MMR is an advanced nuclear reactor made by Ultra Safe Nuclear to produce reliable energy anywhere. MMR uses TRISO particle Uranium fuel in our proprietary FCM Fuel pellets. Learn more at www.usnc.com/mmr/
Jai Hinduja. The governments must really go down to the Shidao Bay nuclear plant in Shidaowan, China to get the most updated data on the benefits of running 4th generation triso pebble reactors.
@@00Tenrai00 Did you watch the video? You can't have a meltdown with this design. It's 2024 and not 1954. We are more than capable of designing reactors that won't have a meltdown issue.
@@zombieshoot4318 you also have no idea what you're on about. Only types of gas cooled reactors, generally known as high-temperature gas-cooled reactors, such as the Japanese High Temperature Test Reactor and the United States' Very High Temperature Reactor, are inherently safe. Meaning that meltdowns and/or other types of core damage are physically impossible. Also whose "we"? Lol you ain't designing fuel rods.
@@shadydealz I’m sure he just meant humans in general and engineers to be specific. I think Nuclear power is safe and efficient enough to use anywhere. Even the earth made its own nuclear reactor billions of years ago in Oklo in Africa. How micro can you go? I’d like one in my backyard for upcoming events.
I saw this in a paper years ago. It was developed by a German university years ago but then nothing heard about it until now! They had developed a micro nuclear reactor that theoretically could be placed in an individuals home or scaled up to produce power for a factory. The ceramic coating of the fuel allows it to be self regulating preventing it from entering a runaway reaction.
Western utilities companies will not allow SMRs to develop and installed commercially. But the fact of the matter is China, Russia and India see a potential market and opportunity to make problems for the West. Upcoming players will be Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and Turkey will thrown in the scenario. I predict whomever comes up a micro nuclear reactor or battery technology first will be driver's seat for modernization for years if not decades to come!!! Hahahaha
Indeed. So how many have they made? (not sold, but actually constructed) We have loads of theoretical designs. Even scores of research reactors. But none have made it to the point of actual - legal - viability. NuScale apparently got there, and then went bankrupt or something.
@@jfbeam Yes the idea of financing the cost of not only a SMR but actually a factory to build SMR"s, and then start building SMR's means there is something like a 15-30 year pay back period, where in most finance things it is like 5-10 years. Sadly, I would love more people willing to fund the idea, to get it going. I think once they can turn one out per month, they will have a very efficient and inexpensive system. Otherwise I would love to suggest that perhaps the Saudi Family Fund could pay for it to be built, but I don't know if that would fly because of the NRC might not like the fact that it is a non-domestic funding source.
@@eriklondon2946 you're right. it's quite the valley of death. we are undeterred. keep up the support! We've been to UAE for fundraising and projects. Incredible ambition and success with their 4 new reactors. They are cautious on new tech.
I am a enthusiast of nuclear energy and it is a pity that this wonderful technology is so bad understood by the population in general, considering it unsafe and dangerous, while today there is a really mature and safe technology.
This approach is way more practical than the HUGE power plant solutions we use today. Each community having a small independent grid that links to others offers redundancy and efficiency of design. Combine this with solar, wind, hydro and tidal to have a complete, carbon free power solution.
These are the kind of nuclear power units we were "sold" back in the 1950s and 60s when I was a kid. We thought everything, including cars and aircraft would be nuclear back then. But all the implementation mistakes in the ensuing decades almost screwed it out of existence. Maybe this will get nuclear back into the game. It would be PERFECT for a Lunar or Mars base!
Those original plants were conflicted and corrupted by corporate greed. The bigger they made them the more government kickback money got involved and the harder it was to trace. Not to mention huge amounts of electricity to profit on. Every risk and responsibility was subsidized by not being regulated safely if regulated at all. Those people involved have squandered our futures, have squandered the great promises of nuclear energy. They’re criminals against humanity of the highest order and deserve prosecution.
we hope so. our ceramic fuels resolve many of the accident consequence issues and our micro reactors unlock factory fabrication and safety. This is for all mankind!
@@ultrasafenuclear I think municipalities can be convinced to vote in tax levies for generators in which the citizens receive the electricity back as return on their investment. A kind of socialized energy.
Silicon Carbide is really neat stuff used in many advanced applications in other industries. I’ve worked with it, and while it was more costly than the alternatives it was a beautiful fit for a lot of applications.
@@rgbcolor6450 Which invalidates nothing I said. The material is a good fit for many advanced applications, like diesel particulate filters, and other types of advanced filtration.
@@waynesworldofsci-tech I wasn't trying to invalidate your statement.. just pointing out that silicon carbide is a common material, not some special nuclear invention.
These types of reactors is the future and can be installed closer to the end user thus minimizing adverse impacts on the various grids and other consumers of this power of heat and electricity
I used to work at a nuclear power plant that used helium as a coolant, thorium rods, and graphite blocks to contain the rods. It was closed years ago and was turned into a natural gas powered plant. Was an expensive experiment that did not pan out due to the technology was beyond the machinery capabilities.
No ,its not about oil companies Its about people. if people still used oil ,oil companies don't need to stop this project but im certainly many oil investor Will investor their money for this project to replace oil energy sector in the future Sorry if my English was bad
Not at all. Oil is made into liquid fuels, and just about every single thing you use in daily life. No amount of wind turbines, solar panels, or nuclear reactors will change that. Those things only produce electricity, whereas oil produces actual physical products and low cost fuels that run the world. No matter what the talking heads say, oil will be produced for the next hundred years or more. There are too many products made from it that can't be obtained otherwise. Fuel, plastics, resins, ceramics, medications, fertilizers, solvents, cosmetics, personal care products, food additives, tangible physical things are made from oil. The world as we know it would not exist if we didn't have oil. So no, oil companies don't really care, power generation is not their primary product target.
Sounds like they have fixed the jamming problem that a pebble bed reactor reactor had by instead making the pebbles tinier and encasing them in fixed graphite fuel elements. It has key good features of the pebble bed reactor like thermal safety, but only lacks the ability to refuel while running. That was neat, but eliminating it made the reactor safer. Making the waste be self storing is also great. Seems to me they should be able to harvest the waste heat of waste fuel on a lower power level to power the reactor station. Why didn't Fukashima do that?
Optimized for a specific temp range I imagine. Once the fuel is delivering heat below a threshold it can't meet power demands so your reactor is just taking up space and not being used to its potential. More codt effective to replace the fuel than to have many reactors running at 1/4 capacity.
We don't use pebbles. We use sesame sized TRISO particles embedded in pellets inside of big hexagonal blocks of graphite. The control rods just slide in and out.
Have to remember that Fukashima was designed and built in the 1960's and start working in 1971. The whole philosophy of design and building nuclear plants was different to today.
для зелёного перехода нужен безопасный реактор который будет работать полгода, чтобы снизить риск аварии аэс. Многие пост советские страны используют реакторы на 200% из-за этого допустили чаэс.
Miniaturizing it even further to power a small city block or just a few houses with a fully self-sustained system within a couple dozen square feet built two or three levels underground could be quite interesting. Main challenge is ofc the cost of installation and the issue with the fuel itself being mishandled or sabotaged by third parties, and to counter that one might need a sort of monitoring system with an oversight. Like imagine a sort of lock on the container similar to ankle locks that felons have to wear during house arrest etc.
I've been watching SMR presentations for years. Until this point, I'd only seen one viable candidate, Moltex Energy. Now I've seen two, congratulations.
Although one big question is use of nuclear approved materials, is there existing approval for all the materials? Nuclear steels, etc. What about the silicon carbide fuel matrix, will it need approval before it can be used? That's often a death trap for new nuclear.
@@MostlyPennyCat Great points. The TRISO specification we are using has been approved, and used in multiple reactors, even some operating today. The steels, graphite, etc are all conventional nuclear materials used in reactors today.
@@ultrasafenuclear I know TRISO pebbles has been approved, but the TRISO & Silicon Carbide matrix is also approved for nuclear use? That's excellent. All but one of the Molten Salt Reactor Designs have pumped molten nuclear fuel. They require new nuclear steels. Only Moltex Energy uses Approved Nuclear Steels, they get around this by having static molten salt fuel tubes. They're currently building one in Canada. To my eyes, only yourselves and Moltex have a dog in this race. Best of Luck, you've got some serious competition in Moltex!
There is also Molten Salt Reactors, which can be used in replacement of the Helium in this situation. I personally would love to see a Small Modular Reactor (where you could have up to say 10 of them) next to each other all using a Molten Salt Reactor, so they could build up energy for large power draws from 2pm-9pm, especially during summer heat. I think it is the best and most efficient way.
The energy density of nuclear fuel (especially HALEU fuel) is so high that the efficiency of the cooling system is of little consequence to the efficiency of the reactor as a whole. Regardless, safety is the number one priority here, as it should be. While stringent regulations do cause various problems in the nuclear industry, it's worth it to keep people and the environment safe. I'd rather have a hundred safe small reactors than one big Chernobyl. That's an exaggeration of course; comparing modern and future nuclear reactors to Chernobyl is like comparing modern airliners to the Hindenburg.
I mean it's almost at the level of refusing to buy coffee to save coffee money despite being richer than elon musk. The inefficiencies via helium can simply be minimized by the fact that Uranium is so energy dense.
We have the ability already to have safe nuclear energy and reactors that use spent fuel from the old reactors. It just takes investment to change out current infrastructure
How do you reprocess Triso fuel? Can Triso fuel be manufactured with Thorium? Are designs 100 percent complete and ready to be built? Is the Ultrasafe Reactor licensed in any nation? Good graphics in the video.
Hopefully you will see this reply. I will attempt to answer your questions. Anything can be reprocessed if we want to do so. Just because TRISO fuel can never break down in a reactor does not mean we will never be able to retrieve it and break it down in a reprocessing facility. That said, Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and microreactors are meant to run with fuel of higher enrichment levels for greater lengths of time. This reduces the need for reprocessing in the first place, and greater ease of disposal also helps. Google "HALEU" (High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium) for more information. As far as I know, thorium-based TRISO fuel does not exist yet, but nothing says it never will. After all, this isn't the only upcoming reactor that will use some form of TRISO fuel. Check out the Xe-100 by X-energy for another example. It seems TRISO users also love helium as a coolant. Given the impressive, practically perfect safety of both, I'm not surprised. I would not say this or any new reactor design is "100% complete and ready to be built" until at least one has actually been built and tested. In the nuclear industry, designs get passed back and forth between companies, regulators, and other organizations, usually many times, before final approval and construction. I have included an example of this in the answer to your final question. Even after construction and activation, lessons are often learned and applied to future designs. I don't expect this to change, even as we see some reactors being mass produced in factories. Currently, the only new reactor design licenced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of the United States is a 50 MWe SMR by NuScale. NuScale has since improved the design to increase power output to 77 MWe, but the revisions themselves will need approval. I'm not very good at keeping up with the regulatory agencies of other nations, but work is proceeding on many fronts to get numerous SMRs and microreactors licensed, tested, built, and operating around the world. Will we see SMRs and microreactors bringing commercial power to the masses by 2030? Time will tell, but I'm cautiously optimistic. There is already at least one SMR facility under construction in China. New Memorandums of Understanding, environmental assessments, and funding agreements are making headlines every month on every continent except Antarctica. The future of nuclear power is safer, more reliable, more efficient, more flexible, and more powerful than ever before.
I chuckled at the point about dissipating heat by glowing, because that's quite literally a thing: all objects lose heat via electromagnetic radiation. Fun fact: this is also how the James Webb space telescope is able to keep cool in deep space, even without anything else to conduct heat away.
It's called radiation, not "glowing." Pretty funny how they avoided the correct term because "glowing" sounds safer than "radiation." Makes me wonder what else they may have misrepresented.
@@Based_transition_Clocker "Glowing" implies light, usually visible light, but in this case infrared. Infrared radiation is harmless as long as it gets absorbed by something which can be heated without damage, i.e. concrete in this case. Even the radiation from (thermo)nuclear weapon detonations is mostly thermal. Radiation is a very general term and can refer to the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Look up ionizing vs non-ionizing radiation. The latter does not cause DNA damage, only heating at most.
@@Based_transition_Clocker What is confusing about my reply? In any case, all radiation from nuclear reactors is shielded with thick steel and concrete. Whether you're talking about the ionizing radiation, non-ionizing radiation, or neutrons, all of it is extensively monitored and none of it escapes the containment building.
@@jlp1528 Nothing about your reply is confusing. Aside from containing several errors, it simply doesn't address the point I raised in my post in any way. In other words it is you who is confused.
I graduated with my engineering degree 50 years ago. At that time nuclear was the bright future, but for a lot of reasons it has never fully achieved the potential we predicted. Just think about 70 years ago they were putting nuclear power plants safely into submarines. This type of development seemed right around the corner at that time.
Sadly the anti-nuclear groups pressurised governments, who switched spending to other things, plus the media still open any discussion on nuclear power with a mushroom cloud, reinforcing deep seated fears. However, with alternatives energies now proving how difficult it is to build reliable 24/7/365 grid with intermittent power input, nuclear is now the obvious choice.
@@s.a.3882 The reactors on submarines use weapons grade fuel - enriched to 20%. The US civilian nuclear industry uses fuel with a lower enrichment to avoid the risk of creating tons of high grade fuel that is outside the control of the military. Enriching fuel to 20% is 90% of the enrichment process, so it would be a much more tempting target for someone who wants steal themselves a nuclear bomb. And one of the byproducts of civilian nuc plants is plutonium and that became the feedstock for our weapons programs. Another reason the navy uses high grade fuel is because it's not prone to xenon poisoning. Radioactive xenon builds up in a reactor as it runs. During normal operation it's just burned up as part of the normal process. But when you shut down a civilian plant that xenon is not burned up as power drops. The left over xenon prevents the reactor from being restarted until it falls below a certain threshold. A military vessel can't afford to shut down a reactor and then have to just wait around before starting it back up again. Someone might be shooting at them.
@@12pentaborane No, they're not. Using highly enriched fuel, Navy reactors can be built small enough to fit inside a submarine hull. Where space is not a consideration, such in a power plant, the fuel is not enriched nearly as much. A significant portion of a large reactor's energy is derived from fast neutrons.
This look great !!! Definitely i will invest and buy share but is a privately held company 😮💨 Haw time this reactor will generate energy whit out replace or add new FCM fuel pellets ???
Not sure how I feel about graphite moderator with a helium coolant. But I love the design, it’s much like our pressurized water reactors, if the coolant goes away the reaction goes away, much different than the reactor at Chernobyl and others like the SL-1 reactor.
We need all the support we can get. Everyone can help by talking about it, going to their local utility meetings, even just sending emails to your elected officials or the utility folks.
many people obsesd after nucleear accidents however people are searcing more safe energy sources but they didn t know nuclear energy is more safe and sustainable than most of resources
Somewhat, but not in the quanitties we're looking at. Global production is 25 milllion kg. We need about 100 kg per reactor. And we use it for 40 years, and can even reusue it.
I'm so tired of waiting for my charcoal grill to heat up. I need this so it's always ready. Yes and I would also like to buy the huge lead oven mitts to replace the fuel.
UK,France and Japan is currently bulding there own Modular reactor this is indeed the future unless we make progress on fusion reactor which is currently under development for almost 2 decades now..
Similar to HTGR pellets. The people from ornl brought a bottle of these to pass around and someond dropped and broke it. We all took turns using a ludlum counter to find them. Could imagine the chaos that would happen today despite being told that in theory we could eat a few with zero ill effects. They were about the size of very fine bird shot and made of uranium coated in graphite and SiC. Fun times ❤
They were the beads that went inside of the "pebble",and yup you are right the pebbles themselves tended to break up and fall apart leading to them abandoning the idea.
At first glance, it is understandable to get this impression. However, SMRs and microreactors are meant to operate without refuelling for many more years than current reactors. Instead of swapping out fuel elements every 2 or 3 years, you're looking at 5, 7, 20, and beyond. Some designs don't call for refuelling at all, they simply run until they can't run any more, at which point the core can be decommissioned and disposed of as a whole. Reprocessing options are also possible.
France has had a similar system over a decade ago holding a patent on it over everyone else's head. Proven technology where they shutdown all pumps and made a control rod failure for a worst case sceniro for 24 hrs. No problems. A true failsafe system mainly due to no moving parts required.... :) Self limiting by the solid way the reactor was built......
Wonder how feasible this is to be used on an industrial application, like factories or steel mills. Heard about this kind of reactor when Meralco, here in the Philippines stated they're planning to have one sometime in the future (2027-28)
Neat idea, but I notice you did not mention one of these likely expensive reactors has the output of *3 wind turbines* (15 MW max). I'm very pro-nuclear, but holy hell that is a really piss-poor fuel density, you'd practically be coating large portions of the landscape, or large areas of underground space, in these reactors. It'd be possible yeah, but it just seems unfeasible compared to constructing a single, centralized plant that produces gigawatts of power, and possibly for less money vs energy output.
We are designing the power plant for 40-year project lifetime, but fully expect that the civil works and much of the power plant will last 60-80 years and beyond. A gift for the future. the $/kWh are acceptable for many users looking for zero carbon power on-demand.
Does this qualify as one of those high temperature gas cooled reactors? I like the lack of water cooling, seems safer this way. But still, I'm much more interested in fluid fuel reactors. I hope your design is successful!
Precisely, and it's no secret why HTGRs are making a comeback: helium is almost everything you could want in a nuclear reactor coolant. It's already gas so it can't boil. It's physically, biologically, chemically, and radiologically inert. It's not hard to get. Even the lower efficiency can be mitigated by operating reactors at higher temperatures; the hotter something gets, the faster it can conduct and radiate heat away. Of course, helium is a very small atom, so it really likes to find leaks, but preventing leaks of anything is hardly a new or unusual challenge in the realm of nuclear power.
Haven't stated how much power it generates. The fact is nuclear is only efficient with multiple large reactors and even then its quite expensive such that we haven't been building that many plants. Something like this may work for a space base or in antartica where budgets are infinite but for mass consumer use it's likely that a plant with 5 reactors costs the same as 20 of these small ones but produces 10x more power than those 20. Being able to be cooled passively is beautiful, but to make lots of power cheaply we need big reactors that produce lots of heat. There's a reason we build buses and planes to fit in multiple passengers.
Howdy folks! Come on down to Farmer Drew's Happy Hot Springs! Why worry about fickle geothermal heat and the potential for super caldera eruption? I've got a safe nuclear reactor under my land, it keeps the water toasty.
Just curious, has anyone every advertised their reactor design as NOT safe? I feel like every reactor that has had a catastrophic event had some marketing materials just like this that preceded it.
TBF, of all failed power reactors, AFAIK, only RBMK was a "fly-by-wire" one, relying almost entirely on SKALA's PRISMA program to remain stable, due to positive void coefficient. This one seems to lack such a dangerous peculiarity.
very interested in micro modular marine reactors that can generate 11 MW - 14 MW of power either collectively or singularly . . . really curious to know if extraction of usable electric power (for marine propulsion or otherwise) is possible without the need for gas turbines . . . if so what are the other options available . . . a combination of micro modular marine reactor & direct injection marine fuel turbines instead of the traditional marine gas turbine . . . such know how is priceless even for a layman or just for the sake of knowing . . .
