Andrew, I do think we should give Molten Salt Reactors a chance. In particular I think Moltex, ThorCon and others have some good ideas. But let us get real, nuclear power is complex technology and this will take time to develop. Most talk about 2030 for the first reactors. We cannot wait until then to go green. That is why I think the sensible choice is to push wind and solar power, now that that is fast, easy and cheap to build. Sure at the moment we need to pair it with fossil fuel when the wind doesn't blow. But in 10 years we may be able to replace that fossil fuel usage with Thorium. My point is that renewable energy and nuclear power should not be enemies. They can complement each other. Molten Salt Reactors e.g. are very good at functioning as batteries if setup the right way. That allows you store power and increase power output in response to power output from renewables. To be fair I am not 100% sold on nuclear. I think it is worth exploring but Nuclear power don't have a great record. Progress has been slow. I have heard about Thorium for a very long time now. People have operated Thorium reactors for a very long time. Yet we are still quite far away from commercialization. If somebody can pull it off, that is great. I will not stand in their way. But given the rapid progress or solar, wind and battery technology Thorium may get beaten to the finishing line. Whether Thorium, batteries or whatever wins doesn't really matter. What matters is that we get a solution. We should not bet on just one horse.
This technology is the way forward. Mind you bread I am interested in the green movement (not be confused with the green party) and am also a communist.
@@erikengheim1106 Solar and wind require the burning of fossil fuels to create them anyway in the first place. Solar panels in particular require coal and quartz to be combined in a huge furnace, resulting in massive CO2 emissions. Wind farms take up to 10 years to produce more power than they took to be built. The world's governments are pouring endless amounts of money into fusion power, yet even the experts in nuclear power say that fusion reactors won't make more power than they require until at least 2060. The Molten Salt reactor experiment at Oak Ridge in the 1960s was a success, and this proves that MSRs can be commercially viable. 2030? That is the best we have at the moment, considering that even if we continue with renewable energy until 2030, we still won't be even close to the needed levels of CO2 emissions to slow down global warming. In my opinion, thorium/molten salt reactors are not only our best chance, but currently they are our only chance.
@@erikengheim1106 Yeah I feel that, but there are plently of other reactor designs too that also use molten salt which is the key principal behind thorium powered reactors. The MSCFR by Elysium technologies is also a really interesting design to LFTR that make it more attractive that can consume not just thorium but also spent nuclear waste from pressurised reactors and nuclear bombs with really high efficiencies because you can make the fuel a liquid not solid. Imagine we can solve 2 birds with 1 stone and prevent nuclear proliferation as well and disarm the planet and live in peace and unity and enjoy nature as we stop climate change.
The amount of information he just relaying in only 10 minutes is ASTONISHING! He has gotten better at getting the word out on Thorium. He is now a professional speaker on the subject of Thorium and I LOVE his lectures. I support Kirk Sorenson and I support moving from Uranium Reactors to Thorium Molten Salt reactors!
Top comments are demonstrations of the kind of dialogue that we need more of in the way of the public. TED is a marvelous platform! We all need to keep it up!
I'm with you, and I am amazed that the properties of Thorium, and that it can is the most wonderful form of energy reactor, that can be easily and cheaply used in liquid salts, to create electricity with very little waste. This is part of our future and so, many thanks to Thomas Jam Pedersen, and Kirk Sorensen for their foresight and energy, in bringing this to us.
I agree, fusion remains the "holy grail". But it does make you wonder why we are fooling around the way we do. Thorium is a perfect way to start adressing the problem now! And there's no reason why we shouldn't pursue both in the long run.
Thank you Kirk for the insight to this energy, I’d be very keen to learn more about it , in a real world application, it’s a topic that needs to be explored and vision on a global scale
Bronner33 Wow your article just makes me want to sit in a puddle of mud and blubber like a big baby, I guess that's that, it's all a bug bust, I'm gonna go home now wait for the inevitable end.. Way to go cherry-picking information and providing it out of all context and objective analysis, of course Thorium is more radioactive, but instead of a million years its only dangerous for hundreds, your welcomed to go try eek out a living as a noble savage on the land, you don't need electricity at all, it's highly overrated.
Great talk. Thanks. You make a very good case there which only leaves me wondering why we're not hearing a lot more about thorium reactors as an alternatiev energy source now. Politics? Commercial problems? Lack of awareness?
BTW, in case nobody mentioned it, thorium is found in coal. In fact, it's the thorium (among other things) in coal that makes its burning a radioactive menace. However, the thorium in a ton of coal contains about 7 times as much energy as the coal itself, so theoretically you could do coal-to-liquid (Fischer-Tropsch) and power the processing with the thorium from the coal, and have energy left over!
I'm a big supporter of 4th gen nuclear...which can't melt down, doesn't use water to cool, recyles it's own waste as fuel...and from which it's impossible to make a bomb. This is why I support the Integral Fast Reactor....which has been built and tested. It works. I also support the thorium reactor, as presented here. It sounds wonderful. Renewables and efficiencies alone, will never supply the right amount of base power. Never. We need 4th gen nuclear...the IFR, or the LFTR, or the CFR. Which is the best, I don't know, but already the IFRs are getting close to commercialization. This is the future. Let's grab it.
@@prysin8890 bruh thorium isn't a fissile material. It is physically impossible for it to be made into a bomb. It is a FERTILE element, that decays into U-233 by neutron activation. U-233, which IS a fissile element, even completely purified, is really hard to make a functional nuclear bomb out of, due to its very high critical mass. It requires a very advanced 2nd or 3rd generation warhead design in order to actually start and maintain a runaway fission chain reaction, and even then the rates of initiation failures and partial burns are very high. IIRC, the US tested U-233 warheads and never actually managed to get the fission core to fission completely enough or fast enough to reach the temperature and neutron flux thresholds necessary to start a Teller-Ulam cycle needed for thermonuclear warheads, which is the real danger.
We need to spread the word about Thorium. Share this information with as many people as you can. This source of energy needs to be harnessed and used because it is cheap and so plentiful.
Kirk - This sounds so good! Why doesn't someone jump on this!? If it's really this good - why are we not able to get an entity or OUR gov to do this in full scale - today!? You sound very knowlegeable about this - what's holding you/us up? Cant you build a small scale LFTR to prove the process!? I like the idea of a safer more stable USA/WORLD! I want everyone to be more capable and successful using a resource like this! Kudos for your enthusiasm and for the info! Lets make this happen!
I have watched this video a few times and the science really resonates with me. My now eleven year old grandson Walter, who loves science, has heard me talk about LFTR’s and it’s benefits and I think it’s rubbing off on him. I understand that Walters science class had a vote on how many students felt nuclear power was safe; 49 out of 50 voted no. Walter voted it was safe and began to defend his position. There was no question he soaked up the information I shared with him over a year ago. By the time he was done with his defense argument two of his classmates changed their vote.
Thanks, I was wondering why this hadn't been implemented. I don't understand why people thumbs downed your post. It was an elephant in the room question that he avoided the entire speech. I'd be awesome if we could get thorium to work but at the moment I'm holding out for fusion based energy production. Check out the research being done at ITER!!!
+Elusive7thElement That's another false argument from the thorium crowd, and it is very easy to demonstrate that it is a lie. You can easily breed weapons-grade plutonium from $400 per kg uranium-238 in any nuclear reactor, including all proposed forms of thorium reactors.
+André Balsa in a breeder such as a thorium reactor it would be exceptionally difficult to do so without stunting the breeding process albeit it is possible if you were to have a load of u233 to tie you over until you switch from pu239. basic math here though, in a situation where you don't have excess u233 lying around it takes over 2 of the 2.3 neutrons produced by the reaction to sustain said reaction so to produce an amount of pu239 in a lftr vs a u235 reactor you'd roughly need 5 to 10 times the numbers of reactions in the lftr to get the same output as the u235 reactor
"... in a situation where you don't have excess u233 lying around..." That's exactly one of the points of all molten salt reactor concepts: you can easily change the concentration of fissile material in the circulating molten salt at any time. So *having spare neutrons to irradiate U-238 and breed Pu-239 is exceedingly easy in a LFTR*, and exactly the contrary of your claim that it would be "exceptionally difficult".
changing the concentration of does not = spare neutrons. please describe to me how you'd obtain said spare neutrons without using material which was already weapons capable to begin with or stunting the reaction
He makes seperating hydrogen from water seem so effortless. The amount of energy needed to seperate the intemolecular bonds and force it to make bonds with something else is enormous.
Every solution to every problem is around us. We can choose to live in harmony with our surroundings or thwart our enemies. Either way, there is no win-lose.
For those people who read my google plus page and want to know more about Thorium Reactors here is Kirk Sorensen's explanation on Thorium Reactors. He is a nuclear physicist who worked for NASA. #thorium #energy #nuclearenergy
Good Question, because you can't build bombs with a thorium reactor. You can use a reactor to change U238 into Pu239 which is a fissile material and made the Nagasaki bomb.
I wish the world was as logical as you. The U235 industry killed it. The Spanish have developed a wonderful solar oven that works on molten salt which can retain its heat for 15 hours of darkness and yet these plants aren't being built. This solar plant can produce energy through out the night. Why are they not being built. Industries are like animals once they find a niche they protect it from intruders. They have a two prong strategy promote their product and destroy the competition. Tesla electric cars is finding that out now.
Why are we not looking into this? This needs a professional advertising company to raise awareness. We need someone to make this form of energy publicly known, this will only realistically get looked into if the masses show an interest. This technology will give cheap and available power to everyone.. ITS LITERALLY WORLD CHANGING
It's seriously maddening that thorium hasn't been researched for 50 years. Just think of all the wasted lives, conflicts and just overall wasted human progress. Makes my blood boil. And even worse, fear mongering, general populace ignorance and mindless self-serving politicians are STILL holding humanity back.
Anyone looking for a more detailed talk on this subject, search TH-cam for "LFTR in 16 Minutes", constructed from 3 Google Tech Talks. It is not as nice to look at as this TEDx video, but if this perked your interest, that's the next step in terms of detailed information delivered quickly.
People who claim to be environmentalists ought to be ashamed of themselves for not working more to promote rail transportation in the US, and FOR DOING PRACTICALLY NOTHING TO PROMOTE THE USE OF THORIUM.
it's about time we have this information time to get onto the new way of thinking and not live in fear like some of the comments here that are crazy. we do not need nuclear weapons get real!
The main reason for the slow developing of the Thorium Molten Salt reactor is most likely the influence from the oil and coal companies, both producing the most pollution in the world. They see this development as a threat to their business. And the many people who work in those industries and the shareholders will do everything in their power to stop or at least slow down this development.
+mang8219 Search " China , Thorium, U.S. Oak Ridge " Hundreds of millions of dollars is already directed to the project so China will get it´s first thorium prototype reactor plant within a decade.
+mang8219 what's happened is that the millions of us who know something about thorium have failed to tell the x millions who don't know about it and together we have allowed our government to keep serving the elites who own the oil, coal and financial industries, more than they even pretend to serve the rest of us.
I'll be back to this thread to announce first criticality of any thorium reactor whenever that happens, but the reality right now is that there are none - not even a single experimental thorium reactor under construction, not in India and not in China. You can check the websites of the Shanghai Institute and BARC to verify this.
@OldSchoolSkill Agreed. Without the internet being free, we'll be very much screwed. Both of these are MASSIVELY important things, and I plan on spreading this video as much as I can
@lo2enge that's the beautiy of it - the waste from a LIFTR is far less and only needs to be isolated for ~300 years, which is easily manageable, as opposed to the Yucca Mountain solution for Uranium waste. There is no hot water waste that destroys nearby environments because the entire system is self contained. There is no chance for reactor meltdown or problems with structural integrity causing massive failure leading to catastrophe - the system kills itself in case of failure.
what's even sadder is that a lot of countries routinely use research done by the US (in many different fields, like: education, health, agriculture, transportation) to make their country better, because they realize that simply throwing money at a problem won't solve it. If only we could put to use all the research we do ... sigh :(
Sustainable Development Goal #7 on affordable clean energy should be plugged into this, and I hope that @kirksorensen is able to link up with the whole program on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.
SRI, amoungst others that we canvassed back in the late 1980's while writing our senior engineering project, clearly concluded that about 20% of total energy needs were possible from the collective of alternate sources and that at the time less than about 6% of total energy needs were being met by such alternate suppliers.
Does the statistic about "extraction from an area the size of a football field" stand up to time and depletion? How long until that area is depleted, less rich ores have to be mined and the size of the mines grows? In the past, copper was easily mined in high concentrations on small areas, but as depletion set in, the ore grade diminished, the mines had to grow larger and larger. How would this play out with Thorium?
Christina, how about Solar and Wind and LFTR? Solar and Wind need either install enough generation capacity and storage capacity to cover a city's needs during a 2-week wind-less heat wave or sun-less winter storm; or have LFTR, which can instantly throttle up/down how much power it generates, provide the "base-load power". (Natural Gas can't supplement them, the efficient NG plants take too long to get to full speed; the fast-on NG plants are so much less efficient use More NG w/wind&solar.)
@MrLachupakabra A Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor can run at a high enough temperature that air cooling can cause a big enough change in the temperature of the coolant (delta T) so that water is necessary for cooling. This is good for locations away from water.
@BeondaPale But I have to admit I like you Beonda; you got plenty of spunk. I appreciate your passion and especially your food-for-thought tidbits about Nocera, biomimicry, Rossi, et al. Got some new research to do....
And LFTR is really practical for near energy production, since the reactor design can be made very small, made on an assembly-line and shipped in a truck to where it needs to be, all because it operates at ambient pressure. It is ignorant to ignore a piece of technology that can be world changing. Every piece of technology has to start somewhere, and thanks to the MSRE at Oak Ridge, LFTR has a head start. If it is unknown, of course nobody is going to invest, denying researched to be done.
Thanks for your excellent reply. I have signed the petition to stop the destruction of our stockpiles of thorium, which the gov't is doing now. See thoriumpetition(.)com. Unfortunately, no one seems to be interested. Thorium should replace coal and gas, but what chance do we have of saving our stockpiles?
The wikipedia article on Liquid fluoride thorium reactors lists 20 challenges with the technology. The most severe of which make startup difficult. I'd like to see these addressed.
This is a short presentation cut into an even shorter youtube version. Working thorium reactors have been built, but never one quite like this. there def. still are some big obstacles in the way for the kind of reactor that he's actually proposing. fandaal keep looking around, he has expounded in on the process in other videos and i believe he clearly addressed the degradation process in a much longer presentation that i watched.. this one: /watch?v=YVSmf_qmkbg possibly was the one
@mikaelgruner we also have quite a bit of oil and natural gas, but here we are fighting over the sources as if we're gonna run out in the next year. this crisis isn't just about just burning fossil fuels, but the economic and political complications when someone (e.g. foreign nations, enemies, etc.)has more than you. you don't have to have literally 'run dry' without feeling the effects of having 'run dry'.we could use thorium for a long while, but another crisis will likely occur.
the salt transfers heat to a closed loop of gas for a Brayton cycle turbine that generates the electricity. At least for this proposed design of a Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) the Liquid fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) though it is not he only kind of of MSR so some may use water for the heat exchanger loop to drive a conventional steam turbine though with the heat generated by LFTR a Brayton cycle is possible to be used.
This is really interesting, but I would assume that there has to be some downsides to the issue. What are some of the reasons that opponents would reject thorium?
You are encouraged to. TED puts it deliberately in the public domain, anyway, for that reason. Use for instance Firefox with any of its TH-cam video downloaders plugins. The only problem is that you will not get the subtitles, unless there is a trick I did not catch.
The reactor itself does not do an energy conversion. That heat exchange is standard. Keep looking around on the topic, you will find drawings that depict MSR electrical plants. Very small, efficient and highly productive while being safe by any standard.
@Jeffersonicus It eliminates one of the main sources of income for the nuclear industry: fuel fabrication. It eliminates the need for high-pressure piping, thus doing away with a critical skill set in today's reactors. It uses thorium about 200 times more efficiently than uranium is used today reducing mining demand. In essentially every way it represents a complete departure from how "nuclear energy" is done today, which means that the "nuclear industry" will continue to ignore it.
@SaberUK1 - You say that Thorium is "4 times more common than Uranium". That is a very blunt number. There are numerous ways minerals can be abundant or not or distributed. The key feature of economic viability is that you need concentrated ores and then it depends on the concentration, extent and distribution of these ores. If in a few spots the ores are high grade enough to need "a football field" only, thats nice, but how many of these areas are there, how long do they last and what is next?
@Astrostevo Simple. The speaker didnt mention it here, but one of the reasons that research into Thorium reactors didnt get the government investment it needed in the 50s was because it is incredibly difficult to use Thorium reactors to create weapons grade nuclear material. I'd wager the same holds true today.
Derek, India's program is Thorium in a Solid fueled reactor, almost no difference from our LWR reactors. LFTR is a molten-fueled salt-cooled reactor, very different from LWR. You can see clear, very readable explanations, with quotes from technical journals, at glerner com / lftr
@scepticsteve That's why I call it a 'Power Crisis'. It's not about energy, it's about power and control. There's enough energy on the planet to provide us all the power we need, but we have people in the way trying to prevent us from fulfilling our own needs. They'll turn us into beggars cause we're easier to please. Same issue with food and starvation. We could easily grow all the food the world needs but people get in the way.
@carrierjunkie It is fission of uranium-233 which is what thorium-232 breeds The beauty is in the molten salt. It can run hotter but at atmospheric pressure so safety concerns can be hugely reduced. Also, hydrogen gas cannot be produced since there is no water being destroyed by radiation. This as well as the fact that no combustibles are produced greatly reduce the chance of any sort of explosion to disperse radioactive particles.
THOR Energy is testing a thorium reactor right now, hopefully it will be successful and they will start implementing this form of nuclear power generation. THOR is actually making a replacement fuel made from thorium that can be directly transferred into our current nuclear reactors, which is innovative and cost-effective until they make liquid salt reactors a reality.
THOR Energy isn't testing a throrium reactor. It's not a reactor optimized for thorium, instead it's a thorium+plutonium mix in solid fuel format for utilization in regular water cooled, solid fuel reactors.
One Thorium plant can supply an entire city with energy and have some left over, in fact, it was estimated that we would need only 400 NEW plants total to reduce our foreign fossil fuel imports to a laughable amount. the 104 plants we have now are all aging and will be retired, we MUST build these new thorium plants, it's essential. Nuclear power can "backload" energy, which NO renewable can, nuclear runs 24/7 365 without halting, something renewable CANNOT do
Well, buddy, you're talking to an anarchist here so i'm with you against any government involvement, but renewables are coming and their share of the energy market is increasing faster than ever. For what it's worth, i really hope to see LFTR take off as an important source of energy during the transition to completely renewable energy.
I watched this thinking I will learn something about Thorium energy. I was sceptical at first but at the end I understood that Thorium energy comes from public relations talks. We might need to re-adjust the Three Laws of Thermodynamics.
@CookyGames Uranium and thorium have similar energy density as a raw material. However, thorium's energy can be extracted in a thermal spectrum reactor. Uranium's full complement of energy requires a fast-spectrum reactor for extraction. Beyond that the differences become reactor-specific, but the fluoride reactor using thorium can extract substantially more of thorium's energy than a solid-fueled, sodium-cooled fast-reactor can extract of uranium's energy.
The Oak Ridge team, having been told in no uncertain terms that there would be no more funding for the program, filed away all of Weinberg's papers, where they remained, nearly completely forgotten, until relatively recently. The team members are now all either retired or deceased. No one in the government knew enough about the benefits of the proposal to advocate it since. That's what Sorensen's organization is doing: trying to educate the public, and thereby, the public's representatives.
@Slayer8957 - I wonder one thing about the claimed weapons proliferation safety. As i understand it, the reactors are in fact run on Uranium 233 (which is made from Thorium in a blanket). While not a great one, U233 is also weapons material. Also each reactor is connected to a chemical extraction facility to extract various "impurities", some of them are at least fit for "dirty bombs", so I am not so sure about the "inherent peacefulness" of these reactors. Can you comment on that?
The Department of Energy grants hundreds of millions of dollars per year in research and development of alternative energy systems. If looking for funding, this would be the best place to start. Either that or contact Sandia National Laboratories and get them started with this project. Having dabbled in the field of alternative energy for over 20 years (I have two patents in the field), I know that implementing such systems in society is always the hardest part.
According to Robert Hargraves, author of "Thorium: Energy Cheaper Than Coal" he estimates wind cost 17.4 cents per kWh and solar costs 23.5 cents/kWh and with research and development thorium could potentially cost 3 cents/kWh. (specifically 10:28 - 25:36 and 39:28) (search on youtube Seminar: Thorium, Energy Cheaper Than Coal)
Bombs were the reason awhile ago but now they are irrelevant now. The US operated a full-scale Light Water Breeder Reactor (LWBR) that operated off Thorium and U233 in a conventional PWR. This reactor operated until 1982. The project was started with the specific intent of research and generating power without the threat of proliferation. After the program was finish, technical reports were disseminated to the commercial nuclear industry.
@CookyGames It uses a closed-cycle gas turbine instead of a steam turbine. The closed-cycle gas turbine is a better thermodynamic fit to the high temperatures that can be achieved by a fluoride reactor, and allows thermal conversion efficiencies approaching 50% (substantially better than the ~35% achievable with today's water-cooled reactors and their steam turbines).
2019. Still with you Kirk, if you're out there! Wish the 'green' movement would educate themselves on this technology instead for the future.
Andrew, I do think we should give Molten Salt Reactors a chance. In particular I think Moltex, ThorCon and others have some good ideas. But let us get real, nuclear power is complex technology and this will take time to develop. Most talk about 2030 for the first reactors.
We cannot wait until then to go green. That is why I think the sensible choice is to push wind and solar power, now that that is fast, easy and cheap to build. Sure at the moment we need to pair it with fossil fuel when the wind doesn't blow. But in 10 years we may be able to replace that fossil fuel usage with Thorium.
My point is that renewable energy and nuclear power should not be enemies. They can complement each other. Molten Salt Reactors e.g. are very good at functioning as batteries if setup the right way. That allows you store power and increase power output in response to power output from renewables.
To be fair I am not 100% sold on nuclear. I think it is worth exploring but Nuclear power don't have a great record. Progress has been slow. I have heard about Thorium for a very long time now. People have operated Thorium reactors for a very long time. Yet we are still quite far away from commercialization. If somebody can pull it off, that is great. I will not stand in their way.
But given the rapid progress or solar, wind and battery technology Thorium may get beaten to the finishing line. Whether Thorium, batteries or whatever wins doesn't really matter. What matters is that we get a solution. We should not bet on just one horse.
This technology is the way forward. Mind you bread I am interested in the green movement (not be confused with the green party) and am also a communist.
@@erikengheim1106 Solar and wind require the burning of fossil fuels to create them anyway in the first place. Solar panels in particular require coal and quartz to be combined in a huge furnace, resulting in massive CO2 emissions. Wind farms take up to 10 years to produce more power than they took to be built. The world's governments are pouring endless amounts of money into fusion power, yet even the experts in nuclear power say that fusion reactors won't make more power than they require until at least 2060. The Molten Salt reactor experiment at Oak Ridge in the 1960s was a success, and this proves that MSRs can be commercially viable. 2030? That is the best we have at the moment, considering that even if we continue with renewable energy until 2030, we still won't be even close to the needed levels of CO2 emissions to slow down global warming.
In my opinion, thorium/molten salt reactors are not only our best chance, but currently they are our only chance.
@@erikengheim1106 Yeah I feel that, but there are plently of other reactor designs too that also use molten salt which is the key principal behind thorium powered reactors. The MSCFR by Elysium technologies is also a really interesting design to LFTR that make it more attractive that can consume not just thorium but also spent nuclear waste from pressurised reactors and nuclear bombs with really high efficiencies because you can make the fuel a liquid not solid. Imagine we can solve 2 birds with 1 stone and prevent nuclear proliferation as well and disarm the planet and live in peace and unity and enjoy nature as we stop climate change.
Kirk, if you're out there, why aren't you addressing the corrosion problem?
Thank you Kirk. I tell everyone I can about liquid thorium, every chance I get and will continue to do so.
Same same one person at a time 😂
The amount of information he just relaying in only 10 minutes is ASTONISHING! He has gotten better at getting the word out on Thorium. He is now a professional speaker on the subject of Thorium and I LOVE his lectures. I support Kirk Sorenson and I support moving from Uranium Reactors to Thorium Molten Salt reactors!
This is what the world needs. Let's make it happen! Spread the word!
Well done Kirk, you said it all only at an higher speed than I would have liked. But thanks.
Many thanks.
I emailed this guy, he's such a champ. We need more Kirk Sorensen's in this world.
Top comments are demonstrations of the kind of dialogue that we need more of in the way of the public. TED is a marvelous platform! We all need to keep it up!
Go Kirk! We need people like you to spread the message about Thorium.
I'm with you, and I am amazed that the properties of Thorium, and that it can is the most wonderful form of energy reactor, that can be easily and cheaply used in liquid salts, to create electricity with very little waste. This is part of our future and so, many thanks to Thomas Jam Pedersen, and Kirk Sorensen for their foresight and energy, in bringing this to us.
History will remember Kirk Sorensen along with Alvin Weinberg and Eugene Wigner!
I love this man 😭😭😭❤❤❤❤
I will hold a presentation about this in school too!!!
Wonderful introduction, Kirk. Now I have something that can help explain Thorium energy to my friends.
Anna Carson www.nirs.org/factsheets/thoriumbackersoverstatefacesheet.pdf
Thorium Reactors: Their Backers Overstate the Benefits
I could listen to this all day.
Kirk created THE BEST performance in TED history !!!
Great presentation (and all in just 10 minutes)...
I am glad to be the 300th member (hope I can do more to raise awareness)!
Excellent presentation, time for a change - is Now.
I agree, fusion remains the "holy grail". But it does make you wonder why we are fooling around the way we do. Thorium is a perfect way to start adressing the problem now! And there's no reason why we shouldn't pursue both in the long run.
High impact. Feels like an action packed speech
Thank you Kirk for the insight to this energy, I’d be very keen to learn more about it , in a real world application, it’s a topic that needs to be explored and vision on a global scale
This is the best option for the future we have right now. Thorium is the future now, we need to make this next coming age the Thorium age......
Mykey Hexadelic It shall kill fossil fuels! MEWHAHAHAHAH!
Bronner33 Wow your article just makes me want to sit in a puddle of mud and blubber like a big baby, I guess that's that, it's all a bug bust, I'm gonna go home now wait for the inevitable end..
Way to go cherry-picking information and providing it out of all context and objective analysis, of course Thorium is more radioactive, but instead of a million years its only dangerous for hundreds, your welcomed to go try eek out a living as a noble savage on the land, you don't need electricity at all, it's highly overrated.
Very well put together, and explained. Thumbs up, and favorited.
8 years later and were still without this technology
Great talk. Thanks. You make a very good case there which only leaves me wondering why we're not hearing a lot more about thorium reactors as an alternatiev energy source now. Politics? Commercial problems? Lack of awareness?
We need this.
BTW, in case nobody mentioned it, thorium is found in coal. In fact, it's the thorium (among other things) in coal that makes its burning a radioactive menace. However, the thorium in a ton of coal contains about 7 times as much energy as the coal itself, so theoretically you could do coal-to-liquid (Fischer-Tropsch) and power the processing with the thorium from the coal, and have energy left over!
The advancement of technology is awesome
I'm a big supporter of 4th gen nuclear...which can't melt down, doesn't use water to cool, recyles it's own waste as fuel...and from which it's impossible to make a bomb. This is why I support the Integral Fast Reactor....which has been built and tested. It works.
I also support the thorium reactor, as presented here. It sounds wonderful. Renewables and efficiencies alone, will never supply the right amount of base power. Never. We need 4th gen nuclear...the IFR, or the LFTR, or the CFR. Which is the best, I don't know, but already the IFRs are getting close to commercialization. This is the future. Let's grab it.
followthefleet1 www.nirs.org/factsheets/thoriumbackersoverstatefacesheet.pdf
Thorium Reactors: Their Backers Overstate the Benefits
you can make a bomb out of Thorium. Totally possible. It's not hard, nor complicated. Heck, it may even be simpler then from normal Uranium 238.
@@prysin8890 bruh thorium isn't a fissile material. It is physically impossible for it to be made into a bomb. It is a FERTILE element, that decays into U-233 by neutron activation. U-233, which IS a fissile element, even completely purified, is really hard to make a functional nuclear bomb out of, due to its very high critical mass. It requires a very advanced 2nd or 3rd generation warhead design in order to actually start and maintain a runaway fission chain reaction, and even then the rates of initiation failures and partial burns are very high. IIRC, the US tested U-233 warheads and never actually managed to get the fission core to fission completely enough or fast enough to reach the temperature and neutron flux thresholds necessary to start a Teller-Ulam cycle needed for thermonuclear warheads, which is the real danger.
This is the way forward for humanity.
We need to spread the word about Thorium. Share this information with as many people as you can. This source of energy needs to be harnessed and used because it is cheap and so plentiful.
ElectronicGigabyte www.nirs.org/factsheets/thoriumbackersoverstatefacesheet.pdf
Thorium Reactors: Their Backers Overstate the Benefits
Kirk - This sounds so good! Why doesn't someone jump on this!? If it's really this good - why are we not able to get an entity or OUR gov to do this in full scale - today!? You sound very knowlegeable about this - what's holding you/us up? Cant you build a small scale LFTR to prove the process!? I like the idea of a safer more stable USA/WORLD! I want everyone to be more capable and successful using a resource like this! Kudos for your enthusiasm and for the info! Lets make this happen!
Why is this guy still alive? Has David Rockefeller not heard of him?
No propably not but David Rockefeller die.
I have watched this video a few times and the science really resonates with me. My now eleven year old grandson Walter, who loves science, has heard me talk about LFTR’s and it’s benefits and I think it’s rubbing off on him. I understand that Walters science class had a vote on how many students felt nuclear power was safe; 49 out of 50 voted no. Walter voted it was safe and began to defend his position. There was no question he soaked up the information I shared with him over a year ago. By the time he was done with his defense argument two of his classmates changed their vote.
Thanks, I was wondering why this hadn't been implemented. I don't understand why people thumbs downed your post. It was an elephant in the room question that he avoided the entire speech. I'd be awesome if we could get thorium to work but at the moment I'm holding out for fusion based energy production. Check out the research being done at ITER!!!
Well, what THE HECK are we (humans) waiting for??!?!?! Haven't we polluted and imperiled our world enough??!?!? Let's go THORIUM, and spread the word!
+Zsolt Khalil
But thorium reactors don't make weapons grade plutonium as a by-product.
How are we gonna make nukes without that plutonium?
/s
+Elusive7thElement That's another false argument from the thorium crowd, and it is very easy to demonstrate that it is a lie. You can easily breed weapons-grade plutonium from $400 per kg uranium-238 in any nuclear reactor, including all proposed forms of thorium reactors.
+André Balsa in a breeder such as a thorium reactor it would be exceptionally difficult to do so without stunting the breeding process albeit it is possible if you were to have a load of u233 to tie you over until you switch from pu239. basic math here though, in a situation where you don't have excess u233 lying around it takes over 2 of the 2.3 neutrons produced by the reaction to sustain said reaction so to produce an amount of pu239 in a lftr vs a u235 reactor you'd roughly need 5 to 10 times the numbers of reactions in the lftr to get the same output as the u235 reactor
"... in a situation where you don't have excess u233 lying around..." That's exactly one of the points of all molten salt reactor concepts: you can easily change the concentration of fissile material in the circulating molten salt at any time. So *having spare neutrons to irradiate U-238 and breed Pu-239 is exceedingly easy in a LFTR*, and exactly the contrary of your claim that it would be "exceptionally difficult".
changing the concentration of does not = spare neutrons. please describe to me how you'd obtain said spare neutrons without using material which was already weapons capable to begin with or stunting the reaction
He makes seperating hydrogen from water seem so effortless.
The amount of energy needed to seperate the intemolecular bonds and force it to make bonds with something else is enormous.
Every solution to every problem is around us. We can choose to live in harmony with our surroundings or thwart our enemies. Either way, there is no win-lose.
Awesome! Thorium energy needs to be funded ASAP!
June 2022. STILL listening!!! Looked this up after reading works of Gregg Braden.
This is a great man.
He certainly is!!
@@zoesorensenallen Thank you my dear child.
For those people who read my google plus page and want to know more about Thorium Reactors here is Kirk Sorensen's explanation on Thorium Reactors. He is a nuclear physicist who worked for NASA.
#thorium #energy #nuclearenergy
Good Question, because you can't build bombs with a thorium reactor. You can use a reactor to change U238 into Pu239 which is a fissile material and made the Nagasaki bomb.
I wish the world was as logical as you. The U235 industry killed it. The Spanish have developed a wonderful solar oven that works on molten salt which can retain its heat for 15 hours of darkness and yet these plants aren't being built. This solar plant can produce energy through out the night. Why are they not being built. Industries are like animals once they find a niche they protect it from intruders. They have a two prong strategy promote their product and destroy the competition. Tesla electric cars is finding that out now.
You too, people are more interested in whether a dress is white or blue.
ronald brignoni Well, more like parents are encouraging kids to be rock stars or athletes and not Nuclear Physicists.
Why are we not looking into this?
This needs a professional advertising company to raise awareness. We need someone to make this form of energy publicly known, this will only realistically get looked into if the masses show an interest.
This technology will give cheap and available power to everyone.. ITS LITERALLY WORLD CHANGING
It's seriously maddening that thorium hasn't been researched for 50 years. Just think of all the wasted lives, conflicts and just overall wasted human progress. Makes my blood boil. And even worse, fear mongering, general populace ignorance and mindless self-serving politicians are STILL holding humanity back.
Hope we have enough time to start to use thorium, otherwise we're screwed.
that's if we refuse to change our way of living .... which we can if we have too ^^ consumerism isn't the only way ^^
Anyone looking for a more detailed talk on this subject, search TH-cam for "LFTR in 16 Minutes", constructed from 3 Google Tech Talks. It is not as nice to look at as this TEDx video, but if this perked your interest, that's the next step in terms of detailed information delivered quickly.
Here in 2021 and as yet I don't see or hear anything about this technology as a commercially viable fuel alternative. Why?
Never heard about Thorium before, my only question is WHY aren't we already using this?? Let's make this video more viral than Kony!
People who claim to be environmentalists ought to be ashamed of themselves for not working more to promote rail transportation in the US, and FOR DOING PRACTICALLY NOTHING TO PROMOTE THE USE OF THORIUM.
what about pro nuclear fission? hahaha
Greenpiss is funded by oil companies. That's a good reason. Isn't it ?
it's about time we have this information time to get onto the new way of thinking and not live in fear like some of the comments here that are crazy. we do not need nuclear weapons get real!
The main reason for the slow developing of the Thorium Molten Salt reactor is most likely the influence from the oil and coal companies, both producing the most pollution in the world. They see this development as a threat to their business. And the many people who work in those industries and the shareholders will do everything in their power to stop or at least slow down this development.
Agree with this statement. No conspiracy theory just a simple explanation. As Charlie Munger says “Show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome.”
This lecture already took place more than 4,5 years ago. Well , what happened since then?
+mang8219 Search " China , Thorium, U.S. Oak Ridge " Hundreds of millions of dollars is already directed to the project so China will get it´s first thorium prototype reactor plant within a decade.
+mang8219 what's happened is that the millions of us who know something about thorium have failed to tell the x millions who don't know about it and together we have allowed our government to keep serving the elites who own the oil, coal and financial industries, more than they even pretend to serve the rest of us.
+mang8219 Nothing. Or if you want, reality happened.
India's first thorium reactor should be completed by the end of 2016
I'll be back to this thread to announce first criticality of any thorium reactor whenever that happens, but the reality right now is that there are none - not even a single experimental thorium reactor under construction, not in India and not in China. You can check the websites of the Shanghai Institute and BARC to verify this.
@OldSchoolSkill Agreed. Without the internet being free, we'll be very much screwed. Both of these are MASSIVELY important things, and I plan on spreading this video as much as I can
It's a double edged sword. Ego and money have also been the very reasons why we've technologically progressed to the point where we are today.
Incredible! Do it now to elevate everyone’s standard of living through drastically cheaper electricity = cheaper everything!
Thanks be to Kirk!
@lo2enge that's the beautiy of it - the waste from a LIFTR is far less and only needs to be isolated for ~300 years, which is easily manageable, as opposed to the Yucca Mountain solution for Uranium waste.
There is no hot water waste that destroys nearby environments because the entire system is self contained.
There is no chance for reactor meltdown or problems with structural integrity causing massive failure leading to catastrophe - the system kills itself in case of failure.
This was a great Ted Talk
thanks for the information. is the installation cost and government rebate included? i renounce to boil water because electricity becomes to expensive
what's even sadder is that a lot of countries routinely use research done by the US (in many different fields, like: education, health, agriculture, transportation) to make their country better, because they realize that simply throwing money at a problem won't solve it. If only we could put to use all the research we do ... sigh :(
Does anyone know how many views are needed before TED Talks might take notice of this TEDxTalk, perhaps review it for consideration?
Sustainable Development Goal #7 on affordable clean energy should be plugged into this, and I hope that @kirksorensen is able to link up with the whole program on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.
Great stuff!
SRI, amoungst others that we canvassed back in the late 1980's while writing our senior engineering project, clearly concluded that about 20% of total energy needs were possible from the collective of alternate sources and that at the time less than about 6% of total energy needs were being met by such alternate suppliers.
Does the statistic about "extraction from an area the size of a football field" stand up to time and depletion? How long until that area is depleted, less rich ores have to be mined and the size of the mines grows? In the past, copper was easily mined in high concentrations on small areas, but as depletion set in, the ore grade diminished, the mines had to grow larger and larger. How would this play out with Thorium?
is there anywhere i can download this video? For science proselytizing of course.
Someone get this guy some grants and publicity to make this happen.
Christina, how about Solar and Wind and LFTR? Solar and Wind need either install enough generation capacity and storage capacity to cover a city's needs during a 2-week wind-less heat wave or sun-less winter storm; or have LFTR, which can instantly throttle up/down how much power it generates, provide the "base-load power". (Natural Gas can't supplement them, the efficient NG plants take too long to get to full speed; the fast-on NG plants are so much less efficient use More NG w/wind&solar.)
@MrLachupakabra A Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor can run at a high enough temperature that air cooling can cause a big enough change in the temperature of the coolant (delta T) so that water is necessary for cooling. This is good for locations away from water.
@BeondaPale
But I have to admit I like you Beonda; you got plenty of spunk. I appreciate your passion and especially your food-for-thought tidbits about Nocera, biomimicry, Rossi, et al. Got some new research to do....
I'd invest in this.
And LFTR is really practical for near energy production, since the reactor design can be made very small, made on an assembly-line and shipped in a truck to where it needs to be, all because it operates at ambient pressure.
It is ignorant to ignore a piece of technology that can be world changing.
Every piece of technology has to start somewhere, and thanks to the MSRE at Oak Ridge, LFTR has a head start.
If it is unknown, of course nobody is going to invest, denying researched to be done.
Thanks for your excellent reply. I have signed the petition to stop the destruction of our stockpiles of thorium, which the gov't is doing now. See thoriumpetition(.)com. Unfortunately, no one seems to be interested. Thorium should replace coal and gas, but what chance do we have of saving our stockpiles?
The wikipedia article on Liquid fluoride thorium reactors lists 20 challenges with the technology. The most severe of which make startup difficult. I'd like to see these addressed.
This is a short presentation cut into an even shorter youtube version. Working thorium reactors have been built, but never one quite like this. there def. still are some big obstacles in the way for the kind of reactor that he's actually proposing. fandaal keep looking around, he has expounded in on the process in other videos and i believe he clearly addressed the degradation process in a much longer presentation that i watched.. this one: /watch?v=YVSmf_qmkbg possibly was the one
@mikaelgruner we also have quite a bit of oil and natural gas, but here we are fighting over the sources as if we're gonna run out in the next year. this crisis isn't just about just burning fossil fuels, but the economic and political complications when someone (e.g. foreign nations, enemies, etc.)has more than you. you don't have to have literally 'run dry' without feeling the effects of having 'run dry'.we could use thorium for a long while, but another crisis will likely occur.
the salt transfers heat to a closed loop of gas for a Brayton cycle turbine that generates the electricity. At least for this proposed design of a Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) the Liquid fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) though it is not he only kind of of MSR so some may use water for the heat exchanger loop to drive a conventional steam turbine though with the heat generated by LFTR a Brayton cycle is possible to be used.
This is really interesting, but I would assume that there has to be some downsides to the issue. What are some of the reasons that opponents would reject thorium?
You are encouraged to. TED puts it deliberately in the public domain, anyway, for that reason. Use for instance Firefox with any of its TH-cam video downloaders plugins. The only problem is that you will not get the subtitles, unless there is a trick I did not catch.
The reactor itself does not do an energy conversion. That heat exchange is standard. Keep looking around on the topic, you will find drawings that depict MSR electrical plants. Very small, efficient and highly productive while being safe by any standard.
@Jeffersonicus It eliminates one of the main sources of income for the nuclear industry: fuel fabrication. It eliminates the need for high-pressure piping, thus doing away with a critical skill set in today's reactors. It uses thorium about 200 times more efficiently than uranium is used today reducing mining demand. In essentially every way it represents a complete departure from how "nuclear energy" is done today, which means that the "nuclear industry" will continue to ignore it.
With bright mind's like this guy, nuclear power plants will be built underground, without the need of human labor and reduction of nuclear risk.
I learned so much thanks
Yea, it is time. Long since past time to build these and become energy independent.
@SaberUK1 - You say that Thorium is "4 times more common than Uranium". That is a very blunt number. There are numerous ways minerals can be abundant or not or distributed. The key feature of economic viability is that you need concentrated ores and then it depends on the concentration, extent and distribution of these ores. If in a few spots the ores are high grade enough to need "a football field" only, thats nice, but how many of these areas are there, how long do they last and what is next?
@Astrostevo Simple. The speaker didnt mention it here, but one of the reasons that research into Thorium reactors didnt get the government investment it needed in the 50s was because it is incredibly difficult to use Thorium reactors to create weapons grade nuclear material. I'd wager the same holds true today.
Derek, India's program is Thorium in a Solid fueled reactor, almost no difference from our LWR reactors. LFTR is a molten-fueled salt-cooled reactor, very different from LWR. You can see clear, very readable explanations, with quotes from technical journals, at glerner com / lftr
@scepticsteve That's why I call it a 'Power Crisis'. It's not about energy, it's about power and control. There's enough energy on the planet to provide us all the power we need, but we have people in the way trying to prevent us from fulfilling our own needs. They'll turn us into beggars cause we're easier to please. Same issue with food and starvation. We could easily grow all the food the world needs but people get in the way.
@carrierjunkie It is fission of uranium-233 which is what thorium-232 breeds
The beauty is in the molten salt. It can run hotter but at atmospheric pressure so safety concerns can be hugely reduced. Also, hydrogen gas cannot be produced since there is no water being destroyed by radiation. This as well as the fact that no combustibles are produced greatly reduce the chance of any sort of explosion to disperse radioactive particles.
THOR Energy is testing a thorium reactor right now, hopefully it will be successful and they will start implementing this form of nuclear power generation. THOR is actually making a replacement fuel made from thorium that can be directly transferred into our current nuclear reactors, which is innovative and cost-effective until they make liquid salt reactors a reality.
THOR Energy isn't testing a throrium reactor. It's not a reactor optimized for thorium, instead it's a thorium+plutonium mix in solid fuel format for utilization in regular water cooled, solid fuel reactors.
thorium reactors charging electric cars and trucks and providing all the energy we need.
One Thorium plant can supply an entire city with energy and have some left over, in fact, it was estimated that we would need only 400 NEW plants total to reduce our foreign fossil fuel imports to a laughable amount.
the 104 plants we have now are all aging and will be retired, we MUST build these new thorium plants, it's essential.
Nuclear power can "backload" energy, which NO renewable can, nuclear runs 24/7 365 without halting, something renewable CANNOT do
Well, buddy, you're talking to an anarchist here so i'm with you against any government involvement, but renewables are coming and their share of the energy market is increasing faster than ever. For what it's worth, i really hope to see LFTR take off as an important source of energy during the transition to completely renewable energy.
I watched this thinking I will learn something about Thorium energy. I was sceptical at first but at the end I understood that Thorium energy comes from public relations talks.
We might need to re-adjust the Three Laws of Thermodynamics.
@CookyGames Uranium and thorium have similar energy density as a raw material. However, thorium's energy can be extracted in a thermal spectrum reactor. Uranium's full complement of energy requires a fast-spectrum reactor for extraction. Beyond that the differences become reactor-specific, but the fluoride reactor using thorium can extract substantially more of thorium's energy than a solid-fueled, sodium-cooled fast-reactor can extract of uranium's energy.
Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known. -Michel de Montaigne
The Oak Ridge team, having been told in no uncertain terms that there would be no more funding for the program, filed away all of Weinberg's papers, where they remained, nearly completely forgotten, until relatively recently. The team members are now all either retired or deceased. No one in the government knew enough about the benefits of the proposal to advocate it since. That's what Sorensen's organization is doing: trying to educate the public, and thereby, the public's representatives.
@Slayer8957 - I wonder one thing about the claimed weapons proliferation safety. As i understand it, the reactors are in fact run on Uranium 233 (which is made from Thorium in a blanket). While not a great one, U233 is also weapons material. Also each reactor is connected to a chemical extraction facility to extract various "impurities", some of them are at least fit for "dirty bombs", so I am not so sure about the "inherent peacefulness" of these reactors. Can you comment on that?
The Department of Energy grants hundreds of millions of dollars per year in research and development of alternative energy systems. If looking for funding, this would be the best place to start. Either that or contact Sandia National Laboratories and get them started with this project.
Having dabbled in the field of alternative energy for over 20 years (I have two patents in the field), I know that implementing such systems in society is always the hardest part.
According to Robert Hargraves, author of "Thorium: Energy Cheaper Than Coal" he estimates wind cost 17.4 cents per kWh and solar costs 23.5 cents/kWh and with research and development thorium could potentially cost 3 cents/kWh. (specifically 10:28 - 25:36 and 39:28)
(search on youtube Seminar: Thorium, Energy Cheaper Than Coal)
Bombs were the reason awhile ago but now they are irrelevant now. The US operated a full-scale Light Water Breeder Reactor (LWBR) that operated off Thorium and U233 in a conventional PWR. This reactor operated until 1982. The project was started with the specific intent of research and generating power without the threat of proliferation. After the program was finish, technical reports were disseminated to the commercial nuclear industry.
The pause button is a wonderful thing.
@CookyGames It uses a closed-cycle gas turbine instead of a steam turbine. The closed-cycle gas turbine is a better thermodynamic fit to the high temperatures that can be achieved by a fluoride reactor, and allows thermal conversion efficiencies approaching 50% (substantially better than the ~35% achievable with today's water-cooled reactors and their steam turbines).