Small Nuclear Reactors - Natrium 

Thank you!

Well said, I feel the same way😊

Well now you do... Just because we are not in a school doesn't mean the information isn't relevant.

I had one prof like him. Didn't use technology as well, but extensive subject matter expertise and incredibly good at presenting it. Notes from the whiteboard were how you survived the class, but it was engaging, challenging, and is still useful in my professional life today.

@@jamuojisan Life will be unfair to those who don't understand Chinese. In a decade or so, after they have subdued Taiwan, HK, and a good portion of the rest of the world.

Haha, I see it! Maybe he's got a side channel explaining this month's best buy, a 2021 Lexus with only 15,000 miles on the clock...

"This sleek ride was made the year I got the record for passing yards in a season! She's a solid, reliable vehicle. Even more reliable than my O-line! Buy today and I'll throw in my signed rookie card! Oh and by the way, nuclear energy is the safest, cleanest, and most reliable form of mass energy production we have. It's even better than solar and wind!"

He looks like an engineer that continued his education.

I never knew there was such a thing as a "well respected used car dealer" 😄 And yes I really like his videos. He is calm and explains things in a clear ration matter. I really wish more anti nuclear people would listen to people like him. If they oppose nuclear plants i can accept that. But do it from a rational viewpoint. Not an emotional one. Myself, l have problems with the US nuclear industry but that is more of a matter of how it was managed. I think something on the level if the French model is a better system. Especially in terms of plant design.

You said it: "infrastructure". It's not only turbines+generators, it is also the electrical lines and its general integration into the power grid, and roads, and I'm sure more.

@@johanponken yep, infrastructure is the name of the game, and its what makes nuclear extremely good. It has the smallest ground footprint per TW of energy produced. Current reactors can opperate for months on end, only suffering a comparatively small downtime, Molten salt throrium reactors can essentially operate without interruption as they can breed their fuel continuously. They are the perfect baseload energy production for countries that cannot enjoy uninterupted sunlight most of the year. We also lose a lot of energy over long distances so we kind of need power generation at various points on a territory and can't just plop down a gigantic square of solar pannels and use that to supply an entire contient. Most of the world live in temperate climates, where MOST of the year is spent under cloud cover with minimal wind and already have dams everywhere a dam is fit to be built. Essentially while renewables work, they need to be built WIDELY over cappacity to actually work as baseloads, and even then during fall/winter, there can be months of almost no uninterupted sunlight and weeks on end of calm winds where even an over-dimentionned network can't help. Nuclear is the perfect baseload. You can place it almost everywhere, it takes little space to generate a lot of energy, is consistent and works in all conditions. You want to add renewables to the grid so the nuclear plant does not have to run at full power all the time, but its actually much easier to have a grid that can work entirely off nuclear than it is to get one that can work entirely on renewables, at least in the areas of the planet where you don't have 24/7 solar or wind, which is most of the planet. Most fossil plants can already be replaced by nuclear reactors, it does not take a lot to replace them by either small modular reactors or molten salt reactors, pretty much every scientist and engineer knows this to be the way to go, just that the public is lagging decades behind in their understnading of nuclear.

Yeah it ain't 1986 anymore. Nuke is the way to go until fusion is made stable. I hear it's only 20 years out now.

It’s a no brainer

@@mobiuscoreindustries if the safire project project is true it would be even easy too heh

Good to know!

Well, the Germans and the Swedes saw to that 'Na' prevailed, as mentioned in enwp.org/Sodium#History, but the name has even Egyptian roots, in a natural Na-salt-mix, more clearly stated in enwp.org/Natron#Etymology.

I've always been a fan of salt. With the benefits of 4th gen one must wonder why nations bother with the old technology anymore. Is it just to produce material for bombs?

I used to have a German periodic table in the office. It also had J for Iodine.

@@dingdong2103 Not many people building bombs these days. But a fair number of people know how to build and operate LWRs, while few know how to build Liquid Metal or Molten Salt Reactors. Hopefully, that will change.

501st like.

I have not looked into it too closely, but I hope the reactor design allows for shutdowns, as in losing criticality, Russians tried the liquid metal route with their early subs and I would imagine it's kinda embarrassing retiring a sub because the reactor cooled off and couldn't be restarted. In other aspects they were amazing reactors, just liquid metal was a bad idea. They were not using sodium though.

@@justingrey6008 The video mentions sodium melts at 98C so you could likely re-melt it pretty easily.

@@Whatsinanameanyway13 no doubt, but whatever heat source was applied would need to be external as any control rods or the like would be stuck in the sodium. Doesn't sound like a good time. But these issues are known so I am sure someone has thought about them a bit

@@justingrey6008 Sodium-Potassium alloy "NAK" has a lower melting point, potentially below -10C though that is with an alloy very high in potassium. A low level of potassium in a sodium system might usefully depress the melting point.

@@justingrey6008 Do you know what metal was used? Lead?

This is 1950 shit. It will disrupt the entire global economy and throw the world into perpetual war for a century. It is interesting. The potential is astounding... but the humans are basically useless and dangerous. We are lucky they let us burn oil.

Second that. Or 9th.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment

@@darknase looks like they fixed the 1959 14th experiment run problems. Another 26k hours and no incident. 1. Hopefully none of the technology has been forgotten. 2. I would build these early plants in low population areas, or with good shielding. I always thought that the first experimental thorium reactors should be used for desalination rather than electric.

This is better, and the tech is far more advanced,China after years of work has a 2MW test reactor,while TerraPower is ready with the 345MW with 500MW for 51/2hour storage Natrium system ready to be built in Klemperer Wyoming. I never imagined our NRC would ever license a fast reactor, but Terra Power will try.

@@dennisgarber Typically, coal power plants (which as you know, the idea of this is to build on their area and reuse the existing generation/distribution infrastructure), are away from population centers. Your concern about being away from population centers is already satisfied. Personally, I'd welcome one in my backyard, but I just wanted to answer your question :)

the problem isn't the lack of water but rather the fact that it's not fresh. you can just use seawater and apply reverse osmosis.

@@Hamstray Yes, and that could be done and powered more locally. Small reactors. :)

In giant _pipelines_ ? AND up and down whole mountain ranges, or would you drill ginormeous tunnels through them? Not sure any of that would be very safe.

Nah, just desalinate the ocean water. Check out what the AEC was coming up with in the 60s and 70s: digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc784269/m2/1/high_res_d/metadc784269.pdf Anywhere from 100 million to 5 billion gallons a day of freshwater with a sub 10ppm level

China had done that experiment with the world's most expensive multi-decade infrastructure project and it failed spectacularly. And that project is based on infrastructure that already existed for centuries. Now they are looking to do what actually makes sense: sea water desalination. The United States could not do an infrastructure project on that scale period. Do not try to fight nature, use what it gives you.

Far too many anti nuclear proponents are acting on emotion. Not from as ny rational fear.

Maybe he is The Grand Nagus.

Inconceivable!

These multi nerd knowledge level comments that I thrive on haha. A comment on a nuclear power video, referencing Star Trek and followed up by princess bride quotes 😂

Water with sodium means violent reaction i.e. explosion. Even a leak into air leads to fire. Fire is not a good thing at all to nuclear plant though a bit better than explosion. Do not use sodium as coolant. Use lead. Simple lead with no Bismuth. You do not want the building up of Polodium.

Glad you like it, and liked Papa Dell's!

Thank you for watching, endeavor to write as soon as for more enlightenment or tips on investing in crypto +1•4•6•9•2•2•5•9•2•5•6

Well?? How did it go? Are you a TerraPower Ranger?

Build one in CA & I would consider it a success in getting the Green people to approve - in reality never happen.

@@jwarmstrong More likely build in northern Mexico, and ship the power over the border.

@@wwoods66 Low natural gas prices make spending billions on nuclear power a big gamble today..

Tax carbon emissions and those prices get closer though. Someone is subsidizing the waste.

You do realize that nuclear power plants are way more complex than a solar / wind installation + battery banks, right? They're also orders of magnitude more expensive and require orders of magnitude more oversight, the comparison is ridiculous. Calling solar / wind "Goldberg machines" that "don't make much sense" is quite silly, specially when the alternative you're proposing is a molten salt nuclear plant 😅 Guess what? I can't have a molten salt nuclear reactor at home (and even if I were allowed to have one, I couldn't possibly afford to run it), but I sure can have solar panels, a battery bank and even small scale hydro (if there's a stream running nearby). Hell, I could eventually go off the grid, by gradually scaling up my renewable installations at home. Nuclear power makes sense to power industry, but homes can power themselves with renewables + batteries + smart architecture. Nuclear zealotry is as silly and misguided as anti-nuclear zealotry, don't be one of those people.

@@Goreuncle Not bad, and good advice at the end.

The molten salt is also interesting in how it 'decouples' the two aspects of electricity production. For example, a turbine/generator trip can occur and yet the response on the reactor side can be more measured and has much more time to react. This can have some interesting effects on safety analysis. Still early stages and most of the design data seems to be proprietary at this stage, but something to keep watching.

Your question is legitimate but based on an illusion. Superphenix admitedly had technical problems (24 months stop after 53 months producing), it was a prototype. This is important, prototypes are heavy investments and have a steep learning curve for the exploitation. That is why it was a european project. But it was also stopped for administrative reasons for a really fucking long time (54 months !!!). Then it suffered political issues and non sense. Imagine, closing a plant you put billions in and that is in working just fine ?! It was time to experiment and gain knowledge for the future... In 1996, it had 95% availability... All in all, the choice of stopping was really hard to comprehend when 99% or more of the population and politician barely get the differences between EPR, BWR, MSR... Now we have a climate crises on our hands, what should we do ?

@@IncHolowind go back to been cave dwellers. We can come back out in about 10,000 years. I kid of course. I'm just wondering if the environmentalist will kill this project as well.

In this case, economy of scale. These are small reactors designed to be manufactured en masse. Just like Nuscale's SMR (which is a PWR). The historical problem with Nuclear power is that each reactor was not only under the most regulatory control of any kind of power, every part had to be built custom made (at least here in the US, France standardized their plants back in the 60s). I suspect that we will see the cost efficiency overtime, as Orgoss put it, Prototypes are expensive, no matter what they are.

@@nathancochran4694 True costs will come down. But will they come down far enough. Solar, wind, and gas in the US have become astonishingly cheap and keep getting cheaper. Sure if you ditch the gas at high enough levels of penetration you have start paying for super expensive storage(or epicly large grid improvements and overbuild). But we might be able to get to 80 or 90% penetration before those costs start getting enormous. And is 20% natural gas really the bottle neck for climate change at that point. Natural gas is also essentially harmless from a safety perspective unlike coal. The obvious choice to handle that last 20% is nuclear. But it might be a better use of money to just use gas and use that money on mitigation or on encouraging less new coal in India. This issue is rarely addressed by the pro nuclear crowd.

French couldn't build the Panama canal,Americans came in studied the medical issues of malaria ,eliminated mosquitos and built the canal.Terra Power is Bill Gates using the info from EBR2.which Bill Clinton moronically cancelled, there are many partners, and computers are more powerful, but you do not want leaks, its explosive when contacting water and our air has water in it.

Exactly! This is the part everyone gets backward and the people who understand this do a terrible job of educating. The same can be said for waste.

He did, you keep the sodium away from water. In this design, the sodium never leaves the reactor vessel.

Liquid metal cooled reactors yes, but liquid sodium no. The reactors used on the super-fast soviet alfa-class attack subs were cooled by eutectic lead-bismuth alloy. The primary reason for this was to make them as compact as possible: Sodium is an excellent coolant, but is not so great as radiation shielding, particularly for neutron and gamma radiation since those are the most penetrating. Lead and bismuth are not quite as good as coolants - in principle either metal alone could work, but the reason why the alloy of both is better is because it has a wider liquid range. Anyway, these reactors could be made much smaller than most because the coolant could also function as the radiation shielding - both lead and bismuth are heavy, dense metals so are highly effective as radiation shielding. This in turn allowed the submarine itself to be smaller than it would otherwise have been if it had used a more conventional pressurised water reactor of equivalent power output. The insanely high power to weight ratio of the alfa-class is what gave it such a high top speed - in fact it was so fast that it could literally outrun every torpedo in use at the time the first alfa-class subs went into service. The UK and USA actually developed faster torpedoes in direct response to the alfa-class.

Yep, and it would take a lot longer to get out of the new dark ages, because all easily accessible energy is gone. SMR is a very generic term, and if the world pick the wrong nuclear reactor again, it might be to late considering how long they held on to the current cold war reactors relic design. I'm no longer holding waiting for fusion, 80 years should been enough. Thorium molten salt reactor seem to check all the right boxes for a fission reactor design.

@@drmosfet New technology would be nice, but I'd be thrilled to be 'stuck' with relic gen3 designs if they were prolific - as in five or ten per state, twenty or thirty in California, that many again in Texas, or more as required. Despite the advantages of gen4, no one really cares how inefficient the current reactors may be, high level waste is hardly a problem since there isn't much, and 70 years of experience operating the current technologies have worked out all the engineering and safety concerns. Just get us on nuclear, period! If it turns out to be on gen4, super; if it happens on gen3 or a mix, that's great too - we'll continue to develop and transition at the next lifecycle event.

Terrapower is already behind schedule and will not go operational until 2030 at the earliest.

Renewables require less coordination, less delays, less inspection, and they can be cheaper. The cost you pay factors in the raw materials. Also less safety risks. While this reactor seems like it is pretty safe there still are risks like the spent fuel pool.

Well for one you can't let people stick sodium-cooled reactors in their garage like how they can put solar panels on their roof. Switching houses to be a little grid-independent just in case of power outages would be prudent: solar and battery backup that at least covers the refrigerator and some lights wouldn't be too hard.

@George Mann The power companies think Wind and Solar is practical as it is now cheaper in many areas, even without artificial subsidies. "virtually zero risk" kind of ignores the fact that high level waste is extremely hazardous and able to self-melt. Yes, if someone is there to check on the pool periodically and fix leaks and add water as needed, it's safe. But it is not "zero risk". Plenty of ways to screw this up. If the most irresponsible, cost cutting company installs solar or wind the worst they can do is cause an electrical fire, not contaminate land.

@@drewgehringer7813 who would want to put solar or wind in their garage if unlimited and cheap nuclear power is available?