Reactors of the Future (Generation IV) 

The most impressive part of this video, to me, was the professor's ability to write backwards. Incredible!

_"Did the marker have its own mic?"_ No, a foley artist dubs it in during post production. I believe they use a mouse.

His backwards writing skills are next level

Meh, I'm gonna wait for the Gen V before I get one.

Did the marker have its own mic?

I still remember walking into a fast breeder reactor in India, it was a school thing, also got to see their largest electron scanner device for finding defects in large metal structures.

"As long as we have an economic imperative for the future, these could be the reactors of 30 or 40 years." Can someone get this man a larger microphone.

“Down to a couple of weeks” I work as a nuclear contractor in the us and I can confirm that. 4 week jobs are considered long within my craft

That was one really good aspect of the RBMK. Being able to fuel it without shutting down

I believed pebble bed style reactors died after the big problems of the THTR-300 in Germany. Interesting to see that these concepts are being worked on again. Thanks for your outstanding videos, professor!

We need innovative Gen 4 plants NOW, and personally I would love it if they were either mini or micro reactors and spread them to every town city and village in the USA

This was awesome. Thank you for putting this together. Hope you do more of these!

Damn, this channel is a gem.. subbed!

Expecting to wait at least 30 or 40 years is a defeatist attitude. Some of these designs have already had functional research reactors built a long time ago. All that is required is the will to build a pilot commercial reactor and then copy it. That could be done in less than ten years if we make it a priority or it may never happen if we don't.

I love listening to your videos,you do such a good job breaking it all down.

You are a very good explainer of difficult subjects. amazing stuff here.

Whoever came up with that pebble bed design is a damn genius.

Great videos professor, keep up the amazing work

Really love your channel and teaching style! Looking forward to new videos :)

He spoke so much about the pebble bed design whereas only one sentence about the molten salt designs, which are the most promising ones.

Refueling downtime a major weekness with light water reactors. It means that one has to have another reactor to compensate the loss of power.

This is amazing ! Thanks professor !

Excellent overview, inspiring.

Such a informative video, thanks professor.

I find it weird that activists were able to stultify the progress of nuclear energy development; It is the next level of progress; That's undeniable. It's good to criticize any dangerous/polluting nuclear, but we need to get better at nuclear and replace fossil fuels with it. Paving everything with solar panels is bad for the environment too, and it probably won't meet the energy needs of the future, because we're always going to want to do more and use more energy. There have been hundreds of nuclear reactors built since the beginning 60-70(?) years ago, and only a few of the earliest-built reactors ended in disaster. Fukushima was built from 1967-1971. Chernobyl was built 1972-1977. Three mile island was built 1968-1978. How many issues have there been with reactors built in the last 30 years? There are over 400 in operation; We're obviously learning how to make them better, and there are all kinds of new avenues to explore there that can lead to significant progress. We need better reactors to reduce our society's footprint on earth and we need them for any type of sci-fi future that you might want to build elsewhere. (e.g. solar is terrible on the moon; 1 night lasts 15 earth-days. Also, solar energy obviously gets worse and worse if you want to go places that aren't as near to the sun)

The advance from current nuclear fuels to the new pebblebed method reminds me of the advance from musket balls to bullet cartridges...this was very educational by the way, thank you

Oh wow, you have a whole course! I saw the economics one, will now watch all the others :)

Brilliantly simple explanation.

7:48 When I read the text below it and noticed it was my native tounge (german), as well as this prb. beeing an older version so the ideas of it has been around in my country for quite a while, I felt ashamed for what my goverment and country has done in the last couple of years. We had the technology to solve most of our issues, but politics and naive ideology of Wind&Sun made us blind.

Next episode: Pens Of The Future Same efficiency as today's pens, but without emitting a sound that stabs your brain.

Great summurization of PBR. Thanks Sir.

The Canadian CANDU heavy water system, around since the 70s, has the ability to be hot refueled. It also runs on natural uranium so you don't need access to enrichment.

I would be very interested in learning about small modular reactors, Could you please make a video about these ?

I wish I had you as a prof. back in the 80's

Really genius design Thank you very much

Awesome work! Thank you so much!

Dear Professor: Thank you for your very informative series of videos. Please do a video on breeder reactors and the potential they have to not generate waste products which is a big problem with current commercial reactors. Also, please take a look at French Nuclear Program and the social benefits that this program, i.e. cheap electricity and reduced carbon emissions.

I appreciate the professor's online mini lectures. Thank you for doing them! I feel one major advantages of Gen4 wasn't touched on strongly enough. It seems to me most (but not all) new nuclear is smaller startups employing molten salts. Configurations or design ethics to eliminate nuclear waste by using it as fuel. That's a political problem solved. Pebble bed makes this goal harder by making the waste really hard to process. Simultaneously, using liquid fuel jumps the efficiency to near full efficiency, rather than nearly zero. Most of the transuranic actinide fission products burned away, most of what's left is valuable material able to be sold. What's left of waste won't matter in it's quantities or lifespan.

Thank you for sharing!

outstanding presentation, thank you

Who needs nuclear research. Clearly everyone in the comments section knows everything already.

"It's the Sony Nuke-Man. A personal portable nuclear power source. They were a big fad on Malnak. Come to think of it, they were the last fad on Malnak. " Alf

Thank you for the knowledge!

Really clear and well explained

I learned a bit about pebble bed reactors after playing Reactorcraft.

The Soviets made a class of submarines that operated with reactors that used lead for coolant. They were really loud, but it allowed for a smaller maritime reactor.

Great video!

Fantastic! The future looks good.

Moltexenergy.com has an interesting twist on the molten salt reactor concept. The static salt reactor keeps the fission products separate from the coolant.

I need to know what generation his DaVinci script is on.

This guy is a genius at writing backwards!

Nicely explained

What about Thorium powered molten salt reactors?

Should we look into building low efficiency reactors where we can allow ' spent ' nuclear fuel to continue to decompose. The goal is to reduce radioactive spent fuel storage and environment contamination.

awesome video. The sources I found only list Gen 4 ideas, but they don't explain what they are trying to achieve!

Thank you for such info.

The molten salt reactor uses fuel that is resolved in the carrier salt, reaches criticality only when introduced to the graphite moderator in reactor core, can be simply drained and separated from the moderator by means of gravity when all possible system fail, there's no need for any downtime while refuelling nor removing fission products, any fuel processing can be done during normal reactor operation. The salt doesn't have to be held under pressure while being at very high temperature, eliminating the risk of leaks, radioactive steam explosion, the necessity for hight vessels strength that can significantly reduce costs.

Dude is from mirror universe

What a wonderful lecture

Interesting use of real time slide graphics semi transparent and alpha keyed during the recording of the presentation. Plus reverse image allowing writing on glass to appear right ways. Oh and the information is interesting too..

He forgot to mention, than liquid sodium fast neutron reactor is commercially operated right now. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor

You can't get a new nuclear power plant permitted in the US. Which is a shame, because until nuclear fusion is perfected, nuclear fission is the only reliable non-greenhouse gas producing power source we have. Hydroelectric is maxed out, there are only so many rivers. Wind only works when it is blowing, and solar only works during the day. Germany went with wind and solar, with coal fired plants as backup power. They now burn so much coal at night and when tne wind does not blow that Germany produces more pollution than before they switched to green energy. France stuck with nuclear power, and is doing just fine. We need to build a massive number of generation 4 nuclear power plants around the world to supply the worlds power needs without carbon emissions. By the time these nuclear plants are worn out in 40 years, hopefully we will have solved the problems with nuclear fusion and can switch to that.

Thanks Prof, excellent lecture

Dude, you really know how to write really well backwards for the rest of us to read!

While I found the lecture interesting, I would like to have reference made to the historical context of reactor design. The original light water reactor was designed by Alvin Weinberg to be used in nuclear submarines and never intended for domestic electricity generation. In fact, he advised against there use as the design does not scale up well, being difficult to maintain safety. Alvin was then approached by the airforce to design a nuclear reactor for the airforce to match the submarines. Clearly, the light water design would be too heavy so he developed the molten salt reactor (which you refer to as GEN 4) which was built and tested in the 70s proving to be inherently safe and efficient burning up the majority of the fuel. (as opposed to the light water reactor which can only burn about 3% of the uranium). The strengths of the LFTR design were many including the fact that fuel is dissolved in the molten salt rather than relying on very expensive pellets or pebbles, there is no need for a hugely expensive containment housing (as required by a light water reactor). This type of reactor can be made small enough to fit on a lorry and cost about the same as a passenger aircraft to build.

Cooling: Lead would be too heavy for anything in industrial scale (also bismuth). Sodium is OK, but a little bit more dangerous for operation personel. Salt containing any halogens is really corrosive in high temperatures, but we can mostly deal with that some way. The "cold water" in the primary cooling circuit in nuclear power plant Temelín is about 290°C (hot is only above 320°C). Fuel: Thorium as a fuel is already used for example in India and Soviets have used it in Kazakhstan. But you don't have waste useful for nukes, so it is not so much supported.

Thank you sir!

I would also be interested to know what defined generations 1, 2 and 3.

worth doing a video on just MSRE

what about the molten salt reactor ??? there is models where the fuel is directely disolve in the coolant

Someone please tell me this guy is an educator too in the broader sense than just this offering. Wow, just wow.

that marker is awesome

A 15 megawatt helium-cooled pebble bed reactor ran in Germany from 1969 until 1988. During this time it apparently encountered all kinds of problems, had several potentially dangerous accidents, and released a bunch more radioactive materials into the environment than it was supposed to. One of the scientists working on the project for over 30 years therefore expressed doubts on the general viability of pebble bed reactors, and criticised their export into countries like China or South Africa. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor

I scrolled to the comments only to confirm my presumption that the first one would be about the screeching marker

4:24 I never realized this. So you can avoid using heat engines and the carnot limit(?!), to produce power. You can feed it to a solid oxide fuel cell, that coincidentally only works on high temperatures, but can be (according to claims 80-90% efficient). The big question is how efficient such a cycle can be? The output of it is water again, which can be fed back to the reactor for re-splitting. If it's insulated the heat loss should be minimal.

Great video! As the pellets grind against each other in a fluidized bed some of the shell material will slowly erode away. Will this dust damage pumps and other parts of the reactor?

damn squiking marker

2:15 so a Thorium power plant at the south pole of Mars would be more efficient?

This guy is brilliant

Top quality videos. 10/10 i cant give more sorry.

yes some russian reactors used lead+cadmium for cooling... but making that liquid again when reactor was down was no fun thing

No one: this guys marker: LET ME SING YOU THE SONG OF MY PEOPLE XD

Cool video. I'm subscribing

Inconceivable!

Molten Salt Reactors are allot better. They are absolutely safe, work at high temperatures suitable for high efficiency and industrial applications, can be refueled while operating, can load follow, their energy can stored to be used for peak power needs, they can power the whole country for over a 100 years on the present nuclear waste stock piles, so why so little discussion about them?

Chernobyl-type RBMK reactors make refueling a breeze because you don't even have to stop them to replace fuel assemblies :-)

well described

NRU (research reactor) first operated in 1957 until 2017 in Chalk River, Canada. It REFUELED ONLINE! Man... Those were the days!

what about Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor?

I would love to show this video to all the green people that want to turn off all nuclear reactors. I hope politics agrees with science and europe builds them.

The only way ahead that seems to make sense is molten salt thorium reactors with a brayton cycle turbine and a steam heat recovery turbine. It addresses safety, fuel utilisation (and hence reduction of waste products). The carbon emissions from obtaining thorium are also much lower than they are for the equivalent amount of uranium required to produce a given amount of electricity. The major difficulty seems to be the continuous reprocessing cycle which involves a large number of different chemical and physical separation processes. However there is no reason why it should not work on a large scale if sufficient R&D is dedicated to the problem.

You are practically describing the rbmk reactor in green. - on the fly refueling - carbon moderated - cannot blow up ; )

Listening to the Daily talk about carbon offsets with Delta airlines got me thinking about generation 4 nuclear reactors. There's about six different designs with six different criteria one of course is they're walk away safe / self moderating. They're non-proliferation, they burn more spent-fuel than they make and it shines for substantially less time. The benefits are so pronounced but even Bill Gates is got his own company building this right now. China, Russia, India and Indonesia are moving ahead while the Trump administration has given the green light to explore this new technology. I would like to see them as common as a hospital in any City. We're not talking about gigantic generation three reactors that can run away or meltdown. One of the generation for designs makes a lot of oxygen and hydrogen and this hydrogen could be used in airplanes. Now everybody wants to freak out about hydrogen flying around but right now they're full of kerosene so no matter what being in an airplane is not all that exciting if you're going to crash. At any time there's about 10,000 airplanes in the air and they could all be carbon neutral with a sustainable source from generation 4 reactors. There's also talk about airplanes running on methane that could be extracted out of the atmosphere and then put back into airplanes. The energy to extract as methane could be from generation 4 reactors. Same with desalination plants in many parts of the earth. If there's drought in one particular area you could have a generation 4 reactor on a floating barge that comes to a certain port and makes fresh water. The media has got to stop scaring people along with politicians. I would much rather live next door to a generation 4 reactor or any reactor than a fossil fuel plant. Start doing a real comparison of the deaths that actually come from radiation exposure versus industrial deaths from oil or coal, natural gas, fracking, even working on wind power or solar. Anybody who works at any kind of industry producing things runs risk of injury or death and nuclear to date is far safer then fossil fuels. I can start going on about the exaggerated fear of Fukushima or Chernobyl but there isn't room for that discussion today.

Thorium is the Future and that's where we should go

His ability to write backwards is the true breakthrough in efficiency.

hi professor, how do these high-temp coolant pumps work? (to pump molten metal or molten salt)

I don’t know if anyone has noticed this 🤷‍♂️ .... Is there a camera trick? Or is this guy able to right backwards legibly??? 😱

In Europe (and many other places) heating homes and businesses uses more energy than electricity. Nuclear could play a part in heating. Nuclear heat can be generated at low temperatures low pressure and would be close to 100% efficient The problem is you would have to build a big district heating grid. This would be slow and costly but once built it would last a hundred years and could be powered by cheap heat only nuclear reactors There would also technically be no waste because the waste can just keep on powering the nuclear heated grid indefinitely so long as humans need warm homes the waste is not waste but low power long lasting energy for the district heating grids. New reactors for electricity generation are 3-5 GW thermal. District heating reactors that are 1/10th the power so around 0.5MW and supply the needs of 200,000 homes would work the energy side would be very cheap. Nuclear should concentrate to address this market. It's a huge market. And the technology needed isn't an advance in nuclear but and advance in methods to build cheap distributed heating grids.

Kind sir, this would be worth an update. Since then, the US has put a bunch of money into two of the concepts, both of which are in active planning for initial reactors to be built/installed at the Idaho National Lab.

Could you please share your opinion on the Molten Salt Reactor concept (MSR)?