THORIUM DEBUNK
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- Опубліковано 27 бер 2017
- Thorium, element 90 on the periodic table, is a fertile material. When struck by a neutron, it will change (over time) into Uranium-233. Uranium-233 is fissile, and can fission into energy and fission products.
Claims have been made regarding both thorium's energy potential, and counter claims that it holds no particular advantage over uranium as a nuclear fuel.
This video seeks to clarify this dispute.
Music in this video was created by KiloWatts: KiloWattsMusic.com/
Video assets were remixed from ThoriumRemix.com/ ,with some video excerpts from COSMOS with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Video constructed by Gordon McDowell.
Reports cited are...
NNL [UK's National Nuclear Laboratory] Comparison of Thorium and Uranium Fuel Cycles: www.gov.uk/government/uploads...
OECD NEA's Introduction of Thorium In The Nuclear Fuel Cycle: www.oecd-nea.org/science/pubs...
IEER Thorium Fact Sheet: energyfromthorium.com/ieer-reb... (I will not be linking to IEER. Easy to Google.)
For a multi-hour in-depth look at Thorium, see video "Thorium.": • Thorium. - Наука та технологія
Gord here! I finance travel and video capture and editing with a Patreon campaign. www.patreon.com/thorium ...and if you pledge only $1/year that's still a really big deal to me. I need both social reinforcement (many PEOPLE supporting) as well as actual financial support. So whichever you might have to offer, please do pledge something.
Quite possibly, for 2020, I won't travel to a single conference. We will see. But I would be perfectly happy working with what I've shot to this point. Frankly, the most important asset I'm missing is not something I could ever get myself... that is laboratory footage. And at this point I expect the footage exists already, shot by everyone doing MSR work. Getting that is a matter of creating a communications piece stakeholders are comfortable letting me slot lab footage into. So if I'm spending any Gord-hours I can simply writing and editing, then I'm not-at-all feeling robbed by Covid-19.
My communications with ORNL have been quite positive, and in regards to pieces like this. It is crazy-slow, but good. The very best value I could offer MSR advocates is to help ORNL create and release presentations and interviews like this themselves. They do already create educational and promotional pieces, but not at the volume nor specificity we want. ORNL MSRW went from zero public videos from ORNL MSRW 2017, to 3 from ORNL MSRW 2018, and it looks like we will (eventually) get 9 from ORNL MSRW 2019. Maybe 2020 won't happen, but they're aware that MORE is what MSR advocates want. ORNL sure don't need me to do this, except to get the ball rolling and demonstrate demand. If ORNL (and all National Labs doing nuclear R&D) did this themselves, I could gladly become irrelevant to the creation of these basic video assets and focus more on narrative. It is the narrative videos which tend to have a bigger impact. But I can't create narrative pieces without interviews such as these. (And lab footage.)
So, again, if you can do Patreon then head here... www.patreon.com/thorium ... if that doesn't work for you please let me know what mechanism does. Thanks for your support, -Gord
It's all well and good to support a candidate who is in favor of advanced nuclear energy, but if their policies would cause the debt and collapse of society as a whole, then it doesn't matter where we get our energy from, does it?
Never trust a Commie.
@@GeneralJackRipper LOL, "commie"? Is this the 50's? Also, not sure you understand the national debt, I mean, the republicans complain about the democrats always causing more of it, but they cause more national debt than the democrats. I don't like either party, but I'm not gonna use either of their talking points blindly. National debt is incurred mainly through the release of government bonds, which is a useful financial instrument. Like any financial instrument, it can be misused, but it is more similar to selling company stocks than getting a loan from the bank.
There's a fear over melt downs and how they can ruin a place for thousands of years, even if the risk is very low (0.1% per 40 years per plant, say). If there's a lot of plants, then the melt down risk increases, and over the course of 100 years, you could potentially have several permanently uninhabitable radiation zones.
@@Usammityduzntafraidofanythin The goal is a reactor which does not spread radioactive material in even the very worst-case scenario. "Melt down" typically implies the fuel melts down, but here the fuel is already in a liquid state, allowing it to reach extremely high temperatures without altering its behavior. More importantly, the coolant is NOT under pressure. The spread of radioactive material is because a force pushes that material out of the reactor, usually the high-pressure (water) coolant.
In the (already) unlikely occurrence of containment failure, without pressure, you have molten radioactive salt which might splatter, might pool, but it isn't travelling off the property.
Please consider nuclear power has been feeding into grids around the world for 60 years. Today it supplies over 50% of USA's carbon-free electricity. And there ARE stats on fatalities, per kWh. If you are worried about ramping-up nuclear then just apply that math to whatever other energy source you think might fit the bill. Solar and wind fatalities are extremely low, but they are not as low as nuclear.
I'm sure solar+wind safety stats can be improved, but then Fukushima and Chernobyl are reactors no one would build today either. Making safe nuclear power is solved. If you doubt that, please also consider this wide array of energy accidents: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents ...and ask if judging nuclear by 1960s technology is as fair as writing-off hydropower because of the Banqiao Dam. THAT is an energy accident. And it seems no one is familiar with it. And, of course, no one should write of hydro because hydro is incredibly safe. Just like solar. Just like wind. Just like nuclear.
@@gordonmcdowell I'm not worried. I'm playing devil's advocate, because someone else online brought up the argument. Thanks for your reply!
The woman saying that Thorium does not economic sense immediately goes on to describe a process of making Thorium into fuel rods (as done with enriched Uranium for most current reactors). Obviously she is not considering what many consider the "best case" for Thorium-based energy, which is the use of Molten Salt Thorium Reactors where there are NO fuel rods involved. This type of molten salt reactor was used and tested successfully for many months at the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. Funding was abruptly ended when the Dept of Defense decided that the Plutonium-production aspect of light water U235 reactors (with fuel-rods) was essential for supplying the Plutonium needed to grow and maintain our nuclear bomb inventory during the Cold War period. Plutonium production trumped the inherent efficiency and safety of Thorium MSRs.
+Actually, ths reactor was burning uranium 235 too, with some experiment about U233 and plutonium.
The real bitch however was that all metal exposed to the salt suffered from embrittlement from tellurium exposure.
Still a promising potential tech, but no where near ready to build turn key power plant, at least in western countries.
Also, a molten metal cooled reactor can be made passively safe too, it is a matter of investments.
+Larry Sherrill : Not sure what you mean.
The talking was about the MSRE, which ran from 1965 to 1969. There have been at least one continuous run of 6 months.
What killed this technology was mostly a political choice.
On the other hand, the program itself was from the beginning aiming for a fairly short life. The alloy used at the time was to resist the corrosion induced by scorching hot molten salt, but it have been discovered than direct neutron exposure was degrading it. Scientists considered it was resilient enough for the duration of the program. Later it was discovered than tellurium, a by-product of the chain reaction, was also degrading the alloy.
By comparison, using thorium into fuel rod would be fairly easy, Russian have built liquid metal cooled reactor for decades. Each of their alpha class submarines have 2 lead cooled fast reactor.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-cooled_fast_reactor
These kind of reactor should be able to burn thorium, plutonium and uranium, even with different kind of rod at the same time.
I think the women describing the process of making thorium fuel rods was Helen Caldicott, a GP (medical doctor) and rabid anti-nuclear campaigner who is more than happy to misrepresent anything for the higher good of her anti-nuclear beliefs.
It is on contrary smart to make thorium into fuel rod, no one know yet how to built a molten salt reactor to work for more than a decade, the alloy used developing cracks and suffering from embrittlement. That could probably solved with researchs. On the contrary, a BN-800 sodium cooled reactor is already in operation, at full power, and can burn both uranium and thorium. It can burn plutonium and MOX too.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor
OKBM is working on the 1200 MW version of this reactor.
Russians are also working on class of lead cooled reactor, the BREST-300 and BREST-1200. The first 300 should be under construction soon.
So yeah, thorium in solid fuel is actually much closer to reality than molten salt, if not already a thing.
Meanwhile, in Europe, Greenpeace.
Trigger warning : wall warning !
sorry.
In term of nuclear energy, size can matter, but not as mush as seems to think. After all, there have been nuclear powered submarine for decades. It is actually in mobile application where size matter. The smallest attack submarine ever built, the Alpha, was running with a lead cooled reactor precisely because it was smaller and lighter than a pressurized water reactor. The loss of pressure vessel was sufficient to more than offset the use of heavy metal as a coolant.
But a reactor still need serious safety system, because sometime earthquake, allah ackbar planes, sometime it is nice to be able to instantly shut down a reactor safely. And the size of the core is dwarfed anyways by the auxiliaries. While the core don't need to be pressurized on a salt or liquid metal cooled reactor, secondary and tertiary loop will still be pressurized. You still need to be able to throttle the reactor, which mean control rood or another system to decrease or increase at will criticality.
And the elephant in the room, you will still need some serious shielding, because a gamma ray don't really care how it came to life, it will cook your DNA
Actually, the real issue is not really cost, it public acceptance and politic. Count on Greenpeace for that.
Fusion is a different matter. Achieving fusion is almost easy. We can do it since the 50's.
First with fusion bombs, then with the Fusor in the 60's.
The trick is to extract usable energy without being turned to ashes biblic style, or simply extract more energy than you use to generate fusion in the first place.
Two ways are realistic: inertial confinement, and magnetic confinement. Respectively, small marbles filled with tritium and shot with mightily powerful lasers, and for the second the Tokamak, the big doughnut shape reactor.
The first type is actually the one who reached the first energy break-even, managing to generate more energy than it used to initiate fusion. Thermal energy though, which mean we are still far from an electric break-even. For obvious reasons, a continuous cycle is hard to design, but some are working on it, the Sandia laboratory being the leader i think. It would basically work a bit like a big explosion engine, except the fuel is already compressed at injection.
Tokamak are more complex, but have ran for minutes succesfully. The first issue is mostly political.
Politicians announce with great PR a big research program with a brand new experimental reactor, say, 200MW for 500 M$. Five years later, after three congressional session, the finished reactor is only 80MW for 200M$. And then they are surprised scientist can't deliver what was initially promised.
The second issue is technological. Tokamak is the first technology reaching a sustained magnetically confined fusion reaction. No where near break-even though. The problem is Tokamak are not only a magnetic confinement system, they also induce a electric currant in the plasma to constrict the plasma, using the Z-pinch. Works well at low energy, but when you increase energy it trigger some instability in the plasma, resulting in something akin to solar eruptions. And when they touch the wall, bad thing happens.
Don't worry though, despite what we saw in Batman, the plasma in a fusion reactor is at very low density.
So it is very hot, but the city near the fusion plant is quite safe. But not the reactor itself, ultra hot plasma on metal tend to trigger some nasty EMP, and reactor electronic don't like that, among other bad things.
There are researchs to learn how to live with them, like pushing them clear of the wall with small puff of gas and so on. Or just trying to prevent them on the first place.
Another technology is the Stellarator. It is a bit like a Tokamak, but then the doughnut is wavy. Instead of relying on Z-pinch to constrict the plasma, this one is a purely magnetic confinement system. Nice, no more instability and scale model solar eruption for internal toasting. But it come at a price, it require a lot more computation power to design in the first place, and they tend to work at even lower density of plasma than Tokamaks. So, for them too it should be possible, we just don't know yet how to built one at commercial power.
And sadly, all of this are very low density power. They all require huge confinement systems with horribly heavy magnetic coils to keep the plasma from touching the inside of the reactor. The first generation fusion plant might be small enough for naval operation, but supertanker size only, certainly not in submarine. Flight? No where powerful enough on a ton by ton basis, except maybe for interstellar ship when you don't mind decades of lazy acceleration as long you burn something as common and cheap as hydrogen. At least for the first generations of fusion reactor.
Did this dude just use clickbait in a video about nuclear physics?
Yupperz
best clickbait ever
Whatever works~
he may be a genius
I've only gotten about 8.5 minutes in. It's 2:20 am so I'm probably just going to watch the rest of it later.
Helen Caldicott lost the plot decades ago. Any opinion she has on nuclear energy is tainted by her misandry.
Bobcat665 constructive criticism: "Feminism" has come to mean so many things to so many people that it's basically useless at conveying intended meaning (because many self-described "feminists" are well past the dictionary definition of wanting equal treatment of women).
If you mean misandrist, just use that term, as there's no ambiguity in that you mean they simply hate men.
If you want a broader term for some reason, the next two broader terms going up from misandrist would be "sexist" and "bigot". It could be amusing to watch them squirm at those labels, but for crazy ones like her, she'll likely try and redefine those terms so I recommend sticking with the most narrow unless you're prepared to argue against someone trying to twist semantics on you.
@@timeless9606 Suddenly a feminist appears. Surprised you didn't lecture us on how to sit on a bus, or some other micro-aggression you 'strong idependent women' cannot seem to endure.
@@timeless9606 I cant wait until the feminists get their way and get DV laws changed and their ass beat just like men when they deserve it. It will be a joyous day for sure.
@@chuckphilpot7756 Say cheesy Chuck, that fantasy sounds bizarre, confused, confounded and confabulated. Shall we just put you down as in favor of equality?
@@timeless9606 without context I am quite sure it does lol. Most "feminists" just want the good parts of equality. They want to keep that part where 1/3 of them at least to some degree choose their partner based on income/worth. And society has too long held the view that you can't hit a woman. Yes, men and women should be completely equal... But then they will just complain about getting beat up more. Think of how many hold their fist because the laws are typically skewed to help the female. Point of my story, they can have their money if I can hit the ones that I would have hit a guy in the same situation. Not even a fighter, but women know they have immunity and use that shit to their advantage. Vindictive lot they are
i think ive watched this video 3 times now in a week. the arguments for thorium reactors are just so well done. how is this technology not widespread yet
nuclear bombs ...
Does not fit general Dynamics or any other government contractors program they're already heavily invested in water reactors why change now
$$$$$$$
@@josnijsten8731 As far as I have learned, you cant make nuclear bombs from thorium reactors today. If you do a lot of research and spend a lot of money that may change, but the claim is that it is cheeper to enrich uranium in other ways. So in practise the thorium reactor is safe in that way too.
@@roarj007 I think he meant the opposite of what you understood. The main reason thorium molten salt reactors aren't widespread could very well be the fact that powerful nations have an interest in nuclear weapons. An interest which cannot be supported in light of what you yourself described: an inability to make fissile material powerful enough for thermonuclear weapons, out of thorium.
I am a US NRC employee Nuclear Engineer with a PE license in Nuclear Engineering and if I had the choice as a regulator, I would shut down every coal plant in the USA and replace them with nuclear plants. IMOA.
I want the MSRs
i commend you on that.
its actually quite rare for a Nuclear Engineer to get and hold a PE license. my structures prof showed us a chart of all of the PE license holders verses non license holders having degrees... i think only like 5% of practicing Nuclear engineers surveyed had a license.
In various videos, Leslie Dewan of Transatomic made much of the current limits on acceptable test reactor power levels for molten salt reactors. Do you know of the NUREG number of such a regulation, if it exists at all? If it does exist, what is the safety case for limiting power levels of test reactors, no matter their choice of fuel or coolant?
Sadly the NRC and the current laws and regulations are preventing this and driving up the price for nuclear sky high. We should repeal the laws and abolish the NRC. It would be better for us all.
Who or what ruined Toshiba and prevented their 4S micro reactor?
Now humanity is entering the nuclear age, finally and permanently, but it is not coming from the USA, even Bill Gates was forced to go to China with his nuclear developments.
I sure hope we will have 100.000 1GW power plants by 2100 or 1 mio mini reactors or 20 mio microreactors.
I think we should build these tiny 20 to 50 MW reactors on assembly lines like cars. We can ship them everywhere and set them up where needed. We can disassemble them in factories with robots.
So - why are you working with the agency tasked with making nuclear expensive?
Yeah, fuck the NRC. Who needs regulation when you're dealing with some of the most dangerous material on earth? Of course we can trust the nuclear industry to be honest, they always have been. Regulation is for wimps who can't handle ionizing radiation.
... At the very beginning, did they seriously just call people who follow thorium a cult? What the fuck?
That was a popular podcast put out by The Economist focused on technology. While I thought their look at Thorium was quite lazy, sourcing only the NNL report, this sort of captures the media's attitude since 2012 when that report came out... the NNL report and the OECD reports do exist. So any reporter looking to quickly determine what-is-up with Thorium is likely to dismiss it unless they understand the limited scope of those reports.
Furthermore, Dr. Lyons articulated to U.S. politicians thorium as having no meaningful advantage.
So we've had U.S. (and UK) politicians told there's nothing there.
The media's casual investigations will always return these reports, and earlier media reports summarizing these reports (with no mention of limited scope).
AND going way back, anti-nuke confirmation-bias was always met by the IEER (anti-nuke-org) thorium dismissal.
IMHO that's the communication challenge facing Thorium reactors today. We really do have to make it clear that what makes Thorium unique is that it can be bred in a liquid-fuel thermal-spectrum reactor, and that none of these reports have evaluated that reactor concept.
Everyone I have explained LFTR to gets it.
I know exactly what you mean. I've come across many people who are otherwise fairly intelligent people who completely dismiss the MSR line of technologies without really knowing anything about it, like it's some kind of made up fairy tale. But there was something special about that line, calling people with an interest in the field of technology a cult, that really struck a nerve for me. That kind of accusation is... well, upsetting. And I really just have an amateur interest in the area of study, I don't have a background in nuclear science or anything. I can't imagine what that must be like to someone actually in the field to have someone basically call you a cult leader.
I want to drive a semi uphill in the snow with icebreaker chains on, over Solar Freekin Roadway tiles.
+Ken Lee - Assuming they don't just dismiss it as being a fantasy, that's typically what's happened with me, too. I've run into two types of people with regard to Thorium -- the person who, when you sit down and tell them what it is and how it works, understand it and think it's a good idea. Or, alternatively, the person who thinks you're making stuff up and are wrong, and simply wont believe you no matter what you tell them.
Ironically enough, for me, it's not usually the type of people who are into stuff like green energy that have been in the latter group, but people with less of an interest in science in general. Their eyes just kind of glaze over and they revert to the 'nuclear bad' line of thought that's been beaten into their skulls for longer than I've been alive.
Kirk Sorensen would make such an amazing teacher. You can just feel his enthusiasm light up the entire room.
LTFR is not a solid fuel reactor, it is MSR (Molten Salt Reactor). Fuel is in the coolant.
I am an engineer - I almost passed this by based on the title - the only reason I watched was the hope to find some technical meat - Frankly most folks who know about thorium are technically competent to understand and would also likely have passed this by - some one below made a comment about the proper title should have been "Crazy Catwoman Speaks on Thorium" -- a MUCH BETTER TITLE.
Perfectly fine for folks to pass on this based on title. There is "Thorium." video ua-cam.com/video/2oK6Rs6yFsM/v-deo.html ...for anyone simply wanting to learn about Thorium (see that video's description for index of timecodes). Some folks seek to have an existing anti-nuclear bias confirmed. This "debunked" is for them, and is why it is so starkly titled.
Bernard Putersznit it's kinda 4D chess if you ask me. It means more people who don't know about thorium will watch it.
My only objection to the suggested title change is that I feel that it may reflect poorly on cats. :)
@@gordonmcdowell I'm not sure you understand the meaning of the word "debunked".
@@charlespolk5221 Is it still called that? I can't figure out how to check with this darn flip phone.
Happy to see this video was in support of Thorium MSR
Paradat the entire channel is the original thorium advocacy channel lol
Why, so you can have your biases confirmed?
Because he is from India so.
@@philipocarroll Probably because thorium debunk implied anti-thorium propaganda. Which was the point: to pull people OUT of echo chambers.
@@MrMeetmeagain No he isn’t
Keep pushing you guys ! We can see the progress ! Thank you Kirk for your undying efforts !
3 years later we hear nothing from Kirk.
As far as clickbait goes: excellent. 10/10.
Proper title "Crazy person talks about an element"
The title "Thorium Debunked" is very misleading, and the video gets off to an awkward start as well. The result being that my initial reaction was, "Is this thing even serious???" I almost gave up watching it after a few minutes (but it gets better). Some of it is fascinating.
David Fafarman Pretty sure that's all intentional to dupe a few people into watching what they would otherwise dismiss out of hand.
Yeah pretty awkward, poorly produced despite a great position and data. He hints at a revision in 2017, I hope they get rid of the extraneous footage like the anti- thorium lecture clips and those embarrassing ladies singing.
TL;DR can you recap? I simply don't have time to listen to it all at the moment.
David you are right, it gives the wrong start picture :) but when watching further in the viewer understands why they picked that headline
So is the video about the thorium cycle or something else?
My god, this womans language. No scientist has that kind of attitude. As if she has a lot of money at stake.
She's a greedy asshole who obviously has a horse in the race.
She’s a physician. It’s interesting how politics in the US and Australia are infected by physicians saying absolutely bonkers shit. Somehow, people seem to respect medical doctors as some sort of authority because of their education and social standing, but they are seen as an authority on everything, while their scope of knowledge is really narrow. Also, they’re often misrepresented as “scientists” where a better classification in the scientific world would be “engineer” - they apply the results of science in their work, but hardly any of them do any research, much less get published.
@@KryzMasta It stems from a tradition of respect for healers, I'd say.
Respect the tribal healer, but not the guy who knows how to farm, or the tool maker, or those who produce. Instead, respect only the shaman, the war leader, and the healer.
@@KryzMasta In the modern era, engineers are doing science better than "scientists" (academics) and all the new innovation is coming from engineers, not academia. Most nuclear engineers that are actually in the field dont even have PhD's.
The fossil fuel gurus, who have a lot invested, are dead scared of any opposition. Somewhere about the 1930s a cartel of tyre, car, and oil companies brought up the electric tram networks in the US cities and closed them down for selfish reasons, not for the good of society
I know this is old, but do you have the source for 33:04 i'd like to look into it more
the BEST overview of the BEST energy alternative for humanity so far
Who was that crazy woman going on about testosterone please? I'd like to make a complaint against her.
LOL
Helen Caldakook is the church lady of the new millenium
The crazy woman was annoying AF its a nuclear reactor not a dildo.
Daniel Le Couilliard I have no idea but that was some Sarkeesian level of insanity right there. All that was missing in her psychobabble was the word "misogyny".
Nuclear Power is Socialism.
12:19 "Let's reword it for clarity." I'm glad you did this. Your videos have a lot of information and move a bit fast. By doing this 'rewording' you allow the point to be made from a different angle and give time for the viewer to digest.
Uhm, yeah.. Solid fuel rod thorium reactors are too expensive to operate, we all know that. Molten salt thorium reactors on the other hand, seems to be a venue worth exploring in greater detail.
The problem with molten salt might be that the mass of molten thorium would erode the piping which is supposed to contain the salt. It seems to me that we have tried this once before in the 1950's
@@kenwilliams9518 watch the video bud
@@enriqueshockwave watched the video again just for you and still don't agree..The outcome is expended uranium fuel bred from thorium which has the fission byproducts of uranium that last for a very long time.I do not question the ability of uranium bred from thorium to work, the problem of nuclear waste disposal does not change nor does the fission byproducts of uranium change which is ultimately the power source of thorium reactors. Time to go plant some trees!
@16vjtdalfa I have not posted to this thread for a long time unless there is more than one ken williams you are barking up the wrong tree.I have my opinion you have yours and as far as i'm concerned our conversation is over. Good luck to you in the future with all your endeavors.
@@kenwilliams9518 , that's like 70 years ago. Don't you think some solutions have overcome this problem by now? China is building one, and for it to build one, the problem you've pointed out must have been solved.
One interesting aspect that this video raised is "natural radioactive products" particularly in the fracking and coal industries. I first became aware of this as early as the late 1970's. I was on holiday in the old DDR (East Germany) whilst I was staying in Dresden I visited a suburb named Gittersee were I found the Willi Agatz Grube which was the last working Colliery in the DDR. I was very surprised to discover that the colliery was operated by the joint DDR-Soviet nuclear fuel company 'WISMUT' It turned out that the ash produced by burning the coal produced at Willi Agatz was a viable source of Uranium! Hence interest of the 'Wismut' organisation. I mentioned this to a friend of mine who worked with the NCB in the UK and he told me that in fact the coal industry in all likelihood produced far more low level radioactive waste than the nuclear industry ever did!
It is a strange old world!
As a complete aside I strongly believe that the real reason why MSR and Thorium have never received the attention that they deserves is due to the fact that it is difficult to weaponise Thorium.
As in truth the Greatest Oxymoron Of Our Time Is "Atoms For Peace" and in fact the nuclear industry has always been about nuclear explosives and ordnance!
"We CANDU It!" podcast had an observation about when nuclear conversations are funded by energy companies, NORM is banned topic. Here's that 35-second audio segment: twitter.com/gordonmcdowell/status/1340690364416413703
Thanks for making and posting, Gord. Well done. Again.
I don't want to be the conspiracy theorist, but companies that sell nuclear reactors and the rods, which only they sell, spend a lot of money on lobbying against Thorium or any other form of nuclear energy. There just need to be A LOT more research on Thorium as a form of energy.
The decision to discard thorium power predates those lobbies. It goes back to the cold war when we wanted (and still want) a nuclear energy program that dovetailed with our nuclear weapons program.
Even out of it, our nuclear stockpiles still need maintained, and depleted uranium is still used by the US for military applications (which is of very questionable ethics on a good day).
The nuclear energy lobby has nothing on the military interests/lobbiests.
Well, with the decline in the use of traditional camera flashbulbs I guess they need find some other way to sell their zirconium. ;)
Duh money is the main motivator behind most peoples actions. If thorium reactors were a thing you could use nuclear waste as fuel i take it. So that completely undermines current nuclear fuel manufacturers. Most of them go out of business of the bat.
the scheme of arguing is so pervasive yet so pointless. First of all, lobbying is neither a super power nor mind control nor is it as "on the nose" as it would need to be for that to be true. Secondly, if all the claims about thorium where real there is a LOT of money to be made there. So however much this shady lobbyist for PRW gave the corrupt politicians (which is a completely unproven claim by the way and it's bad to go around just making up such claims simply because they fit a narrative), the thorium lobbyist could easily match it. Thirdly, we actually KNOW how things came to be as they are. There isn't even a mystery to explain. Governments make outright terrible decisions for no god damn reason all the time and as far as that goes this is even understandable: we have this proven technology so we are going to use it and not 'waste' money on pursuing projects of questionable (incremental) value.
@@cas1652 they had a fucking working and runnin msr in 1968...... this is a proven working system.....
This is probably the type of content the aliens are showing to their kids in kindergarten. That and a "How To" on building a Dyson sphere.
I love how they take bits and pieces of programs (videos) that support Thorium reactors and their development and twist it into something against thorium reactors
BUT, In the End that is the Only SANE Nuclear Energy I see for Earth, It Ticks way More boxes than Light water Uranium reactors. A lot cheaper to build, More Fuel available INCLUDING USING WASTE FUEL RODS FROM EXISTING URANIUM REACTORS AS THORIUM FUEL, 500% safer than Uranium reactors and you CAN'T make Plutonium in a Thorium reactor, so NO Bombs.
I graduated with a BS in International Business and I've been sitting here for the last few years thinking about how I should have gone into a STEM degree program. I wish I could have been able to pour my life and efforts into a program like this and all I can do is throw these UA-cam videos at a bunch of people who couldn't care less about Thorium or any other kind of nuclear power generation. I wish there were some kind of opportunity, but I can't see a way into the job market with my lack of formal education.
SuperMikan join flibe energy as business consultant? or accountant for new thorium upstarts m8
SuperMikan you can still do stem. Go for a masters in a related stem field. You'd actually be able to help things quite a lot. Never to late.
I know exactly what your talking about. I have a 4 year Business degree also. Lockheed Martin is slowly working on small Fusion Reactors, but they might not be economically viable for one or more decades. In your spare time, consider learning as much math, physics, engineering physics and other topics to get an undergraduate degree in nuclear physics. Some folks go to trade schools to learn how about refrigeration in a nuclear power plant. You might want to talk to a guidance career counselor. Another cool topic is hyperloop tunnels for transportation.
The media has made sure that nuclear energy can't advance as fast as it normaly should. Fears based on misinformation and lies block many advancements. Who would have thought that humanity's energy problem is psychological?
How about rounding up investors as well as Governors of states that have to buy power for their utilities from other regions by appealing to their utility boards.
I like how the title and opening bits rope in the anti-nuke people. clever
Sure, if you're a fan of dishonesty!
There's undoubtedly a ton of scare-mongering and unscientific bullcrap that's used in part to scare people from even considering anything labelled "nuclear" and in part by people who have already been scared to the point where rationality has gone out the window. But I don't think it is "clever" to meet this with tactics that are no more truthful and just as manipulative.
With my lack of expertise there's no way I can actually evaluate the content of this video. But even without much knowledge it is certainly possible to see that this isn't simply an unbiased, honest examination of the topic.
For example, take the points made about geothermal. This strikes me as being purely manipulative and entirely irrelevant to a rational discussion of the topic. It may be true (I haven't checked) that there's 200x as much radioactive byproduct per unit energy from geothermal as there would be from a thorium power station. But so what? It's not like if we choose to use thorium reactors this would shut off the Earth's geothermal processes. Nor is it quite the same to produce radioactive byproducts at the surface as it is doing so far beneath the crust.
This is the style of argumentation that has nothing to do with rationality - it's merely an attempt to *associate* thorium nuclear power with *natural*, a concept that is devoid of any real scientific meaning (the only things that are not natural are supernatural - and if something considered supernatural becomes proven, it also ceases to be supernatural and becomes instead natural).
I think we shouldn't care if it is "clever" if it is dishonest is all I'm really saying.
dojohansen123 Well said. It's not necessarily *dishonest*, per say. A better word to use would be *misleading*.
That doesn't make sense. It ropes in someone that wants to know if there is a case against Thorium and what it is.
Dishonesty presumes intent. Someone can be misleading by mistake, but the title was probably intentionally formulated the way it is, so it is dishonest.
M. Otto I understand what you're saying, but in order for it to be dishonest (in the sense that lies are being told), it would also have to be false.
I worked on LWBR program. I firmly believe the molten salt approach is the way to go. An already safe industry would be neighborhood safe technology.
Over the years I've learned bits and pieces but this video helps connect the dots. Thanks!
i watched your full six hour vid but thanks for making a more condensed version!
Always happy to hear someone's made it though. Looks like 3% of viewers do, if UA-cam Analytics are accurate.
I'm 5 hours in. I'd recommend making a smaller video I could send to my non engineer friends.
Michael, I'm not sure what you'd need "LFTR in 5 Minutes" is already out there (based on TR2011) if you want short.
All the TR2016 pieces can be picked thru to construct a 1h assembly with UA-cam Editor UA-cam.com/editor/ search for TR2016c for the chunks or (ideally) consult this playlist... ua-cam.com/play/PLuGiwaUJYEZfNHZR1AUmMYoASGWBroXMM.html ...you can even just make a playlist from those chunks and direct your friends to that.
One such example 1h long I created using that was this: ua-cam.com/video/H6mhw-CNxaE/v-deo.html called "Thorium Debunked" but feel free to use UA-cam Editor to copy it to your own channel and give it whatever name you want.
I look forward to making a bunch of short videos, but need to focus on allowing OTHER people to do it as a higher priority, as that removes myself as a communications bottleneck.
You're right. Thanks for all the hard work.
All these thorium bros are so aggressive with their soft spoken logic. Good thing Helen Caldicott (hah, my spell checker suggests replacing that with "Idiotically") is there to help me get in touch with my emotional side by wanting to throw my computer at the wall.
Some day historians will look back and quantify the opportunity cost of ironic bullshit as a driver of fear to humanity in this age, and people will ridicule our policy makers and trend setters just like every other period in history.
Um, not clear what you're trying to say. I think its growing ever more likely there won't be historians in the future to ridicule anyone. And that possibility isn't "ironic bullshit". You at least need to consider it a possibility. I'm not exactly sure what you are saying, but if you're not considering that, than you can't understand "thorium bros"
I have to say that this video was not only educational, but entertaining.
I think it was Toshiba that was working on an in-ground reactor that would be able to power 10,000 homes, and not need servicing for 30 years. They also had a test unit that was approved by the Inuit for a village in a remote part of Alaska a couple years ago, but haven't heard anything since.
This could be a much cheaper and safer way to power our future, and not have to look at ugly solar panels on roofs, or worse, the blight of 300 foot windmills on the landscape which cause the death of countless birds. The thermal solar plant on the way to Vegas from So. California incinerates their share of birds too.
That pristine landscape should be reserved for future 7-11's.
Are you referring to the TerraPower Traveling Wave Reactor (U235-U238 breeder-burner) that has now been abandoned?
@@michaellorton9474 aww that's sad - I hadn't heard that... of course the notion of the remelt and rod fab section being able to work without any external maintenance or spare parts for a few decades was always the "hmm" part.
Great production! Gordon McDowell you are making history & changing our best minds. If more people were required to learn how modern civilization works we could make great progress. Unfortunately entertainment commands the most attention. New and cheap energy sources are actively suppressed by the industrial moguls running the worlds energy corporations. Thorium is a threat to their profits. Smaller startup companies will have to fight powerful lobbies in government to get permits for commercial construction. Another 10 years is likely needed but I have a concern that Fukushima will change that. This ongoing radiation poisoning disaster will soon be hard to keep a lid on because dying Japanese children will start a public backlash against water cooled reactors. The corporations like TEPCO are a public enemy because they work hand in hand with their government to hide the truth about long term exposure and environmental pollution.
Where would we be without the media ? A lot better off. I think solar power and windmills are more expensive to start up and maintain then a thorium reactor. Thankyou for this interesting video.
Large windmills are the most distracting ugly things ever. Cool to see once, especially up close, but they completely ruin an area. You look at the sky, and you don't see the trees, the clouds, just the stupid wind turbines.
Solar is cheap to maintain, but you have to cover an outrageously vast area to get any kind of meaningful production, even in a desert. The number of solar panels it would take to run a large steel mill or something as energy intensive as that is staggering. It is good (along with small turbines in a windy area) for people to keep lights on, small water pump, laptop power, etc. I don't think many people realize how much energy it takes to make something like a car from raw materials.
@@handleismyhandle Are they uglier than radiation burns?
Congratulations on this video configuration, Gordon. I think it's one of the most easily digestible for the uninitiated, and the title is deceptively clever for any who are fishing for ammo against Th. Kudos!
as a proponent of Th-reactors, i feel a little used based on the clickbaityness of the title.
Has anyone got a link to the original video with Admiral Hyman Rickover?
Seeing Kirk present in what looks like some random laboratory basement gets me every time. LOL
Nice work Gordon Mcdowell! This is one hell of an informational video.
As a young child I was visiting the Bruce (perhaps Darlington...they sit side by side) nuclear plant on a tour and was allowed to handle a few spent fuel pellets in my hand. I remember feeling such a weird feeling. Of course that was just my brain making the feeling up. All in all it was very interesting.
Darlington or Pickering then. Bruce is about 200 clicks west north-west.
i just want to know if a Thorium reactor has the same radiation output of a plutonium reactor ? Such that the Darlington site and nearby townships are currently undergoing a "low level radiation" clean up. Where is the line drawn between "low level, medium level and high level radiation" ?
The problem is that the popular press does not distinguish between radiation and a source of radiation. By design MSR will have less waste. Water cooled reactors yield more waste that has to be collected and stored on site for a long time before that waste can then be removed from the site and taken somewhere else. The problem is that people cannot agree where that waste should be stored.
That wouldn't have been spent fuel. Fresh maybe...
Winston Churchill once said, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.” Perhaps it's time for Thorium based Nuclear Power
It seems like you responding to comments still, at 33:09 how did you arrive at that number? Other than the manufacture of the generating equipment and radon gas from digging that deep I find it hard to believe that plant generates 200x the volume of radioactive waste per watt than nuclear.
Imperial Valley is generating NORM so not very radioactive, but dilute enough that the volume is a hassle. Nuclear reactor creates more radioactive atoms but not as diluted, they are concentrated. I'm using the oh-no Fukushima-waste-water perspective, where the waste isn't particularly dangerous but there is a lot of it. If Imperial Valley waste was concentrated this wouldn't be true. If Imperial Valley generated a meaningful amount of power, this wouldn't be true.
@@gordonmcdowell I guess what I was asking was if you had a source for that number, either papers or a calculation.
@@12pentaborane if you google: imperial valley sierra club pdf geothermal
...you'll see the Desert Report, with quantities of waste.
Geothermal Power Generation in the World 2005-2010 Update Report by Ruggero Bertani has power produced in 2010.
I don't have my calculations on-hand so if you re-run this I'd be curious what you find. /GWh would be a better per-unit than capacity, though I'd expect nuclear and geothermal to both have high capacity factors. (Nuclear was about 90% in 2010.)
@@gordonmcdowell Thank you
I'm really interested in how the "chemical kidney" inline liquid fuel purifier works. Operating a no-moving-parts thermal plant sounds great but doing continuous chemistry on a molten salt sounds pretty challenging. I'd love to see how they did it in the oak ridge reactor, how they selectively removed the fission products and controlled the thorium content of the molten salt.
Also I don't think the economics of thorium vs uranium was well addressed. Sure, thorium is more abundant but the sources you mentioned, coal ash, mine tailings etc, sound like pretty difficult things to work with. In addition, uranium ore is dirt cheap at the moment, so much that mining more of it doesn't seem very profitable. However, I don't know the comparative cost between thorium mining/purification and uranium enrichment and fuel element fabrication. I'd love to see a video addressing this topic.
For more Chemical Kidney thoughts please check out Matthew Lish of Flibe ua-cam.com/video/anlnxRxRc74/v-deo.html and Amanda Lines of PNNL ua-cam.com/video/GENi0I4rfQY/v-deo.html
I'm no expert, and I'm just documenting myself about nuclear power... but it's always been like this economically for anything new. If it's brand new it costs a lot, if it's widespread it's very cheap. I've watched this video (ua-cam.com/video/UC_BCz0pzMw/v-deo.html) about the economics of a nuclear plant (oversimplified) and found out that generally it is true for nuclear power too. If you wanna do it, it's expensive at the beginning, but much rewarding if done right.
Thorium aside, molten salt has proven impractical as a heating medium. For example Crescent Dunes failed in less than a year and it was quite well funded with almost a billion dollars. It never once met its production goals and bankrupted the company behind it. The failure analysis showed that the pipes got blocked due to corrosion. Who could ever predict a metal system full of salt getting corroded from the inside out?
The woman talking about the difficulty in reprocessing nuclear fuel is talking about U238/U235 reactors used in commercial nuclear power reaction. The difficulty with separation happens when you can't do it chemically - so when you have U238/U235 reactors is problematic for reprocessing. On the other hand, in U238/Pu239 reactors, Th232/Pu239, and Th232/U233 reactors are easy to separate chemically because the fissile material, fertile material, and breeder products are all different elements. For all these three types of breeder reactors, the advantage of fuel rod based reactors over molten salt reactors is that the fertile and fissile materials can be kept physically separate, which can help in reprocessing. In molten salt reactors these will all be physically mixed up, which may actually makes (the continuously processed) reprocessing more difficult than in the solid fuel rods.
The main problem they came across was the iodine created by the fission would destabilize the chemistry of the fluoride salt mixture making it excessively corrosive. Also strontium90 and its daughter would precipitate onto cooler reactor parts. Making things even worse are if hydrogen builds up it will form hydride intermediates that will corrode the reactor vessel and heat exchange systems. The fast spectrum chloride reactor is more tolerant of all these issues as lithium or beryllium are not needed, plain old salt works fine.❤
The only complaint with the video as it is, new arguments should be addressed as concisely as possible, adding in old, constantly rehashed video, is analogous to adding fluff to an essay. Ultimately the impact that you are looking to have can be lost in the watering down of the argument.
Keep in mind that the video is aimed towards those uninitiated with any previous videos. Think of it as an introduction with a great number more details available in the many other videos Gordon has produced.
There is also the fact that in a long video, more people watch just the beginning, than the whole thing. I myself quit at about four minutes. I think I'll jump the first half.
Nobody in this video is as persuasive as Sunniva Rose. She is pro-thorium, smarter and far more pleasing to look at and listen to than Mother Caldicott, and she emits enthusiasm, not fear.
I can even forgive Sunniva her statement that "we do not like plutonium", with which I disagree.
What's wrong with not liking plutonium. AFAIK it's pretty nasty stuff and we have a good reason not to like it.
Gordon cuts these to be full-explanation videos, covering as many points as he can on a specific facet or argument while maintaining some sensical overriding narrative.
The entire purpose of these videos is for people like you to take these videos and REMIX them. Cut out what you think is fluff. Shorten it down. Turn it into a more compact form to more succinctly and clearly convey a specific idea you have to a specific audience you have. That's why he enables remixing on all of his videos.
If you think it can be cut together better, do so. And that's not a defensive retort - that's a legitimate request, and the entire purpose of these videos.
BFJunkie, Read "The Curve of Binding Energy"
Your AFA will be pushed not just further but into orbit. It's well written for us lay-people.
A fantastic compilation! Very valuable.
Great video Gordon, very insightful!
Thank you for the very informative video. I learned more about Thorium in one hour than I did in four years of high school. In fact I can say I learned more about nuclear reactions in general then any previous education. I was truly nuclear naive
well be careful, them dummies out there would like to use this knowledge to....i dont know, heat up their microwave pizzas faster? god forbid we eat that crap! but yet here i am.....stupid humans, trix are for kids
The title is kinda clickbait but this is a very high quality video
@@thefoundingtitanerenyeager2345 How is it click bate? They talked about the subject and the history of technology. You can look up the places and names and see if it is true to the facts they are using. Did you find other facts that counter this? I love to read both sides of the subject.
we only have nuke reactors for the military..no other reason.. they banned thorum, 1956..
How did this debunk Thorium?
It doesn't, it's debunking the debunkers, the title is probably to catch the trolls and have them go trough the explaination thinking its going to end on another conclusion, one they like, when in fact it isn't XD
I couldn't watch the entire video. Some of those folks in it trying to argue against were kind of crazy. Im a strong supporter of the molten salt reactors and advancing the cause.
Hi Mitchell, I to am a steadfast supporter of Thorium.. It is well worth waiting until the end amigo !
The first nuclear reactor was built in 1942. Here is a list of all the deaths by country for countries that have active/inactive nuclear reactors: Canada, France, Germany, India, Pakistan, Russia, South Korea, UK - 0 deaths
Japan - 8 deaths, 2 of which were from radiation
United States - 3 deaths from removing a control rod too far which resulted in an explosion
Ukraine (Chernobyl) -
Amaurus you left out how many birds die from windmills. I think its ok and not a big issue. Its not like we need the Downsy Birds anyway.
Was there some reference to gathering energy directly, rather than this kind of reactor just being another steam engine? How does one avoid a cooling system to shed the heat?
When I heard about "thorium reactors" I heard that if there is a breach in the pipes containing the liquid salt , it will self ignite because it enters in contact with the oxygen in the air ?
Is it an actual risk ?
If not what are the risks of the liquid salt leak?
Thanks for your answers.
Our atmosphere doesn't "ignite" under any temperature. If salt leaked it would pool on the floor, eventually cooling into a solid pancake. The fuel salt is radioactive, but conventional reactors propel radioactive material when they leak, because the vessel in under 300 atmospheres of pressure. Pressurized coolant is the safety challenge being addressed by Molten-Salt Reactors. Conventional reactors are already incredibly safe, but MSR achieves this safety inherently, because there is no pressure.
the most telling thing for me. is the amount of money spent on trying to make the uranium plutonium fast breeder work vs the msre. had oak ridge the same level of funding they would easily have solved the two fluid design, reprocessing, tritium mitigation(not really that big an issue), etc.
They didn't even need the same level of funding. Their current level of funding was enough to make thorium power a reality. The problem was their funding was cut entirely and they were basically told to just pack their bags and throw away all their research.
Let's hope these reactors get built sooner rather than later, they would kill the solar+wind nonsense which is wasting a lot of money and efforts
and birds.
The bird arguement is so bullshit. Fossil fuels kills hundreds of times more birds than wind/solar
suddenly we're comparing wind/solar vs fossil fuel, not MSR.
IZuzivowoI sure dropped the ball on that one.
Solar and wind are not nonsense. Renewables have a very useful place in the power grid of many countries. In the USA, you could use nuclear as your base load solution and have renewables make up that last 20 or 30% of production required during peak hours of the day. We could quite literally replace every coal and gas plant with a backbone of Nuclear and cover the peaks with renewables.
That was brilliant, thoroughly enjoyed that , thank you
having the nuclear monopoly judge the effectivness of thorium or even 9 volt batteries is a joke. fox guarding the chickens
This is great!
I advocate for thorium power.
Thorium is the way of the future !!! China and India are building Thorium reactors right now... Why don't we all do the same ?
riseandshinetruthnow because Westinghouse and GE own all of the u-235 or reactor grade fuel in the pellets. So core solid fuel reactors are the way they're going to go LFTRs but use a breeding cycle to create u-233 from thorium and protactinium take a maximum of three months to get up and running and self perpetuating. Lftr would work and work well you can't even meltdown the fucking things no more fukushimas.
Because LFTRs don't leave you with a bunch of depleted uranium for making armor and ammunition. There's obviously more to it than that, but I think that's a big part of it, at least in regards to the US.
India have a lot of thorium and not that much uraniume
Jacques Lapierre. .... According to this video we all have a lot of thorium
Dotte van Dijk, Funny, Liberals/Progressives fake science to push the anti nuclear power agenda, throw money away on bad "Green Energy" solar and wind power projects, while shutting down effective proven solar power projects in the planning stage, shut down coal power operations, stop low sulfur coal from even being mined, to just start the list.
Yet the result is somehow the other sides fault?
I don't know what industrial strength brain annihilator A.K.A. drugs or alcohol you are fond of but you need stop or severely cut back your use.
One point that seems to be missed about cancellation of the MSR programs is the original objective of breeding additional fuel, which became a target as the Anti-Proliferation Treaty became national goal. It was during Carters Administration that the US nuclear fuel reprocessing and breeder reactor programs fell victim to that policy.
Great piece of work Gordon!
but no serious supporter of the thorium fuel cycle are all talking about liquid fluoride salts, not solid fuel, it makes online reprocessing possible.
They need to refurbish the label "Molten Salt Reactor" and paste it to a salt way different from Fluoride.
Fluorine is a very rare gas, mining the staff is a stupid idea ! Why make our street lighting rely on fluorite supply ?
Dependence on oxygen-18 enrichment being foolish, I'd rather sound boring & use K-Nitrite in pressurized water...
Amin Zin fluorine is a very reactive gas, but the fluoride ion is very unreactive, hydrogen is reactive, oxygen is reactive, but water is quite unreactive, fluoride needs something close to 4V to oxidize it back to fluorine, you're going to have a hard time doing that in a molten salt reactor.
Fluorine is not present as a gas, it's the fluoride ion, the atom fluorine is 900x more abundant than thorium and over 3000x more than uranium, plus it's not used up in the reaction, so the fluoride you start the reactor with is the same that you have after 10 years
Dom Vasta Chemicly, I get it. The problem is that this complicated design is not economicly efficient...If you need the potential investers to provide a long list of chemicals (wich supply is hardous & expensive) then you want your key element ("thorium" for example) to be invested in a design that makes best use of chemicals already thriving in the marketplace (sodium, potassium, lithium...etc). Theoretical Science is not the problem, Human Condition is...
Compared to the enriched Uranium any fluoride salt is cheap, the Beryllium in the FLiBe salt solution for Thorium tetrafluoride is far harder to get your hands on than fluoride salts.
Thanks for this video. This technology makes sense to me. More so than wind and solar which need large land areas and batteries to store the energy. This should have been pursued decades ago.
For whole Germany electricity consumption would be needed 2 percent of Germany area for photovoltaic. What will be the area for thorium digging?
@@milan222314 thorium is actually 3 times more abundant than uranium so it isn’t actually very rare
why is 05:59 lower left middle of the screen box blurred?
Security badges. The whole post-production was just blurring badges. So many badges.
@@gordonmcdowell
oh good job :)
i do the same thing when i upload videos too. releasing content to the internet always has its drawbacks in terms of privacy ;)
I have a question about MSR's. In the Air Force's project to make a nuclear powered plane the reactors that were being designed for that project required material for fuel that was so enriched it was almost on par with weapons grade fissile material. I would assume that this has been solved more recently since no regulatory body would allow a reactor to use fuel like this.
We can now use HALEU,just under 20%,but that works with advanced solid fueled TRISO as well as molten fueled reactors. That way th reactor is never opened to refuel zero fuel cost, it runs from 10 to 20 years depending on the load, then you just bury the reactor and install a new one. Right now Russia is the best place to buy it from but US is ramping up.
It seems that the focus is still on building large Nuclear Power stations. As I understand it, there is great value in using molten-salt Thorium fuelled Small Modular Reactors as proposed by Rolls-Royce. They can be supplied ready fuelled for 100 year life, would be more economical to build than large plants, are said to be "walk away safe". Since 20% of generated electricity is said to be lost during distribution an immediate saving can be made in siting these plants close to where the power is required. The excess heat can also be used to heat homes, public buildings and even agriculture.
No no no ,that is not even in the same universe as RR is proposing they would use HALEU 20% enriched U solid fuel in fuel rods with high pressure water cooling and moderator,they have experience with UK submarines which like ours run on 90% bomb grade u,no salt is involved. Just an old fashioned LWR,they are following NuScale and hope to catch them.
Thanks for the good info. Good to see this movement coming together. Great stuff Thorium.
"Never mind about the value of Pi. How does Pi make you FEEL?" (The Simpsons). I bet that was taken from a Caldicott lecture.
there is a lot of valuable insight into the whole biz here
I was always under the assumption that Thorium reactors could be made smaller, hence someday useful for things like moon bases where uranium reactors would be too heavy and bulky.
No, U reactors are plenty compact. Kilo Power , for use on the Moon , don’t use Th, why would you even consider it?
@@paulbedichek5177 I mean thorium is pretty abundant on the moon so that could probably happen
6:15 E=MC^2 is a substitute for what now? And nobody burst out laughing.
And just for the record; yes we do like it.
6:47 on my device
I actually laughed so hard that I started crying, then I really started crying when I realized she was serious...
I just viewed that. I'm currently baffled. I mean, she is essentially calling einstein(y'know, an unimportant bloke, just did a couple things) a pervert?
allright.
I'll be leaving then
Andrew Yang got me to watch this. Because I like him and his way of framing ideas as "not left, not right, but forward", I've been able to look at this with an open mind. The concept is appealing. I'm less attracted to anything that begins with more extracted earth.
I liked the can do attitude of the engineers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory! I wonder where we would be now if they continue their work at ORNL.
Great video, but it definitely seems more like debunking the Thorium debunking! I hope everything goes well in China and the technology spreads.
It is four years later from a massive effort in China they built a 2MW experiment,good job, but no useful power while PWR's are being built at a record pace in China in addition thy successfully connected a HTR to the grid and will now build 20,our version of the TRISO fueled HTR is X Energy. TerraPower is building the Natruim system a fast reactor sodium cooled.
I spoke with Xi the other day and he said that he thinks the Thorium reactor wil be ready next year .... and that the Chinese are very happy with it.
Even if thorium reactors aren't any less of a proliferation hazard than plutonium reactors, it means that we can use thorium as fuel, not just uranium. Isn't more than doubling our supplies of fuel an advantage?
I think it should be tried, for if it requires less shieldimg, it's perfect for off-world. Even if it's less efficient, it would be another tool to use in the exploration of moons and other planets.
Thanks for providing this video.
Can current solid fuel reactors be retrofitted to replace water as a coolant?
No. The improvement there is (IMHO terribly named) "Accident Tolerant Fuel". www.energy.gov/ne/articles/doe-awards-111-million-us-vendors-develop-accident-tolerant-nuclear-fuels
Skip to 33:00 for massive cringe
uhhh, i know where you wanted the cringe to happen (the awful singing) but i cringed when they said that geothermal energy production caused 200x the radioactive waste that nuclear reactors do per watt ... what?????
+IAmTheOnlyYogo Yeah, damn right haha.
It's per watt *hour* . Idiots.
You ruined my evening.
IAmTheOnlyYogo if you're drilling in an area with a lot of natural radioactive materials, then yes, you can get a lot of waste from that compared to the often low amount of energy you get back (remember it's per watt, not per plant, and nuclear energy produces a lot of power). This is doubly true when you often have to redrill geothermal systems because a spot you're pulling from gets too cold.
Not only will you have contaminated groundwater and soil, but you're also going to often release a fair amount of stuff like radon drilling those holes that deep into the ground.
That's not even mentioning the whole bit about the geothermal convection in the Earth's crust that you're trying to get close to is always bringing up radioactive material.
That's not to say that geothermal is always a bad option, but yes, 200x the _volume per watt_ in extreme cases like the one cited (which you can pause at 32:56 ) is plausible when you understand what all counts as nuclear waste, what goes into geothermal power plants, and the Earth's not so clean composition.
I didn't see the cringe, it does bring up Uranium 233 at frame 33:00 but frame 35:50 with the dancing Radium cartoon was a bit messed up.
Note: A thorium molten salt reactor doesn't self destruct in your face like a solid fuel reactor does. The issue is safety. All light water reactors are a horror show design. They all use water to cool the nuclear fuel, Just say an accident, where you get a sudden steam flashover and the 2000 ton reactor lid is blown off the pressure vessel and sending massive amounts of ionizing radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere, ( Chernobyl ). We all know how that has worked out. I know we have to rely on renewable energy production and nuclear energy production to supply the world's energy needs. The Thorium Reactors are just safer with all the facts considered. Light water reactors only use 5% of the valuable enriched uranium fuel before they have to change the fuel bundles. What kind of economical value is that, It's time to move our technologies into the 21st century. Get rid of the light water reactor design, it's dangerous with few reliable safety backups when unpredicted things go wrong, Mainly cooling system. The other good thing about Molten Salt Reactor is they can be set up anywhere, they don't need a body of water as a cooling source. You wouldn't have a Fukushima type of disaster poisoning a water supply and major food source. The Atomic Energy Commision just goes on it's way resistant to change. They don't seem to care about that which lives on this planet. If people are interested in the latest Thorium Reactors, Look up LFTR on youtube.
Look into the Focus Fusion company's use of a dense plasma focus to make ion beams and convert fusion energy to electricity through a direct induction coil. I'd like to see this device used to make a neutron beam assisted Thorium reactor. You could get a nice reaction going down the axis of a thorium fuel rod with a neutron beam.
The question is whether you might be able to just use thorium instead of beryllium for an anode and use the focus fusion device to get direct energy from the alpha particles produced by accelerated decay of the thorium into alpha particles. Some information online claims that you can, but I don't know for sure. I do know that thorium is added to magnetrons and welding rods for enhanced plasma stability, so who knows?
That would have the advantage of being a low/no neutron process.
The only information I have found about accelerated radioactive decay suggests that the input energy is higher than the output gained, but if a way around that is ever found so that u-238 and thorium can be used for direct electrical output in alpha systems, I am pretty sure it will be kept secret.
Every powerplant like system needs a cooling source, a 'waterbody' is preferable because it can cool further wich gives higher vacuumpressure or something like that. Cooling towers can be added to prevent too much heating of the local water. It's still the same steam cycle that comes after the molten salt.
In case of an emergency, I don't see how the absence of water that can boil off and remove residual/secondary heat is necessarily a good thing without it the stuff will just keep heating up. A molten salt reactor after shutdown will still need a cooling system (of some sort).
Great job on the vid! Too bad Kirk Sorensen didn’t move to Canada to start his FliBe operation. Considering the warm response Terrestrial Energy has received in Canada and internationally, Sorensen’s flibe might’ve been the early game changer instead of being the one that lost.
Incredibly well done. As an infrastructure investor, the truth is that you need to change the mind behind the money, not the science. This video is for that audience. The negative comments herein may critique the scientific meat here, but that is the problem. For too long Thorium has been “inside baseball” within nuclear. We need to bring it to the mainstream. Taking a step back to discuss radioactive decay is genius here.
Great Video ! And Thorium MSR for Mars to protect US and the Earth from WMDs. tjl
A LFTR on top of Olympus Mons is my dream.
Personally, I think it'd be awesome if we had a few of these bad boys as the primary power sources for floating cities in the atmosphere of Venus :D.
Though we'll probably want to get a cheaper launch vehicle method before we achieve that, or mass launches to any planet for that matter. Maybe get some space hook designs attached to ion propulsion drives out in space to start setting up the industry to build space elevators? Something like that. Once we have that, then I think something like planetary colonization is on the table.
would it be legal to build a small scale version for a home?
MSR has a minimum practical size suitable for large factory or small community. Not home-size. At that point you are better off harnessing decay of fission products to power a single building or home. Also, site licensing is currently difficult and that cost might be constant regardless of power output.
It's not even legal to do some decent hate speech, so, I guess they would bring you to a special facility...
Can someone tell me what the name is of the show with N deGrasse Tyson? I generally am not a fan but this looks gooood to show a chiild.
COSMOS (remake) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Spacetime_Odyssey is on Netflix. Also there's a tiny bit from www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/the-inexplicable-universe-unsolved-mysteries.html
Thanks
36:40 does anyone know the name of the cartoon shown here
waow, thank you for the overall picture! I'll keep spreading the word!
thorium good, this video after ~15minutes, bad
it becomes a collage of science documentaries and kirk sorensen talks after that. just watch his talks and do your own research from there
i think this title is good, ive been doing a little bit of research on the reactor design and have heard a lot of praise and not a lot of questioning, so here i am.
The best way to use thorium is in a liquid salt reactor. It consumes the thorium and because it requires uranium to to kick start each reaction it consumes the uranium as well. Drawback is the corrosive nature of salt. If the corrosion issue could be overcome it may be very cost effective to use a liquid salt reactor.
Go Thorium
I can imagine that there is a huge pushback against thorium reactors by the existing players. After all, thorium based fission doesn't produce so much profit for the parties involved, from construction to fuel production to waste management (and weapons grade plutonium). This is the same attitude that stated that petrol engines could not be made more efficient until high prices pushed it outside the US - there is a LOT of profit in selling fuel. If it was such a mirage as these people allege, explain to me why China sunk billions into its development? If China gets them operational in 2019/202, there will be *massive* impacts on the US economy as China's current push for electric vehicles will then soon make it almost oil/gas independent, whereas the US has been thrown back to the Stone Age by Trump - a good question if we'll even be able to catch up now.
yeah, China is going to do this and they will corner the market. I am so sick of people willing to cut the throat of their own nation and the worlds climate to guard their dirty outdated cash cow like they are entitled to an industry.
Aren't we supposed to focus more on LFTR instead? Is it safer? Why wait for so long?
finally what i was looking for, thx!!!
I am pro msr thorium.
This is not the first video I’ve seen about molten salt reactors. The logic still sounds solid.
At 3:50ish did the doctor say General Rickover?
I'm a supporter of nuclear power, especially molten salt reactors but I have trouble understanding the appeal of Thorium. David LeBlanc of Terrestrial Energy cites a number of concerns including capital cost and complicated reprocessing. A Uranium molten salt reactor on the other hand is simple and low cost. It also has the potential of using the unused uranium in spent fuel from current nuclear facilities, a feature that would be well received by the public. It is important that whatever path we chose, it must be competitive relative to fossil fuels. It seems to me Uranium has the advantage there.
Martin Pieterse since no one as of yet said anything.
Thorium reactors can recycle uranium fuel. Watch his other videos.
This is utter nonsense. I have seen it even if he hasn't. The cost of uranium is hardly the issue. it is the SAFETY of the reaction, the LACK of waste, and the LOW COST of the reactors, since they do not require a large containment vessel. Let's build one and see! You have to understand that Westinghouse, and other reactor builders are heavily invested in water cooled uranium reactors, and they spend their lobbying money accordingly! Ask yourself "why is China so interested?".
ROFL, you sure you watched the video?! He is arguing for salt...../smack
The main reason the pwr outfits want to stick with fuel rods is because their geometry is proprietary. IE: Vendor lockin on fuel supply.
With a molten salt reactor you just dissolve more fuel into the salt. No lock in means no profits.
And now Westinghouse is financially broken, with the real possibility that it will take parent company Toshiba into bankruptcy, because their nuclear power systems are garbage.
DeaconG1959 actually it isn't westinghouse. It's the poison pill they swallowed of British Nuclear Fuels. Which was about as well run as any other British industry dating from the 1950s when "made in England" was a warning label.
When the answer to the energy crisis is in your name
Na- sodium Th- thorium a N - some amount of nitrogen
You end up here.
Gordon, do you have the full interview with Weinberg where he's talking about how you couldn't guarantee safety if you go to 1000 watt PWRs? It seemed like he was discussing good technical points there that are worth mentioning as to why it is stupid to keep using PWRs for civilian power generation.
Incredibly weak argument against thorium, to the extent of causing me to wonder about your possible ulterior motives.
LOL
They are debunking the debunks.
I hope you don't mind me downloading this video just in case.
Thanks for the video. We have no path forward without Thorium.
Nobody with any intelligence considers a solid fuel thorium reactor. A number of countries are building molten salt thorium reactors.