Is this beginning of a new age of nuclear? Let me know what you think below 👇👇And big thanks to Radiacode for sponsoring today’s episode! Get your own radiation detector and use code here: 103.radiacode.com/DrBenMiles ☢📻 This is genuinely an awesome product - I've be playing with it for a week straight now. Slightly concerned that Gimli, my dog 🐶 is the highest radiation source in my house. What does this mean... Is he ok... Possible super powers in his future...(?) Send help...
No. The reason is simple: To a dictatorship it's easier to lie than to build the sci-fi tech they claim they have. In addition, this is a plan, not a reality today. Get back to this claim in 2025.
As a techy kid in the 1980s talk of Britain leading advanced nuclear power was pushed, molten salt thorium breeder reactors included - then New Labour took over and shut our nuclear power industry. India, Russia and then China bothered to put some effort in, at least.
A cousin who worked at Hanford was arguing for thorium as far back as 1990. He and some colleagues tried to get the companies that ran Hanford to look to the future and invest in development, to no avail. The big problem was that executives were not immune to the scare about nuclear power and the fact that temperatures would rival those of lava made thorium seem more dangerous still,
I really think it is China has 6 times the Genius's of the USA. Their education makes sure they can do math, science and their History more than the USA.
We worked with the Exxon Research people on some of this decades ago. Their estimates indicated that the USA alone had over 10,000Years of available Uranium driven fuels, with Re-Breeding. The French picked up on these studies almost immediately. Thorium reactors were looked at, but the cost ratio was poor with respect to the Uranium cycles, and at that time safety was not seen as a large issue. "Just put them far away" was the prevalent Mantra. After some of these studies, the Thorium cycle was largely abandoned. Now with the pressure to "abandon carbon" this process is showing signs of life, again. I give credit to the Chinese for taking this on. Their population is still growing and they need a cleaner fuel basis than their present coal mining, especially in their smog-laden cities (aka LA,USA). If we do not at least try to copy their efforts, we will soon be buying nuclear re-cycled fuels from them, just like we do from Japan.
so true, we have the means to contain great pressure by just making the material thicker and round. but extreme temperature metallurgy is a whole different beast.
Excuse me, Vikings are busy these days bringing up the genetics of lesser tribes by selecting the finest partners, a little thankfulness is appropriate !
We used to have thorium reactor experiment, it never got funding to upscale it, Norway has lots of thorium, it won’t be bad thing for Norway, if there was demand for it, however it can damage nature, if we dig it out. We already had waterpower, so was not a real national demand for it. there was also question of storing radioactive waste.
@@beelzebobtheinnocent1659 I'm sure everyone is thankful for Norways excellent selection of Nobel Peace Price laureates the last few years🙂 Though, you seems to have reversed the ideas for that from what Alfred Nobel, a Swede, intended. Should we blame that on your diluted Viking genes?
One thing to keep in mind about molt salt reactors and their turbine systems is that molt salt reactors can operator at much higher temperatures. As pointed out in this video, that allows them to not require a high pressure in their reactor vessel and cooling loop. This also has the added benefit of a high thermodynamic efficiency since the delta between the heat source and cooling source is much greater. The higher temperature would also allow a molten salt reactor to operator a air / gas turbine instead of a steam turbine.
I guess that was originally the idea of using this principle as a subsitute for kerosene burning turbines for aircrafts. Just suck in cold air on one end and expulse hot expanded air on the other end for propulsion.. I do not know why it failed..?
The meltdown of a molten salt reactor can be 100% walk-away-safe mitigated and is not a concern at all; the chemistry works out such that as it drains, the salt rapidly cools and stops being able to flow and mix and that stops the fission
Exactly. This has been obvious for decades. But certain parties have kept the focus on uranium. Not to mention the induced hysteria about all things nuclear.
@@Mythhammer I heard the Royal Family of Britain owned the Uranium mines that provided the US. Profit has always been the main concern. And a; "Can't see it from my house." attitude has prevailed.
@@stefanschleps8758Russians own them now in US and CA. Under Obama and his criminals made billion kickbacks off the sales of all US and CA uranium assets to Russia. When Trump announced support for Thorium to counter this, plus taking over the Russian owned mines, did. Or go over well for the Neo-Globalists who profit from Russian ownership.
Starting up a molten salt reactor isn't hard. Making a metal reactor chamber that doesn't corrode away while holding 1200°C salt allowing for a lifespan to be profitable is hard.
Yes, that is the biggest problem with molten salt reactors. Not only do you have hot salts, but also a high neutron flux (that's what makes the reaction). But it's a solvable problem. Ceramics might be the answer, and we've come a long way in ceramics since the 1950's.
Oak ridge said they solved the corrosion issue with Hastalloy-N as this alloy showed no sings of corrosion when examined at the end of the experiment .
@@leekumiega9268 Hastelloy-N is not adequate for the purpose, and is not qualified for nuclear vessel construction. Helium embrittlement (from Nickel decay) and Tellurium contamination remain big issues. Hastelloy-N most certainly showed signs of substantial corrosion and surface cracking after the brief operation of the MSRE, documented extensively by Koger, Litman, and others in an extensive series of articles issued by ORNL. Candidate modified alloys will take many years to develop and qualify. For instance alloy 709 for liquid sodium applications was anticipated in 2018 (Wright and Sham) to take another 13 years to test viability, particularly creep rupture after prolonged irradiation. Actually getting qualification for nuclear vessels will require extensive further work on weld durability. MSRs involving Fluoride have greater difficulties again. This will take a lot longer than most people think.
@@marciacsr Agree. Some of the modern ceramics would make for an excellent reactor chamber, and AFAIK they are highly resistant to neutron effects. Thermal expansion might be an issue, given the complex geometries of the chamber.
Using molten salt has one further advantage. It avoids something that caused a couple of the explosions at Fukushima and may have contributed to the Chernobyl disaster. It has been shown when the zirconium cladding on the fuel rods gets exposed to air, the steam begins to react with the hot metal and the metal oxidizes, releasing hydrogen gas. It is known that at least one of the explosions at Fukushima was a hydrogen, not steam, explosion. If the system does not contain any water, this reaction cannot occur.
The general idea is to keep water out of any nuclear system, because it can cause steam explosions, or worse, hydrogen explosions. This change is one component in the risk reduction with molten salt reactors. The other one, of course, is the elemination of run-away nuclear reactions when the cooling fails. These two things puts them in a an entire different ballpark, safety wise, from our old nuclear reactors, which should be dismantled.
In solid fuel reactors like our entire existing fleet, thorium is a sh--y fuel. It gets much less burnup (energy per ton of fuel) because of parasitic effects in the breeding process. For thorium to be worthwhile, you need to reprocess the fuel. Pretty much nobody does reprocessing, except France in limited capacity. LFTR uses a molten liquid reactor core, so you can reprocess the fuel while the reactor is operating, allowing you to take fission products and other “poisons” out, and to firmly control the enrichment level and available reactivity. This is very hard to do though which is why we don’t have any approved or even ready to license LFTR designs. One thing this video doens't do is go over the cons of thorium reactors. They're insanely expensive upfront, the fuel is super corrosive so pipes need replaced often, and finally, presence of Uranium-232 in irradiated thorium or thorium based fuels result in significant emissions of gamma rays.
@@Zidbits true that video of the thorium in New Jersey, poisoned a huge landmass one of the " Superfund sites " in Maywood, Rochelle park was built on years later and people living in the area all got cancer and just received retribution about 10 years ago ... That's why it got to be in the middle of no where , then nowhere is polluted ... china has plenty of useless land unlike us.
@@larsnystrom6698 That's not how nuclear power works. Reactor coolant (whether it is water, molten salt, etc) interacts with the reactor and moderates the reaction, which then generates lots of heat. That heat is then sent through the coolant loop into a heat exchanger, which then boils water (yes, water) in a separate loop. This boiled water turns to high pressure steam, which then drives a series of turbines, before going through a condenser to be turned back into water. The water is then either discharged harmlessly (There is no radiation, since the heat exchange loop runs separately from the coolant loop and therefore does not directly interact with the reactor or any radioactive materials) or sent back through the heat exchanger where the process repeats. T. Folse Nuclear, a UA-camr who is an experienced and licensed reactor technician, can give a much more detailed and (probably more accurate) breakdown of how the system works, but this is the general gist of it.
in 1918 the US leading scientists predicted we had enough oil for the next million years and more to come. 100 years later and the estimate has been greatly revised.
To be fair, that was 100 years ago when 75% of all the nations on Earth were a part of the 3rd world and hadn't even been industrialized yet. Cars were almost brand new, with Ford "only" having sold 15 million vehicles in a whole decade. Compare that to today when there are 358 million cars in the US and an estimated ~1.5 billion cars worldwide, not to mention motorcycles, boats, ships, yachts, etc. We're pumping a lot more oil nowadays (even out in the ocean which wasn't a thing 100 years ago) and there's no way any prediction 100 years ago could've foreseen how many vehicles, power plants and factories would be powered by oil all over the world in 2024.
Humans are really bad at estimates. We thought we would never run out of IP addresses, and yet we created ipv6 because we needed much more than we anticipated. We also thought 100 MB of RAM was more than enough, but we didn't anticipate Google Chrome hogging up 4 GBs of memory.
Not only is thorium 3-4 times more abundant than uranium, as you said, but over 99% of uranium, U-238 is not fissile (able to be split when hit with a neutron). In order to use it, the mix must be enriched by removing some of the U-238 and leaving a higher percentage of U-235. This is very expensive. In contrast, thorium is 100% usable. A sample is hundreds of times less expensive than uranium. The main drawback to thorium is that a molten salt mixture is corrosive and can eat away at the container it is in.
Neither U238 nor thorium is fissile, both need a breeder reactor to be useful, so they compare well. We have thousands of years worth of U238 already mined and separated ready to be used and no thorium.
@@chapter4travels I was going to say, a U238 reactor should be similar to a thorium 232 reactor. One becomes plutonium (fissile); the other, U233 (fissile).
The theoretical use of Thorium fuel lies above 99% (i.e. > 99% of the fuel is converted into energy), whereas 'traditional' solid (pellet) fuel reactors get to about 0.5% before the pellets are so cracked through byproducts that they need to be removed. I think the solid fuel rods can be reprocessed to get some more energy from them, but that's it then - the result is a lot of long term radioactive waste. That's why Thorium is so interesting: safety and security are simpler, fuel is abundant and used far more efficiently, and the output heat can also be used directly if needed. As temperature self regulation is a default feature of how it works, power generation is also easier as 'load following' is pretty much a default feature.
It's not "the Internet" that thorium MSRs appeal to, it's ordinary people who don't own stock in legacy power companies and don't have a stake in producing weapons grade plutonium.
I don't think ordinary people care about weapons-grade plutonium, at least not in countries such as US and China with nuclear weapons. Ordinary people mainly care about how cheap you can make their electric bill. I came from Shanghai, and even to this day, Shanghainese still limit AC use during the summer due to the cost of electricity.
One additional advantage China has in the pursuit of Thorium power is its widespread deployment of UHV power grids, which enables profitable electricity transmission across far longer distances with lower transmission loss relative to conventional power lines. This enables the PRC to place Thorium power plants in far more remote locations, & take advantage of massive amounts of under-utilized land in its interior. This provides both economic & security benefits.
It is all moot, as any real implementation will be too late. When the _pilot_ projects are small and half a decade out, it is clear nuclear is a distraction. We can't go on behaving like it is 1985. We are on the brink right now, and need a swift transition _today,_ not in 10-20 years. Also look up 'deep warming'. Supplanting coal plants with nuclear plants will continue the heat pollution. Building wind and storage to supply 1 GW will save us 2GW waste heat. That used to be negligible, but in our current crisis it is as good as carbon capture. In other words we get double the bang for the bucks with wind - which is already cheaper. No time to (produce) waste!
@@madshorn5826 china is currently building a lot of renewable energy infrastructure, this thorium reactor is obviously planning way ahead. They went from around 70% fossile fuels in 2016 to close to 50% with plans to go even lower by 2030. It is certainly not enough if the rest of the world doesn't follow suit but it is a great step forward
@@aarvloThe part about china going all in on future green energy is absolutely true, however, they are nowhere near 50% green energy production, unless you count coal as “green” energy that is. They have done a great job thus far, and that’s commendable, but don’t act as if they are doing so out of concern for the environment. If China had large domestic fossil fuel reserves, they’d be using that. Domestic availability of coal is a big reason they use so much coal generation. Well, that and all the coal power plant machinery they’ve been able purchase for next to nothing and import from countries that decommissioned them in favor of natural gas. No, the Chinese government is so interested in getting away from fossil fuels for them same reasons that motivate all governments, power (and not the electrical kind). They see dependence on imported fossil fuels as an impediment to their own power. They’ve cornered the world rare earths processing market, largely by ignoring environmental concerns that drive up costs for rare earth refiners in other countries. In doing so, they have been able to make rare earth processing uneconomical for everyone else. You see, rare earth minerals aren’t rare, like at all. They are actually some of the most abundant minerals out there. It’s just processing the ores that contain them requires massive amounts of highly toxic chemicals. It creates a shit ton of toxic waste/ spoil per unit of actual rare earth mineral. In short, it’s exactly the sort of thing *no* environmentally considerate person/ group/ govt would brag about doing on the cheap. The govt in China sees their current rare earth dominance as a way to control other countries’ access to clean energy. Putting aside the fact that rare earths aren’t like oil so using them for leverage as if they were won’t work, the way China is attempting to use that (perceived) leverage is by threatening to withhold them from countries who refuse to allow them to flood their markets with highly subsidized & therefore cheap green energy related goods. At first, this doesn’t seem sinister at all. Why not let the Chinese government subsidize your green transition? What’s not to like? I’ll tell you. All of these subsidized goods happen to compete directly with products made by the emerging green energy related industries in the countries they’re trying to export them to. Should these countries allow these artificially cheap goods into their markets, it will kill any competing domestic manufacturers. These domestic products are invariably more expensive, largely due to the cost advantages provided to their Chinese competition by subsidies. I say largely, because labor costs are roughly the same now. These green industry jobs often represent an avenue to provide stable, well-paid employment opportunities to a sizable portion of the population who lost the most when companies chose to move their production facilities to China over the last few decades. If they are allowed to go they won’t come back. So there is a lot of popular opposition to throwing that all away in exchange for a few years of cheap (subsidized) goods. It seems short sighted in other ways as well. By destroying these burgeoning industries in countries China relies upon heavily as export markets, China seems to be willing to trade stable long term market opportunity for immediate, short-terms gain. Opposition to China’s strategy is strong from higher ups in industry & government as well. They see China’s decision to produce massive amounts of such products, way more than could be justifiable by forecasted demand in the countries’ markets they hope to export them to. Worse yet, China seems entirely uninterested in supporting the expansion of the domestic service economy that would allow more of its own citizens to purchase all the excess goods they’re producing. This move from an export dominated economy to an economy with a larger emphasis on the domestic service sector is the way every other large economy was able to create a domestic consumer base capable of sustaining economic growth as increasing labor costs continued to make their manufactured goods exports less competitive. By attempting to continue on with manufacturing led growth, Chin’s only option for growing their economy further is taking over what industry is left in the countries it exports to. These countries already moved most of their manufacturing to China. That means those industries China is now competing for are industries those other countries had good economic reasons not to move to China. Should China be allowed to replace those industries with its own, those aforementioned good economic reasons not to move them will come into effect. At first this will destabilize these economies and eventually, it will ensure they become unsustainable. At that point, China will have no one left to export to. That is, if all the social disruption doesn’t lead to a much darker outcome. These countries see this from China together with the subsidies, and to them this looks like textbook dumping. It’s as if the strategy was tailor made to destroy their domestic green manufacturing industries. Green energy is seen among these types as a golden opportunity to rid much of the world of the volatility and conflict that arise when global energy is concentrated in a handful of countries. Large nations each having their own domestic methods to build out renewable infrastructure capable of fulfilling their domestic energy needs gets rid of the political pitfalls of oil. If they were to just sit back and allow China to become the only major producer of green infrastructure, they’d be allowing the same dynamics associated with oil to arise artificially.
All I keep hearing is basically goes like this; China decided 2 months ago to build this amazing nation wide mega project. It's expected to be completed by this time 2 years from now.! Meanwhile for the U.S. it goes something like this; The U.S. had most of the tech to build this 50 years ago, but never did. New projects on very small limited test scale were announced 20 years ago and expected to be completed sometime in about 30 years. Hopefully before the people who work on it die. I am so tired of hearing how China is building mega dams, new rivers, nation wide super high speed rail, and infrastructure and all the U.S. can talk about is how we built the Hover Dam a hundred years ago.
Thorium desalination plant. Seawater is boiled to produce steam. After using the steam to generate power, it gets condensed and harvested as water. The brine gets reused as new material for the molten salt. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
@@jebkermen6087 I don't think there's a source. This seems to be an original idea meant to make the additional output (other than electrical power) of the powerplant useful. And IMO, this idea nails it.
@@julianl.3857 I just think this would make it much more complex having to manage many different liquids in the same assembly. And as was stated the location of the reactor can be far from where saltwater is, and where fresh water needs to be.
This video is somewhat misleading. The Chinese TMSR-LF1 is in fact a *uranium* burner, not a thorium breeder reactor. The primary fissile material is standard Uranium-235, and the plant will burn essentially the same amount of U235 as any other nuclear reactor, it will also require the same amount of mined uranium as a standard reactor. The TMSR-LF1 removes some fertile U238 from the fuel and replaces it with fertile Th232 instead. However, the vast majority of the power still comes from good old fashioned fissile U235. Describing it as a "thorium reactor" is like describing a standard gasoline engine running on E5 (5% ethanol, 95% gasoline) as an "ethanol engine". It is, however, a molten salt reactor - which is a lot more interesting.
Well he got the clicks so why mention it in a 20 minute video. Btw. after "It´s happening - China launches.." and the footnote "planned for 2029" I already knew where this was going.
@@levelazn It's documented in the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) presentations on the design. UA-cam doesn't usually allow posting links (such posts get auto-deleted), but if you look on Wikipedia for TMSR-LF1 you can find the details. The documentation describes the "U-235 enrichment" as 19.75% which is High Assay Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU) fuel. This is a well known path taken by others, for example ThorCon. Uranium ore is around 0.72% U-235. For normal LEU fuel this is then enriched to roughly 5% U-235, 95% U-238 which is done by removing some U-238. If instead you enrich this further to around 20% U-235, 80% U-238 then you have HALEU fuel. You can then take this HALEU fuel and then blend it down 1 part HALEU with 4 parts Th-232 and you get a final composition of 5% U-235, 20% U-238, 75% Th-232. This requires the same amount of uranium ore as LEU fuel (it has the same U-235 content). However, it replaces some of the fertile U-238 with fertile Th-232. In a conventional reactor roughly 75% of the power comes from direct U-235 fission, and that will be the case with the TMSR-LF1 as well; the thorium is going to be contributing around 20% of the final power output. This is an interesting design, and is certainly worth exploring. However, it is certainly not a "thorium breeder" converting pure Th-232 into U-233. Which is what everyone assumes when someone says a "thorium reactor".
Yes, this is the case because it will take about 25 years to build up the necessary fuel for the Th-232/U-233 cycle to become self-sufficient and no longer require U-235 for thermal fissioning. The important point here is that China has begun this process and has a clear path toward the most competitive base load energy source in the world, today. As a result, Its AI program will benefit from this long term strategy.
The one reason, why the Thorium path was never followed through is that the funding was mainly provided by military budgets. And they all wanted Plutonium and Uranium by-products to produce nuclear weapons. This kind of spending power was never made available to people who talk such nonsense as peaceful use for all of man-kind. On top of that, whereas thorium is globally abundant, uranium is concentrated in certain areas and made Russia and the U.S. monopolies of the nuclear industry - further strengthening the uranium industry of thorium competition. And here we are.
You should give props to Kirk Sorenson who literally saved the files of the ORNL MSR as it was on the way to the shredder, published it online which was ignored by congress but picked up by chinese academics. Probably single handedly changed the course of Thorium reactors in human history.
Kirk Sorenson is claiming credit for something he did not do. ORNL never hid or deleted any of the files. They have always been available. A number of other countries looked at the files related to the 2 test MSRs the USA built, and decided that there were far to many problems to tackle at the time and moved onto the half a dozen or so other reactor designs. He just likes to claim a lot of things which are not new and have been known since the mid 1940's in many cases.
I would also like to point out that Kirk Sorenson also does not freely discuss why thorium never took off as a nuclear fuel even though the USA spent the equivelent of likely about $50 Billion trying to develop it in the 1960's and 1970's. Biggest reason: forget the cost of the ore being used. It cost a lot more to extract thorium and convert it into a usable form for nuclear fuel than it cost to extract uranium and convert it into a usable nuclear fuel. The cost difference was very large (and I have seen nothing to indicate that has changed today). 2nd issue. Thorium ore typically contains up to 7 different isotopes of thorium. One of those is large enough and gets converted to U232 to create a real problem. U232 is a very energetic and hard gamma radiation emitter. It makes handling the waste fuel more difficult and makes reprocessing the fuel to extract uranium and reuse of the uranium very costly. For U235 and Pu239 reprocessing the resultant product can be handled with just light plastic or rubber gloves safely from a radiation standpoint. For reprocessed uranium from thorium with the U232 you need to be behind lead shielding (or very thick leaded glass) and would typically work with 18" long tongs. Huge difference, which only adds to the cost of using thorium fuel. I wonder does Kirk S talk about the 5 commercial power plants built to run on a thorium fuel cycle - and what lessons we learned from them. Look for a long post I did under the Dr. Ben Miles pinned post on that history. There is noting new about thorium - and there are very real reasons why no nation has developed power plants beyond the first 5 that were built.
Not mentioned in this video: the primary reason the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment was ultimately considered to have "failed", was that the flouride salt used was damaging the Hastelloy piping at a much faster rate than anticipated. It is well known that neutron bombardment causes embrittlement of most steel alloys, specifically, it increases the nil-ductility transition temperature of the steel, but in the case of the MSRE, the hot flouride salt was not only chemically attacking the pipes and valves, it was also reducing the ductility, a dangerous condition because embrittlement can result in catastrophic failure of a pipe from even a minor impact or vibration stress, for example, if a high-speed gate valve is triggered to slam closed in some type of shutdown emergency. The salt damage to the piping was so widespread, that the engineers determined that the entire piping system needed to be replaced after only 5 years; this would be completely unacceptable in a commercial power plant. I wonder how the Chinese have solved this problem in their molten-salt reactor? At the time that the MSRE was built in the 1960's, Hastelloy was the most corrosion-resistant alloy known, maybe the Chinese engineers have come up with something better?
> The salt damage to the [MSRE's] piping was so widespread, that the engineers determined that the entire piping system needed to be replaced after only 5 years I would be interested in your citation. > [the MSRE considered to have failed] was that the flouride salt used was damaging the Hastelloy piping at a much faster rate than anticipated. What I have read is that tellurium was precipitating out of the salt, attacking the piping. This could be fixed by changing the redox potential of the salt (kind of like pH in water) by modifying the salt. > [5 years & faster rate of damage to piping] completely unacceptable in a commercial power plant The Canadian startup Terrestrial Energy suggests their plant can be economical even with the reactor being replaced every 7 years.
@@laura-ann.0726 They are not using the same alloy. I understand they have gone for higher nickel content amongst other variations. Overall the problem seems manageable because the chinese have now moved on from the experimental plant and have approved an engineering prototype.
Oak Ridge National Lab had a Thorium reactor working for over 5 years without any issue. There are many reasons speculated on why it didnt become used. I tend to believe it due to taking longer to make into fuel for nukes, which where very popular at that time and radiation wasn't fully understood or at least it wasnt understood on its effects on the environment. Remember, at one time the US Gov wanted to use nukes to make lakes and reservoirs. So Thorium got kicked to the side and was generally mostly forgotten about in terms of being a viable fuel.
@AtomicOverdrive: The main reason the U.S. went away from Thorium was POLITICAL !!!! I am talking about politics within the U.S.A. Bunch of folks with their hands on the gavel making decisions based on what would benefit their state the most. Think California for instance. They (WE) could have kept the weapon production separate from the power generation project and gone with Thorium. Corruption. Short-term gratification. BS BS BS. Need to keep educating everyone why NUCLEAR is our answer. Turning off the power supply is quick education.
The MSRE at Oak Ridge was not without problems. An it was never using thorium - though still one of the very few to actually use U233. After the active use phase they found corrosion damage that would have forced an end to the experiment anyway. In the aftermath, well after shut down they run into a bigger issue from the cold fuel salt decomposing and moving some 2.5 kg of U233 to a charcoal filter. This was relatively close to a real desaster. The did relatively little (and what was tested largely failed) to the difficult part of the Thorium cycle, which is the chemical separation / reprocessing. The theoretical design work on a real breeder came to the conclusion that it would be very difficult and not working as initial thought. Not producing weapons grade matirial was definitely not the issue - more off the opposite: there is some extra proliferation risc with the Thorium cycle as it requires a lot of chemical handling of used fuel. They even produces some weapons grade plutonium in the MSRE and only diluted it with reactor grade Pu to avoid the complications with the waste fuel.
When man first encountered fire, it was likely poorly controlled and led to disasters. But now we heat our homes with it, heat our water with it, cook with it. It does humanity no good to simply react to this energy source with superstition.
Thorium requires more neutron bombardments to become a long-lived trans-uranic (heavier than uranium) isotope. A molten salt reactor can continuously filter out the protactinium and uranium before the fuel receives sufficient neutrons to become a trans-uranic. For this reason, a molten salt reactor running on thorium can theoretically avoid the vast majority of long-lived isotopes. Even better, using long-lived trans-uranic isotopes is also possible, as in neutron flux these will eventually split. All these elements are either fertile (being able to receive neutrons to become fissile) or fissile. This means a molten salt reactor could also theoretically burn up 100% of the long-lived nuclear waste. This would result in highly radioactive, short-lived nuclear waste. Solid reactors don't do this because of gaseous fission products destroying the solid fuel elements. Thought this was an important point to share, which the video glossed over.
And how exactly does one continuously filter out these elements from hot, molten salt mixture? You do know almost complete burn-up of fission products is possible with uranium fission reactors, too? Uranium cycle has been closed years ago.
Yup - one of the "Yes but" issues constantly being raised by naysayers is the issues of fission product sequestering/disposal and it blows their tiny little minds that the stock answer is "leave it in the loop to be broken down to safer products" Likewise, there's this mindset that the filtering system would need to process the entire loop every time it passes through the reactor. No amount of explaining that a 1GWe reactor would need to process 5-10kg of salt/day (and only start doing so after 15 years of operation) seems to penetrate people's skulls
@@lajoswinkler Yes, it's possible to burn up fission products with a molten salt uranium reactor. In fact the thorium reactor made by copenhagen atomics can run also on just nuclear waste, using uranium and plutonium to start up. Best case, expand the fuel supply by transmuting thorium. It's one option, among many, due to their exceptional neutron economy due to their use of heavy water. BUT a conventional solid fuel uranium reactor cannot have 1000% fuel burn up, due to cracking of the solid fuel elements due to buildup of gasesous fission products.
As you pointed out, the US had thorium reactors running since the 1950's. The US gov't shifted away from thorium due to the ability of uranium reactors producing plutonium, which was in dire need during the cold war. IMHO, this tech needs to be revisited for the specific purpose of producing base load power, and not just power as available upon the prevailing skies, and currently available energy storage techniques.
The obviously best and most efficient energy systems, from a chemical standpoint, are some kinds of "Binary Batteries" or even "Multiple-Chemistry" batteries. My son is working on these now. If you look at ordinary chemical-couples for energy density (or power density), only Nuclear has a better ratio, especially with re-breeding and the useage of the Waste products for heat and medical isotope production, and similar uses.
No. The US had two experimental reactors running IN the fifites - each for two and three years. Both got shut down rather fast because the corrosion issues wer not controllable. And - the conspiratorially inclined like to believe - because the thorium smrs dont produce bomb-viable plutonium. Claiming they run "since" the fifties is an outright untruth. They where scientific experiments that got discontiued. No more no less. Maybe modern tech will make the system more stable, maybe it will turn out to even be financially viable with LCOE - but both are big ifs.
Not "since". Not even close. The US had two experimental reactors _during_ the fifties. 🤣 One of which was shut down after one, the other after three years. Because both never managed to control corrosion issues caused by the caustic magma-like liquid salt. Since then, nobody touched the tech for half a century. A current japanese experimental setup (2019 I blieve) ran into very similar trouble. And the youngest chinese experiment activated 1,5 years ago is subject to a complete information blackout and is rumored to have been troubleshooting idle for most of the time. So no, the US did not have "reactors running since the 50". That is simply not factual. One could accuse you of blatant untruth. It is still an experimental tech. And even if smart engineers solve all that is needed for industrial application? We have no clue if it will ever become financially viable by LCOE pricing. Something worked in a lab for a few intermittent months half a century ago? Does not a functional, competitive industry make.
Not "since". "During" would be the correct choice of words. 🤣 The US indee had two experimental reactors in the fifties. One ran intermittently for one year, the other for three. Both where shut down quickly, since the team could not find ways to manage the corrosion caused by the magma-like liquid salt. Then - for half a century - nobody touched the tech again. In 2018 the japanese built another experiment - and ran into the same troubles. That experiment too was shut down fast. And now the chinese have another experimental reactor. Has been announced 1,5 years ago and instantly was put under information blackout - but rumored to constantly fall idle for troubleshooting. So no, the US did not have "reactors running since the 50s" - thats a completely counterfactual fabrication. This is very much still an experimental tech, never used for energy production or extended run times or at scales beyond lab work. And if smart engineers manage to iron out all kinks for industrial application? We still have no idea if it will ever be financially competitive by LCOE pricing. If china really plans to build an industrial exploration installation in the next few years? If they solved the many problems? That would be a big step. But a far cry from a running, competitive industry, even then.
@13:16 I remember watching a documentary some years ago where the oak ridge scientist, old and dying and very frustrated that nobody cared about their decades old research, just gave it for free to chinese scientists. And then the media in the US started to pay attention to them, in a negative way of course. Was such a shame that their work was forgotten all this time. Also I do remember reading about some experimental thorium rector in Norway.
Kirk Sorenson is claiming credit for something he did not do. ORNL never hid or deleted any of the files. They have always been available. A number of other countries looked at the files related to the 2 test MSRs the USA built, and decided that there were far to many problems to tackle at the time and moved onto the half a dozen or so other reactor designs. He just likes to claim a lot of things which are not new and have been known since the mid 1940's in many cases. He have anything to give away for 'free'.
@@coreblaster6809 That's exactly why TMSR-LF1 was built, although the Chinese did actually start at the point that ORNL stopped, by loading the reactor with 50kg of thorium. MSRE was supposed to be tested on thorium in 1970 but it was killed by politics and made illegal by Richard Nixon in 1972 Why was MSRE killed? SImple: The design would have permanently divorced civil niclear power from its critical dependency on the byproducts of weaponsmaking processes (don't need enriched uranium, unenriched or thorium work fine instead) and as such, the separation facilities in tennessee would have become subject to nuclear weapons limitation treaties For every 1kg of 5% U235 produced, an "enrichment plant" produces 9kg of depleted uranium suitable for conversion into weapons plutonium. That's WHY the USA is so hot under the collar about the Iranian centrifuges. They talk about "enriched uranium" making bombs but at a cost of $2billion in materials for such a weapon nobody would ever bother (it's cheaper to buy your enemy) and the REAL thing they avoid talking about is where all that depleted uranium has gone and what it's used for
I saw this article in Business Insider. Molten-salt reactors were first built in the 1950s but haven't been used in the US since the 1970s. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently issued a permit to build a molten-salt nuclear plant. Kairos Power is heading the project, which it hopes to finish by 2027.
Am so happy that we finally did it. When I was in my early teens (circa 2004) my dream was to develop a thorium reactor. When time came to choose between Engineering degree, I chose computer engineering 'causs it was guaranteeing a job in India. ( to be honest I do not think I would be good enough to crack the exams in our atomic research center) I saw policies regarding Nuclear power in multiple countries and thought may be no one is going to build a thorium one in the end. I know India has border skirmishes with China and we do not share a close ally relationship with China. I am still happy with their achievement. I feel proud as we ( as a species) finally did it.
Hello there! I like your generous attitude. I have paid attention to several claims of thorium reactors about to enter into successful production in India over the years, but sadly nothing useful seems to have eventuated. I am now very hesitant to get beyond an attitude of 'I'll believe it when I see it' regarding the Chinese claims. That said, both China and India seem to be doing the right kind of research, so that like you, I hope that one day soon we can genuinely succeed (as a species). Warm wishes to you.
@@TykeMison_ We as Human. Think beyond you and me. Americans landed on the moon but people all over the world says human reached space and landed on the moon. They have or haven't, only time will tell. As a early teen I was studying radioactivity and following nuclear research development in our country. I could not crack NEST to enter NISER ( They took 40 people from 40k applicants). I decided to study physics in my bachelors and try again but then changed my mind to CS Engineering to guarantee a job. I was passionate about nuclear power in my teens and not that much interested in solar. I do not know which country you are from or your nuclear policy, in India its all about politics and till date we could not move forward just because of politics ( both national and international pressure from The West: the so called developed countries). Whatever we have achieved after minimal support ( compared to western nations) it is phenomenal but its a long way to go.
Fun fact: When there was a race for approval by Nixon for moving to nuclear plants, a molten salt/ Thorium reactor was built however it had a "melt down" not long before the approval process. Naturally they have melt downs which are safe but because of this failure was not chosen by Nixon. Also it should be mentioned Thorium reactors can use Uranium reactor waste as well and can in some cases reuse it's own waste by cycling it back in. They are also scalable to be used more locally, even at the household level. The downside is they are highly caustic from the salt so the parts have a short lifespan.
china will find a way. they always do unlike usa's bickering over every matter. the government in china literally mandates the entire country and all its resources to find a way to make the impossible possible lmao
capitalism is a tool of china. while in usa usa is a tool of capitalism. sigh thats why real progress is no longer possible in usa anymore. trump wants us to go back to oil.....
The problem I have with all this thorium hype is that it unnecessarily demonizes uranium, which is providing 10% of the world's electricity without harming the climate. You can make uranium light water reactors practically meltdown-proof as well, by having a natural circulation based passive cooling system. And you can recycle any nuclear waste and put the plutonium especially back into a light water reactor, France does this. Or you can use any kind of breeder reactor, whether molten salt, sodium cooled metallic fuel or even some hypothetical water-based breeder reactors. Or gas cooled, or whatever.
Germany had a thorium cycle high temperature reactor synced with the grid in 1985 and AKAIK it wasn't the first thorium reactor. Liquid salt is a first though.
S2G was the initial power plant of USS Seawolf (SSN-575). This was one of three sodium cooled reactors (the core was moderated) ordered for the Seawolf program at the same time as three PWR units were ordered to support the USS Nautilus (SSN-571) program; In each case, one reactor was land-based for training and research, one intended for installation on a submarine, and one spare. The land-based unit corresponding to S2G was S1G reactor. The reactor core was beryllium-moderated.[1][2] Persistent superheater problems on Seawolf caused the superheaters to be bypassed, resulting in mediocre performance. This and concern for the dangers posed by liquid sodium coolant led to the PWR type being selected instead as the standard US naval reactor type, and the S2G on Seawolf was replaced by the spare S2Wa reactor from the Nautilus program. The Atomic Energy Commission historians' account of the naval sodium-cooled reactor experience was: Although makeshift repairs permitted the Seawolf to complete her initial sea trials on reduced power in February 1957, Rickover had already decided to abandon the sodium-cooled reactor. Early in November 1956, he informed the Commission that he would take steps toward replacing the reactor in the Seawolf with a water-cooled plant similar to that in the Nautilus. The leaks in the Seawolf steam plant were an important factor in the decision but even more persuasive were the inherent limitations in sodium-cooled systems. In Rickover's words they were "expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair."[3
I’m surprised you didn’t mention Kirk Sorensen and his company Flibe Energy in Huntsville, Alabama. Kirk is the one who rediscovered Alan Weinberg’s MSRE work at ORNL in the early 2000’s and started posting videos and speaking about this lost technology.
There was a group of Turkish nuclear scientists, that were strongly advocating for Thorium reactors. Their plane crashed under suspicious circumstances while going to a conference.
@antiochianius Rosatom screwing up everything as usual? Maybe it's a good thing if Turkiye is going to improve their PR to the Western world so the Russians can't secretly kill your thorium scientists. I knew you are doing interesting stuff with geothermal energy and apparantly with thorium as well.
It is definitely a win. Anyone disagreeing with Nuclear simply does not know nuclear. It is literally that simple. Learn everything about nuclear, all it's history and it's reactor types, and you've now learned the best way forward for a world that's conquered completely clean energy forever.
That's only true from a certain perspective. You have to ignore the many risks and cut corners that lead to serious concerns. It matters entirely what kind of nuclear you're designing and what safety you plan into the system. The sheer number of plants that create waste that requires constant energy to keep cool was quite reckless
there is one problem which I haven't heard or know a solution for so far yet which people against nuclear power bring up: the last 1% of nuclear waste, also known as the highly-radioactive and long-term nuclear waste so far all we do with it putting it in short-term storage, to later put it into another short-term storage, until at some point in the future we may actually figure out what to actually do with it long term but just so you know: the barrier of "solved" is that future generations can potentially forget about its existence and it wouldn't be a problem for them
no it isnt. Basicaly, western world made everything to delete idea, in 15 years we achieved nothing. Only China invested milions and is actually running first and only thorium molten reactor on this world.
Copenhagen Atomics have developed a molten salt reactor that they are able to build them in 40” container size, in a factory and then assemble on site. They are intending to have the first working plant in 2026. Not sure how much they have progressed since I first heard of them a year ago, but it would be interesting to know more. I think there are some interesting youtube videos from them too.
They have several test reactors built, but cannot do criticality tests in Denmark. So they do that in Switzerland with the Paul Scherrer Institute, and that is a first in Europe! So real progress is being made
@@larsnystrom6698 True, but in exchange for better neutron economy. I believe the heavy water moderater can be flushed in 2 sek. so while you might have some steam building up in case of a leak, it will be limited.
The Brayton cycle, operating with helium gas can operate at 60% thermal efficiency as opposed to the traditional Rankine (steam) cycle, with a thermal efficiency of about 40% ! The heat exchanger can be cooled with helium directly without becoming radioactive.
I've been a fan of Thorium fueled reactors since the process was written about in the New Scientist in around the seventies or eighties. My only puzzles are why it's taken so long, and why the West left it to the Chinese to kick off ...
The US has plenty of uranium 238 so can ponder breeder-reactors going to plutonium rather than thorium going to U233. Also, the US was concentrating on bombs, for which plutonium and U235 work well. Thorium is less useful to the military.
Politics. The U.S. Navy v. the U.S. Air Force (the new kid on the block). The light water reactors generating gigawatts of electricity around the world are based on the design chosen by the navy, and therefore favored by those who wrote the opinions that caused Congress to cancel the Thorium breeder in favor of the light water breeder that ultimately failed. GE, Westinghouse, and Bechtel all make their money refueling LW reactors and therefore have no interest in Thorium - which can easily be had by processing mine tailings (terracons, in Ukraine).
Us nuclear board wanted regular nuclear plants so they could use the waste for nuclear weapons. That was the sole reason the US government killed thorium reactors. The original research scientist wrote about this.
A friend has just made a proof of concept two chamber bubble scrubber adding some ultrasonic cleaner and fogger units and a centrifuge stage wirh some cooling so he can smoke a joint without getting busted but he thinks might might scale to actually clean coal power enough that it might allow for the environmentally safe use of coal generation and the quality of life it brings.
I wrote a paper in university about the history of steam power. I had a few people proof read my paper and they were blown away that most of our energy is still produced using steam turbines
Technically speaking... The fuel is in a liquid form, so these molten salt reactors are in a perpetual meltdown. Should the fuel get much hotter, the liquid salt will expand, which would reduce the amount of fission events. It looses critical mass... And the chain reaction stops.
You say “molten salts are corrosive”… this is not quite true. Molten salts are very hygroscopic (they absorb water) and the wet/damp molten salt is highly corrosive. The problem is keeping the highly radioactive molten salt dry. Keep up the good work!
Well, no. In high temperatures required to melt salts (and especially inside of the nuclear reactor, which generates a lot of heat) salts undergo partial dissociation. Because those are typically fluoride salts - you end up with fluoride ion, which does not care about exchanging its electron with anything around. It may happily bind back to some thorium, but anything other will be a good match in this nuclear tinder. Any electrical field gradient will speed up the process. This is not a new discovery - this dates back to the original process of sodium production from molten salt.
"good work" lmao, first minute of the video he said "cant be weaponized" which is 1000% wrong. Thats the whole deal with molten salt reactors. they can easily be used for plutonium production as a breeding reactor. so bad and dangerous information
I thought the beauty of a molten salt reactor was that it operates at atmospheric pressure, any water should boil off and be drained. Why not use lead coolant?
@@tobyw9573 pure lead is refuelling nightmare. You can add bismuth to form lead-bismuth eutectic, but activated bismuth results in polonium everywhere, so it is even worse. Alkali metals are liquid at the room temperature, but they need to be kept away from anything they can steal oxygen from
Keeping salt at 800 °C dry is automatically the case. It would be hard to add water to something at 800 °C, regardless of how hygroscopic it might be at room temperature.
One of the best descriptions and application of the Thorium Reactor and possible commercial usage of the Salt Reactor set up. Excellent Job, Dr. Miles.
Yeah, I don't wouldn't trust that stuff with ten feet pole. China did take time to validate all that unpleasant material stuff, corrosion, stability at 1200°C, significant budget, hundreds of PhDs a and over a decade of research. Copenhagen Atomics look to be founded in 2014, revenue of ~ $7 Million (I have seen an announcement about $25 mil funding round). From money alone, it's obvious it's not a serious effort (in sense of resources invested, I am sure people are very dedicated and serious). Making a shifty reactor is a recipe for disaster. E.g. PM-3A (one for McMurdo station) had 438 malfunctions during its operational lifetime (1964 to 1972).
Was about to write that as well - they have working molten salt reactors up and running, but with electricity as heating source (because Denmark!) - they are going to test with fissile material in Switzerland.
Thorium reactor design is much more difficult then uranium 235 based reactors because of the neutron economy, that being said it is possible and you can make it easier if you can use some of the spent fuel from light water reactors to jump start a thorium MSR, but its almost impossible to get permission to do anything like that.
We haven't had it for 70 years! There's a difference between knowing the principles, and even building a prototype, and actually work out the details and mass manufacturing of it. That's why it may take a decade to work it all out! We "have it" when there's a factory for building them!
@@larsnystrom6698 we have had this tech since the 50's, the reason they don't use them here in the states is because of our war machine that dictates our every move.
@@mikek5298 Did you just wake up or what? Vietnam, Korea, laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Bananarepublics in Latin America; Nicaragua, Argentinia, Bolivia, Honduras. Bombed half the Middle East into ruins too, Iraq, Afhanistan, Syria, Palestina. Killing in the name of.
The breeding process of Thorium is EXACTLY what the Germans were doing in WW2 with the Die Glocke or Bell. It was a particle accelerator that would breed thorium into nuclear material.
That is why this is a 2MWthermal test reactor. Oak Ridge was a 10MWthermal test reactor. Multiple countries have spent the last 15+ years researching possible super-alloys that would be much more corrosion and radiation resistant than the alloys the USA used in the 1st 2 MSR test reactors. I've actually read some of the papers. No one yet has identified a corrosion/radiation resistant alloy. But they have identified ones that have very slow corrosion/degradation rates. At the same time the concept that we can filter out the worst of the corrosive compounds from the MSR stream has developed - and laboratory testing with partial simulated fluids have indicated the possibility. The very purpose of this test reactor is to see if the combination of their "best guess" of a new super-alloy and their "best guess" for a filtration system will reduce the corrosion/degradation rate to a level where you could desing a reactor with a 40+ year operating life by just using a modest "corrosion allowance" typical for what is commonly done when using carbon steel alloys. Time will tell. My personal guess is that the alloy will likely work well enough (and I am sure that there are corrosion coupons of the other alloys in the reactor); but that they may have to redesign the filtration system a few times to get it to where it works well enough in both filtration and reliablity.
"LFTR"s, pronounced "Lifter" ain't new. America ran one for nearly four years in the 1960s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Much safer and an all round better idea. There is 13 times as much energy in coal in the form of Thorium as there is available by burning the coal. So, another point in favor. The Germans figured out how to turn coal into synfuel - gasoline and diesel - before WWII. We don't and never did have an energy problem. We have 'who makes the damn decisions' problem, and it's acute, verging on terminal at this point.
A high level LFTR design may have existed, but I don't believe the design element were ever integrated together or fully fleshed out. The Molten salt reactor experiment showcased an iterative approach of shutdowns and alterations to prove their concepts, but the LFTR design requires an in-line fuel/salt processing step which would have never been assembled together with their test reactor.
No. Copenhagen Atomic is a scam company generating income and jobs for the key founders with no real plans to build any operational nuclear power plant. I've looked at their concepts and ideas and they have not even done the most basic research into nuclear standards and requirements. There's at least a dozen other similar investor scam companies in the nuclear world. Key thing to look at is who is actually working with a nuclear regulator as part of a "pre-licensing process." There are actually companies doing that.
Yeah, plans for modular mass production and everything. Very promising, but lets see them pull it off and get across regulatory barriers. In the eyes of the public and the law it's still "nuclear".
Please tell me which nuclear regulator they are working with - which "pre-licensing process" they are working through. All the serious companies are doing that. I have not been able to find any reference that Copenhagen has done any of that.
as a fan of nuclear power sourcing, listening to the news about nuclear thorium molten salt reactors sounds like music to my ears. Thorium has become my favorite element in the periodic table years ago bacause of the posibility of building incredibly efficient and safe reactors, plus it has a cool name
There is also a very interesting company Copenhagen Atomics which want to mass manufacture thorium reactors as a service. I think Thorium is the way to go for the future. It is just taking too long to get something in production whereas we’re already researching it for more than 70 years.
At 9:04 this reddish brown phosphate mineral is called Monazite, not Monzanite! I think you confused it with Monzonite which is an igneous intrusive rock Dr. Miles. Awesome content nevertheless.
Information, well presented, is more valuable than gold, and your presentations are ticking the boxes in this department. Thanks for focusing on the practicality of the subjects you cover.
The raw mineral form of Thorium, is worth about $5 a kilogram, unprocessed. Processed, similar to Gold. How do you measure a video, by isotropic/radioactive beta decay?
Imagine finding that your country already has enough resources to provide power for the foreseeable future. Of course you would look for ways to utilize this wherever possible, and increase your ability to manage it.
did a quick google about the abundance of Thorium , and found the top 4 (in order) is India, Brasil, Australia, and US, so if China (number 11 on the scale) has 100,000 years of reserves, at least it will not have the Monopoly, and we can all learn from each other , to succeed in energy production. It would , however hurt our government here in Australia, for they have become far too used to having China pay for our coal exports.
Nice to see a youtuber who actually understands what's going on! I've seen many talking about technical subjects but you get the feeling they're just repeating what they've read without fully understanding it...
Most of UA-cam for years has simply been producers/hosts making a story out of an article/existing documentary & literally just reading off a script in which they had little input/orignal thoughts that isn't a random hot take.
@@Dontwanttoliveanymore is life really that bad? If you don't wanna live why not put some effort into changing things? Start off small, baby steps, before you know it you could of completely turned things around, I believe in you, cmon, get off your backside, stop feeling sorry for yourself and put some action into it 😃
There is absolutely no scenario where our societies run for 20 000 years on cleaner energy sources, while still being locked in consumption societies that are overwhelmed by their own waste: with heavy metals pollution, plastic pollution, PFAS, pesticides, soil erosion, biodiversity destruction, water depletion, ecological collapse is all but guaranteed, no matter how little co2 per kwh you emit at the power plant level.
Indeed ! The key point, too many people with too many needs, mostly fake and still growing ! CO2 may be the smallest problem compared to what you listed ! Demography in population unable to even feed themselves is the biggest threat !
It was am example of why it would be lucrative to them, energy independence is the holy grail of defense. Of course it wouldn't just lock all other technology in a standstill for 20 thousand years
As an Enigneer I can tell reducing the pressure in the pipes will reducing the efficacy. Increased pressure will also increase the volume expansion and with that the kinetic energy in the turbine. Increasing the liquids pressure doesn’t need a lot of volumetric work but with gas its different. Just think about putting pressure in a bike wheels and now image adding pressure to a bike wheel filled with water. Pumping air takes like 20 pumps but increasing the pressure of the tire filled by water you will only with big push. Dealing with pressures is no a problem in modern days anymore
In Europe, Naarea and Thorizon are working together to create the first modular molten salt reactor that could run on multiple fissile fuel sources, including Th. The first MSR to be built will be an 80 MW facility to go online in 2030. There are already plans to upscale this to commercial energy producers with a 250 MW version by 2035. The fuel used will come from existing spent fuel in France and Th mined in Sweden, Finland and Norway will be used as well. The advantage these modular reactors have is they can be built onsite for commercial consumption, requiring no power distribution infrastructure to be added. They can also be used as thermal batteries, storing excess power generated from green sources to be released during peak demand.
@@dan-bz7dz You are 100% correct. That's the power you have in a dictatorship that is focused on energy and weapons. Xi will probably become the single most influential person in the world in the 21st century.
@@millanferende6723 If this were an unproven technology, that could be a concern, but this is 1950s tech being upgraded. Today the LCOE of MSRs is 9% less than that of coal fired plants. When government subsidies for fossil fuels are shifted to green energy, that will be a 200% saving, not increase.
12:26 is exactly why thorium hasn't taken off until now. I knew it would be the military industrial complex, contractors, and government before anything was even said. It's like the Harry Potter meme, it's always you three.
How corrosive is the salt when it's molten? I imagine a molten salt could react with or maybe dissolve certain metals. Do the pipes need both corrosion resistance and high temp tolerance? Or just high temp tolerance?
I 100 percent support the building of this experimental reactor. And the location. With the continued use of coal burning power plants in China not expected to end any time soon. This research reactor can help them develop a commercial blueprint, and China can replace the coal burners with shiny new thorium reactors.
9:45 - _there it [233Pa] undergoes beta decay again, converting another proton into neutron and producing Uranium 233_ - I gues you meant to say "NEUTRON into PROTON", haven't you?
Yeah, Protactinium is element 91 Uranium is 92 so it would have to gain a proton. What I don't get is if a neutron was converted into a proton, then it should be Uranium 232. Unless it gained another one from being "bombarded".
@@Grerak When a neutron "expels" a beta particle (I'm not overly precise in use of the terminology here, I just want to address the issue) the nuclei does not change its mass - it rises its atomic number, i.e. number of protons (hence becoming an element "higher up" on the list). Atomic mass (in a.m.u) is a sum of neutrons and protons, so if one neutron changes its, erm, "preferred pronoun" that does not affect the mass of the nuclei. 233Pa has 91 protons and 142 neutrons [233/91Pa], hence it's a.m. = 233. When one neutron becomes proton it's noow 92 p (one more) + 141 n (one less) which still equals 233, but since proton number became higher, it is now another element, uranium - with the same mass - 233/92U.
I love nuclear power and am a huge supporter of it. That being said. Please stop treating the 3 Mile Island incident like it was catastrophic or anywhere near threatening levels as Fukushima or Chernobyl. The radiation threat from 3 mile to even the people ON THE SITE was a couple of X-ray visits worth and nothing more. The site continued to function for years after until it couldnt afford to anymore and they went into a warm shutdown. Thanks!
Very nice description of the thorium cycle. I have some grammar help for you at 10:55. "Added bonus" is redundant. Say "bonus" instead, without adding "added". At 11:09, "general rule of thumb." is redundant. Say "Rule of thumb" without the "general". In short, "bonus" doesn't need added, and "rule of thumb" doesn't need "general."
You need more than heat to power a heat engine. You need a place to reject heat too. Putting a thorium/steam power plant in the Gobi desert means that the condensers have to be air cooled, hence much larger than a typical water cooled condenser. It is conceivable that a thorium Brayton cycle could be utilized, where the working fluid is air and that the waste heat would be in air and simply exhausted to the atmosphere.
Desert doesn't equate very hot. It just means there is very little life there, mainly because of lack of water, rarely because of excess heat alone. It can be very cold at night and very hot during the day. Antarctica is also technically a desert
Gobi desert is a cold desert. The highest temperature in summer is 38 Celsius. The coldest is -26.5 Celsius in winter. Average temperature is 2.8 Celsius. Dumping heat into the air is viable.
I found the Easter Egg! Go to timeline 15:14, pause the video, and drop playback speed to .25 and hit play. That will slow it down enough for the 4 seconds where the rocks slide uphill towards the power backhoe! That clip was run in reverse, then added to this presentation running backwards!
I always try to take in as much of the visual field as possible, and have been lucky enough to have some good science teachers in both high school and college, so basically, I pay attention more than the average person.
Truly excellent, informative and sublimely well explained evaluation of a fantastic opportunity for mankind (and thus the planet?). I really enjoyed this deep dive approach. A calm, gimmick free and sober presentation pulls the viewer in, it is like a one to one lecture. Great work, Ben.
Some mistakes in this video tbh, but the main point is nuclear energy is great & we need as much of it being built as possible & as fast as possible. I'd like to see the world doing what France has been for decades now but with newer designs coolants & fuels. Idealy we need a 20x increase in World Nuclear energy production by 2050 & a 200x increase by 2100. It's doable but not if we carry on like this.
Agree, was surprised to see Xenon build up cited as the rationale for this when that's another Chernobyl myth, it builds up when reactor load not matched implicating turbines
7:00 - can you imagine with ongoing tension throughout the world the ad for such device comes out as if something completely normal - "for your safer traversal of the post-apocalyptic wastelands"... This is complete madness
From what I recall current materials will only last for 6 to 12 years as a containment vessel in a molten salt reactor, an addition, while the waste products of thorium lose radioactivity far faster than uranium, they are initially far more deadly. On the plus side Thorium molten salt reactors not only "burn" far more of their fuel, resulting in less waste, but can also have other nuclear waste mixed into the fuel to burn it as well.
The molten “coolant “ works at 1400° C or 2552°F . Steel starts melting between 2500°-2700°F there about. Not to mention the corrosiveness of molten salts. I must of missed that part of the video.
S2G was the initial power plant of USS Seawolf (SSN-575). This was one of three sodium cooled reactors (the core was moderated) ordered for the Seawolf program at the same time as three PWR units were ordered to support the USS Nautilus (SSN-571) program; In each case, one reactor was land-based for training and research, one intended for installation on a submarine, and one spare. The land-based unit corresponding to S2G was S1G reactor. The reactor core was beryllium-moderated.[1][2] Persistent superheater problems on Seawolf caused the superheaters to be bypassed, resulting in mediocre performance. This and concern for the dangers posed by liquid sodium coolant led to the PWR type being selected instead as the standard US naval reactor type, and the S2G on Seawolf was replaced by the spare S2Wa reactor from the Nautilus program. The Atomic Energy Commission historians' account of the naval sodium-cooled reactor experience was: Although makeshift repairs permitted the Seawolf to complete her initial sea trials on reduced power in February 1957, Rickover had already decided to abandon the sodium-cooled reactor. Early in November 1956, he informed the Commission that he would take steps toward replacing the reactor in the Seawolf with a water-cooled plant similar to that in the Nautilus. The leaks in the Seawolf steam plant were an important factor in the decision but even more persuasive were the inherent limitations in sodium-cooled systems. In Rickover's words they were "expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair."[3
@@DCMAKER133 As per the Royal Society of Chemistry . Thorium Melting point 1750° C 3182° F or 2023K Boiling Point 4785° C 8645° F 5058K Josephpadula comment was far more useful.
@@michaelpistey4001 HASTELLOY® N alloy (UNS N10003) is a nickel-base alloy that was invented at Oak Ridge National Laboratories as a container material for molten fluoride salts. It has good oxidation resistance to hot fluoride salts in the temperature range of 704 to 871°C (1300 to 1600°F) MSR operating temperatures are around 700 °C (1,292 °F), significantly higher than traditional LWRs at around 300 °C (572 °F) also due to addition of other ions (it´s not pure thorium) the melting point decreases, e.g sodium and potassium are solid when they´re mixed it becomes liquid at room temperature, that´s a so called eutectic mixture
@@Humbulla93 Excellent!! These are the type of points that were not mentioned in the video. Next up would be how easy/hard it is to work with these materials. A master welding friend of mine back in Denmark. Explained some of the intricacies of working with exotic metals. My point has never been. This can’t be done. Obviously it has. My point was this is not the layup that this video makes it appear. I do appreciate your information greatly. It’s been well over 50 years since I gave physical chemistry any thought. Kinda fun to dust off those dormant brain cells.
No doubt. The result of very rich oil men paying off politicians and lobbyists to convince a great number of people how useless renewable energy is. And now they attack EVs. Leaving the US incapable of leading the world in new energy technology. Pathetic. Politicize climate, energy, crime, education, medicine, you name it. Meanwhile the rest of the world moves on.
I certainly wouldn't be betting against the Chinese. If nothing else the recent past has demonstrated how the Chinese are able to exceed the west's projections on Chinese technological developments. Think EV's, Lithium battery production, solar panel manufacture, semiconductor production and so on.
Not just 3-4X more common; it only has one isotope and doesn't need to be enriched or separated from certain isotopes, which is a huge hindrance to U as well (although not as much for more-modern reactors which work with the low-enriched)
@@larsnystrom6698 How many nuclear accidents have there been that caused major problems since the 60's. Oh, yea a total of 2 (and three-mile island was not a major disaster it was a PR disaster)
@@MaximilianMay-x6y And those two huge incidents were enough! Public relations, for better or worse, are important these days, and nuclear power ranks near the bottom. Look on Wikipedia "(Lists of nuclear disasters and radioactive incidents") for a long list of nuclear incidents that never made the news. Look at America's *worst* radiation release near Los Angeles in July 1959 with the Sodium Reactor Experiment at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. The incident directly released deadly radionuclides into the air like iodine-131 and cesium-137 that decay with deadly gamma radiation. It was covered up for a few decades.
China will not be building the worlds first Thorium reactor. The Peach Bottom reactor in Pennsylvania was what you are calling a Thorium reactor. It was built and operated in the mid 1960s. The Fort St. Vrain Reactor was a "Thorium reactor" built in the 1970s in Colorado. I was on the design team for it's first core, and I personally designed the first reload core. The design utilized a graphite moderator with cylindrical holes filled with either U-235 or thorium pellets coated with graphite. The plan was to use the U-233 bred during operation in a subsequent reload. I don't remember if they ever used the generated U-233 in the reactor before they shut it down. Molten salt sounds great but the corrosion was a killer. Perhaps we have better materials now. If China builds reactors the way they build bridges, they are in big trouble.
scumbag humans: refuses to invest in new technology, complains that new technology isnt available. You get like these insane numbers, that worldwide governments spend more an hour on oil than they spent in fusion R&D for the past decade.
Their test reactor must be running alright then. Not surprised given Oak Ridge ran for 5 years when a bunch of 60s nuclear scientists decided to build one. And it didn't break, they got shut down.
First what? They say they may have a demonstrator of 1 MW in 2026, while also claiming going from that small prototype to a 100+ MW operational and commercial reactor 3 years later? Yeah, sure. Looks like another one of those scams just existing to pump public subsidies and tech bro investors money... Same bullshit exists with fusion and supersonic commercial jets startups. Maybe one of those dozens of vaporware merchants isn't in fact one and will succeed, but none of them up until now have made any substantial progress, after more than a decade of PR spins... I would advise extreme skepticism before "fanboying" for any of those.
Indian Point Energy Center (I.P.E.C.) is a now defunct three-unit nuclear power station located in Buchanan, just south of Peekskill, in Westchester County, New York. Indian Point 1, built by ConEdison, was a 275-megawatt Babcock & Wilcox supplied pressurized water reactor that was issued an operating license on March 26, 1962 and began operations on September 16, 1962. The first core used a thorium-based fuel with stainless steel cladding, but this fuel did not live up to expectations for core life. It was switched to uranium in 1965. - wikipedia
I had no idea thorium was a realistic option for nuclear power. This is quite interesting. Meanwhile the US government argues about social issues that are personal issues for individuals and not the government’s business and using tax money for ge n o c i d e instead of scientific projects like this.
You should study harder. The world's first Thorium Reactor was built in America, and it successfully ran for a couple of years before it was shut down.
experimental vs. - supposedly - commercial. The two US things in the 50s where just laboratory proof of concept. Tech never got beyond that stage since then - japan and china both did experimantal reactors in recent years, but at least in japan it didnt go well and in china we dont know. Info blackout. If this is true? it would be the first model meant to actually produce electicity for use.
Is this beginning of a new age of nuclear? Let me know what you think below 👇👇And big thanks to Radiacode for sponsoring today’s episode! Get your own radiation detector and use code here: 103.radiacode.com/DrBenMiles ☢📻
This is genuinely an awesome product - I've be playing with it for a week straight now. Slightly concerned that Gimli, my dog 🐶 is the highest radiation source in my house. What does this mean... Is he ok... Possible super powers in his future...(?) Send help...
Arent China also leading the field in controlled nuclear fusion now?
I for one, welcome our new sino overlords xD
Hi Dr Miles. I'd love at least a little something like a sticker with your Rockstar Scientist stamp on it. I have plenty of T-Shirts. Thanks 😁👍🏻
No. The reason is simple: To a dictatorship it's easier to lie than to build the sci-fi tech they claim they have.
In addition, this is a plan, not a reality today. Get back to this claim in 2025.
The first thorium reactor was built in the US a long time ago.
As a techy kid in the 1980s talk of Britain leading advanced nuclear power was pushed, molten salt thorium breeder reactors included - then New Labour took over and shut our nuclear power industry. India, Russia and then China bothered to put some effort in, at least.
"secretly everything still runs on steam turbines, and we NEVER left the 1800's" Had me dying,. It's SO TRUE
Its like the code in Windows !!!!
Yet, “we can build these reactors in the desert bc they don’t need water…” ??? Is the steam collected & recycled?
@@DurfDiggler Yes!
the steam turbine is part of a closed loop, from reactor, to turbine, then back to the reactor etc.
For more fun, a steam turbine is just a fancy sort of heat pump. also an ICE engine is just a fancy air pump.
Not solar panels
A cousin who worked at Hanford was arguing for thorium as far back as 1990. He and some colleagues tried to get the companies that ran Hanford to look to the future and invest in development, to no avail. The big problem was that executives were not immune to the scare about nuclear power and the fact that temperatures would rival those of lava made thorium seem more dangerous still,
I really think it is China has 6 times the Genius's of the USA. Their education makes sure they can do math, science and their History more than the USA.
With how Hanford has been managed they'd probably still be doing that research today if given the green light in the 90s.
We worked with the Exxon Research people on some of this decades ago. Their estimates indicated that the USA alone had over 10,000Years of available Uranium driven fuels, with Re-Breeding. The French picked up on these studies almost immediately. Thorium reactors were looked at, but the cost ratio was poor with respect to the Uranium cycles, and at that time safety was not seen as a large issue. "Just put them far away" was the prevalent Mantra. After some of these studies, the Thorium cycle was largely abandoned. Now with the pressure to "abandon carbon" this process is showing signs of life, again. I give credit to the Chinese for taking this on. Their population is still growing and they need a cleaner fuel basis than their present coal mining, especially in their smog-laden cities (aka LA,USA). If we do not at least try to copy their efforts, we will soon be buying nuclear re-cycled fuels from them, just like we do from Japan.
so true, we have the means to contain great pressure by just making the material thicker and round. but extreme temperature metallurgy is a whole different beast.
@@MrLehi99no research needed. The first reactor was created in 1947 in the United States and ran for more than a decade.
If Norway wasn’t so busy with oil they could have found a way to harness the power of Thor
Excuse me, Vikings are busy these days bringing up the genetics of lesser tribes by selecting the finest partners, a little thankfulness is appropriate !
Norway already runs on nearly 100% renewable energy. No nuclear required.
We used to have thorium reactor experiment, it never got funding to upscale it, Norway has lots of thorium, it won’t be bad thing for Norway, if there was demand for it, however it can damage nature, if we dig it out. We already had waterpower, so was not a real national demand for it. there was also question of storing radioactive waste.
@@beelzebobtheinnocent1659
I'm sure everyone is thankful for Norways excellent selection of Nobel Peace Price laureates the last few years🙂
Though, you seems to have reversed the ideas for that from what Alfred Nobel, a Swede, intended.
Should we blame that on your diluted Viking genes?
“My distant ancestors were great at raiding fishing villages and abducting children, show me some respect.”
One thing to keep in mind about molt salt reactors and their turbine systems is that molt salt reactors can operator at much higher temperatures. As pointed out in this video, that allows them to not require a high pressure in their reactor vessel and cooling loop. This also has the added benefit of a high thermodynamic efficiency since the delta between the heat source and cooling source is much greater. The higher temperature would also allow a molten salt reactor to operator a air / gas turbine instead of a steam turbine.
Basically it's hot enough to make the air as angry as water to push the turbine and doesn't need water?
thermodynamic efficiencies are irrelevant compared to neutron efficiency.
Helium is one of the gasses that is being used in MSRs or PBRs.
I guess that was originally the idea of using this principle as a subsitute for kerosene burning turbines for aircrafts. Just suck in cold air on one end and expulse hot expanded air on the other end for propulsion..
I do not know why it failed..?
The meltdown of a molten salt reactor can be 100% walk-away-safe mitigated and is not a concern at all; the chemistry works out such that as it drains, the salt rapidly cools and stops being able to flow and mix and that stops the fission
Absolutely, it's just a little additional problem
Exactly. This has been obvious for decades. But certain parties have kept the focus on uranium. Not to mention the induced hysteria about all things nuclear.
@@Mythhammer I heard the Royal Family of Britain owned the Uranium mines that provided the US.
Profit has always been the main concern. And a; "Can't see it from my house." attitude has prevailed.
@@stefanschleps8758Russians own them now in US and CA. Under Obama and his criminals made billion kickbacks off the sales of all US and CA uranium assets to Russia. When Trump announced support for Thorium to counter this, plus taking over the Russian owned mines, did. Or go over well for the Neo-Globalists who profit from Russian ownership.
Fusion is always 30 years away and simultaneously 93 million miles away!
Starting up a molten salt reactor isn't hard. Making a metal reactor chamber that doesn't corrode away while holding 1200°C salt allowing for a lifespan to be profitable is hard.
Yes, that is the biggest problem with molten salt reactors. Not only do you have hot salts, but also a high neutron flux (that's what makes the reaction). But it's a solvable problem. Ceramics might be the answer, and we've come a long way in ceramics since the 1950's.
Oak ridge said they solved the corrosion issue with Hastalloy-N as this alloy showed no sings of corrosion when examined at the end of the experiment .
@@leekumiega9268
Hastelloy-N is not adequate for the purpose, and is not qualified for nuclear vessel construction. Helium embrittlement (from Nickel decay) and Tellurium contamination remain big issues.
Hastelloy-N most certainly showed signs of substantial corrosion and surface cracking after the brief operation of the MSRE, documented extensively by Koger, Litman, and others in an extensive series of articles issued by ORNL.
Candidate modified alloys will take many years to develop and qualify. For instance alloy 709 for liquid sodium applications was anticipated in 2018 (Wright and Sham) to take another 13 years to test viability, particularly creep rupture after prolonged irradiation. Actually getting qualification for nuclear vessels will require extensive further work on weld durability.
MSRs involving Fluoride have greater difficulties again.
This will take a lot longer than most people think.
Doesn't have to be metal.
@@marciacsr Agree. Some of the modern ceramics would make for an excellent reactor chamber, and AFAIK they are highly resistant to neutron effects. Thermal expansion might be an issue, given the complex geometries of the chamber.
Using molten salt has one further advantage. It avoids something that caused a couple of the explosions at Fukushima and may have contributed to the Chernobyl disaster. It has been shown when the zirconium cladding on the fuel rods gets exposed to air, the steam begins to react with the hot metal and the metal oxidizes, releasing hydrogen gas. It is known that at least one of the explosions at Fukushima was a hydrogen, not steam, explosion. If the system does not contain any water, this reaction cannot occur.
If the molten salt comes into contact with water it will absolutely generate hydrogen due to the very high salt temperatures.
The general idea is to keep water out of any nuclear system, because it can cause steam explosions, or worse, hydrogen explosions.
This change is one component in the risk reduction with molten salt reactors.
The other one, of course, is the elemination of run-away nuclear reactions when the cooling fails.
These two things puts them in a an entire different ballpark, safety wise, from our old nuclear reactors, which should be dismantled.
In solid fuel reactors like our entire existing fleet, thorium is a sh--y fuel. It gets much less burnup (energy per ton of fuel) because of parasitic effects in the breeding process. For thorium to be worthwhile, you need to reprocess the fuel. Pretty much nobody does reprocessing, except France in limited capacity. LFTR uses a molten liquid reactor core, so you can reprocess the fuel while the reactor is operating, allowing you to take fission products and other “poisons” out, and to firmly control the enrichment level and available reactivity. This is very hard to do though which is why we don’t have any approved or even ready to license LFTR designs. One thing this video doens't do is go over the cons of thorium reactors. They're insanely expensive upfront, the fuel is super corrosive so pipes need replaced often, and finally, presence of Uranium-232 in irradiated thorium or thorium based fuels result in significant emissions of gamma rays.
@@Zidbits true that video of the thorium in New Jersey, poisoned a huge landmass one of the " Superfund sites " in Maywood, Rochelle park was built on years later and people living in the area all got cancer and just received retribution about 10 years ago ... That's why it got to be in the middle of no where , then nowhere is polluted ... china has plenty of useless land unlike us.
@@larsnystrom6698 That's not how nuclear power works. Reactor coolant (whether it is water, molten salt, etc) interacts with the reactor and moderates the reaction, which then generates lots of heat. That heat is then sent through the coolant loop into a heat exchanger, which then boils water (yes, water) in a separate loop. This boiled water turns to high pressure steam, which then drives a series of turbines, before going through a condenser to be turned back into water. The water is then either discharged harmlessly (There is no radiation, since the heat exchange loop runs separately from the coolant loop and therefore does not directly interact with the reactor or any radioactive materials) or sent back through the heat exchanger where the process repeats.
T. Folse Nuclear, a UA-camr who is an experienced and licensed reactor technician, can give a much more detailed and (probably more accurate) breakdown of how the system works, but this is the general gist of it.
in 1918 the US leading scientists predicted we had enough oil for the next million years and more to come. 100 years later and the estimate has been greatly revised.
And then they decided to keep their jobs and go along with the scarcity scan
@@lochinvar5589Shame they haven't employed you and your internet knowledge to solve the problem eh.
To be fair, that was 100 years ago when 75% of all the nations on Earth were a part of the 3rd world and hadn't even been industrialized yet. Cars were almost brand new, with Ford "only" having sold 15 million vehicles in a whole decade. Compare that to today when there are 358 million cars in the US and an estimated ~1.5 billion cars worldwide, not to mention motorcycles, boats, ships, yachts, etc. We're pumping a lot more oil nowadays (even out in the ocean which wasn't a thing 100 years ago) and there's no way any prediction 100 years ago could've foreseen how many vehicles, power plants and factories would be powered by oil all over the world in 2024.
50 years even. The Club of Rome warned the world in the seventies about ending supplies.
Humans are really bad at estimates. We thought we would never run out of IP addresses, and yet we created ipv6 because we needed much more than we anticipated. We also thought 100 MB of RAM was more than enough, but we didn't anticipate Google Chrome hogging up 4 GBs of memory.
Not only is thorium 3-4 times more abundant than uranium, as you said, but over 99% of uranium, U-238 is not fissile (able to be split when hit with a neutron). In order to use it, the mix must be enriched by removing some of the U-238 and leaving a higher percentage of U-235. This is very expensive. In contrast, thorium is 100% usable. A sample is hundreds of times less expensive than uranium. The main drawback to thorium is that a molten salt mixture is corrosive and can eat away at the container it is in.
Neither U238 nor thorium is fissile, both need a breeder reactor to be useful, so they compare well. We have thousands of years worth of U238 already mined and separated ready to be used and no thorium.
@@chapter4travels I was going to say, a U238 reactor should be similar to a thorium 232 reactor. One becomes plutonium (fissile); the other, U233 (fissile).
The theoretical use of Thorium fuel lies above 99% (i.e. > 99% of the fuel is converted into energy), whereas 'traditional' solid (pellet) fuel reactors get to about 0.5% before the pellets are so cracked through byproducts that they need to be removed. I think the solid fuel rods can be reprocessed to get some more energy from them, but that's it then - the result is a lot of long term radioactive waste. That's why Thorium is so interesting: safety and security are simpler, fuel is abundant and used far more efficiently, and the output heat can also be used directly if needed. As temperature self regulation is a default feature of how it works, power generation is also easier as 'load following' is pretty much a default feature.
You still need uranium as no throium isotopes are fissile but they are fertile so can decay into U 233 if there are fast breeder reactor
@@chapter4travelswe have crazy amounts of thorium already
It's not "the Internet" that thorium MSRs appeal to, it's ordinary people who don't own stock in legacy power companies and don't have a stake in producing weapons grade plutonium.
I don't know about anyone else but I would really like my unlimited power to be slick and stylish.
@@kingkiller244 with racing stripes
I don't think ordinary people care about weapons-grade plutonium, at least not in countries such as US and China with nuclear weapons. Ordinary people mainly care about how cheap you can make their electric bill. I came from Shanghai, and even to this day, Shanghainese still limit AC use during the summer due to the cost of electricity.
@@xiphoid2011 I think ordinary people would care about nuclear waste with a half life of 10,000 years vs. 500 years for thorium.
@@bradstewart7007 They don't care anything other than what's the bill.
Who cares if you've got some radiation.We are gonna die anyways.
One additional advantage China has in the pursuit of Thorium power is its widespread deployment of UHV power grids, which enables profitable electricity transmission across far longer distances with lower transmission loss relative to conventional power lines. This enables the PRC to place Thorium power plants in far more remote locations, & take advantage of massive amounts of under-utilized land in its interior. This provides both economic & security benefits.
It is all moot, as any real implementation will be too late.
When the _pilot_ projects are small and half a decade out, it is clear nuclear is a distraction.
We can't go on behaving like it is 1985.
We are on the brink right now, and need a swift transition _today,_ not in 10-20 years.
Also look up 'deep warming'.
Supplanting coal plants with nuclear plants will continue the heat pollution.
Building wind and storage to supply 1 GW will save us 2GW waste heat.
That used to be negligible, but in our current crisis it is as good as carbon capture.
In other words we get double the bang for the bucks with wind - which is already cheaper.
No time to (produce) waste!
@@madshorn5826china is the only country actually implementing any of the green energies that western liberals whine about but never implement 😂😂😂
@@madshorn5826 china is currently building a lot of renewable energy infrastructure, this thorium reactor is obviously planning way ahead. They went from around 70% fossile fuels in 2016 to close to 50% with plans to go even lower by 2030. It is certainly not enough if the rest of the world doesn't follow suit but it is a great step forward
@@madshorn5826 bro goes out of his house in dies
@@aarvloThe part about china going all in on future green energy is absolutely true, however, they are nowhere near 50% green energy production, unless you count coal as “green” energy that is. They have done a great job thus far, and that’s commendable, but don’t act as if they are doing so out of concern for the environment. If China had large domestic fossil fuel reserves, they’d be using that. Domestic availability of coal is a big reason they use so much coal generation. Well, that and all the coal power plant machinery they’ve been able purchase for next to nothing and import from countries that decommissioned them in favor of natural gas. No, the Chinese government is so interested in getting away from fossil fuels for them same reasons that motivate all governments, power (and not the electrical kind). They see dependence on imported fossil fuels as an impediment to their own power. They’ve cornered the world rare earths processing market, largely by ignoring environmental concerns that drive up costs for rare earth refiners in other countries. In doing so, they have been able to make rare earth processing uneconomical for everyone else. You see, rare earth minerals aren’t rare, like at all. They are actually some of the most abundant minerals out there. It’s just processing the ores that contain them requires massive amounts of highly toxic chemicals. It creates a shit ton of toxic waste/ spoil per unit of actual rare earth mineral. In short, it’s exactly the sort of thing *no* environmentally considerate person/ group/ govt would brag about doing on the cheap. The govt in China sees their current rare earth dominance as a way to control other countries’ access to clean energy. Putting aside the fact that rare earths aren’t like oil so using them for leverage as if they were won’t work, the way China is attempting to use that (perceived) leverage is by threatening to withhold them from countries who refuse to allow them to flood their markets with highly subsidized & therefore cheap green energy related goods. At first, this doesn’t seem sinister at all. Why not let the Chinese government subsidize your green transition? What’s not to like? I’ll tell you. All of these subsidized goods happen to compete directly with products made by the emerging green energy related industries in the countries they’re trying to export them to. Should these countries allow these artificially cheap goods into their markets, it will kill any competing domestic manufacturers. These domestic products are invariably more expensive, largely due to the cost advantages provided to their Chinese competition by subsidies. I say largely, because labor costs are roughly the same now. These green industry jobs often represent an avenue to provide stable, well-paid employment opportunities to a sizable portion of the population who lost the most when companies chose to move their production facilities to China over the last few decades. If they are allowed to go they won’t come back. So there is a lot of popular opposition to throwing that all away in exchange for a few years of cheap (subsidized) goods. It seems short sighted in other ways as well. By destroying these burgeoning industries in countries China relies upon heavily as export markets, China seems to be willing to trade stable long term market opportunity for immediate, short-terms gain. Opposition to China’s strategy is strong from higher ups in industry & government as well. They see China’s decision to produce massive amounts of such products, way more than could be justifiable by forecasted demand in the countries’ markets they hope to export them to. Worse yet, China seems entirely uninterested in supporting the expansion of the domestic service economy that would allow more of its own citizens to purchase all the excess goods they’re producing. This move from an export dominated economy to an economy with a larger emphasis on the domestic service sector is the way every other large economy was able to create a domestic consumer base capable of sustaining economic growth as increasing labor costs continued to make their manufactured goods exports less competitive. By attempting to continue on with manufacturing led growth, Chin’s only option for growing their economy further is taking over what industry is left in the countries it exports to. These countries already moved most of their manufacturing to China. That means those industries China is now competing for are industries those other countries had good economic reasons not to move to China. Should China be allowed to replace those industries with its own, those aforementioned good economic reasons not to move them will come into effect. At first this will destabilize these economies and eventually, it will ensure they become unsustainable. At that point, China will have no one left to export to. That is, if all the social disruption doesn’t lead to a much darker outcome. These countries see this from China together with the subsidies, and to them this looks like textbook dumping. It’s as if the strategy was tailor made to destroy their domestic green manufacturing industries. Green energy is seen among these types as a golden opportunity to rid much of the world of the volatility and conflict that arise when global energy is concentrated in a handful of countries. Large nations each having their own domestic methods to build out renewable infrastructure capable of fulfilling their domestic energy needs gets rid of the political pitfalls of oil. If they were to just sit back and allow China to become the only major producer of green infrastructure, they’d be allowing the same dynamics associated with oil to arise artificially.
All I keep hearing is basically goes like this; China decided 2 months ago to build this amazing nation wide mega project. It's expected to be completed by this time 2 years from now.! Meanwhile for the U.S. it goes something like this; The U.S. had most of the tech to build this 50 years ago, but never did. New projects on very small limited test scale were announced 20 years ago and expected to be completed sometime in about 30 years. Hopefully before the people who work on it die.
I am so tired of hearing how China is building mega dams, new rivers, nation wide super high speed rail, and infrastructure and all the U.S. can talk about is how we built the Hover Dam a hundred years ago.
And major cost overun with years of delay for even a short high speed california rail
Thorium desalination plant. Seawater is boiled to produce steam. After using the steam to generate power, it gets condensed and harvested as water. The brine gets reused as new material for the molten salt. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I thought that they would just use the power from the plant.
can you hit my up with a source?
@@jebkermen6087 I don't think there's a source. This seems to be an original idea meant to make the additional output (other than electrical power) of the powerplant useful. And IMO, this idea nails it.
YUO R A GENIUS
stick to the day job
@@julianl.3857 I just think this would make it much more complex having to manage many different liquids in the same assembly.
And as was stated the location of the reactor can be far from where saltwater is, and where fresh water needs to be.
This video is somewhat misleading. The Chinese TMSR-LF1 is in fact a *uranium* burner, not a thorium breeder reactor. The primary fissile material is standard Uranium-235, and the plant will burn essentially the same amount of U235 as any other nuclear reactor, it will also require the same amount of mined uranium as a standard reactor. The TMSR-LF1 removes some fertile U238 from the fuel and replaces it with fertile Th232 instead. However, the vast majority of the power still comes from good old fashioned fissile U235. Describing it as a "thorium reactor" is like describing a standard gasoline engine running on E5 (5% ethanol, 95% gasoline) as an "ethanol engine". It is, however, a molten salt reactor - which is a lot more interesting.
Well he got the clicks so why mention it in a 20 minute video. Btw. after "It´s happening - China launches.." and the footnote "planned for 2029" I already knew where this was going.
@@levelaznHe/she gave you all you need to do your own research. It's so lazy and obnoxious of us to challenge people in this way.
@@levelazn It's documented in the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) presentations on the design. UA-cam doesn't usually allow posting links (such posts get auto-deleted), but if you look on Wikipedia for TMSR-LF1 you can find the details. The documentation describes the "U-235 enrichment" as 19.75% which is High Assay Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU) fuel.
This is a well known path taken by others, for example ThorCon. Uranium ore is around 0.72% U-235. For normal LEU fuel this is then enriched to roughly 5% U-235, 95% U-238 which is done by removing some U-238. If instead you enrich this further to around 20% U-235, 80% U-238 then you have HALEU fuel. You can then take this HALEU fuel and then blend it down 1 part HALEU with 4 parts Th-232 and you get a final composition of 5% U-235, 20% U-238, 75% Th-232. This requires the same amount of uranium ore as LEU fuel (it has the same U-235 content). However, it replaces some of the fertile U-238 with fertile Th-232. In a conventional reactor roughly 75% of the power comes from direct U-235 fission, and that will be the case with the TMSR-LF1 as well; the thorium is going to be contributing around 20% of the final power output.
This is an interesting design, and is certainly worth exploring. However, it is certainly not a "thorium breeder" converting pure Th-232 into U-233. Which is what everyone assumes when someone says a "thorium reactor".
Good point. Thanks for the info. Salt reactors are tricky to use…. Pipes need to be very tough and corrosive proof. We’ll see.
Yes, this is the case because it will take about 25 years to build up the necessary fuel for the Th-232/U-233 cycle to become self-sufficient and no longer require U-235 for thermal fissioning. The important point here is that China has begun this process and has a clear path toward the most competitive base load energy source in the world, today. As a result, Its AI program will benefit from this long term strategy.
Meanwhile Germany just demolished their plants in favor of... Coal? What?!
Fusion is only 30 years away😂
The jokes write themselves
Lol
Thanks to Merkel and the greens.... how to ruin your own country
Outdated: Germany is building gas plants that are hydrogen ready. Coal will be completely gone in 32 at the latest, maybe even years earlier.
The one reason, why the Thorium path was never followed through is that the funding was mainly provided by military budgets. And they all wanted Plutonium and Uranium by-products to produce nuclear weapons. This kind of spending power was never made available to people who talk such nonsense as peaceful use for all of man-kind. On top of that, whereas thorium is globally abundant, uranium is concentrated in certain areas and made Russia and the U.S. monopolies of the nuclear industry - further strengthening the uranium industry of thorium competition. And here we are.
You should give props to Kirk Sorenson who literally saved the files of the ORNL MSR as it was on the way to the shredder, published it online which was ignored by congress but picked up by chinese academics. Probably single handedly changed the course of Thorium reactors in human history.
Now China will be laughing all the way to the bank. I suppose better them than nobody.
Kirk Sorenson is claiming credit for something he did not do. ORNL never hid or deleted any of the files. They have always been available. A number of other countries looked at the files related to the 2 test MSRs the USA built, and decided that there were far to many problems to tackle at the time and moved onto the half a dozen or so other reactor designs.
He just likes to claim a lot of things which are not new and have been known since the mid 1940's in many cases.
Crazy that it almost happened. How many times does this occur where good ideas get destroyed almost before becoming something because of this.
Even Kirk gives Alvin Weinberg credit where it's due.
I would also like to point out that Kirk Sorenson also does not freely discuss why thorium never took off as a nuclear fuel even though the USA spent the equivelent of likely about $50 Billion trying to develop it in the 1960's and 1970's.
Biggest reason: forget the cost of the ore being used. It cost a lot more to extract thorium and convert it into a usable form for nuclear fuel than it cost to extract uranium and convert it into a usable nuclear fuel. The cost difference was very large (and I have seen nothing to indicate that has changed today).
2nd issue. Thorium ore typically contains up to 7 different isotopes of thorium. One of those is large enough and gets converted to U232 to create a real problem.
U232 is a very energetic and hard gamma radiation emitter. It makes handling the waste fuel more difficult and makes reprocessing the fuel to extract uranium and reuse of the uranium very costly.
For U235 and Pu239 reprocessing the resultant product can be handled with just light plastic or rubber gloves safely from a radiation standpoint.
For reprocessed uranium from thorium with the U232 you need to be behind lead shielding (or very thick leaded glass) and would typically work with 18" long tongs.
Huge difference, which only adds to the cost of using thorium fuel.
I wonder does Kirk S talk about the 5 commercial power plants built to run on a thorium fuel cycle - and what lessons we learned from them. Look for a long post I did under the Dr. Ben Miles pinned post on that history.
There is noting new about thorium - and there are very real reasons why no nation has developed power plants beyond the first 5 that were built.
Radiacode is cheating on me
H
Uh oh... YOU were the guy they told me not to worry about...
Better have a Geiger Count-Off!
Please make a vid on this topic
I love you kile, marry me you sexy science god
Not mentioned in this video: the primary reason the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment was ultimately considered to have "failed", was that the flouride salt used was damaging the Hastelloy piping at a much faster rate than anticipated. It is well known that neutron bombardment causes embrittlement of most steel alloys, specifically, it increases the nil-ductility transition temperature of the steel, but in the case of the MSRE, the hot flouride salt was not only chemically attacking the pipes and valves, it was also reducing the ductility, a dangerous condition because embrittlement can result in catastrophic failure of a pipe from even a minor impact or vibration stress, for example, if a high-speed gate valve is triggered to slam closed in some type of shutdown emergency. The salt damage to the piping was so widespread, that the engineers determined that the entire piping system needed to be replaced after only 5 years; this would be completely unacceptable in a commercial power plant. I wonder how the Chinese have solved this problem in their molten-salt reactor? At the time that the MSRE was built in the 1960's, Hastelloy was the most corrosion-resistant alloy known, maybe the Chinese engineers have come up with something better?
> The salt damage to the [MSRE's] piping was so widespread, that the engineers determined that the entire piping system needed to be replaced after only 5 years
I would be interested in your citation.
> [the MSRE considered to have failed] was that the flouride salt used was damaging the Hastelloy piping at a much faster rate than anticipated.
What I have read is that tellurium was precipitating out of the salt, attacking the piping. This could be fixed by changing the redox potential of the salt (kind of like pH in water) by modifying the salt.
> [5 years & faster rate of damage to piping] completely unacceptable in a commercial power plant
The Canadian startup Terrestrial Energy suggests their plant can be economical even with the reactor being replaced every 7 years.
I think I remember hearing that by the time the report on corrosion issues was distributed they already had a viable solution to it
Replacing pipes? That doesn't seem to bother all the cities that have to routinely replace the pipes that put fluoride into their water supply.
@@earthling808 The differences between that and this are so large that they render the comparison invalid.
@@laura-ann.0726 They are not using the same alloy. I understand they have gone for higher nickel content amongst other variations. Overall the problem seems manageable because the chinese have now moved on from the experimental plant and have approved an engineering prototype.
Oak Ridge National Lab had a Thorium reactor working for over 5 years without any issue. There are many reasons speculated on why it didnt become used. I tend to believe it due to taking longer to make into fuel for nukes, which where very popular at that time and radiation wasn't fully understood or at least it wasnt understood on its effects on the environment. Remember, at one time the US Gov wanted to use nukes to make lakes and reservoirs. So Thorium got kicked to the side and was generally mostly forgotten about in terms of being a viable fuel.
@AtomicOverdrive: The main reason the U.S. went away from Thorium was POLITICAL !!!! I am talking about politics within the U.S.A. Bunch of folks with their hands on the gavel making decisions based on what would benefit their state the most. Think California for instance. They (WE) could have kept the weapon production separate from the power generation project and gone with Thorium. Corruption. Short-term gratification. BS BS BS. Need to keep educating everyone why NUCLEAR is our answer. Turning off the power supply is quick education.
You are absolutely right. The critical decision was made just at a time when the strategic competition with the Soviet Union was in full swing...
The MSRE at Oak Ridge was not without problems. An it was never using thorium - though still one of the very few to actually use U233. After the active use phase they found corrosion damage that would have forced an end to the experiment anyway. In the aftermath, well after shut down they run into a bigger issue from the cold fuel salt decomposing and moving some 2.5 kg of U233 to a charcoal filter. This was relatively close to a real desaster.
The did relatively little (and what was tested largely failed) to the difficult part of the Thorium cycle, which is the chemical separation / reprocessing. The theoretical design work on a real breeder came to the conclusion that it would be very difficult and not working as initial thought. Not producing weapons grade matirial was definitely not the issue - more off the opposite: there is some extra proliferation risc with the Thorium cycle as it requires a lot of chemical handling of used fuel. They even produces some weapons grade plutonium in the MSRE and only diluted it with reactor grade Pu to avoid the complications with the waste fuel.
When man first encountered fire, it was likely poorly controlled and led to disasters. But now we heat our homes with it, heat our water with it, cook with it. It does humanity no good to simply react to this energy source with superstition.
Thorium requires more neutron bombardments to become a long-lived trans-uranic (heavier than uranium) isotope. A molten salt reactor can continuously filter out the protactinium and uranium before the fuel receives sufficient neutrons to become a trans-uranic. For this reason, a molten salt reactor running on thorium can theoretically avoid the vast majority of long-lived isotopes. Even better, using long-lived trans-uranic isotopes is also possible, as in neutron flux these will eventually split. All these elements are either fertile (being able to receive neutrons to become fissile) or fissile. This means a molten salt reactor could also theoretically burn up 100% of the long-lived nuclear waste. This would result in highly radioactive, short-lived nuclear waste. Solid reactors don't do this because of gaseous fission products destroying the solid fuel elements. Thought this was an important point to share, which the video glossed over.
And how exactly does one continuously filter out these elements from hot, molten salt mixture?
You do know almost complete burn-up of fission products is possible with uranium fission reactors, too? Uranium cycle has been closed years ago.
Yup - one of the "Yes but" issues constantly being raised by naysayers is the issues of fission product sequestering/disposal and it blows their tiny little minds that the stock answer is "leave it in the loop to be broken down to safer products"
Likewise, there's this mindset that the filtering system would need to process the entire loop every time it passes through the reactor. No amount of explaining that a 1GWe reactor would need to process 5-10kg of salt/day (and only start doing so after 15 years of operation) seems to penetrate people's skulls
@@lajoswinkler easy, you just take a used coffee filter and pour the salt through it.
Ok chat gpteenager
@@lajoswinkler Yes, it's possible to burn up fission products with a molten salt uranium reactor. In fact the thorium reactor made by copenhagen atomics can run also on just nuclear waste, using uranium and plutonium to start up. Best case, expand the fuel supply by transmuting thorium. It's one option, among many, due to their exceptional neutron economy due to their use of heavy water. BUT a conventional solid fuel uranium reactor cannot have 1000% fuel burn up, due to cracking of the solid fuel elements due to buildup of gasesous fission products.
As you pointed out, the US had thorium reactors running since the 1950's. The US gov't shifted away from thorium due to the ability of uranium reactors producing plutonium, which was in dire need during the cold war. IMHO, this tech needs to be revisited for the specific purpose of producing base load power, and not just power as available upon the prevailing skies, and currently available energy storage techniques.
The obviously best and most efficient energy systems, from a chemical standpoint, are some kinds of "Binary Batteries" or even "Multiple-Chemistry" batteries. My son is working on these now. If you look at ordinary chemical-couples for energy density (or power density), only Nuclear has a better ratio, especially with re-breeding and the useage of the Waste products for heat and medical isotope production, and similar uses.
No.
The US had two experimental reactors running IN the fifites - each for two and three years.
Both got shut down rather fast because the corrosion issues wer not controllable.
And - the conspiratorially inclined like to believe - because the thorium smrs dont produce bomb-viable plutonium.
Claiming they run "since" the fifties is an outright untruth. They where scientific experiments that got discontiued. No more no less.
Maybe modern tech will make the system more stable, maybe it will turn out to even be financially viable with LCOE - but both are big ifs.
US, world needs Chinese scientist....😮😮😮😮
Not "since". Not even close.
The US had two experimental reactors _during_ the fifties. 🤣
One of which was shut down after one, the other after three years. Because both never managed to control corrosion issues caused by the caustic magma-like liquid salt. Since then, nobody touched the tech for half a century.
A current japanese experimental setup (2019 I blieve) ran into very similar trouble.
And the youngest chinese experiment activated 1,5 years ago is subject to a complete information blackout and is rumored to have been troubleshooting idle for most of the time.
So no, the US did not have "reactors running since the 50".
That is simply not factual.
One could accuse you of blatant untruth.
It is still an experimental tech.
And even if smart engineers solve all that is needed for industrial application? We have no clue if it will ever become financially viable by LCOE pricing.
Something worked in a lab for a few intermittent months half a century ago?
Does not a functional, competitive industry make.
Not "since".
"During" would be the correct choice of words. 🤣
The US indee had two experimental reactors in the fifties.
One ran intermittently for one year, the other for three.
Both where shut down quickly, since the team could not find ways to manage the corrosion caused by the magma-like liquid salt. Then - for half a century - nobody touched the tech again.
In 2018 the japanese built another experiment - and ran into the same troubles. That experiment too was shut down fast.
And now the chinese have another experimental reactor. Has been announced 1,5 years ago and instantly was put under information blackout - but rumored to constantly fall idle for troubleshooting.
So no, the US did not have "reactors running since the 50s" - thats a completely counterfactual fabrication.
This is very much still an experimental tech, never used for energy production or extended run times or at scales beyond lab work.
And if smart engineers manage to iron out all kinks for industrial application?
We still have no idea if it will ever be financially competitive by LCOE pricing.
If china really plans to build an industrial exploration installation in the next few years? If they solved the many problems?
That would be a big step.
But a far cry from a running, competitive industry, even then.
@13:16 I remember watching a documentary some years ago where the oak ridge scientist, old and dying and very frustrated that nobody cared about their decades old research, just gave it for free to chinese scientists. And then the media in the US started to pay attention to them, in a negative way of course. Was such a shame that their work was forgotten all this time. Also I do remember reading about some experimental thorium rector in Norway.
I bet they had to do so much work to make it viable everything about the original research had to be replaced
@@coreblaster6809 I'm sure it wasn't easy but they started with proof of concept and probably a very solid base of the nuclear phenomena involved.
The industry has earned the public’s distrust every step of the way. Dishonest, manipulative, unsafe.
Kirk Sorenson is claiming credit for something he did not do. ORNL never hid or deleted any of the files. They have always been available. A number of other countries looked at the files related to the 2 test MSRs the USA built, and decided that there were far to many problems to tackle at the time and moved onto the half a dozen or so other reactor designs.
He just likes to claim a lot of things which are not new and have been known since the mid 1940's in many cases. He have anything to give away for 'free'.
@@coreblaster6809 That's exactly why TMSR-LF1 was built, although the Chinese did actually start at the point that ORNL stopped, by loading the reactor with 50kg of thorium. MSRE was supposed to be tested on thorium in 1970 but it was killed by politics and made illegal by Richard Nixon in 1972
Why was MSRE killed? SImple: The design would have permanently divorced civil niclear power from its critical dependency on the byproducts of weaponsmaking processes (don't need enriched uranium, unenriched or thorium work fine instead) and as such, the separation facilities in tennessee would have become subject to nuclear weapons limitation treaties
For every 1kg of 5% U235 produced, an "enrichment plant" produces 9kg of depleted uranium suitable for conversion into weapons plutonium.
That's WHY the USA is so hot under the collar about the Iranian centrifuges. They talk about "enriched uranium" making bombs but at a cost of $2billion in materials for such a weapon nobody would ever bother (it's cheaper to buy your enemy) and the REAL thing they avoid talking about is where all that depleted uranium has gone and what it's used for
I saw this article in Business Insider. Molten-salt reactors were first built in the 1950s but haven't been used in the US since the 1970s. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently issued a permit to build a molten-salt nuclear plant. Kairos Power is heading the project, which it hopes to finish by 2027.
It's under construction at Oak Ridge TN
Indeed. I believe that the UK also had a sodium cooled reactor in the 1950s.
Am so happy that we finally did it.
When I was in my early teens (circa 2004) my dream was to develop a thorium reactor. When time came to choose between Engineering degree, I chose computer engineering 'causs it was guaranteeing a job in India. ( to be honest I do not think I would be good enough to crack the exams in our atomic research center) I saw policies regarding Nuclear power in multiple countries and thought may be no one is going to build a thorium one in the end.
I know India has border skirmishes with China and we do not share a close ally relationship with China. I am still happy with their achievement.
I feel proud as we ( as a species) finally did it.
Hello there! I like your generous attitude. I have paid attention to several claims of thorium reactors about to enter into successful production in India over the years, but sadly nothing useful seems to have eventuated. I am now very hesitant to get beyond an attitude of 'I'll believe it when I see it' regarding the Chinese claims. That said, both China and India seem to be doing the right kind of research, so that like you, I hope that one day soon we can genuinely succeed (as a species). Warm wishes to you.
@@TykeMison_ We as Human. Think beyond you and me. Americans landed on the moon but people all over the world says human reached space and landed on the moon.
They have or haven't, only time will tell.
As a early teen I was studying radioactivity and following nuclear research development in our country. I could not crack NEST to enter NISER ( They took 40 people from 40k applicants). I decided to study physics in my bachelors and try again but then changed my mind to CS Engineering to guarantee a job. I was passionate about nuclear power in my teens and not that much interested in solar.
I do not know which country you are from or your nuclear policy, in India its all about politics and till date we could not move forward just because of politics ( both national and international pressure from The West: the so called developed countries). Whatever we have achieved after minimal support ( compared to western nations) it is phenomenal but its a long way to go.
@@MrCoolRibhu As a Chinese, I salute to you bro
Meanwhile India is operating 30MW thorium reactor for studying purpose, a simple search would have shown you about KAMINI reactor 😂😂
Fun fact: When there was a race for approval by Nixon for moving to nuclear plants, a molten salt/ Thorium reactor was built however it had a "melt down" not long before the approval process. Naturally they have melt downs which are safe but because of this failure was not chosen by Nixon. Also it should be mentioned Thorium reactors can use Uranium reactor waste as well and can in some cases reuse it's own waste by cycling it back in. They are also scalable to be used more locally, even at the household level. The downside is they are highly caustic from the salt so the parts have a short lifespan.
china will find a way. they always do unlike usa's bickering over every matter. the government in china literally mandates the entire country and all its resources to find a way to make the impossible possible lmao
capitalism is a tool of china. while in usa usa is a tool of capitalism. sigh thats why real progress is no longer possible in usa anymore. trump wants us to go back to oil.....
The problem I have with all this thorium hype is that it unnecessarily demonizes uranium, which is providing 10% of the world's electricity without harming the climate. You can make uranium light water reactors practically meltdown-proof as well, by having a natural circulation based passive cooling system. And you can recycle any nuclear waste and put the plutonium especially back into a light water reactor, France does this. Or you can use any kind of breeder reactor, whether molten salt, sodium cooled metallic fuel or even some hypothetical water-based breeder reactors. Or gas cooled, or whatever.
Don't forget, Nixon started the EPA, maybe as a result of these kinds of events. Very good decision.
Germany had a thorium cycle high temperature reactor synced with the grid in 1985 and AKAIK it wasn't the first thorium reactor. Liquid salt is a first though.
S2G was the initial power plant of USS Seawolf (SSN-575). This was one of three sodium cooled reactors (the core was moderated) ordered for the Seawolf program at the same time as three PWR units were ordered to support the USS Nautilus (SSN-571) program; In each case, one reactor was land-based for training and research, one intended for installation on a submarine, and one spare. The land-based unit corresponding to S2G was S1G reactor. The reactor core was beryllium-moderated.[1][2]
Persistent superheater problems on Seawolf caused the superheaters to be bypassed, resulting in mediocre performance. This and concern for the dangers posed by liquid sodium coolant led to the PWR type being selected instead as the standard US naval reactor type, and the S2G on Seawolf was replaced by the spare S2Wa reactor from the Nautilus program.
The Atomic Energy Commission historians' account of the naval sodium-cooled reactor experience was:
Although makeshift repairs permitted the Seawolf to complete her initial sea trials on reduced power in February 1957, Rickover had already decided to abandon the sodium-cooled reactor. Early in November 1956, he informed the Commission that he would take steps toward replacing the reactor in the Seawolf with a water-cooled plant similar to that in the Nautilus. The leaks in the Seawolf steam plant were an important factor in the decision but even more persuasive were the inherent limitations in sodium-cooled systems. In Rickover's words they were "expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair."[3
I believe Thorium has often been used in MOX fuel mixes when they are trying to dispose of and downgrade weapons-grade plutonium/uranium
I'm really impressed by the comments. Most appear very well informed on this important future energy source. Thanks everyone.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention Kirk Sorensen and his company Flibe Energy in Huntsville, Alabama. Kirk is the one who rediscovered Alan Weinberg’s MSRE work at ORNL in the early 2000’s and started posting videos and speaking about this lost technology.
Kirk Sorensen for president.
There was a group of Turkish nuclear scientists, that were strongly advocating for Thorium reactors. Their plane crashed under suspicious circumstances while going to a conference.
Evet hatta bu konuda hala onu anan, binlerce insan var... Umarım bir gün Rusya'dan bağımsız, biz de bu alanlar hakkında daha özverili çalışabiliriz.
What a load of nonsense.
Hatta çok büyük oranda rezervimiz olduğunu söylüyorlardı değil mi?@@antiochianius
@antiochianius Rosatom screwing up everything as usual? Maybe it's a good thing if Turkiye is going to improve their PR to the Western world so the Russians can't secretly kill your thorium scientists.
I knew you are doing interesting stuff with geothermal energy and apparantly with thorium as well.
Evet ancak benim anladığım kadarıyla bu doğru değil. Yine de detaylı araştırma gerek, googleladım sadece 😅
It is definitely a win. Anyone disagreeing with Nuclear simply does not know nuclear. It is literally that simple. Learn everything about nuclear, all it's history and it's reactor types, and you've now learned the best way forward for a world that's conquered completely clean energy forever.
That's only true from a certain perspective.
You have to ignore the many risks and cut corners that lead to serious concerns.
It matters entirely what kind of nuclear you're designing and what safety you plan into the system.
The sheer number of plants that create waste that requires constant energy to keep cool was quite reckless
there is one problem which I haven't heard or know a solution for so far yet which people against nuclear power bring up: the last 1% of nuclear waste, also known as the highly-radioactive and long-term nuclear waste
so far all we do with it putting it in short-term storage, to later put it into another short-term storage, until at some point in the future we may actually figure out what to actually do with it long term
but just so you know: the barrier of "solved" is that future generations can potentially forget about its existence and it wouldn't be a problem for them
@@kuhluhOGsend it into the sun
@@dimaryk11 Right, send it at night so the rocket doesn't burn up.
@@kuhluhOGConsidering a person's entire lifespan's worth of nuclear waste can fit in a toilet bowl, sending it to the sun ain't such a bad idea....
China is not the first, the U.S. had an operational one long ago, but the technology wasn't ready. Also Denmark recently developed one.
I heard about this technology probably 10 years ago, and of course it’s been around longer than that. I’m glad it is finally up and running.
no it isnt. Basicaly, western world made everything to delete idea, in 15 years we achieved nothing. Only China invested milions and is actually running first and only thorium molten reactor on this world.
Copenhagen Atomics have developed a molten salt reactor that they are able to build them in 40” container size, in a factory and then assemble on site. They are intending to have the first working plant in 2026. Not sure how much they have progressed since I first heard of them a year ago, but it would be interesting to know more. I think there are some interesting youtube videos from them too.
I remember those
They are the approval process within the UK because the EU is too sluggish regarding new developments
The are doing the mistake of using water close to the reactor. That's a safety hazard!
They have several test reactors built, but cannot do criticality tests in Denmark. So they do that in Switzerland with the Paul Scherrer Institute, and that is a first in Europe! So real progress is being made
@@larsnystrom6698 True, but in exchange for better neutron economy. I believe the heavy water moderater can be flushed in 2 sek. so while you might have some steam building up in case of a leak, it will be limited.
The Brayton cycle, operating with helium gas can operate at 60% thermal efficiency as opposed to the traditional Rankine (steam) cycle, with a thermal efficiency of about 40% ! The heat exchanger can be cooled with helium directly without becoming radioactive.
Also, super critical CO2.
We should have saved the Helium instead of selling it for pennies to fill stupid balloons!
@@cat637d nasa wastes more
We should not have given up the US Strategic Helium Reserve.
We should not envy the progress of others. We should applaud them for furthering man kind.
Not all criticism stems for envy.
I've been a fan of Thorium fueled reactors since the process was written about in the New Scientist in around the seventies or eighties. My only puzzles are why it's taken so long, and why the West left it to the Chinese to kick off ...
In the US, the NRC has shut down any and all nuclear advancement, that's why it has to move forward in places like China.
The US has plenty of uranium 238 so can ponder breeder-reactors going to plutonium rather than thorium going to U233.
Also, the US was concentrating on bombs, for which plutonium and U235 work well. Thorium is less useful to the military.
Politics. The U.S. Navy v. the U.S. Air Force (the new kid on the block). The light water reactors generating gigawatts of electricity around the world are based on the design chosen by the navy, and therefore favored by those who wrote the opinions that caused Congress to cancel the Thorium breeder in favor of the light water breeder that ultimately failed. GE, Westinghouse, and Bechtel all make their money refueling LW reactors and therefore have no interest in Thorium - which can easily be had by processing mine tailings (terracons, in Ukraine).
Chinese plans are just that...big talk no action. they don't "kick off" anything because their economy is trashed.
Us nuclear board wanted regular nuclear plants so they could use the waste for nuclear weapons. That was the sole reason the US government killed thorium reactors. The original research scientist wrote about this.
Ever since I found out what a molten sodium reactor was I knew it would be the most important clean energy source we can come up with.
A friend has just made a proof of concept two chamber bubble scrubber adding some ultrasonic cleaner and fogger units and a centrifuge stage wirh some cooling so he can smoke a joint without getting busted but he thinks might might scale to actually clean coal power enough that it might allow for the environmentally safe use of coal generation and the quality of life it brings.
Pretty cool!
I wrote a paper in university about the history of steam power. I had a few people proof read my paper and they were blown away that most of our energy is still produced using steam turbines
Technically speaking... The fuel is in a liquid form, so these molten salt reactors are in a perpetual meltdown. Should the fuel get much hotter, the liquid salt will expand, which would reduce the amount of fission events. It looses critical mass... And the chain reaction stops.
exactly they are self regulating by nature which is just amazing
* loses
Finally, Sam o’ nella’s dream realized
That's where I first heard about it too
You say “molten salts are corrosive”… this is not quite true. Molten salts are very hygroscopic (they absorb water) and the wet/damp molten salt is highly corrosive. The problem is keeping the highly radioactive molten salt dry. Keep up the good work!
Well, no. In high temperatures required to melt salts (and especially inside of the nuclear reactor, which generates a lot of heat) salts undergo partial dissociation. Because those are typically fluoride salts - you end up with fluoride ion, which does not care about exchanging its electron with anything around. It may happily bind back to some thorium, but anything other will be a good match in this nuclear tinder. Any electrical field gradient will speed up the process. This is not a new discovery - this dates back to the original process of sodium production from molten salt.
"good work" lmao, first minute of the video he said "cant be weaponized" which is 1000% wrong. Thats the whole deal with molten salt reactors. they can easily be used for plutonium production as a breeding reactor. so bad and dangerous information
I thought the beauty of a molten salt reactor was that it operates at atmospheric pressure, any water should boil off and be drained. Why not use lead coolant?
@@tobyw9573 pure lead is refuelling nightmare. You can add bismuth to form lead-bismuth eutectic, but activated bismuth results in polonium everywhere, so it is even worse. Alkali metals are liquid at the room temperature, but they need to be kept away from anything they can steal oxygen from
Keeping salt at 800 °C dry is automatically the case. It would be hard to add water to something at 800 °C, regardless of how hygroscopic it might be at room temperature.
One of the best descriptions and application of the Thorium Reactor and possible commercial usage of the Salt Reactor set up. Excellent Job, Dr. Miles.
Too bad he didn't include Copenhagen Atomics in this video. They are already building prototype reactors.
Yeah, I don't wouldn't trust that stuff with ten feet pole. China did take time to validate all that unpleasant material stuff, corrosion, stability at 1200°C, significant budget, hundreds of PhDs a and over a decade of research.
Copenhagen Atomics look to be founded in 2014, revenue of ~ $7 Million (I have seen an announcement about $25 mil funding round). From money alone, it's obvious it's not a serious effort (in sense of resources invested, I am sure people are very dedicated and serious).
Making a shifty reactor is a recipe for disaster. E.g. PM-3A (one for McMurdo station) had 438 malfunctions during its operational lifetime (1964 to 1972).
Was about to write that as well - they have working molten salt reactors up and running, but with electricity as heating source (because Denmark!) - they are going to test with fissile material in Switzerland.
Thorium reactor design is much more difficult then uranium 235 based reactors because of the neutron economy, that being said it is possible and you can make it easier if you can use some of the spent fuel from light water reactors to jump start a thorium MSR, but its almost impossible to get permission to do anything like that.
Thorium reactors might be more difficult than U-235 or plutonium reactors, but still a LOT easier than fusion reactors.
Legit, I'm just happy someone is finally utilizing this tech we've had for 70 years.
We haven't had it for 70 years!
There's a difference between knowing the principles, and even building a prototype, and actually work out the details and mass manufacturing of it. That's why it may take a decade to work it all out!
We "have it" when there's a factory for building them!
@@larsnystrom6698 we have had this tech since the 50's, the reason they don't use them here in the states is because of our war machine that dictates our every move.
@@elrictraver8275 that means u didnt have it lol
@@elrictraver8275Where did you buy your tinfoil hat? MAGA.
@@mikek5298 Did you just wake up or what? Vietnam, Korea, laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Bananarepublics in Latin America; Nicaragua, Argentinia, Bolivia, Honduras. Bombed half the Middle East into ruins too, Iraq, Afhanistan, Syria, Palestina.
Killing in the name of.
The breeding process of Thorium is EXACTLY what the Germans were doing in WW2 with the Die Glocke or Bell. It was a particle accelerator that would breed thorium into nuclear material.
I wonder how they will solve the problem of the corrosiveness of the fuel coolant mixture
By purifying the salt, very pure salt is not corrosive.
Several companies are testing ceramics.
That is why this is a 2MWthermal test reactor. Oak Ridge was a 10MWthermal test reactor.
Multiple countries have spent the last 15+ years researching possible super-alloys that would be much more corrosion and radiation resistant than the alloys the USA used in the 1st 2 MSR test reactors. I've actually read some of the papers. No one yet has identified a corrosion/radiation resistant alloy. But they have identified ones that have very slow corrosion/degradation rates.
At the same time the concept that we can filter out the worst of the corrosive compounds from the MSR stream has developed - and laboratory testing with partial simulated fluids have indicated the possibility.
The very purpose of this test reactor is to see if the combination of their "best guess" of a new super-alloy and their "best guess" for a filtration system will reduce the corrosion/degradation rate to a level where you could desing a reactor with a 40+ year operating life by just using a modest "corrosion allowance" typical for what is commonly done when using carbon steel alloys.
Time will tell. My personal guess is that the alloy will likely work well enough (and I am sure that there are corrosion coupons of the other alloys in the reactor); but that they may have to redesign the filtration system a few times to get it to where it works well enough in both filtration and reliablity.
@@perryallan3524 thank you for your detailed response to my question!
Jai Hinduja. Removing moisture
"LFTR"s, pronounced "Lifter" ain't new. America ran one for nearly four years in the 1960s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Much safer and an all round better idea. There is 13 times as much energy in coal in the form of Thorium as there is available by burning the coal. So, another point in favor. The Germans figured out how to turn coal into synfuel - gasoline and diesel - before WWII.
We don't and never did have an energy problem. We have 'who makes the damn decisions' problem, and it's acute, verging on terminal at this point.
A high level LFTR design may have existed, but I don't believe the design element were ever integrated together or fully fleshed out. The Molten salt reactor experiment showcased an iterative approach of shutdowns and alterations to prove their concepts, but the LFTR design requires an in-line fuel/salt processing step which would have never been assembled together with their test reactor.
Best comment in the whole chat!!
Corruption, lobbying by vested interests and petty ego battles are our biggest issues by a very long way.
Another fun fact, the germans had wood burning cars, pretty interesting design.
You forgot Copenhagen atomic is working on thorium power plant
One that fits into a shipping container for use in remote locations.
No. Copenhagen Atomic is a scam company generating income and jobs for the key founders with no real plans to build any operational nuclear power plant. I've looked at their concepts and ideas and they have not even done the most basic research into nuclear standards and requirements.
There's at least a dozen other similar investor scam companies in the nuclear world. Key thing to look at is who is actually working with a nuclear regulator as part of a "pre-licensing process." There are actually companies doing that.
Yeah, plans for modular mass production and everything. Very promising, but lets see them pull it off and get across regulatory barriers. In the eyes of the public and the law it's still "nuclear".
Please tell me which nuclear regulator they are working with - which "pre-licensing process" they are working through. All the serious companies are doing that. I have not been able to find any reference that Copenhagen has done any of that.
Lots of data is premeditated in the video. Infact the video is more of a China shill content than actual reality of what's happening in the world.
as a fan of nuclear power sourcing, listening to the news about nuclear thorium molten salt reactors sounds like music to my ears. Thorium has become my favorite element in the periodic table years ago bacause of the posibility of building incredibly efficient and safe reactors, plus it has a cool name
There is also a very interesting company Copenhagen Atomics which want to mass manufacture thorium reactors as a service. I think Thorium is the way to go for the future. It is just taking too long to get something in production whereas we’re already researching it for more than 70 years.
At 9:04 this reddish brown phosphate mineral is called Monazite, not Monzanite! I think you confused it with Monzonite which is an igneous intrusive rock Dr. Miles. Awesome content nevertheless.
Also called protactinium "proactinium"
Somewhere in New Mexico Hank is spinning in his grave.
Information, well presented, is more valuable than gold, and your presentations are ticking the boxes in this department. Thanks for focusing on the practicality of the subjects you cover.
The raw mineral form of Thorium, is worth about $5 a kilogram, unprocessed. Processed, similar to Gold.
How do you measure a video, by isotropic/radioactive beta decay?
His children can one day look back and see how Dad sold his soul to the CCP.
Congrats-your shilling is recorded for posterity.
Imagine finding that your country already has enough resources to provide power for the foreseeable future.
Of course you would look for ways to utilize this wherever possible, and increase your ability to manage it.
did a quick google about the abundance of Thorium , and found the top 4 (in order) is India, Brasil, Australia, and US, so if China (number 11 on the scale) has 100,000 years of reserves, at least it will not have the Monopoly, and we can all learn from each other , to succeed in energy production. It would , however hurt our government here in Australia, for they have become far too used to having China pay for our coal exports.
Nice to see a youtuber who actually understands what's going on! I've seen many talking about technical subjects but you get the feeling they're just repeating what they've read without fully understanding it...
Most of UA-cam for years has simply been producers/hosts making a story out of an article/existing documentary & literally just reading off a script in which they had little input/orignal thoughts that isn't a random hot take.
AI
@@Dontwanttoliveanymore is life really that bad? If you don't wanna live why not put some effort into changing things? Start off small, baby steps, before you know it you could of completely turned things around, I believe in you, cmon, get off your backside, stop feeling sorry for yourself and put some action into it 😃
There is absolutely no scenario where our societies run for 20 000 years on cleaner energy sources, while still being locked in consumption societies that are overwhelmed by their own waste: with heavy metals pollution, plastic pollution, PFAS, pesticides, soil erosion, biodiversity destruction, water depletion, ecological collapse is all but guaranteed, no matter how little co2 per kwh you emit at the power plant level.
Indeed ! The key point, too many people with too many needs, mostly fake and still growing ! CO2 may be the smallest problem compared to what you listed ! Demography in population unable to even feed themselves is the biggest threat !
It was am example of why it would be lucrative to them, energy independence is the holy grail of defense. Of course it wouldn't just lock all other technology in a standstill for 20 thousand years
Yeah, the issue boils down to what it always does: capitalism is killing the planet and preventing us from fixing it.
@KrislLeon Socialism and fascism is killing it faster
@@KrislLeon a
15:06 "I'm not sure what this would look like, so here's some salt"...I lost it :D
Worth it for the sponsor alone. Best thorium reactor discussion I've seen outside of University.
It's so funny to think that Xi Jinping watched that Sam O'Nella video
LOL, So biden and trump didn't watch?
3:05 oh I see ! it's driving a STEAM TURBINE I thought it was a slice of pizza !....
Copenhagen Atomics perhaps deserved a mention?
As an Enigneer I can tell reducing the pressure in the pipes will reducing the efficacy. Increased pressure will also increase the volume expansion and with that the kinetic energy in the turbine. Increasing the liquids pressure doesn’t need a lot of volumetric work but with gas its different. Just think about putting pressure in a bike wheels and now image adding pressure to a bike wheel filled with water. Pumping air takes like 20 pumps but increasing the pressure of the tire filled by water you will only with big push. Dealing with pressures is no a problem in modern days anymore
This isn't the first one. I might be the first one to be used for commercial use but the first one was done in Oak Ridge
In Europe, Naarea and Thorizon are working together to create the first modular molten salt reactor that could run on multiple fissile fuel sources, including Th. The first MSR to be built will be an 80 MW facility to go online in 2030. There are already plans to upscale this to commercial energy producers with a 250 MW version by 2035. The fuel used will come from existing spent fuel in France and Th mined in Sweden, Finland and Norway will be used as well. The advantage these modular reactors have is they can be built onsite for commercial consumption, requiring no power distribution infrastructure to be added. They can also be used as thermal batteries, storing excess power generated from green sources to be released during peak demand.
While that is great. It's quite different from what China is doing in terms of scale
Do you wanna bet that after rising 200% in cost, the energy will only become 10% cheaper?... 😂
@@dan-bz7dz You are 100% correct. That's the power you have in a dictatorship that is focused on energy and weapons. Xi will probably become the single most influential person in the world in the 21st century.
@@millanferende6723 If this were an unproven technology, that could be a concern, but this is 1950s tech being upgraded. Today the LCOE of MSRs is 9% less than that of coal fired plants. When government subsidies for fossil fuels are shifted to green energy, that will be a 200% saving, not increase.
12:26 is exactly why thorium hasn't taken off until now. I knew it would be the military industrial complex, contractors, and government before anything was even said. It's like the Harry Potter meme, it's always you three.
Agreed, GE and the Navy had a big hand in it.
How corrosive is the salt when it's molten? I imagine a molten salt could react with or maybe dissolve certain metals. Do the pipes need both corrosion resistance and high temp tolerance? Or just high temp tolerance?
I 100 percent support the building of this experimental reactor. And the location.
With the continued use of coal burning power plants in China not expected to end any time soon. This research reactor can help them develop a commercial blueprint, and China can replace the coal burners with shiny new thorium reactors.
I think thats the plan. Coal neutrality by 2060 means rapid replacement in the future.
and my country is demolishing all of it's nuclear power plants. what a joke
It's almost like a psy-ops. It would solve everything but oh no it's supposed to be evil.
9:45 - _there it [233Pa] undergoes beta decay again, converting another proton into neutron and producing Uranium 233_ - I gues you meant to say "NEUTRON into PROTON", haven't you?
Yeah, Protactinium is element 91 Uranium is 92 so it would have to gain a proton. What I don't get is if a neutron was converted into a proton, then it should be Uranium 232. Unless it gained another one from being "bombarded".
@@Grerak When a neutron "expels" a beta particle (I'm not overly precise in use of the terminology here, I just want to address the issue) the nuclei does not change its mass - it rises its atomic number, i.e. number of protons (hence becoming an element "higher up" on the list). Atomic mass (in a.m.u) is a sum of neutrons and protons, so if one neutron changes its, erm, "preferred pronoun" that does not affect the mass of the nuclei.
233Pa has 91 protons and 142 neutrons [233/91Pa], hence it's a.m. = 233.
When one neutron becomes proton it's noow 92 p (one more) + 141 n (one less) which still equals 233, but since proton number became higher, it is now another element, uranium - with the same mass - 233/92U.
@MrKotBonifacy Makes sense! Thanks for the clarification. Now I know why Carbon-14 turns into Nitrogen-14 for carbon dating.
I love nuclear power and am a huge supporter of it. That being said. Please stop treating the 3 Mile Island incident like it was catastrophic or anywhere near threatening levels as Fukushima or Chernobyl. The radiation threat from 3 mile to even the people ON THE SITE was a couple of X-ray visits worth and nothing more. The site continued to function for years after until it couldnt afford to anymore and they went into a warm shutdown. Thanks!
yeah, i agree. the public sees 3 mile as a disaster, but it was'nt.
Very nice description of the thorium cycle. I have some grammar help for you at 10:55. "Added bonus" is redundant. Say "bonus" instead, without adding "added". At 11:09, "general rule of thumb." is redundant. Say "Rule of thumb" without the "general". In short, "bonus" doesn't need added, and "rule of thumb" doesn't need "general."
It's not so much grammar but styling because the phrase is still grammatically correct. The seemingly redundant adjective can be used for emphasis.
You need more than heat to power a heat engine. You need a place to reject heat too. Putting a thorium/steam power plant in the Gobi desert means that the condensers have to be air cooled, hence much larger than a typical water cooled condenser. It is conceivable that a thorium Brayton cycle could be utilized, where the working fluid is air and that the waste heat would be in air and simply exhausted to the atmosphere.
Desert doesn't equate very hot. It just means there is very little life there, mainly because of lack of water, rarely because of excess heat alone. It can be very cold at night and very hot during the day. Antarctica is also technically a desert
Gobi is a very cold place, nothing like the normal image of a desert. Tibet is also a technical desert bc of lack of water.
Is a hot desert that hot compared to molten nuclear material?
Gobi desert is a cold desert. The highest temperature in summer is 38 Celsius. The coldest is -26.5 Celsius in winter. Average temperature is 2.8 Celsius. Dumping heat into the air is viable.
I found the Easter Egg! Go to timeline 15:14, pause the video, and drop playback speed to .25 and hit play. That will slow it down enough for the 4 seconds where the rocks slide uphill towards the power backhoe! That clip was run in reverse, then added to this presentation running backwards!
wow how did you find this? It is true but just how
I always try to take in as much of the visual field as possible, and have been lucky enough to have some good science teachers in both high school and college, so basically, I pay attention more than the average person.
Truly excellent, informative and sublimely well explained evaluation of a fantastic opportunity for mankind (and thus the planet?). I really enjoyed this deep dive approach. A calm, gimmick free and sober presentation pulls the viewer in, it is like a one to one lecture. Great work, Ben.
Some mistakes in this video tbh, but the main point is nuclear energy is great & we need as much of it being built as possible & as fast as possible. I'd like to see the world doing what France has been for decades now but with newer designs coolants & fuels. Idealy we need a 20x increase in World Nuclear energy production by 2050 & a 200x increase by 2100. It's doable but not if we carry on like this.
Agree, was surprised to see Xenon build up cited as the rationale for this when that's another Chernobyl myth, it builds up when reactor load not matched implicating turbines
Doesn't France get most of their uranium from mines they 'own' in Africa?
7:00 - can you imagine with ongoing tension throughout the world the ad for such device comes out as if something completely normal - "for your safer traversal of the post-apocalyptic wastelands"... This is complete madness
I think it was intended to be tongue in cheek.
1:51 Forbidden Gatorade
From what I recall current materials will only last for 6 to 12 years as a containment vessel in a molten salt reactor, an addition, while the waste products of thorium lose radioactivity far faster than uranium, they are initially far more deadly. On the plus side Thorium molten salt reactors not only "burn" far more of their fuel, resulting in less waste, but can also have other nuclear waste mixed into the fuel to burn it as well.
The molten “coolant “ works at 1400° C or 2552°F . Steel starts melting between 2500°-2700°F there about. Not to mention the corrosiveness of molten salts. I must of missed that part of the video.
That's when it gets near boiling not "works" Mr. Daft. A 5 year old wouldn't even be this daft.
S2G was the initial power plant of USS Seawolf (SSN-575). This was one of three sodium cooled reactors (the core was moderated) ordered for the Seawolf program at the same time as three PWR units were ordered to support the USS Nautilus (SSN-571) program; In each case, one reactor was land-based for training and research, one intended for installation on a submarine, and one spare. The land-based unit corresponding to S2G was S1G reactor. The reactor core was beryllium-moderated.[1][2]
Persistent superheater problems on Seawolf caused the superheaters to be bypassed, resulting in mediocre performance. This and concern for the dangers posed by liquid sodium coolant led to the PWR type being selected instead as the standard US naval reactor type, and the S2G on Seawolf was replaced by the spare S2Wa reactor from the Nautilus program.
The Atomic Energy Commission historians' account of the naval sodium-cooled reactor experience was:
Although makeshift repairs permitted the Seawolf to complete her initial sea trials on reduced power in February 1957, Rickover had already decided to abandon the sodium-cooled reactor. Early in November 1956, he informed the Commission that he would take steps toward replacing the reactor in the Seawolf with a water-cooled plant similar to that in the Nautilus. The leaks in the Seawolf steam plant were an important factor in the decision but even more persuasive were the inherent limitations in sodium-cooled systems. In Rickover's words they were "expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair."[3
@@DCMAKER133
As per the Royal Society of Chemistry . Thorium
Melting point
1750° C 3182° F or 2023K
Boiling Point
4785° C 8645° F 5058K
Josephpadula comment was far more useful.
@@michaelpistey4001 HASTELLOY® N alloy (UNS N10003) is a nickel-base alloy that was invented at Oak Ridge National Laboratories as a container material for molten fluoride salts. It has good oxidation resistance to hot fluoride salts in the temperature range of 704 to 871°C (1300 to 1600°F)
MSR operating temperatures are around 700 °C (1,292 °F), significantly higher than traditional LWRs at around 300 °C (572 °F)
also due to addition of other ions (it´s not pure thorium) the melting point decreases, e.g sodium and potassium are solid when they´re mixed it becomes liquid at room temperature, that´s a so called eutectic mixture
@@Humbulla93 Excellent!!
These are the type of points that were not mentioned in the video. Next up would be how easy/hard it is to work with these materials. A master welding friend of mine back in Denmark. Explained some of the intricacies of working with exotic metals.
My point has never been. This can’t be done. Obviously it has. My point was this is not the layup that this video makes it appear.
I do appreciate your information greatly. It’s been well over 50 years since I gave physical chemistry any thought. Kinda fun to dust off those dormant brain cells.
Personally I'm not a big surprised
America is totally fast asleep at this subject
No doubt. The result of very rich oil men paying off politicians and lobbyists to convince a great number of people how useless renewable energy is. And now they attack EVs. Leaving the US incapable of leading the world in new energy technology. Pathetic. Politicize climate, energy, crime, education, medicine, you name it. Meanwhile the rest of the world moves on.
I certainly wouldn't be betting against the Chinese. If nothing else the recent past has demonstrated how the Chinese are able to exceed the west's projections on Chinese technological developments. Think EV's, Lithium battery production, solar panel manufacture, semiconductor production and so on.
What I LOVE about Thorium is how safe it is.
Like how safe Uranium is..
Like how safe Plutonium is...
Like how safe Lead is....
Not just 3-4X more common; it only has one isotope and doesn't need to be enriched or separated from certain isotopes, which is a huge hindrance to U as well (although not as much for more-modern reactors which work with the low-enriched)
The markets will tell you at current, that a new nuclear era is in it's infancy.
the first Thorium reactor was in the US in the 60's.
In Hollywood
Ofcourse
the first *failed* Thorium reactor was in the US in the 60's.
Yes, but they pulled the plug on it!
Otherwise, we might have small safe nuclear power plants by now, instead of the current safety hazards.
@@larsnystrom6698 How many nuclear accidents have there been that caused major problems since the 60's. Oh, yea a total of 2 (and three-mile island was not a major disaster it was a PR disaster)
@@MaximilianMay-x6y And those two huge incidents were enough! Public relations, for better or worse, are important these days, and nuclear power ranks near the bottom.
Look on Wikipedia "(Lists of nuclear disasters and radioactive incidents") for a long list of nuclear incidents that never made the news.
Look at America's *worst* radiation release near Los Angeles in July 1959 with the Sodium Reactor Experiment at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. The incident directly released deadly radionuclides into the air like iodine-131 and cesium-137 that decay with deadly gamma radiation. It was covered up for a few decades.
China will not be building the worlds first Thorium reactor. The Peach Bottom reactor in Pennsylvania was what you are calling a Thorium reactor. It was built and operated in the mid 1960s. The Fort St. Vrain Reactor was a "Thorium reactor" built in the 1970s in Colorado. I was on the design team for it's first core, and I personally designed the first reload core. The design utilized a graphite moderator with cylindrical holes filled with either U-235 or thorium pellets coated with graphite. The plan was to use the U-233 bred during operation in a subsequent reload. I don't remember if they ever used the generated U-233 in the reactor before they shut it down. Molten salt sounds great but the corrosion was a killer. Perhaps we have better materials now. If China builds reactors the way they build bridges, they are in big trouble.
I think you skipped over the problems of thorium somewhat
The biggest problem is its cold aka not powerful enough.
Fusion has always been and it will always be the technology of the future
scumbag humans: refuses to invest in new technology, complains that new technology isnt available.
You get like these insane numbers, that worldwide governments spend more an hour on oil than they spent in fusion R&D for the past decade.
Their test reactor must be running alright then. Not surprised given Oak Ridge ran for 5 years when a bunch of 60s nuclear scientists decided to build one. And it didn't break, they got shut down.
They would shut it down in weekends, it was not an issue for them
Excellent video! This needs to go viral to educate the masses 😁
Not first. Copenhagen Atomics did.
who cares?
First what? They say they may have a demonstrator of 1 MW in 2026, while also claiming going from that small prototype to a 100+ MW operational and commercial reactor 3 years later? Yeah, sure. Looks like another one of those scams just existing to pump public subsidies and tech bro investors money... Same bullshit exists with fusion and supersonic commercial jets startups. Maybe one of those dozens of vaporware merchants isn't in fact one and will succeed, but none of them up until now have made any substantial progress, after more than a decade of PR spins... I would advise extreme skepticism before "fanboying" for any of those.
Indian Point Energy Center (I.P.E.C.) is a now defunct three-unit nuclear power station located in Buchanan, just south of Peekskill, in Westchester County, New York.
Indian Point 1, built by ConEdison, was a 275-megawatt Babcock & Wilcox supplied pressurized water reactor that was issued an operating license on March 26, 1962 and began operations on September 16, 1962. The first core used a thorium-based fuel with stainless steel cladding, but this fuel did not live up to expectations for core life. It was switched to uranium in 1965.
- wikipedia
India are already working on a thorium rector
No one can beats china, our country india half of the population even doesn't have access to internet and cant make toilet
I had no idea thorium was a realistic option for nuclear power. This is quite interesting. Meanwhile the US government argues about social issues that are personal issues for individuals and not the government’s business and using tax money for ge n o c i d e instead of scientific projects like this.
Pointless fearmongering about uranium plants at the start. Disliked.
You should study harder. The world's first Thorium Reactor was built in America, and it successfully ran for a couple of years before it was shut down.
Someone didn't watch the video
experimental vs. - supposedly - commercial.
The two US things in the 50s where just laboratory proof of concept.
Tech never got beyond that stage since then - japan and china both did experimantal reactors in recent years, but at least in japan it didnt go well and in china we dont know. Info blackout.
If this is true? it would be the first model meant to actually produce electicity for use.
The “We should have invested in Fusion” skeleton is my spirit animal