Nuclear 4.0 | The Small Modular Reactor Revolution
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- Опубліковано 26 вер 2024
- Is this the Future Of Nuclear? Can Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) pave the way for nuclear energy's mainstream entry?
I want to explore whether these systems will fall into the same traps as conventional nuclear power, or finally offer the trinity of inexpensive, reliable and intrinsically safe energy.
Thank you to Radiant Nuclear for use of their footage. and best of luck in their journey to realise their portable reactor systems. To find more about Radiant Nuclear and follow their journey, click here: www.radiantnuc...
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Thank you to Radiant Nuclear for use of their footage. and best of luck in their journey to realise their portable reactor systems. To find more about Radiant Nuclear and follow their journey, click here: www.radiantnuclear.com/
4:15 Supercriticality just means "reaction rate goes up", which is quite important when starting up a reactor. Increasing heat output is key for going from 'warm rock' to 'useful power plant'. It's just _uncontrolled_ supercriticality which is bad.
I'm surprised you even made it to 4:15, I can't make more than 3 to 5 seconds before I want to become "that" guy. It's like everyone gets their scripts from AI without any critical thinking.
Considering the sheer volume of easily fact-checked misinformation in this video, I'm starting to wonder if this guy actually has a PhD or if he just says he does online. It's not like there are doctorate cops or anything to prevent people from doing that.
Had to comment when he started talking about "more like a bomb then an energy generator". This is total lies. Bombs need much higher enrichment then even 20%. He should have said meltdown but he is just another one looking for drama. Not going to watch more of his stuff now.
@@olssonan lol I didn't even make it past a minute.
@@olssonan Completely agree! The ''uncontrolled nuclear reactor is like a bomb'' line gets repeated over and over and over and over....Might be one of the single most damaging myths about nuclear power, that it's just a nuclear bomb being 'babied' to not blow up. As a result of this, most people still think Chernobyl was a nuclear explosion.....Absolutely maddening!!
Would've been nice to mention, that nuclear, with all its accidents, still kills the fewest people per energy output.
True, and by a very wide margin.
It is not about death count. It is about commercial costs. The Fukushima cleanup was more expensive than basically all other power disasters ever. It was even more expensive than that dam that broke in China and killed 20 0000 people.
Chloe Abrams and Johnny Harris did some great vids about nuclear around the same time this vid came out. They talked through some of the facts and why nuclear is low hanging fruit for climate proponents that are capable of using logic.
Alas, there's no logic to be found regarding attitudes around nuclear. They cover the advertising and hysteria around nuclear as well.
@@searchingfortruth619 Nuclear is a dead technology. It will always be too complex, too expensive, too large. We have extremely cheap solar and wind. Which can very easily be built at any scale. The market hasn't decided to built nuclear in the last 20 years in the west. Now, even if you want to build nuclear, the skill and knowledge is no longer available.
The Moltex Static Salt design does away with almost every hazard from traditional nuclear power. Its sheer simplicity and intrinsic safety should dramatically reduce costs. It’s also scaleable by building more reactors on the same site. It is naturally load following and and cannot over heat. Excessive temperature stops the nuclear reaction long before it becomes dangerous. It could be disconnected from load at full power and nothing nasty would happen. It has boron shut-down rods but they are not needed as an emergency tool.
There is no water or steam in the core so no pressure and considerably less corrosion than we get in PWR cores.
We should be moving heaven and earth to build these things. Instead we have an out of control nuclear regulator that completely stalled progress. Moltex is now getting the job done in Canada.
What are downsites of said system?
It might be good to have newer reactor designs that are safer than the older ones. But the problem of disposal of spent nuclear fuel continues regardless of safety of reactors themselves. And this problem has never been solved. Keeping spent uranium in water pools a few years, then outdoor dry storage in metal housings is insanity. There is no assurance that this extremely dangerous material will remain secure for thousands of years.
@@alesksander it's powered by pixie dust and unicorn farts.
@@stanleyhampton7185Finland does deep geological storage, and both France and Japan recycle spent fuel. Also some of these newer designs are able to burn up most of the spent fuel resulting in waste that only needs to be kept safe for a couple hundred years.
@@justinhalsall4077 A couple hundred years is still a long time. A society can easily collapse such a lengthy time. Natural and man made disasters can occur. It is very uncertain that spent nuclear fuel can be kept secure due to these potential failures. Geological storage is not without risk. Seismic activity can cause leakage. Water migration can cause dispersal of material from ruptured containers. There is really no safe means to dispose of spent nuclear fuel.
Reactors in the 250-500MW range would be useful. I worked as a consultant for a Canadian power utility, who could have replaced their entire generation fleet with a couple of big reactors. It was not practical to do so because a typical large reactor is down for maintenance about 12 days a year. Taking a small modular reactor offline can be much more easily scheduled, if you have a fleet of them.
There is not and never has been economies of SMALL scale in power production
@@clarkkent9080as always, advantages and disadvantages balancing...
The hell are you on about "Not a market"??? Did I imagine solar panels being invented? They dont produce gigawatts, but still is able to power a home, and even several cities are investing in roadside vertical wind turbines that produce 200 watts when a car passes by.
The more redundancy you have, the less down time, and in greater numbers you can even outperform large scale installations.
12 days time down is small change compared to the wind not blowing or too much cloud cover.
@@Suzuki_Hiakuratry it without base load, economically it makes absolutely no sense to put everything at the whim of the weather.
3-mile island failure was not dmging, just widely broadcasted by media and blown out of proportion. You can actually look up a list of failures and only 2 out of over 100 were dmging, there are over 400 total plants in operation as over 2023, but there have also been at least 100 that have been shut down in the 10yrs earlier. Every modern navy ship is nuclear powered, not one failure on those since their start of use.
No failure for American ships, anyway. The Soviets kinda screwed the pooch on that one.
Three Mile Island was a 3 month old multi billion dollar nuclear plant that was TRASHED. Cost $1 billion i n 1996 dollars just to cleanup the melted fuel. The containment is so contaminated that it is not even SCHEDULED to be cleaned up until 2047....that is 67 years after the accident
That accident was no big deal
He's generalising from one example, Chernobyl. And even that one killed far fewer than the worst Hydroelectric dam failures. As for renewables being scaleable, they most assuredly are NOT. At least at grid scale anyway, because of their intermittent nature.
Yes Three Mile Island was really not such a problem in terms of radiation release. Weirdly Windscale is completely forgotten and it was awful, but it was the frst British reactor, and since then the British never had an event near that proportion. About Chernobyl we have a corrupt, bureaucratic government and a very bad design (not only the factors popularized by the TV series but A LOT of others and a complete mismanaged way they made the test like adding more refrigeration pumps causing cavitation, the misunderstanding of how it was unstable at lower power, etc). Fukushima is similar: The Magazine of Nuclear Scientists had published an article a few years before saying that the inspections of nuclear reactors in Japan were an empty ritual that was only to appease the bureaucracy gods without any capacity to prevent disasters. lets remember that the manager of the plant flew to Tokyo to explain to his bosses that they could not take the crew there and let the reactor on its own or the disaster would be of gigantic proportions (yes the executives of the company wanted to just abandon the plant). It was an heroic action specially if you consider that in Japan you are not supposed to do something like that saying to your bosses in their faces that they are basically...well. coward, stupid, and even corrupt when they are (see the Olympus scandal for a tiny example).
It is possible to build reactors in which the physics itself turn off the reactor when it goes awry (United Atomic had some of those in the 50s) but those reactors do not scale, as it is expensive to build reactors you need to build big ones to make the cost of the energy competitive with other energy sources: that is the real problem of nuclear energy, not the danger of reactors as the huge amount of carbon we put in the atmosphere are proving to be far more dangerous, and they can be made safe (other example wee the gas refrigerated reactors that are largely forgotten, again: cost).
When discussing Chernobyl, however, few seem to bother to note that the design was amazingly primitive -- *literally the exact same design as Fermi's very original nuclear pile in the early 40s, aside from the power generation aspects* -- and had absolutely nothing to do with modern nuclear power generation in the West. There were only something like 10 power generating plants in all of USA and Western Europe that used that design, and signs are that all of them had been decommissioned by *_1970_*
Grasping what the design was -- basically, a giant pile of *_Charcoal Briquettes_* -- should give you an idea how ridiculous it is as a safety concept. "Yes, we're going to take the same thing you use in your backyard grill and heat it to several hundred degrees and pull hot water out of it." 😕 As the Guinness commercial goes, "BRILLIANT!"
So the Chernobyl accident had absolutely nothing to do with First World power generation equipment, safeties, and dangers.
As for Fukashima, that required no less than THREE particularly unique and improbable failures to occur --
1 -- Massive earthquake nearby
2 -- Earthquake causes massive Tsunami
3 -- Previously unnoticed plug incompatibilities in emergency replacement pumps.
That last one, well, I'm betting there isn't a freaking plant anywhere in the West, now, that hasn't addressed that issue completely, so that they all can handle one single plug for powering emergency systems.
10/10 for excitement 5/10 for technical knowledge, 2/10 for commercial application, 0/10 for future use of micro nuclear plants. We have major switchgear yards adjacent to previous nuclear plants. These are the ideal sites for re-siting without significant GRID restructuring. It is the GRID STRUCTURE that determines the future generation sites not the generator.
If they took everything they have in solar and wind and put it all into turning Coal Plants into Nuclear by installing a reactor and beefing up the power grid we would be at or near zero emissions from power generation.
Nuclear power brings down electricity prices by 75% in Finland.
This is a bit misleading... Finnish energy prices had sharply increased after they banned energy imports from Russia in the wake of the Ukraine invasion (and other secondary causes, like the rise of coal and oil prices). Prices are about where they were back in 2019.
BUT... not saying energy independence isn't important.
@@KakashiInWinter : Easily debunked your rubbish by searching 2019 prices.
@KakashiInWinter If nuclear power reduced Finnish energy prices to 2019 levels after the loss of Russion oil and gas, and rising world oil and coal prices, that sounds really great.
Energy independence at 2019 prices? I wish we had that here in California.
…until one factors in end-of-life expenses. Decommissioning - primarily the decontamination- takes years. In Germany, there is one power plant being decommissioned by 1000 permanent staff for almost 30 years now. The rest is still waiting. So if you’re looking for a safe job… just saying.
@@Ca0815 : Decommissioning is taken into account. It's well documented.
I got 70% through this and still no mention of the Thorium Molten Salt Reactor (which we had working just fine over 50 years ago). Why is that?
Because that is off topic. Thorium reactors are not uranium reactors which he is covering and the big vs small uranium (or any) reactor is better in nuclear. Which is counterintuitive compared to the others.
He mentioned Molten salt at 4:56 as a type of coolant
The thorium reactor we had going was only a small scale research reactor. Scaling up to full production is a difficult game. There are some issues with thorium MSRs though they do seem like an interesting solution and I hope we chase that. I believe china has one MSR.
Thorium does not create plutonium which is needed for the weapons industry, that is why
@@jeroenvangastel9079 I don't need the weapons industry, do you?
@20:50 The lunar night is between 1.5 and 3.5 days? I don't think so. More like 14 to 15 days.
Yeah I caught that one also
I think he meant no light at all being reflected. In the country w/no human activity you can see some of the Moon before it turns new, then the sliver of silver crescent. Takes usually between 2.3 days on average to go from some discernable light to just nothing then back to that curved line of light - waxing or waning, the amount of X depends on the position of the embraced orbits around the Sun.
@@nomadscavengerYeah but that doesn't work for a fixed spot on the Moon.
I'm no Astronaut but, wouldn't the lunar day/night cycle be shorter at the poles? Could that be the time-frame he's referring to?
@@cmac3530I was thinking that too, but without any specification, you have to assume the Moon as a whole... and then it just doesn't hold true. On the other hand, I remember the next NASA landing spot being on the South pole (correct me if I'm wrong), so maybe he got it from that, but the info is skewed.
the fact that Yellow Cake is not just less expensive than Printer Ink, but it's a low single-digit percentage, seems to be bordering on something profound... 🤣
That really highlights how much printer companies are screwing the public.
Galen Winsor said for years nuclear power was safe. He drank the water and swam in the cooling ponds. Died at an old age.
I don't believe this and everything we know about science says this isn't possible. Or he was an original Xman.
@@jameswatkinsiii7834 Swimming in the cooling pools is safe so long as you don't go to the bottom. Water is very good at blocking radiation.
@@jameswatkinsiii7834 look him up
4:05 Super critical doesn't automatically mean bomb or else it would be impossible to get the reactor to produce more than decay heat. The whole runaway melting/boom thing has to do with prompt criticality and a bunch of fun physics.
That was exactly what I was going to post. 👍
Also, to expound further, prompt critical is dependent on the neutron life cycle, which depends on a variety of factors to include fuel/poison loading, core geometry, moderator, and power history. The longer the neutron life cycle, the more controllable and safe the reactor is.
Great, we'll put them in YOUR backyard. 🤣
@@SciHeartJourney Anyone who understands fission and how these plants actually work (doesn't get their information about the fission industry from the media and movies) will have no problem with this. Put one in my backyard, way better than a giant noisy wind turbine or solar panels which are more toxic per kW (GW-hr really considering lifetime) to produce and recycle than fission fuel, then there are all the batteries required to make renewables viable. Don't get me wrong, renewables + batteries have their place on say powering farmland or a small township, but you're not going to run an entire industrial sector or a place like Tokyo, Paris, London or NYC on a giant solar field and battery the size of a small town.
That was a joke
Research reactors like at the University in Vienna even operate on prompt criticality, at multiple dollars for short pulses
A normal big reactor never would/should enter such high criticality, but the special inherently safe design allows this. That's why students are allowed to fuck around with the reactor, and why it's interesting for research (high neutron density and shit)
Dr. Miles ignored the single biggest use case for mobile SMRs in the 50-80 MW range: commercial shipping.
Riiight. I'm sure pirates would love getting their hands on nuclear material. Nuclear doesn't scale for these reasons. 1. Cost 2. Risk 3. Proliferation 4. Waste management. None of these have solutions on the horizon for fission based reactors. Those are the facts.
@@ultrastoat3298 proliferation? waste management? first of all the uranium used in nuclear reactors can't be used to make bombs. second, waste is usually stored on the reactor site these days in air cooled containers.
@@canepaper967 Of course the uranium can be used to make bombs, it's just not much easier than starting with natural uranium. Waste management is a choice; we could be reprocessing and separating waste to the point of near irrelevancy but we don't.
@@canepaper967Lol..... I'm sure the world wants the Taliban to have nuclear reactors 😆. Ever heard of a dirty bomb? Also any country using nuclear energy will seek to build their own centrifuges or they will absolutely be held hostage by countries that do have them. So swing and a miss there. And waste materials are stored on site today...🤣🤣😂. Another swing and miss. I'll let think about it for a while and see if you can figure out why that is a dumb statement.
@@ultrastoat3298 Any country using nuclear energy will seek to build their own centrifuges? I don't even know how to start addressing a statement this dumb. There are 9 countries with nuclear weapons and dozens upon dozens that operate nuclear reactors and have done so for decades. Maybe learn more about nuclear energy before criticizing it idk.
20:18 "...in the northern hemisphere and so receive less sunlight."
I'll remind you that the northern hemisphere starts at the equator, and covers one-half of the Earth.
Cheers.
The northern hemisphere still receives less sunlight because it is tilted away from the sun when the sun is closest to the Earth
@@shanent5793 I admire your generosity.
Finding a friend to proofread your script is surprisingly difficult. 😂
The main weakness of SMRs is competition. For their business model to work, they need economies of scale. One company needs to produce hundreds of copies of their SMR. If there are too many companies competing, each individual model can not be produced cheaply enough to be worth it.
Flammanville III in France was supposed to be online in 2012. So far it has not even had the fuel rods loaded. It was 5x over budget years ago.
And that one is a prototype - the same design was built in Finland and China and now is built in Hinkley Point (and Sizewell). The one in Finland was a little bit faster, the ones in China are online now for over 5 years.
I had this discussion with some friends who live in a small town a few hours away from me. They were very enthusiastic about a small scale nuclear reactor that could be dropped off in their town, solving their energy problems forever. I asked them to have a look at their current lot of local councillors and council staff and choose somebody they could could trust to run the little plant, keep it safe for generations, and dispose of the waste. Nobody could put forward a name they would trust, which suggests to me that safety of these things depends on more than just good engineering.
The issue is not safety, it is cost. Ask your friends if they would be willing to pay 3 times or more for electricity in order to solve their energy problems? Vogtle (Ga.) just completed 2 new nuclear plants at a cost of $17 Billion EACH for a 1,000 Mw unit. SMRs cost more per Mw capacity. Can their town afford that in their budget?
Local government doesn't handle nuclear waste disposal nor are they free of the nuclear safety and containment regulations every power plant MUST abide by. Nuclear waste is stored in casks that demolish trains. You read that right they test the casks they put this spent fuel in by running trains into them. Not just any trains FKIN ROCKET POWERED TRAINS and guess which breaks first? The train or the cask?
To be fair what local politicians do you trust to run conventional power generation plants and keep them good for generations?
Decentralized power generation does not mean local control. SMRs are intended to be buried in the ground and remotely controlled.
@@evanpnz That sounds great until you look at reality. Every nuclear power plant will require staffing, including operators, maintenance, security, management. There are literality thousands of valves in a nuclear plant, even a SMR and they don't open and close themselves. You just don't start major equipment without people monitoring the startup and while there are hundreds of sensors that can be monitored remotely there are many more that only read out locally. The reactor primary is just a very small part of an electric generating power plant.
You need to tour a plant to understand how complex it is. There is no magic with SMRs and they are less efficient that the standard size units. So a SMR that puts out 1/10 the Mws of a full size reactor will require more than 1/10 the acreage.
I am basing my comment on 40+ years in the industry at 5 different facilities.
Dr Ben: Please address Thorium Nuclear as an option for SMRs.
Germany started building a Thorium plant in 1970, took them about 17 years to finish it, then they shut it down within 15 months to cut their losses - the thing was costing way too much to run.
People have been saying "ooh, what about Thorium" for over 50 years. There's nothing special about Thorium - it's still an incredibly expensive way to boil water.
What is the risk if we don't use nuclear power ..? Answer: Being unable to defeat climate change! 2nd question: What risk is larger for mankind ... climate change or the use of nuclear power? Answer to reader ... please find out by yourself.
There are many new founded companies worldwide since Oak Ridge ...researching and investing in 4th generation Thorium MSRs:
Alpha Tech (2016) U.S.A.,
Copenhagen Atomics (2014) DK,
Clean Core Thorium U.S.A.,
Elysium Industries (2015) Canada,
Flibe Energy (2011) U.S.A.,
Kairos Power (2016) U.S.A.,
Moltex (2014) U.K.,
NAAREA (2020) F,
Seaborg Technologies (2014) DK,
Terra Power (2006) U.S.A.,
Terestrial Energy (2012) Canada,
Thor Energy (2006) NO,
ThorCon (2011) USA,
Thorium Power (2015) Canada,
Thorizon (2018) NL.
@@xcrockery8080
India is working on thorium breeder reactor,right now 2nd phase just concluded and third is underway because India is abundant in thorium. In the next decade whole system will be complete
“Just discovered your channel and I’ve already subscribed! You have a knack for explaining complex systems in a way that’s easy to understand, even for someone with little prior knowledge. Keep up the great work!”
Very good presentation. Particularly impressive is your explanation of the accident at Chernobyl's Unit number 4. I have studied the event in detail, including perusing actual blueprints of the RBMK reactor. You are correct while being nicely concise. Thank you.
The 3+gen European EPR reactor is producing 1600MW so the SMR mention in this video need 21 reactors to produce the same amount of power. EPR is buildt at 8-9M$ for each Megawatt, but the failed Nuscale/Utah project clocks in at 20M$/Mwat. Nuclear is ridiculously expensive both at small or large scale. Even before waste handeling is considered.
This is the first I have heard of Micro Nuclear Reactors. I like it! Additional to terrestrial use, I could see something like this deployed on the Moon and Mars. Well done!
In concept the idea is attractive, but imagine a booster exploding or veering off seconds or a minute after liftoff, carrying a 50mW plutonium core. That'd be a much larger ooooops.
@@frontiergeek4953 Then don't use plutonium. Use Thorium and molten salts as coolant. Or evden if you use plutonium, this has proven to work in the past. Do you know what powers some of the rovers in Mars? A Plutonium nuclear reactor.
if you're allowed to play with high assay uranium , weapons grade uranium and plutonium allow you to build very small yet very powerful reactors , the thermal rocket engine nuclear reactors are the sort of small , insanely powerful reactors i am talikng about use weapons grade stuff
Another use would be backup power for facilities like hospitals or military bases. Places that are connected to the grid, but need to be immune to broader power outages or shortages. Normally it just sits there, selling power to the grid to offset its own purchase price. But if the day ever comes when it's needed, you've got megawatts available for any length of time you might want. In that use case, the fact that it's potentially more expensive than the alternatives is irrelevant, because you're only paying the difference to have guaranteed power on demand.
The military tried this at Fort Greeley in Alaska in the late 50's and again 10 years later at McMurdo. Both were operational failures. Reciprocating piston diesel generators are an extraordinarily well developed technology with low acquisition costs, low storage costs and lower operational costs.
@@otm646But that doesn’t answer the carbon emissions.
That is rediculus, a SMR is not a back up disel generator, it contains highly enriched uranium and has to be guarded by armed men at all times behind a fortified limited access compund. Their is no way to just put that behind a hospital.
@@kennethferland5579 SMRs don’t use highly enriched uranium. Stop talking nonsense.
@@kennethferland5579 Ok, so stick it out front where it's always in plain view. Definitely not a smash & grab operation!
Another market for micro-reactors, is for self-consumption industrial use (e.g., manufacturing and tech). Tech companies are little more open to risk taking, exploring new technologies, esp. if they are low carbon. They. also have deep pockets and can take the early adopter premium. The growth of data centers, increasing energy use from AI, presents another use case, guaranteed uptake, to jumpstart a new industry.
Didn't he say that the solar panel equivalent was only like 1% of the cost? price needs to come down to be viable
@@luka3174you have to remember that they don't have to pay for the batteries bc it's constant power instead of intermediate that is extremely important for factories
@@loganaurora of course, and batteries at the moment are the most expensive part. But still the efficiency difference is too big, we have seen solar efficency increase with massive global investment, is it possible nuclear can do the same?
I was going to write my own comment and say basically the same thing but you beat me to it. Factories, data centers, office parks, airports, military bases, sports arenas and other mega-structures are all great candidates for isolated SMRs which can either feed excess power to the grid or store the excess power in other forms (batteries, hydroelectric or thermal reservoirs, etc). The advantages over large solar arrays are the small footprint, easy installation and energy density.
@@brianmagner9220 The NA fission industry and Canada and USA regulators are actually meeting soon to discuss SMR regulations. A lot of it has to do with streamlining the cost model of submitting FSARs, since SMRs will be modular a lot of the cost can be handled by not modifying a standard FSAR for an SMR design. It's just the sight anaylsis (siesmic, heat sink and the like) which will be project specific. This will massively cut down on costs, especially if the SMR company can bring in their own tradesmen to complete the project and initial criticality. Then hand the keys over to the utility after they have established and certified their operator/maintenance qualification programs.
1:35 He said uranium is "4% the price of printer ink" LMFAO, its so true.
LEU is around the price of gold. Raw uranium metal is about $150/kg. Yellowcake is cheaper still (it's like bauxite - more processing needed to be useful)
Fun fact: When the Manhattan project needed something to pack around the plutonium and uranium bombs (tamper), they seriously considered using gold as it was dirt cheap compared to the Uranium/Plutonium and had sufficient molecular weight to do the job
It's also happening in Europe, a Polish, mostly government owned oil company called Orlen, which mostly makes gas stations, announced a year ago that they wil put SMRs near cities to power them, sadly I didn't hear anything about them for a long time other than them planning to do it before 2030 so I don't know if they will actually do it
I'm watching Poland very carefully, as are many others. They are the real test case to see whether it is possible to rapidly, cheaply decarbonise a grid with nuclear in the 21st century.
This is what I came up with that should be considered:
1. With all of these large scale light water reactors, we need to get back into fuel reprocessing. Only 5% of the U-235 is used, so we have vast reserves of U-235 just sitting in cooling ponds for spent fuel rods right now. This U-235 is what also makes these fuel rods hazardous for eons, so consider below for how to solve this problem.
2. The Thorium MSR. You may say well we have Thorium to burn. Right. But do you understand how this all starts? Well you stuff in some U-235 starter fuel (look above for the proposed source of this U-235) and long story short, you breed Thorium-232 into Uranium-233 and then burn the highly fissile U-233. This all gets into neutron absorption and decay where the Thorium has to absorb neutrons and then have a decay to become Uranium. The thing is Thorium is stable, so we have enough to last us until the Sun turns into a red giant and swallows the Earth. We don't have enough Uranium, so we really need to focus this in as a starter fuel and then run off of Thorium bread into Uranium after this.
3. A Thorium MSR can run a jet engine directly. No water needed for this power generator. Maybe even focus in on desalination as a second stage as in use the hot exhaust of the jet engine to make fresh water.
4. A Thorium MSR can be mass produced as an SMR. The thing is Thorium MSRs are very energy dense while maintaining inherent safety. Water just can't be all that hot and is inherently unsafe, so you end up with a large, low density design trying to compensate for these pitfalls. The MSR is high heat, non-reactive chemically, and inherently safe, so can be made energy dense. Energy dense can be made a lot more cheaply. So doing this at scale would be cheap and thus you solve the cost issue.
5. A liquid core MSR can have a continuous chemical process applied to it to separate out waste products and introduce more fuel. No need to stop the reactor to swap out spent fuel rods or even fuel spheres that have cracked from the gaseous waste products building up in them as atoms get split up into smaller atoms.
6. We can make chemical fuel with electricity. The reason we don't really do this at scale today is electricity is just too expensive. Mass produced Thorium MSR SMR reactors should get into extremely cheap power. So now you have this cheap electricity where ever you need it, you can get into mass producing hydrogen and methane. Methane (natural gas) is already used everywhere. Methane can be turned into propane and propane is used everywhere. Consider when you make methane and propane, you can capture CO2 from the atmosphere / before it enters the atmosphere from say a smoke stack. So you use CO2 in a circular fashion, making it net zero emissions wise.
Especially if you get into making the propellant for SpaceX's Starship, you could have a major propellant producing facility powered by Thorium MSR SMR reactors pulling in sea water and air and outputting liquid methane, liquid oxygen, and liquid nitrogen, all of the things needed to make Starship work, and then just pipe it into the launch site from a safe distance away. As Starship launch cadence increases, just modularly add more reactors and other equipment to the facility.
7. SMRs can be used for giant commercial ships. Especially if the ship has say 250 MWs of SMR(s) onboard, it can fast steam around the world, slashing trip times. As for risk of hijacking / attack, well just fast sail around Africa, avoiding the main hot spot in the world where this kind of stuff happens.
8. As for space, especially if you help out Starship in #6, you want to fan out into the solar system and do resource gathering and processing in space. After all, everything on Earth fell in from space and space has all of the raw materials in its more pure and elemental form to start out with, so much better in a lot of ways than getting it from Earth. You just need nuclear to efficiently get around space and nuclear to also supply regular electrical power for everything as in deep space the Sun is too diffuse to be all that effective as an energy source. The Sun is only really all that useful as a power source in the inner solar system. And you are wrong about the Moon. It is 2 weeks in darkness and 2 weeks in the light. Need nuclear power to cover 2 weeks in darkness at a time.
Once you have all of this resource gathering going on in space, something like Starship will be more focused on moving people around and less on moving material around. Starship as a shuttle to infrastructure in LEO has more interior space than a Boeing 747, a plane that can potentially hold more than 500 people. It is just if you kit it out for say a whole trip to Mars, it is filled with stuff for the trip and so very little capacity left to stuff humans inside. At this chemical is a very inefficient and ineffective way to get around the solar system where everything nuclear, and there are many possibilities around this, has a lot more kick and so can make it trivial to go anywhere in the solar system, turn around, and come back to Earth. Even going out to say Pluto, nuclear could make that a weeks to months long trip that you can then turn around from and make it back to Earth. So of course closer places like the resource rich and easy to mine asteroid belt are easy peasy to get to with nuclear.
Having operated a nuclear reactor on a US Navy submarine, I have a few things for this video.
The term Super Critical gets an overcharged negative connotation associated with it. During a reactor start up, we actually need the reactor to go super critical to get everything to full operating parameters. Once we are operating where we need to be we control the state of criticality with the control rods and the demand of the steam being produced. The more steam that is used, the cooler the coolant is leaving the heat exchanger. The colder the water, the closer the atoms are to each other. The closer they are to each other when they get to the reactor, the more reactions you get which in turn makes the reactor super critical for a moment, but everything will eventually even out back to a critical state. It was only when the steam demand was dramatically increased that we had to take actions with the control rods to prevent an uncontrolled super criticality. Just because a reactor goes super critical does not mean it will end in a failure of some sort.
The other point I have is I did not realize our reactor would have been considered a micro reactor as I do not think it would fit on a truck (or lorry), so I was imagining the small modular reactors to be smaller than what we had on the sub.
Great info, excellent video, thanks for everything!
One application MNR could be useful in is a situation we have here in Kansas. Panasonic is building a large battery factory in a near by city. This requires a huge upgrade to the areas power grid. This is being done via a special tax and a rate increase for the customers of the local power company. However, neither of these apply to the county this plant is being built in. The local residents that are going to benefit from the large amount of high paying jobs are not footing any of the bill for this. If instead this plant could have its own MNR or two to power itself the grid upgrades wouldn't be necessary thus meaning no cost being spread out to surrounding communities that aren't getting the benefits of the site to begin with.
I think the micro reactor model would be good for small rural towns, and not just ones that are very remote. This could reduce the need for large distribution centers that transport the power great distances. This would also have the advantage of being less susceptible to widespread outages because the grid could be segmented into smaller units.
That depends on how controllable the output is, traditionally nuclear reactors only function well with a steady output.
Grid is still present for backup and load leveling, but huge redundancy with higher reliability becomes possible. So called renewables reduce grid reliability. And they are not economically or environmentally friendly in spite of all the hype to that effect.
There are actually several ways to enrich uranium. For many years we used gaseous diffusion. Currently the most efficient method is gaseous centrifuge enrichment. In the future there is high hopes for a process called laser enrichment.
The main reason for nuclear cost is restrictions fueled by politicians that have been bought and paid for by the gas, coal, and oil companies that have big deep pockets making sure that alternatives to not overrun them.
No nuclear Industry is hold by the same rich people,as oil and gas and we pay pay the Bill,wake up and Study the Business data.
Project fear on nuclear was going strong since the 1970s so it is assumed by Western populations not used to nuclear on their doorstep. So the NIMBY reaction is real and goes beyond and amplifies lobbying by anti-nucleur forces. Hopefully sanity will prevail and we will see that having at least a small amount of nuclear in the power mix is good.
I think we should just go ahead with these SMRs and nano reactors. The first ones may have a bit higher cost, but are necessary to build out economies of scale. The issue is that nuclear has stagnated for decades, so cost to start building them again is high. There is a lack of experience in the industry, so costs are higher. This combined with unnecessary regulation and irrational public fear keeps nuclear of life support, rather than commonplace.
Economy of scale in nuclear reactors is building larger ones, since you can minimize the fix costs per W: Like safety structures and systems, supervision, etc. If they make thousands of them, who is going to make sure that they run safe? IAEA will not be able to keep up.
Nuclear energy is safe thanks to regulations. You have to see the rest of private tech industry to see how much they care about the environment or the customer itself. Uber, Tesla, etc are starting to lower their standards once they capture the market.
When every legal obstacle is thrown at a nuclear power plant project by green activists the price goes up. Since the activists don't have anything else to do it's cost effective for them and grossly expensive to the project. Time is money in construction. Every delay means compensation to contractors who should be working on building but can't proceed until the lawsuits are resolved. Green activists have gotten very savvy at timing litigation to increase costs to building projects as much as possible.
"green activists" aren't green activists, they're oil company workers in disguise!!
"Oh why is nuclear is failing while 'renewable' are growing ... maybe cause you spend trillon investing into one working and billion into making sure the other one doesn't ..." The entire political aspect of stuff and the "it's easier to cut off ,do investement package and trading in this new project rich rise and fall governementally funded sector RATHER than a sector where project are slow and just steadily work for really long (the throw away nuclear reactor work for EIGHT YEAR lol)"
@@fabienherry6690 Renewables aren't even growing. Even with all the heavy government subsides they barely break even. Some still fail anyway.
All SMRs mentioned in this (very good) video still need custom steam plant turbines to turn low temperature steam into electricity. Heavy nitrogen (N15) cooled reactors with direct cycle turbines based on open cycle turbine designs from natural gas plants might be a solution. I'd also like to see these nitrogen gas cooled reactors borrow Moltex Energy's idea of putting a molten fuel salt in fuel pins. This eliminates the real hazard of nuclear reactors - release of radioactive gases in an accident. It would also surely lead to much lower fuel costs than using TRISO fuel.
I haven't watched this yet... But is the new reactor just steam with extra steps?
3:30
Yup it's just a steam engine.
It's almost always a steam engine
In the water treatment industry, we are moving away from centralised infrastructure for various reasons. Some of these reasons likely apply to energy generation as well. I can see a use case for SMNRs in large new builds.
Don’t forget that LCoE is calculated over 20 years. A big nuclear plant can last up to 60 or even more than 80 in some cases. If you look at the lifecycle costs of energy, nuclear is considerably cheaper than renewables. LCoE is an indicator made by and for the financial markets. When it shows the price of renewables, it excludes many externalities such as energy storage and grid updates. What LCoE tells us is that nuclear plants are capital intensive, and therefore too expensive for private investors who want a quick return on investment. But governments can afford such investments, which become very profitable after 20 or 30 years of amortization, depending on the funding model used…
No the astronomical costs of Nuclear assumed 40 years, the original licensed age of reactors. Some reactors have gotten extensions to their licenes but reactor is even close to 60 years old and many shutdown early because they are having ESCALATING operating and maintence costs. Nuclear reactors are not like renewables which have effectivly zero maintence cost.
LCOE is calculated over the economic lifetime of the generator. An economic life of 60-80 years for a new nuclear plant is unrealistic in a competitive generation market, as are the customary industry assumptions of 90% capacity factors and 7% cost of capital. Put in more realistic assumptions and the economics quickly go out the window.
@@gibbonsdp LCoE is not calculated over the lifetime of a generator. Look at Lazard’s LCoE+ annual report: it’s 20 years, like most LCoE estimates. If you want lifecycle costs, you need to look at IEA’s world energy outlook. The numbers are very different.
@@kennethferland5579 the licensed time of an EPR is 60, and can be renewed after that. Most French PWRs have seen their license renewed after 40 years. Licensed time is not the same as lifecycle. Look at IEA’s reports for an accurate lifecycle cost of energy.
@@salahidin The French nuclear fleet had an extended period where 50% of it was out of commission last year. They're getting old, unreliable and are costing a bomb to maintain.
9:29 safe for renewable if your not endangered birds and you don't count the toxic materials and environmental impact of mining for solar panels. None of the impact including battery materials for storage actually balance out the incredibly small and inconsistent energy that is produced.
You still need nuclear engineers to staff these reactors.
I love the idea,but the economics unfortunately don't make sense. Now what level of subsidy is justifiable for a diverse and healthy grid is a question I can't answer but might be worth looking into.
You don't need credentialed nuclear engineers to staff a nuclear power plant. Contrary to popular belief, it is quite possible to be well trained without ever attending college.
@@kevincrosby1760 Good ol' Homer Simpson.
@@footbru Actually, control room operators have spent almost as many hours in the classroom (not including simulator training) as the average person with an AA degree has. The difference is that their training is ALL job-related...no Psych/Soc, no English, no PE, etc.
Think of it this way, do you need to be an automotive engineer to be an excellent mechanic?
@@kevincrosby1760 "hmmm ... donuts"
"No matter how good you are at something, there's always about a million people better than you."
One aspect not discussed here is the concept distributed generation versus central generation, and its impact on infrastructure stability.
Blackouts aren't usually caused by a failure at the generator, but rather something within the distribution grid. These small failures can cascade when the load transferring nature of a grid activates a sequence of self protective features.
The current power grid relies on a few HUGE generation points, and massive distribution networks. If it were feasible to build smaller generation facilities efficient and clean enough to place throughout a region, then the amount of distribution serving each generator would be much smaller and the ability to contain any particular loss of power to a small area would be dramatically improved. SMRs are the only technology likely to meet this challenge.
As much as this would benefit wealthy nations with extensive and aging grids, it would be an absolute game changer for countries with less overall power and little grid stability.
It's a good thing these micro nuclear reactors fit on the back of a truck so we can easily transport them to the moon.
We can ship them though. In a starship.
Space is probably the best use for these kinds of technologies in the long term.
Fundamentally, there's more than enough energy in the form of solar, wind and geothermal to do anything we want here on earth. Energy is abundant here, we just need to pluck it out of the air. The sun is blasting us with a ridiculous amount of energy every day.
But in space, especially further from the sun, energy is far more scarce.
@auspiciouslywild that is not at all true. Obviously you have done zero research or studied the topic at all. Pretending to have a clue just to be seen is sad. People like you are why aliens won't talk to us.
Wow. Just wow.
What's ironic is that the experimental reactors back in the 60s and early 70s were >400 KW reactors.
SMRs will likely never be a "thing", too many dangers and drawbacks associated with them and pretty much is better, unless you are trying to power a very remote scientific outpost or something like that where other power sources would be impractical, also there is no way to make those cheap enough to be practical on a mass scale.
"back of a lorry, delivered to site, plug in, off you go" was literally the cartoon concept of a late 60's "small boy's science book" I inherited from my older brother. This concept was really popular in the pre-internet days of in your face, establishment (pseudo) science propaganda. Although of course, this is an engineering problem. All the science is known and has been for nearly a century.
Isnt there a thorium fueled smr?, I'm pretty sure theres thorium in North America.
Yeah, and didn’t these use molten salt to convey power?
I believe China is working on one. Or.. Possibly both things separately..
No that is just a pipedream on the internet.
@@kdeuler that's only One design.
Generally speaking, making things bigger and more centralized is the only economically viable solution… I have my doubts here.
Ahh one of the few videos Ive seen that addresses the real issues with nuclear. I do think its good that people like Kyle Hill tackle the myths of the dangers of nuclear power, but the problem of the enormous amounts of time, cost, and politics (Within which erroneous fears are only one part.) just to get each reactor online is rarely addressed by advocates.
I believe it takes the better part of a decade or even longer to get a reactor up, when you contrast that to how far renewables have come in the same time, and even without the support they should have been receiving from many governments, its a stark contrast.
As mentioned, the base load issue is the biggest flaw in this rapid growth, but Ive seen the rise of grid level storage solutions that are well proven, scale well, and are already coming online. (Flow batteries are one of my favourites, but there are others, and new far more efficient generations of the tech already on the horizon.)
It would be nice for the nuclear boffins to come up with something, and Im sure there will always be niche uses, but as a broader player, with each passing year, nuclear fission just seems to get closer and closer to becoming redundant. (Which may not be so bad a thing, Im not scared of the technology but what little highly dangerous waste it does produce is still a pain to deal with.)
With the high profits from big oil blinding the politicians who allegedly have the people's best interest in mind when governing... It's exceedingly difficult to get anything even remotely healthy done when it comes to the people. Serfs paying income tax just don't have the same clout as a oil company exec lobbyist...
When it comes to SMRs becoming economically competitive because of mass production, I have doubts. I'm no manufacturing expert, but my amateur understanding of mass production is that its benefits kick in when you achieve massive scale. For example, billions of kitchen spoons being produced. Each spoon becomes cheap. With SMRs, how many will we really need? If each one produces, for example 50 MW, and the world only needs 20 TW of power production, then that means we'd only need 400,000 SMRs. Will that be enough for economies of scale to kick in?
@@seanhewitt603you have no idea how much subsidies have changed that equation. Now its all abnout lobbying for wind, and rich politicans who might own some farmland might be more than happy to stick a turbine up and farm subsidies instead. Big oil, BTW, are all getting onto the renewables bandwagon too.
Thorium would be a better source honestly. Little to no run-away meltdown risk, and far less toxic waste.
As for "clean" ... Nuclear is cleaner and safer than "green" energy statistically speaking.
what actual operating reactor are you basing your comments on?
China has been building it for the last five years and it has been given the green light to commission shortly. TMSR-LF1
@@evanpnz If you research that further, TMSR-LF1 is a demo test reactor that just began operating. It is 1/4 the size of the U.S. ORNL demo reactor that operated in the 1960s. It produces no electrical power.
I would not believe much that China says, but they do say it will be operated for 10 years to gather data on the reactor system BEFORE operating any of the support systems that are necessary to prove many of the claims you make.
Thorium has been tested in many reactor types in many countries but today there is only 1 operating commercial Thorium reactors. India has built a small prototype Thorium reactor and for them it makes sense since they have large Thorium reserves but no uranium reserves.
@@clarkkent9080 Yes. I read the whole article. I understood all of that.
I am not a nuclear scientist, but I am a scientist and to be honest I usually get bored when every video starts with the basics of fission. I must admit that yours was different because you went beyond the basics and explained what is usually hidden behind the math of controlled fission reaction.
This is the fascinating part of nuclear power, isn't it? The mathematics of the process promises incredible energy gain and anyone who doesn't follow through would be like to pass on the greatest gift nature has hidden from view.
The question I often ask myself is how come nuclear energy is used in military and space applications so readily, for so many years and yet we are stuck when it comes to using them for providing energy for widespread use.
Why can't we just rip one out of an old nuclear submarine and stick it in a hole in the ground and turn it on? Either the military as an indispensable arm of governments has authorities beyond what we know or when it comes to defence the price per kw is not constraint by the competitive math used in the Energy market. Given the lack of exposure of failed submarines or people dying of radiation sickness, it makes the possibility of the latter remote. Therefore, by the old, trusted process of eliminating the possible reasons for this disparity the conclusion must be how we value defence compared to the general energy market.
Renewable energy of wind and sun is currently viewed more like a gold rush. As usual the market is short-sighted and is blind to long-term problems of recycling wind blades on wind turbines or the problems of lithium-ion batteries. The cost of recycling them hasn't been included in the math.
The market creates its own narrative and like any narrator is biased and the results are what we see. I don't know if the long-term price of widespread use of SMR technology has been calculated or even exists.
Whether it exists or not is irrelevant, what matters in the end is always our perception and the power of stories we conjure and spread like a game of Chinese whisper where it gets reinforced by yet another more biased (as the result of being more committed) player in the market.
A company who has committed a large investment to manufacturing lithium-ion battery cannot afford to be truthful when it suddenly becomes apparent that hydrogen can be obtained through use of the chemical reaction between aluminium like in tin foils and an oxidation agent like hydrogen peroxide that can be manufactured a lot easier anywhere in the world independent of a of petrochemical industry which is the last excuse supporters of lithium-ion batteries or Elon Musk's devotees resort to in an argument before the channel owner hides the dissidents' voices can reach too many people.
Finally there is a more sinister factor to consider which is the necessity of centralization of power. If anyone could produce its own energy totally off grid who would be able to control them? Who could turn off their supply if they didn't follow some other rule? We long passed of sending heavies round the door and resort to such measures except maybe in extreme circumstances like when defence of the government is involved. As a real example of what I am trying to explain conceptually without sounding like tin foil wearing conspiracy theorist is the recent case in California where the trade off between the central supplier and those customers who also produced their own electricity and feedback the excess to the grid started to tilt in favour of these type of customers that gave rise to a new law to rebalance the trade off.
Given the above does anyone need to be a nuclear scientist to explain why nuclear energy sector has found it so hard to enable humanity to benefit from the hidden treasure in nature?
We need MMRs and SMRs for deployment on a distributed basis, giving us back a lot of wire and steel for use in other endeavours. We just don't need the high price tags. Maybe puny humans can get it done before micro and small fusion plants deprive fission of all usefulness. When replacement time rolls around, fusion slots right in.
That's never going to happen. Fusion energy is too advanced for our civilisation this century. The economics of fission don't even stack up, and that is orders of magnitude simpler than a tokamak.
Bro...I got through the whole video and then heard "Westinghouse is also announcing their lunar base nuclear reactor" and I just had a sudden flash of a realization that the sci fi future we envisioned is easily within our lifetimes if we just play our collective cards right (far more hopeful than certain, but still)
Bro??
That’s the future we envision? Nuclear reactors in the moon? What for? Whose needs are going to be satisfied with that?
The future should be one where we design a socioeconomic system that allows humanity as a whole to live the healthiest, longest and happiest lives possible. Where humans are at the center and not capital.
Future is not terraforming mars. Future is cleaning earth. Being able to go back to drink water and eat fish from every river without fear of contamination. Not paying more and more for bottled water and packaged fish.
Future is not flying taxis for the rich, is clean air and a clean sky view for everyone.
Insane how much I learned in one video. That was brilliant.
Hmmm nuclear reactors scale with size...there is literally no reason to make them smaller... making them modular and standardized is a great idea, but making them small means losing tons of efficiency!
manufacturing a large reactor containment vessel is a big hurdle for nuke power. there's only one or two foundries that can actually make them. making the containment requirement smaller really reduces the barrier to entry for other manufacturers, will reduce the timeline, and make assembly easier. Also, some of these SMR designs operate at much higher temperature, which claws back a decent amount of that lost efficiency that you're talking about.
Financing costs also scale with reactor size, and are currently a large hurdle. While smaller means more material and labor cost per unit electricity generated, it also would (hopefully) mean shorter build times and less financing cost.
@@RentableSocks The cost of making the reactor vessel is not the problem, nor is ANY part of the reactor which is fabricated offsite like turbines, generators are other heavy machinery (which btw ALL powerplants are made from). The steel and cement pouring to make the containment vessel (a protective bunker) is where the cost overruns and delays are coming from, and your not going to make that in a factory. The whole concept of factory production of SMR is ignorant of the fact that that's ALREADY how the innards are made.
@@kennethferland5579 the cost itself isn't necessarily a problem, it's the lead time which is what causes the cost to balloon over time. All of the basic mechanical components as you've just stated is not actually a pricing concern since other power plants are already installing those en masse.
The primary containment vessel (aka reactor vessel) has to be solid metal, and there are only a few foundries that can produce them. you are referring to the secondary containment vessel, which IS a concern, but that's not where the big delays are. in fact most of the unforeseen delays are caused by regulatory bodies or public interference with nuclear. The one major delay for building a plant is several years of lead time on the reactor vessel. I'm not sure how into manufacturing you are, but having a chosen few worldwide sources for something like that leads to production limits, especially when that particular item isn't the focus of their business.
Cement pouring is hard, but we've gotten very good at it. as far as I can remember, there has only been 1 reactor in the US that was delayed because of its steam containment vessel being of subpar quality concrete. You often see sites partially built with their containment vessels unfinished, but that's not the reason for the stoppages.
@@nelsonsnow75Financing a multi-billion dollar project that ends up barely profitable is hard but possible. Financing a somewhat cheaper project that gives even less energy per dollar invested, is almost impossible.
See, the thing about wind and solar is that there was a big market for very small installations, even if the cost was high. So you could build the market on these microscopic solutions.
But the scaling of nuclear means that you can't build a viable market for kWh-scale nuclear solutions (outside of space). It's just WAY too expensive and difficult.
So you can't scale from small solutions up to medium ones, like we saw with wind/solar. And you can't scale from huge solutions down to medium ones, because if you can already build huge, you don't have much if anything to gain by going smaller (in the short term).
My bets are on small molten fluoride salt reactors using thorium as the fuel, these are able to consume the nuclear waste deposits from LW reactors, and are inherently safe (self extinguishing upon cooling system failure). That means cheap fuel (waste) and they are also purported to do a 95% fuel conversion to energy rather than the 0.5% that most LW reactors achieve. Also they can be bolted into the ground sufficiently that you can't just drive away with it. They can also be continually refuelled so there is no actual down time as with most LW reactors except some maintenance.
The difficulty with the molten fluoride salt reactors is highly corrosive aspect of the salts in question. These salts corrode the metal pipes they come in contact with overtime.
One company has found an innovative solution to this chemistry problem. Apparently corrosion occurs when impurities in the salt chemically react with the metals in the pipe. So get around this the company has developed an ultrapure rock salt with non corrosive properties.
The point of gen4 reactors is "walk away safe".
The "small modular" came about because dissipating heat passively from less fuel is easier.
This actually makes them more expensive per MW than the current 1GW+ units.
Sure the individual modules are cheaper but you need more of them.
The big costs are not actually the reactor. It's everything around it for safety, the regulations, the scarce high-skilled labor, the loan costs, etc.
"Helium doesn't explode if ignited"
You might want to put an asterisk on that line lol XD
Explosions involve the release or movement of other gasses. If theres no atmosphere surrounding helium, it is only flammable, not explosive. Helium shouldnt be able to ah.. expand explosively? Idk its 5 am i might not even be right but ima shoot my shot. Id love to be corrected cleanly. But helium is elemental weight 1. When burned it should dissappear or idk.
@@LolWutMikehSM No sir. Helium can't be ignited. It's a noble gas. That's why I say it needs an asterisk. Maybe he meant to say that it doesn't ignite if exploded?
@@LolWutMikehSM The bigger problem with helium is that it's bloody near impossible to 100% contain and you're constantly having to top the thing up. AGRs have the same issue to a smaller extent. Molten metal coolants (sodium and lead) have a tendency to get bearing lubricants into the loop, which react chemically and then clog the core (Santa Susannah accident) or in the case of soduim - burn furiously if exposed to air (Monju)
I'm sure someone's goign to bring up the issue of salts and metals freezing solid as they cool. This is a good thing and prevents widespread contamination in a worst case scenario (sodium is problematic for reasons above, lead vapours are quite literaly brain eating. if you're going to use alternative coolants/moderators to water then one which isn't dangerous, doesn't easily leak and is negligabily corrosive seems like a good idea) The MSR design pipework is wrapped in electric heaters to bring it up to temperarure before going critical and the 4 inch plumbing had over a foot of insulation around it in the MSRE. Because the salt isn't electrically conductive, bearings can use it as circulating pump lubricant and use magnetic coupling to stay fully sealed
Flibe is not sea salt (and sea salt is only corrosive in the presence of water or other ionic contaminants. At 400C, water doesn't hang around for long in a molten salt) Tests at MSRE showed no detectable corrosion after 9000 full power hours
Time will tell, but Kurt Sorenson and friends have the right idea - however CHina has beaten everyone to first working 21st century prototype and that's a lead that developed countries will have a hell of a time recapturing - particularly as molten salt liquid fuelled systems were made illegal in the USA in 1972 (Nixon) as a near direct reaction to Weinberg advocating them as an anti-proliferation technology and that ban hasn't (yet) been walked back
It’s about time for self contained nuclear power stations for each city, county and towns.
It is unbelievable that people still think nuclear is 24/7 for 60 years.
The manufacturers of SMRs state clearly on their websites that
you need to power it down for 30 days every 18 months to replace fuel rods
you need to power it down for 6 months at 10 years to replace the coolant (which is by then radioactive)
you need to power it down for at least 6 months at 20 years to replace coolant, turbines and reactor module.
You also need to budget for at least one "unscheduled outage per year.
Wouldn't it be easy enough to plan around that? Put in redundancies so you just need to temporarily drop to half operation during maintenance times?
Why would it be down for 18 months to replace fuel rods? There's no way to design it to have robots replace them in a way that requires no downtime?
We know things are radioactive and have ways to deal with it.
These technical challenges you cite don't seem too hard to deal with in a way that requires no downtime in newly built power plants.
Buy two and run them on split shifts. Not only do you double your life expectancies from them, downtime is a non issue. Or if the whole point is to not run them at full capacity ever, buy three and run them in redundant pairs. Always maintaining and cycling which core is on downtime.
There are reactors designed and maintained with full power refueling. Just the most popular are sealed PWR using light water, which do need to be shutdown.
The Navy uses reactors that don't have those limitations. The Nimitz class carriers need refueling every 25 years, and newer submarines are being built to go their entire lifespan without refueling. Those limitations are design choices, not absolute requirements.
correction related to fission: each fission event directly leading to >1 (on average) more fission events isn't just supercritical, it's prompt critical. prompt neutrons are produced by fission events. when a reactor is supercritical, that just means it is increasing in reactor power. when it's supercritical but not prompt critical, those extra neutrons are from delayed neutrons. so you still get an exponential release, but it's MUCH slower. nuclear bombs work on prompt criticality, nuclear power plants work on supercriticality.
'Baseload power' is an axiom that maybe needs to be challenged. I think you touched on this when you explored use cases for smr. For general use, renewables (+storage) can be sufficient for 100% load even through the dunkelflaute periods. If this isn't true, it's not actually clear that a baseload generator technology solves this because it would be overstretched during those dunkelflaute periods. Or else it has nothing to do for most of its lifetime, so it's uneconomic.
Yea the 'base load fallacy' is what it's called. Baseload is a BUISNESS MODEL for a powerplant, not a 'need' that the grid has as if it needs to eat a balanced diet of electric vegtables. The Baseload buisness model explicitly leaves large amounts of grids demand unmet as well so anyone claiming that we 'only' need it is lying their ass off.
Dispatchable power is the real industry term. Meaning available on demand, 24/7.
Small Modular Reactors remind me of science fiction spaceships.
And these discussions are like a bunch of science fiction writers speculating on how to travel between stars, what colour the ships will be and what adventures the crew and passengers will have.
One day ....
Micro installations could also help shore up deficiencies in the grid, be they long-term or short-term as a result of recent events, even if they aren't full blown disasters.
Small modular reactors should be easy, but they seem to be taking as long as nuclear fusion reactors to develop.
Dude, you pretty much killed it. Good job. I'm a recent sub. I'm glad that SOMEONE doesn't make videos for children or dumb down in order to elevate understanding. Whoop!
The Rolls Royce UK SMR is planned to be operational by the end of this decade. The economy of scale in SMRs is in the multiple units coming off a production line all to the same design. The obvious locations for initial SMRs are any existing nuclear facility with spare grid connection capacity, recently decommissioned nuclear power plant sites which could host multiple SMRs, and then decommissioned coal (or even gas) power plants. A ship to shore power plant is also an obvious choice for emergency restoration of power following disasters - just need the port to have the power connection facilities. A SMR powered water desalination plant could also be a game-changer in some locations.
There has never been and there is not economies of small scale in power generation. Every nuclear power plant uses standard components built in a factory and system modules are built in factories and shipped to the site. The build it in a factory cost savings will never happen because it has already been used.
As an Aussie SMRs, modular or micro, always fascinating to me.
Now with the AUKUS sub deal, and talk of nuclear energy back due to it, the opportunity to have a unit that fits both uses made here in Australia, be awesome
"When wind, solar or even gas fail, it's usually a blackout..."
Conveniently leaving out hydro which fails catastrophically, but nobody talks about it
Wonderful idea. I've been following these small (micro?) nuclear reactors (MNR) for several years. I really don't see any other feasible alternatives. Fusion is at least 10 to 15 years out. Well done - keep us posted.
MNR sounds interesting, but can the unit's be daisy chained on one site???
Replaced my printer ink with Uranium for cost. Thanks for the hot-tip!
thanks for the glowing report!
SMR's absolutely work, its the exact same systems that are used in Nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. What is stopping this is the same thing that is stopping full site nuclear reactors, hostile regulators, NGO's and government bodies. It's the same reason all existing reactors are Gen II's with only a few III's being tossed around and no Gen IV's. To get any design approved you need to an existing identical design safely operating for a long period of time, meaning anything "new" can't be used just "old" stuff in different combinations. Then assuming you get that all approved, the local governments need to play nice and not actively try to block you. Then if any NGO's get involved, they can insert delay after delay into your site causing interest payments on the loans you took to eat up all your investment capital.
This definitely merits more investment and research. SMRs and, on the geothermal side, Millimeter Wave Drilling (See Quaise Energy) have the most promise and "bang for the buck" over the long term.
Amazing channel. Glad I found ya! Great video, brilliantly done.
I've been serendipitously watching this video right after Sabine Hossenfelder on the subject and this is a great complementary video.
Ideal for aluminum smelters I would have thought
Very good tech. It needs to be safe and must power small cities of 100k structures and amenities. Yes. This is what we need for the future.
Everything up to 11 minutes is a history lesson.
the thing is you don't really need a baseload if you just build enough wind, hydro or pumped water storage, exclusively renewable energy is achievable in many countries
That`s kinda funny that the video about small modular reactors fails to mention the only already commercialy availible civilian SMR "RITM-200". I wonder why? Casualy namedropping the Westinghouse and others with their prototipe-less projects is ok, but naming the company with a purchasable working SMR - is an advertisement and a big no-no? :D
How much power do these micro nuclear reactors typically push out and could these reactors power data centers to get them off of the public power grid?
I am not a physicist, therefore, any comments for comparison need a track record of performance, cost of installation, productivity, and waste management for someone like me to juxtapose their comparable problems/solutions. It sounds good to have clean efficient power but our host is casting shadows of nuclear reactors past, present, and future. It is the honest thing to do but fear of nuclear energy has long been fraught with bean counters trying to save a buck and shit starts blowing up like an SNL Pepsi Syndrome skit. A heroic President Jimmy Carter stood within the 3-mile Island facility to show its design capabilities were safe and would continue to this day, percolating a bit less.
I believe that nuclear power is the solution. I marveled at Fukushima being built on a fault line with one cooling pond for 6 reactors. (What bean-counter thought of that?) It was built on a Pacific Rim fault line and the predictable result happened. I check my tuna fish for radioactivity and is considered safe for human consumption, just kidding.
Eggheads like Dr. Ben Miles with his ambivalent approach aren't swaying many hearts but he is honest and his own assessment is casting considerable doubt. (Muster up that Pt Barnum spirit!) What I have seen in my lifetime, are Republicans on the take for Russian bribe money now in the news, leaking of sensitive documents to our enemies, denial of them to support our allies while Russia attacks the last nuclear reactor in Ukraine, and refusal to protect our already born children from automatic weapons. I do not see them shutting off the fossil fuels anytime soon. How did Trump win the electoral college vote? (I wonder if Donald Trump would stand in 3-mile Island for a photo-op?) I doubt the Democrats would borrow Navalny's coffee cup, Republicans might. Tell Vlad to leave the 2nd reactor intact!
-To sum up, we can build a space station now in 146 days using robotic assemblers. We can effectively power moon missions with microwave power beamed to the moon from orbiting power stations, why fuss with the dust? We can build Elysium in orbit with a constant rotation of solar panels and backup nuclear power. Our future assets are in space. Nixon was an idiot to slash the space program.
Let's electrostatically capture helium-3, and store it in superconductor materials that capture not only electrons but helium isotopes, protons, and gamma particles to power our own UFOs. How much energy is in a 2-liter bottle filled with compressed helium-3 at a storage temperature of 3 Kelvin background radiation? Is it enough to go to Pluto and back?
I favor nuclear power, Good video!
Thank you Dr. Strange for this detailed explanation
This is what we need, hundreds of small reactors plugged into the grid. We could have a distributed power grid where small reactors are spread out throughout an area and they replace them like batteries when they run down, and send them off to be refurbished and refueled. Send the spent fuel and waste to a burner reactor to finish it off. It's only because the populous has been conditioned to be terrified of nuclear energy that we don't have a super cheap stable power grid.
Thank you, Dr. Miles for bringing all these great events to the screen for me to watch. I love you. I love your channel. Thank you.
"Wait, it's just a new way to boil water?"
"Always has been."
Well balanced views presented. On the SMR (or smaller) usage cases I remember reading a number of articles suggesting their use for marine propulsion. Clearly many hurdles to overcome here as well but this is an area which is much more difficult to address with renewables or batteries.
Well obviously it can be done reliably and relatively safely, we've got subs and carriers
Am glad to hear Westinghouse has the Astro Vinci project aimed at producing micro reactors that could be used for lunar (and later Martian and maybe asteroid) colonies. That, along with possibly orbital solar stations beaming power to the surface (Lunar and maybe Martian bases this would work), would provide the needed energy to maintain viable bases. Micro fusion reactors would also be viable for Earth's arctic and antarctic settlements, and areas where transportation of resources for conventional power stations and solar farms are difficult (micro reactors could potentially be carried in by helicopter or ships.
in most remote locations access is a problem. A problem for the thieves that want the reactor. Knowing how to disconnect the reactor, having the equipment to load it onto a semi truck,
unloading the reactor at their destination...yep, lots of problems. Especially without getting caught !!!
0:26 agile and nuclear power are words I would never expect to hear in the same sentence
Part of the challenge is competition with dropping renewable costs for sure. But longer term, I feel that EGS might have a larger impact and I wonder if that isn’t on the mind of some SMR investors, as it would deliver continuous power, i.e. a more direct competitor to SMRs. EGS seems very promising as drilling expertise and technology shifts from a fossil fuel focus.
In short, no. The question is not whether nuclear can be made cheaper, but rather whether it can be made cheaper than renewables with energy storage (and if needed a few percent of gas). Note that renewables are now mature and cheap and storage is maturing rapidly and we're talking about mid next decade.
Please don't forget the additional grid costs (2x ... 3x) for intermittend renewables ... and some backup power plants ... batteries may be able to complement demand for hours (few days) but not months or seasons.
@@uwemielke6672 I'm not. Even accounting for this, nuclear is still the most expensive option.
@@saumyacow4435 Did you also add the cost of replacement? Here in germany we have now installed about 135GW of PV and Wind and now start to through away the oldest ones and built new ones - a process called re-powering. And if we are at the end of the road in 2045 we most probably through the actual built and re-built plants away again. New nuclear plants are designed to work for 60 years+. So - yes their cost is very high, but they also work longer. In my opinion they are not the most expensive in the long term, they are just more expensive when building them.
@@rayengel714 The experts do consider the life cycle of the equipment and they find that nuclear is the most expensive option. Also, do you realise just how ruinously expensive it is to decommission nuclear plants?
@@saumyacow4435 "just how ruinously expensive it is to decommission nuclear plants?"
what is ruinously expensive?
The swiss plant Mühleberg is in decommisioning and they say it will cost 3 billion CHF - converted to the produced energy over 47 years this is round about 1ct/kWh - is that what you mean with totally ruinously?
Micro's make a lot of sense when you consider a grid approach. If every town has their own generator, they can cross feed each other as needed and there isn't a single point of failure. It also means that simple coordination of maintenance windows is all that's needed during upgrades. It also somewhat simplifies the whole electrical grid infrastructure since there aren't a few huge producers, which also means it's easier to merge solar and wind into the total equasion, because varying the output of a micro reactor is much easier than a huge one. The overall cost to build is close to the one huge installation, but it's more incremental and can more easily benefit from improvements in technology when the lifespan is a less than decade compared to half a century.
These micro-rector designs all seem to operate around the "replaceable battery" model, proven over a century now- with predictable weaknesses and defects, still a reasonable engineering solution. This is especially appropriate for moving to massively-distributed supply and grid topologies. They're certainly a reasonable choice of component in such grid systems.
(IMO) Nano/Micro nuclear reactors are the future, for sustainable energy, if we can minuaturise reactors small enough to fit into a car sized vehicle, then we have portable energy on demand whereever we go, rather than being stuck to a centralised for profit grid. I think Batteries are a stop gap measure until we get micro/nano reactor technology, a cumbersome unreliable expensive technology that will give way to a hopefully lightweight portable, base load energy source that we take with us which means energy supply will increase in direct proportion to the demand for energy, no issues with brown outs etc.
22:54 lunar night is not 1.5 to 3.5 days. Lunar day is 14 days long, and lunar night is also 14 days long. Exception might one or few craters on the poles, but everywhere else on the moon night is 14 days long.
Essential polling suggests approximately half of Australians, support development of nuclear power. 55% of respondents supported use of small modular reactors. However, 1. Toxic Waste, 2. Security Risks, 3. Policy Proliferation. Australia, a major uranium exporter, has only one nuclear research reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney, producing essential medicines for cancer detection and treatment. A balanced approach, considering energy needs and risks is required, fast as Australia is indeed in an energy supply crisis. Anyone who pays bills, will tell you that.
The only thing hindering innovation in nuclear power is government intervention. Reduce the regulations to appropriate levels, and nuclear power will overtake all other forms of inefficient energy sources such as hydro, solar, and wind power.
These SMR's are concerning in terms of potential waste and other associated risks. However, the availability, the costs, and the serious demand for more energy from electric cars and data centers we might have much of a choice. One approach is refitting retired or decommissioned nuclear missile silos and repurpose them as nuclear energy containment facility. Otherwise, I say we have to go underground in constructing these SMR systems where proper and sure containment can overcome the associated risk despite their size and modularity. Even more important when the demand increases forcing industry to quantify these SMR's into batches or series. These large underground facilities will enable inhouse manufacturing and recycling process along with the storage of nuclear waste all in one site. I hope that this "All in One Site" concept will ensure that the entire nuclear energy lifecycle happens at one location instead of exposing all others.