Kirk Sorensen @ MRU on LFTR - Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 พ.ค. 2011
- ThoriumRemix.com/ is a doc created (in part) from this footage: • Thorium: An energy sol...
When arriving in Calgary to present at TEDxYYC, Kirk Sorensen was immediately raced from his late arrival flight to MRU, where Brett McCollum had helped organize a lecture.
Kirk gave a brief overview of Molten Salt Reactors (MSR) and specifically Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR). Half of the time was spent fielding questions from the Calgary students.
This video is released by Gordon McDowell under a Creative Commons Share-Alike License.
If you are interested in LFTR, consider joining Facebook's / energyfromthorium , if you are CANADIAN and interested in promoting this technology, also email me at gordonmcdowell@gmail.com
An easy-to-download copy of this video (for recycling purposes) can be found at: www.archive.org/details/201103...
If you remix on TH-cam, aside from a description hyperlink, please add an annotation hyperlink when MRU footage is first cited. - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
When the molten salt reactor comes to life. I propose that Kirk recieves the highest civilian medal for his work making us aware of this game changing technology.
A Nobel piece prize would be appropriate, I believe...
@@francisgaliegue6645 The American political establishment does not like it for it will solve one problem which is a big money maker for the contractors who are the biggest campaign fund contributors to corrupt American politicians because it will CONSUME NUCLEAR WASTES ALSO AS A NUCLEAR FUEL. And nuclear wastes storage is a BIG MONEY MAKER for corrupt government contractors and corrupt government politicians. Russia and China already went ahead with their BFMSR power reactors power plants, with Russia using plutonium 239 and China using thorium. More than 200 Russian military underground BFMSR power reactors power plants are already on line and China has more than 500 underground BFMSR power reactors power plants on line. You won't hear or see that on your American and European mainstream media.
I can't get enough of Kirk's lecture.
There is absolutely nothing on this rock that I respect more than brilliant scientists trying to do good for humanity and the entire planet...
Can’t get over how well Kirk speaks. I could listen to him talk about anything. 👍🇬🇧.
Kirk is a master orator, his ability to talk about and explain advanced nuclear technology to the public in such a relaxed manor is of unprecedented importance for humanity's future. Hope that some day in the far future he'll be awarded a Nobel prize for peace and/or technology for his work if all goes well and China don't end up ruling the world with this technology.
^THIS
It's much easier to explain things when you fully understand it. It's the mark of someone who thoroughly knows what they're talking.
Low and behold, China's first Thorium MSR just started commercial operation.
The new book describing Thorium as the ideal fuel is "SuperFuel: Thorium, the Green Energy Source for the Future", by Richard Martin, which includes mention of Kirk Sorensen throughout. Excellent book.
Thanks for this Gordon. I found it enjoyable, very informative and more relaxed and 'human' than the intense condensed compilations of the three Google Tech Talks. Of course this wasn't edited down to 10 minutes, but in my opinion the extra time taken here to include the questions and interactions adds another, important dimension to the other videos you've done and was well worth the extra time involved. Thanks again.
Thank you for making this available. I wish this concept would be given more attention, our environment needs it.
44:28 Oh my God. Did he just say he believes Thorium came from God. I think I've just found a new hero for myself. Intelligent, motivated, charismatic, optimistic and a visionary scientist who believes in God and wants the United States to succeed. GO KIRK GO!
Just want to say thanks for the education you’ve given me. I’ve watched several video’s of yours, and other people who have shined a light on thorium salt reactors. Get it done.
This is very exciting and I'm sharing this with everyone I know. I've always been for nuclear energy, but this is amazing.
Dear "T Karlo", when you hop all over TH-cam posting "Thorium is not the answer" without raising any points specific to the video you're commenting on, that is called spamming. You need to counter a SPECIFIC POINT touched on in the video. Not just the element itself, which is like saying "gravity isn't an answer to our energy problems". Leave better comments or I'll block you.
It’s almost as though there are people who don’t like advanced technology that can help everyone, who would have thought 🤷🏻♂️?
There are of course environmentalists who don’t understand the scope of how industrialization has removed human poverty, and want us to go back to having “reduced consumption.”
@@evannibbe9375 yea, those folks talking about less energy consumption as a solution to climate change in the future... they need to get real..
@@captainsloth5895 the "best" are the very rich with the footprint of small towns, who preach austerity to the "poor"...
Makes you think.
To hit on 1:35:00 on the security: the upscale security measures are not only to protect spent fuel, but to protect the radioactive wastes such as cesium-137 and Cobalt-60 that are highly radioactive, protect calibration sources, etc which can be used in dirty bomb construction. 10-CFR-37 describes these requirements.
all true but the amount of effort and exposure to them selves and time to do that. if would be very difficult and way harder with a MSR
It’s good to see the government actually taking steps to protect the public I didn’t know this
Totally captivating....let's do it! A great orator and enthusiast. Thanks.
Michael, well he's currently co-founder of Flibe Energy, and wants to build LFTR. When he delivered this material in 2011 he was on the tail-end of trying to simply get anyone to try build it. That was his interest in MSR at NASA... it looked like a great way to power a manned moon outpost, given tough energy constraints on the moon.
To the camera person: With respect, getting a close-up of the presenter's head while he is explaining an image on the screen is the exact opposite of what is needed. In fact, it detracts from the presentation. Thank you.
Amazing!! thank you for this channel. I have subscribed and will share this on social media and remind all my friends of this. thank you.
Am reading it now. Wonderful resource to have.
Fantastic and desperately needed
Thanks Kirk, you are an inspiration
Kirk Sorensen will go down in history as a visionary and a prophet of future logical energy development. Even if other energy sources are discovered, Thorium MSRs are ideal for burning up plutonium waste stockpiles and reducing their half life to one that is within humanities ability to store successfully until they decay to safe levels.
Great idea. Great presentation, Great speaker.
Unglaublich wie jung er war.
"A cup and a pen, I gotta come back to Canada..." lol. Kirk is awesome!
In India we already have a 300MW Thorium reactor which is the world first working Thorium reactor!
There's occasional online Q&A sessions where MSR notion could be bounced off him. I don't think an MSR question would get enough upvotes or retweets to be noticed without preparation and coordination. I'm not gonna coordinate that, but it is a strategy that hasn't been tried yet, in terms of getting POTUS attention directly.
Very impressive - please come to Australia and speak at our universities!
Lets get on the Thorium hype train
This was posted 9 years ago why is no one talking about this right now ?
Aye, hes an amazing speaker
I heard of this at the University I work at. A student was doing a project with this idea. If only the nuclear society would be a bit more enthusiastic about this. It might just work out. Else... Asia will have a head start....
You can run your house on solar, and that is fantastic and amazing, but Kirk is talking about running civilization --- a totally different thing.
Thanks!
Thank you
Gordon, I was merely commenting facetiously upon your reply to "t karlo", not on the video. I have been following the efforts of Kirk, and subsequently, your good self, since Kirk's 2009 GoogleTalk hit youtube. Also a big fan of David Leblanc and his DMSR approach. I think IMSR may be what's needed to pave for way for LFTR. A version of IMSR might also make for a good space reactor - no way Musk will colonise Mars using only solar or an LWR. Keep up the good work - you guys are all true heroes.
Thanks for correcting me. I read the 2006 WHO report more recently on Chernobyl and you're right.
In physiology we describe a self-regulating, inherently stability system as being "homeostatic". We expect to find this in living organisms but to find this in a nuclear energy source is serendipitous to the point of incredulity.
Kirk in love with his own voice
I'm part of the thorium tribe and advocate every chance
@yorryyorry Yes - go to energyfromthorium. On the right side is "Java Programs" - download and run your own simulation or join the forum. I can also recommend my site lftrnow which is geared towards summarizing the key points that make LFTR and Thorium great, with links to back up the points. Finally, the quick answer - most products from LFTR decay quickly with fairly little left after a few 100 years rather than 100,000+ years.
A conventional steam locomotive is also, in a sense, a load-following system. The rate of burning in the firebox depends on the draft. The draft is pulled by exhaust steam from the engine flowing through a nozzle in the smokebox. The draft thus depends on the load, and so does the rate of burning.
@gregreman That was probably me running to turn on another camera. Hey, if you write a comment like this... "At 10:35 there's a duck and run! How entertaining! He is still in the frame!" ...then the timecode should be clickable and start playing at the moment you specify.
Dear Americans, please realize that there currently are NO petitions on the Whitehouse's "We the people" petition site matching either the thorium or lftr search terms.
The "need" for LFTR waste being recycled is pretty high, since some impede reaction, and NEED to come out. I'd take a look at NASA's needs for Xenon (ion drive Dawn mission) and Pu-238 (RTG for Curiosity mission) as prime examples. This is an in-the-USA process. Since PV aren't REALLY being recycled yet it will end up looking like electronics recycling... ship the used up PV waste to China. If there's no heavy rare earths the PV just isn't that valuable. PV are NOT like hybrid car batteries.
On fission products & wastes, the purpose of using 232Thorium is it's 6 neutron captures away from Plutonium, while natural 238Uranium is but 1 away. So, the amount of heavy, long-lived (transuranic) waste is under 1/1000 of what current reactors leave in 'spent' fuel.& there's no spent fuel because the liquid cycle makes just what's needed.
Regular fission products also occur, as for regular 235U reactors, but their lives are relatively short & are retained in the salt, unless noble gasses.
Please come and convince Australia to go down the LFTR track
Good presentation, I found it really interesting. When he doesn't need to raise his voice to reach a larger audience (TED talks) his voice sounds just like Tom Hanks' to me. That might be one of the reasons (on top of it being very interesting) why I, knowing absolutely nothing about nuclear energy in general, watched the whole video.
one thing i wish he would've conveyed over and over is "molten salt can boil at atmospheric pressure, this means you aren't going to have flash steam explosions when a cooling system breaks down. you need to mention this to your congressmen/senators. it's so important. the more of you that bring this up to your represenatives, the more likely they'll realize that they wont win their next elections unless they listen."
I find this all very interesting I ran across this last night and have spent the whole night watching these videos and reading about this issue., thanks for the work you do in this Kirk.
I would recommend that you shift your focus from trying to get the government to fund this, to approaching venture capitalists for funding. The government wont fund this because 1: There are too many vested interest that back the politicians (on both sides) and who will push out any competitors.
also...
I'm not qualified to know if what this guy is saying is accurate but I like the way he speaks - he has conviction. its convincing.
Load Following --
The blowpipe of a conventional coal-burning steam locomotive makes the firebox tend to follow the load imposed on it by the engine proper. So the combination of the firebox and the blowpipe constitutes an engineered load-following heat supply.
1. What do you mean by 95% recyclable. There's material used to make the solar cells, cost involved in installation and upkeep and there's a set useful lifetime. Over that time, it generates certain number of gw/hours.
Plus, while there are hazardous substances with LFTR and other nuclear powered variants, those substances have been found to be very beneficial to medical and space research. Hazardous is not anthesis to benefits.
@OfficeThug Google video search (The Don Smith Device RUS-(part 2))
At about 1 minute into the presentation, Smith shows one of the radiological survey maps of an area nearby conducted by the US government.
Just because a home energy project is slightly tricky to get going does not make it impossible.
Google video search ("testatika generator" OR "Swiss ML converter")
The creators of this video should consider separating out the first 8 minutes or so and posting it as a separate video. Then link to this full video at the end of the "summary version."
Would make sharing the main ideas in classrooms and on social media much easier.
Dylan, the [remix this video] feature is enabled for all my videos. If you want to try do it yourself right in TH-cam (I'd recommend using Chrome browser) you could host that yourself on your own TH-cam channel.
Actually, Chernobyl happened because of stupidity of operators, who violated instructions and also didn't understand the processes that go in reactor. Each RBMK can produce up to 1500 MW of electricity and plutonium for atomic bombs.
It's not such a terrible design, main problem is that this reactor was originally designed as a small reactor, and when it becomes bigger and bigger - a lot of safety problems appears.
I remembered Chernobyl because in 80-s some of USSR scientists also told that RBMKs are extremely safe. They couldn't even imagine, that such shit could happen.
***** I don't think anyone was "vaporized" from Chernobyl but it killed about 30 workers from radiation poisoning (from what I heard). It's laughable for anyone to compare Fukushima to Chernobyl, Ch. was 100-1000x worse.
Hi Kirk, given the news that the Japanese are pulling out of the construction of a Reactor on coast of North Wales UK. Could this project become Liquid Flouide
@yorryyorry iirc there's a very small amount of material left, but unlike uranium it'd only be around a couple hundred years rather than for hundreds of thousands of years. Not sure what the isotopes are, but they're definitely not any more dangerous than the uranium fueled ones
I want an explanation what is preventing such a reactor from being built today ?
What is so expensive or difficult ? If so, how can this be accomplished as a power source in cars to have the cars be low cost ?
54:53 -55:56 Point. Marked for reference.
lets do this asap
'A cup and a pen, I need to come back to Canada'
Had there been a water tower on the hill behind the Fukashima power station cold water fed by gravity could have cooled the rods as a back up for the diesel power plant.
Would have taken far less than that to avoid the meltdown. But yes, this is true.
Energy is easy to make, make with the storing it.
At 1:13:00 the question comes up regarding interest in development. The interest would be limited to those who have a genuine concern for the human race, which is not the goal of the .001% who run the world. We have to overcome the .001% before any positive advancements will ever take place.
Actually it's cheaper than coal, so even they're interested once they understand how much money they're looking at.
Either a concern for the human race or an abnormal passion for engineering.........
Why don't we use a fast sodium chloride reactor to breed a blanket of thorium salt chlorides that would slow down high neutron flux by boron carbide, graphite or zirconium hydride with zirconium as the salt containment vessel or window? The idea is we can breed more thorium faster for burners short term or fuel existing reactors, while consuming our nuclear waste spent fuel rods. I figure that thorium is more common and cheaper to breed as a fuel. With wast u238 can drive the breeding in the high flux fast salt reactor. So you can do both.
If i dont have facebook and arent canadian (but a swede), what and where can i go then? ;) Very interesting stuff this i must say!
Who was the MRU Student/Staff that organized Kirk Sorensen's talk at MRU? I would like to get in touch with them. I am a current MRU student that is interested in starting a Nuclear Club their, and bringing Kirk back would be fantastic.
Bret McCollum PhD was the MRU guy who organized the lecture/visit date
at MRU. I graduated from MRU back when it was a College (MRC), and is
why I visited and asked around Physics dept to see if anyone was
interested in hosting a short Kirk talk while he was in town for sake of TEDxYYC talk.
Mr Sorensen how can I help with this project
@yorryyorry There's Kirk Sorensen @ PROTOSPACE video ( watch?v=YVSmf_qmkbg ) where 1h 38m the isotopes produced by the reactor are profiled. There might be more info scattered around the video, but that's a chunk of it.
Well why don't you just pick ONE then, and we'll take a closer look at it. Instead of me listing off problems with intermittent/diffuse power sources you've listed, and ignoring any proposed solutions or counter arguments.
also...
2: There are a large body of Malthusian government class people all over the world who basically see the rest of us (you and me and most people) as weeds who need to be culled. They really aren't interested in making us more productive (because they see that as making us more independent and uncontrollable). I found this out years ago when the "Cold Fusion" thing came out. The biggest opponents (at first) were the "environmentalists" who were scared they were about to lose their
very interessting video. But can anyone explain me what isotopes are left after this reaction and how long they're dangerous.
about 300 years
we come back to rockets some day. genuis, pure genius mind of the C21th
Kirk needs better public relations AND his own LFTR webpage. HELP HIM!
@OfficeThug According to the full version video "The science and politics of cancer A discourse" by G Edward Griffin, the board of Memorial Sloan Kettering were the ones in charge of the brewing controversy that was exposed by Dr. Ralph Moss.
How much more plentiful is thorium than U235?
This video was posted 11yrs ago, and yet the rate of CO2 emissions are higher than ever. Where are all the thorium molten salt reactors? I suspect that, like all forms of zero carbon energy production, the fossil fuels industries and the uranium based nuclear power sector are heavily lobbying congress to obstruct and thorium reactors as long as possible. Since there is already enough greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to make the Arctic Ocean ice-free by the 2030s, which will trigger an abrupt 3 degree increase in average global temperature. That will be game-over for the anti-thorium lobbyists, as well as the rest of the human race.
LFTR specifically hasn't seen much progress. TerraPower is using molten-salt to buffer thermal energy in their Natrium reactor (fast-spectrum Uranium fuelled solid fuel). Moltex is building an SSR-W in New Brunswick that is a fast-spectrum MSR which will recycle used CANDU fuel. Kairos finalized construction (in 2022) the Engineering Testing Unit (ETU) which simulates Hermes their demo unit which they've submitted to NRC. ThorCon will likely build Indonesia's first nuclear reactor, a molten-salt reactor. There's progress but is scattered in western world. The only fast and impressive progress is in China, where they've actually built their MSR. There's been no announcement but most people think it is likely already fissioning. Is a small test reactor similar to MSRE built in Oak Ridge.
@@gordonmcdowell Gordon please consider covering these sorts of things in videos, as in, the latest state of the industry, any new news, the differences in reactor spec between them etc, the public needs to know about and rally around these companies. Thank you so much for all your hard work.
No movement can realize success without an enemy whose detrimental influence is beaten into the heads of the movement's supporters, motivating action necessary to achieve the movement's objectives.
(Hint: a government of, by and for the people is no more the enemy to LFTR development than it was an enemy to Tesla's conception of free energy, which statement, itself, provides certain clue to who the real enemy is. As fate would have it, this enemy is so widely hated these days, its aggressive promotion as enemy to LFTR for the sake of building support for the technology practically is a no brainer.)
Not really considering the US gov just gave a grant to companies designing these last year.
Sugar is much better for catching flies than vinegar.
I read this 4 times and I still can't understand, I think you misplaced a comma or two
@oldspammer Also Transmitters don't produce energy. They take electrical energy and alter it. Tesla's magnifying transmitter would indeed produce nothing at all, because it does not generate electricity at all.
LFTR+ mobile suit?
ok we had something similar shown to us when they first came out with nuclear power being the power of future. being cleaner and being so cheap they won't be able to meter and you provide a very pro Thorium presentation but i want to read the cons of this power source as well. I'm not pro Nuclear,oil or solar and would love to learn more on this possible alternative type of power..... call me a fence sitter for now
Ok, I'll bite:
1. What is the cost of LFTR that makes it much too expensive?
2. When has complexity stood in the way of implementation? A passenger airplane is a complicated piece of equipment, it still gets manufactured.
3. If profit exceeds costs, it's economical. Considering such devices are used for more than electricity, it seems very economical.
4. What risks are there that are not present in nuclear powered solar and thermal energies?
Beryllium may be rare, but it is not consumed in the reactor. Ideally what you start out with will last the the end of the reactor.
Why was abandonned in 60ties if not that militaries wanted more plutonium for their bombs ?
R.I.P.
There seem to be a lot more problems with developing the Thorium Reactor than I was first led to believe, especially related to Radiation levels that a decent sized one will produce. Only Research and Development sized ones are being produced; with problems still with materials for the containment vessel. Kun Chen estimates that it will take 20+ years for the introduction of a Functional Reactor. Fukushima was a major turning point; and problems from it will continue for many years, the situation being still very unstable. It has turned things back to Coal, Fracking and Natural Gas, and the continuing drop in Oil production. I shudder to think what will happen when Oil output drops below a critical level. That's when there will be a sudden drop in Food production. Either this Thorium Reactor gets built within the next few years or we might as well forget about it.
*****
no, India's thorium program is based on the heavy-water CANDU reactor design. Solid fueled, water-cooled.
+D Nickaroo Chen didn't say it would take 20+ years for a "functional reactor" He was guessing a timeframe to having a commercial capacity operating reactor online providing power to their grid in 20+ years, there's a huge difference there. What levels of radiation will a "decent sized" one produce?
Douglas Dobson. Yes, I can see that there would be a significant interval between the development of a design for a commercially viable Reactor and when it is built and functioning on the grid. I do not know the exact levels of radiation, but this would appear to be main problem: container materials become brittle.
However, technical problems usually seem to solved sooner than one expects; so I feel rather more optimistic that this will occur.
I understand that Uranium is a rather scarce resource, with only enough to last another 100 years or so. The solid Thorium Reactor as developed in India seems to be an available technology.
Although there are continuing improvements in Solar and Wind Energy, it appears that Nuclear Reactors will be needed to replace Coal, Natural Gas etc to solve the problem of storage; and Thorium-based Reactors seem to be the only ones with assured long-term availability of fuel.
+Douglas Dobson It will be even longer if they don't start right now.
so how did they burn the U233 from thorium back in the 60's yet everyone was safe. yes it will have a high radiation area which no one can go in for a while after it has stopped reacting. just like any reactor. or even fusion
A natural and very knowledgeable speaker..........The US could be a world leader in this technology........so why no interest........
Oh there's interest, there are guys selling hot salt loops on amazon now, some progress has been made in 9 years.
You can consume, hold even, or create surplus (breed) U-233 depending how reactor is tuned & operated.
Good questions. Takes only seconds to ask them. I don't want to dig up answers which can't be completely accurate, there's material science still to do and components need to be put under neutron bombardment to see how they do. Am not worried about ANY unit of waste measure since E=[MC^2]/1500 is energy density. 4g Th per year per human. Mass isn't being created, so small waste footprint.
Have no fear, if the US does not invest to conquer those risks, someone else will. Canada perhaps, China definitely. I think it highly likely that the world will have significant power generation from molten salt reactor technology well within 25 years.
So it isn't the an option for space exploration?
its probably possible in a centrifuge to power space stations but imagine what happens if it stopped spinning for whatever reason lol radioactive molten salt floating everywhere
You can run Alberta for a year on 10 Tons of thorium. That's cool.
well, not really, as he points out, it's actually very costly and needs a consolidated effort preferable on a governmental level. The Chinese and the Indians have started to look seriously into this and it's just a question if the United States are going to be trailing behind and be left in the dust...
So many cameras.
Will there be fluoride air or water pollution caused by liquid fluoride thorium reactors
Short answer: no.
Long(ish) answer: an LFTR does not need a water source for cooling -- and while it can use it, this waste heat can then be used to desalinate water, so that's the first point. As to fluorine gas/fluorides, they are used in the fuel/blanket closed cycle and as such never get released in the environment. If a danger exists here, it's in the manufacturing and transport of fluorine (which never is transported as such anyway), not in the LFTR itself.
Corporate industrialization of nuclear plants typically involves cost cutting & liability avoiding policies that result in very poor operating procedures & suppression of embarrassing reports of the results of those poor procedures--pollution of toxic materials, radiation leaks, etc. Major sources of long term pollution has often come from such companies as DuPont & other fuel producing companies. Freon in the air, fluoride in soil & ground water.
Seems to me, we should be extracting the protactinium from the blanket. If we wait till it decays to U-233; we run the risk of the protactinium absorbing another neutron because Pa-233 is fertile.
he does this. its just not mentioned in this talk
@MrDobrod Chernobyl's released radiation killed thousands of people within weeks of the accident. Several months later, zero people have died due to radiation from Fukushima. At worst Fukushima will cause a few more radiation-caused cancer cases to spring up, but the radioactive material fallout released by the accident still pales in comparison to Chernobyl's mess. For that matter, the average coal plant produces more radiation than Fukushima daily, why aren't those level 7 nuclear disasters?
And by the way - Japan meltdown now officially more dirty than Chernobyle. Looks like that Chernobyle reactor scheme was not so bad as we speak about it.
The problem with developing this technology is it has the scary term "nuclear" and there is so much red tape to cut through to even start building a prototype LFTR that it would take probably close to a decade to get 1 of these built. The chinese will have this technology before we do. They are not hindered by the insane overregulation and buerocracy.
I guess nearly all fission products come out as fluorides. But what about stuff like gold which (I think) eschews collaboration with any other elements? The fission product stream must require a lot of processing, but it sounds like a cornucopia for chemists.