I'm a retired nuclear engineer and have worked on nuclear fuel and safety aspects. In those early years in the 1980s, Thorium was not utilized in NPPs. But its potential was always recognized, and India's 3-stage strategy included Thorium utilization in stage-3. Hopefully, good progress has been made in the last 40 years, and would not be surprised if Thorium bundles are loaded in the operating heavy water reactors. My best wishes.
Hello sir, I know this may seem a bit out of the blue but how would you describe your overall experience as a nuclear engineer? This is coming from someone who is thinking about taking it on as their own profession
The reason we don't use Thorium for energy is because it can't be used for weapons and isn't rare enough to monopolize the market so it can be controlled by governments. It's cheap energy which means no one makes money which means those making money on energy right now which includes renewable energy are not going to support this energy source.
How is it cheap energy ? , it's not easy to build and operate a nuclear power plant the company or government who did that can charge for it , it's just like a business with a very High profit margin , put 10 - twelve companies and voila free market will bring it cost down enough where it would be virtually nothing but if a company provides it to even half a billion population it would result in huge profits for the company.
I do not buy it. If Thorium power is cheaper and safer, then production costs fall, and prices can, for example, be reduced by half. But profits are far higher. Then the big cost in power is mainly in transmission -- power lines .
@@DeSalvoLaw , We pay separate cost for electricity and transit. There is a free market for selling electricity. Currently transfer costs vary from 50% (big towns) to 70% (rural areas). If electricity price would halve then transfer costs would raise to 75-85% of the costs. I guess we need more cost effective transfer technologies too.
The pants are actually the only original, creative part of this presentation. The rest is the usual thorium kool-aid distilled by Kirk Sorensen, repackaged with a Danish accent.
Great lecture, Thomas! It brings back confidence in the "Atoms for Peace"-vision. Energy must be cheap, clean and abundant so that humanity can prosper!
But without artificial scarcity how will the owner class stay in power and keep the billions of owned people fighting each other for the right to exist?
India is leader in thorium and they have built reactors as well. There are so many scientists around the world studying how India is solving it's power problem with thorium.
@@subramanyabhat446 No, I think he was saying that anyone in that room - the intelligentsia, which definitely includes brown peoples - will be the ones to do it. Half of silicon valley is Indian!
Excellent talk. I’m glad to finally see the world waking up and realizing the future is nuclear energy. As many have pointed out work is ongoing on the use of Thorim
Our rejection of Nuclear power was a massive mistake, and the environment has payed dearly for it as we continue to rely on fossil fuels for our electricity
@@nacho.4583 Sorry, right now I have other worries, Yes that would be correct, exactly right to have a good laugh and drink red wine, la vie est belle.
People were uncertain of the thermal spectrum nuclear reactors. They hadn't been testen while fast spectrum reactors were already proven to work. But they should've realized thorium could've been the next big thing after the first PWR came into being.
All of the reactors up to that point, were thermal spectrum reactors. PWRs, BWRs, CANDU, etc are all thermal spectrum. They use water as their coolant, but also as their neutron moderator (heavy water for the CANDU). Fast spectrum reactors don't use a moderator to slow down the neutrons. Thomas didn't mention that the project that got the funding, was the EBR-2 Fast Reactor design in Idaho, with a number of the contracts making it work, coming from companies like General Atomics in California. The EBR-2 and later prototype Integral Fast Reactor are more developed than the MSRs Thomas talked about. EBR-2 ran for 30 years and produced power.
A good talk but he has a number of small errors. The two biggest are: --- Current nuclear reactors burn only 0.5 % of the U235, not a couple percent as he says. --- Thorium is about as common as Lead. We have enough Thorium on the planet Earth to power everyone for 100,000's of years. You can take ordinary dirt, and the trace amounts of Thorium are equal to 12 barrels of oil. Energy wise, we can burn the Thorium in ordinary dirt, and make an energy profit. I would have liked if the explained WHY Thorium based reactors produce fewer Actinides, and thus, the wastes are so short lived. (On the other hand, it likely would have added another 5 minutes to his talk.) Warm regards, Rick.
@@lennartvonblottnitz6396 Hi Lennart, Not sure you are asking me about the Neutron Bomb, they have nothing to do with Thorium power. That said... The neutron bomb was designed to produce a pulse of radiation, which would kill soldiers in the open, but have little fallout and not harm civilians in towns a short distance away. It was designed, to credibly threaten Soviet armor columns which could attack West Germany. The USSR, spent a LOT of hard currency to portray these weapons as inhumane in the Western media. (I remember Johnny Carson making a joke about a bomb that killed people but preserved the lawn chairs.) The whole point became moot, when France left NATO, developed its own atom bombs and said it would nuke Soviet armies in Germany. (They hated Germany because of WWI and WWII.) That threat was a credible deterrent. Thorium can not be used in any sort of nuclear bomb. NO nuclear material from civilian power plants has ever been used in nuclear weapons, (it is far cheaper to make Plutonium in specialized plants.) But Thorium has several properties which make it even harder than to make into bombs than Uranium based power reactors. Warm regards, Rick.
Just a short comment, the percentage varies with each reactor type and how the fuel burns as the exact timing and positions of the reactions are not 100% predictable, so this percentage can vary to 2% and up to 5% in some cases
@@bobec2999 Hi Batkatabg. Natural radioactive ores have very long half lives (hundreds of millions of years to billions of years). They are so stable they are safe. (If they were more radioactive, they would have decayed away long ago.) However, once they are put in a nuclear reactor and bombarded with neutrons, they become dangerous. With nuclear wastes (over simplifying slightly), there are two types. Fission products (after a large element has fissioned), have very short half lives. They are wildly dangerous, but 'burn up' quickly. You need to keep them out of the bio-sphere for a couple hundred years, not thousands of years. Heavy elements that absorb neutrons, become 'transuranic actinides'. These have half lives in the hundreds of years to thousands of years range. This is problematic. They are radioactive enough that you don't want to spend a long time near them, but their half lives are long enough that it takes thousands of years for them to decay to insignificance. Since we get the energy from fissions, ideally we would like to have all the Thorium or Uranium fission. Lots of power, and only short lived half lives left. Solid fuel rods in Uranium power plants only fission 0.5% of the Uranium, which maximizes the long term wastes. Thorium is based in a molten salt. Being a liquid, we can do chemical processes on it to pull out the wastes constantly. (With Uranium, you have to carve up the highly radioactive solid fuel rods and dissolve them in nitric acid to pull out the wastes from a traditional power plant. This is so expensive, that few countries bother.) The up shot is, with a molten salt reactor, you can keep the non-fissioned atoms in the reactor until they fission. Less long term nuclear wastes. Thorium has another advantage. It is a lighter element and has 3 places where it can fission. As it absorbs neutrons and becomes heavier, it can fission at U233, U235 and at Pu239. Uranium 238 only gets one chance before it becomes a transuranic actinide. For this reason, Thorium reactors produce less Plutonium and other heavy actinides. Which means less long term wastes. For more information, I recommend the book: "Thorium: Power Cheaper than Coal" by Robert Hargraves. Warm regards, Rick.
The only reason we don't use Thorium for nuclear power is because it's relatively stable and you can't use it for nuclear weapons. For the civilian market, however, Thorium is optimal.
Thorium is the source material for uranium-233, which can be used in weapons. In Oak Ridge, I think that's what that first reactor was for. (He said it wasn't a power generator, and Oak Ridge was where nuclear weapons material was refined for the US arsenal.) The US made a uranium-233 bomb from thorium, but we went with plutonium bombs in the long run.
That's the norm. The US did, however, make a working bomb from [233]U derived from [232]Th. I don't know why they abandoned [233]U as a fissile material, but it's easy enough to make, and the bomb worked just fine. Maybe extracting and enriching the [233]U from the remaining Th was more of a hassle than they wanted to deal with? I dunno. If they ran that reactor for 5 years, maybe that means it took 5 years to get enough [233]U for a single bomb? But then the reactor was relatively tiny, and they could have built them by the thousands. I can only guess at their reasoning. There must be a good reason though, or else every terrorist group would be making [233]U bombs.
Modern weapons use neither U233 nor U235, they use Pu239 (Plutonium), because it's easier to obtain and more efficient (higher cross section, a bit more energy per fission). U233 is similar to Plutonium, but it's more dangerous to handle and process because it gives off high amounts of radiation (which also makes it easier to detect, when we're talking about secretly smuggling it out somewhere). In terms of obtainability, U235 has to be extracted (separated) from natural uranium that you dug out of the ground somewhere, while Pu239 and U233 have to be synthesized by shooting neutrons at (relatively abundant) elements that you dug out of the ground somewhere (thorium for U233, natural uranium for Pu239). It turns out that the synthesizing thing is cheaper than the separating thing -- at least for highly developed countries that own nuclear reactors where they can get the neutrons required. You don't need a reactor for the separating thing (U235), so this may be easier for low-tech countries. If you're a terrorist, you probably don't have your own reactors, so you'd either try to separate U235, or "get" Plutonium from somewhere, which should be easier than "getting" U233 from somewhere for the reasons described above, at least as long as not the whole world builds thorium reactors and thus produces U233 as a byproduct.
There are two reasons U-233 from Thorium reactors is a horrible choice for nuclear weapons: 1) It has a pretty high critical mass. Pu-239 just makes for smaller and more efficient warheads. 2) It will be contaminated with U-234, which is very hard to separate from U-233 and emits gamma radiation. Which, in turn, needs heavy shielding to protect against (making the nukes too heavy to fit on missiles) lest it damages electronics. Not something you'd want to happen to the control systems of your nukes.
It’s insane that this technology isn’t being widely adopted. Solves many problems avid would provide energy independence throughout the world. Avoiding all the conflicts over oil would be enough justification to rapidly research this technology.
9:00 while i know he's only talking about uranium nuclear power being expensive compared to thorium, i still find it very important to point out that even current gen nuclear energy is by far the cheapest safest cleanest and most reliable source available today compared to renewables and fossil fuels
@@ano2425 Have you looked up the disposal costs of the high tech materials that make up solar panels with an average lifespan of twenty years or wind turbines with an average lifespan of 12 years? The cost of, and disposal of, the batteries required to store the energy for inconsistent energy sources, or the costs of the vast acreage of land required for the energy farms? Solar and wind are far more expensive, it isn't remotely close. The amount of toxic waste is also far more than modern nuclear.
@@ano2425 shut down costs are known, to burry the waste not realy, stil what can those costs be, everywhere it is the same, nuclear makes money, the profit are often spend in foolish ways like it has no limits and when the money is spend they need to pay up for the shutdown and so forth, belgium has sold(given away) its plants to france, suez and every year paris recieves around 300 miljon € from them in profits, they poorly maintain them, renewables are getting cheaper and cheaper but everywhere it is the same it needs a healthy flow of tax money
@Dan Meu... : Nuclear power is certainly cheaper than so called renewables but not cheaper than coal in large scale power systems. Solar and wind do work well on a very small scale. i.e. we use them to power pumps on the farm. They are ideal for that.
@@buildmotosykletist1987 your talking about windmills that don't work if there is no wind and can take a week to a month to fill a 20,000 gallon water tank. Alot of ranches around the western United States are doing away with windmills because of their inefficentcy.
I don't think he means that you are not smart or educated, but rather that there is more money and infrastructure available in more economically developed nations.
Just go for it, all contributions are of course welcome. I guess that Thomas is pointing to the fact, thar there are more resources available for research and development in developed western countries (like Denmark where I live myself). But of course China has decided to focus substantial research resources in this field - and this can be done anywhere with the right focus.
India, China and other countries are going forward with Thorium. There is a company named Light Bridge in VA, ( stock symbol : LTBR), who has been in it for many years. There are companies in France and China involved in patented technology in this field. But because of the fear factors that the nuclear industry has been under a great amount of constraints. So the future is unknown from commercial aspects in the western world, America. But the rest of the world seems to be going forward.
This is old news. Thorium reactor tech has been talked about for 20 yrs. The experiment worked 50 yrs ago. However, the oil sands are not "tar sands". Extraction of oil from the sand is actually a naturally occuring, large scale, spill clean up. The world will always need oil. Not always to burn, but for lubrication and as an additive to a huge variety of products. There's no need to demonize the oil industry in order to make thorium look good.
@@staninjapan07 He is a moron! He is boosting about the developed countries, that only rich can change the world. India is already building thorium reactor and almost finished building fast breeder reactor after 27 years of testing when all European nations, China and Japan failed to tame highly complex fast breeder reactor technology, only Russia have a working prototype. Don't underestimate what people can do with how much they have. Anyone can change the world if they are determine to do so.
The boiling water reactor was intended to be a stepping stone to better technology but industry never took the next step. There is just to much money to be made supplying uranium pellet fuel. Once the BWR reactor exists utilities have no choice but to buy your fuel pellets and the suppliers have managed to saddle the plants with the spent fuel that nobody knows what to do with. That a fluoride salt based liquid thorium plant could use this existing waste could be the answer to existing nuclear waste. Just build a thorium plant next to existing BWR reactors and start using that waste as fuel. All the other properties of a thorium reactor are just a lot of icing on the cake. This won't happen unless people start to push their governments to start work on it, without that push the solid fuel suppliers will just keep pouring money into the pockets of politicians to keep the status quo
That would not work... you would still get fission products with a long half life time and need to dispose then safely for 1 million years. And there are a few more reasons why we dpnt build MSR's. You should base youre opinion on facts and not on opinions an dreams.
Government gives subsidies to this oil companies. Example, America gives lot of tax incentives to shale oil which is pretty expensive than conventional process. Without incentives they're straight into loss.
In fact Thorium reactor, which is usually called Thorium battery, has already been used for so many decades in both US and USSR satellites to power satellites. It's not unknown. It's in fact well-known in aerospace field, but the knowledge of it has been closed for public by big energy engineering companies.
This is NOT True. The Chinese only got access to Thorium Molten Salt Reactors after 2000 when Kirk Sorensen found the old Oakridge design information and put it on the internet as an open source. The Chinese downloaded it and have been working on producing an MSR since then. They are very close and have one project under construction right now, (2022), but it is not online yet. Meanwhile, China suffers from energy shortages and has been buying Russian gas cheaply since the boycotts began against Russia for invading Ukraine in February of 2022. China has been shutting down industries because of energy shortages in the past three years since your post!
@@cliffterrell4876 This is NOT True. Whenever one reads a major claim like this that provides zero citations, the healthy mind will be naturally skeptical. China has not even been in apace that long. They had several rocket failures on their way to getting satellites up so if they did have any nuke-powered rockets or satellites, (completely necessary BTW), it would have been noticed by NASA and other observers. The Chinese only got access to Thorium Molten Salt Reactors after 2000 when Kirk Sorensen found the old Oakridge design information and put it on the internet as an open source. The Chinese downloaded it and have been working on producing an MSR since then. They are very close and have one project under construction right now, (2022), but it is not online yet. Meanwhile, China suffers from energy shortages and has been buying Russian gas cheaply since the boycotts began against Russia for invading Ukraine in February of 2022. China has been shutting down industries because of energy shortages in the past three years. Look up Tommy Tuberville (R Alabama) Senate Bill S4242 The Thorium Security Act of 2022, and related info and you will find that the government, meaning the DOE has been destroying our U233 stockpile that Thorium produces, not engaging in secret projects around it. All of the U.S. companies working on MSRs are private, Flibe Energy, which is Sorenson's outfit, has been around the longest. Terrapower (Bill Gates) did just get a government grant along with another company for further development of their MSR design. They have three projects going on in the Pacific Northwest. Elysium Energy has had a model ready to build since 2016 which will burn nuclear waste from Light Water Uranium Reactors exclusively. You should lose the conspiracy theory mindset and do some serious research on this subject. It is very exciting.
The knowledge of it has been closed for public by big energy engineering companies..? Wow, it's amazing you were able to post this and it sit right there, for 3 years.
This is a great speech. Thank you. Other issues not mentioned (a) much safer inherently because it doesn't require high pressure reactors just waiting to explode (b) ultimately if something goes wrong it shuts down (c) LFTRs are load-adaptive. As demand increases they generate more power (d) you don't need to store energy. it's stored at the atomic layer in the matter itself. you don't have to worry about solar availability. (e) thorium isn't scary, it's what heats the core of our planet. what could be more green? (f) there is plenty of thorium around the world so it can't easily be monopolized by a single country (g) the US has a huge stockpile of it right now and the energy department is requiring coal miners to collect it as they consider it nuclear waste. insane. (h) there is plenty on earth as well as the lunar nearside and mars. (i) the original molten salt reactors were an effort to make a reactor you could use to run an airplane, so its already scaled down and could be used in larger spacecraft and space colonies. (j) we have enough of it for 1000 years so that should easily get us to fusion power. this is something that tesla should be funding. chinese scientists have already gone to oak ridge to copy their designs and are now finishing their first reactor. maybe we should be starting on ours to avoid buying them from the chinese.
IM ON BOARD THOMAS!!!!!! Im going to be looking more into it!! This guy is me new hero. Seriously, how are people in the crowd NOT DOING BACKFLIPS. This is AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So cool!!!
I have never heard of Thorium before. The talk by Thomas Jam Pedersen , Copenhagen, out lines the amazing properties of this form of energy fuel or energy and this will be the solution for the future.
kokofan50 No, they were thorium reactors. We abandoned them because they couldn't make nuclear weapons. We wanted nuclear weapons but we couldn't afford 2 programs. We needed one that produced weapons and one that produced energy. We wanted to kill 2 birds in one stone. I wasn't alive then and I'm not happy about it either. But I do have a personal policy of not apologizing for things done before aI was born. By that logic everybody everywhere ever in human history would have to argue or fight over that forever for what happened before they were born. To me that seems racist and stupid.
Curtis, the Shipping Port reactor, the first pressurized water reactor, had a core for breeding thorium. Thorium is just a fuel that can be used in different types of reactors. Also, you're wrong about why thorium research was abandoned.
India is building thorium plant right now and you called only first world or rich people to do it, the main thing you have forgot is the necessity is mother of every thing.
He is not up to date about Thorium research. Ask him to take a trip to India where there is an operating thorium reactor. Either it is ignorance or pure chest beating that only first world can solve all energy problems.
Funny that most nuclear plants in india are more modern than their western counterpart (europe, usa). also better maintained and have way less incidents recorded. still they think their technology is superior to everyone else on the planet.
It is actually obvious why they are more modern. In the west, most of the nuclear plants were built in the early days of the nuclear age while countries such as India and China started building their reactors later. The rate that reactors were built in the west decreased drastically as time went on because of the stigma surrounding nuclear energy and so many of the reactors in the west are the older models. Also India has a program that would utilize thorium to create uranium that they are developing. There are no active plants that use this technology. Also the safest way of using thorium would be to create a liquid flouride thorium reactor which uses thorium directly as the fuel source. India is not developing that type of reactor. They are still using uranium based reactors.
The future of electricity in India is solar, not nuclear and certainly not thorium. "India unveils the world's largest solar power plant" www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/11/india-unveils-world-largest-solar-power-plant-161129101022044.html
The future Base Load Electrical Generation is going to have to be Nuclear, preferably Thorium. . . . Wind & Solar can certainly help with the daily variable Electrical Demand. . . . But only with Energy Storage, and or some form of east-west "InterPower" : www.dropbox.com/s/rr4xe4pahhoar8c/World%20Map%20-%20%27InterPower%27%20Systems.jpg?dl=0
Good stuff Thomas. Keep up the good work. I have shared this on Facebook. I think the Albertan government needs to take a serious look at this as it phases out coal. If the state of Idaho has one of the richest deposits of Thorium in the United States, given the geographical proximity of Alberta, it seems likely their geology is also Thorium rich.
IT is funny ,when someone can jots down on a napkin about a hyperloop system and a dozen companies jump on it . But say you can solve the energy problems and everyone is just like noway.
lol Just realized that but this is not immediate, the power plants can take 20-30 years to built(so my research says). This could be why people are so timid to start making the power plants.
I like your thought process. I've studied Thorium for over 40 years, and I concur with everything this speaker has said. One immediate application I can see is to build a 100 Watt Thorium reactor-properly shielded, that could go into present-day electric vehicles, thus eliminating the need for charging stations. The reason I DON'T think Thorium will be employed, at least any time soon, is that the powers that be are too invested in fossil, and even Solar and Wind energy systems. Then, as the speaker correctly points out, ALL of the daunting regulations that will HAVE to be developed in order to ensure a UNIFORM design for a commercial scale Thorium Reactor, primarily for safety considerations. Then there is the current-JUSTIFIED-fear of nuclear, based on the last 70 years of Uranium usage that will also have to be overcome. All of my comments aside, I think this guy is on the road to a Nobel Prize in Physics, AND a Nobel Peace Prize. I HOPE HE SUCCEEDS!
"But say you can solve the energy problems and everyone is just like noway." Only in the US. China will get it down as we in the US watch the lights go out.
Fantastic lecture. I'm a massive believer in Thorium for future energy production. Fusion sounds incredible in theory. But we're not there yet. We already know this works. It was proven decades ago. I've heard there are Thorium plants under construction in France and India already. I hope we will follow suit soon. As great as electric cars are, we need energy to charge the batteries. And we need energy to make the cars, including the batteries. Thorium Reactors solve that problem immediately. I don't know much about the Tesla battery plants, but Musk is brilliant. They're likely to be much more efficient in production, use, and even after (I imagine easily recycled with little to no waste. Though, this will likely require patented equipment only found in his facilities for now. Possibly licensed out in the future). But even if they're nothing impressive, and we feel we're better off with something else, Graphene batteries, and even supercapacitors, can fulfill that need (assuming it's not already in the Tesla batteries). Graphene stands to revolutionize power delivery, power storage, and even power consumption. Add Thorium for power production and start to finish is taken care of. Although it's been said that Graphene can make incredible clear solar panels, I just can't imagine a world living off solar power alone. But a combination of our already known methods of clean energy production can. At least for now
This has enormous potential. One of the remaining issues is embrittlement of the containment vessel. The combination of neutrons and potentially corrosive salts makes this important to understand, and to solve. I know there is research going on in a collaboration between Sandia National Laboratories and Georgia Tech. on this issue, but where are we on this?
Molten salt reactors are the best answer we have for power since, as of now, we don't have a good way of storing traditional reactor waste. If people would stop being so scared every time they hear "nuclear", we could've pushed coal and fossil fuels out of the picture a long, long time ago.
Thorium energy production will happen - only it will happen in Denmark or China or India where the need for energy is great and the socialist type government is in a position to fund or in fact own the means of production. The technology will be proved and it will creep ever so slowly into the US and by 2075 the US will be producing Thorium energy to supply 10% of its need while still complaining about global warming
@@robertleese2961 If you actually looked up the facts for yourself instead simply accepting the utter BS from the "Union of concerned Scientists", you would not show your lack of intelligence with questions like this....
@@bruceforster3709 I have looked up and read plenty and understand the IR spectroscopy of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. You are welcome to troll someone else as your opinion and comments mean nothing to me, and while I do not feel free to comment on your general intelligence, your ignorance on climate science is clearly delineated in your vacuous statements.
kgbme We are spending bilions on fusion that doesnt work at all, so 1000 problems that are in fact corosion based are just a materials and enginering challange - simple R+D needed.
We're not funding this because US regulation and its captured regulators have locked it out of the US market. Let China make it happen...we will just be chasing their licensing terms after that.
Make a videogame called "reactor simulator" that uses physics simulation to allow the player to make a nuclear reactor of their very own design. After a few months add a new material to the game: thorium. As the players find new and interesting ways to make it work, the game designers can fix glitches that allow the player to break the laws of physics to make things work that wouldn't actually work. The tutorial level can be a carbon reactor where the material is carbon and oxygen and is much safer than the nuclear. Every update can add things like coal, loam, natural gas, hydrogen, etc. You design the reactor core by drawing it with a CAD like interface. You get scored on several criteria; power output divided by pollution, power output divided by fuel cost, power output divided by construction cost, power output divided by maintenance cost. If the reactor breaks during the test you don't get any points, but you can make changes to the reactor and test again. Videogames are fun and cheaper than real-world experiments.
I have a few questions for Tom: 1- What would be required to develop an electrical generator from Thorium? I understand from his talk that this has yet to be achieved. 2- Could you develop small modular units of say 1 MW, 5 MW, 10 MW? 3- Could the output of these generators be throttled as per peak demand and lowered to idle during los demand hours? Or would they need to operate at 100% 24/7, leading to the need of complementing technologies to modulate according to demand?
Great speech - with Thorium reactors, wouldn’t it be neat to clean up and use the “spent” but still burnable nuclear fuel already available, and also harvest excess carbon-dioxide to create hydrocarbon fuel as we continue transitioning to electric powered vehicles!
Why haven't I heard if Thorium only uranium. This surely must be the way forward, thoroughly excited by this new technology. Am following Copenhagen Atomics!
Jona Adams I don't think they have the complete designs, cos a fair bit of the research was lost over the year's. Only real cash being put into it is India and China. western countries will not move without the US first. We may buy the IP off them in 20 years
Dan Burke The Department of Energy gave the the research away to anyone who requested a copy of it. It's not lost, but the research isn't complete either. What research has been done is completely open source. All you have to do is ask the DOE, and they will give it to you.
+Jona Adams That's not entirely true. They do give away the information they have. But a lot of the information is lost. During Kirk's intervju with the scientists working on the molten salt reactor back in the 50's they said themselves that they were shut down over a day. They were asked to clear their desks and burn it. While some of the scientists did save all their documentation. Not all did. Thats why Kirk also said that some of the research is lost. Not all research was digitalized either. He said about 2/3rds were.
Actually no one owns MSR technology because there is no such technology. The only MSR ever built and operated was the purely experimental 8MWt MSRE, at ORNL in the late 60's. Going from the MSRE to a working, commercial modern nuclear reactor would take 50+ years of R&D and cost $ tens of billions, without any guarantee of success.
André Balsa So you are saying that there is nothing called Intellectual property (IP)? You seem to be confusing Engineering property of design with the different parts of technology (Science) needed to build it. You don't build a car and after you built the car you invent the wheel. It's the other way around. You can still own the technology of the wheel even if no car was ever built.
Loving the implication in the title that nuclear isn't already incredibly safe. It'd be nice if the Thorium crowd could stop throwing uranium power under the bus at every opportunity rather than combating the anti-nuclear propaganda that has itself contributed immensely to thorium power never really being pursued.
Well Mr Jones, If Uranium wasn't such a World destroying bomb in itself, It would NOT "get thrown under the Bus". Thorium is 500% safer, that is the point. We all should convert all the Uranium plants around the world into Thorium salt reactors and be done with Plutonium all together.
Fusion is difficult, because you're trying to mimic what a star does concerning mass and gravity, and that's self containment of one of the most volatile reactions in the universe. Its very difficult to do with magnetic containment what a star does with mass and gravitation.
@@imonlyamanandiwilldiesomed4406 Yah, I heard something abour using lasers from multiple directions to fuse nuclei together. I'm not saying it can't be done, just that its really difficult to reach more energy output than is put into it. It should be studied and invested in.
I've just listened to this guy and realised that now is thoriums time,what I mean the world is waking up to the fact how dependent we've become on other countries be it Russia today to supply us with energy. I believe governments are waking up to the fact that renewables cannot supply us with enough energy, and the cost of backup and storage makes them too expensive. As this guy says thorium is widely available so the energy would be cheap but best of all we good burn today's nuclear waste solving over night the main hindrance to the expansion of nuclear energy. Maybe thorium could be the hope that nuclear scientists always hoped nuclear power could be.
@@alexandrawhitelock6195 No, there Is none yet. That's easily gonna take one or two more generations. India is struggling to even keep the lights on. They are going with normal pressurized water reactors.
Thank you. 2nd generation American - Grandfather from Denmark. Other lineage - French. Could have been Taiwan and it wouldn't have mattered. This world is worth it.
@@ano2425 umm yeah and no. We CAN build a MSR now, fusion needs still a lot ov development and has problems unsolved. Running both things paralell would probably be the better option. The US could use some of the military budget, money shuödn't be the problem.
@@ichheissemarvin5613 thats not true. We cant build an MSR which produces its own fuel. The reactor in Oak Ridge was preloaded with U-233. Its even questionable if physics allow an MSR with an breeding factor >1. In the past nobody did proof the principle of an MSBR. Experts estimate that both technologies need the same amount of developement work.
Both, China and India have heavily funded programs for Thorium reactors since about a decade, but there still hasn't been a breakthrough yet by now (2020), projections have been delayed over and over again. So the technical challenges seem to be much bigger than anticipated.
It is very well known. It's been around for over 70 years and has been flavour of the month for twenty years with more than twenty or thirty projects all over the world, from Australia to Denmark. Several in the USA. It's popular because it's easy to sell using the standard 'Snake Oil' script this bloke used.
Thomas, I have watched a couple of UA-cam videos with you as the presenter My mind changed on nuclear energy about five years ago when I became aware of Th. Australia has both uranium and thorium. I would like to be involved in making thorium reactors the producers of energy in Australia. Renewables is not going cut it in Australia in the long term How would we make that happen?
So you'd like to invest in a technology that will produce electricity at around 30x the current wholesale price for electricity? Why would that be a good idea?
The story of how we got where we are with both civilian and military nuclear power in the U. S. is relatively well told in the biographies of Admiral Hyman G. Richover, Dixie Lee Ray and Milton Shaw. And yes, Richard Nixon had a hand in it too. It involved money, politics, military objectives, nuclear weapons development, nuclear reactor engineering development and did I mention politics. Molten Salt Reactors were tried at sea by the Navy. They just didn’t know enough reactor engineering yet to make it safe enough to be successfully deployed. At that point Admiral Richover and Dixie Lee Ray directed both the U. S. Navy and civilian nuclear developers (G. E. and Westinghouse) to focus on uranium fueled thermal neutron pressurized water and boiling water reactors. Thorium was a non-starter.
Luck will have nothing to do with it. We already know how to implement this technology. And it's a practical solution for the world's energy needs. Maybe AOC and the other Green New Deal scammers should be focused on Thorium nuclear power as the solution, rather than the crack pipe dream they're pushing now.
The mining companies don't put it back in the ground. Tailings are generally just shuved aside in huge piles. Good source of thorium and most rare earth elements also. No digging required only take and process.
Thorium Reactors should be built on ships that are nearing the end of their working life, they can be moored in any port that is experiencing drought, powering a desalination plant which is also mounted on the ship, to process sea water drawn from the harbour enabling cheap fresh water to be pumped into the city's water mains. The salt byproduct is a valuable commodity, it can be on sold to industry.
No no no ! We need to have people trembling at the feet of the rich and powerful while they weaken from thirst and hunger ! Don't t you know anything about behavioural psychology ? GEEEZ !!!
You had me till bashing the Tar Sands. Here is the thing, whether you like it or not, the oil is there. Someone, Someday will pull it out. We will be using oil to make plastics for decades, for tools, carpet, linen, etc. The positive way to spin this, is to pressure the tar sand companies to be the first in North America to build 1 or 2 MSR, just for their operations. They could switch most of their processing over to electrical, and then instead of shipping most of the oil to USA, we can refine it ourselves. Completely based on a Thorium reactor. Their Truck fleet can switch to electrical, everything. Those companies have the money to do it. Pressure them for it, and it will drive the industry. Bashing them makes them not want it. I have known about this technology for 10 years, and am itching to see it reborn.
If one KWh will cost less then 4 cents it will be cheaper then any other energy so that removes the investors from fossil power. If oil is no longer turned into gasoline, diesel or cerosine it will be plentiful for plastics. Tar sands are much more expensive to process then standard crude so that will stop too. A company called ThorCon is getting ready to supply Indonesia with the first Thorium MSR's but they don't focus om optimal operation but om short term feasibility so initially they focus on sodium chloride salt instead of FliBe and they have more shortcuts to be producing reactors as fast as possible. Series production building it in automated shipyards just like ships. using barges to transport modules to wherever they are needed an retreiving the spent reactor modules after 5 year production and 5 year cool down. I hope this opens-up eyes
Wow less than a dollar per human year or energy! A few corporations are going to make SO much profit off Thorium power. edit: ah he touched on this problem and shared a wonderful vision of a future where the surplus is shared to the benefit of all humans. That is the best vision of the future I’ve ever felt was possible. I just wish I could be more optimistic about it coming true. It seems to me if we could reduce inequality, end food and housing shortage, improve education, provide good healthcare to everyone, share productivity gains, and so on… up to a point… such a system would perpetuate and improve itself and not devolve back into capitalism and imperialism. I think people would be happy and fulfilled. But the problem is getting over that hump, and wrestling power away from those who quite enjoy their current position. Humanity could achieve so much more. Ah who knows
You hear things like this tiny 100 dollar amount of thorium can power my entire life for 100 years, less war, etc. and I am like sign me up. All for it. The top 1% and corporations hear "We will make no money from this". This is why it will never happen, unfortunately.
But the top 1.1% could say: "I can make the energy market mine". Probably the truth about thorium is that a) it's not as magical as expected, b) it's not as easy as it's sold, c) there are cheaper alternatives and d) a+b+c.
Thorium is definitely the best option for free energy, but it is needed to be solved some technical factors in it, we can only count on that someone would show out with an updated and great idea
The portable reactor is a good idea, but the name is horrible. Instead of calling it an "waste burner" they should call it a "nuclear fuel recycler." Both "waste" and "burning" have very negative connotations, while "recycle" has a very positive one.
@@timentimentimen Honestly (not an attack, a legit question): Is the word "Atomic" perceived as that "scary?" I like Tom's idea, calling it a "nuclear fuel recycler" or some such - what term for Thorium Power companies do you think would be more "marketable" to selling the idea?
@WALLAROO I'm not an expert, but personally I would not use any words that (some) people associate with bombs, war, meltdowns, etc. So no nuclear (bomb), atomic (bomb), radioactive, reactor, etc.. Why not use a brand name that has no associations. People don't know the word thorium, and it's an awesome word - it even has Thor in it. ThorPower, Thorify, EnThor, Thoryum, Thoria, Thorio, Thorp, Thoren, ThorX.
@@timentimentimen Good points. I think that is part of Thorium's problem - marketing. I think that's part of the reason Sorenson came up with the LFTR acronym. It's pretty hard to describe how this works without those terms - it IS a nuclear power reactor. Maybe just use "core" - like Thorium Core? Or lift from Next Generation, and call it a Thorium Chamber? That might actually work well - "The Thorium Chamber power generator works by... et al." My thoughts are to use the LFTR (or similar) scale-ability to have local stations for less dependence on the grid system in case of failure, a town could still operate - and even be able to produce fresh water in an emergency. So, Thorium Station maybe? Thorium Chamber Plant?
@@wallaroo1295 From the names you mention I like Thorium Station the most. It's neutral and sounds like train station, or some fun place. Thorium chamber sounds heavier and somehow gives me an image of a gas chamber. The potential scalability of Thorium is indeed very interesting.
Pretty amazing india is the world leader in thorium research and they have built 3 stage reactor in Chennai india and there is no word about india in his talk I really doubt how much research he has done on the topic
Watching this in 2022, over 6 years old. Now consider that 6 years ago this was old stuff. In the early 2000's, we already knew. I knew, as a young kid, and so did all other mildly bright young people. That's the true crux of the problem: Politics is open to everyone, thus deranged ideas are still at the forefront of how humanity operates. Not merely inefficient energy, but also inefficient epistemology, such as various cults and religions. For the next few hundred years, nothing will change, though we're perfectly capable of changing.
I have a question which is based on Copenhagen Atomics concept of a small scale mass produced molten salt thorium reactor. Would it be possible to convert coal based power plants by replacing the furnace part of the plant with a molten salt thorium reactor. I mean a coal fired furnace and a molten salt reactor are both a source of heat generation so the rest of the power plant should work fine with either and little else should need to be replaced aside from the furnace. And there is the benefit that it will already be connected to the electricity grid and there will be no need to build an entirely new power plant so it should work out relatively cheap. I mean if this can be done then surely such power plants can be converted all over the world fairly quickly.
Yes many startups are thinking along your lines too. ThorCon for example is now building a shipyard like site in Indonesia and they want to mass produce the "parts" for these power-plants to about 90% of construction, the same way ships are produced. They then load the parts onto barges and tow them to there destination, the entrances of rivers, where they will have enough water for cooling and for desalination. Usually there are already towns there so electric will be easy to connect to. But if your coal plants are to far land inward and the river is not totally navigable (too narrow or rapids or waterfalls) then it would be hard to do for ThorCon.
I find this is a really smart idea and it would reduce costs dramatically. If we truly want to make such conversion the problem is never technical but always political. The energy companies, like car companies, oil companies, big pharma, just want profit at the highest rate and they'd do anything to avoid helping humanity and losing profits for social rights. If it were not that way we already would have a non polluted world with most human problems solved. Instead it's the exact opposite...very sad.
One of the problems is finding a reasonably priced metal for containing the liquid salt that can withstand the heat and radiation in the reactor for any period of time.
I have a much better idea: Solar PV panels and wind turbines. Proven technology that produces cheap power, is accepssible to all and entails no serious risks. The only parts of the Thorium MSR concept that are proven are the Thorium part, which has been proven to be astronomically expensive, and the MSR part, which has been proven to be astronomically expensive. Those two drawbacks aside, it's a technology with some serious potential!
@@screamingnutbag7955 solar, wind, and hydro are failures. The weather is too erratic to depend on it for energy. Nuclear is the path to the future. It would even help propel man among the stars.
To give away energy cheap...? Tezla tried that........! There will always be SOMEONE who doesn't like that idea a bit. However I think Thorium will be a great idea.
Yeah but, it's the SAME old someone's, and if it's not them then it's their offspring! These people need to be shot off the Earth and into space with a one way ticket, along with their entire gene pool because it will NEVER end until these parasites are all dead and gone!
I agree with nuclear and esp. thorium. He asks, why was this never developed/used? We can say the same thing about solar. It's been with us for eons, but it is only in this period where solar has become popular. If price was an issue, the same issue applies before. Had they been bought in larger scale before, then we would have lowered the prices even sooner.
If it is too good to be true It is too good to be true. I'm sorry but im watching thorium and expect some more technical explanation, it felt like reading off some webpages that cover pros and cons only.
I was also waiting for him to explain the downsides, the reasons why thorium is still not considered by leading scientists and companies, and the plans to overcome those obstacles. Basically he should have talked about the contents of the metaphorical stacks of problems from his slides. It sounded interesting (even more so after the latest IPCC announcements) but it never became more than a sales pitch of sorts.
Thorium Reactors are the best solution to solve our future energy needs, but we have to get the ignorance of our :Politicians solved so we can remove all the laws that have been put in place to keep this technology from happening.
This sounds like a great plan and one that we should use. It would be owned by everybody with no vested interest. What an idea and I really hope this gets adapted as soon as possible. Some will not like it because it can not be controlled and price can not be fixed but it would be great for our earth from an ecological point of view. Thank you for sharing and I will do the same. JBK
I support the idea of developing thorium based power, but I don't like how this guy skims over the technical issues involved in a Molten Salt Reactor as if they are no big deal. They are challenging and may or may not be a solvable in an economically viable way. It's one thing to say you can't have a Chernobyl like explosion, but you can't run a real world power grid on a reactor than eats itself to death every so often. Light water reactors have a lot of flaws, but all you're really dealing with is high temp/pressure water, which is something we are very good at dealing with. Molten salt is a completely different animal.
The reason why Thorium was rejected in the early days was because it could not be refined into nuclear weapons. Uranium can, so that is where the money went. We really should be investing in Thorium. Back in the 50s, a reactor about the size of a fridge was built and could produce 3 KW, testing the idea that each house could have its own reactor in the kitchen. This, like flying cars, was rather ambitious, but the point was made that a liquid salt reactor could be small, efficient and above all, cheap. To put it crudely, if the reaction got a bit heated, an ice plug at the bottom would melt and the whole thing would drop into a giant drip tray and stop. Thorium is interesting for another reason. It is very plentiful and so we are not reliant upon unfriendly and unpleasant regimes for energy supplies. We can work with people we like and who share roughly similar values, another major plus. Finally, we can get rid of the vast piles of nuclear waste which is extremely dangerous. A 3 year warranty on cars is standard. Some give 5 and one 7 years. Nobody can give a 300 year warranty, but that is an imaginable time frame for storage. 100,000 years is not. That is vastly older than civilisation and who knows what mischief could arise if some maniac found the stuff and started throwing it around.
With 40 years of Danish windturbine development for NO result in terms of reducing CO2 emissions, and the most expensive electricity in Europe, plus similar experiences in Germany, isn't it about time to give other ideas like Thorium a try? -Who was it said that the definition of insanity is to keep trying the same thing over and over, hoping that the outcome will be different? Which, could also apply to building pressurised water uranium reactors and hoping they don't go boom this time.
expensive electricity encourages people to reduce their consumption. Demand for electricity has gone up considerable in the last 40 years, and CO2 production would have gone up too. Wind/water/solar/geothermal energy is mitigating that increase.
@@sbkenn1 The main problem with wind and solar is it's too variable. When you don't get enough energy, you have to use gas or coal to supplement. That's why the big oil companies really love renewable energy, it basically makes sure that the world will always be dependent on oil. Creating and maintaining wind and solar parks also takes a lot of fossil materials. Nuclear is the future.
@@excessiveworry3838 : Nuclear, as in Fukushima, 3-Mile-Island, Chernobyl ? I think not. We need renewables, with much improved energy storage. They do take some power to build, but not much (materials or energy) to maintain. Hydro-electric would be capable of filling in the gaps in solar/wind power if it was JUST for that. Oil, gas, coal, and nuclear have to be kept hot, even if their capacity isn't needed. Hydro can be started within seconds of surges in consumption or dips in supply. Micro-nuclear does have a place though, in ships and long-haul trains.
Using thorium powered nuclear power plants, we can also create synthetic petrol/diesel and thus make our existing fleet of vehicles carbon neutral as well.
@steve... : Because it does not work. It does however sell well using a 'Snake Oil' script, so there probably thirty or more projects all over the world starting in the nineties and they've all had dates for a 'break-through' come and go, come and go. They may solve all the problems in three or more decades but not this decade I fear.
The first warning flag that Pedersen is a devious liar was when he said (4:10) "Thorium is only slightly radioactive". That is true, but its half-life is 15 billion years, so it remains "slightly dangerous" for ever.Thorium is not fissile, so there is no such thing as "a Thorium reactor". It is however fertile, which means it can "absorb" a neutron to become Uranium-233. This is fissile, so it can form the fuel of a reactor and nuclear bombs, just like Uranium-235. U-235 has a half life of 704 million years, so if it is mixed in with Thorium in the reactor's liquid, the liquid will be dangerous for ever, whether it is spent or not."Why don't we have it yet?" - well, Pedersen admits that there are problems, and who is going to fix those problems? - YOU !Just another slick salesman telling us we are going to have cheap, safe energy for ever, and 3-D printers to make anything we want, and ...
Why dont they build Thorium reactors? Simply because its my belief that they cannot be utilised to make atomic weapons. Also, maybe it would not be profitable for companies to their shareholders if production of electricity was so easy and cheap to manufacture.
I'm a retired nuclear engineer and have worked on nuclear fuel and safety aspects. In those early years in the 1980s, Thorium was not utilized in NPPs. But its potential was always recognized, and India's 3-stage strategy included Thorium utilization in stage-3. Hopefully, good progress has been made in the last 40 years, and would not be surprised if Thorium bundles are loaded in the operating heavy water reactors. My best wishes.
Hello sir, I know this may seem a bit out of the blue but how would you describe your overall experience as a nuclear engineer? This is coming from someone who is thinking about taking it on as their own profession
@@ryanbrimson8238 You will need to purchase a pocket protector.
Pakistan has superior infrastructure.
@@markbernhardt6281 🤣
@@BigRamifications how ?
The reason we don't use Thorium for energy is because it can't be used for weapons and isn't rare enough to monopolize the market so it can be controlled by governments. It's cheap energy which means no one makes money which means those making money on energy right now which includes renewable energy are not going to support this energy source.
I believe that India is leading the world with Thorium.
How is it cheap energy ? , it's not easy to build and operate a nuclear power plant the company or government who did that can charge for it , it's just like a business with a very High profit margin , put 10 - twelve companies and voila free market will bring it cost down enough where it would be virtually nothing but if a company provides it to even half a billion population it would result in huge profits for the company.
@@sbkenn1Is this based on what...?
I do not buy it. If Thorium power is cheaper and safer, then production costs fall, and prices can, for example, be reduced by half. But profits are far higher.
Then the big cost in power is mainly in transmission -- power lines .
@@DeSalvoLaw , We pay separate cost for electricity and transit. There is a free market for selling electricity. Currently transfer costs vary from 50% (big towns) to 70% (rural areas). If electricity price would halve then transfer costs would raise to 75-85% of the costs. I guess we need more cost effective transfer technologies too.
I'm pretty sure that Thorium-based nuclear energy is a good idea. Thomas's pants, however, are not a good idea.
FO', SHO' !!!
The pants are actually the only original, creative part of this presentation. The rest is the usual thorium kool-aid distilled by Kirk Sorensen, repackaged with a Danish accent.
Spacewine are you questioning nu Euro lifestyle decisions?
Copenhagen Atomics site not updated since April 2016. *Thorium energy belongs in the "internet scam" realm.*
Spacewine So true! I didn't even notice it until I read your comment. Funny! :)
Great lecture, Thomas! It brings back confidence in the "Atoms for Peace"-vision. Energy must be cheap, clean and abundant so that humanity can prosper!
Vaporized helps who ?
But without artificial scarcity how will the owner class stay in power and keep the billions of owned people fighting each other for the right to exist?
I'd add 'all' before humanity but I agree this is a great lecture.
So we can pollute the planet and use up the world's natural resources faster than ever!
I know nothing abou thorium but I know the environmentalists” will want to kill thorium powered nukes; they are anti- humanity.
India is leader in thorium and they have built reactors as well. There are so many scientists around the world studying how India is solving it's power problem with thorium.
No but he wants the rich world to do it cuz apparently they'd do it better? 😅
@@subramanyabhat446 No, I think he was saying that anyone in that room - the intelligentsia, which definitely includes brown peoples - will be the ones to do it. Half of silicon valley is Indian!
India's stated path forward is utilization of coal (sadly). As the speaker says, it's up to the rich countries to fix the problem
Breeder reactors.
Excellent talk. I’m glad to finally see the world waking up and realizing the future is nuclear energy. As many have pointed out work is ongoing on the use of Thorim
Our rejection of Nuclear power was a massive mistake, and the environment has payed dearly for it as we continue to rely on fossil fuels for our electricity
Safe, inexpensive, clean ... on paper.
@@marcwinkler could you develop ?
And now rich countries just fumble about wasting huge sums of money on wind and solar which will never replace fossil fuels.
@@marcwinkler Tell France that nuclear power is not a good idea. And they will laugh at you.
@@nacho.4583 Sorry, right now I have other worries, Yes that would be correct, exactly right to have a good laugh and drink red wine, la vie est belle.
It is kind of sad that one of the main reasons that the MSR project was scrapped was because it didn't produce any plutonium for the nuclear weapons.
People were uncertain of the thermal spectrum nuclear reactors. They hadn't been testen while fast spectrum reactors were already proven to work. But they should've realized thorium could've been the next big thing after the first PWR came into being.
All of the reactors up to that point, were thermal spectrum reactors. PWRs, BWRs, CANDU, etc are all thermal spectrum. They use water as their coolant, but also as their neutron moderator (heavy water for the CANDU). Fast spectrum reactors don't use a moderator to slow down the neutrons.
Thomas didn't mention that the project that got the funding, was the EBR-2 Fast Reactor design in Idaho, with a number of the contracts making it work, coming from companies like General Atomics in California. The EBR-2 and later prototype Integral Fast Reactor are more developed than the MSRs Thomas talked about. EBR-2 ran for 30 years and produced power.
False
Incorrect
..but Uran 233 which can also use for nuclear weapons
A good talk but he has a number of small errors. The two biggest are:
--- Current nuclear reactors burn only 0.5 % of the U235, not a couple percent as he says.
--- Thorium is about as common as Lead. We have enough Thorium on the planet Earth to power everyone for 100,000's of years. You can take ordinary dirt, and the trace amounts of Thorium are equal to 12 barrels of oil. Energy wise, we can burn the Thorium in ordinary dirt, and make an energy profit.
I would have liked if the explained WHY Thorium based reactors produce fewer Actinides, and thus, the wastes are so short lived. (On the other hand, it likely would have added another 5 minutes to his talk.)
Warm regards, Rick.
Please bring a talk about the Neutron Bomb
@@lennartvonblottnitz6396
Hi Lennart,
Not sure you are asking me about the Neutron Bomb, they have nothing to do with Thorium power. That said...
The neutron bomb was designed to produce a pulse of radiation, which would kill soldiers in the open, but have little fallout and not harm civilians in towns a short distance away. It was designed, to credibly threaten Soviet armor columns which could attack West Germany. The USSR, spent a LOT of hard currency to portray these weapons as inhumane in the Western media. (I remember Johnny Carson making a joke about a bomb that killed people but preserved the lawn chairs.) The whole point became moot, when France left NATO, developed its own atom bombs and said it would nuke Soviet armies in Germany. (They hated Germany because of WWI and WWII.) That threat was a credible deterrent.
Thorium can not be used in any sort of nuclear bomb. NO nuclear material from civilian power plants has ever been used in nuclear weapons, (it is far cheaper to make Plutonium in specialized plants.) But Thorium has several properties which make it even harder than to make into bombs than Uranium based power reactors.
Warm regards, Rick.
Just a short comment, the percentage varies with each reactor type and how the fuel burns as the exact timing and positions of the reactions are not 100% predictable, so this percentage can vary to 2% and up to 5% in some cases
This is SOOOOO COOL!!!!!!!!!!!! :)
@@bobec2999
Hi Batkatabg. Natural radioactive ores have very long half lives (hundreds of millions of years to billions of years). They are so stable they are safe. (If they were more radioactive, they would have decayed away long ago.) However, once they are put in a nuclear reactor and bombarded with neutrons, they become dangerous.
With nuclear wastes (over simplifying slightly), there are two types.
Fission products (after a large element has fissioned), have very short half lives. They are wildly dangerous, but 'burn up' quickly. You need to keep them out of the bio-sphere for a couple hundred years, not thousands of years.
Heavy elements that absorb neutrons, become 'transuranic actinides'. These have half lives in the hundreds of years to thousands of years range. This is problematic. They are radioactive enough that you don't want to spend a long time near them, but their half lives are long enough that it takes thousands of years for them to decay to insignificance.
Since we get the energy from fissions, ideally we would like to have all the Thorium or Uranium fission. Lots of power, and only short lived half lives left. Solid fuel rods in Uranium power plants only fission 0.5% of the Uranium, which maximizes the long term wastes.
Thorium is based in a molten salt. Being a liquid, we can do chemical processes on it to pull out the wastes constantly. (With Uranium, you have to carve up the highly radioactive solid fuel rods and dissolve them in nitric acid to pull out the wastes from a traditional power plant. This is so expensive, that few countries bother.) The up shot is, with a molten salt reactor, you can keep the non-fissioned atoms in the reactor until they fission. Less long term nuclear wastes.
Thorium has another advantage. It is a lighter element and has 3 places where it can fission. As it absorbs neutrons and becomes heavier, it can fission at U233, U235 and at Pu239. Uranium 238 only gets one chance before it becomes a transuranic actinide. For this reason, Thorium reactors produce less Plutonium and other heavy actinides. Which means less long term wastes.
For more information, I recommend the book: "Thorium: Power Cheaper than Coal" by Robert Hargraves.
Warm regards, Rick.
The only reason we don't use Thorium for nuclear power is because it's relatively stable and you can't use it for nuclear weapons. For the civilian market, however, Thorium is optimal.
Thorium is the source material for uranium-233, which can be used in weapons. In Oak Ridge, I think that's what that first reactor was for. (He said it wasn't a power generator, and Oak Ridge was where nuclear weapons material was refined for the US arsenal.) The US made a uranium-233 bomb from thorium, but we went with plutonium bombs in the long run.
I'm under the impression that is U235 is used for bombs not U233. And that was why it was dropped.
That's the norm. The US did, however, make a working bomb from [233]U derived from [232]Th. I don't know why they abandoned [233]U as a fissile material, but it's easy enough to make, and the bomb worked just fine. Maybe extracting and enriching the [233]U from the remaining Th was more of a hassle than they wanted to deal with? I dunno. If they ran that reactor for 5 years, maybe that means it took 5 years to get enough [233]U for a single bomb? But then the reactor was relatively tiny, and they could have built them by the thousands. I can only guess at their reasoning. There must be a good reason though, or else every terrorist group would be making [233]U bombs.
Modern weapons use neither U233 nor U235, they use Pu239 (Plutonium), because it's easier to obtain and more efficient (higher cross section, a bit more energy per fission). U233 is similar to Plutonium, but it's more dangerous to handle and process because it gives off high amounts of radiation (which also makes it easier to detect, when we're talking about secretly smuggling it out somewhere). In terms of obtainability, U235 has to be extracted (separated) from natural uranium that you dug out of the ground somewhere, while Pu239 and U233 have to be synthesized by shooting neutrons at (relatively abundant) elements that you dug out of the ground somewhere (thorium for U233, natural uranium for Pu239). It turns out that the synthesizing thing is cheaper than the separating thing -- at least for highly developed countries that own nuclear reactors where they can get the neutrons required. You don't need a reactor for the separating thing (U235), so this may be easier for low-tech countries. If you're a terrorist, you probably don't have your own reactors, so you'd either try to separate U235, or "get" Plutonium from somewhere, which should be easier than "getting" U233 from somewhere for the reasons described above, at least as long as not the whole world builds thorium reactors and thus produces U233 as a byproduct.
There are two reasons U-233 from Thorium reactors is a horrible choice for nuclear weapons:
1) It has a pretty high critical mass. Pu-239 just makes for smaller and more efficient warheads.
2) It will be contaminated with U-234, which is very hard to separate from U-233 and emits gamma radiation. Which, in turn, needs heavy shielding to protect against (making the nukes too heavy to fit on missiles) lest it damages electronics. Not something you'd want to happen to the control systems of your nukes.
It’s insane that this technology isn’t being widely adopted. Solves many problems avid would provide energy independence throughout the world. Avoiding all the conflicts over oil would be enough justification to rapidly research this technology.
It's all about money. Greedy politicians, greedy CEOs and the most greedy, stockholders.
9:00 while i know he's only talking about uranium nuclear power being expensive compared to thorium, i still find it very important to point out that even current gen nuclear energy is by far the cheapest safest cleanest and most reliable source available today compared to renewables and fossil fuels
No, thats not true. Its far more expensive because of the disposal cost and modern reactors are verry expensive to build.
@@ano2425 Have you looked up the disposal costs of the high tech materials that make up solar panels with an average lifespan of twenty years or wind turbines with an average lifespan of 12 years? The cost of, and disposal of, the batteries required to store the energy for inconsistent energy sources, or the costs of the vast acreage of land required for the energy farms? Solar and wind are far more expensive, it isn't remotely close. The amount of toxic waste is also far more than modern nuclear.
@@ano2425 shut down costs are known, to burry the waste not realy, stil what can those costs be, everywhere it is the same, nuclear makes money, the profit are often spend in foolish ways like it has no limits and when the money is spend they need to pay up for the shutdown and so forth, belgium has sold(given away) its plants to france, suez and every year paris recieves around 300 miljon € from them in profits, they poorly maintain them, renewables are getting cheaper and cheaper but everywhere it is the same it needs a healthy flow of tax money
@Dan Meu... : Nuclear power is certainly cheaper than so called renewables but not cheaper than coal in large scale power systems. Solar and wind do work well on a very small scale. i.e. we use them to power pumps on the farm. They are ideal for that.
@@buildmotosykletist1987 your talking about windmills that don't work if there is no wind and can take a week to a month to fill a 20,000 gallon water tank. Alot of ranches around the western United States are doing away with windmills because of their inefficentcy.
i'm a guy from bangladesh, i can still help!
I don't think he means that you are not smart or educated, but rather that there is more money and infrastructure available in more economically developed nations.
Just go for it, all contributions are of course welcome. I guess that Thomas is pointing to the fact, thar there are more resources available for research and development in developed western countries (like Denmark where I live myself). But of course China has decided to focus substantial research resources in this field - and this can be done anywhere with the right focus.
India, China and other countries are going forward with Thorium. There is a company named Light Bridge in VA, ( stock symbol : LTBR), who has been in it for many years. There are companies in France and China involved in patented technology in this field. But because of the fear factors that the nuclear industry has been under a great amount of constraints.
So the future is unknown from commercial aspects in the western world, America. But the rest of the world seems to be going forward.
This is old news. Thorium reactor tech has been talked about for 20 yrs. The experiment worked 50 yrs ago. However, the oil sands are not "tar sands". Extraction of oil from the sand is actually a naturally occuring, large scale, spill clean up. The world will always need oil. Not always to burn, but for lubrication and as an additive to a huge variety of products. There's no need to demonize the oil industry in order to make thorium look good.
@@staninjapan07 He is a moron! He is boosting about the developed countries, that only rich can change the world. India is already building thorium reactor and almost finished building fast breeder reactor after 27 years of testing when all European nations, China and Japan failed to tame highly complex fast breeder reactor technology, only Russia have a working prototype. Don't underestimate what people can do with how much they have. Anyone can change the world if they are determine to do so.
The boiling water reactor was intended to be a stepping stone to better technology but industry never took the next step. There is just to much money to be made supplying uranium pellet fuel. Once the BWR reactor exists utilities have no choice but to buy your fuel pellets and the suppliers have managed to saddle the plants with the spent fuel that nobody knows what to do with.
That a fluoride salt based liquid thorium plant could use this existing waste could be the answer to existing nuclear waste. Just build a thorium plant next to existing BWR reactors and start using that waste as fuel. All the other properties of a thorium reactor are just a lot of icing on the cake.
This won't happen unless people start to push their governments to start work on it, without that push the solid fuel suppliers will just keep pouring money into the pockets of politicians to keep the status quo
That would not work... you would still get fission products with a long half life time and need to dispose then safely for 1 million years. And there are a few more reasons why we dpnt build MSR's.
You should base youre opinion on facts and not on opinions an dreams.
"The best way to compete with fossil fuel companies is to supply energy at so low cost that you make them go bankrupt."
It's the only way.
Government gives subsidies to this oil companies. Example, America gives lot of tax incentives to shale oil which is pretty expensive than conventional process. Without incentives they're straight into loss.
@@umeshofficial13 Fossil fuels get pennies in subsidies compared to wind and especially solar.
@@chapter4travels whatever makes you sleep at night
or charghing them to recapture all their waste ( carbon dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur...) which is what nuclear plants are forced to do.
His mouth says Nuclear, but his pants say Solar-powered hemp peace
No governments will want to use Thorium; unless thorium can be used to produce bomb.
He's the Thorium genie! At least he wasn't wearing high heels.
Nostalgic yes
Solar is justified.
You mean outdoor cannabis?
In fact Thorium reactor, which is usually called Thorium battery, has already been used for so many decades in both US and USSR satellites to power satellites. It's not unknown. It's in fact well-known in aerospace field, but the knowledge of it has been closed for public by big energy engineering companies.
Money, money, money is all the energy engineering companies care about. Those mega grants. Thats why the public knows nothing about them.
@@cliffterrell4876 : you are absolutely right!!
This is NOT True. The Chinese only got access to Thorium Molten Salt Reactors after 2000 when Kirk Sorensen found the old Oakridge design information and put it on the internet as an open source. The Chinese downloaded it and have been working on producing an MSR since then. They are very close and have one project under construction right now, (2022), but it is not online yet. Meanwhile, China suffers from energy shortages and has been buying Russian gas cheaply since the boycotts began against Russia for invading Ukraine in February of 2022. China has been shutting down industries because of energy shortages in the past three years since your post!
@@cliffterrell4876 This is NOT True. Whenever one reads a major claim like this that provides zero citations, the healthy mind will be naturally skeptical. China has not even been in apace that long. They had several rocket failures on their way to getting satellites up so if they did have any nuke-powered rockets or satellites, (completely necessary BTW), it would have been noticed by NASA and other observers. The Chinese only got access to Thorium Molten Salt Reactors after 2000 when Kirk Sorensen found the old Oakridge design information and put it on the internet as an open source. The Chinese downloaded it and have been working on producing an MSR since then. They are very close and have one project under construction right now, (2022), but it is not online yet. Meanwhile, China suffers from energy shortages and has been buying Russian gas cheaply since the boycotts began against Russia for invading Ukraine in February of 2022. China has been shutting down industries because of energy shortages in the past three years. Look up Tommy Tuberville (R Alabama) Senate Bill S4242 The Thorium Security Act of 2022, and related info and you will find that the government, meaning the DOE has been destroying our U233 stockpile that Thorium produces, not engaging in secret projects around it. All of the U.S. companies working on MSRs are private, Flibe Energy, which is Sorenson's outfit, has been around the longest. Terrapower (Bill Gates) did just get a government grant along with another company for further development of their MSR design. They have three projects going on in the Pacific Northwest. Elysium Energy has had a model ready to build since 2016 which will burn nuclear waste from Light Water Uranium Reactors exclusively. You should lose the conspiracy theory mindset and do some serious research on this subject. It is very exciting.
The knowledge of it has been closed for public by big energy engineering companies..? Wow, it's amazing you were able to post this and it sit right there, for 3 years.
Much of the waste from LFTRs is in the form of medically valuable isotopes. Another benefit.
This is a great speech. Thank you. Other issues not mentioned (a) much safer inherently because it doesn't require high pressure reactors just waiting to explode (b) ultimately if something goes wrong it shuts down (c) LFTRs are load-adaptive. As demand increases they generate more power (d) you don't need to store energy. it's stored at the atomic layer in the matter itself. you don't have to worry about solar availability. (e) thorium isn't scary, it's what heats the core of our planet. what could be more green? (f) there is plenty of thorium around the world so it can't easily be monopolized by a single country (g) the US has a huge stockpile of it right now and the energy department is requiring coal miners to collect it as they consider it nuclear waste. insane. (h) there is plenty on earth as well as the lunar nearside and mars. (i) the original molten salt reactors were an effort to make a reactor you could use to run an airplane, so its already scaled down and could be used in larger spacecraft and space colonies. (j) we have enough of it for 1000 years so that should easily get us to fusion power. this is something that tesla should be funding. chinese scientists have already gone to oak ridge to copy their designs and are now finishing their first reactor. maybe we should be starting on ours to avoid buying them from the chinese.
Yes, we Don't want to Buy anything else from the Chinese, they have far too much control now.
Gosh, what would the perpetually-aggrieved greenies do, if they didn't have "problems" to complain about?? Great post.
I wrote an essay on this when I was 15 for school. Beat ya to it Thomas!
same here, probably the most animated discussion i've ever had with my teacher
IM ON BOARD THOMAS!!!!!! Im going to be looking more into it!! This guy is me new hero. Seriously, how are people in the crowd NOT DOING BACKFLIPS. This is AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So cool!!!
I sure was doing backflips on my sofa while I watched this
@@Spekulantoss :D
Wonderful Thomas J P , Really great Bless ya ! We need more people like ya in the planet .
I have never heard of Thorium before. The talk by Thomas Jam Pedersen , Copenhagen, out lines the amazing properties of this form of energy fuel or energy and this will be the solution for the future.
There is allready a Thorium-powerplant in operation in Kalpakkam in India.
India has already developed thorium based reactor ,currently working from last two years.
As a prototype yes. Just like the US did in the 50's
Those are light water reactors.
kokofan50 No, they were thorium reactors. We abandoned them because they couldn't make nuclear weapons. We wanted nuclear weapons but we couldn't afford 2 programs. We needed one that produced weapons and one that produced energy. We wanted to kill 2 birds in one stone. I wasn't alive then and I'm not happy about it either. But I do have a personal policy of not apologizing for things done before aI was born. By that logic everybody everywhere ever in human history would have to argue or fight over that forever for what happened before they were born. To me that seems racist and stupid.
Curtis, the Shipping Port reactor, the first pressurized water reactor, had a core for breeding thorium. Thorium is just a fuel that can be used in different types of reactors. Also, you're wrong about why thorium research was abandoned.
Curtis T hopefully one day that will be more than a personal policy. Agree completely
India is building thorium plant right now and you called only first world or rich people to do it, the main thing you have forgot is the necessity is mother of every thing.
He is not up to date about Thorium research. Ask him to take a trip to India where there is an operating thorium reactor. Either it is ignorance or pure chest beating that only first world can solve all energy problems.
Funny that most nuclear plants in india are more modern than their western counterpart (europe, usa). also better maintained and have way less incidents recorded. still they think their technology is superior to everyone else on the planet.
It is actually obvious why they are more modern. In the west, most of the nuclear plants were built in the early days of the nuclear age while countries such as India and China started building their reactors later. The rate that reactors were built in the west decreased drastically as time went on because of the stigma surrounding nuclear energy and so many of the reactors in the west are the older models. Also India has a program that would utilize thorium to create uranium that they are developing. There are no active plants that use this technology. Also the safest way of using thorium would be to create a liquid flouride thorium reactor which uses thorium directly as the fuel source. India is not developing that type of reactor. They are still using uranium based reactors.
The future of electricity in India is solar, not nuclear and certainly not thorium.
"India unveils the world's largest solar power plant"
www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/11/india-unveils-world-largest-solar-power-plant-161129101022044.html
The future Base Load Electrical Generation is going to have to be Nuclear, preferably Thorium. . . . Wind & Solar can certainly help with the daily variable Electrical Demand. . . . But only with Energy Storage, and or some form of east-west "InterPower" : www.dropbox.com/s/rr4xe4pahhoar8c/World%20Map%20-%20%27InterPower%27%20Systems.jpg?dl=0
Good stuff Thomas. Keep up the good work. I have shared this on Facebook. I think the Albertan government needs to take a serious look at this as it phases out coal. If the state of Idaho has one of the richest deposits of Thorium in the United States, given the geographical proximity of Alberta, it seems likely their geology is also Thorium rich.
@Primal... : Canada has a couple of Molten Salt projects, i think at least one might be Thorium.
IT is funny ,when someone can jots down on a napkin about a hyperloop system and a dozen companies jump on it . But say you can solve the energy problems and everyone is just like noway.
lol Just realized that but this is not immediate, the power plants can take 20-30 years to built(so my research says).
This could be why people are so timid to start making the power plants.
I like your thought process. I've studied Thorium for over 40 years, and I concur with everything this speaker has said. One immediate application I can see is to build a 100 Watt Thorium reactor-properly shielded, that could go into present-day electric vehicles, thus eliminating the need for charging stations.
The reason I DON'T think Thorium will be employed, at least any time soon, is that the powers that be are too invested in fossil, and even Solar and Wind energy systems. Then, as the speaker correctly points out, ALL of the daunting regulations that will HAVE to be developed in order to ensure a UNIFORM design for a commercial scale Thorium Reactor, primarily for safety considerations.
Then there is the current-JUSTIFIED-fear of nuclear, based on the last 70 years of Uranium usage that will also have to be overcome.
All of my comments aside, I think this guy is on the road to a Nobel Prize in Physics, AND a Nobel Peace Prize. I HOPE HE SUCCEEDS!
"But say you can solve the energy problems and everyone is just like noway."
Only in the US. China will get it down as we in the US watch the lights go out.
@DarkEternal6 Wrong.
@@bruceforster3709 You have nailed it.
Fantastic lecture. I'm a massive believer in Thorium for future energy production. Fusion sounds incredible in theory. But we're not there yet. We already know this works. It was proven decades ago. I've heard there are Thorium plants under construction in France and India already. I hope we will follow suit soon. As great as electric cars are, we need energy to charge the batteries. And we need energy to make the cars, including the batteries. Thorium Reactors solve that problem immediately. I don't know much about the Tesla battery plants, but Musk is brilliant. They're likely to be much more efficient in production, use, and even after (I imagine easily recycled with little to no waste. Though, this will likely require patented equipment only found in his facilities for now. Possibly licensed out in the future). But even if they're nothing impressive, and we feel we're better off with something else, Graphene batteries, and even supercapacitors, can fulfill that need (assuming it's not already in the Tesla batteries). Graphene stands to revolutionize power delivery, power storage, and even power consumption. Add Thorium for power production and start to finish is taken care of. Although it's been said that Graphene can make incredible clear solar panels, I just can't imagine a world living off solar power alone. But a combination of our already known methods of clean energy production can. At least for now
THANKYOU.
If you're an environmentalist, this seems like the most perfect solution anyone's ever come up with.
Or, even if you're not...so long as you have an ounce of logic.
This has enormous potential. One of the remaining issues is embrittlement of the containment vessel. The combination of neutrons and potentially corrosive salts makes this important to understand, and to solve. I know there is research going on in a collaboration between Sandia National Laboratories and Georgia Tech. on this issue, but where are we on this?
Molten salt reactors are the best answer we have for power since, as of now, we don't have a good way of storing traditional reactor waste. If people would stop being so scared every time they hear "nuclear", we could've pushed coal and fossil fuels out of the picture a long, long time ago.
Thorium energy production will happen - only it will happen in Denmark or China or India where the need for energy is great and the socialist type government is in a position to fund or in fact own the means of production. The technology will be proved and it will creep ever so slowly into the US and by 2075 the US will be producing Thorium energy to supply 10% of its need while still complaining about global warming
As by 2075, the global mean temp will have dropped another 1.5 Degrees!
@@bruceforster3709 Where did you get that fantasy?
@@robertleese2961 If you actually looked up the facts for yourself instead simply accepting the utter BS from the "Union of concerned Scientists", you would not show your lack of intelligence with questions like this....
@@bruceforster3709 I have looked up and read plenty and understand the IR spectroscopy of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. You are welcome to troll someone else as your opinion and comments mean nothing to me, and while I do not feel free to comment on your general intelligence, your ignorance on climate science is clearly delineated in your vacuous statements.
Researching Andrew Yang brought me here. Thanks for the lesson
This has to go viral
kgbme We are spending bilions on fusion that doesnt work at all, so 1000 problems that are in fact corosion based are just a materials and enginering challange - simple R+D needed.
Exactly, thorium seems to be a much easier problem to solve along with molten salt reactors than nuclear fission/fusion problems.
the number 1 stumbling block for such wonderful sounding power is greed, if right people and politicians don't get richer it will never exist.
why are we not funding this?
Lack of political will. If only Elon Musk could be brought on board...
Julia Lerner that would be great
We're not funding this because US regulation and its captured regulators have locked it out of the US market. Let China make it happen...we will just be chasing their licensing terms after that.
Military is more important
It's Hammer Time!
Awesome potential! This seems like the best thing since sliced bread.
Make a videogame called "reactor simulator" that uses physics simulation to allow the player to make a nuclear reactor of their very own design. After a few months add a new material to the game: thorium. As the players find new and interesting ways to make it work, the game designers can fix glitches that allow the player to break the laws of physics to make things work that wouldn't actually work. The tutorial level can be a carbon reactor where the material is carbon and oxygen and is much safer than the nuclear. Every update can add things like coal, loam, natural gas, hydrogen, etc. You design the reactor core by drawing it with a CAD like interface. You get scored on several criteria; power output divided by pollution, power output divided by fuel cost, power output divided by construction cost, power output divided by maintenance cost. If the reactor breaks during the test you don't get any points, but you can make changes to the reactor and test again. Videogames are fun and cheaper than real-world experiments.
Agreed. I always thought city officials should have to test their city plans in Sim City first to see if it will work lol
I have a few questions for Tom:
1- What would be required to develop an electrical generator from Thorium? I understand from his talk that this has yet to be achieved.
2- Could you develop small modular units of say 1 MW, 5 MW, 10 MW?
3- Could the output of these generators be throttled as per peak demand and lowered to idle during los demand hours? Or would they need to operate at 100% 24/7, leading to the need of complementing technologies to modulate according to demand?
I thought they run a longer period around three months on the same fuel
Great speech - with Thorium reactors, wouldn’t it be neat to clean up and use the “spent” but still burnable nuclear fuel already available, and also harvest excess carbon-dioxide to create hydrocarbon fuel as we continue transitioning to electric powered vehicles!
Why haven't I heard if Thorium only uranium. This surely must be the way forward, thoroughly excited by this new technology. Am following Copenhagen Atomics!
India is on that way. Look up the reactor in the south of india called kalpakkam.
Thanks for spreading the word
No one owns MSR technology. The US Department of Energy will provide the details of the design for free.
Jona Adams I don't think they have the complete designs, cos a fair bit of the research was lost over the year's. Only real cash being put into it is India and China. western countries will not move without the US first. We may buy the IP off them in 20 years
Dan Burke The Department of Energy gave the the research away to anyone who requested a copy of it. It's not lost, but the research isn't complete either.
What research has been done is completely open source. All you have to do is ask the DOE, and they will give it to you.
+Jona Adams
That's not entirely true. They do give away the information they have. But a lot of the information is lost. During Kirk's intervju with the scientists working on the molten salt reactor back in the 50's they said themselves that they were shut down over a day. They were asked to clear their desks and burn it.
While some of the scientists did save all their documentation. Not all did. Thats why Kirk also said that some of the research is lost. Not all research was digitalized either. He said about 2/3rds were.
Actually no one owns MSR technology because there is no such technology. The only MSR ever built and operated was the purely experimental 8MWt MSRE, at ORNL in the late 60's. Going from the MSRE to a working, commercial modern nuclear reactor would take 50+ years of R&D and cost $ tens of billions, without any guarantee of success.
André Balsa
So you are saying that there is nothing called Intellectual property (IP)?
You seem to be confusing Engineering property of design with the different parts of technology (Science) needed to build it.
You don't build a car and after you built the car you invent the wheel. It's the other way around. You can still own the technology of the wheel even if no car was ever built.
Loving the implication in the title that nuclear isn't already incredibly safe. It'd be nice if the Thorium crowd could stop throwing uranium power under the bus at every opportunity rather than combating the anti-nuclear propaganda that has itself contributed immensely to thorium power never really being pursued.
Its not so much about safety as the cost to make it safe. High pressure reactors require a vast investment for equivalent safety levels to LFTRs
Well Mr Jones, If Uranium wasn't such a World destroying bomb in itself, It would NOT "get thrown under the Bus". Thorium is 500% safer, that is the point. We all should convert all the Uranium plants around the world into Thorium salt reactors and be done with Plutonium all together.
@@scottcarr3264 Exactly how is Uranium world destroying and in exactly what way is Thorium "500% safer"?
This almost seems to good to be true. My gosh, what a wonderful world we might have if this is true and gets implemented.
But then lil' Gretta will be out of a job! :):)
I know these comments are older but just want to say from a complete petrol head this stuff is bloody exciting
It would be great to have an enclosed modular liquid thorium nuclear reactors available.
God damit Nixon everywhere I look you've had alredy screwed up something
It is good to see other people than Kirk talking about LFTR.
1000 years of energy available from thorium? Cool, maybe by then we'll have fusion.
Fusion is difficult, because you're trying to mimic what a star does concerning mass and gravity, and that's self containment of one of the most volatile reactions in the universe. Its very difficult to do with magnetic containment what a star does with mass and gravitation.
@@nathansharp5743 Yup. I'm familiar with it. And there are other methods than magnetic containment.
@@imonlyamanandiwilldiesomed4406 Yah, I heard something abour using lasers from multiple directions to fuse nuclei together. I'm not saying it can't be done, just that its really difficult to reach more energy output than is put into it. It should be studied and invested in.
@@nathansharp5743 1000 years my guy we went from horses to cars in 100
I've just listened to this guy and realised that now is thoriums time,what I mean the world is waking up to the fact how dependent we've become on other countries be it Russia today to supply us with energy. I believe governments are waking up to the fact that renewables cannot supply us with enough energy, and the cost of backup and storage makes them too expensive. As this guy says thorium is widely available so the energy would be cheap but best of all we good burn today's nuclear waste solving over night the main hindrance to the expansion of nuclear energy. Maybe thorium could be the hope that nuclear scientists always hoped nuclear power could be.
I wish Michael Shellenberger would join the fight for thorium reactors.
Agree! And get Bill Gates onto this!
@@alexandrawhitelock6195 Right. It's kinda sad but I guess the first one will be built in China.
@@MarioStahl1983 interesting. Thought there was one in India? Someone kn this thread posted this...🤷♀️
@@alexandrawhitelock6195 No, there Is none yet. That's easily gonna take one or two more generations. India is struggling to even keep the lights on. They are going with normal pressurized water reactors.
Those were some funky pants
I'm noticing a pattern, every single ambitious tech project ends with "and then nixon happened".
also California
Thank you. 2nd generation American - Grandfather from Denmark. Other lineage - French. Could have been Taiwan and it wouldn't have mattered. This world is worth it.
The [LFTR] Liquid Floride Thorium Reactor should be the technology that we use in the Future.
Try to spread the news by posting this on social media, shut down every time.
We shouldnt waste our money for the MSR and build fusion reactors.
@@ano2425 umm yeah and no. We CAN build a MSR now, fusion needs still a lot ov development and has problems unsolved. Running both things paralell would probably be the better option. The US could use some of the military budget, money shuödn't be the problem.
@@ichheissemarvin5613 thats not true. We cant build an MSR which produces its own fuel. The reactor in Oak Ridge was preloaded with U-233. Its even questionable if physics allow an MSR with an breeding factor >1. In the past nobody did proof the principle of an MSBR.
Experts estimate that both technologies need the same amount of developement work.
Both, China and India have heavily funded programs for Thorium reactors since about a decade, but there still hasn't been a breakthrough yet by now (2020), projections have been delayed over and over again. So the technical challenges seem to be much bigger than anticipated.
This should be front page news everyday until people know about this
It is very well known. It's been around for over 70 years and has been flavour of the month for twenty years with more than twenty or thirty projects all over the world, from Australia to Denmark. Several in the USA. It's popular because it's easy to sell using the standard 'Snake Oil' script this bloke used.
This gives me renewed confidence for the future. Nuclear seems so obvious.
Thomas, I have watched a couple of UA-cam videos with you as the presenter My mind changed on nuclear energy about five years ago when I became aware of Th. Australia has both uranium and thorium.
I would like to be involved in making thorium reactors the producers of energy in Australia. Renewables is not going cut it in Australia in the long term
How would we make that happen?
So you'd like to invest in a technology that will produce electricity at around 30x the current wholesale price for electricity?
Why would that be a good idea?
copenhagen atomics
@@screamingnutbag7955 30x nobody can make electricity from thorium today...so far nobody did a serious investment in it at least in the western world
@SUCH... : Aust has a Thorium project, go ask them.
@@filipkeysers5211 : Bill Gates (sigh) so we know it's still decades away.
Wow... vary eye opening...
What I love most is that thorium is named after a Norse god.💪💪
are you from Norway? :O
The story of how we got where we are with both civilian and military nuclear power in the U. S. is relatively well told in the biographies of Admiral Hyman G. Richover, Dixie Lee Ray and Milton Shaw. And yes, Richard Nixon had a hand in it too. It involved money, politics, military objectives, nuclear weapons development, nuclear reactor engineering development and did I mention politics. Molten Salt Reactors were tried at sea by the Navy. They just didn’t know enough reactor engineering yet to make it safe enough to be successfully deployed. At that point Admiral Richover and Dixie Lee Ray directed both the U. S. Navy and civilian nuclear developers (G. E. and Westinghouse) to focus on uranium fueled thermal neutron pressurized water and boiling water reactors. Thorium was a non-starter.
As a long term power company man, I honestly wish you good luck with that one 😀
Luck will have nothing to do with it. We already know how to implement this technology. And it's a practical solution for the world's energy needs. Maybe AOC and the other Green New Deal scammers should be focused on Thorium nuclear power as the solution, rather than the crack pipe dream they're pushing now.
The mining companies don't put it back in the ground. Tailings are generally just shuved aside in huge piles. Good source of thorium and most rare earth elements also. No digging required only take and process.
Thorium Reactors should be built on ships that are nearing the end of their working life, they can be moored in any port that is experiencing drought, powering a desalination plant which is also mounted on the ship, to process sea water drawn from the harbour enabling cheap fresh water to be pumped into the city's water mains. The salt byproduct is a valuable commodity, it can be on sold to industry.
No no no ! We need to have people trembling at the feet of the rich and powerful while they weaken from thirst and hunger ! Don't t you know anything about behavioural psychology ? GEEEZ !!!
You had me till bashing the Tar Sands. Here is the thing, whether you like it or not, the oil is there. Someone, Someday will pull it out. We will be using oil to make plastics for decades, for tools, carpet, linen, etc. The positive way to spin this, is to pressure the tar sand companies to be the first in North America to build 1 or 2 MSR, just for their operations. They could switch most of their processing over to electrical, and then instead of shipping most of the oil to USA, we can refine it ourselves. Completely based on a Thorium reactor. Their Truck fleet can switch to electrical, everything. Those companies have the money to do it. Pressure them for it, and it will drive the industry. Bashing them makes them not want it. I have known about this technology for 10 years, and am itching to see it reborn.
If one KWh will cost less then 4 cents it will be cheaper then any other energy so that removes the investors from fossil power. If oil is no longer turned into gasoline, diesel or cerosine it will be plentiful for plastics. Tar sands are much more expensive to process then standard crude so that will stop too.
A company called ThorCon is getting ready to supply Indonesia with the first Thorium MSR's but they don't focus om optimal operation but om short term feasibility so initially they focus on sodium chloride salt instead of FliBe and they have more shortcuts to be producing reactors as fast as possible. Series production building it in automated shipyards just like ships. using barges to transport modules to wherever they are needed an retreiving the spent reactor modules after 5 year production and 5 year cool down.
I hope this opens-up eyes
Someone Tweet this ti Elon Musk please!
Sure, you tweet him.
Elon is pro solar, how would he support something that goes against his business?
Wow less than a dollar per human year or energy! A few corporations are going to make SO much profit off Thorium power.
edit: ah he touched on this problem and shared a wonderful vision of a future where the surplus is shared to the benefit of all humans. That is the best vision of the future I’ve ever felt was possible. I just wish I could be more optimistic about it coming true.
It seems to me if we could reduce inequality, end food and housing shortage, improve education, provide good healthcare to everyone, share productivity gains, and so on… up to a point… such a system would perpetuate and improve itself and not devolve back into capitalism and imperialism. I think people would be happy and fulfilled. But the problem is getting over that hump, and wrestling power away from those who quite enjoy their current position. Humanity could achieve so much more. Ah who knows
You hear things like this tiny 100 dollar amount of thorium can power my entire life for 100 years, less war, etc. and I am like sign me up. All for it.
The top 1% and corporations hear "We will make no money from this". This is why it will never happen, unfortunately.
But the top 1.1% could say: "I can make the energy market mine".
Probably the truth about thorium is that a) it's not as magical as expected, b) it's not as easy as it's sold, c) there are cheaper alternatives and d) a+b+c.
Thorium is definitely the best option for free energy, but it is needed to be solved some technical factors in it, we can only count on that someone would show out with an updated and great idea
The portable reactor is a good idea, but the name is horrible. Instead of calling it an "waste burner" they should call it a "nuclear fuel recycler." Both "waste" and "burning" have very negative connotations, while "recycle" has a very positive one.
I also cringed when he said they named their company "Copenhagen Atomics".
@@timentimentimen Honestly (not an attack, a legit question): Is the word "Atomic" perceived as that "scary?"
I like Tom's idea, calling it a "nuclear fuel recycler" or some such - what term for Thorium Power companies do you think would be more "marketable" to selling the idea?
@WALLAROO I'm not an expert, but personally I would not use any words that (some) people associate with bombs, war, meltdowns, etc. So no nuclear (bomb), atomic (bomb), radioactive, reactor, etc..
Why not use a brand name that has no associations. People don't know the word thorium, and it's an awesome word - it even has Thor in it. ThorPower, Thorify, EnThor, Thoryum, Thoria, Thorio, Thorp, Thoren, ThorX.
@@timentimentimen Good points. I think that is part of Thorium's problem - marketing. I think that's part of the reason Sorenson came up with the LFTR acronym. It's pretty hard to describe how this works without those terms - it IS a nuclear power reactor.
Maybe just use "core" - like Thorium Core? Or lift from Next Generation, and call it a Thorium Chamber? That might actually work well - "The Thorium Chamber power generator works by... et al."
My thoughts are to use the LFTR (or similar) scale-ability to have local stations for less dependence on the grid system in case of failure, a town could still operate - and even be able to produce fresh water in an emergency.
So, Thorium Station maybe? Thorium Chamber Plant?
@@wallaroo1295 From the names you mention I like Thorium Station the most. It's neutral and sounds like train station, or some fun place. Thorium chamber sounds heavier and somehow gives me an image of a gas chamber.
The potential scalability of Thorium is indeed very interesting.
Pretty amazing india is the world leader in thorium research and they have built 3 stage reactor in Chennai india and there is no word about india in his talk I really doubt how much research he has done on the topic
if everyone complaining about funding just donated to a go fund me, you'd have funding. Try the markets instead of government. They work.
Thank you......food for thought....
Uranium reactors give you bomb materials by refining Plutonium. I am having zero luck on social media to get this article out.
Watching this in 2022, over 6 years old. Now consider that 6 years ago this was old stuff. In the early 2000's, we already knew. I knew, as a young kid, and so did all other mildly bright young people. That's the true crux of the problem: Politics is open to everyone, thus deranged ideas are still at the forefront of how humanity operates. Not merely inefficient energy, but also inefficient epistemology, such as various cults and religions. For the next few hundred years, nothing will change, though we're perfectly capable of changing.
Aladin called... he wants his pants back
Idiotic remark
A joke, maybe you found it unfunny@@jonnifjader
😅
One of molten salt's biggest problems is corrosion. Salt and heat will corrode just about any metal, although there are advancements in this area.
I have a question which is based on Copenhagen Atomics concept of a small scale mass produced molten salt thorium reactor. Would it be possible to convert coal based power plants by replacing the furnace part of the plant with a molten salt thorium reactor. I mean a coal fired furnace and a molten salt reactor are both a source of heat generation so the rest of the power plant should work fine with either and little else should need to be replaced aside from the furnace. And there is the benefit that it will already be connected to the electricity grid and there will be no need to build an entirely new power plant so it should work out relatively cheap. I mean if this can be done then surely such power plants can be converted all over the world fairly quickly.
Yes many startups are thinking along your lines too. ThorCon for example is now building a shipyard like site in Indonesia and they want to mass produce the "parts" for these power-plants to about 90% of construction, the same way ships are produced. They then load the parts onto barges and tow them to there destination, the entrances of rivers, where they will have enough water for cooling and for desalination. Usually there are already towns there so electric will be easy to connect to.
But if your coal plants are to far land inward and the river is not totally navigable (too narrow or rapids or waterfalls) then it would be hard to do for ThorCon.
I find this is a really smart idea and it would reduce costs dramatically. If we truly want to make such conversion the problem is never technical but always political. The energy companies, like car companies, oil companies, big pharma, just want profit at the highest rate and they'd do anything to avoid helping humanity and losing profits for social rights. If it were not that way we already would have a non polluted world with most human problems solved. Instead it's the exact opposite...very sad.
One of the problems is finding a reasonably priced metal for containing the liquid salt that can withstand the heat and radiation in the reactor for any period of time.
I have a much better idea: Solar PV panels and wind turbines.
Proven technology that produces cheap power, is accepssible to all and entails no serious risks.
The only parts of the Thorium MSR concept that are proven are the Thorium part, which has been proven to be astronomically expensive, and the MSR part, which has been proven to be astronomically expensive. Those two drawbacks aside, it's a technology with some serious potential!
@@screamingnutbag7955 solar, wind, and hydro are failures. The weather is too erratic to depend on it for energy. Nuclear is the path to the future. It would even help propel man among the stars.
Nice clear presentation
To give away energy cheap...?
Tezla tried that........!
There will always be SOMEONE who doesn't like that idea a bit.
However I think Thorium will be a great idea.
Yeah but, it's the SAME old someone's, and if it's not them then it's their offspring! These people need to be shot off the Earth and into space with a one way ticket, along with their entire gene pool because it will NEVER end until these parasites are all dead and gone!
I agree with nuclear and esp. thorium. He asks, why was this never developed/used? We can say the same thing about solar. It's been with us for eons, but it is only in this period where solar has become popular. If price was an issue, the same issue applies before. Had they been bought in larger scale before, then we would have lowered the prices even sooner.
If it is too good to be true
It is too good to be true.
I'm sorry but im watching thorium and expect some more technical explanation, it felt like reading off some webpages that cover pros and cons only.
I was also waiting for him to explain the downsides, the reasons why thorium is still not considered by leading scientists and companies, and the plans to overcome those obstacles. Basically he should have talked about the contents of the metaphorical stacks of problems from his slides. It sounded interesting (even more so after the latest IPCC announcements) but it never became more than a sales pitch of sorts.
wow. you probably want to change that figure of speech.
Yeah, lacks solid evidence and isn’t a convincing argument
@@Sturzfaktor2 that is because ted talks are about making money. Dude even stated that only people like him can solve the issue. That explains alot.
FB-ads and a lot of stickers to exchange could generate some curiousity on the mainstream.
*edit: We need Cambridge Analytics to promote this!*
Thorium Reactors are the best solution to solve our future energy needs, but we have to get the ignorance of our :Politicians solved so we can remove all the laws that have been put in place to keep this technology from happening.
i think we should use ocean wave and hydroelectric as our first options
This sounds like a great plan and one that we should use. It would be owned by everybody with no vested interest. What an idea and I really hope this gets adapted as soon as possible. Some will not like it because it can not be controlled and price can not be fixed but it would be great for our earth from an ecological point of view. Thank you for sharing and I will do the same. JBK
Politicians and the big utility industry won't let the people own it because they wouldn't get rich off of it
I support the idea of developing thorium based power, but I don't like how this guy skims over the technical issues involved in a Molten Salt Reactor as if they are no big deal. They are challenging and may or may not be a solvable in an economically viable way. It's one thing to say you can't have a Chernobyl like explosion, but you can't run a real world power grid on a reactor than eats itself to death every so often. Light water reactors have a lot of flaws, but all you're really dealing with is high temp/pressure water, which is something we are very good at dealing with. Molten salt is a completely different animal.
And we can design the plants better to be simpler and safer which would reduce both cost and public fear.
The reason why Thorium was rejected in the early days was because it could not be refined into nuclear weapons. Uranium can, so that is where the money went.
We really should be investing in Thorium. Back in the 50s, a reactor about the size of a fridge was built and could produce 3 KW, testing the idea that each house could have its own reactor in the kitchen. This, like flying cars, was rather ambitious, but the point was made that a liquid salt reactor could be small, efficient and above all, cheap. To put it crudely, if the reaction got a bit heated, an ice plug at the bottom would melt and the whole thing would drop into a giant drip tray and stop.
Thorium is interesting for another reason. It is very plentiful and so we are not reliant upon unfriendly and unpleasant regimes for energy supplies. We can work with people we like and who share roughly similar values, another major plus. Finally, we can get rid of the vast piles of nuclear waste which is extremely dangerous. A 3 year warranty on cars is standard. Some give 5 and one 7 years. Nobody can give a 300 year warranty, but that is an imaginable time frame for storage. 100,000 years is not. That is vastly older than civilisation and who knows what mischief could arise if some maniac found the stuff and started throwing it around.
With 40 years of Danish windturbine development for NO result in terms of reducing CO2 emissions, and the most expensive electricity in Europe, plus similar experiences in Germany, isn't it about time to give other ideas like Thorium a try?
-Who was it said that the definition of insanity is to keep trying the same thing over and over, hoping that the outcome will be different?
Which, could also apply to building pressurised water uranium reactors and hoping they don't go boom this time.
uhhh YES
expensive electricity encourages people to reduce their consumption. Demand for electricity has gone up considerable in the last 40 years, and CO2 production would have gone up too. Wind/water/solar/geothermal energy is mitigating that increase.
@@sbkenn1 The main problem with wind and solar is it's too variable. When you don't get enough energy, you have to use gas or coal to supplement. That's why the big oil companies really love renewable energy, it basically makes sure that the world will always be dependent on oil. Creating and maintaining wind and solar parks also takes a lot of fossil materials.
Nuclear is the future.
@@excessiveworry3838 : Nuclear, as in Fukushima, 3-Mile-Island, Chernobyl ? I think not. We need renewables, with much improved energy storage. They do take some power to build, but not much (materials or energy) to maintain. Hydro-electric would be capable of filling in the gaps in solar/wind power if it was JUST for that. Oil, gas, coal, and nuclear have to be kept hot, even if their capacity isn't needed. Hydro can be started within seconds of surges in consumption or dips in supply. Micro-nuclear does have a place though, in ships and long-haul trains.
Albert Einstein.
Using thorium powered nuclear power plants, we can also create synthetic petrol/diesel and thus make our existing fleet of vehicles carbon neutral as well.
This is fantastic! I've never heard of this before. Just wondering why has it been sitting for fifty years and nobody has acted on it until now?
$$$$$$$ that's why no massive profit margin...
@steve... : Because it does not work. It does however sell well using a 'Snake Oil' script, so there probably thirty or more projects all over the world starting in the nineties and they've all had dates for a 'break-through' come and go, come and go. They may solve all the problems in three or more decades but not this decade I fear.
The first warning flag that Pedersen is a devious liar was when he said (4:10) "Thorium is only slightly radioactive". That is true, but its half-life is 15 billion years, so it remains "slightly dangerous" for ever.Thorium is not fissile, so there is no such thing as "a Thorium reactor". It is however fertile, which means it can "absorb" a neutron to become Uranium-233. This is fissile, so it can form the fuel of a reactor and nuclear bombs, just like Uranium-235. U-235 has a half life of 704 million years, so if it is mixed in with Thorium in the reactor's liquid, the liquid will be dangerous for ever, whether it is spent or not."Why don't we have it yet?" - well, Pedersen admits that there are problems, and who is going to fix those problems? - YOU !Just another slick salesman telling us we are going to have cheap, safe energy for ever, and 3-D printers to make anything we want, and ...
What are we waiting for - the last drop of oil to be consumed??
Why dont they build Thorium reactors? Simply because its my belief that they cannot be utilised to make atomic weapons. Also, maybe it would not be profitable for companies to their shareholders if production of electricity was so easy and cheap to manufacture.
There are no CO2 "problems". It is a necessary gas for the creation of oxygen.
Yes. Keep spreading the word.
Thorium fueled fission reactors now, fusion reactors when we can.