This was a ludicrous amount of work to summarise in such a short presentation. Jiri should be congratulated for not only doing the hard yards but finding a format that presents these findings so quickly and concisely.
Technical details are above my pay grade, but hearing all the different accents tells a story of its own. The future for cheap, clean, sustainable power looks bright if these people have their way.
Before 1950, scientists in Chicago and Tennessee did this very same process to figure out the first fission reactors. They used pencil and paper and slide rule. Freaking amazing!
What he is saying to me is during fast spectrum the 85% of the uranium in the waste produces about 25% from uranium fission directly from u238 & plutonium but does not help at all with the thorium component in the fast spectrum. So a lead fluid reactor instead of flibe might perform better neglecting the corrosion effects of lead but the same worry can be said about flouride salts. It becomes easier to remove the uranium produced from the protactinium with flouride so that must be considered as well as the better shielding of the lead.
Question: Why not both? Have two reactors running parallel to one another, then, utilize the breakdown independently, feeding the split to the uranium reactor.
Indeed, fast chlorides are optimal for waste destruction and depleted uranium burning with no reprocessing, while thermal spectrum fluorides are excellent for thorium breeding and no (or very low) transuranics production
By the way, only already mined uranium (as depleted uranium) is almost 15 thousand years of energy supply in chlorides fast reactor - with the extra bonus of destruction of long life transuranics waste
Use existing U and Pu to jump start a Th reactor. The chloride fast reactors can actually burn thorium raw once the reaction reaches criticality. If they wanted to create plutonium it would be simple to do so using these reactors. Simply surround the core region with plumbing that carries UF6 and a beryllium oxide moderator. The isotope purity would also be extremely high, and in the fluoride form that could be used for jump starting other MSRs or processed to the metal. Win win.❤
This brings up a question for me, what percentage of the u235 is left after being removed as waste from the high prssure water reactor. In regular waste from present reactors is the percentage of u235 and this will be the controlling agent in molten salt fast reactors whether flibe or lead or chloride or sodium, (natrium)?
yea, so Th, Pu, U etc without sodium or whatever. Its probably not practical because of fission product reaction/removal/corrosion, or the lack of nuclear qualified materials at the high temperatures he states. That's just a guess not a chemist.
Sorry but this is too confusing. What I know is thorium uranium233 cycling is 300 years storage while fuel rods from a pressurized uranium235 reactor not neutronized in a thorium reactor stays dangerous for 25,000 years. That is a no brainer to think about plus 95% of the fission level material is left in. What this means is people will dig it up and use it in the future because of economics theory. IE very compact source of energy even buried in the Marianas Trench.
complex nuclear fuel cycals give me a headack. I have always liked the natural uranium used in Candu reactors. No centrafuge enrichment required. with heavy water your fuel flexability is great. So Iran can shut down their centrafuge technology.
The argument for candu reactor being that it will reduce weapons proliferation is kinda pointless, when India created their first bomb from plutonium extracted from a candu reactor
@@Toefoo100 It was a heavy water graphite moderated light water cooled reactor = NRX (National Research Experimental) was a heavy-water-moderated, light-water-cooled, nuclear research reactor at the Canadian Chalk River Laboratories.
You could use fuel with uranium plus thorium in a CANDU reactor. The benefit will be that it will breed 233U delayed by a bit while it is actively burning the 235U and 239Pu. Eventually the 233U will be producing most of the reactivity. It would be sorta like a long burning log in a fireplace. Once burned well you could separate the fission fragments and dump the mixed actinides into a chloride MSR without needing much treatment besides turning them into chloride salts.❤
It can be used, search for "operation teapot" for more information. The conclusion back then was AFAIK, "it can be used, but it's not very good on its own". All recent information I've seen have confirmed the initial findings. There are also some well known methods to substantially mitigate the proliferation risk of U233, different kinds of poisoning - either by materials that emit very much gamma radiation or isotopes that are very difficult to separate and that makes the U233 much less usable as weapons grade material. So I'm also a little surprised by the classification of U233 as when I examined the question I reached the conclusion that any nation state with an intent to proliferate would be guaranteed to chose another path than U233, and I've so far considered non state actors as incapable of a nuclear weapons program - even for the very basic fission only gun type weapons. But I still don't think I can challenge the obviously very well informed presenters classification, I'm just an electrical engineer who is very interested in these questions. I may be misinformed and/or lack some essential knowledge. But as I will look into this question once more based on this, my initial examination will probably be the latter of my assumptions - perhaps today the landscape has changed so much that non state actors have enough resources and expertise today so that they can create a working fission bomb. When I think about organizations such as ISIS or al-Qaida they have become much more organized and control substantial resources today. Maybe that's where the problem can can be found?
@@NomenNescio99 I don't think the desert wizards are apt to use any type of nuclear weapon. Such would result in the rest of the world declaring Jihad on them.
U233 with a relatively high concentration of U232 is not a good material for weapons. However, it is easy to separate the U232 from the U233 because their intermediates are Protactinium 232 and Protactinium 233. These two isotopes of Protactinium have half lives of about 1 day for Pa232 and 27 days for Pa233. To separate the Pa232 from the Pa233 just let the mixture of the two isotopes decay for about 10 days then chemically separate the newly formed U232 from the Pa233. After several months most of the nearly pure Pa233 with will decay into U233. High purity U233 is an excellent material to make bombs with a critical mass only slightly greater than Pu239.
U233 is even better for use that U235. You need lower levels of enrichment to make it function. However, when you produce U233 from breeding Thorium, you generate a (relatively) large amount of U232 as well. This makes your uranium core very hot and dangerous and expensive to work with. And the emissions from the U232 decay are liable to damage your trigger mechanisms for your bomb, so it makes for a terrible shelf life. So U233 is unattractive for use in weapons. However, the process by which you get U233 and U232 from thorium differ. An intemediate product, protacticinium I believe, exists and has a relatively long half-life. Thus during the breeding process, one could get the U233 made, and then chemically separate out the protactinium before it becomes U232. This removes most of the U232 from the U233 and thus removes most of the negatives associated with using U233 as your fissile bomb material. So nuclear reactors that breed U233 and use some kind of reprocessing step need to be guarded against this kind of selective chemical seperation, either by poisoning all the Uranium with U238 to essentially un-enrich it, or by making it so there is no way to separate out protacticinium during the breeding process, so that the U233 and U232 stay mixed. This is all based off of several-year-old knowledge, so anybody else, feel free to correct me where I've misspoken.
@@yonnsmith9243 According to en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-233, neither USA nor the soviet union successfully created pure U233 weapons and both abandoned U233 after a single test. With rather mediocre results, at least on the USA side of weapons development. Even India have chosen the U-Pu route to weapons grade material, despite their resource situation and strong commitment to thorium. This have made me come to the conclusion that U233 is not as good as WGPu/U. One reason among others is obviously that the U233 will have unavoidable co-presence U232 to some degree, which makes the handling more cumbersome. Most discussions I've heard have indicated that U238 is a far better additive to stop proliferation, with the rather big gotcha that U238 also makes the U233 useless as reactor fuel and can mostly be used as defense against external bad actors. I've also been under the impression that most of the proliferation concerns can be solved by a "seal and inspect" design and operating regime - much like the current fleet of HWR reactors such as the CANDU reactors. Most, if not all of the proposed designs of MSRs have chosen this method to mitigate any proliferation concerns. And under such a system, I still have have a hard time to figure out why the high risk is being applied to U233. Although I'm a militant pacifist and hate nuclear weapons probably even more than the next guy, I sometimes find non proliferation advocates to be somewhat unreasonable in their views on the issue - demanding far reaching administrative routines and technical support that sometimes seems to bog down the entire nuclear industry. My view is that the better solution is to solve the problem of proliferation at the national policy level rather than to use technical/administrative tools. Much like the intention and spirit of the non proliferation treaty is supposed to work, "atoms for peace" - adopt a solid non nuclear weapons policy and be welcomed into a world of nuclear technology. It clearly worked as intended with the non nuclear weapons, but heavily invested in nuclear power, nation of South Korea. And when North Korea wanted nuclear power, we didn't trust nor allowed them any nuclear power plants - and they ended up developing nuclear weapons. On my more paranoid days I almost suspect the most loud anti proliferation voices to be a part of the clearly dishonest anti nuclear maffia. But I will dig deeper into the U233 proliferation issue as I find it very interesting and want to know more.
This was a ludicrous amount of work to summarise in such a short presentation. Jiri should be congratulated for not only doing the hard yards but finding a format that presents these findings so quickly and concisely.
Technical details are above my pay grade, but hearing all the different accents tells a story of its own. The future for cheap, clean, sustainable power looks bright if these people have their way.
Information dense, very informative.
I will need to return and watch this a few times more before I've absorbed the information.
Coming back to this after knowing a bit more it really shows that Elysium Industries has the best reactor at the moment.
Thank you Jiri and Gordon. Brilliant insights and a very practical eyes wide open approach to the options, thank you both.
this was a great presentation
Before 1950, scientists in Chicago and Tennessee did this very same process to figure out the first fission reactors. They used pencil and paper and slide rule. Freaking amazing!
Wow that was a huge amount to summarize! Very interesting. Impressive how such different concepts compare
I think is the most useful presentation of the lot.
This is the sort of package that needs to be put together for governments and their engineers so they can target their decisions on investment.
The question is which country will step up and champion this technology? Right now, the only country that appears to be willing is China.
What he is saying to me is during fast spectrum the 85% of the uranium in the waste produces about 25% from uranium fission directly from u238 & plutonium but does not help at all with the thorium component in the fast spectrum. So a lead fluid reactor instead of flibe might perform better neglecting the corrosion effects of lead but the same worry can be said about flouride salts. It becomes easier to remove the uranium produced from the protactinium with flouride so that must be considered as well as the better shielding of the lead.
Question: Why not both? Have two reactors running parallel to one another, then, utilize the breakdown independently, feeding the split to the uranium reactor.
Indeed, fast chlorides are optimal for waste destruction and depleted uranium burning with no reprocessing, while thermal spectrum fluorides are excellent for thorium breeding and no (or very low) transuranics production
By the way, only already mined uranium (as depleted uranium) is almost 15 thousand years of energy supply in chlorides fast reactor - with the extra bonus of destruction of long life transuranics waste
Use existing U and Pu to jump start a Th reactor. The chloride fast reactors can actually burn thorium raw once the reaction reaches criticality. If they wanted to create plutonium it would be simple to do so using these reactors. Simply surround the core region with plumbing that carries UF6 and a beryllium oxide moderator. The isotope purity would also be extremely high, and in the fluoride form that could be used for jump starting other MSRs or processed to the metal. Win win.❤
This brings up a question for me, what percentage of the u235 is left after being removed as waste from the high prssure water reactor. In regular waste from present reactors is the percentage of u235 and this will be the controlling agent in molten salt fast reactors whether flibe or lead or chloride or sodium, (natrium)?
I suppose the easiest design to sell to the regulators would be a fast spectrum waste burner but thermal can get you cool isotopes..
Creating the sustainable future. Go nerds!
HWB-TT-MSR...*Made my day!
7:30 Ac is some indeterminate actinide? Is this practical?
yea, so Th, Pu, U etc without sodium or whatever. Its probably not practical because of fission product reaction/removal/corrosion, or the lack of nuclear qualified materials at the high temperatures he states. That's just a guess not a chemist.
@@hootis8 Hmmm... Melting point of that seems to be around 7-800C. The reactivity figures look quite good if you could make it work though.
The first design that becomes commercially successful is the best. Without that first step, non of the rest matters.
I really liked this one!
Sorry but this is too confusing. What I know is thorium uranium233 cycling is 300 years storage while fuel rods from a pressurized uranium235 reactor not neutronized in a thorium reactor stays dangerous for 25,000 years. That is a no brainer to think about plus 95% of the fission level material is left in. What this means is people will dig it up and use it in the future because of economics theory. IE very compact source of energy even buried in the Marianas Trench.
complex nuclear fuel cycals give me a headack. I have always liked the natural uranium used in Candu reactors. No centrafuge enrichment required. with heavy water your fuel flexability is great. So Iran can shut down their centrafuge technology.
The argument for candu reactor being that it will reduce weapons proliferation is kinda pointless, when India created their first bomb from plutonium extracted from a candu reactor
@@Toefoo100 It was a heavy water graphite moderated light water cooled reactor = NRX (National Research Experimental) was a heavy-water-moderated, light-water-cooled, nuclear research reactor at the Canadian Chalk River Laboratories.
You could use fuel with uranium plus thorium in a CANDU reactor. The benefit will be that it will breed 233U delayed by a bit while it is actively burning the 235U and 239Pu. Eventually the 233U will be producing most of the reactivity. It would be sorta like a long burning log in a fireplace. Once burned well you could separate the fission fragments and dump the mixed actinides into a chloride MSR without needing much treatment besides turning them into chloride salts.❤
Thought U233 couldn't be used for weapons so why a high proliferation risk?
It can be used, search for "operation teapot" for more information.
The conclusion back then was AFAIK, "it can be used, but it's not very good on its own".
All recent information I've seen have confirmed the initial findings.
There are also some well known methods to substantially mitigate the proliferation risk of U233, different kinds of poisoning - either by materials that emit very much gamma radiation or isotopes that are very difficult to separate and that makes the U233 much less usable as weapons grade material.
So I'm also a little surprised by the classification of U233 as when I examined the question I reached the conclusion that any nation state with an intent to proliferate would be guaranteed to chose another path than U233, and I've so far considered non state actors as incapable of a nuclear weapons program - even for the very basic fission only gun type weapons.
But I still don't think I can challenge the obviously very well informed presenters classification, I'm just an electrical engineer who is very interested in these questions.
I may be misinformed and/or lack some essential knowledge.
But as I will look into this question once more based on this, my initial examination will probably be the latter of my assumptions - perhaps today the landscape has changed so much that non state actors have enough resources and expertise today so that they can create a working fission bomb.
When I think about organizations such as ISIS or al-Qaida they have become much more organized and control substantial resources today.
Maybe that's where the problem can can be found?
@@NomenNescio99 I don't think the desert wizards are apt to use any type of nuclear weapon. Such would result in the rest of the world declaring Jihad on them.
U233 with a relatively high concentration of U232 is not a good material for weapons. However, it is easy to separate the U232 from the U233 because their intermediates are Protactinium 232 and Protactinium 233. These two isotopes of Protactinium have half lives of about 1 day for Pa232 and 27 days for Pa233. To separate the Pa232 from the Pa233 just let the mixture of the two isotopes decay for about 10 days then chemically separate the newly formed U232 from the Pa233. After several months most of the nearly pure Pa233 with will decay into U233. High purity U233 is an excellent material to make bombs with a critical mass only slightly greater than Pu239.
U233 is even better for use that U235. You need lower levels of enrichment to make it function.
However, when you produce U233 from breeding Thorium, you generate a (relatively) large amount of U232 as well. This makes your uranium core very hot and dangerous and expensive to work with. And the emissions from the U232 decay are liable to damage your trigger mechanisms for your bomb, so it makes for a terrible shelf life.
So U233 is unattractive for use in weapons. However, the process by which you get U233 and U232 from thorium differ. An intemediate product, protacticinium I believe, exists and has a relatively long half-life. Thus during the breeding process, one could get the U233 made, and then chemically separate out the protactinium before it becomes U232. This removes most of the U232 from the U233 and thus removes most of the negatives associated with using U233 as your fissile bomb material.
So nuclear reactors that breed U233 and use some kind of reprocessing step need to be guarded against this kind of selective chemical seperation, either by poisoning all the Uranium with U238 to essentially un-enrich it, or by making it so there is no way to separate out protacticinium during the breeding process, so that the U233 and U232 stay mixed.
This is all based off of several-year-old knowledge, so anybody else, feel free to correct me where I've misspoken.
@@yonnsmith9243 According to en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-233, neither USA nor the soviet union successfully created pure U233 weapons and both abandoned U233 after a single test. With rather mediocre results, at least on the USA side of weapons development.
Even India have chosen the U-Pu route to weapons grade material, despite their resource situation and strong commitment to thorium.
This have made me come to the conclusion that U233 is not as good as WGPu/U.
One reason among others is obviously that the U233 will have unavoidable co-presence U232 to some degree, which makes the handling more cumbersome.
Most discussions I've heard have indicated that U238 is a far better additive to stop proliferation, with the rather big gotcha that U238 also makes the U233 useless as reactor fuel and can mostly be used as defense against external bad actors.
I've also been under the impression that most of the proliferation concerns can be solved by a "seal and inspect" design and operating regime - much like the current fleet of HWR reactors such as the CANDU reactors.
Most, if not all of the proposed designs of MSRs have chosen this method to mitigate any proliferation concerns.
And under such a system, I still have have a hard time to figure out why the high risk is being applied to U233.
Although I'm a militant pacifist and hate nuclear weapons probably even more than the next guy, I sometimes find non proliferation advocates to be somewhat unreasonable in their views on the issue - demanding far reaching administrative routines and technical support that sometimes seems to bog down the entire nuclear industry.
My view is that the better solution is to solve the problem of proliferation at the national policy level rather than to use technical/administrative tools. Much like the intention and spirit of the non proliferation treaty is supposed to work, "atoms for peace" - adopt a solid non nuclear weapons policy and be welcomed into a world of nuclear technology.
It clearly worked as intended with the non nuclear weapons, but heavily invested in nuclear power, nation of South Korea.
And when North Korea wanted nuclear power, we didn't trust nor allowed them any nuclear power plants - and they ended up developing nuclear weapons.
On my more paranoid days I almost suspect the most loud anti proliferation voices to be a part of the clearly dishonest anti nuclear maffia.
But I will dig deeper into the U233 proliferation issue as I find it very interesting and want to know more.
I like turtles