I first learned about these reactors from, no kidding, a _Minecraft mod._ The mod, called ReactorCraft, adds realistic nuclear reactors which you use to power machines. It has pebble bed reactors, conventional light water reactors, plutonium breeder reactors, thorium reactors, and even a tokamak fusion reactor. Despite being incredibly old and quite obscure, it remains one of my favorite mods.
Bonus points if you tried to experiment with making the reactors explode as an impromptu dirty bomb in minecraft. Stuff was basically impossible to clean up quickly
Very close. The quote is "A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."
Just as it is with the constant race between what hardware can do and what software can crash it, the world is constantly building new and improved idiots.
i tried to make a list of all the modern technology China was able to develop on its own... .... ..... ...... im sure its totally gonna work they way they say it will
As a chemical engineer from South Africa, I am sad to see the PB(M)R associated with China mostly. It is a pity that our leaders shut down funding to this in 2010.
Well when an anc loyalty test is the chef measure of fitness for a job, things are bad. Kind of a good thing, you really don't want a reactor being run by say a former sausage factory boss?
wouldn’t a true scientist be proud that the project they started has been revived adopted with proper funding? I don’t quite see the point of comments being “sad” that the project is ongoing unless it is due to politics. In that case, they are not true people of science…
I found out about pebble ball reactors from Plainly Difficult's video 6 days ago where Germany had a radiation release with one. "Inside Germany’s “Chernobyl”" is the video. Kinda funny timing
China's pebble bed reactor is essentially the same one that South Africa was working on. The made an agreement of cooperation with China and when South Africa cancelled it's project, China kept working on it.
A friends' father was an Engineer on the project here in South Africa. Lost his job when the project was cancelled. Caused a lot of anger and resentment, to this day, in some circles.
Thank you for explaining, as a non-american, I had no idea about this reference and I had to watch the video twice because I was more thinking of beer at the first run. Now I want some. It's Saturday, 3PM, yeah, it's ok :)
PBR has not been cheap for at least a decade. It is contract brewed by MillerCoors for Pabst. Because of that it always cost more than MillerCoors value brands like Hamm's, Keystone and Miller High Life. Anheuser-Busch's Natural Light and Busch are cheaper than PBR.
Germany ran a small PBR reactor for an extended period. It had...issues. One of which was the constant motion of the graphite balls created dust (radioactive dust) that ended up getting into the containment ventilation. They also had structure cracks due to neutron embrittlement. Hopefully the Chinese designs have learned from the German experience with PBRs.
Seems like the dust issue can be dealt with by use of advanced ceramic coatings. I suspect China probably already thought the same thing - the photo of the workers seems to indicate the spheres are wrapped in some kind of metallic shell.
Germany ran two (AVR and THTR-300), although neither was particularly successful. And I don't really see how you can solve the dust issues when the basic concept of the pebble bed makes the fuel a (lot of) moving part(s).
Those were the AVR and THTR-300. Neither of which used the TRISO ceramic coatings which are used now. The Chinese HTR-PM PBR is a development (under license) of the AVR, with TRISO fuel and other improvements that fix all of the issues seen in the 1980s.
@@MayaPosch Collisions and things grinding against each other is going to make dust regardless of what its made of. Ceramic coatings might make less but it is still an issue.
We need MOAR Radiation to turn Science Man Kyle , to real AquaMan, just a simple mutation to breath under water. Its the Risk Im willing to Take, FOR SCIENCE.
I had to pause and hit the 10 sec. back button for each of those and Kyle's top-notch comedy reactions :D (did i go back and watch those bits again? .....mayyyybe.....)
In Germany we had a very similar kind of reactor called the THTR-300, where there was an incident just a few days after Chernobyl, spreading radioactive dust. It went unnoticed at first because it was believed to be fallout from Chernobyl. It had a lot of problems and ultimately sparked a lot of demonstrations and is seen as the start of our country's effort of a nuclear phase-out.
Important to note with AVR & THTR-300 is that these did not use the TRISO fuel pebbles that are now used, such as in China's HTR-PM. TRISO fuel solves many of the issues with damaged fuel & dust seen with the German PBRs. Incidentally, the Chinese licensed the AVR tech from Germany and turned it into the HTR-PM. Incidentally, the nuclear phase-out wasn't decided until a green-red (Greens/SPD) government in the 90s, and protests existed for decades before the THTR-300. Today's German Greens used to campaign for German coal instead of 'foreign uranium'.
Also produced a lot of dust.. They somehow didnt tought that balls made of graphite shocking constantly for hours under immense temperatures would create a cloud of dust.. Not a perfect design. MSR are the true future. Even China will bring them into service in the Gobi region after several years of testing smaller MSR's in the region.
@MayaPosch but what about the danger of a water leak into the reactor? This was also one of the major concerns of the THTR. While it is true that there were voices rising against nuclear energy in the 70s already, the most attention came after Chernobyl. And as the problems with the THTR became public shortly after, it sparked a lot of anti-nuclear demonstrations at the site, which resulted in the movement gaining a lot of medial attention. I think the political decision to phaseout nucleary energy then finally happened after Fukushima, but the public movement was already huge by then. Edit: I looked it up, apparently the decision was made by Red-Green party 2002. But after Fukushima Merkel decided to turn off some reactors earlier as planned.
@@MayaPosch It's always been apparent to me that the entire anti-nuclear clown show is paid for by oil and gas, they know once we're off the stuff we're not coming back. Oil and gas exploration is only going to end with a careful series of arrests meanwhile the true geopolitical context of it is that China doesn't have extensive oil reserves, thus this innovation can only come from them, if any of us tried we'd wake up with concrete shoes.
As a German… we dont have powerplants Like this anymore ,because of the danger they say …. But we buy Electricity from France … wtf , i want my cheaper power back
I read an article about this technology that China was developing in around 2016-2017. I hadn’t seen or heard anything else after that. I’m glad to see that it is still something being worked on.
Major factual error and omission of important details: The doppler broadening is not relevant for Fukushima type accidents, as the chain reaction has been shut down, by the control rods. What keeps the PBR safe is a low power density (as is required when using gas as a coolant), passive cooling (cooling of the outside of the reactor that is sufficient to take care of the decay heat when the temperature has been elevated), and finally a fuel capable of withstanding a higher temperature than needed during normal operation (700C to 900C under normal operations, but up to 1800C during accidents). The doppler broadening is quite useful as an additional passive safety feature, and will prevent runaway reactions, and it may even allow the reactor to withstand a loss of coolant without a scram. However, it is not what would save the reactor in a Fukushima style accident.
Isn't the point to avoid a Fukushima style accident? Fukushima had all reactors powered down and cooled by generators that got water logged by the tsunami. What am I not catching that you are saying? Would a PBR losing backup power not be in a safe state?
@@ValleyDragon PBRs are indeed safe from Fukushima-type decay heat incidents - that's what the Chinese test proved. The problem is that the mechanism behind that safety is not the one Kyle talked about in this video. He attributes it to doppler broadening, when the highly negative fuel temperature reactivity coefficient it causes is instead a precaution against Chornobyl-type power spike incidents. It's actually the increased surface area/volume ratio he mentions earlier, plus a few other factors, which make PBRs safe from decay heat meltdowns. Probably just a research mistake, since those two safety improvements are often talked about together whenever these is reporting about PBRs.
He's talking about the loss of active cooling due to a power outage at Fukushima. If there is no need for active cooling with a PBR, then a power outage caused by earthquake and flooding won't be an issue.
Yeah just like the reactors at fukushima. There is always some level of stress that will exult in failure. They are generally aware of design deficiencies until the accident exposes them.
@@CardinalTreehouse What’s to say Aria isn’t the multiple times great grandmother of Bender? Like there may be a programming lineage between the two… 😂🤣😂🤣
The big problem with pebble beds is the amount of waste they create, not only it is impossible to reprocess their wastes in fast neutron reactors, they also create a shit ton of irradiated carbon
Which from an engineering perspective made no sense but then again newspaper men aren't know for understanding science and engineering. That ship's 'water tight containment' was open at the top so that the water could spill over into the next chamber. Now if they had spent the few thousand pounds for steel to seal it off, then maybe the ship would have had enough enough buoyancy to remain afloat.
If there are two things that history has shown, they are that a new design will always behave exactly as expected and that the engineers always think of all possible failure points
Pebble bed reactors are over 80 years old so they're not new. What's new is that they've shown the reaction will self-mitigate rather than escalate under failure conditions. Previous reactors weren't able to achieve that.
@abebuckingham8198 Did you know Kim Jong Un doesn't go to the bathroom? I love Communist propaganda too friend! Russia has some crazy new tech too you should read about. I hear their new super soldier gear can stop 50 cal rounds!? 🤯
@@theapexsurvivor9538@theapexsurvivor9538 Kairos is building the Hermes Generator that uses a Molten Salt Reactor design WITH pebble aka Pellets called TRISO fuel similar the fuel in the Chinese reactor. So you can get double passive safety features.
"How does an RBMK reactor explode?" Calling something "meltdown proof" can potentially give people a false sense of security. They might disregard proper proceedures thinking that if anything goes wrong, the reactor will be fine.
Negligence from higher ups and operators was probably half or more of what led up to Reactor 4 exploding. The other portion was major design deficiencies in the reactor itself. RBMKs have a slew of issues and specifically the CNPP was pretty unstable even in 1984. It was known that the building itself was structurally weak in key locations such as the boiler room that could get too hot, explode, and fall onto the reactor causing a meltdown. It's surreal hearing someone say a nuclear reactor is meltdown-proof post Chernobyl and especially the Fukushima incident.
@@otherscup yeah, I don't trust their quality control enough to buy a shirt from them and trust that it's not contaminated with lead, but trust their nuclear reactors?
What’s crazy is I was reading about the Chinese PBR at Beijing Uni back in 2013-14 in Popular Mechanics. It was a testing facility that did power quite a few facilities. So why is Kyle talking about it now? Was there a new development? Did it go from test to functional design? Mitsubishi also made micro reactors for powering smaller loads, like villages instead of vast networks. They had offered to give them to Alaskan villages in exchange for access to the data. Due to Alaskan Constitutional Legislation stuff, they couldn’t accept the offer. Stupidest laws I’ve ever heard of keeping a source of power from being used.
This new one is a demonstration commercial plant - 210MW electrical generation, all the supporting systems, etc. The old one was just a research prototype - just a stand-alone reactor, 10MW thermal output, no electrical generation. The test that was just performed is supposed to show that if full-scale power plants were built with the same technology, as China plans to do, they would also be 'meltdown-proof' (or at least safe from the Fukushima failure mode)
Will say, the fact that this uses helium is a bit troubling. The world is short on helium, and so having such a heavy use on it like this si not preferrable.
This was my exact thought when I heard that helium gas was the "coolant" agent. When Helium eventually becomes that scarce, then what happens to these "fool proof" reactors, especially if they catch on globally?
@@KVGKQuake Also what happens when there's an earthquake and shocker, the containment vessel gets a little crack? All the helium rushes out and is replaced with air? Presumably bad things happen or else they would have used nitrogen in normal operation?
@@JMurph2015 Southern China rarely suffers from earthquakes, and neither do Inner Mongolia or the Northeastern provinces. Also, if the only way for it to malfunction is for a freak incident like an earthquake, then maybe don't doompill so much?
@@JMurph2015 the containment vessel isn't a skyscraper though. Earthquakes aren't an Ice Age style crack that comically rips through objects. It's just a large shake. Tall buildings will be whiplashed because of how motion is transferred to the foundations and then makes the lower floors move and pull the floors above, then stop moving and the higher floors are still swinging. This causes cracks in concrete because it will see non-compessive loads. We fight this with foundations that minimize shaking, bracing that supports the load across floors, and dampers that minimize movement in the top floors. The containment vessel is more like a bunker.
in the 50's the US was researching molten salt reactors along side heavy water. they had an event where they lost control .... sort of, the reactor self stabalized because the salt pusch the reactants further apart as it got hotter, reducing neutron collision. the reason we have the design in use today is because the other guy had a friend in congress.
Admiral Rickover's PWR was also a lot easier to build safely. Molten salt corrodes aluminum and rubber into powder, burns on contact with air, explodes in water, and leaves behind acid that'll dissolve people into puddles of organic goo. Refueling them was a pain and they're expensive and complicated to build. Molten salt reactors are probably part of the future and I really like them, but in the 60s the PWR made more economic sense.
@@Ralph-yn3gr Let's face it though, the investors were not nuclear physicists; They mostly cared about the money, and there was little fear and understanding of the dangers of nuclear meltdown and fallout at that time. Ultimately, msr's would have been the better option, and to say that water cooled reactors were a lot easier to build safely... well, they weren't really safe, now were they?
@@Ralph-yn3gr depends on the salt, some salt chemistries are corrosive, some are not, but the ones that are not offer different issues. Engineering is always a compromise, currently there is no "Magic Bullet" salt that solves all the issues. The main problem is that a lot of the knowledge from the research in the 1960's has been lost and so it's having to be re-learned. Added that the research into the chemistry of these salts and their interactions at various temperature ranges is not fully understood, so risky. The primary funders at that time were world governments, and what they were primarily interested at that time was Nuclear weapons. Extracting the plutonium from solid fuel is much easier than first having to extract the fuel from a molten mix of stuff, so they weren't seriously interested. Combined with the nuclear accidents affecting public opinion and politicians betting the farm on Fusion. The R&D wasn't invested into other Fission proposals.
We got the reactor we got because it produces by products useful for nuclear bombs. At time of selection that was a big deal. Politics did not pick the safest tech.
Admiral Rickover wanted PWRs because Navy ships are surrounded by water and he cared more about a nuclear powered Navy than he did about safe civilians.
Wait, am I misremembering or did we have meltdown-proof reactor designs like 30 years ago? I distinctly remember one that utilized a salt block plug that was actively cooled to keep it solid, so that if power ever failed the block would melt and allow everything to naturally drain out into a (safe) containment... Man, I am going to go down such a rabbit hole tomorrow.
No, you are not. Los Alamos was experimenting with "Gen 4" reactors in the 90's, just prior to its loss of funding, and that and nuclear recycling were the two big techs to come out of it.
I remember talking to an engineer about helium coolant, he was worried about helium embrittlement, where the helium coolant diffuses into materials it is exposed to
One problem I seem to recall was the pebbles eroding unevenly and jamming the discharge chute. That kinda fouls things up for commercial power, if one cannot cycle the fuel while operating, as it's supposed to do.
bro your videos are so swesome i put it on and its like i fall into a trance with the bgm and your voice explaining things especially like the video with the luciteria set
@@BitLyrist CANDU just uses heavy water as its moderator. Since the heavy water only slows, but rarely captures neutron, it has much better neutron economy, and can run on natural uranium without enrichment. Other than that, it’s just a pressurized water reactor. Phenix is a breeder and is a completely different beast. It’s also the kind of reactor we need if we actually want to continue and expand our use of nuclear fission.
That pic was wild to me too! I wonder if that's a training reactor for the operators where they aren't actually fuel balls. Seems wildly unsafe to just stand in a spicy ballpit
I'm pretty sure uranium decays by the alpha chain route for at least the first few steps. Alpha radiation can absolutely be stopped by those suits. The issue would be when the fuel decays further down the chain and starts entering beta and gamma decay.
“Do I need to put a lock on the fridge?” Fun fact, when I was very little I couldn’t reach the upper cabinet in our kitchen (that contained all the candy) so I climbed a chair and was hanging from the cabinet. My grandma found me like that and not too long after, that cabinet had a lock.
We also had a pebbled Reactor in the 80s. The THTR-300. main Problem with it was that the pebbles broke more than expected and it was shutdown 89. So even a good on paper reactor might be a total failure, if once build.
Scientists, Engineers, and Accountants. The holy grail is in the intersection of the three. Making fuel more expensive just makes me think it’ll push companies to cut safety. After all, it’s melt down proof.
@@PinkMawile lets also not forget the fact that a lot of chinese stuff looks really fkn good on the theoretics and then gets the tofu drag treatment and turns to shit because of the rampant corruption there
"So even a good on paper reactor might be a total failure, if once build." Yup, same is true of anything engineered. It ain't invented until you've got a working prototype. And it ain't a product until you've worked out a ton of bugs in the prototype. They never show that in movies.
Except the THTR-300 didn't actually fail, it was shut down due to politics. They even wanted to build a new plant based on the same operation the year after, but that too failed due to politics. New reactor types will need years to iron out the issues and have many, as far as public health is concerned, inconsequential breakdowns. It's not a problem of the reactor if public outrage forces it to be decommissioned prematurely.
I'm on the fence with this one a bit. Yes I do love the idea of having reactors that need no intervention to prevent meltdowns in the case that somebody is dumb and doesn't follow proper safety protocols or there's an unexpected event. But I am a man who thoroughly believes in efficiency. Specifically, efficient power. In my opinion, it is a delicate balancing act that is well worth the effort. Because not only are you able to make things more powerful, but you're also able to keep them as efficient or more by doing so. That said, I still do look forward to seeing where this new technology goes and what this new generation of nuclear reactor is capable of. Perhaps at some point we will be able to get the best of both worlds
The only problem with this is greed. Even if the power plant itself is perfect and never has any issues with corner cutting, manufacturers would. Three mile island happened because someone didn't run the reactor right sure, but that event ultimately only happened because of a manufacturing defect in a valve that the manufacturer insisted was perfectly fine and couldn't ever have faults period... until it did. It took an enormous volume of public pressure to get them to admit fault, and that's true for basically every company. Sweep it under the rug and kick the can down the road for someone else to deal with it is their general ethos. Making a reactor that by it's very base design, can't be screwed by people trying to cut corners to save ten cents into having a meltdown instead of some other minor malfunction is important. I wish this wasn't the case, but until companies are no longer pushed by laws to maximize profit over everything else, this is going to be a problem for all time. The designs have to be, inherently, fail safe passively. That however causes huge inefficiencies and makes it so you can't really get every bit of power out of the fuel that you might want. That's the price we pay until people can stop greeding themselves into an early grave.
Maybe it's not yet a perfect solution. But it's definitely a good step for exploration. It's good to see investment happening in nuclear again instead of the west obeying oil industry 's every whim.
yeah, modern reactors are already so safe that they are basically meltdown-proof already, A LOT would need to go wrong for all the active and passive safety features to fail. so the only thing this technology does is make it safer to sell to the public. said that, more efficiency is not necessary, if we recycle fuel there is enough accessible fissile material on the planet to power every country for something like a thousand years, if we include breeder reactors and thorium fuel we can extend that for a few million years. efficiency is only a concern if you worry about how much money you can make out of it.
As far as nuclear power is concerned, China seems to be taking a 'try everything' approach to see what works and what works best. Pebble bed reactors are one approach they seem to be trying. You should make a video about molten salt reactors, their past history (at Oak Ridge) and China's research into them. You should also look into the thorium nuclear fuel cycle, something that also sometimes comes up alongside molten salt reactors but which can be useful without them.
For those (TLDW): PBR economics Works a little bit different because it's a lot less energy dense than a typical lightwater reactor, so the reactor in China is going to put out less power than an lwr but it's going to be smaller and then probably require less space, less containment, less everything, and so it's going to cost less. If the Public's main concern is going to be safety and we want more nuclear power, well maybe we don't need a lot more giant plants maybe we just need a lot more even more smaller plants that are meltdown proof.
Unfortunately it also means less efficiency which means more nuclear waste, arguably a worse problem than safety with modern designs. Even if you don't care about the waste, these things wouldn't remain economical for a long period of time because ready-made fissile material is somewhat of a rarity. If we are to make greater use of nuclear, with the ever-increasing energy requirements, naturally occurring fissile isotopes like U-235 will run out quickly. If you want to go nuclear, it's fast breeder reactor or bust. And this design doesn't work for breeding.
I hope she doesn't wake up tomorrow with a hangover and pregnant. The last thing we need is hybrid AIs running around ruling us squishies with their iron/silicon fists.
For people concerned about Helium Supply for Pebble Bed reactors - Nitrogen can be used. You do have to separate N14 and N15. You can find a good discussion on this topic via a query "Will heavy nitrogen become a widely used fission reactor coolant? By Rod Adams"
Over 30 years ago, I had left the navy as a reactor operator. I was in college for EE degree and was taking a course in public speaking. The final was a 10 minute report, and I did mine on reactor operation and theory, ending with a look at next gen PBRs. This was when the internet was mostly bulletin board and file sharing. This was after TMI, and before Chernobyl & Fukushima. I am so glad they've moved on to walk away safe reactors.
@@rawkfist-ih6nk In the end it was. The accident demonstrated that it was flawed, and the system much more expensive because of these issues. The demonstrations against it would have been ignored, if it had been viable in any way.
@@kosmosXcannon The design is excellent and the technology sound. Low proliferation and inherently safe. They could've lead the world in safe nuclear technology but let others take it further.
I was demolishing K east at Hanford when Fukushima melted down. I had the privilege of working with an extremely talented Radiological Team. They brought in diagrams of those reactors. They had personal experience with them. We were given an excellent briefing on what happened. We used to have meetings once every few weeks to discuss old technology, the difference between the commercial ones and the ones developed to produce weapons grade plutonium. Basically no biological domes over the non commercial reactors. We also discussed PBR, the Molten salt types and the small modular types. Yes we studied the very 1st one SL-1. It was an interesting time. That was only 1 of the projects I worked on in the 10 years I worked in the area. Knowledge is power. You respect radiation and handle the situation accordingly. There is no reason to fear it.
The Fukushima plant had a major design flaw. The backup generators are at the top of the critical safety list, but they were put at the bottom of the plant, where they were easily overcome by flooding. How that passed design review is a mystery.
I built a 1:1 scale RBMK 1000 nuclear reactor in minecraft (without a containment chamber because the RBMK can't explode) and my friends rated it a 3.6/5 not great not terrible
Plainly Difficult JUST released a video on Saturday about the German PBR experimental reactor. I would love a comparison of the two. IIRC, the German reactor even used Thorium in it's fuel cycle. I would also love to see the fuel used in CANDU reactors get a coating that exhibits the same anti-meltdown property (without destroying the fuel bundle which is how it currently fail safes) - probably never happen, but still it seems like the design CANDU just about everything nuclear (except fusion.)
TRISO fuel is available for a variety of fuel pellet shapes and sizes. There are variants designed for use in many different reactors but they have slightly different characteristics. The heat tolerance for example is superior in all of them but to varying amounts. Some could tolerate more severe conditions outside of normal operations than others.
I remember reading about this pebble tech reactors back in 2005. I’m sure it was the same thing, graphite or C60 (Buckminsterfullerene) encases the nuclear fuel and regulates the fission reaction.
THTR-300 was a high-temperature pebble bed reactor that began operation in 1983, so the claim made at 5:52 seems questionable, and that reactor was not as simple and safe as theory would suggest.
@@sillyking1991 sometimes they’re closed for financial reasons. Nuclear plants are 10 times the cost of a conventional fossil fuel plant. I like to be warm, keep using fossil I say
And sadly, chances are we will be wasting it for a good while. By the looks of it, the pebbles were about 2-3inch diameters. Probably half of the diameter of uranium inside. The main difficulty in recycling it being removing the graphite completely before grinding up the pebble to carry on with the rest of the current recycling process
Kyle I don't know if you touched on it, but two key designs of the PBR would aid in safety. 1. The Helium gas system could be effectively vacuum sealed to remove oxygen from the system and prevent graphite fires. 2. The PBR fuel pellets have a higher capacity to be effectively recycled by being placed in centrifuges to recharge the fuel pebbles reducing nuclear waste significantly. I personally would say safety is better than raw power output. A smaller safer reactor would simply be just better.
The sheer number of ships that were “unsinkable“… I don’t put much stock in something being “infallible” in any industry. If humans are involved, it can go wrong in some way.
We are running out of helium far too fast for PBRs to be useful, I think. The amount of raw helium located somewhere in Earth is a volume estimated to last something like 100,000 years...but we basically cannot access any of it because we can't get down far enough in the ground to let it loose (the only practical method of helium capture is via fossil-fuel mining, specifically oil and natural-gas wells). What we CAN access is located primarily (most-concentrated deposits) in the US, Algeria, and Qatar, and secondarily (less-concentrated deposits) in Canada and Tanzania. The US moreorless stopped mining for helium now and has become an importer of it with the final deadline for this being sometime in 2025, and other countries (basically, Russia) are strictly refiners with no reserves of note. Depending on the metric being used, estimates for this supply of helium range from 30 years all the way up to about 700ish years; this does not account for expected growth of consumption or recycling/conservation efforts, however, so the more likely estimate is probably around 100 years or basically 2 generations. This does not mean we will see capturable helium go extinct on Earth, however. Instead, as the price inevitably ranges upwards we will see the curtailing or abandonment of certain usages...some of which are actually happening right now rather than in the future. Party balloons and parade floats (both of which use a lower grade of helium that's about 50% nitrogen) will probably go away completely, with that supply entering the refiner supply to become purity-grade (99.9%) helium used for everything else. Prices will continue to go up, similarly restricting or vacating some of the lower-end "essential usage" applications, which will definitely have some increasing knock-on effects. What is purity-grade helium used for? MRIs and MNH medical equipment, for one. If we have to restrict these, the overall rates of lifetime health could go down. We'll probably be eating healthier and exercising more, so it might be more like an increase in cancers and other chronic conditions that could've been detected and treated early on. Another use, and one that's on the increase now with the renewal of the space race and development of space tourism, is space travel. Rocket fuel uses helium to keep the volatile elements separated...no rocket fuel, no space travel, Elon Musk/SpaceX goes belly-up (or they get stranded and The Expanse becomes a documentary). Various science research gets delayed or canceled, so bye-bye CERN or whichever facility replaced it. Superconductors in general would get scarcer, so things like mag-lev trains or cryogenics would stop working/wouldn't get built and the entire electronics universe (mainly cellphones) would contract. Helium also gets involved in manufacturing work, too, being used in welding applications. Really, helium is just too good for the applications we use it for so if we had to switch away from it there's a whole lot of redesign that would have to take place to take over the work. Existing designs can't really support other elements taking over the role helium filled.
Given nuclear power is dead in Germany it is infuriating to see that we have counter arguments now for every fear mongering scare tactic that caused it. Such an amazing video that hopefully changes people's minds ❤
They've existed the whole time, Germans are just sheep that listened to the Greens without doing a shred of research for themselves after Fukushima (source: literally visited the Bundestag after Merkel announced the closure to interview one of die Grüne reps)
Given that this kind of reactor has already been built in germany in 1983 (THTR-300) and also malfunktioned i wouldnt get my hopes up. Though this is no doubt of a different design.
@@MyPonyLooksKindaWeird The problem was that it was an experimental design, using pre-TRISO fuel. All those issues were addressed and the German researchers were in the process of fixing it when the plug was pulled. That's when Siemens et al. licensed the tech to China (today's HTR-PM) and the German nuclear industry just kinda died, including backstabbing the French-German EPR design.
Not commercial reactors, just experimental reactors. China has a major commitment to nuclear power including a lot of money for research. They're looking into fusion reactors as well.
Extremely interesting and is for sure a breakthrough in the field. My issue with it would arise with adding so many thousands of mini sources into the equation. Just one goes missing and you have an incident, still very cool!
The main advantage of nuclear thermal propulsion is savings on fuel weight. Since this method is less fuel efficient than light water reactors it would increase fuel weight. However the weight of the reactor may also be a factor as well so it might have some advantages. It would definitely outperform chemical rockets.
@@abebuckingham8198 i was mostally thinking as @king_br0k said, the hydrogen could flow through the core and the balls have higher surface area than experimental NTP reactor cores so this could cause more hydrogen to be heated faster and more evenly than going through current experimental NTP reactors . i may be wrong about this though, please correct me if so.
It kind of sounded like aria was actually drinking a pbr every time she cracked one open, by the end of the video and when she said fission is stored in the balls she sounded kinda drunk
From the USSR with concern. We had tier 1 physicists in Chornobyl. The reactor was considered "meltdown proof." And it almost worked out until Dlyatov proved human arrogance can turn anything into a disaster. China is no different.
Dlyatov was a scapegoat. His team was reckless, no doubt, but they were encouraged to be so because of what was told to them. The real problem was the Soviet information system suppressing knowledge of the positive-SCRAM design flaw, despite engineers and leadership knowing beforehand, because it would be embarrassing for the government. It was not arrogance, but greed that caused the disaster. With the CCP's obsessive control over information and 'national prestige', I don't doubt that they would make the same mistake.
If the problem is when the pumps turn off the water can boil off and then the rods heat up ect ect. Then why not just set up a uphill lake that has enough water for months of flow, that just uses gravity to move the water thru the core. When the pumps are working you just pump the water back up to the lake but if they fail you have months of water flow to get those pumps working again.
The coolant water still needs to be contained in case any fission products get into it. You could use a lake and heat exchanger, but that'll still require pumps
Passive heat circulation is one solution. In fact, CANDU already has that feature. In the event of complete loss of power to cooling systems in CANDU, the water continues to circulate through convection. Seriously, CANDU is an attitude built right into the design.
@@kstricl plus CANDU reactors can run on the thorium U233 cycle big plus today even shame is hat U233 can be used to make nukes so its not done currently
@@powertechnical Canadian Deuterium Uranium. Technically it is a Pressurized Heavy Water reactor. It's not that popular because heavy water is expensive (I think it's like $100k per year to replace the primary coolant), though it runs on natural uranium. There are so many advantages to the reactor design, it's a blinking shame more operators haven't bought into it.
the idea is great, unfortunately there was a project in germany a couple decades ago, massively damaging the reputation of nuclear technology. Maybe worth a story on it's own, the THTR300.
The THTR 300 was a "Kugelhaufenreaktor" (pebble-bed reactor) and one of Germany's early attempts to harness thorium as a fuel source in the future. Even the reactor's designers acknowledged that it operated like a "black box," and the complexity of the pebble design posed significant challenges. Modern reactor designs have simplified these issues by using liquid fuel, which allows for real-time monitoring, filtering, and replacement. Another innovative nuclear project, also "Made in Germany," is the "Dual-Fluid Reactor," which is currently being developed and tested in Rwanda. The future of energy lies in nuclear power. Despite resistance from German media, the physics and technology behind new thorium reactors strongly support their potential as a sustainable and efficient energy source.
This pebble technology has been around at least since the late 1970s when one of my professors, a big fan of nuclear energy, explained it to us. There are quite a few meltdown proof nuclear reactor technologies far safer than what we have been using since the 1970s, but politics keeps getting in the way to building them.
It doesn't really need cooling *at all* so helium isn't really the limiter. You could cool it with anything. Helium is nice because it doesn't want to react with things so you can get it hot and it won't try to corrode your pipes. But reactors cooled by liquid salt have been made and that stuff is nasty. So it's certainly possible to find coolants somewhere in between "masochistic I hate myself" liquid and "nicest damn fluid I ever met."
@@goodfortunetoyou from a quick 2 second search it seems like u can use argon theres just slight differences that more need a bit more technical designing but its much cheaper than helium. in the future they'll probably have some with argon. it's just less thermal conducive, slightly less efficient and has a radioactive isotope that has a long half life. theres some pros tho.
@@abebuckingham8198 Nope. Gas cooled reactors operate under high pressure, so you are not going to have anything leaking in, only out until the pressure equalises
Read somewhere that pebble reactors dont do super well when shaken by something like an earthquake. Granted, not many things do well when shaken by an earthquake, but it seems pebble reactors are especially vulnerable to it.
The biggest meltdown I saw is when youtubedrama went after Kyle for accidental plagiarism instead of the hundreds of scammers and abusers on the platform.
Well, it is very ironic that he had engaged in plagiarism on the same video which he had accused another "science" channel of "stealing" arounds 2 years ago I think.
There was a German pebble-bed reactor with a similar design that had multiple accidents and radiation release. It wasn’t a meltdown, but it was problematic enough that they decommissioned it back in 1988.
That sounds in general pretty good. Just three thoughts cross my mind after this video. - Besides graphite being highly flammable, when those balls get continuously replaced, how about the danger of graphite dust being created from all the friction from the spheres brushing against each other? Dust is much more dangerous for ignition because of its much higher surface area which would accumulate in time in the reactor. If those spheres could be coated with something to decrease the chance for dust creation that would be helpful and increase safety. - Why does the reactor use Helium and not another inert gas like Nitrogen? Helium is rare and much more expensive then Nitrogen. - What is the chance to store spend pebbles, resp. recycle them for long term disposal or way down the road for a remotely possible transmuting of them into something less harmless? Safe use of a reactor is one thing, safe storage or disposal of spend fuel is another important point.
Never expected so much misinformation on a Kyle feed. The fuel feed became jammed in 1986, which caused radioactive isotopes to leak out from the fuel that was in the jammed feed tube. In short, no structural damage occurred, no temperatures surged and hence the risk of meltdown was exactly 0%. Not only that, but the radiation released was roughly the safe limit authorized by authorities.
"Fission is stored in the balls."
Aria saying what I was thinking.
Adds a dimension to "alpha emitter" I hadn't previously considered. 🤔
Ah yes, Dandadan.
I know, only a few might get the reference. Had to do it.
She said what I was thinking right after I thought it
@@erika002 i got it
I read that in Daft Punk voice.
I first learned about these reactors from, no kidding, a _Minecraft mod._ The mod, called ReactorCraft, adds realistic nuclear reactors which you use to power machines. It has pebble bed reactors, conventional light water reactors, plutonium breeder reactors, thorium reactors, and even a tokamak fusion reactor. Despite being incredibly old and quite obscure, it remains one of my favorite mods.
Bonus points if you tried to experiment with making the reactors explode as an impromptu dirty bomb in minecraft. Stuff was basically impossible to clean up quickly
try hbms ntm
@egeiscan5206 Oh, that's definitely on my list.
@@AlteryxGamingI did that & crashed the whole server lmao
Are you my chemistry teacher? Because he's definitely talked a lot about this mod and how much he likes it
As Douglass Adams once wrote, the problem with things that are "foolproof" is that they never take into account the ingenuity of genuine fools.
Very close. The quote is
"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."
Just as it is with the constant race between what hardware can do and what software can crash it, the world is constantly building new and improved idiots.
i tried to make a list of all the modern technology China was able to develop on its own...
.... ..... ...... im sure its totally gonna work they way they say it will
Proof of fools? look around
I remember hearing that paraphrased as "Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool", not sure which I like better.
As a chemical engineer from South Africa, I am sad to see the PB(M)R associated with China mostly. It is a pity that our leaders shut down funding to this in 2010.
Indeed! 😢 Good to see a fellow South African. 😊
Was a sad thing to mothball that project. This is proof that they were 15 years ahead of their time.
Well when an anc loyalty test is the chef measure of fitness for a job, things are bad. Kind of a good thing, you really don't want a reactor being run by say a former sausage factory boss?
wouldn’t a true scientist be proud that the project they started has been revived adopted with proper funding?
I don’t quite see the point of comments being “sad” that the project is ongoing unless it is due to politics. In that case, they are not true people of science…
@@lillilacac I guess so! But i am not that scientist, just more sad at some of the decisions and the state of the nation that I currently call home.
I love how aria's VA was really struggling to keep from busting up laughing basically the whole time. She was really having a blast with it 😂
Well, that is his irl girlfriend.
@@hanzzel6086 I had no idea but still cool.
@@hanzzel6086i didn't know that either but it explains alot 😂 bit ya she just about lost it on fission is stored in the balls 😂😂😂
@@hanzzel6086weren't they already married??? I seem to remember him saying so... or am I high?? Or both??
@TheGamerbeasts101 Idk, last I remember hearing they were boyfriend and girlfriend. That was multiple years ago.
I found out about pebble ball reactors from Plainly Difficult's video 6 days ago where Germany had a radiation release with one. "Inside Germany’s “Chernobyl”" is the video. Kinda funny timing
I knew I’d seen a video recently! I just couldn’t remember whose. Thank you.
I agree that's a funny coincidence, happened to me too.
Was thinking the same thing!
@@JCBeastie Well, if i had a nickel every time I saw a video about pebble ball reactor that would make two nickels.
And shows they're *NOT* meltdown proof.
China's pebble bed reactor is essentially the same one that South Africa was working on. The made an agreement of cooperation with China and when South Africa cancelled it's project, China kept working on it.
A friends' father was an Engineer on the project here in South Africa. Lost his job when the project was cancelled. Caused a lot of anger and resentment, to this day, in some circles.
Came here to say this. The P.B.M.R. or Pebbel Bed Modular Reactor. Could have been one of South Africa's major achievements. Such wasted potential.
Corruption.....yay....
Considering SA can barley keep coal fired plants running anymore it may be a good thing they bailed on this.
we germans had one too.
we did it first
I chuckled when you said "fission is stored in the balls"
That's actually what she said
Favorite joke in the episode
Actually it’s more like fusion is stored in the balls
Relax babe~ It's just fiss'n not hiss'n
I remember being 13 too.
The P.B.R. reference was excellent. For those that do not know, there's a really cheap beer in the US called Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR).
Thank you for this. I was scouring the internet for what PBR could stand for. :-)
Professional Bull Riding
The Frank Booth endorsement is well documented.
Thank you for explaining, as a non-american, I had no idea about this reference and I had to watch the video twice because I was more thinking of beer at the first run. Now I want some. It's Saturday, 3PM, yeah, it's ok :)
PBR has not been cheap for at least a decade.
It is contract brewed by MillerCoors for Pabst.
Because of that it always cost more than MillerCoors value brands like Hamm's, Keystone and Miller High Life.
Anheuser-Busch's Natural Light and Busch are cheaper than PBR.
8:12 silky whart lab cart
its the PBR LOL
Germany ran a small PBR reactor for an extended period. It had...issues. One of which was the constant motion of the graphite balls created dust (radioactive dust) that ended up getting into the containment ventilation. They also had structure cracks due to neutron embrittlement. Hopefully the Chinese designs have learned from the German experience with PBRs.
Seems like the dust issue can be dealt with by use of advanced ceramic coatings. I suspect China probably already thought the same thing - the photo of the workers seems to indicate the spheres are wrapped in some kind of metallic shell.
Germany ran two (AVR and THTR-300), although neither was particularly successful. And I don't really see how you can solve the dust issues when the basic concept of the pebble bed makes the fuel a (lot of) moving part(s).
Those were the AVR and THTR-300. Neither of which used the TRISO ceramic coatings which are used now. The Chinese HTR-PM PBR is a development (under license) of the AVR, with TRISO fuel and other improvements that fix all of the issues seen in the 1980s.
@@kstricl That's a photo of the german reactor. It's what graphite looks like.
@@MayaPosch Collisions and things grinding against each other is going to make dust regardless of what its made of. Ceramic coatings might make less but it is still an issue.
2:36 I unironically DO think of Kyle whenever nuclear reactors come up. He's become part of my nuclear lexicon.
Well, he IS hot stuff ;)
Plainly Difficult is another channel that comes to mind
It's not about your lexicon. It's just your parapraxis talking.
you dam righ!!!!! they are now sinonims. Nuclear energy=Kyle Hill
His vibes are radioactive-- wait.
thank you Science Aquaman
Before the beard he was science Thor
Scie-Man
Science Surfer, herald of Galactibeard
We need MOAR Radiation to turn Science Man Kyle , to real AquaMan, just a simple mutation to breath under water. Its the Risk Im willing to Take, FOR SCIENCE.
@@jimjimmyjim Science Man, a man who doesn't not have any super ability but average human anatomy.
Also, there is, a molten salt reactor recently started in China, inherently safe too.
Aria developing a day drinking problem is unexpected AF but I'm totally here for it
I had to pause and hit the 10 sec. back button for each of those and Kyle's top-notch comedy reactions :D (did i go back and watch those bits again? .....mayyyybe.....)
0:27 that shot right there is absolutely DEVIOUS and I’m all here for it
henlo
@ bro wait do you have the same picture as ur pfp
What's worse than a meltdown is when the individual is right about the meltdown.
I'm there for that.
the chocolate milk 😆
I'm missing the joke, who is that?
In Germany we had a very similar kind of reactor called the THTR-300, where there was an incident just a few days after Chernobyl, spreading radioactive dust. It went unnoticed at first because it was believed to be fallout from Chernobyl. It had a lot of problems and ultimately sparked a lot of demonstrations and is seen as the start of our country's effort of a nuclear phase-out.
Important to note with AVR & THTR-300 is that these did not use the TRISO fuel pebbles that are now used, such as in China's HTR-PM. TRISO fuel solves many of the issues with damaged fuel & dust seen with the German PBRs. Incidentally, the Chinese licensed the AVR tech from Germany and turned it into the HTR-PM.
Incidentally, the nuclear phase-out wasn't decided until a green-red (Greens/SPD) government in the 90s, and protests existed for decades before the THTR-300. Today's German Greens used to campaign for German coal instead of 'foreign uranium'.
Also produced a lot of dust.. They somehow didnt tought that balls made of graphite shocking constantly for hours under immense temperatures would create a cloud of dust..
Not a perfect design.
MSR are the true future. Even China will bring them into service in the Gobi region after several years of testing smaller MSR's in the region.
@MayaPosch but what about the danger of a water leak into the reactor? This was also one of the major concerns of the THTR.
While it is true that there were voices rising against nuclear energy in the 70s already, the most attention came after Chernobyl. And as the problems with the THTR became public shortly after, it sparked a lot of anti-nuclear demonstrations at the site, which resulted in the movement gaining a lot of medial attention. I think the political decision to phaseout nucleary energy then finally happened after Fukushima, but the public movement was already huge by then.
Edit: I looked it up, apparently the decision was made by Red-Green party 2002. But after Fukushima Merkel decided to turn off some reactors earlier as planned.
PlainlyDifficult just had a video on his channel about it!
@@MayaPosch It's always been apparent to me that the entire anti-nuclear clown show is paid for by oil and gas, they know once we're off the stuff we're not coming back. Oil and gas exploration is only going to end with a careful series of arrests meanwhile the true geopolitical context of it is that China doesn't have extensive oil reserves, thus this innovation can only come from them, if any of us tried we'd wake up with concrete shoes.
Presumably it would be very vulnerable to an earthquake, the consequences of shaking a PBR are well known.
what is a PBR, all i can find is Professional Bull Riders.
@@nopenope8418pabst blue ribbon, an inexpensive beer
@@nopenope8418pebble ball reactor
@@Rockow pebble-bed reactor?
@nopenope8418 Those guys get Shook a lot lol.
As a German… we dont have powerplants Like this anymore ,because of the danger they say …. But we buy Electricity from France … wtf , i want my cheaper power back
I read an article about this technology that China was developing in around 2016-2017.
I hadn’t seen or heard anything else after that.
I’m glad to see that it is still something being worked on.
Major factual error and omission of important details: The doppler broadening is not relevant for Fukushima type accidents, as the chain reaction has been shut down, by the control rods. What keeps the PBR safe is a low power density (as is required when using gas as a coolant), passive cooling (cooling of the outside of the reactor that is sufficient to take care of the decay heat when the temperature has been elevated), and finally a fuel capable of withstanding a higher temperature than needed during normal operation (700C to 900C under normal operations, but up to 1800C during accidents).
The doppler broadening is quite useful as an additional passive safety feature, and will prevent runaway reactions, and it may even allow the reactor to withstand a loss of coolant without a scram. However, it is not what would save the reactor in a Fukushima style accident.
Isn't the point to avoid a Fukushima style accident? Fukushima had all reactors powered down and cooled by generators that got water logged by the tsunami. What am I not catching that you are saying? Would a PBR losing backup power not be in a safe state?
@@ValleyDragon PBRs are indeed safe from Fukushima-type decay heat incidents - that's what the Chinese test proved. The problem is that the mechanism behind that safety is not the one Kyle talked about in this video. He attributes it to doppler broadening, when the highly negative fuel temperature reactivity coefficient it causes is instead a precaution against Chornobyl-type power spike incidents. It's actually the increased surface area/volume ratio he mentions earlier, plus a few other factors, which make PBRs safe from decay heat meltdowns. Probably just a research mistake, since those two safety improvements are often talked about together whenever these is reporting about PBRs.
He's talking about the loss of active cooling due to a power outage at Fukushima. If there is no need for active cooling with a PBR, then a power outage caused by earthquake and flooding won't be an issue.
Thank you... was wondering what the heck the video was talking about and then your comment cleared it up.
I was a nuke in the Navy and the amount of safety engineered into those reactors is insane.
Me too. Prototype S5G in the Idaho desert.
@matta5498 here's how old I am. I did power school in Orlando and prototype at S1C in Windsor Connecticut.
Yeah just like the reactors at fukushima. There is always some level of stress that will exult in failure. They are generally aware of design deficiencies until the accident exposes them.
Wait you were a nuke, how are you typing? Last time I checked nukes don’t have hands?!
Yeah this feels like one of those ai comments @David-bg9od
3:46 ARIA displays human emotion.
At 3:59 too lol
Aria must be one weird robot. That's not how most robots would react if you poured beer into them.
@@emilysmith6897Someone hasn't seen Futurama
@@CardinalTreehouse In that case I hope Aria keeps drinking
@@CardinalTreehouse
What’s to say Aria isn’t the multiple times great grandmother of Bender? Like there may be a programming lineage between the two… 😂🤣😂🤣
The pebbles eventually get crushed, creating dust and debris and jamming the reactor.
This was observed in a german test reactor of that type
Supposedly that was a much older design that this one fixes, dunno if it is actually fixed though
The big problem with pebble beds is the amount of waste they create, not only it is impossible to reprocess their wastes in fast neutron reactors, they also create a shit ton of irradiated carbon
"Unsinkable" Some chap - Southampton, England. April 10, 1912.
Which from an engineering perspective made no sense but then again newspaper men aren't know for understanding science and engineering. That ship's 'water tight containment' was open at the top so that the water could spill over into the next chamber. Now if they had spent the few thousand pounds for steel to seal it off, then maybe the ship would have had enough enough buoyancy to remain afloat.
I was looking for this comment lolol
If there are two things that history has shown, they are that a new design will always behave exactly as expected and that the engineers always think of all possible failure points
Pebble bed reactors are over 80 years old so they're not new. What's new is that they've shown the reaction will self-mitigate rather than escalate under failure conditions. Previous reactors weren't able to achieve that.
Especially in China where Tofu Dreg projects are rampant.
@abebuckingham8198 Did you know Kim Jong Un doesn't go to the bathroom? I love Communist propaganda too friend! Russia has some crazy new tech too you should read about. I hear their new super soldier gear can stop 50 cal rounds!? 🤯
@@abebuckingham8198 well, previous solid fuel reactors couldn't. Molten Salt reactors were also self mitigating by design.
@@theapexsurvivor9538@theapexsurvivor9538 Kairos is building the Hermes Generator that uses a Molten Salt Reactor design WITH pebble aka Pellets called TRISO fuel similar the fuel in the Chinese reactor. So you can get double passive safety features.
"How does an RBMK reactor explode?"
Calling something "meltdown proof" can potentially give people a false sense of security. They might disregard proper proceedures thinking that if anything goes wrong, the reactor will be fine.
RMBK reactors were only called "meltdown proof" as propaganda. It was clear even from the prototypes that they absolutely could.
Negligence from higher ups and operators was probably half or more of what led up to Reactor 4 exploding. The other portion was major design deficiencies in the reactor itself. RBMKs have a slew of issues and specifically the CNPP was pretty unstable even in 1984. It was known that the building itself was structurally weak in key locations such as the boiler room that could get too hot, explode, and fall onto the reactor causing a meltdown. It's surreal hearing someone say a nuclear reactor is meltdown-proof post Chernobyl and especially the Fukushima incident.
especially when talking about China...
@@otherscup yeah, I don't trust their quality control enough to buy a shirt from them and trust that it's not contaminated with lead, but trust their nuclear reactors?
Reminds me of a certain "Unsinkable" ship.
What’s crazy is I was reading about the Chinese PBR at Beijing Uni back in 2013-14 in Popular Mechanics. It was a testing facility that did power quite a few facilities. So why is Kyle talking about it now? Was there a new development? Did it go from test to functional design? Mitsubishi also made micro reactors for powering smaller loads, like villages instead of vast networks. They had offered to give them to Alaskan villages in exchange for access to the data. Due to Alaskan Constitutional Legislation stuff, they couldn’t accept the offer. Stupidest laws I’ve ever heard of keeping a source of power from being used.
This new one is a demonstration commercial plant - 210MW electrical generation, all the supporting systems, etc. The old one was just a research prototype - just a stand-alone reactor, 10MW thermal output, no electrical generation. The test that was just performed is supposed to show that if full-scale power plants were built with the same technology, as China plans to do, they would also be 'meltdown-proof' (or at least safe from the Fukushima failure mode)
Probably because as the video states, on December 6 2024, a plant with that configuration entered commercial use.
Will say, the fact that this uses helium is a bit troubling. The world is short on helium, and so having such a heavy use on it like this si not preferrable.
This was my exact thought when I heard that helium gas was the "coolant" agent. When Helium eventually becomes that scarce, then what happens to these "fool proof" reactors, especially if they catch on globally?
That, and I don't trust the CCP to do anything right. They're going to cut corners, embezzle funds, and not do safety inspections...
@@KVGKQuake Also what happens when there's an earthquake and shocker, the containment vessel gets a little crack? All the helium rushes out and is replaced with air? Presumably bad things happen or else they would have used nitrogen in normal operation?
@@JMurph2015 Southern China rarely suffers from earthquakes, and neither do Inner Mongolia or the Northeastern provinces. Also, if the only way for it to malfunction is for a freak incident like an earthquake, then maybe don't doompill so much?
@@JMurph2015 the containment vessel isn't a skyscraper though.
Earthquakes aren't an Ice Age style crack that comically rips through objects. It's just a large shake.
Tall buildings will be whiplashed because of how motion is transferred to the foundations and then makes the lower floors move and pull the floors above, then stop moving and the higher floors are still swinging. This causes cracks in concrete because it will see non-compessive loads.
We fight this with foundations that minimize shaking, bracing that supports the load across floors, and dampers that minimize movement in the top floors.
The containment vessel is more like a bunker.
2:28 whoa, make sense the Facility would have a reactor. The power would be expensive otherwise
I'd drink a cold one with Aria any day
She always reminds me of ADA from Outer Worlds
Step on me, jacked robomommy.
I love how you could hear Aria's actress laughing as she delivered that line lol
in the 50's the US was researching molten salt reactors along side heavy water. they had an event where they lost control .... sort of, the reactor self stabalized because the salt pusch the reactants further apart as it got hotter, reducing neutron collision. the reason we have the design in use today is because the other guy had a friend in congress.
Admiral Rickover's PWR was also a lot easier to build safely. Molten salt corrodes aluminum and rubber into powder, burns on contact with air, explodes in water, and leaves behind acid that'll dissolve people into puddles of organic goo. Refueling them was a pain and they're expensive and complicated to build. Molten salt reactors are probably part of the future and I really like them, but in the 60s the PWR made more economic sense.
@@Ralph-yn3gr Let's face it though, the investors were not nuclear physicists; They mostly cared about the money, and there was little fear and understanding of the dangers of nuclear meltdown and fallout at that time. Ultimately, msr's would have been the better option, and to say that water cooled reactors were a lot easier to build safely... well, they weren't really safe, now were they?
@@Ralph-yn3gr depends on the salt, some salt chemistries are corrosive, some are not, but the ones that are not offer different issues.
Engineering is always a compromise, currently there is no "Magic Bullet" salt that solves all the issues.
The main problem is that a lot of the knowledge from the research in the 1960's has been lost and so it's having to be re-learned.
Added that the research into the chemistry of these salts and their interactions at various temperature ranges is not fully understood, so risky.
The primary funders at that time were world governments, and what they were primarily interested at that time was Nuclear weapons.
Extracting the plutonium from solid fuel is much easier than first having to extract the fuel from a molten mix of stuff, so they weren't seriously interested.
Combined with the nuclear accidents affecting public opinion and politicians betting the farm on Fusion. The R&D wasn't invested into other Fission proposals.
We got the reactor we got because it produces by products useful for nuclear bombs. At time of selection that was a big deal. Politics did not pick the safest tech.
Admiral Rickover wanted PWRs because Navy ships are surrounded by water and he cared more about a nuclear powered Navy than he did about safe civilians.
Wait, am I misremembering or did we have meltdown-proof reactor designs like 30 years ago? I distinctly remember one that utilized a salt block plug that was actively cooled to keep it solid, so that if power ever failed the block would melt and allow everything to naturally drain out into a (safe) containment...
Man, I am going to go down such a rabbit hole tomorrow.
No, you are not. Los Alamos was experimenting with "Gen 4" reactors in the 90's, just prior to its loss of funding, and that and nuclear recycling were the two big techs to come out of it.
PBR is my beer of choice. This episode makes me appreciate Aria even more.
I remember talking to an engineer about helium coolant, he was worried about helium embrittlement, where the helium coolant diffuses into
materials it is exposed to
Guess what helium is used for in MLS thorium plants
One problem I seem to recall was the pebbles eroding unevenly and jamming the discharge chute. That kinda fouls things up for commercial power, if one cannot cycle the fuel while operating, as it's supposed to do.
FCM is an improvement over TRISO fuel. Sort of weird it's not explained that TRISO fuel was around before China used it.
The Plainly Difficult channel covered one of these reactors going a bit wrong.
glad i found your content again. i got nervous when uploads just stopped on the other channel i watched you on.
bro your videos are so swesome i put it on and its like i fall into a trance with the bgm and your voice explaining things especially like the video with the luciteria set
You should do a whole series on Not American designs, like CANDU and Phenix
I’d like to hear more about how these compare as well.
@@BitLyrist CANDU just uses heavy water as its moderator. Since the heavy water only slows, but rarely captures neutron, it has much better neutron economy, and can run on natural uranium without enrichment. Other than that, it’s just a pressurized water reactor.
Phenix is a breeder and is a completely different beast. It’s also the kind of reactor we need if we actually want to continue and expand our use of nuclear fission.
@3:02 balls of uranium fuel? that they are standing in...?
That pic was wild to me too! I wonder if that's a training reactor for the operators where they aren't actually fuel balls. Seems wildly unsafe to just stand in a spicy ballpit
Uranium isn't that radioactive. As long as they were fresh pebbles it would probably be safe for at least a few hours
Nah it's alright
I'm pretty sure uranium decays by the alpha chain route for at least the first few steps. Alpha radiation can absolutely be stopped by those suits. The issue would be when the fuel decays further down the chain and starts entering beta and gamma decay.
“Do I need to put a lock on the fridge?”
Fun fact, when I was very little I couldn’t reach the upper cabinet in our kitchen (that contained all the candy) so I climbed a chair and was hanging from the cabinet. My grandma found me like that and not too long after, that cabinet had a lock.
Love your content Kyle and all the amazing staff of the Facility! Thank you for another fascinating glimpse into the science world we all share
We also had a pebbled Reactor in the 80s. The THTR-300. main Problem with it was that the pebbles broke more than expected and it was shutdown 89. So even a good on paper reactor might be a total failure, if once build.
Scientists, Engineers, and Accountants. The holy grail is in the intersection of the three.
Making fuel more expensive just makes me think it’ll push companies to cut safety. After all, it’s melt down proof.
@@PinkMawile lets also not forget the fact that a lot of chinese stuff looks really fkn good on the theoretics and then gets the tofu drag treatment and turns to shit because of the rampant corruption there
"So even a good on paper reactor might be a total failure, if once build." Yup, same is true of anything engineered. It ain't invented until you've got a working prototype. And it ain't a product until you've worked out a ton of bugs in the prototype. They never show that in movies.
Except the THTR-300 didn't actually fail, it was shut down due to politics. They even wanted to build a new plant based on the same operation the year after, but that too failed due to politics. New reactor types will need years to iron out the issues and have many, as far as public health is concerned, inconsequential breakdowns. It's not a problem of the reactor if public outrage forces it to be decommissioned prematurely.
I'm on the fence with this one a bit. Yes I do love the idea of having reactors that need no intervention to prevent meltdowns in the case that somebody is dumb and doesn't follow proper safety protocols or there's an unexpected event. But I am a man who thoroughly believes in efficiency. Specifically, efficient power. In my opinion, it is a delicate balancing act that is well worth the effort. Because not only are you able to make things more powerful, but you're also able to keep them as efficient or more by doing so. That said, I still do look forward to seeing where this new technology goes and what this new generation of nuclear reactor is capable of. Perhaps at some point we will be able to get the best of both worlds
The fact that the helium coolant is able to get much hotter than water improves the theoretical efficiency too, actually.
Prioritizing efficiency often means losing resiliency since you become too optimized for a specific situation. It really is a balancing act.
The only problem with this is greed. Even if the power plant itself is perfect and never has any issues with corner cutting, manufacturers would. Three mile island happened because someone didn't run the reactor right sure, but that event ultimately only happened because of a manufacturing defect in a valve that the manufacturer insisted was perfectly fine and couldn't ever have faults period... until it did. It took an enormous volume of public pressure to get them to admit fault, and that's true for basically every company. Sweep it under the rug and kick the can down the road for someone else to deal with it is their general ethos.
Making a reactor that by it's very base design, can't be screwed by people trying to cut corners to save ten cents into having a meltdown instead of some other minor malfunction is important. I wish this wasn't the case, but until companies are no longer pushed by laws to maximize profit over everything else, this is going to be a problem for all time. The designs have to be, inherently, fail safe passively. That however causes huge inefficiencies and makes it so you can't really get every bit of power out of the fuel that you might want. That's the price we pay until people can stop greeding themselves into an early grave.
Maybe it's not yet a perfect solution. But it's definitely a good step for exploration.
It's good to see investment happening in nuclear again instead of the west obeying oil industry 's every whim.
yeah, modern reactors are already so safe that they are basically meltdown-proof already, A LOT would need to go wrong for all the active and passive safety features to fail. so the only thing this technology does is make it safer to sell to the public.
said that, more efficiency is not necessary, if we recycle fuel there is enough accessible fissile material on the planet to power every country for something like a thousand years, if we include breeder reactors and thorium fuel we can extend that for a few million years. efficiency is only a concern if you worry about how much money you can make out of it.
As far as nuclear power is concerned, China seems to be taking a 'try everything' approach to see what works and what works best. Pebble bed reactors are one approach they seem to be trying. You should make a video about molten salt reactors, their past history (at Oak Ridge) and China's research into them. You should also look into the thorium nuclear fuel cycle, something that also sometimes comes up alongside molten salt reactors but which can be useful without them.
7:17 pondering the uranium orbs
I just saw a Colgate ad with Kyle Hill in it, which is really freaking cool to see that forward progression since the because science days.
I remember looking into PBMRs for a high school project in the 90s.
Meltdown proof reactor? Hey I have seen that one before.
Let’s call this one the Titanic
@@unclelurk1556 Iceburg Industries says it's a great plan.
Yes. It was called EBR-II. It was made in 1964.
For those (TLDW): PBR economics Works a little bit different because it's a lot less energy dense than a typical lightwater reactor, so the reactor in China is going to put out less power than an lwr but it's going to be smaller and then probably require less space, less containment, less everything, and so it's going to cost less. If the Public's main concern is going to be safety and we want more nuclear power, well maybe we don't need a lot more giant plants maybe we just need a lot more even more smaller plants that are meltdown proof.
Unfortunately it also means less efficiency which means more nuclear waste, arguably a worse problem than safety with modern designs. Even if you don't care about the waste, these things wouldn't remain economical for a long period of time because ready-made fissile material is somewhat of a rarity. If we are to make greater use of nuclear, with the ever-increasing energy requirements, naturally occurring fissile isotopes like U-235 will run out quickly. If you want to go nuclear, it's fast breeder reactor or bust. And this design doesn't work for breeding.
PBR with the boys!!
I hope she doesn't wake up tomorrow with a hangover and pregnant. The last thing we need is hybrid AIs running around ruling us squishies with their iron/silicon fists.
For people concerned about Helium Supply for Pebble Bed reactors - Nitrogen can be used. You do have to separate N14 and N15. You can find a good discussion on this topic via a query "Will heavy nitrogen become a widely used fission reactor coolant? By Rod Adams"
Over 30 years ago, I had left the navy as a reactor operator. I was in college for EE degree and was taking a course in public speaking. The final was a 10 minute report, and I did mine on reactor operation and theory, ending with a look at next gen PBRs. This was when the internet was mostly bulletin board and file sharing. This was after TMI, and before Chernobyl & Fukushima. I am so glad they've moved on to walk away safe reactors.
1:11 allllllllrighty then 😂😂
Ong what I thought 😂😂😂❤❤
Something’s only idiot proof until nature makes a new breed of idiot.
She already has its called Gen-Z. There's definitely a candidate in there that would crack the idiot proof seal lolol
@@-TAPnRACK- ok boomer
haha fr nuclear meltdown literally be people going oopsy doopsy my spicy rocks are burning because of some nuclear reactor shenanigan
@@-TAPnRACK- ok boomer
😂😂😂 yes!
They tried this in Germany years ago. Very very complicated. A lot of maintenance issues. The site was shut down
That’s not why the site was shut down
@@rawkfist-ih6nk In the end it was. The accident demonstrated that it was flawed, and the system much more expensive because of these issues. The demonstrations against it would have been ignored, if it had been viable in any way.
The problems were solved. Germany just didn't have the political will to build a nuclear reactor.
@@AndreLeRoux81yeah and now they are back to using coal.
@@kosmosXcannon
The design is excellent and the technology sound. Low proliferation and inherently safe.
They could've lead the world in safe nuclear technology but let others take it further.
I was demolishing K east at Hanford when Fukushima melted down. I had the privilege of working with an extremely talented Radiological Team. They brought in diagrams of those reactors. They had personal experience with them. We were given an excellent briefing on what happened. We used to have meetings once every few weeks to discuss old technology, the difference between the commercial ones and the ones developed to produce weapons grade plutonium. Basically no biological domes over the non commercial reactors. We also discussed PBR, the Molten salt types and the small modular types. Yes we studied the very 1st one SL-1. It was an interesting time. That was only 1 of the projects I worked on in the 10 years I worked in the area. Knowledge is power. You respect radiation and handle the situation accordingly. There is no reason to fear it.
The Fukushima plant had a major design flaw. The backup generators are at the top of the critical safety list, but they were put at the bottom of the plant, where they were easily overcome by flooding. How that passed design review is a mystery.
What is this? The Foundation?
I built a 1:1 scale RBMK 1000 nuclear reactor in minecraft (without a containment chamber because the RBMK can't explode) and my friends rated it a 3.6/5 not great not terrible
This comment is going to simply explode.
An RBMK reactor cannot explode if the rods don't have graphite tips and the water is always flowing
@jeffreysmith236 superheated steam Cavitation says Henlo,
Radiation is OURS
cringe
Plainly Difficult JUST released a video on Saturday about the German PBR experimental reactor. I would love a comparison of the two. IIRC, the German reactor even used Thorium in it's fuel cycle.
I would also love to see the fuel used in CANDU reactors get a coating that exhibits the same anti-meltdown property (without destroying the fuel bundle which is how it currently fail safes) - probably never happen, but still it seems like the design CANDU just about everything nuclear (except fusion.)
TRISO fuel is available for a variety of fuel pellet shapes and sizes. There are variants designed for use in many different reactors but they have slightly different characteristics. The heat tolerance for example is superior in all of them but to varying amounts. Some could tolerate more severe conditions outside of normal operations than others.
I remember reading about this pebble tech reactors back in 2005. I’m sure it was the same thing, graphite or C60 (Buckminsterfullerene) encases the nuclear fuel and regulates the fission reaction.
Just saw your Colgate ad!! Was not expecting that lol. 'Science Thor' for the win!
THTR-300 was a high-temperature pebble bed reactor that began operation in 1983, so the claim made at 5:52 seems questionable, and that reactor was not as simple and safe as theory would suggest.
Not safe at all, hence the closure of the plant
Kyle is a half brained nuclear shill
It was a prototype. They rarely meet specifications.
@@_Musashi_13 you didn't seriously mean to imply that the only reason a nuclear plant might be closed is that it was "not safe at all" did you?
@@sillyking1991 sometimes they’re closed for financial reasons. Nuclear plants are 10 times the cost of a conventional fossil fuel plant. I like to be warm, keep using fossil I say
Its only waste if we waste it 7:38
I wish I could be more optimistic but we don't have a good track record of not being wasteful 😅
Type shit
And sadly, chances are we will be wasting it for a good while. By the looks of it, the pebbles were about 2-3inch diameters. Probably half of the diameter of uranium inside. The main difficulty in recycling it being removing the graphite completely before grinding up the pebble to carry on with the rest of the current recycling process
Forbidden ball pit reactors
ball pits for dragons to play in
Kyle I don't know if you touched on it, but two key designs of the PBR would aid in safety.
1. The Helium gas system could be effectively vacuum sealed to remove oxygen from the system and prevent graphite fires.
2. The PBR fuel pellets have a higher capacity to be effectively recycled by being placed in centrifuges to recharge the fuel pebbles reducing nuclear waste significantly.
I personally would say safety is better than raw power output. A smaller safer reactor would simply be just better.
The sheer number of ships that were “unsinkable“… I don’t put much stock in something being “infallible” in any industry. If humans are involved, it can go wrong in some way.
We are running out of helium far too fast for PBRs to be useful, I think. The amount of raw helium located somewhere in Earth is a volume estimated to last something like 100,000 years...but we basically cannot access any of it because we can't get down far enough in the ground to let it loose (the only practical method of helium capture is via fossil-fuel mining, specifically oil and natural-gas wells). What we CAN access is located primarily (most-concentrated deposits) in the US, Algeria, and Qatar, and secondarily (less-concentrated deposits) in Canada and Tanzania. The US moreorless stopped mining for helium now and has become an importer of it with the final deadline for this being sometime in 2025, and other countries (basically, Russia) are strictly refiners with no reserves of note. Depending on the metric being used, estimates for this supply of helium range from 30 years all the way up to about 700ish years; this does not account for expected growth of consumption or recycling/conservation efforts, however, so the more likely estimate is probably around 100 years or basically 2 generations.
This does not mean we will see capturable helium go extinct on Earth, however. Instead, as the price inevitably ranges upwards we will see the curtailing or abandonment of certain usages...some of which are actually happening right now rather than in the future. Party balloons and parade floats (both of which use a lower grade of helium that's about 50% nitrogen) will probably go away completely, with that supply entering the refiner supply to become purity-grade (99.9%) helium used for everything else. Prices will continue to go up, similarly restricting or vacating some of the lower-end "essential usage" applications, which will definitely have some increasing knock-on effects.
What is purity-grade helium used for? MRIs and MNH medical equipment, for one. If we have to restrict these, the overall rates of lifetime health could go down. We'll probably be eating healthier and exercising more, so it might be more like an increase in cancers and other chronic conditions that could've been detected and treated early on. Another use, and one that's on the increase now with the renewal of the space race and development of space tourism, is space travel. Rocket fuel uses helium to keep the volatile elements separated...no rocket fuel, no space travel, Elon Musk/SpaceX goes belly-up (or they get stranded and The Expanse becomes a documentary). Various science research gets delayed or canceled, so bye-bye CERN or whichever facility replaced it. Superconductors in general would get scarcer, so things like mag-lev trains or cryogenics would stop working/wouldn't get built and the entire electronics universe (mainly cellphones) would contract. Helium also gets involved in manufacturing work, too, being used in welding applications.
Really, helium is just too good for the applications we use it for so if we had to switch away from it there's a whole lot of redesign that would have to take place to take over the work. Existing designs can't really support other elements taking over the role helium filled.
Geez that is commitment to comment an entire essay with a thesis and all. This is interesting too.
You would use Nitrogen. You do need to separate N14 and N15. If you query via Rod Adams, then you can read about it.
Given nuclear power is dead in Germany it is infuriating to see that we have counter arguments now for every fear mongering scare tactic that caused it.
Such an amazing video that hopefully changes people's minds ❤
They've existed the whole time, Germans are just sheep that listened to the Greens without doing a shred of research for themselves after Fukushima (source: literally visited the Bundestag after Merkel announced the closure to interview one of die Grüne reps)
Given that this kind of reactor has already been built in germany in 1983 (THTR-300) and also malfunktioned i wouldnt get my hopes up. Though this is no doubt of a different design.
@@MyPonyLooksKindaWeird The problem was that it was an experimental design, using pre-TRISO fuel. All those issues were addressed and the German researchers were in the process of fixing it when the plug was pulled. That's when Siemens et al. licensed the tech to China (today's HTR-PM) and the German nuclear industry just kinda died, including backstabbing the French-German EPR design.
@@MyPonyLooksKindaWeird yeah I'm sure no advancement on fixing those flaws could have possibly been made in the past 40 years....
@@jesseewing7948 you can only read one sentence at a time before answering, can't you?
didnt China also started a new fase for Thorium Reactors or something like that this past month?
Not commercial reactors, just experimental reactors. China has a major commitment to nuclear power including a lot of money for research. They're looking into fusion reactors as well.
Extremely interesting and is for sure a breakthrough in the field. My issue with it would arise with adding so many thousands of mini sources into the equation. Just one goes missing and you have an incident, still very cool!
Germany tested a pebble reactor like this back in the 80s. It was shut down after an accident during refueling caused a release of rads.
8:38 Wisconsin, Represent!
Hell yea we got kyle
Big win for us Wisconsinites ✊
3:33 1600C/1800F?
could thease ballsy reactors be used for more better nuclear thermal propulsion engines?
Potentially, as you can have the hydrogen flow directly through the core
The main advantage of nuclear thermal propulsion is savings on fuel weight. Since this method is less fuel efficient than light water reactors it would increase fuel weight. However the weight of the reactor may also be a factor as well so it might have some advantages. It would definitely outperform chemical rockets.
@@abebuckingham8198 i was mostally thinking as
@king_br0k said, the hydrogen could flow through the core and the balls have higher surface area than experimental NTP reactor cores so this could cause more hydrogen to be heated faster and more evenly than going through current experimental NTP reactors .
i may be wrong about this though, please correct me if so.
It kind of sounded like aria was actually drinking a pbr every time she cracked one open, by the end of the video and when she said fission is stored in the balls she sounded kinda drunk
That first meltdown test must have been nerve wrecking
From the USSR with concern. We had tier 1 physicists in Chornobyl. The reactor was considered "meltdown proof." And it almost worked out until Dlyatov proved human arrogance can turn anything into a disaster. China is no different.
Dlyatov was a scapegoat. His team was reckless, no doubt, but they were encouraged to be so because of what was told to them. The real problem was the Soviet information system suppressing knowledge of the positive-SCRAM design flaw, despite engineers and leadership knowing beforehand, because it would be embarrassing for the government. It was not arrogance, but greed that caused the disaster.
With the CCP's obsessive control over information and 'national prestige', I don't doubt that they would make the same mistake.
If the problem is when the pumps turn off the water can boil off and then the rods heat up ect ect. Then why not just set up a uphill lake that has enough water for months of flow, that just uses gravity to move the water thru the core. When the pumps are working you just pump the water back up to the lake but if they fail you have months of water flow to get those pumps working again.
The coolant water still needs to be contained in case any fission products get into it. You could use a lake and heat exchanger, but that'll still require pumps
Passive heat circulation is one solution. In fact, CANDU already has that feature. In the event of complete loss of power to cooling systems in CANDU, the water continues to circulate through convection. Seriously, CANDU is an attitude built right into the design.
@@kstricl plus CANDU reactors can run on the thorium U233 cycle big plus today even shame is hat U233 can be used to make nukes so its not done currently
@@kstriclis it a Westinghouse design?
@@powertechnical Canadian Deuterium Uranium. Technically it is a Pressurized Heavy Water reactor. It's not that popular because heavy water is expensive (I think it's like $100k per year to replace the primary coolant), though it runs on natural uranium. There are so many advantages to the reactor design, it's a blinking shame more operators haven't bought into it.
the idea is great, unfortunately there was a project in germany a couple decades ago, massively damaging the reputation of nuclear technology. Maybe worth a story on it's own, the THTR300.
The THTR 300 was a "Kugelhaufenreaktor" (pebble-bed reactor) and one of Germany's early attempts to harness thorium as a fuel source in the future. Even the reactor's designers acknowledged that it operated like a "black box," and the complexity of the pebble design posed significant challenges.
Modern reactor designs have simplified these issues by using liquid fuel, which allows for real-time monitoring, filtering, and replacement. Another innovative nuclear project, also "Made in Germany," is the "Dual-Fluid Reactor," which is currently being developed and tested in Rwanda.
The future of energy lies in nuclear power. Despite resistance from German media, the physics and technology behind new thorium reactors strongly support their potential as a sustainable and efficient energy source.
This pebble technology has been around at least since the late 1970s when one of my professors, a big fan of nuclear energy, explained it to us. There are quite a few meltdown proof nuclear reactor technologies far safer than what we have been using since the 1970s, but politics keeps getting in the way to building them.
too bad we're in a helium crisis, i feel like by the time we perfect it. we might be out of helium.
It doesn't really need cooling *at all* so helium isn't really the limiter. You could cool it with anything. Helium is nice because it doesn't want to react with things so you can get it hot and it won't try to corrode your pipes. But reactors cooled by liquid salt have been made and that stuff is nasty. So it's certainly possible to find coolants somewhere in between "masochistic I hate myself" liquid and "nicest damn fluid I ever met."
Why not argon? It's a slightly heavier noble gas, but also the third most common gas in the atmosphere.
@@TysonJensen good to know
@@goodfortunetoyou from a quick 2 second search it seems like u can use argon theres just slight differences that more need a bit more technical designing but its much cheaper than helium. in the future they'll probably have some with argon. it's just less thermal conducive, slightly less efficient and has a radioactive isotope that has a long half life. theres some pros tho.
You can use Nitrogen but you have to separate the N14 and N15. Same tech as separating Uranium.
I just saw the other day a Plainly Difficult about a balls reactor accident...
so if the helium leaked out whats going to cool the reactor?
Prayers to Mao
if the helium is leaking out then something else is leaking in to equalize the pressure. It will carry away the heat.
The atmosphere. Nitrogen. N14
@@abebuckingham8198 Nope. Gas cooled reactors operate under high pressure, so you are not going to have anything leaking in, only out until the pressure equalises
Thanks!
Read somewhere that pebble reactors dont do super well when shaken by something like an earthquake.
Granted, not many things do well when shaken by an earthquake, but it seems pebble reactors are especially vulnerable to it.
6:10 I want to believe Chinese science research papers, but the china fakes everything guy has me terrified of their published media
This^ theres alot of propaganda coming out of china and its very hard to determine whats legit and whats bs
gods above you're so fucking racist
No offense, but I'll believe it when a second entity not associated with the original country to do this, can replicate the results.
The biggest meltdown I saw is when youtubedrama went after Kyle for accidental plagiarism instead of the hundreds of scammers and abusers on the platform.
Well, it is very ironic that he had engaged in plagiarism on the same video which he had accused another "science" channel of "stealing" arounds 2 years ago I think.
There was a German pebble-bed reactor with a similar design that had multiple accidents and radiation release. It wasn’t a meltdown, but it was problematic enough that they decommissioned it back in 1988.
That sounds in general pretty good. Just three thoughts cross my mind after this video.
- Besides graphite being highly flammable, when those balls get continuously replaced, how about the danger of graphite dust being created from all the friction from the spheres brushing against each other? Dust is much more dangerous for ignition because of its much higher surface area which would accumulate in time in the reactor. If those spheres could be coated with something to decrease the chance for dust creation that would be helpful and increase safety.
- Why does the reactor use Helium and not another inert gas like Nitrogen? Helium is rare and much more expensive then Nitrogen.
- What is the chance to store spend pebbles, resp. recycle them for long term disposal or way down the road for a remotely possible transmuting of them into something less harmless? Safe use of a reactor is one thing, safe storage or disposal of spend fuel is another important point.
The germana had a pebble reactor which nearly melted down.
Never expected so much misinformation on a Kyle feed. The fuel feed became jammed in 1986, which caused radioactive isotopes to leak out from the fuel that was in the jammed feed tube. In short, no structural damage occurred, no temperatures surged and hence the risk of meltdown was exactly 0%. Not only that, but the radiation released was roughly the safe limit authorized by authorities.
4:02 Why does drunk Aria sounds like Kamala Harris?
heres hoping we finally go Nuclear in the 30s lol
We just gotta hope we dont accidentally violate safety protocols and fail to look after nuclear plants
Did they learn this meltdown proof method from how the "Titanic" was unsinkable??
3:45 ... that adorable happy voice... i love it