After watching Kyle Hill's channel I have a very hard time having anything bad to say about nuclear energy. Do it. Any potential danger is miniscule, it being one of the safest forms of energy production while fossil fuels are leading to hundreds of deaths per year.
I didn’t watch Kyle’s vid but honestly the degree of diabolisation nuclear is subjected to is insane. Instead of investing in polluting and not so efficient solar panels and wind turbines, let’s keep investing in nuclear fusion while keeping our focus on fission for the moment…
@@ThisUserPassedAway I'm not sure which one of his you're referring to, as he's done a lot on nuclear education. The best one I think so far is the one he did recently on nuclear waste.
As somebody that's has been pro Nuclear for decades it really does seem like a no brainer. Spent fuel reactors are a pretty cool thing, The more people learn about this stuff the better.
In France, despite having 70 % of our electrical energy being produced out of fission, there is a strong developing anti-nuclear movement which is absurdly irrational, to say the least, and doesn't want to hear any argument, thinking we can replace all nuclear power plant with renewable in less than a decade even though we know it won't be enough for some of the reasons this video explained at the beginning. Those people really need to understand we can't have anything with no downside, including their renewable technology they take a great care at ignoring the bad side that contradicts their own principle. We need nuclear, it's undeniable but it's not by shouting that the nuclear power plants will all explode like the only examples they can give (caused by human negligence btw) which are Chernobyl and Fukushima, even though they wouldn't be able to describe what happened exactly as they don't know anything about the subject, instead of trying to make everything so they don't explode under any circumstance, that they will win an argument against fission.
The problem is those examples are terrifying, and having being caused by negligence and poor design means they can and will happen again. It is true that the grid cannot switch overnight to 100% renewables, and it must be noted that these pushes come from end consumers that do not use a great deal of energy directly. Industrial facilities push back because they want to buy the cheapest energy. We will see what happens
@@TheNasaDude Poor design, it can't happen anymore as we have nuclear power plants now that automatically shut down when a problem occurs (the reaction cease by itself when not maintained by human intervention) and even if it melts because of a human error which could accelerate the reaction, we still have a system of big tanks to store the melted fuel with its byproduct which will eventually stop the reaction. But human error or negligence, it can surely happen again, that's why we have to be extra careful. Still, it's not a reason to stop nuclear fission exploitation as a source of energy. Concerning the price : the thing is that at the opposite of most other technologies, nuclear power plants can produce a huge amount of energy with a very limited amount of space and materials. And it last very long. So it could be possible that in overall, nuclear is still cheaper than most source of energy (maybe at the exception of coal). Regardless, electricity is cheap and will be cheaper and cheaper as we perfect our technologies and improve the supply of fuel and materials on the long term, so it's not a problem here.
@@rigierish3807 poor design can sadly still happen by accident or by choice, as it happened with the Fukushima generators. Placing them on the ground floor might have seemed a smart move for easy accessibility in case of a manual startup, or for cheaper maintenance and savings on auxiliary equipment such as cranes, larger elevators and whatnot. Still, its not very likely nowadays. Poor execution remains a big challenge: what if the builder decides to skimp on those meltdown container tanks and pocket the money? What if theres enough money in this operation to bribe the inspectors and regulators? These are not impossible challenges to overcome, but nuclear needs to be ruled over and continuously supervised with an incredible iron fist. Any change in procedure or components driven by cost reduction should be rejected. Any other change should be carefully configured and have contingency plans. Plants should be built in remote areas far from population, and obviously in known safe environments. Off-shore powerplants might be a good idea, in the end Fukiahima used a lot of marine water, and if Chernobil could have sunk underwater it would have caused a lot less damage. After all water stops radiation pretty quickly iirc. Of course scale is challenging, an oil rig would look like a small object in comparison
@@TheNasaDude Fukushima, they were just dumb. There's no debate about it. You don't place a goddamn nuclear reactor in a country where 50% of the earthquakes in the world happen there. That's all. Apparently, no engineer when they constructed it thought about that, despite being obvious. Still, even when there is an accident, we can see it is still safe, as no one died because of the radiation during and even after this accident. The area is still condemned but it's not that huge of an area. The only death were due to poor management of the population which was terrified at that moment. Concerning the skimping : why would they? First, it's just tanks, there is nothing technological and spectacular about it, and the main purpose isn't to contain the melted fuel but to dispatch it in several tanks making less fuel in each tank therefore slowing down the reaction to eventually allow it to stop itself. So even if the fuel could pass through due to skimping on the thickness of the material for example, then it's not a problem, the main purpose of the tanks will be achieved anyway. And second, it's the government's budget, so if they need more money, then the government will bring the extra money needed. Which means if there is a skimping, then it can only we a sabotage from the inside which would be highly unlikely to happen. Off-shore power plants, I'm not sure if it's a good idea. Sure, the radiation are absorbed pretty well by water but the environmental damages if there would be a problem will be dramatic, possibly more than if we construct it on the ground. Plus, it wouldn't be really convenient to build on off-shore, so I don't know if it's a good idea. But it could be a solution of it turns out to be better.
One of the best videos I have seen on the subject -- well done! I would like you also to explore the question of whether Plutonium really _is_ dangerous. The often-quoted figures that (traditional) spent nuclear fuel must be stored safely for tens of thousands of years (some people go as high as millions of years) is really based on the concern that Plutonium will get out into the environment. Here's a breakdown of relevant half-lives: * Thorium-232: 14 bn years * Uranium-238: 4 bn years * Uranium-235: 0.7 bn years * Plutonium-239: 24,500 years * Caesium-137 and Strontium-90: 30 years Most people will see this and recoil in angst from the long half-lives of the top-most isotopes because _big number=scary_ but the scientific reality is that the longer the half-life, the less intense the radiation. To wit: Stable isotopes have infinite half-lives. (As an aside, I think this video's classification of high-level, intermediate and low-level waste also needs to be discussed in more detail, since the thing that makes low-level waste _low-level_ is not the short half-lives themselves -- which actually contribute to making it _more_ radioactive -- but that we are talking about very small amounts that may be sprinkled lightly across used gloves, shoe covers, sampling equipment, etc. So what we really need when talking about waste are two axes, one for half-lives and one for concentration of material, which together can describe how intensely some material will radiate, graphed over time.) There is a rule of thumb that can be applied to radioactive material: After ten half-lives, the material will basically have decayed to nothing. So ten times the half-life of Plutonium-239 equals roughly a quarter of a million years. The longer-lived, milder materials like Uranium are naturally occuring. Most people will accept the premise that "I dig it out of the ground, I can put it back in the ground later". Plutonium-239, on the other hand, is the longest-lived of the materials that are only created in decent amounts as a byproduct of nuclear fission. Since it still is shorter-lived than the Uranium isotopes, it still has more intense radioactivity than either of those, meaning that any escape into the environment would cause an increase in background radiation levels. This makes it stand out when nuclear regulators want to plan for permanent storage. They apply the "precautionary principle" in a very rigid way: We don't _know_ how much harm Plutonium-239 in the environment might cause, so we need to make sure this can never happen This is the crux of the problem: We _do_ have a fairly good idea how much harm Plutonium-239 can cause, and unless you basically eat it in substantial quantities, it's negligable. You can handle it with your bare hands, no shielding needed. Should you build your bedstead of Plutonium? Probably not, but if it ever _were_ to leach into the environment from storage sites, it would be in dilute form, and would make for a very small increase in background radiation. The idea that we don't know enough about the harm from radiation in general, stems from the model of radiation damage called _LNT_ which stands for "linear, no threshold". It basically says that all radiation is harmful, and the amount of harm is proportional with the amount of radiation, or in other words that there is no threshold for radiation, which would allow you to be safe be remaining under it. This is basically the premise behind every comparison you may come across between radiation and some number of "chest x-rays". This was a natural idea to have in the development of nuclear science and radiomedicine. But at this point, LNT has been falsified. It is simply not true. There _are_ thresholds for safe radiation levels. However, regulators are still using LNT. I hope a future video from this channel will explore the topic of LNT further. There is a terrible paradox -- humans have no senses that can detect radioactivity, but it is easy to build instruments to detect it with extreme precision! It is scary because it is so invisible, and we can feed that fear by looking at every little uptick on our Geiger counters. So, yes, escaped Plutonium may become detectable, but there is a huge step up from that to where it becomes physically harmful. Biology has evolved around radiation. We eat radioactive bananas, due to the presence of natural Potassium-40. We are struck by cosmic rays. Pilots and cabin crew receive the greatest amount of radiation of any professions. The _real_ substances to worry about are Caesium-137 and Strontium-90. These are the longest-lived isotopes that are created, next after Plutonium-239. Applying the rule of thumb, after 300 years, these will have decayed to nothingness. So in summary, traditional spent nuclear fuel needs to be shielded for 300 years. We have built cathedrals that took longer, so I'm sure that's something humans can pull off.
That is one of the most profoundly ignorant questions I have seen for some time. Plutonium is preferred material for nuclear bombs. Any person that advocates nuclear energy is also advocating proliferation of nuclear weapons ... they just may not know it. Over 2,000 nuclear bombs have been detonated so far and thousands more are in storage or in missiles. The material to make these nuclear weapons came almost entirely from nuclear power plants built, ostensibly, for 'peaceful' purposes.
@@dunexapa1016 Oh that's a bit of a fallacy, this is like if I said that anyone who advocates for renewables & battery storage also advocates for more e-waste as well as the emissions and damage mining lithium creates. Everything has downsides and nuclear power is *strictly* regulated, it's a minority of countries which use nuclear power that have developed nukes, don't generalize! and simply that possibility is not nearly enough to say we should instantly stop pursuing nuclear. This is the classic "but what if!" argument that comes up with almost anything new. As a fun fact, the material in nuclear weapons can be used for fusion experiments or power generation in fast and other modern reactor designs. So if what you want is less nukes then funny enough what you want is more reactors
This was the most "newcomer" friendly nuclear energy video I have ever seen. Kudos for a very good product. It's exceedingly difficult, in my opinion, to delve into this subject, with it's complicated science, convoluted history and substantial social conflicts and, do it in a way that is understandable, or as nearly so as possible, to someone encountering it for the first time or with very limited prior awareness. It wasn't perfect but it was about as close to the mark as I have seen. I'm now a new subscriber and will be looking at all your content and hoping it will all be of the same quality. Thanks for the hard work. P.S. the Thorium Energy Alliance Conference is coming up in Oct in Albuquerque and will certainly be an update on many facets of the cutting edge of research and development in this field and may be of particular interest to the producers of this channel.
Well done and informative video! However, I think it would have been better if you quickly mentioned how nuclear is statistically the safest form of energy in deaths/kWH. This would have put the fears of many relating to the safety to rest.
Nuclear energy vs fossil fuels is like airplane vs car. Currently, airplanes are the safest method of travel, because there are so many regulations and background checks done before you get in the plane that there's hardly any risk of failure. Nuclear power plants are the same, they're heavily regulated and protected
@@davidcatanzaro8838 Unfortunately very true. You can't have a reasonable argument with 95% of people who are anti-nuclear because all of their arguments are based solely on emotion. It's sad. My father is usually a pretty intelligent man but whenever I suggest to him that nuclear is safe and clean he goes on a rant about Tchernobyl and nuclear waste and how renewables will magically fix everything.
Please do a video on string theory! I've had a hard time learning about dark matter and dark energy, but thanks to your channel now I understand almost everything about their misteries! Also a video about plasma would be awesome too!!
Every time I consume a well-informed piece of media about nuclear energy I despair of human short-sightedness. Fearing nuclear waste over carbon emissions is like fearing a plane crash but not thinking about the orders of magnitude times higher chance of dying in a car crash on the way to the airport.
Many countries including the UK proposed a geological waste disposal facility to be made for high level waste. This will lower the cost of maintenance and monitoring and it’s very spacious.
Finland already has a deep dump site under construction.....but that's for their own waste only. There won't be a similar dump in UK.....public opposition won't allow it.....aint going to happen
Thanks for the video! Will it ever be safe to create a commercial fast reactor when the risk of the plutonium being stolen likely outweighs the benefits?
This is what we will be exploring in the follow-up video. Using uranium as the main fuel source will almost certainly produce more plutonium. A more attractive alternative is using thorium as a fuel. Which will also be highlighted heavily in the next video.
@@ButWhySci well, stealing fuel rods is not that viable, it's not like you can extract and refine plutonium at a terrorist's home lab; and rogue statates will do it anyway with or without stealing as exemplified by North Korea... And stealing for dirty bombs is stupid, just use mercury salts, arsenic oxides or if you really wanna get fancy and radiological a hospital is a way easier target... Heck there are stories of soviet radioisotopes being stolen from hospitals and lighthouses after the fall... At any rate, the Th cycle is not nuke-proof as claimed, U233 is very easy to extract off the core (potentially easier than Pu as most Th designs call for a molten salt core rather than a solid oxide, which is easier to separate chemically) and it makes very good weapons having similar characteristics to Pu239. And yeah, there are U232 (gamma emitter) impurities that make it hard to work, but yoh also get Pu240/41 (neutron emitters) to similar effects... Truth is, if you wanna make nuke material, you gotta make a nuke material factory, just reusing civillian designs aint gonna work out, and this has been seen forever, plutonium factories are simply different... It is like saying coal power plants encourage war because missiles use fuel and explosives that have carbon. However, it is true that fast reactors make more pure plutonium than slow ones, but the designer has a lot of control over how pure anyway and it'd be evident wheather it was made to make nukes... Lastly, there is a lot of misinformation or different narratives about nuclear power, the fearmongers are not the only ones doing propaganda, and Th fanboys are ones quick to make shit up or just compare reactor designs from a half century ago to theirs (which would work roughly the same with either fuel) and say YOOO THORIUM :/ Why is this topic so full of crap and politics? I mean, its because Chernobyl and the meaning it had, how it was used by everyone as political pawn inside and out of the soviet union for their own goals... heh, history can be weird sometimes, this one it decided to pick on a technology...
@@ButWhySci The engineering of fast neutron reactors is problematic compared to the steam-kettle simplicity of modern PWRs and BWRs. Everything in a fast reactor happens hotter (thermally and radiologically) in a more compact space compared to PWRs and the like, hence the use of liquid sodium and lead as coolants and heat transfer media rather than gases or water. The Soviet-era BN-600 sodium-cooled fast reactor caught fire more than once (not sure about the BN-350 predecessor). It's a bit like going from an internal combustion engines in aircraft to jet engines, the development of materials and structural designs to cope with the extra stresses in a fast reactor are still in its infancy. The issue of reprocessing is also a problem since currently and for the forseeable future the cost of the once-through uranium fuel cycle, from minehead to spent fuel in pools is a lot less than the ticket price of reprocessed fuel. Work is being done on making reprocessing a lot cheaper but it is not a priority, commercially speaking. The nations that do carry out some reprocessing (France, Russia etc.) do so for non-commercial reasons such as reducing the volume of high-level waste, although the amount of radioactive waste is concentrated rather than being reduced per se.
@@ButWhySci I have a question: Is there a way to extract any meaningful amount of energy from the nuclear waste produced by fast reactors? If so, will it be a threat to the health and safety of people and the environment?
That's been a consistent fear of people, but when you consider how hard it's been for them to recover the fuel from Fukushima without people dying, so it's not exactly like you can just go into these things and scoop it out. I'm pretty sure the proliferation risk is minimal.
OMG fast breeder reactors! I'm an electrical engineering freshman and I made a full presentation on how we could power all of humanity for the next 4 billion years using this technology we've had since the 60's. Nuclear power engineering may eventually become my specialty in the future and I just can't wait because learning about it just gets me so excited!!! Great video btw, subbed after only watching 2 and I just can't wait to see more!
Overall quite good, but worth noting that as U238 gets bred to Pu239, there are a lot of excess neutrons around in most cases. That means the Pu (particularly in "spent fuel" today, is a mixture of isotopes and those absorb too many neutrons to give you a bomb, even if you chemically separate it. In a fast reactor, you get a lot more fissions (destroying the Pu isotopes as you mentioned) but any Pu left behind will be a mix when running it as a normal power reactor.
Excellent presentation. I'm an old nuclear operator in thermal reactor plants. Here in Canada we are beginning to seriously consider a wasteburner reactor. This presentation gave me a good basic understanding of how that will work. Well done Kyle!
The amount already spent on solar and wind subsidies and extra consumer price would have paid for a fleet of fast breeders or thorium thermal breeders to replace all closing generation and keep up with new demand.
1GW Nuclear power costs roughly 20 billion USD, for the same amount of money you can build ~20 GW of Solar. It takes at least 5 but often more than 10 years to build a nuclear power plant, while it takes less than 6 months for wind or solar. Economics are important because the determine how much of something we can afford.
@@leonfa259 20GW of solar without batteries is worthless even if it was free. Peak grid demand hits just as the sun sets and solar output drops to zero. So for the real number you need to include about 8GW/hrs of storage and build about 1.6 GW of solar to meet 1 GW of on demand power, and still have some 20% of peak demand base load in the background. Oh and that is only If you get 100% of your expected output curve from solar, which you won't. The physical construction time for solar could be 6 months, as your can build a whole bunch of the sub parts at the same time. But you couldn't get a plan into the early planning stage in 6 months let alone, all other required aspects for building something covering 24km^2 (the space used by a 1GW solar farm in India I just looked up). I think 2-3 years might be a more reasonable timeline for a 1GW solar farm (which is on the low end for a handful of the larger solar projects I looked at) Current nuclear power is tied with coal power and comes in joint second after large hydro in terms of cost. However nuclear costs can be divided between paying back it's construction cost and once it's been paid for. This nuclear costs is a one and done costs that don't require other investments to work like solar needs extra storage or a complete replication of peak grid demand of standby generation. Anyway, once nuclear is paid back in 20 years and has something like 20 to 80 more years of operating the cost drops even lower. Also getting cut rate loans (as I was talking about using subsidies given to solar) from a government can reduce the price from nuclear in half by getting 3% interest rather than 10%, over it's pay back period. That's with our not optimal for power generation current light water reactors that are passable submarine power sources but not really the best for grid demand. My statement about the new types of reactors is critical to my comment, not addressing that tech is missing the point. Commenting on current light water reactors when I was talkin about something like the LFTR would be like talking about trains when I'm talking about trucks. They do a similar thing but are so different as make talking about out useless for talking about the other for most cases. Due to vastly lower construction and operating costs a LFTR could be running profitably in the sub 1 cent range.
@@leonfa259 1GW of nuclear will provide 0.92 GW/h while 20GW of solar will provide 5GW/h; BTW price of nuclear vary > 100%, that is, it is not physics it is politics
Solid depiction of nuclear energy, and truly great introduction to the topic of fast nuclear reactors. As a Nuclear Engineer working towards developing advanced reactors, the biggest hurdle in a lot of these reactor concepts is proving that they are proliferation resistant. Ironically, the technological safety is many year ahead of our operations safety. How do we guarantee that enriched fuel from old reactor cores, Plutonium-239 and other transuranic elements, isn't going to be harvested for malicious use? Unfortunately, this may be the question which puts fast reactor development to a halt until the safeguards exist to prohibit these scenarios from occurring. That being said, I have high hopes for nuclear energy in the future. The depiction of what it is, how energy is generated from "burning" fuel, and what it looks like on the social level are all key factors to demystifying nuclear energy and revealing how smart of an idea it is to mitigate and reverse effects of climate change and the carbon footprint of humanity!
Finally! a rational comment!!! There is also those pesky problems of human error and human nature. I wish I had a nickle for every time I have heard an American say they would like to level Iraq with nuclear weapons ... As if falsely accusing Iraq of having 'weapons of mass destruction' and invading that country and killing thousands of innocent people was not enough. Oh, Iraq was also accused of the THOUGHT CRIME of thinking about attacking America ... with its imaginary WMD's.
@@pip0109 diversion of nuclear material is a worldwide concern. It is very easy to fudge some numbers and divert material to storehouses if safeguards were not in place. A good design for a reactor makes it challenging, if not impossible, for such diversion of material to occur. It helps prevent weapons grade material from entering into anyone's hands. Remember, safeguards only work if they work for everyone indiscriminately!
I really enjoyed this! As somebody with some interest in nuclear energy and a casual knowledge of the basics of nuclear physics, I found this to be a really accessible introduction to get me a bit deeper into it. The only suggestion I could think of would be if you had used the term “proliferation” to describe Evildoers™ getting hold of high-level fissile material, since it’s what somebody would want to search for to learn more.
As the saying goes ... a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. If you deny that the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the building of nuclear power plants to generate electricity do not go hand in hand then you are denying nearly 70 years of history. If you believe nearly all leaders in the world are kindly old wise philosopher kings ... you've a bit to learn about history and human nature. Maybe start with learning about the United States invasion of Iraq.
@@dunexapa1016 I don’t think anybody here is denying it! In the video he discusses those dangers, just that he doesn’t specifically use the word “proliferation” to describe it. (Unless I missed it, which is entirely possible.)
Call me pessimistic but I think fusion will always be the power of the future and is more of a money hole than a practical energy source...however there's so much untapped potential in fission that we know can work. Between this and thorium and MSRs and everything we should be jumping on nuclear like crazy, it's such a no brainier and it's such a good source of energy I really feel like society messed up by letting a few bad accidents scare us off of it. I honestly cannot overstate how hyped I am for this next video, I love nuclear topics
Great video. I'd like to point out that reactors often last longer than 30 years. There are some SMRs that are designed to only last that long but there's no rule why they can't last longer. Indeed there are reactors today that are licensed until they're 80. I'd also like to point out that some kinds of fast reactor can actually consume nuclear weapons. A pool type Molten Salt reactor has it's fuel and coolant mixed together and you can basically just toss in your weapon's material which is downblended to non-weapons grade in the reactor and is fissioned. Another thing to talk about with those few Fast Reactors is they were really experimental or test reactors that were trying out a variety of things like new coolants. However there are incoming fast reactors right now like Natrium in Wyoming so they're much closer than you might think.
@@reahs4815 , lol, Next thing you will tell me is that there is no correlation between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Do you know why the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 and killed thousand upon thousands of *INNOCENT* people (not to mention Abu Ghraib prison where prisoners were tortured) ? Do you approve of this invasion? Can any country invade another country for *SAME* reason??? Why not??? Who will play policeman ...*PLEASE* tell me!!!!
Intersting video. I was surprised how positive you talked about CCS. Maybe you do a deprive on that, because as of now, most CCS facilities fail on different levels, sometimes even releasing more CO2. Its also greenwashing if the CO2 escape rate is higher than expected
I love this channel. Even if the videos have 2 months of waiting between them, the videos are surprisingly calming to listen to, and informing on top of that.
It would be good to see any video that advocates nuclear energy to strongly emphasize that the proliferation of nuclear weapons was a by-product of building nuclear power plants. If a nuclear war occurs, the last thing people will be worried about then is the safe storage of nuclear waste from a nuclear power plant. Any nuclear power plant would be a strategic target. The irony ... a nuclear weapon created using material from a nuclear power plant destroying a nuclear power plant.
First few words are great ... "In an ideal world ... " sadly, the world is far from being an ideal place. I hope that you are, at least, trying not to leave it any worse than you found it.
The one data point everyone forgets is the amount of people affected from weather events . Is higher than they were before. We need to stop building in places that are in the hot zones.
Great video! Thanks for making! Where does this "ideal future will be powered by renewables and nuclear fusion" comes from? It is being repeated in places like a mantra but no justification if this is the future to hope for. I would like to see the future with plentiful and cheap energy, with minimum impact on environment and this is possible with energy dense fuel and methods. Renewables are diluted, unpredictable and resources intense (space and materials) and to be sustainable these require storage (because backup from fossil fuel is expensive and poluting). Large scale storage doesn't exist (in real world). As for fusion- there is no guarantee that it will ever work as practical source of power and just from the fact of how difficult it is to make proof of concept reactor I learn that it may never be even remotely affordable. Nuclear fission in its many forms may be the best solution for now and maybe also in 1000years, with minimal impact on environment, plentiful and sustainable fuel supply (with breeding in few forms for Uranium, Thorium). And the waste material can be kept simply away from biosphere for as long as needed.
One thing mentioned in this video but I think not pointed out hard enough is the economics: Nukes are talked horribly for extremely wrong reasons, the non-issue of waste and the nonsensical safety stuff that mostly shows complete lack of rellevant knowledge, and to be honest" *trying to argue against it is like telling somebody afraid of flying that planes are pretty much perfectly safe...* Yet nobody, neither advocates nor detractors; neither reasonable people nor folks pushing an agenda; seem to talk about the true great probkem of nuclear power: It is damn costly, expensive, pricey; and very risky politically and economically. You simply take way too long to recoup the high initial costs, specially with so much red tape, tho that depends on the country... Fast reactors are simply more expensive than thermal ones, they need to operate hotter (which is good for efficiency, but pricey), have way more red tape, and generally more complicated safety systems that drive cost up (for a slow reactor, you only really need a mod-coolant and adequate enough air cooling for the decay heat). Being like two magnitudes more efficient with fuel (counting waste in enrichment, as fast ones dont need) is nice and all, but fuel is only a small fraction of a NPP's cost, even not that signifficant in the operating cost, *so it just doesnt make sense economically.* A bit of the same issue with thorium reactors, you are just trying to solve a fuel scarcity problem that doesnt exist... The industry should be (and has been for decades) focused on cutting on capital cost instead of all that fuel changing nonsense, altho I cant deny that having some ability to burn fuel can save a lot of money for the country in disposal, which isnt huge (why do you think its almost if not the only industry that boxes its waste to be pretty much safer than the rock it came from) but still signifficant enough to contribute to that cost issue so hard on the technology (overkilling less is an option too, tho Id rather have all industries adopt that standard first ;P) Another point you should note is that fission products are way more dangerous than actinides. You can (if shouldnt!) hug a plutonium bar with just clothes, but you get ARS if you do it to a Cs137 one with a lead suit! Talking about half lives and comparing them is very common and *extremely misleading,* by that logic, normal lead is nigh infinitely dangerous with a half life so large no decay has ever been recorded, so it should be stored ro be kept beyond a shadow of a doubt until the last black hole flashes out ;P Also mentioning the numbers like that (without context) is musleading too. If you say that arsenic poison stays literally forever, along with most inorganic chemicals, 20ky to half doesnt seem that bad, but saying that it will last 20ky gives the impression that it is "particularly" long lived, heck, even "90% is gone in a century" as for many fission products (if we ignore the supermajority of radioactivity that dies in days and months) would be pretty good by many standards, even better than many plastic wastes for example, yef still sounds like a horrible threat that will stick around for generations... *It is again like telling someone afraid of flying that planes are safe*
Excellent comment! It is a great irony that the geological waste disposal sites for Mercury, Arsenic and Cadmium are engineered basically the same as the ones that are proposed (and being built) for spent fuel, but only the less-dangerous nuclear disposal sites are being met with extreme opposition from nimbys and environmental campaigners.
@@eckligt I mean it's the same reason nobody says "nuclear magnetic resonance imaging", it has nothing to do with nuclear reactions (other than using nucleai I guess), but *it has the word therefore bad.* TO BE FAIR actinide glasses are still very toxic while most metal poisons get very tame in such stable forms. On the other its way overkill anyway, who cares if the lethal dose is a gram or a millionth if you need a literal nuke (possibly shaped, Idk if the blast could break the canister) to have any hope of it getting close to your ass...
@@eckligt yeah thats fake, ur a paid actor by big uranium lobbies, we all know that a quarter atom of thorium is enough to leave a city uninhabitable for a trillion years Jokes aside, by actinides I meant transuranics (and I guess U232 can be thrown in the bunch), radiologically dangerous stuff with long half lives. Th, even pure, is little more than measurable, let alone in such tiny concentrations as that of a camera lens
The only reason we don't have the future we envisioned almost a hundred years ago is because people are too scared of a threat that doesn't even exist. With the amount of funding these guys put into military, nuclear waste would not even be a thing the general population would ever think about.
You got a bit too preachy and emotional near the end when talking about "Putting a cost to your children's lives". It's something we all do every day for more than just children. Fact of the matter is that the economic argument is the only one that matters.
The way we choose to act now will be the future we set for our children. Burning coal is not the answer, and renewable energy still has its issues. I don't think it's too preachy, and as stated, the direct economical impact of nuclear energy is not much compared to the eventual economical impact of climate change.
@@CraftyF0X In general. You make the same value judgement all the time. Human lives are of finite value. Nobody would spend the entire US GDP to save a single child's life.
@@blenderfoto Nobody is going to pay for more expensive energy that takes years longer to develop for some speculative damage the changing climate might cause.
@@loneIyboy15 but admit it we could pull and use our resources much better, especially since we are not talking about just one child, but more like literally billions coming after us. Maybe we could factor that into our current economic calculations, and consider that way whether mitigating climate change is worthwhile in the long term.
Loved this video. I haven't watched one of your videos in a while and I missed your content so I searched you out. Your energy and voice is different, more charming, in this video. I love it. Keep it up, sir, as you always have!
Every argument falls down when you have to say 'we did it so they can do it to'. First world countries destroyed the ecosystem and owned slaves, therefore third world countries can destroy the ecosystem and own slaves? Slavery in Arab nations and India isn't driving those countries to prospering, and destroying the ecosystem in Indonesia and Brazil isn't helping Indonesia and Brazil either. India said at cop26 that will burn coal till 2070, and around 60-70% of their energy is from coal. If you think that's OK just because you happened to be born in the UK or USA, then you're part of the global warming problem.
What isn't mentioned about the fast reactors is, if thorium is in the mix, you get plutonium isotopes that are short lived and poison the potential to use the plutonium as a weapons grade fuel, it would require centrifugal isotopic separation as with Uranium and thus be no more valuable to rogue states than Uranium ore.
@@TheOriginalJAX , Is the density requirement for a controlled, sustained, nuclear fusion reaction, capable of generating meaningful amounts of electrical power, a limiting factor in the quantity of Deuterium fuel used? Yes or no?
@@TheOriginalJAX , If you had the choice between home 'A' which is a zero net energy home and is not connected to the grid and home 'B' which is a home that receives its electricity from a nuclear power plant and uses natural gas to heat in the winter, which home would you choose? 'A' or 'B' ? Both homes cost the same and either home is large enough for a family of four to live in comfortably.
ADSR reactors usually doesn't get enough attention in videos like this but yet it is theoretically possible to make such reactor that would give about 40 times more energy then we will have to pomp into it to operate. Additionally those reactors could burn nearly all possible nuclear waste and even use it as a fuel.
Great video, I love the visualisations, but just a couple of corrections! You point out that one of the largest arguments against wide spread fast reactor implementation is that it would be easy to produce plutonium-239 for use in nuclear weapons. It's only partially true - although it's easier to chemically separate plutonium from uranium - it's actually far easier AND quicker for countries to use centrifuges/gaseous diffusion to isotopically enrich natural uranium to whatever level they want. Look at North Korea for example. And while some U-238 is inevitably bred in the core where neutron speeds are the fastest, most of it is produced in the outer 'blanket' regions surrounding the core. Fast-breeder reactors take advantage of all these excess neutrons and try to minimise neutron leakage by completely blanketing the core with natural or depleted uranium.
Any person that advocates building nuclear power plants is advocating the proliferation of nuclear weapons ... they just may not realize it. There have been over TWO THOUSAND nuclear bombs tested and there are thousands more around the world still. To deny that nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons go hand in hand is to deny History. Do you know the reason for the United States *PREEMPTIVE* invasion of Iraq. Thousand of innocent people were killed.
Your math was off on the carbon capture. First, you believed them, which is at your own peril. Second, there's not enough space to store even a fraction of captured carbon in the earth. And third, where the math comes in, is that the coal plant has to burn significantly more coal to be able to fuel the energy-intense process of capturing and compressing the co2 into a storable form.
I vaguely recall that, early on, one of the reasons thermal won over fast breeder reactors was that the former were very effective at producing by-products that could be processed for the nuclear armaments industry, while the latter were very effective at disposing of (consuming) those same materials. So there was advantage during the arms race to thermal. I’m curious whether there are any videos that look directly at this issue.
Civilian reactors are not utilized for production of weapons material. Special or purpose built reactors were deployed to produce Pu239. Rods had to be removed < 3 months to avoid buildup of Pu 240. Uranium is enriched to > 90 percent in centrifuges for weapons production.
Huge omission. You refer to all the isotopes of Plutonium produced by a power reactor as just Plutonium. In reality, the isotopic ratios of reactor grade Plutonium make it physically impossible to make into a weapon.
France had a failure at doing a first prototype of this technology due to costs, but recently planned another wave of second generations EPR reactors which should replace all aging reactors by 2050
Some numbers regarding carbon capture here in Saskatchewan. The Boundary Dam coal power plant produces 531MW of power. Only Unit 3 which is only about 1/4 of the total plant captures any CO2. Of that 1/4, 90% is temporarily captured, and then half of that CO2 is lost back to the atmosphere after it is used to help extract crude oil. So instead of the 90% carbon capture rates claimed by proponents it's more like 10-12%. And even then unit 3 is more likely to be offline than the other units because it is more expensive to use and maintain. So even the 10-12% capture rates is optimistic. And this is a successful carbon capture installation. Most have failed much more spectacularly.
We should use hot nuclear waste as a heat source. Instead of burying it in remote areas you could put it in a buried container with a heat exchanger and build an industrial park around it, most industrial applications need low level heat that is usually generated with natural gas or electricity. For example you use the heat from a buried waste pile to distill alcohol for fuel turning making the process actually carbon neutral.
I grew up in a town, that has been using the BN-350 reactor for several decades to desalinate the sea water. Built by the Soviet engineers, and once visited by an American astronaut with the nuclear physics diploma in his pocket. As I recall, he even left a record in the Visitors Book. And now Russia is building the BREST reactor.
@@TheOriginalJAX No surprise. A person that has *NOTHING* to say about nuclear energy wants people who can make an intelligent statement to go away. If you must wallow in your ignorance, ... please do not put it on disply.
@@TheOriginalJAX Is the density requirement for a controlled, sustained, nuclear fusion reaction, capable of generating meaningful amounts of electrical power, a limiting factor in the quantity of Deuterium fuel used? Yes or no?
11:45 there is quite a few more.. SAy we set the limit at 50MW. then it would be. Fermi 1 (60MW) FR (D) 250MW, Phenix (250MW), Superphenix (1240ishMW), PFBR (500MW), Munju (280MW), BN350 (135MW), BN600 (600MW), BN800 (864MW), CFR600 (600MW) Brest (400MW), Joyo (Thermal only 140MW)
Great video and extremely informative - the all round overview has enlightened my perspective on this ongoing and important issue. However, with current technologies available, CO2 does not need to be sequestered and can be refueled. That is to say, we have no need to pump the captured CO2 into the ground as we can create new fuel from the capture, allowing us to make energy from the captured byproduct, much like the reuse of the cores and with far less risk. For more info on the capture and refueling of CO2, check out Carbon Engineering on this, the most informative of social media outlets. I am sure you will be as pleased as I am that there are more cost effective and lower risk solutions to our misfortunate status quo 😉 Keep up the great work and looking forward to part 2. 🙃
Very informative video, I have been a nuclear power proponent for a long while now. But this helped me understand the difference in slow neutron and fast neutron reactions. I really think we need to replace the 80 plus percent fossil fuel power plants with nuclear. Other renewables can make a difference but they have other environmental and economic issues. Fast neutron reactors and types that can use thorium like LFTR’s need to be explored and used to the fullest extent.
I disagree about both nuclear fusion and the sun,wind,water kind of renewable energy. But you have in fact described the best solution. I was working for the FERC at the time when the "Pacific NW" didn't get enough rain and snow for California's hydropower, so the standard defense for sharp demand increases was "spinning reserve" gas turbines. A 60 Hz AC system, necessary for the working of transformers, demands a very prompt response to a load increase, which slows down generators that are overloaded, and if some slow down faster than others, they supply the grid bus with different voltages, because it goes from zero to max in one quarter of a 60th of a second then zero, negative max, zero. If the voltage difference is high enough to endanger the bus, the offending supplier will be dropped, so "spinning reserve" can charge ransom level fees. "VRE" is quite hopelessly Varying (it isn't "variable" like gas) so it worsens the problem. Nuclear fusion on Earth depends upon the deuterium+tritium reaction that provides a huge amount of energy per unit mass, but not nearly as attractive per unit volume. The equation creates just high energy helium nuclei, and furiously higher energy neutrons. These are both high energy radiation, so no radioactive isotopes isn't such a great bargain. Any neutrons that our fusion reactor doesn't capture can make the machine itself radioactive.
This is what I've been trying to communicate to people for the longest time. Nuclear waste is valuable. It's full of useful stuff and we're finding ways to use it instead of shove it in a mountain for 10,000 years. It'll eventually be as valuable as any other heavy elements. Proliferation will never be stopped. There's literally no way to do it. You can make the world a prison like police state and make it less likely but less likely is still a fraction of likely. What would be really cool with the stuff, especially mox is finding a way to induce targeted fission with super heavy intermediaries so the output products are even more useful. Who wouldn't want to find a way to generate Niobium or Indium at scale from heavier elements?
You assume a solid fuel core. In a molten salt core, you could syphon off fission products in real time. Also, you could use a thermal spectrum reactor to also transmute u238 into plutonium (or Thorium into u233) and keep burning it that way. The main advantage to thermal spectrum vs. fast spectrum reactors are that the fissile inventory required is much smaller, the control of the reaction is easier as it is a slower reaction, and the overall capital costs and safety could be much improved in a thermal spectrum reactor. There's a reason fast reactors have been tried by all major powers for decades and yet it hasn't gotten anywhere. Additionally, any solid reprocessing of spent cores, especially those containing plutonium, can lead to proliferation concerns, meaning only nuclear powers and trusted democracies can do this part of the fuel cycle. The developing world, however, is where most carbon emissions will come from in the future.
Excellent video, as always great presentation of more complex topic but it's still easy to understand. I love this topic and can't wait for more of your videos about it.
First Guy: “So if it solves the spent nuclear waste issue, why not start building them now?” Second Guy: Because they don’t really work like that.” First Guy: “Oh well , that’s too bad.”
Hi! I love you and your videos so much! Would you mind sharing how you do your research (if there are any specific sources you regularly refer to, resources you'd recommend, etc...)? Thank you!
Really great video, only some slight changes issues here and there (a little bit of clipping, weird topology, lack of shade smooth, and odd textures) but those are really small and the rest is awesome! (Is this done in blender and/or eevee?)
This is why we need to invest in modern advanced nuclear energy options. Small form reactors, LFTRs, Thorium Reactors, liquid reactors, with modern technology, engineering, material science, safety measures understandings and designs, computer technology, robotics, It will really allow any nation to be pretty much be energy independent. Less reliant on fossil fuels. They'll have efficient, stable electrical grids and the rest of the grid could experiment with alternative power sources, etc.
Are you aware of the reason for the United States *PREEMPTIVE* invasion of Iraq? The United States FALSELY accused Iraq of having weapons of mass destruction. *THOUSANDS* of innocent people were killed. Are you aware that the raw material to make nearly all the nuclear *BOMBS* that have been tested and the nuclear *BOMBS* in existence throughout the world came from nuclear power plants built for 'peaceful' purposes? So, ... are you okay with Iraq building nuclear power plants???
So capture bad, fission good, in order to be more efficient with resources?(waste vs fuel) And fast neutrons increase fission and decrease capture/absorption?
After watching Kyle Hill's channel I have a very hard time having anything bad to say about nuclear energy. Do it. Any potential danger is miniscule, it being one of the safest forms of energy production while fossil fuels are leading to hundreds of deaths per year.
Same here. I was already pretty pro-Nuclear but after watching Kyle Hill's videos he cleared up a lot of uncertainties I had.
there were 2 methane explosions in Poland's coal mines in the past 2 weeks. 20 miners dead. go for the nuclear, it's way safer...
I didn’t watch Kyle’s vid but honestly the degree of diabolisation nuclear is subjected to is insane. Instead of investing in polluting and not so efficient solar panels and wind turbines, let’s keep investing in nuclear fusion while keeping our focus on fission for the moment…
@@ThisUserPassedAway I'm not sure which one of his you're referring to, as he's done a lot on nuclear education.
The best one I think so far is the one he did recently on nuclear waste.
Kyle did a great job with that video.
As somebody that's has been pro Nuclear for decades it really does seem like a no brainer. Spent fuel reactors are a pretty cool thing, The more people learn about this stuff the better.
Then use the brain.
@@0MVR_0 Wrong answer kohai
@@sicfxmusic change your avatar,
then we can talk
@@0MVR_0 Guess we don't talk then!
@@sicfxmusic ...
2:23 Keep in mind, only 29,000 cubic meters of high level nuclear waste have been created _ever, in the history of nuclear energy._
And it could be drasticaly reduced if it is reprocessed.
lmao
i mean nuclear energy never was that relevant
@@baronbrummbar8691 70% of france's energy grid would like to have a word with you.
@@-yttrium-1187 still below 5% of worlds energy needs -------
In France, despite having 70 % of our electrical energy being produced out of fission, there is a strong developing anti-nuclear movement which is absurdly irrational, to say the least, and doesn't want to hear any argument, thinking we can replace all nuclear power plant with renewable in less than a decade even though we know it won't be enough for some of the reasons this video explained at the beginning.
Those people really need to understand we can't have anything with no downside, including their renewable technology they take a great care at ignoring the bad side that contradicts their own principle. We need nuclear, it's undeniable but it's not by shouting that the nuclear power plants will all explode like the only examples they can give (caused by human negligence btw) which are Chernobyl and Fukushima, even though they wouldn't be able to describe what happened exactly as they don't know anything about the subject, instead of trying to make everything so they don't explode under any circumstance, that they will win an argument against fission.
The problem is those examples are terrifying, and having being caused by negligence and poor design means they can and will happen again.
It is true that the grid cannot switch overnight to 100% renewables, and it must be noted that these pushes come from end consumers that do not use a great deal of energy directly. Industrial facilities push back because they want to buy the cheapest energy. We will see what happens
The only nuclear France "deserves" is a nuclear holocaust.
@@TheNasaDude Poor design, it can't happen anymore as we have nuclear power plants now that automatically shut down when a problem occurs (the reaction cease by itself when not maintained by human intervention) and even if it melts because of a human error which could accelerate the reaction, we still have a system of big tanks to store the melted fuel with its byproduct which will eventually stop the reaction.
But human error or negligence, it can surely happen again, that's why we have to be extra careful. Still, it's not a reason to stop nuclear fission exploitation as a source of energy.
Concerning the price : the thing is that at the opposite of most other technologies, nuclear power plants can produce a huge amount of energy with a very limited amount of space and materials. And it last very long. So it could be possible that in overall, nuclear is still cheaper than most source of energy (maybe at the exception of coal). Regardless, electricity is cheap and will be cheaper and cheaper as we perfect our technologies and improve the supply of fuel and materials on the long term, so it's not a problem here.
@@rigierish3807 poor design can sadly still happen by accident or by choice, as it happened with the Fukushima generators. Placing them on the ground floor might have seemed a smart move for easy accessibility in case of a manual startup, or for cheaper maintenance and savings on auxiliary equipment such as cranes, larger elevators and whatnot. Still, its not very likely nowadays.
Poor execution remains a big challenge: what if the builder decides to skimp on those meltdown container tanks and pocket the money? What if theres enough money in this operation to bribe the inspectors and regulators?
These are not impossible challenges to overcome, but nuclear needs to be ruled over and continuously supervised with an incredible iron fist. Any change in procedure or components driven by cost reduction should be rejected. Any other change should be carefully configured and have contingency plans. Plants should be built in remote areas far from population, and obviously in known safe environments.
Off-shore powerplants might be a good idea, in the end Fukiahima used a lot of marine water, and if Chernobil could have sunk underwater it would have caused a lot less damage. After all water stops radiation pretty quickly iirc. Of course scale is challenging, an oil rig would look like a small object in comparison
@@TheNasaDude Fukushima, they were just dumb. There's no debate about it. You don't place a goddamn nuclear reactor in a country where 50% of the earthquakes in the world happen there. That's all. Apparently, no engineer when they constructed it thought about that, despite being obvious. Still, even when there is an accident, we can see it is still safe, as no one died because of the radiation during and even after this accident. The area is still condemned but it's not that huge of an area. The only death were due to poor management of the population which was terrified at that moment.
Concerning the skimping : why would they? First, it's just tanks, there is nothing technological and spectacular about it, and the main purpose isn't to contain the melted fuel but to dispatch it in several tanks making less fuel in each tank therefore slowing down the reaction to eventually allow it to stop itself.
So even if the fuel could pass through due to skimping on the thickness of the material for example, then it's not a problem, the main purpose of the tanks will be achieved anyway. And second, it's the government's budget, so if they need more money, then the government will bring the extra money needed.
Which means if there is a skimping, then it can only we a sabotage from the inside which would be highly unlikely to happen.
Off-shore power plants, I'm not sure if it's a good idea. Sure, the radiation are absorbed pretty well by water but the environmental damages if there would be a problem will be dramatic, possibly more than if we construct it on the ground. Plus, it wouldn't be really convenient to build on off-shore, so I don't know if it's a good idea.
But it could be a solution of it turns out to be better.
One of the best videos I have seen on the subject -- well done!
I would like you also to explore the question of whether Plutonium really _is_ dangerous. The often-quoted figures that (traditional) spent nuclear fuel must be stored safely for tens of thousands of years (some people go as high as millions of years) is really based on the concern that Plutonium will get out into the environment.
Here's a breakdown of relevant half-lives:
* Thorium-232: 14 bn years
* Uranium-238: 4 bn years
* Uranium-235: 0.7 bn years
* Plutonium-239: 24,500 years
* Caesium-137 and Strontium-90: 30 years
Most people will see this and recoil in angst from the long half-lives of the top-most isotopes because _big number=scary_ but the scientific reality is that the longer the half-life, the less intense the radiation. To wit: Stable isotopes have infinite half-lives.
(As an aside, I think this video's classification of high-level, intermediate and low-level waste also needs to be discussed in more detail, since the thing that makes low-level waste _low-level_ is not the short half-lives themselves -- which actually contribute to making it _more_ radioactive -- but that we are talking about very small amounts that may be sprinkled lightly across used gloves, shoe covers, sampling equipment, etc. So what we really need when talking about waste are two axes, one for half-lives and one for concentration of material, which together can describe how intensely some material will radiate, graphed over time.)
There is a rule of thumb that can be applied to radioactive material: After ten half-lives, the material will basically have decayed to nothing. So ten times the half-life of Plutonium-239 equals roughly a quarter of a million years. The longer-lived, milder materials like Uranium are naturally occuring. Most people will accept the premise that "I dig it out of the ground, I can put it back in the ground later".
Plutonium-239, on the other hand, is the longest-lived of the materials that are only created in decent amounts as a byproduct of nuclear fission. Since it still is shorter-lived than the Uranium isotopes, it still has more intense radioactivity than either of those, meaning that any escape into the environment would cause an increase in background radiation levels. This makes it stand out when nuclear regulators want to plan for permanent storage. They apply the "precautionary principle" in a very rigid way: We don't _know_ how much harm Plutonium-239 in the environment might cause, so we need to make sure this can never happen
This is the crux of the problem: We _do_ have a fairly good idea how much harm Plutonium-239 can cause, and unless you basically eat it in substantial quantities, it's negligable. You can handle it with your bare hands, no shielding needed. Should you build your bedstead of Plutonium? Probably not, but if it ever _were_ to leach into the environment from storage sites, it would be in dilute form, and would make for a very small increase in background radiation.
The idea that we don't know enough about the harm from radiation in general, stems from the model of radiation damage called _LNT_ which stands for "linear, no threshold". It basically says that all radiation is harmful, and the amount of harm is proportional with the amount of radiation, or in other words that there is no threshold for radiation, which would allow you to be safe be remaining under it. This is basically the premise behind every comparison you may come across between radiation and some number of "chest x-rays". This was a natural idea to have in the development of nuclear science and radiomedicine. But at this point, LNT has been falsified. It is simply not true. There _are_ thresholds for safe radiation levels. However, regulators are still using LNT. I hope a future video from this channel will explore the topic of LNT further.
There is a terrible paradox -- humans have no senses that can detect radioactivity, but it is easy to build instruments to detect it with extreme precision! It is scary because it is so invisible, and we can feed that fear by looking at every little uptick on our Geiger counters. So, yes, escaped Plutonium may become detectable, but there is a huge step up from that to where it becomes physically harmful. Biology has evolved around radiation. We eat radioactive bananas, due to the presence of natural Potassium-40. We are struck by cosmic rays. Pilots and cabin crew receive the greatest amount of radiation of any professions.
The _real_ substances to worry about are Caesium-137 and Strontium-90. These are the longest-lived isotopes that are created, next after Plutonium-239. Applying the rule of thumb, after 300 years, these will have decayed to nothingness. So in summary, traditional spent nuclear fuel needs to be shielded for 300 years. We have built cathedrals that took longer, so I'm sure that's something humans can pull off.
10/10 comment right here
Im not reading all that, but I agree man
@@BerryMcCockiner I'm sorry, I have many skills but brevity is not among them. Basically: Plutonium=Bogeyman
That is one of the most profoundly ignorant questions I have seen for some time. Plutonium is preferred material for nuclear bombs. Any person that advocates nuclear energy is also advocating proliferation of nuclear weapons ... they just may not know it. Over 2,000 nuclear bombs have been detonated so far and thousands more are in storage or in missiles. The material to make these nuclear weapons came almost entirely from nuclear power plants built, ostensibly, for 'peaceful' purposes.
@@dunexapa1016 Oh that's a bit of a fallacy, this is like if I said that anyone who advocates for renewables & battery storage also advocates for more e-waste as well as the emissions and damage mining lithium creates. Everything has downsides and nuclear power is *strictly* regulated, it's a minority of countries which use nuclear power that have developed nukes, don't generalize! and simply that possibility is not nearly enough to say we should instantly stop pursuing nuclear. This is the classic "but what if!" argument that comes up with almost anything new. As a fun fact, the material in nuclear weapons can be used for fusion experiments or power generation in fast and other modern reactor designs. So if what you want is less nukes then funny enough what you want is more reactors
This was the most "newcomer" friendly nuclear energy video I have ever seen. Kudos for a very good product. It's exceedingly difficult, in my opinion, to delve into this subject, with it's complicated science, convoluted history and substantial social conflicts and, do it in a way that is understandable, or as nearly so as possible, to someone encountering it for the first time or with very limited prior awareness. It wasn't perfect but it was about as close to the mark as I have seen. I'm now a new subscriber and will be looking at all your content and hoping it will all be of the same quality. Thanks for the hard work.
P.S. the Thorium Energy Alliance Conference is coming up in Oct in Albuquerque and will certainly be an update on many facets of the cutting edge of research and development in this field and may be of particular interest to the producers of this channel.
Well done and informative video! However, I think it would have been better if you quickly mentioned how nuclear is statistically the safest form of energy in deaths/kWH. This would have put the fears of many relating to the safety to rest.
The NIMBY's have made up their minds. Don't try to confuse them with facts.
Nuclear energy vs fossil fuels is like airplane vs car. Currently, airplanes are the safest method of travel, because there are so many regulations and background checks done before you get in the plane that there's hardly any risk of failure. Nuclear power plants are the same, they're heavily regulated and protected
Absolutely correct. And the opposition to both is based completely off of feelings.
And renewables are like the horse and carriage.
im stealing that analogy
@@davidcatanzaro8838 Unfortunately very true. You can't have a reasonable argument with 95% of people who are anti-nuclear because all of their arguments are based solely on emotion. It's sad. My father is usually a pretty intelligent man but whenever I suggest to him that nuclear is safe and clean he goes on a rant about Tchernobyl and nuclear waste and how renewables will magically fix everything.
@@thepope2412 I like to respond to renewable fans with the following quip: Whale blubber is renewable -- doesn't mean it's sustainable.
Always great to see another one of your uploads. I thoroughly enjoy your videos man.
Please do a video on string theory! I've had a hard time learning about dark matter and dark energy, but thanks to your channel now I understand almost everything about their misteries! Also a video about plasma would be awesome too!!
Every time I consume a well-informed piece of media about nuclear energy I despair of human short-sightedness. Fearing nuclear waste over carbon emissions is like fearing a plane crash but not thinking about the orders of magnitude times higher chance of dying in a car crash on the way to the airport.
Many countries including the UK proposed a geological waste disposal facility to be made for high level waste. This will lower the cost of maintenance and monitoring and it’s very spacious.
Finland already has a deep dump site under construction.....but that's for their own waste only. There won't be a similar dump in UK.....public opposition won't allow it.....aint going to happen
@@aduantas geological waste facilities such as mines possess no threat of leaching into the environment.
Thanks for the video! Will it ever be safe to create a commercial fast reactor when the risk of the plutonium being stolen likely outweighs the benefits?
This is what we will be exploring in the follow-up video. Using uranium as the main fuel source will almost certainly produce more plutonium.
A more attractive alternative is using thorium as a fuel. Which will also be highlighted heavily in the next video.
@@ButWhySci well, stealing fuel rods is not that viable, it's not like you can extract and refine plutonium at a terrorist's home lab; and rogue statates will do it anyway with or without stealing as exemplified by North Korea... And stealing for dirty bombs is stupid, just use mercury salts, arsenic oxides or if you really wanna get fancy and radiological a hospital is a way easier target... Heck there are stories of soviet radioisotopes being stolen from hospitals and lighthouses after the fall...
At any rate, the Th cycle is not nuke-proof as claimed, U233 is very easy to extract off the core (potentially easier than Pu as most Th designs call for a molten salt core rather than a solid oxide, which is easier to separate chemically) and it makes very good weapons having similar characteristics to Pu239. And yeah, there are U232 (gamma emitter) impurities that make it hard to work, but yoh also get Pu240/41 (neutron emitters) to similar effects...
Truth is, if you wanna make nuke material, you gotta make a nuke material factory, just reusing civillian designs aint gonna work out, and this has been seen forever, plutonium factories are simply different... It is like saying coal power plants encourage war because missiles use fuel and explosives that have carbon.
However, it is true that fast reactors make more pure plutonium than slow ones, but the designer has a lot of control over how pure anyway and it'd be evident wheather it was made to make nukes...
Lastly, there is a lot of misinformation or different narratives about nuclear power, the fearmongers are not the only ones doing propaganda, and Th fanboys are ones quick to make shit up or just compare reactor designs from a half century ago to theirs (which would work roughly the same with either fuel) and say YOOO THORIUM :/
Why is this topic so full of crap and politics? I mean, its because Chernobyl and the meaning it had, how it was used by everyone as political pawn inside and out of the soviet union for their own goals... heh, history can be weird sometimes, this one it decided to pick on a technology...
@@ButWhySci The engineering of fast neutron reactors is problematic compared to the steam-kettle simplicity of modern PWRs and BWRs. Everything in a fast reactor happens hotter (thermally and radiologically) in a more compact space compared to PWRs and the like, hence the use of liquid sodium and lead as coolants and heat transfer media rather than gases or water. The Soviet-era BN-600 sodium-cooled fast reactor caught fire more than once (not sure about the BN-350 predecessor). It's a bit like going from an internal combustion engines in aircraft to jet engines, the development of materials and structural designs to cope with the extra stresses in a fast reactor are still in its infancy.
The issue of reprocessing is also a problem since currently and for the forseeable future the cost of the once-through uranium fuel cycle, from minehead to spent fuel in pools is a lot less than the ticket price of reprocessed fuel. Work is being done on making reprocessing a lot cheaper but it is not a priority, commercially speaking. The nations that do carry out some reprocessing (France, Russia etc.) do so for non-commercial reasons such as reducing the volume of high-level waste, although the amount of radioactive waste is concentrated rather than being reduced per se.
@@ButWhySci I have a question: Is there a way to extract any meaningful amount of energy from the nuclear waste produced by fast reactors? If so, will it be a threat to the health and safety of people and the environment?
That's been a consistent fear of people, but when you consider how hard it's been for them to recover the fuel from Fukushima without people dying, so it's not exactly like you can just go into these things and scoop it out. I'm pretty sure the proliferation risk is minimal.
I love nuclear power and always love learning about it. Thank you!
Great video.
But are FR and DE mixed up at 1:33?
Ignoring existence of BN600 and BN800 is not a good thing.
OMG fast breeder reactors! I'm an electrical engineering freshman and I made a full presentation on how we could power all of humanity for the next 4 billion years using this technology we've had since the 60's. Nuclear power engineering may eventually become my specialty in the future and I just can't wait because learning about it just gets me so excited!!! Great video btw, subbed after only watching 2 and I just can't wait to see more!
Overall quite good, but worth noting that as U238 gets bred to Pu239, there are a lot of excess neutrons around in most cases. That means the Pu (particularly in "spent fuel" today, is a mixture of isotopes and those absorb too many neutrons to give you a bomb, even if you chemically separate it. In a fast reactor, you get a lot more fissions (destroying the Pu isotopes as you mentioned) but any Pu left behind will be a mix when running it as a normal power reactor.
I am super excited for every video! Quality guaranteed!
Excellent presentation. I'm an old nuclear operator in thermal reactor plants. Here in Canada we are beginning to seriously consider a wasteburner reactor. This presentation gave me a good basic understanding of how that will work. Well done Kyle!
The amount already spent on solar and wind subsidies and extra consumer price would have paid for a fleet of fast breeders or thorium thermal breeders to replace all closing generation and keep up with new demand.
1GW Nuclear power costs roughly 20 billion USD, for the same amount of money you can build ~20 GW of Solar. It takes at least 5 but often more than 10 years to build a nuclear power plant, while it takes less than 6 months for wind or solar. Economics are important because the determine how much of something we can afford.
@@leonfa259 20GW of solar without batteries is worthless even if it was free. Peak grid demand hits just as the sun sets and solar output drops to zero. So for the real number you need to include about 8GW/hrs of storage and build about 1.6 GW of solar to meet 1 GW of on demand power, and still have some 20% of peak demand base load in the background. Oh and that is only If you get 100% of your expected output curve from solar, which you won't.
The physical construction time for solar could be 6 months, as your can build a whole bunch of the sub parts at the same time. But you couldn't get a plan into the early planning stage in 6 months let alone, all other required aspects for building something covering 24km^2 (the space used by a 1GW solar farm in India I just looked up). I think 2-3 years might be a more reasonable timeline for a 1GW solar farm (which is on the low end for a handful of the larger solar projects I looked at)
Current nuclear power is tied with coal power and comes in joint second after large hydro in terms of cost. However nuclear costs can be divided between paying back it's construction cost and once it's been paid for. This nuclear costs is a one and done costs that don't require other investments to work like solar needs extra storage or a complete replication of peak grid demand of standby generation. Anyway, once nuclear is paid back in 20 years and has something like 20 to 80 more years of operating the cost drops even lower. Also getting cut rate loans (as I was talking about using subsidies given to solar) from a government can reduce the price from nuclear in half by getting 3% interest rather than 10%, over it's pay back period.
That's with our not optimal for power generation current light water reactors that are passable submarine power sources but not really the best for grid demand. My statement about the new types of reactors is critical to my comment, not addressing that tech is missing the point. Commenting on current light water reactors when I was talkin about something like the LFTR would be like talking about trains when I'm talking about trucks. They do a similar thing but are so different as make talking about out useless for talking about the other for most cases. Due to vastly lower construction and operating costs a LFTR could be running profitably in the sub 1 cent range.
@@leonfa259 1GW of nuclear will provide 0.92 GW/h while 20GW of solar will provide 5GW/h; BTW price of nuclear vary > 100%, that is, it is not physics it is politics
oh yes, and Nuclear will provide it 24/7 while solar might or not when you need it
@@pip0109 Like the 2/3 of francese aktive nuclear power plants that are offline currently.
Solid depiction of nuclear energy, and truly great introduction to the topic of fast nuclear reactors. As a Nuclear Engineer working towards developing advanced reactors, the biggest hurdle in a lot of these reactor concepts is proving that they are proliferation resistant. Ironically, the technological safety is many year ahead of our operations safety. How do we guarantee that enriched fuel from old reactor cores, Plutonium-239 and other transuranic elements, isn't going to be harvested for malicious use? Unfortunately, this may be the question which puts fast reactor development to a halt until the safeguards exist to prohibit these scenarios from occurring.
That being said, I have high hopes for nuclear energy in the future. The depiction of what it is, how energy is generated from "burning" fuel, and what it looks like on the social level are all key factors to demystifying nuclear energy and revealing how smart of an idea it is to mitigate and reverse effects of climate change and the carbon footprint of humanity!
Finally! a rational comment!!! There is also those pesky problems of human error and human nature. I wish I had a nickle for every time I have heard an American say they would like to level Iraq with nuclear weapons ... As if falsely accusing Iraq of having 'weapons of mass destruction' and invading that country and killing thousands of innocent people was not enough. Oh, Iraq was also accused of the THOUGHT CRIME of thinking about attacking America ... with its imaginary WMD's.
One thing I never got, "proliferation resistant", how is that even an issue for any but 3rd world countries?
@@pip0109 diversion of nuclear material is a worldwide concern. It is very easy to fudge some numbers and divert material to storehouses if safeguards were not in place. A good design for a reactor makes it challenging, if not impossible, for such diversion of material to occur. It helps prevent weapons grade material from entering into anyone's hands. Remember, safeguards only work if they work for everyone indiscriminately!
I really enjoyed this! As somebody with some interest in nuclear energy and a casual knowledge of the basics of nuclear physics, I found this to be a really accessible introduction to get me a bit deeper into it. The only suggestion I could think of would be if you had used the term “proliferation” to describe Evildoers™ getting hold of high-level fissile material, since it’s what somebody would want to search for to learn more.
As the saying goes ... a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. If you deny that the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the building of nuclear power plants to generate electricity do not go hand in hand then you are denying nearly 70 years of history.
If you believe nearly all leaders in the world are kindly old wise philosopher kings ... you've a bit to learn about history and human nature. Maybe start with learning about the United States invasion of Iraq.
@@dunexapa1016 I don’t think anybody here is denying it! In the video he discusses those dangers, just that he doesn’t specifically use the word “proliferation” to describe it. (Unless I missed it, which is entirely possible.)
Call me pessimistic but I think fusion will always be the power of the future and is more of a money hole than a practical energy source...however there's so much untapped potential in fission that we know can work. Between this and thorium and MSRs and everything we should be jumping on nuclear like crazy, it's such a no brainier and it's such a good source of energy I really feel like society messed up by letting a few bad accidents scare us off of it. I honestly cannot overstate how hyped I am for this next video, I love nuclear topics
Molten salt fast reactors are even more efficient and harder to divert to weapons.
there are also byproducts we dont want to throw away, some are very useful medical isotopes eg. for chemo therapy.
Great video. I'd like to point out that reactors often last longer than 30 years. There are some SMRs that are designed to only last that long but there's no rule why they can't last longer. Indeed there are reactors today that are licensed until they're 80. I'd also like to point out that some kinds of fast reactor can actually consume nuclear weapons. A pool type Molten Salt reactor has it's fuel and coolant mixed together and you can basically just toss in your weapon's material which is downblended to non-weapons grade in the reactor and is fissioned.
Another thing to talk about with those few Fast Reactors is they were really experimental or test reactors that were trying out a variety of things like new coolants. However there are incoming fast reactors right now like Natrium in Wyoming so they're much closer than you might think.
And when a nuclear power plant is decommissioned who will pay the cost of guarding it?
@@dunexapa1016 nuclear power plants have all decommissioning costs baked into the price for their power
@@reahs4815 , lol, Next thing you will tell me is that there is no correlation between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Do you know why the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 and killed thousand upon thousands of *INNOCENT* people (not to mention Abu Ghraib prison where prisoners were tortured) ? Do you approve of this invasion? Can any country invade another country for *SAME* reason??? Why not??? Who will play policeman ...*PLEASE* tell me!!!!
@@dunexapa1016 1 there is not.
2. Oil/control
3. no
4. probably not
FYI I think the US is a international bully
@@dunexapa1016 Get a life
Such a great video! Really appreciate your hardwork in the video! 👏🏼 Excited for the next video! 👌🏼
Intersting video. I was surprised how positive you talked about CCS. Maybe you do a deprive on that, because as of now, most CCS facilities fail on different levels, sometimes even releasing more CO2. Its also greenwashing if the CO2 escape rate is higher than expected
I love this channel. Even if the videos have 2 months of waiting between them, the videos are surprisingly calming to listen to, and informing on top of that.
It would be good to see any video that advocates nuclear energy to strongly emphasize that the proliferation of nuclear weapons was a by-product of building nuclear power plants. If a nuclear war occurs, the last thing people will be worried about then is the safe storage of nuclear waste from a nuclear power plant. Any nuclear power plant would be a strategic target. The irony ... a nuclear weapon created using material from a nuclear power plant destroying a nuclear power plant.
@@dunexapa1016 stop bothering people with your spam already.
This channel never disappoints. Excellent video!
Had to watch that new intro a couple times:)
First few words are great ... "In an ideal world ... " sadly, the world is far from being an ideal place. I hope that you are, at least, trying not to leave it any worse than you found it.
Most people who are anti nuclears just came from watching/reading chernobyl documentaries
I'm glad i was already somewhat knowledgeable about this topic beforehand, because i wouldn't have been able to follow it otherwise.
1:31 you have france and germany mixed up
The one data point everyone forgets is the amount of people affected from weather events . Is higher than they were before. We need to stop building in places that are in the hot zones.
Great video! Thanks for making!
Where does this "ideal future will be powered by renewables and nuclear fusion" comes from? It is being repeated in places like a mantra but no justification if this is the future to hope for. I would like to see the future with plentiful and cheap energy, with minimum impact on environment and this is possible with energy dense fuel and methods. Renewables are diluted, unpredictable and resources intense (space and materials) and to be sustainable these require storage (because backup from fossil fuel is expensive and poluting). Large scale storage doesn't exist (in real world). As for fusion- there is no guarantee that it will ever work as practical source of power and just from the fact of how difficult it is to make proof of concept reactor I learn that it may never be even remotely affordable. Nuclear fission in its many forms may be the best solution for now and maybe also in 1000years, with minimal impact on environment, plentiful and sustainable fuel supply (with breeding in few forms for Uranium, Thorium). And the waste material can be kept simply away from biosphere for as long as needed.
Uranium-238 lookin real fertile and breedable lately
One thing mentioned in this video but I think not pointed out hard enough is the economics:
Nukes are talked horribly for extremely wrong reasons, the non-issue of waste and the nonsensical safety stuff that mostly shows complete lack of rellevant knowledge, and to be honest" *trying to argue against it is like telling somebody afraid of flying that planes are pretty much perfectly safe...* Yet nobody, neither advocates nor detractors; neither reasonable people nor folks pushing an agenda; seem to talk about the true great probkem of nuclear power: It is damn costly, expensive, pricey; and very risky politically and economically. You simply take way too long to recoup the high initial costs, specially with so much red tape, tho that depends on the country...
Fast reactors are simply more expensive than thermal ones, they need to operate hotter (which is good for efficiency, but pricey), have way more red tape, and generally more complicated safety systems that drive cost up (for a slow reactor, you only really need a mod-coolant and adequate enough air cooling for the decay heat). Being like two magnitudes more efficient with fuel (counting waste in enrichment, as fast ones dont need) is nice and all, but fuel is only a small fraction of a NPP's cost, even not that signifficant in the operating cost, *so it just doesnt make sense economically.*
A bit of the same issue with thorium reactors, you are just trying to solve a fuel scarcity problem that doesnt exist...
The industry should be (and has been for decades) focused on cutting on capital cost instead of all that fuel changing nonsense, altho I cant deny that having some ability to burn fuel can save a lot of money for the country in disposal, which isnt huge (why do you think its almost if not the only industry that boxes its waste to be pretty much safer than the rock it came from) but still signifficant enough to contribute to that cost issue so hard on the technology (overkilling less is an option too, tho Id rather have all industries adopt that standard first ;P)
Another point you should note is that fission products are way more dangerous than actinides. You can (if shouldnt!) hug a plutonium bar with just clothes, but you get ARS if you do it to a Cs137 one with a lead suit! Talking about half lives and comparing them is very common and *extremely misleading,* by that logic, normal lead is nigh infinitely dangerous with a half life so large no decay has ever been recorded, so it should be stored ro be kept beyond a shadow of a doubt until the last black hole flashes out ;P
Also mentioning the numbers like that (without context) is musleading too. If you say that arsenic poison stays literally forever, along with most inorganic chemicals, 20ky to half doesnt seem that bad, but saying that it will last 20ky gives the impression that it is "particularly" long lived, heck, even "90% is gone in a century" as for many fission products (if we ignore the supermajority of radioactivity that dies in days and months) would be pretty good by many standards, even better than many plastic wastes for example, yef still sounds like a horrible threat that will stick around for generations... *It is again like telling someone afraid of flying that planes are safe*
Excellent comment!
It is a great irony that the geological waste disposal sites for Mercury, Arsenic and Cadmium are engineered basically the same as the ones that are proposed (and being built) for spent fuel, but only the less-dangerous nuclear disposal sites are being met with extreme opposition from nimbys and environmental campaigners.
@@eckligt I mean it's the same reason nobody says "nuclear magnetic resonance imaging", it has nothing to do with nuclear reactions (other than using nucleai I guess), but *it has the word therefore bad.*
TO BE FAIR actinide glasses are still very toxic while most metal poisons get very tame in such stable forms. On the other its way overkill anyway, who cares if the lethal dose is a gram or a millionth if you need a literal nuke (possibly shaped, Idk if the blast could break the canister) to have any hope of it getting close to your ass...
@@antaresmc4407 I actually have a camera lens with thoriated glass. The hottest thing I have found with my Geiger counter.
@@eckligt yeah thats fake, ur a paid actor by big uranium lobbies, we all know that a quarter atom of thorium is enough to leave a city uninhabitable for a trillion years
Jokes aside, by actinides I meant transuranics (and I guess U232 can be thrown in the bunch), radiologically dangerous stuff with long half lives. Th, even pure, is little more than measurable, let alone in such tiny concentrations as that of a camera lens
"tho that depends on the country... " THIS !!!! it is not intrinsic property of nuclear, but POLITICS who take their knowledge from HIPPIES
one of if not the best scientific channel on yt fr
1:33 I don't get it how such mistakes go unnoticed throughout production
I believe it's only 1 guy. Perhaps he handed the animating part to someone else.
The only reason we don't have the future we envisioned almost a hundred years ago is because people are too scared of a threat that doesn't even exist. With the amount of funding these guys put into military, nuclear waste would not even be a thing the general population would ever think about.
You got a bit too preachy and emotional near the end when talking about "Putting a cost to your children's lives". It's something we all do every day for more than just children. Fact of the matter is that the economic argument is the only one that matters.
* in capitalistic realism (where one can imagine the end of the world easier than the end of capitalism)
The way we choose to act now will be the future we set for our children. Burning coal is not the answer, and renewable energy still has its issues.
I don't think it's too preachy, and as stated, the direct economical impact of nuclear energy is not much compared to the eventual economical impact of climate change.
@@CraftyF0X In general. You make the same value judgement all the time. Human lives are of finite value. Nobody would spend the entire US GDP to save a single child's life.
@@blenderfoto Nobody is going to pay for more expensive energy that takes years longer to develop for some speculative damage the changing climate might cause.
@@loneIyboy15 but admit it we could pull and use our resources much better, especially since we are not talking about just one child, but more like literally billions coming after us. Maybe we could factor that into our current economic calculations, and consider that way whether mitigating climate change is worthwhile in the long term.
Loved this video. I haven't watched one of your videos in a while and I missed your content so I searched you out. Your energy and voice is different, more charming, in this video. I love it. Keep it up, sir, as you always have!
Every argument falls down when you have to say 'we did it so they can do it to'.
First world countries destroyed the ecosystem and owned slaves, therefore third world countries can destroy the ecosystem and own slaves?
Slavery in Arab nations and India isn't driving those countries to prospering, and destroying the ecosystem in Indonesia and Brazil isn't helping Indonesia and Brazil either.
India said at cop26 that will burn coal till 2070, and around 60-70% of their energy is from coal. If you think that's OK just because you happened to be born in the UK or USA, then you're part of the global warming problem.
What isn't mentioned about the fast reactors is, if thorium is in the mix, you get plutonium isotopes that are short lived and poison the potential to use the plutonium as a weapons grade fuel, it would require centrifugal isotopic separation as with Uranium and thus be no more valuable to rogue states than Uranium ore.
I love your content, I really hope you reach a point where your views and subscribers reflect the quality of your videos. Stay strong and dont give up
Thx for explaining the difference between fizzle and fertle. Great video.
Learn about fissile as well and nuclear fusion as well. Both of these processes occur in nuclear bombs.
@@dunexapa1016 go away, reply guy.
@@TheOriginalJAX , Is the density requirement for a controlled, sustained, nuclear fusion reaction, capable of generating meaningful amounts of electrical power, a limiting factor in the quantity of Deuterium fuel used? Yes or no?
@@dunexapa1016 Go away, Iv found you in over 20 comment threads in this video you need to stop spamming everybody, you are unhinged get help.
@@TheOriginalJAX , If you had the choice between home 'A' which is a zero net energy home and is not connected to the grid and home 'B' which is a home that receives its electricity from a nuclear power plant and uses natural gas to heat in the winter, which home would you choose? 'A' or 'B' ? Both homes cost the same and either home is large enough for a family of four to live in comfortably.
the biggest threat to nuclear energy will always be politics
ADSR reactors usually doesn't get enough attention in videos like this but yet it is theoretically possible to make such reactor that would give about 40 times more energy then we will have to pomp into it to operate. Additionally those reactors could burn nearly all possible nuclear waste and even use it as a fuel.
Man, the quality of your videos keeps increasing!
every school should play a video of your channel every day.
Great video, I love the visualisations, but just a couple of corrections! You point out that one of the largest arguments against wide spread fast reactor implementation is that it would be easy to produce plutonium-239 for use in nuclear weapons. It's only partially true - although it's easier to chemically separate plutonium from uranium - it's actually far easier AND quicker for countries to use centrifuges/gaseous diffusion to isotopically enrich natural uranium to whatever level they want. Look at North Korea for example.
And while some U-238 is inevitably bred in the core where neutron speeds are the fastest, most of it is produced in the outer 'blanket' regions surrounding the core. Fast-breeder reactors take advantage of all these excess neutrons and try to minimise neutron leakage by completely blanketing the core with natural or depleted uranium.
Any person that advocates building nuclear power plants is advocating the proliferation of nuclear weapons ... they just may not realize it. There have been over TWO THOUSAND nuclear bombs tested and there are thousands more around the world still.
To deny that nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons go hand in hand is to deny History. Do you know the reason for the United States *PREEMPTIVE* invasion of Iraq. Thousand of innocent people were killed.
This was well presented, thanks~
genius! and applicable right now
Your math was off on the carbon capture. First, you believed them, which is at your own peril. Second, there's not enough space to store even a fraction of captured carbon in the earth. And third, where the math comes in, is that the coal plant has to burn significantly more coal to be able to fuel the energy-intense process of capturing and compressing the co2 into a storable form.
Nice intro. Videos looking better and better
Amazing new Intro!
Been waiting for your video. Gotta get some snacks to watch it now.
I vaguely recall that, early on, one of the reasons thermal won over fast breeder reactors was that the former were very effective at producing by-products that could be processed for the nuclear armaments industry, while the latter were very effective at disposing of (consuming) those same materials. So there was advantage during the arms race to thermal. I’m curious whether there are any videos that look directly at this issue.
Civilian reactors are not utilized for production of weapons material. Special or purpose built reactors were deployed to produce Pu239. Rods had to be removed < 3 months to avoid buildup of Pu 240. Uranium is enriched to > 90 percent in centrifuges for weapons production.
Huge omission. You refer to all the isotopes of Plutonium produced by a power reactor as just Plutonium. In reality, the isotopic ratios of reactor grade Plutonium make it physically impossible to make into a weapon.
France had a failure at doing a first prototype of this technology due to costs, but recently planned another wave of second generations EPR reactors which should replace all aging reactors by 2050
You just gave me tons of hope for nuclear waste at around 9:10.
Excellent program. Thank you for sharing.
I think "little boy" was U235. "Fat man" was Plutonium.
Some numbers regarding carbon capture here in Saskatchewan. The Boundary Dam coal power plant produces 531MW of power. Only Unit 3 which is only about 1/4 of the total plant captures any CO2. Of that 1/4, 90% is temporarily captured, and then half of that CO2 is lost back to the atmosphere after it is used to help extract crude oil. So instead of the 90% carbon capture rates claimed by proponents it's more like 10-12%. And even then unit 3 is more likely to be offline than the other units because it is more expensive to use and maintain. So even the 10-12% capture rates is optimistic.
And this is a successful carbon capture installation. Most have failed much more spectacularly.
We should use hot nuclear waste as a heat source. Instead of burying it in remote areas you could put it in a buried container with a heat exchanger and build an industrial park around it, most industrial applications need low level heat that is usually generated with natural gas or electricity. For example you use the heat from a buried waste pile to distill alcohol for fuel turning making the process actually carbon neutral.
I grew up in a town, that has been using the BN-350 reactor for several decades to desalinate the sea water. Built by the Soviet engineers, and once visited by an American astronaut with the nuclear physics diploma in his pocket. As I recall, he even left a record in the Visitors Book. And now Russia is building the BREST reactor.
Every country can probably point to at least one major mistake.
@@dunexapa1016 look what we have here........ go outside Xapa leave comments sections alone already.
@@TheOriginalJAX No surprise. A person that has *NOTHING* to say about nuclear energy wants people who can make an intelligent statement to go away. If you must wallow in your ignorance, ... please do not put it on disply.
@@dunexapa1016 Go away, Iv found you in over 20 comment threads in this video you need to stop spamming everybody, you are unhinged get help.
@@TheOriginalJAX Is the density requirement for a controlled, sustained, nuclear fusion reaction, capable of generating meaningful amounts of electrical power, a limiting factor in the quantity of Deuterium fuel used? Yes or no?
Awesome new intro!
Thank you very much for your channel. the videos are extremely interesting and helpful!
Love your videos, very concise and the graphics are well done and easy to understand!
Probably before watching the video:
When I thought about the high level waste thing, I was like:
That stuff's like less intense fuel, why not use it?
The name of the game should be energy density and reliability (nuclear), not dilute harnesses of intermittent weather (pv and turbines).
11:45 there is quite a few more.. SAy we set the limit at 50MW. then it would be.
Fermi 1 (60MW) FR (D) 250MW, Phenix (250MW), Superphenix (1240ishMW), PFBR (500MW), Munju (280MW), BN350 (135MW), BN600 (600MW), BN800 (864MW), CFR600 (600MW) Brest (400MW), Joyo (Thermal only 140MW)
Awesome vid, learnt a lot. More Nuclear vids please!
Nice ... i last saw a vid 2 months ago, with like 30k subs...now 180k? Amazing, congrats and well deserved
Those pannels are scary to watch for Intel Personel acquainted with Quantum Mechanics
Great video and extremely informative - the all round overview has enlightened my perspective on this ongoing and important issue.
However, with current technologies available, CO2 does not need to be sequestered and can be refueled. That is to say, we have no need to pump the captured CO2 into the ground as we can create new fuel from the capture, allowing us to make energy from the captured byproduct, much like the reuse of the cores and with far less risk.
For more info on the capture and refueling of CO2, check out Carbon Engineering on this, the most informative of social media outlets.
I am sure you will be as pleased as I am that there are more cost effective and lower risk solutions to our misfortunate status quo 😉
Keep up the great work and looking forward to part 2. 🙃
CO2 is energetically stable, which means you can’t do much with it.
i'm subscribing no question about it
Very informative video, I have been a nuclear power proponent for a long while now. But this helped me understand the difference in slow neutron and fast neutron reactions. I really think we need to replace the 80 plus percent fossil fuel power plants with nuclear. Other renewables can make a difference but they have other environmental and economic issues. Fast neutron reactors and types that can use thorium like LFTR’s need to be explored and used to the fullest extent.
I need a nuclear physics refresher apparently.
Keep up the awesome work!!! :D
I disagree about both nuclear fusion and the sun,wind,water kind of renewable energy.
But you have in fact described the best solution.
I was working for the FERC at the time when the "Pacific NW" didn't get enough rain and snow for California's hydropower, so the standard defense for sharp demand increases was "spinning reserve" gas turbines. A 60 Hz AC system, necessary for the working of transformers, demands a very prompt response to a load increase, which slows down generators that are overloaded, and if some slow down faster than others, they supply the grid bus with different voltages, because it goes from zero to max in one quarter of a 60th of a second then zero, negative max, zero. If the voltage difference is high enough to endanger the bus, the offending supplier will be dropped, so "spinning reserve" can charge ransom level fees.
"VRE" is quite hopelessly Varying (it isn't "variable" like gas) so it worsens the problem.
Nuclear fusion on Earth depends upon the deuterium+tritium reaction that provides a huge amount of energy per unit mass, but not nearly as attractive per unit volume. The equation creates just high energy helium nuclei, and furiously higher energy neutrons. These are both high energy radiation, so no radioactive isotopes isn't such a great bargain. Any neutrons that our fusion reactor doesn't capture can make the machine itself radioactive.
3:27 "We'll increase the volume 150%", but actually increases it to 338%
This is what I've been trying to communicate to people for the longest time. Nuclear waste is valuable. It's full of useful stuff and we're finding ways to use it instead of shove it in a mountain for 10,000 years. It'll eventually be as valuable as any other heavy elements. Proliferation will never be stopped. There's literally no way to do it. You can make the world a prison like police state and make it less likely but less likely is still a fraction of likely.
What would be really cool with the stuff, especially mox is finding a way to induce targeted fission with super heavy intermediaries so the output products are even more useful. Who wouldn't want to find a way to generate Niobium or Indium at scale from heavier elements?
You assume a solid fuel core. In a molten salt core, you could syphon off fission products in real time. Also, you could use a thermal spectrum reactor to also transmute u238 into plutonium (or Thorium into u233) and keep burning it that way. The main advantage to thermal spectrum vs. fast spectrum reactors are that the fissile inventory required is much smaller, the control of the reaction is easier as it is a slower reaction, and the overall capital costs and safety could be much improved in a thermal spectrum reactor. There's a reason fast reactors have been tried by all major powers for decades and yet it hasn't gotten anywhere. Additionally, any solid reprocessing of spent cores, especially those containing plutonium, can lead to proliferation concerns, meaning only nuclear powers and trusted democracies can do this part of the fuel cycle. The developing world, however, is where most carbon emissions will come from in the future.
Excellent video, as always great presentation of more complex topic but it's still easy to understand. I love this topic and can't wait for more of your videos about it.
In your graphic at 1:33 either the icons or the labels for France and Germany are swapped I am curious which is which, my guess would be the labels?
First Guy: “So if it solves the spent nuclear waste issue, why not start building them now?”
Second Guy: Because they don’t really work like that.”
First Guy: “Oh well , that’s too bad.”
Fast reactors need to become mainstream knowledge
Hi! I love you and your videos so much! Would you mind sharing how you do your research (if there are any specific sources you regularly refer to, resources you'd recommend, etc...)? Thank you!
Really great video, only some slight changes issues here and there (a little bit of clipping, weird topology, lack of shade smooth, and odd textures) but those are really small and the rest is awesome! (Is this done in blender and/or eevee?)
I think that getting the Internet behind renewables is a good option. Hype up renewables as much as you can, and people will invest.
This is why we need to invest in modern advanced nuclear energy options. Small form reactors, LFTRs, Thorium Reactors, liquid reactors, with modern technology, engineering, material science, safety measures understandings and designs, computer technology, robotics, It will really allow any nation to be pretty much be energy independent. Less reliant on fossil fuels. They'll have efficient, stable electrical grids and the rest of the grid could experiment with alternative power sources, etc.
Are you aware of the reason for the United States *PREEMPTIVE* invasion of Iraq? The United States FALSELY accused Iraq of having weapons of mass destruction. *THOUSANDS* of innocent people were killed. Are you aware that the raw material to make nearly all the nuclear *BOMBS* that have been tested and the nuclear *BOMBS* in existence throughout the world came from nuclear power plants built for 'peaceful' purposes? So, ... are you okay with Iraq building nuclear power plants???
It definitely feels like the public opinion of nuclear power is taking a turn, just as we need it more.
03:53 How is that second cube 10% of the one beside it? I even rewound the video. It appears more like 1/3.
Is covering every square inch of terrain in solar panels and windmills going to “indelibly affect” the environment?
Another banger, keep up the dubs
So capture bad, fission good, in order to be more efficient with resources?(waste vs fuel)
And fast neutrons increase fission and decrease capture/absorption?
Sick intro