@@kevinclark2813plenty of people already do. France itself is mostly nuclear and the US and Germany have quite a few as well. There is no issue living nearby
@@kevinclark2813 Actually I would very much like to, as nuclear power plants tend to provide very stable reliable well paid jobs which is kinda something nowdays.
In france, the most common molten salt design use NaCl (yeah table salt) to dissolve U238 and plutonium 239. The corrosion issue is resolved through ceramics coating. working with a fast spectrum vastly reduces the transUranic generation, while allowing to work with used Mox fuel. It also allows to work as a burner for long life waste.
Using a flouride salt instead of NaCl adds a layer of security since a breakage of the reactor will let the fuel solidify into rocks not dissolvable in water. The fast spectrum is in itself a technological challenge. At the very least it means you cannot make a small compact reactor, since the size of the fuel and blanket salt necessary to sustain the chain reaction and breeding increase by a lot.
@@migBdk Uranium chloride is solid or liquid if molten or dissolved in water. Uranium fluoride is gas. Solid or liquid are easier to handle than gas in case of accident.
That's only a test reactor. Notice they never even talked of building power plants with that design... Perhaps it did not work as well as you think it did. There have been dozens of different designs tried as test reactors. Most of them show that other designs are known to work better.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
Another thing is, that all the liquid salts inside and outside the reactor are insanely corrosive at that temperatures. Although there are materials to deal with that, it remains a big headache when it comes to maintenance since every part of the system is contaminated, making any work on the system as a whole a pretty hazardous adventure.
Glad to see someone mention this in the comments. It's much more difficult than the theoretical science makes it out to be. There is much more practicality in simply updating water cooled/moderated reactors like we are seeing with Small Modular Reactors, which are proven to actually be functional, safe, and more affordable.
Copenhagen has claimed that they have solved the corrosion problem by eliminating contaminents in the fuel. They have been running Lithium Fluoride salts through their process loops for years with minimum corrosion problems.
The chemical process for Kirks LFTR specifically (which is what we're talking about here) does NOT look like what you describe here. There is no fluorine injection, it's basically electrolysis. You put a relatively small voltage across and Protactinium moves from one salt into the other salt while the other electrode is made from Thorium which by this electrolysis dissolves into the salt to replace the Protactinium. The two salts are in separate tanks connected by liquid Bismuth at the bottom which acts as one of the electrodes and allows the Protactinium to travel from one salt to the other. That purely chemical process is possible too like you say but I believe the electrochemistry wins out by simplicity and lack of maintenance needed. The only parts involved are a liquid metal which is not spent and being liquid no structural damage and the Thorium electrode which is destroyed but that is your refuelling process. The only thing you really need to worry about is keeping the voltage of the process at the right level which is in the modern day VERY easy to do. If you only use the voltage which corresponds to the binding energy of Protactinium you only pull out Protactinium, if you use a higher voltage you pull out things with higher binding energy too. The downside is that the process is probably a LOT slower than the purely chemical approach but should be easily able to keep up with the reactor. Flibe Energy RU-vid channel has a nice introduction video of the "Thorium Fuel Cycle"
This won't get enough attention. Every time someone makes the argument against LFTR it feels like they're parroting things they hear from lobbyists instead of doing research and reporting their findings, you know, the scientific method. "But it will be hard, and we can't make good bombs" is the reasoning that will ensure China & India get it working before we do. We'd rather burn platinum than make affordable, reliable energy that has beneficial byproducts like other fuels we need here and in space. Industry doesn't see the big picture if it doesn't generate profit this quarter.
this is why i just ignore most videos about thorium other than 3 hour presentations by people who actually know almost nobody talks about this they just do some Wikipedia search and make a 10 minute video for views its extremely infuriating but oh well china will sell us back our own technology by 2030
@@cpt_bill366 If we can pop energy out like jelly beans...anywhere in the world... and above it or below the sea... which is the potential here, the reason for all these wars.... and bombs largely goes away. We're just left with the megalomaniacs... and we can develop a pill for that.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
ENGINEER HERE{ The real technical problem that is rarely being mentioned is operational experience with Molten Salt Reactors. Being honest this was something I had missed until it was pointed out recently by James Krellenstein on an interview he did with Decoupled Media here on YT. After they did the MSR experiment at Oak Ridge in Tennessee back in the late 1960s and Early 1970s the entire MSR concept basically was shelved with zero work being done until Kirk Sorenson re-discovered it as part of a project he was doing looking at powering a Lunar base. With the exception of nuclear fusion we literally have millions of hours of operational and maintenance time with all the other forms of nuclear power - gas cooled, liquid metal cooled, pressure water, CANDU.... etc. By comparison we have almost nothing with respect to any of the molten salt types. None of them were ever put into service so NOBODY actually knows what the ongoing operational or maintenance issues actually are. This is one of the most fundamental issues with all technologies. Its one thing to build something its another thing to operate it and yet another thing to maintain it AND EVERY technology goes through a learning phase that never really ends. Think about how much experience we now have with cars and aeroplanes and other technologies.
Wasn't one of the reasons MSR's were shelved (and very quickly, too) was because they couldn't produce weapons grade uranium which the government could use?
Sure but it boils down to that we can't have good, safe, cheap nuclear power because we don't have good, safe, cheap nuclear power. We did have Oak Ridge though and I think the results from that are very promising. China is also building one so I have hope that we will finally see what Thorium can do.
@@cas1652 As an engineer I have to correct or at least clarify your main claims that we can't have good, safe, cheap nuclear power. 1) GOOD as compared to what? because every type of power we use has a number in inescapable side effects. Solar panels are great once they are made but making them is toxic and disposing of spent cells is near impossible. Like nuclear we still haven't found a way to deal with the waste. 2) SAFE as compare to what? Because if you are going to compare nuclear to coal then the fatality rates make coal one of the most lethal substances ever known. Coal mines are some of the most dangerous places any person can work. By comparison do you know how many people have died from nuclear power or nuclear power accidents? 3) CHEAP again compared to what? Yes nuclear is damn expensive to construct but once built its operating costs are quite low because it doesn't require a lot of fuel in terms of mass. Don't get me wrong there are some serious issues with nuclear the most obvious being what to do after wards. Other then the fuel the power stations themselves don't last for ever and cleaning up those sites has proven to be incredibly expensive. *BUT I'D ADD cleaning up so many other industrial sites ahs also been incredibly expensive. PLUS we have barely begun to start cleaning up many of the incredibly toxic sites built in the post WW2 era.* I'm Australian and did you know that Sydney harbour one of our great tourist spots is so toxic that NOBODY is allowed to eat any of the fish or seafood in it. Its all due to a Phillips factory that nobody knew was dumping stuff into the ground water system. I'm not a great fan of nuclear but I also accept we need a a reliable bulk energy system that can back up the renewable systems people want. Sorry but renewables just can't do everything, that's just a fantasy. Plus it will take decades to get all that we need installed. Nuclear is like so many other things. It can be done safely, reliably and cost effectively. THE PROBLEM is the people who's only interest is milking as much money is possible from it. *HAVE YOU SEEN all the crap at Boeing?* That sort of corporate stupidity is rampant through the engineering industries. That's the sort of stupidity that scares me way more than nuclear anything because they DO NOT CARE about the consequences other people have to deal with. That's what you should be calling out - stupid ridiculous corporate greed because its the *REAL PROBLEM.*
@@tonywilson4713 i think i agree with. I just think Thorium will be (even?) better than we have now. 1) good: when the corrosion issues are solved, I expect Thorium to be easier and faster to build 2) safe: liquid salt reactors can be passively safe unlike contemporary designs that rely on active cooling with diesel generators in an emergency 3) cheap: thorium is much cheaper then uranium, both in fuel costs and for the nuclear waste
@@cas1652 I'd agree with all 3 of those points. There's just one major issue with thorium, but it is solvable. RIGHT NOW we have effectively zero experience with Thorium as well as with using MSRs long term. There's a channel called Decouple Media. I don't always agree with either the host or some of the people he has on because like so many of the pro-nuclear crowd they aren't engineers and don't understand what these issues mean or what it takes to deal with them. An exception to that is a guy named James Krellenstein who he's had on a number of times. Jame's family has been involved in the Canadian nuclear industry for decades. So there's a wealth of experience behind what he explains. He's spoken about the pro's and cons of all the different types including CANDU, MSRs and MSRs. A really important interview he gave was on Uranium enrichment. He went through the whole history and why there's now a major issue in that area with capacity. America RIGHT NOW can't even supply its own needs and has to buy enriched Uranium from the Russians. the only enrichment plant in America isn't even owned by Americans its owned by a British, German and Dutch conglomerate. *NOBODY else is even speaking about this stuff, which find even more amazing.* Not even all the pro nuclear clowns are talking about it. NONE of them are saying anything like: _"To get the nuclear industry going we need more mines and more enrichment facilities and better waste disposal."_ I think we will need thorium to help boost the baseload power supply and the sooner we get on and sort it out the better *BUT ALMOST NO ONE IS SAYING THAT.* This is the sort of thing that *as an engineer* I find truly aggravating. There's all these clowns who will never have to do a damn thing DEMANDING people like me solve these f*cking issues for them. Worse they will probably take credit when we do solve these issues.
this video is a propaganda video with zero real input other than plz stop regulating my industry with shit out of Ayn rand's novel like 'oh those Bad actors'? Is this video a joke or wtf
I literally was looking for your channel yesterday to see if you had posted any new cool videos, and I was so sad there hadn't been for a year. BUT TODAY HE HAS RETURNED, WE HAVE BEEN BLESSED
He has been using his time on another channel of his ( don't remember what is called ) I thought he had abandoned us. Not sure what to think of it. Edit: It's called "Bleak Science"
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
You forgot to mention that you can run a lifter like molten salt reactor for urainium also.You can pretty much use any fissile or fertile material in there.
Yes, ThorCon plan to use a mixture of 235U and thorium, so the thorium does not turn it into a real breeder it just reduce the time needed before refuelling.
the problem is it's too easily modified to be a breeder. it technically is a modified breeder in the first place. no way the IAEA is allowing that lmao. @@migBdk
@@seanprice7645 this isn't correct. ThorCon's design is not a modified breeder at all, it's a uranium burner to which thorium is added. You could do this with *any* nuclear power plant: just replace some of the U238 with Th232. In any case this seems a moot point. Last time I heard, ThorCon have been looking away from using thorium because they can't get the necessary fuel: it's just easier and simplier to run with standard low-enriched-uranium. This turns out to be true for almost *any* design that uses thorium: it's just easier and cheaper to use uranium. Which is why there is very little real interest (i.e. outside of the internet) in using thorium in any timescale anyone cares about.
CANDU reactors, a design from the 60's, use non-enriched uranium for fuel currently, and are perfectly cable of the Thorium breeding cycle and fuel re-processing with stuff like MOX cycles.
Which is oen reason they are not looking closely at Thorium yet, they are more interested is using waste fuel from older nuclear plants before they start looking at new fuel types.
So to make this reactor work, you need a highly radioactive material, combined with a highly corrosive material, at high temperature, mixing with another pretty radioactive and corrosive material, also at high temperature, and you need to remove another material from all of this otherwise the system fails. And then to top it all off you have to get the government involved. Suddenly it all makes sense why this tech has been theoretical for so long.
It is an unfair characterisation of the technology. First, every reactor uses radioactive material, which gets hot, and even more radioactive during operation. Corrosion happens in every industry including the current PWRs. That is being said water is actually more corrosive than salt I see a lot of confusion about this. The removing of materials breaks down to realtively simple chemical steps. I see, also, not a lot of ppl knows that nuclear fuel reprocessing happens in salts anyway, so unless you prefer throwing away 95-96% of the useful fuel as "high level nuclear waste" that no one wants in their backyard or even under their mountain you already on the side of doing this sort of chemistry on our spent fuels. This proposal merely means they cut out the fabrication step and do reprocessing in situ. "And then to top it all off you have to get the government involved" so does in case of building highways, fight crime, catastrope relief, provide security, education, healthcare, pension etc. I don't like the goverment not a tiny bit more than you, but ppl tend to forget what we gain by not living in a complete anarchy. "Suddenly it all makes sense why this tech has been theoretical for so long." The two thing correlates. If it has been pursued when it was first conceived, we would already either perfected or discarded the technology by now.
Chinese and indian researcher is quite advanced in thorium tech. India will commission its Prototype Fast breeder reactor in 2024 for our 2nd stage of nuclear programme. In third stage we intend to using Thorium which is present in abundant supply in India instead of nuclear fuel which is imported
@@stickynorth India is not lagging behind in terms of thorium reactor development, but rather pursuing a different and more comprehensive approach than China. India’s thorium programme is based on decades of research and experience, and has the potential to revolutionise the global nuclear energy scenario.
At around 5 minutes, it was mentioned it takes a month to refuel a power plant after 18 months of usage... Depending on the plant, the outage might only last less than a week, with refueling only taking a few days. Other maintenance is way more time consuming in general, from my experience. Usually during refueling all the other work is done, too, taking up most of the outage time
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
Coming as someone who works with typical U-235 LWRs, my biggest question with Thorium is what do you do to start back up the plant when it inevitably shuts down? You can't run it forever, equipment (especially pumps) will need maintenance overhauls at some point or some sensor fails and brings you offline. Is molten salt really going to allowed to solidify in the piping? If so how will you unblock these solid masses of salt to get flow again? I assume a massive amount of heat tracing but haven't seen a commercially viable answer to this.
Just spitballing here, but the nice thing about modular reactors is you can have more than one. So it seems plausible that you could have one shut down for maintenance while others continue to operate.
Run the salt lines inside larger pipe? It's extra containment, and When plant running such could maybe serve as heat exchanger. To warm up salt... instead of feeding water in...feed in steam. Nb unlike water, the proposed molten salts are likely to behave as most materials do and and contract on freezing. Lower chance of burst pipes. And for horizontal runs...there'll likely be a small volume of pipe left unfilled by frozen salt, along which hot salt would be able to flow during a restart.
It's a relatively short circuit and limited quantities of fuel, and the heat is about 400*c to keep the salt liquid, no big deal, if one pump stops I guess you can have a secondary parallel circuit implemented as a back up while you repair the main one. We are dealing here with cheap materials at atmospheric pressures.
A lot of them are astroturfed by Fossil and adjacent companies anyway. I bet these so-called "green activists" probably couldn't even tell you the real answer to what would be the best course of action to solve the climate crisis - which is to cut out consumption of underground carbon (fossil fuels) for electricity.
Imagine Greenpeace actually does what their name indicates and we actively build nuclear reactors in the past 20 years. We'd have solved the majority of CO2 from electricity by now.
YESSS!!!! AN ACTUALLY VIDEO UPDATE AGAIN! I know these videos are expensive to produce subject zero but I love and im very happy you made another of these its been a while sense u uploaded here!
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
The fundamental problem with LFTRs is the same as what killed all previous attempts to make breeder reactors, namely proliferation. Breeders naturally produce weapon's grade material, and with the chemical separation on these thorium reactors it's even worse, because you essentially have pure U233 on tap. Thorium fanboys have long claimed that U232 poisoning prevents this, but this ignores the enormous difference in halflife, which allows the U232 to simply be skimmed off before the Pa233 -> U233 decay has barely even started.
"Skimmed off". You're funny. You skimmed over how hard it is to do just that. Trying to separate nearly identical atoms with only a single neutron weight difference. At best breeder reactors won't get you more than 40%-60% purity. Way south of fissile capable. Gotta hit 92% for the boom. Getting the last six percent takes the most herculean efforts.
"Skimmed off". You're funny. You skimmed over how hard it is to do just that. Trying to separate nearly identical atoms with only a single neutron weight difference. At best breeder reactors won't get you more than 40%-60% purity. Way south of fissile capable. Gotta hit 92% for the boom. Getting the last six percent takes the most herculean efforts.
@@brianhirt5027 There is no need to separate them by weight. Stop repeating that myth. I'm talking about the CHEMICAL separation of U from Pa, which is something a LFTR _already does_ during normal operation. Because Pa232 has a 20.4x shorter halflife than Pa233, 99.99993% is already long gone by the the time that merely _half_ of the U233 is done processing.
@@Dayanto Go argue with Wikipedia & the NRC about the physics. I'm sure they'll be appropriately impressed. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons-grade_nuclear_material
@@brianhirt5027 You separate the U232 from the PA233 before the PA233 decays into U233. Just wait a few months and less than one part per BILLION of PA232 would remain and the PA233 would be down to about 1/8 the original. At that point, very simple chemical separation would allow you to easily produce weapons grade material superior to plutonium. Dumbass.
New to the channel and your voice was so nice and clean, i started getting paranoid about ai voice bs. Went through your archive to make sure, and i gotta applaud your consistency of narration, while also improving in your oration
Shutting down a conventional rod reactor every 18 months isn't as bad as having to replace flow structures in a molten salt reactor sometimes as often as every 200 days. The cool thing about water being the moving part in conventional reactors is that unless things go way way off the rails the water is stupid safe and doesn't tear up the pipes. Molten salt reactors just add an absurd step of ALSO moving the fuel around. If you think liquid salt fuel that is liquified by the radioactive fissile action internally is somehow going to "cool off" when it isn't moving through a cooling system or especially if the cooling system fails and you end up with elephant feet inside the reactor system I'll be more than happy to take seed money for my new outlet expander that doubles the amount of power available from 15A to 30A on a conventional household outlet!
As pointed out by LFTR advocate Kirk Sorenson, the current, conventional Cro-Magnon technology reactors work on a razor/razor blade profit model. The money is not made by building the plant. It is made by supplying the custom fuel elements/modules. Thus, I will extend that point to say that there is a lobby against reactors like LFTRs where the "fuel elements" can be supplied in drums and/or bags that anyone can make and are not proprietary. Thus, I predict that thorium reactors will originate in China where there isn't a lobby against that.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant in China has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
The fact that the half life of Pa233 is about 10 times longer than Np239 means that breeding enough fuel for another reactor takes about 10 times longer than a U238 fast breeder reactor. India started a project to have the country running on Thorium. They estimated it would take about 70 years to get a full fleet of nuclear reactors running on the Thorium cycle. That was 50 years ago and they're still in the early stages. In the UK Rolls-Royce estimated it would take 200 years to breed enough U233 from Th232 to run the country on Thorium. The time it takes to breed enough U233 from Th232 is the biggest problem.
You start with some U235 in the mix, within 90-120 days, you’ve bred enough U233 to sustain the reaction, and you always introduce new Th232 to keep the breeding going. With the 160KY half-life of U233, you can extract/add U233 in the fuel mix as needed. The burnup rate can exceed 90% because the fuel is constantly being “reprocessed”. So, not only is Th232 more abundant in nature, you can use nearly 100% of it, unlike Uranium. Yes, it’s tricky to keep processing the fuel to remove undesirable isotopes and reintroduce desired ones, but the benefits are huge.
@@geoffstrickler "Burn up" doesn't make sense to me in this context, as we're not talking about a fixed amount of fuel, unlike solid fueled reactors. I think you'll find the majority of potential benefits are the result of MSR generally, not Th specifically. Whether there are potentially "huge" benefits to use of the Th cycle is dependent on where in the world you are. If you have lots of Th and little to no U, then the benefit is obvious. If not, then much less so.
@@richardbaird1452 you’d be wrong about that. Th232 is one of the few isotopes suitable for a “breeder” reactor. As for worldwide availability, Thorium is widely available in basically every country, and is 4x as abundant as uranium. Uranium deposits are limited to a few countries and seawater (low densities so extremely expensive to extract). So, everything you wrong is incorrect.
The biggest problem is gonna be cost. Uranium NPPs already struggle on the market due to their high costs, even in countries that can mine their own Uranium (USA) and Thorium NPPs are going to be even more expensive.
Good to see you back Sir😄. Try to keep animations simple & easy to render in order to make your production process faster and focus more on the core topic of the video sir. We would love to see more from you🙂.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
Goddamn man, it's been so long since you posted I was worried you got shipped off to the front. It's good you're back, I love yr vids! Do whatcha gotta do homie and take care of yourself.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
Thanks for the Thorium review, good to see your video. Material Science has come a long way, though I understand maintance on a corrosive system like that will be problematic. I hope it comes about some day, would be nice to have safer energy being produced, at least until we figure out how to tap Zero Point energy like the other cool fantasy aliens do....
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
There are two technologies involved here. 1. A Thorium breeder reactor and 2. a molten salt reactor. The combination (if scientific challenges are met, like the corrosion problem etc.) is in theory awesome, but a molten salt reactor, fuelled with Uranium is so much more efficient than a traditional one (water cooled under pressure), that you could fuel them with nuclear waste (plenty of it available), greatly reducing the waste in volume, as well as reducing the time you have to store it safely. So maybe, we could build some molten salt reactors and in time, add the breeder-unit and switch to Thorium later.
You realize the US had already pioneered Thorium reactor technology on the USS Seawolf(SSN-575)? The main reason why Admiral Rickover rejected it was that it never delivered on the claims. Further, it was an accident waiting to happen should sea water contact the internal components.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
I know right! Like he thinks there have been 3 Chernobyl incidents, 5 Fukushima incidents, and that Three Mile Island was an actual accident and has happened at least twice.
Indeed. There is a reason why the IAEA takes its cues from US Navy Nuclear Program. Thanks to Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, there has NEVER been a reactor related accident.
20 years from now a factory in China will be shipping small Thorium reactor power plants every month. 10 years later, the thorium power generation market will drive out all other types of power plants and electricity & heat will be half current prices.
The major hurdle is money, those that stand to loose their monopoly and those that are funded by the same, through lobbyists. If something doesn’t make sense, always follow the money. Politicians are the winners and humanity is the loser
Partially correct: China approved building a 2 MWthermal thorium molten salt reactor (MSR) 3-4 years prior to last year. It started up in August 2023. It is about 1/4th the size of the Oak Creek test MSR reactor of the 1960's. The key purpose is to see if we now have a suitable "super-alloy" along with a side stream chemical separation process that works well enough to control the corrosion rate to an acceptable level that would allow construction of a future 40+ year operating life power plant reactor in the future. It will be many years before we know the answer to that question. The Oak Creek MSR reactor had a huge issue with corrosion as the daughter products from splitting atoms and the chemical compounds they form are extremely corrosive. The key reason there was never a 2nd generation MSR test reactor was that no known alloy of the day could withstand the corrosion rate of the "in use" circulating molten salt mixture.
"what about energy loss from the dissipation of heat?" The heat goes into making electricity. The laws of thermodynamics mean that if the difference between input and output temperatures is large, then the efficiency of power generation is greater. So very high temperatures are a benefit. You just have to make sure that there's a lot of insulation on the pipes between the reactor and the turbines generating electricity so you don't waste all that heat. Also the high temperature means you can use the Sulphur-Iodine cycle to make hydrogen more efficiently than converting heat into electricity and then using the electricity to electrolyse water.
A little before 7.0 minutes, you said “the governments are not in the business of solving the problems.”. It is so true for most of the countries, including the developed countries.👍
Tbf it does also kind of go against the grain of some newer reactor designs, a lot of which are increasinly implementing inherent safety designs and focus on being more simple to build and modular. Thorium has potential, but needs a lot to get going when any development in the nuclear industry apart faces huge scepticism and a hugely uphill battle on all fronts. If China is investing into them, they could set about the base level knowledge and supply chains that let it spread a bit more. Whether or not it's ideal, China is one of the few countries now making advancement in Nuclear power. Doubtful if this will result in positive effects on approval of the technology, seems more likely it will end up as just another way to demonise it counterfactually. Also, to be fair an "infinite fuel cycle" as Thorium could feasibly do failed in the original nuclear rennaisance, although with Thorium it's self-contained within the reactor, it relies on a great deal of ambition and confidence in the future of the technology.
Note that China has ordered 6 more Westinghouse AP-1000 reactors (nominal 1150-1200 MWe) beacause the 4 AP-1000 units they built are running better and more efficient than their own most current designed nuclear power plants. Perhaps the west still knows some things that the Chinese does not know about nuclear power plants.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
Why all the pipping?, only what is deteriorated, and this is a technology that requires only cheap alloys and work at atmospheric pressure, so it's cheap and easy to replace. And to keep the heat at 400* in a small circuit is not a big deal.
@@WilhelmGuggisberg Not sure about the cheapness of the alloys. While the issue being addressed is different (i.e. pressure for LWR and corrosion resistance and chemical induced fatigue for MSR), the materials for the MSR are still fairly exotic and therefore relatively expensive, at least so far. The cheap and east to replace part is also questionable, as the big difference in repair costs is whether the particular pipe/part has been directly exposed to fuel/radiation or not, regardless of the reactor type. One of the issues with traditional MSR designs is fuel and/or fission products plating out on piping. Some designs plan for sacrificing all the fuel contact parts on fairly short timeframes kind of like cladding is sacrificed in traditional solid fuel reactors to address this, others have more elaborate schemes. As far as all the parts/piping needing to be kept at high temp, that is only when running. If the reactor is shutdown for repair, the fuel salt would be drained away, allowing the entire active part of the reactor to cool without significant issues. After repair, you heat it up again prior to reintroducing the fuel. Of course if the part being repaired/replaced has been in contact with fuel salts, the cost just spiked significantly.
The biggest problem with Thorium you hit on at the very start, but decided to go down another road. Thorium reactors are breeder reactors, which means you make more fuel than you consume. This fuel, because you're dealing with fissile materials, means you can skim off some and use it for weapons. I hear a lot of people state that Thorium is "safe" because of the n,2n reaction and no one would try to gather the U233 for weapons because of the dose from those n,2n reactions (and the gammas they emit). U233 has a half life of 160k years, someone that had the patience can easily wait out the n,2n reaction before gathering the U233 for weapons. So, this is why any country that is serious about following the Non-Proliferation treaties will never take a serious look at LFTR and any county that is will be getting a serious amount of scrutiny from those countries that have signed various NPTs. As someone that has a degree in Nuclear Engineering, I can tell you that you are very much less likely to have issues with any governments if you're using "burner" reactors (the typical reactors you see now) than if you're dealing with "converters" (make as much fuel as you consume) or "breeders" (like LFTR where you make more fuel than you consume).
The world does not seem too fazed by North Korea so I doubt that "biggest problem" you mention is de facto the biggest problem. I think the anti-nuclear lobby is in fact the biggest de facto problem to Thorium.
Something that immediately jumped out to me about this design is that the chemical processing plant is outside the primary containment vessel, and contains insanely hot, toxic, corrosive, radioactive, and likely chemically reactive molten salts. What happens if part of that molten salt rube goldberg machine springs a leak? I'm assuming that flaming hot radioactive poison salt mix would react to atmospheric oxygen with... enthusiasm. My understanding is that thorium reactors are inherently safe from meltdowns, but it still seems like you could end up with a serious radioactive accident on your hands if anything in there fails. I know that's a concern with the primary steam loop in a traditional reactor too, but while the water is radioactive, it's also water. The shit flowing through these pipes would be massively more dangerous than some radioactive steam...
From what I understand the half life of the chain is only something like 60 days, so long term radioactivity isn't an issue. I'm not a chemist, but I'm not sure oxygen will react strongly; oxygen fluorides would be highly endothermic to create. I also don't know if the byproducts of any such reaction would be gas; if they're solid it won't spread very far. In short, I imagine a major mishapwould just result in a local poisonous spill that while bad is comparable to any other industrial accident.
I feel somewhat misrepresented in this video. I am an avid anti nuclear activist, but I never lobbied against Thorium Reactors or Nuclear Fusion or any research projects in Nuclear Fission. I am just against a very badly maintained nuclear reactor (Tihange) built in my vicinity and I know a lot of people in my neighborhood who see things as I do. More research in nuclear energy technologies will make things safer and why should an (let's call it) anti conventional nuclear powerplant activist be against research? I am just against nuclear powerplant companies that cut corners, which unfortunately is a thing. Why should I tolerate that someone is risking the whole landscape I grew up in for a profit margin they should have put in maintaining the powerplant to keep it as safe as possible? So please don't blame it on me that there might not be Thorium Reactors in our future.
Yes and Yes. The Chinese Thorium (test) reactor was licensed on June 7, 2023 and is located in the Gobi desert region. It is operational. There is also talk that China might use a Thorium reactor in a future aircraft carrier.
No doubt they will! I think the public cargo/military evacuation ships are probably first before the out and out military applications like aircraft carriers are coming, but they are a coming!@@ltribley
The host of this channel is biased against China. He said "I'm skeptical of everything China does". I don't know, this is supposed to be a science channel, not politics or Chinese hating channel. He decided to ignore the achievements because they are from China. Mind boggling!!!!
The way to test the viability of a substitution and eliminate all the FUD arguments is as follows: (1) Assume the proposed replacement is the entrenched process. (2) Make the case for the actual process as better than the proposed process. This limits the inertia of the entrenched process which shouldn't enter into the question at all. And this technique proves it.
Feel like you left out a lot of anti nuclear lobbying is funded and pushed by fossil and wind/solar interests-the companies can “improve” their product by chipping at perceptions of the alternative
Sorry, but this is cut short in so many ways. First of all: thorium reactors have been built test wise and they were found to be problematic because of the insane high corrosion due to the salt. This means, that these reactors need repairs after around 2 years. That means draining the reactor, cleaning it, replacing the parts and the starting it up again. This alone is a big reason why it is economical not feasible. The other part is, that any nuclear reactor comes with very high building times, as when compared to solar or wind, you may need a couple of years. The safer and faster return of investment here is clear. All that together makes it hard to find anyone investing in it, if its the government (because of ideological reasons) or private investors, for which the sums are waay to high for that kind of uncertainty. Current already established research is going to make wind and solar probably even cheaper, and energy storing techniques are improved every day, so we can buffer them. I would like to see a video from you about that, actually. Otherwise cool animations!
Indeed. All of these advocates of Thorium reactors seem to ignore that the US Navy has already tested the designs in the USS Seawolf (SSN-575). There is a reason why Admiral Hyman G. Rickover rejected it.
Solar and wind will never work in regions closer to the poles. Heck, go close enough to either pole and the sun will be gone half a year. Wind is not reliable, usually when the temperatures drop, the wind dies down, precisely the time when you need the most energy. The only thing that delivers at times like that is oil and nuclear, to lesser degree hydropower.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
Rule 1: When something sounds too good to be true, it rarely is. One of the many problems with Thorium, that are barely mentioned is the low breeding rate. There simply aren't enough neutrons available to produce an excess of U233.
That's what the lithium beryllium salt is for. Beryllium-9 has the neat property that if you hit it with a neutron, it immediately decays into 2 alpha particles and 2 neutrons. So you multiply the number of neutrons floating around by 2. Which means that by tuning the ratio of beryllium to thorium, you can tweak the breeding rate into something self sufficient. They use a similar trick at ITER to get the fusion reaction to breed enough fuel. Of course this comes with the massive downside that you are now using Beryllium as a fuel, which is pretty rare. Worldwide production of Be is only like 200 tons a year, and ITER alone is eating up 10% of that. If we wanted to use molten salt thorium reactors, we'd quickly run out of Beryllium and the costs would be truly astronomical. As always, the problem with nuclear is pure cost. Not any of the made up problems like activists or a renewable energy lobby, and its not something you can realistically fix by trying alternate fuel cycles. At the end of the day, its just a lot cheaper to build renewables and they have a faster return on investment. Which is why everyone is building renewables and nuclear is left to die a quiet death.
@@harmenkoster7451 "As always, the problem with nuclear is pure cost. Not any of the made up problems like activists or a renewable energy lobby, and its not something you can realistically fix by trying alternate fuel cycles. At the end of the day, its just a lot cheaper to build renewables and they have a faster return on investment. Which is why everyone is building renewables and nuclear is left to die a quiet death." - Sadly I see ALOT of people thinking that nuclear fission power is the cheapest source of energy and that renewables are only built due to subsidies.... I just dont understand where that weird hate boner for renewables come from. Is it because people associate it with the climate activists and taxes?
Well, and then there is the issues of implementation. The US Navy could never get it to work on the USS Seawolf (SSN-575), which is why Admiral Rickover rejected the design.
@@xXYannuschXx I notice this too. Is it the Nuclear lobby and spin doctors at work? While in reality the cheapest electricity (in my country anyway) comes from renewables. And nuclear was heavily subsidised as well.
The biggest hurdles to Thorium Breeders are the high operating temperatures in the fuel cycle and the crazy safety devices and materials needed to safely contain molten Soidium cooling loops and heat exhangers...
Stop blaming greenpeace. Start blaming simple economics and money. Go and ask a big insurer what it costs to insure your nuclear power plant, ask him what it costs to insure any fossil or renewable power plant. Then go to a bank, and give the bank your cost breakdown and business plan, and compare that to any renewable.
True. The regulation and associated cost to comply are the biggest issue. Investors and power companies are not going to fund the building of a plant that takes 20 years to build with negative returns and historically crazy overages, over simply building a gas plant in 2 years for 1/50th the cost lol.
There's certainly a bit of market failure there. But keep in mind that these plants do not replace renewables, they replace coal and gas at the point where renewables cannot, not without a huge breakthrough in energy storage. Which actually makes it a little worse: if renewables provide the bulk of our power and nukes are only used to make up the shortfall, then the cost per kWh is even worse. But in general, nuclear power isn't that expensive... the problem is the enormous risk associated with regulatory issues, and the large up front investment required. One way to address this is to not treat every nuclear plant as a separate project, but build several. Another way would be for the government to build these, if private parties are reluctant to make the investment. The thing is: we will need either coal / gas plants, or nukes. Renewables cannot as yet provide 100% of our power. With that in mind, it's worth calculating whether it makes sense to build nukes, or to keep some gas plants around, and accept the CO2 they emit (or sequester it). But sadly no one around here seems to be willing to make any actual plans. We're already dealing with an overloaded grid, and politics are more concerned about distributing the capacity "fairly" than with doing anything about it.
These are gen four reactors too, companies don’t want to risk billions on a design only tested by 1-2 reactors at a national lab in the 70s. Which is one of the main reasons they just keep building LWRs (along with all the regulation hurdles mentioned in other comments).
@@nathanj202yes another issue is that most of the Gen IV concepts are created by startups with no established means to actually build a plant unlike say GE or Westinghouse who are focusing on newer LWR designs for the same reasons you stated.
People here citing "regulations" are trying to make that out to be the biggest hindering factor, but you got to remember that regulations are the reason why nuclear energy is the safest form of energy production that it is - even safer than wind energy, actually. What's really hindering Nuclear is corporate lobbies, they're the ones propping up unnecessary/unwanted bureaucratic hurdles to compete against nuclear progress; let's not forget that they fund "green" activists too.
I understood because of the low pressure and the auto shut down method, no containment vessel is required. That is one of the great benefits of the product.
EVERY nuclear power plant MUST have a containment to withstand a commercial aircraft collision (ever here of 9-11?). The containment of current reactors meet that requirement as so called Thorium reactors would have to as well
Facts, facts and more facts... Just look at Visual Capitalst and their section on nuclear power... That alone should snap into focus the realities of the industry... It's as clean as solar, wind or geothermal but almost always available... I am pro renewables but I am also pro nuclear. Whatever decarbonizes the world as fast as possible, I am all for!
I get what you meant when you said that the nuclear energy industry was plagued by disaster but there have only been 3 nuclear plant disasters and 2 of them were from human error and negligence with one of them being partly from cut corners as well. The other one being Fukushima which was a tsunami. It does come off as you saying there have been numerous nuclear plant disasters which there haven’t been. It is a great video nonetheless
Three that people are aware of. Not on your list is the Kyshtym Disater, which was WORSE than either 3-mile Island or Fukushima. Neither is the Windscale Fire in the UK, nor the Swiss Lucens reactor meltdown. All three of those I listed are never mentioned by the anti-nuclear crowd.
@@davidford3115 The Kyshtym disaster and Windscale fire were both the result of nuclear weapons work, and have nothing to with nuclear power generation. The Lucens reactor meltdown was only a category four incident, with no radiation release outside the cavern which has since been decontaminated anyways. The problem with nuclear power is the cost of building new reactors, not the danger.
@@faroncobb6040 Windscale was not just weapons, it WAS used for power as well. You don't have cartages designated as fuel just for production of weapons grade uranium and plutonium. Regardless, you are trying to downplay the examples I gave because they are inconvenient details and events. The fact that the anti-nuclear crowd NEVER mention them shows how dishonest their arguments are.
@@davidford3115 Pile 2 of Windscale was air cooled, using large fans during operation and with tall chimneys that would provide passive airflow for cooling even during shutdown. There was no provision for electrical generation at all, reactor designs for plutonium production have very little in common with designs optimized for power production.
Molten Salt Reactors have already been built and are providing energy in a number of countries including Indonexia, which bought a ship borne MSR from an American company called ThorCon, and China put at least one online last year. India is setting up several and we have a couple pilot projects underway in the U.S. Terrapower is setting up a Natrium (fluoride sal) reactor in Wyoming on the site of a former coal plant and Flibe Energy is constructing one at the Pacific Northwest Nuclear Laab in Hanford, WA. Because of footdragging by the NRC, we are ten years behind China!
Correction, the Natrium reactor is not an MSR. It is a fast spectrum, metallic fueled, liquid sodium cooled pool type reactor along the lines of the EBR-II. The thermal storage scheme uses molten salts to provide wide load following ability, but they not involved in the operation of the reactor itself.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
"the uranium industry sees thorium as a major threat" Then why don't they join the thorium industry so they can benefit from it? Like, if you're concerned about some tech outpacing yours, just invest in that tech so you have say in it and profit from it.
Funny, because if thorium was everything it was claimed to be, the Uranium Industry would already be a part of that market. The reason they are not is the same reason why Admiral Hyman G. Rickover rejected the Thorium reactor originally installed on the USS Seawolf (SSN-575): it never delivered on the claims of its advocates.
I decided to watch this to see if the video made some kind of complicated mistake in reasoning. Nope. Turns out to be the same old 'Solar & Wind can't supply enough energy' mistake. Yes, they can supply all the energy we need, more cheaply and FAR more safely than any nuclear option. Not only that, they can make energy production *decentralized*.
I wanted to mention a less flashy, but true deveuloppement in thorium. they will a nuclear fuel that includes thorium in Cadadien CANDU reactors. CANDUs are super low tech, do not work under pressure. historcally they are super fuel inficient and creat a lot of waits. The new mix is supposed to last 3 to 5 time longer if i remember well. THe idea would be to make this cheap nuclearplants and run them with a fuel taht is not as wastfull, bringing closer to par with modern nuclear plants. I don't where the catch is, or if there is one, but I liked the idea. Have all nice day
I don't think the uranium mining industry can be particualrly in the way of "building up thorium infrastructure". Thorium is an abundant byproduct of rare earth mining and right now for the most part considered as a nuisance. One of the big advantage of the plan to use thorium is then we talk about material already mined and just sitting in piles as unwanted byproduct.
Have you looked into Quaise? They're pretty close to deploying a working gyrotron drilling system capable of surpassing the temperature and pressure limitations of conventional drilling to reach rock hot enough to produce supercritical steam for nearly any turbine system found in existing power plants. Why build a nuclear reactor for use on Earth when we have one larger than anything we could ever build right beneath our feet?
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
This video ignored the fact that a 2MW Thorium pilot power plant has been running since June 2023. It is already happening. Lessens learned from the pilot plant will show the world how to improve the system for a safe and abundant energy source.
It is simply not true that nuclear power plants are the cheapest way to produce energy. This can only achieved by assigning the costs for nuclear waste and the risks to the society (while the earnings are privatized, as usual). Very often, the harvesting of nuclear fuels is also not taken into account correctly.
Built into the cost of all nuclear generated electricity worldwide is a fee for disposal of the nuclear waste. The US Government has a huge trust fund that anyone who looks at the issue understands more than covers the cost of even the most expensive disposal options. Very safe waste disposal is a political problem - not a technical or cost one.
@@perryallan3524 and who is funding the trust? Any catastrophic nuclear event will undoubtedly render any company bankrupt without the helping public hand. That's you.
@@olafscherdin2683 My previous answer was related to Waste disposal; and all that money has already been collected and is in a trust. Accident insurance is by a special nuclear industry insurance fund set up the the US Government (as a federally mandated private company). Money has been collected from nuclear electricity customers from the beginning, and my memory is that the trust fund now has enough money to pay for several very severe nuclear power plant accidents in the USA. In the event that the existing insurance fund is not enough... then the federal law that set it up says that Congress Shall take action to raise addition money. The expected 1st action that Congress would take is to assess additional fees on existing nuclear facilities to pay for any shortfall and rebuild the insurance fund (this apparently is in the recorded discussion about this law when it was passed). Nuclear electrical users would foot the bill for such surcharges if they are ever needed. Only if that was not enough could liability fall to general taxpayers. Note however that the USA has never had a worst case nuclear disaster - and even 3 mile island was not that expensive to clean up and dispose of the partially melted core (another fact: people who fly commercial airliners from say Chicago to the east or west coast - or any similar distance - gets more radiation exposure than the people who lived next to the 3 Mile Island plant during its partial core meltdown: Containment buildings work). An interesting thing about this insurance fund is that its size is limited by law to the current cost of "X" number of worst case commercial disasters in the USA, and that for the last 15+ years it has earned so much interest on the invested funds that it has returned a substantial amount of that interest to the nuclear facilities covered by the insurance policy as the fund is fully funded. So I don't see the general public having to pay for a civilian nuclear accident in the USA, unless they are using electricity from nuclear power - in which case it has been built into the electric rate since I believe the very early 1960's. My understanding is that all Western Countries have set up something similar.
The trouble with radioisotopes is chiefly that they do not have addictive toxic effluent pouring out of the exothermic reaction that generates the energy necessary to power technology. Crude oil distillates and the exhaust generated gives humans serious deleterious neurological side effects (they get high) as well as the energy generation. Quite simply put, humanity is a doper, and thorium doesn't get them high, that's why the disinterest.
😮 Well, Kirk Sorensen looks surprisingly young after introducing Thorium energy 8 decades ago. 😂😂😂 Apart from this gaffe, I th Bought it was reasonably well researched. I agree that normal investors are hard to find for a field like Thorium reactors. However, as you state correctly India and China are driving the effort at the moment. I have not seen much of any concrete implemebtations of a Liquid salt Thorium reactor in India, while China has built a plant and is operating it. The main driver behind the Chinese effort is the potential for powering the domestic industry and also being able to export a non-preliferating atomic power plant into the third world as am export product. I think that LiFTR's big potential for the EU and the US is its capability to 'burn' highly radioactive waste into low radioactive waste, thus solving the nuclear waste safety issue. Also the chemical plant of every LiFTR is a small nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, which should make that process more palatable. Finally, nuclear angst. I guess human civilization will have to choose its poison. Either we kill the climate by continued use of fossile fuels, or build nuclear power plants that are of a newer design and don't blow up every roughly 40 years, which happens to be the designed in risk. 10000 years for 400 power plants worldwide. Finally the uranium lobby. Well they will run out of easily accessible fuels in about 40 years. The uranium lobby also has no solution for highly and medium radio active nuclear waste. LiFTR is the best hope for that.
You missed that there is nothing new about Thorium Reactors - and the USA Built 4 Thorium Commercial Power Plants early on that did not work, U233 makes great nuclear bombs, a Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) could easily be used to produce bomb grade U233, and your liquid fueled reactor design is only one of many MSR reactor designs under consideration. Here is a more complete history. You can look up each plant I mention on the internet to verify this history. Thorium as a potentially viable fuel was identified in the 1950's by many countries. First though is that thorium is not fissile (you cannot get a nuclear reaction using thorium). A thorium reactor actually runs on U233 in the end - and its U233 that is recoverable from them. In the presence of a properly controlled nuclear reaction thorium 232 absorbs a neutron and becomes protactinium233. The protactinium233 then decays to U233 (which takes about 2 months to get usable quantities of U233). As such all thorium reactors must be seeded with U233, U235, or plutonium239 (the common fissile materials) to supply fuel for the first 4+ months of operation. I’m not going to list and discuss all the existing test reactors that had thorium loaded into them or the thorium specific test reactors that were built. Suffice to say that thorium was tested in both existing test reactors and specific built thorium designed test reactors by multiple countries. Also in all kinds of designs since the 1950’s: Light Water, Heavy Water, High Temp Hot Gas (HTGR) and of course the Oak Ridge Molten Salt Reactor (MSR). The recent several decades have focused on HTGR pebble bed designs and of course China just built and started up in August 2023 a new thorium based MSR to determine if we technically have solved the molten salt corrosion issues well enough to proceed with further development. I am including the Shippingport thorium core load 3 (1977-1982) as a test reactor. Shippingport was a naval aircraft carrier PWR that became the 1st demonstration and test reactor for commercial power: 60MWe output, Online 1958 (1st nuclear electrical power generation from a plant built with its primary purpose to generate electricity). This thorium core proved that a thorium core could self-generate surplus U233 for recovery by reprocessing. Shippingport was shut down in 1982 at the end of this test. To date only the USA felt that they had thorium fuel designs based on test reactors that worked well enough to design commercial power plants from, which did not work out as explained below. In retrospect they can be viewed as very large and vastly costly test reactors. The USA had also spent the equivalent of $Billions in today’s money to build a stockpile of U233 to seed thorium reactors and for atomic bomb tests in the 1960's (the U233 bomb worked well). Note that they are now looking to spend $billions to dispose of that U233 stock as the containers are degrading and disposal is cheaper than repackaging the U233 stock into new containers which does not count long term cost of storage that follows - and eventual use or disposal in the future. Also, there is no real foreseen use at this time for that U233 to justify the cost of preserving it. 1st attempt was Indian Point Unit 1 - light water thorium fueled 275MWe PWR power plant. Online in 1962. The thorium fuel performed so badly that they changed to uranium fuel in 1965 and the plant spent the rest of its life as a uranium reactor that operated well. Unit 1 was shut down in 1974 due to changes in regulations from when it was built as the emergency core cooing system that was acceptable in 1962 was no longer acceptable in 1974, and initial plant design made retrofit of an acceptable system uneconomical (nuclear power plants tend to have lots of rooms with very substantial reinforced concrete walls - there may be almost no room to install something different). 2nd attempt (approved for construction at essentially the same time as Indian Point Unit 1) was Elk River - a light water thorium fueled 22 MWe BWR (Online in 1964, Shut down 3 ½ years later in 1968 due to major design and construction issues which led to cracks in the reactor vessel and main piping resulting in significant reactor water leakage. I have found comments that says the reactor and power plant did not operate as expected; but, no evidence if this was a fuel issue or other issues. A couple notes related to the design and how it relates to the modern concept of Small Modular Reactors (SMR’s). The outline sketch shows what looks like a natural circulation reactor vessel with a boiler design never used again. It looks more like a natural circulation PWR without any pressurizer or pumps for the primary loop with a separate boiler/steam generator. The Atomic Energy Commission and the plant designers insisted it was a BWR and the sketch and easy documentation I can find with short internet searches leaves a lot of questions - like was there intermixing between the reactor loop and the feedwater inside the lower section of the boiler). More interesting is that this was presented as a prototype for a “Small Modular Reactor” for rural America (SMR’s as the reactor assembly and boiler was built in a plant and shipped to site by a railcar, which could be done anywhere as the key SMR concept of small nuclear reactors would be economical due to mass production was presented at an international conference in 1955. However, 17 power plant reactors which would be considered SMR size today were built in the USA from the 1950’s into the 1970’s. Not one of them is operating today - where a number of large central station nuclear power plants built at the same time are still operating. Other than the cracks and reactor water leaks the biggest lesson learned was that small nuclear units like this would never be cost competitive with larger nuclear units as they need more materials and cost much more to build on a MWhr generated basis; and also cost much more to operate and maintain on a MWhr generated basis than a larger plant due to staffing requirements. Note that a 12MWe uranium power plant in Piqua, Ohio which ran from 1963-1966 was closed with the same conclusion. 3rd attempt was Peach Bottom Unit 1 - a thorium fueled HTGR reactor (as that seemed to be the most applicable technology other than light water based on test reactors). I believe it was about 60MWe output. Online in 1967, shutdown in 1974. There were severe problems with the thorium fuel and it was quickly changed to U235 fuel. There were massive other plant design problems (scaling up from a test reactor size rarely goes smooth). A total commercial and technical flop. 4th attempt (based on lessons learned from Peach Bottom) was Fort St Vrain - a 330MWe output thorium fueled HTGR. Online in 1979, shutdown in 1989 due to several issues in the plant design that affected operation and required excessive and expensive maintenance and only produced 15% of the power it should have if it could run well enough to base load at 100% output which is how most US Nuclear Reactors are loaded. I had a coworker who had worked at Fort St Vrain and he told me that in the end it was also converted to Uranium fuel. I have been unable to verify that with limited internet searches (multiple sources report that Peach Bottom Unit 1 was quickly converted to Uranium). Fort St Vrain was again both a major technical and economic flop. Bottom line is that there has been extensive research into thorium-based reactors by multiple countries from the 1950’s to current time, and the USA even built 4 commercial power plants using BWR, PWR, and HTGR designs. No country to date has made a test reactor or power plant work well enough to design a future power plant at this point - especially when they look at the USA’s attempts at building thorium fueled power plants by substantial scaling up of test reactors. The world history of initial nuclear power plant designs, and even 2nd generation designs, in many countries show lots of failures as what seems to work so well on paper often does not work in practice (or is too expensive to maintain). Research continues and just because thorium did not work well and was not economical in the past does not mean that it won’t work well or be economical in the future. It’s just going to take a lot of money and time. If it was easy, it would have already been done.
8:28 Talking about nuclear output capabilities: Nuclear doesn't produce more energy than wind. The difference is, one time you build a centralized plant, the other time you build a hundred to twohundred windgenerators.
This video was doing all right UNTIL, he decided the pull that worn out old trope, the green(peacers), are largely, if not entirely to blame for any problems, real or imagined in the nuclear energy field. And no, I am not with GP, nor do I know anyone that is in that org. But I do know a strawman when I see them, and its appears here@ 7:32
Thorium seems to be the safest method of produing power. The reactor runs so hot you never have a risk of meltdown. If it cools at all the reaction stops. I studied thorium reactors in the 90s because i was interested in them. From what i remember they were good, but you cant produce weapons grade nuclear material from them.
ANY fissile material can be used to make a nuclear weapon and so called Thorium reactors make U233. Where do people keep coming up with this BS that Thorium was abandoned and Uranium based PWR/BWR were chosen so we could make bombs? Hanford Wa. has been making weapons material, at their 9 reactors, since 1944, 12 years before the first U.S. commercial nuclear plant became operational and their weapons production reactors are very efficient graphite moderated reactors and DO NOT produce any electrical power. Savannah River site SC. Has been making weapons material since 1955 and their 5 production reactors are very efficient low pressure heavy water moderated reactors and DO NOT produce electric power. Thorium was tried at Shippingport and Indian Point commercial reactors in the 1970s and abandoned as too costly compared to Uranium. Weapons production reactors are NOTHING like U.S. commercial PWR or BWR power reactors and commercial power reactors have NEVER been used to produce Pu239 for weapons, since there has never been a need beyond what the efficient weapons production reactors could provide.. The U.S. currently literally has hundreds of TONS of Pu239 (takes less than 20 pounds per weapon). The U.S. has so much that 34 tons of weapon grade Pu239 is being treated so it can eventually be disposed of at a cost of billions. Your comment is like saying automobiles use gas engine because the military wanted jet fighters. God help us that people base their knowledge on social media and YT videos.
