I wanted to clarify that "burning" nuclear waste doesn't mean to combust/incinerate it. "Burning" is just the term for when fuel is used in the reactor - these nuclear reactors don't combust anything, they merely reuse the spent fuel from traditional reactors. I have also received some comments that some people aren't seeing the end screen link to my other video. If you're interested in watching it and can't see the end screen then here's the link: ua-cam.com/video/0E1TbFDOeH0/v-deo.html
From what I understand, they burn up the long life actinides, or waste. So instead of spent fuel being dangerous for millions of years, it is only for 100s of years.
The fact that they take half life actinides and reduces that from tens of thousands of years to 100s of years should be pursued regardless of cost as the economics will always support it. If you want to have your head really melted delve into the history behind molten salt reactors and how the world essentially got fucked over by politics in the US at the time. When you think about any MSR design and features compared to a light water reactor design its nothing short of sheer insanity that anything that dangerous was advocated for let alone propagated as the default technology for civilian nuclear power generation. With all the focus on a decarbonisation its maddening to think we are 60 years behind where we could be all because of political decisions and something to bear in mind as there is advocacy for what can only be described as delusional green wrapped policies.
Could you also make a video about Canada's advancement in Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing? It is very interesting to me how Canada (a sparsely populated country) is a global leader in those fields as well.
Considering how little actual nuclear fuel is used in a reactor, nuclear waste from power plants shouldn't be as big of an issue as it is. Spent fuel still contains an immense amount of energy. It's like you had a glowstick which produced the brightest light for only a minute, but still produced mild light for a year, yet it was still thrown away after that minute.
''''nuclear waste from power plants shouldn't be as big of an issue as it is.'''' Why should it be ? The natural halving works for us . If the planet earth has yearly 100.000 tons nuklear waste , those humanity will have after 700 millions years 50.000 tons nuklear waste . Again after 700 million years it's 25.000 tons and so on . But bad news is ; We will have every year 100.000 tons in addition and our maths can't count how big the accumulation is .
@@alimali2120 I think he means that, rather than being a big issue as it currently is, there are likely multiple solutions for dealing with the "waste" other than just containing it in storage facilities.The main problem is that energy production is profit driven, so after the profitable part of the system is complete they want the cheapest solution possible for dealing with the waste. In my opinion, reprocessing the material into less dangerous components should naturally be a base level requirement. Still not an ultimate solution, but at the slow rate we are progressing, there should be the highest level of damage control possible, until they settle on a more responsible system of energy production.
@@brt5273 Recycled waste would reach background radiation levels in roughly 300 years. By continuously recycling the waste there would be no build-up. Most people don't understand radioactive decay half-life. Waste with half-life in the millions of years is not a problem as we're already surrounded by rocks and minerals with similar radioactive decay. Long half-life means less radiation.
@@alimali2120 the thing is a kilogram of u235 is enough to power a city for a decade. the primary nuclear waste is very minimal. But the secondary and teritiary wastes are the bulk if the nuclear wastes which are not that radioactive like the plumbing and the gloves and apron used to handle the nuclear material.
Referring to spent fuel as "nuclear waste" only adds the confusion. Spent fuel just needs to be reprocessed into fresh fuel, then it can used to generate more power. This video gives several examples of how this is done. The term "nuclear waste" should be reserved for the actual (low, medium, high)-level waste which is generated by various (medical, industrial, scientific, military) activities. It needs to be carefully handled and disposed of in secure, long-term facilities. By tonnage, the amount of waste is small compared to spent fuel. However, on a *volumetric* basis the waste is the larger problem, mainly because spent fuel is so incredibly dense.
Yes, for too long, the anti nuke crowd has used terminology like "waste" that only instills fear, not understanding. I think people are finally coming around though; even the founder of Green Peace is more friendly to nuclear than he was in the past.
Passive shutdown in a nuclear reactor design is really crucial. The loss of electrical power and the resulting failure of coolant circulating systems caused the disaster at Fukushima. It is good that novel reactor designs which address safety and waste issues are being explored. Innovation in the nuclear power industry has been lacking for a long time.
There is no point in making a new reactor unless it's "walk away" safe. They need to be able to turn the key off on Friday and turn it back on Monday if need be. In the event of any cataclysmic disruption, the reaction ceases and the nuclear fuel is spread out enough to become harmless indefinitely. Seriously, we don't need another Chernobyl. Make it physically/mathematically impossible even if you try. This is the way.
Yes, but let's put things into perspective. Fukushima's accident killed 0 people (possibly 1 person but hard to prove). Most industrial accidents kill more people and barely ever make the local news. The evacuation killed thousands more. That's the scary part. Overreacting due to caution turns out to be more dangerous.
Gen 3+ are requirewd whitstoud Long term lost of power incidents, whitout problems... well after Fukushima States and plants invested on Hellicopter based response teams in (extremly unlikely) event happed which would put out of order standart on site metods to provide power for emergency cooling systems. so lessons was learned,...
@@marianmarkovic5881 Fukushima had been recommended to move their backup generators to the top of the containment buildings years before, and refused to do so.
@@nuanil first, having heavy diesel generator at bottom make a lot of sense if you thing about resistance against earthquake. But true, there was that kind of suggestions. But newer forget, a a lessons are learned, and although it was heavy accident, most areas hit by fallout are decontaminated to point it's safe to return.
Japan had one of these liquid sodium cooled reactors. Problem, sodium is highly corrosive and combusts explosively when exposed to air and even more so water. Japan's reactor ate through a pipe, leaked sodium, started a fire. Molten salt reactors have all the same advantages with none of the disadvantages. The salt though still somewhat corrosive is MUCH less corrosive than sodium AND is not flammable in the event of a leak.
I'd rather trust liquid sodium than water. I well remember my 8th grade science class, 1959. Mr. Zweig took a small piece of pure sodium from its kerosene environment and let it burst into flames. Cool!
Japan was so backward they managed to melt down a LWR,we should never take cues from Japan,in fact the Bill Gates company is already building the Natrium system for a closed coal plant in Wyoming.
Japanese are quite backwards, they managed to melt down a Lee something no one else has managed now they insist on building coal plants because they have no faith in science.
Canada has a great track record in the nuclear reactor realm with CANDU. Given we need energy and need to stop using fossil fuel, investing in nuclear is imperative. As we see in Europe today, wind and solar alone doesn't cut it. I believe China has an MSR going online very soon, and they have plans to share their technology with developing nations. If that works out, we'll see many countries escape poverty by have the energy they need to industrialize. There is so much good that can come from this, whether it's addressing climate change, reducing stockpiles of spent fuel, helping developing nations, and so on. Safety concerns have improved dramatically with these new designs and tech advances in alloys and sensors. The only thing that is of concern is that some of the advanced nuclear reactor technology will still allow an operator to obtain bomb grade material. I would like to see that those reactor technologies that can't produce bomb material are the ones being invested in, so the technology can be shared without worrying about someone initiating the destruction of humanity. Talking about the demise of humanity, I suspect that this new reactor technology is what will be needed to establish colonies on Mars. Lots of hope and opportunity ahead if we take our heads out of the anti-nuclear sand.
@@blackandcold What's not answered? Molten Salt Reactors are the answer, and were well on their way to becoming a commercialized reality 20 years before Chernobyl happened.
Fast sodium cooled reactors aint nothing new,... from US EBR, and Soviet BN series,... Soviets also used molten lead-bismut conpound as cooland, in fast reactors... which mean idea well tested and proven,... but PWR were more cost-efficient so far.
Politics... nuclear energy is full of it. Oil companies don't like them, and they have money to run disinformation campaigns. I even bet Greenpeace gets a lot of donations from oil companies.
It was a loop type reactor that was plagued with sodium leaks, theBritish government did not have the wherewithal to work though the problems, that combined with the discovery of large uranium deposits reduced the incentive to continue. Many loop type fast reactors suffered a similar fate.
It cost a fortune, the reprocessing of nuclear fuel was expensive and demand for it fell, In the eighties gas power stations were built. Building nuclear power stations seems to always overrun on time and cost. If the government doesn't underwrite them in some way they are uneconomic. E.g. the 7gw station under construction by EDF was guaranteed an electricity price of 90GBP/MWh when other sources could be built to generate at half the cost. This was justified as diversity of power sources and base load.
@@bradjames6748 actually Canada is kinda authoritarian. The nuc engineering is good.. but I'd not want to go there after the last year an a half has shown their true colors
It really infuriates me how a project like the Onkalo waste storage in Finland is being praised. We'll be able to literally turn waste into free energy for decades to come, and then a multi billion dollar project to bury that free energy forever is receiving praise???
You haven't mentioned fast sodium reactors are in Russian electricity grid and functioning for decades (the BN series) with 800 MWh capacity. And it demonstrated capabilities to work on MOX fuel. Great that other countries picking up in fast reactors design.
It's cool to see that better nuclear reactor technologies are being developed. Looking at the numbers, it doesn't appear that green energy technologies will be enough to meet the world's energy demands if we quit using fossil fuels right now, so it looks like nuclear will help fill in the gaps. Great video!
Really interesting and informative video, though I got a bit distracted by the volume balance between your voice and the sound effects. I think it would be an improvement to raise the speech volume a bit
Its always been a well known fact "spent" fuel is still useable. Its just not enough to run a normal reactor at peek efficiency, cause thats all anyone seems to care about.
Besides, it's not safe because of assembly wear during operation. And I cannot imagine how fuel from one reactor type would fit into another reactor type/design. It is different even between models of one reactor series.
@@wwlb4970 - The fuel would need to be removed from tubes and reprocessed to work in molten salt reactors. We have been reprocessing old nuclear weapon grade uranium into fuel for over a decade.
@@WJV9 Depending on what you call fuel. I call fuel assemblies fuel, as a minimal working unit currently in use. Besides, can you point out any working industrial molten salt reactor?
Great summary of it all! Key fact is that this is all proven technology, and was scrapped only due to funding issues. If these new wave of reactors can stay within budget and schedule, then the industry will have no problem with public support.
BN-800 reactor is interesting. It already works at 880MWe, while Brunswick is not built yet and will be small modular reactor if finished. Hope they do it, i want to see economics of this small, safe reactors because industry says only bigger really make sense from financial standpoint.
The federal government website has some info about SMRs in Canada. Lot's of talk but no one is willing to spend the billions needed. The BN-800 reactor is a first of it's kind. Program started in 2016 with the reactor going online in 2019.
@@DennisCambly BN-800 program actually started in 1983 and stopped due to Chernobyl accident in very different type of reactor, end of the USSR, etc... Project resumed in 2006 getting at full power in 2016. We are at a point where it doesn't matter what type of reactors are built, if it is done fast and cheap enough people will realize this is the only way forward. Modern reactors like APR1400 or AP1000 have a lot more passive safe we could hope for. China is working on MSR, this are even more advanced, although we might wait a decade or so before they make commercial power station with this technology.
@@codaalive5076 I understand what you are saying. We need to look at the fact any reactor will take years and a lot of money before it is ready. The media is hyping reactors of all sizes as a quick fix. They are not. Meanwhile the millions of tons of spent nuclear fuel needs to be dealt with worldwide.
@@codaalive5076 I understand what you are saying. We need to look at the fact any reactor will take years and a lot of money before it is ready. The media is hyping reactors of all sizes as a quick fix. They are not. Meanwhile the millions of tons of spent nuclear fuel needs to be dealt with worldwide.
@@DennisCambly Media is still into oil, at least mainstream. In 60's politicians with help of oil barons decided they don't want MSR capable of using fuel so much more efficiently nothing else comes close. Nuclear waste? You produce 1 can of Fanta of high level waste in your lifetime, if all power would be from nuclear this would amount to maybe 10 cans or much less with MSR and some other technologies. Don't worry about it because CO2 is so much more dangerous. Coal is killing 850.000 people every year, probably a lot more. Did you ever hear about civilian nuclear waste or even accidents killing thousands? No.
Any prototype is expensive to develop; as a rule of thumb, they're on average PI-factor over budget. However, building them in series considerable lower their cost, mostly because you span the cost of tooling over many pieces instead of one.
All true Florent and for new ultra high tech (like reactors, aircraft, etc...) another factor contributes massively as well and that is the huge sunk R&D costs get spread over many units, not just the tooling. Add to that designing things so as much as possible can be produced in a modular fashion in a factory instead of onsite and the potential is there to make things much cheaper than they would be otherwise.
@@richardbaird1452 they are building regular SMRs too and this technology can’t compete with price for them and is why this technology isn’t going anywhere. It’s more expensive. They don’t want to pay for it.
@@TheBooban Not sure what a "regular SMR" is, since none have been built yet. There are 3 first of a kind designs in Canada that are actually proposed for building and either in or getting ready for licensing discussions. The first is the MOLTEX SSR-W which is a molten salt waste burning fast spectrum design 300MWe class proposed by NB Power. Then there is the ARC-100 which is a sodium cooled metal fueled fast spectrum of ~100MWe also by NB Power. Lastly there is the Ontario Power Generation proposal for a BWRX-300 which is a thermal spectrum boiling water design in the 300MWe class. There are other programs in development as well (e.g. Terrestrial Energy and a bunch of others using CNSC pre-licensing to advance their designs), but those are the three which actually have utilities planning implementation. The first two can both participate in waste reduction using appropriate reprocessing tech. So I would say it is far too early for your "They don't want to pay for it" statement.
Russia has 3 comercial, fast breader, lead-bizmuth cooled reactors operational for 20yrs. BN600, BN800, BN1200. Number stands for megawatt power. They had subs (alpha class) using these reactors in 70s.
While the Russians have built lead-bizmuth cooled reactors, the BN series are sodium cooled. BN-600 in operation from 1980, BN-800 since 2014 and BN-1200 is still in development. There are outstanding problems with PbBi coolant including corrosion and production of Po from activation of Bi which complicates maintenance
The other thing about the IFR-EBR2 design upon which ARC-100 is based which I think distinguishes it from France's Phenix, Scotland's Dounreay, and I think Russia's two fast neutron designs, is that the fuel is the metal itself, not the ceramic oxide.
Small correction -- Pu-239 is fissile like U-235, not fissionable. U-238 is fissionable. Slightly different meanings but still an important distinction.
@@paulbedichek2679 EBR2 prototype was a solid fuel reactor, fast spectrum, sodium cooled. It was actually built and operated for a time. IMSR is none of those things. There is not yet any existing IMSR, not anywhere in the world, nor any license to build one in the US.
@@Nill757 Good point, IMSR has more in common with the aircraft reactor experiment, with molten salt molten fuel. We have had lots of experience with Graphite which is why they just replace the reactor after 7 years.
Informative video. Since the majority of the viewers of this video are watching solely out of curiosity, it would have been wise for Clinch River to put out such a video on the LMFBR. It would have calmed many people's fears and perhaps even sway the public towards the need of a clean burning power source.
No pressure vessels needed? It would be nice to have it explained how this reactor converts its energy in to mechanical motion. If you have steam, you have pressurized vessels and tubes.
They use multiple coolant loops and heat exchangers. The primary coolant (that passes through the reactor) remains a liquid at operating temperature and therefore does not have to be at high pressure. The primary coolant then passes through a heat exchanger where heat is transferred to a secondary water loop to produce the steam needed to drive the turbine. This loop is at high pressure, but because it does not pass through the reactor it does not become radioactive (or contain radioactive by-products) and can be released to atmosphere if necessary. The pressure vessel of a traditional PWR reactors is designed to contain a release of steam from the primary (radioactive) coolant water.
Sodium in reactor condition is liquid in standart pressure,... unlike watter which need extremly high pressure to remain liquid. But well if there is leak, You still have problem,.. since Sodium is extremly high reactive and burns once in open air, and you cannot use water to gauge fire since it kick hydrogen from water, so fire continues and you have extra hydrogen flying around :). So in similar facilities there was not even bathrooms, and around facility was on hand buckeds whit sand, in case of (small) leak and firefighting was needet.
Would this be an alternative to burying these radioactive rods, deep underground centered on the world's largest fresh water supply in Teeswater Ontario Canada.
We used to work on breeder reactor designs back in the late 70s and early 80s until all funding and research was dropped….thanks to Jane Fonda at the time…we lost decades in important research.
The real killer was Clinton/Gore when they cut the Integral Fast Reactor off in mid 90s, which is somewhat ironic in that it was one of the big solutions to Gore's hockey stick CO2 graph.
The other thing about thermal-reactors is that amongst the fission-products generated there are several isotopes that have high neutron absorption cross-sections where they just absorb the neutrons, as these particular isotopes accumulate during operation they slowly choke the fission reactions.
Fast breeder reactors are nothing new and neither is converting uranium 238 into plutonium 239 for fuel. The thing is that fast breeder reactors generally are less controllable than the conventional reactors due to the changing nature of the fuel in and how breeder reactors have to be designed, which leaves less space for the safety measures in place at conventional reactors. I am still hoping for this to succeed because there are ways to make breeder reactors that are safe and efficient. And anyways i’m always happy to see new innovations in this field. As a nuclear engineer myself, I’m still a bit skeptical due to being very strict with my own work, but i think this could be a step forward for nuclear power if it works out.
What is the product after splitting the Plutonium-239? The only way nuclear energy by fission is ever going to be feasible...without the detriment of having to store deadly waste, WHICH CAN LEAK, for millions of years...is if they reprocess the waste until it is no longer a major threat. If the fuel can be reprocessed to a point that the waste is safer, the goal shouldn't be based on profits from the reprocessing, but rather as a necessary component of the disposal of the unusable material, same as the cost of a storage facility, with the resulting extra energy being a benefit that just offsets the overall cost. That fabulous state of the art storage facility in New Mexico has already had a leak/breach just a few years ago. We simply cannot depend on burying more and more deadly radioactive waste as a solution, because there will ALWAYS BE LEAKS.
The United States has tons and tons of nuclear wasted stored everywhere in our country. We could pay Canada to take all of our nuclear waste and make lots of energy out of nuclear waste. Storing nuclear waste in America is just to expensive and ineffective.
Canada is way back on this technology, in Russia they have already built reactors of 600MW (BN-600) and 800MW (BN-800) and have operated them 40+ and 5+ years respectively, now they are in planning stages of a "serial" reactor of 1200MW
Ah Yes Russia the nation that gave us Chernobyl, Nyonoksa, Kyshtym, Tomsyk etc etc. Ya I would suggest anyone touting ANY Russian Nuke technology should probably think twice before commenting, Especially since the Russians have had more nuclear accidents and failures than the rest of the planet combined. The only that can be learned from the Russian nuke programs is how to NOT do something.
Russia is incredibly backward, very poor people struggling to stay alive, yes Russia does lead in fast reactors ,but that won't last, and their nuclear output is pitiful compared to US reactors.
i havent watched the whole video but what happens to the burning of the material, turn into heat energy? doesnt this heat the atmosphere contribute to your carbon footprint'?
First you tell us that a molten sodium reactor operated for about 20 years in the US. Then the Green party says the designs are paper only. So which is it?
Fast neutron reactors that use Plutonium as fuel are also called “bombs” specifically because their reaction rate, generation to generation, is < 10 to the -14 seconds. The reason that these reactors were always real small is that they are relatively unstable and hard to control. Generally they required complicated control mechanisms using computers to control the control rods to control the reactor. Traditional reactors have the benefit of running with a negative temperature coefficient, where water is the moderator. When the reactor heats up, less moderator, reactor power goes down. This combined with the thermal fuel, U-235, is what makes them so stable. When you go outside of these design criteria you are asking for problems.
That is just plain false. Properly designed SFRs with metal fuel have a far higher negative temperature coefficient of reactivity than either a LWR or HWR using oxide fuels (nearly every commercial plant on the planet) regardless of if SFRs are running HALEU or mixed Pu/U/Zr fuel types. The EBR-II reactor demonstrated this completely passive safety feature twice in the mid 80s running at full power by disabling the safety systems and removing the power to the primary coolant pumps (test 1) and then the generator heat sink (test 2). In both cases as the fuel, coolant and reactor vessel heated up, the reactivity dropped dramatically and the reactor slowed to an idle with zero damage to the reactor or fuel. This is fully documented in published papers and was even recorded on video.
ARC-100 is the first design I read about after learning of the IFR EBR-2 that was built by the US national labs in Idaho. It's pretty much based on that research. In April 1986 it was deliberately subjected to the condition that had caused meltdown at TMI, and subsequently from the tsunami at Fukushima Daiichi. Loss of coolant pumping action can be fatal to water cooled reactors. They cut power to the liquid sodium pumps, the neutrons got hotter, faster, and herder to capture. Sure enough, in 300 seconds the chain reaction ended and the sodium continued to cool the mere radioactive heat by convection. This was three weeks before the infamous Soviet stupidity at Chernobyl.
Different project. You are referring to the thorium LFTR reactor and he is talking about a conventional uranium breeder reactor. What connects them is the use of liquid salt as a coolant . these uranium based reactors are a nightmare when it comes to controlling the production of weaponizable materials like plutonium, as he points out without comment. Indeed, it was exactly the reengineering of a CANDU reactor sold to India they gave that country the fuel supply for its atomic weapons program. This was a huge blow to the CANDU program at the time, and setback Canada’s reputation in the international community for decades. The whole point of modular small reactors is it to be mass produced and become essentially a traded commodity. Given that the primary obstacle for most countries to creating a nuclear weapons program is the refinement of uranium into plutonium, you can be very sure that as this technology spreads, it will get into the wrong hands or it will be re-engineered by some states to sell weaponizable material on the open market to rogue states and terrorist organizations. In most ways this is the absolute worst option available for the renaissance of nuclear energy. It’s very likely that atomic energy is the key to controlling climate change, but this replaces one problem with another one. The thorium technologies that were approved at Oak Ridge 40 or 50 years ago, show huge promise, cannot be Weaponized, and have the same or higher inherent passive shut down capabilities and zero pressure processes, but they don’t suit existing companies who make the majority of their money on the supply of fuel to the nuclear industry, rather than the supply of the reactors themselves . Thorium is far more abundant, easier to handle, and lower cost than uranium. Ask yourself the question.
They referred to the EBRII, the oak ridge reactor was the MSRE anyway the former is a sodium cooled fast breeder reactor, the latter a salt cooled and fueled graphite moderated thermal reactor.
@@danieldonaldson8634 Who's word are you taking that the Th fuel cycle cannot be weaponized? It certainly can be and molten salt reactors are the easiest way to do it. Papers published from LLNL stated this while MSRE was being performed, although proponents who stand to make money if it is adopted ignore this. While the U/Pu cycle may be better than the Th cycle for mass production, you don't need a huge and detectable PUREX plant for Th->U233. It is the second best bomb material according to LLNL, ahead of U235, but not quite as good as Pu239 for implosion devices.
Of course SMRs have already been produced. They are installed in MOD shipping. If they are safe in a ship, it should not take a great deal of upgrading to adapt them for use on land.
Superphenix was a prototype it has been shut down only for political reasons and France has worked on it's successor with Astrid wich is currently stopped but a comeback is still possible since Macron changed is mind. The main issue for Astrid is the cost and France is looking into partners to finish the project.
This should be pursued even if the electricity is not competitive with plummeting costs of clean energy and energy storage. Dealing with nuclear waste alone would be totally worth it.
@@appa609 Stefan is correct. The difference in a fast spectrum is that the vast majority of the fission products have relatively short half-lives and you can fission the actinides (the really long lived stuff) out of the stream. The waste doesn't actually turn to lead...but the radiotoxicity degrades to original ore levels within a few hundred years (vs. 10s-100s of thousands).
Where has rickys comment gone? Interesting he should reply to me with a comment as such and can make such a judgment from one sentence. I work with wind turbines so know a bit about them… but I guess that makes me sub 80 Intelligence. His comment makes me think he’s a true commie
Clickbait title (and that's hard to do for a video interesting only to people who have worked in the field). What exactly do you mean by the use of the word BURN? Cheers, D.
Fast reactors where the ratio of final to initial fissile content is less than 1 are called burner reactors. I explained in the video that these reactors are fast reactors that would use reprocessed spent fuel/nuclear waste as fuel. And both reactors would be located in Canada. It's a title that's meant to pique the interest of anyone who sees it, but it's also not misleading - the video is about what I said it's about. world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/fast-neutron-reactors.aspx
@@ProfessorGoose I appreciate the difficulty of conveying anything like accurate information about nuclear power in a short video and I commend you for it. Your presentation was short, sharp and concise. Well done. i just feel that the use of the word 'BURN' (your all caps) was both misleading and not well explained. It's a small thing, but the vast majority of humans are going to think "hey, let's chuck another fuel rod on the barbie..." Could have been explained as jargon developed in the industry, but not to be confused with real combustion. There's more than enough people out there with zero concept of what nuclear power is all about. (For the record, your title did pique my interest and hence this feedback re same.) Thanks for the conversation. Cheers, D.
@@ProfessorGoose After I hit send on my last reply to you I read all of the comments. One guy thought 'combustion byproducts' and another felt you hadn't addressed the message of the title. I am a former public speaker and have had to take great care in educating the public re nuclear power. It's a daunting task. Now that I'm retired I can sit back and shake my head. I admire you for tackling the subject. Cheers, D.
Well, the molten salt reactor sounds cool. But do you know Thorium232=Uranium233 super fissioners work on this basis? Also it an order of magnitude safer than the safest traditional fissioners
Not much point extracting thorium if you have huge piles of spent nuclear waste. I would prefer they started with burning the weapons grade plutonium stockpile. Then shift to spent fuel rods. Leave the thorium fuel cycle for a distant future where there are not any nasty materials in the inventory.
3:09 Sodium is also 100 times better at transferring heat than water - this means that in an 3:13 emergency where the plant’s electricity is shut off, the liquid sodium can passively 3:18 cool down the reactor and prevent a meltdown without any operator intervention. Wow! Very impressive of sodium to be 100 times better at transferring heat than water!
I was talking about an idea with my grandpa that involved using nuclear waste for power ig my phone was listening because now I’m getting these videos lol. Only problem is it seems like this would take way to long to construct which is off since no normal ones take that long
Is it economicaly viable? Or is it cheaper to burn new fuel? This idea is not new. Would it be better to develop sodium based batteries for storrage for solar, wind etc power plants....nuclear is dirty and may be extremely dangerous both long and short term, not to mention proliferation risks if we scale it up... Edit none of these ideas are new. In fact all of them are old tested and abandoned zirka 60 years ago.
Irradiated nuke fuel can be reprocessed but the costs are huge which is why it never happens. It also contains a huge percentage of the fissile energy. Using virtually all of that remaining energy is why the final waste has 1/1000 of the rad life of the old used fuel. Moltex use a chemical process which denatures the mix, making it completely unsuitable for military uses and the end result all goes into the new fuel rods. There is no "reprocessing" aka preferential extraction of fissile materials. This is important as that's how bomb grade materials are extracted and therefore very heavily regulated and very costly. Moltex simply convert the used fuel into salts and put it back into a reactor. The reactor is as simple as it gets while just a stirrer inside the core to ensure the thermal transfer salts move around the fuel rods. A third salt in a separate loop extracts the heat for use in power generation.
Russia, France, Japan, China and possibly Korea reprocess spent fuel, the UK used to. The mixture is denatured as result of it its residence time in the core, the longer it is irradiated, the more higher actinides accumulate and the plutonium isotopes are very difficult to separate. FWIW the CANDU is almost ideal for making weapons, like the RBMK the fuel can be removed while the reactor is operating making it convenient to operate with very low burnup producing almost pure Pu239.
the main reason for the cost, and the fact that some countries don't reprocess, is regulatory and legal restrictions. If those are sanitised and turned into pragmatic regulations it becomes quite economical while remaining safe (in fact it'd become more safe).
it happends,.. US, Brittain, France, Russia and Japan are reprocessing fuel,.. (well, whit exception of Japan they needet reprocesing capacities for Nuclear weapons program, so if facility already exist why not use it) for others proces is not cost effective att,.. but that does not mean they will not start doing it once it will be.
@@ValExperimenter Japan and Germany asks France to reprocess their spent fuel. ( well used to ask in Germany case ) and don't worry the Weapon Grade Isotopes of Pu and U are separated... before the remaining is sent back to it's original country. ( It's not as if we didn't build that whole recycling system without a reason beyond being able to reuse used nuclear wastes... )
Molten salt and sodium reactors are too much trouble and too far away time wise. CANDU reactor designs are fail safe. Loss of power or coolant. The reaction stops. No melt downs. They can reuse spent fuels. They are real world, ready to go designs. More costly to build? Perhaps. But it’s something we can start building today.
My question is if they are not cost-effective why build them? Why not use the money to build PV, wind and storage to get more power faster and cheaper? Even CANDU reactors are not as fast to build as PV, wind and storage.
Steve Irwin I agree with you assessment of the situation. The CANDU's are a proven design, I'm surprised a SMR CANDU hasn't been offered! Say a 100-200 MWe model. The DUPIC layout for burning spent LWR fuel could make these SMR's units little sports cars with an average 1.5% fissile material content. In addition the CANDU layout is way more flexible for other uses in making useful Isotopes like C0-60 or Mo-99. LWR really can't preform this task because of the pressure vessels. The making of Medical Isotopes would be a very profitable side line. In addition AECL did allot of prototype work on Organic coolant for CANDU's. This would move the thermal efficiency from the high 20's to the mid 30's. This was done at Whiteshell WR-1.
CANDUs are great reactors and IMO the best of their generation, but fail safe might be a bit overboard as it means there CANNOT be an accident. We have had fuel melt in CANDUs, although so far it has tended to affect only a few fuel channels which causes an expensive fix, but not a disaster. However we do have a whole lot of zirconium and water together and that needs to be actively managed. The goal with the new designs is to make it virtually impossible to overheat the reactor vessel based on physic AND to make all the nuclear materials at or very near atmospheric pressure which along with a few other features is inherently safer as it doesn't require safety systems to be engaged (i.e. no moving parts). No energy source is 100% safe, not even renewables and all designs have pros and cons and CANDU is no exception, though at the time, they were exceptionally good...:)
If we have a safe and effective nuclear power generator, there's no need to build in the ability to supplement renewables when the latter aren't producing. Just scrap the renewables, and build enough nuclear generation to do the entire job.
Though upcoming small modular designs are hoping to bring down costs through standardized production, until they arrive nuclear remains an expensive power source. Nuclear also makes for a fantastically reliable baseload, but struggles with throttling up and down. If you rely solely on nukes, you're either going to have far too much power at midnight, or not nearly enough at 7am. Diversity in generation alongside some form of power storage will be key for future grid stability through mismatched supply and demand peaks.
The first reactor mentioned sound just a little better than a H2O&Uranium reactor unfortunately both the H2O and sodium are unstable coolant, the second reactor sounds much better, swap the uranium for Thorium and you really got something there. A Thorium reactor has a reduced security concerns which means the reactor is better suited for remote installations. Canada desperately needs Thorium Molten Salt reactor to hold on to there far northern Territories as global warming continues.
Thorium is far less proliferation resistant than many have been led to believe (mostly by people who want to make money developing them). There are LLNL papers that describe how to make weapons material from Thorium MSRs and the material is rated second only to plutonium (i.e. it is better than weapons grade enriched U235). They also note you don't require huge PUREX facilities to do it, so in a way they are less proliferation resistant. What is needed for the north is small modular reactors, but they don't need to be Molten Salt or Th based...that is simply a choice and there are pros and cons to each design.
If we want to reduce emissions, nuclear has to be part of the mix. My question will the plant be protected against natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis, storms, floods, etc. Fukushima failed because of a tsunami so this is a key concern.
Molten Salt reactors are self managing in a disaster as they don’t depend on water cooling to slow the reactivity. The fatal problem wit 12 mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima is the design, originally meant for Warships but then adopted as the only solution under Richard Nixon’s Administration … watch why Molten salt is safer on many or the available videos on YT …
Why does nuclear need to be part of the mix? Nuclear power is more expensive than to build as PV, wind and storage and it is slower to build. Why not use the money to build PV, wind and storage to get more power faster and cheaper?
This is the kinda education material to calm the public for the fear of nuclear power, nuclear power is the only tool, when combined with renewable energy sources, to support our energy needs until we discover the proper way of utilizing fusion power, while keeping carbon output low.
The ARC-100 and Moltex designs don't need this (they have no moderator at all). Both have extreme negative temperature coefficient of reactivity to the point that they simply slow to idle if they get beyond the designed operating temperature with no moving parts or operator/automatic intervention required...just based on physics.
You can use fast reactors to destroy plutonium. Regular standard commercial reactors create plutonium. Canada has been doing it for decades. Canada has been constructing Candu reactors and light water reactors all over Earth. Canada was humanity's largest supplier of Uranium for a long time and remains second only to Kazakstan.
The Pu for the very first Pu bomb was created in Hanford B reactor, which was a thermal spectrum reactor. The key for weapons Pu production is having very short residency of the U238 in the reactor to maintain a favorable isotopic mix, more than the spectrum used.
Costs seem to be increased because of under estimating in order to get the contract. Also mismanagement I'm sure there are clauses in contracts, but at the end of the day if I say I can build that for $100 with only a little wiggle room say $10 and it ends up costing $200 I have to eat the $90, If I can't pay the extra $90 (insurance) and it has to go to another contractor and contractor A has done $55 of work contractor B only needs to finish off with (wiggle room) $55 worth of work
@@pierrekilgoretrout3143 he closed SPX prematurely. When most bugs were fixed. He made SPX look like a failure and a money pit, instead of using the technology to further improve the French Nuclear power program.
it's been possible for decades. The first fast breeders that would have been commercial scale reactors were constructed in the 1980s. But then the anti-nuclear lobby went ape and caused them to be banned from operation before they even went life. Kalkar comes to mind. The KGB created and funded that movement, destroyed the European nuclear industry and seriously harmed the US industry.
@@Markus-zb5zd It's the most critical part though. The rest is pretty low risk waste that doesn't need to be stored for all that long to "cool down" to where it can be normally recycled. Problem is that in many countries the law does not allow for it, so entire fuel rod assemblies are put into barrels that are then filled with concrete and stored for effectively forever. A massive and unnecessary waste of resources, all because of an unjustified fear of all things "nuclear".
@@jwenting yeah but tbh, most of the spent fuel can't even be used as fuel in these reactors, it has to be prepared in a very complex way. And no, the low and medium radiation waste is not low risk, as it's even less defined what's in it and due to the sheer mass can contaminate the environment as well.
Don't get me wrong, I am all for nuclear power but this narrator seems to play down the potential disaster from pure sodium. Pure sodium is kept covered in kerosene (or maybe now days something different) to prevent the moisture in the air from causing a reaction and fires and explosions. The reaction causes the sodium to release it's own O2 so it cant be smothered. As I remember the only thing it can do is burn it's self out. If it is a small amount, fire hoses can be used to move it to a safer place until it burns it's self out. At least that is what we where taught in the service. It is used for underwater welding and at least in WWII I think it was a component of some bombs.
Liquid sodium doesn't "release it's own O2". It is a pure metal. It needs a source of O like air, or water which it can release the O from. In reactors that are properly designed, the primary sodium is in a single piece capped stainless steel pool covered by argon and there is no water in the reactor building. The only pipes are in the top cap and argon is heavier than air, so it just lays there like a blanket. Liquid sodium is 100% compatible with stainless steels used in the reactors (i.e. no corrosion). A secondary sodium loop which is never in contact with the fuel moves the heat out so that if you have a leak, it is an industrial accident, not a nuclear one.
These type of Fast Breeder Reactors are first constructed in the USSR and operating safely from last 40+ years and also a similar one is operating in India for past 26+ years
Actually they were constructed all over the world starting in the 50s... but they had a huge drawback : it's hard as hell to separate Uranium Isotopes and a tiny fraction of the wrong one just make the whole lot useless... That's also what killed Thorium reactors. In the 50s/60s the important thing was to produce as much as possible of the Weapon Grade U Isotope and Pu to make bombs.
@@tenalafel Got it in one, people are grossly misinformed that the purpose of civil nuclear power generation was power generation. The entire nuclear industry focused on producing feedstock for nuclear weapons.
Russia/USSR built the first commercial plants, but the first fully successful prototype SFR was EBR-II in the US, which ran for 30 years generating power for Argonne National Labs from 65, long before the BN series.
@@davidcullen4996 That is just BS in most cases. The US weapons grade material was produced in dedicated military reactors, not commercial ones. The burnup in civilian reactors in most cases is too high to easily make weapons grade materials due to a bad isotope ratio. Same applies to nearly all western countries. Much easier and cheaper to make the stuff in dedicated facilities.
@@richardbaird1452 Hey! I'm not sure about the reactors in the west, but in the USSR at least, most civilian reactors were designed to produce weapon grade Pu-239 along with their function of generating electricity. In fact the RBMK reactors at Chernobyl were also designed for this purpose. I've heard that this hampered the investigation after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster since the military classified certain aspects of the designs of these reactors since they were involved in weapons production. (FYI I'm NOT saying this after watching the HBO miniseries about Chernobly, I've actually read quite a few articles about this. Though those articles need not be 100% accurate so take the info with a grain of salt.)
It has been found in murica that molten sodium fast reactors seem good but turn out not so good long term. A much better alternative is molten salt thorium reactors and if aec gets off it's duff and starts making tons of lithium seven it will go gangbusters and make electricity cheaper than coal or natural gas and can also burn nuclear waste wonderfully.
Right, molten salt reactors with lots of fuel options like the moltex reactor is great. Liquid metal fast reactors can be good, but using sodium as a coolant turned out to be a PITA. Lead cooled ones have a large number of advantages
@@BosonCollider Lead creates long lived activation products...that's why the west never seriously went that path. It creates another long term waste stream.
It was mentioned, but it goes by quickly. I agree it isn't the most clear. When you start out with fuel for a (typically US) light water reactor, it is enriched. Natural uranium is 0.7% U235 which as he mentioned is the type that can be fissioned for energy by "slow" neutrons which is how most reactors today work. However, those reactors won't work at such low levels of U235, requiring it to be enriched to about 4-5% U235 (the remaining 95%+ is U238). When the fuel is done in the LWR, it is about 1% U235 and a mixture of other things, but over 94% of the "spent fuel" contains the U238 that was not consumed. Remember also he mentioned the new reactors would "breed" U238 to plutonium which can then be consumed for energy in the new "fast" reactor design. I think of it this way, our current reactors burn the bark off of logs and leave you with the wood. Then we store the wood as "spent logs". The technology exists (using these fast reactors) to simply burn the wood.
@@LFTRnow LWR use 3,5% enrichment AFAIK. The remaining U235 is more than 1%, they still make power but too little to make it worth it. Breeding new Pu and other Actinoids makes the waste problem way worse not better.
@@0MoTheG I'm not sure where you heard breeders were tried and didn't work? Look up the ebr 2 as it worked very well. Funding was cut however. As for waste, the worst material is plutonium, but not only do breeders make it, it is also consumed as fuel . The result is less waste that is radioactive for less time.
This is "old" technology, even Germany started exploring these right after WW2, with building the first example on an industrial scale in the 1970's in Kalkar. However, technical issues as well as a change in sentiment after the Chernobyl accident prevented the Kalkar reactor from ever being run. Russia, the USA and other nations actually have run these types of reactors for a long time, struggling with technical problems caused by limitations of available building materials along the way. This is, even today, not to be considered "safe" technology, but as they can be modified to produce weapons grade material they are still considered "very desirable" by the likes of Putin for obvious reasons.
i thing liguid salt is better coolant option then Sodium, but i bet nuclear engineers woud convince me othervise,... Sodium fast reactors are nothing new, its proven, working concept.
You should explain how nuclear radiation always escapes from nuclear power plants. You could trace the atomic chain reaction from the reactor core to the environment beyond the fence line as the plumes common to all nuclear power plants..
Uhhhh… plutonium 239 decays into uranium 235. Is the process essentially converting uranium 238 into fissionable products (U 235 and Pu 239), with fissionable being a very important attribute, such as utility in nuclear weapons? Maybe the Content title should be “the Canadian reactors that can turn nuclear waste into weapons grade products”
Finally, some people realized that "green" energy is limited and at high latitudes doesn't have much sense. The molten salt technology is much more flexible than the geothermal plants demonstrated in Greenland and Iceland, and in the US at Yellowstone, with Alberta planning to copy the same in other to kick its oil addiction. If Canada would harness its gigantic energy resources, it could become the dream of anyone who wants MORE in life, become the American dream that the US will never be. ENERGY - it is the key resource humanity is meant to have, to move mountains and create a better version of itself.
American dream alive and well, no country gets more clean energy from fission plants than the USA,all Canadian nuclear efforts work very closely with American regulators, we should also mention Terrestrial Energy a Canadian IMSR based on US EBR2,molten salt coolant molten nuclear fuel,after 7 years you replace the fuel cartridge with its Graphite moderator and replace with new one the old one goes to permanent storage, cheap power, little troublesome waste.
@@paulbedichek2679 How is IMSR based on EBR-II at all? The only MSR that I know of that borrows from EBR-II (Which was sodium cooled, solid metal fuel) is the Moltex design which places the fuel salt inside fuel pins similar to EBR-II.
Sorry to sound like a negative neutron but why has it taken people soooo long to do something like this?? Seems pretty obvious that spent fuel has a reduced possibility of being reused but could always be used for something smaller maybe. Need to use up ALL of it though, would be nice lol instead of stashing it away in either the ground, in mountains or purpose built warehouses that have to keep it cool. Anyone that says nuclear energy is clean is full of it... No idea
If stopping the uses of carbon based energy is the actual goal? One needs a nuclear reactor that has minimum security concerns so the reactor can be placed next to factory or material processing plant like desalination or concrete etc. A safe nuclear reactor need to be efficient burning fuel as close to completion as possible resulting in very small quantity of short term hazardous radioactive waste. High thermal output capability for material processing. Only Thorium Molten Salt Reactor tick all the boxes, it's a shame we will have to buy them from China.
maybe their is a concern about this not use raw nuclear waste and more reprocessed nuclear waste who need another industry for being ready to use what obivously will byproduct another kind of more impure waste
I wanted to clarify that "burning" nuclear waste doesn't mean to combust/incinerate it. "Burning" is just the term for when fuel is used in the reactor - these nuclear reactors don't combust anything, they merely reuse the spent fuel from traditional reactors.
I have also received some comments that some people aren't seeing the end screen link to my other video. If you're interested in watching it and can't see the end screen then here's the link: ua-cam.com/video/0E1TbFDOeH0/v-deo.html
Your volume is low,or you just don't talk loud.
From what I understand, they burn up the long life actinides, or waste. So instead of spent fuel being dangerous for millions of years, it is only for 100s of years.
The fact that they take half life actinides and reduces that from tens of thousands of years to 100s of years should be pursued regardless of cost as the economics will always support it. If you want to have your head really melted delve into the history behind molten salt reactors and how the world essentially got fucked over by politics in the US at the time. When you think about any MSR design and features compared to a light water reactor design its nothing short of sheer insanity that anything that dangerous was advocated for let alone propagated as the default technology for civilian nuclear power generation. With all the focus on a decarbonisation its maddening to think we are 60 years behind where we could be all because of political decisions and something to bear in mind as there is advocacy for what can only be described as delusional green wrapped policies.
Could you also make a video about Canada's advancement in Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing? It is very interesting to me how Canada (a sparsely populated country) is a global leader in those fields as well.
@@davidcullen4996
I find it insane Thorium reactors were not developed and produced. We certainly made mistakes
Considering how little actual nuclear fuel is used in a reactor, nuclear waste from power plants shouldn't be as big of an issue as it is. Spent fuel still contains an immense amount of energy. It's like you had a glowstick which produced the brightest light for only a minute, but still produced mild light for a year, yet it was still thrown away after that minute.
''''nuclear waste from power plants shouldn't be as big of an issue as it is.'''' Why should it be ? The natural halving works for us . If the planet earth has yearly 100.000 tons nuklear waste , those humanity will have after 700 millions years 50.000 tons nuklear waste . Again after 700 million years it's 25.000 tons and so on . But bad news is ; We will have every year 100.000 tons in addition and our maths can't count how big the accumulation is .
@@alimali2120 I think he means that, rather than being a big issue as it currently is, there are likely multiple solutions for dealing with the "waste" other than just containing it in storage facilities.The main problem is that energy production is profit driven, so after the profitable part of the system is complete they want the cheapest solution possible for dealing with the waste. In my opinion, reprocessing the material into less dangerous components should naturally be a base level requirement. Still not an ultimate solution, but at the slow rate we are progressing, there should be the highest level of damage control possible, until they settle on a more responsible system of energy production.
@@brt5273 Recycled waste would reach background radiation levels in roughly 300 years. By continuously recycling the waste there would be no build-up. Most people don't understand radioactive decay half-life. Waste with half-life in the millions of years is not a problem as we're already surrounded by rocks and minerals with similar radioactive decay. Long half-life means less radiation.
@@SirRebonack Agreed. It's the best solution until or if they finally discover a better source.
@@alimali2120 the thing is a kilogram of u235 is enough to power a city for a decade. the primary nuclear waste is very minimal. But the secondary and teritiary wastes are the bulk if the nuclear wastes which are not that radioactive like the plumbing and the gloves and apron used to handle the nuclear material.
Referring to spent fuel as "nuclear waste" only adds the confusion.
Spent fuel just needs to be reprocessed into fresh fuel, then it can used to generate more power. This video gives several examples of how this is done.
The term "nuclear waste" should be reserved for the actual (low, medium, high)-level waste which is generated by various (medical, industrial, scientific, military) activities. It needs to be carefully handled and disposed of in secure, long-term facilities.
By tonnage, the amount of waste is small compared to spent fuel. However, on a *volumetric* basis the waste is the larger problem, mainly because spent fuel is so incredibly dense.
Yes, for too long, the anti nuke crowd has used terminology like "waste" that only instills fear, not understanding. I think people are finally coming around though; even the founder of Green Peace is more friendly to nuclear than he was in the past.
Passive shutdown in a nuclear reactor design is really crucial. The loss of electrical power and the resulting failure of coolant circulating systems caused the disaster at Fukushima. It is good that novel reactor designs which address safety and waste issues are being explored. Innovation in the nuclear power industry has been lacking for a long time.
There is no point in making a new reactor unless it's "walk away" safe. They need to be able to turn the key off on Friday and turn it back on Monday if need be.
In the event of any cataclysmic disruption, the reaction ceases and the nuclear fuel is spread out enough to become harmless indefinitely.
Seriously, we don't need another Chernobyl. Make it physically/mathematically impossible even if you try. This is the way.
Yes, but let's put things into perspective. Fukushima's accident killed 0 people (possibly 1 person but hard to prove). Most industrial accidents kill more people and barely ever make the local news. The evacuation killed thousands more. That's the scary part. Overreacting due to caution turns out to be more dangerous.
Gen 3+ are requirewd whitstoud Long term lost of power incidents, whitout problems...
well after Fukushima States and plants invested on Hellicopter based response teams in (extremly unlikely) event happed which would put out of order standart on site metods to provide power for emergency cooling systems. so lessons was learned,...
@@marianmarkovic5881 Fukushima had been recommended to move their backup generators to the top of the containment buildings years before, and refused to do so.
@@nuanil first, having heavy diesel generator at bottom make a lot of sense if you thing about resistance against earthquake. But true, there was that kind of suggestions. But newer forget, a a lessons are learned, and although it was heavy accident, most areas hit by fallout are decontaminated to point it's safe to return.
Japan had one of these liquid sodium cooled reactors. Problem, sodium is highly corrosive and combusts explosively when exposed to air and even more so water. Japan's reactor ate through a pipe, leaked sodium, started a fire.
Molten salt reactors have all the same advantages with none of the disadvantages. The salt though still somewhat corrosive is MUCH less corrosive than sodium AND is not flammable in the event of a leak.
I think salt can be used to put out fires on the stovetop too, so that could be right.
I'd rather trust liquid sodium than water.
I well remember my 8th grade science class, 1959. Mr. Zweig took a small piece of pure sodium from its kerosene environment and let it burst into flames. Cool!
Japan was so backward they managed to melt down a LWR,we should never take cues from Japan,in fact the Bill Gates company is already building the Natrium system for a closed coal plant in Wyoming.
Japanese are quite backwards, they managed to melt down a Lee something no one else has managed now they insist on building coal plants because they have no faith in science.
Research in molten salt reactors is going on current with other research projects in Canada and the US.
Canada has a great track record in the nuclear reactor realm with CANDU. Given we need energy and need to stop using fossil fuel, investing in nuclear is imperative. As we see in Europe today, wind and solar alone doesn't cut it. I believe China has an MSR going online very soon, and they have plans to share their technology with developing nations. If that works out, we'll see many countries escape poverty by have the energy they need to industrialize. There is so much good that can come from this, whether it's addressing climate change, reducing stockpiles of spent fuel, helping developing nations, and so on. Safety concerns have improved dramatically with these new designs and tech advances in alloys and sensors. The only thing that is of concern is that some of the advanced nuclear reactor technology will still allow an operator to obtain bomb grade material. I would like to see that those reactor technologies that can't produce bomb material are the ones being invested in, so the technology can be shared without worrying about someone initiating the destruction of humanity. Talking about the demise of humanity, I suspect that this new reactor technology is what will be needed to establish colonies on Mars. Lots of hope and opportunity ahead if we take our heads out of the anti-nuclear sand.
Well said! 😁
About bloody time, I've been asking this question for 20 years.
@@blackandcold What's not answered? Molten Salt Reactors are the answer, and were well on their way to becoming a commercialized reality 20 years before Chernobyl happened.
Fast sodium cooled reactors aint nothing new,... from US EBR, and Soviet BN series,...
Soviets also used molten lead-bismut conpound as cooland, in fast reactors...
which mean idea well tested and proven,... but PWR were more cost-efficient so far.
This type of fast breeder reactor at Dounreay in the UK about 30 years ago - no idea why the UK stopped this development.
Probably some political interference from an upset other client nation …
Politics... nuclear energy is full of it. Oil companies don't like them, and they have money to run disinformation campaigns. I even bet Greenpeace gets a lot of donations from oil companies.
It was a loop type reactor that was plagued with sodium leaks, theBritish government did not have the wherewithal to work though the problems, that combined with the discovery of large uranium deposits reduced the incentive to continue. Many loop type fast reactors suffered a similar fate.
It cost a fortune, the reprocessing of nuclear fuel was expensive and demand for it fell, In the eighties gas power stations were built.
Building nuclear power stations seems to always overrun on time and cost. If the government doesn't underwrite them in some way they are uneconomic.
E.g. the 7gw station under construction by EDF was guaranteed an electricity price of 90GBP/MWh when other sources could be built to generate at half the cost. This was justified as diversity of power sources and base load.
@@chrisdaniels3929 Again, politics.
Nuclear power is expensive because of regulations. Because people are afraid of it.
Go Canada! Hopefully they can get it cheap enough for mass use in the future!
This is the kind of thinking that solves problems.....
The world needs more Canada
@@bradjames6748 actually Canada is kinda authoritarian. The nuc engineering is good.. but I'd not want to go there after the last year an a half has shown their true colors
Unfortunately it's not in abundance these days
The title is misleading. The reactor still produces radioactive Cs, Sr, etc which must be stored for 1000+ years.
It really infuriates me how a project like the Onkalo waste storage in Finland is being praised. We'll be able to literally turn waste into free energy for decades to come, and then a multi billion dollar project to bury that free energy forever is receiving praise???
You haven't mentioned fast sodium reactors are in Russian electricity grid and functioning for decades (the BN series) with 800 MWh capacity. And it demonstrated capabilities to work on MOX fuel. Great that other countries picking up in fast reactors design.
It's cool to see that better nuclear reactor technologies are being developed. Looking at the numbers, it doesn't appear that green energy technologies will be enough to meet the world's energy demands if we quit using fossil fuels right now, so it looks like nuclear will help fill in the gaps. Great video!
So true!
Thank you. This is very nice reporting! It is super-encouraging that these wasteburner reactors are actually being built. All good wishes.
Really interesting and informative video, though I got a bit distracted by the volume balance between your voice and the sound effects. I think it would be an improvement to raise the speech volume a bit
Its always been a well known fact "spent" fuel is still useable. Its just not enough to run a normal reactor at peek efficiency, cause thats all anyone seems to care about.
Besides, it's not safe because of assembly wear during operation. And I cannot imagine how fuel from one reactor type would fit into another reactor type/design. It is different even between models of one reactor series.
@@wwlb4970 - The fuel would need to be removed from tubes and reprocessed to work in molten salt reactors. We have been reprocessing old nuclear weapon grade uranium into fuel for over a decade.
@@WJV9 Depending on what you call fuel. I call fuel assemblies fuel, as a minimal working unit currently in use. Besides, can you point out any working industrial molten salt reactor?
@@WJV9 Also, reprocessing highly enriched uranium into fuel is quite easy. Reprocessing fuel assemblies is quite a different, and a very long story.
Great summary of it all! Key fact is that this is all proven technology, and was scrapped only due to funding issues. If these new wave of reactors can stay within budget and schedule, then the industry will have no problem with public support.
BN-800 reactor is interesting. It already works at 880MWe, while Brunswick is not built yet and will be small modular reactor if finished. Hope they do it, i want to see economics of this small, safe reactors because industry says only bigger really make sense from financial standpoint.
The federal government website has some info about SMRs in Canada. Lot's of talk but no one is willing to spend the billions needed. The BN-800 reactor is a first of it's kind. Program started in 2016 with the reactor going online in 2019.
@@DennisCambly BN-800 program actually started in 1983 and stopped due to Chernobyl accident in very different type of reactor, end of the USSR, etc...
Project resumed in 2006 getting at full power in 2016.
We are at a point where it doesn't matter what type of reactors are built, if it is done fast and cheap enough people will realize this is the only way forward. Modern reactors like APR1400 or AP1000 have a lot more passive safe we could hope for. China is working on MSR, this are even more advanced, although we might wait a decade or so before they make commercial power station with this technology.
@@codaalive5076 I understand what you are saying. We need to look at the fact any reactor will take years and a lot of money before it is ready. The media is hyping reactors of all sizes as a quick fix. They are not. Meanwhile the millions of tons of spent nuclear fuel needs to be dealt with worldwide.
@@codaalive5076 I understand what you are saying. We need to look at the fact any reactor will take years and a lot of money before it is ready. The media is hyping reactors of all sizes as a quick fix. They are not. Meanwhile the millions of tons of spent nuclear fuel needs to be dealt with worldwide.
@@DennisCambly Media is still into oil, at least mainstream. In 60's politicians with help of oil barons decided they don't want MSR capable of using fuel so much more efficiently nothing else comes close.
Nuclear waste? You produce 1 can of Fanta of high level waste in your lifetime, if all power would be from nuclear this would amount to maybe 10 cans or much less with MSR and some other technologies. Don't worry about it because CO2 is so much more dangerous. Coal is killing 850.000 people every year, probably a lot more. Did you ever hear about civilian nuclear waste or even accidents killing thousands? No.
Any prototype is expensive to develop; as a rule of thumb, they're on average PI-factor over budget. However, building them in series considerable lower their cost, mostly because you span the cost of tooling over many pieces instead of one.
All true Florent and for new ultra high tech (like reactors, aircraft, etc...) another factor contributes massively as well and that is the huge sunk R&D costs get spread over many units, not just the tooling. Add to that designing things so as much as possible can be produced in a modular fashion in a factory instead of onsite and the potential is there to make things much cheaper than they would be otherwise.
@@richardbaird1452 they are building regular SMRs too and this technology can’t compete with price for them and is why this technology isn’t going anywhere. It’s more expensive. They don’t want to pay for it.
@@TheBooban Not sure what a "regular SMR" is, since none have been built yet. There are 3 first of a kind designs in Canada that are actually proposed for building and either in or getting ready for licensing discussions. The first is the MOLTEX SSR-W which is a molten salt waste burning fast spectrum design 300MWe class proposed by NB Power. Then there is the ARC-100 which is a sodium cooled metal fueled fast spectrum of ~100MWe also by NB Power. Lastly there is the Ontario Power Generation proposal for a BWRX-300 which is a thermal spectrum boiling water design in the 300MWe class.
There are other programs in development as well (e.g. Terrestrial Energy and a bunch of others using CNSC pre-licensing to advance their designs), but those are the three which actually have utilities planning implementation. The first two can both participate in waste reduction using appropriate reprocessing tech. So I would say it is far too early for your "They don't want to pay for it" statement.
Russia has 3 comercial, fast breader, lead-bizmuth cooled reactors operational for 20yrs.
BN600, BN800, BN1200. Number stands for megawatt power.
They had subs (alpha class) using these reactors in 70s.
Getting away from a sodium cooled reactor is a good thing.
While the Russians have built lead-bizmuth cooled reactors, the BN series are sodium cooled. BN-600 in operation from 1980, BN-800 since 2014 and BN-1200 is still in development.
There are outstanding problems with PbBi coolant including corrosion and production of Po from activation of Bi which complicates maintenance
The other thing about the IFR-EBR2 design upon which ARC-100 is based which I think distinguishes it from France's Phenix, Scotland's Dounreay, and I think Russia's two fast neutron designs, is that the fuel is the metal itself, not the ceramic oxide.
Small correction -- Pu-239 is fissile like U-235, not fissionable. U-238 is fissionable. Slightly different meanings but still an important distinction.
Older Candu and fast reactor set off the proliferation belly as they can enrich and be refueled while in operation
If there's a contract why does the government pay for overages when any private contractor would be penalized for cost overruns or delays?
Terrestrial’s IMSR can take spent fuel on as well.
If there was an existing IMSR, and there is not.
@@Nill757 yeah, that bothers me too. Can you write some emails to OPG and get them to hurry up and make a decision for their Darlington SMR vendor?
@@Nill757 The EBR2 was an IMSR,the US ran it for years, we did not lose any of that information, the IMSR from Terrestrial is the result.
@@paulbedichek2679 EBR2 prototype was a solid fuel reactor, fast spectrum, sodium cooled. It was actually built and operated for a time.
IMSR is none of those things. There is not yet any existing IMSR, not anywhere in the world, nor any license to build one in the US.
@@Nill757 Good point, IMSR has more in common with the aircraft reactor experiment, with molten salt molten fuel. We have had lots of experience with Graphite which is why they just replace the reactor after 7 years.
Informative video. Since the majority of the viewers of this video are watching solely out of curiosity, it would have been wise for Clinch River to put out such a video on the LMFBR. It would have calmed many people's fears and perhaps even sway the public towards the need of a clean burning power source.
No pressure vessels needed? It would be nice to have it explained how this reactor converts its energy in to mechanical motion. If you have steam, you have pressurized vessels and tubes.
They use multiple coolant loops and heat exchangers.
The primary coolant (that passes through the reactor) remains a liquid at operating temperature and therefore does not have to be at high pressure.
The primary coolant then passes through a heat exchanger where heat is transferred to a secondary water loop to produce the steam needed to drive the turbine.
This loop is at high pressure, but because it does not pass through the reactor it does not become radioactive (or contain radioactive by-products) and can be released to atmosphere if necessary.
The pressure vessel of a traditional PWR reactors is designed to contain a release of steam from the primary (radioactive) coolant water.
Sodium in reactor condition is liquid in standart pressure,... unlike watter which need extremly high pressure to remain liquid. But well if there is leak, You still have problem,.. since Sodium is extremly high reactive and burns once in open air, and you cannot use water to gauge fire since it kick hydrogen from water, so fire continues and you have extra hydrogen flying around :). So in similar facilities there was not even bathrooms, and around facility was on hand buckeds whit sand, in case of (small) leak and firefighting was needet.
@@bobthebomb1596 I very much appreciate this explanation
@@marianmarkovic5881 Yeah, I am not a fan of sodium cooling. There look to be less troublesome ways to do it.
@@bobthebomb1596 Well if you keep water and oxygen away from it any meltdowns aren't a big deal to the public :P
Would this be an alternative to burying these radioactive rods, deep underground centered on the world's largest fresh water supply in Teeswater Ontario Canada.
We used to work on breeder reactor designs back in the late 70s and early 80s until all funding and research was dropped….thanks to Jane Fonda at the time…we lost decades in important research.
We lost decades investing in nuclear power instaed of renewable energy.
Jane Fonda one women more responsible for millions of deaths worldwide. An enemy of the people.
thank you for your service to humanity
The real killer was Clinton/Gore when they cut the Integral Fast Reactor off in mid 90s, which is somewhat ironic in that it was one of the big solutions to Gore's hockey stick CO2 graph.
The other thing about thermal-reactors is that amongst the fission-products generated there are several isotopes that have high neutron absorption cross-sections where they just absorb the neutrons, as these particular isotopes accumulate during operation they slowly choke the fission reactions.
Fast breeder reactors are nothing new and neither is converting uranium 238 into plutonium 239 for fuel. The thing is that fast breeder reactors generally are less controllable than the conventional reactors due to the changing nature of the fuel in and how breeder reactors have to be designed, which leaves less space for the safety measures in place at conventional reactors. I am still hoping for this to succeed because there are ways to make breeder reactors that are safe and efficient. And anyways i’m always happy to see new innovations in this field. As a nuclear engineer myself, I’m still a bit skeptical due to being very strict with my own work, but i think this could be a step forward for nuclear power if it works out.
Hasn’t liquid sodium been used before and it caused issues with degenerating seals in the cooling loop.
3:22
Use thorium.
@@oldman2800 Sodium is the coolant not the fuel.
What is the product after splitting the Plutonium-239?
The only way nuclear energy by fission is ever going to be feasible...without the detriment of having to store deadly waste, WHICH CAN LEAK, for millions of years...is if they reprocess the waste until it is no longer a major threat. If the fuel can be reprocessed to a point that the waste is safer, the goal shouldn't be based on profits from the reprocessing, but rather as a necessary component of the disposal of the unusable material, same as the cost of a storage facility, with the resulting extra energy being a benefit that just offsets the overall cost.
That fabulous state of the art storage facility in New Mexico has already had a leak/breach just a few years ago. We simply cannot depend on burying more and more deadly radioactive waste as a solution, because there will ALWAYS BE LEAKS.
The United States has tons and tons of nuclear wasted stored everywhere in our country. We could pay Canada to take all of our nuclear waste and make lots of energy out of nuclear waste. Storing nuclear waste in America is just to expensive and ineffective.
Canada is way back on this technology, in Russia they have already built reactors of 600MW (BN-600) and 800MW (BN-800) and have operated them 40+ and 5+ years respectively, now they are in planning stages of a "serial" reactor of 1200MW
Ah Yes Russia the nation that gave us Chernobyl, Nyonoksa, Kyshtym, Tomsyk etc etc. Ya I would suggest anyone touting ANY Russian Nuke technology should probably think twice before commenting, Especially since the Russians have had more nuclear accidents and failures than the rest of the planet combined. The only that can be learned from the Russian nuke programs is how to NOT do something.
@@matthewq4b Bullshit
Russia is incredibly backward, very poor people struggling to stay alive, yes Russia does lead in fast reactors ,but that won't last, and their nuclear output is pitiful compared to US reactors.
What about all the spent fuel Russia dumps in the ocean?
@@matthewq4b Rave! Over the past 20 years, Russia has built more nuclear reactors than the rest of the world (mostly foreign orders).
The British built one of these in the 1950s, I've worked on some of the decommissioning projects at Dounreay.
Cool this was very well explained and i think if sodium or Lead-bismuth reactors could convert U-238 into Plutonium 239 that would be great.
What about Elysium Industries fast reactor?
i havent watched the whole video but what happens to the burning of the material, turn into heat energy? doesnt this heat the atmosphere contribute to your carbon footprint'?
Yeeei! I became your subscriber nr 1000! :D
Congratulation! Now you can start earning money.
What happens with the burned waste? Is it still radioactive? How long?
First you tell us that a molten sodium reactor operated for about 20 years in the US. Then the Green party says the designs are paper only. So which is it?
Fast neutron reactors that use Plutonium as fuel are also called “bombs” specifically because their reaction rate, generation to generation, is < 10 to the -14 seconds. The reason that these reactors were always real small is that they are relatively unstable and hard to control. Generally they required complicated control mechanisms using computers to control the control rods to control the reactor. Traditional reactors have the benefit of running with a negative temperature coefficient, where water is the moderator. When the reactor heats up, less moderator, reactor power goes down. This combined with the thermal fuel, U-235, is what makes them so stable. When you go outside of these design criteria you are asking for problems.
That is just plain false. Properly designed SFRs with metal fuel have a far higher negative temperature coefficient of reactivity than either a LWR or HWR using oxide fuels (nearly every commercial plant on the planet) regardless of if SFRs are running HALEU or mixed Pu/U/Zr fuel types. The EBR-II reactor demonstrated this completely passive safety feature twice in the mid 80s running at full power by disabling the safety systems and removing the power to the primary coolant pumps (test 1) and then the generator heat sink (test 2). In both cases as the fuel, coolant and reactor vessel heated up, the reactivity dropped dramatically and the reactor slowed to an idle with zero damage to the reactor or fuel. This is fully documented in published papers and was even recorded on video.
ARC-100 is the first design I read about after learning of the IFR EBR-2 that was built by the US national labs in Idaho. It's pretty much based on that research. In April 1986 it was deliberately subjected to the condition that had caused meltdown at TMI, and subsequently from the tsunami at Fukushima Daiichi. Loss of coolant pumping action can be fatal to water cooled reactors.
They cut power to the liquid sodium pumps, the neutrons got hotter, faster, and herder to capture. Sure enough, in 300 seconds the chain reaction ended and the sodium continued to cool the mere radioactive heat by convection.
This was three weeks before the infamous Soviet stupidity at Chernobyl.
Did You refer to the reactor in Oak Ridge? Then You have the dates wrong...It was between 1964 to 1969. Not 1994...
Different project. You are referring to the thorium LFTR reactor and he is talking about a conventional uranium breeder reactor. What connects them is the use of liquid salt as a coolant .
these uranium based reactors are a nightmare when it comes to controlling the production of weaponizable materials like plutonium, as he points out without comment. Indeed, it was exactly the reengineering of a CANDU reactor sold to India they gave that country the fuel supply for its atomic weapons program. This was a huge blow to the CANDU program at the time, and setback Canada’s reputation in the international community for decades.
The whole point of modular small reactors is it to be mass produced and become essentially a traded commodity. Given that the primary obstacle for most countries to creating a nuclear weapons program is the refinement of uranium into plutonium, you can be very sure that as this technology spreads, it will get into the wrong hands or it will be re-engineered by some states to sell weaponizable material on the open market to rogue states and terrorist organizations.
In most ways this is the absolute worst option available for the renaissance of nuclear energy. It’s very likely that atomic energy is the key to controlling climate change, but this replaces one problem with another one. The thorium technologies that were approved at Oak Ridge 40 or 50 years ago, show huge promise, cannot be Weaponized, and have the same or higher inherent passive shut down capabilities and zero pressure processes, but they don’t suit existing companies who make the majority of their money on the supply of fuel to the nuclear industry, rather than the supply of the reactors themselves . Thorium is far more abundant, easier to handle, and lower cost than uranium. Ask yourself the question.
They referred to the EBRII, the oak ridge reactor was the MSRE anyway the former is a sodium cooled fast breeder reactor, the latter a salt cooled and fueled graphite moderated thermal reactor.
@@danieldonaldson8634 Who's word are you taking that the Th fuel cycle cannot be weaponized? It certainly can be and molten salt reactors are the easiest way to do it. Papers published from LLNL stated this while MSRE was being performed, although proponents who stand to make money if it is adopted ignore this. While the U/Pu cycle may be better than the Th cycle for mass production, you don't need a huge and detectable PUREX plant for Th->U233. It is the second best bomb material according to LLNL, ahead of U235, but not quite as good as Pu239 for implosion devices.
This sounds like a version of the IFR (which was, by the way, developed in large part by Dr. Charles Till--a Canadian).
Ho hum molten salt reactors have been known for over 50 years ....
Thorium is the only alternative .... developed in for.modular reactor
Agreed, thorium fast breeder liquid salt are safe cheap and versatile
Of course SMRs have already been produced. They are installed in MOD shipping. If they are safe in a ship, it should not take a great deal of upgrading to adapt them for use on land.
I really appreciate that you're not afraid to talk about politics these things, which is one of the most important parts
Superfenix was the only commercial fast breeder reactor operated. It was part of the French nuclear programme but it was a commercial failure.
Superphenix was a prototype it has been shut down only for political reasons and France has worked on it's successor with Astrid wich is currently stopped but a comeback is still possible since Macron changed is mind. The main issue for Astrid is the cost and France is looking into partners to finish the project.
U238 is also fissionable by fast neutrons
This should be pursued even if the electricity is not competitive with plummeting costs of clean energy and energy storage. Dealing with nuclear waste alone would be totally worth it.
This utilizes the uranium 238 by turning it into plutonium and then fissioning it. Will still have the daughter isotopes from plutonium fission.
@@stefanr8232 You can get surprisingly far down the fission chain in a fbr. I believe most of the fuel ends up as lead
@@appa609 Stefan is correct. The difference in a fast spectrum is that the vast majority of the fission products have relatively short half-lives and you can fission the actinides (the really long lived stuff) out of the stream. The waste doesn't actually turn to lead...but the radiotoxicity degrades to original ore levels within a few hundred years (vs. 10s-100s of thousands).
The volume on this Video is a bit low, you should make it a bit higher but it should not crop (maybe 10% crop is okay).
The Green Party communists would have us all
Sitting in the dark waiting for a windy day
Where has rickys comment gone? Interesting he should reply to me with a comment as such and can make such a judgment from one sentence. I work with wind turbines so know a bit about them… but I guess that makes me sub 80 Intelligence. His comment makes me think he’s a true commie
Clickbait title (and that's hard to do for a video interesting only to people who have worked in the field). What exactly do you mean by the use of the word BURN? Cheers, D.
Fast reactors where the ratio of final to initial fissile content is less than 1 are called burner reactors. I explained in the video that these reactors are fast reactors that would use reprocessed spent fuel/nuclear waste as fuel. And both reactors would be located in Canada. It's a title that's meant to pique the interest of anyone who sees it, but it's also not misleading - the video is about what I said it's about.
world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/fast-neutron-reactors.aspx
@@ProfessorGoose I appreciate the difficulty of conveying anything like accurate information about nuclear power in a short video and I commend you for it. Your presentation was short, sharp and concise. Well done. i just feel that the use of the word 'BURN' (your all caps) was both misleading and not well explained. It's a small thing, but the vast majority of humans are going to think "hey, let's chuck another fuel rod on the barbie..." Could have been explained as jargon developed in the industry, but not to be confused with real combustion. There's more than enough people out there with zero concept of what nuclear power is all about. (For the record, your title did pique my interest and hence this feedback re same.) Thanks for the conversation. Cheers, D.
@@fodank Thanks for your comments and feedback, I'll certainly keep this in mind when making future videos
@@ProfessorGoose After I hit send on my last reply to you I read all of the comments. One guy thought 'combustion byproducts' and another felt you hadn't addressed the message of the title. I am a former public speaker and have had to take great care in educating the public re nuclear power. It's a daunting task. Now that I'm retired I can sit back and shake my head. I admire you for tackling the subject. Cheers, D.
What is the accent at the end of some of the words spoken by Professor Goose?
Canadian. I grew up in Ontario to be more specific.
well it must be a part of Ontario i’ve never been to.
Did NS Savannah use this method?
Well, the molten salt reactor sounds cool. But do you know Thorium232=Uranium233 super fissioners work on this basis? Also it an order of magnitude safer than the safest traditional fissioners
Not much point extracting thorium if you have huge piles of spent nuclear waste. I would prefer they started with burning the weapons grade plutonium stockpile. Then shift to spent fuel rods. Leave the thorium fuel cycle for a distant future where there are not any nasty materials in the inventory.
3:09 Sodium is also 100 times better at transferring heat than water - this means that in an
3:13 emergency where the plant’s electricity is shut off, the liquid sodium can passively
3:18 cool down the reactor and prevent a meltdown without any operator intervention.
Wow! Very impressive of sodium to be 100 times better at transferring heat than water!
CANADA is the future!!
I was talking about an idea with my grandpa that involved using nuclear waste for power ig my phone was listening because now I’m getting these videos lol. Only problem is it seems like this would take way to long to construct which is off since no normal ones take that long
Ooo What idea? care to elaborate?
Is it economicaly viable? Or is it cheaper to burn new fuel? This idea is not new. Would it be better to develop sodium based batteries for storrage for solar, wind etc power plants....nuclear is dirty and may be extremely dangerous both long and short term, not to mention proliferation risks if we scale it up...
Edit none of these ideas are new. In fact all of them are old tested and abandoned zirka 60 years ago.
Why didn’t Rickover not use liquid Na? Also, name one incident of a “meltdown”?
3-mile island, Chernobyl, Fukushima.
Irradiated nuke fuel can be reprocessed but the costs are huge which is why it never happens. It also contains a huge percentage of the fissile energy. Using virtually all of that remaining energy is why the final waste has 1/1000 of the rad life of the old used fuel.
Moltex use a chemical process which denatures the mix, making it completely unsuitable for military uses and the end result all goes into the new fuel rods. There is no "reprocessing" aka preferential extraction of fissile materials. This is important as that's how bomb grade materials are extracted and therefore very heavily regulated and very costly.
Moltex simply convert the used fuel into salts and put it back into a reactor. The reactor is as simple as it gets while just a stirrer inside the core to ensure the thermal transfer salts move around the fuel rods. A third salt in a separate loop extracts the heat for use in power generation.
Russia and France reprocess the fuel at apparently-economical costs, though.
Russia, France, Japan, China and possibly Korea reprocess spent fuel, the UK used to. The mixture is denatured as result of it its residence time in the core, the longer it is irradiated, the more higher actinides accumulate and the plutonium isotopes are very difficult to separate. FWIW the CANDU is almost ideal for making weapons, like the RBMK the fuel can be removed while the reactor is operating making it convenient to operate with very low burnup producing almost pure Pu239.
the main reason for the cost, and the fact that some countries don't reprocess, is regulatory and legal restrictions.
If those are sanitised and turned into pragmatic regulations it becomes quite economical while remaining safe (in fact it'd become more safe).
it happends,.. US, Brittain, France, Russia and Japan are reprocessing fuel,.. (well, whit exception of Japan they needet reprocesing capacities for Nuclear weapons program, so if facility already exist why not use it) for others proces is not cost effective att,.. but that does not mean they will not start doing it once it will be.
@@ValExperimenter Japan and Germany asks France to reprocess their spent fuel. ( well used to ask in Germany case ) and don't worry the Weapon Grade Isotopes of Pu and U are separated... before the remaining is sent back to it's original country. ( It's not as if we didn't build that whole recycling system without a reason beyond being able to reuse used nuclear wastes... )
Molten salt and sodium reactors are too much trouble and too far away time wise. CANDU reactor designs are fail safe. Loss of power or coolant. The reaction stops. No melt downs. They can reuse spent fuels. They are real world, ready to go designs. More costly to build? Perhaps. But it’s something we can start building today.
My question is if they are not cost-effective why build them? Why not use the money to build PV, wind and storage to get more power faster and cheaper? Even CANDU reactors are not as fast to build as PV, wind and storage.
Steve Irwin
I agree with you assessment of the situation. The CANDU's are a proven design, I'm surprised a SMR CANDU hasn't been offered! Say a 100-200 MWe model. The DUPIC layout for burning spent LWR fuel could make these SMR's units little sports cars with an average 1.5% fissile material content. In addition the CANDU layout is way more flexible for other uses in making useful Isotopes like C0-60 or Mo-99. LWR really can't preform this task because of the pressure vessels. The making of Medical Isotopes would be a very profitable side line. In addition AECL did allot of prototype work on Organic coolant for CANDU's. This would move the thermal efficiency from the high 20's to the mid 30's. This was done at Whiteshell WR-1.
CANDUs are great reactors and IMO the best of their generation, but fail safe might be a bit overboard as it means there CANNOT be an accident. We have had fuel melt in CANDUs, although so far it has tended to affect only a few fuel channels which causes an expensive fix, but not a disaster. However we do have a whole lot of zirconium and water together and that needs to be actively managed. The goal with the new designs is to make it virtually impossible to overheat the reactor vessel based on physic AND to make all the nuclear materials at or very near atmospheric pressure which along with a few other features is inherently safer as it doesn't require safety systems to be engaged (i.e. no moving parts).
No energy source is 100% safe, not even renewables and all designs have pros and cons and CANDU is no exception, though at the time, they were exceptionally good...:)
Why is the Volume so low!? 😑🥵🧐
well one thing i have discovered is that our nuclear scientists are very competent and take public safety very seriously............kudos
A fast reactor, along the lines of the integral fast reactor, would be nice
Germany wanted to build such a fast breeder, but politics came in between...
U cant replace deiszel add on synthetic oil
If we have a safe and effective nuclear power generator, there's no need to build in the ability to supplement renewables when the latter aren't producing. Just scrap the renewables, and build enough nuclear generation to do the entire job.
Though upcoming small modular designs are hoping to bring down costs through standardized production, until they arrive nuclear remains an expensive power source. Nuclear also makes for a fantastically reliable baseload, but struggles with throttling up and down. If you rely solely on nukes, you're either going to have far too much power at midnight, or not nearly enough at 7am.
Diversity in generation alongside some form of power storage will be key for future grid stability through mismatched supply and demand peaks.
The first reactor mentioned sound just a little better than a H2O&Uranium reactor unfortunately both the H2O and sodium are unstable coolant, the second reactor sounds much better, swap the uranium for Thorium and you really got something there.
A Thorium reactor has a reduced security concerns which means the reactor is better suited for remote installations. Canada desperately needs Thorium Molten Salt reactor to hold on to there far northern Territories as global warming continues.
Thorium is far less proliferation resistant than many have been led to believe (mostly by people who want to make money developing them). There are LLNL papers that describe how to make weapons material from Thorium MSRs and the material is rated second only to plutonium (i.e. it is better than weapons grade enriched U235). They also note you don't require huge PUREX facilities to do it, so in a way they are less proliferation resistant. What is needed for the north is small modular reactors, but they don't need to be Molten Salt or Th based...that is simply a choice and there are pros and cons to each design.
If we want to reduce emissions, nuclear has to be part of the mix. My question will the plant be protected against natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis, storms, floods, etc. Fukushima failed because of a tsunami so this is a key concern.
Molten Salt reactors are self managing in a disaster as they don’t depend on water cooling to slow the reactivity. The fatal problem wit 12 mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima is the design, originally meant for Warships but then adopted as the only solution under Richard Nixon’s Administration … watch why Molten salt is safer on many or the available videos on YT …
Why does nuclear need to be part of the mix? Nuclear power is more expensive than to build as PV, wind and storage and it is slower to build. Why not use the money to build PV, wind and storage to get more power faster and cheaper?
This is the kinda education material to calm the public for the fear of nuclear power, nuclear power is the only tool, when combined with renewable energy sources, to support our energy needs until we discover the proper way of utilizing fusion power, while keeping carbon output low.
Good video. Lousy sound level. With the speakers maxxed out, it was still barely audible.
The audio is too quiet.
Wouldn't using a adjustable moderator act as a safety function in this case also preventing melt down. Shame they don't use them.
The ARC-100 and Moltex designs don't need this (they have no moderator at all). Both have extreme negative temperature coefficient of reactivity to the point that they simply slow to idle if they get beyond the designed operating temperature with no moving parts or operator/automatic intervention required...just based on physics.
As someone who has seen pure sodium in solid form explode, i can safely say that there still is a problem if there is any exposure to air.
Your title is misleading. You didn't even talk about this.
I really doubt fast factors will be allowed for commercial use, you can use them to create weapons grade plutonium.
You can use fast reactors to destroy plutonium. Regular standard commercial reactors create plutonium. Canada has been doing it for decades. Canada has been constructing Candu reactors and light water reactors all over Earth. Canada was humanity's largest supplier of Uranium for a long time and remains second only to Kazakstan.
Russia has two commercial fast reactors running today (BN-600 and BN-800) and France had one (Superphenix) some time ago.
The Pu for the very first Pu bomb was created in Hanford B reactor, which was a thermal spectrum reactor. The key for weapons Pu production is having very short residency of the U238 in the reactor to maintain a favorable isotopic mix, more than the spectrum used.
Costs seem to be increased because of under estimating in order to get the contract. Also mismanagement I'm sure there are clauses in contracts, but at the end of the day if I say I can build that for $100 with only a little wiggle room say $10 and it ends up costing $200 I have to eat the $90, If I can't pay the extra $90 (insurance) and it has to go to another contractor and contractor A has done $55 of work contractor B only needs to finish off with (wiggle room) $55 worth of work
The first reactor lets me think to the French Phenix and super phenix reactors in past century
Jospin is a criminal.
@@AlldaylongRock why?
@@pierrekilgoretrout3143 he closed SPX prematurely. When most bugs were fixed. He made SPX look like a failure and a money pit, instead of using the technology to further improve the French Nuclear power program.
if this can go full scale then it could allow better disposal of nuclear waste witch has to be stored onsite or in special disposal dumps.
it's been possible for decades. The first fast breeders that would have been commercial scale reactors were constructed in the 1980s.
But then the anti-nuclear lobby went ape and caused them to be banned from operation before they even went life.
Kalkar comes to mind.
The KGB created and funded that movement, destroyed the European nuclear industry and seriously harmed the US industry.
yeah but the spent fuel makes such a tiny percentage of the nuclear waste...
@@Markus-zb5zd It's the most critical part though. The rest is pretty low risk waste that doesn't need to be stored for all that long to "cool down" to where it can be normally recycled.
Problem is that in many countries the law does not allow for it, so entire fuel rod assemblies are put into barrels that are then filled with concrete and stored for effectively forever. A massive and unnecessary waste of resources, all because of an unjustified fear of all things "nuclear".
@@jwenting yeah but tbh, most of the spent fuel can't even be used as fuel in these reactors, it has to be prepared in a very complex way.
And no, the low and medium radiation waste is not low risk, as it's even less defined what's in it and due to the sheer mass can contaminate the environment as well.
It makes up about 98% of the waste.
Don't get me wrong, I am all for nuclear power but this narrator seems to play down the potential disaster from pure sodium. Pure sodium is kept covered in kerosene (or maybe now days something different) to prevent the moisture in the air from causing a reaction and fires and explosions. The reaction causes the sodium to release it's own O2 so it cant be smothered. As I remember the only thing it can do is burn it's self out. If it is a small amount, fire hoses can be used to move it to a safer place until it burns it's self out. At least that is what we where taught in the service. It is used for underwater welding and at least in WWII I think it was a component of some bombs.
Liquid sodium doesn't "release it's own O2". It is a pure metal. It needs a source of O like air, or water which it can release the O from. In reactors that are properly designed, the primary sodium is in a single piece capped stainless steel pool covered by argon and there is no water in the reactor building. The only pipes are in the top cap and argon is heavier than air, so it just lays there like a blanket. Liquid sodium is 100% compatible with stainless steels used in the reactors (i.e. no corrosion). A secondary sodium loop which is never in contact with the fuel moves the heat out so that if you have a leak, it is an industrial accident, not a nuclear one.
These type of Fast Breeder Reactors are first constructed in the USSR and operating safely from last 40+ years and also a similar one is operating in India for past 26+ years
Actually they were constructed all over the world starting in the 50s... but they had a huge drawback : it's hard as hell to separate Uranium Isotopes and a tiny fraction of the wrong one just make the whole lot useless... That's also what killed Thorium reactors.
In the 50s/60s the important thing was to produce as much as possible of the Weapon Grade U Isotope and Pu to make bombs.
@@tenalafel Got it in one, people are grossly misinformed that the purpose of civil nuclear power generation was power generation. The entire nuclear industry focused on producing feedstock for nuclear weapons.
Russia/USSR built the first commercial plants, but the first fully successful prototype SFR was EBR-II in the US, which ran for 30 years generating power for Argonne National Labs from 65, long before the BN series.
@@davidcullen4996 That is just BS in most cases. The US weapons grade material was produced in dedicated military reactors, not commercial ones. The burnup in civilian reactors in most cases is too high to easily make weapons grade materials due to a bad isotope ratio. Same applies to nearly all western countries. Much easier and cheaper to make the stuff in dedicated facilities.
@@richardbaird1452 Hey!
I'm not sure about the reactors in the west, but in the USSR at least, most civilian reactors were designed to produce weapon grade Pu-239 along with their function of generating electricity. In fact the RBMK reactors at Chernobyl were also designed for this purpose. I've heard that this hampered the investigation after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster since the military classified certain aspects of the designs of these reactors since they were involved in weapons production. (FYI I'm NOT saying this after watching the HBO miniseries about Chernobly, I've actually read quite a few articles about this. Though those articles need not be 100% accurate so take the info with a grain of salt.)
It has been found in murica that molten sodium fast reactors seem good but turn out not so good long term. A much better alternative is molten salt thorium reactors and if aec gets off it's duff and starts making tons of lithium seven it will go gangbusters and make electricity cheaper than coal or natural gas and can also burn nuclear waste wonderfully.
Right, molten salt reactors with lots of fuel options like the moltex reactor is great.
Liquid metal fast reactors can be good, but using sodium as a coolant turned out to be a PITA. Lead cooled ones have a large number of advantages
Not true, no need for Th,but we can burn it in IMSR,but doesn't have any benefits.
@@BosonCollider Lead creates long lived activation products...that's why the west never seriously went that path. It creates another long term waste stream.
There was no explanation as to why one might consider it as burning waste
or what processing it takes.
It was mentioned, but it goes by quickly. I agree it isn't the most clear. When you start out with fuel for a (typically US) light water reactor, it is enriched. Natural uranium is 0.7% U235 which as he mentioned is the type that can be fissioned for energy by "slow" neutrons which is how most reactors today work. However, those reactors won't work at such low levels of U235, requiring it to be enriched to about 4-5% U235 (the remaining 95%+ is U238). When the fuel is done in the LWR, it is about 1% U235 and a mixture of other things, but over 94% of the "spent fuel" contains the U238 that was not consumed. Remember also he mentioned the new reactors would "breed" U238 to plutonium which can then be consumed for energy in the new "fast" reactor design. I think of it this way, our current reactors burn the bark off of logs and leave you with the wood. Then we store the wood as "spent logs". The technology exists (using these fast reactors) to simply burn the wood.
@@LFTRnow Ok, but nothing about that is new. Breeders (U238) were tried many times and never worked.
@@LFTRnow LWR use 3,5% enrichment AFAIK. The remaining U235 is more than 1%, they still make power but too little to make it worth it. Breeding new Pu and other Actinoids makes the waste problem way worse not better.
@@0MoTheG I'm not sure where you heard breeders were tried and didn't work? Look up the ebr 2 as it worked very well. Funding was cut however. As for waste, the worst material is plutonium, but not only do breeders make it, it is also consumed as fuel . The result is less waste that is radioactive for less time.
@@LFTRnow Producing the power of five wind turbines from 65% enriched primary fuel at that price. You call that "worked" !?
This is "old" technology, even Germany started exploring these right after WW2, with building the first example on an industrial scale in the 1970's in Kalkar.
However, technical issues as well as a change in sentiment after the Chernobyl accident prevented the Kalkar reactor from ever being run.
Russia, the USA and other nations actually have run these types of reactors for a long time, struggling with technical problems caused by limitations of available building materials along the way. This is, even today, not to be considered "safe" technology, but as they can be modified to produce weapons grade material they are still considered "very desirable" by the likes of Putin for obvious reasons.
Before I watch the video and or read the description..... Are they LFTRs of some description 😜
The answer is a disappointing no. But it's still cool answer!
Every kWh we consume from nuclear energy is a kWh less for a nuke.
I was hoping this was about Thorium LFTR
i thing liguid salt is better coolant option then Sodium, but i bet nuclear engineers woud convince me othervise,... Sodium fast reactors are nothing new, its proven, working concept.
You should explain how nuclear radiation always escapes from nuclear power plants. You could trace the atomic chain reaction from the reactor core to the environment beyond the fence line as the plumes common to all nuclear power plants..
Bwhahahaha
Volume is very low
Continued political support = subsidized. guaranteed to have cost overruns.
Uhhhh… plutonium 239 decays into uranium 235. Is the process essentially converting uranium 238 into fissionable products (U 235 and Pu 239), with fissionable being a very important attribute, such as utility in nuclear weapons?
Maybe the Content title should be “the Canadian reactors that can turn nuclear waste into weapons grade products”
Finally, some people realized that "green" energy is limited and at high latitudes doesn't have much sense. The molten salt technology is much more flexible than the geothermal plants demonstrated in Greenland and Iceland, and in the US at Yellowstone, with Alberta planning to copy the same in other to kick its oil addiction. If Canada would harness its gigantic energy resources, it could become the dream of anyone who wants MORE in life, become the American dream that the US will never be. ENERGY - it is the key resource humanity is meant to have, to move mountains and create a better version of itself.
American dream alive and well, no country gets more clean energy from fission plants than the USA,all Canadian nuclear efforts work very closely with American regulators, we should also mention Terrestrial Energy a Canadian IMSR based on US EBR2,molten salt coolant molten nuclear fuel,after 7 years you replace the fuel cartridge with its Graphite moderator and replace with new one the old one goes to permanent storage, cheap power, little troublesome waste.
@@paulbedichek2679 How is IMSR based on EBR-II at all? The only MSR that I know of that borrows from EBR-II (Which was sodium cooled, solid metal fuel) is the Moltex design which places the fuel salt inside fuel pins similar to EBR-II.
Sorry to sound like a negative neutron but why has it taken people soooo long to do something like this??
Seems pretty obvious that spent fuel has a reduced possibility of being reused but could always be used for something smaller maybe. Need to use up ALL of it though, would be nice lol instead of stashing it away in either the ground, in mountains or purpose built warehouses that have to keep it cool. Anyone that says nuclear energy is clean is full of it... No idea
Great and exciting information but horrible audio.
If stopping the uses of carbon based energy is the actual goal? One needs a nuclear reactor that has minimum security concerns so the reactor can be placed next to factory or material processing plant like desalination or concrete etc. A safe nuclear reactor need to be efficient burning fuel as close to completion as possible resulting in very small quantity of short term hazardous radioactive waste.
High thermal output capability for material processing.
Only Thorium Molten Salt Reactor tick all the boxes, it's a shame we will have to buy them from China.
Bad sound.
maybe their is a concern about this not use raw nuclear waste and more reprocessed nuclear waste who need another industry for being ready to use what obivously will byproduct another kind of more impure waste