Kirk Sorensen - The Promise of Thorium in Meeting Future World Energy Demand
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ก.ย. 2024
- Kirk Sorensen presented "The promise of thorium in meeting future world energy demand" at TU Delft in 2015.
flibe-energy.com/
Today’s approach to nuclear energy consumes only a small amount of the energy content of uranium while producing "transuranic" nuclides that complicate long-term waste disposal.
The central advantage of thorium as a nuclear fuel is its unique ability to be sustainably consumed in a thermal-spectrum reactor, maximizing the production of energy while minimizing the production of wastes.
All the thorium TU Delft presentations can be found at: www.janleenkloo... and PDFs can be found here: www.thmsr.nl/
Imagine getting Elon Musk involved with Kirk Sorensens company. It makes a lot of sense.
perrrry I said that same thing in a comment on another Thorium video a while ago. I got some angry responses. I know Elon is a big fan of renewable energy like wind and solar but I do not know how he would feel about liquid salt Thorium nuclear reactors.
I hope he does get interested and involved if only as a proponent and perhaps investor. He has done amazing, outside of the box things with the Tesla vehicles, SpaceX, and the hyperloop. To those of us who like what Elon has done and like the prospects of LFTR it seems like a perfect fit.
perrrry More likely would be Peter Thiel
perrrry
High temperatures would be used to produce synthetic fuels and hydrogen.
Elon wouldn't like that.
+Marc Bill Gates is a huge fan of nuclear energy!
+perrrry I wish someone will show Elon this presentation :)
Thanks again Gordon! Kirk was on point and hopefully made an impact on some European politicians. Always great to see Mr. Sorenson, looking forward to more TEAC videos soon. Keep it up.
I admire Kirk's passion and enthusiasm for this technology.
The separation of uranium and plutonium in a single fluid MSR isn't really necessary as a fast reactor. That would also lead to more proliferation resistance if your waste stream is only fission products.
Thanks for the informative update, Gordon. It is interesting to see the refinements in Kirk's vision on "getting there".
Another really informative and fun video. Kirk really is a great spokesman.
(You might want to deinterlace your videos)
***** This is mostly webstream MP4, upconverted to 1080P by who-ever streamed it. Also, Thomas Jam Pedersen of Copenhagen Atomics captured with a Canon Vixia camera, in 1080i (not 1080p). So it all be interlaced before I received it.
I'm hounding Thunderfoot to showcase thorium in one of his video's... He's a big fan of nuclear energy
What an excellent presentation. Very confident, prepared and accurate.
I really wish him all the best. People like him are agents of change.
Great presentation. They get more compact and informative each time Kirk does a new one. The Q&A at the end was really good too.
Do you know whether he makes the slides available? Making screenshots is tedious and quality is not great.
David Tangye You want to email me? I don't host slidedecks myself anywhere. gordonmcdowell@gmail.com
I absolutely loved this video, one of the best!
Great presentation Kirk. I mentioned I'm involved in decommissioning here in Japan. On August 29th, I will be touring the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant. Too my understanding they not only store but do fuel recycling as well. I will as about U233 production from their spent waste.
Thorium ion Molten Salt “Batteries”
LFTR - Ionic Liquid Thorium metal dissolved in a Lithium/Beryllium Fluoride Molten Salt in a “walk-away” safe, atmospheric pressure/high temperature Thermal Reactor. Can also be safely used to consume waste nuclear products to reduce their unsafe life from 30,000 years to 300years while providing radioactive medical products; storing peak power from solar & end; desalinate sea water, heat for processing mining products and recycled steel etc...
Good job Kirk! ......
He emphasizes its production of energy which I believe most people think of in terms electricity but at a high enough temperature ~1000C the heat is great for producing carbon neutral fossil fuels. If the Exxon's of the world could produce gasoline at $1.5/gallon using its heat they might provide the push to get the reactor commercialized.
Another great video!
Hopefully, a sequel to LFTRs in 5 Minutes is also in the works. Going Viral, with a compelling vision of engaging, sustainable communities and global prosperity will build a wave of public support which will wash over all NIMBY and political barriers...
Kirk Gothier Working on it right now. Have been for quite some time. I'm not going to focus on a 5m edit although I certainly know one is needed... is longer content but after release i'll focus on ensuring there's easy mechanisms for making 5m videos... way easier than how TR2011 was edited into LFTR-in-5-Minutes.
gordonmcdowell You're doing great work. Hopefully, the monetizing thingy is happening too.
Kirk Gothier (And I'm only commenting while PPro is thinking... it does stop and think a lot regardless of all the RAM and CPU cores.) It is iffy at moment, there's enough pledges that this doesn't look ridiculous and so there's enough commitment that people who already know and care have stepped forward as much as I need them to.
What I don't have (apparently) is an effective "ask". And that's my own fault... i just think a higher priority is to edit the doc than ask for pledges because to improve that ask will be difficult. it's not my skill to do that. i'll return to the ask once i've got the doc percolating in some state like a long render or a peer review.
So it might all work out, I just won't know until I iterate the ask and see how it improves. My insight that it sucks came when it went viral on Reddit and got ~38,000 view which is a hell of a lot, and I think I got about 20 pledges from that. 1 pledge per every 2000 views... would have guessed better.
gordonmcdowell Wish I could offer some practical advice. Unfortunately, my monetizing efforts peaked in the 80's, selling Adopt a Baby Redwood seedlings, when mail order catalogues were King and personal computers could barely handle QuickBooks spreadsheets...
At the Ferndale Museum we have produced over a dozen, full length historical films, by engaging our audience in telling their story. They act for free, pay to see the film multiple times, and invite all their family and friends to watch with them: www.ferndale-museum.org/giftshop.htm.
The folks at Creative Startups are doing some interesting work "to accelerate the success of creative entrepreneurs and economies." Tom Aageson has recognized our Museum's entrepreneurial efforts, and they may have some helpful insight: www.creativestartups.org/building-creative-economies.
The beauty of this technology is it's scalability ... Which allows minimization of transmission infrastructure ... Making it a reliability multiplier ....
Original video source from here:
www.janleenkloosterman.nl/symposium.php
Featured speakers include Leslie Dewan of Transatomic, David LeBlanc of Terrestrial, Jan Leen Van Kloosterman of SAMOFAR/MSFR (Euratom EVOL), Jilt Sietsma (MSR Materials study), Rudy Konings (Chemistry and neutron irradiation studies) and a few other speakers.
Kirk Sorenson introduced MSRs to me through TED talks on youtube and reignited my interest in nuclear power but the talk here is merely an iteration on previous talks. This would be fine if he were simply to be presenting at TED again, but this is the TU Delft MSR symposium where he is speaking to a nuclear engineer crowd. More details on his version of the LFTR where he uses 1.5? fluids would have been nice. Not sure if the Thorium blanket salt is to be plumbed the same way as ORNL proposed.
Reading through the ORNL documentation (energyfromthorium.com/pdf/) and reading about the yet to be solved problems - these are issues that should have been discussed in depth.
Addressing the feasibility of the chemical processing steps in 1 and 2 fluid reactors and experiments that still need to be done.
Looking at the Tellurium problem and intergranular attack of the reactor core material.
Addressing the "chemistry problem" where a solution for rare earth removal in reprocessing and salt cleanup was never worked on in detail before program termination.
Trying to find a supplier for the Lithium 7 enrichment, or details on the status of the depleted FLiBe and U233 in the US.
The more I read the more I realise how far we got along, and how far still we have yet to travel. Kirk expounds on the Thorium isobreeder and its multitudinous advantages, but the urgency of the climate challenge calls less for swords than machetes. The power density of nuclear is such that even run inefficiently a great deal of energy can be liberated; and in fluid fuel reactors the burnup is limited only by the core life hence Terrestrial's "razor blade" 7 year core life, with the half-burned salt transferred to a new core.
The "inelegant" 90% solution is the DMSR running on uranium, possibly from low burnup spent fuel; or the WAMSR. No more anti-nuke peanut galleries waving Operation Teapot MET documentation on the U233/Pu fizzle, and unblocking the back ends of the US reactor fleet to stave off the retirement cliff for a few years longer.
I find myself increasingly disenchanted with the prospect of the "pure" cycle LFTR making it to market in sufficient time and sufficient quantity to make an impact on climate change; nor would it necessarily be cheaper than coal as Robert Hargraves exhorted back in China at THEC12. The promise of profit, too, is making Sorenson and LeBlanc both clam up to protect IP in a world where licensing an MSR looks like a remote possibility in the first place. A truly open and transparent architecture as Delft and Euratom EVOL are sharing; benefits all MSR proponents. But this is not happening. There is a long game to be played here; and keeping one's cards close to the chest is a losing bet for all.
MonMalthias Thanks for mentioning that, I'll include in description text. I should have included that but forgot.
for some reason the stink of big oil and big coal surrounds the cover up of this energy source.
+vengencefrom1979 Someday we will realize that BURNING oil & coal is a huge waste of carbon molecules that would be better utilized manufacturing compounds to make stuff with, just as today we see how short-sighted our ancestors were burning trees for energy that could've been used for making furniture. It seems like a no brainer for "Big Oil" & "Big Coal" to get behind the LFTR to produce the energy to bring that future about.
+vengencefrom1979 It's not the cover up of big oil & coal. Kirk goes on to explain that thoriom got burried in the 50-60s due to the goverment not wanting to "try out new things" as they were happy with the U-235 reactors, and they could also make bombs with the stuff. but tides have turned and Norway ( has a working one) and China are developing Thorium reactors. hopefully US and other countries will follow soon
They’re desperately shorting Tesla shares to dishearten potential buyers...
Kirk, do you have any employment opportunities?
It might also be interesting to design in some thermal hardware at the "Wet Cooling" stage for some high-temperature chemistry. Otherwise that is basically just steam going out the reactor tower.
Thorium - Energy from dirt.
Gordon could you hook me up with some reading material about the exact chemical process? Or maybe just give a link to the corresponding Kirk video?
CabalaCicero I don't have any chemical processes in text format... I only have video content. Kirk goes into a bit more detail in "LFTR Chemical Processing & Power Conversion - Kirk Sorensen" on TH-cam, but that's all I got.
Thank you for your response! I've already seen that video!
CabalaCicero Kirk got a grant to put all the ORNL research documentation online. You can find it here
energyfromthorium.com/pdf/
HTH
Andrew
What about getting agencies like the California Transportation Authority interested to power the new high speed rail they envision. They may have some political muscle they can use. They would also be a great fit for water De-salination.
"Technology doesn't development in It's own, it needed to be pushed."
Does "highly depleted lithium" refer to highly purified lithium7 or some other type of processing of the lithium?
+Dukky Drake Lithium-6 is easily fissioned by thermal neutrons producing Tritium and He-3 (which goes on to absorb a neutron and become more tritium). Lithium-7 goes through a similar fission but only with fast neutrons.
So in this instance he is referring to high purity Li-7. Thankfully, the mass difference between Li-6 and Li-7 is so large it enables chemical separation unlike U-235 and U-238. There may also exist stockpiles of Li-7 somewhere from the days of Li-6 production for thermonuclear weapon use.
kylesenior
Thanks for the explanation.
Coincidentally, I actually ran across an old post that shed some light on this subject only yesterday on his forum.
energyfromthorium.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=4475&p=60929#p60288
Is any country actually starting a lftr reserach program? I keep hearing rumors that lead nowhere.
michalchik China is building test Reacor's
+michalchik china & norway are building them, Norway has one working as a test.
The test in Norway is not LFTR. It uses thorium pellets.
250MWe? What about 500MWe? And 2000MWe?
what would be really cool is for some physics students to build a thorium reactor to scale, say about 1/10th the size of a real one.
I Love it
Why thorium when the price of uranium has fallen through the floor and we have hundreds of years of it?
Fast-spectrum lets you fission either fuel more fully. But only Thorium can be fissioned fully in thermal spectrum (with liquid fuel and some online chemistry). There's no short-term supply side challenge either way. But there's a waste story that's very different with the correct thorium reactor. There's also an opportunity to monetize the byproducts which depend on that same chemical processing. It offers a very unique value proposition, not fully explained by cost per clean+reliable kWh.
@@gordonmcdowell I'm not sure I understand all that but can thorium be used in a burner reactor instead of a breeder? Breeders have a downside and will always be a harder sell.
@@robertbrandywine I don't think it is likely they'll always have a harder sell. I'd far rather have people champion best-tech and argue for that than try placate the likes of The Bulletin or Greenpeace, which today have a history of weak-sauce to defend.
But Thorium is in monazite and monazite can easily be bought on the internet. The implication is, every country could have nuclear weapon......
As found in the Earth neither Uranium nor Thorium are concentrated enough to qualify as source material. It is the act of refining Rare Earths which results in the concentration and thus regulation. But even that regulated waste material is in no way useful for constructing a weapon... that why Iran had their centrifuges and someone deployed Stuxnet against them, and ultimately the nuclear treaty Iran and USA signed resulted in Iran's heavy water reactor being filled with concrete (destroyed)... all of that is because it is no trivial matter to turn nuclear fuel into a nuclear weapon.
By the way, Thorium is NOT an attractive nuclear fuel to try weaponize. That is why Uranium based reactors raced ahead while Thorium was largely ignored... because the very first R&D pertaining to nuclear was to try develop weapons not civilian energy. It was simply easier to weaponize U/Pu instead of Th.
this should have huge persuasive value among the anti-nuke greens. they were deceived by a weapons program. they can understand this., deception and weapons go hand in hand.
is there a video just explaining the difficulty of weaponization of thorium?
No, proliferation is the messiest topic. So there's comments scattered through-out lecture videos but I haven't tried to clarify that topic yet... that is in TR2016 part-two and there's a very rough edit in an older (private) Patreon post. I'd wait until I iterate that, as it is a very ugly edit.
So a Dr. Lyons testified to an energy committee that there's no advantages to thorium and then mentions proliferation concerns as being a concern. The OECD report he cited in his testimony (which took about a year after his testimony to become public) does not include any mention of liquid-chemistry monitoring mechanisms as safeguards. Nor does it clarify that the U233 created is then also consumed inside the reactor, never needing to make a round-trip to a solid-fuel reprocessing plant.
The biggest fundamental anti-proliferation feature of liquid-fuel thermal breeding of Thorium, is that the U233 does not leave the reactor in the waste stream. The waste stream is only fission-products, and no surplus proliferation material is being created. If you remove the U233, the reactor stops operating.
This is a communications challenge more in line with today's reactors, where REAL proliferation risk of civilian power reactors is very small... today's reactors DO make Plutonium, but reactors are designed in such a way as to make it impossible to get at.
That's why the USA/Iran nuclear deal was so important... Iran filled their heavy-water reactor (which COULD make weapons-grade Plutonium) with concrete. THAT was a troubling reactor. But there was nothing fundamentally different from Iran's Pu-capable reactor than all civilian reactors.... they operate about the same except that Iran's was not secured and was designed to make Pu harvesting possible.
That's the same story here... if you designed a LFTR specifically to make bombs... well then you have a proliferation problem. It would be U233 bombs which are regarded as inferior: 2 ever made, 1 fizzled, vs 10,000s of Pu bombs. Just the same as if you designed a PWR to make bombs... you could do it.
Common sense says, control mechanisms will be put in place to ensure the U233 is not diverted. It isn't hard. This line of problem solving simply isn't the biggest obstacle right now, and so not much talk/thought has been spent on it. But there's no reason to think it is an insurmountable problem. Thanks to liquid chemistry the monitoring of materials should be EASIER not harder... we can sample liquids and analyze them... a tiny sample of a homogeneous liquid tells you what is in the entire volume.
Man that is a lot of mic feedback
Non-Plutonium nuclear power. There are a few options besides Thorium's MSRs... the various varieties of fusion, decay heat-generators. For non-Plutonium FISSION this is the only option. Gotta be careful with your phrasing ;P.
Why on Earth would you want to introduce additional potential nuclear problems/disasters to the environment?
You don't, you actually "clean up" the environment in consuming other spent nuclear fuels. It's a win for mother earth!
Gen 3 reactors are coming on line all the time (there are currently 440 nuclear power plants). The question then is do we keep producing them or switch to safer Gen 4?
Christ, what a messy PowerPoint
At that point I think Kirk was using LaTeX not PowerPoint.
What a pack of lies. There are still lots of technical problems to overcome before there can be an economically viable thorium reactor. Scientists agree that the development of such a reactor will take at least another 25 years. It is NOT just a matter of building one.
Apart from that, we have free solar energy for billions of years to come. The technology for CSP is fully worked out. Why not build CSP installations now rather than wait another 20 years for this TMSR to become operational. Now is the moment that we need clean power, not 25 years from now. We cannot afford another 25 years to run our economy on oil and coal. The climate won’t stand for it.
Adje you're referring to Ivanpah style CSP? The Blade Runner 2049 fly-over tech? Here is how well it has performed: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility#Production for only 2018 (latest available stats) Natural Gas provided 1,329,278 MILLION BTU for this CSP operation. Just as RFK Jr. stated waaaayyy back in 2010, utility scale renewables require natural gas to balance intermittency. th-cam.com/video/qcm1gmPL50s/w-d-xo.html
Flibe Energy and ThorCon Power have each thrown out 7 year timelines given an assumption of political will and full funding. Andrew Yang's policy platform did include construction of such reactors before the ends of his hoped-for 2nd term. There are technical challenges remaining, particularly for Flibe's design, but they're chemistry challenges that don't require access to LEU or Plutonium to resolve... it is university lab work with natural uranium and thorium. And it is progressing, although without full funding, so slowly, and not yet chipping into the 7 years projection.
I'd love to hear more about CSP and how it is supposedly viable. What's the operating example that wasn't a giant carbon-emitting waste of money? I am glad they did build Ivanpah as it is always good to test ideas. But its a giant gas plant. Multiple high-temperature (air cooled) reactors on that same footprint could have powered all of California, with no carbon emissions. Tortoises would still have been killed to develop anything on that spot, but at least carbon-free electricity would have been the result.
Technology maturity is not important at all. We have tons of mature technology that we can use now. Burn coal, oil or natural gas to generate electricity. Very mature. Wind. Holland folks use that to power wind mill. Mature. Hydro--electricity. It is also a hundred year of using multiple purpose dams to generate electricity. What is so different with CSP? Scale of operation is a key. Say for using solar energy. You need an area with size of the whole Sahara desert to power the energy requirement in the world. Using nuclear reactors, you may need a few thousand nuclear sites. You can actually achieve that. Of course nuclear waste is a big issue. Total area as large as Sahara desert, you will never achieve that.
The answer to the first question on how to discuss thorium energy: we must build up the brand of "Thorium Energy" and avoid using the term nuclear until we can distance the concept of uranium nuclear from thorium nuclear within our audience's minds. Providing a safer energy future depends on easing the public into these concepts and not allowing emotional reactions to "nuclear" to derail a better energy future.
Had Nuclear power been introduced in peace-time, perhaps it would have been seen for its true epic potential in Molten Salt Reactors.
this guy is gonna change the world!!!
There are two "issues" the ANTI's constantly put forward regarding LFTR that need to be addressed in a 5 minute LFTR primer.
1) Corrosion. [foreseen chemistry and metallurgical requirements]
2) Separation of Protactinium 233 for bomb making material. [seems most easily overcome by simply reducing the incident neutron flux by increasing the blanket volume]
There are real engineering challenges with these so-called issues, but IMO nothing more daunting nor complex than the challenges overcome by the Apollo mission, Manhattan Project or Nautilus Program.
I'm pretty sure that Kirk has figured out the issue with corrosion with FLiBe. Oak Ridge did extensive testing on this back in the 60's and 70's and found a few ways to "proof" the steel reactors against FLiBe corrosion. High Nickle content in Hastelloy-N with some Niobium or Titanium (the former being preferred to resist Tellurium attacking the nickle in the Hastelloy-N) were tested by ORNL in the 1970's and showed sufficient embrittlement and corrosion resistance for reactor designs... Combine that with a thorium rich blanket actively blocking the walls and you don't have much neutron flux at the reactor wall.... In fact, as I was typing this he addressed the corrosion and embrittlement issues.
Number two is a challenge but one that is horribly overblown. U233 is a horrible bomb making material because of U232 contamination (high gamma emitters in the decay chain) but it isn't impossible. In reality, making a nuke out of Pa-233->U-233 is a really weak argument. It's weak in current reactors, it's even weaker in MSR's where everything is operating at extremely high temperatures using a fuel with significant gamma emitters that also form. Also, in terms of countries that want nukes... they will get them... of the 17 countries with nuclear power plants, only 9 have access to weapons and only 2 have been confirmed to go from Civilian Power to Nuclear Weapons and how is entirely unclear. It would be far easier to have separate enrichment facilities away from prying eyes to do this for the countries that really want it.
@@UrPeaceKeeper It's not only that they "magically" forget that it's physically impossible to separate Th232 - Pa233 outside a containment process because it is a gamma emitter. It not only physically hot it is also radiologically hot, and not only that they seem to forget that U-234 is also present in the flux and it just "magically" becomes U-235. Too bad the physics doesn't work that way, and if you do make U-234 it kills the process because you do not have a spare neutron to make it into U-235. I don't care how much "magic" you've got in there, the physics doesn't work that way period!
Gordon McDowell
Can you link the source Kirk speaks about at 27:25 please?
i hope this becomes a real solution to help on energy
13:44 aluminum and steel production also.
Shared ! GO Thorium (GO TEAC!)
Keep Pushing Kirk! Good job Sir!
This presentation and the audience proves that Kirk is a game changer.
Portuguese, please!
Two questions: is it possible to start up a thorium breeder with a mix of low enriched uranium and plutonium from LWRs, considered that a large amount of 233 is not currently available ? Why gas turbine, if you can achieve with that heat grade an efficency > 50% with today steam tech ?
Gas Turbine would help in detection and recovery or tritium. Not sure LEU adequate to seed LFTR might need HEU (or Pu) and run until fissile consumed and replaced with created U233.
+Mark Smed
Interesting. So, just curious, any guess about the time frame to achieve thorium-uranium 233 steady state in a such LFTR ?
Initially the reactor is fed with U235, the initial period of time in the order of months after that only Th232 is needed. The supercritical CO2 Turbine requires much less real state to build than a steam turbine, among other cost reduction. My opinion is that initially we may have to use steam turbines.