Thorium. Is it the future of clean energy? 

The water moderator does not control the reaction as you might expect and is suggested by the name, it increases the reaction. It is called a "moderator" because it moderates the speed of the neutrons (slows them down) so they can be absorbed by uranium nuclei to promote fission rather than just flying around at high speed. Thus the moderator actually counter-intuitively increases the reaction. My trivia for today.

“I’m not a scientist”. If you think like a scientist, research like a scientist, and explain like a scientist, that’s quite good enough. Working scientists so often have trouble communicating outside their specialties, so effective science communication is rare and essential. Bravo.

That jump scare 0:54

Another long comment in support of the video and Steven Gulie. Ed Phiel of Elysium has 30 years of nuclear industry experience. He noticed that used "waste" nuclear fuel is only 5% used. 95% of the fissile energy just sits there highly radioactive and highly costly to manage. Ian Scott of Moltex realised that nuclear power is expensive, because the reactors are big and complicated to build and to operate. The best component is no component so he cut out everything possible while still keeping it as safe as possible. The result is another fast spectrum design. For every megawatt hour of nuclear power generated today, there is another 24 megawatts of energy trapped in the used fuel. Do the maths - there is a HUGE amount of fissile energy sitting untouched. The snag is that thermal spectrum neutrons do not work on the transuranic elements found in waste fuel. The fuel itself is mechanically distorted and fission gasses build to extremely high pressures. The Elysium and Moltex modular fast spectrum reactors use chloride salts for fuel and cooling with no carbon moderator. The latter is a another source of active waste because it distorts and has to be replaced. The waste fuel rods are chemically converted into salts and put into the reactor. Salts cause corrosion only when water and oxygen are present. The core of a reactor has neither of these. In fact, molten chloride salts (aka - table salt) are actually less corrosive than the pressurised hot water used in today's PWRs. It also does not etch metals in the ways fluorides salts can do. There is no issue with tritium and no lithium cannot be accused of being a proliferation issue. The used fuel rods are converted to a salt and burnt down. The 24,000 years half life of today's "waste" fuel becomes just 24 years when fully used. This 1000 times reduction in radioactive life is easily managed with engineered containment. They can even burn all isotopes of plutonium (e.g. from bombs and their manufacture) and the depleted uranium as left over from processing nuclear fuels. The resultant salt fuel mix is denatured so much that extracting the original bomb isotopes would be more difficult than making new from scratch. Anyone wanting to make bombs would avoid taking an elysium or a Moltex reactor. Last of all costs. These plants are low cost. They are naturally self regulating with no internal pressure. There is no circulating sodium to cause problems and cannot overheat. Fast neutrons have a narrow useful range. Too cool and the reaction speeds up, but too hot and it virtually stops. It cannot overheat. The only problem is the glacial pace of regulatory approval. The engineering is ready to go but approval will take decades at current rates.

While I think the thorium molten salt reactor will be commercialized, and will eventually make an important contribution to power generation, it will take alot longer than 11 years. But you have left out a far more promising technology, that is further along than the molten salt reactor - the fast breader, based on U238 to plutonium. Just as thorium is fertile and not fissile, u238 is fertile and with absorption of neutrons becomes fertile plutonium. And in a fast breeder, it becomes the fuel that powers the reactor, and gets consumed. Now for the best part - a fast breeder can use spent nuclear fuel waste from conventional reactors as its fuel, as its mostly u238. And the other nastly long lived radioactive products also getted consumed, and create power. And one year of a conventional U235 1GW reactor’s waste is 25 tons. That would fuel a 1 GW breeder for 25 years. So with fast breeders, we can use existing nuclear waste as fuel, and the resulting waste from the breeder has the same 30 year half life (300 years until safe) as the thorium reactors waste. There is enough existing waste to provide 1000 years of electricity at current levels of nuclear production - all without digging up any more uranium. ( 100 years at 10x the current number of nuclear production, which would be 100% of current worldwide electricity production). And for each kg of nuclear waste, there is 5-6 kg of depleated uranium which can also be used as fuel. Now what is the status of a fast breeder reactor? The US built one using liquid sodium cooling in the 70s which operated until Pres Clinton shut down research at the urging of Sen Kerry, because we wouldn’t need nuclear with renewables. Ge/Hitachi have a reactor design based on that design. Bill Gates Terrapower is collaborating with GE/Hitachi. The Russians built a fast breeder cooled with molten lead.It was used in one of their submarines. And just like the molten salt thorium reactor, there is a molten salt fast breeder design from Elysium that on the surface, seems superior to any of the other designs. It is extremely simple, molten NaCl with dissolved fuel in the salt. Low pressure, no graphite moderator necessary, and all of the other advantages of molten salt designs. Elysium recently demonstrated conversion of nuclear waste to fuel compatible with their design. Just have a think :)

Such a huge gain for hurdles we can overcome. WAY easier than fusion. Let’s make it happen!

I honestly feel we should invest in both Thorium and renewable forms of energy.

Yeah, If we had developed thorium msr's in the 50's, we might have reached minimal carbon footprint by 2000. The advantage of nuclear is the extremely high energy density compared to other forms, especially solar and wind which are very low density.

Nice graphics again, channel gets better and better. There are so many promising new nuclear designs coming through, especially in the small modular / molten salt reactors, which are not as design in the video.

Remove the subsidies from all different kinds of energy and then let them compete with each other. Make sure that the environment is protected. Polluting the environment is a hidden subsidy.

I follow few science related channels and scroll down much more of it. But scarce no. of science channel anchors can present complex topics in simple and in an engaging manner. And tiny of those scarce anchors can be funny or be witty without looking ridiculous or being off topic. Congratulations you are among a rare breed of anchors who are in a goldi lock zone of anchoring. Please keep it up! Ty

The MSR (molten salt reactor) work was being done in Tenn at ORNL, the fast breeder reactor work was being done in California. Nixon was president and CA was home base. Dick sent all the money home like a good boy. He didn't mind screwing the country - ever. MSR designs can use U or Th, and they can be configured to burn ALL of the existing "waste" stockpiles. Because they operate at much higher temperatures they can provide process heat, desalination, CO2 extraction and conversion to carbon neutral aviation fuel, and replacement of gas and coal boilers for electricity production.

I'm afraid the typical blunder was made of insinuating that only reactors that use the thorium fuel cycle would benefit and can be used with a molten salt reactor design. Yes, to design a thermal spectrum breeder reactor you essentially would need a molten salt design that uses thorium, but many of the benefits of using a molten salt reactor design is just as valuable when used with Uranium. A Uranium molten salt burner reactor that uses U235 can more fully utilize it's fuel and get the added safety benefits, and a Uranium fast-neutron breeder that utilizes U238 and all the dangerous plutonium can also be designed. Yes, thorium can be a valuable nuclear fuel, but there is very little that makes it inherently better than Uranium. It is the molten salt concept that has the greatest value.

You asked for corrections so here they are: 3:35 The proton is in the nucleus. It doesn't orbit it. 5:30 This is not was the moderator does. The moderator slows down the neutrons that have been released from previous reactions at a very high speed called the "fast spectrum" to a speed roughly the same as vibration due to heat of the other particles in the system. This is called the "Thermal spectrum". This gives them a higher chance of successfully interacting with more U-235 nuclei. 8:43 I'm not sure where you are going with this. In the LFTR design, there isn't actually any thorium in the core anyway. The Thorium is kept in a "Blanket" around the core so that it can absorb neutrons to undergo is transmutation to U-233. That U-233 is then removed and processed into the fuel that is dissolved in the core fluid. 13:05 Although corrosion and well as neutron embrittlement of certain parts such as pumps are still a problem for most LFTR designs (due to the types of salts they use), there are plenty of MSR designs such as Moltex's Stable Salt reactor that employ simple, proven solutions to the issues. 13:40 Only time will tell how much these reactors will cost but it is imagined that MSRs will be orders of magnitude cheaper to build than current PWR or BWR designs mainly because they don't require the incredibly large, thick containment vessels that are designed to quell the rapid expansion of steam. Instead, their containments only need to be large enough to house the reactor and are mainly there to protect the reactor from outside threats such as plane crashes. MSRs also don't need expensive backup systems to maintain safety in abnormal situations such as loss of offsite power. 14:00 Why not just throw money at renewables? Because they can't solve the problem by themselves. You keep claiming that energy from renewables is now cheaper than that of fossil fuels. While that is true if you just look at the upfront price per kw/h produced it doesn't even begin to look at the big picture. When you install an intermittent and non-dispatchable source of power you must also install some form of backup to that power. So if you install a wind or solar farm you must also install a natural gas plant to cover for it when those sources are idle. Now some might say this is a temporary problem and storage technologies will soon solve this problem. But even the best options imagined for storage can't overcome the problem of Energy Return on Investment or EROI. Every credible study I have read on the topic shows that wind or solar paired with storage results in an EROI score that isn't high enough to provide the large excesses of energy required to maintain our modern society. If you want proof that renewables aren't cheap just do a quick search for the relationship between % of renewable energy installed vs price per kw/h for different countries. Germany is a perfect example. As they have added renewables their energy prices have skyrocketed, not to mention their CO2 emissions per kw/h haven't budged. If Germany had invested all of the billions they have on renewables on nuclear power instead of phasing it out, it's highly likely they would be getting close to 100% low carbon electricity by now.

Just found your great show . You describe science in such a calm and simplistic manner where a common minded person such as my self can understand.

From what I've read, these are not only smart and walk-away safe, they can be used to make our existing high level nuclear waste reduced to a half life of 300 years, instead of 10,000 years, which is better?

5:17 Correction: explosions following a nuclear meltdown are not nuclear reactions as you implied here. The Fukushima Daiichi accident was a hydrogen explosion. The Chernobyl explosion was prompt criticality and a steam explosion (and a second steam or hydrogen explosion) followed by the meltdown. The meltdown is never the dangerous part of a nuclear accident, but it is the part that ruins the machinery and makes further accidents likely.

Thankyou for this presentation. Modular molten salt reactors are a much more prospective solution to future energy needs, particularly for high temperature industrial processes, think: cement, bricks, metal refining, fertiliser, synthetic fuels, desalination etc, than nuclear fusion. Consequently it is deserving of as much or more investment as is going into fusion. Renewables with the necessary backup and levelling are also vital but the logistics of rolling them out at sufficient scale to do the job on their own is daunting. Roughly 1,000 wind turbines plus one large pumped storage system equals 1 nuclear plant. For Australia we will need about 80 times this by 2050. This is no longer a matter of economics, it is about survival. I write this looking out at what little I can see of Batemans Bay Australia, not long ago a pristine environment that has now been shrouded in thick smoke for over two months. The smoke cloud has circled the globe. There has been record heat and little or no rain for six months making fire control near impossible. Essentially the fires will end when there is nothing left to burn. There is an environmental catastrophe of global consequence playing out here, there is no time to waste addressing global heating. We need to use every shot in the locker to get green house gases under control and achieve zero emissions by 2050.

Very good presentation , thank you

Nice new graphics and another great video. Well done yet again.

"...as many of you remind me each week..." Oof.

Pitching thorium MSRs as a nuclear waste management solution will probably be the best way to push it through regulatory and media obstacles.

Love your presentations....very clear

really well done.

I don't know if MSFR will get a significant place in the energetic mix but as they are reactors with fast neutrons, they could be used for the transmutation of transuranic elements coming from PWR into shorter period's elements in order to manage them in historical time scale. A nice side is the possibility to reprocess continuously the molten salt mixture so that elements which are not transmuted are returned in the reactor and the elements which have been transmuted are put aside. Then, even if not economicaly relevant, they could be still usefull to manage the stockpile of nuclear wastes that we have accumulated.

I cringed pretty hard when he went on and on about how water moderators slow the reaction. The moderators remove some of the energy of the neutrons so they are able to induce another fission reaction. If they didn't remove that energy, the neutrons would not be able to induce another reaction and would have to opposite effect of what he is saying. It is the control rods that slow the rate of reaction by absorbing the neutrons so they are no longer able to induce another reaction.

This info. has been around for so many decades. A clear, concise voice here to explain Thorium reactor benefits. This should be made compulsory viewing for all school kids and Davos attendees.

Great video again. Very informative and thought provoking.

when that thing fell I got so scared because it was off time and i was NOT expecting that bass sound on my studio monitor headphones jeeeeeez

Good presentation Dave! Maybe Thorium has a place in the energy future, especially in China. I still think like Amory and Hunter Lovins though; energy savings are so easy , the negawatt revolution. LED bulbs take sips of juice, insulation and good doors lower heating and cooling pump demand, bicycles make short trips fun, many ways for industry and air travel to save. Solar, geothermal, other renewables can provide enough if we.go high efficiency.

Thank you for taking up this cause...

Excellent content. Thank you.

The reactors we have so far have killed a tiny fraction per MW than fossil fuel has due to pollution related hazards. Heavy water reactors such as CANDU work at pressures slightly above atmospheric which is far safer and a fourth generation design of CANDU is waiting to be built. We're going to be building one of the new reactor designs (LFTR, travelling wave, etc) anyway to deal with the current stock of nuclear waste as these designs can use them up leaving a tiny fraction behind.

3 naturally occurring isotopes of Uranium. 0.711% uranium-235, 99.284% uranium-238, and a trace of uranium-234 by weight (0.0055%).

Thanks for the vid!..answered a lot of my questions!

You nailed this!

I think that research and development of thorium reactors is important for the future of energy demands. I think when it comes to energy all options should be considered and developed to ensure energy security. 

Molten Salt Reactors can also be used to burn the waste created by water Reactors. Also these Reactors can be used to create carbon neutral gasoline and diesel from seawater.

I just love your videos

(14:50) The Chinese have already been working on various MSR designs for 9 years, picking up where the US left off after the MSRE was shut down in the 70's.

I hope they can crack the salt corrosion problem soon. Thorium reactors of some sort definitely seem like the best hope for the future by far. Definitely a whole lot better than anything we having going on in the renewable field.

"One proton circulating around the nucleus" ? I thought the proton was the nucleus and electrons circulated around the nucleus.

Excellent content, like always👌

This was well done! Thank you for sharing such interesting information.

Btw, amazing progress on your side of things as well! from a wooden shed to an animated virtual studio.. Looks slick! Well done! Keep these video's coming!

Greed will always outpace common sense

Thanks, you provide extremely timely and useful information. I love your content.

Thanks Dave, once again great video, and I love the new graphics, really topnotch ! MSR is one of my favourite subjects, next to solid state batteries. I hope there will be some breakthroughs real soon, like yesterday or so !

Thank you so much for this great video! This is by far my favorite subject and in my opinion the number one solution that’s the most overlooked. As you say it’s going to take some brave investors but over the long run this is by far the best solution to pollution as well as climate change! Too many people focus on just climate change (which is hrs for a lot of people to care about or wrap their minds around) and forget to mention that over a million people die every year as well as countless animals from fossil fuel pollution! Renewables are good but they aren’t better for the environment or our wallets than nuclear energy. We need a massive movement to change the public perception of nuclear energy. This is my number one issue and one of the many reasons I’m passionate about supporting Andrew Yang for president. He wants to invest 50B in these new thorium reactors which I think will be a huge jump start to getting this going. Thanks again! Love your channel 🤙

12:20 Greenland has TWO LTFR experiments!? Impressive!

GREAT video, as always.

Thanks sir for the great explanation

At the end you asked whether we should charge ahead and go forward with designing licensing certifying in building thorium plants or should we just see about going forward with the typical clean Renewables like solar wind Hydro, Etc and hydrogen. The fact of the matter is we need to do both! Excellent video! Thanks!

of course the real advantage isn't in the thorium itself, moreso it's that molten salt reactors which are the ideal application for the thorium fuel cycle, because: a) they do not need to be pressurized to prevent coolant vaporization b) they do not need extraneous competing systems to keep them at the right operating temperature c) they automatically homogenize the fuel mix through convection d) they allow removal of unwanted byproducts without needing to shut down via on-site chemical filtration e) molten salt does not dissociate into volatile, flammable gases when hit with ionizing radiation (unlike water which splits into hydrogen and oxygen) f) molten salt fuel can be instantly rendered inert by passively draining it from the fission optimized 'sweet spot' in the core g) if the reactor is damaged in any way, there is nothing in the process that would make it explode h) adding more thorium does not require expensive reprocessing, fabrication, or assembly; it is dissolved into the molten salt fuel i) thorium is incredibly cheap and plentiful, being a byproduct of rare earth mineral mining, and is about as common as lead j) before breeding, thorium is almost inert and not very toxic k) even without thorium, molten salt reactors can 'burn' our existing nuclear waste, REDUCING the amount of waste present in the world l) molten salt reactors are capable of 'burning' radioisotopic material far more completely, m) as a result, the waste that comes from a molten salt reactor is hazardous for a shorter amount of time, with less environmental effect, than the same quantity by mass of CONSUMER GRADE PLASTIC. n) Nuclear power is STILL the safest form of electricity in history, resulting in fewer deaths, and less emissions per gigawatt hour than ANY other form of energy - and *Molten Salt Reactors are **_even safer than that!_* bonus: with sufficietly abundant electricity to spare, we can actually AFFORD to 1. desalinate seawater for irrigation and drinking 2. grow unimaginable quantities of food using otherwise energy intensive aeroponics (a closed loop system that wastes almost NO water) 3. separate CO2 from seawater or even the atmosphere using electrolysis, thus sequestering the Carbon and making more Oxygen availble 4. pump floods out of flooded areas 5. transport people to safer places as sea levels rise and climates become less hospitable 6. filter and condition the air of our habitats 7. manufacture carbon neutral internal combustion fuels out of polluted air/water - usually too electricity intensive 8. run fusion reactors at a loss until we can figure them out the rest of the way 9. break down and recycle our organic/plastic waste using thermal depolymerization 10. sustain colonies on the moon and mars because there is THORIUM and SALT present at both locations, but no fossil fuels, insufficiently thick atmosphere for wind turbines, and sunlight availability shortfalls (sunlight shortfalls: lunar rotational period means it's nighttime for 14 earthweeks straight, sunlight so attenuated by the time it reaches mars that it takes 4x as much surface area to generate the same amount of power using photovoltaic cells on mars as it does on earth.) Thorium and Molten Salt Reactors are like rails and trains: they make a whole lot more sense when they are working *together.*

Excellent content, keep up the good work!

Wow - nice info.....Thank you!

3:35 "hydrogen having 1 proton flying around its nucleus" yeah, no. proton IS its nucleus, it doesn't fly around it.

We're investing in fusion, which is even harder, so definitely also invest in Thorium reactors.

Bro, you made a believer out of me! Great Lecture!!!

Thank you for this information. 👍

Well done. A few inaccuracies. However, they're of a technical nature, the correction of which wouldn't substantially enhance the presentation. As a former nuclear engineer and chemist who served on fleet ballistic missile submarines, I've been a proponent of nuclear energy since the late '70's. I've also long been a supporter of energy efficiency, as well as renewable and sustainable energy production, and distributed, smart grid technology. Since the release of research documentation on molten salt reactors conducted in the 1960's at Oak Ridge National Labs, I've supported the inclusion of MSR's in the "silver buckshot" that is the collective solution to avoid the worst effects of climate change. There is no silver bullet. Only silver bucket, and "green nuclear" absolutely requires increased R&D, as well as regulatory reform, in order to bring this technology to market.

It should be noted that the radioactive waste from a thorium reactor also has a lot of uses in nuclear medicine. In fact, there is going to be a dogfight of who gets the waste first, the nuclear medical industry or disused salt mines to store waste with a half-life of 350 years.

Nice Video Edit!

Great vid, as always, thanks!

11:55 I thought we were doomed but that’s a lot of facilities working to get this off the ground.

Calculate the EROI of renewables plus necessary seasonal storage. The energy return is lower than the energy needed to build that. That leaves us with nuclear. (The basic study on EROI is Weißbach)

Thanks for publishing this great content. You are really good at what you do.

Soo a few corrections to be made. 1. Three mile island wasn't a disaster, it was a near miss incident and the facility ran for decades after the incident. 2. Power reactors make plutonium as described but it isn't weapons grade as they make two other forms of plutonium that are either non fissile or fission spontaneously. To get weapons grade material you have to remove the Plutonium and its progenitors as specific time intervals (just the same as you can do with U233.) 3. All reactors have control rods that throttle and can completely stop fission reactions. It's a needed capability for control, safety and is a requirement to allow things like refueling and maintenance. 4. U238 is needed in LFTR to dilute the amount of U233 made in fission to below weapons grade (Yes U233 is a weapons grade material and can be made so rather easily in a LFTR.) There is another isotope of uranium (U232) that can also be used to prevent U233 from being weapons grade, but it's always better to err to the side of caution (plus you get a bit of power from fissioning the bred plutonium.) 5. There is no major benefit of going with a Thorium-Uranium Cycle over a Uranium-Plutonium cycle aside from using a more plentiful fuel source. Uranium-Plutonium fuel cycle reactors (fast breeder reactors) can actually use the Thorium cycle quite easily and can have the same short (if not less so) lived waste.

3:37 with only one proton flying around its nucleus. The proton is the nucleus. An electron would be flying around.

0:53 RIP Headphone users

Most people don't realise that creating power and creating weapons-grade material doesn't go together. It's not just what material you do have but also which ones you don't have. This means according to what I can find on the subject and with having admittedly limited knowledge on the subject that because you have to be very precise with the enrichment process it's not feasible to create weapons-grade plutonium in the current power generating reactors we have now. This is why it is done in research reactors that don't generate power where it can be tightly controlled in a purpose-built reactor.

great video

"There was a problem somewhere in the cooling system that caused a catastrophic failure in the Chernobyl reactor". - That's a way too vague! I beg people to do more research before speaking oversimplifications that I've heard plenty of times. In fact, there was a combination of factors in this incident. When reactor operators were carrying out a safety test on the plant's turbine generators, they didn't watch out for steam voids to be formed in the reactor’s cooling water. That caused a positive void effect like when you press your car's pedal to the maximum. The effect caused the fission to speed up and so the heat inside the reactor increased to more than 300 million watts in a few seconds. When the steam and hydrogen exploded it destroyed the reactor. A graphite fire inside, in the core, blew out radioactive waste outside. The incident happened mostly due to the negligence of the reactor operators and those who asked them to implement it despite the reactor was malfunctioning at the time and instead, they should have shut it down.

Errr no... the moderator in a enriched uranium reactor actually promotes fission, as slow neutrons are more easily captured by your U235, this is not just a nip pick because it means that if you lose your water fission will stop. You will still have the decay heat and that will still lead to a meltdown, but within a second of fission ending you will be down to 10% of the thermal output, and within 8 hours you will be at less than 1% which all modern reactors are capable of passively getting rid of that heat. This means you cannot have a Chernobyl like disaster where the reactor went briefly prompt critical, as Russian reactor design used graphite as a moderator which is a much better moderator than water which doesn't capture any neutrons-where as water does-so when the water got really really hot that the water started to bubble and they had removed almost all of the control rods, so the vacuums bubbles caused meant that the water was not absorbing any neutrons and the only moderator was the graphite. So the fission rate went up in an exponential curve. Where as in a pure water moderated reactor if you got bubbles in the water is would actually decrease the fission rate. Second problem was that the Russian style reactors at the time did not have a containment building, which all other reactors did even at the time, so the radioactive materiel was allowed to escape unabated. With Fukishima, the problem was also partially to do with the containment, they used water in a vessel to condense the steam, but it didn't work as well as designed, and the containment area was insufficient passively contain the steam given off by the reactor where as most containment building are just big enough to contain the steam. Also it is thought that they waited to long to release the pressure which overloaded the hardened filter, which if they hadn't have waited as long it would have filtered out the radioactive materials. Three Mile Island was also a design issue, where a plate meant as a safety feature to enable a negative temperature coefficient-meaning the hotter the reactor the lower the fission rate-got stuck in a way which stopped coolant getting to the reactor, it was a last minute addition... So in all cases it was a design issue which wont be made again, although I am all for replacing water as the coolant with salt or at least something like salt which doesn't need to be pressurised at high temperatures.

Mapping out the problems and shining light on setbacks are the way forward. Solve what you can, and inform future scientists as to the obstacles involved in projects like these.

always enjoy you programs :0)

Have you looked at the Moltex Stable Salt Reactor? It doesn’t require the molten salt to be pumped and it never leaves the reactor vessel thus simplifying the design and reducing the problem of corrosion. It can take spent nuclear fuel and the byproducts I believe are radioactive for 100s rather than 1000s of years. They are currently building a demonstration reactor with New Brunswick power in Canada.

Benefits of nuclear in general: -Very safe compared to fossil fuels (~0.07 deaths per terrawat hour) -Low lifecycle carbon emissions on par with wind at 12gC02/kwh -Absolutely miniscule land requirements relative to other energy sources. -Low material throughput compared to other energy sources -Extremely reliable baseload power. Non weather dependant -Can scale with increased demand if it gets the proper backing like it did in france -Very small waste stream making it possible to manage waste with the highest standards. Spent fuel is packaged into thick, steel reinforced concrete casks after cooling down for ~3 years which are capable of withstanding high speed collisions with a train and burning in kerosine for hours without any radiological release. Furthermore spent fuel still contains uranium and can be used in fast breeder reactors making it a valuable resource for the future. Overall just a no brainer for humanity during this incredibly dangerous period of anthropogenic climate change

Great discussions on a potentially massive future of energy ! Very important subject of Thorium . I have been waiting for this development but have learned to be patient. Great educational video! Remain optimistic. Best regards.

Thanks for making a good video promoting MSR.

It would be interesting to hear what you have to say about the problem with nuclear reactors versus sea level rise. We're already in trouble given that it takes decades to properly decommission reactors. We're possibly faced with hundreds of Fukushimas if we aren't decommissioned before waters rise to dangerous levels.

There is one big problem with thorium that nobody ever mentions - it does not readily form economic deposits. Although it is more abundant in the crust (12 ppm) than uranium (4 ppm) you can't mine these elements at those levels. The word "abundant" is unfortunate, as it implies "plentiful" which they are not. There needs to be a geological process to concentrate an element to a point where it can be extracted, same as with iron, lead, copper and gold etc.. This is then a matter of chemistry and economics to extract the elements or the oxides as required. Uranium is chemically mobile in oxygenated water and there are at least 14 types of deposits that can be formed, so some uranium can be found in almost every country. Not so with thorium, there are only two types of deposits, pegmatites and monazite sands. India has unique and extensive monazite deposits and relatively little uranium, which is why they are leaders in thorium reactors. Europe, Australia and N. America have plenty of uranium deposits but few thorium ones. Thorium costs a lot more than uranium as a result. Security of supply is another issue, e.g. if your supplier turns out not to be so friendly in the future.

Thank You

You missed three other benefits of Thorium MSRs. 1- Thorium is also a byproduct of coal mining and so there are thousands of tonnes of Thorium already available, without the need for further mining. 2- Because the traditional Uranium-Plutonium cycle reactors only actually use a relatively small percentage of the fuel in the fuel rods (hence all the waste), there is still plenty left available, which can be put back into Thorium reactors to kick start the fission reactions. Which means that Thorium reactors can actually clean up the huge stockpiles of nuclear waste materials currently being stored for tens of thousands of years. 3- Thorium mining (when it becomes necessary) uses the same methods and equipment as coal mining and so can offer new employment opportunities for coal miners to transition to.

You can't run the entire grid reliably off solar and wind. Way too unreliable with peaks and valleys. Thorium would be ideal, they actually had one running I think at oak ridge back in the 60s. They would shut it down on the weekends and fire it back up on Mondays.... much safer. I think it true the reason for Uranium was the weapons aspect. Lot of smart people on this, I would venture one of them will hit on a way to get this commercially viable. I saw an article that just China has about 1,000 people working on this. First time I heard "we have 10 years to fix this" was in 1988 from James Hansen.

2:20 "we all know about nuclear waste and Hiroshima and Nagasaki and meltdowns" No we don't and that's the problem. Most people are completely ignorant about nuclear power, its safety, and the realities of nuclear waste. That you've even mentioned atom bombs in the same sentence as commercial fission derived power and most people won't see that as inappropriate shows the problem.

The first commercial operated molten salt reactor is probably only 5 to 10 years away. A company called Thorcon seems to be closest to reach this goal. Already back in the Oak Ridge experiment did the use Hastleoy n alloy to combat corrosion at high temperatures. Though wind power and solar power can be useful at small scale projects they can not compete thorium reactors on a larger scale. Besides the wast head from the reactor can be used to run desalination plants and large scale hydrogen production. The hydrogen can again be used to run mobile units like cars and even planes.

Great shots of the Domes Beach BONUS reactor, here in Rincon, PR.

Wind, solar, hydro and hydrogen (and by that I mean hydrogen gas made by electrolysis powered by surplus wind and solar energy) will make up the lion's share of the energy transition. Hydrogen is particularly attractive for cold climates considering its viability for Combined Heat and Power. The hydrogen-to-energy conversion efficiency might be ~65% if it's just electricity but it goes up to 85% when heat is also utilized. Another aspect that makes green hydrogen elegant is that it could be used as a chemical feedstock. Examples include the direct reduction of iron ore for making steel (still in the research stages), production of ammonia in the conventional Haber-Bosch process and the production of methanol -- two key commodity chemicals. This would lead to the displacement of coal, oil and gas on different fronts besides for energy.

Thorium is a nice technology. I'm not sure we can get it going fast enough to be a major part of carbon reduction. The most interesting thing to me that the higher temperature of molten salt enables is direct-air capture synthetic fuels. So you take CO2 out of the atmosphere, add in some hydrogen, and a iron or nickle catalyst and it makes alkalies (basically gas). You could tune the process to make gasoline/petrol and feed it into our current transportation infrastructure for mostly carbon neutral transportation. The hydrogen is somewhat difficult to come, energy wise, by but the energy of the reactor can help with that too. You could do this very far away from people reducing the risks of contamination. You can also feed the high level waste from traditional light water reactors into thorium reactors. You end up transmuting the long lived actinide into the same shorter lived ones that the thorium cycle usually produces. So several good things in one swoop.

Nice work as always. What sets you apart is your willingness to consider most ideas.

Yeay! Thank you for this video :)

torium seems amazing I personally think that's the way forward that is the best option the ultimate is nuclear fusion but but they will never get there

I was thinking... The amount of money invested in the research could be spent on renewable energy now and have our problem solved in 2y time. After that we could then spend on thorium so we can generate a surplus to get into other things like better transportation and outer space traveling.

Very interesting!!

Yes thank you for talking about thorium

OK. So the sun doesn't always shine, and the wind doesn't always blow, but King Canute will tell you that the tide ALWAYS comes in and goes out. It's a predictable known quantity, and how many thousands of miles of coastline are there where tidal generators could be installed safely with little impact on the environment? www.emec.org.uk/marine-energy/tidal-devices/

How about doing a video on the downsides of wind and solar energy? From what I read, combined they only currently supply 5% of the world's energy. Wind turbines and solar panels are constantly exposed to the elements such as rain, hail, snow, high temps, freezing temps, high winds, no wind, clouds, storms, darkness, etc. There are groups complaining that turbines are killing millions of bats and birds, some endangered species. To supply needed energy, so many wind turbines will be have to be built it will blight the landscape. New power lines and substations will have to be built. Warehouses full of batteries to store excess power will have to be built. I've also heard other groups complain that to build turbines and panels and batteries, toxic metals have to be mined and manufactured. It is not a simple process to convert to renewables to replace fossil fuels, though the media and certain politicians make it seem so. They have to consider that they could be creating a "boondoggle."

At 0.53 you scared the sh!t out of me! My speakers were almost at max volume! :D

We plow on with both strategies because diversity = more options = stability in the face of unexpected events. There's also the thing about making all your new energy systems weather based sources because you're worried the weather is getting unpredictable and extreme. "Hey, honey, I'm worried someone's going to break in to our house so let's make sure all our friends are ex-cons." Also, molten salt works on the Moon or Mars without wasting water.