Clarification: 14:14 Rare Earth Mining: 5,000 tpy figure assumes a 50,000 tpy facility that primarily utilizes monazite as its feed-stock. Thorium is a companion element to Monazite. Monazite runs at +50% REE and about 7% Th. So if you processed 50,000 tons of monazite you would get about 3,500 tpy of Th. However, monazite would not be the only feed-stock. You would use many other mineralizations. like apatite running at 3% REE and .002% Th (but with lots of heavy REE). So it would be a mix and tend toward the 5,000 tpy range. 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
Gordon, Wow! Your editing efforts have finally resulted in a single comprehensive video hitting all of the attributes T-MSRs have and the services they can provide. This is the one to circulate as widely as possible!
Here before LFTR and MSR became commonplace. The last 10 mins or so with the update over the last few decades was incredible. Thank you for your content!
If you have the time to set up yet another social media account, I'd appreciate your support on Patreon the campaign is called /thorium/ and I'm collecting support yearly (~NOT~ monthly). Promise you won't get much private content, but you'll be kept updated. Asking $1/year for that. The friction helps filter out the riff-raff for the sake of a semi-private means of broadcasting updates.
again, super good video, i'd suggest one that would be thoroughly oriented towards waste, because it's quite a thing when chatting with people about nuclear technologies down here ! :)
If waste disposal is of interest, Integral Fast Reactors are a better option than LFTRs. Arguably, the IFR is a more mature design than the LFTR, having run longer and with more funding at Argonne Natl. Labs in Idaho. Spent fuel from light water reactors can be reprocessed using techniques developed at Argonne and the spent fuel reprocessed and reused for decades in reactors that are also passively safe, just like the LFTR. The resulting waste is much less hazardous than the stuff coming from LWRs and has a much shorter half life. It also has no proliferation issues, just like the LFTR.
Problem is not nuclear a very clean and efficient form of energy - rather it would appear the problem is corrupt management and lack of stringent oversight of plant operations - human greed
@@STSWB5SG1FAN I would say it's justified, even if the chances are very low. On the other hand, the vast majority just doesn't know that there are other ways of nuclear power production. So the biggest issue is just lack of education/public awareness.
I was sold on the Thorium reactors when my Nuke Engr major room mate in college explained them to me. They made sense then and even more now (35 years later). -- The 'green' folks basically killed the commercial nuke programs around the nation, and what is left is aging. I would like to see new Thorium reactors put into place to replace, on-site, old power plants, first Nuke, then carbon/coal based to keep down the new infrastructure for distribution costs. We could just co-site them where the old plants are now, as a great head start. I have written my representatives in Washington till their staff is sick of hearing from me. So what can we do next? I see this as melding into the "Pickens Plan" that Boone Pickens has been touting for years, but we need a new standard bearer. Gates is saving the world with medicine. Koch brothers are making lots of $$. Musk is addressing transportation issues. We need a new 'Energy Savior' with enough clout, money, and political savvy to get Thorium and LIFTR reactor technology off top dead center in the US. Can we get the old school Uranium Cycle folks (GE, Westinghouse, whomever else is still in the business in the USA) to help and get the US in a net energy exporting realm (there is lots more money to be made here than building/refurbishing old reactors and spent fuel rods). What can we as 'little people' do to help get this all back on point with the powers that be? Thanks for listening to my rant. We need answers to these questions ... not now, but yesterday!
servant74 I think we as proponents should support this research in Canada. Then hopefully, when demonstrated, it can challenge the status quo in the US. The video talked a little about this option.
Much of the point of the whole video is that PWR simply is not safe or cost effective enough and the political motivation for creating them was to have a stealth weapons program under the cloak of civilian power, exactly what the early protest movements said. That nuclear power production sector was never commercially competitive with other sources and failed to provide cheap electricity. The low air pollution aspect of Nuclear power was really it's only selling point and got countries like France on board but now cheaper alternatives no one has any reason to advocate for PWR and many reason to be against it.
servant74, I don't think you'll be able to get old school Uranium folks on board with this, as they are satisfied and making a living off of the status quo of nuclear energy. To try something new & radical would risk them loosing their career & entire way of life. It's like when EA releases new games that are, gameplay wise, replicas of what they have already released. So, what if we took an existing nuclear reactor, and replaced the water coolant system with salt? Would it be cost-effective? Would it be any safer? I think this would at least be a start.
We can thank Greenpeace and the Sierra club for global warming. Thanks guys, you put a halt to all nuclear research, thinking the light water reactor is the only technology possible? Wrong. There's a lot more to be learned and the brakes were put on. Big mistake. Now we are in an environmental pickle and we must move on now.
Hey, sweet. I'm glad it's only 33 minutes long. I mean, don't get me wrong, big fan of the 6.5 hour stuff, but I can't imagine too many people being patient enough to sit through nearly 7 hours of why they should put all their funding into/trust with their life some obscure could-be-metal could-be-salt who-really-knows 2 elements behind uranium. Also, if people want to get questions about MSR answered, they should ask about MSR, not thorium.
One day I think there will be a monument like the Vietnam War Memorial with all of the names of the people that made this happen. This will be the change everybody has longed for, unlimited electrical power, unlimited clean water for drinking and irrigation, urban warehouse farming which will guarantee an end to famine, and finally put all the nails into the coffin of nuclear ignorance. Think about your grandparents witnessing the birth of air travel, automobiles, television & your parents witnessing the birth of the internet & social media, I think that has lead to this being possible. The fact that only 40 people may have read ORNL's reports in the 50's 60's & 70's explains why this time it will be different, because this time it won't be just some guy nobody listens to advocating for Thorium, by standing together we can make it happen!
The major impetus for the US finally moving ahead with this only will come when it's framed as a National Security issue of paramount importance because of likely Chinese Dominance. This runs concurrently with the current near monopoly China enjoys in rare-earth elements, which we gave them when we vacated the market in the late 1980's. This is the outline for the energy "Manhattan Project" needed for the country and for the planet!
Bill Hart, that's not how they do things anymore. South Korea has a highly successful indigenous Nuclear Power program, produces electricity cheaper than Coal, without the emissions, including highly successful NPP exports. So what do the Oligarchs do? Buy or blackmail the new Korean president and get him to shutdown Nuclear power in Korea, with the usual crap about "clean, renewable energy" which of course actually means petrodollar LNG imports from the Middle East. Just as they bought Hollande and Macron who were and are shutting down their highly successful nuclear program. And did the same to McGuinty in Ontario. It is a whole lot cheaper to buy or blackmail politicians then to actually compete fairly in the marketplace. They are now trying to takedown Russia/Putin and if you read Engdahl (Target China) they will try to do the same to China. And of course financing anti-nuclear activism in India, while promoting their petrodollar gas pipeline to India through Afghanistan. Thus the Afghanistan pipeline war. And their petrodollar gas pipeline through Syria to Europe, so that France can replace their nuclear power with gas/wind/solar. 90% gas, 10% wind/solar. Note how adamant Macron is now on expanding the Syrian pipeline war.
This time it is different because China starts up their first Thorium reactor later this year. They have a massive program running. They are going after all the patents and mass production line. Only Oak Ridge Usa is building a test reactor. (China reactor is ofc also a test reactor)
1 Iron mine can fuel the world as they said. Also China have 100.000 tons in open landfills. Thorium Reactors can be produced in the scales of a bus on wheels and be driven on roads. Or Towed in sealed ship sections (they also have video on that) But the coolest part is the over double temp it runs on will make it possible to produce many kinds of fuels on the fly. Thorium and solar will live side by side. None of them will destroy the other. We need multifaceted decentralized energy delivery sytem. Water/solar/thorium/bio
I'm not a big fan of Trump, but when he says things that are correct I have to support those moments. To be internally consistent AND perhaps encourage someone like Trump to make other good decisions. It doesn't stop me from criticizing Trump when I think he's wrong, despite what some others might say.
I hope Trump will keep his word with this and some other good things he said... I had hoped his actions would have been more sensical then what he has done up to this point.
So Thorium is an byproduct of Mining? What they do with the Thorium normaly? The coal used annually worldwide for power generation contains, about 10,000 tons of uranium and 25,000 tons of thorium, which either end up in the environment or accumulate in power plant ash and filter dust but it be extracted from the ash? And how would it be done?
This technology must be presented to President Trump as he a practical businessman can appreciate the value and importance of thorium molten salt reactors to America's future energy needs .
Here's a list of tRump's "practical" business success stories: Trump Football Team - NJ Generals (failed 1985) Trump Board Games (two failed 1990, 2005) Trump Casino & Taj Mahal (cheated contractors $60 million, 1990 - failed 2014) Trump Plaza (busted for discrimination to please Mafia boss John Gotti, 1991 - failed 2014) Trump Tower (hired 200 illegal immigrants in 1980, found guilty of conspiring to avoid paying pension and welfare fund contributions in 1991) Four Bankruptcies (1991, 1992, 2004, 2009) Two Marriages (failed 1992, 1999) Trump Airline (failed 1992) Trump investigates casino development in Cuba - in violation of the US embargo (1998) Trump Video/Internet (failed 1998) Trump Ice (failed 2004) Trump International Golf Links, Aberdeen Scotland (2006, incomplete and losing millions) Trump Travel (failed 2007) Trump Mortgage (failed 2007) Trump Steaks (failed 2008) Trump Radio (failed 2008) Trump Magazine (failed 2009) Trump Mar-a-Largo (500 visas for foreign workers while denying Americans jobs, 2010) Trump University (unaccredited, failed 2011, investigated for fraud, settled for $25 million in 2017) Trump Vitamin (pyramid scheme, failed 2011) Trump Vodka (failed 2011) Trump Restaurant (failed 2012) Trump Foundation (investigated for fraud and self-dealing by NY AG, 2016) Trump Bay Street used Chinese EB-5 investment money while Trump was castigating China for having too much influence in the American economy (2016) An Ontario Canada appeals court reinstated a suit brought against Trump and associates by investors in a hotel-condo tower in Toronto’s financial district (Singh v. Trump, 2016) The National Labor Relations Board ruled that Trump’s Las Vegas hotel violated the law when it refused to bargain with a union representing workers there (2016)
The one thing overlooked in Kirk's presentation and a great many "thorium enthusiast" promotions is the fact that the reactor needs a fissile starter. The purest LFTR would provide fission-produced neutrons from fissile uranium alone, either U-233 or the U-235 of customary reactors. I'm not sure if Pu-239 can be used. But the thing is, that if you were to add sufficient pure U-233 or U-235 directly to thorium, Th-232, then either one of the Uranium isotopes, at 90% purity, is bomb material. Thorcon Power (look them up) proposes a reactor (MSR) charged with 80% thorium fluoride and uranium fluoride at just less than 20% enrichment, for the rest of the fuel content of the liquid. That would be just less than 4% fissile overall. They reckon that neutron capture by the U-238 and even the unwanted neutron capture rather than fission by the Pu-239 will not hinder the productivity.
The cement production is a terawatt consuming industry that uses wonderful coal, and is a massive, and concentrated, producer of C02. That industry produces more CO2 that all trucks on the road, but is concentrated to a few locations. It would be interesting to see if it would make sense to locate a molten salt or metal reactor that could supply the energy needs of those plants, and also incorporate an "Air to fuel" cycle to recapture massive CO2 from the limestone. Molten salt temps may not be enough for the 1450*C needed, but a thermochemical process of 800*C to make H2 could perhaps be used to increase temp. Fast spectrum lead cooled reactors may also be a consideration. There are relatively few of these plants concentrated around areas with product demand and that of locations of raw material. Combining these, pun intended, hot-spots of energy consumption and CO2 emission seems like a winner.
Great video. Thank you uploader. I would like to ask who made it? And also whether anyone can recommend any other good documentaries or channels with similarly engaging and informative content? Any suggestions appreciated!
Fantastic video, Gordon! Getting better and better always. Thank you! Also, gotta gloat a little bit...I was one of the very few pro-Trump members on TEA's facebook page...and Lo! he delivers at least some lip service. Let's see if it turns into anything practical, but I'm optimistic.
Created a custom version which highlights Trump's statements up-front. Might be more compelling to Trump supporters. ua-cam.com/video/mXaDqRrPc_M/v-deo.html
I've watched many times, all the videos the were beautifully chopped up and put together to make this incredible video posting and still enjoy them all regardless of watching Kirk age another 15 years or so - thank you all and in particular Gordon's Stirling efforts to preserve them all.🥝🥝🙏
Fun fact: based on the amount of thorium worldwide, and assuming a static power usage every year, if every country pooled in all their thorium, we'd be able to power our planet for roughly 15,000 years
Actually, you could power the entire world at current energy levels for 300,000 years with the uranium contained in seawater - and longer since it is constantly replenished by erosion. You could power the entire world with thorium & uranium (largely thorium) in the Earth's crust mined to 1.2 km deep for over 600 million years. And loads of the stuff in asteroids, moons, Mars.
In the early days after WWII, Hymen Rickover and Dixie Lee Ray made some key pathway decisions to develop pressurized water reactor designs. This made sense at the time. Our technological momentum has since carried us down that pathway to where we are now. We need to evaluate our energy options and choose a new pathway. Or we can just wait for the Chinese. I’m sure they will be glad to sell us the technology very cheaply.
First 30 seconds I figured it's just retitled regurgitation. .. sure it's the same information but you pulled the best bullet points from a dozen or so long, sometimes boring videos and the order and tempo really work to convey the overall message. . Pretty awesome job of boiling it down to Thorium condensed . L p Vy y
Gordon great video compilation. Have Kirk keep ringing the Bell on Th/MSR. For the rest of you, ask your friends and co workers, Is salt frozen? Careful not to laugh at them when they answer.
I 100% agree, light water reactors suck and we need nuclear energy; fossil fuels are going to bite us in the rear and "green energy" sources just don't have the punch and stamina we need to meet our demands. Molten Salt Reactors don't run at high pressure so there is no risk of a Chernobyl type explosion, they can be made to be walk-away safe using the frozen salt plug and drain tank so no Fukushima or 3-Mile island scenarios, they use fuel far more efficiently since the fissile material is dissolved in a liquid and thoroughly mixed which stretches our fuel supply, and the higher temperatures they can run should equate to higher generation capacity in a smaller package with lower cost, etc.. Molten salt reactors would be great! Why do we need to start with Thorium and all the complicated breeding process though? Why can't we focus on mastering the chemical and mechanical challenges of using more conventional uranium fuel dissolved in a single-liquid molten salt reactor design, then tackle the two-fluid/fertile blanket/thorium breeding problem separately once the tech is mature? That would get the ball rolling and get our foot in the door. There are serious problems left to solve with respect to balancing neutron use between fission and breeding, issues with the materials in the separator breaking down from radiation and heat damage, issues with the chemistry involved in distilling out fission products and finished fissile material, etc, many of which could be reduced by putting off on the thorium->u235 breeding cycle until the technology is more mature. Uranium is still cheap, even more so when you eliminate the manufacturing costs of solid fuel assemblies so fueling costs would be reasonable. Don't go calling me a naysayer, Thorium is definitely a worthwhile long-term goal.. It just seems like taking things in smaller steps may get this technology rolling more quickly. Is there a physics basis for why Molten Salt Reactor technology would be incompatible with current Uranium fuel?
"green energy" sources just don't have the punch and stamina we need to meet our demands. Amen to that. "Green energy" sources can just about meet electricity demands of 2010-2015, but when you factor in increased electrical demand for transportation, heating (domestic oil/gas heating systems will be axed in the face of climate change) and industrial processes then you can figure an additional 6 to 8 times increase in demand in developed countries. In developing countries by the time they're brought up to the same demands as the rest of us, that's more like factor of 20-30 increase in global generation capacity being required.
Why such a focus on Thorium specifically rather than MSRs generally? By all purposes it seems that it's much cheaper and easier to just use Uranium, while maintaining basically all the same benefits. Especially seeing as there are still more economically viable to extract Uranium reserves than Thorium despite 70+ years of heavy extraction.
If your intent is to only produce power (either electricity or process heat) and you're not worried about uranium mining or enrichment (which I can see reasonable people not being worried about) or waste profile (again reasonable people can view current waste stream as acceptable) then a U-MSR is fine. In fact a fast-spectrum U-MSR could also address some of the above, if that's a concern. But it is pretty obvious Flibe is looking to monetize the "waste" stream. To do so it'll need to be segregated. The Chemical Kidney, which is a pre-req for high-efficiency Th-MSR lends itself to such segregation. Flibe has long been cagey about all their potential revenue steams, and that leads to observations such as yours. Still, Flibe isn't ready to spell it all out and rather keeps emphasizing many features also offered by U-MSRs.
Did someone hear about the sodium hydroxide heating system? It use the exothermic reaction of sodium hydroxide when dissolve in water. It should be used as a he heat battery for solarthermic energy did you hear something about this system?
I think many will be scared off who aren't already familiar with what is talked about. I think it should at least start off with a clear and simple introduction, giving people a reason to keep watching. The whole video constructs a good case through successive shots, but its quite obtuse and doesn't get to the really compelling points until past when people will have stopped paying attention. I dunno, I'm not a video editor.
There is an error in the closed caption at .11 minute into the video. The slide is correct at 0.5% efficiency for a light water reactor and the CC gives the number as 0.05% efficiency. This bothered me because of limited hearing; I tend to focus on CC rather than the slide.
Fusion reactors are going to use molten salt for trapping neutrons and carrying heat. Once it becomes an established and accepted tech, molten salt fission reactors will follow. This means that molten salt fission will only become mainstream after fusion, which is fine by me. If humanity goes for molten salt fission first, there's a risk that we'll be content with it and won't put enough effort into fusion.
Pressurised water, AND the use of zirconium alloy fuel cladding are the problems with the PWR. Zirconium is very like magnesium; hard to ignite but burns furiously once lit. Really not the kind of substance you want inside a hot reactor. Molten salts avoid the need for inflammables in the reactor.
There are a hundred good reasons to use thorium to provide power for Mankind and removing carbon dioxide (not carbon) from any part of our environment is NOT ONE OF THEM! CO2 has a very minimal effect on Earth temperatures (maybe 1%) but has a huge beneficial effect on growing food and greening the Earth in general. Radical Environmentalists have the relationship of CO2 and temperatures backwards: A rise in temperature is followed by a rise in CO2 level, Not the other way around. I know it is fun for those that believe in CO2 driven global warming to talk about energy production that produces no CO2 but it is in fact an irrelevant point. So, by all means lets produce abundant cheap energy using thorium MSR's and Fusion when it is conquered to bring about the many benefits, not the least of which are cheap electricity and water desalinization, But, lets stop spreading the lie that CO2 needs to be reduced !!
Thank you, I enjoyed this video very much. I hate to make this political, but I seriously hope that if Trump can do at least one profound thing; please fund and spearhead Thorium reactors.
@@GoDodgers1 Someone should tell him the US will make a billion more dollars by marketing this technology (once we've mastered it) to other developing countries. Trump's in it just for the money after all.
Don't worry, you won't have to buy the reactors from Chinese, they won't sell them to you. They'll rent them to you at best, but they'll prefer to sell you the energy ;-)
Is that a bad thing though? I'm pretty sure if we could start a serious nuclear build program on a BOO ( Build-Own-Operate ) model in the US/West it'd be a better outcome then waiting for the US/EU/Western nuclear industry to get it's act together. Turkey and Rosatom are actually doing exactly that and most view Rosatom's willingness to back up their product by doing a BOO seems to have helped get things moving given the challenges around financing these huge projects.
From my understanding, the US has had a boom in industry related jobs in recent years because energy prices in the US have come down a bit. I fear that, if China beats us to the Thorium reactor, that trend will shift back towards China. They'll then have all the jobs, and we'll be left in another economic depression. We need to get thorium MSRs working and turned into a serious market before that happens.
I'm afraid the US will be stuck to import nuclear power from Canada and Mexico, and China & Russia can park floating barge NPPs outside of the 200mile limit so they can tell the corrupt NRC to blow-off, and sell clean electricity to energy starving US cities, after the Shale Gas bubble bursts and the US is forced to burn expensive imported terrorist diesel and LNG for its electricity supply.
It's certainly true that industry likes low energy prices and that keeping them reasonably low will be important to keep some degree of manufacturing going in the US, but that's also sorta the point I'm making. If China/Russia is willing to sell the US reactors ( and one of them certainly will ) the US will have the low-cost energy needed, one all-too-likely alternative to China/Russia selling reactors to the US is that we get stuck with expensive energy and that will result in the economic impacts you're worried about. Even importing power from Canada/Mexico wouldn't be as bad as the possible scenario of the US just having expensive energy for decades, as much as my own country ( Canada ) might love to make some business selling electricity to the US there isn't enough capital and will here to make up for the lack of it south of the border, Canada can't finance a reactor build program to serve the US in full. Also the floating barges aren't designed for open ocean so I wouldn't worry about that ;) the real threat is going to be being stuck 1-2 decades behind in terms of energy infrastructure and losing out competitively as a result, buying Chinese/Russian reactors or Canadian/Mexican power could actually help take the edge off.
Thorium is a very interesting energy option. The LFTR especially. We should have had them decades ago, but politics got in the way. Again. I will say this though, the ludicrously heavy editing abundant in this video and others really does hurt their credibility in the eyes of the average viewer. Makes it look like the whole thing was hacked together from unrelated information. It's a shame, the LFTR technology really does need more credible media exposure.
As much as I love nuclear and MSR, LFTR, et al... It is still used to boil water and requires gravity. Is there a more direct way to use the heat / energy liberated? In micro or low gravity? If the video said, I must have missed that part.
based on the and many other videos... I have to ask ... why? why aren't we already doing this? why don't we have LFTR running all over the place? What is holding back this technology? or WHO is holding it back? Does its commercialization require a huge investment it's not getting?
LEU, Pu or U233. LFTR49 is the one designed to recycle spent fuel rods. It first separates out the Uranium that won't sustain fission in thermal spectrum. articles.thmsr.nl/the-flibe-energy-lftr49-the-triple-ace-in-nuclear-gen-iv-design-ea9bffcd71dd There was some debate between Kirk Sorensen and Ed Pheil on Kirk's EFT Facebook page if you dig thru the comments on this post... facebook.com/EnergyFromThorium/posts/10159595752600377
There's another major reason why they don't go with this technology thorium reactors don't produce weapons-grade plutonium that's why they went with that design the first place to generate fuel for thermal nuclear weapons
True, but I recently saw a video where a nuclear engineer (Blomqvist) told his audience that no commercial energy reactor has ever created weapons grade plutonium. They do produce plutonium, but not of the quality they need for the weapons. It's more efficient and cheaper to just have a reactor dedicated to creating the weapons grade plutonium.
Its more i think that current reactors use weapons byproducts as it is. We will have nukes made and that waste disposed either way as that is a necessity. However if the claims made that thorium is so much safer on civil use then it seems to me that this is a perfect supplementary power source to uranium based reactors. The fear of meltdowns from reactors like fukashima cherynoble prevents them proliferating that is a undeniable fact. That alone makes them a national symbol of weakness for any nation forced to use them.
It's true that it's easier to make weapons materials from dedicated reactors - and one of the worst nuclear accidents ever was one of those reactors (Sellafield/Windscale) - only mitigated by filters on the exhaust stacks, else it would have been much worse than Chernobyl.
They generate Uranium 233... perfect stuff to build "low tech" gun-type Hiroshima bomb designs. It'*too* easy to build an A-bomb with that, so you'll have to worry about proliferation.
If you're using a single salt system it's virtually impossible to chemically separate U233 or proactinium out without also getting high gamma emitting isotopes coming along for the ride - which make any attempt to build such a bomb useless unless you like fizzles. It'd be ruinously expensive to separate out using centrifuges and in any case the logistics, size and power consumption of a centrifuge farm are hard to hide, even if you're a nation-state like Iran (Isotopic separation costs of uranium fuel are so high that the USA regards them as a classified secret, but the power cables going into the facilities give a hint as to the energy requirements) In any case, as the U233 comprises a critical path in the breeding/fission process, taking it out of the reactor it will make a big dent in your output power and pretty much destroys your neutron economy so it's detectable pretty quickly. This is one of the reasons why thorium single salt designs are regarded as proliferation-resistant. Another is that the salts in a working reactor are so fiercely radioactive that you can't just attempt to slip a vial into your backpack. Yet another is that you don't need or even want to reprocess all the waste products. Simply extracting the neutron poisons and low mass products is sufficient and that's mostly as simple as pulling iodine/helium/hydrogen out of the sparge space behind the circulation pump and _limited_ onsite online chemical processing of a small fraction of the salt with no need (or desire) for isotopic separation. The reprocessing should be entirely within the facility, meaning that salts stay onsite at all times. If you're using a dual salt thorium blanket system then you could extract the Proactinium more easily (it's this that decays to U233), but the 2-fluid setup is expensive, offers no substantial benefits over the single fluid setup (the plumbing is hideously more complex for 2-fluid, whilst the tradeoff for single fluid is a larger volume in circulation and the cost/benefit strongly favours 1-fluid) and the decrease in output will _still_ be detected long before you have obtained usable quantities of U233. What that means is that anyone pushing a 2-fluid setup in real life is going to have their installations watched like a hawk to make sure they're not being naughty. Weapons proliferation from a thorium reactor is _possible_, but it's a lot harder and way more expensive than with current technology. (Mind you, everyone thought CANDU was proliferation-proof until India proved the Canadians wrong by stealing uranium from right under the contractors' noses). The best defense against this is to ensure that any possible path to chemical extraction of U233 is heavily contaminated with hot isotopes, so that the resulting material is useless for bombmaking without expensive isotopic separation methods. This is already the case for the plutonium produced in a thorium reactor. (Dirty bombs are mostly a myth. They have a very limited area of effect and anything radioactive enough to have a biological effect is also detectable from a distance (see fukushima cleanup). On the other hand things like Depleted Uranium are quite nasty environmental toxins as well as important for weapons work (they're the casings for "H-bombs" (teller-ulam devices) as well as bullets) and the current nuclear enrichment processes keep producing ~90kg of the stuff for every 10kg of reactor-grade u235 made (1 to 10 tons for every kg of weapons-grade). Thankfully a thorium reactor can happily eat (low quantities) of U238 whilst operating, along with conventional used nuclear fuel rods (which surprisingly can apparently be slowly "dropped in, whole" without any further processing needed as flibe salt will dissolve them and strip the ceramics).
I would like to see a video comparing Thorium to the *currently best available* technology using uranium fuel, because that's what it's competing with, surely. Ive seen a video claiming that uranium can be used in a liquid fuel. And another claiming that the short term radiation from Thorium is higher. So a fair comparison needs to compare like with like, and also list all the known disadvantages.
How much can this be scaled down for distributed local power generation? Could this become an affordable power generator for small communities? Maybe someone like Elon Musk could find a way to bring this to the open market in some form? The less centralized it is, the more secure it is from sabotage or terrorism/war.
Diesel jenarstors in a basement beach front is madness and I am no nuclear scientist but that was like throwing light matches at a gas station it's just madness
FirmGrip DownWithTheShip seriously? I feel this video gave me schizophrenia. This style of editing conveys very little information, only very shallow ideas, and makes this feel like a conspiracy theory video. I'm a big thorium fan but this doesn't really help the cause.
Alex Mason seriously. I found it was fast paced and contained nothing that was not pertinent to the topic. With the immense volume of interesting topics on the internet I end up wanting content to take me along at a quicker speed so I enjoyed this video very much. I'm in my 30's and I find that my parents generation say It is difficult to watch anything with jump cuts. They say similar comments like your "schizophrenic feeling" when watching modern media. It's too much for them to handle. A good comparison would be that they watch television news at night and I watch Philip DeFranco online for news. Look at the difference in editing and you will see clearly what I mean. Philip edits out all breathing between sentences...so it's very fast talking. My folks feel like they are going insane when watching it. Whereas I find television news very slow and am always feeling like get to the point please.
I'd actually love to have anyone correct me if I get this wrong, but I think PWR uses a heat exchanger so that radioactive water is not used to drive turbines directly, and that BWR uses radioactive water to directly drive power turbines.
Anything nuclear is hard and expensive to commercialize. United States has some specifics costs on top of all that (due to regulation) which targets liquid fuel reactors. MSR moves forward internationally, just without anyone (I'm aware of) planning on building a test reactor domestically. Dr. Leslie Dewan is the one person who's spoken about this at greatest length, on both Atomic Show (podcast) with Rod Adams and in her testimony to an energy sub-committee.
Kaeden Ngai-Natsuhara it is largely based on 6h edit ... ua-cam.com/video/2oK6Rs6yFsM/v-deo.html ... you might find that less frantic, although my 2016 claim that no MSRE footage was publicly available became false before the 2017 edition.
The movie THRIVE on UA-cam will explain why we don't use this technology and so much more. these are frightening times we must all join the movement...there is hope
No, there are reactors which do this but it specialized use, like KiloPower for NASA. Very small energy needs could be met by harvesting Fission Products and segregating them. 4thgeneration.energy/atoms-for-space/
Clarification: 14:14 Rare Earth Mining: 5,000 tpy figure assumes a 50,000 tpy facility that primarily utilizes monazite as its feed-stock. Thorium is a companion element to Monazite. Monazite runs at +50% REE and about 7% Th. So if you processed 50,000 tons of monazite you would get about 3,500 tpy of Th. However, monazite would not be the only feed-stock. You would use many other mineralizations. like apatite running at 3% REE and .002% Th (but with lots of heavy REE). So it would be a mix and tend toward the 5,000 tpy range.
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
Gordon, Wow! Your editing efforts have finally resulted in a single comprehensive video hitting all of the attributes T-MSRs have and the services they can provide. This is the one to circulate as widely as possible!
yeah... all of the attributes... but none of the shortcomings!...
@@sergiokorochinsky49
What short comings (that greedy people can't keep energy scarce)?
I'm still posting these videos (what seems like decades later)!
Gordon, these are fantastic, articulate videos, made for a great cause - please keep making them.
Here before LFTR and MSR became commonplace. The last 10 mins or so with the update over the last few decades was incredible. Thank you for your content!
If you have the time to set up yet another social media account, I'd appreciate your support on Patreon the campaign is called /thorium/ and I'm collecting support yearly (~NOT~ monthly). Promise you won't get much private content, but you'll be kept updated. Asking $1/year for that. The friction helps filter out the riff-raff for the sake of a semi-private means of broadcasting updates.
Another fantastic video that I can send to people when I cannot be bothered to argue with them about Nuclear energy. Keep up the great work!!!! :)
I show your work to all I see, I pray that soon Humanity will see the light and support this with all their heart!
PLEASE keep up the incredible work on this. This will change the world
What an incredible supercut!! Great job, I learned a lot. It's great to see something encouraging for the future.
One of the best videos I've watched this year.
Excellent work. You managed to compress all the message and details into order here.
again, super good video, i'd suggest one that would be thoroughly oriented towards waste, because it's quite a thing when chatting with people about nuclear technologies down here ! :)
Yeah, waste treatment and storage is a problem, but thorium already produces verry little waste compared to present nuclear energy.
i know :)
but that's exactly the point of a video oriented to the waste issue
ericasw28 +1 Maybe that video could also feature a part about the relative limited supply of materials for solar.
If waste disposal is of interest, Integral Fast Reactors are a better option than LFTRs. Arguably, the IFR is a more mature design than the LFTR, having run longer and with more funding at Argonne Natl. Labs in Idaho. Spent fuel from light water reactors can be reprocessed using techniques developed at Argonne and the spent fuel reprocessed and reused for decades in reactors that are also passively safe, just like the LFTR. The resulting waste is much less hazardous than the stuff coming from LWRs and has a much shorter half life. It also has no proliferation issues, just like the LFTR.
Yep, people do worry about waste.
So a video on:
Lack of waste produced by MSRs
MSRs configured as "waste burners" fueled by waste from PWRs.
I am in favor of building a test reactor and it should be large enough to produce commercial power after testing to recoup costs.
This is why we never should have stopped researching nuclear. The US let fear cause us to fall behind.
Not just fear, but ignorance. I think ignorance is the fuel of all fear.
Problem is not nuclear a very clean and efficient form of energy - rather it would appear the problem is corrupt management and lack of stringent oversight of plant operations - human greed
Thorium rocks are the stepping stones to Star Trek Tech.
Hardly, first we will have to get over the public's basic (yet somewhat justifiable) fear of nuclear energy.
@@STSWB5SG1FAN I would say it's justified, even if the chances are very low. On the other hand, the vast majority just doesn't know that there are other ways of nuclear power production. So the biggest issue is just lack of education/public awareness.
*Fusion
@@STSWB5SG1FAN Not justifiable; safest industry there is.
I was sold on the Thorium reactors when my Nuke Engr major room mate in college explained them to me. They made sense then and even more now (35 years later). -- The 'green' folks basically killed the commercial nuke programs around the nation, and what is left is aging. I would like to see new Thorium reactors put into place to replace, on-site, old power plants, first Nuke, then carbon/coal based to keep down the new infrastructure for distribution costs. We could just co-site them where the old plants are now, as a great head start.
I have written my representatives in Washington till their staff is sick of hearing from me. So what can we do next?
I see this as melding into the "Pickens Plan" that Boone Pickens has been touting for years, but we need a new standard bearer. Gates is saving the world with medicine. Koch brothers are making lots of $$. Musk is addressing transportation issues. We need a new 'Energy Savior' with enough clout, money, and political savvy to get Thorium and LIFTR reactor technology off top dead center in the US.
Can we get the old school Uranium Cycle folks (GE, Westinghouse, whomever else is still in the business in the USA) to help and get the US in a net energy exporting realm (there is lots more money to be made here than building/refurbishing old reactors and spent fuel rods).
What can we as 'little people' do to help get this all back on point with the powers that be?
Thanks for listening to my rant. We need answers to these questions ... not now, but yesterday!
servant74 I think we as proponents should support this research in Canada. Then hopefully, when demonstrated, it can challenge the status quo in the US. The video talked a little about this option.
Much of the point of the whole video is that PWR simply is not safe or cost effective enough and the political motivation for creating them was to have a stealth weapons program under the cloak of civilian power, exactly what the early protest movements said. That nuclear power production sector was never commercially competitive with other sources and failed to provide cheap electricity. The low air pollution aspect of Nuclear power was really it's only selling point and got countries like France on board but now cheaper alternatives no one has any reason to advocate for PWR and many reason to be against it.
servant74, I don't think you'll be able to get old school Uranium folks on board with this, as they are satisfied and making a living off of the status quo of nuclear energy. To try something new & radical would risk them loosing their career & entire way of life. It's like when EA releases new games that are, gameplay wise, replicas of what they have already released.
So, what if we took an existing nuclear reactor, and replaced the water coolant system with salt? Would it be cost-effective? Would it be any safer? I think this would at least be a start.
We can thank Greenpeace and the Sierra club for global warming. Thanks guys, you put a halt to all nuclear research, thinking the light water reactor is the only technology possible? Wrong. There's a lot more to be learned and the brakes were put on. Big mistake. Now we are in an environmental pickle and we must move on now.
servant74 to be fair the fossil fuels industry has a long history of astro turfing the anti nuclear environmental movement.
i love it, great work as always.
Brilliantly edited! Well done. Thanks so much. The race is on!
Hey, sweet. I'm glad it's only 33 minutes long. I mean, don't get me wrong, big fan of the 6.5 hour stuff, but I can't imagine too many people being patient enough to sit through nearly 7 hours of why they should put all their funding into/trust with their life some obscure could-be-metal could-be-salt who-really-knows 2 elements behind uranium.
Also, if people want to get questions about MSR answered, they should ask about MSR, not thorium.
Great video. Makes my task easier when explaining this technology to people. Now, if only I could get our politicians to understand this technology.
More like if only we could get our politicians off of Big Oil's money train.
One day I think there will be a monument like the Vietnam War Memorial with all of the names of the people that made this happen. This will be the change everybody has longed for, unlimited electrical power, unlimited clean water for drinking and irrigation, urban warehouse farming which will guarantee an end to famine, and finally put all the nails into the coffin of nuclear ignorance. Think about your grandparents witnessing the birth of air travel, automobiles, television & your parents witnessing the birth of the internet & social media, I think that has lead to this being possible. The fact that only 40 people may have read ORNL's reports in the 50's 60's & 70's explains why this time it will be different, because this time it won't be just some guy nobody listens to advocating for Thorium, by standing together we can make it happen!
The fossil fuel & bankster oligarchs will do everything and anything necessary, up to and including mass murder, to prevent that day from coming.
The major impetus for the US finally moving ahead with this only will come when it's framed as a National Security issue of paramount importance because of likely Chinese Dominance. This runs concurrently with the current near monopoly China enjoys in rare-earth elements, which we gave them when we vacated the market in the late 1980's. This is the outline for the energy "Manhattan Project" needed for the country and for the planet!
Bill Hart, that's not how they do things anymore. South Korea has a highly successful indigenous Nuclear Power program, produces electricity cheaper than Coal, without the emissions, including highly successful NPP exports. So what do the Oligarchs do? Buy or blackmail the new Korean president and get him to shutdown Nuclear power in Korea, with the usual crap about "clean, renewable energy" which of course actually means petrodollar LNG imports from the Middle East. Just as they bought Hollande and Macron who were and are shutting down their highly successful nuclear program. And did the same to McGuinty in Ontario. It is a whole lot cheaper to buy or blackmail politicians then to actually compete fairly in the marketplace. They are now trying to takedown Russia/Putin and if you read Engdahl (Target China) they will try to do the same to China. And of course financing anti-nuclear activism in India, while promoting their petrodollar gas pipeline to India through Afghanistan. Thus the Afghanistan pipeline war. And their petrodollar gas pipeline through Syria to Europe, so that France can replace their nuclear power with gas/wind/solar. 90% gas, 10% wind/solar. Note how adamant Macron is now on expanding the Syrian pipeline war.
This time it is different because China starts up their first Thorium reactor later this year. They have a massive program running. They are going after all the patents and mass production line. Only Oak Ridge Usa is building a test reactor. (China reactor is ofc also a test reactor)
1 Iron mine can fuel the world as they said. Also China have 100.000 tons in open landfills. Thorium Reactors can be produced in the scales of a bus on wheels and be driven on roads. Or Towed in sealed ship sections (they also have video on that) But the coolest part is the over double temp it runs on will make it possible to produce many kinds of fuels on the fly.
Thorium and solar will live side by side. None of them will destroy the other. We need multifaceted decentralized energy delivery sytem. Water/solar/thorium/bio
I'm not a big fan of Trump, but when he says things that are correct I have to support those moments. To be internally consistent AND perhaps encourage someone like Trump to make other good decisions. It doesn't stop me from criticizing Trump when I think he's wrong, despite what some others might say.
I hope Trump will keep his word with this and some other good things he said... I had hoped his actions would have been more sensical then what he has done up to this point.
apainintheaas how about now?
No, no, no! Orange Man Bad! Who gave you permission to think for yourself!
/sarc
Missing Trump yet?
I agree …. the 80/20 principle applies ….. Trump was (roughly) right 80 times out of 100 !
So Thorium is an byproduct of Mining? What they do with the Thorium normaly?
The coal used annually worldwide for power generation contains, about 10,000 tons of uranium and 25,000 tons of thorium, which either end up in the environment or accumulate in power plant ash and filter dust but it be extracted from the ash? And how would it be done?
I'd be very excited to see LFTR facilities being built in the next 5 or 10 years... The things we could do with it.
I was not a fan of Trump but if he begins the nuclear revolution in earnest, he will go down as the greatest president in history. I hope he does.
You are very naive one.
Trump is investing in "Clean Coal"
This technology must be presented to President Trump as he a practical businessman can appreciate the value and importance of thorium molten salt reactors to America's future energy needs .
he won't he is a parasite of the fossil fuel industry
Here's a list of tRump's "practical" business success stories:
Trump Football Team - NJ Generals (failed 1985)
Trump Board Games (two failed 1990, 2005)
Trump Casino & Taj Mahal (cheated contractors $60 million, 1990 - failed 2014)
Trump Plaza (busted for discrimination to please Mafia boss John Gotti, 1991 - failed 2014)
Trump Tower (hired 200 illegal immigrants in 1980, found guilty of conspiring to avoid paying pension and welfare fund contributions in 1991)
Four Bankruptcies (1991, 1992, 2004, 2009)
Two Marriages (failed 1992, 1999)
Trump Airline (failed 1992)
Trump investigates casino development in Cuba - in violation of the US embargo (1998)
Trump Video/Internet (failed 1998)
Trump Ice (failed 2004)
Trump International Golf Links, Aberdeen Scotland (2006, incomplete and losing millions)
Trump Travel (failed 2007)
Trump Mortgage (failed 2007)
Trump Steaks (failed 2008)
Trump Radio (failed 2008)
Trump Magazine (failed 2009)
Trump Mar-a-Largo (500 visas for foreign workers while denying Americans jobs, 2010)
Trump University (unaccredited, failed 2011, investigated for fraud, settled for $25 million in 2017)
Trump Vitamin (pyramid scheme, failed 2011)
Trump Vodka (failed 2011)
Trump Restaurant (failed 2012)
Trump Foundation (investigated for fraud and self-dealing by NY AG, 2016)
Trump Bay Street used Chinese EB-5 investment money while Trump was castigating China for having too much influence in the American economy (2016)
An Ontario Canada appeals court reinstated a suit brought against Trump and associates by investors in a hotel-condo tower in Toronto’s financial district (Singh v. Trump, 2016)
The National Labor Relations Board ruled that Trump’s Las Vegas hotel violated the law when it refused to bargain with a union representing workers there (2016)
The one thing overlooked in Kirk's presentation and a great many "thorium enthusiast" promotions is the fact that the reactor needs a fissile starter.
The purest LFTR would provide fission-produced neutrons from fissile uranium alone, either U-233 or the U-235 of customary reactors. I'm not sure if Pu-239 can be used.
But the thing is, that if you were to add sufficient pure U-233 or U-235 directly to thorium, Th-232, then either one of the Uranium isotopes, at 90% purity, is bomb material.
Thorcon Power (look them up) proposes a reactor (MSR) charged with 80% thorium fluoride and uranium fluoride at just less than 20% enrichment, for the rest of the fuel content of the liquid. That would be just less than 4% fissile overall. They reckon that neutron capture by the U-238 and even the unwanted neutron capture rather than fission by the Pu-239 will not hinder the productivity.
The cement production is a terawatt consuming industry that uses wonderful coal, and is a massive, and concentrated, producer of C02. That industry produces more CO2 that all trucks on the road, but is concentrated to a few locations. It would be interesting to see if it would make sense to locate a molten salt or metal reactor that could supply the energy needs of those plants, and also incorporate an "Air to fuel" cycle to recapture massive CO2 from the limestone.
Molten salt temps may not be enough for the 1450*C needed, but a thermochemical process of 800*C to make H2 could perhaps be used to increase temp. Fast spectrum lead cooled reactors may also be a consideration.
There are relatively few of these plants concentrated around areas with product demand and that of locations of raw material. Combining these, pun intended, hot-spots of energy consumption and CO2 emission seems like a winner.
Great video. Thank you uploader. I would like to ask who made it? And also whether anyone can recommend any other good documentaries or channels with similarly engaging and informative content? Any suggestions appreciated!
Fantastic video, Gordon! Getting better and better always. Thank you!
Also, gotta gloat a little bit...I was one of the very few pro-Trump members on TEA's facebook page...and Lo! he delivers at least some lip service. Let's see if it turns into anything practical, but I'm optimistic.
Created a custom version which highlights Trump's statements up-front. Might be more compelling to Trump supporters. ua-cam.com/video/mXaDqRrPc_M/v-deo.html
I've watched many times, all the videos the were beautifully chopped up and put together to make this incredible video posting and still enjoy them all regardless of watching Kirk age another 15 years or so - thank you all and in particular Gordon's Stirling efforts to preserve them all.🥝🥝🙏
Except for Dr. Helen Candiclott's rant.
Fantastic Gordon, keep it up... Good stuff, you make 'em I'll push them from my end. XD
the irony is Chernobyl and Fukushima wouldn't happen if this plant wasn't "vanish" more than 50 years ago
Fun fact: based on the amount of thorium worldwide, and assuming a static power usage every year, if every country pooled in all their thorium, we'd be able to power our planet for roughly 15,000 years
Actually, you could power the entire world at current energy levels for 300,000 years with the uranium contained in seawater - and longer since it is constantly replenished by erosion. You could power the entire world with thorium & uranium (largely thorium) in the Earth's crust mined to 1.2 km deep for over 600 million years. And loads of the stuff in asteroids, moons, Mars.
This is the Future !!!
Awesome! I love these documentaries
If the Chinese are successful with developing a thorium reactor, I don't believe they will do any exporting because their own needs are so great.
Our only hope left....all hail Thorium!
In the early days after WWII, Hymen Rickover and Dixie Lee Ray made some key pathway decisions to develop pressurized water reactor designs. This made sense at the time. Our technological momentum has since carried us down that pathway to where we are now. We need to evaluate our energy options and choose a new pathway. Or we can just wait for the Chinese. I’m sure they will be glad to sell us the technology very cheaply.
First 30 seconds I figured it's just retitled regurgitation. .. sure it's the same information but you pulled the best bullet points from a dozen or so long, sometimes boring videos and the order and tempo really work to convey the overall message. . Pretty awesome job of boiling it down to Thorium condensed . L p
Vy y
Shocking that this technology was left to languish.
Is it possible to built an compact powerplant in the size of a truck Container ?
MSRE is still in Oak Ridge. I walk through the building every day. Why can't they get it going again?
Thorium salt reactor can produce cheaper electricity than solar cells.
Gordon great video compilation. Have Kirk keep ringing the Bell on Th/MSR. For the rest of you, ask your friends and co workers, Is salt frozen? Careful not to laugh at them when they answer.
I 100% agree, light water reactors suck and we need nuclear energy; fossil fuels are going to bite us in the rear and "green energy" sources just don't have the punch and stamina we need to meet our demands. Molten Salt Reactors don't run at high pressure so there is no risk of a Chernobyl type explosion, they can be made to be walk-away safe using the frozen salt plug and drain tank so no Fukushima or 3-Mile island scenarios, they use fuel far more efficiently since the fissile material is dissolved in a liquid and thoroughly mixed which stretches our fuel supply, and the higher temperatures they can run should equate to higher generation capacity in a smaller package with lower cost, etc.. Molten salt reactors would be great! Why do we need to start with Thorium and all the complicated breeding process though? Why can't we focus on mastering the chemical and mechanical challenges of using more conventional uranium fuel dissolved in a single-liquid molten salt reactor design, then tackle the two-fluid/fertile blanket/thorium breeding problem separately once the tech is mature? That would get the ball rolling and get our foot in the door. There are serious problems left to solve with respect to balancing neutron use between fission and breeding, issues with the materials in the separator breaking down from radiation and heat damage, issues with the chemistry involved in distilling out fission products and finished fissile material, etc, many of which could be reduced by putting off on the thorium->u235 breeding cycle until the technology is more mature. Uranium is still cheap, even more so when you eliminate the manufacturing costs of solid fuel assemblies so fueling costs would be reasonable. Don't go calling me a naysayer, Thorium is definitely a worthwhile long-term goal.. It just seems like taking things in smaller steps may get this technology rolling more quickly. Is there a physics basis for why Molten Salt Reactor technology would be incompatible with current Uranium fuel?
"green energy" sources just don't have the punch and stamina we need to meet our demands.
Amen to that. "Green energy" sources can just about meet electricity demands of 2010-2015, but when you factor in increased electrical demand for transportation, heating (domestic oil/gas heating systems will be axed in the face of climate change) and industrial processes then you can figure an additional 6 to 8 times increase in demand in developed countries.
In developing countries by the time they're brought up to the same demands as the rest of us, that's more like factor of 20-30 increase in global generation capacity being required.
Why such a focus on Thorium specifically rather than MSRs generally? By all purposes it seems that it's much cheaper and easier to just use Uranium, while maintaining basically all the same benefits. Especially seeing as there are still more economically viable to extract Uranium reserves than Thorium despite 70+ years of heavy extraction.
If your intent is to only produce power (either electricity or process heat) and you're not worried about uranium mining or enrichment (which I can see reasonable people not being worried about) or waste profile (again reasonable people can view current waste stream as acceptable) then a U-MSR is fine. In fact a fast-spectrum U-MSR could also address some of the above, if that's a concern. But it is pretty obvious Flibe is looking to monetize the "waste" stream. To do so it'll need to be segregated. The Chemical Kidney, which is a pre-req for high-efficiency Th-MSR lends itself to such segregation. Flibe has long been cagey about all their potential revenue steams, and that leads to observations such as yours. Still, Flibe isn't ready to spell it all out and rather keeps emphasizing many features also offered by U-MSRs.
Thanks for the reply!
Thorium Energy Alliance 8! I hope people go to St. Louis this August!
This is fun to watch thanks for the video.
Did someone hear about the sodium hydroxide heating system?
It use the exothermic reaction of sodium hydroxide when dissolve in water. It should be used as a he heat battery for solarthermic energy did you hear something about this system?
Why does it have to take so long when the need is so urgent?
Freeze seals, like MSRE are NOT scaleable, not predictable. Regulators don't like the unpredictable performance of freeze seals.
I think many will be scared off who aren't already familiar with what is talked about.
I think it should at least start off with a clear and simple introduction, giving people a reason to keep watching.
The whole video constructs a good case through successive shots, but its quite obtuse and doesn't get to the really compelling points until past when people will have stopped paying attention.
I dunno, I'm not a video editor.
When a 34 minutes video is just the editing of public presentations by Sorensen, you realise this is a one-man show...
There is an error in the closed caption at .11 minute into the video. The slide is correct at 0.5% efficiency for a light water reactor and the CC gives the number as 0.05% efficiency. This bothered me because of limited hearing; I tend to focus on CC rather than the slide.
Fixed. Thank you for pointing it out.
Amazing video. Keep up the research!
Gordon needs to put this on Mitt Romney's laptop STAT!!!
Like Mitt trusts the academic and engineering prowess of a "canadian videographer"?
So this is a solution to using up the so-called Nuclear Waste situation - that's only 5% used up from the high pressure reactors? Right?
keep it up gordon
Fusion reactors are going to use molten salt for trapping neutrons and carrying heat. Once it becomes an established and accepted tech, molten salt fission reactors will follow. This means that molten salt fission will only become mainstream after fusion, which is fine by me. If humanity goes for molten salt fission first, there's a risk that we'll be content with it and won't put enough effort into fusion.
Pressurised water, AND the use of zirconium alloy fuel cladding are the problems with the PWR. Zirconium is very like magnesium; hard to ignite but burns furiously once lit. Really not the kind of substance you want inside a hot reactor. Molten salts avoid the need for inflammables in the reactor.
There are a hundred good reasons to use thorium to provide power for Mankind and removing carbon dioxide (not carbon) from any part of our environment is NOT ONE OF THEM! CO2 has a very minimal effect on Earth temperatures (maybe 1%) but has a huge beneficial effect on growing food and greening the Earth in general. Radical Environmentalists have the relationship of CO2 and temperatures backwards: A rise in temperature is followed by a rise in CO2 level, Not the other way around. I know it is fun for those that believe in CO2 driven global warming to talk about energy production that produces no CO2 but it is in fact an irrelevant point. So, by all means lets produce abundant cheap energy using thorium MSR's and Fusion when it is conquered to bring about the many benefits, not the least of which are cheap electricity and water desalinization, But, lets stop spreading the lie that CO2 needs to be reduced !!
"Hey these guys had a pretty good idea, lets go back to it"
Thank you, I enjoyed this video very much. I hate to make this political, but I seriously hope that if Trump can do at least one profound thing; please fund and spearhead Thorium reactors.
Trump? He's far too ignorant. I wouldn't hire him on to clean my toilet, let alone expect he would understand physics.
@@GoDodgers1 Someone should tell him the US will make a billion more dollars by marketing this technology (once we've mastered it) to other developing countries. Trump's in it just for the money after all.
Don't worry, you won't have to buy the reactors from Chinese, they won't sell them to you. They'll rent them to you at best, but they'll prefer to sell you the energy ;-)
Is that a bad thing though? I'm pretty sure if we could start a serious nuclear build program on a BOO ( Build-Own-Operate ) model in the US/West it'd be a better outcome then waiting for the US/EU/Western nuclear industry to get it's act together.
Turkey and Rosatom are actually doing exactly that and most view Rosatom's willingness to back up their product by doing a BOO seems to have helped get things moving given the challenges around financing these huge projects.
From my understanding, the US has had a boom in industry related jobs in recent years because energy prices in the US have come down a bit. I fear that, if China beats us to the Thorium reactor, that trend will shift back towards China. They'll then have all the jobs, and we'll be left in another economic depression. We need to get thorium MSRs working and turned into a serious market before that happens.
I'm afraid the US will be stuck to import nuclear power from Canada and Mexico, and China & Russia can park floating barge NPPs outside of the 200mile limit so they can tell the corrupt NRC to blow-off, and sell clean electricity to energy starving US cities, after the Shale Gas bubble bursts and the US is forced to burn expensive imported terrorist diesel and LNG for its electricity supply.
It's certainly true that industry likes low energy prices and that keeping them reasonably low will be important to keep some degree of manufacturing going in the US, but that's also sorta the point I'm making. If China/Russia is willing to sell the US reactors ( and one of them certainly will ) the US will have the low-cost energy needed, one all-too-likely alternative to China/Russia selling reactors to the US is that we get stuck with expensive energy and that will result in the economic impacts you're worried about.
Even importing power from Canada/Mexico wouldn't be as bad as the possible scenario of the US just having expensive energy for decades, as much as my own country ( Canada ) might love to make some business selling electricity to the US there isn't enough capital and will here to make up for the lack of it south of the border, Canada can't finance a reactor build program to serve the US in full.
Also the floating barges aren't designed for open ocean so I wouldn't worry about that ;) the real threat is going to be being stuck 1-2 decades behind in terms of energy infrastructure and losing out competitively as a result, buying Chinese/Russian reactors or Canadian/Mexican power could actually help take the edge off.
Spot on. Chinese will hold the active patents. China will be the biggest super power in human history. Buy stocks in Chinese Thorium development
Thorium is a very interesting energy option. The LFTR especially. We should have had them decades ago, but politics got in the way. Again.
I will say this though, the ludicrously heavy editing abundant in this video and others really does hurt their credibility in the eyes of the average viewer. Makes it look like the whole thing was hacked together from unrelated information. It's a shame, the LFTR technology really does need more credible media exposure.
Great Vid thanks for posting! Dont mind if i share it x10000000000!
wells that run out of crude will fill themselves after only a few years so those decaying plants are really something or theres something else at work
Yay for Canada, Czech Republic, China, India, , et al somebody please solve the energy crisis! ASAP.
As much as I love nuclear and MSR, LFTR, et al... It is still used to boil water and requires gravity. Is there a more direct way to use the heat / energy liberated? In micro or low gravity?
If the video said, I must have missed that part.
The Netherlands started a MSR in the summer of 2017! Gooo Netherlands!!
They're announcing an important MSR experiment but it isn't an actual MSR.
I don't think so.....maybe doing some thorium research in a test reactor....
rick is very excited
based on the and many other videos... I have to ask ... why? why aren't we already doing this? why don't we have LFTR running all over the place? What is holding back this technology? or WHO is holding it back? Does its commercialization require a huge investment it's not getting?
if you're using air or other gasses as the working fluid for the turbine, wouldn't a Tesla turbine design be better than a bladed turbine?
Robert a Heinlein wrote a book that mentioned molten salt react ors
Politica vs science = power vs ideas
Humanity: Fail, for dismissing the advantages of a molten salt reactor. If I was President, that would be my one and single goal.
How do you start up a Thorium reactor? How does a Thorium reactor burn up uranium?
LEU, Pu or U233. LFTR49 is the one designed to recycle spent fuel rods. It first separates out the Uranium that won't sustain fission in thermal spectrum. articles.thmsr.nl/the-flibe-energy-lftr49-the-triple-ace-in-nuclear-gen-iv-design-ea9bffcd71dd There was some debate between Kirk Sorensen and Ed Pheil on Kirk's EFT Facebook page if you dig thru the comments on this post... facebook.com/EnergyFromThorium/posts/10159595752600377
Can the USA please take the muzzle off the dog that is thorium and show the world we ain't all bark but some bite as well?
You know why they don't want to go to thorium?
Because you can't make bombs with it...
EXACTLY !!!
www.businessinsider.com/beneficial-thorium-byproducts-2013-1
Beaver = Dufus you couldn't pass a Grade Six science exam even if you studied for a month.
Great vid
Curious how this MSR history Ignores Elysium and TerraPower and Molten chloride salt reactor benefits.
There's another major reason why they don't go with this technology thorium reactors don't produce weapons-grade plutonium that's why they went with that design the first place to generate fuel for thermal nuclear weapons
True, but I recently saw a video where a nuclear engineer (Blomqvist) told his audience that no commercial energy reactor has ever created weapons grade plutonium. They do produce plutonium, but not of the quality they need for the weapons. It's more efficient and cheaper to just have a reactor dedicated to creating the weapons grade plutonium.
Its more i think that current reactors use weapons byproducts as it is. We will have nukes made and that waste disposed either way as that is a necessity. However if the claims made that thorium is so much safer on civil use then it seems to me that this is a perfect supplementary power source to uranium based reactors. The fear of meltdowns from reactors like fukashima cherynoble prevents them proliferating that is a undeniable fact. That alone makes them a national symbol of weakness for any nation forced to use them.
It's true that it's easier to make weapons materials from dedicated reactors - and one of the worst nuclear accidents ever was one of those reactors (Sellafield/Windscale) - only mitigated by filters on the exhaust stacks, else it would have been much worse than Chernobyl.
They generate Uranium 233... perfect stuff to build "low tech" gun-type Hiroshima bomb designs. It'*too* easy to build an A-bomb with that, so you'll have to worry about proliferation.
If you're using a single salt system it's virtually impossible to chemically separate U233 or proactinium out without also getting high gamma emitting isotopes coming along for the ride - which make any attempt to build such a bomb useless unless you like fizzles. It'd be ruinously expensive to separate out using centrifuges and in any case the logistics, size and power consumption of a centrifuge farm are hard to hide, even if you're a nation-state like Iran (Isotopic separation costs of uranium fuel are so high that the USA regards them as a classified secret, but the power cables going into the facilities give a hint as to the energy requirements)
In any case, as the U233 comprises a critical path in the breeding/fission process, taking it out of the reactor it will make a big dent in your output power and pretty much destroys your neutron economy so it's detectable pretty quickly.
This is one of the reasons why thorium single salt designs are regarded as proliferation-resistant. Another is that the salts in a working reactor are so fiercely radioactive that you can't just attempt to slip a vial into your backpack. Yet another is that you don't need or even want to reprocess all the waste products.
Simply extracting the neutron poisons and low mass products is sufficient and that's mostly as simple as pulling iodine/helium/hydrogen out of the sparge space behind the circulation pump and _limited_ onsite online chemical processing of a small fraction of the salt with no need (or desire) for isotopic separation. The reprocessing should be entirely within the facility, meaning that salts stay onsite at all times.
If you're using a dual salt thorium blanket system then you could extract the Proactinium more easily (it's this that decays to U233), but the 2-fluid setup is expensive, offers no substantial benefits over the single fluid setup (the plumbing is hideously more complex for 2-fluid, whilst the tradeoff for single fluid is a larger volume in circulation and the cost/benefit strongly favours 1-fluid) and the decrease in output will _still_ be detected long before you have obtained usable quantities of U233. What that means is that anyone pushing a 2-fluid setup in real life is going to have their installations watched like a hawk to make sure they're not being naughty.
Weapons proliferation from a thorium reactor is _possible_, but it's a lot harder and way more expensive than with current technology. (Mind you, everyone thought CANDU was proliferation-proof until India proved the Canadians wrong by stealing uranium from right under the contractors' noses). The best defense against this is to ensure that any possible path to chemical extraction of U233 is heavily contaminated with hot isotopes, so that the resulting material is useless for bombmaking without expensive isotopic separation methods. This is already the case for the plutonium produced in a thorium reactor.
(Dirty bombs are mostly a myth. They have a very limited area of effect and anything radioactive enough to have a biological effect is also detectable from a distance (see fukushima cleanup).
On the other hand things like Depleted Uranium are quite nasty environmental toxins as well as important for weapons work (they're the casings for "H-bombs" (teller-ulam devices) as well as bullets) and the current nuclear enrichment processes keep producing ~90kg of the stuff for every 10kg of reactor-grade u235 made (1 to 10 tons for every kg of weapons-grade). Thankfully a thorium reactor can happily eat (low quantities) of U238 whilst operating, along with conventional used nuclear fuel rods (which surprisingly can apparently be slowly "dropped in, whole" without any further processing needed as flibe salt will dissolve them and strip the ceramics).
I would like to see a video comparing Thorium to the *currently best available* technology using uranium fuel, because that's what it's competing with, surely. Ive seen a video claiming that uranium can be used in a liquid fuel. And another claiming that the short term radiation from Thorium is higher. So a fair comparison needs to compare like with like, and also list all the known disadvantages.
MSRs are easier to use with Uranium than Thorium. All of the supposed arguments for Thorium are really just arguments for MSRs.
How much can this be scaled down for distributed local power generation? Could this become an affordable power generator for small communities? Maybe someone like Elon Musk could find a way to bring this to the open market in some form? The less centralized it is, the more secure it is from sabotage or terrorism/war.
Unfortunately it boils down to big business losing money. Instead of looking after this amazing planet we destroy it due to ignorance and greed.
Diesel jenarstors in a basement beach front is madness and I am no nuclear scientist but that was like throwing light matches at a gas station it's just madness
Please investigate a resource based economy.
Thank god America has abundant resources
Brilliant
good job!
Great editing.
FirmGrip DownWithTheShip seriously? I feel this video gave me schizophrenia. This style of editing conveys very little information, only very shallow ideas, and makes this feel like a conspiracy theory video. I'm a big thorium fan but this doesn't really help the cause.
Alex Mason seriously. I found it was fast paced and contained nothing that was not pertinent to the topic. With the immense volume of interesting topics on the internet I end up wanting content to take me along at a quicker speed so I enjoyed this video very much. I'm in my 30's and I find that my parents generation say It is difficult to watch anything with jump cuts. They say similar comments like your "schizophrenic feeling" when watching modern media. It's too much for them to handle. A good comparison would be that they watch television news at night and I watch Philip DeFranco online for news. Look at the difference in editing and you will see clearly what I mean. Philip edits out all breathing between sentences...so it's very fast talking. My folks feel like they are going insane when watching it. Whereas I find television news very slow and am always feeling like get to the point please.
Chinese visited oak ridge laboratory years ago, americans literally gave it for free. US can be generous sometime
Percent of waste heat in this process?
Where may we get PDFs of the original molten salt reactor documents mentioned in this video?
www.ornl.gov/content/research-library
moltensalt.org/references/static/downloads/pdf/
So I forget. What is the difference between a PWR reactor and a BWR reactor?
I'd actually love to have anyone correct me if I get this wrong, but I think PWR uses a heat exchanger so that radioactive water is not used to drive turbines directly, and that BWR uses radioactive water to directly drive power turbines.
So, is it just traditional energy lobbies blocking this or is there more holding these liquid reactors back?
Anything nuclear is hard and expensive to commercialize. United States has some specifics costs on top of all that (due to regulation) which targets liquid fuel reactors. MSR moves forward internationally, just without anyone (I'm aware of) planning on building a test reactor domestically. Dr. Leslie Dewan is the one person who's spoken about this at greatest length, on both Atomic Show (podcast) with Rod Adams and in her testimony to an energy sub-committee.
9:50. First mention of Thorium for those wondering if they every get around to talking about this subject.
Good video but why is it so Frankenstein stitched together in editing?
Kaeden Ngai-Natsuhara it is largely based on 6h edit ... ua-cam.com/video/2oK6Rs6yFsM/v-deo.html ... you might find that less frantic, although my 2016 claim that no MSRE footage was publicly available became false before the 2017 edition.
How much energy per kg or cm3 of material!?
The movie THRIVE on UA-cam will explain why we don't use this technology and so much more. these are frightening times we must all join the movement...there is hope
Whats radiation like on these verse salt
Could a reactor be scaled down to personal use size, like to provide 200 amp service? How small could it be?
No, there are reactors which do this but it specialized use, like KiloPower for NASA. Very small energy needs could be met by harvesting Fission Products and segregating them. 4thgeneration.energy/atoms-for-space/
Vote this guy as president. He can tag team with musk and change our planet for the better. Science Bitch.