How Molten Salt Reactors Could Revive Nuclear Power
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REFERENCES
How Thorium nuclear works: • It’s time to rethink N...
Copenhagen atomics: / @copenhagenatomics
World energy stats: tinyurl.com/y5zvomd9
Safety challenges of molten salt: tinyurl.com/yqsj5avq
CHAPTERS
0:00 World energy challenge
2:14 Soylent
3:31 How power plants work
6:43 How Conventional nuclear reactors work
10:23 How Molten Salt nuclear reactors work
15:06 Why are molten salt reactors not commercial
18:11 Bottom line and my opiniion
SUMMARY
There is a technology which could eliminate concerns about nuclear waste and disasters obsolete and allow us to have nearly unlimited energy, molten salt nuclear power technology. How does it work? What makes it safe? And how is it different from conventional nuclear power plants?
Any powerplant uses some fuel to heat some liquid. This liquid can be water, but it doesn’t have to be. This hot liquid can be used in industrial processes, or we can convert it to steam to drive a turbine to create electricity.Then it's icooled down again to be reused, to continue the cycle.
In a nuclear power plant. the source of energy is from the nuclear process of fission. Fission, very simply put, is when in the core of the reactor, we are split a heavy elements like uranium into smaller elements, like Krypton and Barium. The energy comes from the mass difference between the starting and ending products.
There have been drawbacks to nuclear power: 1) very expensive to build, 2) produces highly radioactive by-products which require storage for long periods of time, 3) an accident can cause an environmental disaster. A molten salt and Thorium reactor can eliminate many of these problems.
In the core of a traditional reactor, the fuel used today is uranium 238 with a tiny amount, uranium 235. But the fuel also has a lot of U238 which transmutes into highly radioactive isotopes, like Plutonium 239. This is the core of the nuclear waste problem.
There are two main differences with a molten salt reactor. Instead of solid fuels, the fuel is dissolved in molten salt which is in liquid form. The second difference is that instead of water as the coolant, they use a second molten salt as the coolant. These have several advantages, and some disadvantages.
The fissile material such as uranium is now part of the salt, which is in liquid form. This can allow it to move and circulate. This is very different from traditional designs where the uranium just sits in the core, and can’t go anywhere.
A circulating molten fuel is better, first, because it’s molten, it operates at much higher temperatures and can carry a lot more heat . And because it doesn’t operate under pressure, there is no chance of pressure vessel failure, so it can’t blow. Furthermore, because the fuel salt is being pumped into the reactor to keep it circulating, if anything goes wrong, for example if the pump stops working, the fuel will simply drain out via gravity into the bottom holding tank.
Molten salt also has a chemical property that when becomes too hot, it naturally expands. This reduces the nuclear chain reactions because the distance between the fissile atoms increases, so the chain reaction slows down all by itself. This is like a built-in thermodynamic safety valve. So in case of trouble, the salt can be just allowed to overheat, and the chain reaction will be reduced by itself. This makes a meltdown virtually obsolete.
Since the fuel is circulating, the reactor does not have to be shut down to be refueled. It can be refueled on the go. Finally, because the core by virtue of using molten salt is very hot, 600+ degrees Celsius, it has much better thermal efficiency. You can thus make more heat with a smaller core. So the reactor is unpressurized and has a smaller footprint, so it costs less to build for a given energy output. The reactor design by Copenhagen Atomics are so efficient and small that the whole thing can fit in a 40-foot container, and be produced on an assembly line, drastically reducing manufacturing cost.
#nuclearpower
#moltensaltreactors
So if molten salt reactors are so great, why are they not everywhere? They are highly corrosive and have not been commercially proven. Copenhagen Atomics has solved the problem by keeping removing the moisture and air from the salt, so that it doesn’t corrode. - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
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Quick story about their name: Soylent was actually named after the food in the 1966 science fiction novel "Make Room! Make Room!" and later 1973 film Soylent Green. While the food in the book is made from soy and lentils (hence the name), the food in the movie is made from humans. Soylent actually in 2022 (the year the film takes place), released a SoylentGreen snack bar in a mystery flavor as a humorous nod to the film.
...why would the nuclear power industry require "saving" when it claims to be efficient, economic and safe?
Could "Cathodic protection" be used to help reduce corrosion, in the same way it is used on underground natural gas pipelines?
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@@SpotterVideo Good question. I'm not sure that it would work in the extreme chemical and temperature conditions, or whether there is sufficient electrolytic conditions for it to work. It's a good question for Copenhagen Atomics. You might ask them on one of their videos. The link to their YT page is in the description.
Soylent is trash. I hope you don't eat it.
Isn't it a bit eery that a food company is named Soylent?
It's sus
This is why we don't believe in Science.
Soylent green is disgusting
But is it green?
Sorry, I'm a bit slow. Why is it weird/eery? What does soylent mean?
@@andrewmiller8402the movie Soylent green
First: As a nuclear power plant engineer who is very interested in new nuclear power plants I would like to complement you on being I believe the 1st TH-camr to talk about the very real corrosion issue with MSR's. People often wonder why there was never a 2nd MSR test reactor after Oak Ridge. It was because there was no known super-alloy of the day that could withstand the corrosive effects of the daughter products and chemicals generated by their reactions in the mixed molten salt stream that occurred at the Oak Ridge test MSR.
The good news is that a number of countries have been doing research into new "exotic" super-alloys that should better withstand the corrosion (to the best of my knowledge - no one has found an "immune" super-alloy at this time). Also, that the concept of chemical separation of the problem daughter products and resultant chemicals has been developed and limited testing of the concept has been done without actually using real MSR molten salts and daughter/chemical byproducts.
So the theory is that if you use a much better super-alloy than what was used in Oak Ridge and can filter enough of the daughter products and chemical reactants that you can minimize the corrosion rate to one that would allow construction of a 40+ year operating life reactor and molten salt stream piping and equipment. As you pointed out this is only a theory and has not yet been adequately demonstrated.
China built and started up a 2 MWthermal test reactor in I believe August 2023 to test their best guess of the right exotic super-alloy and an adequate filtering system. This test reactor is about 1/4 the size of the 1960's Oak Ridge Reactor. If it works (which is an unknown and failure is a real possibility) they plan on building another test reactor 10-15 size larger to see how it scales up. If that works then a small power plant (likely in the 40 - 60 MWe range). Then if that works they can design a power plant likely in the 200-400 MWe range. Etc.
Each step is likely to require a minimum of 5 years of successful run time before finalizing the next larger size plant design and starting construction. Reliable MSR power plants are likely several decades away.
Note that the history of nuclear plant development worldwide shows that scaling up from test or small reactors often does not go very well. Lots of plants the next size larger did not work well - or needed major modifications. No one at this point knows enough about the performance of any fuel in a MSR to do anything but take a very large gamble on building a power plant sized reactor (and we know that well as the USA built 4 commercial thorium fueled nuclear power plants in the 1960's - 1970's and all 4 were both a technical and a commercial economic failure: I will post separately on that history).
Second: Liquid salts are not the only material that expand and self control a nuclear reacton in a reactor. Light water BWR's and PWR's do the same (I'm not sure of heavy water reactor designs); and in the case of PWRs (which I have worked extensively in) once the reactor is in the power range they pull out the control rods more and just let the water temperature self moderate the reaction rate. So nothing new here.
Third: I hate to pop your bubble about Copenhagen Atomics, and about 15 other such companies in both the MSR and SMR market. I consider them an investment scam company (they exist to get investor money to fund jobs for a decade or more). They are not serious at all about building a real nuclear reactor and their designs and timetable are laughable to anyone with real experience in the nuclear industry. They don't even have a clue on which super-alloy will be needed to make the concept work yet (ordinary 304 SS is corrosion resistant to the pure lithium salt with unreacted nuclear fuel in it - the problems start once the nuclear reaction starts).
Companies that are serious are working with a nuclear regulator for eventual licensing of the reactor. This typically takes several years and multi-millions of dollars in a "pre-License" review process (and all western nations have such a process or will tell you to use a design licensed by other western countries).
The best example right now is I suggest that you look up the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission website, page down to "New Reactor Facility Projects" link, then use the link under "Current pre-licensing vendor design reviews" heading not quite half way down the page. There are two links near the top of the page for "Current" and "Completed" and a list of project at the bottom of the page. When this process is completed the vendor knows what will be needed in a license application for a reactor design. It typically takes several years to review a license application once submitted if it has all the required information and the regulator agrees things are properly designed and proper procedures and staffing will exist.
The mass production possibility is a myth. Airbus and Boeing build over 100 of the same model airplane each year, and they are largely hand assembled. Yes a number of parts are mass produced; but its cost prohibitive at that production rate to build a plant that could automate the assembly much more than it is currently. You would likely need to have orders on the order of 250 near identical MSR plants per year for at least 5 years to justify building a plant for mass production (and that plant will take years to build). Just not happening - no one needs that many new power plants (even at 50 MWe each) for that amount of time. Also, nuclear plant is highly site specific due to earthquake and natural disaster requirements. One location may need very light reinforcement and provisions for a natural disaster. The next site may need 10 times as much. The sites with low risk do not want to pay for 10 times the reinforcement materials.
Building nuclear plants requires a assembly of lots of parts; and having it in an appropriate safety structure. Also, nuclear construction codes exist due to lives lost and major nuclear plant issues. No short-cutting those and only about the top 25% of workers adjust to working like that (it's a completely different approach than normal construction). They also want to be paid for their expertise.
This myth also assumes that your design is well proven. It took the light water PWR about 50 years of operating history and lots of failures along the way to know how to build a well proven design (the current AP-1000). It will likely take a similar amount of time and failures to get MSR reactor plants that are really well proven after the designs are proven in test reactors. Who is going to buy more than a few units until the design is shown to work well for decades? Low production numbers means no special factory and highly skilled and paid workers custom building most everything.
Have a great day,
Thank you for this reality check. I had already suspected Copenhagen Atomics of being an investor-trap, and feel validated that somebody with more knowledge of the industry would say so as well. Does this go for all the highly profiled actors in the thorium space, like Flibe Energy, Thorcon, and so on?
Thanks a comprehensive reply from someone with his feet on the ground. One other point. commercial nuclear power came about on the back of the atomic bomb projects. Thorium has yet to find such a sponsor.
That's easily the most excellent comment I've ever seen on TH-cam! Better than anything I could've written.
As of late, the TH-cam science and engineering community seems to have discovered nuclear power as a topic of interest. Obviously, MSRs and SMRs are the new thing that everybody seems to agree will make nuclear power generation rise to glory again and be the ultimate solution to decarbonization.
I myself was getting tired of always pointing out the obvious problems with that. Your write-up gave me new energy, and I might quote you on occasion, If I may.
Thanks for taking the time to share your reasoning.
Very well said. Thanks 👍
@@haldir108 What separates the scammers from the potential real companies is how they talk about licensing and nuclear construction codes. Many of the scam companies talk about starting in 3rd world countries where they don't believe there will be any nuclear licensing and construction review. I'm sure that they can bribe some country leaders - and equally sure that they will leave a radioactive mess for that country to clean up when their commercialization plans don't work out.
This past summer I looked and did not find any company working with the regulators in the EU for future licensing of MSR's or SMR's. Nor any in the USA except for the already issued 50 MWe SMR license that turned out to be too expensive to build in Utah. Note that the GE 300 MWe "small" (if you can call it that) SMR is being licensed in Canada. Most western countries accept other major western countries licensing with nothing more than a cursory review and approval. Non western countries often just accept western country licensing (China Built 4 AP-1000's licensed by the US NRC - and they run so well that they ordered 6 more last year, Ukraine is staring construction on a 2 unit AP-1000 plant a this time also with Ukraine's nuclear regulator just accepting the US NRC license). Canada has a number of companies who have entered the pre-license review process. Follow the instructions in my base post on how to find them. I limited my search due to time. But, see where they are planning to build a reactor and see if the country has a solid pre-license and licensing process, or look to see if the reactor is in license process, or has been approved, in a major western country. I've never seen a company that had an approved nuclear design license not make a point of having that license on their website.
If they talk about building nuclear plants using ordinary construction methods and people - that's another solid clue (I've seen companies claim that their reactor is inherently safe and therefore does not need nuclear quality control and nuclear construction processes: It's not safe if it leaks or falls apart a lot worse than the problems that occur at properly constructed nuclear plants occur (you cannot eliminate all failures - you can just make them rare and have small leaks vs major ones)
A big drawback of coal is how much radiation it releases because of the radioactive elements in the coal you are burning 🔥
Maria Curie
Kirk Sorensen was on this case for decades now. Good to see this finally hitting mainstream.
0:01 As he was taking the bottles out of the box, I was wondering -- will there be a green bottle? Yes!!! Soylent Green!!!
I was wondering that too. I smiled at the last bottle was pulled out. I realized, "Of course that would be the last, They know what the name and color means." Well done!
What's interesting is that nearly all the negatives of solid fuel reactors have been solved by the Canadian CANDU reactors many decades ago. I'm disappointed the Canadian design wasn't even mentioned.
Edit: except for the cost
CANDU reactors still produce waste containing long-lived actinides and plutonium that takes a long time to become safe. If we could get Fast Reactors working we could burn that waste and get most of the 97% waste that most of todays nuclear reactors produce. Also Thorium reactors would not produce Plutonium and other long lived radiation waste, molten salt, Thorium reactors would be 'walk-away' safe and what waste remains will be safe within 300 years.
It’s great that they can use U238, but they’re pressurized and thus need heavy reactor walls and large containment buildings which add to the cost, land requirements, safety, etc.
While CANDU have mostly succeeded you might recall Darlington had a long outage.
Last chance for fission is molten salt reactor, old fission had over 50 years to get the general public to accept it, it's like the old RCA video disks nobody wanted, a old technology that been pushed to far.
All the D2O is out on neutrino detectors.
Thank you! Thank you so much for covering this! You did a great video and covered all of the important points.
Here’s a couple of additional things:
1) You should see if you could tour Flibe Energy and interview Kirk Sorensen if possible. Flibe has several important additional uses for lithium-fluoride thorium molten salt reactors (LFTR) that involve using the radioactive byproducts for medical purposes and the heat for desalination and recycling. Also, Plutonium 238 is a byproduct and this is very rare and very useful for radioisotope batteries.
2) Another important benefit of LFTRs is since they don’t use water for cooling, they don’t need to be near large bodies of water.
3) There are other important political reasons why the world stuck with water-based reactors.
4) The low pressure and no water make them perfect for space-, moon-, and Mars-based power generation.
For those of use who watched Soylent Green...how could they name their product that!
Yeah, right? Obviously, they've never watched the movie!
I think they actually knew and called it as a joke, there is a YT interview somewhere.@@Cybersawz
@@arofhoofwe know why science sucks. Disgusting science in Soylent
It's all about name recognition!
Haha. I do know the movie and no, Soylent isn't made from people. I double-checked the ingredient list, just to be sure!.I endorse Soylent but not cannibalism.
Quick story about their name: Soylent was actually named after the food in the 1966 science fiction novel "Make Room! Make Room!" and later 1973 film Soylent Green. While the food in the book is made from soy and lentils (hence the name), the food in the movie is made from humans, leading to this dramatic scene: th-cam.com/video/b2aH9tu4s30/w-d-xo.html . Soylent actually in 2022 (the year the film takes place), released a SoylentGreen snack bar in a mystery flavor as a humorous nod to the film.
In a post I did below I mentioned that I would post the history of Thorium fueled power plants. The USA built 4 of them. This is an edited version of a post I did elsewhere.
Thorium as a potentially viable fuel was identified in the 1950's by many countries.
First though is that thorium is not fissile (you cannot get a nuclear reaction using thorium). A thorium reactor actually runs on U233 in the end - and its U233 that is recoverable from them.
In the presence of a properly controlled nuclear reaction thorium 232 absorbs a neutron and becomes protactinium233. The protactinium233 then decays to U233 (which takes about 2 months to get usable quantities of U233). As such all thorium reactors must be seeded with U233, U235, or plutonium239 (the common fissile materials) to supply fuel for the first 4+ months of operation.
I’m not going to list and discuss all the existing test reactors that had thorium loaded into them or the thorium specific test reactors that were built. Suffice to say that thorium was tested in both existing test reactors and specific built thorium designed test reactors by multiple countries. Also in all kinds of designs since the 1950’s: Light Water, Heavy Water, High Temp Hot Gas (HTGR) and of course the Oak Ridge Molten Salt Reactor (MSR). The recent several decades have focused on HTGR pebble bed designs and of course China just built and started up in August 2023 a new thorium based MSR to determine if we technically have solved the molten salt corrosion issues well enough to proceed with further development.
I am including the Shippingport thorium core load 3 (1977-1982) as a test reactor. Shippingport was a naval aircraft carrier PWR that became the 1st demonstration and test reactor for commercial power: 60MWe output, Online 1958 (1st nuclear electrical power generation from a plant built with its primary purpose to generate electricity). This thorium core proved that a thorium core could self-generate surplus U233 for recovery by reprocessing. Shippingport was shut down in 1982 at the end of this test.
To date only the USA felt that they had thorium fuel designs based on test reactors that worked well enough to design commercial power plants from, which did not work out as explained below. In retrospect they can be viewed as very large and vastly costly test reactors.
The USA had also spent the equivalent of $Billions in today’s money to build a stockpile of U233 to seed thorium reactors and for atomic bomb tests in the 1960's (the U233 bomb worked well). Note that they are now looking to spend $billions to dispose of that U233 stock as the containers are degrading and disposal is cheaper than repackaging the U233 stock into new containers which does not count long term cost of storage that follows - and eventual use or disposal in the future. Also, there is no real foreseen use at this time for that U233 to justify the cost of preserving it.
1st attempt was Indian Point Unit 1 - light water thorium fueled 275MWe PWR power plant. Online in 1962. The thorium fuel performed so badly that they changed to uranium fuel in 1965 and the plant spent the rest of its life as a uranium reactor that operated well. Unit 1 was shut down in 1974 due to changes in regulations from when it was built as the emergency core cooing system that was acceptable in 1962 was no longer acceptable in 1974, and initial plant design made retrofit of an acceptable system uneconomical (nuclear power plants tend to have lots of rooms with very substantial reinforced concrete walls - there may be almost no room to install something different).
2nd attempt (approved for construction at essentially the same time as Indian Point Unit 1) was Elk River - a light water thorium fueled 22 MWe BWR (Online in 1964, Shut down 3 ½ years later in 1968 due to major design and construction issues which led to cracks in the reactor vessel and main piping resulting in significant reactor water leakage. I have found comments that says the reactor and power plant did not operate as expected; but, no evidence if this was a fuel issue or other issues.
More interesting is that this was presented as a prototype for a “Small Modular Reactor” for rural America (SMR’s as the reactor assembly and boiler was built in a plant and shipped to site by a railcar), which could be done anywhere as the key SMR concept of small nuclear reactors would be economical due to mass production was presented at an international conference in 1955. However, 17 power plant reactors which would be considered SMR size today were built in the USA from the 1950’s into the 1970’s. Not one of them is operating today - where a number of large central station nuclear power plants built at the same time are still operating.
Other than the cracks and reactor water leaks the biggest lesson learned was that small nuclear units like this would never be cost competitive with larger nuclear units as they need more materials and cost much more to build on a MWhr generated basis; and also cost much more to operate and maintain on a MWhr generated basis than a larger plant due to staffing requirements. Note that a 12MWe uranium power plant in Piqua, Ohio which ran from 1963-1966 was closed with the same conclusion.
3rd attempt was Peach Bottom Unit 1 - a thorium fueled HTGR reactor (as that seemed to be the most applicable technology other than light water based on test reactors). I believe it was about 60MWe output. Online in 1967, shutdown in 1974. There were severe problems with the thorium fuel and it was quickly changed to U235 fuel. There were massive other plant design problems (scaling up from a test reactor size rarely goes smooth). A total commercial and technical flop.
4th attempt (based on lessons learned from Peach Bottom) was Fort St Vrain - a 330MWe output thorium fueled HTGR. Online in 1979, shutdown in 1989 due to several issues in the plant design that affected operation and required excessive and expensive maintenance and only produced 15% of the power it should have if it could run well enough to base load at 100% output which is how most US Nuclear Reactors are loaded. I had a coworker who had worked at Fort St Vrain and he told me that in the end it was also converted to Uranium fuel. I have been unable to verify that with limited internet searches (multiple sources report that Peach Bottom Unit 1 was quickly converted to Uranium). Fort St Vrain was again both a major technical and economic flop.
Bottom line is that there has been extensive research into thorium-based reactors by multiple countries from the 1950’s to current time, and the USA even built 4 commercial power plants using BWR, PWR, and HTGR designs.
No country to date has made a test reactor or power plant work well enough to design a future power plant at this point - especially when they look at the USA’s attempts at building thorium fueled power plants by substantial scaling up of test reactors. The world history of initial nuclear power plant designs, and even 2nd generation designs, in many countries show lots of failures as what seems to work so well on paper often does not work in practice (or is too expensive to maintain).
Research continues and just because thorium did not work well and was not economical in the past does not mean that it won’t work well or be economical in the future. It’s just going to take a lot of money and time. If it was easy, it would have already been done.
There are also a lot of investor scam companies out there claiming that they have the solution, when no one really knows what the solutions are yet. These companies often talk of building plants on a fast timetable but have never even started a "pre-licensing" review of their design which is normally needed to get to the point to be able to submit a reactor design for licensing (figure several years for pre-license review, and then several more years for licensing once a license application is submitted). Just how many reactors does anyone think they are going to build that are not approved by the nuclear regulators? But, they generate good paying jobs for people for a decade or more by telling by telling investors and lots of people that the solution is obvious and simple.
Wow, thanks. 😎
Thanks, I was a fan of Thorium MSRs until reading your comments. I would love to see them happen but that probably wont be in my lifetime, if ever.
As I understand it, Thorium can be (and perhaps is) used in MOX fuel. By replacing some of the U238 with TH232 or mixing it with PU239, you can make a substitute fuel pellet that works similar to standard enriched uranium fuel pellets. Doing so can reduce the overall PU239 remaining in your fuel waste or be used to downgrade highly enriched weapons-grade materials.
Though I do understand that such methods do not really count towards building a true reactor based on Thorium.
*It’s just going to take a lot of money and time. If it was easy, it would have already been done.* - Why bother? Wind and solar are cheap, safe and scale up.
Next time, could you just write an abstract or executive summary?
Your collection of videos on TH-cam are the greatest of all the TH-cam science channels! Even you older ones are relevant, thank you for years of teaching me more about how the world works
0:00 Soylent Green is both the name of a 1973 science fiction film and of a wafer-like food product in the film. The film is a police procedural set in the future, based on the 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! The food is a processed protein ration made of human beings and distributed to an unsuspecting populace.
The basic premise of the story is flawed, because widespread cannibalism as a food source only works if you're shrinking the population as you go. You can't have everyone live 70 years eating nothing but human protein, when everyone else is doing the same.
It's like if you ate a whole cow. Over time, you could do it. It might take you a year, but after that's done you starve to death. And a cow has more meat than a people.
I was thinking about Soylent Green, also. Who is their marketing strategist?!
I can't thank you enough for producing content like this. Your videos are genuinely so informative and educational. I've passed this video along to multiple people I know that could benefit from watching this (the anti-nuclear energy types). I am excited to see your interview with Copenhagen Atomics!
Beyond less waste, it can be used to burn the waste produced by traditional uranium fired reactors.
I first heard of thorium molten salt reactors like 15 years ago. It's nice to see someone is finally working on their construction.
Imagine the treasure chest of fuel sitting on-site at current nuclear facilities. Being called "waste" (and it's not even a lot, in fact it's negligible next to the gigatons of particulates each and every year thrown right into the atmosphere from fossil fuel!)
These plant operators are smart to not want to bury it kilometers down: after a few decades there will be some very valuable elements in those concrete cylinders.
@A-Milkdromeda-Laniakea-Hominid and, due to the high cost of the current plants, as the reactors come up for recertification, most power companies in the US are opting to decommission the sites. TMI hasn't been operating for several years now, and they're dismantling the facility that could have been converted to thorium liquid salt.
@@pohldriver That's ridiculous. If you have the site and the containment buildings already that's a good piece of the work done.
This could change everything. Humans could actually stop hacking down the Amazon and burning it as biomass. We're such an idiot species.
It would be nice if there was less misinformation out there concerning nuclear energy. If people could actually be educated on the real risks and safety, we could all just use regular nuclear energy.
That’s intentional. Government-fueled climate change activists are after power and control cannot achieve that if there’s cheap, abundant, green energy.
There's no misinformation out there in the general public that wasn't generated by the from the fossil fuel industry. It has it's tendrils into the Right and Left of politics, but on the Right they are honest about it.
They're playing this game where they are making out they possess the panacea to save us as opposed to the pagans that are the proponents of renewables.
I put it to you most people think nuclear is already safe. All that's happening is renewables are being demonized by big business, who see renewables as a direct threat to their profits. They are deliberately trying to make nuclear look like the underdog.
Market forces are driving cost of renewables and that does not suit the greedy puppeteers behind the push for nuclear. Nuclear should have to compete like everything else in the marketplace.
The Right of politics representing the fossil fuel energy sector is now doing what they always do and that's trying to manipulate market forces in their favor. The Right opposed climate change regulation because they denied climate change existed. Now they can see climate change does exist (although it couldn't possibly be man made) they are trying to keep their pockets lined by artificially monopolizing electricity production through government regulation.
I'm all for nuclear energy if the electricity it supplies is a) competitive when compared to renewables and b) not subject to fossil fuel type cartel behavior and c) that it can be implemented very quickly.
At the moment we're seeing energy companies closing coal power stations not for environmental concerns but for profit by reducing supply therefore driving up energy costs. The treachery of these pigs knows no bound because a regular maintenance overhaul has all of a sudden become the excuse to close down a whole power station during the transition from fossil fuel to renewables. They are manipulating the market and we're paying. It's corruption.
Now apply this to the subject of this vid to see what will likely happen.
Make no mistake we will pay through the teeth for electricity after they have used their influence to a) use taxpayer funds to wholly or partially build their high cost nuclear electricity power plants, b) use taxpayer government subsidies to make their electricity affordable compared to renewables thereby costing renewables out of the market. c) once the subsidies are lifted the power price goes up but they use their considerable market powers to control renewables.
It's called the free market in a 'democracy'. It's not a democracy we live in per se, but the illusion of it - that is so long as big business get what they want then all's well. They corrupt both the Right and the Left BTW through a well understood process called State Capture:
"The classical definition of state capture refers to the way formal procedures (such as laws and social norms) and government bureaucracy are manipulated by government officials, state-backed companies, private companies or private individuals, so as to influence state policies and laws in their favour."
Yep you're right. Nuclear waste isn't really a big ass problem. we've got our way to deal with such Threat
@@_DZ_UR_ Riiiight....
That "way" being the usual human shortsightedness along the lines of:
"Problem's gonna be here for around 100.000 years. Im'ma live around 80 years. Cool, not my problem, really."
That attitude is what lead to climate change in the first place.
@@danieloberhofer9035 That's a straight out fact 💯
Till this day I wonder why they don't make good use of it (Nuclear waste) instead of disposing of it via store them inside a deep underground bunker or vice versa 🤔
The problem with commercialisation of molten salt reactors is the wear issue, not only is the molten salt extremely corrosive and reactive it also mechanically etches it's vessels and pipes as it circulates.
This was one of the primary reasons it was initialy shelved until further advances in materials sciences brought about the ability to negate or at least resist those effects long enough to be viable.
I like the tech and it is pretty safe as an automated installtion, I would indeed like to see further development on this and other thorium cycle small reactors.
Love your insights! Keep them coming! Thank you for your work!!
another problem with molten salt reactors is containment. meaning how do they make sure that no nuclear material is stolen.
With conventional control rods, since they don't go anywhere, if they are pulled out and weighed, you know EXACTLY how much you have and it can be compared to what was put in, and there is perfect traceability of all that material.
With molten reactors, you don't know if some of the molten salt is still in the system, if some of it is stuck the walls of the reactor. It's almost impossible to get a perfect tracking of material, which means you can't rule out that some of it might have gone missing.
This is a molten salt power storage plant, heated by a nuclear reactor. If molten salt plants turn out to be a competitive storage option, they'll be heated by peaks in cheap and cheerful renewable output, not expensive, high security nuclear reactors.
The idea of shipping container sized nuclear reactors might be a more important innovation than either molten salt or thorium.
If the reactors can be transported efficiently, then their manufacturing and maintenance can all happen at a central facility.
The on site construction, then, becomes much easier to regulate.
Also, for powering cargo ships and freight trains, a shipping container sized nuclear boiler would be really handy.
That might even be the first market ready application. An efficient nuclear powered freight delivery system could be the backbone of green transportation infrastructure.
I can imagine a high speed trans siberia nuclear train that goes 200 mph and only needs refuelling every other decade!
The potential of nuclear makes the transition seem that much more attainable.
And tiny AA sized reactors please.
It’s only possible of low pressure reactors like molten salt ones. The reactor walls of Light Water Reactors are 10 inches of steel, and the containment buildings of water cooled reactors have to have 1000 times the volume of the reactor and use reinforced concrete.
You never be able to move them after they been fueled & used because of severe radiation contamination. No way to move it on roads, ships. Not practical for utilities since they still have all of the regulatory costs, but the reactors only produce a small fraction of power. When it comes to reactors size, only very big reactors many any economically sense. Also two of the three companies working on SMR have cancelled their projects. The only remaining company is NuScale, which I am sure will exit when the grant money from the gov't runs out.
@@randalljsilva There's a number of conventional miniaturized reactors, it's just that none of them are for civilian use. Only military, research and space applications.
We could have gone nuclear 30 years ago, that's the sad reality. We're not waiting on technological innovation, we're waiting on governments willing to put the fossil fuel industry out of business.
@@guytech7310 Nuclear powered aircraft carriers and submarines have been moving around just fine for decades now.
It's a very dense source of energy, which is exactly what you want for TRANSPORTATION.
You don't have anything except complaining, and it's really dubious complaining at that.
Understand the tech before you criticize it.
Awesome. In 1984 I graduated with a BSNE from NCSU, Disappointed with the US effectively abandoning the nuclear fuel cycle, I reluctantly moved into another discipline. Hopefully there is a less emotional and political response to nuclear power When I left, we were struggling to keep the Liquid Metal cooling technology alive. Combining that with the homogeneous reactor tech we had, there was promise. Glad to see the good fight is still going on. I'd like to see the notion of alternate fuels go away, instead a notion of using right fuel to solve the problem at hand.
Alternative energy is well and good, but I agree with you that we have this technology in hand and it's only a matter of commercialization and public willingness that we need to overcome.
As well as the gaseous pollutants, coal also produces arsenic as a byproduct; it also releases more radioactive waste, albeit low level, than a nuclear reactor.
Indeed
Without commenting on the validity of molten salt, I would just like to say that the fact that a video about saving nuclear power is sponsored by a food called Soylent is hilarious.
The entire video is hilarious and he is having hassles hiding a lot of answers contradicting him so far
No private investors in their right mind would build another nuclear power plant until it is proven that it can be built on a predictable schedule (preferably no more than 7 years) and a known cost. I say this as a nuclear engineer who worked in the industry for 35 years and was laid off when the AP1000 plant in South Carolina was cancelled after delays and cost overruns back in 2017. Several executives faced criminal charges and jail time over this. Either the design company is going to have to build their own prototype and demonstrate the feasibility at their own expense or the government will have to subsidize it.
Scale models, computer simulations and CGI are not enough.
And whatever concept is envisioned, it better take into account for the decline in quantity and quality of the workforce that is going to design, build and operate it.
Excellent video. Great summary. We need to be open to this innovation.
Thorium reactors have struggled to get attention for decades, but so glad Copenhagen are making inroads into a container sized reactor.
NUCLEAR IS NOT DEAD.
Nuclear Energy is essential for low carbon future world, this is science.
What we need is to install more and more fission reactors plus renewables as their costs get lower and lower.
The more reactors, the better the future
Unfortunately, science sucks.
Science doesn't exist, only curiosity and greed
Low carbon is a scam 😂
I think nuclear energy’s future is not promising. It works but the electricity it generates costs three times more per kilowatt-hour than the same kilowatt-hour from renewables that are close to free. Battery storage costs are falling dramatically so this factor can almost be ignored depending on how much coverage you need. Nuclear energy is prohibitively expensive if used to meet peak load needs, which is the more valued electricity. It is okay for less valuable base load needs if that’s your only option but it remains more costly.
Nuclear is not dead but nearly dead! It's an efficient stop gap between fossil fuel and fully renewable energy. Why we need a stop gap? Because despite our collective minds and efforts it turns out we cannot store energy in a small, portable, efficient, durable storage. Yes lithium battery is good, but it degrades over time, not that efficient, dangerous, low density energy storage, and toxic for the environment. We need time to find alternative for grid scale battery system, a time that we do not have. So going for nuclear is a much preferable option than maintaining coal or other fossil fuel power plant.
but...there is NO climate emergency...that is a huuuuggee scam designed to control you
Don't you know, "Soylent Green is PEOPLE!". At least in the movie.
What a superbly informative video! I'm an engineer of 40 years and I learned a lot. One thing; The turbine you show is I believe, a gas turbine rather than a steam turbine. Not that it does anything to detract from brilliance of the video, but you clearly value accuracy. Thank you for this lesson. I'm a believer and I subscribed.
Nothing in nuclear engineering is as simple as you make it, decades of work to prove it out, and work through the edge case
Amazing videos. Not sure about sponsorship. Second ingredient on list is sugar (Maltodextrin) probably not the best supplement unless you like a sugar spike and your insulin working overtime.
FLUID DYNAMICS pipe size matters! Flow efficiency physics, dictates that you want larger pipes for efficient flow efficiency. Large reactors are more efficient. SMRs are more for Silicon Valley glossy brochured investor schemes than a practical economic solution for energy.
MSRs need exotic expensive materials. Hastelloy, Li7 via depleted lithium or similar, tritium management and the high temperature 🌡️ corrosive salts and neutrons are harsh on components it is not just the water. Hit 700c and Cr migrates in the Hastelloy.
We need nuclear power plants now! CANDU style heavy water 🌊 reactors are more efficient and effective. Tested and proven.
MSRs are promising and should be researched. We lack the necessary information and experience to deploy at scale.
Two remarks that I have picked up from other TH-cam video's on the subject:
1. Thorium can also be used in presurized water reactors. But it is less useful. The shorter half-life of the waste products remains, though. So I still would prefer it to Uranium.
2.Presurized Water Reactors use solid fuel. Which results in only a fraction of the fuel being used. With Molten Salt Reactors, pretty much all of it can be used. (And I don't mean the U235 is only a few percents of the rods. I mean not all U235 is used up.)
Maybe an idea for a followup video?
Cool video! Your narration fits quite well over the animations. Very nice
The real Elephant in the Room should be named here and that is that our "traditional" U235 fission plants prime functionality wasn't ever meant as a power source, but to produce weapon grade PU239!
It never was intended as "Waste Product", it was the main cause to build them that way.
Power generation was just how PR sold us that Billion Dollar Tax spendings
If it ever was about power generation, the molten salt route would have been the method of choice even back then.
But it was the cold War and they needed to bamboozle Taxpayers out of their money to fund the creation of the industrialized military Complex we have around the world today
That is incorrect. Standard U235 nuclear power plants cannot be used to create bomb grade plutonium; and this was known prior to the 1st nuclear power plant being built.
While most of the uranium in a U235 power plant is U238, and the U238 does convert to P239; a small amount of the P239 converts to P240.
P240 is a poison for the fissile P239 and if you get more than a very small amount of P240 then the plutonium will not go "boom."
The amount of P240 generated is dependent on the time the P239 is inside a reactor. Special bomb grade plutonium reactors were developed (with one exception discussed below) where the fuel rods are only in the reactor for several months to limit the P240 to acceptable levels. Note that same applies to the U233 that a thorium reactor runs on - which also makes a great bomb - but is poisoned by U234.
Fuel assemblies in power plants are typically inside the reactor for a minimum run time of 11 months and most are there for 33 - 46 month run times. 11 months creates far to much P240 (or U234 in a thorium core) for use as a bomb material.
The key exception to this is that the UK designed and developed a series of Magnox AGR power plants specifically to produce weapons grade plutonium. They were not a commercially economic source of power.
All of the Magnox reactors have been decommissioned and replaced with reactor designs that cannot produce weapons grade plutonium.
These days they've gotten lazy about hiding they're intentions
Soylent Green is my favorite, it reminds me of my grandparents 😊
14:12 The ability to refuel while the reactor was on was a trait of the RBMK reactors as well. Although they have now become obselete not only through the chernobyl accident (which was corrected for in other similar plants later), but also through time and advancing technology.
Taking water out of the core of the reactor has so many benefits.
The low boiling point of water is the big one, but also that it dissociates.
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima all happened because water’s limitations. When things go wrong, water becomes a liability.
Fukushima is indeed, a good example of how safety nuclear plants are. A nuclear plant that survived a seaquake, with 0 direct deaths and 1 indirect.
Well you can go to live beside a nuclear power plant, it's curiously cheap and safe!
@@samuelec If you live in France, probably this is the case.
Unless you count deaths as a result of the (unnecessary) evacuation itself.
@@samuelec Honestly, I would, and I would also be bathed in LESS radioactivity than living next to a coal plant.
Also, do you *_seriously_* think highly-educated and expensive people would work inside nuclear plants, every, single, day, if they didn't believe it was safe???
@@unduloid or a hydroelectric dam
It's not safety concerns that makes nuclear not to be adopted, rather, It is its deep cost, and lcoe that deters wide adoption, solar, wind and battery are cheaper.
We can as well wait for fusion while solar and wind and battery fills in the gap
Except that fusion will also be uneconomic.
The reason you think so is that here in the USA (and a few other countries) is that they are not telling you the truth of the cost of different power sources. They've created a "convenient lie" to push the wind and solar.
If you only look at the cost of the generation plant - then solar and wind beats nuclear plants.
But if you look at the cost of power delivered to the customer (including transmission and distribution cost) then new nuclear is often cheaper than either new solar or wind in many places in the world (including in many places in the USA).
It turns out that the connection cost of a multitude of small generators to the grid and being able to handle reactive power without a spinning generator that can generate "VARs" is very very expensive. In my area people are very upset about how much the cost of electricity is going up with all the new solar and wind-farms. It's mostly because the "transmission" component of the power bill has skyrocketed.
There have been many studies on this by many countries and even international agencies.
That is why so many new nuclear power plants are under construction worldwide - with more planned. Because the delivered power cost for substantial generation is cheaper than solar and wind in most cases.
Not to mention more long term reliable. Solar and wind typically has to be replaced every 20 years of so. New nuclear power plants are now initially licensed for 60 years and it's likely that they will run about 100 years. Note that the "better designed" 40 year licensed plants from the early 1970's have now been running for 50+ years and are seeking another license extension to 80 years (and people are talking about rewiring the plant and replacing controls to go for 100 years or more).
Be careful to ask the right question, and don't be distracted by only part of the picture.
@@perryallan3524 You missed the fact that even considering all these factors, nuclear is more expensive.
@@saumyacow4435 About 20 other countries and the studies within the US on total cost of power delivered disagree with you.
Feel free to believe what you wish. Wishful thinking is free and available to all.
However, those of use who are actually trying to solve problems tend to focus more on the facts.
@@perryallan3524 If you want the facts, just google "csiro gencost". Read it. Then get back to me.
Right on Arvin! We need more people willing to take a serious new look at Nuclear Energy. The info was great and easy to understand. Some additional info about other practical uses besides electricity generation would also be helpful, such as water desalinization, medical isotopes, and industrial scale heating using the waste heat. Imagine a small modular liquid thorium reactor being built for a community in an artic location. It could provide electricity, heat and viable by-products for the community, all while doing it in an environmentally friendly way. A small modular micro fission reactor could also provide stable abundant energy for a lunar or Mars colony. The words of FDR remind us that "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." When it comes to anxiety about Nuclear Energy, perhaps we should remember and apply FDR's words in the context of Nuclear Energy.
Thank U for the concise summary of Thorium/molten salt reactor system!
It appears to be a step forward for our energy depended lifestyle!
Or course there is a new way of producing fusion energy to electricity eye have seen on your tube!
The Chinese are quite advanced in the development of their own thorium molten salt reactor.
Sad that even conventional nuclear plants are so much safer and cleaner than all fossil fuels, even with the disasters. What an oversight to not have everything nuclear by now, well unless you're invested in fossil fuels, know that most people need a car by design, and have so much money that politicians can be easily convinced to turn a blind eye.
Political bullshit from many politicians across the world, but not only that, many stupid people still have very perverse opinions on how the technology works, even when much information exists to indicate otherwise.
The crippling regulatory environment, public scaremongering about radiation, together with horrendous construction delays of the nuclear industry, has frightened priced nuclear power out of the market. Most power companies don't want to risk this industry anymore.
All of you ARE taking CMEs into account, AREN'T you?
Well, of COURSE you are! Being such all-knowing know-it-alls who already know EVERYthing.
@@satanofficial3902CMEs? As in, coronal mass ejections?
Except that you need 10+ years and $Billions of moneys to build nuclear, you can't build nuclear at all sites, it must be safe from natural disasters and have access to water, plus all the extra cost in fuel transport, waste material transport and storage. Didn't it occurred to you that there maybe be reasons why not everything is nuclear by now? Nuclear is expensive, risky and doesn't scale.
Thanks for the video. There are many new designs for fission nuclear. It is kind of exciting. There are also other molten salts power production. All of it is exciting.
I'd like more folks to be open to many different ways of producing the power we need. That goes for big commercial power production that can and will serve large needs. Down to houses that are built to power themselves and potentially a couple of vehicles.
The molten salts solar power production here in Nevada is very exciting. Yet not everywhere has the sun and space Nevada has. Meaning its good to have many different ways to produce power.
Soon I believe that it will become code that new homes be capable of producing 150% of the needs of the home.
Thanks for the video. You always do such a great job.
Great video! You should follow this up with a video on fast neutron reactors, which can burn the "waste" (aka spent fuel) from thermal neutron reactors.
As a nuclear reactor operator, Arvin is spot on.
IMO the biggest problem with nuclear power IS the nuclear waste. If a country(ies) can't get to a single storage facility for waste as is the case in the US it makes waste storage cost prohibitive since it's something that has to happen for 1000s of year.
A secondary problem is cost. If the energy produced costs so much that most people can't afford it, it's not beneficial. Govts. COULD subsidize it but since in the US we have slashed taxes so much that we can't even fund the IRS, or people are getting close to seeing their Medicare get slashed and can't afford medical care and SS benefits are about to get slashed by 25% which will turn a few million retired people into abject poverty, then nuclear power needs to be able to be built and operated to where the output power can be sold on the market for no more than 25 cents/KWh. And even at that cost it has to be mixed with lower cost power. Otherwise we turn ever more into a country of have and have nots where the people without have to do a LOT of power rationing.
The waste isn't a problem
90% of it can be reprocessed into medical isotopes
Lab isotopes
Or more fuel.
America just doesn't reprocess fuel cause Jimmy Carter was an asshole.
As for cost
Yeah
Thats why goverments need to do it. Money's fake, but it's really fake for governments
Look at france. They built the Super Phonix, and a shiton of conventional reactors that are copy pasted down to the bolts
Never knew that molten salt was an option. Thank you for video and look forward to the video tour.
it has been for 60 years. and yet, we have no idea if it is a WORKING option.
Excellent explanatory video!
You are the ONLY podcaster that actually did his homework before he spewed his opinions and I thank you for that. Of COOOURSsse~~ we SHOULD invest immensely in order to make LFTRs commercially successful.
This is the type of reactor that I think we need NOW!! If they could address the corrosion problem it seems it would be almost perfect. If they could get the cost of them heating chambers down low enough, you could just remove the salts, bring in a new chamber, but the salts back in and keep going. I know that's too simple, but I just got the oil in my car changed today, and thought you could do the same with the reactor. Please don't take me serious!
No practical way to remove waste products from the salt especially neutron poisons. MSR will never happen because they have unsolvable technical problems.
rdgale2000, you deserve a medal for expertly using sarcasm. At first you had me, when you went on with your car I almost choked - and I think I needed your exit line to really catch your drift. Well done!
@@guytech7310 Not necessarily unsolvable only not answered yet.
@guytech7310 that is not true, you can process them in the loop. There are chemical and electromagnetic techniques to remove byproducts and treat the fuel salts as they pump through the primary loop.
@@ironassbrownNo that is wrong. No process has been develeped to date to extract waste products in situ. There has been talk about it, but no process has been developed.
In the 1970s ORNL process was to extract (remove) the salt, dissolve the salt in water, extract the U-233 and dispose of the contaminated Salt & use fresh uncontaminated salt to replace the disposed contaminated salt. This is not practical & creates a huge amount of waste included a large amounts of contaminated water.
the thing with the waste is that it doesn't actually take much space at all and with current and upcoming technology people are working on turning the waste into forever batteries. they dont make much power but will never need charged so can be used for heart machines and other things that never get touched. there was a basic version on one of the probes that still operate in space after 40+ years. I dont remember who but someone on youtube went into a reactor plant and even kissed a tank of waste because its not actually much of a hazard if stored properly in concrete.
Thank you so much for this video. Always curious about Nuclear Power.
Nope:
1. Too may technical problems, such as salt caking breaking off in chunks and destroying the circulation pumps, to no practical way to extract waste products, especially neutron poisons that will impact critically & efficiency of the reactor.
2. Salt makes it difficult to fully inspect & maintain the reactor as of its opacity, and when cold the salt is a solid, and the salt is hard on equipment like circulation pumps & heat exchangers.
3. World is running out of economically recoverable Uranium. At current production the World will run out of economically recoverable Uranium around 2050. Most utilities are aware of this & will not invest in new reactors or plants unless the gov't pays for it.
4. Forget Thorium as it fertile & not fissile, requiring a Breeder type reactor, and has a problem with U-232 (produced when Th-232 is converted into fissile U-233) is nasty gamma emitter. A MSR using thorium would be complete unserviceable because of the extreme radiation.
5. Liquid metal reactors (ie Sodium) is far far more practical than MSR, but even they are a nightmare to run & maintain. France & Japan ended their Sodium reactors as they had to deal with constant problems & cost too much to operate. Russia also had a Sodium reactor BN-800 as was going to build a larger BN-1200, but canceled the project because of issues with the BN-800. Operating a Sodium reactor is like going to the moon, Operating a MSR would be like going to Pluto, its far more difficult & costly.
What is going to happen is the world is going to revert back to perhaps a 19th century level of economy when Oil production crashes, and probably cause a fast population crash as the global economy & food production crashes with it. Global Oil production peaked in 2018 and diesel production peaked in 2015. Most of the worlds production originates from very large oil fields that are in or near terminal decline. The world managed to postpone an energy crisis with advanced drilling & shale Oil. Conventional Oil production peaked in 2005. Since about 2010, US shale Oil production has managed to delay Peak Oil Production until 2018, However 3 of the 4 Shale sweet spots are now in decline and Shale well have an extremely short production life (most of the Oil is extracted in the first 18 months as production rapidly drops off).
Those Soylent people have watched "Soylent Green" right? Not sure I could bring myself to consume anything named that!
Lol. Yes, I checked the ingredients...twice. See Soylent's website for the story of how and why they named the company. The stuff iis delicious by the way!
I'm convinced. I love the idea, and most of my questions were answered in the video. This needs to be physically put to use and tested. If all goes well, with no major unforeseen consequences, then start making this the new standard. Fusion is indeed the holy grail, but it does always seem just out of reach.
Corrosion resistance is not purely about metal alloys. . And we have had 50 years of further technologies. Other Corrosion technologies include diagnostics, machining, 3d printing, sacrificial materials, electronic systems., maintenance, robotics, silicon carbiðes, carbons, ceramics, cooling, modular systems, computer design and testing., and oxygen removal. Also the widespread use of industrial Molten Salt systems. Possible oxygen scavanging. Can anyone add to this.
An MSR should be built to have easily replaced parts and accessibilities, as well as inspection methods.
With so many options to consider along with hard steel alloys, corrosion should be manageable.
Soylent Green was last. Ah, just wondering. What’s really in Soylent Green?😇 And, I’m all for Nuclear Fusion and in my backyard but really, I want to get started on that Dyson Sphere. The feasible one, not the one on Star Trek.
Soylent Green is People!
I'm so glad that after soo maaaany decades this topic starts to emerge again. For me it was almost unbelievable it wasn't considered before, since the nuclear is actually the cleanest and safest way to produce green energy and in difference to all other sources that need to rely on other factors like sun, wind or geothermal and cannot be used constantly and reliably, nuclear energy is the ONLY way to have energy supply constantly. Most ironic is that we had technology like in 60'tees even for molten salt reactors, but its sad that sheer politics never got us this way. The big elephant in the room was that nuclear had it golden age in the time of the Cold War, where research and development of the civil reactors got hand in hand with military needs. If I'm not wrong, the first idea for molten salt reactor use was proposed for nuclear plane engine concept, since it needed to be small enough and not have any waste product released in atmosphere. But in the end it was scrapped for convenience of water cooled reactors that were developed for nuclear submarines, and since technology was proven *and fairly simple* in the end we were stuck with water cooled reactors that got constantly improved and built while molten salt got in the dustbins of history. Also the Thorium, although cleaner and more abundant than Uranium wasn't even considered, because it cannot be used for nuclear weapon production, since at the time good deal of civil reactors was used for Plutonium production for weapon usage at the Hight of the nuclear race. So it was too sad that this revolutionary technology never got the right chance to shine. And in 2010 it got derailed again after Fukushima incident, when even Germany that had Angela Merkel at the time as Chancellor (who is actually a nuclear physicist by education) needed to yield under the public pressure and its coalition partners and commit on shutting down of all Germany nuclear reactors. So...irony is that today Germany is one of the biggest proponents of the total fossil fuels ban and 100% green energy production and it sits of the back seat for the best and most efficient way to do it, since they tied both their hands for it. That's why the China will be the leader in this technology, since they're developing it for quite some time and it will most likely field the fist commercial reactors that uses this approach for energy production.
I see no mention of the Moltex stable salt reactor designs, which use zirconium galvanised tubes to avoid corrosion, and convection only to transfer heat to the primary cooling circuit. That avoids the need to pump highly radioactive molten salt fuel through pipes valves heat exchanges and a chemical processing unit. This reduces the capital cost to a little over $1 per Watt. The Moltex flex design uses uranium fuel dissolved in molten salt, which is a simpler fuel cycle than thorium. The stable salt reactor waste burner design being developed in Canada uses molten salt fuel recycled from nuclear waste, using The Moltex waste to stable salt process. You can find all this explained several years ago on a TH-cam video by chief technology officer Ian Scott. there is no plan to make large reactors. They will all be small modular reactors sitting side-by-side.
The Moltex flex design produces 800°C heat, which provides efficient electricity generation using the same turbines off the shelf that are used with coal-fired power plants, further reducing costs.
Doesn't the high price of zirconium make this cost prohibitive?
Great video- thanks.
Sounds a bit like an ad for Copenhagen atomics
I think the same. I'm not 100% against nuclear but I'm still suspicious of these allout positive videos.
SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!!!!!
The Thorium based modular nuclear reactors is essentially not a new technology, it's an old branch that was mothballed. Since this technique has been revisited it makes sense to delve further into it's feasibility. The current renewable technologies, ie. Wind and Solar are simply not " Green", more to the point; they are not recyclable or efficient!
They are simply a quick fix to make a small group of individuals rich!
Great job explaining! Shared on X
🤜🏻⚛️🤛🏼
when do we want it? we want it Now!
It would take 20 or 30 years to fully develop and build in reality.
I built a small thorium reactor in my lab.
Fr? Upload a video
I built a small thorium reactor in my pants.
This was a good & concise presentation.👍
You should do a video on the amplituhedron so I can get a better grasp of what it means and how it relates to our world. Thanks
Soylent green has all extra protein a body needs. Made from people by people. 😮
⚠️ WARNING ⚠️
❌Avoid Soylent❌ It uses sugar alternatives that lead to chronic irritable intestines & bowel syndrome❌ u might not start feeling it right away, but after weeks of using, u will start to feel constant discomfort in ur belly ❌ SAY NO FOR SUGAR ALTERNATIVES ❌
Haha...I double checked the ingredients to make sure! No meat! Only veggies.
Almost there, but you missed the worst source of radioactive waste, one that all too often gets ignored or overlooked in such discussions. Coal-fired plants release prodigious quantities of radioactive radon, straight into the atmosphere in a conveniently breathable form.
Not prodigious amounts. Typically radon is stable you breathe it in, you breathe it out unless you are in radon long enough to have it on your skin or whatever you are wearing, which is very low activity but you are right
Radon is a pain when leaving a nuclear plant and the instruments now have radon discriminators but they are not fallible but no, the hazard is lower than what you are making it...
Would love a much more detailed video. Love your channel!
I think the biggest issue with fission isnt any of the concerns over waste and safety, you need only watch some Kyle Hill videos to see how overblown these problems are. Its time.
Renewables are already here, being built, being improved rapidly, and in the last ten or twenty years have seen explosive growth even with a fraction of the support that they should have received from governments. Meanwhile, traditional fission can require in excess of a decade for new reactors to be built despite repeated broken promises of this being sped up, and Thorium could presumably take even longer because as this video points out its not yet commercially proven.
To me this means we need to have grid ready reactors starting to be built _right now_ I mean literally within the next year or two, otherwise the technology risks being redundant, superceded by waves of ever more efficient renewables coupled with grid level storage solutions that are already coming online and can resolve remaining issues with renewable unreliability. If we had a different attitude to nuclear over the past few decades I think wed be in a much better position, but as it stands, the window for their use seems to be shrinking fast.
I should clarify though, even if Im right about everything above I do think we should keep current reactors working (Germany...), current projects building, planned expansions going, and research in to fission tech trucking along. Maybe they can beat the clock, maybe itll be useful in ways we cant even foresee; Im increasingly skeptical of how useful the technology will be in future, but we have to keep as many options open as possible to address global warming. Its too vast a threat to risk doing anything else.
Hear! Hear! One of the big downsides of nuclear is that it's almost always government driven. Here in South Africa, the state owned power utility took 10 years to build a basic coal plant which should have taken 4-5, yet they still think they can build nuclear plants in our lifetimes. Meanwhile private firms are building wind and solar farms in 12-18 months, on budget.
Soylent green?
why would anyone name a product after an apocalyptic movie ?
⚠️ WARNING ⚠️
❌Avoid Soylent❌ It uses sugar alternatives that lead to chronic irritable intestines & bowel syndrome❌ u might not start feeling it right away, but after weeks of using, u will start to feel constant discomfort in ur belly ❌ SAY NO FOR SUGAR ALTERNATIVES ❌
@@steveducell2158 It would provide an association that would make it easier to remember. There's others. B well m8. 🙂
If SMRs are sized to serve small, nearby areas, the short distances involved in serving these areas can be covered with no step-up transformers at the plant, and no step down transformers and no high voltage wiring and towers in the neighborhood, thereby lowering the cost of the grid. Minimal wiring could also help protect against EMP events. MSR should also allow atmospheric pressure cooling circuits reducing the amount of high strength containment for high pressure radioactive steam.
Great update for me on the state of thorium molten salt reactors. In a future post, could you discuss subcritical reactors as a way to "burn" high-level nuclear waste down to a lesser amount of intermediate-level waste? Wikipedia discusses it in their subcritical reactor page but It's such a great idea (reaping power from nuclear waste while making it less dangerous) someone as good as you should bring it up so we can discuss it more. It could eliminate the fear of nuclear energy for many people who understand the basics of subcritical reactors, and help lend support to building a community of fast reactors that share one subcritical facility for reduction of the threat of nuclear waste, which would make the whole concept better accepted by general public.
Any power plant becomes a huge liability in case of war. What about thorium?
My understanding is that Thorium reactors are more of a safety hazard than proponents usually claim.
@@TV-xm4ps Do you care to make a case?
No one ever said producing power would be risk-free. Unless you want to freeze in the dark during a war, you still need to have and use them. The bigger risk is that you'll be bereft of power than that the plant will harm you in its destruction.
It's not clear to me that nuclear power plants are any more of a liability than a munitions storage, or any number of chemical processing facilities.
When the situation is war, you're going to have more to worry about than power plants.
What happened to your normal videos? This seems like you are reading somebody else's script
Seemed normal to me.
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We should embrace nuclear for sure!
Why should he have to stick to some video formula just to please those with expectations?
Commercialism Bru
I have been monitoring this research for several years and have researched the concepts and engineering. I am convinced this is the best course of action for eventually replacing the fossil fuels and laying the "Renewable Energy" dogma to rest (it will never be efficient enough to replace fossil fuels or Nuclear).
This is a good article in that shows hope for modern infrastructure and clean atmosphere. But off the subject, what are the projections on recycling nuclear waste products ? Maybe we could see an article on that someday .
It is imminent that we embrace the nuclear path to power production, and the suggested molten salt appears to have solved many known disastrous consequences. Instead of a few developed nations grouping up for the project, it my be in the safety and wisdom of equanimous growth and development to share the technology with developing and under developed nations and "empower" them, and hence all global nations. This can also eliminate hydro-thermal process, which has immediate and long term consequences on the health of entire ecosystem, thank you ArvinAsh😃.
@13:30: The salt expanding with heat means that less mass of it fits in the volume of the reactor because it is less dense. And this means less fuel too, and so less reactivity. This is why it's passively safe.
Also missed a good point: Solid fuelled reactor fuel is 'spent' when the byproducts build up enough that they absorb too many neutrons: This usually happens after only a few % OF the few % of U-235 is actually used. And so it goes: Th in breeder: eventually convert high 90's % to U-233, then burn all U-233 because *the wastes can be removed from the liquid salt*.
Conventional solid-fuelled nuclear: Burn about 5% before spent: need 20x more fuel. Need it concentrated to 4% (but it's 0.72% naturally: better have about another 10x more natural U. Natural U is about 0.25% to 0.001% U Oxides. So dig up 10000x more ore. 20x10x10000: you needed to dig up 2 million times more ore. Suddenly digging up coal isn't looking so terrible by comparison.
So, 'fuel efficiency' of Th breeder by comparison is 'probably almost all of it'. Oh, and there's typically about 5x more Th than natural U. All this means you end up digging up *significantly less* dirt to get the energy. More like 1000x less. Suddenly Th is looking *a thousand times* easier than conventional nuclear. And a similar ratio easier (in terms of dirt-digging) than coal.
This is the reason Copenhagen Atomics expect to achieve the cheapest energy on earth, without compromising safety or sustainability.
Part of the problem? We don't actually need any new Th mines. It's an industrial waste that comes 'free' with the rare-earth metals: It's commonly just thrown back in the hole, or maybe put into dodgy 'energy crystal' scam products. Th is so common that you can get it from beach sand. You could dig up practically any earth, anywhere, and the energy you could make from what little Th you'd find would still be enough to pay the energy costs of getting it. But you'd be better off with the beach sand.
Why is this a problem? Because it leaves the coal mining companies with nothing to do. The waste from rare earth mines is enough to power the world several hundred times over.
There's estimated to be enough Th around on the planet for us to be good for probably 10 000 years or so, at current energy usage rates. Then in space there's millions of years worth more. You think it's going to take us 10 000 years to get around to mining asteroids? The way Elon is going, It won't be all that much longer.
But even a few centuries of carbon-free and clean energy is basically sustainable. On the scale of millions of years, even solar isn't really sustainable: Sun will die in 50 M years or so - there goes all 'renewables'.
No energy source is infinitely renewable: There's really no such thing as 'renewable' energy. You can use it, once, before it's too cold and you have to chuck it out.
If you think that can't be right, then you don't understand the Laws of Thermodynamics properly: You can't break even, you can't win, you can't quit, and it's the only game in town. You can only 'cheat' temporarily - the House always wins.
Energy gets colder with time, irreversibly. This is the "you can't win" part, also known as The Second Law. This one is also why death & taxes are inevitable: The most natural state of any machine is broken, the most natural state of any living thing is as dead remains. It's also why Murphy's Law too: Anything that can go wrong, will: Entropy can grow bigger sooner that way: equivalently, the heat can cool off.
It IS depressing, but it's also fundamentally Why We Can't Have Nice Things, so it really helps to come to grips with it.
Conventional nuclear has pissed away too many orders of magnitude in it's 'digging up earth' efficiency, and that's why it's economically failed to be so much cheaper than coal that it kills coal.
Liquid fuel nuclear has a real shot at getting it right.
As a general rule, compounds will increase in size with higher temperature (molecule translation rotation etc). However, ionic compounds have an extremely high boiling point
Hmm I'd argue that at least for people living in the US, the thousands of nuclear warheads that are literally designed to explode are a much bigger hazard than the handful of nuclear power plants that are designed to be as safe as possible.
Chernobyl was not an accident. The people in charge knew they were ignoring restrictions and the safety protocol. For the sake of their careers.
The reason for the disaster was selfishness, greed and ignorance to finish a simulation, a test. But the reactor wasn't in the right condition. They did it anyway.
All that mattered to those who were responsible was their careers. Nuclear power isn't a threat. It's the people who are responsible who are a threat.
For those interested, there are several videos about nuclear power generation in the Illinois Energy Prof channel.
This technology was first developed, and successfully tested, in the 1950's and 1960's. The reason it did not see use in the 1970's, under the Nixon Administration, was that it could NOT produce Plutonium, which is a material used in the making of nuclear bombs.
So, an added benefit of Thorium reactors is that third world countries could use it for energy, but not be able to make nuclear bombs.
Another benefit, which was not covered in the video is that it can take the existing nuclear waste from regular nuclear power plants and use that for its fuel. In this way, the nuclear waste that exists could be used up and made into a safer, shorter life waste, that will be easier to dispose of in a few decades - instead of thousands of years - as was discussed in this video.
Feasible or not in the near future - it is good to know that research is done in the high density energy sector other than oil and coal. Notice Solar and Wind are low density energy producers that need a lot of land, the right climate conditions - not every country is blessed with spacious deserts. Go Thorium go.
Chernobyl accident was caused by human stupidity, by bypassing the safety systems, while Fukushima was caused by the same stupidity, by placing the powerplant on the sea shore, in an area prone to large quakes and tsunamis. It is hard to believe that a thorium powerplant is safe facing the limitless stupidity. As a note, the oxygen is not the only element than can cause corrosion, flourine is also very aggressive, along others.
The video looks more like a hidden ad to a company that payed for a nice trip.
Fukushima wasn’t that dumb. The expectation time for a quake of that size is 400 years…..so it should be save to run it there now for quite some time.
@@DrDeuteron well, you might be right. However, from my point of view, that was marginally acceptable, considering the operational lifetime of a nuclear powerplant of about 50years. That would raise the chance to have such an event, in that area , probably to 1:100, which seems quite high from the point of view of the risk management.
@@alex3261 true. Low prob X massive high consequence = not good risk. But it came down to the tsunami wall, which was very high. I think it was rated for an 8.9 generated tsunami, and guess what? They got a 9.0, which is absurdly high number, and it was overtopped. I’m not sure if that’s on the nuclear industry, or the geologists. There was a design flaw that should it flood, the diesel backup pumps were in the basement, iirc?
@@DrDeuteron as I said, the risk assessment was starting from wrong assumptions. Remember the 2004 Indonesia quake, they was a 9.3, generating a 100 ft. tsunami
@@DrDeuteron Actually no. Tsunami's like that occured in that area about every 90 years. They have lots of history and there are stone markers on all the hillsides on how high they reached.
The Japan Nuclear Regulator only requred reactors in those days design for flood events that occured on average twice the desing life of the plant. So they only had to look at events that occured every 80 years or less on average.
That left Fukushima with a probability of 45% of a tsunami in its 40 year life - a bet they lost.
That plant never would have been licensed in the USA, Canada, or most of the EU as they require looking and designing based on the much more than the worst event in the historical record.
Sad thing is that Japan bull dozed away about 5 meters of a hilltop to get the plant to the level they built it. Had they built it 3 or 4 meters higher the tsunami would never had affected it.
Yes! Been thinking for 10 years that this is the answer, just hope that a viable solution to the corrosion can be found.
At 4:07 , the graphic seems to suggest that the residue of burned coal is slag. Slag is actually the name of the waste product containing impurities that is formed and separated out when a metal is smelted from ore.
Excellent presentation... you simplified but didn't make it simplistic...I actually gained a better understanding of some of the concepts I was a little fuzzy on, like Thorium Salt Reactors inherent self balancing property... great animation, simple explanation... Interesting, the big claim today is finding a material that can withstand the corrosion, but what were they running at Oak Ridge National Lab in the mid 60's... when they said they had a running molten salt reactor and they were running it for how long? didn't they say they ran it for over 5 years? with no problems? in the bloody 60s!!
One of the things not discussed in this video is why thorium-salt reactors aren't already commercialized and in operation around the world. In fact, thorium reactors were first theorized and tested in the 1960s with the Oak Ridge project. Although the results were mostly positive, the US government decided to shelve the technology and ultimately go with uranium reactors because they could use the highly radioactive nuclear waste from uranium-235 fuel to build nuclear weapons. Thorium reactors didn't have this "beneficial" waste product. At least that is how I understand it. Feel free to expand or correct me if I got something wrong, but to me this just underlines how throughout history our species makes bad decisions, and for all the wrong reasons.
Glad you talk about the corrosion problem.
Excellent video!
*Plutonium 239* is fissile... 8:10
"Plutonium-239 is also one of the three main isotopes demonstrated usable as fuel in thermal spectrum nuclear reactors, along with uranium-235 and uranium-233."-Wikipedia
Plutonium 239 is a waste only if you waste it; otherwise, it is fissile fuel!
I believe that non harmful nuclear power is a great source of energy when managed well. Great summery presentation! I think that you should pitch this solution to the Governors and Energy Management Officials first in troubled states with current nuclear facilities such as California, Illinois, and New York. Add in Florida for super extra credit - they deserve and need it too.
I agree this is a fantastic innovation. (I guess the trucks would be electrically powered?)
It looks like you are saying the reactor setups are as small as a semi? If so, it could power a city or town from anywhere. Including my own "back yard," my condo community's power house.
Perhaps this could be used with underground pipes to provide hot water? Or maybe produce enough electricity to give everyone hot water on demand units? Imagine if you never had to use gas or coal power anymore. Maybe we could replace hydroelectric dams where there isn't any water traffic in order to help restore natural habitats. I dream about the reversal of desertification of the Sahara and other deserts.
(I just realized I just wrote "desertification of the Desert and other deserts.")
This could also help reverse climate change in this way: provide power to machines used to sequester carbon from the atmosphere like have been researched as of late. Or also mitigate ground issues of natural gas.
Replace cement furnaces that burn waste fuel (solvents that can't be recovered by distillation) with electrical fuel. Power other large industrial complexes like car manufacturers.
I'm afraid it might not be able to mitigate burping cows directly at the moment. (methane)
Electrical stations would grow ubiquitous and electric cars would be more prevalent. Maybe in the future nuclear-powered cars would happen.
I've got a question for ya Arvin, do A-bombs which work on fission have moderators inside them? if not, how can the chain reaction leading to explosion happen then with all the released fast neutrons?
Everyone discussing the safety of nuclear power plants and i only have 3 questions
- how much does it cost to build a nuclear power plant?
- how much does it cost to maintain the building and subsequently decommission it at eol?
- how is fission sustainable when we have limited uranium and thorium deposits? (Plus cost when it's scarce)
I haven't heard much from Elysium recently, but i liked their reactor design more than most others.