Can thorium nuclear energy make a comeback?
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- Опубліковано 22 тра 2024
- Nuclear energy gets a pretty bad rap - for good reasons. But thorium, a weakly radioactive element, is hailed to fix all its problems: no meltdowns, less waste, no bombs. We developed a molten-salt reactor to unlock its potential decades ago - but then turned our backs on it. Was that a huge mistake?
Credits:
Reporter: Malte Rohwer-Kahlmann
Video Editor: Frederik Willmann
Supervising Editor: Michael Trobridge
We're destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn't need to be this way. Our new channel Planet A explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world - and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we'll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.
#PlanetA #Thorium #Nuclear
Read More:
Atomic Energy Commission report on molten-salt reactors (1972):
www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/43...
Oak Ridge report on Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (1969):
www.thmfgrcs.com/NAT_MSREexper...
Problems with molten-salt reactors:
thebulletin.org/2022/06/molte...
World Nuclear Association's fact-sheet on thorium:
world-nuclear.org/information...
3D reactor animation in thumbnail courtesy of Flibe Energy.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:12 Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment
03:40 Power couple
05:26 What went wrong?
07:41 Today's vision
08:32 The road ahead
What's your take on thorium and molten-salt reactors?
There cool and can be safe but we are lacking geothermal energy and that is clean green energy machines
@Thesilent One Have you seen our video on geothermal energy? Here's a link if you want to check it out 🙃: ua-cam.com/video/c7dy0hUZ9xI/v-deo.html
Pretty much the same as in your video or in other words: The Thorium and gen IV rector concepts are only power point presentations and catchy CGI. The worth of such reactor concepts are to be proven yet. Money is not the obstacle for success, these startups collected a lot of money already.
They, at least, base on a technology that has already worked, unlike fusion energy. The dude from this Thorium startup sounded a bit weird though, "It's baked into the laws of chemistry"... doesn't sound like a scientist (or engineer for that matter) speaking. I thus assume that this company and a lot of the rest are (were) just living off the stream of excess cash from venture capitalists during the years of low interest rates.
Sure, it is real research, but the same that is done in universities around the globe but with a large layer of bling and a marketing department.
Now that the stream of endless free cash has stopped, I bet a lot of these startups will disappear.
As for thorium reactors themselves, they may be possible, but are they really a solution? Could they really provide enough energy or compete in price with renewables? Specially considering that by the most optimistic timescale for commercially viable molten salt reactor, renewables will have been advancing too in technological terms, but also in their scale? Thorium energy would need to be very damn cheap to compete.
My take is simple… what’s the cost, and what’s the turnaround time? The fact that basically no one has even put a real effort into thorium since the 1960s strongly suggests that it’s harder (read more expensive) than it looks. Partisan accusations aside, it has to compete economically with renewables - wind/solar/geothermal and storage. That means it’s going to have to be an order of magnitude cheaper than current light-water commercial reactors. And, because renewables are being rapidly built out NOW, and because global warming is a rapidly growing problem NOW, we don’t have decades to screw around with figuring it out and building it out. So I’m not hopeful for thorium molten salt reactors. But I also don’t care one way or the other, as long as the carbon problem gets solved as quickly as possible. Renewables, thorium, whatever, just STOP BURNING FOSSIL FUEL.
Sam O'nella first, guys! 😂 Our chad really changes the world 🎉
The chad himself
As if we would have it any other way
Lies again? Energy Drink Too Nice
Who asked your opinion?
I hope you guys asked his permission to use his clip
India is a leader in Thorium research. Currently Fast breeder reactor is in final stages of construction. Also India is the only country with a plan on how to deal with nuclear waste. It will be fed into Fast breeder reactors.
Hey man I love ur videos, I watch em regularly keep up the good work vande matram
I see your videos man
China recently gave consent for first experimental molten salt reactor, so hope this will give positive results, they have plans for several more thereafter in near future.
India has years of experience with Thorium
We have 3 stages where thorium is converted to uranium which will be as nuclear fuel and will be converted to plutonium which will also be used for power generation
@@dr.sandipmehta973 is feasible for mass production or not ?
We already developed the alloy needed, and it has been approved. The current issues are mostly related to filtering the molten salt to remove elements created in the reaction while operating. This is one of the main advantage of molten salt reactors over conventional light water reactors where you have to shut light water reactors down periodically, reshuffle the rods, and replace some rods. Molten salt is supposed to be able to just keep running and have small amounts of Thorium put in while it is operating for perhaps years on end. If you don't filter it, it will have to be shut down now and then to get it filtered some other way. They could just take out the old and put in new, and restart. Then clean the old stuff while it is using the new stuff, but as he mentioned, the start-up is complicated, and requires uranium and such. If we get all the filtering working, the thing practically does not need anyone to operate. Of course, there will be people in actuality.
One has to question the integrity of presenting a bunch of nuclear explosions in association with reactors. Nuclear weapons are not reactors, reactors are not nuclear weapons and can't detonate like them. It is also ignored how safe nuclear reactors are already. They are the safest form of energy we have. There are far more deaths with anything else.
Germans were just goofy to shut down their reactors after Fukushima. Not only do they not have major earthquake faults, but even with 3 worst-case meltdowns, no one died from radiation. Imagine if they shut down all the windmills after one technician fell to his death. In reality, lots of people have died working on windmills. And lots of people have fallen off buildings to their deaths installing solar, but even the imagination of someone dying of radiation is enough to scrap dozens of perfectly good reactors. Coal is killing thousands of Germans a year, but it is just shrugged off. I used to think Germans were rational, common-sense people.
" I used to think Germans were rational, common-sense people". I had pretty much the same thought when they announced they going to shut down their reactors. Do they really think Germany can be made to run on some other system that does not emit CO2? But maybe I should not be so surprised as they also have their "Frankenfood" problem.
Excellent point about the explosions and reveals the presenter as not well informed or unwilling to explore the misconceptions in depth.
It's absolutely ridiculous that people are barely informed on the specifics of nuclear energy, so of course they will vote with their emotions.
A lot of effort in, send back to manufacturer-.
@@YourCapybaraAmigo_17yrsago I am afraid that Finland (or Norway?) is the first country in the world to have a "final" waste storage. Germany has founded something like a company to find one - time frame: 30+ years.
No way out boy Sam O Nella got a spot in DW. When will our boy come back? God damn it!
he made a video. he is back
I think there is a LOT of potential here.
The biggest hurdle is in the materials, which have improved by an order of magnitude since the Oak Ridge MSR experiment was shut down. It's possible, for instance, that advanced ceramics may be even better-suited than the metal alloys of the original experiment.
ua-cam.com/video/mz49CB8XGQo/v-deo.html
If you use LiF-BeF2-UF4 salt, graphite moderator, and Hastelloy-N alloy, we have the data to show that you can build a successful reactor.
@@DemPilafian the main problem with the current reactors is the cost and the main costs goes into their safety features like concrete building super protections etc. if the molten salt can help decrease those costs , it will help a lot. although nuclear is the safest and cleanest form of energy , it was ruined by the propaganda from russia and fossil fuel companies which sponsored all these "green" energy groups. Unfortunately without nuclear power we won't have green energy . I am happy to see that the topic of nuclear energy is resurected and hopefully this will help people in accepting it after all the bad propaganda it was done against it
@@DemPilafian I disagree. Even if thorium can ever function only as good as existing reactors, we are still saving tons of nuclear waste. Nuclear energy is cheap, the waste disposal is not..
@@DemPilafian check out waste disposal dumps in the USA and the world. It's not just the rods, there are lot of other radioactive byproducts that need to be disposed. For current reactors the outputs aren't safe for 10s of thousands of years. For thorium reactors it's about few hundred years. Also the amount of waste generated is far less. That's even touched on in this video. The only problem is they can't get them to run for long without problems. Of course research has to be done on this and fixed.
Sure, but thats a lot of ifs and whats. I agree we should research it, but we should always prioritize known clean sources since the issue is so pressing
india has a one of the largest reserves of thorium, so it has carried out a lot of research on it. And it is developing reactors for thorium
70% world reserves at Kerala
@@greennature143 only 25% of worlds thorium is in India. How come Kerala have 70% of world thorium reserves?
@@prateeksharma729 70% of total deposits in India Maybe.
@@SZD. Not really, 31% is in Andhra Pradesh which is the highest, as per 2016 survey estimates. In fact, Tamil Nadu and Odisha states have 21 and 20% respectively followed by 16% in Kerala, 10% in West Bengal and 2% in Jharkhand.
Hey Aryaman, true! Way outstrip the country's uranium reserves. Thrilling to see where the results of these studies lead. ⚡
It would have been nice to delve more into the Chinese test MSR than 7 seconds. It’s already been built and was approved for testing for almost a year. Everyone else is talking years before they build a test reactor, and China has already built one.
Would u trust chinese nuclear tech?
@@fredfrond6148 I would trust japanese and US engineering any day of the week.
@@om-qz7kp the chinese dont have the experience, russian companies are doing the tech install behind their own expanding nuclear reactor fleet. the russian tech is good now, chernobyl was bad design and lack of qualified ppl to run the facility. how good the training is going to be for the chinese is an entirely a different question.
@@om-qz7kp because your a shill thats why
@@om-qz7kp Hello Fukushima and Three Mile Island.
Lotta folks in the comments don’t seem to under that alot of tech is already developed for it, it’s simply lack of investment
"nuclear energy gets a bad rap, and for good reason" names literally the only 3 incidents in over 75 years of nuclear energy, none of which were caused by the actual nuclear technology but by the humans running and building the plants.
Technology moves on. New plants are orders of magnitude safer. It's similar to aviation which is now one of the safest ways to travel
And not comparing to coal, oil, and gas which have even worse rep.
@@dewibermingham816 exactly
Yea but thats the problem, you're never going to get a reactor without humans running or building it.
Something can be very safe in theory, until some company wants to save a buck and pushes it beyond its limits.
@@tjeulink there have been 0 nuclear incidents where the staff are properly trained and adhering to safety guidelines and the construction of the plant is up to code. my country, canada has never had a nuclear incident. nuclear energy is safe.
Thorium reactors are worth a look. But video stories like this overlook some important facts: the benefits of molten salt reactors are not unique to thorium. The same could be done with uranium. Thorium waste is much more radioactive and dangerous for a shorter period of time. Uranium reactor waste is less radioactive, but for a much longer time. Thorium is more abundant at the surface, but uranium is much more abundant overall including the sea floor.
No to nuclear
I was going to write something similar.
Passive safety design is not unique to LFTRs either. Many conventional generation 3(+) reactors already have passive safety features, and there's another big wave of improvements coming with gen4. (including non-thorium based MSRs)
Overall, it's good that thorium can open people's minds to the idea that, hey, maybe not every nuclear reactor is a bomb in disguise. Maybe it's just an engineering problem, and the failure of some old designs doesn't mean that the problem is inherently unsolvable.
I just hope they don't get stuck in thorium tunnel vision.
The disparity of funding between Fusion Power and Thorium is mind boggling. If they put 10% of such funding to Thorium, will likely have useful technologies much much sooner. Secondly, Canada is scheduled be having Throium running in a Candu Reactor this year, albeit not using Molten Salt but still very interesting. Third, waste heat from molten salt reactors can be used for industrial purposes, replacing the need for Natural Gas such as fertilizer production.
You can thank the green nutjobs for this and many other stupid energy policy mistakes.
Running thorium in a CANDU (or even a PWR) is perfectly possible and would not need very much research investment. But the only problem it solves is the high price and low availability of uranium. And uranium is currently cheap and plentiful. If we keep using fission for electricity generation there is a case for moving to thorium in the next couple of hundred years, but not much of a need to do it now.
@@YourCapybaraAmigo_17yrsago Why? Like I said uranium is plentiful and cheap. What's the advantage of moving to thorium?
@@JohnHughesChampigny For geopolitical reasons some countries like India have a lot more thorium than Uranium and would rather not have to import it in the future when their Uranium deposits run out , so thorium provides more energy independence/security which could justify it even if it is a bit more expensive.
@@mechano6505 That makes a lot more sense than the "we're going to run out of uranium" nonsense.
I believe molten salt reactors have a definite place, especially for countries that already have a lot of spent fuel that could be used up. It would be great if the West were to match China and India is trialing these designs, especially the design similar to Oak Ridge. Molten salt also gives operators process heat which can run desalinators, another of our urgent needs.
Desalination is not a good use of residual heat. Desalination creates brine, a toxic harmfull sludge.
To get to know more about desalination, we made a video on if it can solve the global water crises. 💧 Check it out here: ua-cam.com/video/XPCaM9Rzzbs/v-deo.html. And don't forget to share your thoughts in the comments. ☀
The thermal output is closer to coal-fired boilers than to those of light-water reactors. Factory-built thorium reactors can be placed at decommissioned coal burners and "burn" the "waste" from the LWR's to operate existing generators. Some startups are looking into this. (I live in Missouri, U.S.A. and know of a few coal plants not far away that would qualify as test sites [easy access to the Missouri river].) Utility companies typically not early adopters; and that is why they still use scaled-up Navy reactors whose original designs date back to the 1950's. Until the USN is forced away from using highly enriched U-215 in their ships, there won't be enough money in the U.S. to bring thorium reactors online in this century.
The US has the world's largest nuclear fleet. China opens a new coal plant every two days.
I thoroughly enjoyed this documentary, it provided valuable insights and presented the information in a compelling manner. Great work!
In Germany there was the THTR-300, working with thorium but not as molten salt. It was very expensive, didn't work very well and generally seen as a failure.
It's simply not true that thorium reactors cannot be used to produce weapons-grade fissionable materials.
@@DemPilafian Who cares. Nuclear weapons have made the world objectively safer. And most global primary energy consumption is in countries that already have nuclear weapons.
Thorium reactors are very inefficient to make weapons-grade material. Be much easier and economical to use an RBMK reactor.
We have so many countries posesing nuclear weapons or having friends that will help them if they ever needed some and many of these countries are considered evil by western leaders and some of their citizens. when north Korea has nuclear weapons what difference does it make? If we want to kill all of us we can already do it but if we want to make they world prosper so we don't need to fight then it's considered too dangerous. Basically we are idiots and self-destructive so there is no need for nuclear weapons because we destroy ourselves from within.
While the fissile U-233 can (and has been) used to build atomic bombs, it has proved to be very difficult because contamination with highly radioactive U-232 makes the material difficult to handle and can lead to spontaneous pre-detonation of the device. Separating the two isotopes has proved to be very difficult and requires complex machinery.
0:44 OHHH MY GOOODDDDDDD SAMMY WHEN I HEARD THORIUM I REMEMBERED HIS VIDEO
Excellent video! Many thanks for the information. 😊
I knew this was going somewhere when I heard the voice of Master Sam O'Nella
Thank you for talking about this.
Thorium is VERY realistic. Commitment needs to be made and the willingness to own past mistakes. Ego will be the only true enemy.
What is the advantage of Thorium? There is NONE
@@YourCapybaraAmigo_17yrsago Ok sonny. Save up that allowance to build one because the big boys with the big bucks are not interested.
Public school educated and social media zombie youth are destroying America
Thorium would be good in a consumer/industrial application.
Conventional nuclear power is also very safe, fear mongering notwithstanding.
Nuclear power fearmongering is german national policy. And DW is german national chanel
I love DW; they are so truthful, balanced, and honest, refreshing. Go Thorium! We need all options on board as soon as possible. Tapping energy in the water solves our energy problems and our water problems with the power and beauty of the life cycle to put the Carbon Genie back in the bottle. Pluvicopia is not an engineering proposal; its meteorology is its power, but it has yet to be numerically tested and parameterized. Its beauty is why to build Pluvicopia; instead of pollution and danger, it solves nearly all our ecological and fossil fuel-created problems.
Since we need to quickly make steps to avoid climate disaster, thorium will not really help in that area. However, these reactors can diversify energy generation in the future, and, maybe most importantly, reduce our nuclear waste. So yeah, I think there definitely is a future for these type of reactors.
If thorium works as intended it will produce more energy than traditional nuclear powerplants. Also green energy is one of the worst way to avoid climate change since we spend more energy(Mostly coal) to produce them,also spending the resources.
Green energy is very inefficient due to you need lots of them to make up the loss but when the number increase so does the maintence cost ,it also do not help that solar powers are time limited their efficiency lowers in 5-10 years a lot thus most countries who use green energy extensively instead of nuclear energy such as Germany has more expensive energy costs. Germany also burns lots of coal to keep its energy costs down to the point they carved a mountain that could be seen from satelites to find coal.
France on the other hand has extensive nuclear powerplants and burn less coal and natural gasses(Natural gasses , oil and coal produce %42 of the energy in France,%77 in Germany according to the 2019 statistics). Their energy cost is around 18 euro cents per kwh while Germany's around 30 euro cents per kwh.
Don't believe everything career doomsayers tell you.
Climate disaster, like fusion energy is always just around the corner. Keep the climate fear alive!
The climate problem is way overblown and the only sustainable solution in the long run is nuclear.
@@Hunter_Bidens_Crackpipe_ *looks at name
"Rights..."
We should go with what we have today: modern gen3 reactors, and fund further research into the utilization of high level nuclear waste in the future. I'm sceptical about the hyped thorium MSRs. The radioactive molten salt mixture is highly corrosive, and even if proper materials are engineered, there may be proliferation risks by chemically separating the uranium-233 from the mixture.
@YourFriendlyNuclearPhysicist made a great video about thorium reactors, including the downsides, which are usually missing or trivialized.
Exactly, we could use proven technology to produce green energy at this very moment with nuclear power, but the green energy industry would rather use less efficient technologies (solar, wind) instead. Not saying they are bad, but the technology as it exists today are still in their infancy and need some time to develop before we can use them reliably.
Proliferation is a made up argument and the materials are already available: ceramics.
Modern reactors still take atleast a decade to build. Time we simply do not have anymore.
@@Tyler_Owen23 solar and wind are more efficient in terms of money, they cost less even if you compensate for grands etc. Nuclear is a very expensive energy source
@@tjeulink We have lots of time in the future. Exactly one year every year.
Samonella academy taught me about thorium and Im so happy he was in the news lmao
Any good regulator will do his very best to increase the cost of any nuclear plant. That is their main job. They are in cahoots with the lawyers to regulate nuclear out of existence. If you can’t sue them to death, then you regulate them to death.
I used to be a Thorium miner back then in my WoW's days
All in all, a really good discussion of the subject. Obviously, it's not long enough to explore every significant issue about these reactors, but it pretty much gets everything right, and it comes to about the same conclusion I would come to: Absolutely, do R&D on these designs, but one thing these reactors are NOT is simple. These are breeder reactors, with complex chemical separation systems built right into them-what some have called "chemical kidneys." No way are plants based on this technology going to be deployed widely until there is a substantial track record, and that will take many years, even in the most optimistic scenarios.
CLARIFICATION: At various points throughout the video, we show a concept for a molten-salt reactor by a company called Terrestrial Energy. Particularly at 08:43 and 10:13 it could be understood this is supposed to run on thorium. That's not the case. It's supposed to run on low-enriched uranium.
You should add this to the pinned comment on top.
Which is a much better fuel than thorium.
Great to see DW do a coverage on this
Hard to find impartial sources on the topic these days
DW is impartial news channel, expect in the topic of nuclear energy and immigration!
@@dantetre i do expect that in those topics.
They ACTUALLY included Joe Scott 😃
And Kirk Sorensen - I think some clips were Gordon Mcdowell's.
I learn that some countries, such as India and China, are investing in thorium reactor research and development, and it is possible that thorium nuclear energy could make a comeback in the future. However, it is important to note that thorium reactors are still in the experimental stage and it may take some time before they can be commercially deployed..👍
Lies again? Face Of New England
How can it make a come back ? It never came in the nuclear park till now.
You're being a little pedantic. The science and research into it is NOT brand new.
TBF you can use a MSR with Uranium or even existing high level nuclear waste.
"climate solution we we have available now": current gen nuclear, renewables dont work because of the storage issue, this is not a simple thing to fix but needs a fundamental breakthrough similar to fusion. Thorium is a very close second.
Would be smart for India to look into it. Could perhaps provide their own fuel if the bugs can be worked on
You know what you’re completely right if they perfect this they can sell the idea and he come at global power.
Indian program started in 1960's and the finalized reactor design for mass production will not be do before 2050. (That's the official date by the government). Although we do have a new thorium test reactor in construction and will be commission next year. So may e government can push the date to 2040 but before that only test reactors will be construced
The potential Thorium has itself demands the requirement to persist investing in the Research and development of the technology.
At 06:00 all those problem are totally normal and expected with a prototype... that's why we build them.
Great essay!
Hey Rob! Glad you like the video. We post new videos every Friday. Subscribe to be notified about new releases ✨
Very put together video going in depth and giving relevant context. One small correction: the amount of available thorium and uranium is pretty similar. It varies between regions so some countries might find it more cost effective while others will still prefer uranium.
The U-235 that fission plants run on is only a small fraction of uranium available though, if we can start using U-238 in fast fission commercial plants that would be a game changer also.
@@anydaynow01 ... And Thorium is easily found in mine tailings -- no need for more open pit mines, we have more than enough of them supporting the green revolution as it is.
It is important to invest in research of options like this, but in the meantime, it would be great if more countries invested in renewable energy resources already available, to make transition from fossil fuels towards wind and solar. Much to be learned from Germany's EEG bill from 2000 in terms of legal framework, incentives and support.
Biggest reason why Thorium reactors arent here is because back then it was decided that uranium must be used as fuel source, because at the time nukes needed uranium (nukes=weapons)
The biggest problem today is people that think the know something when they just repeat some BS they heard on a YT video or on social media.
Where do people keep coming up with this BS that Thorium was abandoned and Uranium based PWR/BWR were chosen so we could make bombs?
Hanford Wa. has been making weapons material, at their 9 reactors, since 1944, 12 years before the first U.S. commercial nuclear plant became operational and their weapons production reactors are very efficient graphite moderated reactors and DO NOT produce any electrical power.
Savannah River site SC. Has been making weapons material since 1955 and their 5 production reactors are very efficient low pressure heavy water moderated reactors and DO NOT produce electric power.
Thorium was tried at Shippingport and Indian Point commercial reactors in the 1970s and abandoned as too costly compared to Uranium.
Weapons production reactors are NOTHING like U.S. commercial PWR or BWR power reactors and commercial power reactors have NEVER been used to produce Pu239 for weapons, since there has never been a need beyond what the efficient weapons production reactors could provide..
The U.S. currently has so much Pu239 that 34 tons of weapon grade Pu239 is being treated so it can eventually be disposed of at a cost of billions.
Your comment is like saying automobiles use gas engine because the military wanted jet fighters. God help us that people base their knowledge on social media and YT videos.
Great content! Finally DW taking advanced nuclear power to the discussion. Glad to see that! There are though some misconceptions in the video, but nothing too harmful to the general comprehension of the technology.
One of the main misconceptions I'd like to clarify is that the more nuclear power plants we deploy, the less nuclear weapons we TEND TO have. That's true for every reactor, even for Light Water Reactors vastly deployed nowadays. That's mainly because the more attractive nuclear raw fuel becomes, the less interest in wasting them as excessive nuclear arsenal in reserve. That's mainly true to states like the US and Russia. Also for China and India. Of course there will be exceptions like North Korea, who doesn't seem to be interested in civil and commercial nuclear power at all.
Beyond that, there is also the fact that the plutonium produced in nuclear power reactors IS NOT weapons-grade. To be able to obtain such a device, you would need more purified Pu-239, which definitely isn't obtained by just having a nuclear power plant operating in your territory. Most, if not all, Pu-based weapons produced to date come from so-called Production Reactors, which are specifically designed to breed Pu-239 in the purity needed for a nuclear explosive device.
Anyway, the main principle I stated at the beginning still holds truth:
The more reactors we deploy, the less weapons we TEND TO have in the world.
Again, great content! Aprecciated the topic very much.
So you cant refine plutonium from nuclear waste?
@@tjeulink From Light Water Reactors in principle not. You would be able to do so with adequate resources and equipment, but we're talking about the type of machinery you just don't buy off the shelf. So proliferation-wise, you would only need to safeguard who you'll be selling those equipment to.
BUT it's always best to be safe than sorry! And that's the International Atomic Energy Agency philosophy. That's why they'll never say it's ok NOT to safeguard spent fuel from LWRs.
We too should heavily invest into molten salt reactor Research and Development in Germany.
@@alainpannetier2543 Yeah, he's already buying a kg of salt at the EDEKA and heating it up in a pan, 🤣
You can pop rice in heated salt. It's called puffed rice. I just ate it. Okay man!!
Germany needs to start by restarting all of their 16.6 gigawatts of nuclear capacity closed for purely political reasons since 2011.
Already watched 100 times, good job!
That's not even possible
@@bottleflaskan802 Watched at 100x speed?
@@tomblaise no he didn't
@@bottleflaskan802 Prove it.
@@bottleflaskan802 he did I saw it with my own eyes.
Thorium Oakenshield will never give up the mine.
Argon and Boron of Gondor will surely fight by his side.
This video focuses on the US. However, China is moving forward on MSR development. They knew the issues with the ORNL experiment and in fact ORNL scientists were consultants on the Chinese project. The main issue was the plumbing corrosion. China had metallurgical experts on the development trying to solve the corrosive nature of the liquid fuel/coolant. Though public data was not available, one would think the Chinese would not be allowed to activate the prototype reactor had not the plumbing issue not be successfully addressed. That developmental reactor has been running since late 2022 so we should get some readings in the near future.
I'm not an expert in the field of energy but I remember a solar-moulted-salt power plant halted in the USA a few years ago due to the difficulty of working with moulted salt.
This has to do with the available thermal energy not being enough to keep the salt molten overnight, not so much the corrosive nature of molten salt. This is why there was so much controversy surrounding the Ivanpah Power Plant, because it was sold to the public as a zero emission power generation project and ended up using quite a bit of natural gas to keep the temperatures stable in the salt reservoirs. The operator of the facility readily admitted that for the rates output power in MWh, the input natural gas consumption was dramatically lower than that of a conventional natural gas fired powerplant, however the green energy mafia couldn't swallow this fact. The operational costs were also highly variable and the operator was having trouble with drastically changing operating costs and environmental pushback from anime rights groups claiming that the installation was inhibiting local species from natural transiting paths and so forth.
Yes, hyper liberalism can literally slow down the pace of its own progress.
The biggest hurdle to clean energy is the “green energy mafia” itself. Nuclear power is the way to go, we have plenty of places in the desert, DEEP underground where it would never affect anything, we have the money to build the reactors and we have the most developed nuclear energy industry in the world. But the green activist hitch their wagon to something and refuse to let it go, just to save face.
I’m not saying solar and wind are bad, but it’s still too expensive and inefficient to rely on it today.
@@scenicdepictionsofchicagolife Thank you for noticing me, I appreciate your time.
@@scenicdepictionsofchicagolife damn, didn't know anime rights groups were going after nuclear energy. I guess Hiroshima and Nagasaki still have an ongoing impact on the anime mentality.
You can find a successful version of this progress in Ouarzazate, Morocco, in the "Noor" power station
While fusion is always 30 years away, thorium reactor is always 10 years away
Healthgrades reactor spent a lot more time shut down than it did operating and they were still trying to get rid of the u-233 in 2008. There's no place licensed to keep it. Apparently they made a successful suitcase bomb that was tested underground at Nevada with some of. Oakridge was not the only molten salt reactor it was just the only one that used thorium.
We need to seek further more in Molten Salt Reactors and thorium powered nuclear reactors.
There are many startups that want your money if you think it is a great idea.
look at molten chloride salt fast reactors, a lot better suited to power reactors. LFTR has useful fission products but do that later.
why the focus on thorium? most molten salt reactors being devloped today use uranium.. both 'spent' fuel burners or U238 breeders (although they need a little HALEU/weapons grade to start up the breeders).
DOE is funding salt creep testing at PNNL so I don't think the regulators are complete dinosaurs.
Thorium reactors are great, you can easily set up one for the backup energy and forget about it (in minecraft)
People have to remember that nuclear means pertaining to the nucleus, and the nucleus is part of atoms.
Why did this video include a nuclear explosion? Nuclear power cannot do that. It’s a shame that these fears are all lumped together.
Probably part of the reason why Germany closed nuclear plants while building coal plants.
Hi Mike. Well, nuclear weapons utilize the same processes we use to generate nuclear power, fission and fusion. And also, these are the images many people have in their head when they hear the word "nuclear" - so that's why we started the video this way. ⚡
@@DWPlanetA they may be based on the same physical process, but I think lumping together these unrelated « scary » things reinforces a fear of fission power that is entirely divorced from reality
@@DWPlanetA it's like starting a story about drinking water quality with imagery of water torture. You may use the same tools and infrastructure for both.
Truly hope we will diversify our energy production more!
Reactors today consume mostly U235, which is about 0.7% of natural uranium. In spite of this, they are still the best and cleanest solution to power we have. However, thorium is about 3x more common than uranium, but about 400x more common than U235. If you build a breeder reactor (from thorium or U238), then you basically have unlimited power with fuel available all over the world. Thorium is found everywhere, particularly with "rare earth" mining, which is what we do to get the various elements needed for our high power motors, generators, phones, etc.
For some math, it is common to find 6% thorium in "rare earth", "Monazite" sand which thorium is currently is thrown away as a waste product. If you filled a soda can ~1/3L with sand and extracted the thorium, that would be about 30g (about an ouce) of thorium. According to Wikipedia, thorium has an energy density of about 80,000,000 MJ/kg (~2,400,000 MJ for the 30g), or roughly 700,000 kWh for the 30g. Or if you like, gasoline is about 35 MJ/L so the equivilent of 2.4M/35 = ~70,000 liters of gasoline. Will thorium change the world? What do YOU think?
Thorium is NOT fissile and does not fission. If you want to compare apples to apples, compare Thorium to U238. U238 is cheap and plentiful as it is used in armor, bullets, and ship ballasts. Thorium would require a complete parallel infrastructure to uranium and who is going to pay for that????
@@LFTRnow I think no. Thorium is NOT fissile and does not fission. If you want to compare apples to apples, compare Thorium to U238. U238 is cheap and plentiful as it is used in armor, bullets, and ship ballasts. Thorium would require a complete parallel infrastructure to uranium and who is going to pay for that????
@@clarkkent9080 While you are technically correct, in order to keep comments brief it's necessary to skip to the main points otherwise you wind up with a giant mass of text. When people refer to thorium they're talking about thorium breeding. Th232 absorbs a neutron and after two beta decays becomes U233. Thorium is referred to as fertile, and uranium 233 and 235 are referred to as fissile. A fissile isotope will typically absorb a neutron and then fission. A fertile isotope which includes Th232 and U238, can be bred into another isotope which is then fissile. The rest of the energy calculations I provided are from values from the energy density table in Wikipedia. Rounded to the nearest significant figure it is approximately 80 million MJ/kg. Apologies for the long reply but this is what I mean by how long things get when you need to specify this level of detail. Hope you found it helpful.
@@LFTRnow I already knew everything you said. The point is; why operate a breeder reactor that requires reprocessing spent fuel to continue the cycle when you can use U235 enrichment without reprocessing. Who says we are running out of Uranium? Thorium is a solution in search of a problem.
Your values for uranium and thorium are KNOWN and ESTIMATED reserves. If you are old enough, you would remember that we were supposed to run out of oil in the 1970s but we always seem to find more.
Canadian CANDU reactors are breeder burner type of heavy water reactors and they have used Thorium as a fuel and as far as I know they still can but Thorium is just not as hot of a fuel as uranium and it produces more byproducts that slo the reaction down. India, Pakistan, Romania and Argentina all have some CANDU type of reactors as well. I think China does too. They are not as common as Tokamak or light water reactors from Russia and USA but still they are out there in operation and have an excellent safety record
I'm under the impression tokomak reactors are only used for fusion energy not for fission energy.
The molten salt reactors are not everywhere, because it simply couldn‘t be used for warfare (as uranium lead to plutonium, which could be used for the construction of atomic bomb).
Please at least learn basic chemistry before comment, salt produce corrosion in many alloys and can destroy an entire facility very fast , you need special compound materials, alloys or devices to protect the conducts from it.
"let me tell u kids about thoriom"
did he allow u to use that cut?
Falls under fair use.
@@kingofthend ok
Oh my god thanks for the @Sam Onella mention!!!
Did Thorium ever come in the first place in order to be making a "comeback"?
Many advantages....no need for lots of cooling water...can drive gas turbines instead of steam turbines. Can be used to supply process heat...very useful for green cement for example.
Overall energy context is important too. Consider the terribly low EROI's of renewables which are essentially non-sustainable energy systems, which are themselves terribly damaging to the environment (see, for example, “The Unpopular Truth: about Electricity and the Future of Energy" 2022 by Lars Schernikau & William Hayden Smith, and references therein). Thorium nuclear power, if it holds to its promises, should have much higher EROIs and much lower environmental impacts. Consider, too, the possibility of over-building nuclear capacity and using the excess electricity to make efuels (like Prometheus Fuels). That would suggest at least part of the fossil fuel infrastructure could be repurposed and save us a lot, too (no need to quadruple our copper mining, for example). For me, nuclear power (e.g., thorium) plus efuels is a very interesting alternative way forward for a completely sustainable way forward to meet our expanding energy needs.
The sun is the only source of power that will carry humanity through sustainably into the future. Nuclear power has had over *70 years* to prove itself and now only provide 10% of the world's power. Why is that? One big reason is that a nuclear project is almost guaranteed to be over-budget by billions and over-schedule by years. Its a running joke in the energy industry. Its not even clear if Thorium will fix this in significant levels as Thorium has its own set of unique problems and deficits in addition to its benefits.
Context? I'll give you a big one and the only one we need to know: the sun occupies 99.9% the mass of the solar system. The remaining 0.1% is mostly just Jupiter and Saturn. So the Earth is essentially a grain of sand next to a 10-pin bowling ball. The sun's energy runs through our veins and powers our very thoughts.
Moreover, all the *combined* fissile and fossil fuels on Earth would be like comparing a *millimeter* against a *country mile* when compared to the sun's power. The sun provides a *continuous* & *clean* 173,000-terawatts of power to the Earth reliably non-stop as the Earth spins like a rotisserie chicken in the sun's heat. That amount of power is difficult to wrap one's head around. So another way to think of it is 1333-watts/m² upper atmosphere or 1000-watts/m² peak ground. And its peak somewhere on Earth all the time!
We could not even approach Kardashev type-1 civilization power levels with nuclear, not even close. There's a reason why Kardashev based his scale on sun power when thinking *big* about what really moves civilizations through long expanses of time.
There's zero chance that nuclear could make a significant dent in the world's annual electricity consumption of some 23,000 TWh before we reach catastrophic levels of global warming. I used to be a fan of nuclear until markets and technology shifted clearly and the urgency of the climate crisis was disseminated. The worst part of nuclear is the distraction of attention and financing it will take to really solve the world's fossil fuel crisis. The US federal government has set the year 2035 to have a carbon-free electrical grid by 2035 and the EU has similar goals.
The leading economy is the US and it's solar capacity is currently at 29.1GW and growing at a stellar 33% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the past decade. So the US solar capacity will be nearly 1.0 terawatts by 2035! Probably even more as with IRA 2022 and more subsidies as fossil fuels winds down. Combined with the US's wind power (which is even greater than solar) at 140GW, the US is on its way to meeting its 2035 target. China's solar capacity growth is even more spectacular at 66% CAGR. China's renewable portfolio exceeds US by multiples which makes sense for its huge population.
We look to the leading economies marketplace and energy policies because that will likely be the near future for the rest of the world as leading economies R&D expenditures and big purchases of technology drive down the price for everyone else.
I re-iterate that the sun's power, be it *direct* solar or *indirect* like wind, wave, hydro is the only source of power that will reliably carry humanity to next levels. Of course, fossil fuels are just concentrated solar over millions of years. But I think we can all agree that fossil fuel hegemony must end now.
EXACTLY. Variable renewables like wind and solar have an EROEI of 7. Adding batteries puts it below 5. Global industrial civilization requires an EROEI of at least 10. The global oil industry has a current EROEI of about 15.
0:45 Yooo Sam O’ Nella Academy
... we got clear energy... nuclear energy is clean ....
@Dotage Drain The fissile nuclear energy we use today is a bit of a mixed bag environmentally-speaking. We did a whole video on the topic to show the advantages and disadvantages to the technology (🔗 ua-cam.com/video/9X00al1FsjM/v-deo.html) - Check it out and let us know what you think in the comments 🙃
@@alainpannetier2543 well if you look at the number of deaths nuclear has caused compared to other fuel sources, it's killed only slightly more people than solar. And FAR less than Hydro.
@@mervynlarrier9424 Add the deaths to come in the next 100k years due to nuclear waste and the ones who died in the uranium mines and the picture looks different. It is always surprising that the nuclear industry does consider only deaths related to accidents but not the deaths related to the full supply chain and the normal operation. Everything related to long lasting nuclear waste problem can't be calculated at all.
Nuclear energy is clean but very limited. It is regulated very precisely and safe, but very expensive just to build huge plant which take years when uranium source is very little.
@@aesharadadiya8447 I worked for a company that serviced nuclear plants. Natural uranium is hugely abundant in soil. The problem we have is that we have these 60 year old technology that requires radioactive uranium. Heck with the current advancements in research we don't even need to use natural uranium, we can use smaller isotopes like thorium.
Hey, Sam O’ Nella told us about this years ago!
(this video’s still really good, don’t get me wrong)
Never thought I'd ever see Sam O' Nella on a DW video.
Good journey and good job and good working
based on global distribution, thorium seems like the best way to ensure every country in the world can be energy independent, hopefully lowering international tensions.
Don’t worry; people will cook up something else to fight over.
Is it possible that we did not develop Thorium reactors at scale because they were unable to produce sufficient amounts of fuel that could be later used for nuclear weapons?
Hi, thank you for your question. As we indicate in the video, nuclear weapons may or may not be one aspect to this, it's quite difficult to say for sure. 👽
Barefoot Gen anime footage on the opening really surprise me...
To answer the question around 1:10 we didn't use thorium salt reactors because they didn't had any waste and America was keen on using it for their weapons of mass destruction. That's why the fast breaders didn't got any wind. They weren't usable for the military 😢.
If we did have them we wouldn't be in a pickle right now with global warming etc.
Respect, I think you really managed to cover all important points in one video. I have seen a lot of videos just praising it as the greatest thing that just never happened. You covered Tritium, corosion and the poor reliability. You also even mentioned that India has an intrerest in it because it has a lot of thorium. If anybody ever comes up to me again and wants to tell me just how great the MSR is, I wil point him to this video. Than you for making it. We really need good documentaries like this one in the times of quick and dirty, shiny CGI nonsens.
Nice video. I do think you underplayed the weaponization aspect a little, the thorium U233 cycle has been weaponized, it's just more complicated than the existing U235 and Pu239 pathways. Widespread use of the thorium fuel cycle would of course change that.
I generally think nuclear is too slow and expensive to be much of climate solution, at least not right away which is when it is needed most. Molten salt waste burner reactors do interest me a little, just to deal with existing stockpiles of spent fuel with any power generated helping to defray the cost.
No, 233U has never been weaponized. It's been tested two or three times in experimental devices and always managed to underperform. It has never been used in an operational nuclear weapon. And there are good reasons why it will always be inferior for weapons use to plutonium or enriched uranium.
@@kirksorensen3923 Kirk, is that true that U233 is near impossible to separate from U232 because they have only one dalton apart from each other and that U232 is a strong gamma source?
I hear so many naysayers around badmouthing MSR’s including your brainchild of FLIBE Energy.. :(
@@kirksorensen3923 Thank you Kirk for weighing in and setting the record straight. BTW have downloaded your master's thesis to learn about the history of why Th232 was not pursued further during the war (great read). Even the Russian's did not pursue it when Allan Nunn May smuggled some U233 into the soviet union from his work in Canada. It will go down as one of history's more unfortunate missed opportunities.
@@DemPilafian traditional nuclear reactors don't even need to be modified to generate weapons grade material, in fact many reactors were designed to be dual purpose from the outset, like the magnox tractors in the UK and RBMK reactors in the USSR.
In solid fuelled uranium reactors, you just need to toast the uranium fuel for the right amount of time to optimise the generation of the right isotope of plutonium. The plutonium can then be chemically separated and used in nuclear weapons.
For me the question is not if there is a proliferation risk from thorium reactors, but whether the risk is greater than existing uranium fuelled reactors or centrifuges.
If you can run zirconium chloride and use high quality stainless steel it may be better to do a chloride based reactor. Though you have bromides or iodides as well.
Uranium based reactors are already the single safest form of energy ever developed. Thorium is interesting and could extend nuclear fuel reserves by several billion years, but it isn't necessary for us now.
You mean safer than solar panels and wind or water turbines?
@@leonlowenstadter9223 Yes, even safer on a per-megawatt hour basis.
@@gregorymalchuk272 Okay, interessting. What are the dangers respective risks of solar panels and wind turbines? I mean, you probably don't deny that there is radioactive waste to handle?
I definitely feel that in the future these can work well with existing nuclear infrastructure
INDIA has a plan to build it's own thorium reactor
But the government seems to have abandoned it they don't want to spend money on research :'(
the text says: " In addition to the intergranular corrosion problem, the standard Hastelloy-N used in the MSRE is not suitable for use in the MSBR because its mechanical properties deteriorate to an unaccetable level when subjected to the higher neutron doses which would occur in the higher power density, longer-life MSBR. The problem isa thought to be due mainly to impurities in the metal..."
so we need cleaner steel, i think its safe to say that steel manufacturing has made immense progress in the last 50 years.
one problem less
Fun Fact: India already has a 5MW Operational Experimental Thorium Reactor compared to China’s newer 3MW one. India is also constructing 2 Big Scale Thorium Reactors.
India's 2nd stage nuclear program completed 🗿📈
@@-EVIL-FRIDAY-THE-13-TH Entered into 2nd stage not 3rd.
Most nuclear accidents aren't even the fault of the fissile material
Hope I could see one operational in my country India
I have been fairly critical of you in the past (I think it will be easy for you to find all my comments in the channel). However, I must say that you are continuously improving the channel and bringing a wide array of topics, some are very niche, some are popular, some others are unpopular. I see how you try to take an objective stance and try to tell a story in just more than ten minutes, that is almost impossible to capture all the nuances. And I love the references or deep dives that you list in the description. So, thank you DW, amazing job! Keep rolling. If I may add, perhaps at some points you would like to put some relationships between the topics that you discussed? Such as a scorecard at the end of each video or a deepdive video to sum up technologies/topics/problems+solutions?
and my take on molten salt reactors is that we need a diversified portfolio of energy sources, and especially built baselines that can provide backup energy when other energy sources can not be supplied. Hence, good that there are solar and wind, among others, and I maintain that more investments in molten salt reactors, and in nuclear energy more broadly (but also geothermal) are needed.
Hi Andrea, thank you for your feedback. We link two related videos to each new video, and you can also browse the different playlists with aggregated titles. Please subscribe to our channel to receive new video material every Friday! ⚡🌸
haha the irony of Germany... Right when the narrator says we need some alternatives until this technology is mature, cut to wind mill standing still. It could only be more ironic if the same shot contained a demolition of a nuclear power plant in the background....
Germany is ruled by the green cult, therefore no chance.
Interesting take. China is building many reactors with this technology. The reason is cheap energy.
Oh, teh Magic Chinese!!! They are living in the Future!!
Unfortunately, in our time-space continuum and on this planet, Thorium reactors are not a thing yet. And the Chinese on this planet are only building a small one for testing. But of course, in your universe, 1 may be plural :)
The TMSR in China is even not a commercial project. The tiny 2 MW reactor is for R&D only, not for energy production. The cost is today everything else than cheap, in fact the cost is somewhere around $ 400 to 500 Million for such a tiny reactor. China is, like everyone else, still far away from a commercial viable reactor.
@@meerkathero6032, I know they are building 150 reactors. I won't get into the specifics.
@@j.erickson8571 Please don't get into specifics, but please check the CAEA (Chinese Atomic Energy Authority) releases. They are counting new, old, planned, potential projects in a very generous manner, however, even these guys come up with a much lower number of a total of 15 (planned, under construction and recently energized) reactors on their list. All planned projects and projects under construction are old style pressurized water reactors fulled by U-235. The TMSR is a R&D project, if successful the next test reactor might be a little bit larger, however, still not commercial or utility scale.
@@meerkathero6032 First point0 the TMSR its ON and running with Torium. That is clear well ahead of anyone else and there are plans for future ones once they learn from this one. Second point -the exact number a country plan varies across press releases, depending on how much they disclose, but they may well plan for 150.
It's interesting the Autodesk CAD software with artificial intelligence, strengthening structural design, by designating necessary material type, couldn't be used to measure corrosion levels with Molten salt reactions. It would speed up the prototyping phase to achieve more feasible working solution. The safety would get more attention.
Everyone forgets that all research on thorium reactors was made illegal along with research into recycling uranium fuel rods (because it didn't make bomb materials)
I notice you did not include conventional reactors in the end when you mentioned existing solutions. Why is that?
Also the video begins with a section that basically merges existing nuclear power systems and nuclear weapons. Not twisted at all /s.
@@falsemcnuggethope They talked about downsides, nuclear weapon ingredient production as an wastestream is a downside. How is that biassed lol.
Hi Alex, we made a whole video on this topic.⚡⚡ Please check it out here "Do we need nuclear power to stop climate change?": ua-cam.com/video/9X00al1FsjM/v-deo.html. Let us know your thoughts in the comments. 🍀
I seriously hope that on this age of climate change this kind of alternative and safer nuclear options get fully researched, humanity needs desperately new energy sources that help us to curve down the warming tendency...
It sounds like something that the government of Germany should invest in with industry partners.
Im so dumb I thought Thorium was an imaginary substance from the comic book Thor.
Just imagine if the criticisms leveled at the MSRE were also applied to cars, or air travel, or mining, or undersea tunnels, etc... We'd never have accomplished anything if we didn't at least try to find better designs... Improvements in processes... Consider that airline pilots used to be ineligible to buy life insurance because of the danger of their jobs. Now? They probably get a discount because their job comes with good health care...
Can you make a video about CANDU reactor and compare with other news nuclear fuel alternatives and its drawbacks? Tanks
Hi Eduardo, thanks for the suggestion! They seem to have many of the same benefits as do thorium. We'll keep this in mind. 🌸
What is to stop the dissolved particulates from melting? It would to boil off the liquid, but in a reactor there is no shortage of energy.
As an engineer that worked in the nuclear industry in my early career, Thorium is the only viable solution for small reactors. Fast bread reactors are simply unviable to be made small and installed near humans. Thorium nuclear reactors work, 90% of the research as been done . It was axed as governments wanted to make boobs in those early years.
That intro wasn't at all biased.