Making Nuclear Sustainable with CMSR (Compact Molten Salt Reactor) - Troels Schönfeldt @ ThEC2018
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- Опубліковано 26 тра 2019
- Seaborg Technologies's CMSR is designed to "Make nuclear a sustainable, safe and inexpensive technology, revolutionising the energy market." www.seaborgtech.com
"In the CMSR, fuel is mixed in a liquid salt that acts as coolant. This ensures it can always be cooled and it cannot melt down or explode. It will simply shut down by itself in case of an emergency. The importance of this is not only the safety but also a significant reduction in complexity and cost."
As Troels points out in his presentation, CMSR is unusual from other MSR designs as it is using a liquid moderator instead of graphite.
This video capture and edit is a collaboration between iThEO and the "Thorium Remix" project. thoriumremix.com/ - Наука та технологія
Distributed MSR energy is much better than the cost and pollution of battery energy storage systems. Radioactive half lives of hundreds of years is acceptable. Consuming existing radioactive waste as fuel is brilliant. Reducing weapons grade materials, using them for fuel is genius. Beating our swords into plowshares...
Greatest idea of American ingenuity that no body knows. Sad really they figured this out out in the 50's. But they didn't because you can't make bombs with it.
@@AgentExeider Molten Salt Ractors can easily be set up to run a breeding cycle that produces weapons grade plutonium. This has always been known... But Nixon wanted to create jobs in California, and the other designs required much more man power to build and maintain.
There is a time tested battery storage system that is often overlooked. Go see Iron Edison Battery Co. But I am a hardline proponent of MSR and Thorium. The status quo is hardlining against it. GE and Westinghouse stand to lose tremendously. I mean a 95% efficient power source replacing their awesome 5% efficient fuel?
@@andersjjensen Nixon was a globalist puke! MSR project ran 20,000 hours with no incidence. Shut it down Fri evening, fire it back up Monday morning. Nixon killed it because it wouldn't breed Plutonium. So explain your theory.
Say that to these people ua-cam.com/video/voLggSutwZA/v-deo.html who knows maybe you'll have one!
I'm absolutely loving these, Gordon!
Gordon, thank you for your continued role as the chief promoter of MSRs! MSRs should be utilized in the decommissioning of Existing Lightwater reactors. They are small enough to be sited on the existing secure, approved reactor campuses and easily integrated into the Electric grid as the old reactors come off-line these new reactors come online, potentially even using the existing turbine halls. Effectively, they are smaller more efficient replacement boilers burning the nuclear "ash heaps" of their predecessors. Processing of old (not) spent fuel into new fuel salt could potentially be done on the existing sites, reducing the need to transport the highest level Nuclear "waste" and its volume is greatly reduced as the balance of this former waste, is transmuted (probably the incorrect term) into thermal and electrical energy, and a reduced volume of less hazardous wastes. The concern with the total length of service is moot beyond 100 years, by which time all of the legacy nuclear waste (spent fuel) will have been consumed/reduced and Fusion Power will have reached a mature state. MSRs are the bridge to fusion, removing vast majority of the legacy high-level nuclear wastes, providing equal or greater generating capacity, along with desalination, nuclear medicines, and more. Decarbonizing and surviving the next 100 years must be the aim, MSRs are the means.
You want to decarbonise LIFE, it seems you have fallen for THE GRETA CULT, like the speaker has! Have you considered man as expandable in your "decarbonisation" effort alá GRETA. Taking advice from EVE was THE ORIGINAL SIN, but surely you are "enlightened" to discard such "rubbish", rather following the POISONED gospel of THE SYNAGOGUE OF SATAN!
It seems ADAM hasn't learned a lot over millennia!
Very good thank you for the video.
Thank you, so very much, for posting these important «pieces of information»...
Godspeed Sir!
From the late 50s till today, the road must end soon to implement this beautiful system to achieve inexpensive, clean, and long lasting methods of energy for all.
Let's face it, what would it be if Nixon didn't shut it down in 1973, now think where we would be today.
Let's get the Gov hands out of our dreams ones and for all.
The government is other people ffs! And how does anyone get anywhere with unreasonable people creating more unreasonable and damaged people?
In East Asia, “license and manufacture” is a euphemism for “steal and copy”.
Honestly as long as it gets built I don't much care. If China steals the tech they use to save the world, they still saved the world.
@@wasdlmb
And no one will innovate any more technology to save the world the next time...
@@sophrapsune
As if innovation is bound to intellectual property, or "stealing." Copying and reverse engineering has been rife since the dawn of invention. Copyright and patent infringements have been rife since the rise of copyright law. And yet...invention's pace has not decreased. Actually it has increased, especially as computer aided design has proliferated through the engineering field. What _has_ increased is the amount of patent and copyright lawsuits, patent and copyright durations (I think we're up to something ludicrous like 70+ years or something now). Lawyers have obtained their pound of flesh, laws have been tightened, and yet despite rife "copying" taking place in East Asia, the pace of innovation has not decreased in the engineering field.
If we are to look at a field outside of engineering though, it would be instructive to look at the pharmaceutical industry. Here, despite ever growing patent durations, despite patents on everything from process to chemical entity to even testing and validation, and lawsuits to match, innovation has slowed down. This despite record profits year on year, despite the industry routinely investing up to 50% or more of its revenue into research and development, and despite East Asia having very little to do with "copying" of drugs and selling them. Actually, despite being one of the world's leading growth markets for pharmaceuticals, strong attempts from nearly all governments in the region to harmonise regulation, there has been very little "copying" going on. With local generic pharmaceutical industries facing accusations of low quality control standards and trust, consumers turn to drug imports.
So maybe it isn't "copying". Maybe it's the death of industrial strategy in the West. Maybe, just maybe, intellectual property laws aren't worth the paper they are written on, because they serve lawyers more than engineers seeking redress. Maybe, and I know this might be a radical thought for you, people in East Asia are just as good engineers as those in the West, they just have no qualms about taking a design and iterating on it. Like the Hualong One takes design cues from the Areva CPR series but incorporates pretty significant engineering changes so as to incorporate fully domestically produced parts. Or the Korean APR1400 could charitably called "just another Combustion Engineering System 80" but actually it has about as much in common with the original System 80 as the Ship of Theseus.
Let's be real here. These systems have been bought and paid for in USD, with full technology transfer in almost all cases, besides some parts that the donor country would like to keep proprietary, in their own strange form of industrial strategy. Because apparently selling the full blueprints of a nuclear reactor is fine, but keeping the valves and pumps proprietary is important. Full technology transfer means just that: Asian engineers get the blueprints for the thing being sold, and in most cases, even technical support from Western engineers on how to build it and the techniques needed to fabricate it. So why the charge of "copying"? If you do have a valid complaint, level it at the French, German, American or Canadian governments for negotiating these deals. But of course that would imply that Western governments fire-selling off their technologies for profit would be somehow wrong and not in keeping with the basic tenets of capitalism. It would imply that shareholders in Areva or Westinghouse wouldn't want the profits of those technology transfer deals. Who wants profit, anyway?
Malthias
Are you trying to convince yourself that aggressive intellectual property theft by the Chinese is normal and defensible?
You’re not convincing anyone else.
@@sophrapsune Lol, this is why China has a growing middle class and why the west is struggling.
Brilliant! Making Hydrogen from Nuclear Power with MSR sounds far better than having it as a coolant involved in pressurized water reactors. Maybe the fuel might show negative cost. That means income, because MSR fuel is other nuclear power plants waste, they are happyly giving away for free and most likely with a bonus payment, if you only take it off their sites.
Would you please state the dates of the presentation and/or recordings?
ThEC2018 (in the title) means 2018. I enter (manually for every video) the date captured into UA-cam meta-data. I dunno where it shows it to your, but UA-cam knows it. Either that or "Date Recorded" field is some sort of black hole to everyone else but me... which wouldn't surprise me. The value is 2018-10-29.
@@gordonmcdowell Thank you!
0:23 His slide deck is dated "29 10 2018"
These videos cured my depression.
I like that it doesn't use graphite, but with a thermal spectrum reactor you don't get rid of the long lived activation products. Transuranics or transthoriums in this case. Fast spectrum is the best way to do nuclear because you close the fuel cycle and the waste is gone after 300 years, not milions of years in the case of transuranics.
I can't imagine why this isn't front and center stage technology. It makes so much sense. Which may be the problem. It makes sense, common sense, and common sense seems to be a bit rare in the political and commercial world.
Great ! Please bring it to the US for NRC approval ASAP. I'm sure you will find investors and plenty of interest.
The NRC is busy licensing the APR1400, NuScale, and before the whole Trump China trade war, CNNC was looking into getting NRC licences for their Hualong One, as well as getting Chinese components of the Hualong One and the AP1000 certified. Basically their pipeline is full, unless the US Government is willing to give the NRC more resources (particularly to hire more regulators). In the current political climate, it's just not going to happen.
It looks like this was 2 years ago, are there any follow up videos or ones from the following day he referenced?
no yet
@@gordonmcdowell Yes, the following day video would be awesome.
well, if october 2018 is 2 years ago for you, I must have lived in a high gravity well for the last 6 months .
@@AndreiAndrei-pg8eg His progress slide said 2017. Your gravity is just fine.
@@chapter4travels the slide yes, but not the presentation. thats pretty recent.
What I understand about MSR is that the molten salt is too corrosive on existing alloys. New materials would have to be developed. Is that right?
Kirk Sorensen argues not, that Hastelloy-N can be used. ua-cam.com/video/2U9HVIFt2GE/v-deo.html Ed Pheil argues not and that corrosion is not the issue people think it might be and nickel-alloy will be fine. ua-cam.com/video/aHsljVnY6oI/v-deo.html ...the other companies planning to replace their reactors regularly (ThorCon and Terrestrial) are doing so likely because of the graphite and not the nickel alloys... chemistry can be addressed by offering deliberate areas for FP to "plate out" and keeping oxygen out of the salt. Neutrons do degrade graphite, and the neutrons have to hit the graphite or the graphite won't be doing its job as moderator.
@@gordonmcdowell You can use 316 stainless steel (A standard, nuclear grade, ASME-coded steel) in Molten Salt reactors. _If_ you have proper chemistry control, corrosion can be limited to 0.1mm per year. So an extra 1mm of vessel thickness is 10 years of extra vessel life.
The real problem is not reactor vessels. The problem is corrosion products plugging the heat exchanger tubes, or noble metal plate-out in the heat exchangers. Even though a reactor vessel might only lose 0.1mm of surface material throughout the year, if you consider the entire surface area of the reactor vessel and imagine that stripped surface clogging up the heat exchangers, you will be throwing away a lot of heat exchangers. Or have to resort to using very large diameter tubing so that even if there is plate-out it doesn't matter. Then your problem becomes huge heat exchangers that almost become impossible to incorporate into an integral design. This is why I think that the Terrestrial Energy route of using multiple heat exchangers that can be switched to if HXs fail is probably the way to go.
Thorium has advantages. It can work in thermal spectrum as well.
Chemistry with fluorine.
Source of fuel is no an issue, nor can it be used for weapons.
Weapons grade plutonium is made in a graphite pile.
Fluorinesalt is less corrosive then chlorinesalt. Better materials today then in the 60s.
Neutron eaters (gas) can be separated when running as well as refueling.
High output temperature => thermochemistry. => synthetic fuel for transport etc.
High efficiency making electricity etc etc.
Fluid moderator tried in IN2P3 Lausanne. Expensive research needed to make reactors accepted by authorities .
Nuclear energy competes with the fossil, a big economic player.
Thermal spectrum is a fundamentally flawed way of doing nuclear because you don't get rid of the long lived transuranic radioisotopes, Curium, Americium, Californium etc. Fast reactor preferrably chloride salt.
@@hjembrentkent6181 Could you elaborate on your point?
So what is proposed to fo with oranure we cannot even revert desert so why generate more desert
I think we need to use the fuel rods intact inside the molten salt thorium reactor. Horrible, cracked faulty fuel rods insitu in the molten salt reactor, burned to forever till depleted. controlled neutron flux by temperature of the salt by pumping speed. Maybe not graphite moderated, but would still be good.
Super interesting stuff. The US has GOT to get with the program. This is way more important than getting back to the moon for crise sake.
The green believers, ironically funded by big oil, have poisoned the well for Nuclear energy in the US. We need the moon to get our mojo back. We can fix all the dams, bridges, and roads and that won't have 1/10th the impact of watching Americans walking on the Moon again.
There is some good to come of it too. If SpaceX can knock another zero off the cost of getting to GEO then we will be in a position to build space based solar power. That's the other zero carbon option for predictable baseload generation.
@@ElizabethGreene Our Mojo ;-)
I'm holding out for "Mr. Fusion". Why? Because where we're going, we don't need no steeeenking roads. Merging Back to the Future and Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Anybody know who said......... "Badges? We don't need no steeenking badges!". Character was named "Golden Hat".
Blazing Saddles.. was the movie
Keep in mind that you need to support the dark horses. The main line approach, the Tokamak, is a dead end. The dark horses, if they work, are actually economical
Ideas like Polywell, FRC, Focus Fusion, and some others need support.
But between the Tokamak and the MSR I would choose the MSR hands down
for some reason my phone won't buffer This video. Is this the same thing as an LFTR reactor or is this Something different?
It is not a LFTR, which is thorium based. This is a different style of molten salt reactor using uranium as its fuel (unclear if it's a breeder or simply using U-235 enriched form natural uranium) as well as a liquid moderator that isn't water but is a hydrogen compound (they're waiting for the patent to go through before they give more information). This molten salt reactor is designed with safety, simplicity, and marketability in mind in order to start a supply chain and be able to set up commercial nuclear facilities all over the world, without the extreme costs associated with gigantic pressurized water designs and without having to worry about the problem of finding a customer for gigawatt-scale power supplies (there simply isn't any situation in which adding a large reactor power supply makes sense without there also being a significant shut-down of other power systems all at once, which is something electricity supply companies do not want to do; making a smaller cheaper reactor makes the transition from fossil fuel systems to nuclear fuel systems much less painful).
I am antinuclear,but you have now introduced some doubt in my thinking. Let all options be on the table,but we don’t want nuclear pushing sustainable off the table as has been done by oil,gas and coal.
The best option as I see it would be to have them work in concert, Nuclear as the base load and other sustainable soures to make up the difference and peak loads
Yes we do
It would be nice to sketch a MSR Fukushima scenario. What would have happened if Fukushima would have been a MSR?
There's enough blame to go around, but one aspect that is often overlooked is the Japanese PM denied TEPCO permission to vent out the hydrogen gas because it was radioactive. That hydrogen gas would later explode and lead to the (post-flooding) chain of events making it very difficult to get water to reactor cores. Of course with MSR there'd be no hydrogen gas in the first place because no water coolant to dissociate into H and O.
gordonmcdowell hmm ... rather essential. Thanks for the info.
2:14 um point of order .. but if the preceding statement were true... would the market not have already solve it ? either the market has failed to invest in r&d to switch from carbon based fuels or it lacks the ability to do so .. this is a 60 year old problem the market has failed because ..well.. simply its cheaper to ignore a problem in the short term until it becomes ignoreable and then it is far cheaper to lie about it being a problem than it is to solve it ... the market made its decision on climate change and that was to first ignore it then to down play it then to deny it...
Former NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko published a piece in the Washington Post May 19, 2019. He outlined why he was no longer a proponent of atomic power. In three words: safety, safety, safety. Fukashima was the event that changed his position. His statement did not mention MSR. He worked under physicist DOE Secretary Steven Chu. What I'm getting at is, I understand corrosion is an issue with MSR. Otherwise it's been successfully tested and no matter how hard I search, no one refutes its combination of its inherent safety and flexibility. People can say "politics" all they like, but there are other soverign states like, for example, France and Germany, that rely heavily on atomic electrical generation. There's got to be a technical shortcoming, is it just corrosion?
Gregory Jaczko has always been more of a Democratic Party politician than a physicist - his expertise is in 'science policy', rather than science (although he has a PhD is Theoretical Physics, he has never held a research or teaching position - other than on 'policy'.) He was regarded as obstructive and basically anti-nuclear while at the NRC, and was eventually forced to resign following allegations that he had an imperious and bullying management style and had alienated all four of the other Commissioners with whom he served. He has been pretty open about his dislike of the US nuclear industry, and is probably dislikes it even more after being effectively fired from the NRC - which the industry certainly celebrated. As a Democrat politician it is not entirely surprising that he advances a policy position in exact alignment with the Party.
It's interesting that you mention Steven Chu, who is a real practicing physicist (and a Nobel laureate, no less), and consistently argues for more research into nuclear power.
"There's got to be a technical shortcoming, is it just corrosion?"
There is a still work to do on the chemistry, metallurgy, and all of the engineering challenges to build and operate a complete working design. However, Seaborg are still in business so they must be hitting their milestones. There are a number of competitors in the same space who are also attracting a lot of venture capital funding (including from Bill Gates). I also read recently that a Chinese government nuclear energy research institute has progressively increased the number of scientists and engineers working on MSR's from 300 a few years ago to around 800 today). There is no doubt that this technology is going to be perfected - the only question is who gets there first, and which will be the best of the emerging designs.
Jaczko tries to tell people that he's not anti-nuke, because three new reactor designs were approved on his watch. Which is true. What he doesn't say is that he was the only person on the board who voted against all three designs.
Corrosion isn't a show-stopper, it is a factor limiting vessel durability, so ThorCon and Terrestrial Energy respond with shorter-life reactors that are swapped in&out every 5 or 7 years. Maybe they'll last longer but until it is known through operational experience how long they'll last, we need to guess short.
Another approach is Flibe Energy and cleaning Fission Products out of the salt, and helping address corrosion that way. So longer lifespan but then more complexity in gear.
Lots of ways to address it. The only thing we don't have yet is decades of MSR operation to clearly state how long the materials will last. Low-balling lifespan is what can be (easily) done until then.
The right Humanist Philosophy
If the market is *HONEST*, and if natural wealth is shared, the hurdle of contending with the first-mover costs would be more easily overcome. If the market operates honestly, it will find the best solutions *automatically*.
If natural wealth is shared, people everywhere will be able to afford modest amounts of electricity. We would have factories producing MSRs now, if we had started accounting for externalities within a few decades of Pigou's suggestion that we do so (more than 100 years ago).
Consider that the newer MSR's consume what we used to consider "nuclear waste" as fuel. They intake high-level waste (stays dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years) and spits out low-level waste (stays dangerous for a couple hundred years. If for no other reason, we should do this to get rid of our dangerous radioactive waste.
We have enough radioactive waste to produce USA-level power for the whole world for the next 1000 years. If we did that, most of the new radioactive output would have become completely inert by the time we ran out of the old radioactive waste.
I am noticing that he brought a lot of the problems with graphite that I did in an earlier video that someone here went pretty feral about defending. Cant have it both ways, guy.
All engineering is a tradeoff. Not sure why people would be wedded to an engineering concept of a conceptual reactor design and be willing to die on a hill for it.
In any case, I don't think the CMSR offers a strong solution with heavy water, either. A tube leak or break would generate hydrogen fluoride (or should it be deuterium fluoride?) - which is hydrofluoric (deuterofluoric) acid. Not something that you want to have flowing around a 700 degree primary loop. The oxygen would also cause rapid corrosion of the primary loop. And while I don't think it is likely that such an accident would pressurise the containment, it could very well ruin the reactor. Not a problem if Seaborg plans to produce SMRs which thrive on serial production, but it would be a significant cost to the operator and therefore, a financial risk.
EDIT: Looks like Seaborg has updated their design and moved away from heavy water, since the last time I remember reading about them was in the IAEA SMR book 2016. The SMR book 2018 on page 201 seems to have updated their moderator to "proprietary liquid moderator"
aris.iaea.org/Publications/SMR-Book_2018.pdf
It looks like they're mostly using sodium fluoride as a carrier for their fuel and fission products. It must be mixed with something to lower its melting temperature as the core operating temperature is well below the melting temperature of sodium fluoride. Even so, whatever their "proprietary liquid moderator" is has to exist at at least 700C.
Its just speculation but I'm wondering if they're not planning on just using some kind of graphite emulsion in another molten salt like beryllium fluoride.
The list of effective moderators that aren't a gas at 700C near atmospheric pressure is pretty short.
-edit
If they were ever using heavy water as their moderator, it would either have to be a high pressure reactor already or they would have to maintain their moderator not in thermal equilibrium with the reactor. This company is giving me a bit of a "Theranos" vibe.
@@htomerif
You can have a liquid D2O moderator that is unpressurised - see the CANDU. The trick is using a gas insulator between the coolant loop and the moderator tank. In that sense it is perfectly fine to have D2O at near ambient temperature
www.nuceng.ca/candu/pdf/8%20-%20Nuclear%20Plant%20Systems.pdf
See section 2.3. CO2 or Helium gas is kept in the gap between the primary, pressurised loop, and the calandria assembly holding the heavy water. This double wall design enables the moderator to be kept at 30-70 degrees Celsius while the pressurised loop might be running at 250-300 degrees.
As for the "proprietary liquid moderator", ionic liquids would be the choice here. Preferably something without organic compounds because radiation would polymerise them (turning them into goopy, tarry crude oil) but then something hydrogen rich would be preferable, so this would also favour hydrocarbons or hydrides.
Proprietary implies some kind of special compound or ionic liquid system which again, speaks to the likelihood of using organic compounds. The polymerisation problem can be mitigated against or ignored, especially if the insulation is good enough to assure that no pressurisation is needed for the moderator. There might be issues with decommissioning: you might put in a wax or a free flowing, clear oil at the beginning of reactor life but then wind up with a tarry, goopy mixture at the end of life.
If it is a hydride eutectic, or just solid hydride, I fail to see how such a thing could be made proprietary. You cannot patent salt (NaCl with some KCl). But if avoiding radiation driven polymerisation is a priority then a hydride eutectic would be preferable, since as an ionically bonded mixture, radiation cannot break or change the arrangement of covalent bonds. The LiCl-LiH eutectic system has a melting point of 495 degrees Celsius: htracyhall.org/ocr/HTH-Archives/Cabinet%207/Drawer%203%20(HUH%20-%20KAK)/(Johnson,%20C.E.)%20(linked)/(Johnson,%20C.E.)-9_OCR.pdf . This is a eutectic point similar to the inlet temperature of molten salt reactors. 34 mol% LiH is no-where near as much hydrogen per volume as H2O, but on the other hand there is no radiolysis either.
@@MonMalthias He says high temperature liquid, ionically bonded and hydrogen based ... I don't know about you but all I can think of is lithium hydride in that regard.
Wow what a BRILLIANT person! Wish him luck! Why Musk not doing anything on this?
When "We" can have 100KW MSRs on our properties, I will be a happy camper!
running on thorium so some nazi banker aint making money on a commodity
I find your claim, telling your future, to be immature and likely false. You must be ignorant and/or stupid to what's really going on and why. You must choose to evolve to not harm others and yourself because you won't listen.
Life isn't about corrupt and short sighted man made monetary system that doesn't work.
18:40 -- high temp ionic liquid -- hydrogen based
Borax / NaOH ?
Page 8 www.dualports.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Seaborg-making-nuclear-sustainable.pdf "NaOHmelts at 318 C, boils at around 1400 C" "10 times slowing down power of graphite, about half of water"
Hydrogen based ionic liquid moderator? Did i hear that right?
NaOH that's what they are using www.dualports.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Seaborg-making-nuclear-sustainable.pdf
What liquid moderator? That is the trick, isn't it? Tell us about that.
Molten hydroxides is what they're using.
You need millions of views because a lot of people seems to gave up on nuclear energy nowadays.
Small local MSRs means the loss of control by the rulers of the world, this they will not allow. One of the hidden reasons for bad relations of countries, could be the desire of some countries to move forward with this technology.
Zionism.
someday we will have rulers who actually care, for now we are sheep being ruled by wolves and promoted sheep keep turning into wolves
Look a fellow nerd with Sansa clipped on his collar. I bet he rocks the box!
Item on collar may be wireless microphone.
@@birdwing98
he is using it for recording
17:35
www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Sansa-Player-Discontinued-Manufacturer/dp/B002MAPS6W
Can you use a diamond as a moderator?
Yes
Yeah but it'd still have all the same cracking problems (diamond is very hard but quite brittle), plus good luck building reactor components out of solid diamond. If they have a liquid moderator that is stable in the reactor environment, then good for them.
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
A liquid moderator? It can't be water, another molten salt?
He said ionic liquid hydrogen based
@@leerman22 And I am stumped as to what that could be. An acid? A hydroxide? The boiling points would be far too low, I'd have thought.
A liquid moderator would really be the holy grail for thermal spectrum MSRs. It would amplify the huge negative temperature coefficient of an MSR even further than it already is because the moderator would expand in volume in addition to the fuel salt's expansion when the temperature rises.
@@Mabus16 Heavy water with an insulator between the fuel loop and the calandria. The CANDU calandria system can have the moderator loop sit at about 30-70 degrees Celsius (depends how old the average age of the fuel is) while the primary loop is around 250-320 degrees. www.nuceng.ca/candu/pdf/8%20-%20Nuclear%20Plant%20Systems.pdf (See section 2.3).
But now that Troels said ionic liquid, all bets are off the table. I am guessing LiH-LiCl with a melting point of around 495 degrees Celsius - this would mean that no insulation layer is required between primary loop and calandria, but you would probably still want double-walled piping separating the two. The LiCl series of eutectics isn't unknown within the nuclear field either: LiCl-KCl eutectic systems have been used in the pyroprocessing field experimentally.
www.researchgate.net/publication/263625692_EutecticLiCl-KCl_waste_salt_treatment_by_sequencial_separation_process .
Lithium itself is a decent moderator but the presence of Lithium 6 would cause some neutron absorptions that produce tritium through the Li-6 + n -> Tritium + He process.
beryllium in the salt? flibe salt is " flouride of lithium and beryllium" all you need is a stable neutronic atom to beat around with neutrons without damage or neutron theft, the graphite does the same job, hope that helps, this is the future if they wil let us...
Couldn't we utilize 3d printing into drastically more solid redundancy models. If they can make rocket engines we can do a reactor
Yes indeed. In fact a whole plethora of differing designs, helped by AI. MSRs need to breed like fruit flies. In an ideal world. . . .
Check out "Electron-beam freeform fabrication" ua-cam.com/video/WrWHwHuWrzk/v-deo.html
Great Idea!
I can assure you, offgas from a fissioning full-power MSR will be way nastier than what this sounds like. Unless Seaborg has some trick up their sleeves regarding fissioning fluoride chemistry.
Gavin Ridley Could you elaborate?
Gavin Ridley go to 5:59
Vladi Dlr look at the offgas treatment system for the ORNL MSRE. That was a low power reactor. Go to higher powers, and the salt develops significantly uninvestigated chemistry; like half the periodic table is dissolved in the salt, and a non-negligible amount of these fluoride compounds that develop are volatile.
MSRE had activated carbon filters which did the job apparently pretty well, but some clever thinking will be required for high power LF-MSR.
TheOldGuyPhil “few that come out” yeah, those “few” coming out will kill people if inhaled. BTW, it isn’t just noble gases that come out. ORNL experimental data proves this... For instance, over-oxidized salt releases gaseous uranium hexafluoride...
@@gavinridley5727 MSRE off-gas system was not very big or complicated. It was simple water cooled/shielded, low pressure system with low flow rates. If you need to look at the construction of the charcoal beds check out "ORNL-3708" document.
We have to physically separate noble gases from the salt, they are not highly volatile. ORNL-MSRE used spray separation.
13 minutes in. I disagree with his assessment of using graphite as a solid moderator. Graphite has extremely low thermal expansion. As a comparison, it's less expansive than the nickel alloy containment vessel it's housed in. Adding another liquid moderator is an additional point of failure and level of complexity. The beauty of the MS LFTR is its simplicity and few points of failure. Having to include a layer of separation between two (potential very reactive) moderators adds to the size as well
A possibility that's seriously intriguing me: Could radiogenic lead be used as a neutron moderator for thermal spectrum reactors? Its slowing down power is atrocious, but when you take into account the extremely low absorption cross section and extremely high scattering cross sections, then it actually has a moderating ratio far higher than even graphite. You might need a lot of it, but it's is also an excellent neutron reflector and absorber of gamma radiation. There are multiple materials that are co-compatible with molten salts and lead, and it's very non-reactive, even when compared against the formidable intertness of molten salts.
This presentation is a bit short on detail, so those interested in improving the world should look at more of these Thorium MSR videos.
Germany has really tried to go green with wind and solar, and could not keep up with demand. Energy storage at the terawatthour level has to be considered, and individually owned systems is possible but not realistic.
Germany now uses bad brown coal in massive amounts and other CO2 generating crap. Wishful thinking is not going to work.
Read up on MSRs. This is the lowest cost and cleanest, cheaper than coal. Varoius nuclear fuels can be used and waste processed in-line. With no risk of explosions and meltdowns nuclear is not a risk, global warming and wishful thinking is a much bigger threat.
This is very accurate. Germany has spent over 800billion euro's in rolling out a massive amount of renewables with an effective zero reduction in CO2 Emissions. The only real effect has been to ensure Germany has the 2nd highest energy costs in Europe, at 30.5c/kWh. I admit half of this is taxes. Switzerland decided to focus on improving insulation and has managed to reduce CO2 emissions.
The reason why the CO2 reductions, once you factor in power from Poland, have not gone down is Germany did not decommission any coal plants, apart from a few old one in East Germany. This was replaced by importing lignite fired power from Poland, so there was no saving there.
The reason why they did not decommission their coal fired plants was reliability, Germany cannot afford to have regular brown-outs and more importantly a black out, so even when the renewables are producing lots of power, the coal fired plants are still running. The solution would have been to spend half the money on storing the power renewables produce, but that would have doubled the LCOE cost of renewables.
The best way of reducing CO2 is to set a target and a metric, create rewards and penalties and just let the free market decide what the best solution is. However I must admit Nuclear is probably not going to be solution, as at $95-130/MWh it is very expensive. Even in china nuclear, while an important element of their future plans, will only represent 10% of their power mix. But that does represents a very rapid building program of nuclear power plants, with them building plants in about 42 to 60 months. On the other hand renewables with storage are just as expensive, if not more,so perhaps I am wrong.
@@peterfmodel
The highest cost for high CO2 sources is the damage it makes, and if considered would make it the most expensive.
Fluid Fuel Reactors does not explode nor melt down, Thorium fuel is essentially free, does not generate train loads of ashes, reactors are smaller and can be prefabbed and shipped in, does not require massive forged steel vessels, that can only be produced in a handful locations.
Without considereing the cost of energy storage wind and solar are a delusion.
Maintenance of wind and solar is not risk free nor free and must be considered. The developing world is exploding energy demands and the lowest cost wins. LFTR is the lowest cost energy source and the least risky. Nuclear proliferation is not much of an issue either as the Thorium cycle produces small but nasty hard gamma emitters from U232, which is very hard to separate. (Nuclear weapons does not radiate anything unsafe and detectable to be usable. )
This video is but one example of many Fluid Fuel reactor. Look at the others.
Fear and oil financed propaganda has done great damage to nuclear power. People have more fear of it than knowledge and the nuclear industry is keeping its head down.
The nuclear industry needs a new generation of scientists and engineers to make 4th generation reactors that does not explode or melt down.
1 ..... energy sources 2 ...... fewer children with better care 3 ..... use DNA creatively 4 ..... create many versions of ASI .
13:42 If you partner with China to manufacture the reactor, how do you prevent them from stealing your designs, and going forward without you? Doesn't China have a history of stealing any ideas or designs they want to? Do they respect patents and intellectual property of others?
The R&D reactors at the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics are state of the art. There isn't anyone for them to copy from; they are inventing it.
I can say that both comments are true. As someone who works in china - the new high speed rail, thanks to French technology, but totally built in china with no French involvment. But saying all of that the Chinese have put a lot of effort into nuclear power technology so i suspect the 2nd comment is correct as well. On the other hand the most commonly built new reactors are Westinghouse AP1000. I am not sure when the first commercial Gen IV pebble-bed reactor will becomes operational. It was suppose to be in 2018, but i think that has been delayed to 2019? They are also building a Gen-IV sodium reactor in Fujian, again not sure when that will be completed
He said Troels, I heard Trolls, and said what? Replay, read text, reset brain. Enjoy program.
Then again, he had to bring up APC. A farce propagated globally. It has been measured, and Man caused 0.0004% of that change. Idiots propagate this calamity. CO2 has been 20 times higher and the world was a much better place. Thorium is the most promising potential for Mankind to survive the oncoming winter. A mini Ice age similar to the 1500s. Most will not survive, and 2030 is about the drop dead timeline.
@@bryanst.martin7134 You crazy
Looks Nice …… but distributed MSR are perspectively everywhere. Will it withstand every accident in such a form it is not critical? Assume there are some devices in the German Ar Region. The Flash Flood have a huge Power. Possibility of smashing some of your Device is high. Yes Molten Salt locks the fission products by cooling …… but gives them than away by going in solution. 2.7 kg/m³ at 20°C in case of LiF …… in case of Flood the Fission Products will be still speared like Chernobyl.
Yes your Design is better then the Current …… but sill critical. What you need to Build is something like a "molten rock reactor" …… and than there is still the boring question about how to handle the fission products and keep than away from life for tenthousands of years.
Nice Gordon, but god this tech is taking so long. I know the US is hopeless, but can't see why the rest of the power hungry world isn't going great guns. I look at the time line and wonder do we have that much time before the climate gets us?
5 years. Stockpile what you can now. Food shortages are weeks away. Grow your own food sources. Teach others to do the same. Aquaponics is extremely effective for concentrated area growth. US isn't hopeless. We invented Thorium and Salt reactors a long time ago. We also are plagued with lying backstabbing politicians too! But the Oil, Coal, and Hydroelec Barons are in the way too. Not to mention the new "Brain Child" Solar power! When? Great question. When greed no longer serves them.
IF I had a few millions, I would invest...
Thank you Gordon. I enjoy your work. This fella has such a beautiful voice and he's s thousand times more handsome than kirk!
neither energy nor money is the fundamental resource, it is humanity.
Actually I'm with the presenter on this one - with 'energy to cheap to meter' humanity can do anything - that is what I believe anyway.
@@BMA967 then you do not value yourself or your neighbor.
If Nixon hadn't given in to big business there would be no climate change and the world would have nearly free clean energy with hardly any wast and are children would not have to die.!
Sorry buddy but uranium will not last 10's of thousands of years! Under no scenario do we have that kind of resource base or event the possibility of discovery of that resource base.
Respectfully, you are wrong. We can harvest uranium from seawater at a cost of ~USD300/kg, burned in reactors that can burn close to 100% of their fuel, you can power the entire plant for longer than the surface of the earth can be inhabited by mammals. large.stanford.edu/publications/coal/references/docs/pad11983cohen.pdf
@@lindsaydempsey5683 Which reactors are those? The current PWRs are 5% efficient. LB cooling hasn't shown much promise either. Russians made a couple dozen subs with it, but it really didn't proliferate the Nuke fleet. Thorium is sitting on the ground in huge stockpiles waiting for a purpose.
@@bryanst.martin7134 The best hope is for a branch of the molten salt reactor family that uses chloride salts and is moderator free, the MCFR. They can be made to have an extremely hard (high energy) neutron spectrum which will burn any nuclear heavy metal put into it. For example, U238, U234, U236, Pu238, Pu240, Pu242, Np237, Am241 are all materials that do not burn well in LWR's that are quickly consumed in a MCFR. Moltex, Elysium Industries and TeraPower are all developing MCFR technology. Nothing available commercially yet however.
Sorry guy, the last person we need trying to sell MSR is somebody whose name is 'Trolls' go by your middle name
Who's that tripping over my bridge?
Cost. Fusion in the form of solar is much much cheaper so it doesn't really matter. Nuclear is a religion. Sad that such smart people waste their careers on something that's never going to be anywhere near as cheap as solar thermal or solar PV with battery storage.
Nuclear is significantly cheaper than solar. Nuclear is as cheap as coal right now, and that's power coming overwhelmingly from the pressurized water reactor design, which is arguably the most expensive design possible. MSRs especially on the 100 megawatt-electric scale are the solution to both providing huge amounts of energy to the entire world, AND doing it several times cheaper than the cheapest power production methods today.
I have long thought so too, but you are wrong. Storage is killing (except for hydro which is storage, but where the possibilities are limited, and burning wood which can be even worse than burning coal). Renewables can or will be cost effective as long as you have fossil power plants whose output you can cut into. Once you get to the point where renewables are your main or even a sizeable source of electricity (>~ 30%) , storage is needed. Not only is the storage very expensive, at that point you also regularly have too much energy, and you have a real problem getting rid of it without blowing out your grid. From that point on all your investments in wind and solar have less and less return, as more and more often you produce too much energy which only costs you money, and it gets progressively more difficult to make up for the times you produce less energy than the average you want to achieve. Hence more and more of your investments is sunk in energy storage.
That is not to say that we do not need better batteries (we do), and that technology for grid scale storage with specialised batteries and or pumped hydro is not a good idea (it is even for the current grid), or that cost and efficiency of PV and wind should not be driven down resp up. But Germany is already running into these problems, and they will only get worse, which unfortunately will mean that they won't get rid of coal anytime soon, while shutting down their perfectly adequate nuclear reactors (in case you wonder, I live 25km away from one of the remaining working ones). We will have little choice but to go nuclear, so we better start getting our act together and get the safest, cheapest, longest sustainable form of nuclear with the least problematic waste available.
The same can be said about the solar / wind fan club. Nobody talks about how much CO2 is generated for a windmill base. No one talks about that the diluted nature of renewables require more copper to collect this to the grid than there is in the world, or that the very nature of solar dumping so much power simultaneously onto the grid at the same time driving the wholesale cost to zero, thus getting poor return on investment. The South Australian Tesla battery costs have driven power bills through the roof in that region and it can supply the grid for 4 minutes. I put solar panels on my roof 10 years ago with visions of the future, but the more I learn about its shortfalls, the more I realise that at best renewables an only supplement base power, not be base power. This leaves you with fossil fuel or nuclear for base load. Our choices are indeed very limited and it’s a question of what problems are we willing to live with. Again, nuclear is the devil we will have to live with.
The clean up mess of a nuclear reactor has more expensive the than energy out of it.
This guy is another energy lunatic who wants to poison our environment when nuclear waste we need to stop that now
renewables are all we need
@@cedriceric9730 I wish that were true, however we can and must use more solar wind etc as much as we can of course.
The reactor he's promoting uses waste as fuel. It's the nuclear equivalent of burning trash.
@@electrum5579 he wants to use saltwater reactors which still creates long lived products. Which pollute our environment and destroy all species on Earth! United States has tried salt water reactors before.
No more nuke stuff
Burn nuke waste ? That's bad
Consuming nuke waste is bad? Are you a troll?
@@matthewdick6063 are you a dick
Too expensive, too dangerous, too complicated
Dangerous? Back your claim
@@matthewdick6063 You might ask some Japanese or Russians about it.
@@kathyfausett9301 You are talking about two fundamentally different technologies.
The most significant difference is that the molten salt reactors are able to produce efficient
power outputs from high temperature, low PRESSURE reactors. A molten salt reactor would
leak into a much lighter cheaper containment vessel, whereas a pressurised water reactor
must operate at high pressure to get useful amounts of power output. A 1500 psi leak is a much different
scenario than a 60 PSI leak, even with the huge ,expensive and still barely adequate containment vessel
to control it. There are plenty of other advantages as well, including a fuel , (Thorium) which has a half life
of 14 billion years outside of a reactor. It has to have additional neutrons provided from another source to
maintain a reaction. Dropping the fuel/ heat transfer liquid into storage tanks stops the reaction and decay heat
,which was the cause of the Fukushima explosion, is absorbed by passive air cooling.
@@316tomiller Sounds like a much safer system. Could I put one on my roof?
Salt reactors are still not safe
Troll
There is no such thing as 100% safety, or rarely 100% anything else. We just need to find the best compromises for optimal results.
@@stuarthirsch What are you talking about? Nuke waste can contaminate air water land for billions of years and can distroy your DNA! Nothing on Earth can do that. Nothing!
@@stuarthirsch tell that to these people you fucked over scum bag! See how they feel! ua-cam.com/video/voLggSutwZA/v-deo.html
@@stuarthirsch MSR designs rely on nickel-based alloys to hold the molten salt. Alloys based on nickel and iron are prone to embrittlement under high neutron flux.
Corrosion risk
As a breeder reactor, a modified MSR might be able to produce weapons-grade nuclear material
The MSRE and aircraft nuclear reactors used enrichment levels so high that they approach the levels of nuclear weapons. These levels would be illegal in most modern regulatory regimes for power plants. Some modern designs avoid this issue.
Neutron damage to solid moderator materials can limit the core lifetime of an MSR that uses moderated thermal neutrons. For example, the MSRE was designed so that its graphite moderator sticks had very loose tolerances, so neutron damage could change their size without damage. "Two fluid" MSR designs are unable to use graphite piping because graphite changes size when it is bombarded with neutrons, and graphite pipes would crack and leak. MSR using fast neutrons cannot use graphite anyway to avoid moderation.
High boiling point! Hydrogen products which can Explosion
Solar, wind, geothermal, passive solar, thermal mass, biomass need to be used in conjunction with the elimination of fossil fuel derived plastic packaging, roof shingles, and road tar. When used in-situ these technologies eliminate the need for vast infrastructure that cannot be maintained. The cost of the infrastructure is the highest environmental, and economic cost; while the health of the infrastructure can significantly impact the health of people especially with regards to water distribution. If people used in-situ power that would eliminate 25% of the entire amount of electricity being used; the 25% that is currently wasted through line loss. It would cost a fractional amount to subsidize in-situ solar panels, wind turbines, solar collectors, and financed reconstruction for each citizen compared to the large generation stations and distribution infrastructure. There would be no need to build a mine and dispose of any waste material. The materials used in current technology can be recycled without causing significant impacts to human health. Stone is still the best building material. It may be harder to work with, but it lasts longer and has the best life cycle assessment performance.
WIPP in Nevada leaked plutonium underground and a very large amount is now detectable on the surface. Thermal plastic shifting caused the structure to fail and ruptured the containment barrels; which were always a far cry from the proper, expensive, copper capsules and bentonite backfill that should have been in place. These half measures caused the contamination and thousands of people will now die a horrible death from cancer; no one will take accountability. Allthough, McIntosh Engineering published a paper back in 2007 for a North American consortium comparing all the Deep Geological Nuclear Waste Repository designs in the entire world; including AECL, ONKALO (wrong spelling), WIPP, and even the super deep Russian borehole project. The only reliable long term waste storage solution is the super deep borehole method, and this is extremely expensive and not at all SUSTAINABLE.
PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Why don't you take your own advice?
@@bobthebomb1596
1. I'm right.
2. The world depends on it.
3. I'm not causing cancer.
4. Only rich people stand to benefit from Nuclear power.
5. I'm not afraid to stand up to horrible power hungry people.
6. I was one of the team members who worked on the paper published for the North American consortium. We had access to mining journals that cost $1500/month to subscribe to; aka things not published in the media.
7. My dad has cancer.
8. I studied Civil Environmental Engineering, Structural Engineering, and Civil Engineering Technology in school.
9. I have worked as a property manager and carefully modeled each overhead cost of the property while ensuring a proactive maintenance schedule was in place.
10. I have performed life cycle assessment on a number of water treatment technologies, and using mathematical modelling I was able to confirm my hypothesis.
11. The technologies I want to promote are not a part of the Military Industrial Complex.
... shall I go on?
I certainly won't stop on your accord. You are just a basic narcissist; dime a dozen.
@@brendanwood1540 The internet breeds them. It's interesting that his argument for insitu power is the very argument for MSRs.
@@tonyduncan9852 I won't argue with the logic of in-situ power. I will only argue with the relative sustainability, risk, and potential impacts to human health and the environment. Especially regarding the long term storage of Nuclear Waste.
@@brendanwood1540 Every dictator the world over begins with the words "I'm right".
Crappy presentation for three reasons:
First, Troels Schönfeldt has such a thick Scandi accent that it's almost gibberish, and I'm pretty good with accents. That means a large percentage of his UA-cam audience (who cares about the auditorium) will simply go away in frustration. Get him out of there!!
Second, Schönfeldt presents MSR tech from a typical engineer-centric viewpoint. All his bullet points are technical goodies, but none of them focuses on the nightmare scenarios that the public has learned to associate with nuclear energy.
Example: Around the 9 minute mark, he starts listing some goodies. One of them is the fact that molten salts don't explode and mix with the atmosphere. That's a pretty big point, right? That's Chernobyl he's talking about! Okay, where's the slide of the area of Europe affected by Chernobyl? Nothing.
Third, his presentation drifts away from sustainability to the difficulties his own company is having in developing its own MSR design. Not exactly persuasive, and not exactly on topic!
Please Troels, recognize your own limitations. Hand off presentations to somebody trained in that discipline. You and your crew can sit in the audience ready to help with questions. Find yourself an American college student that understands your technology, knows presentations, and works cheap. They're out there. The goal is to develop a rhetorical approach to MSR tech that is both technically accurate and persuasive. Right now that approach is tragically lame.
any bashing of thorium is about maintaining power of the elite with commodity materials
Yeah, never mind that it will likely cost double or treble what renewables + storage will cost in the future.
@@Kie-7077 Renewables and storage are far more expensive than anything nuclear, today, and with future nuclear power systems being far cheaper that price gap will only increase further in the future.
@@sycodeathman "with future nuclear power systems being far cheaper " Lol, pure fantasy, cost of nuclear is going up, no-one ever talks about the cost of re-processing because it's hideously expensive whilst the cost of renewables continues to plummet and storage hasn't even scratched the surface of what's possible.
@@Kie-7077 Nuclear could go up 10x and still be cheaper than solar is now, we're already approaching the limits of what is possible with renewables (especially wind, which is pretty much as good as it's going to get and it's still terrible). As it stands, you're wrong anyway, because the cost of nuclear has been either stable or declining worldwide. Due to the fact that there are numerous 4th generation reactors with modularity and low cost designs in development there is no reason so think nuclear will do anything other than drop precipitously in price in the very near future.
Finally, only SOLID fuel reprocessing is hideously expensive. Reprocessing of liquid fuel of any kind has essentially zero cost associated with it, as even consumable chemicals using in the process can be recycled using energy produced from the reactor itself. Since in liquid fuels the daughter products are in solution rather than locked inside an extremely non-chemically-reactive ceramic, they are very easily removed using a variety of simple methods, and this process can be done continuously. How do I say all this with confidence? Because at Oak Ridge alongside the molten salt reactor experiment and the molten salt reactor project, there was also a simple chemical processing unit developed which worked totally successfully and was capable of keeping up to the reprocessing needs of an entire gigawatt scale nuclear reactor, and that unit was small enough to fit inside of a modest room and barely required any manpower to run or monitor the system. If we could do it in the 60's we could certainly do the same if not better today.
@@sycodeathman You clearly haven't got a clue what modern solar actually costs because if you did know then you'd know it is cheaper than nuclear large scale.