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@@galactock It's way harder to produce nukes from the U-233 created by thorium as how he said there are products within the material mix that create a lot of high energy gamma rays. It is way easier to just enrich mined uranium directly.
You completely failed to explain how this is better than other reactors. Do you even know what cladding is? Yeah well I don't so thanks for keeping that a secret. Oh and your intro music makes me want to go back in time and punch a baby version of myself in the face. Trust me there's a better way to get a take, you don't have to murder the singer. It's so high pitched and off key, and whats the clicking in the background right before she squeals, that goes 'chick chick'. Sounds like somebody attempted to hit the space bar on their keyboard and turn it off, but was overtaken by the squealing and never made it out of the studio alive. ' I do respect your cleverness in picking a name for your channel though. You couldn't come up with a name so you added an 'ed' and said it was with you. This is "Failed Brainstorming with Matt Ferrell" doesn't have quite the same ring to it. Good luck , and have a nice day.
9:01 Thorium is an unwanted byproduct of the rare earth mining process used for making electronics. If it is more expensive to mine that cost would be covered by the rare earth mining process. Also the USA has a huge store of already mined and separated Thorium sitting in containers out in the desert.
I think the desalination plant integration idea is probably the best seller. Freshwater is a huge stresser that will come up in the near future (think 5-10 years)
I remember the father of a coworker of mine discussing MSR’s back in the early 1980’s. He was a engineer and a boilermaker who was Superintendent on many different power plant construction jobs. He had worked at Oak Ridge and at the Hanford Reservation, along with multiple other energy facilities. I wish he was still living, it would be great to pick his brain today.
I think positives to nuclear like footprint, which allows less habitat destruction and energy density, are overlooked too much due to fear and complexity. Wind and solar is simple for people to get their heads around but I’d rather one “small reactor” and Forrest area around it vs a huge field of solar panels. Thoughts to square footage as a consideration?
I think more research into solar and storage can I overcome the size. But, I've been more interested in hydrogen fuel cells, getting hydrogen from electrolysis.
@@robertnicholls9917 energy from the sun is very dispersed. There isn't very much energy per square foot coming from the sun... Even if you could capture it all, the square footage (density) of solar would change by a factor of 4-5 (panels are 20-25% efficient currently). But the density difference between solar and nuclear is FAR larger than a factor of 4. There's a physics limitation that can't just be "innovated" through.
Centralized power, especially nuclear power, has significant security risks. Wind and solar do not. You could cut the power to millions of people *and* contaminate an enormous area by targeting a nuclear plant. Just because it hasn’t really happened yet doesn’t mean it won’t.
@@PvtPartzz a fair point if not a little dystopian, but very relevant as seen with Russia in the Ukrainian. Small reactors would mitigate that risk though.
There are lots of people asking about the claim of "burning up," old nuclear waste in Thorium reactors. I posted a response to one such comment asking about it, and figured there were so many others it would probably be best to post it outright so others can see the explanation and hopefully it will address questions or concerns, or simply those wanting to hear about the potential for Thorium to "burn up" old nuclear waste products. First, the main issue with this concept: The ""burning" of old nuclear waste, specifically plutonium (the primary nuclear byproduct of the classic Uranium-based light-water reactor (LWR) nuclear power plant) doesn't occur in Thorium-based plants. The process is actually used to create a new fissile material for use in the current nuclear power plants. The process of generating electricity via the fission of Uranium is far more complex than most people realize. It's not as simple as melting uranium and dumping it in a rod and boiling water. The uranium refinement process involves creating a granular black powder known as UOX, or Uranium Oxide. This material is formed into the nuclear rods which generate heat via fission, boiling the water, which spins turbines, which generates electricity. The Plutonium is created when U-235 (the type most common isotope of Uranium used in nuclear energy generation and some fission-based nuclear weapons) is fissioned and releases Neutrons, which can then be absorbed into U-238, which is present in the UOX fuel pellets used to make rods. When U-238 absorbs several neutrons, it becomes U-239, which beta-decays into Neptunium 239, which beta-decays into Plutonium-239. That Plutonium is the nasty material we usually associate with nuclear waste byproducts. While U-238 isn't fissile enough to generate the heat and energy necessary to maintain the fission reaction that generates the heat used for electricity generation, Pu-239 is. Now, Plutonium can be used in other types of nuclear reactors, like "fast neutron reactors," but it can also be mixed with UOX as a fissile material to make rods for classic LWR fuel. Here's where the "burn-up" of Pu can occur. Instead of mixing UOX with PuOX to make MOX (mixed oxide fuel, composed of uranium oxide and plutonium oxide) pellets for fuel rods, Thorium oxide, or ThOx can be mixed to make (PuTh)Ox, or Plutonium-Thorium Oxide, which can them be used to made fuel rods for classic LWR nuclear power plants. It can also be added to UOX to make (UTh)OX, which works like traditional nuclear fuel pellets and rods, but reduces the amount of Plutonium generated during the fission process. the Thorium absorbs neutrons and becomes U-232, which can absorb another neutron and become U-233, which is fissile and can be reused as even more fuel. Essentially, Thorium can be used in CURRENT nuclear power plants to extend the quantity of uranium fuel (by becoming U-232, and then U-233), or can be combined with Pu-239 to create a new fuel source out of our stockpiles of nuclear waste byproducts. This is where the misconception of Thorium plants burning Plutonium plants comes from. Plutonium can be used to make a new fuel source for CURRENT nuclear power plants, not as a fuel source for FUTURE Thorium-based fuel power plants. This still accomplishes the desired goal of burning plutonium from our piles of nuclear waste, resulting in less nuclear material proliferation, and thus less potential nuclear weapons. This idea is already used in some places, and can be used in almost every single current nuclear power plant. Now, Thorium-based fuel in FUTURE Thorium power plants (they're still being designed and tested, they're not fully viable yet) would use a different method to generate power. Instead of creating powdered Oxides, turning them into fuel rods, and using those to generate power, Thorium *breeds* Uranium-233. Thorium itself CANNOT generate sufficient heat to run a power plant. But remember, just like in fuel rods, Thorium can be bombarded with neutrons, and it becomes U-233 (that's why it's called fertile, or a breeder; it is used to create a fissile material that can be used as fuel, but thorium cannot be used as a fuel by itself). If we wanted to be technical, Thorium plants are *actually* U-233 plants, since it can only generate enough heat to run a power plant once the thorium has been bred into U-233. I know this is a massive amount of information, but hopefully it will help anyone who is curious about Thorium and its *multiple* potential uses a as a fuel source through breeding, extending Uranium stockpiles, or being used with old nuclear waste (plutonium) to create a new fuel source for old nuclear power plants. Also, sorry for any typos. I had to type this up in a hurry and didn't have time to spell check.
Actually, that's not exactly true. The "magic" isn't the Thorium part, it's the Molten Salt Reactor, w/ fuel kept in a liquid state. You can basically just throw any nuclear waste into the salt _along with _ thorium. As the thorium fissions (technically Uranium as the Thorium is converted to U232) it bombards the waste with neutrons and either activates it or transmutes it into a more stable or unstable form. This unstable form makes it WILDLY radioactive short term, where it breaks down and releases decay heat. And then eventually ends up as waste that can be stored for a few months before becoming inert as opposed to current waste which is low radiation but stays that way for relatively long periods. I'm glossing over *a lot* but its sort of like a catalytic side process that uses the extra neutrons to boost the heat generated from the reactor by irradiating other elements (or waste). I believe you can technically do this to anything heavier than Iron and some things lighter. Plutonium specifically is probably worth more as weapons grade material or for solid core reactors. The "dirty little secret" of LNRs is that you inherently add a reprocessing stage to make your primary fuel, U232 from Thorium but you can also reprocesses whatever you want, as long as it's chemically separable, as opposed to isotopically separable. If it's not what you want, you can put in back for another pass of neutron bombardment. Obviously it's WAY more efficient & safe to use specifically calculated and measured percentages of certain "waste" to get a more favorable yield but, in theory you can just chuck crap in and let it stay there until it transmutes, becomes unstable and isn't radioactive anymore - or long term radioactive. It's really not hard to guard waste for a few months up to 20-30 years, the problem is current "waste" (which is actually often barely used up fuel that no longer can work in a solid reactor) that lasts or longer than humans have been a species and trying to keep that contained on geological time scales.
@@bryanl1984 Being an absolute novice as far as nuclear power goes, there's a lot I really haven't grasped BUT I did read both the original post and your reply and I thank you both for taking the time to post.....
The British company: Moltex is ALREADY building a 300MW "waste burner" reactor in New Brunswick, for the Canadian grid. The reactor is powered by stockpiles of Plutonium, which some countries have accumulated during the "cold war". Britain has about 100 tons - enough to last quite a while. MSRs are powered by a liquid fuel - the uranium/thorium is dissolved in the coolant. This gives excellent controlability. The reactors are even throttleable.
@@bryanl1984, to burn the really nasty actinides, you need a fast spectrum and Th MSRs are not well suited to that cycle. To really clean up you need to do something like the MCFR or Moltex fast spectrum molten chloride salt reactors or SFR + Pyroprocessing.
@@thrunsguinneabottle3066, As you may know, the Moltex design is quite different than the other MSRs as the fuel is NOT dissolved in the coolant. Rather the fuel salt is loaded into fuel pins very similar to a Metal Fueled SFR like PRISM and a completely separate non-fuel coolant salt is circulated to remove the heat. Another HUGE difference is it runs a fast spectrum (unlike most MSRs) which allows it to burn the higher actinides. NB Power/Moltex are still in the design stage...hopefully they can make it work and between them and Ontario's OPG recycle all the spent CANDU fuel to significantly reduce the radioactive lifetime of the waste down to several hundreds years.
I think the omission here is the small modular reactor development which applies modern mass production technology to the construction of nuclear power stations and decimates both the cost and construction time. There is no reason why Thorium MSR cannot be supplied modular.
Thorium MSR concept was mentioned in some of the information I came across on Thorium Molten Salt Reactor over a decade ago, back then mainstream nuclear industry was not talking much about this SMR, it’s like a failed actor that’s keep trying to reinvent themselves by what others are doing.
There is no commercially viable MSR technology, so there is no point in making the production of the reactors more modular. This is putting the cart a decade or two before the horse...
since the last nuclear incedent in fukusima, some people are pushing to smaller reactors. In case of a meltdown, can easily be repaired and etc. the msr didn't make his debut as de facto energy producer is bc of the lobby from ppl who produce uranium PWRs and BWRs since MSRs are safer and the govs who need in a pinch produce nuclear weapons using plutonium.
@@MrKamikaze1337 You don't need to resort to conspiracy theories. The reality is that all forms of nuclear energy requires very high upfront costs in development and infrastructure, and the financial and temporal risk involved in developing and then deploying MSR technology is just too high to take on. Ever seen a reactor that was built on schedule and under budget? Now do the same with a technology that hasn't been proven yet. Much simpler explanation.
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors "LFTRs" are seriously the future. I love their design, their safety nets, the commonalities of the resources, the beta decay map. It would greatly improve the future power grid and we can finally move past our painful learning growing pain days of nuclear power that sadly timed up with a war and when we didn't respect the safety nets that were necessary while learning about this science and power source. There is so much untapped potential to create stability to our power grid with no emissions so our atmosphere improves, the climate stops heating up, there is so much positive to gain from safe and smart nuclear power.
Yea. I’ve become convinced late that I may have written nuclear off too early and need to pay more attention to the actual results being realized. Seems like it definitely has a place in our energy future.
I agree. Wind farm are hideous and solar just isn't an option everywhere. That said, it will take some doing to educate people how safe these new reactors are. For the uneducated nuclear=bad. Look at Germany, they're shutting down their nuclear reactors just so they can be dependent on Russian natural gas...(facepalm)
@@rodger3641 From what I have learned, the old ways is about 15% efficient thus a lot of waste. While Thorium is about 90% efficient and thus a lot less waste. the half-life is around 300 to 500 years.
Pretty good breakdown of this technology. As far as comparing msr reactors to renewables, there are some unfair/inaccurate biases that always raise their ugly heads. If the promise of msr technology is realized, their construction, regulatory and operating costs will be a small fraction of light water reactors. Solar and wind costs are always presented with a 4 hr battery backup. This is fine with a renewable contribution of 20 - 40%. The costs rise exponentially once they are relied on for 80%, and another exponential rise for 100% reliance. A likely candidate for the best "battery" is molten salt or other thermal storage. This would work well with nuclear as well, making a mixed system of renewables and nuclear an easy visual. Of course if we pursued nuclear more aggressively, there wouldn't be an intermittency issue. Nuclear equals constant, reliable energy, with boatloads of heat. Heat for not only desalination, but hydrogen production, heavy industrial processes, heating the local community and more. The waste can be used for things like medical isotopes. MSRs are not just of the lftr design. Fast neutron designs can be employed to use much of the nuclear waste already in storage. Well worth pursuing. 👍
Your exponential cost growth assumes renewables produce just enough energy. It'll be cheaper to over-produce to displace some batteries. The side effect will of course be free power at times of high production.
@@mrleenudler, an electrical grid works by matching demand with production on the fly. Over producing is not possible. The can only be over capacity some of which is shut down to not overwhelm the system. What is produced must be consumed.
Not true. Denmark already produces 50+ % of electrical energy with wind, and we have 0 battery storrage. Intelligent energy pricing will allow us to move demand off peak hours like car charging and other high demand loads. PtX will also make it possible to get even higher wind production.
@@gandalf1124 Denmark is also a net importer of electricity, generating only 83% of net energy. It imports / exports a lot of energy when production is low / high which wouldn't work if everybody was doing it. Denmark exports 45% of generation and imports around 30% of usage
I work with Uranium fueled pressurized water reactors, and I've been super fascinated with the differences between Thorium MSR's and what I work with. This video was extremely concise and well explained. Thanks, Matt!
No investor owned utility in the U.S. is even considering Thorium. Isn't it strange that when people have to invest their own money, they don't fall for the social media, YT, or power point chatter ???
@@TheLegitSounds Really? Name one project that is doing anything more that asking for taxpayer welfare. Kirk Sorenson has been pushing Thorium for more than a decade and his company has done nothing but ask for hand outs. Bill Gated and his Terrapower MSR reviewed Thorium and rejected it as too costly
(11:05) Terrapower isn't building a molten chloride fast reactor in Wyoming. It's building its liquid sodium metal fast reactor (Natrium) in Wyoming. Using molten salt for thermal energy storage DOES NOT make Natrium an MSR.
@@gordonmcdowell Anyone who wants to learn about advanced reactors, nuances, the advantages and disadvantages of different types of reactors, should check out Gordon's channel. It's got TONS of content and is a great place to start learning.
Matt, could you say more about MSRs "burning up" radioactive waste from pressurized water reactors? I understand this is possible, and if so, that may, in the near term, be as important a use as producing energy.
Molten chloride salt reactors like the one from Terra power are fast-spectrum. Fast reactors burn actinides, while thermal spectrum reactors tend to accumulate more actinides than they burn, that's why fast reactors are called waste-burners (they don't burn all the waste, just the actinides which are the ones that make spent fuel radioactive for tens of thousands of years instead of hundreds). LFTRs, despite being thermal spectrum, burn from U233, so they accumulate less actinides than traditional thermal spectrum, but any reactor using u233 would do the same, molten salt or not. Similarly, you do not need MSRs to burn waste, just a hard-spectrum reactor like a liquid metal cooled reactor (they have it in Russia and they have had them since the 1960s)
Elysium energy were designing a fast spectrum molten NaCl reactor which could burn waste, Plutonium, U238 and Thorium. The waste would have to be processed into chloride salts but the Japanese developed a process to do just that some time ago - dissolve fuel rods, capture the volatiles and sequester them until decay to solid and filter the insolubles out for geologic disposal. Elysium estimated they could run their reactor for 40 years continuously only stopping for checks on the erosion of the reactor pot. I believe Terrapower is looking at a similar project.
@@vipondiu Th reactors are pretty interesting but the push for them is strongly reminiscent of the push for FBRs in the past. I just hope we finally get something that is functional, safe and addresses the waste issue, and soon. It's the cleanest energy out there and we could use that in a big way.
Hi Jim, I'm no scientist but let me break down the thing that rocks me to the core about these 'waste-eating' breeder reactors. This from a guy who was anti-nuclear for the first 40 years of my life! It's simply an unscientific myth that nuclear waste is a problem for 100,000 years. Put it in a breeder reactor, get 90 times the energy out of it, and the final waste only stays hot for about 300 years. This real waste (called fission products) should be vitrified. This means melting it down into strong ceramic bricks that chemically bond the waste in the brick. If an accident drops the bricks or a truck smashes into the bricks, there is no radioactive dust to spread about. Then just bury the bricks under the reactor park for 300 years, and it's safe. America has enough nuclear 'waste' to run her for 1000 years without mining any more uranium, and the UK has enough for 500 years. Today's nuclear 'waste' is not a problem - but the SOLUTION to climate change! This 4 minute Argonne Labs video explains. th-cam.com/video/MlMDDhQ9-pE/w-d-xo.html The world's most famous climatologist Dr James Hansen recommends Breeder Reactors as the solution to climate change. th-cam.com/video/CZExWtXAZ7M/w-d-xo.html His colleague Tom Blees wrote a free book summarising their work. www.thesciencecouncil.com/pdfs/P4TP4U.pdf IF you're REALLY paranoid about nuclear waste - there's another place to store it. The ocean. This is not dumping uranium dust into steel barrels at the bottom of the English channel where the barrels could rust and nuclear dust spread everywhere. Instead, we'd vitrify the waste into ceramic bricks as the video above explains. If the whole world used used breeder reactors it would only generate 1 barge worth of waste every 2 years. Pilot the barge out to your deepest ocean trench, and sink it. Water halves radiation every 15 cm. If you trap the bricks in cages mounted a few meters in from the ship's walls, that space filled with water would protect anything outside the barge. Drop the entire world's nuclear waste in 6km deep trenches every 2 years, and you're done with it FOREVER!
Two questions: - I seem to recall hearing somewhere that thorium reactors could actually be used to consume nuclear waste from traditional nuclear power. Is this true? If so, that alone would seem to be a huge advantage. - How adjustable is the output of a thorium plant? Is it only suitable for base load or could it replace the highly reactive gas power plants without resorting to batteries?
I responded to your question but realized there was a misunderstanding that many people have about the way thorium is used in power generation, and what it can do with plutonium as a fuel source. I posted a general comment about it if you'd like to read it and understand the process better.
Yes Th MSRs can burn nuclear waste from traditional U reactors. If I remember, Kirk Sorensen estimated up to 5% of the fuel could be old waste. Q2: power (heat) output can regulated by adjusting graphite rods in the MSR, increasing or decreasing the amount of fission reactions. Also, most MSR designs are small, some are small enough to fit on a flatbed trailer, making mass production in a factory viable, thus greatly reducing cost. The thinking is if we make them small then each town could have their own MSR. Bigger cities would just need more small MSRs. Thus power output is scalable in this way too. It would also eliminate the need for high power lines (where power loss can be significant) and an interdependent grid, making us much less susceptible to grid attacks or EMPs. The video didn't mention these other benefits of MSRs. It's the smartest way forward bc wind & solar can't even keep up with increasing demand, let alone supply current needs.
Most MSR designs are load adaptive and can generate more power as demand increases, thus as long as the infrastructure can handle the level of power and peak demand doesn't exceed the generation capacity its not an issue. Also it would eliminate the need for storage.
*It's about time. The USA was the leaders in Thorium reactors in the 1950's. We should never have given up on the Thorium reactor but then we needed THE BOMB and Uranium plants make enough D3 to turn A-bombs into H-bombs so we needed to run "DIRTY" reactors, for the weapons!*
I am certain that the planet needs some form of consistent energy to work alongside the renewables. Thorium appears to be the most acceptable (politically) before fusion can be relied upon.
Absolutely agree with the first point. Without an consistent energy source, we won't be able to provide enough energy to anybody at any time. No matter how good energy storage systems might get - the potential energy that we get out of nuclear fission and especially Fusion reactors is just too immense to ignore. But I actually doubt, that Thorium reactors will be available much earlier than nuclear Fusion reactors.
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Thorium nuclear power plant can also be considered recycling too, because it uses Thorium that is otherwise useless and thrown away. Thorium is a common waste product of rare earth mining, especially for Monazite and Bastnasite.
Solar and wind are wastes of time so long as there are no means to store energy. They are primarily made by communist china which uses coal energy to make them. Meaning the carbon sagings are small. Lithium is just too dirty to produce and not an efficient storage medium for large scale use. Nuclear is the only answer.
I know it's part of the funding cycle, but if the mainstream fusion keep claiming fusion when there's no sustainable fusion, then people will replace the saying "the boy who cried wolf" will be replaced with the "the scientists that claimed fusion".
I've explored much "fringe" science over the years, & your channel is pretty much a list of my favorites-the discoveries that I KNEW would soon advance tech exponentially. Thanks for keeping me informed of how my imagined future is finally arriving!
Greetings: Although you mentioned briefly that thorium reactors have spent fuel waste with a shorter half-life than conventional light water reactors (pressurized and boiling water reactors) you failed to mention that molten salt fueled and cooled reactors can use light water reactor spent fuel as its fuel, being a potential solution to existing stored spent fuel; we get energy while significantly reducing the volume of existing spent fuel and significantly reducing the lifetime of its radioactive spent fuel. Thorcon is presently working on a demo molten salt reactor for Indonesia that will operate on the least expensive fission fuel available at the time. The reactors will then be manufactured in Korean shipyards similar shipbuilding, towed to the shore closest to their need and settled on the seabed where they will be connected to the grid. Multiple units will work in parallel as power capacity is required. The reactors themselves will be delivered as sealed pots that will be swapped with second units that are available side-by side with collant/fuel pumped from the old pot to the new so refueling downtime is limited and providing radioactive decay time before the old pot is refurbished. Factory construction will enable reduced expense as improvements can be handled during manufacture.
The U.S. built a plant to reprocess spent reactor fuel but it was never used and abandonded in the 1970s. The U.S. spent billions building a MOX plant to recycle weapons grade Pu239 into reactor fuel but it was cancelled in 2018 because of massive cost over runs and schedule delays. ANYTHING dealing with nuclear is super expensive. You are not just burning waste paper in a boiler.
it's not that easy, this process needs massive, very complicated treatment of heterogenous fuel rods to be able to be used for the transmutation and even then, only very specific parts of the "waste" can be used. it's nowhere near economical
@@Markus-zb5zd We need an economical base load power source and that can be nuclear. But here in the U.S. every recient (last 25 years) nuclear project has been plagued by massive cost over runs and schedule delays to the point that most have simply been canceled and the ones that were not canceled are resulting in significant cost to ratepayers. Most of these private investor owned companies that are on the "we gotta fix climate change bandwagon" , were polluting the planet for decades. The only green they see is billions of taxpayer dollars up for the taking. They don't want to fix the construction issues because those billions of cost over runs flow into the pockets of these companies. I have not heard any suggestions on how that will be any different for any new nuclear project. The excuse used in the current builds (VC Summer and Vogtle) was pre-fab factory builds but that was used and turned out to be a complete failure. The failures in constructing nuclear is resulting in a new generation of anti-nuclear Americans as electrical generation from these sources results in significant rate increases. I am not a betting person but I am willing to wager my own money that the Natrium and NuScale will not meet schedule or cost targets and I am not the only one that believes this. The article below appeared 2 days ago. According to Ohio-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a new type of nuclear reactor that would provide carbon-free energy to at least four states in the Western U.S. poses financial risks for utilities and their ratepayers as being is "too expensive, too risky and too uncertain. “The report concluded that it's likely the NuScale reactor will take longer to build than estimated and that the final cost of power will be higher than anticipated and greater than the cost of power from renewable alternatives. The project's owner and the company developing the reactor, that stands to benefit from $4 billion in taxpayer funds used to help build the reactors. criticized the report, saying that the cost estimates should include taxpayer subsidizes when calculating the costs of the reactor.
@@Markus-zb5zd It doesn't use fuel rods at all, And the radioactive byproducts end up in the molten salt and are free to keep reacting to lighter and more stable byproducts. The molten nature of the reaction make it possible to separate and/or filter out desirable and undesirable byproducts.
The reason I keep focusing on a 100MW reactor is the engine needed for a ship. Ships are the worst polluters than cars and power plants except for coal plants.
another use besides desalination is hydrogen production like high temp electrolysis as well as distinct heating. its more efficient(esp if used from required cooling) to use some of this heat directly for heating then turning into electricity just to be turned back into heat for heating buildings, of course this requires another system. Also when comparing energy sources should see whole impact. glad you mentioned nuclear waste and batteries but there is also all the resources to build wind turbines, PVs, batteries and then also the life span of each component
Desalination would be a really bad idea, when it comes to MSRs at least. There's a reason China built their prototype in the desert and far from any body of water, and in an area where in practically never rains. Those salts used for cooling are massively corrosive and massively reactive with water (and oxygen). The reaction with oxygen is one problem, but it produces non-volatile solids. The reaction with water is a horrendous problem .. you get a massive explosion, then a hot and volatile mist of hydrogenfluoride which is so agressive that .. well, don't look it up if you have a weak stomach, let's just say: it can dissolve glass/quartz .. and there's beryllium which is massively biotoxic and cancerogenic. These all are really good reasons, to set up MSR as far away from water as possible.
@@augustaseptemberova5664 HF can pass through your skin and destroy your bones. If I remember right, there's a Refinery Unit called HF Alkylation and it is among most dangerous oil industry processes.
@@artsmith103 Exactly. That's what they taught us in chem at uni, too. But I couldn't find that info on the English wikipedia, so I didn't include that here in case someone thinks I made that up or smth
@@artsmith103 lol .. thanks for the probably nicely meant comment, but .. no thanks. There's an international collective of devoted chemists that work hard to keep chemistry-related wikipedia clean and factually correct, and backed up by primary sources. This is why wikipedia is actually quite good to look up elements, main chemicals etc. and their main properties and hazards, especially the English and German wiki. You shouldn't quote wikipedia in any scientific work, because it's not a primary source, but other than that when it comes to online referring someone to some basic knowledge, it's fair game.
I don't understand why LCOE is counted for 30 years of operation? Most of the nuclear reactors have lifespan of 60 years, new one are designed for 80 years of operation. On the other hand, wind and solar have lifespan up to 30 years batteries even shorter 15.... We can't logically compare something with lifetime measure if we don't assume in equation different lifespan. For 1 NPP we must rebuild 2x wind/solar plant and 4x its balancing storage...
Some people have been keeping an eye on Thorium since the 1968 when the first MSR was built. Hopefully big oil/tech won't get innovators killed/bribed to shut it down this time.
I did a paper about thorium reactors 17 years ago. I'm still waiting but I've matured enough to realize they wouldn't be making as much profit from such an efficient power source.
The problem is supply - both in terms of source and security. Thorium is not as widely distributed as uranium and is more difficult to extract from the few ores it has. High-grade uranium deposits are fairly common and can be very big, but high-grade thorium deposits are small. Thorium reactors would require countries to import thorium from a few countries that might not always be friendly!
Kirk Sorensen said in one of his LFTR videos that the antique (my term, not his) uranium based reactors work on the razor/razorblade business model. The profits aren't made from building the reactor, they're made from selling the highly specialized and very difficult to manufacture fuel elements. How much money can be made from BAGS of lithium fluoride salt? Thus, there's a disincentive for the legacy reactor industry to work toward LFTRs or lobby for government support to research them.
@@karhukivi the problem is REGULATION Nuclear has a high upfront cost, the industry is matured. And the big players have little reason to stretch their hands and disrupt it. End of Argument. Because like the other user said, solid fuel rod reactors are a razor 🪒 blade business model. ------ As for your points, even if supply was an issue, (which it's not), Thorium is already in surplus as a byproduct of our rare earth mining processes). It would make sense to massively adopt Thorium if only because of the giant Climate Crisis we are going through. The amount of power we can draw from it. And the better Fuel efficiency compared to solid candle light reactors.
@@karhukivi Thorium can be purchased as a bulk chemical from any reliable supplier. But, uranium reactors are built to only use patented machined uranium fuel rods. They can only be purchased from 1 supplier so they can keep prices sky high.
One minor confusion. The TerraPower (Bill Gates) design only uses Molten Salt to hold the energy (heat) from the reaction for later use. It uses liquid sodium for cooling, and is a fast neutron design.
With recent advances in mass produced thorium reactors in ship yards, a complete reactor can be built in months, and delivered anywhere in the world in weeks. This destroys the cost of long construction times, the primary expense of building reactors, and further reduces the cost per kw. Moreover, because the reactor is made of plug and play modules, replacing worn subsystems, is fast, inexpensive (relatively speaking), and increases service life. Finally variations in design make it possible to also build fast breeder reactors based on the thorium cycle, allowing us to use the existing solid nuclear waste as fuel, and eliminating the long term storage problem created by the prior technology. Until we improve our grid to better handle transient energy production, thorium reactors provide us a fantastic stop gap to ensure global energy sufficiency, while protecting the environment, and even providing the energy to help us begin removing excess carbon from the environment.
Very well said, I agree. This NEEDS to be brought in as a comprehensive solution to combine with monocrystalline solar panels on business warehouse & residential home roofs, as well as wind-power in areas with stable winds and hydro-electric where available. Lower energy costs and increased electrical production is sorely needed across the board, and with lower prices will positively impact things like electric vehicles, desalination, recycling, aluminum production, and many other industries. It can't just be one technology only, but on the large electric utility scale we're way past needing some new state-of-the-art nuclear reactors here in the USA. And frankly? It's a bit embarrassing that China is jumping past us on this... I guess we'll have to see what happens with China's facility first?
@@XSFx5 As long as our government is for sale to the highest bidder (i.e. the fossil fuel consortia), ours will remain a society antagonistic to environmentally friendly energy alternatives. We need to firewall government from corporate influence if we ever hope to have a government serve its most vital purpose. Namely the success and sufficiency of a thriving middle class.
Thorium for all!! My dad has worked in Nuclear for almost 40years including many of the new tech developed in the 90’s and said this is where the technology should be going for many reasons
It's going to be necessary for space colonization as thorium is plentiful on the Moon and Mars. And it could help solve a number of international crises like the dispute between Iran that wants to modernize its power grid with nuclear energy, and the United States forcing a ban on nuclear weapons development.
@@ernie4125 I agree, but don't count out solar too. United diversity, if you will. Solar panels are ideal for hot warehouse roofs, that seem to be everywhere these days. Currently they are just waste heat. So basically: solar for small-scale homes and businesses ; MSR nuclear, hydroelectric, wind farms for large-scale utility production & storage (pumped hydro, batteries, kinetic storage, etc).
@@XSFx5 -- It's funny how the empty, hollow cries for "diversity" from the left turn out to be Orwellian misuses of language when it comes to ideological and technical diversity. Control freaks want dominance in everything, but there are many reasons for decentralized approaches to our energy future and our economy.
9:01 - Thorium would only be expensive to mine if we were to explicitly mine just for that, but it happens to be a waste product of rare earth mining - at present, we apparently "throw away" (read: store in large piles) 30x more Thorium per year than needed to power the entire world. Add to that that Thorium needs very little processing to be fuel ready and it's pretty much the cheapest nuclear fuels in the world, and that's even before we consider that it's also far more efficiently used (99% vs 0.5%).
If you take a look at the Agorameter, which tracks Germany's electricity production in real times, and look at, say, the last month, you'll see that intermitency problems go far beyond a 4 hours lag of renewables production. it's more like several days in a row. So yeah, even on rather long lasting batteries, they'll still need to be backed up by gas or coal or nuke, that should obviously factor in the mwh price.
Plus his numbers make the meme of 30 year lifespan for nuclear when it's closer to twice that. How many times would solar panels and battery banks have to be replaced completely in 60 years?
Great video, as always. I have been asking and wondering for years, why are we so against Thorium. Yeah, we will get there with solar and wind someday but we can't just stop and just hope the newer items will be enough. Let's get on board with Thorium.
Thorium electricity generation will be mega plants that require complex engineering and high cost. Solar and wind are not realistic because we do not have the engineering vision to even come up with a solution for their shortcomings. Renewable along side SMR, Thorium, natural gas and coal plants (recycling) can massively reduce carbon outputs. Even if we still had the combustion engine as the main means of transport and the nuclear low carbon approach we would be able to reduce carbon levels. This approach can also be used in the developing world to lower their carbon and also allow them to modernise and grow their economies at the same time. We all know that fusion and renewables are where we want to get to but we have a 50 year gap in between that to fill.
Solar & wind are really only good for small applications. If we include all the energy a state uses, for example, Colorado, we would have to cover the whole state with solar panels, plus all of WY & KS, & most of NE, just for one state. This is bc our REAL energy use is not just lights and toasters, it's cleaning city water, building infrastructure, repairing roads, launching satellites, etc. 100% renewable is a utopian myth. We need something like Thorium MSRs with a high energy density at a cost cheaper than coal to make a real difference in the world, the WHOLE world, not just rich western countries.
@@bighands69 Would it be 50 years if we spent a fraction on nuclear energy that we have on wars and covid relief funds? Probably not. Moreover if government allows innovators to do their thing, costs can come way down. For example Thorcon believes they can build 500MW plants for less than $500 million. How many billions were thrown around during covid relief and with $10 billion that could be 20 of these modular plants built.
@@destroya3303 Yes it would be 50 years. It takes a long time to building out a whole energy generation system. Even if they somehow tomorrow come forward with a design that would satisfy a working system it would then take several decades to build the thousands of plants needed in the west. It is not just an issue of money being spent.
Politics and uranium cartel. As of 2023 thorium is going to be tested by official u.s nuclear authorities. If thorium MSR's are viable.But its pretty much a done deal and commercial ones are coming before 2030. With prototypes already in production and running in china and russia. Greed and bribes can only hold for so long when theres such an abundant energy source to solve the impending energy crisis.
*The USA even had a Thorium powered airplane in the early1960's plus many working reactors BUT since the DOD was more interested in bomb making materials they ditched Thorium as being 'TO CLEAN'. An alloy called MONEL was even developed to safely carry the Molten salts.*
If I remember correctly, a molten salt reactor first achieved criticality in the mid sixties. Due to the large amount of investment in what is our current form of nuclear energy technology, such competition could not be allowed. This was the explanation I heard in an interview by one of the developers of the reactor. We are not unfamiliar with many examples of valuable technology and products being suppressed by powerful special interest. Hopefully the Chinese showing interest in this technology will make this less likely to happen.
The actual reason from what I understood was the MSR wasn't as suitable for producing weapons grade plutonium which was a major reason for the preference for traditional PWR/BWR reactors and thus they pushed for cutting the funding to MSR research. The military saw it as a potential threat to its supply for making warheads.
California… we have plenty of thorium. Every military base should have a reactor. Even if they produce less power, it will make stabilizing the grid far easier.
This. He reminds me of the Eureka video's we used to watch at the start of each new module in science class. Come to that, he reminds me of my science teacher back then. Mr. Stewart. Hilarious sense of humour, with module titles like "Light: A Heavy Subject" and such.
*It's about time. The USA was the leaders in Thorium reactors in the 1950's. We should never have given up on the Thorium reactor but then we needed THE BOMB and Uranium plants make enough D3 to turn A-bombs into H-bombs so we needed to run "DIRTY" reactors, for the weapons!*
Thanks for the balanced video on nuclear. First, I'd like to express strong support for more -- _much_ more -- nuclear energy. It is shocking that nuclear power has been campaigned _against_ by the same people who claim to worry about the climate. Being anti-nuclear is the climate equivalent of being an anti-vaxxer: Both attitudes stem from not having a rational understanding of risk, both attitudes are expressions of distrust in science and engineering _per se_ and both rely on a hand-wavy "naturalism" or appeal to what seems "organic". In other words, they're both forms of magical thinking. With that out of the way, I'd like to clarify a few things that the video skirted around: * Using Thorium as fuel and molten-salt reactors are two completely separate things. People often talk about them as if they are synonyms. But in reality, you can have all four combinations: Solid Uranium, molten-salt Uranium, solid Thorium and molten-salt Thorium. (You touch on this around 6:00, and that is good.) Three of these four combos have actually already been created and operated: The MSRE (Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment, in Oak-Ridge in the late 1960's) was a genuine molten-salt reactor, but only powered by Uranium (though the intention of the research was eventually to make a Thorium reactor). While reactors in both Pennsylvania and Germany have in the past used solid Thorium in combination with solid Uranium. So some lucky people in Europe and the US have already received electrical energy derived from Thorium. * 4:18 "Thorium-fueled reactors offer a potentially safer, cleaner and more abundant alternative to traditional reactors fueled with highly radioactive elements." Sorry, Matt, but this is not a true statement. Uranium is the traditional fuel, and it is not highly radioactive. The two isotopes of Uranium that you can find on Earth have half-lives of 700 million and 4 billion years, meaning they have very low levels of radioactivity. Thorium-232's half-life is 14 billion years, so granted, it is even lower. But all three substances have very low levels of radioactivity. (Remember, the longer the half-life the more it approaches being a stable substance.) Maybe you had in mind the fission products inside the fuel once it has been used for a while -- these short-lived isotopes (whose half-lives range from less than a second to around 30 years) are intensely radioactive but are created with both fuel types (although with MSR's they would often be extracted from the fuel loop continuously). Or maybe you had in mind Plutonium-239 which, with a half-life of around 24,500 years, falls somewhere between the mild long-lived isotopes and the hot short-lived isotopes. People often highlight that Thorium reactors don't create any significant amounts of Plutonium-239, while Uranium reactors do. However, Plutonium is _not_ highly radioactive, you can handle it with no shielding and no gloves. * 5:27 "One big benefit of Thorium reactors is the much smaller half-life of the nuclear waste." This sounds like a reference to the same topic as I described in the previous point, the creation of Plutonium-239. It is really only that substance which lies behind the scary soundbite-friendly statements that nuclear waste is dangerous for a hundred thousand years. The thinking behind those who hold this view is that any elevation in background radioactivity, beyond what exists in the original Uranium mine whence the fuel once came, is unacceptable. However, there is a large step from normal background radiation levels up to what is actually dangerous. The presence of Plutonium can indeed elevate background levels in the area where it is stored (in the hypothetical case that it were to escape the dry casks in which it would be stored), but even so it would not be to a level that is manifestly dangerous. In the opposing view where we accept that Plutonium-239 is not a significant danger, we must look for the radioactive substances that create more intense radiation, with the shorter half-lives that go along with that. This is in fact Strontium-90 and Caesium-137, both with half-lives of around 30 years. These are legitimately dangerous, but will have decayed to one thousandth the amount after 300 years, and one millionth the amount after 600 years -- pick your threshold. These two isotopes are also present in the fission products in Thorium, and are probably what lie behind the video's statement at 5:52 that Thorium waste is dangerous for 500 years. My contention is that the same is true for Uranium -- but that playing politics and a mis-applied "precautionary principle" has meant that Plutonium's decay is used as the benchmark for when the spent fuel is safe, rather than the Strontium and Caesium mentioned above. This has caused costs for traditional Uranium-based nuclear to balloon, and is one of the ways the technology has been thwarted in its efforts to decarbonize the world. * 5:31 "Uranium-233 can be separated from the Thorium, which sets it apart from the Uranium-235 and 238. And it's Uranium-235 that contains very radioactive isotopes with half-lives of _thousands_ of years." (Emphasis is in the original audio.) Beyond being merely untrue, this statement is actually difficult to make sense of. If something is "very radioactive", it cannot have half-lives in "thousands of years". Those are mutually exclusive. The shorter the half-life, the more intense the radioactivity. The substance you're almost certainly referring to here, again, is Plutonium, which is weakly radioactive (though Uranium and Thorium are far weaker still). The way you use emphasis in this sentence makes it seem like long half-lives are scary and dangerous and somehow have a positive correlation with degree of radioactivity -- the truth is that long half-lives have a negative correlation with degree of radioactivity.
Follow-up because my original comment was too long so I had to split it in two: * 8:46 Talking about the proliferation risk, I commend you for bringing this to the fore. Many people talk about Thorium being without proliferation risks. But as you point out, the Protactinium can be extracted (chemically), before undergoing the second beta-decay, leaving pure U-233, which can be used in bombs. You don't quite explain why the gamma rays from U-232 are important -- the idea often promoted by Thorium fans is that the large amounts of U-233 are naturally contaminated by trace amounts of U-232, which emits a hard gamma ray that is difficult to shield, making any U-233 both hard to work with (without killing your workers) and easy to detect from a distance. But as you indicate, this is not really true. * 12:52 Comparing LCOE of nuclear (any type) with intermittent renewables like wind and solar is difficult. Nuclear can provide always-on power, while wind and solar are intermittent, and difficult to predict -- especially wind, but also solar in case of cloudy days. You wisely include a separate LCOE figure for solar _with_ storage. But storage needs to last much, much longer than four hours for it to create dependable power. A lull in the wind can last weeks in the dead of winter at high latitudes. At the same time, bear in mind that the cost of storage -- which typically means Lithium-based batteries even as new techniques are being researched -- is calculated in the context of the current Lithium and Cobalt markets. The current costs have achieved a balance based on the current demand, the rate of increase in that demand, the current supply and the current rate increase in that supply (i.e. new mining operations being brought online). However, with Lithium and Cobalt you also have to take into consideration the total amounts of these materials thought to exist in the Earth's crust, which would give an indication of a kind of _upper bound_ for how much energy we are able to store from intermittent renewable energy sources. I don't have any hard numbers for that, but I did hear one estimate that if all the Lithium thought to exist on Earth were turned into batteries, it would still only be able to store a few hours' worth of the global electricity consumption. So in short, don't look too much at LCOE for renewables vs nuclear -- either LCOE numbers for renewables omit storage, or they include storage but using numbers established in very different market conditions than those that would apply in a world where most energy is derived from renewables + storage. Lastly, my general observations on nuclear: Comparing nuclear with hydropower is relevant and on-point, because they both provide dependable power. But comparing either of these with wind and solar is very difficult. The non-intermittency has a value in itself. A value that you can think of in terms of money. Imagine if you didn't have your city's water supply brought to your home through water pipes that you can control by opening a tap. Imagine there is no possibility to dig a well. Imagine instead that you had to accept water delivered by a truck, which would drop by your home sporadically, with no schedule. Imagine that you didn't have a large water tank in your home that you could fill up from the water truck. This would mean you had to shower yourself and your family, do laundry, do the dishes, wash your home -- all in a mad dash during the water truck's brief visit to your home. To be sure, many people in poor countries live in something approaching this kind of "water poverty". Now imagine that in a society like this, what would you be willing to pay if you could buy a _premium_ water supply service in which another water truck came to your home exactly when you asked it to? Or what would you be willing to pay for plumbing so you could have plentiful water at any time you wanted? This premium is effectively the monetary value of _dependability_ itself. In electricity, it's much the same -- when push comes to shove, when rolling blackouts or loadshedding starts being commonplace, many people will come to the realization that they are willing to pay extra for dependable energy. A life in "energy poverty" is just too cumbersome. This is why, in places like Nigeria, everyone who can afford to will have diesel generators at home. For the Nigerian economy as a whole, it's remarkable that the total possible power output of all the diesel generators in the country is several multiples of the country's total electricity consumption. The alternative, which creates wealth and wellbeing for everyone -- not just those who can afford to shield themselves from intermittency by buying generators or large home batteries -- is of course to make the public electricity supply not intermittent in the first place. Therefore, I think using LCOE to compare intermittent sources against dependable sources is always misleading. Access to dependable energy is such an important tool in lifting societies out of poverty, it seems unconscionable to advocate for a switch to intermittent sources.
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when smth has half life of few days it will decay to safe levels pretty quickly. Either very quickly or in millions & billions of years, few thousand years is "no mans land"
@ True. The awkward thing for regulators is that Plutonium inhabits that "no man's land". They have erred on the side of caution, but there is really no scientific evidence that they need to do that. You can also apply "the precautionary principle" the other way, and say that massive climate change is such a huge risk that any proven technology should be employed to avoid the danger it poses. That is my view.
You mention solid fuel rod thorium as if that’s a good thing when most of the benefits come from having a liquid fuel that breeds more fuel instead of solid rods that are never used completely. Good comment but I think the points aren’t concise enough, or your prose not super structured. Which discourages people from reading and obscures what you are indeed saying.
@@fdc184 Seemed like a very high quality comment to me, and the prose was structured better than a majority of the stuff people usually regurgitate on the internet. If people don't have the attention span to deal with a scant page of good content it is ultimately their loss.
I recall several countries building Thorium reactors several decades ago but not much since -so presumably they weren't very good so hopefully problems have been solved. I wouldn't go holding my breath waiting for this.
Um, that is untrue to the core. Traditional uranium nuclear reactors can have the fuel reprocessed into weapons grade plutonium. Thorium burns up very cleanly and leaves very little waste to build weapons. If you are a country that wants to increase your nuclear arsonal do you champion the awful power plant that creates lots of fuel for your bombs or do you want the one that doesn't help you at all? Do you fund the one making you weapons and abandon the Thorium reactor?
Japan’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant Unit 6 took only 39 months for completion. Nuclear power brings down electricity prices by 75% in Finland. We need nuclear power.
First thorium reactor is actually almost under construction now. Indonesia has signed an agreement to build first TMSR-500 reactor that will be constructed by ThorCon. It will be constructed in shipyard in form of a ship, then moved to desired place, placed in one of the bays next to one of the islands. Work is progress is fast and we may see this plant operational within 2023-2024.
There have been plenty of Thorium reactors across the globe, but they failed for one reason or the other. Typically, Thorium reactors have too large positive or negative void coefficients, which makes them either a massive safety risk, or makes them unprofiatble if they are moderated within safe limits. (This was ofc a very simplified explanation, but in essence that's what it boils down to.)
You mentioned desalinization as a nice "bonus" side effect of LFTRs. You did not mention that the excess heat can also be used, as a byproduct, in the production of important medical isotopes also.
@MattFerrell You left out the most important downside of using Thorium in a reactor.... It produces GAMMA RADIATION..!! You know, the stuff that will kill you if any of the random gamma beams hits you and we can't block them without a literal ton of materials...
Matt, excellent job in explaining the thorium processes. As a minimum we should build some prototype reactors and learn. These reactors could be the "flywheel" when solar and wind are intermittent.
I agree we could have had a 50year head start if we hadn't been influenced by the green lobby and would almost certainly not have been talking about climate change today, and our reliance on fossil fuels would be significantly reduced. Electric cars would probably be the norm with cheap energy. Now we have missed the boat, and the cost of electricity is also hampering the uptake of EVs as it is as expensive with no infrastructure and larger capital outlay that only the wealthy can afford. I have a hybrid and can charge at home a luxury most don't have.
I remember hearing about Thorium reactors like 12 years ago and I've been a strong supporter of them. It's unfortunate that profit is normally 1st 2nd and 3rd concern for what guides and advances technology, because if that weren't the truth we would of had eleltric vehicles for the past 100 years. I feel Thorium is a victim of the same trend. If we had been investing into over coming the problems of Thorium when it was first brought to the table as an option instead of almost completely dismissing it for so long, we'd probably be using them now. Just happy there's finally a push for it now
"we would of had eleltric vehicles for the past 100 years" Though that would've made city air much cleaner, it wouldn't have made much difference to global CO2 levels. The electricity for the batteries would still have had to be generated and that electricity would've come mostly from fossil fuels. For electric vehicles to really save us from climate change, the electricity must come from source that doesn't produce CO2.
Matt Ferrell. I hope you don't mind if I give a lengthy rebuttal or commentary: 4:15 is Canada's Terrestrial Energies IMSR, also at 12:35. The slanted roof is part of the "always on" emergency cooling system. Pipes filled with a gas remove 1% of the heat from the reactor and the roof is used to dissipate the heat. 8:30. Are you referring to "plate out" where nuclear fission products collect in unwanted and unknown areas of the liquid reactor? This is a huge problem that nuclear regulators will demand be solved. More R&D and material development is required. Terrestrial Energy decided to not even try to solve this and have been given approval to just replace their IMSR reactor every seven years. This is a work around to the plate-out and corrosion issues in liquid fueled reactors. They don't discuss what happens to the used up reactors though. LFTR will never happen due to these issues, also the the conversion of Thorium 232 to Uranium 233 in a LFTR results in High Enriched Uranium. Even though the fuel stays in the reactor vessel this is a big no no! I heard a leader of the LFTR team say "to collect the highly radio active off gas, one only needs to bend a pipe, like seen in a kitchen sink pipe". I knew then that LFTR was a R&D sinkhole. Make money on R&D contracts and probably never produce a working reactor. 11:00 Molten Chloride (fast reactor). Another R&D sinkhole. Obtaining unspent fuel and or weapons grade Uranium/Plutonium, which is required, is a regulatory and political nightmare. No politician will allow this. They will say they support it but they are lying. Even if approved the permits for the facilities, safe operation (most nuclear accidents and injuries happen in processing facilities) will take years/decades. I don't see a government entity doing this properly. I also don't trust Bill Gates-had to fit that in. 10:24. Kairos Power's pebble bed, salt cooled reactors (Uranium only) is the best option to get Gen4 reactors built and once the public, business, government see Gen4 is so much safer than Gen1,2 reactors then hopefully MSR and Thorium will be seriously developed. I have a feeling Kairos reactors will be expensive and the TRISO fuel, while much safer than existing solid fuel, is not recycleable due to its complexity. But TRISO fuel is already licensed and the reactor is well on its way in the NRC regulatory system (the regulatory system is just as important as reactor development and not to be under estimated). Matt. Will you make a video on Kairos's design, as well as the X-Energy pebble bed reactor, X-100.
One thing that I don't think that you mentioned (correct me if I just missed it) but Thorium based reactors have far less radioactive waste that builds up over time, making them much, much cleaner in terms of waste compared to Uranium based reactors. Also, you can get far, far more energy out of Thorium than you can for the same amount of Uranium. 2 very important things to remember and mention when discussing it.
This is only true when comparing thorium reactors to classical uranium reactors. When compared to a uranium fast breeder reactor thorium is about the same with only 1 big advantage left. Thorium breeders are thermal reactors instead of fast reactors.
The amount in raw volume may not necessarily be "less". It's just that some of what comes off it is medically or scientifically useful. And most of the "waste" is actually far "hotter" than the stuff you get out of a traditional reactor. However, the way it usually works is the hotter the stuff, the faster it breaks down. So much of what's coming out of a reactor will break down in seconds, minutes, and hours. Less of it will break down in days/weeks/months. And even less of it will break down in years/decades. With only a fraction being the stuff that'll take the full 500 years to cook off.
@@PhotonHerald thats not correct. Radioactive waste has a half-life that is indipedent of temperature. The specific radioactive bi-product entirely determines the half-life and thus directly determines how dangerous or problematic the waste is. In turn the type of bi-product is determined by what fission cycle you use to generate the power and if you are using a breeder reactor or not. Breeder reactors can cosume a portion of the neutron and this power output to convert problem.atic waste products to less problematic ones. They also tend to have a larger percentage of fuel being converted to power resulting in less waste.
@@nocare I'm not using "hot" in terms of temperature. Nor, when I'm talking about nuclear fuel, am I talking about conflagration when I use the term "burn" or "cook". I'm using "hot" in the sense of overall energetic radioactivity output. Things with a shorter half-life tend to be MORE energetically radioactive than things (of equivalent mass) with a longer half-life. The reason current nuclear waste takes so long to break down is that it isn't that energetically radioactive.
The cost of solar needs to be increased to include enough battery storage to allow for a constant output on a 24/7 basis. So if you want a 100 megawatt solar plant you need enough batteries and solar panels to provide 100 megawatts 24/7.
I really don't get the cost for renewables stated, if you leave out storage, its a useless comparison. 4 hours is arbitrary, to me it should be at least a month. Cost of storage is obviously not nearly to where we need it to be to make renewables useful. This energy storage issue is at the heart of the debate but its treated like its a small hurdle, its not, its a far greater issue than getting thorium to work.
Thorium has been the answer since the 50s when the guy who designed nuclear reactors like Hanford told the committee that thorium was the long term solution. For those interested in a more in depth overview of what a thorium reactor is I highly recommend you look for Gordon Cromwell here on TH-cam.
(8:46) The production of U-232 isn't a proliferation risk, it's a proliferation barrier. Pure U-233 is a "potential" proliferation risk, but it's much less so if you have U-232 contamination, which makes the contaminated U-233 VERY unworkable in either a gun-type or implosion-type nuclear bomb. That said, the real proliferation barrier for thermal spectrum MSR thorium breeders is the anemic U-233 breeding ratios in the thermal spectrum, which are only 1.05 to 1.07 (depending on whether you separate out protactinium). This means that thermal spectrum MSR thorium breeders use almost all of the fuel they produce, on an almost 1 to 1 ratio, leaving VERY little excess, such that it would take between 17 to 25 years (depending on your breeding ratio) to just double the amount of fuel in the reactor (which, given it's a thermal spectrum reactor, will only be 3% to 4% of the material in the fuel salt, is not a whole lot to even begin with). Operating a thermal spectrum MSR thorium breeder with protactinium separation, the protactinium would flow in a constant stream from separation to a single insulated decay tank that is constantly fluorinated to strip off uranium (both U-233 & U-232) as it's produced/decayed, with that fluorinated uranium gas flowing to another chemical process which strips off the excess fluorine to convert the uranium back to a salt that goes into the reactor. One continuous chemical process, like what's handled by any chemical or petroleum plant. If someone wanted to make a bomb out of U-233, they'd have to set up their MSR to separate protactinium in batches (so that you could separate the U-232 & U-233), which would require a whole lot of additional complexity on the reactor, with all protactinium produced over a single day, for example, going to individual insulated tanks, which will require several radiation, high temperature, and chemically appropriate (not reactive with the salt) flanges & valves which will be mechanical in nature, diverting production from one container to the next to the next. Each one of those individual decay tanks must also be fluorinated separately instead of together, with dozens to hundreds of pipes carrying highly reactive fluorine gas instead of just one. Then, even after you introduce all of that complexity, you still can only pull off a TINY sliver of U-233 production (due to the anemic breeding ratios). If you take out any more than that tiny sliver you'll kill the reactor, as you'll be reducing the overall fuel density in the reactor below the point required for criticality.
THIS. Thank you for the explanation. I had a vague idea that this would be the case, but it's good to have solid detail when answering "but someone will make a bomb out of it!" objections to MSR.
Good video. I noticed a couple of important subjects that you missed: First, the 500 year storage of waist from Thorium - This is only possible if fuel "reprocessing" is used where the unspent fuel and the non fission products are separated via a process inside of the reactor chamber, as in LFTR, or separated outside the reactor by a third party. Both methods require government regulations and certification that are too lengthy (decades?) and expensive. Plus the government will surely screw it up! Also, if Thorium is converted to Uranium-233 and is then used to fuel other reactors, I heard a presentation given by Terrestrial Energy that this constitutes High Enriched Uranium which nuclear regulators probably won't allow, even if the new U-233 is used "internally" like in the LFTR reactor. But if Thorium is used in a "burner" reactor like in Thorcons design I think the regulation process is simpler. One cool feature regarding molten salt fueled reactors is that the chemistry binds with the fission products in an "ionic bond". So if the fuel is exposed to the atmosphere the fission products stay in the fuel (this needs more research though because the MSRE experiment in the 1960's was not for the purpose of studying this feature, but this was observed in the experiments results).
Correct: The barriers to deployment of low pressure LFTRs is entirely due to fast-reactor entrenched regulatory environment originating from the US. A bit ironic, how often high temperature slow reactor deployment gets sidetracked in favor of 'burners' to give existing fast breeder reactors a waste outlet... while these same comparatively low material waste, _far_ lower risk, high temperature low pressure molten salt thorium reactors, are opposed as if _they_ posed some greater risk than the breeders we've been funding instead!? Low pressure deployments first, because we can do them _now_. Burners when the legacy reactor industry finds a way to pay for them.
I really hope this develops into as viable of a power source as it is promised to be- we definitely need a replacement for current nuclear reactor technology. Basic safety factors aside, any power source that produces a by-product where the only viable response is to pour it in barrels, put the barrels in massive underground vaults, and wait centuries or millenia for it to become less toxic... Yeah, not really all that good in the long term view, is it?
The thing is, most of the reactor byproducts being buried are actually fairly low output. Which is why they take so long to break down. The stuff coming out of a Thorium reactor is MUCH more radioactive. But, proportionately, cooks itself down much faster.
@@romado59 Depends on the size of the MSR. Mostly, "no cladding" on the fuel, and you essentially cook the fuel all the way down. With solid fuel reactors, those fuel rods are removed because the cladding breaks down. 90-95% of the fuel, itself, is still fine.
@@romado59 and how many people have died from old commercial nuclear power? very few. only one clearly documented. from coal at least 156000 from mining accidents and black lung (not even including pollution effects).
Nathan -- Do you have any idea how much is left over after burning coal (the residual fly ash is mildly radioactive) or refining and burning oil? Even 50 year old nuclear plants produce orders of magnitude less waste than coal or oil (not to mention what goes into the air.) I'm not sure what the environmental status of petroleum "coke" is, but there is aconstant stream of trucks from the local Chevron refinery, hauling off this coke which gets loaded on ships and sent to some 3rd world country for disposal (presumably because there is no safe/economical use for it. I'm rooting for Thorium, but I would place my long money on Fusion. . . .
Another educational video from the inimitable Matt Ferrell. Well done, sir! All options must be on the table since current trends for carbon dioxide emissions look really bad. Let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good or even good enough.
Agreed. I don’t like how quickly people write off nuclear. I’m becoming more and more convinced that we’ll end up with a mix of several of these energy sources. Can’t lose sight of just how bad fossil fuels are in comparison.
What do you mean by "battery energy storage costs?" @13:30 Cost of manufacturing? Including installation? Including maintenance (if so, over what time period)? Cost of powering up and discharging electricity (if so, at what price per input?)? That claim amounts to about a 20% cost reduction in a single year -- if that's a trend, that's phenomenal; which is why I'm questioning the definition. Thanks!
Great video Matt, it’s defo a subject that’s going to be worth watching for the future. Hopefully the research will all come to fruition from all parties and a stable and safe nuclear future will benefit everyone.
I think it's odd that the costs associated with solar only includes a 4 hour discharge time worth of battery storage, where no place on earth gets 20 hrs of sunlight a day all year round. In order for it to be a relevant comparison of costs, you would expect to see an amount of storage that would at least make it through the night and ideally through a few overcast days, seeing as how nuclear power does provide constant power regardless of time or season. They might also allow for the subsidies of solar and on the other side the costs of heavy regulation and licensing fees of nuclear into this equation, since those things affect the price artificially. I'd be interested to see what an actual cost comparison would reveal.
Considering that in winter you get much less sunlight and you might have cloudy days for long periods of time you would need at the bare minimum 24h battery, but for safety reasons I probably wouldn't decide to live in place that had anything less than a week long batter if they decided to go solar/wind only. Otherwise you might have issues like Texas did (tho admittedly conventional power plants also failed there). Such battery would likely make renewables uneconomical with our current technology level. I'm also curious if those costs take into account that conventional power plants take the burden of managing changes in demand of power and have to lower their output or even shutdown completely, with rises costs of running them (or of running renewables, depending on how you look at it); AFAIK there are even dedicated power plants for doing just that - did they factor that in while calculating price for solar/wind?
@@staryimoze good point, AFAIK hydro and natural gas are the only current plants that can quickly spool up and shut down according to demand, and hydro isn't available everywhere, and also comes with some pretty steep ecological costs, but for most of the world that would mean natural gas as the backup. So still reliant on fossil fuels. Honestly I don't see anything even as remotely beneficial as nuclear right now from an environmental perspective.
Dear Matt, Good presentation, but there are a few extra points need consideration: 1) the radioactive waste is not only hugely shorter lived for thorium, but there is a much higher percentage utilised than uranium. Separation of the fissile fuel is easier because there is a chemical difference between the substances not just isotopic differences. 2) if there had been as much money thrown at thorium that the high pressure water reactors have had then there would be these reactors all over the world many years ago and it would be cheap and safe to operate. 3)The sourcing of Thorium is not as expensive as you might imagine since it is a byproduct in many types of mining waste; enough to fuel the world for many years. 4) the cost of recycling batteries, PV cells and wind turbines after their useful life has not, (as far as I can work out) been factored into the cost of these renewables because it is difficult to calculate the cost factor for that far into the future. Lastly there were initial encouragements for uranium reactors when there was an urgent need for Plutonium, for fission bombs and then tritium for fusion bombs. The byproducts from thorium would be greatly sought after for medical and other industrial uses and much less attractive for military use. If the products were to be used for destructive purposes then the gamma radiation signature would make their source easy to detect.
Matt, you missed one of the big benefits of a liquid Thorium reactor... all the waist from our current water reactors could be reprocessed and burned up in a Thorium reactor. Do that and we solve our current nuclear waist storage problem.
Nice work as always! One correction Matt - not all conventional Uranium-fueled reactor must shut down for re-fueling. The CANDU reactors, which are in wide use in North America and elsewhere, are fueled/de-fueled continuously without the need for an expensive shutdown, nor is it necessary to build two reactors to ensure that there is always power flowing from at least one reactor. This has always been a huge advantage of the CANDU design over the Westinghouse PLW designs favored in the US.
For renewables to become feasible you'll need somewhere around 400 hours storage, not 4 hours. Putting the LCOE around 160 USD/MWh. Then add in the grid-costs and you're looking at around 200 USD/MWh. Or 3-8 times higher than standard uranium nuclear.
Thorium reactors could be a good way to augment grid storage as well as emergency backup. Grid storage isn’t where it needs to be yet. Four hours isn’t enough. One Arctic blast could suck up all the juice and people could freeze to death. Problem is neither grid storage nor thorium reactor technologies are where they need to be yet.
That was actually planned to happen. I know many peoppe people personally that work in the energy sector here and they get laughed at for mentioning winterizing
The one thing held against Thorium is that you can't make nuclear weapons from it. Which means that the Military Industrial Complex won't fund it which is (partially) how we've paid for the fission reactors we have now.
The much bigger issue is that Thorium technology is unproven and will take a decade or two to get into commercial use, at least... Nuclear energy, Thorium and otherwise, is always a huge financial risk, not because of accidents, but just because of the huge infrastructure expenditures involved in every single plant and that it is almost certain that the budget will be overrun by multiples and the schedule will not be met... Now suggest to someone investing a few billion Dollars that you'd like him to try a technology that hasn't even been proven at all.
That is not true. In fact, it may be easier to make a working weapon using the Th cycle in an MSR, although the weapon itself isn't likely to be as efficient as a Pu based weapon. To make weapons grade material from Th, you circulate some of the fuel salt through a protactinium extractor and then let it decay in an isolated pure state into U233, which only takes ~27 days. If your extractor is very efficient, the rest is relatively easy. The only drawback to someone who wants a weapon is that only a small amount of protactinium can be extracted at a time and still keep the fuel salt fissile, so it does take time to gather enough. The proliferation-proof line the Th advocates push is an outright lie. U233 based bombs have been tested and you don't need a huge (and therefore detectable) PUREX plant to obtain it, unlike Pu.
The former director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory Thorium Molten Salt Reactor program will be happy that his work is finally being put into use (if he is still alive). There is a video somewhere of him talking about the TMSR and he knew back in the 50's it was a superior and safer alternative to Uranium, water cooled reactors. He felt Uranium reactors had been chosen because they integrated with America's nuclear weapons program better back in the 50's, not because they were a better commercial energy source than TMSRs.
Thanks for the great video. I have a couple comments/notes 1) THORIUM SUPPLY - A very rich source of rare earth metals (REM) is Mountain Pass California. But because the chemical properties of thorium and REMs are very similar, deposits rich in REM also tend to have substantial amounts of thorium. Currently because there is no commercial use for thorium, that is a problem. US environmental law doesn't just allow that Thorium to be dumped in tailings piles. As a result US production cost are more expensive than Chinese REM, which aren't quite so fussy. But if Thorium becomes source of income and not an expense, then not only can the US get much close to being independent with respect to these materials so important to advanced technology, but also produce enough thorium to power our economy. This is even more the case of Australian, where their major deposit of REMs have an even higher Thorium content. And to "prime the pump" as it were, there is approximately 7 million pounds of thorium nitrate that the US government acquired decades ago with the thought of using it in breeder reactors. But when that didn't happen, they got tired of paying for storage. So all of it was put it in metal containers and buried at the US nuclear testing site in Nevada. All we would have to do is go dig it up and we would have enough thorium to supply all of the power currently used by the US for a decade. With a gradual ramp up of MSRs and given that MSRs (or any nuclear reactor) are unlikely to generate more than about 1/3 of our total energy, just the thorium buried in the Nevada desert would provide all that we would need for 40-50 years. 2) SYNERGISTIC INTEGRATION WITH WIND AND SOLAR - Current Pressurized Light Water Reactors (PWRs) do not work at all well with intermittent energy source like wind and solar. PWR can only increase or decrease power output very slowly. Thus they can be a good source of base power, but they can't provide the necessary rapid load-following capability to fill in the gaps in wind and solar. PWRs peak temperature is only 280 c, so not hot enough to make direct thermal storage feasible. Thus to store any of the power they generate in order to provide load-following, PWRs would have to use the same methods that solar and wind would use to store excess power (batteries, pumped hydro, etc.). Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs) don't like to change power levels any faster than PWRs do. But MSR's advantage is that their peak temperature is over 600 C. This is hot enough to make direct thermal storage worthwhile. Studies have been done that look at using vacuum insulated tanks to hold molten tertiary salt. While the energy from the reactor coming into these storage salts is pretty steady, the amount of energy being extracted depends on the flow rate of the molten salts being pumped through steam generators, which can be varied rapidly over a wide range. This allows MSRs with thermal storage to have a load-following ability. With the ability to rapidly change the amount of electrical power generated, MSRs could be key to fill the gaps left by the intermittency of wind and solar without having to build huge battery storage farms, or other energy storage mechanisms. Another fact to consider is that for wind and solar to provide say 75% of the total grid energy, the actually installed capacity would have to be approximately double that so that excess power created when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining can be store for the periods every day when it the wind has died and the sun has set. And it is likely even worse than that because of fairly large seasonal variations in solar incidence and wind velocity. So solar will have to be even more capacity to produce enough power in the winter when the sun is lower. And wind installed wind generating capacity will have to be sized based on times of the year when winds are on average lower. With MSRs with thermal storage, the installed capacity of wind and solar could be considerably smaller. So while MSR might have a higher levelized cost of energy by itself than wind or solar, the important load-following capability could mean that MSR (or potentially other high temperature reactors like helium cooled pebble bed reactors which could store energy in exactly the same types of molten salts) could be a very important part of a future grid where wind and solar is a significant fraction of the total energy supply 3) PROCESS HEAT - most industrial processes require some amount of increased temperature to work. About half require temperatures above 400 C. With a 600 C working temperature, MSRs could be a source of process heat. One very interesting one that my team is investigating is using renewable energy sources to make synthetic fuels. These fuels take CO2 out of the air (or sea water, which looks like it requires less energy) and hydrogen from splitting sea water and using a combination of heat, electricity and the right catalysts, reverse the combustion process and produce hydrocarbon fuels. The initial fuels produced by most processes are methane or methanol. Methane can be used for anything which currently uses natural gas. Methanol can be used as a fuel for transportation. But further processes which are largely heat driven in the presence of a catalyst can combine methane and methanol to make longer chain hydrocarbons, all the way up to octane (the major component of gasoline) and even diesel/kerosene/jet fuel. It is likely the only non-combustion heat source that can be used directly to drive a lot of very important industrial processes. The one we are particularly interested in for use in aircraft is butanol. Butanol is the alcohol of butane. It has an energy density just slightly less than gasoline, can be used at up to100% concentration in most current gasoline engines. So a notional MSR could be located near the coast. Sea water is pumped in to provide CO2, hydrogen and cooling. The MSR provides a steady 24/7 source of electricity and high heat to drive the processes. various stream
Transferring the excess heat to thermal batteries rather than electric is an angle I never though of. It's yet another way to work with the renewable energy sector.
My thoughts come from hearing about this through Matt's and Joe's productions on this subject: when asking if we need nuclear, I'm convinced the answer is "Yes". The cost figures given here for returns I'm pretty sure don't include the total cost environmentally of building the solutions...and cleanup when they are no longer viable. Others here also mention that nuclear is needed for base load although that can also possibly be countered with cheaper storage solutions...again considering the footprint though...it makes me nervous to leave out nuclear. I also feel a good mix is a safer solution. Nothing totally wins out. Germany's decision to phase out nuclear and go all green for example does not think of the environment foot print cost of eliminating this vital power producer. It feels like...saying I like chocolate cake. I like chocolate. I like sugar. I don't like flour so eliminate that one. Well you now have a candy bar...not a cake.
one other thing, the uranium smrs or thorium smrs can be put more places than wind or solar. provide more energy in a smaller footprint even if wind and solar are viable but land area is lacking.
@@Joe-Dead oh yeh, and back when they calculated the posibility for a reactor meltdown that came up with 1000 years :) not even 100 years with this techlogie and we had two major disasters. The fact that thoes small reactor are not everywhere, and wont be there in the next ten years, its because Cgi animations are not real power powerplants. So many Questions, how long do they need to build, what cost, where are the people that will maintain it, who even wants a reactor near them ???
@@Joe-Dead The NIMBY people already go full apeshit when you try to build a wind turbine in proximity to their houses. With nuclear reactors you can dial that up by a factor of 1000. So excuse me when I take that "can be put more places than wind or solar" of yours with a heavy grain of molten salt.
@@3gax3 smrs are being built and deployed now kid. before you start pretending to be tucker carlson "asking questions" do a little actual work and research beforehand...saves the embarrassment of your BS questions having been answered long ago. secondly, nuclear power in general has a better safety record than ANY OTHER FORM OF POWER excluding thus far renewables. cherry-pick two nuclear plants, one not even built along western standards and another in a once in a lifetime tsunami. GG fool, last nail in your idiocy coffin kid is that the next gen reactors being deployed are safe, they can't meltdown. so your mistaken self-inflicted fearmongering doesn't apply. not that it ever did.
China's 2MW MSR is up and running at Wuwei (criticality was October 2021), expect some reports soon This is a rebuild of the ORNL MSRE running on thorium (MSRE ran on U235, U233 and Pu239, not thorium) - to validate the ORNL work There's a 100MWe system being built alongside it to validate power generation - that's what ORNL was proposing when the project was shuttered by Nixon Contrary to scaremongers, it's virtually IMPOSSIBLE to make U233 weapons from thorium. The USA, USSR and India have all tried and failed miserably. The level of inherent U232 contamination is so high it's too dangerous to handle when irradiated and makes any weapons attempt fizzzles essentially, thorium is highly weaponisation RESISTANT, whilst U235 reactors are built from the waste product of weaponsmaking systems - this is why the USA shut down the MSRE project in 1972 - it would have divorced civil nuclear power from the military dependency and stripped uranium enrichment plants of their "dual purpose" protection from SALT treaties
I don't say this as "scare mongering", "proliferation concerns" are inherently meaningless. But it's very possible to make U-233 based weapons. This is not a "disadvantage" in any sense but it's still true. In testing it performed about as well as Pu-239 for an implosion device. The reason why they weren't used is because it's just easier to do it by breeding Pu-239.
i understand that wind and solar might be cheaper, but they take a lot, and by a lot i mean very much more space than a nuclear powerplant. we should also look at the MWh/surface produced, becuase it would be amazing to have a 300mwh solar powered farm, but if a solar panel of around 2m^2 could produces 300wh, you would need 2 million m^2 of land, not mentioning the other infrastructure required. Moreover,, many countries cannot rely on solar power, and wind power is also not a constant. nuclear power can be scaled immensly and can just work anytime and anywhere
I don't think it is more expensive to mine thorium than uranium if you are talking about the final product. With thorium, .25 of the ore is used where with uranium it is a fraction of a percentage of the ore, and requires a great deal of processing e.g. cladding before it is ready for the reactor.
The thing is we don’t have many uses for Thorium at the moment so we already have tons and tons of it just lying around as a byproduct of our existing mining processes.
Also, molten salt reactors don’t use solid fuel rods, so there is less of a window for companies to build their entire business model around ultra expensive uranium candle lights that are never burnt completely before they have to be replaced.
Hello, i think the problem is not the cost of producing electricity, it is the cost of not having electricity when it is needed. As long as electricity can not be stored in megawatts and hundreds of megawatts. it is not renewable source vs other, it is the cost of having electricity vs having no electricity when needed. This winter will be interesting in Europe, we might see what is the cost of blackout or industry shutdown because of the lack of electricity when it is needed. I love your channel keep on the good work.
Renewables are swimming in subsidies to get those rates. Both solar and wind require a natural gas power plant to even be viable, as the intermittent problem you mentioned. 4 hours is not sufficient back up. Nor are you including the cost of having to replace the batteries every 10-15 years. Nor the growing demand for batteries for numerous industries which will drive up the cost. Nor the fact that renewables often have to be built in remote locations with ideal conditions (adding infrastructure costs). Renewables are at best good for supplementing a power grid, pretending as if they can be the main generation is non-sensical as we have seen with Germany. I live near mass renewable generation in the high desert of California. That shit breaks down constantly. So again are you going to see a 30 year life span out of renewables. Lastly, where is the money going for renewables? China. Even a chunk of batteries are also being built there. Nuclear power plants are all American. The money to run them will be American professionals. Desalination has always been a huge bonus for these for State's like California that have huge water issues.
Here in Michigan my 4Kw photovoltaic system has only produced power for about three days for the last 30, so you are spot on about the 4-hour nonsense. I'd like to see any greenie come and tell me how big of a battery I would need to be 100% solar here..
@@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunk Yeah where I live we get a lot of sun shine a wind. So renewables make sense out here. But the infrastructure to get that power generation to the cities which are hours away has a significant cost. I imagine the North East solar is not a good idea at all. So depending on where you are in the world, without the ideal conditions, renewables become even worse in terms of supplying the power demands of our growing civilization. This is the second video I've come across that claims that nuclear is just not "economical" compared to green energy. Which just isn't true at all. Yet this is being pushed as a common sense look at energy infrastructure.
Higher neutron efficiency also leads to longer lifespan of reactor casings, pretty cool, seeing as start up and refit costs are the largest expenditure for reactor operators.
Hi Matt, I've been following the progress being made relative to LFTR technology since around 2011. That said, the good news is that more countries and companies - around the world - have jumped on the Thorium-based MSR bandwagon since that time. The bad news is that not one has gone commercial with their designs since then; and that's NOT due to any technical issues that have yet to be resolved. From the standpoint of materials science, operational configurations and procedures for salt cleansing, and thorium mining/processing there's nothing standing in the way of making LFTR technology a commerical reality. You don't have to take my word for it either, just ask Kirk Sorenson, CEO of Flibe Energy, for his perspective on what the BIGGEST IMPEDIMENT has been to date. And from a historical perspective, the REAL REASON the MSR Experiment was cancelled does NOT have anything to do with corrosion issues. The operating parameters related to ensuring long component life times were well-researched and understood by the engineers and scientists working on the project. In fact, the demonstration reactor operated for 6000 hours strait - at FULL POWER - without any issues. The REAL REASON President Nixon cancelled the project - without giving any prior warning to the team - was purely POLITICAL in nature. He was convinced by parties closely linked to the traditional nuclear power industry to shut down the MSRE because it might threaten the ability of the US to produce the materials needed for nuclear weapons... the COLD WAR was still HOT at that time. Quite interestingly, when it comes to Thorium mining and production, there has been another very blatent SELLOUT by the US Government in that regard; one that took place 10-15 years ago, when some enterprising individuals seeking approval to open and operate a mine rich in Thorium was denied the necessary operating permits. The story of this intentional blocking of thorium mining is thoroughly documented in book published in 2017 with the title... SELLOUT: How Washington Gave Away America's Technological Soul, and One Man's Fight to Bring It Home, by Victoria Bruce. And there's more intentionally-buried thorium from other mining operations here in the US that could be readily recovered for use in commercially operating LFTRs. Access to and on-going supply of thorium are NOT of any issue when it comes to commercializing the technology. Bottom Line: Had the MSRE not been cancelled, but were to have its R&D endeavors funded through commercial fruition, the US could be ENERGY INDEPENDENT by now and NOT be staring into a looming existential abyss due to the past, present, and likely on-going future pollution of the planet through the continued use of fossil fuels. In that regard, the winners have been the BIG OIL and COAL interests, while the losers happen to be all the rest of mankind that's been made to be dependent upon these resources. PS - Thorium-based MSRE (with its Tritium production capability) would make for a perfect (i.e., highly complimentary) match for the FUSION REACTOR technology now under development at Helion Energy out in the Seattle area. That being the case, you might want to try spending more of your time watching the videos that already exist on these topics.
I think thorium is going to have an impact regardless of whether it pans out as a viable fuel. Nuclear is really the only option we have for a de-carbonized world and the increased research Thorium spurs is the best chance we have of getting there. whether it is public perception or new reactor designs it's a net benefit.
Great video Matt but could you please enlighten your viewers about Indonesia's choice of the walk-away safe high temperature but near ambient pressure ThorCon's 7×500MWe Liquid metal Thorium ion molten sodium fluoride salt burner energy converters that can be brought on line within 2 years for $1200/kiloWatt and provide electricity to the grid for a pre-profit levelised cost of $30/Megawatt.hour without destruction of thousands of Hectares of scarce tropical rain forests ...each 500MWe unit is bult like a double-hulled bulk-carrier in a Korean shipbuilding yard, fully equipped and fitted out before being towed to Indonesia where the fuel salts are added. All at a cost of $1200/kiloWatt to ThorCon. Although the PPA agreement is initially for 25 years the design life is 80 years by replacing alternating reactor pots every 8 years including a 4 year passive cooling period. These are capable of being either auto "load-following" or as a "base loader"
U233 breeding of Thorium is just as useful and practical as Pu239 breeding from U238. U238 is the most common material in used fuel fods from light water reactors. This means a uranium fuel cycle can produce negative waste as it disposes of existing stockpiles. This seems far more attractive. Moreover the neutron economy with Thorium is a bit thin. You need fissile U235 ro bootstrap the breeding, but most likely people will be blending U235 with thorium long term anyway. "I came for the thorium but stayed for the molten salts". The real advance here is the reactor concepts not the fuel type. Another big advantage is industrial process heat. These things can reach 600C or with more material science, 1000C. This means cracking of water into hydrogen as well as desalination. CO2 and ammonia harvesting from the atmosphere becomes possible. Hydrocarbon synthesis becomes possible by tying these things to refineries. This could clean up the oil industry by creating carbon neutral or negative combustible fuels.
@@romado59 Pardon, I was discussing molten salt reactors, not pressurized water reactors. I'm advocating reusing used fuel rods from light water reactors as feed-stock for breeding plutonium from depleted uranium.
Wind and solar are great, but at very high (or low) latitudes where population densities tend to be low and distances vast, small offsite built reactors might make a lot of sense and Thorium has its advantages, too.
This is a good point. I see the grid getting abandoned in the southern US because it will soon be cheaper to make your own electricity, but in the north, grids will still be needed and solar is less effective.
I don't know if it was mentioned, but these Thorium reactors are quite small. Windmills, solar cells and associated distribution and transmission equipment take up a lot of space. Covering up land so people and animals can't live or farm on it isn't all that bright. Running power lines hundreds of miles when you can have a power plant next door to give you 24 hour power,.......well you get my thinking. And,......even the promised magic batteries won't help for long spells without sun or wind. Thanks for the video.
other potentials of thorium molten salt reactors encountered: 1. the MSR can also use much of the other nuclear waste as fuel to supplement their own fission processes - a way to productively consume decades of dangerous stockpiled waste. 2. the high temperature of molten salt can be used industrially - no need to create heat (burning fossil fuel) to support industrial applications.
The Chinese research project should be closely watched, (preferably by reading their e-mail in real time; reversing the usual flow of research information). One fact that is rarely spelled out is that the waste storage problem is a symptom of the horrendous inefficiency of the current conventional technologies. So much of the potential energy in the fuel is not captured for use, but remains in the waste to cause problems.
Sharp Ears and Eyes. Thorium is ONE of the MAIN fuel that the CCP under their 2010 , 5 year plan wanted as Part of the Nuclear Generation Source. Todate 10 years has passed. But they have a 20 year PLAN and is STILL doing R&D plus refining their Thorium reactors. Beleive that have a "Demo Thorium reactor" running . And are getting DATA on it reliability, effeciencies, re-fuelling, maintenance, etc. ..... China HAS BEEN very Tight-LIP on its Thorium reactors programe. Would NOT be surprised that Chian will have a COMMERCIAL Thorium reactor RUNNING by 2030. Besides China have the LARGEST Thorium deposit ( Disputed by India ). 😅😅
Except farming the steady wind these regions for free. Many regions are at the coast too, which even bolsters the steadiness. Before anyone guessing about a reliance problem. There are already GW installed capacity inside the arctic circle.
or according to the IPCC you can burn wood pellets and trash, carbon free like in Sweden or greta from la la land as some call it - strange that the level of CO2 keeps going up when its carbon free
@@jimlofts5433 Burning wood is okay for low density rural areas that have enough land to grow back as many trees as they burn making it technically net zero. But its not really an option in urban areas where the particulates/air pollution becomes a major issue if everyone is burning wood, even if they somehow grow enough trees to offset.
The metric equivalent of an acre-foot is the cubic meter (m³). An acre-foot is a unit commonly used in the United States to measure large volumes of water, particularly in relation to irrigation, water supply, and reservoir capacities. It represents the volume of water required to cover one acre of land to a depth of one foot, which is approximately 43,560 cubic feet. To convert acre-feet to cubic meters, you can use the following conversion factor: 1 acre-foot = 1233.48 cubic meters (rounded to two decimal places) Therefore, if you have a given value in acre-feet and want to convert it to cubic meters, you would multiply the number of acre-feet by 1233.48. Conversely, to convert cubic meters to acre-feet, you would divide the number of cubic meters by 1233.48.
there is a cost of disposal for all forms of energy creation or capture. The cost for solar and the vast amounts of land it takes, and mix of toxic materials in the panels so easily broken and so hard to track the massive amounts of material. Yes we need a nuclear option in the mix.
Please talk about the crucial idea that MSR reactors could run exclusively on nuclear waste and thorium (presumably mined responsibly), and we could end uranium mining forever. A very real potential advantage of molten salt reactors is simply processing and dealing with all that high level nuclear waste, and getting energy in return.
This is one of the best features but I wonder if people can get their mind over the "nuclear is scary" hurdle. We have had FBR reactors that could be burning up waste for decades but one of the keys to getting it done is people have to be willing to let reactors be built. There is a huge NIMBY problem...
@@NickFrom1228 personally I am opposed to obsolete solid fuel reactors for many reasons including real cost. But I very much support research into newer molten fuel designs with in situ reprocessing, which run on and neutralize existing high level nuclear waste.
We need an reliable back system.. Wind, Solar and Water are not reliable enough.. While I do believe, they will always be Wind, Solar can be struggle with an "Fallout Winter" mostly meaning from Vulcanos or Asteroids. And not even meaning a Doomsday, where it doesn't matter if Electricity is working. Our Econemies are quite sensetive. A stronger Combination of mutliple Energy Plants is the better Option and if MSR works as wanted, then it should be Part of that. Same for the ITER, when it ever works.
"Thorium is 3 times as common as uranium. " Only a tiny fraction of Uranium is suitable for nuclear power generation. Thorium is 400 times as common as that fraction.
Three times as abundant meaning 12 ppm (g/tonne) compared to uranium at 4 g/t, but you can't mine grades like those economically. Deposits of uranium can be of much higher grade and larger tonnage due to natural chemical concentration processes (hexavalent uranium can be dissolved in water and precipitated in a reducing environment) while thorium has a different chemistry and few geological processes can concentrate it enough to form large, high-grade deposits. The geographical distribution is also very different, uranium is found in many places and geological environments, unlike thorium.
@@karhukivi interesting is this a double narrative going around? As I understand Thorium is already stupidly abundant to us as a byproduct of our existing rare earth mining processes, and that Uranium was super inefficient to mine because of how rare the deposits are in comparison. and that from the Uranium that is mined, most of it has to undergo enrichment anyways because of how astronomically scarce the specific U235 isotope is in it. Not to mention dressing (cladding), and that a lot of that ultra processed fuel isn’t used before the fuel rods have to be replaced anyways.
Overall very solid and well balanced video! There's just a couple details you got a bit wrong - all reactors (including light water and MSR) can reprocess fuel to consume nearly 100% of all the fuel. It's just more expensive (france has been doing it for decades) Also, the MSR wasn't invented during or for the Manhattan project. It was designed exclusively for the nuclear bomber program. And it wasn't shut down due to difficulties with reliability - it ran longer than any other test reactor in history without needing any maintenance. It was fabulously reliable. Alvin Weinberg was the director of Oak Ridge and a HUGE proponent of developing the MSR because it actually poses a far, far lower risk of proliferation and accident than uranium PWR's. The problem came in the form of the cold war and politics. Admiral Rickover from the Navy ultimately had the final say in what was pursued at Oak Ridge, and he and Weinberg butted heads constantly over it, because Rickover wanted a nuclear navy (particularly nuclear subs) and reactors that could produce warheads to keep up with the Russians. Molten Sodium has... _problems_ with water, and the reactors are much harder to make produce weapons-grade material. The main issue it had outside of politics, was that MSR's (particularly fluorides) are EXTREMELY corrosive, and radiation embrittlement can exacerbate things even further. So they lose some of their cost benefit in needing to be made from stronger corrosion-resistant materials. They're also a tad more sensitive to xenon poisoning. There's a fantastic book chronicling the history of why nuclear power went the direction it did - it's called "Superfuel" and is a really fun, enlightening, easy read - it's basically 100% down to the cold war and nuclear arms and ships. Civilian reactors were always a complete afterthought. And lastly, you were close to an important point about timelines. Most climate studies I've seen estimate that we simply don't have enough time to bring nuclear on anymore as the primary base-load source for energy. We waited too long and now we don't have enough time to wait. So while I think in the future nuclear will be an important part of base load energy grids (particularly as energy needs grow everywhere) I don't think it can currently compete for the money we need to be investing to end fossil fuel use. I have a hunch that some of the load will be handled with a system like what Ford is using with the new F150 lightning - your electric car can produce a LOT of power. Enough to power a home for 3-10 days at full, normal use. If we install systems for home and apartment buildings that charge the vehicle during low-demand hours, and then somehow coordinate them with a signal from the power company during peak use to cause the ones that are still parked at home and plugged in to just start sending power back into the home, it can act as a smoothing power source that we currently use a lot of natural gas power plants for.
Amazingly after 14 minute video, and somehow not-very-much-in-debt information presented, the main point, aside from safety, why a Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) is an amazing tech, is not event mentioned. The main point is not that thorium is 3 or 4 times more abundant then uranium, but that in LFTR, the energy of thorium - via thorium-protactinium-uranium 233 fuel cycle - can be utilized over 90%, versus the current uranium fuel cycle with less then 1% efficiency of extracting energy from the input fuel roads. That is almost a factor of 2 improvement ( 100x ). Any, supposedly informational video not explaining that, does not do a good service educating the interested audience and more over can be viewed as either technically poor quality or informatively neglecting to present an extremely important information, that makes or breaks the economy of LFTRs and in that manner of future of efficient and likely massively distributed electricity energy production on Earth.
Wind and solar are still far more deadly than nuclear. "Renewbles" supporters forget to let you know how many people fall to their deaths each year from windmills and roofs.
12:55 LCOE is a good measure; however, nuclear reactors produce steam that can be used for many other purposes - residential heating & commercial production (refining commodities) are the most common uses of steam. Solar and wind are far less efficient sources of energy to produce steam. You did mention desalination as another purpose; nuclear plants can generate hydrogen too. Huge benefits of nuclear plants compared to solar&wind.
So glad they’re finally beginning to invest in this technology. When I first learned of the existence of thorium reactors years ago I was shocked that we haven’t invested so much in this technology. Seemingly only because you could make nuclear weapons with uranium reactors and it’s not feasible with thorium reactors.
@@michaelleue7594 so how come countries don't utilise Thorium for weapons but rather use centrifuges to refine U238 and reactors for plutonium- it is cheaper and easier. The U233 from Thorium is eventually burnt in the MSR
@@pyhead9916 they have already outlawed reprocessing of fuel rods and this is the waste they like to refer to while in France it is reprocessed and reused and have far less "waste" too handle
Renewable LCOE should include the cost to make renewable a 24-7 reliable energy source. GW days of storage are needed plus you need to build up the renewable output so it can both provide the required load power plus at the same time charge the batteries. You might need to double the renewable capacity to both charge the batteries and provide the load power at the same time.
Very good presentation. Is the problem more with handling molten salt than the Thorium reaction? Wasn't there a solar farm near Las Vegas that used the sun to heat molten salt that was shut down, mostly due to the cost of maintaining equipment that comes in contact with molten salt?
Nature provided humanity the gift of essentially unlimited non-intermittent energy in the form of nuclear power. But instead of investing into research for energy generation, we made bigger and better bombs. In almost all other forms of technology, problems are viewed as issues to be solved. But in nuclear, people just claim "oh it's expensive and creates nuclear waste, so we can't do it", rather than just solving the problem. It's expensive now because we didn't put in the effort to make it cheaper. It creates nuclear waste because we use inefficient designs. We have public ignorance because of political/corporate scare campaigns and uninformed yuppies. Had we put as much effort into nuclear energy research as we have in defense 50 years ago, we almost certainly would have all our energy needs solved, nuclear waste would be a very minor issue, climate change would have been heavily mitigated because we wouldn't have needed all those coal plants for electicity and thermal energy-intensive industries, and water massive scale de-salination would be extremely viable. But yet, Matt goes on: "but do we really NEED nuclear energy for a renewable energy future?" mere MINUTES after mentioning water de-salination. The answer is YES you fool. This kind of mentality is WHY we have these problems today. For someone with a technology channel, you really need to wake up. Renewables will never be able to meet all our energy demands; sometimes it's cloudy, sometimes there's no wind, tidal ruins ecosystems. An advanced nuclear plant would be 100% safe, could be buried underground, and provide energy for 100 years. But no let's just build a billion windmills with max 20y lifetimes along with 10s of billions of batteries. Sounds like a GREAT plan if you just ignore the ecological impact of endlessly mining minerals from the ground; is it 'environmentally friendly' to destroy entire ecosystems, have environmental contaminants leeching into ground/water supplies, and air pollution from processing/transportation? How about the human cost of these rare-earth mining operations in 3rd world countries with despicable conditions and child labor? I unsubscribed from you channel awhile ago after you made some easily disprovable BS claims. I thought i'd give you another try but now regret the 14 minutes.
4 hours storage? mate, even 4 days of storage won't be enough to remedy the crisis Texas was in last year. 4 hours won't even be enough to get you through the night, in the winter...
I think one of the biggest unknowns with our energy future is the effect that 100 million plugin electric vehicles will have on the grid. They are a massive energy storage network but also a massive draw. 30 Million people getting home from work between 6-7pm EST and plug in their cars. Peak Power needs to be managed somehow, right now it it managed with Coal and Natural Gas since it they can be fired up and shut down on demand. Currently, renewables are absolutely terrible for Peak Power because you cannot increase the output of Solar. Steady State isn't the problem, Peak is.
Storage, we will see about that when people go to their car in the morning and can't goto work because it was sunless overnight and the grid needed all of the energy from their cars.
With a nation of electric vehicles, we could expect to see charging stations at work and other parking destinations. It would be possible to charge your car during daylight hours, then drive it home and drive it back again before charging. Plus, with that many networked vehicles on the road, it will be possible for the utilities to control how quickly vehicles charge. It would be possible to control the demand to match production.
@@thomasemberson8021 Renewables plus Storage can handle overnight. The biggest energy problem is sudden change. Heavy peak for a few hours, you need to be able to ramp up extra output for 2-3 hours out of 24. Peak is a hard problem with renewables. Nuclear is like renewables, it is steady state. You cannot manage Peak with Nuclear.
@@williammeek4078 I "love" these obscure and broad suggestions. Over build! sure, who cares if we have to use 3 to 5 times the known reserves of lithium, and up to 20 to 40% of the lower 48's land mass, let alone all the steel, copper and concrete required to bolt all of that together. But sure, without any technical ability to do it currently known to man, we will just solve the problem. So sure, yeah. You do realize the sun goes down at night, and even in West Texas the wind will go still for days on end, right?
"My battery is low, and it is getting dark" is no way to run a robust electricity grid (even NASA gave up on this), especially with climate change affecting weather patterns. Renewables and the battery storage which makes them viable (also the sun sets and the wind calms for more than four hours in most places) are a good transition but long term 24 hour a day base load nuclear is definitely needed especially as we transition away from fossil fuels to electricity for our heating and transportation. These new designs offer a lot of promise, very few technologies stand still and remain viable after all.
Not so, there's is always sun shining somewhere and wind blowing somewhere and water flowing somewhere, that's the point of a grid, the solution isn't nuclear its worldwide cooperation, which is why we will never succeed
@@davidmedlin8562 That answer implies that if its sunny lets say in France, but cloudy in Poland, energy will be send. sounds good until you take into account losses. A fully green "grid" needs some alternate source on demand,. Also nuclear can very well be included in that utopian grid. Just saying
As I see it, the optimal direction is if we invest in nuclear for the transition phase, so it can aid in whatever natural energy may fail to provide in terms of consistency. In the meantime, natural sources of energy will aid in generating hydrogen during excess power periods, which can be used either for transportation - or preferably to simply store the energy for later use at no cost to the environment - far better than any conventional battery. By investing more in nuclear now during the transition phase, we also increase the speed of development for the future, where nuclear could become a far greater player overall, while other types of energy collection have time to grow at their natural pace.
We absolutely need this for base load. Even with LFP batteries, Wind and Solar aren't stable enough for baseload generation as the requirement for batteries is truely massive in the case of solar. There is also the potential in military vessles as nuclear powered destroyers and cruisers (the biggest logistical headache for the military in prolonged operations). Further, if demonstrated to be safe enough (which is well within the realm of possibility) it can be used to produce clean shipping. Small reactors can be more safely deployed to service remote towns and the waste (what there is of it as it is only 1% or less of conventional nuclear, can be transported as a solid in a tank that can then be heated, melted and pumped. During the transport, there is no danger of a "leak". Using this in conjunction of Wind/Solar will also allow less aggregate land use for the grid. From a security perspective, its also much easier to secure to ensure part of the grid remains operational during hurricane etc.
With the inefficiency of solar, and inconsistency of wind, the conversation of the transportation system to electricity will require energy that can only be supplied by nuclear if we are to reduce dependence on fossil fuel. Molten salt reactor might be the cheapest and safest form of nuclear energy.
That just isn’t true. While I am still building it, the system that will power both my house and my car is easily achievable and compared to gasoline, cheaper.
1. Inefficiency doesn't matter when you have practically infinite power. Also modern solar panels are approaching the efficiency of conventional power plants. 2. Batteries are now cheap enough to store energy for several hours and still be competitive against conventional power sources. 3. Solar panels can be put anywhere, and with falling prices you don't even need optimal angles. And batteries are even less picky about location and scale. That means most of the transmission cost can be eliminated, and that's huge. According to some predictions solar energy can soon get cheaper then just the transmission cost, which means nothing can compete. But nuclear energy will have a role still, where sunlight is scarce, or where power density matters more than cost. Larger ships for example would be a perfect fit for nuclear energy. So much that it has been done for almost 70 years. In fact naval reactors predate commercial power reactors.
Thanks for the update. Those unanswered questions you mention have already got the push to nuclear much slowed in the US- nuclear has to answer those lingering questions (how "lingering" is a persistent 10,000 year effect?) before anyone is going forward commercially. Ironically, Chernobyl may have created on of the likelier invasion routes into Ukraine, lying less than 100km north of Kiev, and being relatively empty. We gotta stop doing this particular boogie! FR
But not perhaps so promising a route for them as getting to Kiev is more likely to raise a military response and there's not much round Chernobyl. Rumour has it they're more interested in the coast running down towards Odessa.
About this persistent 10,000 year effect: If nuclear waste is so horrible, why has Chernobyl been repopulated with a wide variety of wild animals that seem to be doing splendidly? I think the danger of nuclear waste is rather exaggerated.
Wow. Both doesn't understand nuclear waste recycling AND likes to speculate about Russia invading Ukraine. Let me guess - Biden voter? ~Sincerely, a Green voter who wishes the Green movement hadn't sold out to fossil fuel lies about nuclear power in the 1970's and given us another 5 decades of fossil fuel thanks to the "clean coal" lie they got Nader to unfortunately repeat.
I think the key is to build mini reactors. They're Faster faster faster. Faster to approve, faster to build, faster to replace (or upgrade.) Granularity of resources is the same argument as modern computing with server farms and a distributed network, versus a few giant centralized computers like in 1950. Yes we absolutely have to move forward with this technology. And we have to perfect the actual safety.
Nuclear reactors don't make a large amount of waste in general. They use so little fuel, that safe storage isn't really a huge issue. Coal plants, in contrast, produce huge amounts of toxic waste, and kill far more people. Natural gas is much better, but unlike the products of nuclear reactions, the waste is pumped straight into the atmosphere. Thorium reactors may be amazing in a decade, but there are great reactors today. Public opinion shaped by paranoia, and insane regulations, set back clean and efficient power.
The problem with things like having a number for LCoE is that it's heavily dependant on your assumptions. Eg. I'd expect a traditional Uranium cycle plant to have a lifespan closer to 40 years (at least for those built in the '70s and '80s), not just 30 years, and any built today I'd expect to be more like 50 years. A thorium one I'd think would be less than that because of all of the increased corrosion factors. Likewise, the assumptions for wind and solar are that only a 4-hr battery storage is nessasary (might be so when they're only contributing 30% to the grid, but if we were aiming for ~80% then you'd likely need days worth of battery banks). And then there's the point that these LCoE measurements are trying to compare apples to apples when in the real world, it's apples and bananas. You'd need much more energy capacity for a wind and solar dominated system to account for the variability in supply. Then there's the point of under what conditions are those LCoE for renewables caculated? For example, is that just the numbers for solar from southern California or a global average?
The lifespan might be less with current materials, but the costs are more than made up for by far cheaper construction requirements. A molten salt reactor core can be made of 1/2 inch thick stainless steel and doesn't require a massive reinforced concrete bunker to house it. A PWR reactor is a precision forging many inches thick and does require a bunker to house it. The less stringent manufacturing requirements also mean they could be mass produced, like ThorCon is planning to do. Days? Try weeks or months. The number of daylight hours varies by nearly 8 over the course of the year where I live and the wind blows when it feels like it. Ambient energy is simply far too unreliable to run civilization.
The fuel rods used in our common nuclear reactors only give up 3% of its fuel, the rest is wasted. This waste product can be combined with the Molten Salt Reactors and "burnt up" in the process. One would need to build them in pairs, as periodic maintenance of these reactors may take about 3 months.
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Yes I definitely think we need nuclear energy. It is the safest, cleanest and space saving energy source we have.
If humans want to continue making nuclear weapons' to kill each other with.... yes😮💨
@@galactock It's way harder to produce nukes from the U-233 created by thorium as how he said there are products within the material mix that create a lot of high energy gamma rays. It is way easier to just enrich mined uranium directly.
You completely failed to explain how this is better than other reactors. Do you even know what cladding is? Yeah well I don't so thanks for keeping that a secret. Oh and your intro music makes me want to go back in time and punch a baby version of myself in the face. Trust me there's a better way to get a take, you don't have to murder the singer. It's so high pitched and off key, and whats the clicking in the background right before she squeals, that goes 'chick chick'. Sounds like somebody attempted to hit the space bar on their keyboard and turn it off, but was overtaken by the squealing and never made it out of the studio alive. '
I do respect your cleverness in picking a name for your channel though. You couldn't come up with a name so you added an 'ed' and said it was with you. This is "Failed Brainstorming with Matt Ferrell" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
Good luck , and have a nice day.
We need more cowbell. Oh, sorry wrong wild animal.
9:01 Thorium is an unwanted byproduct of the rare earth mining process used for making electronics. If it is more expensive to mine that cost would be covered by the rare earth mining process. Also the USA has a huge store of already mined and separated Thorium sitting in containers out in the desert.
what desert
@@jediknight2350 the desert
*pans across dunes*
@@jediknight2350 Mojave desert
same in France we have 150 years of thorium ready too be used if we developed Thorium reactor
I think the desalination plant integration idea is probably the best seller. Freshwater is a huge stresser that will come up in the near future (think 5-10 years)
Living in the west, with drought, thirsty crops, and wildfires, we need desalination and Micronuclear Thorium power now, not 5-10 year
s
They could also use the water and electricity to make hydrogen.
@hun dun,
That's an expensive way to make hydrogen.
I remember the father of a coworker of mine discussing MSR’s back in the early 1980’s. He was a engineer and a boilermaker who was Superintendent on many different power plant construction jobs. He had worked at Oak Ridge and at the Hanford Reservation, along with multiple other energy facilities. I wish he was still living, it would be great to pick his brain today.
I think positives to nuclear like footprint, which allows less habitat destruction and energy density, are overlooked too much due to fear and complexity. Wind and solar is simple for people to get their heads around but I’d rather one “small reactor” and Forrest area around it vs a huge field of solar panels. Thoughts to square footage as a consideration?
I think more research into solar and storage can I overcome the size. But, I've been more interested in hydrogen fuel cells, getting hydrogen from electrolysis.
@@robertnicholls9917 Right now there is a million times energy density factor difference.
@@robertnicholls9917 energy from the sun is very dispersed. There isn't very much energy per square foot coming from the sun... Even if you could capture it all, the square footage (density) of solar would change by a factor of 4-5 (panels are 20-25% efficient currently). But the density difference between solar and nuclear is FAR larger than a factor of 4. There's a physics limitation that can't just be "innovated" through.
Centralized power, especially nuclear power, has significant security risks. Wind and solar do not. You could cut the power to millions of people *and* contaminate an enormous area by targeting a nuclear plant. Just because it hasn’t really happened yet doesn’t mean it won’t.
@@PvtPartzz a fair point if not a little dystopian, but very relevant as seen with Russia in the Ukrainian. Small reactors would mitigate that risk though.
There are lots of people asking about the claim of "burning up," old nuclear waste in Thorium reactors. I posted a response to one such comment asking about it, and figured there were so many others it would probably be best to post it outright so others can see the explanation and hopefully it will address questions or concerns, or simply those wanting to hear about the potential for Thorium to "burn up" old nuclear waste products.
First, the main issue with this concept: The ""burning" of old nuclear waste, specifically plutonium (the primary nuclear byproduct of the classic Uranium-based light-water reactor (LWR) nuclear power plant) doesn't occur in Thorium-based plants. The process is actually used to create a new fissile material for use in the current nuclear power plants. The process of generating electricity via the fission of Uranium is far more complex than most people realize. It's not as simple as melting uranium and dumping it in a rod and boiling water. The uranium refinement process involves creating a granular black powder known as UOX, or Uranium Oxide. This material is formed into the nuclear rods which generate heat via fission, boiling the water, which spins turbines, which generates electricity.
The Plutonium is created when U-235 (the type most common isotope of Uranium used in nuclear energy generation and some fission-based nuclear weapons) is fissioned and releases Neutrons, which can then be absorbed into U-238, which is present in the UOX fuel pellets used to make rods. When U-238 absorbs several neutrons, it becomes U-239, which beta-decays into Neptunium 239, which beta-decays into Plutonium-239. That Plutonium is the nasty material we usually associate with nuclear waste byproducts. While U-238 isn't fissile enough to generate the heat and energy necessary to maintain the fission reaction that generates the heat used for electricity generation, Pu-239 is. Now, Plutonium can be used in other types of nuclear reactors, like "fast neutron reactors," but it can also be mixed with UOX as a fissile material to make rods for classic LWR fuel.
Here's where the "burn-up" of Pu can occur. Instead of mixing UOX with PuOX to make MOX (mixed oxide fuel, composed of uranium oxide and plutonium oxide) pellets for fuel rods, Thorium oxide, or ThOx can be mixed to make (PuTh)Ox, or Plutonium-Thorium Oxide, which can them be used to made fuel rods for classic LWR nuclear power plants. It can also be added to UOX to make (UTh)OX, which works like traditional nuclear fuel pellets and rods, but reduces the amount of Plutonium generated during the fission process. the Thorium absorbs neutrons and becomes U-232, which can absorb another neutron and become U-233, which is fissile and can be reused as even more fuel.
Essentially, Thorium can be used in CURRENT nuclear power plants to extend the quantity of uranium fuel (by becoming U-232, and then U-233), or can be combined with Pu-239 to create a new fuel source out of our stockpiles of nuclear waste byproducts.
This is where the misconception of Thorium plants burning Plutonium plants comes from. Plutonium can be used to make a new fuel source for CURRENT nuclear power plants, not as a fuel source for FUTURE Thorium-based fuel power plants.
This still accomplishes the desired goal of burning plutonium from our piles of nuclear waste, resulting in less nuclear material proliferation, and thus less potential nuclear weapons. This idea is already used in some places, and can be used in almost every single current nuclear power plant.
Now, Thorium-based fuel in FUTURE Thorium power plants (they're still being designed and tested, they're not fully viable yet) would use a different method to generate power. Instead of creating powdered Oxides, turning them into fuel rods, and using those to generate power, Thorium *breeds* Uranium-233. Thorium itself CANNOT generate sufficient heat to run a power plant. But remember, just like in fuel rods, Thorium can be bombarded with neutrons, and it becomes U-233 (that's why it's called fertile, or a breeder; it is used to create a fissile material that can be used as fuel, but thorium cannot be used as a fuel by itself). If we wanted to be technical, Thorium plants are *actually* U-233 plants, since it can only generate enough heat to run a power plant once the thorium has been bred into U-233.
I know this is a massive amount of information, but hopefully it will help anyone who is curious about Thorium and its *multiple* potential uses a as a fuel source through breeding, extending Uranium stockpiles, or being used with old nuclear waste (plutonium) to create a new fuel source for old nuclear power plants. Also, sorry for any typos. I had to type this up in a hurry and didn't have time to spell check.
Actually, that's not exactly true. The "magic" isn't the Thorium part, it's the Molten Salt Reactor, w/ fuel kept in a liquid state. You can basically just throw any nuclear waste into the salt _along with _ thorium. As the thorium fissions (technically Uranium as the Thorium is converted to U232) it bombards the waste with neutrons and either activates it or transmutes it into a more stable or unstable form. This unstable form makes it WILDLY radioactive short term, where it breaks down and releases decay heat. And then eventually ends up as waste that can be stored for a few months before becoming inert as opposed to current waste which is low radiation but stays that way for relatively long periods. I'm glossing over *a lot* but its sort of like a catalytic side process that uses the extra neutrons to boost the heat generated from the reactor by irradiating other elements (or waste). I believe you can technically do this to anything heavier than Iron and some things lighter. Plutonium specifically is probably worth more as weapons grade material or for solid core reactors. The "dirty little secret" of LNRs is that you inherently add a reprocessing stage to make your primary fuel, U232 from Thorium but you can also reprocesses whatever you want, as long as it's chemically separable, as opposed to isotopically separable. If it's not what you want, you can put in back for another pass of neutron bombardment. Obviously it's WAY more efficient & safe to use specifically calculated and measured percentages of certain "waste" to get a more favorable yield but, in theory you can just chuck crap in and let it stay there until it transmutes, becomes unstable and isn't radioactive anymore - or long term radioactive. It's really not hard to guard waste for a few months up to 20-30 years, the problem is current "waste" (which is actually often barely used up fuel that no longer can work in a solid reactor) that lasts or longer than humans have been a species and trying to keep that contained on geological time scales.
@@bryanl1984 Being an absolute novice as far as nuclear power goes, there's a lot I really haven't grasped BUT I did read both the original post and your reply and I thank you both for taking the time to post.....
The British company: Moltex is ALREADY building a 300MW "waste burner" reactor in New Brunswick, for the Canadian grid. The reactor is powered by stockpiles of Plutonium, which some countries have accumulated during the "cold war". Britain has about 100 tons - enough to last quite a while.
MSRs are powered by a liquid fuel - the uranium/thorium is dissolved in the coolant. This gives excellent controlability. The reactors are even throttleable.
@@bryanl1984, to burn the really nasty actinides, you need a fast spectrum and Th MSRs are not well suited to that cycle. To really clean up you need to do something like the MCFR or Moltex fast spectrum molten chloride salt reactors or SFR + Pyroprocessing.
@@thrunsguinneabottle3066, As you may know, the Moltex design is quite different than the other MSRs as the fuel is NOT dissolved in the coolant. Rather the fuel salt is loaded into fuel pins very similar to a Metal Fueled SFR like PRISM and a completely separate non-fuel coolant salt is circulated to remove the heat. Another HUGE difference is it runs a fast spectrum (unlike most MSRs) which allows it to burn the higher actinides. NB Power/Moltex are still in the design stage...hopefully they can make it work and between them and Ontario's OPG recycle all the spent CANDU fuel to significantly reduce the radioactive lifetime of the waste down to several hundreds years.
I think the omission here is the small modular reactor development which applies modern mass production technology to the construction of nuclear power stations and decimates both the cost and construction time. There is no reason why Thorium MSR cannot be supplied modular.
Thorium MSR concept was mentioned in some of the information I came across on Thorium Molten Salt Reactor over a decade ago, back then mainstream nuclear industry was not talking much about this SMR, it’s like a failed actor that’s keep trying to reinvent themselves by what others are doing.
There is no commercially viable MSR technology, so there is no point in making the production of the reactors more modular. This is putting the cart a decade or two before the horse...
since the last nuclear incedent in fukusima, some people are pushing to smaller reactors. In case of a meltdown, can easily be repaired and etc.
the msr didn't make his debut as de facto energy producer is bc of the lobby from ppl who produce uranium PWRs and BWRs since MSRs are safer and the govs who need in a pinch produce nuclear weapons using plutonium.
Except for the need for at least 3 armed guards at every Reactor for the next 98,000 years.
@@MrKamikaze1337 You don't need to resort to conspiracy theories. The reality is that all forms of nuclear energy requires very high upfront costs in development and infrastructure, and the financial and temporal risk involved in developing and then deploying MSR technology is just too high to take on. Ever seen a reactor that was built on schedule and under budget? Now do the same with a technology that hasn't been proven yet. Much simpler explanation.
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors "LFTRs" are seriously the future. I love their design, their safety nets, the commonalities of the resources, the beta decay map. It would greatly improve the future power grid and we can finally move past our painful learning growing pain days of nuclear power that sadly timed up with a war and when we didn't respect the safety nets that were necessary while learning about this science and power source. There is so much untapped potential to create stability to our power grid with no emissions so our atmosphere improves, the climate stops heating up, there is so much positive to gain from safe and smart nuclear power.
Yea. I’ve become convinced late that I may have written nuclear off too early and need to pay more attention to the actual results being realized.
Seems like it definitely has a place in our energy future.
I agree. Wind farm are hideous and solar just isn't an option everywhere. That said, it will take some doing to educate people how safe these new reactors are. For the uneducated nuclear=bad. Look at Germany, they're shutting down their nuclear reactors just so they can be dependent on Russian natural gas...(facepalm)
What would the waste amount be compared with uranium waste, equal or more or less?
@@rodger3641 From what I have learned, the old ways is about 15% efficient thus a lot of waste. While Thorium is about 90% efficient and thus a lot less waste. the half-life is around 300 to 500 years.
@@cam35mm shithot mate, where ever you find intact dinosaur bones would be a good place to bury the crap too.
Pretty good breakdown of this technology. As far as comparing msr reactors to renewables, there are some unfair/inaccurate biases that always raise their ugly heads. If the promise of msr technology is realized, their construction, regulatory and operating costs will be a small fraction of light water reactors. Solar and wind costs are always presented with a 4 hr battery backup. This is fine with a renewable contribution of 20 - 40%. The costs rise exponentially once they are relied on for 80%, and another exponential rise for 100% reliance.
A likely candidate for the best "battery" is molten salt or other thermal storage. This would work well with nuclear as well, making a mixed system of renewables and nuclear an easy visual. Of course if we pursued nuclear more aggressively, there wouldn't be an intermittency issue. Nuclear equals constant, reliable energy, with boatloads of heat. Heat for not only desalination, but hydrogen production, heavy industrial processes, heating the local community and more. The waste can be used for things like medical isotopes. MSRs are not just of the lftr design. Fast neutron designs can be employed to use much of the nuclear waste already in storage.
Well worth pursuing. 👍
Your exponential cost growth assumes renewables produce just enough energy. It'll be cheaper to over-produce to displace some batteries. The side effect will of course be free power at times of high production.
@@mrleenudler, an electrical grid works by matching demand with production on the fly.
Over producing is not possible.
The can only be over capacity some of which is shut down to not overwhelm the system.
What is produced must be consumed.
Not true. Denmark already produces 50+ % of electrical energy with wind, and we have 0 battery storrage. Intelligent energy pricing will allow us to move demand off peak hours like car charging and other high demand loads. PtX will also make it possible to get even higher wind production.
How does the specific heat of molten salt heat/energy storage capacity compare with batteries, or heat stored in water?
@@gandalf1124 Denmark is also a net importer of electricity, generating only 83% of net energy. It imports / exports a lot of energy when production is low / high which wouldn't work if everybody was doing it. Denmark exports 45% of generation and imports around 30% of usage
I work with Uranium fueled pressurized water reactors, and I've been super fascinated with the differences between Thorium MSR's and what I work with. This video was extremely concise and well explained. Thanks, Matt!
No investor owned utility in the U.S. is even considering Thorium. Isn't it strange that when people have to invest their own money, they don't fall for the social media, YT, or power point chatter ???
@@clarkkent9080 big oil folks are jumping on it in the states, they're realizing they'll get left behind otherwise.
@@TheLegitSounds Really? Name one project that is doing anything more that asking for taxpayer welfare. Kirk Sorenson has been pushing Thorium for more than a decade and his company has done nothing but ask for hand outs.
Bill Gated and his Terrapower MSR reviewed Thorium and rejected it as too costly
@clarkkent9080 : Interesting that @TheLegitSounds never named even one project. Maybe there are none.
(11:05) Terrapower isn't building a molten chloride fast reactor in Wyoming. It's building its liquid sodium metal fast reactor (Natrium) in Wyoming. Using molten salt for thermal energy storage DOES NOT make Natrium an MSR.
What William said.
@@gordonmcdowell Anyone who wants to learn about advanced reactors, nuances, the advantages and disadvantages of different types of reactors, should check out Gordon's channel. It's got TONS of content and is a great place to start learning.
Matt, could you say more about MSRs "burning up" radioactive waste from pressurized water reactors? I understand this is possible, and if so, that may, in the near term, be as important a use as producing energy.
Molten chloride salt reactors like the one from Terra power are fast-spectrum. Fast reactors burn actinides, while thermal spectrum reactors tend to accumulate more actinides than they burn, that's why fast reactors are called waste-burners (they don't burn all the waste, just the actinides which are the ones that make spent fuel radioactive for tens of thousands of years instead of hundreds). LFTRs, despite being thermal spectrum, burn from U233, so they accumulate less actinides than traditional thermal spectrum, but any reactor using u233 would do the same, molten salt or not.
Similarly, you do not need MSRs to burn waste, just a hard-spectrum reactor like a liquid metal cooled reactor (they have it in Russia and they have had them since the 1960s)
Elysium energy were designing a fast spectrum molten NaCl reactor which could burn waste, Plutonium, U238 and Thorium. The waste would have to be processed into chloride salts but the Japanese developed a process to do just that some time ago - dissolve fuel rods, capture the volatiles and sequester them until decay to solid and filter the insolubles out for geologic disposal. Elysium estimated they could run their reactor for 40 years continuously only stopping for checks on the erosion of the reactor pot. I believe Terrapower is looking at a similar project.
@@vipondiu Th reactors are pretty interesting but the push for them is strongly reminiscent of the push for FBRs in the past. I just hope we finally get something that is functional, safe and addresses the waste issue, and soon. It's the cleanest energy out there and we could use that in a big way.
Hi Jim, I'm no scientist but let me break down the thing that rocks me to the core about these 'waste-eating' breeder reactors. This from a guy who was anti-nuclear for the first 40 years of my life! It's simply an unscientific myth that nuclear waste is a problem for 100,000 years. Put it in a breeder reactor, get 90 times the energy out of it, and the final waste only stays hot for about 300 years. This real waste (called fission products) should be vitrified. This means melting it down into strong ceramic bricks that chemically bond the waste in the brick. If an accident drops the bricks or a truck smashes into the bricks, there is no radioactive dust to spread about. Then just bury the bricks under the reactor park for 300 years, and it's safe.
America has enough nuclear 'waste' to run her for 1000 years without mining any more uranium, and the UK has enough for 500 years. Today's nuclear 'waste' is not a problem - but the SOLUTION to climate change! This 4 minute Argonne Labs video explains. th-cam.com/video/MlMDDhQ9-pE/w-d-xo.html
The world's most famous climatologist Dr James Hansen recommends Breeder Reactors as the solution to climate change. th-cam.com/video/CZExWtXAZ7M/w-d-xo.html
His colleague Tom Blees wrote a free book summarising their work. www.thesciencecouncil.com/pdfs/P4TP4U.pdf
IF you're REALLY paranoid about nuclear waste - there's another place to store it. The ocean. This is not dumping uranium dust into steel barrels at the bottom of the English channel where the barrels could rust and nuclear dust spread everywhere. Instead, we'd vitrify the waste into ceramic bricks as the video above explains. If the whole world used used breeder reactors it would only generate 1 barge worth of waste every 2 years. Pilot the barge out to your deepest ocean trench, and sink it. Water halves radiation every 15 cm. If you trap the bricks in cages mounted a few meters in from the ship's walls, that space filled with water would protect anything outside the barge. Drop the entire world's nuclear waste in 6km deep trenches every 2 years, and you're done with it FOREVER!
This entire comment thread basically nailed it.
Two questions:
- I seem to recall hearing somewhere that thorium reactors could actually be used to consume nuclear waste from traditional nuclear power. Is this true? If so, that alone would seem to be a huge advantage.
- How adjustable is the output of a thorium plant? Is it only suitable for base load or could it replace the highly reactive gas power plants without resorting to batteries?
I responded to your question but realized there was a misunderstanding that many people have about the way thorium is used in power generation, and what it can do with plutonium as a fuel source. I posted a general comment about it if you'd like to read it and understand the process better.
Yes Th MSRs can burn nuclear waste from traditional U reactors. If I remember, Kirk Sorensen estimated up to 5% of the fuel could be old waste.
Q2: power (heat) output can regulated by adjusting graphite rods in the MSR, increasing or decreasing the amount of fission reactions. Also, most MSR designs are small, some are small enough to fit on a flatbed trailer, making mass production in a factory viable, thus greatly reducing cost. The thinking is if we make them small then each town could have their own MSR. Bigger cities would just need more small MSRs. Thus power output is scalable in this way too. It would also eliminate the need for high power lines (where power loss can be significant) and an interdependent grid, making us much less susceptible to grid attacks or EMPs. The video didn't mention these other benefits of MSRs. It's the smartest way forward bc wind & solar can't even keep up with increasing demand, let alone supply current needs.
Most MSR designs are load adaptive and can generate more power as demand increases, thus as long as the infrastructure can handle the level of power and peak demand doesn't exceed the generation capacity its not an issue. Also it would eliminate the need for storage.
*It's about time. The USA was the leaders in Thorium reactors in the 1950's. We should never have given up on the Thorium reactor but then we needed THE BOMB and Uranium plants make enough D3 to turn A-bombs into H-bombs so we needed to run "DIRTY" reactors, for the weapons!*
True, Search for video's by 'kirk sorensen' for more info on spent Uranium recycling.
I am certain that the planet needs some form of consistent energy to work alongside the renewables. Thorium appears to be the most acceptable (politically) before fusion can be relied upon.
Absolutely agree with the first point. Without an consistent energy source, we won't be able to provide enough energy to anybody at any time. No matter how good energy storage systems might get - the potential energy that we get out of nuclear fission and especially Fusion reactors is just too immense to ignore.
But I actually doubt, that Thorium reactors will be available much earlier than nuclear Fusion reactors.
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What this means is that ALL current methods of electrical generation, even wind generators, & solar panels, will be superceded by the Plasma Reactor, within the next few years. For the simple reason the Plasma Reactor can do all three jobs explained above, simultaneously, and do these jobs at a FRACTION of current costs !!!!!!!!!
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Yep
Thorium nuclear power plant can also be considered recycling too, because it uses Thorium that is otherwise useless and thrown away. Thorium is a common waste product of rare earth mining, especially for Monazite and Bastnasite.
Solar and wind are wastes of time so long as there are no means to store energy. They are primarily made by communist china which uses coal energy to make them. Meaning the carbon sagings are small. Lithium is just too dirty to produce and not an efficient storage medium for large scale use.
Nuclear is the only answer.
Fusion power would be the best option, and you know it's only 30 years away.
Yep! It's been just 30 years away for about 80 years now.
Whereas thorium has been an actual thing since the 60s, and we still have neither. What's going on?
Fusion is real in Science fiction, now we need to explore antimatter a bit more.
Cheap shot
I know it's part of the funding cycle, but if the mainstream fusion keep claiming fusion when there's no sustainable fusion, then people will replace the saying "the boy who cried wolf" will be replaced with the "the scientists that claimed fusion".
I've explored much "fringe" science over the years, & your channel is pretty much a list of my favorites-the discoveries that I KNEW would soon advance tech exponentially. Thanks for keeping me informed of how my imagined future is finally arriving!
Not that "fringe" anymore. But I get the meaning
Greetings:
Although you mentioned briefly that thorium reactors have spent fuel waste with a shorter half-life than conventional light water reactors (pressurized and boiling water reactors) you failed to mention that molten salt fueled and cooled reactors can use light water reactor spent fuel as its fuel, being a potential solution to existing stored spent fuel; we get energy while significantly reducing the volume of existing spent fuel and significantly reducing the lifetime of its radioactive spent fuel.
Thorcon is presently working on a demo molten salt reactor for Indonesia that will operate on the least expensive fission fuel available at the time. The reactors will then be manufactured in Korean shipyards similar shipbuilding, towed to the shore closest to their need and settled on the seabed where they will be connected to the grid. Multiple units will work in parallel as power capacity is required. The reactors themselves will be delivered as sealed pots that will be swapped with second units that are available side-by side with collant/fuel pumped from the old pot to the new so refueling downtime is limited and providing radioactive decay time before the old pot is refurbished. Factory construction will enable reduced expense as improvements can be handled during manufacture.
The U.S. built a plant to reprocess spent reactor fuel but it was never used and abandonded in the 1970s. The U.S. spent billions building a MOX plant to recycle weapons grade Pu239 into reactor fuel but it was cancelled in 2018 because of massive cost over runs and schedule delays. ANYTHING dealing with nuclear is super expensive. You are not just burning waste paper in a boiler.
it's not that easy, this process needs massive, very complicated treatment of heterogenous fuel rods to be able to be used for the transmutation and even then, only very specific parts of the "waste" can be used.
it's nowhere near economical
@@Markus-zb5zd We need an economical base load power source and that can be nuclear. But here in the U.S. every recient (last 25 years) nuclear project has been plagued by massive cost over runs and schedule delays to the point that most have simply been canceled and the ones that were not canceled are resulting in significant cost to ratepayers. Most of these private investor owned companies that are on the "we gotta fix climate change bandwagon" , were polluting the planet for decades. The only green they see is billions of taxpayer dollars up for the taking. They don't want to fix the construction issues because those billions of cost over runs flow into the pockets of these companies.
I have not heard any suggestions on how that will be any different for any new nuclear project. The excuse used in the current builds (VC Summer and Vogtle) was pre-fab factory builds but that was used and turned out to be a complete failure. The failures in constructing nuclear is resulting in a new generation of anti-nuclear Americans as electrical generation from these sources results in significant rate increases.
I am not a betting person but I am willing to wager my own money that the Natrium and NuScale will not meet schedule or cost targets and I am not the only one that believes this. The article below appeared 2 days ago.
According to Ohio-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a new type of nuclear reactor that would provide carbon-free energy to at least four states in the Western U.S. poses financial risks for utilities and their ratepayers as being is "too expensive, too risky and too uncertain. “The report concluded that it's likely the NuScale reactor will take longer to build than estimated and that the final cost of power will be higher than anticipated and greater than the cost of power from renewable alternatives.
The project's owner and the company developing the reactor, that stands to benefit from $4 billion in taxpayer funds used to help build the reactors. criticized the report, saying that the cost estimates should include taxpayer subsidizes when calculating the costs of the reactor.
@@Markus-zb5zd It doesn't use fuel rods at all, And the radioactive byproducts end up in the molten salt and are free to keep reacting to lighter and more stable byproducts. The molten nature of the reaction make it possible to separate and/or filter out desirable and undesirable byproducts.
The reason I keep focusing on a 100MW reactor is the engine needed for a ship. Ships are the worst polluters than cars and power plants except for coal plants.
another use besides desalination is hydrogen production like high temp electrolysis as well as distinct heating. its more efficient(esp if used from required cooling) to use some of this heat directly for heating then turning into electricity just to be turned back into heat for heating buildings, of course this requires another system. Also when comparing energy sources should see whole impact. glad you mentioned nuclear waste and batteries but there is also all the resources to build wind turbines, PVs, batteries and then also the life span of each component
Desalination would be a really bad idea, when it comes to MSRs at least. There's a reason China built their prototype in the desert and far from any body of water, and in an area where in practically never rains. Those salts used for cooling are massively corrosive and massively reactive with water (and oxygen). The reaction with oxygen is one problem, but it produces non-volatile solids. The reaction with water is a horrendous problem .. you get a massive explosion, then a hot and volatile mist of hydrogenfluoride which is so agressive that .. well, don't look it up if you have a weak stomach, let's just say: it can dissolve glass/quartz .. and there's beryllium which is massively biotoxic and cancerogenic.
These all are really good reasons, to set up MSR as far away from water as possible.
@@augustaseptemberova5664 HF can pass through your skin and destroy your bones.
If I remember right, there's a Refinery Unit called HF Alkylation and it is among most dangerous oil industry processes.
@@artsmith103 Exactly. That's what they taught us in chem at uni, too. But I couldn't find that info on the English wikipedia, so I didn't include that here in case someone thinks I made that up or smth
@@augustaseptemberova5664 Note to self, don't use Wikipedia ;-)
@@artsmith103 lol .. thanks for the probably nicely meant comment, but .. no thanks.
There's an international collective of devoted chemists that work hard to keep chemistry-related wikipedia clean and factually correct, and backed up by primary sources.
This is why wikipedia is actually quite good to look up elements, main chemicals etc. and their main properties and hazards, especially the English and German wiki.
You shouldn't quote wikipedia in any scientific work, because it's not a primary source, but other than that when it comes to online referring someone to some basic knowledge, it's fair game.
I don't understand why LCOE is counted for 30 years of operation? Most of the nuclear reactors have lifespan of 60 years, new one are designed for 80 years of operation. On the other hand, wind and solar have lifespan up to 30 years batteries even shorter 15.... We can't logically compare something with lifetime measure if we don't assume in equation different lifespan. For 1 NPP we must rebuild 2x wind/solar plant and 4x its balancing storage...
Plus look at the storage of solar in the cost comparison; four hours! Not sure where on the planet that would consistently work.
Thanks for this update Matt.
I've been keeping an eye on the viability of Thorium technology for a while.
Some people have been keeping an eye on Thorium since the 1968 when the first MSR was built.
Hopefully big oil/tech won't get innovators killed/bribed to shut it down this time.
I did a paper about thorium reactors 17 years ago. I'm still waiting but I've matured enough to realize they wouldn't be making as much profit from such an efficient power source.
The problem is supply - both in terms of source and security. Thorium is not as widely distributed as uranium and is more difficult to extract from the few ores it has. High-grade uranium deposits are fairly common and can be very big, but high-grade thorium deposits are small. Thorium reactors would require countries to import thorium from a few countries that might not always be friendly!
Kirk Sorensen said in one of his LFTR videos that the antique (my term, not his) uranium based reactors work on the razor/razorblade business model. The profits aren't made from building the reactor, they're made from selling the highly specialized and very difficult to manufacture fuel elements. How much money can be made from BAGS of lithium fluoride salt? Thus, there's a disincentive for the legacy reactor industry to work toward LFTRs or lobby for government support to research them.
@@karhukivi the problem is REGULATION
Nuclear has a high upfront cost, the industry is matured. And the big players have little reason to stretch their hands and disrupt it.
End of Argument.
Because like the other user said, solid fuel rod reactors are a razor 🪒 blade business model.
------
As for your points, even if supply was an issue, (which it's not), Thorium is already in surplus as a byproduct of our rare earth mining processes).
It would make sense to massively adopt Thorium if only because of the giant Climate Crisis we are going through.
The amount of power we can draw from it.
And the better Fuel efficiency compared to solid candle light reactors.
@@karhukivi umm 🤔 you do realize thorium is actually very abundant and is even considered waste when mining for rare earth metals.
@@karhukivi Thorium can be purchased as a bulk chemical from any reliable supplier. But, uranium reactors are built to only use patented machined uranium fuel rods. They can only be purchased from 1 supplier so they can keep prices sky high.
One minor confusion. The TerraPower (Bill Gates) design only uses Molten Salt to hold the energy (heat) from the reaction for later use. It uses liquid sodium for cooling, and is a fast neutron design.
With recent advances in mass produced thorium reactors in ship yards, a complete reactor can be built in months, and delivered anywhere in the world in weeks. This destroys the cost of long construction times, the primary expense of building reactors, and further reduces the cost per kw. Moreover, because the reactor is made of plug and play modules, replacing worn subsystems, is fast, inexpensive (relatively speaking), and increases service life. Finally variations in design make it possible to also build fast breeder reactors based on the thorium cycle, allowing us to use the existing solid nuclear waste as fuel, and eliminating the long term storage problem created by the prior technology. Until we improve our grid to better handle transient energy production, thorium reactors provide us a fantastic stop gap to ensure global energy sufficiency, while protecting the environment, and even providing the energy to help us begin removing excess carbon from the environment.
Very well said, I agree. This NEEDS to be brought in as a comprehensive solution to combine with monocrystalline solar panels on business warehouse & residential home roofs, as well as wind-power in areas with stable winds and hydro-electric where available. Lower energy costs and increased electrical production is sorely needed across the board, and with lower prices will positively impact things like electric vehicles, desalination, recycling, aluminum production, and many other industries. It can't just be one technology only, but on the large electric utility scale we're way past needing some new state-of-the-art nuclear reactors here in the USA. And frankly? It's a bit embarrassing that China is jumping past us on this... I guess we'll have to see what happens with China's facility first?
@@XSFx5
As long as our government is for sale to the highest bidder (i.e. the fossil fuel consortia), ours will remain a society antagonistic to environmentally friendly energy alternatives. We need to firewall government from corporate influence if we ever hope to have a government serve its most vital purpose. Namely the success and sufficiency of a thriving middle class.
@@annemarietobias Looking at the last few years, I would say the highest bidders were Russia and China.
Thorium for all!! My dad has worked in Nuclear for almost 40years including many of the new tech developed in the 90’s and said this is where the technology should be going for many reasons
It's going to be necessary for space colonization as thorium is plentiful on the Moon and Mars. And it could help solve a number of international crises like the dispute between Iran that wants to modernize its power grid with nuclear energy, and the United States forcing a ban on nuclear weapons development.
We simply need some kind of nuclear if we want to go out. Solar just doesn't cut it.
The pioneers of nuclear energy knew molten salt was the way to go in 1965. Was better then and is still better now.
@@ernie4125 I agree, but don't count out solar too. United diversity, if you will. Solar panels are ideal for hot warehouse roofs, that seem to be everywhere these days. Currently they are just waste heat. So basically: solar for small-scale homes and businesses ; MSR nuclear, hydroelectric, wind farms for large-scale utility production & storage (pumped hydro, batteries, kinetic storage, etc).
@@XSFx5 -- It's funny how the empty, hollow cries for "diversity" from the left turn out to be Orwellian misuses of language when it comes to ideological and technical diversity. Control freaks want dominance in everything, but there are many reasons for decentralized approaches to our energy future and our economy.
9:01 - Thorium would only be expensive to mine if we were to explicitly mine just for that, but it happens to be a waste product of rare earth mining - at present, we apparently "throw away" (read: store in large piles) 30x more Thorium per year than needed to power the entire world. Add to that that Thorium needs very little processing to be fuel ready and it's pretty much the cheapest nuclear fuels in the world, and that's even before we consider that it's also far more efficiently used (99% vs 0.5%).
If you take a look at the Agorameter, which tracks Germany's electricity production in real times, and look at, say, the last month, you'll see that intermitency problems go far beyond a 4 hours lag of renewables production. it's more like several days in a row. So yeah, even on rather long lasting batteries, they'll still need to be backed up by gas or coal or nuke, that should obviously factor in the mwh price.
Plus his numbers make the meme of 30 year lifespan for nuclear when it's closer to twice that. How many times would solar panels and battery banks have to be replaced completely in 60 years?
Great video, as always. I have been asking and wondering for years, why are we so against Thorium. Yeah, we will get there with solar and wind someday but we can't just stop and just hope the newer items will be enough. Let's get on board with Thorium.
Thorium electricity generation will be mega plants that require complex engineering and high cost. Solar and wind are not realistic because we do not have the engineering vision to even come up with a solution for their shortcomings.
Renewable along side SMR, Thorium, natural gas and coal plants (recycling) can massively reduce carbon outputs.
Even if we still had the combustion engine as the main means of transport and the nuclear low carbon approach we would be able to reduce carbon levels.
This approach can also be used in the developing world to lower their carbon and also allow them to modernise and grow their economies at the same time.
We all know that fusion and renewables are where we want to get to but we have a 50 year gap in between that to fill.
Solar & wind are really only good for small applications. If we include all the energy a state uses, for example, Colorado, we would have to cover the whole state with solar panels, plus all of WY & KS, & most of NE, just for one state. This is bc our REAL energy use is not just lights and toasters, it's cleaning city water, building infrastructure, repairing roads, launching satellites, etc. 100% renewable is a utopian myth. We need something like Thorium MSRs with a high energy density at a cost cheaper than coal to make a real difference in the world, the WHOLE world, not just rich western countries.
@@bighands69 Would it be 50 years if we spent a fraction on nuclear energy that we have on wars and covid relief funds? Probably not.
Moreover if government allows innovators to do their thing, costs can come way down. For example Thorcon believes they can build 500MW plants for less than $500 million. How many billions were thrown around during covid relief and with $10 billion that could be 20 of these modular plants built.
@@destroya3303
Yes it would be 50 years. It takes a long time to building out a whole energy generation system. Even if they somehow tomorrow come forward with a design that would satisfy a working system it would then take several decades to build the thousands of plants needed in the west. It is not just an issue of money being spent.
Politics and uranium cartel. As of 2023 thorium is going to be tested by official u.s nuclear authorities. If thorium MSR's are viable.But its pretty much a done deal and commercial ones are coming before 2030. With prototypes already in production and running in china and russia. Greed and bribes can only hold for so long when theres such an abundant energy source to solve the impending energy crisis.
*The USA even had a Thorium powered airplane in the early1960's plus many working reactors BUT since the DOD was more interested in bomb making materials they ditched Thorium as being 'TO CLEAN'. An alloy called MONEL was even developed to safely carry the Molten salts.*
If I remember correctly, a molten salt reactor first achieved criticality in the mid sixties. Due to the large amount of investment in what is our current form of nuclear energy technology, such competition could not be allowed. This was the explanation I heard in an interview by one of the developers of the reactor. We are not unfamiliar with many examples of valuable technology and products being suppressed by powerful special interest. Hopefully the Chinese showing interest in this technology will make this less likely to happen.
The actual reason from what I understood was the MSR wasn't as suitable for producing weapons grade plutonium which was a major reason for the preference for traditional PWR/BWR reactors and thus they pushed for cutting the funding to MSR research. The military saw it as a potential threat to its supply for making warheads.
California… we have plenty of thorium. Every military base should have a reactor. Even if they produce less power, it will make stabilizing the grid far easier.
Matt, I’m not even a science guy but I think you’re wonderful. I love watching your presentations. Thanks
This. He reminds me of the Eureka video's we used to watch at the start of each new module in science class. Come to that, he reminds me of my science teacher back then. Mr. Stewart. Hilarious sense of humour, with module titles like "Light: A Heavy Subject" and such.
*It's about time. The USA was the leaders in Thorium reactors in the 1950's. We should never have given up on the Thorium reactor but then we needed THE BOMB and Uranium plants make enough D3 to turn A-bombs into H-bombs so we needed to run "DIRTY" reactors, for the weapons!*
Thanks for the balanced video on nuclear. First, I'd like to express strong support for more -- _much_ more -- nuclear energy. It is shocking that nuclear power has been campaigned _against_ by the same people who claim to worry about the climate. Being anti-nuclear is the climate equivalent of being an anti-vaxxer: Both attitudes stem from not having a rational understanding of risk, both attitudes are expressions of distrust in science and engineering _per se_ and both rely on a hand-wavy "naturalism" or appeal to what seems "organic". In other words, they're both forms of magical thinking.
With that out of the way, I'd like to clarify a few things that the video skirted around:
* Using Thorium as fuel and molten-salt reactors are two completely separate things. People often talk about them as if they are synonyms. But in reality, you can have all four combinations: Solid Uranium, molten-salt Uranium, solid Thorium and molten-salt Thorium. (You touch on this around 6:00, and that is good.) Three of these four combos have actually already been created and operated: The MSRE (Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment, in Oak-Ridge in the late 1960's) was a genuine molten-salt reactor, but only powered by Uranium (though the intention of the research was eventually to make a Thorium reactor). While reactors in both Pennsylvania and Germany have in the past used solid Thorium in combination with solid Uranium. So some lucky people in Europe and the US have already received electrical energy derived from Thorium.
* 4:18 "Thorium-fueled reactors offer a potentially safer, cleaner and more abundant alternative to traditional reactors fueled with highly radioactive elements." Sorry, Matt, but this is not a true statement. Uranium is the traditional fuel, and it is not highly radioactive. The two isotopes of Uranium that you can find on Earth have half-lives of 700 million and 4 billion years, meaning they have very low levels of radioactivity. Thorium-232's half-life is 14 billion years, so granted, it is even lower. But all three substances have very low levels of radioactivity. (Remember, the longer the half-life the more it approaches being a stable substance.) Maybe you had in mind the fission products inside the fuel once it has been used for a while -- these short-lived isotopes (whose half-lives range from less than a second to around 30 years) are intensely radioactive but are created with both fuel types (although with MSR's they would often be extracted from the fuel loop continuously). Or maybe you had in mind Plutonium-239 which, with a half-life of around 24,500 years, falls somewhere between the mild long-lived isotopes and the hot short-lived isotopes. People often highlight that Thorium reactors don't create any significant amounts of Plutonium-239, while Uranium reactors do. However, Plutonium is _not_ highly radioactive, you can handle it with no shielding and no gloves.
* 5:27 "One big benefit of Thorium reactors is the much smaller half-life of the nuclear waste." This sounds like a reference to the same topic as I described in the previous point, the creation of Plutonium-239. It is really only that substance which lies behind the scary soundbite-friendly statements that nuclear waste is dangerous for a hundred thousand years. The thinking behind those who hold this view is that any elevation in background radioactivity, beyond what exists in the original Uranium mine whence the fuel once came, is unacceptable. However, there is a large step from normal background radiation levels up to what is actually dangerous. The presence of Plutonium can indeed elevate background levels in the area where it is stored (in the hypothetical case that it were to escape the dry casks in which it would be stored), but even so it would not be to a level that is manifestly dangerous. In the opposing view where we accept that Plutonium-239 is not a significant danger, we must look for the radioactive substances that create more intense radiation, with the shorter half-lives that go along with that. This is in fact Strontium-90 and Caesium-137, both with half-lives of around 30 years. These are legitimately dangerous, but will have decayed to one thousandth the amount after 300 years, and one millionth the amount after 600 years -- pick your threshold. These two isotopes are also present in the fission products in Thorium, and are probably what lie behind the video's statement at 5:52 that Thorium waste is dangerous for 500 years. My contention is that the same is true for Uranium -- but that playing politics and a mis-applied "precautionary principle" has meant that Plutonium's decay is used as the benchmark for when the spent fuel is safe, rather than the Strontium and Caesium mentioned above. This has caused costs for traditional Uranium-based nuclear to balloon, and is one of the ways the technology has been thwarted in its efforts to decarbonize the world.
* 5:31 "Uranium-233 can be separated from the Thorium, which sets it apart from the Uranium-235 and 238. And it's Uranium-235 that contains very radioactive isotopes with half-lives of _thousands_ of years." (Emphasis is in the original audio.) Beyond being merely untrue, this statement is actually difficult to make sense of. If something is "very radioactive", it cannot have half-lives in "thousands of years". Those are mutually exclusive. The shorter the half-life, the more intense the radioactivity. The substance you're almost certainly referring to here, again, is Plutonium, which is weakly radioactive (though Uranium and Thorium are far weaker still). The way you use emphasis in this sentence makes it seem like long half-lives are scary and dangerous and somehow have a positive correlation with degree of radioactivity -- the truth is that long half-lives have a negative correlation with degree of radioactivity.
Follow-up because my original comment was too long so I had to split it in two:
* 8:46 Talking about the proliferation risk, I commend you for bringing this to the fore. Many people talk about Thorium being without proliferation risks. But as you point out, the Protactinium can be extracted (chemically), before undergoing the second beta-decay, leaving pure U-233, which can be used in bombs. You don't quite explain why the gamma rays from U-232 are important -- the idea often promoted by Thorium fans is that the large amounts of U-233 are naturally contaminated by trace amounts of U-232, which emits a hard gamma ray that is difficult to shield, making any U-233 both hard to work with (without killing your workers) and easy to detect from a distance. But as you indicate, this is not really true.
* 12:52 Comparing LCOE of nuclear (any type) with intermittent renewables like wind and solar is difficult. Nuclear can provide always-on power, while wind and solar are intermittent, and difficult to predict -- especially wind, but also solar in case of cloudy days. You wisely include a separate LCOE figure for solar _with_ storage. But storage needs to last much, much longer than four hours for it to create dependable power. A lull in the wind can last weeks in the dead of winter at high latitudes. At the same time, bear in mind that the cost of storage -- which typically means Lithium-based batteries even as new techniques are being researched -- is calculated in the context of the current Lithium and Cobalt markets. The current costs have achieved a balance based on the current demand, the rate of increase in that demand, the current supply and the current rate increase in that supply (i.e. new mining operations being brought online). However, with Lithium and Cobalt you also have to take into consideration the total amounts of these materials thought to exist in the Earth's crust, which would give an indication of a kind of _upper bound_ for how much energy we are able to store from intermittent renewable energy sources. I don't have any hard numbers for that, but I did hear one estimate that if all the Lithium thought to exist on Earth were turned into batteries, it would still only be able to store a few hours' worth of the global electricity consumption. So in short, don't look too much at LCOE for renewables vs nuclear -- either LCOE numbers for renewables omit storage, or they include storage but using numbers established in very different market conditions than those that would apply in a world where most energy is derived from renewables + storage.
Lastly, my general observations on nuclear: Comparing nuclear with hydropower is relevant and on-point, because they both provide dependable power. But comparing either of these with wind and solar is very difficult. The non-intermittency has a value in itself. A value that you can think of in terms of money. Imagine if you didn't have your city's water supply brought to your home through water pipes that you can control by opening a tap. Imagine there is no possibility to dig a well. Imagine instead that you had to accept water delivered by a truck, which would drop by your home sporadically, with no schedule. Imagine that you didn't have a large water tank in your home that you could fill up from the water truck. This would mean you had to shower yourself and your family, do laundry, do the dishes, wash your home -- all in a mad dash during the water truck's brief visit to your home. To be sure, many people in poor countries live in something approaching this kind of "water poverty". Now imagine that in a society like this, what would you be willing to pay if you could buy a _premium_ water supply service in which another water truck came to your home exactly when you asked it to? Or what would you be willing to pay for plumbing so you could have plentiful water at any time you wanted? This premium is effectively the monetary value of _dependability_ itself. In electricity, it's much the same -- when push comes to shove, when rolling blackouts or loadshedding starts being commonplace, many people will come to the realization that they are willing to pay extra for dependable energy. A life in "energy poverty" is just too cumbersome. This is why, in places like Nigeria, everyone who can afford to will have diesel generators at home. For the Nigerian economy as a whole, it's remarkable that the total possible power output of all the diesel generators in the country is several multiples of the country's total electricity consumption. The alternative, which creates wealth and wellbeing for everyone -- not just those who can afford to shield themselves from intermittency by buying generators or large home batteries -- is of course to make the public electricity supply not intermittent in the first place. Therefore, I think using LCOE to compare intermittent sources against dependable sources is always misleading. Access to dependable energy is such an important tool in lifting societies out of poverty, it seems unconscionable to advocate for a switch to intermittent sources.
when smth has half life of few days it will decay to safe levels pretty quickly. Either very quickly or in millions & billions of years, few thousand years is "no mans land"
@ True. The awkward thing for regulators is that Plutonium inhabits that "no man's land". They have erred on the side of caution, but there is really no scientific evidence that they need to do that. You can also apply "the precautionary principle" the other way, and say that massive climate change is such a huge risk that any proven technology should be employed to avoid the danger it poses. That is my view.
You mention solid fuel rod thorium as if that’s a good thing when most of the benefits come from having a liquid fuel that breeds more fuel instead of solid rods that are never used completely.
Good comment but I think the points aren’t concise enough, or your prose not super structured. Which discourages people from reading and obscures what you are indeed saying.
@@fdc184 Seemed like a very high quality comment to me, and the prose was structured better than a majority of the stuff people usually regurgitate on the internet. If people don't have the attention span to deal with a scant page of good content it is ultimately their loss.
I recall several countries building Thorium reactors several decades ago but not much since -so presumably they weren't very good so hopefully problems have been solved. I wouldn't go holding my breath waiting for this.
Um, that is untrue to the core. Traditional uranium nuclear reactors can have the fuel reprocessed into weapons grade plutonium. Thorium burns up very cleanly and leaves very little waste to build weapons. If you are a country that wants to increase your nuclear arsonal do you champion the awful power plant that creates lots of fuel for your bombs or do you want the one that doesn't help you at all? Do you fund the one making you weapons and abandon the Thorium reactor?
Japan’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant Unit 6 took only 39 months for completion.
Nuclear power brings down electricity prices by 75% in Finland.
We need nuclear power.
First thorium reactor is actually almost under construction now. Indonesia has signed an agreement to build first TMSR-500 reactor that will be constructed by ThorCon. It will be constructed in shipyard in form of a ship, then moved to desired place, placed in one of the bays next to one of the islands. Work is progress is fast and we may see this plant operational within 2023-2024.
Thorcon still uses a mostly uranium cycle. But a general SMR is a step in the right direction at least.
The us had a torium reactor upp and running in the -50’ or 60’s så not that new
Thx, See also Seaborg Technologies.
Their intention is to get something in action that is cheaper than coal Now and prove it works and get to Thorium later.
There have been plenty of Thorium reactors across the globe, but they failed for one reason or the other. Typically, Thorium reactors have too large positive or negative void coefficients, which makes them either a massive safety risk, or makes them unprofiatble if they are moderated within safe limits. (This was ofc a very simplified explanation, but in essence that's what it boils down to.)
You mentioned desalinization as a nice "bonus" side effect of LFTRs. You did not mention that the excess heat can also be used, as a byproduct, in the production of important medical isotopes also.
@MattFerrell You left out the most important downside of using Thorium in a reactor.... It produces GAMMA RADIATION..!! You know, the stuff that will kill you if any of the random gamma beams hits you and we can't block them without a literal ton of materials...
Matt, excellent job in explaining the thorium processes. As a minimum we should build some prototype reactors and learn. These reactors could be the "flywheel" when solar and wind are intermittent.
I agree we could have had a 50year head start if we hadn't been influenced by the green lobby and would almost certainly not have been talking about climate change today, and our reliance on fossil fuels would be significantly reduced. Electric cars would probably be the norm with cheap energy. Now we have missed the boat, and the cost of electricity is also hampering the uptake of EVs as it is as expensive with no infrastructure and larger capital outlay that only the wealthy can afford. I have a hybrid and can charge at home a luxury most don't have.
I remember hearing about Thorium reactors like 12 years ago and I've been a strong supporter of them. It's unfortunate that profit is normally 1st 2nd and 3rd concern for what guides and advances technology, because if that weren't the truth we would of had eleltric vehicles for the past 100 years. I feel Thorium is a victim of the same trend. If we had been investing into over coming the problems of Thorium when it was first brought to the table as an option instead of almost completely dismissing it for so long, we'd probably be using them now. Just happy there's finally a push for it now
Thorium is a massive waste of money for literally no benefit. Traditional fuel cycle reactors are far better in many ways.
Uranium 238 is better then Thorium :)
"we would of had eleltric vehicles for the past 100 years"
Though that would've made city air much cleaner, it wouldn't have made much difference to global CO2 levels. The electricity for the batteries would still have had to be generated and that electricity would've come mostly from fossil fuels.
For electric vehicles to really save us from climate change, the electricity must come from source that doesn't produce CO2.
@@TpoJioJio47 Nope.
@@FUnzzies1 Wrong.
Matt Ferrell. I hope you don't mind if I give a lengthy rebuttal or commentary:
4:15 is Canada's Terrestrial Energies IMSR, also at 12:35. The slanted roof is part of the "always on" emergency cooling system. Pipes filled with a gas remove 1% of the heat from the reactor and the roof is used to dissipate the heat.
8:30. Are you referring to "plate out" where nuclear fission products collect in unwanted and unknown areas of the liquid reactor? This is a huge problem that nuclear regulators will demand be solved. More R&D and material development is required. Terrestrial Energy decided to not even try to solve this and have been given approval to just replace their IMSR reactor every seven years. This is a work around to the plate-out and corrosion issues in liquid fueled reactors. They don't discuss what happens to the used up reactors though.
LFTR will never happen due to these issues, also the the conversion of Thorium 232 to Uranium 233 in a LFTR results in High Enriched Uranium. Even though the fuel stays in the reactor vessel this is a big no no! I heard a leader of the LFTR team say "to collect the highly radio active off gas, one only needs to bend a pipe, like seen in a kitchen sink pipe". I knew then that LFTR was a R&D sinkhole. Make money on R&D contracts and probably never produce a working reactor.
11:00 Molten Chloride (fast reactor). Another R&D sinkhole. Obtaining unspent fuel and or weapons grade Uranium/Plutonium, which is required, is a regulatory and political nightmare. No politician will allow this. They will say they support it but they are lying. Even if approved the permits for the facilities, safe operation (most nuclear accidents and injuries happen in processing facilities) will take years/decades. I don't see a government entity doing this properly. I also don't trust Bill Gates-had to fit that in.
10:24. Kairos Power's pebble bed, salt cooled reactors (Uranium only) is the best option to get Gen4 reactors built and once the public, business, government see Gen4 is so much safer than Gen1,2 reactors then hopefully MSR and Thorium will be seriously developed.
I have a feeling Kairos reactors will be expensive and the TRISO fuel, while much safer than existing solid fuel, is not recycleable due to its complexity. But TRISO fuel is already licensed and the reactor is well on its way in the NRC regulatory system (the regulatory system is just as important as reactor development and not to be under estimated).
Matt. Will you make a video on Kairos's design, as well as the X-Energy pebble bed reactor, X-100.
One thing that I don't think that you mentioned (correct me if I just missed it) but Thorium based reactors have far less radioactive waste that builds up over time, making them much, much cleaner in terms of waste compared to Uranium based reactors. Also, you can get far, far more energy out of Thorium than you can for the same amount of Uranium. 2 very important things to remember and mention when discussing it.
This is only true when comparing thorium reactors to classical uranium reactors.
When compared to a uranium fast breeder reactor thorium is about the same with only 1 big advantage left. Thorium breeders are thermal reactors instead of fast reactors.
The amount in raw volume may not necessarily be "less".
It's just that some of what comes off it is medically or scientifically useful.
And most of the "waste" is actually far "hotter" than the stuff you get out of a traditional reactor.
However, the way it usually works is the hotter the stuff, the faster it breaks down.
So much of what's coming out of a reactor will break down in seconds, minutes, and hours.
Less of it will break down in days/weeks/months.
And even less of it will break down in years/decades.
With only a fraction being the stuff that'll take the full 500 years to cook off.
@@PhotonHerald thats not correct.
Radioactive waste has a half-life that is indipedent of temperature.
The specific radioactive bi-product entirely determines the half-life and thus directly determines how dangerous or problematic the waste is.
In turn the type of bi-product is determined by what fission cycle you use to generate the power and if you are using a breeder reactor or not.
Breeder reactors can cosume a portion of the neutron and this power output to convert problem.atic waste products to less problematic ones.
They also tend to have a larger percentage of fuel being converted to power resulting in less waste.
@@nocare I'm not using "hot" in terms of temperature. Nor, when I'm talking about nuclear fuel, am I talking about conflagration when I use the term "burn" or "cook".
I'm using "hot" in the sense of overall energetic radioactivity output.
Things with a shorter half-life tend to be MORE energetically radioactive than things (of equivalent mass) with a longer half-life.
The reason current nuclear waste takes so long to break down is that it isn't that energetically radioactive.
@@PhotonHerald I see.
In that case we agree.
The cost of solar needs to be increased to include enough battery storage to allow for a constant output on a 24/7 basis. So if you want a 100 megawatt solar plant you need enough batteries and solar panels to provide 100 megawatts 24/7.
I really don't get the cost for renewables stated, if you leave out storage, its a useless comparison. 4 hours is arbitrary, to me it should be at least a month. Cost of storage is obviously not nearly to where we need it to be to make renewables useful.
This energy storage issue is at the heart of the debate but its treated like its a small hurdle, its not, its a far greater issue than getting thorium to work.
Yeah, until we have a quantum leap in energy storage technology, renewables will massively fail without nuclear.
Thorium has been the answer since the 50s when the guy who designed nuclear reactors like Hanford told the committee that thorium was the long term solution. For those interested in a more in depth overview of what a thorium reactor is I highly recommend you look for Gordon Cromwell here on TH-cam.
But politics got in the way, of course.
(8:46) The production of U-232 isn't a proliferation risk, it's a proliferation barrier. Pure U-233 is a "potential" proliferation risk, but it's much less so if you have U-232 contamination, which makes the contaminated U-233 VERY unworkable in either a gun-type or implosion-type nuclear bomb. That said, the real proliferation barrier for thermal spectrum MSR thorium breeders is the anemic U-233 breeding ratios in the thermal spectrum, which are only 1.05 to 1.07 (depending on whether you separate out protactinium). This means that thermal spectrum MSR thorium breeders use almost all of the fuel they produce, on an almost 1 to 1 ratio, leaving VERY little excess, such that it would take between 17 to 25 years (depending on your breeding ratio) to just double the amount of fuel in the reactor (which, given it's a thermal spectrum reactor, will only be 3% to 4% of the material in the fuel salt, is not a whole lot to even begin with).
Operating a thermal spectrum MSR thorium breeder with protactinium separation, the protactinium would flow in a constant stream from separation to a single insulated decay tank that is constantly fluorinated to strip off uranium (both U-233 & U-232) as it's produced/decayed, with that fluorinated uranium gas flowing to another chemical process which strips off the excess fluorine to convert the uranium back to a salt that goes into the reactor. One continuous chemical process, like what's handled by any chemical or petroleum plant.
If someone wanted to make a bomb out of U-233, they'd have to set up their MSR to separate protactinium in batches (so that you could separate the U-232 & U-233), which would require a whole lot of additional complexity on the reactor, with all protactinium produced over a single day, for example, going to individual insulated tanks, which will require several radiation, high temperature, and chemically appropriate (not reactive with the salt) flanges & valves which will be mechanical in nature, diverting production from one container to the next to the next. Each one of those individual decay tanks must also be fluorinated separately instead of together, with dozens to hundreds of pipes carrying highly reactive fluorine gas instead of just one. Then, even after you introduce all of that complexity, you still can only pull off a TINY sliver of U-233 production (due to the anemic breeding ratios). If you take out any more than that tiny sliver you'll kill the reactor, as you'll be reducing the overall fuel density in the reactor below the point required for criticality.
THIS. Thank you for the explanation.
I had a vague idea that this would be the case, but it's good to have solid detail when answering "but someone will make a bomb out of it!" objections to MSR.
Good video. I noticed a couple of important subjects that you missed: First, the 500 year storage of waist from Thorium - This is only possible if fuel "reprocessing" is used where the unspent fuel and the non fission products are separated via a process inside of the reactor chamber, as in LFTR, or separated outside the reactor by a third party. Both methods require government regulations and certification that are too lengthy (decades?) and expensive. Plus the government will surely screw it up! Also, if Thorium is converted to Uranium-233 and is then used to fuel other reactors, I heard a presentation given by Terrestrial Energy that this constitutes High Enriched Uranium which nuclear regulators probably won't allow, even if the new U-233 is used "internally" like in the LFTR reactor. But if Thorium is used in a "burner" reactor like in Thorcons design I think the regulation process is simpler. One cool feature regarding molten salt fueled reactors is that the chemistry binds with the fission products in an "ionic bond". So if the fuel is exposed to the atmosphere the fission products stay in the fuel (this needs more research though because the MSRE experiment in the 1960's was not for the purpose of studying this feature, but this was observed in the experiments results).
Correct: The barriers to deployment of low pressure LFTRs is entirely due to fast-reactor entrenched regulatory environment originating from the US.
A bit ironic, how often high temperature slow reactor deployment gets sidetracked in favor of 'burners' to give existing fast breeder reactors a waste outlet... while these same comparatively low material waste, _far_ lower risk, high temperature low pressure molten salt thorium reactors, are opposed as if _they_ posed some greater risk than the breeders we've been funding instead!?
Low pressure deployments first, because we can do them _now_. Burners when the legacy reactor industry finds a way to pay for them.
I really hope this develops into as viable of a power source as it is promised to be- we definitely need a replacement for current nuclear reactor technology. Basic safety factors aside, any power source that produces a by-product where the only viable response is to pour it in barrels, put the barrels in massive underground vaults, and wait centuries or millenia for it to become less toxic... Yeah, not really all that good in the long term view, is it?
The thing is, most of the reactor byproducts being buried are actually fairly low output. Which is why they take so long to break down.
The stuff coming out of a Thorium reactor is MUCH more radioactive. But, proportionately, cooks itself down much faster.
Thorium SMRs have 100 times less waste than water- uranium reactors
@@romado59 Depends on the size of the MSR.
Mostly, "no cladding" on the fuel, and you essentially cook the fuel all the way down.
With solid fuel reactors, those fuel rods are removed because the cladding breaks down.
90-95% of the fuel, itself, is still fine.
@@romado59 and how many people have died from old commercial nuclear power? very few. only one clearly documented. from coal at least 156000 from mining accidents and black lung (not even including pollution effects).
Nathan -- Do you have any idea how much is left over after burning coal (the residual fly ash is mildly radioactive) or refining and burning oil? Even 50 year old nuclear plants produce orders of magnitude less waste than coal or oil (not to mention what goes into the air.) I'm not sure what the environmental status of petroleum "coke" is, but there is aconstant stream of trucks from the local Chevron refinery, hauling off this coke which gets loaded on ships and sent to some 3rd world country for disposal (presumably because there is no safe/economical use for it. I'm rooting for Thorium, but I would place my long money on Fusion. . . .
Another educational video from the inimitable Matt Ferrell. Well done, sir!
All options must be on the table since current trends for carbon dioxide emissions look really bad. Let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good or even good enough.
Agreed. I don’t like how quickly people write off nuclear. I’m becoming more and more convinced that we’ll end up with a mix of several of these energy sources.
Can’t lose sight of just how bad fossil fuels are in comparison.
I don't understand the second part of the statement.
What do you mean by "battery energy storage costs?" @13:30
Cost of manufacturing? Including installation? Including maintenance (if so, over what time period)? Cost of powering up and discharging electricity (if so, at what price per input?)?
That claim amounts to about a 20% cost reduction in a single year -- if that's a trend, that's phenomenal; which is why I'm questioning the definition.
Thanks!
Great video Matt, it’s defo a subject that’s going to be worth watching for the future. Hopefully the research will all come to fruition from all parties and a stable and safe nuclear future will benefit everyone.
I think it's odd that the costs associated with solar only includes a 4 hour discharge time worth of battery storage, where no place on earth gets 20 hrs of sunlight a day all year round. In order for it to be a relevant comparison of costs, you would expect to see an amount of storage that would at least make it through the night and ideally through a few overcast days, seeing as how nuclear power does provide constant power regardless of time or season. They might also allow for the subsidies of solar and on the other side the costs of heavy regulation and licensing fees of nuclear into this equation, since those things affect the price artificially. I'd be interested to see what an actual cost comparison would reveal.
Considering that in winter you get much less sunlight and you might have cloudy days for long periods of time you would need at the bare minimum 24h battery, but for safety reasons I probably wouldn't decide to live in place that had anything less than a week long batter if they decided to go solar/wind only. Otherwise you might have issues like Texas did (tho admittedly conventional power plants also failed there). Such battery would likely make renewables uneconomical with our current technology level. I'm also curious if those costs take into account that conventional power plants take the burden of managing changes in demand of power and have to lower their output or even shutdown completely, with rises costs of running them (or of running renewables, depending on how you look at it); AFAIK there are even dedicated power plants for doing just that - did they factor that in while calculating price for solar/wind?
@@staryimoze good point, AFAIK hydro and natural gas are the only current plants that can quickly spool up and shut down according to demand, and hydro isn't available everywhere, and also comes with some pretty steep ecological costs, but for most of the world that would mean natural gas as the backup. So still reliant on fossil fuels. Honestly I don't see anything even as remotely beneficial as nuclear right now from an environmental perspective.
Dear Matt,
Good presentation, but there are a few extra points need consideration:
1) the radioactive waste is not only hugely shorter lived for thorium, but there is a much higher percentage utilised than uranium. Separation of the fissile fuel is easier because there is a chemical difference between the substances not just isotopic differences.
2) if there had been as much money thrown at thorium that the high pressure water reactors have had then there would be these reactors all over the world many years ago and it would be cheap and safe to operate.
3)The sourcing of Thorium is not as expensive as you might imagine since it is a byproduct in many types of mining waste; enough to fuel the world for many years.
4) the cost of recycling batteries, PV cells and wind turbines after their useful life has not, (as far as I can work out) been factored into the cost of these renewables because it is difficult to calculate the cost factor for that far into the future.
Lastly there were initial encouragements for uranium reactors when there was an urgent need for Plutonium, for fission bombs and then tritium for fusion bombs.
The byproducts from thorium would be greatly sought after for medical and other industrial uses and much less attractive for military use. If the products were to be used for destructive purposes then the gamma radiation signature would make their source easy to detect.
Matt, you missed one of the big benefits of a liquid Thorium reactor... all the waist from our current water reactors could be reprocessed and burned up in a Thorium reactor. Do that and we solve our current nuclear waist storage problem.
Exactly- shocked that HUGE “ win win advantage “ was missed 😯!!
i wouldnt call that solving the problem because it still generates waste that needs to be stored
@@koalakakes yeah with a much smaller half-life
@@philheathslegalteam its still very problematic
The waste problem is not solved it's just reduced and the remainder of the fuel waste is reduced in half life?
Nice work as always! One correction Matt - not all conventional Uranium-fueled reactor must shut down for re-fueling. The CANDU reactors, which are in wide use in North America and elsewhere, are fueled/de-fueled continuously without the need for an expensive shutdown, nor is it necessary to build two reactors to ensure that there is always power flowing from at least one reactor. This has always been a huge advantage of the CANDU design over the Westinghouse PLW designs favored in the US.
For renewables to become feasible you'll need somewhere around 400 hours storage, not 4 hours. Putting the LCOE around 160 USD/MWh. Then add in the grid-costs and you're looking at around 200 USD/MWh. Or 3-8 times higher than standard uranium nuclear.
Thorium reactors could be a good way to augment grid storage as well as emergency backup. Grid storage isn’t where it needs to be yet. Four hours isn’t enough. One Arctic blast could suck up all the juice and people could freeze to death. Problem is neither grid storage nor thorium reactor technologies are where they need to be yet.
like in Texas last year...
That was actually planned to happen. I know many peoppe people personally that work in the energy sector here and they get laughed at for mentioning winterizing
The one thing held against Thorium is that you can't make nuclear weapons from it. Which means that the Military Industrial Complex won't fund it which is (partially) how we've paid for the fission reactors we have now.
The much bigger issue is that Thorium technology is unproven and will take a decade or two to get into commercial use, at least... Nuclear energy, Thorium and otherwise, is always a huge financial risk, not because of accidents, but just because of the huge infrastructure expenditures involved in every single plant and that it is almost certain that the budget will be overrun by multiples and the schedule will not be met... Now suggest to someone investing a few billion Dollars that you'd like him to try a technology that hasn't even been proven at all.
That is not true. In fact, it may be easier to make a working weapon using the Th cycle in an MSR, although the weapon itself isn't likely to be as efficient as a Pu based weapon. To make weapons grade material from Th, you circulate some of the fuel salt through a protactinium extractor and then let it decay in an isolated pure state into U233, which only takes ~27 days. If your extractor is very efficient, the rest is relatively easy. The only drawback to someone who wants a weapon is that only a small amount of protactinium can be extracted at a time and still keep the fuel salt fissile, so it does take time to gather enough. The proliferation-proof line the Th advocates push is an outright lie. U233 based bombs have been tested and you don't need a huge (and therefore detectable) PUREX plant to obtain it, unlike Pu.
The former director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory Thorium Molten Salt Reactor program will be happy that his work is finally being put into use (if he is still alive). There is a video somewhere of him talking about the TMSR and he knew back in the 50's it was a superior and safer alternative to Uranium, water cooled reactors. He felt Uranium reactors had been chosen because they integrated with America's nuclear weapons program better back in the 50's, not because they were a better commercial energy source than TMSRs.
Alvin Weinberg inventor of both the MSR and LWR
Thanks for the great video. I have a couple comments/notes
1) THORIUM SUPPLY - A very rich source of rare earth metals (REM) is Mountain Pass California. But because the chemical properties of thorium and REMs are very similar, deposits rich in REM also tend to have substantial amounts of thorium. Currently because there is no commercial use for thorium, that is a problem. US environmental law doesn't just allow that Thorium to be dumped in tailings piles. As a result US production cost are more expensive than Chinese REM, which aren't quite so fussy. But if Thorium becomes source of income and not an expense, then not only can the US get much close to being independent with respect to these materials so important to advanced technology, but also produce enough thorium to power our economy. This is even more the case of Australian, where their major deposit of REMs have an even higher Thorium content.
And to "prime the pump" as it were, there is approximately 7 million pounds of thorium nitrate that the US government acquired decades ago with the thought of using it in breeder reactors. But when that didn't happen, they got tired of paying for storage. So all of it was put it in metal containers and buried at the US nuclear testing site in Nevada. All we would have to do is go dig it up and we would have enough thorium to supply all of the power currently used by the US for a decade. With a gradual ramp up of MSRs and given that MSRs (or any nuclear reactor) are unlikely to generate more than about 1/3 of our total energy, just the thorium buried in the Nevada desert would provide all that we would need for 40-50 years.
2) SYNERGISTIC INTEGRATION WITH WIND AND SOLAR - Current Pressurized Light Water Reactors (PWRs) do not work at all well with intermittent energy source like wind and solar. PWR can only increase or decrease power output very slowly. Thus they can be a good source of base power, but they can't provide the necessary rapid load-following capability to fill in the gaps in wind and solar. PWRs peak temperature is only 280 c, so not hot enough to make direct thermal storage feasible. Thus to store any of the power they generate in order to provide load-following, PWRs would have to use the same methods that solar and wind would use to store excess power (batteries, pumped hydro, etc.).
Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs) don't like to change power levels any faster than PWRs do. But MSR's advantage is that their peak temperature is over 600 C. This is hot enough to make direct thermal storage worthwhile. Studies have been done that look at using vacuum insulated tanks to hold molten tertiary salt. While the energy from the reactor coming into these storage salts is pretty steady, the amount of energy being extracted depends on the flow rate of the molten salts being pumped through steam generators, which can be varied rapidly over a wide range. This allows MSRs with thermal storage to have a load-following ability. With the ability to rapidly change the amount of electrical power generated, MSRs could be key to fill the gaps left by the intermittency of wind and solar without having to build huge battery storage farms, or other energy storage mechanisms.
Another fact to consider is that for wind and solar to provide say 75% of the total grid energy, the actually installed capacity would have to be approximately double that so that excess power created when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining can be store for the periods every day when it the wind has died and the sun has set. And it is likely even worse than that because of fairly large seasonal variations in solar incidence and wind velocity. So solar will have to be even more capacity to produce enough power in the winter when the sun is lower. And wind installed wind generating capacity will have to be sized based on times of the year when winds are on average lower. With MSRs with thermal storage, the installed capacity of wind and solar could be considerably smaller.
So while MSR might have a higher levelized cost of energy by itself than wind or solar, the important load-following capability could mean that MSR (or potentially other high temperature reactors like helium cooled pebble bed reactors which could store energy in exactly the same types of molten salts) could be a very important part of a future grid where wind and solar is a significant fraction of the total energy supply
3) PROCESS HEAT - most industrial processes require some amount of increased temperature to work. About half require temperatures above 400 C. With a 600 C working temperature, MSRs could be a source of process heat. One very interesting one that my team is investigating is using renewable energy sources to make synthetic fuels. These fuels take CO2 out of the air (or sea water, which looks like it requires less energy) and hydrogen from splitting sea water and using a combination of heat, electricity and the right catalysts, reverse the combustion process and produce hydrocarbon fuels. The initial fuels produced by most processes are methane or methanol. Methane can be used for anything which currently uses natural gas. Methanol can be used as a fuel for transportation. But further processes which are largely heat driven in the presence of a catalyst can combine methane and methanol to make longer chain hydrocarbons, all the way up to octane (the major component of gasoline) and even diesel/kerosene/jet fuel. It is likely the only non-combustion heat source that can be used directly to drive a lot of very important industrial processes. The one we are particularly interested in for use in aircraft is butanol. Butanol is the alcohol of butane. It has an energy density just slightly less than gasoline, can be used at up to100% concentration in most current gasoline engines.
So a notional MSR could be located near the coast. Sea water is pumped in to provide CO2, hydrogen and cooling. The MSR provides a steady 24/7 source of electricity and high heat to drive the processes. various stream
Underrated comment!
Transferring the excess heat to thermal batteries rather than electric is an angle I never though of. It's yet another way to work with the renewable energy sector.
My thoughts come from hearing about this through Matt's and Joe's productions on this subject: when asking if we need nuclear, I'm convinced the answer is "Yes". The cost figures given here for returns I'm pretty sure don't include the total cost environmentally of building the solutions...and cleanup when they are no longer viable. Others here also mention that nuclear is needed for base load although that can also possibly be countered with cheaper storage solutions...again considering the footprint though...it makes me nervous to leave out nuclear. I also feel a good mix is a safer solution. Nothing totally wins out. Germany's decision to phase out nuclear and go all green for example does not think of the environment foot print cost of eliminating this vital power producer. It feels like...saying I like chocolate cake. I like chocolate. I like sugar. I don't like flour so eliminate that one. Well you now have a candy bar...not a cake.
one other thing, the uranium smrs or thorium smrs can be put more places than wind or solar. provide more energy in a smaller footprint even if wind and solar are viable but land area is lacking.
@@Joe-Dead Oh I like that thinking too
@@Joe-Dead oh yeh, and back when they calculated the posibility for a reactor meltdown that came up with 1000 years :) not even 100 years with this techlogie and we had two major disasters. The fact that thoes small reactor are not everywhere, and wont be there in the next ten years, its because Cgi animations are not real power powerplants. So many Questions, how long do they need to build, what cost, where are the people that will maintain it, who even wants a reactor near them ???
@@Joe-Dead The NIMBY people already go full apeshit when you try to build a wind turbine in proximity to their houses. With nuclear reactors you can dial that up by a factor of 1000. So excuse me when I take that "can be put more places than wind or solar" of yours with a heavy grain of molten salt.
@@3gax3 smrs are being built and deployed now kid. before you start pretending to be tucker carlson "asking questions" do a little actual work and research beforehand...saves the embarrassment of your BS questions having been answered long ago. secondly, nuclear power in general has a better safety record than ANY OTHER FORM OF POWER excluding thus far renewables. cherry-pick two nuclear plants, one not even built along western standards and another in a once in a lifetime tsunami.
GG fool, last nail in your idiocy coffin kid is that the next gen reactors being deployed are safe, they can't meltdown. so your mistaken self-inflicted fearmongering doesn't apply. not that it ever did.
China's 2MW MSR is up and running at Wuwei (criticality was October 2021), expect some reports soon
This is a rebuild of the ORNL MSRE running on thorium (MSRE ran on U235, U233 and Pu239, not thorium) - to validate the ORNL work
There's a 100MWe system being built alongside it to validate power generation - that's what ORNL was proposing when the project was shuttered by Nixon
Contrary to scaremongers, it's virtually IMPOSSIBLE to make U233 weapons from thorium. The USA, USSR and India have all tried and failed miserably. The level of inherent U232 contamination is so high it's too dangerous to handle when irradiated and makes any weapons attempt fizzzles
essentially, thorium is highly weaponisation RESISTANT, whilst U235 reactors are built from the waste product of weaponsmaking systems - this is why the USA shut down the MSRE project in 1972 - it would have divorced civil nuclear power from the military dependency and stripped uranium enrichment plants of their "dual purpose" protection from SALT treaties
I don't say this as "scare mongering", "proliferation concerns" are inherently meaningless.
But it's very possible to make U-233 based weapons. This is not a "disadvantage" in any sense but it's still true. In testing it performed about as well as Pu-239 for an implosion device. The reason why they weren't used is because it's just easier to do it by breeding Pu-239.
i understand that wind and solar might be cheaper, but they take a lot, and by a lot i mean very much more space than a nuclear powerplant. we should also look at the MWh/surface produced, becuase it would be amazing to have a 300mwh solar powered farm, but if a solar panel of around 2m^2 could produces 300wh, you would need 2 million m^2 of land, not mentioning the other infrastructure required. Moreover,, many countries cannot rely on solar power, and wind power is also not a constant. nuclear power can be scaled immensly and can just work anytime and anywhere
pv house roofs
I don't think it is more expensive to mine thorium than uranium if you are talking about the final product. With thorium, .25 of the ore is used where with uranium it is a fraction of a percentage of the ore, and requires a great deal of processing e.g. cladding before it is ready for the reactor.
The thing is we don’t have many uses for Thorium at the moment so we already have tons and tons of it just lying around as a byproduct of our existing mining processes.
Also, molten salt reactors don’t use solid fuel rods, so there is less of a window for companies to build their entire business model around ultra expensive uranium candle lights that are never burnt completely before they have to be replaced.
Hello,
i think the problem is not the cost of producing electricity, it is the cost of not having electricity when it is needed.
As long as electricity can not be stored in megawatts and hundreds of megawatts. it is not renewable source vs other, it is the cost of having electricity vs having no electricity when needed. This winter will be interesting in Europe, we might see what is the cost of blackout or industry shutdown because of the lack of electricity when it is needed. I love your channel keep on the good work.
Renewables are swimming in subsidies to get those rates. Both solar and wind require a natural gas power plant to even be viable, as the intermittent problem you mentioned. 4 hours is not sufficient back up. Nor are you including the cost of having to replace the batteries every 10-15 years. Nor the growing demand for batteries for numerous industries which will drive up the cost. Nor the fact that renewables often have to be built in remote locations with ideal conditions (adding infrastructure costs).
Renewables are at best good for supplementing a power grid, pretending as if they can be the main generation is non-sensical as we have seen with Germany. I live near mass renewable generation in the high desert of California. That shit breaks down constantly. So again are you going to see a 30 year life span out of renewables.
Lastly, where is the money going for renewables? China. Even a chunk of batteries are also being built there. Nuclear power plants are all American. The money to run them will be American professionals. Desalination has always been a huge bonus for these for State's like California that have huge water issues.
Plus the typical lifespan of a NPP is 50-60 years, not the 30 they used in the price comparison.
Here in Michigan my 4Kw photovoltaic system has only produced power for about three days for the last 30, so you are spot on about the 4-hour nonsense. I'd like to see any greenie come and tell me how big of a battery I would need to be 100% solar here..
@@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunk Yeah where I live we get a lot of sun shine a wind. So renewables make sense out here. But the infrastructure to get that power generation to the cities which are hours away has a significant cost.
I imagine the North East solar is not a good idea at all. So depending on where you are in the world, without the ideal conditions, renewables become even worse in terms of supplying the power demands of our growing civilization.
This is the second video I've come across that claims that nuclear is just not "economical" compared to green energy. Which just isn't true at all. Yet this is being pushed as a common sense look at energy infrastructure.
Higher neutron efficiency also leads to longer lifespan of reactor casings, pretty cool, seeing as start up and refit costs are the largest expenditure for reactor operators.
Hi Matt,
I've been following the progress being made relative to LFTR technology since around 2011. That said, the good news is that more countries and companies - around the world - have jumped on the Thorium-based MSR bandwagon since that time. The bad news is that not one has gone commercial with their designs since then; and that's NOT due to any technical issues that have yet to be resolved. From the standpoint of materials science, operational configurations and procedures for salt cleansing, and thorium mining/processing there's nothing standing in the way of making LFTR technology a commerical reality. You don't have to take my word for it either, just ask Kirk Sorenson, CEO of Flibe Energy, for his perspective on what the BIGGEST IMPEDIMENT has been to date.
And from a historical perspective, the REAL REASON the MSR Experiment was cancelled does NOT have anything to do with corrosion issues. The operating parameters related to ensuring long component life times were well-researched and understood by the engineers and scientists working on the project. In fact, the demonstration reactor operated for 6000 hours strait - at FULL POWER - without any issues. The REAL REASON President Nixon cancelled the project - without giving any prior warning to the team - was purely POLITICAL in nature. He was convinced by parties closely linked to the traditional nuclear power industry to shut down the MSRE because it might threaten the ability of the US to produce the materials needed for nuclear weapons... the COLD WAR was still HOT at that time.
Quite interestingly, when it comes to Thorium mining and production, there has been another very blatent SELLOUT by the US Government in that regard; one that took place 10-15 years ago, when some enterprising individuals seeking approval to open and operate a mine rich in Thorium was denied the necessary operating permits. The story of this intentional blocking of thorium mining is thoroughly documented in book published in 2017 with the title... SELLOUT: How Washington Gave Away America's Technological Soul, and One Man's Fight to Bring It Home, by Victoria Bruce. And there's more intentionally-buried thorium from other mining operations here in the US that could be readily recovered for use in commercially operating LFTRs. Access to and on-going supply of thorium are NOT of any issue when it comes to commercializing the technology.
Bottom Line: Had the MSRE not been cancelled, but were to have its R&D endeavors funded through commercial fruition, the US could be ENERGY INDEPENDENT by now and NOT be staring into a looming existential abyss due to the past, present, and likely on-going future pollution of the planet through the continued use of fossil fuels. In that regard, the winners have been the BIG OIL and COAL interests, while the losers happen to be all the rest of mankind that's been made to be dependent upon these resources.
PS - Thorium-based MSRE (with its Tritium production capability) would make for a perfect (i.e., highly complimentary) match for the FUSION REACTOR technology now under development at Helion Energy out in the Seattle area. That being the case, you might want to try spending more of your time watching the videos that already exist on these topics.
I think thorium is going to have an impact regardless of whether it pans out as a viable fuel. Nuclear is really the only option we have for a de-carbonized world and the increased research Thorium spurs is the best chance we have of getting there. whether it is public perception or new reactor designs it's a net benefit.
I do not think thorium will be the backbone of a grid but it most certainly could be a tool that gets used.
@@bighands69 I don't know whether it will or not but it's the research into finding out that will make the difference.
Great video Matt but could you please enlighten your viewers about Indonesia's choice of the walk-away safe high temperature but near ambient pressure ThorCon's 7×500MWe Liquid metal Thorium ion molten sodium fluoride salt burner energy converters that can be brought on line within 2 years for $1200/kiloWatt and provide electricity to the grid for a pre-profit levelised cost of $30/Megawatt.hour without destruction of thousands of Hectares of scarce tropical rain forests ...each 500MWe unit is bult like a double-hulled bulk-carrier in a Korean shipbuilding yard, fully equipped and fitted out before being towed to Indonesia where the fuel salts are added. All at a cost of $1200/kiloWatt to ThorCon.
Although the PPA agreement is initially for 25 years the design life is 80 years by replacing alternating reactor pots every 8 years including a 4 year passive cooling period. These are capable of being either auto "load-following" or as a "base loader"
Thorium MSRs are ambient presssure.
U233 breeding of Thorium is just as useful and practical as Pu239 breeding from U238. U238 is the most common material in used fuel fods from light water reactors. This means a uranium fuel cycle can produce negative waste as it disposes of existing stockpiles. This seems far more attractive.
Moreover the neutron economy with Thorium is a bit thin. You need fissile U235 ro bootstrap the breeding, but most likely people will be blending U235 with thorium long term anyway.
"I came for the thorium but stayed for the molten salts". The real advance here is the reactor concepts not the fuel type.
Another big advantage is industrial process heat. These things can reach 600C or with more material science, 1000C. This means cracking of water into hydrogen as well as desalination. CO2 and ammonia harvesting from the atmosphere becomes possible. Hydrocarbon synthesis becomes possible by tying these things to refineries. This could clean up the oil industry by creating carbon neutral or negative combustible fuels.
Not true since uranium in water reactors are made into rods not liquid.
@@romado59 Pardon, I was discussing molten salt reactors, not pressurized water reactors. I'm advocating reusing used fuel rods from light water reactors as feed-stock for breeding plutonium from depleted uranium.
Wind and solar are great, but at very high (or low) latitudes where population densities tend to be low and distances vast, small offsite built reactors might make a lot of sense and Thorium has its advantages, too.
Thorium is a lot of cost for no real benefit over traditional fuel cycle reactors.
@@FUnzzies1 did you even watch the video?
This is a good point. I see the grid getting abandoned in the southern US because it will soon be cheaper to make your own electricity, but in the north, grids will still be needed and solar is less effective.
@@FUnzzies1 Thorium should be a bit cheaper to make: but if you are talking about U233, that is a different beast altogether
@@FUnzzies1 Wrong.
I don't know if it was mentioned, but these Thorium reactors are quite small. Windmills, solar cells and associated distribution and transmission equipment take up a lot of space. Covering up land so people and animals can't live or farm on it isn't all that bright. Running power lines hundreds of miles when you can have a power plant next door to give you 24 hour power,.......well you get my thinking. And,......even the promised magic batteries won't help for long spells without sun or wind. Thanks for the video.
other potentials of thorium molten salt reactors encountered:
1. the MSR can also use much of the other nuclear waste as fuel to supplement their own fission processes - a way to productively consume decades of dangerous stockpiled waste.
2. the high temperature of molten salt can be used industrially - no need to create heat (burning fossil fuel) to support industrial applications.
The Chinese research project should be closely watched, (preferably by reading their e-mail in real time; reversing the usual flow of research information).
One fact that is rarely spelled out is that the waste storage problem is a symptom of the horrendous inefficiency of the current conventional technologies. So much of the potential energy in the fuel is not captured for use, but remains in the waste to cause problems.
Sharp Ears and Eyes. Thorium is ONE of the MAIN fuel that the CCP under their 2010 , 5 year plan wanted as Part of the Nuclear Generation Source. Todate 10 years has passed. But they have a 20 year PLAN and is STILL doing R&D plus refining their Thorium reactors. Beleive that have a "Demo Thorium reactor" running . And are getting DATA on it reliability, effeciencies, re-fuelling, maintenance, etc. ..... China HAS BEEN very Tight-LIP on its Thorium reactors programe. Would NOT be surprised that Chian will have a COMMERCIAL Thorium reactor RUNNING by 2030. Besides China have the LARGEST Thorium deposit ( Disputed by India ). 😅😅
In northern climates with little sunlight and snow/icing problems during the winter, nuclear is a must for a zero carbon future.
Except farming the steady wind these regions for free. Many regions are at the coast too, which even bolsters the steadiness. Before anyone guessing about a reliance problem. There are already GW installed capacity inside the arctic circle.
or according to the IPCC you can burn wood pellets and trash, carbon free like in Sweden or greta from la la land as some call it - strange that the level of CO2 keeps going up when its carbon free
@@juliane__ at 30% efficiency so you have a possibility of freezing 70% of the time
@@jimlofts5433 Burning wood is okay for low density rural areas that have enough land to grow back as many trees as they burn making it technically net zero. But its not really an option in urban areas where the particulates/air pollution becomes a major issue if everyone is burning wood, even if they somehow grow enough trees to offset.
@@juliane__ Yes but its more difficult in these climates as the blades can ice over if they are not heated which greatly reduces efficiency.
The metric equivalent of an acre-foot is the cubic meter (m³).
An acre-foot is a unit commonly used in the United States to measure large volumes of water, particularly in relation to irrigation, water supply, and reservoir capacities. It represents the volume of water required to cover one acre of land to a depth of one foot, which is approximately 43,560 cubic feet.
To convert acre-feet to cubic meters, you can use the following conversion factor:
1 acre-foot = 1233.48 cubic meters (rounded to two decimal places)
Therefore, if you have a given value in acre-feet and want to convert it to cubic meters, you would multiply the number of acre-feet by 1233.48. Conversely, to convert cubic meters to acre-feet, you would divide the number of cubic meters by 1233.48.
there is a cost of disposal for all forms of energy creation or capture. The cost for solar and the vast amounts of land it takes, and mix of toxic materials in the panels so easily broken and so hard to track the massive amounts of material. Yes we need a nuclear option in the mix.
Please talk about the crucial idea that MSR reactors could run exclusively on nuclear waste and thorium (presumably mined responsibly), and we could end uranium mining forever. A very real potential advantage of molten salt reactors is simply processing and dealing with all that high level nuclear waste, and getting energy in return.
This is one of the best features but I wonder if people can get their mind over the "nuclear is scary" hurdle. We have had FBR reactors that could be burning up waste for decades but one of the keys to getting it done is people have to be willing to let reactors be built. There is a huge NIMBY problem...
@@NickFrom1228 personally I am opposed to obsolete solid fuel reactors for many reasons including real cost. But I very much support research into newer molten fuel designs with in situ reprocessing, which run on and neutralize existing high level nuclear waste.
We need an reliable back system.. Wind, Solar and Water are not reliable enough.. While I do believe, they will always be Wind, Solar can be struggle with an "Fallout Winter" mostly meaning from Vulcanos or Asteroids. And not even meaning a Doomsday, where it doesn't matter if Electricity is working. Our Econemies are quite sensetive.
A stronger Combination of mutliple Energy Plants is the better Option and if MSR works as wanted, then it should be Part of that. Same for the ITER, when it ever works.
Very interesting topic. I would recommend you to also look into the "dual-fluid reactor" design, that combines molten salt and molten lead reactors
"Thorium is 3 times as common as uranium. "
Only a tiny fraction of Uranium is suitable for nuclear power generation. Thorium is 400 times as common as that fraction.
This is just blatantly false.
but them thorium is not fissile by itself; it need to go through the process. Finally we need to consider U233. That is really rare.
@@FUnzzies1 Stop shilling for uranium.
Three times as abundant meaning 12 ppm (g/tonne) compared to uranium at 4 g/t, but you can't mine grades like those economically. Deposits of uranium can be of much higher grade and larger tonnage due to natural chemical concentration processes (hexavalent uranium can be dissolved in water and precipitated in a reducing environment) while thorium has a different chemistry and few geological processes can concentrate it enough to form large, high-grade deposits. The geographical distribution is also very different, uranium is found in many places and geological environments, unlike thorium.
@@karhukivi interesting is this a double narrative going around?
As I understand Thorium is already stupidly abundant to us as a byproduct of our existing rare earth mining processes,
and that Uranium was super inefficient to mine because of how rare the deposits are in comparison.
and that from the Uranium that is mined, most of it has to undergo enrichment anyways because of how astronomically scarce the specific U235 isotope is in it.
Not to mention dressing (cladding), and that a lot of that ultra processed fuel isn’t used before the fuel rods have to be replaced anyways.
Overall very solid and well balanced video! There's just a couple details you got a bit wrong - all reactors (including light water and MSR) can reprocess fuel to consume nearly 100% of all the fuel. It's just more expensive (france has been doing it for decades)
Also, the MSR wasn't invented during or for the Manhattan project. It was designed exclusively for the nuclear bomber program. And it wasn't shut down due to difficulties with reliability - it ran longer than any other test reactor in history without needing any maintenance. It was fabulously reliable. Alvin Weinberg was the director of Oak Ridge and a HUGE proponent of developing the MSR because it actually poses a far, far lower risk of proliferation and accident than uranium PWR's. The problem came in the form of the cold war and politics. Admiral Rickover from the Navy ultimately had the final say in what was pursued at Oak Ridge, and he and Weinberg butted heads constantly over it, because Rickover wanted a nuclear navy (particularly nuclear subs) and reactors that could produce warheads to keep up with the Russians. Molten Sodium has... _problems_ with water, and the reactors are much harder to make produce weapons-grade material.
The main issue it had outside of politics, was that MSR's (particularly fluorides) are EXTREMELY corrosive, and radiation embrittlement can exacerbate things even further. So they lose some of their cost benefit in needing to be made from stronger corrosion-resistant materials. They're also a tad more sensitive to xenon poisoning.
There's a fantastic book chronicling the history of why nuclear power went the direction it did - it's called "Superfuel" and is a really fun, enlightening, easy read - it's basically 100% down to the cold war and nuclear arms and ships. Civilian reactors were always a complete afterthought.
And lastly, you were close to an important point about timelines. Most climate studies I've seen estimate that we simply don't have enough time to bring nuclear on anymore as the primary base-load source for energy. We waited too long and now we don't have enough time to wait. So while I think in the future nuclear will be an important part of base load energy grids (particularly as energy needs grow everywhere) I don't think it can currently compete for the money we need to be investing to end fossil fuel use.
I have a hunch that some of the load will be handled with a system like what Ford is using with the new F150 lightning - your electric car can produce a LOT of power. Enough to power a home for 3-10 days at full, normal use. If we install systems for home and apartment buildings that charge the vehicle during low-demand hours, and then somehow coordinate them with a signal from the power company during peak use to cause the ones that are still parked at home and plugged in to just start sending power back into the home, it can act as a smoothing power source that we currently use a lot of natural gas power plants for.
Amazingly after 14 minute video, and somehow not-very-much-in-debt information presented, the main point, aside from safety, why a Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) is an amazing tech, is not event mentioned. The main point is not that thorium is 3 or 4 times more abundant then uranium, but that in LFTR, the energy of thorium - via thorium-protactinium-uranium 233 fuel cycle - can be utilized over 90%, versus the current uranium fuel cycle with less then 1% efficiency of extracting energy from the input fuel roads. That is almost a factor of 2 improvement ( 100x ). Any, supposedly informational video not explaining that, does not do a good service educating the interested audience and more over can be viewed as either technically poor quality or informatively neglecting to present an extremely important information, that makes or breaks the economy of LFTRs and in that manner of future of efficient and likely massively distributed electricity energy production on Earth.
It powers down safely. I don't care how much it costs to prevent another disaster.
Wind and solar are still far more deadly than nuclear. "Renewbles" supporters forget to let you know how many people fall to their deaths each year from windmills and roofs.
12:55 LCOE is a good measure; however, nuclear reactors produce steam that can be used for many other purposes - residential heating & commercial production (refining commodities) are the most common uses of steam. Solar and wind are far less efficient sources of energy to produce steam. You did mention desalination as another purpose; nuclear plants can generate hydrogen too. Huge benefits of nuclear plants compared to solar&wind.
So glad they’re finally beginning to invest in this technology. When I first learned of the existence of thorium reactors years ago I was shocked that we haven’t invested so much in this technology. Seemingly only because you could make nuclear weapons with uranium reactors and it’s not feasible with thorium reactors.
You have it backwards. Thorium reactors produce weaponizable uranium. Uranium reactors do not.
They better because when liberal democrats outlaw all fossil fuel America will no have enough energy to power their homes, cars or iphones.
@@michaelleue7594 so how come countries don't utilise Thorium for weapons but rather use centrifuges to refine U238 and reactors for plutonium- it is cheaper and easier. The U233 from Thorium is eventually burnt in the MSR
@@pyhead9916 they have already outlawed reprocessing of fuel rods and this is the waste they like to refer to while in France it is reprocessed and reused and have far less "waste" too handle
Renewable LCOE should include the cost to make renewable a 24-7 reliable energy source. GW days of storage are needed plus you need to build up the renewable output so it can both provide the required load power plus at the same time charge the batteries. You might need to double the renewable capacity to both charge the batteries and provide the load power at the same time.
Very good presentation. Is the problem more with handling molten salt than the Thorium reaction? Wasn't there a solar farm near Las Vegas that used the sun to heat molten salt that was shut down, mostly due to the cost of maintaining equipment that comes in contact with molten salt?
We need to expand the use of this technology, post haste!
Nature provided humanity the gift of essentially unlimited non-intermittent energy in the form of nuclear power. But instead of investing into research for energy generation, we made bigger and better bombs. In almost all other forms of technology, problems are viewed as issues to be solved. But in nuclear, people just claim "oh it's expensive and creates nuclear waste, so we can't do it", rather than just solving the problem.
It's expensive now because we didn't put in the effort to make it cheaper. It creates nuclear waste because we use inefficient designs. We have public ignorance because of political/corporate scare campaigns and uninformed yuppies. Had we put as much effort into nuclear energy research as we have in defense 50 years ago, we almost certainly would have all our energy needs solved, nuclear waste would be a very minor issue, climate change would have been heavily mitigated because we wouldn't have needed all those coal plants for electicity and thermal energy-intensive industries, and water massive scale de-salination would be extremely viable.
But yet, Matt goes on: "but do we really NEED nuclear energy for a renewable energy future?" mere MINUTES after mentioning water de-salination.
The answer is YES you fool. This kind of mentality is WHY we have these problems today. For someone with a technology channel, you really need to wake up. Renewables will never be able to meet all our energy demands; sometimes it's cloudy, sometimes there's no wind, tidal ruins ecosystems. An advanced nuclear plant would be 100% safe, could be buried underground, and provide energy for 100 years. But no let's just build a billion windmills with max 20y lifetimes along with 10s of billions of batteries. Sounds like a GREAT plan if you just ignore the ecological impact of endlessly mining minerals from the ground; is it 'environmentally friendly' to destroy entire ecosystems, have environmental contaminants leeching into ground/water supplies, and air pollution from processing/transportation? How about the human cost of these rare-earth mining operations in 3rd world countries with despicable conditions and child labor?
I unsubscribed from you channel awhile ago after you made some easily disprovable BS claims. I thought i'd give you another try but now regret the 14 minutes.
I can taste the salt from here. Tell me more how you really feel
4 hours storage?
mate, even 4 days of storage won't be enough to remedy the crisis Texas was in last year.
4 hours won't even be enough to get you through the night, in the winter...
I think one of the biggest unknowns with our energy future is the effect that 100 million plugin electric vehicles will have on the grid. They are a massive energy storage network but also a massive draw. 30 Million people getting home from work between 6-7pm EST and plug in their cars. Peak Power needs to be managed somehow, right now it it managed with Coal and Natural Gas since it they can be fired up and shut down on demand. Currently, renewables are absolutely terrible for Peak Power because you cannot increase the output of Solar. Steady State isn't the problem, Peak is.
Storage, we will see about that when people go to their car in the morning and can't goto work because it was sunless overnight and the grid needed all of the energy from their cars.
Overbuild RE. Problem solved.
With a nation of electric vehicles, we could expect to see charging stations at work and other parking destinations. It would be possible to charge your car during daylight hours, then drive it home and drive it back again before charging. Plus, with that many networked vehicles on the road, it will be possible for the utilities to control how quickly vehicles charge. It would be possible to control the demand to match production.
@@thomasemberson8021 Renewables plus Storage can handle overnight. The biggest energy problem is sudden change. Heavy peak for a few hours, you need to be able to ramp up extra output for 2-3 hours out of 24. Peak is a hard problem with renewables. Nuclear is like renewables, it is steady state. You cannot manage Peak with Nuclear.
@@williammeek4078 I "love" these obscure and broad suggestions.
Over build! sure, who cares if we have to use 3 to 5 times the known reserves of lithium, and up to 20 to 40% of the lower 48's land mass, let alone all the steel, copper and concrete required to bolt all of that together.
But sure, without any technical ability to do it currently known to man, we will just solve the problem.
So sure, yeah.
You do realize the sun goes down at night, and even in West Texas the wind will go still for days on end, right?
"My battery is low, and it is getting dark" is no way to run a robust electricity grid (even NASA gave up on this), especially with climate change affecting weather patterns. Renewables and the battery storage which makes them viable (also the sun sets and the wind calms for more than four hours in most places) are a good transition but long term 24 hour a day base load nuclear is definitely needed especially as we transition away from fossil fuels to electricity for our heating and transportation. These new designs offer a lot of promise, very few technologies stand still and remain viable after all.
Not so, there's is always sun shining somewhere and wind blowing somewhere and water flowing somewhere, that's the point of a grid, the solution isn't nuclear its worldwide cooperation, which is why we will never succeed
@@davidmedlin8562 That answer implies that if its sunny lets say in France, but cloudy in Poland, energy will be send. sounds good until you take into account losses. A fully green "grid" needs some alternate source on demand,. Also nuclear can very well be included in that utopian grid.
Just saying
As I see it, the optimal direction is if we invest in nuclear for the transition phase, so it can aid in whatever natural energy may fail to provide in terms of consistency. In the meantime, natural sources of energy will aid in generating hydrogen during excess power periods, which can be used either for transportation - or preferably to simply store the energy for later use at no cost to the environment - far better than any conventional battery.
By investing more in nuclear now during the transition phase, we also increase the speed of development for the future, where nuclear could become a far greater player overall, while other types of energy collection have time to grow at their natural pace.
We absolutely need this for base load. Even with LFP batteries, Wind and Solar aren't stable enough for baseload generation as the requirement for batteries is truely massive in the case of solar. There is also the potential in military vessles as nuclear powered destroyers and cruisers (the biggest logistical headache for the military in prolonged operations).
Further, if demonstrated to be safe enough (which is well within the realm of possibility) it can be used to produce clean shipping.
Small reactors can be more safely deployed to service remote towns and the waste (what there is of it as it is only 1% or less of conventional nuclear, can be transported as a solid in a tank that can then be heated, melted and pumped. During the transport, there is no danger of a "leak".
Using this in conjunction of Wind/Solar will also allow less aggregate land use for the grid. From a security perspective, its also much easier to secure to ensure part of the grid remains operational during hurricane etc.
With the inefficiency of solar, and inconsistency of wind, the conversation of the transportation system to electricity will require energy that can only be supplied by nuclear if we are to reduce dependence on fossil fuel. Molten salt reactor might be the cheapest and safest form of nuclear energy.
That just isn’t true. While I am still building it, the system that will power both my house and my car is easily achievable and compared to gasoline, cheaper.
1. Inefficiency doesn't matter when you have practically infinite power. Also modern solar panels are approaching the efficiency of conventional power plants.
2. Batteries are now cheap enough to store energy for several hours and still be competitive against conventional power sources.
3. Solar panels can be put anywhere, and with falling prices you don't even need optimal angles. And batteries are even less picky about location and scale. That means most of the transmission cost can be eliminated, and that's huge. According to some predictions solar energy can soon get cheaper then just the transmission cost, which means nothing can compete.
But nuclear energy will have a role still, where sunlight is scarce, or where power density matters more than cost. Larger ships for example would be a perfect fit for nuclear energy. So much that it has been done for almost 70 years. In fact naval reactors predate commercial power reactors.
See Thorcon and Seaborg Technologies.
Thanks for the update. Those unanswered questions you mention have already got the push to nuclear much slowed in the US- nuclear has to answer those lingering questions (how "lingering" is a persistent 10,000 year effect?) before anyone is going forward commercially. Ironically, Chernobyl may have created on of the likelier invasion routes into Ukraine, lying less than 100km north of Kiev, and being relatively empty. We gotta stop doing this particular boogie! FR
But not perhaps so promising a route for them as getting to Kiev is more likely to raise a military response and there's not much round Chernobyl. Rumour has it they're more interested in the coast running down towards Odessa.
About this persistent 10,000 year effect: If nuclear waste is so horrible, why has Chernobyl been repopulated with a wide variety of wild animals that seem to be doing splendidly? I think the danger of nuclear waste is rather exaggerated.
Wow. Both doesn't understand nuclear waste recycling AND likes to speculate about Russia invading Ukraine. Let me guess - Biden voter? ~Sincerely, a Green voter who wishes the Green movement hadn't sold out to fossil fuel lies about nuclear power in the 1970's and given us another 5 decades of fossil fuel thanks to the "clean coal" lie they got Nader to unfortunately repeat.
Thorium MSRs waste has a half-life of 300years.
@@romado59 Our present uranium based reactors generate waste that needs a couple more zeros than that- just sayin'. FR
I think the key is to build mini reactors. They're Faster faster faster. Faster to approve, faster to build, faster to replace (or upgrade.) Granularity of resources is the same argument as modern computing with server farms and a distributed network, versus a few giant centralized computers like in 1950. Yes we absolutely have to move forward with this technology. And we have to perfect the actual safety.
Nuclear reactors don't make a large amount of waste in general. They use so little fuel, that safe storage isn't really a huge issue. Coal plants, in contrast, produce huge amounts of toxic waste, and kill far more people. Natural gas is much better, but unlike the products of nuclear reactions, the waste is pumped straight into the atmosphere.
Thorium reactors may be amazing in a decade, but there are great reactors today. Public opinion shaped by paranoia, and insane regulations, set back clean and efficient power.
Glowing rock bad
The problem with things like having a number for LCoE is that it's heavily dependant on your assumptions.
Eg. I'd expect a traditional Uranium cycle plant to have a lifespan closer to 40 years (at least for those built in the '70s and '80s), not just 30 years, and any built today I'd expect to be more like 50 years. A thorium one I'd think would be less than that because of all of the increased corrosion factors.
Likewise, the assumptions for wind and solar are that only a 4-hr battery storage is nessasary (might be so when they're only contributing 30% to the grid, but if we were aiming for ~80% then you'd likely need days worth of battery banks). And then there's the point that these LCoE measurements are trying to compare apples to apples when in the real world, it's apples and bananas. You'd need much more energy capacity for a wind and solar dominated system to account for the variability in supply. Then there's the point of under what conditions are those LCoE for renewables caculated? For example, is that just the numbers for solar from southern California or a global average?
Plus additional transmission line capital costs and energy losses
The lifespan might be less with current materials, but the costs are more than made up for by far cheaper construction requirements. A molten salt reactor core can be made of 1/2 inch thick stainless steel and doesn't require a massive reinforced concrete bunker to house it. A PWR reactor is a precision forging many inches thick and does require a bunker to house it. The less stringent manufacturing requirements also mean they could be mass produced, like ThorCon is planning to do.
Days? Try weeks or months. The number of daylight hours varies by nearly 8 over the course of the year where I live and the wind blows when it feels like it. Ambient energy is simply far too unreliable to run civilization.
The fuel rods used in our common nuclear reactors only give up 3% of its fuel, the rest is wasted. This waste product can be combined with the Molten Salt Reactors and "burnt up" in the process. One would need to build them in pairs, as periodic maintenance of these reactors may take about 3 months.
More like .05% usage.