Energy From Thorium: A Nuclear Waste Burning Liquid Salt Thorium Reactor
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 22 ก.ค. 2009
- Kirk Sorensen's Tech Talk, delivered at Google on July 20, 2009.
Successfully developing a liquid-fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) would essentially solve our planets energy problems for thousands of years, because it would allow us to fully utilize the energy in natural thorium, which makes up 0.0012% of the Earths crust. Most of the research and development work for this technology was done by Oak Ridge National Labs back in the 50s and 60s. They were working to a different set of overall objectives, nevertheless, there are many lessons to be gleaned from their work that can help us to avoid pitfalls and develop LFTR into a high-performance, high-reliability power supply.
I love how down to earth and realistic this man is, a true engineer, I like the fact that he accepts it will take billions for this to happen. It is true. It is sad, but true.
can't believe it's been 10 years since this talk. still one of my favorites
Now if google could just upload a higher resolution version of it.
@@eitkoml I know! c'mon Google!
This technology is amazing. How do make this a national priority?
In his talk (2009) he assumes that we will have Yucca Mountain for storing the Nuclear waste. Now that that project has been cancelled, the thorium reactor is even more advantageous.
Very compelling indeed. Maybe Kirk could encourage Australian development into domesticating it's reactor technology with this liquid Thorium cycle. Since we've only used Nuclear for medical and industrial purposes we have the opportunity to start from scratch without compromising our non-extant Nuclear power plants.
I'm inspired to become a LFTR evangelist!
We spend $9 billion dollars for three new navy destroyers and there is no real support for innovative thorium nuclear reactor research.
Affordable clean electricity is critical to our national security.
Let's build the best thorium reactor possible now.
Well said!! Sustainable clean energy research should be top priority for our country and the world!
that's not even that much to spend & we got something for it. compare to the 10's of billions spent on 4 PWRs (Summer Units 2 and 3 and Vogtle Units 3 & 4) with so far nothing to show. both Summer Units have been canceled & the Vogtle Units are so delayed an over budget that there is a real chance they will be canceled.
Absolutely spot on. We need this.
Thanks for the presentation. It would be nice if the audio & visual quality were a bit better, but it's good to see these ideas promoted articulately.
thanks for posting quite astonishing video.
I don't know about the USA, but in the UK, an entire LFTR programme could be developed for just the small change of the nuclear decommissioning programme.
Great presentation!
This technology is amazing. How do make this a national priority?
In his talk 2009 he assumes that we will have Yucca Mountain for storing the Nuclear waste. Now that that project has been cancelled, the thorium reactor is even more advantageous.
Please post a video with better resolution. 240p is not good enough for the slides.
Totally agree, 240p was low res even in 2009! A re-upload would be great!
great video thanks
love the video really good
@Richbund The Thorium reactor produces many times less waste than a conventional reactor, and the waste itself doesn't need to be contained for nearly as long. And that is not taking into account the percentage of that waste that would be used for other purposes.
The problem with fusion is maintaining a reaction. We can start one, but it basically fizzles out as soon as it starts.
Yes. Fission essentially returns its energy profit from a basically passive process: just gather together enough material in a densely packed space and let the chain reactions flow. You can't get too much simpler than that in engineering terms. A fusion reactor requires a great deal of complexity and input energy just to get a reaction going and for a disappointing return. I can see fusion power for spacecraft propulsion but seriously doubt it can ever be made practical for industrial electricity or heat generation here on Earth.
@halo07guy2 Thanks again for taking the time to reply to my questions. I had only viewed the one video on"The answer to all our energy problems" etc... followed links to his site, and sure enough, he talks the talk, but he definitely does not walk the walk. People have to be critical of just about everything they read and watch. I guess Mark Twain was right about that "believe nothing you hear, and only half of what you read" Thanks again and best regards, Rich
Thank you for this video! i learnd so much and it really helped me to create my own power point show off :p
I hope the teacher grade it high :s
Thanks for presentations Mr Sorenson,
Piping (under radiation in both 1 and 2 fluid) to heat exchangers also using Hastelloy-N? Brittleness from damage + high temperature?
What to use for piping insulator? What for radiation shielding? Would pumps/seals have same problem with LiF-BeF2-ZrF4-UF4 as in liquid sodium reactors? Can use convection - flow rate?
Corrosive HF problem:
salt Helium blanket sufficient?
Has Hastelloy-N + Titanium been extensively verified for corrosion performance?
Why is the resolution so poor? I cannot read the slides at all. Please give us a higher resolution where the slides are legible.
this is very interesting but i can't read the slides. are they published online somewhere?
Thanks MrEnergyCzar! How can you buy that technology, unless it is proprietary and who is WE?
@halo07guy2 It's a pleasure to exchange ideas with someone with the background and education in the subject. More can be learned by discussing instead of brawling... I honestly wish this guy was a genius and his proposal a true one. What a different world we'd live in. Not to say that perhaps future technology will give us the means to attain cold/hot fusion to the benefit of the world. Otherwise, it's Ockham's razor... Cheers,
Rich
Is there a two or three page fact sheet I could find to send to congressmen, senators and the like to let them know what we are missing out not taking advantage of this technology we developed and ignored? Thanks.
does anyone know where i can find the pp slides used in this video. need them for a research project. appreciate help. thanks!
I'm a big Th232 fan but I do have a question that has yet to be answered from the Th community. What is the solution to the hard gamma from U232? What are the shielding considerations? how is that going to inflate costs? A second less so question would be has there been a material developed that shows promise in containing UF6 without significant maintenance / leakage issues?
I came here seeking an answer to these two questions. Still no convincing answer after a decade. A Danish lab is claiming it has developed resilient stainless steel pumps and plumbing and a good core design for passive control of actinide burning as well as preventing proactium neutron absorbtion, but their cost assumptions weren't convincing.
@Richbund Your welcome. Honestly, I wish there were more people like you on youtube. If we could actually have discussions without it turning into an all out brawl, it'd be very nice.
Does anyone know at what point in this video he discussing india, I watched it all but can't remember at what point he covers it.
Thorium's relative abundance to Uranium is about 4 to 1, but relative to U-235 is about 400 to 1.then there is the cost of extracting the isotope..
They make U-235 in the process of running the reactor. It would need some "seed" U235 to get the process starting, but after that they would be good to go.
I am aware of this, I am just curious what point in the video it is as it is a long video, thanks.
@Richbund Fusion reactions need a high-pressure environment to exist, as far as we have been able to tell. We've been able to make fusion bombs by using a nuclear weapon to create that pressure, but the problem is creating that kind of pressure without a reactor and maintaining it.
With a star's mass, it isn't hard to maintain that pressure during fusion. But on earth, it's extremely difficult to maintain one during the fusion process as the reaction causes it to expand, decreasing pressure.
where did you obtain this info? link please!;-)
With a thermal reactor, you can transmute even-mass actinides to odd-mass actinides, and fission the odd-mass actinides. This only really works if you have an excess of neutrons which once-through fuels like U-235 or MOX simply don't have. The next best thing you can do with MOX is not have any uranium at all in it, and instead have thorium as the support fuel, because it's lighter and less likely to be overbred into transuranics
Fast reactors, which exist, can simply fission even/odd actinides
Could we harvest light antimatter for energy ?
@exenrontexas That's what I meant. And the Cold War lasted form 1945 to 1991. THe Thorium reactor itself is a late 50's early 60's design. I know Thorium as a technollogy isn't new. But it hasn't seens 40+ years of devlopment whereas Uranium has, and it hasn't yet entered the commercal market yet. It needs to catch up.
What I'm thinking is that waste from the Japanese reactors was shipped to the US to produce weapons during the Cold War. Makes sense.
The sound quality was very poor I had to turn the volume way up. But conceptually, heck yeah.
Google, please invest in this clean energy technology!!
Or Apple...any of these companies could do it -- I think they worry about the PR if anything goes wrong hurting their current status.
trumanhw
Hell, Bill Gates should invest in this! He knows about it, AND he advocates advanced nuclear! What is missing? lol
Robert Weekes That scumbag Gates also advocates killing innocents with vaccines. He's slime.
Robert Weekes PV, wind, geo, hydro, wave, tide, yes. Screw Goodge/NSA though.
k4lgarcias
I dunno, what was the thread about? LOL
Could you explain the "5 times more energy' statement at 13:16? This makes no sense in any interpretation I have tried so far.
Heavy necroposting, but it has to do with the probability of one fission causing another, neutrons that don't cause a fission are lost, that energy that neutron held is lost, so by decreasing the probability of neuron loss, with an equivalent mass of fuel a thermal spectrum reactor would produce more energy since it losses less energy in fissions that don't cause more fissions
Glad I understand fission now. Too bad I won't go to college and benefit humanity. Anyway excellent informative speech.
Could we use Carbon nanotubes, question mark? LOL or slightly larger tubes made with graphene if that is any different. You would need a stiffener such as a ceramic, and possibly a thermal insulating material.
upload in 1080p HD
I've created a VERY fast paced doc THORIUM REMIX 2011, on Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors featuring Kirk Sorensen. It is free on TH-cam, and Creative Commons licensed. If you are curious about LFTR please check it out.
@josephboyle Basically what he is saying is, as an isotope in a reactor, Thorium has less absorption. You get a lot more energy, for less fuel due to the fact that the fission it's self is much easier. Plutonium and Uranium have a sizable absorption range, which means wasted fuel and effort.
@MrMaveri Unfortunately, India's approach (using solid based fuels) loses many of the key benefits Mr. Sorensen explains under a LFTR program.
Isn't all that needed for existing reactors?
Let's work this through like a toddler taking their first steps.
What is the enrichment level of U-235 used in reactors?
What is the enrichment level of U-235 used in weapons?
Now, here's the tough part!
Can you use Low-Enriched uranium in a nuclear weapon? WHY NOT?
In 7 years nobody has answered you?
1) fresh reactor fuel for light water reactors is approx 3% Uranium 235.
2) I believe the enrichment level for weapons is 95 plus percent.
3) You can’t make a nuclear bomb with reactor fuel because all of those neutrons flying around from split U 235 would be absorbed by the Uranium 238 (97%) of the mix and then you have to wait for it to decay into plutonium.
Totally different physics path involved.
What about the shielding issues? If U-232 is flowing around in these pipes and pumps and heat exchangers and there is no 30 foot layer of water for shielding then what protects the workers and inspectors from the gamma emissions?
The liquid molten salt
galt57 www.nirs.org/factsheets/thoriumbackersoverstatefacesheet.pdf
Thorium Reactors: Their Backers Overstate the Benefits
galt57 steel and concrete.
1. How can you prevent Protactinium 233 from absorbing a new neutron while it is in the blanket for several months before its decay into Uranium 233?
2. If you want to use LFTR to burn spent fuel from light water reactors, what would happen with Plutonium 240, wich is a non fissile nor fertile isotope?
3. Is there anything you can do to accelerate the natural decay of radioactive isotopes?
1. It only takes a month on average for Pr-233 to decay into U-233. It can be chemically separated from the blanket (see 16:00) along with Xe-135 and other neutron poisons. The Pr-233 can be held in a separate tank while it decays and the U-233 can be filtered back into the core. 2. According to wikipedia, Plutonium 240 has a half-life of 6563 years. In a molten salt reactor, Pu-240 would just sit and not do anything. But Pu-238 could be burned up, which is most of it, and isn't energy utilization the best way to destroy plutonium? 3. Yes, decay of isotopes can be sped up by burning them up in a molten salt reactor. Dumping them in the fuel core would expose them to neutrons causing them to decay or fission into more manageable isotopes while harnessing the atomic energy. MSR's will be the ultimate recycling program!!
I stand corrected, sub and edit "main pressure assembly" to "heat ex changer tubes/bundle"
At least there is no massage heat ex changer towers...aka drip cooling towers
Search youtube for other thorium tech talks:
• Aim High: Using Thorium Energy to Address Environmental Prob (yes, don't search for 'Problem', you won't find it)
• The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor: What Fusion Wanted to be
Who was Dr. Weinberg's protector?
@halo07guy2 Thank you for your information on Thorium. It is definitely a better answer than enriched uranium.
By the way, why do you think the fusion reaction fizzles out?
Thanks, Rich
We all need to face reality, wind, solar, and future thermoelectrics are great technologies but will never be efficient and energy-dense enough to supply the worlds demand for energy. We need a powerful clean, reliable, flexible, and plentiful source of energy that will support our future smart grids where solar and wind can't, with beneficial products and manageable wastes, and Thorium in LFTRs can fit that bill. The Oak Ridge prototype already proved the potential of LFTRs.
I don't want to even get out of bed unless my alarm clock is Thorium powered!
Could you email the presentation to me?
The graphite blanket wearing problem is not going to be easy to solve. There is only 1 percent of extra neutron you can workaround breeding your thorium. If you drain the graphite tank to replace the wall, you can only do it less than 1 percent of the time of the operation of the core. One day off every seasonal change, 4 times a year. But, is that enough to keep the graphite water tight all year round? Can you change the wall one extra time when graphite is leaking before the season ends? No, you only get one shot. You miss it, your power plant is dead. How is that for reliability ?
I seriouslyt hope that the Indian DAE correct course on the thorium chemistry and go the liquid route.
@exenrontexas Likely because Uranium reactors are a proven technology, whereas Thorium is only just now entering the commercial scene. Plus, you have to remember that the reactor itself is a US design from the Cold War, so it makes sense that any nuclear waste produced would go towards the development of nuclear weapons. However, with the Cold War over...
Uhhh, no. The US has it's share but it isn't the mecca of thorium. It seems to be pretty evenly distributed among the continents.
Working in the nuclear industry is one of the healthiest professions on earth. You get checked very frequently for diseases and the early development of cancers, so much so that natural ailments are also detected and can be treated before it's too late.
Nuclear kills statistically less than wind and solar per TWh (including Chernobyl deaths). You need to mine more, build more, and maintain more things with wind and solar to make the same amount of electricity, which means more accidents.
u232 has a positron captured in it's nucleus they should figure harnessing that anti matter
Uh, no. Weinberg's first molten salt reactor was built in 1954 (for the aircraft propulsion studies), and the one most often referred to was developed and run from 1965 to 69.
Neutron energy affects the number of neutrons emitted from a fission event. The cycle Th-232 + n --> Pa-233 --> U-233 + n (thermal) --> fragments + 2.3 neutrons is sustainable.
@jimbalio "New queue ler" ain't a word.
I believe they pronounce it new-killer.
I am incredibly pissed off nobody has at least built research/prototype reactors. Who cares if you waste $100 mil, or even $900 mil.
Although already demonstrated, if there are insurmountable problems, the materials and chemistry research alone would pay for itself.
Too few people have heard of it. And it sound WAY TOO GOOD to be true.
Its 2009, and we're still building more "old idea" sodium liquid metal, critical water, and high temp gas research reactors for megre benefits.
Build LFTR!
Fordi,
The sulfur-iodine cycle wants heat at 850 C or hotter. The Aircraft Reactor Experiment ran at 877 C, which is the hottest anyone's ever run a reactor.
Waste heat from the turbines will come out at... whatever you choose. Take it out at 50 C and you can air-cool the reactor. Take it out at 70 C and you can drive multiple-effect desalination, at 4% less electrical power output. But you can't drive sulfur-iodine with waste heat.
6:30 "Seaborg, who had a very, very fertile mind..."
I see what you did there.
What is with all the noise?!
wow there was a youtube in 2009
A Google Tech Talk and all that can be mustered is 240p of resolution? Stop using interns for your social media platforms!
By my estimates there is 5.97200 × 10 to the power of 18 kilograms of Thorium on earth and it is quite easy to obtain, why are we not funding this?
Wait math... people hate math..
There is a shit load of Thorium.
+roflcopterkklol
Mainly because you can't use Thorium reaction by products to make a bomb (eg. no plutonium.)
Ken Marshall I suppose i should have figured that from the video haha, they outline that being the reasoning behind why funding was cancelled in the early days, but still that was back then and this is now, we already have enough nukes to blow the world up 10 times over, you would think something like this would be on the table before plans to mine helium 3 from the bloody moon for a replacement fuel for breeder reactors.
+roflcopterkklol Because the cost of the research to develop a commercial-grade reactor is about $1 Billion.
Hired Mind So the Australian government alone could fund this project 1500 times every year?
Heck the HMAS Canberra and Adelaide cost $3.1 billion, are you saying for a third of the price of two warships the world could have had this technology?
Yeah i am failing to see why this is not being funded, A billion dollars in funding is literally nothing in the worlds economy today.
Pu-239 under some conditions might be as poor as 60-something% fissions per absorption, but there's no way that number translates into five times the energy.
Why the MSR FUJI with molten-salt fuel on Thorium-Uranium is out of scope of this presentation? There is the International Thorium Molten-Salt Institute (ITHMSI), President K. Furukawa and Chief Manager Y. Kato. It would take only about US$ 300M to put the MSR FUJI into an INDUSTRIAL phase.
Should move to smaller countries ready to except this radical approach for lftr with small proof of concept reactor
Cesorship by google of its own lectures ? Why is resolution of this video full of slides only 240 pixels ?!?
Just finished watching. That was an excellent talk. Kind of preaching to the choir with me, but very convincing nonetheless.
A side note on your last Q&A: From Dr. Hargraves' talk, waste heat, not electricity, would be used to split water via the sulfur - iodine cycle, and it need not affect the reactor's electrical efficiency at all.
@halo07guy2 I regret that I did not express myself better. I believe that since there is little or not need for uranium and plutonium these days and since it is more expensive, less stable and less abundant than Thorium that the solution to most nuclear energy problems is Thorium and that the reasons against Thorium are corporate and politicial.
Instead of throwing money away on oil wars in the middle east we should be spending money on this.
In order for Sweden, or indeed most countries, to make good use of solar you need a giant "spider-webs" of HVDC crossing the entire continent to deal with weather. You need to massively overbuild solar capacity and provide months of storage to deal with seasonal variation.
This continent-wide Rube Goldberg machine will never be built, nor can it be built. Coal and gas won't be back-up, they will be the mainstay with fickle flows of wind and solar providing a little help whenever they can.
Solar still requires backup fossil fuel generation...especially if we switch from internal combustion engine driven cars to electric vehicles. Worldwide, the nuclear power industry has a much better safety record than the various fossil fuel industries (See 1998 Paul Scherrer Institute Report comparing accidents and fatalities across the energy sector from 1969 to 1996. Hydroelectric actually has the worst safety record). Solar will NEVER have the capacity to replace fossil fuels, the least
OK. The way the LFTR works as I understand is that it's safe, no need of large complex, no need of having peoples around to look after, and if something happen, the frozen plug will open to aloud for the liquid thorium mater to flow in to the holding tank.......... then what ? Can some one enplane what will happen after ? can it be re start it ?
He actually explains it in the video. th-cam.com/video/AZR0UKxNPh8/w-d-xo.html. The situation would be the same as when they would turn it off for the weekend. As I understand it thorium would get too hot, melt the freeze plug and get into the holding tank and because it's no longer heated it would cool down and turn into a salt. When you want to use it again you need to heat it up to turn it into a liquid to pump it back up into the reactor.
After it cools it can be manually removed, re-melted, and poured back into the reactor.
Wind makes up 2.9% of your annual energy and solar makes up 0.04%. But hey, if your energy-expert president says that's all you need as alternate energy, then I guess you should just go with it.
How much does it cost you at the pump again?
On an all too human level I wish that there had been at least one good close-up of the presenter sometime during the talk (he was wearing a very nice suit and is young enough to still look presentable in a close-up).
Long camera angles and gentle diffuse lightning may improve (slightly) the appearance of presenters belonging to the pioneering nuclear generation.
Transuranics can be fissioned using nuclear transmutation. Most fission products can also be stabilized in a similar manner.
Nuclear waste was never supposed to be an issue. Bans on nuclear reprocessing and anti-proliferation laws limiting breeder reactors basically created our waste issue, and didn't really help mitigate proliferation either.
And if you remove nuclear from our options altogether, all that waste we have right now will never go away.
to Kirk Sorensen
If you could talk in Lyman terms, so that all of us that don't know anything about nuclear energy could understand exactly what Thorium is all about, you will get more support from. I have been listened to most video of pro and con of it.
PS: The power to be [ WE ] is listening, but we need clear info.
Louis+
Check out Kirk Sorenson @ Protospace on Liquid Floride Thorium Reactors.
very straight laymen's explanations in a relaxed, fun, entertaining venue. It's Kirk Sorenson at his best.
You're mistaken. I could explain why, but you really ought to watch Kirk's other talks. The main point is that solar and wind are just too diffuse and intermittent to compete seriously with fission in terms of energy per unit cost, even if used at much higher efficiencies than current or foreseeable technology allows. They're not sufficiently energy-dense to sustain the growth of global technological civilization. Solar will find plenty of useful applications, but it can't be the main course.
No; antimatter is only produced on earth through particle accelerators, which consume gobs more energy than the antimatter contains.
Interesting how he mentioned India as being the most likely candidate for thorium reactors - 2011 is the date given for India to fire up it's first thorium reactor!
Shame that in Australia they refuse to look at just about anything except for dirty coal :-(
If that were possible, I would still argue why do you want to continue to produce energy that requires combustion and thus more pollution for everyone to breathe?
LFTR reactors and the Sun are both nuclear reactors but do differ in scale.
Why make the choice an either or choice?
Why not develop solar energy and LFTR nuclear technology in parallel and reduce technical risk to the nation?
Work through the worst-case scenarios if you want but it is, in fucking fact, possible to achieve a conversion ration higher than 1.00 with the thorium fuel cycle, which makes it a self-sustainable breeding cycle.
@Suqatish A lot of electricity used to be generated by oil, and now it isn't. Much of heating used to be done with oil and now it's gas and heat pumps(there is less overlap between oil and gas companies than you think)..Iraq is about securing access to oil, it is not about petrodollars and it is not to the benefit of "big oil". Oil is a very inelastic commodity and it is not in the interest of "big oil" to expand supply. Just a decade ago oil was $20/bbl, why did "they" let it happen?
@Suqatish Cheap energy is very profitable if you're the business of making things.
i guess the jury is still out: (Reuters Health) - "Rates of certain birth defects appear higher than normal in one of the Ukraine regions most affected by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, according to a new study.
The findings, reported in the journal Pediatrics, stand in contrast to a 2005 U.N. report stating that there is no evidence of an increased risk of birth defects or other reproductive effects in areas contaminated by radiation from the Chernobyl accident."
OLops, sorry - GE, not Westinghouse.
not only do we have entrenched infrastructure...but your describing a system that is impossible to build with the current labor pool.. this salty high temp fuel flowing in nickle or stainless pipes is impossible to build without 4-7 TIMES the current amount of pipe-fitters in the US. the ramp up to build these would be four or five years
100% this guy is styropyros dad.
No, my understanding is that the "fuel" in the thorium cycle is actually the plutonium or the uranium 233, the stuff that actually "burns" and produces energy and keeps the system going.
Sorry - guess, I couldn't spell "breeding". Without the plutonium or U233, thorium won't breed sufficiently.
OK, LFTR is not entirely theoretical.
"Sorry, I did mean around 2 MW per day, In kw/h units..."
Those are nonsense units.
A joule is unit for energy. A watt is a joule per second, a unit of power. A watt per second is a joule per second square, it's some kind of acceleration of power consumption.
1 kWh = kJ/s * h = 3600 kJ/s * s = 3.6 MJ. Energy.
"A grid from south Asia through the middle east into Africa can easily cover the electricity of the whole area at least ..."
As I said. Dependence and collectivism.
Had Chernobyl employed LFTR, there would have been NO problem :)