - for those wondering I have been working on this for a while and I must thank people like Prof David Ruzic for there efforts because there's answers I would not have been able to give without their efforts. Australia is in a difficult place and that's not unusual as many other nations across the developed world are also in a difficult place. No matter who has been elected there has been a failure of government after government to make effective policy changes or have effective plans or get on and do anything. *THE ACTUAL PROBLEM* It was relatively easy to find the bug in the system the harder answer was why. In part the problem is due to a voracious media who's only goal is the next sound bite they can club the current government with *BUT IT IS MORE SO* the effects of Economists NOT understanding how energy works in a modern economy. I knew they loved to club engineers with lines like _"What's the business case for that?"_ and _"Who's going to pay for that?"_ because that's what I have experienced during 35+ years of project engineering across several industries. It wasn't until I heard contrarian (or rebel) economist Steve Keen say in an interview that mainstream economists don't even include energy in the models. The most famous example of this the the Cobb-Douglas model which claims Value is just a function of Labor and Capital which can be simply written as V = f(L,C). Note in that model Capital includes both money and machinery. Its all based on the _"Labor theory of Value"_ that *BOTH* Adam Smith (the founding father of Capitalism) and Karl Marx (the founding father of Communism & Socialism) believed in. Basically the 2 main economic concepts of the 20th Century *DO NOT* consider energy to play any part in economic value. Steve Keen's refute of models like Cobb-Douglas is the logical statement: _"Capital without energy is a statue and Labor without energy is a corpse."_ Not only did I find Steve's explanation of their modelling true but I have since found out that some economists don't even include money in their models. Even crazier than that as an engineer the models mainstream economists all use are based on theories of equilibrium in that the markets will self regulate and settle to a steady state. As someone trained as an Aerospace engineer I found that absurd as every system we have is dynamic with respect to time. There's changes, disturbances and imperfections in all systems. The reason cars have suspensions with shock absorbers is because there is no such thing as a perfectly smooth road. The reason why aircraft have to be carefully designed is so that air pockets and wind shifts and atmospheric turbulence doesn't throw the airplane into an unrecoverable state where either the plane tears itself apart of crashes. *THE PROBLEM WITH ECONOMISTS* is that unlike other sciences which have Fundamental Laws like Newtons Laws and the Laws of Thermodynamics, economics is based on ideas and theories that are unbounded by any fundamental rules of reality. This is why there's all the arguments over money theory. Because they have no rules they can basically make up anything they want in terms of models. Their models do not need to explain anything or be based on any fundamental concept like conservation of momentum. They just have to fit the data or part of the data. *SOME FINAL FACTS* For those who don't think Economists are a problem in respect of energy. Here are some basic facts. 1) Every politician is either an economist or has an economic advisor. None of them have an engineering advisor. 2) As far as I know NOT 1 country has an independent engineering advisory committee like the fact that all the central bankers are now independent and advise the government rather than the elected government instructing them. Here in Australia we have 2 reports of significance to the current energy discussion. One was by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) who have always been a scientific organisation with scientists and engineers. HOWEVER this report was by a team of economists within the CSIRO. The other report was commissioned by the political opposition and used a British consultancy and that report was also written by economists. *- Both reports* did not involve engineers and yet building and maintaining power stations and energy grids is an engineering task. *- These reports* had wildly different answers on nuclear energy. if economics is a science as economists claim then why are these reports so different for the same problem? This is the real crux of the problem. Engineers have been completely cut out of the public discussion so far. Its been dominated mostly by economists but also infested with collections of activists, Think Tankers and lobbyists all with their own agendas. The one thing not being discussed is: *_What can the engineers actually deliver?_*
Hey Prof, it's been a while. Good to see you again. OK, now to click 👍and watch the video. EDIT: 9:35 Are there any of these SMRs that are totally portable? As in, the entire operation mounted on / contained in one or more Standard Shipping Containers? Is the tech for something like that even feasible at this time? It would be amazing to simply drop off a couple semi trailers and Viola, here's your electricity! Even if it was like 10 semi trailers, one of which had the control room, another for the team of nuclear specialists that are in charge of operating the plant, that would still be really neato.
That is the general idea. There is another class of micro modular reactors that make on the order of 15MW of electricity that are indeed totally portable -- great for the military or remote mining operations. The ones I described here have the nuclear reactor part (or parts) arrive on trucks. One still has to pour a lot of concrete etc. on site. Still, the most complicated part can be made in one place and supply sites throughout the world.
When the world needed him most, He returned.
Someday I'll be early enough to post this.
I really new before entering the video that someone will write this comment.
They let him out of the 'Not-woke-enough' dungeon.
He's like Batman.!
I clicked this so fast my finger hurts now
Welcome back professor, we've missed you
Yes!!! Yes we did.
HOLY MOLY THE PROFESSOR IS BACK
Guy took a year off to recharge at the local nuclear plant
No clickbait, no BS, just a well-planned presentation for laypeople. Illinois Energy Prof is one of the best channels on TH-cam. MORE! MORE! MORE! Please.
Thanks for dislaying the shirt that I made for you!
Thanks Sweetie!
so wholesome :D
💯🇺🇸
Most reliable nuclear power show on the internet. Thanks for your return!
As a retired licensed reactor operator, thank you for the update. I try to keep up on the changes in the industry because people still ask me questions. You present the information that most lay people can understand and I do use your information because of the simplicity.
The number of permits, federal, state, local, even the grid operator, is unbelievable. it seem like every three-letter agency that gets a say.
DOGE 2025
@@bfth121
Seriously. The #1 enemy isn't the number of regulations, or even their strictness, it's the sheer quantity of laws (and interpretations of laws) to navigate.
12:10 "And I'll have other videos to come". Best. Christmas. Gift. Ever! 😁
These things are wildly optimistic. I'll believe it when I see it. 2040 is probably a more realistic date assuming it is ever built.
The legend returns. Without the hyperbole thank you for another very informative and well explained video on an important and relevant topic.
I was just rewatching your catalog over the last month to refresh my memory in anticipation that you might return soon. Welcome back!
Hello Prof. David Ruzic. Great video, I always look forward to watching when I see a new upload. Another one I am sure you are aware of is the GE Hitachi SMR BWRX-300 currently being built in Canada. I drive by the construction site every day. As a nuclear engineer working in Canada it is exciting to see a new-style reactor being built in Canada, or any new reactor for that matter. Though the CANDU style is very unique and a pleasure to work on as well.
Great comment, and possibly a new video topic!
We seem to be preparing to build one of them in Sweden too, maybe start actual build in 2028 or so.
I’m sure Prof. Ruzic is a very busy man. But he should know that when people like me are THIS excited about an upload, he’s onto something special.
Hey! Great to see a new drop from you!
Glad to see you back Prof! Thank you!
Woo! New EnergyProf video!
What took you so long for a video?
You're the best! I miss it!
Thank you youtube for bringing this immediately back into my feed. Welcome back!
Here in the Netherlands, we have one major nuclear power plant. Borsele with a capacity of 485 MWe.
Construction started in 1969 and the plant was online in 1973. About 5 years later.
Building a nuclear power plant in only 5 years is, as we all know now, very very risky.
It should take at least 20 years: 15 years for talking and 5 years for the construction.
Funny thing... this plant will be in operation till at least 2033.
That is 60 years of clean energy.
The French build them fast still --- that is because they use the same (continually improved) design with many of the same workers. The hope is that standardization, and being able to build reactor after reactor at one plant wiht the same workforce, and then ship them to different locations will make the process much quicker once the first few are made.
@@illinoisenergyprof6878 Thanks for your reply.
Building the units in a factory will keep the cost down and improve the quality for sure.
If they are intrinsically safe, do you need a containment building?
Not having this enormous thick concrete dome will also speed up construction and keep cost down.
@@olafzijnbuis They end up selling SMR's in IKEA. The containment building is the last line of defence in a reactor design with water cooling. The water can expand, create hydrogen, disappear etc. and you have gas explosion or melt down. But if there is no pressure that risk i gone and the containment should be unnecessary. They only reason I could see you need it is due to exterior threats, someone running a car or plane into to the facility. But still you won't have a huge blowup, only some solidified salt or pellets which can be controlled.
@@illinoisenergyprof6878 Do they though? I really don't think it is honest to say that EPRs are built quickly.
@@olafzijnbuis i don't see the public accepting no containment building . hell i m surprised they got approval. when you have public hearings every dingbat and conspiracy nut will complain at the hearings. oh yes and realize the biggest dingbat - RFK is now going to be in the federal govt.he is anti nuclear to the core.
The gen IV reactors also produces more manageable waste. It is more radioactive, but decays much faster. Waste from old reactors can also be "burned" up in a gen IV reactor tuned for it.
absolutely
Welcome back, Professor.
Awesome informative video professor. Cheers❤️👍
Glad to see you’re back (as opposed to glad to see your back)
I really appreciate all the content on your channel.
Excellent to see you back good sir! I hope life has been treating you well! Merry Christmas Happy New Years, Seasons greetings etc etc!
Been waiting for this one! Great to see you again!
Love your videos. Great info and you do such a great job explaining complex topics
Uhuuuuuu, the professor is back!!!!!
Thank You Professor David. Hopefully there are no hiccups in the further development of this energy technology. I am 63 years old and my whole life electricity and energy are so taken for granted in this country. I live in upstate central NY, 3 nuclear reactors are still running (Oswego ) 24-7 providing carbon free electricity within 75 miles from me. This country needs to wake up about today and the future energy and electricity needs of this country and the world’s thirst for electricity. Nuclear is the answer to providing it. Looking forward to future videos from you on this subject. Thank You for your past videos on a variety of subjects 👍
These reactor designs are impressive. Equally impressive is this man's ability to legibly write backwards.
Where ya been, man? Finally, the Good News Professor returns. You're inspiring more young folks to get involved. Thank you.
Dr. Ruzic, it's a genuine pleasure to see another informative video from you.
Love the content! Glad you are back!!
Strangely enough, I have no professional need to know anything about nuclear reactors, but this is one of my favourite channels. I could probably listen to this guy talk about anything.
So glad to see you back! I've been missing your videos. I truly hope that SMRs get fast-tracked and proliferate quickly.
Good to see you back sir 🫡.
Welcome back to the Energy Prof. The best mirror-image penmanship professor on the planet.
pro-tip: he writes on glass, the video is mirrored. Observe his belt buckle and shirt & coat buttons, compare to how they are in reality.
Knowing how he does the magic does not detract from the great content, delivered so that non-technical people can understand it.
YES HE HAS RETURNED!!
Hell yeah, my favorite TH-camr dropping a new video!
It’s wonderful seeing the professor back in action. Love watching his videos in the mirror, because I know he’s right handed.👏
SMR is new and exciting tech! I see this type of reactor being a game-changer for interplanetary exploration and settlement. Would be perfect for the Moon, Mars and farther out. Hyper-interesting stuff! Thank you!
Kind sir you are a treasure, keep doing what you like, and I will always keep supporting your channel. You make one of the hardest endeavors known in modern society which is to educate people regarding nuclear energy which is often targeted by the stream of ignorant people whose only purpose is to steer the money away from beneficial projects whether they consciously know it or not.
Good to see you back. Watched your videos many years ago and these lessons are timeless.
Salutations from Argentina❤
Great to see you back, Prof!
This is the best belated Christmas present I've gotten in a long time; thank you sir.
I can’t even say how happy I was to see a new video from the Energy Prof. This is by far and away the best information on nuclear power and many other scientific fields available anywhere.
Hi Professor, in Australia, the federal opposition has announced they will build nuclear reactors here, most of them taking up land where coal plants are located or were there. The next election in 2025 will be a choice of nuclear future or renewables with gas fired stations as backup. I do hope for Australia to finally become a nuclear nation. It is great to see you back on YT. Have a great new year.
Pleasure to see you back!
Thank you for the video.
Greetings from the UK,
Anthony
I have never clicked on a video so quickly! He's back y'all! 🎉
Welcome back!
This is how I knew about what happened in Chernobyl before the HBO series came out .. enjoying the video !
How exciting. It's about time we opened new reactors in America, especially considering all the advances in tech. Looks like people have been hard at work making it happen. Thanks for the video, you're a very good teacher. I get excited when I see you've posted a new video. Hell, I've seen 'em all, and they're all fantastic. This one is no different.
I binge watched all your content years ago and still get excited when a new one comes out.
Glad you're back professor! Always enjoy your review and explanations. Thank you!
I hope these work out. I worked on the VC Summer AP1000 project that was cancelled in 2017. One of the major problems we had was finding qualified people to build the plants. We had to compete with a sister plant in Georgia at the same time (which did get built but at double the cost and years behind schedule). The problem wasn’t finding engineers as it was ironworkers, carpenters, electricians etc. Many that we did find were in their 50s and 60s. Young people don’t enter those professions any more (and we have fewer young people to begin with). And they don’t want to put up with nuclear requirements such as background checks and drug testing.
Very good points. This is why the smaller, modular reactors may be the answer. All the nuclear parts can be built in one location with one workforce and shipped.
@@illinoisenergyprof6878 And the power conversion side of the plant is the same as a coal or gas power plant, no nuclear specialized workers are needed.
Welcome back Professor Ruzic! You were my favorite professor at U of I!
Thanks prof for the insights. Much appreciated!
Welcome back! Got thru pandemic with your content!
Great to see you educating us again, Professor. Hope you’ve been well.
Electric:cars,trains,
planes,crypto money,AI and robots. Everyone is inventing and investing in something powered by electricity but very few are talking about from where and how will be produced
Excited for the future! Thank you for the update, Professor!
The comet has returned on its highly elliptical orbit, and we are once more in awe of the brilliance!
Thank you for coming back!
Correction at 6:30 minute mark: 320 MW electric or 800 MW heat
Always enjoy your videos.
He’s back!! 🥂
The most important question is, how did you stop the pen squeak?
Oh my God! I waited for so long for a new video! Please don’t leave us like that.
NOT ALL HEROES WEAR CAPES !! Welcome back professor!
Really excellent, please make more videos!
There is a giant hole in your description of this process of building and grid connecting a SMR. In the "benefits" section you talk about building SMRs serially in a factory, but in your "How to build a nuclear reactor" section, you do not mention the bit where they actually build the SMR factory. I am genuinely interested in how this bit works, since this is the bit that people haven't done before. Does the NRC regulate the factory production of ready-to-go nuclear reactors? Since this is a manufacturing process, do they need new regulations surrounding serial production and dispatch of complete, sealed reactors? Do those companies actually have factories already? What are the siting requirements in a nuclear reactor factory? There are so many unanswered questions about this I would like to learn about.
Those are really good questions. These first reactors will be built somewhere -- and it is not going to be at the site itself. My guess is that is what turns into the factory. All of the PSAR is about the construction of the reactor, so it covers the "factory".
@@illinoisenergyprof6878 Until I see a submission by one of these companies to a regulator for a SMR factory, I am going to be very skeptical about the M part of SMRs until they break ground on that and not the final site.
EDIT: The part about the TRISO fuel manufacturing site near ORNL is a very good start though!
Good to see you back professor!
Good to see you back.
We miss you Dave! Glad for the new content.
Good to see you Professor.
Thank you for these comments! Much appreciated, Prof. J. Braun, Germany
Glad you're back.
Seems to me the cost savings of modular construction of reactors is similar to the cost savings of modular home construction vs. stick-built.
Knowing someone who is working on the development of another technology, thermal solar, it is quite a process. It involves simulations and actually constructing parts of the system to test those individually. Then eventually you have everything designed and that takes people who are experts on constructing this type of equipment. Then build it, and hope it works.
love your videos! Thanks for making them!
He's back babby. We missed you! Love your work!
Prof, thank you for coming back. You provide an important service for the everyday people. Please discuss China's new plant. 👍
Good topic for the future. We'll add it to the list!
I get way more excited than I should when I see these get released.
2:52 other things that are inherently safe are burning gold powder. above 300 degrees of temperature, the reverse reaction occurs bringing the burning gold powder's temperature down. Similarily hydrogen gas is inherently safe, at 3000 degrees temperature, the reverse reaction occurs enough that it sucks up the heat preventing the hydrogen gas from going hotter. 3000 degrees is low enough that it can't melt tungsten
Thanks for the rad content!
he posts again! the world is healing
Whew, I was wondering when he'd be back. Awesome!
I was watching another video when this notification dropped.
Sorry other video....
🤣
Amazing, what advanced nations can do.
Regards from England.
I don't want to build *a* nuclear reactor. I want to build *many* nuclear reactors.
Welcome back Energy Professor !!!
Whoa, at 6:10 you just misstate what you meant to say: 320 *watts* electric rather than megawatts, and *200* megawatts thermal rather than the 800 that's the combined output of 4 units you're referring to...
I know. Since in the next sentence I said "Megawatts" and I wrote MW on the light board, we were hoping everyone would understand that it must be 320 MW thermal, 200MW electric.
Thank you for the excellent videos.
Amazing designs!
Thanks Professor. I’ve been missing your videos.
Nice video.
*Illinois Engineering graduate (aerospace) here:*
Great to see you back doing more videos Prof Ruzic.
The timing is fantastic.
I'm Australian but was lucky enough to go to Illinois on a sports scholarship. Right now here in Australia we are having a hell of a debate on what our future energy will be. I do think nuclear has to be considered, but unfortunately our pro-nuclear lobby are just as bat crap crazy as the pro-wind/solar lobby. Neither can be the 100% solution they want let alone the 82% wind/solar or 38% nuclear that they claim. All of the figures are ridiculous but the practicality of either solution kills it at the first hurdle.
I hope you won't mind when I point a lot of people towards your TH-cam channel.
FYI - for those wondering about the 82% and 38% figures and why they wrong I'll add to more comments below this one.
Why Australia's 82% Renewable energy has issues.
The problem with renewables is NOT the issue with inconsistent power that is usually talked about. People talk about that because its the easiest issue to understand.
Yes we hear all the arguments.
The pro-wind/solar people counter that with we can build more in another place and the wind is always blowing somewhere is the solution. Plus we know the sun will always come up in the morning. The anti-wind/solar people then scream back - _"Who will pay for it?"_ or _"How much will it cost?"_ and the current favorite: _"It will spoil my views so build it somewhere else?"_
The issue we don't talk about much is a technical issue with noise on the AC network and its harder to understand.
Whenever someone turns something on or off it generates spikes in the power grid. That seems like it can't be a problem because there's not that much power in a house, a building or even a factory compared to what power stations pump out. However what all that switching causes is noise on the power grid which you can actually see with an oscilloscope (maybe Prfo Ruzic can show this one day). The problem with that noise is that it can also have harmonics in it and harmonics can be very bad on an energy grid supplying a building full of computers or other equipment as it can cause catastrophic failures.
I first became aware of the harmonics issue in the late 90s when my employer at the time showed me information he'd been sent by one of his college professors. It showed a noisy sine wave but not with bad noise but it was overlaid with nasty spikes. The problem with harmonics in large multistory office blocks are things like the 100s of switched mode power supplies in all the computers and UPSs. It can get so bad in some parts of buildings that nothing can be plugged except things like water heaters and kettles. This is a far more common issue than people know because its not talked about by anyone outside of those involved in dealing with those issues.
The problem with renewables is the way the pump power onto a grid via inverters which do not put out a nice clean sine wave like a traditional generator. Be warned there is an advertising tag used by inverter manufacturers where they claim _"pure sine wave inverter."_ This is totally misleading and the Wikipedia page for "Power Inverters" details this.
Even without inverters power generators have to be synched to the grid. The technology that is used for that is incredibly well proven and robust. between the generator is a synchronising relay and a circuit breaker and the synchronising relay wont let the break close until the generator matches the grid and will open if it falls out of sync. The problem is inverters don't or can't use these traditional technologies because they are DC supply being fed into a transistor pack and the control circuit for the transistor pack monitors the grid and tries to match it. The problem is that the transistors only switch on & off with short pulses that create a pseudo sine wave that has small steps in it. There's a drawing of this on the Wikipedia page titles "Power Inverter" right at the paragraph titled "Near sine wave PWM".
*The real problem with inverters is they make harmonic issues worse because of the way they put that pseudo sine wave onto the grid.* The TH-cam Channel Real Engineering did a fantastic video on this subject titled "The Problem with Wind Energy" highlighting how this is now a major problem in Ireland and they are nowhere near the 82% Australia wants to get to.
This was NOT a problem with previous power generation systems because they were based on large turbines (water or steam) and the physical mass of those turbines had inertia. Its the Inertia of those turbines that hold the frequency of the grid stable. With lots of renewables there's a loss of that inertia which held the frequency of the grid stable.
So as Australia tries to go to 82% Renewables with lots of inverters attached to solar arrays, mega batteries and DC output Wind turbines, we are going to smash into the harmonic problem. Yes I am trying to get the current government to see this. Hopefully in the New Year things might change.
Why Australia's 38% nuclear power goal is a phantom.
The real issue here is having a basic understanding of what any modern society actually needs in terms of energy. Yes its different for every society because of how their society is structured.
The real issue is where did they get the 38% from and how do they think $330 Billion of nuclear can do it.
Going back a couple of steps.
Right now Australia has around 54GW of EFFECTIVE generating capacity which is a mixture of coal, gas turbine, hydro, a few other minor things and renewables. I say effective because any complex power grid is made up of a mixture of base load, load following and peaking.
The coal, gas turbine and hydro are easy to get an estimate of because there's readily available lists that show Australia had 26GW of coal before shutting down a few plants. Currently has around 13GW of gas of which about 8GW is base load. Around 7GW of Hydro of which about 5GW is base load. The renewables is much harder to estimate because we have around 54GW installed but if you divide the Terawatt hours produced & sold to the market by 365 and 24 you get about 11GW. So its feasible to say Australia's renewables is currently equivalent to about 12gw of nuclear at 90% utilisation.
Also Australia, and this is how I got very interested in our energy sector, has NOT BUILT and major power stations since before the year 2000. By major mean those power stations with name plate capacities over 1,000MW (or 1 GW). We did up grade a couple the largest of which was around an 800MW addition to an existing power station.
I found this out during a project in 2016 about Australia's future energy needs. After the initial shock of finding out how badly Australia was planning its future I looked around the world and found this is very common. Due to a mixture of politics and seriously flawed economics, almost everyone across the developed world stopped building new power stations starting in the 1990s. You can go and look up the lists of power stations on Wikipedia.
So Australia's power system wasn't actually designed for the 27 million we have right now. It was actually built for the 20-22 million we had back in the early 2000s. The reason why Australia like every other place that did this hasn't had an energy collapse is because we shipped our largest energy user the manufacturing sector to China.
So considering this lets look back to the 38% figure and where it came from.
If you take Australia's overall energy production of 273 Terawatt hours and divide by 365 and 24 you get that an energy system with a capacity of about 31.2 GW.
Now if you start asking how much nuclear (AP1000 or EPR 2) running at 90% utilisation generates 38% of 31.2 then you get an answer of around 13GW give. If you look at the current costs of AP1000s (from Vogtle) or EPR 2s (from Hinkley Point C) and ask how much you can buy (at current prices) for AU$330 Billion you get a number just under 13GW.
So it might be a bit convoluted but it is possible to work out where the claim that 38% of Australia's energy can be done using nuclear at a cost estimate of AU$300 Billion came from.
*HERE'S THE PROBLEM*
As I wrote earlier our power system was built for around 20-22 million people with a functioning manufacturing sector. it is now just limping along with a population of 27 million with most of that manufacturing sector gone to China. *By 2050 our population is expected to reach 40 million and by around 2090 60 million and our politicians want to rebuild the manufacturing sector that the economists shipped off to China. Added to that will be the demands from transportation and data centres both of which will be massive.*
*AT BEST* the earliest Australia would get reactors on line will be 2035 irrespective if is current AP1000, EPR 2 larges scale technology or SMRs the first of our reactors will be finishing their 60year design life at a time when our population will be over 60 million with at least 3 times the energy demand and more likely over 4x the current energy demand.
So either the 38% needs to be regarded as about 10% (or less) in the long term or if Australia is to have 38% of its energy be nuclear long term then its going to cost 3, 4 or more times the current AU$330 Billion *PLUS* the costs of grip upgrades.
*AND THAT* is all without any consideration of the on going fuel costs, spent fuel storage and most importantly the site decommissioning and clean up costs for which EVERYONE should look at what the British ended up paying to clean up Sellafield.
*FINAL SUMMARY*
YES - for those wondering I have been working on this for a while and I must thank people like Prof David Ruzic for there efforts because there's answers I would not have been able to give without their efforts.
Australia is in a difficult place and that's not unusual as many other nations across the developed world are also in a difficult place. No matter who has been elected there has been a failure of government after government to make effective policy changes or have effective plans or get on and do anything.
*THE ACTUAL PROBLEM*
It was relatively easy to find the bug in the system the harder answer was why. In part the problem is due to a voracious media who's only goal is the next sound bite they can club the current government with *BUT IT IS MORE SO* the effects of Economists NOT understanding how energy works in a modern economy. I knew they loved to club engineers with lines like _"What's the business case for that?"_ and _"Who's going to pay for that?"_ because that's what I have experienced during 35+ years of project engineering across several industries.
It wasn't until I heard contrarian (or rebel) economist Steve Keen say in an interview that mainstream economists don't even include energy in the models. The most famous example of this the the Cobb-Douglas model which claims Value is just a function of Labor and Capital which can be simply written as V = f(L,C). Note in that model Capital includes both money and machinery. Its all based on the _"Labor theory of Value"_ that *BOTH* Adam Smith (the founding father of Capitalism) and Karl Marx (the founding father of Communism & Socialism) believed in.
Basically the 2 main economic concepts of the 20th Century *DO NOT* consider energy to play any part in economic value. Steve Keen's refute of models like Cobb-Douglas is the logical statement: _"Capital without energy is a statue and Labor without energy is a corpse."_
Not only did I find Steve's explanation of their modelling true but I have since found out that some economists don't even include money in their models. Even crazier than that as an engineer the models mainstream economists all use are based on theories of equilibrium in that the markets will self regulate and settle to a steady state. As someone trained as an Aerospace engineer I found that absurd as every system we have is dynamic with respect to time. There's changes, disturbances and imperfections in all systems. The reason cars have suspensions with shock absorbers is because there is no such thing as a perfectly smooth road. The reason why aircraft have to be carefully designed is so that air pockets and wind shifts and atmospheric turbulence doesn't throw the airplane into an unrecoverable state where either the plane tears itself apart of crashes.
*THE PROBLEM WITH ECONOMISTS* is that unlike other sciences which have Fundamental Laws like Newtons Laws and the Laws of Thermodynamics, economics is based on ideas and theories that are unbounded by any fundamental rules of reality. This is why there's all the arguments over money theory. Because they have no rules they can basically make up anything they want in terms of models. Their models do not need to explain anything or be based on any fundamental concept like conservation of momentum. They just have to fit the data or part of the data.
*SOME FINAL FACTS*
For those who don't think Economists are a problem in respect of energy. Here are some basic facts.
1) Every politician is either an economist or has an economic advisor. None of them have an engineering advisor.
2) As far as I know NOT 1 country has an independent engineering advisory committee like the fact that all the central bankers are now independent and advise the government rather than the elected government instructing them.
Here in Australia we have 2 reports of significance to the current energy discussion. One was by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) who have always been a scientific organisation with scientists and engineers. HOWEVER this report was by a team of economists within the CSIRO. The other report was commissioned by the political opposition and used a British consultancy and that report was also written by economists.
*- Both reports* did not involve engineers and yet building and maintaining power stations and energy grids is an engineering task.
*- These reports* had wildly different answers on nuclear energy. if economics is a science as economists claim then why are these reports so different for the same problem?
This is the real crux of the problem. Engineers have been completely cut out of the public discussion so far. Its been dominated mostly by economists but also infested with collections of activists, Think Tankers and lobbyists all with their own agendas.
The one thing not being discussed is: *_What can the engineers actually deliver?_*
Hey Prof, it's been a while. Good to see you again. OK, now to click 👍and watch the video.
EDIT:
9:35 Are there any of these SMRs that are totally portable? As in, the entire operation mounted on / contained in one or more Standard Shipping Containers? Is the tech for something like that even feasible at this time? It would be amazing to simply drop off a couple semi trailers and Viola, here's your electricity!
Even if it was like 10 semi trailers, one of which had the control room, another for the team of nuclear specialists that are in charge of operating the plant, that would still be really neato.
That is the general idea. There is another class of micro modular reactors that make on the order of 15MW of electricity that are indeed totally portable -- great for the military or remote mining operations. The ones I described here have the nuclear reactor part (or parts) arrive on trucks. One still has to pour a lot of concrete etc. on site. Still, the most complicated part can be made in one place and supply sites throughout the world.
Thanks for letting me know
We've missed you so much - glad to see you with that awesomely iconic explosively precussive intro again 😀🧨🧨🧨
Yeah. I really love it too -- and I made each one of those in person!