2l bottle of water, put a little bit of waterin the bottom, now try to balance it. and i couldn't because the weight was really low,i couldn't- -maneuver it fast enough. then he filled itall the way up. now it was much heavier it was much more unstable butthe center of gravity was higher so yeah i was totally able to balance it. rockets are the same way.they're unstable, but you want them to beunstable in a particular kind of way. you want them to be unstablein a way you can control it. i'm an aerospace engineer by training, wentto geogia tech got my masters degree there.
now i spent 10 years working at nasa. thisis the kind of community i was thinking of. it had all the same needsa community on earth would have but it had some very unique constraints. he grew up talking space, living space, didhis 4th grade state report on alabama because of the rocket center. even from our firstdate i knew he was passionate about space. harrison schmitt was the first trained geologist,and only trained geologist, to go to the moon. so he was a guy who knew what the heck tolook for. and so the scientific take was so vast, it almost eclipses all the other missionsput together. during the apollo era you didn't need governmentprograms to try convince people
that doing science and engineering wasgood for the country. it was self evident. and even those not formallytrained in technical fields embraced what those fields meantto the collective national future. we choose to go to the moon.we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not becausethey are easy, but because they're hard. who wants to be an aerospace engineer so thatyou can design a plane that's a few percent more fuel efficient. that doesn't really work.saying who wants to be an aerospace engineer because we need a plane that can navigatethe rarified atmosphere of mars- you're going to attract the very best of those students.
and the solutions to that problem,in every case i've ever seen, have improved life backhere on earth. zero, and liftoff of the atlas 5 with curiosity. it had, like, heat shields and ahypersonic drogue chute. i said this is not going to work. retro-rockets and then a hoist. it was something rube goldbergwould have designed. an suv sized rover was plunked down on mars. how confident were you that this whole sequenceof landing devices would work?
i wasn't confident at all i wasshitting bricks. it was scary. this lander has more than 10 timesas much scientific instrumentation than anything we've sentonto the surface of mars. so it needs more power?needs more power, -as kirk would say to scotty.well the last one was solar this one's got nukes. wait, wait. so you've got anuclear power plant on the rover? it's not a power plant,it's a power source. we're touchy about this becausewhen you use the nuclear word-
one of the two verboten n-words- that's right, that's right. just saying. so when we use that n-word,we try to speak carefully. and it's not like a nuclearpower plant with the cooling towers and the turbines and all that.it's a bunch of plutonium that's giving off heat and we use thatto generate electricity. so you found another thing to call it to notspook people when it's launched? yeah.okay.
apollo astronauts used plutonium rtgto power their science equipment. the mars rover curiosityis entirely powered by rtg. and it can run at night.it can run in any season. the other ones had solar panelsthey could only run in the daytime? yup. couldn't you charge a batteryand keep working at night? in the martian winter,your monopower goes down if your solar panelsget covered with dust. so in the martian winterthe sun is very low in the sky?
yeah. the martian exploration rovers oftenfound themselves short on power as dust settledon their solar panels. they were the onlysource of energy, and the martian winterwas approaching. the part of the it that reallybreaks my heart is that we just didn't have powerto drive any more. well, one of them did die,because of the winter- one of the two rovers?
yeah, if the power goes down enoughso that you can't run the heaters at night, then you die. that already happened to one of our previousrovers, so, if you want to do a lot of science, you want a lot of powera lot of instrumentation, you want to last a long timeand run anywhere on mars- send nukes.send nukes. exploring space requires energy. energy to run experiments. energy to scrub carbon dioxidefrom astronauts oxygen supply.
the carbon dioxide removal assembly is beingworked on today inside the destiny laboratory. a short was seen in one of the heating elementsthat you see mike barratt there. he put a filter in there thathelps keep the water pure. that system uses water because obviously water is made ofhydrogen and oxygen. it uses electrolysis, which is passingan electrical current through that water to split the water intohydrogen and its oxygen. the hydrogen is dumped overboard,the oxygen is used to pump into the air- of the station for thecrew members to breathe.
you go to the moon and there's no oxygen atmospherethere's no lakes of water or anything. so it really comes down tonuclear and solar power. they called it the n-word at nasa.they're like- we can't even talk about nuclear. and i said-how can we not talk about it? we have exactly two options for how to makepower in space and this is one of them. europa! another europa. a black and white pictureof a ring of jupiter! why is the earth round?why isn't it square or any other shape?
that's a good question.that's a question i've asked myself. and the answer has to do with gravity- carl sagan was a memberof voyager's imaging team. and it was his idea that voyagertake one last picture. that's here. that's home.that's us. every hero and coward.every creator and destroyer of civilization. every king and peasant.every young couple in love. every mother and father.hopeful child. inventor and explorer. every teacher of morals.every corrupt politician.
every superstar.every supreme leader. every saint and sinnerin the history of our species. on a mote of dust.suspended in a sunbeam. as we explore further from the sun,the utility of solar panels shrink to zero. to illustrate, imagine we can power a space missionorbiting the earth with one solar panel. we'll call this solar panel-the earth panel. if we use earth panel orbitingvenus instead of the earth, we'll get almost twice as muchelectricity from it, because orbiting closer to the sun,more photons will be hitting the panel surface.
the same earth panel orbiting mercury will generate almost 7x as much electricity. mercury is closer to the sun.more photons hit the panel. but when we start movingaway from the sun- in mars orbit-we only get half as much electricity. so to power an identical space mission,we now need 2 earth panels. at jupiter, where only 4% as manyphotons can hit earth panel, we now need 27 earth panelsto power the mission. the distance between earth and the sun iswhat's called an astronomical unit.
earth is 1 astronomical unitaway from the sun. jupiter is only 5 astronomical unitsaway from the sun, but it requires 27xas many solar panels. the relationship is not linear,its quadratic. at saturn, 91 earth panels.uranus [370]. neptune [900]. at pluto, 1500 earth panelsare required to power the mission. somewhere between mars and saturn,our mission became impractical. clouds and haze completely hidethe surface of titan, saturn's giant moon. titan reminds me a little bit of home.
like earth, it has an atmospherewhich is mostly nitrogen. but it's 4x denser. nasa's cassini missionto saturn pulled into orbit, dropped off of itself a little probe. the probe huygens descended down from thecassini spacecraft and landed on titan. hidden beneath lies aweirdly familiar landscape. titan has lots of water.but all of it is frozen hard as rock. in fact, the landscape and mountainsare made mainly of water ice. on titan, the seas and the rain are madenot of water but of methane and ethane.
on earth those molecules form natural gas.on frigid titan, they're liquid. there might be creatures thatinhale hydrogen instead of oxygen. and exhale methaneinstead of carbon dioxide. they might use acetylene instead ofsugar as an energy source. how could we find out if such creatures rulea hidden empire beneath the oil dark waves? the probe huygens landed in one spot.you know it's a big moon, it's 1 of 6 moons biggerthan pluto by the way. what does the other sideof the moon look like? the probe only had battery life for a coupleof hours.
we weren't there long enoughto see how things change. does is snow methane? so these long time baseline questionscan't be answered by 2 hours worth of data. cassini mission was launched in 1997 and saturnis a long way away, it took 7 years to get there. the huygens probe launched from cassinionly operated 2 hours. but cassini itself,powered by a plutonium rtg, continues to study saturnand her 62 moons. for how long can plutonium power a mission?how far from the sun can we explore? the sun is constantly shooting out streamsof charged particles in all directions.
this "solar wind" blowsa vast magnetic bubble it pushes out against thethin gas of interstellar space beyond the outer planets,our heliosphere. there is a border where one ends,and the other begins. turns out there was a massive eruption fromthe sun which eventually reached voyager 1 in april of 2013. it caused the plasma around voyager to vibrateor oscillate and by measuring that sound wave we could measure the densityof the plasma in interstellar space: the space between the stars.
the voyagers move at about 40,000 mph. they gave us our first close up lookat jupiter's great red spot, a hurricane 3x the size of earth. we can now make outfiner detail on jupiter than the largest telescopeson earth have ever obtained. the cloud patters are distinctive and gorgeous.its motion hypnotizes us. 4 days after the voyager 1encounter with jupiter, i was looking at anoptical navigation frame. it became very evident to methere was an anomalous present
in the upper left hand cornerjust off the rim of io. a volcanic plume,in fact a volcanic eruption. the voyagers discovered the first active volcanoon another world, on jupiter's moon io. the voyagers dared to flyacross saturn's rings and revealed that theywere made of hundreds of thin bandsof orbiting snowballs. voyager successfully completed its missionof discovery to the outer planets, but its odyssey into the darknesswas just beginning. 35 years after its launch, voyager 1became the first of our spacecraft
to enter an uncharted realm. until then, we didn't know wherethe interstellar ocean began. oh, hello universe! this morning, the new horizons spacecraftmade the closest ever pass near pluto after being launched almost a decade ago back whennasa had the cash to do cool stuff like this. and wow, the pictures are unbelievable! after nearly a century of near total mysterywe finally know what pluto really looks like. and we have to wait over a year nowfor all the information to come in. it's like opening up a birthday present everyday from now until the end of the next year.
who doesn't love atmospheric data for their birthday?if you're watching honey, hint-hint! and in 2019 - new horizons will start sucking up data once againas it passes by a kuiper belt object at a distance from the sunof 43 astronomical units. compare the performance of cassini, voyagers,new horizons, and the curiosity mars rover against solar andbattery powered exploration. the mars rover, spirit, froze to death,thanks to dust on its solar panels. huygens landed safely on the surface of titan,but nasa only received 2 hours worth of data. and most recently,
the european space agency's2014 achievement, of landing a solar powered probenamed philae on comet 67p. humanity landed a probe on a comet whose path spans bothearth's orbit and jupiter's. every 6 years,comet 67p nears the sun,warms up, and ejects material from its corethrough vents on its surface. every 6 years, 67p freezes once againas it drifts out towards jupiter. solar powered philaewas never designed to survive a full orbit.
but inner orbit study, an appropriatechallenge for solar panels, hit a snag. the landing produced some surprises. philae didn't secure itself to the comet's surfaceand bounced making multiple touchdowns. the final resting site was partly in shadow,receiving less sunlight to recharge its instruments. philae was power-starved and unable toconduct experiments, before freezing to death. hours of operation.decades of operation. neil degrasse tyson is a tireless advocatefor nasa, explaining to politiciansand public what we miss when space explorationis severely financially constrained.
we lost an entire generationof these smart people they became investment bankersor lawyers out of the 1980s and 90s because they had no place for themto take their interest in science. when the merger between boeingand lockheed's business occurred, their merger promisedin the press release $150 million of savings. instead there were billionsof dollars of cost overruns. and entrepreneur elon musk explains how space explorationis launch constrained.
musk created spacex to drastically reducethe cost of launching payload into orbit. space-x was founded to make radicalimprovements to space transport technology. with particular regard to reliabilityand safety and affordability. we have top men working on it right now. who? top. men. but what about poweringspace exploration? most of our rtg fuel, the plutonium-238,was created a quarter century ago. nasa started producing more in 2013,
but the worldwide shortageof rtg fuel is a perpetual constrainton space missions. and while our tiny supplyof plutonium-238 can power exploration missions lasting decadesanywhere in our solar system, the radioactive decay of plutoniumreally does not provide much power. curiosity runs on 100 watts. rolling across the surface of mars, takingphotos, grinding samples, detecting neutrons, monitoring the atmosphere, and sending allthis data back to us- curiosity does all of thison 2 incandescent light bulbs worth of power.
our space missions will never matchwhat we see in movies, or read about inscience fiction novels. this is an invisible constraint. the martian is based on mars direct,a research paper written by nasa engineers. the weight of the rocket fuel requiredfor a round-trip to mars was so enormous it would render the launchship impossibly heavy. we would split the mission up into 2 parts. and we'd send the return vehicle out first with its own return propellant plant.
the propellant would be made on mars. before any humans land on the planet, mars direct uses a small,unmanned nuclear reactor on wheels to power the creation of rocket fuel. so that humans can get from the surface of mars,back up into space. it is 6:53 on sol 19, and i'm alive. obviously. but i'm guessing that's going to comeas a surprise to my crew-mates. that a starving astronaut'sjourney across mars consists of repeatedlydeploying solar panels,
sleeping during the daywhile his vehicle recharges, and then driving at night, is a realistic but unnecessary challengecreated for dramatic tension. had mark watney been abandonedduring a mars direct mission, he'd have ample electricity to journey across mars, thanks tothe small nuclear reactor on wheels it's just a nice little putt-putthe could tow behind his rover. it's not a giant nuclear power plant thatpowers a city, it's just a nice little putt-putt nukesitting in the back of a truck.
look i don't mean to sound arrogant or anythingbut i am the greatest botanist on this planet. similarly, mark watney rations his potatocrop to survive 400 days on mars. i now have 400 healthy potato plants. i dug them up being carefulto leave their plants alive. the smaller ones i'll re-seed.the larger ones are my food supply. the carbon in watney's potato crop tissue does not come fromnutrient rich astronaut poop. it comes from the carbon in the martian atmosphere. photosynthesis is carbon dioxide + photonscreating plant tissue and emitting oxygen.
because there's no shortage of carbon or wateron mars, more photons means more potato. artificial lighting means bigger potatoesthan could otherwise be grown in mars orbit. it is the difference betweenone-half of earth sunlight, and as many photons asthe potato crop can absorb. hey watch him. oh my god!el dorado, the legends are true. that is how illegal grow operationsare routinely busted- simply by monitoring unusual behavioron the electrical grid. this is also why high yield urban farmingrequires so much energy.
you want to see what minimal calorie countlooks like? it has been 7 days since i ran out of ketchup. andy weir put his astronaut on the brinkof freezing to death and starving to death, by downgrading the mars directnuclear reactor to an rtg. even so, nuclear power of some sortwas still required, as the author explains. at one point i considered when he'son his long drive to schiaparelli, i thought, what if the rtg develops a problem? what if it leaks or something like thatand he has to live without it? throws it away and he hasto drive away without it?
there's just no way you'd survive.you are dead. when you see a futuristic and inspiringspace mission on the big screen, it's not being powered by rtg or solar. well what if nasa missionshad access to far more energy? most people don't appreciate howlittle energy nasa has at their disposal to design missions around. the most exciting missionsare not even under consideration because we have no way to power them. we've got 1 liquid water planet in oursolar system, and we've already identified
3 potential hydrospheres that areice covered and far from the sun. right. based on our own immediateexperience its a 3:1 ratio. sure, sure. do we know ifany of them are habitable? we don't, but we gotta go look. a mission to explore under the ice of europawould be the ultimate robotic challenge. solar is out of the question.jupiter is too far from the sun. and batteries can't hold enough power to meltthrough a planet's outer shell of ice. we need something small, lightweight,long lasting and extremely energy dense
to power such a mission. can i just get my favorite missionwhich doesn't exist and isn't funded now? it would be to go to jupiter's moon europa.it has an icy outer surface. the gravitational stress on europa from jupiterand other surrounding moons is pumping energy into it much the same way when you warm upa racquetball by hitting it. you distort it, it bounces back to shape,you're pumping energy into it. that has melted the interior ice. it has an ocean of liquid waterthat's been liquid for billions of years. everywhere on earth where we'vefound liquid water we've found life.
i want to go ice fishing on europa.lower a submersible. aerospace is fricking cool, man. it's awesometo work on rockets and spaceships and everything. i love it. it's like in my guts. i love it. if you want to build a shipdon't drum up people to collect wood. but rather, teach them to longfor the endless immensity of the sea. this was o'neil's vision back in the 70s. we all knew we needed energy.solar energy sure seemed great. this really affected the way i thought.i was like, yeah, sign me up for this. there's no coal on the moon.there's no petroleum. there's no wind either.
and solar power had a real problem. i've worked a lot of my careerin solar powered systems. it's just that, that said- i'm a lot more aware of their limitations. the moon orbits the earth once a month. for 2 weeks the sun goes down and your solar panelsdon't make any energy. i knew kirk sorensen as a young engineer. i ended up getting a job atmarshall space flight center at nasa.
dating back to nasa dayswhen we were looking for deep space power systems outthere for mars and the moon. and all of the systems we hadwere just not going to make it. this is mark watney,astronaut, here on the hermes. you basically point the birdin that direction, you wait 150 days, 36 million miles laterwe should be at mars. ion engines are a real technology.they're not just invented for the book. basically they're particle acceleratorsthat shoot particles very, very fast. so fast, that the particlesgain relativistic mass.
oh, wow. so with less matter you'regetting more momentum change. so you need very, very little mass. all the technology inthe book actually exists. however, some of it is betterthan our current incarnation. so we don't have ion enginesanywhere as powerful as hermes has. but there's nothingpreventing us from making it. we know how to do that.we could scale it up. and everything you do in space,because you don't have any ground
or air or anything to push against,it all comes down to delta-v. to put yourself on a mars interceptyou need a delta-v of about 2.5 km/s which is about 5,000 mph. you can't cheat the system in any way.physics demands that you pay the price. and the amount of fuelthat you have on your ship determines the total amountof delta-v you can have. period. and you need a lot of energy on boardso you need a reactor on board, which my fictional ship has. there were a lot of people who were saying-let's put solar arrays out on mars.
well mars has terrible dust storms. i said, if you were on mars,and you had these solar arrays, and they got coated by dust,you're going to die. take a look. dust storm. headed right for mars one base camp. southern hemisphere coming from the east. these bad boys can covera whole planet and last up to a year. now at this time i was notparticularly excited about nuclear.
i thought- nuclear-isn't that bad or dirty or yucky? i had this vague distaste for nuclear. almost all the nuclear power we use onearth today uses water as the basic coolant. at normal pressures water willboil at 100 degrees celsius. this isn't nearly hot enough togenerate electricity effectively. so water cooled reactors have to run at muchhigher pressures than atmospheric pressure. and this means you have to run a watercooled reactor as a pressure vessel. if that sounds heavy that's because it is. we were looking at a nuclearreactor and they tend to be heavy
and you need to have a large amount of shielding. my dad worked on the snap reactor for nasa.did he really? what my dad did was thathe shook the shit out of it. they would see what broke.then they would fix it, shake it again. see what broke, fix it again.nice. then they ran it for 1,000 hours.up power, down power. they were going to put it in a saturn v rocket.send it to the moon. never did that. send it to the space basethat they never built. put it onto mars but they never did that program.i know. it's a shame.
we presented this at the nuclear and emergingtechnologies for space conference, to accommodate spacetravel or off-world living. that brings in a whole set of more robustvariables that need to be attended to. nuclear reactors in space, like you just said,they are under such extreme conditions. you know, the shuddering ofthe rocket as its going up into space. the g-forces, the vibrational problems. but mass is everything in space,and so if you can have a much lighter reactor let's do it. well your choices are limited.
you're not going to makea light water reactor that you need this really thick pressure vessel. let me diss on water a few more times.it's a covalently bonded substance. the oxygen has a covalent bond with two hydrogens. neither one of those bonds is strong enough to survive getting smackedaround by a gamma or a neutron. and sure enough,they knock the hydrogens clean off. now, in a water cooled reactor, you have a system called a recombiner that willtake the hydrogen gas and the oxygen gas
that is always being created from thenuclear reaction and put them back together. it's a great system as long as it'soperating and the system is pumping. well, at fukushima daiichi, the problemwas that the pumping power stopped. at high temperature h2o can alsoreact with the cladding to release hydrogen. or damage the cladding, releasing radioactive isotopes. these 2 accidents illustrate the need for a coolant which is morechemically stable than h2o. in a community on the moon we wouldlive very close to your power source. this isn't something that'sgoing to be far away.
if the power source were to fail,you're going to die really quickly. so i thought, if i were living on the moonand i was totally dependent on a power source i'd want one that i'd just about feelcomfortable living right on top of. three mile island, chernobyl and fukushimawere all radically different incidents. but what all 3 had in common washow poorly water performed as a coolant when things started to go wrong. steam takes up about 1,000 timesmore volume than liquid water. if you have liquid water at 300 degreescelsius and suddenly you depressurize it, it doesn't stay liquid for very longit flashes into steam.
that's scuba tank, hot scuba tank,full of nuclear material. at three mile island, watercouldn't be pumped into the core because some of the coolantwater had vaporized into steam. the increased pressure forced coolant waterback out, contributing to a partial meltdown. at chernobyl, the insertion of poorly designedcontrol rods caused core temperature to skyrocket. the boiling point of the pressurized watercoolant was passed, and it flashed to steam. it was a steam explosion that torethe 2,000 ton lid off the reactor casing, and shot it up throughthe roof of the building. at fukushima, loss of pump powerallowed the coolant water
to get hotter and hotteruntil it boiled away. these 3 accidents illustrate the need fora coolant with a higher boiling point than water. when you put water underextreme pressure like anything else it wants to get out ofthat extreme pressure. almost all of the aspects of our nuclear reactorstoday that we find the most challenging can be traced back to the needto have pressurized water. water cooled reactorshave another challenge. they need to be near large bodiesof water so the steam they generate can be cooled and condensed.
otherwise they can't generate electrical power. now there's no lakes or rivers on the moon so if all this makes it soundlike water-cooled reactors aren't such a good fit for a lunar communityi would tend to agree with you. you see i had the good fortune to learnabout a different form of nuclear power that doesn't have all these problems for a very simple reason:it's not based on water cooling and it doesn't use solid fuel. surprisingly it's based on salt.
science allows you to look at everyday objectsfor what they really are. chemically and physically. and it really makes you look twiceat the world around you. your table salt is frozen. that's a really strange thing to thinkabout your table salt on your kitchen table. it's frozen. but once they melt they have a 1,000 degrees[celsius] of liquid range. and they have excellent heat transfer properties. they can carry a large amount ofheat per unit volume, just like water. water is actually really goodfrom a heat transfer perspective.
its really good at carryingheat per unit volume. salts are just as good carrying heat per unitvolume. but salts don't have to be pressurized. and that- if you remember nothing else ofwhat i say tonight, remember that one fact. a nuclear reactor is a roughplace for normal matter. the nice thing about a salt- is that it is formed froma positive ion and a negative ion. like sodium is positively charged, and chlorineis negatively charged. and they go- we're not really going to bond we'rejust going to associate one with another. that's what's called an ionic bond. yeah,you're kinda friends. you know, you're-
facebook friends! there you go, facebook friends. alright, well it turns out this is a really good thing for areactor because a reactor is going to take those guys and just smack them all over the place withgammas and neutrons and everything. the good news is they don't really carewho they particularly are next to. as long as there are an equal numberof positive ions and negative ions, the big picture is happy. a salt is composed of the stuffthat's in this column the halogens, and the stuff that's in thesecolumns the alkali and alkaline.
fluorine is so reactive with everything. but once it's made a salt, a fluoride, then it's incredibly chemicallystable and non-reactive. sodium chloride, table salt, or potassiumiodide, they have really high melting points. we like the lower meltingpoints of fluoride salts. sometimes people go, oh you're workingon liquid fluorine reactors, no, no! i am not working on liquid fluorine reactors. i'm talking about fluoride reactors and there'sa big difference between those two. one is going to explode,the other is like, super-duper stable.
i see moving to molten salt fueled reactortechnology as a way to get rid of all the stored energy term problemswe look at in today's reactors. whether it is pressure,whether it is chemical reactivity. even the potential of fissionproducts in the fuel itself to be released. those fission products arebound up very tightly in salts. strontium and caesium are bothbound up in very, very stable fluoride salts. caesium fluoride is a very stable salt.strontium bifluoride another very stable salt. in a light water reactor caesium is volatile, in the chemical state of theoxide fuel in a light water reactor.
that's been one of theconcerns about caesium release. caesium would not releasefrom a fluoride reactor at all. i actually met kirk in a conferencein manchester in the uk- as part of an event put onby the guardian newspaper. hi, i'm kirk sorensen. they'd invited people tocome and present their ideas and kirk was 1 of the 10people that presented. and i can remember sitting on the paneland just being kind of blown away by the fact that there was analternative version of nuclear.
i'm an environmentalist,my passion is climate change and energy. i worked at friend of the earth,a green campaign group in the uk. and i was an anti-nuclear campaigner. but i've become a politician. i will be faithful and bear true alleganceto her majesty, queen elizabeth. that's changed my life quite a lot. i'm still getting used to it really, peoplecall me "my lady" and "the barronnesse. sellafield limited is activelyworking with the 600 people who are going to be losing their jobs at this time.
and everybody in the areais doing their very best to see if these people can find jobs very quickly. sellafield is a unique site in the uk, and i believe it couldbecome home of world leading research into next generation nuclear reactors. such reactors- as well asbeing more efficient in their fuel use- generating no long lasting waste,can be be designed to burn up existing stockpiles ofplutonium held at the sellafield site. despite greater acceptanceof nuclear power
there remain concernsabout nuclear waste. so, in light of this, is there morethe government can do to support r&d into new nuclear designs that will help to ensure we develop the safestand the most efficient reactors? an engineer looks at the world ashundreds of things that are inefficient and should bemore properly designed. when you tell an engineer thatsomething is 20% more efficient he's like, yeah! you tell him it's 50%more efficient, oh my gosh! you tell him it's hundreds of times more efficientit becomes absolutely irresistible.
making solid nuclear fuel is acomplicated and expensive process and we extract less than 1%of the energy from the nuclear fuel before it can no longer remain in the reactor. the solid fuel will begin to swell and crack, and you begin to get this central void. this is actually a gap in the fuel. when the fuel swells to a certain pointthe clad can't hold it any more. and when the clad can't hold it any more it'stime to remove the fuel from the reactor. at this point only a small amountof the energy has been consumed.
wigner didn't like solid fuel. he was a chemicalengineer by training and he thought- what process do we run chemically based on solids?we don't. everything we do, we use as liquids or gassesbecause we can mix them completely. you can take a liquid, you can fully mix it.you can take a gas, you can fully mix it. you can't take a solid and fully mix itunless you turn it into a liquid or a gas. i believe part of this came from wigner'seducational background. he was the only person or almost theonly person who combined great skill as a nuclear physicist withgreat skill as an engineer.
wigner was a chemical engineer by training. he was the only one whocommanded both of those attributes. and so he was able to see boththe engineering and physics aspects. he was a chemical engineer by training andhe knew that in chemical processes the reactant streams are almost always liquidsand gases- they're fluids. and in fluids a completion of the variouschemical reactions are possible. he looked at the nuclear problem and wonderedif the same principle might not apply. and they began investigatingsome very radical nuclear reactors, totally different fromthe stuff we have now.
wigner was not terribly successful in makingconverts in the nuclear community. but he did make one convert,this guy, alvin weinberg. he was his student duringthe manhattan project. and weinberg got it, he got the big picture.we need liquid fuel. i see it. i see what we gotta do. they were into small modular reactorsbefore small modular reactors were cool. small, liquid-core, andthen you have high-efficiency. so there were a couple thingsthat jumped right out at us. the shielding weightbecame reasonable.
all these great benefits,how do we know this can work? quite simply because-because we did it. i got in the car, i live in alabama,and i was able to drive to oak ridge and talk to some of the people there,and i said- hey, i heard long time ago you guysdid this really cool thing. in the 1960s at oak ridge nationallaboratory we ran what was called the molten salt reactor experiment. this was the main focus of oak ridge for decadesand it was very abruptly cut off. it was a very bitter pill to swallow for them.
so a lot of these great minds, they thoughttheir life's work had gone to waste. yeah, long time ago we did a really cool thing.everyone who worked on it is retired or dead now. oh. that's not good. i've got the world's oldest molten salt website. if you find the original copyof the generation 4 report, my url from my website is listedas the only [molten salt] reference. i'm a guy in a garage.i should not be the only reference for this. the other thing is-alvin weinberg wasn't dead yet. to list me while there's so many other documentsare you kidding me?
i actually got an email from richard weinberg,the son of alvin weinberg. well are your father's papers somewhere,have they been examined? he said- most of my father's papers areat the oak ridge children's museum. so i ended up going back to oak ridge. literally there was a bigwalk-in closet with filing cabinets stacked to the ceiling that nobodyhad looked at in decades probably. i'm realizing as i go throughthese oak ridge documents, how limited their distribution was. at the very last page of every one,there's a distribution, about 40 people.
so best case scenario, 40 people read whati'm holding in my hand, 50 years ago. and this is no little thing. this was along research project starting from the 50s, a huge body of research oak ridge did. unfortunately only oak ridgeso it was geographically limited knowledge. there's hundreds of these big thick documents. at one time this whole courtyard wouldhave been filled with these specimens so we could do all sorts ofresearch and testing on it. but one day, nickel alloys were at a real premium.like, unheard of recycle value. he said someone madethe decision to come in,
and they cleaned out allof our lab specimens for recycle. uri gat, a scientist at oak ridge, got meinvolved in molten salt. walking through graphite reactor building, there's this large palettecovered with books, manuals. we kind of stoppedit was in the way of our path. uri was there, and he goes-oh, they didn't tell me again. and i just reached down and picked them up. they were all big thick documentson the molten salt reactor. and i happened to pick 2of the best i possibly could.
the status report of the molten salt breederreactor, the other was the project plan. i just randomly picked them up. the workmancomes and he says- what are you doing here? uri goes-what's going to happen to these documents? the guy goes-these are the excess going to the burn facility. they were burning them. it was a real shame, probably in the 1990s,that needing more space so many documents were being destroyed or shredded. hey, this would be a great for a space reactorwe ought to throw some money at these guys and get all this stuff documented.
nasa was able to get oak ridge and like$10,000 bucks to scan in those documents. a really genuinely beautiful thingto try and share knowledge. there was never a level of uptakefor it at the agency, but amongst individualsa lot of people got very interested. we had dug up that informationfrom oak ridge national labs, thought it was great,and put together several proposals based on it. it has been a lot better. the new policy is, any old documents-if someone in the world is calling about them that makes it important enough to scan.
and as we need them they seem tobe ready to make electronic versions of them that the restof the world can use. we have been able to access, and also to disperse,an amazing amount of information. this was the big problem was,how do you show this is real? you know? it sounds like made up technologywhen you describe it to people. jeeze the molten salt reactorpretty much does what fusion is asking, and were almost developed tothe stage we could start using them so long ago,in the 50s, 60s, and early 70s. you nuclear engineers are probably going tothink those are fuel rods, they're not.
they're graphite. the fuel was a liquid which flowed throughchannels in this graphite. so the graphite serves the function waterserves in existing solid fuel reactors, which is to moderate the neutronswhich are being born in fission. except, this time, instead of havingsolid fuel in a liquid moderator, you've got liquid fuelin a solid moderator. it's so opposite. there they have solid fuel, liquid moderator.molten salt- liquid fuel, solid moderator. uh- water, salt.uh- graphite, no graphite in here.
metal in here, yeah.no metal in here. it's like an opposite reactor. well back around 2004 a gentleman namedkirk sorensen had contacted me by email and came to visit us at berkeley. we'd been working on molten salt reactor technologyand doing some of the early studies of how salts might be used to cool solid fuel reactors. and kirk came into my office.he had a stack of cd-roms. on them was this compendium of reports
from oak ridge national laboratory from the molten salt reactor programof the 1950s through 1970s. and that was a treasure-trove. there was an enormousamount of very useful data. he'd discovered a treasure-trove.this was going to change the world. when i was at nasa i finagled somefunds to get those documents scanned. i made bunches andbunches of copies of cds. for you young people this was almost pre-internet. yeah, we had it, but your website would holdabout 20 megabytes.
cds were really the onlyway to move around big data. sneaker-net was probablythe better way to describe it. i made these for the secretary of energy,delivered them in d.c.- and sent them to lab directors. sent it all out, to these different placesjust sure that they were going to get cds from a random person and put them intheir computer and study them extensively- all 5 gigabytes of them, and come to the same conclusionthat i had and change national policy. i mean of course, right?nobody cared at all.
the only person who cared was per. and i'm really glad that he did because i think he feels the same way aboutthis technology that i do, that it's really exciting. i mean i spent a number of years when ifirst learned about this just asking people- okay, tell me what's wrong with this? tell me why it's not the greatestthing since sliced bread. because really, i'm not a nuclear- i wasn'ta nuclear engineer back then. i didn't want to get involvedif it wasn't important. i wanted someone to come and say,
oh we did this and this and thisand it totally did not work out. that would have been simple.i'd be like, okay, fine. i'll go back to doing my space things. but the fact that- they didn't say that.and they said that- this was a great idea.we really should have done it. that stuck in my- that stuck in my craw for a long time. joe bonometti and i wouldtalk to each other at nasa. and it almost tormented us. i think it really did literally torment joe.
that we weren't working onwhat we felt was the most important thing. it'd be a fantastic helpto the human race in general. it could also be what lends usquite well into space reactors and going to mars, going tothe moon and other places. you need that light,small power source. we need water.we need to grow our food. the sustainability oflong-term colonization of mars is a very real option withthe molten salt reactor. already we're prettyconstrained in fresh water.
we in california areexperiencing this first-hand right now. another application ofhaving lots of energy, is to be able to createfresh water from ocean water. every drop of drinking water on the planetis desalinated with nuclear power- today. i think we should just use a little bit more. and everybody on the planethas all the fresh water they can drink. put a power plant on the coast. bring in seawater from acouple miles out. desalinate it. suddenly you're not even pullingwater out from the aquifers any more.
so the river's not touched.the lake's not touched. i must be missing something. these guys who arereal nuclear engineers, they must know somethingabout nuclear that would- if i knew it then i'd know whywe're not doing molten salt reactors. so i need to go, get my degree,and get an understanding, and then i'll seewhatever it is they see. turns out everything i learned,everything i studied, just made this look better and better.
and these are kind of arcane reasons,but they're very important- like one day i learned how the reactorwould always homogenize its composition. that may not sound like a big deal but toa reactor designer that's a humongous deal. it's just of absolutely incredible performance.i'm sitting here thinking- you guys should build this machineif you only picked one reason it should be for that reason because if would make it so much easierfor you to design and operate the reactor. and i brought it up to my professor-he was talking about how current reactors work- i said did you realize this design would alwayshave a homogenous composition, and he goes-
i never thought about that. from cyberspace, from kirk sorensen, who iswith the nasa marshall space flight center. he would like for you to commenton the molten salt reactor program. the molten salt people included the most famous figures innuclear energy, in particular eugene wigner, are all dying off. we don't have peoplebuilding molten salt reactors now. the molten salt reactor experimentwas one of the most important and, i must say, brilliant achievements
of the oak ridge national laboratory. and i hope that afteri'm gone people will look at the dusty books that werewritten on molten salts and will say- hey, these guys had a prettygood idea let's go back to it. once you learn something, you know, you can'tpretend you didn't learn it and you can't pretend you don't knowwhat a powerful thing this is. and- you can choose to do that.but that's not the moral choice to make, right? to ignore it.to pretend you didn't learn it.
so the moral thing, the right thingto do is to do what we're doing. which is, in my opinion,it's sort of the bare minimum. well i've been in this energy gamefor about 10 years now. no one's ever told me there was a safer,more sustainable form of nuclear. so i was kind of instantly interested. so i kept thinking about it occasionally,and i kept in touch with kirk a little bit. and then fukushima happened. this is great, this is justwhat i wanted to have happen. is for her talking to these guys,and getting that straight dope.
oh, man, it's just perfect. dick engel is probably the mostknowledgeable person around these days, right? i've never met syd i've read all his papers.i've actually extracted all the text from them, converted it all, rebuilt-i mean i have- i don't know if there's anybodywho's studied his stuff more than me. i was so tickled when ifound out he was alive. i mean how do you feelabout the reactor now? it sounds like kind of a boring job in a way. did you feel fondlytowards this reactor design?
oh yes.it wasn't at all boring. i mean boring in the sense- it was safe. it did exactly whatwe calculated it ought to do. and that's pretty satisfying. i think it would unleash a lot of human potentialwhich is currently not being fulfilled. standard of living does correlatequite well with access to energy. throughout her life she hadbeen heating water with firewood, and she had hand washedlaundry for 7 children. and now, she was going towatch electricity do that work.
there's a great talk on tedby hans rosling, how women in the 50s, when they started to have washing machines,became suddenly hugely more productive. to my grandmother,the washing machine was a miracle. washing clothes isa really unproductive task. it's just repetitive,you have to keep doing it. you're not creating anything that'ssustaining anyone really, it's just time wasted. so 2 billion have access to washing machines.and the remaining 5 billion, how do they wash? how do most of the women in the world wash?they wash like this. by hand. it's a time consuming labor,hours every week.
and sometimes they alsohave to bring water from far away. and they want the washing machine! and there's nothing different in their wishthan from my grandmother 2 generations ago in sweden, water from the stream,heating with firewood, washing like that. they want the washing machinein exactly the same way. but when i lecture environmentallyconcerned students they tell me, no, not everybody in the worldcan have cars and washing machines. how many of you don't use a car, and some of them proudlyraise their hand and say-
i don't use a car. and then i put the really tough question- how many of you hand wash your jeans and yourbedsheets? and no one raised their hand. soon as you could get a machine to do thatfor you that time became time for the family and he said that's when he sat down with hismom and started to learn to read with her. and that would happen multiplied over all these women suddenlyhave much more capacity for being more nurturing,being more productive. it's a great empowerer to haveenergy and to do things for us
that are just routine, rote tasks. huge fractions of the developing world,women spend all day looking for sources of water. and, when they get to the water,it is typically filthy. and- parasites, disease, etc. i mean, if you could have clean water,disease and parasite-free water for homes- you would liberate anenormous amount of time. and you'd increase thehealth of the people. there's a lot of thingswe just throw away because the energy to re-use them ismore expensive than virgin material.
dig it out of the ground, turn it intosomething, you use it, you smash it, then you throw it backin a pit in the ground. ultimately it means you just leave one bighole in the ground over here and start filling up another hole over there. is that sustainable? perhaps there's a moreclosed-loop system that could be employed. that's the dream.but that does require energy. that was one of the things that attractedme about the notion of exploring space was that you had to implement that simply to survive. if you were going to live on the moon or mars,there was no pit over here and pit over there.
you better figure out how to make it all stay. every atom of nitrogen or oxygenor hydrogen became precious to you. when i would tell people why are we doingnasa, that was the most effective thing was the whole idea of recycling and whatwe would learn from exploring space. what prevents us from doingthat right now on earth? i mean, why do we have to go to space to learn how to be really,really good recyclers? why don't we recycle like that on earth? it was energy, you know-energy has to be really, really cheap
or the penalty has to be really, really bad. now, in space,the penalty was really, really bad. if you didn't recycle,you ran out of air and water. but, on the ground, to go achievethat dream of a closed loop, you need to have really,really cheap energy. for example in the copper mining space,when they extract the copper- they'll do a first pass, and then leave it as a mound. and they'll wait until the priceof copper goes high enough.
there's a price at which you can justifydoing a second, third or more passes. it's all a function of what's the energyinput and what's the market price. and when those reach parity,you can go in and justify more extraction. well the same is true with recycling materials. if we can bring the cost ofelectricity down far enough, we can conceivably goback and recycle landfills. appliances, we chop up old rail cars.demolished bridges, buildings. whatever. we load scrap into large haul trucks. back up into this bucketand dump scrap inside.
that's dozens of cars.yeah. a lot of cars. that bucket probably has140 tons of scrap metal in it right now. i told them if they seeanything go boom to run behind you. that's still the standard protocol? that's right i've got kevlar on.alright you guys do the same we're all getting behind- so you've been able to drop your powerconsumption per ton almost by a third it looks like. probably since the mid-early-80s. so besides your scrap material input,what's you next largest cost on production? electricity.electricity.
how's your water use?we're evaporatively cooling. we use about 2.5 million gallons a day.so we're pretty big water users. which is about a tenth ofwhat the paper mills use. but you can get far morerecycles on steel or aluminum than you could out of paper or plastic. oh, sure. yeah, actually it is debatable whetherpaper recycling is even that great a pursuit. in some cases it is mandated, but- this is one whereeconomics drive the recycling. but the steel industry is probably one ofthe better models of recycling.
aluminum too would be.there's less given over to waste. if we could make energy cheapenough there's a lot of other products you could make economic to recycle. absolutely. it's easy to forget about thatin our world here on earth because we're so extractedfrom our energy sources. food is at the grocery store. we flush the toilet and the waste goes somewhere,where someone takes care of them. we don't really think about the flow ofenergy that makes all of this possible.
with the energy generated we couldactually recycle all of the air, water, and waste productswithin the lunar community. in fact doing so would be anabsolute requirement for success. we could grow the crops neededto feed the members of the community even during the 2 week lunar nightusing light and power from the reactor. it kind of was this microcosm that made iteasier for me to understand the bigger picture that we have going on here on earth andhow we can make the bigger picture better. how we can enhance ourquality of life here on earth. when i think of our golden era of space exploration,the late 1950s through the early 1970s-
over that time very few weeks would go bybefore there'd be an article in a magazine, a cover story would extol- the city of tomorrow. i mean why wouldn't we wanta community of the future to be self-sustainingand energy independent? the same energy generationand recycling techniques that could have a powerful impacton surviving on the moon could also have a powerful impacton surviving on the earth. and people love that. they thinkyou're naive to be optimistic. we are going to make thefuture better than the past.
we're going to figure out our problemsand we're going to get past them. what's your project? my project is on reducing carbon emissionsand i choose to do so with nuclear. i talk a bit on the oil-sands,on how nuclear can help. for example generatingthe steam for sag-d. people were mostly interested in the lftr,talking about the thorium. they liked that better as an alternativebecause uranium really has a bad rap. has it directed you in your life?i want to be a nuclear physicist. you do eh?yeah.
i was going to be a music teacher.i had my heart set on it. that's what i went to school for,music education. when i heard about thorium,i just thought to myself- music is great, i love it,but it's just insignificant to the challenges thehuman race is experiencing. because of my formerexperience as a reactor operator for the u.s. navy, i got it,i understood it right away. i made a 2 minute video fora science video competition. in the 1950s alvin weinberg,director of oak ridge national labs
was tasked with building a nuclear reactor. today we learn that we can runthis type of reactor on thorium. i've been trying to get people inmy generation to do the good stuff that needs to happen onenergy issues for 30 years. the title of my talk is- thorium and molten salt reactors:improving public knowledge and awareness. with us being in chemical engineering we havea background in liquid-liquid extraction- the fission products are moresoluble in the bismuth stream than in the salt stream, so they willbe transferred when they contact.
it was nice to finally have a technical audience.yeah. oh my gosh. it's going to be up to you guys. you high-school students andyou college people, to pull us out. so you can do good for mygrand-kids and everything. and you know what,they get it, they know it. i didn't grow up around oh we gotta fightthe russians we gotta fight the communists. you don't have a searing image of amushroom cloud in your head, probably. no. absolutely not. i really want to work on lftr.i really want to work on thorium technology.
i know everyone i talk to about this technology,we're all engineers so we're all geeky that way, but everyone's super excited here aboutthe potential. because it's really quite cool. we're going to try and get ateacher in every single school to teach molten salt chemistryand molten salt class. i love to see you all here, butit's for me and it's for my children. i've love to see more companiescoming up with codes, coming up with reactor designs,and i would love to jump on board. my desire, when i was a younger man,was to get involved in alternative energy. i hadn't really seen anything aboutthorium or molten salt reactors at all.
and that ted talk was the one wherekirk was in town talking about lftr. thorium has an electromagnetic signature thatmakes it easy to find even from a spacecraft. here's an actual map of wherethe lunar thorium is located. when i pitched this story to wired magazine.there were 6 editors around a table, they're pretty well informedscience and technology journalists, and not a single one ofthem had heard of thorium. we were working on nuclear engines,working on really far out stuff. i'm in this buddy of mine's office. he's got this book on his shelf andthe book was called "fluid fuel reactors.
he used to work at oak ridgenational labs in tennessee and he said- i just went to the library and i gotthis old book. it was written in 1958. i've been meaning to look through it. i said well, hey, can i borrow this book? big old thick book, itwas about 1,000 pages. oh boy. whew! but it was intriguing enough to meand it seemed really different than the kind of nuclearenergy that we have now. they also mention in this booka lot about thorium. thorium, thorium, thorium.
i was like-dude, what the heck is thorium? thorium is a naturallyoccurring radioactive substance found just about everywhere on this planet. we have lots and lots of thorium. and it has some unique properties.one of them is- if you hit thorium with a neutron, the thorium will absorb the neutron- and t will turn fromthorium-232 into thorium-233. it's going to decay into protactinium-233,
and then it will decayin about a month to uranium-233. uranium-233, if you hit itwith a neutron, it will fission. in addition to releasing all that energy,it will release 2 or 3 additional neutrons. alright- so you need 1 of those neutronsto go find another thorium. and you need another 1 of thoseneutrons to go find another uranium-233, to continue the reaction. you've fissioning uranium-233but you're making a new one. you can almost thinkabout it as a pseudo-catalyst. if you had some uranium-233
you could catalyse theburning of thorium indefinitely. when shippingport was shut downfor the last time, in 1982, the examination showedthere was more fissile material, more uranium-233 in the fuelthan there was when they started. thorium breeding worked.it was actually done and demonstrated. not in a molten salt reactor,but in a light-water reactor. well you're really coupling 2 differenttechnologies as far as history proving them out. you have shippingport thatproved the thorium fuel cycle. and then you have molten salt reactorsthat prove the liquid fuel form.
the oak ridge plan was to couple- i mean they designed themsre for a thorium fuel cycle. their design-they didn't do it. that was their plan but they never got there.but it was- it wasn't like somebody said- oh gee put thorium in msri never thought of that before! today's reactors are fueled by arare isotope of uranium: uranium-235. to fuel a reactor with abundantmaterial is called breeding. breeder reactors takenaturally common isotopes
and turn them intoman-made isotopes that can be split apart to release energy. shippingport was a breeder whichused pressurized water as a coolant. to combine pressurized water,with the breeding of nuclear fuel, is a particularly expensive approach. with breeder reactors, coolant choicegreatly impacts the cost of operations. even more so than withinefficient non-breeders. the real object of this reactor is to learn about pressurizedwater reactors for atomic power.
it will not be cheap to operate. it will be no cheaper to operate than wright's kitty hawk wouldhave been to carry passengers around. at the present time,reactor design is an art, it is not a science. we are trying tomake a science out of it. shippingport's thorium fuel load was a proof-of-concept,and not an economic breeder design. at oak ridge, wigner sawmolten salt as a way of economically breeding naturalthorium into uranium-233.
at argonne, fermi sawliquid metal as a way of economically breeding naturaluranium into plutonium. both uranium and plutonium canbe and are of course peacefully used, and alleviate a greatdeal of human suffering. but- i must admit, thereis that lingering notion of how they were usedterribly in weapons at one time, that does make it difficult for the public to acceptforms of energy that have that connection, and- thorium, fortunately,was never employed in that manner and so probably has a neutralfeeling in most people's minds.
they don't really have an opinionone way or the other about thorium any more than theywould about dysprosium or something elseon the periodic table. nein! nein! nein! nein! nein! nein! nein! well this was war time.their plan was to make bombs. they took natural uranium andthey separated those 2 isotopes. they would highly enrich uranium-235from less than 1% up to like 90-plus percent. took big factories, very difficultto do isotopic enrichment. but this is how they made the uranium forthe first nuclear weapon used in war.
this was the bomb at hiroshima.it was called "little boy. then they said- well, what can we do with all thisjunk uranium-238, the 99.3% of it? you could expose it to neutrons,and you could make it into plutonium. now, plutonium is a different chemical elementthan uranium, so they can be chemically separated. because uranium-235 anduranium-238 are identical chemically. there's no chemicaldifference between them. but there is a chemical differencebetween plutonium and uranium, so it was a lot easier to do a chemicalseparation of the plutonium you'd made.
and that's also how they made thenagasaki bomb which was called "fat man. ok, well, maybe we can dothe same thing with thorium. maybe we can expose it to neutrons,and we can make it into uranium-233. uranium will be chemicallyseparable from thorium, and we can go make a bombout of it, right? sounds great. it's a really bad idea, becauseas you made the uranium-233, you were alwaysmaking uranium-232. you didn't make a lot of ityou only made a little bit of it. but, uranium-232 is much moreradioactive than uranium-233.
here's the decay chainthat uranium-232 is on. it jumps down tobismuth-212 and thallium-208 and these 2 decay products putout very, very strong gamma rays. and these gamma raysare just super bad news if you want to go and builda practical nuclear device. because they tell everybodywhere the stuff is, and they kill you. so really quickly they were going, okay, wecan work with uranium-235, that seems okay. we can work with plutonium,that seems okay, but this uranium-233 stuff that's badnews for making a nuclear weapon.
so thorium was just set aside. run! the wolverine.pg-13. well, after the war, they picked up onthis again because now they were thinking- let's talk about making powerinstead of making nuclear weapons. and so what happenedis they put resources into the plutonium-breederreactor almost from the get-go. they built the experimentalbreeder reactor one in 1951. this was the first reactorthat made electricity.
four little light bulbs here.this was a breeder reactor. it was designed to convert plutoniuminto energy while making new plutonium. this was not a light water reactor!this predated the light-water reactor by years! early nuclear pioneers like enrico fermi andeugene wigner saw the future quite a bit differently. fermi believed that we should really focusour efforts on the fast-breeder reactor. eugene wigner on the other hand,reached a different conclusion which was that thoriumwas a superior fuel. and this opened up a number of possibilitieswith coolants and reactor configurations. they by-in-large said:we're going to go the plutonium route.
and one of the reasonswhy, was they developed a great deal of understanding aboutplutonium from the weapons program. they had made the stuff. they had workedwith its chemistry. they'd made fuel out of it. they go- we get this. thorium?we haven't really messed with thorium. you know, it wouldbe like starting over. so that propensity there was to goand do what you already knew how to do. and the plutonium was so muchbetter developed than the thorium. because the liquid metal fast breederreactor uses liquid sodium as coolant,
and because sodium has a higher boilingpoint than water at atmospheric pressure, the coolant in a liquid metal fastbreeder does not need to be pressurized. pressurized water reactor has thick pipe.where as here we have relatively thin pipe. so then- both types of breeder reactors, the liquid metal fast breederand the molten salt breeder can avoid the costand complexity associated with containing pressurized watercoolant which may flash to steam. however, the chemicalstability of molten salt coolant, and the ability of molten salt to secureradioactive isotopes within strong chemical bonds
is not shared by sodium. it's stored under an oil,to stop air or moisture getting on it. reacts very, very quicklywith air and also with water. the hydroxide is a white crust on the outside. alright, go.booooo. they built the reactorand put it in a sub and ended up cutting the reactorout of the sub and putting a lwr in it. they became disenchanted withsodium cooling rather quickly. what happens if there's a leak?sodium reacts with the air and the water.
well you haven't got air next door toyour sodium surfaces. it's inerted. with liquid metal fast breeders, the advantageof a coolant operating near atmospheric pressure must be weighed against the useof that same coolant which also reacts rapidly to air at high temperature,and violently to water at any temperature. milton shaw wanted alvin weinberg and oakridge to get on the fast breeder funding wagon. weinberg wanted to stay onwith thorium and molten salts. well it was pretty obvious that shawwas completely convinced that lmfbr- with its sodium cooled systemwas going to be successful. if we have a winner here, why spend moneyon what we know is going to be the loser?
this breeding principle holdsthe key to our efficient use of our atomic fuel resourcesof uranium and thorium. this atomic power plant in michigan is namedafter enrico fermi. a breeder type of reactor. great amounts of research and testing go intothe design and construction to make them efficient, and above all, to make them safe. breeder reactor has taken ona strongly negative connotation. in 1966 a liquid metal breederreactor suffered a meltdown. this incident led to the book and song-we almost lost detroit. however, in 1986, twenty years after the accident,another liquid metal breeder reactor,
running at full power, underwenta controlled system blackout. we took ebr-2 to 100% power,and we gagged the safety system so the emergency control rodswould not go in if they were told to. and then we turned offthe main coolant pumps. and you pulled on your helmets! well it sounds dangerous but it wasn't. no control rods were inserted.no human intervention was involved. they just turned off the pumps, and waited. the temperature climbed,held, and then began to drop.
the core tends to expandthermally a little bit as it heats up. the fuel expands the clad expands,the core support structure expands, the core plate underneath expands. and now more neutrons leak out, anddon't contribute to the chain reaction. and now there's natural circulationgoing on inside this big vessel. we can design it so that natural aircirculation on the outside would occur so you would never, everneed to take operator action. the trouble is, these tests were doneabout 2 weeks before chernobyl. yes i was aware of that it was-
and so no one- no one even knewabout this which was a shame. bob? this was not commercialized, right? we were going to. it was called clinch river.i was working on clinch river. and then- we're eliminating programsthat are no longer needed such as nuclear powerresearch and development. this administration does notsupport the department of energy's advanced liquid metal reactor program, and will oppose any efforts tocontinue funding this reactor project. in 1994, during theclinton administration,
the last american breederreactor program was cancelled. this is not a dream. this is real.we know how to do these things. nobody was the light water reactor as themachine on which we would power our civilization using nuclear power for thousands of years. the only question is, which breeder,and how fast do we get to it? i mean, i've got a 1962report to the president and right in there it states,this is a stop-gap technology. i think these early nuclear pioneerswould be absolutely floored to show up today inour nuclear world and go-
gosh, you're still using light water reactors?i mean come on guys- we should have seen moretechnology advancement by now. we should have seen something better. successful breeder reactor testshave never been publicly celebrated. the advantages outweigh the difficulties.you can handle this molten salt reliably- and when things go wrong,we were able to fix. the concept is ultimatelygoing to be practical applications. cancelled, plutonium and meltdown- would be the words most commonlyassociated with breeder reactor.
pandora's promise came out andthey're talking about the fast reactor. is there any uptick in interest in this now? i think it has motivated some peoplewho had been either skeptical of nuclear or were antinuclear to re-think. so i'm robert stone i'm thedirector of pandora's promise, which is the documentarywhich chronicles the conversion of a number of high-profile environmentalistsfrom being anti-nuclear to pro-nuclear. and their process of conversion onthis issue very much mirrors my own. on opening night i polled the audience.
i was actually surprised that 20% admittedto being pro-nuclear art sundance but they raised their hands. q&a after the film, andi asked the same question. and that was the response. until pandora's promise in 2013 there was no compelling video explanationof the liquid metal reactor's safety test for the public to digest. that same year, a video of molten saltresearchers was posted to youtube, explaining how themolten salt reactor experiment
safely compensated foran equipment malfunction thanks to the passive safetyenabled by molten salt. molten salt is inherently safe,you know, self controlling. just about any molten salt conceptthat has been seriously considered has been shown to havethis stable behavior. this is an old facility look down before youwalk, that is our biggest hazard here right now. oh!oh my goodness! yes, yes!i've modelled this shape neutronically. it is like a lead pencil isn't it?yes, it's graphite.
we just returned from a trip tooak ridge national laboratories and one of the exciting thingsthat the baronesse and i got to do was to tour themolten salt reactor experiment, which was one of these types ofreactors that was built in the 1960s. decades ago, we successfullydemonstrated passive safety features of the competing breeder reactors. we took ebr-2 to 100% power, then weturned off the main coolant pumps. the fuel expands the clad expands. now more neutrons leak out, anddon't contribute to the chain reaction.
safety is one of the most importantreasons to consider very seriously molten salt reactors and this isbecause of the clever implementation that was demonstrated in themolten salt reactor experiment. a small port in the bottom ofthe reactor that was kept plugged. and to keep the port plugged, they hasa blower that would blow cool gas over it. so there was a littleplug of frozen salt there. if the power went out,the blower turned off, and the heat would melt thefrozen plug and guess what- sploosh, everything woulddrain out of the reactor-
into this drain tank, and the differencebetween the drain tank and the reactor vessel is that the reactor vessel is notmeant to lose any thermal energy. the only place you wantedto lose thermal energy was to give it up in theprimary heat exchanger. the drain tank on the otherhand is designed to maximize the rejection of thermalenergy to the environment. i'm a mechanical engineer.so all we ever talked about in school was how to add heat to thingsand take heat out of things. one of the hard things aboutdesigning a nuclear reactor
is to design it to not loseany heat while you're running it because you want that heatto go over to the steam turbine. you don't want to lose a bunchof heat in normal operation. but to then turn around and trykeep it cool if something goes wrong. so there's 2 conflicting things. the great thing about liquid fluoride reactorsis you can design them completely separately. you can say here's my reactorand it's designed to make heat. and here's the drain tank andit's designed to cool in all situations. decades ago we turned naturally abundantisotopes of uranium, and thorium, into energy.
shippingport, a light water breeder,was captured on film. the liquid metal fast breederswere also captured on film. and when you present that to somebody'swho's been antinuclear their whole life they go, huh? did you know that? and most people are like-no i never knew that. people say- i never knew that.and they think. that's why thorium, like- do you knowyou can power a reactor with thorium? they go, what's that? clearly, someone also shot film footage
of glenn seaborg standing infront of the molten salt reactor discussing the thorium fuel cycle.i can not find this film. i can not show you any film footageof an operating molten salt reactor. only a handful of pictures exist. it's like nasa landed a manon the moon, and then lost the film. this makes for an interestingcommunications challenge. i was driving homefrom work in april of 2006, and i was listening to apiece on the radio from npr. and it was talking about theimportance of proper branding.
and that m was a bad sound.muh. it was kind of a- they were saying l was one of the best sounds.m was one of the worst sounds. so i'm sitting there thinking about them s b r. the mmmuhhh. you know, the molten salt breeder reactorand i thought- hmmm. molten: bad. salt: bad.i thought well how can we fix this? well instead of saying molten we could say liquid.because it is liquid. and liquid turns an m to an l, andaccording to this l is a lot better letter than an m. there are a lot of different kind of salts.so if we were more specific on the salt- we could say fluoride, which is a salt.it's a particular kind of salt.
breeder is kind of a generic term, and whatwe're really doing is using thorium as a fuel. so all of a sudden there it was, l f t r. one of the things i learned at nasa was,you really want your acronyms to be sayable. if they have more than 3 letters,you want to be able to say them like a word. and it's like it just appeared. there it was: l f t r. lifter.you could say it. it was a word. well as a marketing student i'dhave a lot different approach, but- hey, you know what? we need guys just like you.any other marketing students here? this stuff- there's almost a brandingeffort that needs to happen.
how do you tell a storysaying this is different? i used to think, when i was y'alls age,i was an aerospace engineer i didn't know anything about nuclear. i thought nuclear power was dumb.i had no interest in it. i was like- old junk. who would want to be into that? it wasn't until i learned about thorium andi reallized these efficiencies were possible that i began getting really interested. you know- don't do new coke,but what do you do? how do you help people understand that therereally are alternative possibilities out there?
we need guys like you thinking about this.you can come to one of the conferences. talk to your friends.tell people about it. i mean the biggest problem wehave is getting the message out. a guy got on yesterday and he said-why don't we buy a full page ad? because that costs a lot of money. why don't you go tell 5 of your friendsabout it that doesn't cost anything. and it's probably awhole lot more effective. it was only developed at oak ridge. so no other national laboratoriesreally participated in the development,
which is not true about any other-about most other types of reactors where the effort was spreadand many people participated. this was really only in the oakridge, before the age of internet. i think it was some time in 2006 wheni discovered kirk's site- energy from thorium- and learned aboutmolten salt reactors. kirk sorensen, he is whatbrought molten salts to the fore. it's pretty much all on his shouldersand he should be lauded for that. it's outstanding what he has done. kirk gave me some cds, andthen he put them on the internet.
and of course, to me that was a game changer.that was an inflection point. before, i sounded like a nut.and i couldn't point- unless you were physically with me,and i could bring down- i have a copy of fluid fuel reactorsshowing the molten salt reactor in it and the aircraft reactor experiment.matter of fact, it has a picture and in the background there'sa stepladder shows you the scale. it was half the size of your refrigerator,and it put out 2 million watts of heat! and it operated in 1954,i wasn't even on the planet then. you know, we can have world peace, and wecan specialize in what areas that we're good at,
and trade with one another,and not fight over limited resources. there's some chemical differencesbetween thorium and uranium. bleached by water, uraniumcompounds were widely dispersed. and having been scattered far and wide, uranium compounds todayare found as complex, generally dilute deposits containing mixturesof tetra, penta and hexa-valent uranium. unlike uranium, tetra-valent thorium-and it's constantly tetra-valent- resists weathering. thorium thus remained concentrated where itfirst wound up- within easy reach. barack obama, and i've heardother people say this before,
they say that there's nosilver bullet to the energy crisis. molten salts are truly the best silver bullet forserving mankind. it unlocks thorium economically, and as we know, thorium isso plentiful in the earth's crust. it'll come as a byproduct forhundreds of thousands of years. and, in fact, if we- on purpose-wanted to mine the granite just for its thorium, we're not going to run out untilthe sun becomes a red giant. alvin weinberg called it burning the rocks. you could literally mine rockjust for its energy content. glenn seaborg realized this in 1944and he was absolutely dumbfounded
with the possibilities ofwhat it meant for the future. the molten salt reactor experimenthas operated successfully and has earned areputation for reliability. i think that some day the world willhave commercial power reactors of both the uranium-plutonium andthe thorium-uranium fuel cycle types. here he was watching nations wagewar with each other in world war 2 and realizing this could bea complete game changer and change the entireenergy outlook of the future. you know eft bloggers noticed all these guysfrom china from graduate school computer modelers
started showing up on eftsigning up from shanghai, beijing, and they started asking all theseobvious questions about this and that. how they make the code work. they were all modelling it, the chinesegovernment as best as we could tell. did you say chinese is building nuclear reactorsso where are they getting the blueprints or are they developing them? well they probably got a whole bunch ofstuff from the pdfs from my website. gone through your logs to seehow many are coming from china? it's been in the public domain for an awful long time.i just made it a little easier to get, you know?
china announced to their national press of the existence of a well fundedmolten salt reactor project. and it's being run by a guynamed jiang mianheng. he got his phd in electricalengineering from drexel university, he was educated inthe united states. the really interesting thingabout dr. jiang mianheng is that his father's name is jiang zemin,and he used to be the premier of china. so, when i found that out i thought- this is not some shmoe here, this is probablysomeone who's got some resources behind him.
and if he says he's going to go builda thorium molten salt reactor well then i tend to thinkhe's probably going to do it. so, ever since finding that out i've beenreally encouraging people in the united states, and england, and canada, and japan, and justabout anywhere- i said, you know it wouldbe maybe a good idea if we got going onthis because, uh, these guys are probablygoing to pull it off, and you know, good,i hope they do. china definitely needsclean energy. absolutely.
and thorium will provide them clean energyfor hundreds of thousands of years. but, frankly, i'd really likeus to be able to do it too. and i'd like it to be something maybewe develop rather than that we go buy. we buy a lot of thingsfrom china already. you know, i mean, it's not as if we'renot buying enough things from china. we are definitelykeeping them busy. so let's- you know-let's go develop thorium. and, uh, that's really what i'd like to do. you know one of the funthings about being mayor is that
you come to the science fair to see theprojects of some people that are close to you, and next thing you know you're standing on stagein front of 1,000 people. it tends to happen. hi, i'm joe willis, and this is my sciencefair project- decarbonize alberta, and this is just a dry-run for ascience fair which is in a week. what is this, you brainwashed your son intobeing a proponent of the nuclear industry? why? why, man, why?!? no it's the other way aroundactually, i was the first critic. joe willis fordecarbonize alberta. wait, what, that's me?
i got a thorium documentary,i watched it with my dad and naturally he fell asleepthrough the entire thing. and i'm telling him how thorium can save theworld and he's not agreeing with me at all. so i put it in the second time,and he falls asleep. yeah, i got the gold medal,i got the second consumer science award, and the american society of heating,refrigeration & air conditioning and although that one's name sounds likesomething for air conditioning it's for air quality. i try to portray science as exciting andfun with katie and caysie science videos. caysie is my miniaturepoodle she's 3 years old.
i thought that if we adopted the lftrthen we would have a much better future. if we educate people, then they may understandnuclear power, and they may become supportive. you need this stuffexplained in layman's terms so the average joeon the street gets it the way the average joe onthe street gets the basic beats of an internal combustion engine. they made an information packagethat they tried to be relatively neutral, that they could give to people and thenask for their opinion on nuclear power. people were meh-not really opposed, not really in favor.
when they did focus groupswhere they brought 12 people in, left the same information and thenleft the room and let them talk, then went back, pulled thepeople apart, anonymously, the approval ratings were amazing. it's probably you at least get 1 or 2 peoplethat knows enough that the other people trust, that can explain it to them, so,if we can explain it better to the public i think that will go a long way. for me, i think it'seducation. at all levels. we talked about, on the board, educatingcandidates and people in political office.
but i think there'salso the general public. make them awareof what's possible. and get them interested in thesciences at the lower ages and say, yes, i want to be working on somethingthat can power the world in the future. in addition to being an engineer,he really is an educator. he really is a teacher. and he was beginning to spend moreand more and more time- mostly educating. this stuff, this is laws of physics stuff.i didn't invent it. all i do is promote it. he got a phone call from a stranger and spentprobably 45 minutes on the phone really being patient with the specifics.i'm tapping at my watch.
we need to start today to get young peopleinterested in this area. the molten salt chemistry. the metallurgy. the radiochemistry.even the civil engineering. we have to start that supplychain almost from scratch. are their labs going to beintegrated into this curriculum? or is there any wayto leave those out? i know that was really the biggest challenge,getting the supplies to develop a lab for our curriculum. but still any molten salt is goingto require a furnace of some type. most of the nuclear engineering schools havelost their operating reactors in the past 20 years. so they're teaching-
it'd be like teaching you how to operateon a car with a shop manual but no car. so there's students learning how to runnuclear reactors with nothing to learn on just sort of reading about it. china has built a hugenetwork of training reactors. they did it in,like, a couple years. we did a journey to just aboutevery nuclear engineering school and we said how wouldyou like to have a salt loop? it would be just be externally heated. it wouldn't be fueled so itcouldn't generate its own heat, but-
in every other conceivable way,especially if you had neutronic stand-ins, you know, it would act exactly likea molten salt reactor would. you can show the scientific phenomena,the chemical and physical phenomena, without breaking the bank. would that be utilized by other departments as well?absolutely! you'd need an xrd, basically tolook at the crystal pre and post. and those type of equipment span the gamutfrom biological sciences to geo-sciences, engineering- if they're going to have a training reactor theymight as well have a gen 4 training reactor not a gen 1. that's what they have now, downat u of i, that's being dismantled.
mit and harvard, even they can't afford to buildtheir own telescope any more just by themselves- so harvard and berkeley anduniversity of chicago and mit get together and they all say we'llpitch in and we'll share it. so you've got all of thesepeople excited now- i hope so is everybody excited?-the molten salt reactor- well plus you mention nuclear toanyone and their initial reaction is: nuclear energy oh, there's noway we could learn this stuff i don't want to do that classit's going to be too hard. i was really encouraged by thechicago meeting we were at,
was the number ofyoung kids that were there. and i mean like- i suppose i don'tmean kids- like, college age- how knowledgeable.how enthusiastic. and that kind of gives me hope. and i can tell you that is not going onin the conventional nuclear industry. we haven't produced very many nuclear engineers. i taught a class of senior levelengineering students at tennessee tech in the fall of 2010.there were 13 in the class. and they didn't even have nuclear at tennesseeso these were electricals and chemicals. um-
5 of them went on to grad school innuclear engineering because of my course. i wanted to- like- write the nrc and say-you've told them the best situation you can possibly have is to be part of amassive decommissioning contract. i mean- how many people wantto spend their careers doing that? when a nation dreams big, and hasfully funded projects, visible to everyone, where a frontier isgetting advanced, daily innovations attract smart, clever people.the prospect of innovation attracts them. everyone feels like tomorrow is somethingthey want to invent, and bring into the present. you know, you guys should electan engineer president.
well that's what the chinese do. you know all our politicalleaders are lawyers and all china's political leaders are engineers-heh heh- so- oh gosh. we're going broke.we're mired in debt. we don't have as manyscientists as we want or need. and jobs are going overseas. i assert that these arenot isolated problems. that they are thecollective consequence of the absence of ambition thatconsumes you when you stop having dreams.
if all you do is coast,eventually you slow down, while others catch up,and pass you by. why nuclear energy? especially,after what happened in japan? why molten salt reactor? why thorium? and last but not least, why china is the firstone to eat the crab? that's chinese saying. uh, the chinese academy of sciences hasbegun an effort to develop what they call t-msr, thorium molten salt reactor.and it's really along these same lines. and they are well funded,and well staffed.
we have 300 peopleworking full time on this. they know that those are the samepeople who are going to turn around and operate and maintain those reactors.i give them great credit. it's very compelling work. chinese are definitelyin the lead right now on this. 1994 the state of californiapassed a law of the zero emissions. and gm's ev1 came out in 1996 because they want very much liketo catch the market of the california. the big oils heavilylobbying east coast,
not to follow the sametrack as california did. finally, gm called back all the ev1s fromthe market, and crashed them in 2004. it's- it's- it's something to me like-like- like world war 2 nazi. it's amazing.it's a very scary story here. here is pure electric car developedby chinese academy of sciences. we used to have a dream-if we can produce clean electricity then we can driveour electrical car. however-if you look at this- as of today- it's all gasoline cars.so it makes our job even impossible.
we need a revolutionary something happen.why thorium? and why msr? low pressure here,which give you more safety. we also end up with the high temperature here.we need high temperature. because, if you can go 900 degrees c,then we can use this energy to- convert the co2,which is not the waste at all- is a raw material forour chemicals, in fact. we need the energy to convert them.we need the high temperature. there's all sorts of very, very interesting chemistrythat we have never had the opportunity to look at because we've never had a cheapenergy platform at those temperatures.
with a heat platform likea molten salt reactor you can do any number ofhigh temperature reactions. we're still going to need liquid fuelsfor vehicles and machinery. but we could generate these fuels fromthe carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and from water,much like nature does. we could generate hydrogenby splitting water and combining it with carbon harvestedfrom co2 in the atmosphere- making fuels like methanol,ammonia, and dimethyl-ether, which could be a directreplacement for diesel fuels.
the whole planet's transportation system isgauged toward the consumption of a fossil fuel. there's an entire internal combustioninfrastructure on the planet. imagine carbon neutral gasoline anddiesel sustainable and self produced. -a way of getting the full lifecycle out ofthe infrastructure we've already built up. because you don't want to just abandonthe infrastructure we've already built up. we have trillions of dollars ofinternal combustion machinery around. but we need to at least stopputting more stuff into the air. the opportunities abound.i couldn't even tell you. i just- there's so many possibilities.i wouldn't-
i wouldn't even want to predict.wouldn't even want to. alright, so- this the work that'sactually going on at nrl today, this is not a theoretical possibility. the ocean or rivers, as it's pointed out,is full of carbon dioxide and hydrogen. there's lots of thiseverywhere on the planet. in fact, seven-tenths of the earth'ssurface is covered with water. we are looking here at theelectrolytic cation exchange module. this is on version 3. here's the skid that's used downat naval air station key west.
what's going on is pretty simple.we're pumping electricity into this module up here. we're pulling carbonic acid,hco3, out of the water. by the way, per unit gallon weget about a 92% removal from it. then we're using standard electrolysisto crack water in order to make hydrogen. and what do you do with it? you string the carbon together with your hydrogen,and let's get into the fuels business. here is the spectrum for jp-5, which is thestandard fuel used to run all the aircraft. a bit like a classic bell curve. what you're seeing is the spectrum-
based upon carbon content of the individualhydrocarbons as you make this guy out of oil. so this is anybody. exxon, bp, shell,whoever you want to name it- pulling petroleum out of the ground,fractionally distilling it, and making jp-5 accordingto the military specification. so what happens coming out of ourmachine down at naval air station key west? now look at this,we've got a decay curve. because we're manufacturing the fuelssynthetically we're able to control the carbon content and get a better concentrationof the c10 hydrocarbons that we want than you can get from natural oil.
so what this turns out is that thesynthetically made aviation fuel actually has a higherenergy density and is cleaner. it doesn't have the sulfur compounds in it,it doesn't have the nitrates in it. all of the really nasty stuff that comesout of burning a fossil fuel we don't have, and we have a better power densityprofile making this stuff artificial. if you can do just basic high school chemistry,if we can get hydrogen and co2 from seawater you have the fundamental building blocks rightthere for making any hydrocarbon fuel you want. burn the fuel it will go into the air,it'll get absorbed into the ocean, pulled out of the ocean, turnedinto fuel, burned and back into the air.
so your car works beautifully justas today but it's not running on oil. but it's still running on thesame fuel you have today. it's not a real airplane, i admit it.however, you're looking at it in the air- flying on fuel that was madefrom sea water and electricity. what do you do about civilian aviation?are we going to move to a world where only the highest of our elected officials fly aroundthe world when the rest of us get to walk? because there is no substitute foraviation fuel if you want to get in the air. we're not going to havesolar powered aircraft. we're not going to have hydrogenfuel powered aircraft anytime soon.
we're looking at some total radicaltechnology breakthrough if you want to fly. the hydrocarbonic acid in the ocean is inequilibrium with the co2 in the atmosphere. it's a very simple test. seal up a fish-tank, fill saltwater inthe bottom, don't let any air into it. run your probes in there, pullcarbonic acid out of the bottom. read your co2 level on the air above it andwatch the co2 level in the atmosphere drop. every time you take a piece of carbon out of theocean it is the same as taking it out of the atmosphere. it will pass from the air into the water. when you send an aircraft up inthe air and it's running on fuel
you made by takingcarbonic acid out of the ocean, you have a virtual carbon cycle.you are not adding co2 at all. it's carbon-free fuel that is carbonand burns in our existing engines. so what we're going to do is go throughthe various stages that will be needed to make fuel on the martian surface. i've taken a tray full of ice, and coveredit in sand to represent the martian geology. there's ice caps at the top and this issolid ice, water, and also solid carbon dioxide. we can drill down to get thissolid ice and turn it into liquid. take a screwdriver.heat it up. melt this ice.
by burrowing through ourmartian surface that we've got here, we can turn frozen waterinto liquid water and steam. now we can use electricity topull the hydrogen and the oxygen apart by simply dropping a9-volt battery into our bowl of water. on the negative terminal,which is the fatter terminal, we see bubbles forming, and that'shydrogen gas being formed out of the water. did lewis and clark cross the american continent bringing with them all the food, water andair they would need for their horses for a 3 year transcontinentaltrip of exploration?
no, if they had done that they would haveneeded a wagon train of supplies for every man, and anotherwagon train for every horse, and then of course the wagon train menwould have needed more wagon trains and it would havegone exponential. if you looked at these other missionplans, what you saw was that the majority of the mass they were sendingto mars was the propellant to come back. what is the travel-light and live-off-the-landapproach to mars exploration? this is a little rocket ship forreturning from mars to earth in the terminal stage of the mission.
but no one is in it whenit goes out the first time. they have to be unfueled or this willweigh much to heavy to throw to mars. and then slung below thevehicle not shown in this diagram is a little truck in the back ofthat truck is a little nuclear reactor. you take the water you electrolize it,split it into hydrogen and oxygen, and you suck in the martian air, which is95% carbon dioxide, and now you've got a fully fueled earth return vehicle sitting,waiting for you on the surface of mars. but it wouldn't be practical if youhad to bring the fuel from earth. and in fact we make extra propellant beyondwhat the earth return vehicle needs
so we can operate chemical powered vehicleson the surface of mars for exploration purposes. the ability to make use of local resourcesis not just the key to making the mission cheap, it's also the key to makingthe mission effective. because there's no point going to mars unlessyou can do something useful once you get there. the constellation program wasthe program nasa had started to put people back on the moon and i hadbeen working on it for a number of years. it was good that it got cancelled. it wasa program that was in really big trouble. it was way over budget, it was poorly designed,it was being very poorly implemented. but- i was where with a colleague and shedid trajectory work like i did and i said-
are you disappointed this has been cancelled?i'll never forget what she said to me, she said- kirk, i've been here 30 years. every singlething i've ever worked on has been cancelled. the old strategy, including the constellation program,was not fulfilling its promise in many ways. that's not just my assessment. and i think there is a parallelthere, i think, between what's going on in the nuclear industryand what's going on at nasa. so it sounds like you each worked on a numberof different reactors over your careers. everything i ever worked on got cancelled. not because of him though.
you know the shuttle was a magnificenttechnology development- in 1981. part of the problem was,u.s. held on to the shuttle for 30 years. and in 2011, the shuttle was not such amagnificent technology development any more. because nasa kept holding on the old technology,until finally president bush had to say- we're going to stop doing it. the space shuttle, after nearly 30 yearsof duty, will be retired from service. i think there's a parallel therewith the light water reactor. we built 100-some-oddlight water reactors between the 70s and the 80sand a few into the 90s.
and, as you've seen fromour visit to oak ridge, there's talk about extendingthose reactors 60 and 80 years. and you get into the same sort ofargument of diminishing returns. how long do you hold onto the old technology? i don't see the trajectory as serving anypurpose, because there are processing disadvantages, there are engineering disadvantages,there are material science disadvantages. all of those things are non-issues if youadopt a truly fluid fuel / cooling system. whether you're in spaceor on the moon or on mars. you need something that is basically stupid-proof.right? it's idiot-proof.
and all of the redundancy that is involvedin solid fuel reactors is basically eliminated. desalinating briny water. synthesizing liquid fuel. growing indoor crops. these are how humans can reduceour ecological footprint here on earth- and explore marswithout breaking the bank. in all environments,on earth, and in zero gravity, we want reactors capable of producing largeamounts of power, yet are simple and compact. on earth, small reactors can betransported by train by truck or by ship.
factory construction is muchcheaper than on-site construction. a small reactor also requires less naturalresources to fabricate in the first place. size is even more importantfor off-world application, because launching stuff intospace is so incredibly expensive. we don't want any complex mechanismfor shuttling around solid fuel. much operational complexitytakes place outside a nuclear reactor. the enrichment of uranium.the management of spent fuel. overall, molten salt reactors are much simpler. the greater efficiencyenabled by liquid homogeneity
means less mining, and less wasteper kilowatt-hour generated. unlike today's solid fuel reactors, whichcan only be economically fueled with uranium, it is possible to fuel an appropriately designedmolten salt reactor economically with thorium. almost all of it will ultimately end up fissioning. out of about 1000 kg, about 15 kgof plutonium-238 will be left over, now this is good stuff. plutonium-238 is different thanplutonium-239, the stuff we use in bombs. in fact it's worthless for bombs. this is the stuff nasa usesin its deep-space batteries.
voyager, galileo, cassini, new horizons,all these deep space probes. almost everything that comes out ofthis reactor can be sold for product. and then, it'll make enough uranium-233to replace itself with 1000 kg of thorium. breeding thorium requiresa more complicated design than is required for a uraniumfueled molten salt reactor. the question becomes, do you only wantthe reactor to be as simple as possible? or- do you want the entire fuel lifecycleto be as simple, and efficient, as possible? in space, for most applications, we absolutelyneed our reactor to be as simple as possible. a smaller, lighter reactor is of the utmost importance,for our immediate exploration needs.
the first molten salt reactorlaunched into space will undoubtedly be poweredby uranium not thorium. but eventually, we want to maximize the efficiencywith which we consume natural resources. on earth we do this because we don't like diggingbig holes over here, and dumping big piles over there. on the moon and mars, we mightnot worry about pollution, but we'd be far more constrained inhow we harvest natural resources. thorium is an element found everywhere.it is junk. rare earth mining operations would justas soon pay you to take it off their hands. if you're pulling out rare earths, andyour deposit has- let's say- 8% rare earths,
it may have 14% thorium. every known way to extract rare earthsfrom their mineral concentrates- thorium just literally drops outlike a rock and you have it. the thorium is free. so it's going to bethe most valuable commodity in the world- with almost no value. because the element thorium canbe isolated with basic chemistry, and because molten salt reactorsdo not require solid fuel fabrication, it is possible to mine dirt for energyeven on the moon and on mars. one amazing application of molten saltreactors is to solve the water problem.
we're standing in palo alto,california, in silicon valley, and they are in the midst of one ofthe worst droughts in california history. well, solve the water problem by reverse osmosisdesalination of all that water we have off-shore here- then make veryenvironmentally friendly fertilizers- because you're doingzero-emission energy source- and then solve the food problem.and you can apply that model worldwide. any factory assembledadvanced reactor, brought to market, could help make nuclear powersafer and less expensive. but, it is liquid fueled thorium reactorswhich can completely decouple energy generation
from negative environmental impact. lftr consumes only the unwantedbyproduct of existing mining operations. there's so much rare earths thatwe're throwing away because of thorium. one rare earth andusually one thorium atom. we could solve the rare earth problemwithout opening any new mines and we can solve the energyproblem without mining either. we need the thorium, and he needssomeone to get rid of the thorium. i realized that there was 60 people sittingon the other side of the podium going- do you think there's enough of it?do you think there's a stable supply?
how much thorium do youthink you'll be pulling up a year? and he goes- i think about 5000 tons.he goes- is that a lot? by my calculations,5000 tons of thorium would supply the planet withall of its energy for a year. i said- so your 1 mine, in missouri,would bring up enough thorium- without even trying-to power the entire planet. and he goes- and there's like a zillion otherplaces on earth that are just like my mine. i mean-it's a nice mine, but it's not unique, it's not like this is the oneplace on earth where this is found.
the promise of abundant clean energy hasalready been made by wind and solar advocates. however, those are diffuse andintermittent sources of energy. thorium, when consumed in a molten salt reactor,is incredibly energy dense. and thorium, in a molten salt reactor,can follow energy demand. we did it at a numberof different power levels. you could change the load on thisradiator by moving the doors down and the reactor would follow the load. as the salt would heat up, there would be less fissile material in thenuclear reactor core, and so fission became less likely.
conversely, as the salt cooled down, therewas more material, because the salt was contracting, and fission became more likely. an inherently stable system. in other words, gets hotter, cools down,gets too cool, heats up. so that is a really amazing quality that a nuclearreactor can have and this reactor had it in spades. and then you have other thingslike wind and solar where you can't change the rate of what's coming at all,you just take whatever you're going to get. we have to get beyond burning stuff for energy. and we can go to a dispersed form of energy,which is gathering wind and solar.
or we can go to a more concentratedform of energy, which is nuclear. and the disadvantage of wind and solar thatwill always exist is the amount of labor, energy, and expense of gathering andconcentrating and directing that energy. because energy had to becollected and directed to do work. and nuclear energy hasalready been collected. our national conversation on energy- rarely mentions these concepts:energy density. energy reliability. if we continue to ignore energy density and reliability,we'll wind up in a future like this one- a future where we continue to solve problemsthrough ingenuity and perseverance,
but always with a disadvantage- we won't be using energy to tackle problems,if we've constrained our own access to it. human mechanical energy is so amazing.why can't we use that to create energy? you will never run out of electricity.you never generate any pollution. so half the world is notgoing to generate pollution. we call it- free electric. solar freakin' roadways- -replaces all roadways, parking lots,sidewalks, driveways, tarmacs, bike paths and outdoor recreation surfaces with smart,microprocessing, interlocking, hexagonal solar units!
maintaining a nation of solar highways. manufacturing bicycle-battery-generatorsfor every home. an extremely ambitious idea to replaceour nation's roads with solar panels. the department of transportation has kicked in$850,000. people are actually taking this seriously. despite the media attention they've received,i think these ideas are flat-out crazy. but they're par for the coursein today's energy landscape. they keystone xl pipeline extension- for a while, the entire national energy discussionrevolved around a single pipeline. sometimes it seems, the more difficultan energy source is to harness,
the more attention it receives. if you'll give me a chance to serve, i'll bring the epa and the agriculture departmentand all the people together and we'll use ethanol as a part of our nation'senergy security future! for example, corn ethanol receives7 billion dollars in subsidy each year. corn ethanol'sreturn on energy investment is 1.3 times. only 30% more energy is recoveredfrom corn ethanol, then went into producing it. ethanol is a lousy molecule. i'm sorry,but the farm lobby did a really good job- because they had a lot of money-
to be able to peddle a reallygrossly inferior molecule like ethanol. its got 25% less energy density-per mole- than regular old gasoline. and it costs a hell of a lotmore money to make. even al gore, who was a keyproponent of corn ethanol, acknowledges that thesubsidy was a mistake- the energy conversion ratios are,at best, very small. how does corn's 1.3 timescompare against other energy sources? solar cells return 7 times.natural gas is 10 times. wind is 18 times.today's water cooled nuclear is 80 times.
coal is 80 times.hydropower is 100 times. a thorium powered molten salt reactor canreturn 2000 times the energy invested in it. as another point of reference, 7 billion dollarsis not just our yearly corn ethanol subsidy- it would also triple nasa's entiretechnology development budget. uh- personally if i was going to tryto be living on the moon or mars i would definitely wanta nuclear power source i would consider anything lessto be tantamount to suicide. there's lots of thorium on the surface of the moon.there's lots of thorium on the surface of mars. there are fluorides on mars. for certain.
so you can actually get your fluorine source,your thorium source, your uranium source, and most likely the othermetals that you would need. extract the water from the soils of mars. separate the hydrogen and oxygen.we now have a supply of rocket fuel on mars. a filling station.so you don't have to carry all your fuel with you. there are many advantages to not havingenergy being your scarcest resource in space. set up some other nuclearreactor somewhere else in space. space becomes that frontier. these innovations make headlines.
and those headlines work theirway down the educational pipeline. everybody in school knows about it. you don't have to set up a program toconvince people that being an engineer is cool. this is a video about thorium, molten saltreactors, nuclear power, and energy itself. we look at technical challenges. we look at statements made whichmischaracterize the potential of thorium. and we'll examine some claims that nuclearpower is entirely unnecessary in the first place. this video exists because nasa spent $10,000to digitize reactor research documents in 2002. the documents are public domain, accessiblethrough ornl's online library or kirk's website.
this is not mystery technology. anyone can learn aboutmolten salt reactors in great detail. in fact, half a dozen privately fundedstartups are working right now to bring modern, factory assembled,molten salt reactors to market. the bug was put in my ear,to think about a new company. i worked 10 years ontechnology development at nasa. technology doesn't develop on its own.it develops when we push it. and the converse is true. when wedon't push technology it doesn't go anywhere. these reactors are designedto operate under 1 earth gravity.
they won't be small enough to launchinto space. but unlike a space reactor, these molten salt reactors don'tdepend on nasa to fund development. in fact, the first moltensalt reactor to ever operate, was called theaircraft reactor experiment. it was incredibly compact, and itwas designed to operate without gravity. unless you were physically with me,and i could bring down fluid fuel reactors showing the molten salt reactor in itand the aircraft reactor experiment. they consciously and deliberatelyignored the contribution of convection to heat flow in liquids.they ignored it.
they ignored itfor a very good reason. they were designing anuclear reactor powered bomber. it was going in an airplane. airplanes do interesting things like gointo dives. the force of gravity disappears. convection then stops.convection is a gravity driven phenomena. so they couldn't rely on convection. nasa will be able to crib fromthe aircraft reactor experiment- and an abundance ofmodern reactor designs- to begin work on low gravity-or zero gravity- molten salt reactors.
when molten salt reactors beginpowering our cities and providing fresh water, it will be quickly recognizedthat the best bang-for-the-buck ever attained bya government agency was the scanning ofmolten salt research- performed by nasa for $10,000. in the last third of this century, our independencewill depend on self sufficiency in energy. the united states will not bedependent on any other country for the energy we need toprovide our jobs, to heat our homes, and to keep ourtransportation moving.
beginning this moment, this nation will neveruse more foreign oil than we did in 1977. never. our imports of foreign oil havebeen climbing steadily since 1985, and now stand at 42%of our total consumption. we need a long-term energy strategyto maximize conservation and to maximize the developmentof alternative sources of energy. america is addicted to oil,often imported from unstable parts of the world. this country can dramatically improveour environment, move beyond a petroleum-based economy, make our dependenceon middle-eastern oil a thing of the past.
in 10 years, we will finally end ourdependence on oil from the middle east. hello, i'm llewellyn king. i'm executive producer and hostof white house chronicle on pbs. and i've been writing about nuclear power in washington for nearly 50 years. in the 60s, there was an enormous enthusiasm for nuclear. and if you had some different scheme youweren't encouraged but there was room. the atomic establishment consisted of the joint committee on atomic energy which directed the atomic energy commissionwhich had its way in everything. the joint committee was different from any other organ of the congress, any other committee,
because it was a joint committee. they could introduce legislation. none other ever has, and is an experiment which will not be repeated. the result was a kind of world of its own. people who on it were devoted to nuclear, but they had their own view of it. and it didn't matter whether the senate was in charge or the house was in charge and there was no separation between the parties. one of the people by the way on the joint committee on atomic energy was al gore's father who is just as passionately pro-nuclear.
the players and names arenow sort of lost in history. john pastore from rhode island. chet hollifield a very powerful house member also chairman of the government operations committee in the house. and i am one of the few people who actually knew alvin weinberg. i also saw at that time thorium get pushed out by the atomic establishment of the day. the light water industry, the industry we have, is very defensive it has really- it serves the utilities, not the vendors, not the scientists, not the engineers but the operators, the utilities they are in thecatbird seat they control the general view
expressed by the nuclear industry. and they're timid. they don't want to say nuclear is better than coal it's cleaner than natural gas because they have a lot of sunk investmentin coal and because they're buying that all gas very cheaply. they never want to be put in the classicadvertising situation of saying: "this is better. we are moving ahead. when you come along and you say a reactor is going to be much better, safer perhaps, than previous reactors this alarms thembecause the sunken investment and
the fear for thefleet that they have. the hearing of the subcommitteeon energy will come to order. numerous engineerswho are renowned engineers... people who know what they're doing... tell me that there are a number of approaches that would eliminate the leftover waste problem but everytime i hear about it,coming back, what will be built? again, it's light water reactors. i don't understand what's going on here? why are we spending money to build reactors based on the same concept that we have been
building ever since world war 2 ? i believe that the light water reactors for theforeseeable future will be a bridge between the industry of todayand an industry of tomorrow. what we've got is not a bridge to tomorrowbut a protection of the status quo. my constituents are alwaysasking me about this... does thorium have a placein our nuclear future? we have made a massive commitmentin this country to uranium based cycle, i see no compelling reason to movetowards a thorium cycle. there was a recent report done by the nuclear energy agency of the oecd on thorium systems.
can you make them work? yes you can make them work. is there an advantage doing it?i haven't seen it. a new paper has just come out onthorium powered nuclear reactors. not quite so bullish on the case for thorium. it's from britain's national nuclear laboratory. so they say that there is about 4x morethorium on earth than there is uranium. but at the moment uranium is cheapenough that simply doesn't matter. it's, i think, one of these sort oftechnological cults.
melting the fuel rods down in concentrated nitric acid from the thorium reactor. extracting [uranium] 233 and thenmaking more fuel rods with that and putting it in another reactor... it's economically totally out of the question. go to my web page section on thoriumreactors, written by physicists. you just heard three different reports cited. one to a congressional committee on energy. one to readers of the economist. and one to the audience of russia today.
all 3 reports overwhelminglyfocus on the challenge of consuming thoriumin solid fuel reactors. solid fuel reactors such as shippingport atomic power station. this reactor is going to cost something over 55 million dollars, i believe it will produce about a 100,000 kilowatts of power. the real object of thisreactor is tolearn about pressurized water reactorsfor atomic power. it will be no cheaper to operate thenwrite's kitty hawk would have been to carry passengers around.
at the present time reactor designis an art, not a science. we are trying to make a science out of it. rickover built one of these reactorsand put it over here in shippingport. a funny-looking submarine shellshaped containment building. get out.that's funny. my understanding was that he had a veryaggressive timeline for the first power reactor and he was told it would take forever. he pushed it through very quickly. oh, absolutely.
he was an absolute termagant. other managers who have been less successful than they should have been were because they thought they were rickover, and they weren't. shippingport was the first civiliancommercial reactor in the world. for 25 years we've never had any problem. why? because i have my representativesitting in that control room every minute that reactor is operating. if he sees one of the operators talking to another and it's not on business he tells
them to stop. if they don't stop he shuts down the plant. and we have shut down twice. you managed to recruit an extraordinary group of people and bring them in. there are no good people waiting to be hired. all the good people already have good jobs. i did not recruit extraordinary people. i recruited people that extraordinary potential then i trained them. tests of mechanisms in air andin room temperature water looked alright-
nevermind the good news get to the problem!dynamic hot water test from the labs. some bearings froze and somevalves tended to seize up. now, these results are just preliminary. damnit mannoff! the test equipment may be at fault. our job is to anticipate the worstand then fix it. did you know about this rockwell? yes adminral, i did. then why the hell didn'tyou tell me about it?
yes sir i guess i figured this was panoff's area. i didn't want to take over his turf. his turf! does it matter to you if pumps and valves freeze up or the reactor control rods sticks? yes sir that would be disastrous but it's-then it's your responsibility to tell me so, 100% your responsibility! and it's 100% panoff's. and it's 100% dunfurt's. the existence of these other people doesn't change your responsibility one wit.
he insisted on everyone being trained everyone being up to quality and no excuses. you know, you did it right and you did it right the first time. this shippingport atomic power station on the ohio river it is the first full-scale nuclear power plant for generation of electricity in the united states. over its 25-year life, shippingport was powered by various combinations of nuclear fuel including one fuel load of thorium. he wanted to prove you canmake a light water breeder. he kind of snuck radkowsky in thereto put the thorium in. the people in charge now of the aecwere not interested in the breeding.
only problem is the core turned into a gigantic humongous swiss watch that had to be that accurate with a million littlesprings holding it all together. he was trying to shoehorn differentnuclear physics into an existing system. it made it very complicatedand very difficult to work. he did that under the naval reactor program. we used to have a separatenaval reactors division here in this lab. they developed and built the reactor for the world's first atomic submarine: the nautilus. the story of the nautilus is legend. because of its success it was used as a starting point in the development of an advanced design
reactor for shipping port. its name: pwr - pressurized water reactor. the reason we have that as the base for our power reactor technology today is because the navy was prepared to pay the first-mover costs to make one work. and once you've done that it's extraordinarily difficult to compete with it because those first mover costs are very, very high and have no financial return associated with them. i became really quite friendly with rickover and spent better than a year... and that's where he learned about nuclear power. was that about 1947?
it was 1947, yes. and it was i who urged young rickover, the way to make nuclear powered submarine was with the pressurized water reactor. you know, the navy had reactors and so the air force had to have reactors. the navy has built their nuclear submarines and the army has taken the same technologies as the navy, the water-cooled reactor and they're doing their thing. but the air force wants to builda nuclear-powered bomber! dirty little secret was that most of the people involved in it knew from the get-go that it really wasn't practical.
in contrast to a submarine where you've got limited space but you can shield it for the people on the submarine, it's much harder on an airplane because of the weight. most of us did not really think aircraft reactor really could work. but we did feel that there is very interesting technology there that someday could be applied. and i would maintain that weinberg was absolutelyright in his assessment of the situation back then. he knew that to make the nuclear airplane work they couldn't use water cooled reactors. they couldn't use high-pressure reactors. they couldn't use complicated solid fuel reactors. they had to have something that was so slick, that was so safe, that was so simple...
operated at low pressure, high temperature, had all the features you wanted in it. they didn't even know what it was. i think someday this will be looking at as one of the great pivot points of history that if this program, this nuclear airplane program had not been established the molten-salt reactor would have never been invented because it is simply too radical, too different, too completely out of the ball fieldof everything else- for it to be arrived atthrough an evolutionary development. it had to be forced into existence by requirements that were so difficult to achieve and the nuclear airplane was that.
well we were young chemicalengineers at the time. god smiles on young chemicalengineers they do things that in later years wouldbe regarded as crazy. the navy program that led to the light water reactors we have now was well optimized to the needs of the navy. it actually wasn't very well optimized to the needs of power production. the reactor category advocated by alvin weinberg for civilian power production, the molten-salt reactor is covered in only two of the three reports dismissing thorium. so let's dismiss that third report by the anti-nuclear organization ieer, and focus
on the nnl and oecd reports. they do include sections on molten salt. the united kingdom's nnl report correctly identifies the advantages offered by molten salt reactors in its molten salt reactor section. that is, page 23. however, the full implications ofmolten salt reactors are not examined throughout the different sections. for example, proliferation risk and reprocessing are covered as if spent fuel containing uranium-233 will be shuttled between the reactor, a reprocessing facility, and the spent fuel repository.
that is not the case. uranium-233 is both created and fissioned into energy inside the reactor itself. unlike solid fuel alternatives what emerges from the molten-salt breeder does not represent a proliferation risk, nor a reprocessing challenge. a single part of the nnl report illustrates how this should have gone. page 18. recycling u-233 present some difficult challenges in fuel fabrication because of the daughter products from u-232. problems.
challenges. technological barriers. technical risk. and then, at the bottom- msr is unique in that it avoids these problems entirely with no fuel fabrication required. the nnl report could easily havea caveat carved out in every section regarding molten salt reactors. msr impacts every aspect of the thorium fuel cycle, including proliferation. the subreport cited as a molten salt reactor reference is in fact also focused on solid
fuel as well, just like the main report. from a liquid fuel perspective, there's no meat in this report. the oecd report is another report focused on solid fuel. like the nnl report, every section goes into detail about the challenges of thorium with solid fuel reactors, but it does offer a fairly meaty section on molten salt reactors. 11 pages. does the oecd report evaluate alvin weinberg's concept of the molten-salt breeder and identify technical challenges which may impede development? of those 11 pages, in a 133 page report, 1 sentence does so.
this 1 gigawatt design was a thermal reactor with graphite moderated core that required heavy chemical fuel salt treatment with a removal time of approximately 30 days for soluble fission products, a drawback that could potentially be eliminated by using a fast spectrum instead. the remaining 10 pages of molten salt are then entirely dedicated to a different molten salt reactor concept. a fast-spectrum molten salt reactor. if you don't know the meaning of:moderator, fast spectrum, or fission products, then please bear with me.
these terms will be explained, as will the need for chemical processing. the critical point is, the oecd report carefully dances around the thorium reactor options being promoted by advocates such as myself. i know that our policy is very simple to understand- no nuclear. is there more nuanced demanded there, because concerns about nuclear energy can be addressed with future technologies? in a fast-spectrum reactor, uranium and thorium perform the same. in a solid fuel reactor, uranium is a superior choice. it is only in alvin weinberg's thermal-spectrum molten-salt breeder reactor that thorium's
advantages become clear. and this is what i think is really worthy of consideration- right now we have to make an economic case for why should we consider thorium as a fuel source? we can go and we can mine uranium and we can enrich it and we can essentially burn out the small amount of uranium-235 in that. and you can put an economic quantification on the value of a gram of fissile material in the form of leu [low enriched uranium]. it is on the order of $10 to $15. out of the ground that's that's what a gram of of u-235 in that fuel represents.
so if you want to make an economic case for why you're going to use the thorium fuel cycle you better figure out how to turna gram of thorium into fissile and fission it for less money than that. otherwise nobody's really going to care from an economic basis and so this is why we want to pursue radical simplification in the reprocessing. want to make it as simple as we possibly can but no simpler. the oecd report evaluates thoriumand based only on solid fuel reactors and fast-spectrum molten salt reactors. it does not evaluate thorium based on alvin weinberg's molten-salt breeder reactor.
when the idea of the breeder was first suggested in 1943, the rapid and efficient recycle of the partially spent core was regarded as the main problem. nothing has happened in the ensuing quarter-century that has fundamentally changed this. and i'll go further- nothing hashappened in the ensuing 40 years that has fundamentally changed this. weinberg nailed the basic idea. the media overlook this gapinghole in the report. no mention of alvin weinberg, the molten-salt reactor experiment or of liquid chemistry. no mention of a buried sentence in the hundred page report.
let's reword it for clarity. this one gigawatt design was a thermal reactor with graphite moderated core, that avoided the drawbacks of fast-spectrum by removing soluble fission products through the use of chemical fuel salt treatment. the successful breeder will be the one that can deal with the spent fuel most rationally, either by the achievement extremely long burn, up by greatly simplifying the entire recycle step. we at oak ridge have always been intrigued by this latter possibility. it explains our long commitment to liquid fuel reactors, first the aqueous homogenous,
now the molten salt. the second reactor actually operated very well, that was the molten salt reactor experiment there it is this is the place. these things right over here are the spent probes. see those things will extend like 60 foot in length, and went down the tank did the melting, the bubbling and stirring and everything. he had to go down an additional 20 feet to get to the top of the tanks, it actually had to go inside the tanks. those things would extend you got a pipe within a pipe.
the probe had heaters on the end of it. it would melt a pool in the salt and would sink down into it. all those long-handled tools they had for operations, those were- it was almost heroic actions you'd say when they were trying to do things, when you've got this length of distance, and we'd certainly try to design things today that could be robotically handled. it just would not be designed the same way as it was at that point. one of the things that i've learned from talking to some of the old-timers, people didn't disbelieve that we could build the machine, they didn't believe that we could maintain it. operation of the msre was not too difficult.
and the people that i had working for me they all had hound dogs under the porch. old cars out in the yard, that didn't run very well. if anything came up inside the molten salt reactor say hey we can fix that. and they did. he felt like despite the challenges of operating high radiation fields that they were able to operate and maintain that machine over the course of its a lifetime. i started out at the lab in 1957 and got onto the molten-salt reactor experiment. the dynamics were not common to reactorsbecause it was molten salt instead of water cooled solid fuel.
if it heats up it gets less dense and that means it's less critical- less reactive-yeah less reactive- i was running some tests late at night. the device that i was using got stuck in the wrong place and pulled the rod out and the power went went up and up beyond the design power and then controlled itself and went back down. everybody was happy. after they completed the molten salt reactor experiment they went to the atomic energy commission, they said, hey g can we havesome more money?
we'd like to go now and build the real thing. we'd like to build the core and we'd like to build the blanket and we'd like to hook a power conversion system on and makeelectricity. they felt like they shot the moon. well, the atomic energy commissionunfortunately did not share their zeal to continue with the technology. in addition to being a thorium guru,weinberg was also the original inventor of the pressurized water reactor. he had invented it and gottenhis patent for it in 1947. it was a little bit of a tricky thing to have the inventor of the light water reactor
advocating for something very,very, very different. he didn't like the fact that ithad to run at really high pressure, he just he saw that as a risk. but as long as the reactor was as small as the submarine intermediate reactor which was only 60 megawatts, then containmentshell was absolute. it was safe. but when you went to 1,000 megawatt reactors you could not guarantee this. he figured there would be an accident someday where you were not able to maintain the pressure
or keep cooling. in some very remote situation conceive of the containment being breached. does any of this sound familiar? he was making enough of a stink about this the congressional leader named chet holifield told alvin weinberg, he said, if you're so concerned about the safety of nuclear energy it might be time for you to leave the nuclear business. and weinberg was really kind of horrified that they would have this response to him because he wasn't questioning the value or the importance of nuclear energy. if anything he was far more convinced about that than anyone else.
what he was questioning, was whetherthe right path been taken in the development of nuclear reactors. he was particularly well-suited to ask that question because of his role as the inventor of the predominant technology. so, he was quietly shown the door. after he left oak ridge within a very short order the atomic energy commission commission commissioned a report, wash-1222. they really nitpicked on three small issues about the reactor. they said look big problems here!
you know i don't think we can go forward until these are resolved! and when it came time to talk about the safety and the performance of the reactor- there may be some safety advantages that haven't been quantified yet regarding this approach but you know we just really can't be sure about that. and it just just burns me up because a big, big, big mistake the united states made in 1972 walking away from this. do you feel like the program had sound technical basis or do you feel like technical problems were the basis for cancellation? some of the technical reasoning that i heard for the cancellation was that there was a
corrosion problem. tritium was raised as another issue, we made no effort on msre to do anything with tritium. did the people on the program feel like tritium was an insurmountable problem? we recognized that tritium would have to be captured but most people thought that that's something that we should be able to do. did the people on the program, particularly the chemists or the material scientists feel that corrosion was aninsurmountable problem on the program? no. and some of the subsequent experimental work seem to bode very favorably for an ability
to solve that issue, as well asthe tritium issue by the way because we did dosome tritium experiments. were either of you present when the molten-salt reactor program was cancelled in the early seventies? we were still working here. we were still working on the system. we were still finalizing reportson the performance of the msre. i didn't see it coming. mr. president?
since you missed our meeting on breederreactors, we sent the message today, craig. i told ziegler to tell the pressthat it was a bipartisan effort. this has got to be somethingwe play very close to the vest but i am being ruthless on one thing. any activities that we possibly can should be placed in southern california. so, on the committee, every time you have a chance, needle them. say, where's this going to be? let's push the california thing. can you do that?
nixon was from california. hosmer was from southern california. chet holifield, who ran the joint committee on atomic energy, was also from california. it doesn't lead me to believe that the president was seriously considering alternatives to the fast breeder reactor and other paths that could be taken. it was a focus on what can we do right now to get jobs. now, don't ask me what a breeder reactor is. all of this business about breeder reactors and nuclear energy and this stuff is over my...
that was one of my poorer subjects, science. i got through it but i had to work too hard. i gave it up when i was about a sophomore. but what i do know is this- that here we have the potentiality of a whole new breakthrough in the development of power for peace. the fellow on the phone call that we heard earlier said that if cost targets were missed i for one don't intend to scream and holler about it. in that same month the atomic energy commission issued wash-1222. it almost completely ignored the safety and economic improvements possible through the
use of the molten-salt breeder reactor technology. milton shaw who was the head of reactor development in washington called up he says stop that msre reactor experiment, fire everybody, just tell them to clear out their desks and go home. and send me the money for fast breeders. we were competing with the fast breeder people at argonne [national labs] mainly. they just had more political sway than molten salt reactor. do to see a prevailing opinion about molten salt reactors? we haven't been funded to look at molten salt reactors. there's no opinion?
the opinion is simple. build ifr. that's it. we realized that we were minor league money-wise compared to the other program. one anecdote that i heard was put your hand on your desk take everything that has to do with molten salts, sweep it off and you're finished. i saved all my documents. i did too. you look at the authors of the papers that i've listed, most of them are deceased.
grimes. rainey. they're deceased. all their techincal skill is gone. and i'm reading ornl documents fiendishly to try and go okay i think i know how they did that. but i don't know. i don't know. i don't know because i don't have anybody to talk to. we had a corpus of people in oak ridge who knew how to do this in the mid-1970s. they are literally dead and gone now. i've met a handful of them they're in their 80s. you know... they're not going to do this anymore. well beecher's been dead for a long time now.
how about paul? i have not had any contact with him so i don't know. you don't get taught this stuff in nuclear engineering school. you know i said one time in an online talk you can get a phd in nuclear engineering and never learn about this stuff. i got an email a few weeks ago. kirk, i just saw your talk. i wanted you to know i just graduated from purdue with my phd in nuclear engineering and i want to tell you're absolutely right.
i have never heard of this stuff before. he goes on to say it's even worse than that, because i'm totally a student of nuclear history. he goes: i'm so geeked out on nuclear history and i've never heard of this. how did i not hear about it? he goes: it's great though. he goes: you're absolutely right this is top-notch stuff they did and we should be working on it right now. but it's absolutely possible for you to go through a normal curriculum and never learn about this.
in any other place, as an organization you're abandoning this route and going another, well it just gets lost. it is amazing how much they documented. enormous amount of detail aboutthe work that had been accomplished and how they had developed the technology. they were written to very high scientific standards that we can go back and repeat once again things that were initially studied back in the 1960s and 1970s. now, you were aware of the molten salt reactor experiment? there were some journal articles that gave basic background.
they had a full issue of a pretty substantial nuclear engineering journal. but the thing that was missing was this extensive compendium of hundred-page reports that gave enormous amount of detail about the work that had been accomplished and how they had developed the technology, and using that we were able to accelerate our work in looking at how to develop fluoride salt cooled high-temperature reactors, a variant of the earlier molten-salt reactor technology. ok, now, this compact integral effects test oil loop that we've developed is a 50% height scaled replica for a fluoride salt cooled high temperature reactor loop. the scaling between the cietfacility here on the left and
this is the mark-1 pb-fhrdesign that we've developed. now this is a pebble bed fluoride salt cooled pebble bed reactor. the key thing in this design is that we also have passive safety so that you have confidence that even if all of your electricity is gone that you'll still be able to remove decay heat after shutdown. it is actually very easy toturn off the fission reaction. when the reactors at fukushima daiichi, there were seismic sensors in the plant that notice the earthquake before anyhuman being ever noticed it. and they noticed that was out of their tolerance their bounds they've been set to, and so before
anybody did anything the computersstarted shutting down the reactor. the workers stayed calm becausethey knew japanese power plants are designed to withstand earthquakes. the reactors automaticallyshut down within seconds. but nuclear fuel rods generate intense heat even after a shutdown, so backup generators kicked into power the cooling systems and stop the fuel rods from melting. so when you turn a reactor off fission stops, but you have this decay heat. you have to manage that decay heat. the tsunami hit about an hour after the reactors were shut down.
so fission was long gone by the time the tsunami came along, but the reactors are still managing decay heat. that decay he continued to build. heat was not being removed from the reactor. and why weren't they using the power from the reactor in the pumps? because the reactor been turned off. the reactor was turned off immediately when the seismic sensors sensed the quake. so there was no reactor generated power. in light water reactors, if you allow fuel to be uncovered and you allow it to heat up
the zirconium cladding will react with steam to form hydrogen. as the fuel overheats to temperatures where it begins to lose its physical integrity and have localized melting- in the chemical conditions that you have with water- highly oxidized conditions- cesium and iodine are very volatile. they evaporate out, condense to small particles, and you have intrinsically high pressure. so you therefore how physical mechanisms that can mobilize cesium and iodine. now we designed the reactors to make that very unlikely through a combination of highly reliable cooling systems. passive systems are better than active as we learned at fukushima.
but the physical mechanism remains. the physical mechanism remains. whereas in a salt reactor- in a salt reactor, cesium- there's nothing that cesium loves more than fluorine and it will compete with anything else to grab hold of fluorine. and cesium-fluoride is very low volatility and very high solubility in salt. so no aerosols. this is the watts bar plant. up here is where all the control rods slide in and out of the core.
and then there's these 4 steam generators. you see the steam generators at watts bar are as big if not bigger than the reactors and they also have to operate these very high pressures. now there's 4 of them, look-1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8- big pipes. the number one accident people worry about with this kind of reactors is what's called a double-ended pipe break. one of these 8 pipes, for whatever reason, shears. and all of a sudden pressure is lost in the reactor. steam doesn't take away heat nearly as well as liquid water does from a surface.
so all of a sudden your fuel rods are not being cooled nearly as effectively as they were before. now fission will stop. because one of things the water is doing- its slowing down the neutrons. so without the waterthe fission reaction stops. you do not need to putcontrol rods in or anything. the reactor will turn off immediately. but the containment building,i mean look at the size of the reactor, look at the size ofthe containment building.
it's huge. it's much much much bigger than the reactor and it's all driven by that 1000:1 difference in the density between steam and liquid water. this building is the size it is, and it's the wayit is, precisely to accommodate this event. they've designed this reactor so if this happens, all the steam is captured in this building. a design basis accident for pressurized water reactor that is evaluated, in which we believe the reactors can respond safely is what's called a large break loss coolant accident. you could think about going to a real big pressurized water reactor, the real thing, getting high explosive, strapping it onto the cold leg of the reactor, and blowing that,
like, take the pipe apart-and and do the test. there's a number of reasons whythat's just a bad idea. the best way, once we're getting into rather severe conditions is to make use of simulations validated by scaled experiments. i think that would surprise people to realize that the best way to simulate a fluid is with a different fluid, not with the same fluid. because your first impression would be, if i want to stimulate water i should use water. yup yup. if you want to scale the fact that's not the case.
if you went back to 1960s and asked how are you going to put in place a system to reliably provide cooling under emergency conditions. when the normal shutdown cooling system is not functioning really the only practical way to do that was to use active systems with redundant and diverse components and power supplies and all of that. that was the reason we ended up with gen2 approach to active safety. south korea, japan, france- you know there's lots of countries that are still stuck there, right? the united states we're the one country that really has developed the capability to do
something much more sophisticated in terms of validating models for the reliability of passive safety systems. and therefore, to be able to shift towards using systems that do not require electrical power. and now you're going to see for molten salt reactors, there's this amazing thing- we can match the behavior of molten saltsin terms of convective heat transfer using heat transfer oils. we can put up to 10 kilowatts of heat into this loop. which, in salt, would be equivalent to half a megawatt of heat.
which is a scaling relationship between the oil and the salt. it's very convenient. was it just kind of dumb luck that it happened to be so favorable in that direction? it makes you believe there must be ahigher power that sometimes every now and then smiles down on us. was there a student who approached you and showed you some calculations? because i don't think anyone's done this- philippe bardet, he's an assistant professor at george washington university now. he came into my office and said, you know, i was just looking at the properties here
and the prandtl number of this oil matches the prandtl number of salt. and realized that in fact we couldmatch simultaneously all of the key non-dimensional parametersthat come out of the energy equation. this technique then was developed here at berkeley. it was invented here, yes. at moderate temperatures around 80 degrees centigrade heat transferred oils like dowtherm have the same prandtl number as flibe does at 650 degrees. and if we scale to about 50% geometric scale, and if we accelerate time, we can match grashof, reynold, proud and prandtl number which means convective heat transfer can be the same.
and this has huge implications because you'll notice that in the ciet facility we can instrument extensively. so really, the big goal of this machine here is to simulate how decay heat is removed from this design when there's a shutdown. that is correct. also you learn a lot. for example if you get bubbles trapped in the system, which when you fill things you generally do, they can change the behavior. so in this loop we've got lots of transparent locations where we can see bubbles and where
we can vent them from thehigh places so that we can get all of the trapped gases outonce we filled it. well, it's really important when you design the salt system also to make sure that it's not going to have high points that are going to trap gas in ways that you didn't expect. up at 600 degrees centigrade it'sa different environment in terms of instrumentation and pipes. transparent pipes are tough to do. you might get little windows in. you can put flibe into a test tube and heat it up and melt it and you can see it, but
you can't build glass molten salt loops. that would be bad. well they'd probably break. i was in seventh grade. i read isaac asimov story about the implications of what free energy would do and i sort of knew i wanted something- i was going to be an engineer or scientist just from day one, and this sort of said- ok, what can you do to make a difference? and that was where i sort of said advanced nuclear power was something that could make a difference, and that low-cost clean energy could make a huge difference to society.
if i'm gonna have to get up every day for 50 or 60 years and working on something well it ought to be something i believe in. and so here is some flinak. this is a fluoride salts. flibe actually looks almost identical to this. liquid salts are an outstanding heat transfer media. it really doesn't matter what you're going to be transferring heat for- whether this be a solar power tower, whether this be a salt cooled reactor, a molten-salt reactor, viscosity on it is 30 times larger.
water is very low viscosity so it's still very low viscosity fluid. some people might imagine this is quite a gloopy or kind of slow moving liquid but it's actually quite fluid. you're right. it does go through a melt much like a glass as opposed to water which doesn't quite do that. so we want to run it at 100 degrees or so above this so it does flow nicely. if you go ahead and you repeat doing things in here you can see you start to etch the glass just a little bit.
so what we have to do in a reactor is keep things very highly reducing. if you put an extra beryllium in there, essentially giving you a preferred spot to rust. and so this is all about controllingthe potential corrosion of the salt within any vessel that you put it in. the iron in some of the the alloys or is more soluble at higher temperatures and in your heat exchanger where it's a hot temperatures you will get medals taken out a solution and then it gets the colder end it will redeposit. so you can self-plug your heat exchangers which you would very much like not to do. your technique to avoid that iskeep everything very well reduced
so it doesn't corrodein the first place. you'll make it lousy, but there are no strong chemical reactions that are going to take place between the salt and even direct contact with water. the hazards on this are same thing as the hazards on a deep-fat fryer, which is, i trip throwing hot oil or hot salt in this case on visitors would be considered a bad. but there's nothing else to this. it just makes a nice little clear liquid. but i'll just pour this out into a stainless steel crucible, and you could hear that little snap there was just there wasa little bit of moisture
at the bottom of the stainless steel. i mean at 450 degrees this thing is a solid. so it doesn't take very long for itto form a solid again. isn't that a nice feature? if you had a little crack on this and it started to weep- it forms a plug. self plugging. that's nice thing about not being under pressure. on the other hand if your design keeps the vessel hot it'll stay liquid on there but that's why you have a guard vessel.
if your absolute worst-case happensand you have massive vessel rupture well you still catch it. the idea of this loop- to retain our expertise in using high temperature salts. to provide a platform for us to test different components different reactor concepts. above about 600 c it becomes technologically very difficult to transfer heat effectively. the loop is designed to run at 700 celsius that's about 1,300 degrees fahrenheit. and the whole loop is madeout of inconel 600. currently, the loop is designed to runon flinak which has pretty similar properties to flibe.
it's just a different salt with different composition. the main purpose of the enclosure is to keep the heat inside. the loop is designed to be about 200 kilowatts. that is 700 c. that's pretty hot. we'd rather keep the heat in here, out the ceiling, instead of trying to air-condition the room with 200 kilowatts. so we'll heat the whole loop up. will pressurize this container and pump the salt into here. and within here is the pump.
will be a motor mounted up top. a long shaft. then the bottom here is the impeller of the pump. and there is a little picture of it here. it is currently out being assembled. the salt will be pumped through a test section. silicon carbide pipe almost. currently it's upside down. so if you imagine it flipped around upside down then inserted in this spot here.
we're going to fill it full of these little graphite spheres about three centimeters. we'll fill it up about this much. this kind of illustrating how many of these 600 spheres will be inside of it. and the idea is we're testing a reactor concept where the fuel would be inside these pebbles. fuel pebbles in here and that's where the fission and the heat created. and you've got flowing flibe over it. we're using an inductive power supply which would be located on the outside here so it comes in kind of through the wall here around the test section and it inductively heats the pebbles without using fission it's kind of the only way to really get heat into the
system. can i ask them what the theory was between up around using a sort of a solid-fuel pebble into the flibe rather than absolving the actinide into the salt? currently in this country we're not really looking at the molten salt fueled system. so the driver from a programmatic research was solid fuel or the pebble. but there must be some advantages to doing the solid fuel? or it's just it's just an extension from previous research study really? the applicability of molten salt fueled system can be tested also in this system. this is the base for an awful lot more of our testing for example we'll be doing natural
circulation safety testing. we're doing a lot of corrosion specimens in here and a pump loop. silicon carbide even though we're using that as part of the design that's part of the test. we're going to find out how that performs in a salt environment now. there are a number of technologies that have never been done before in salt in here. that rotating flange up there to allow things to shift between there. the fact that we've got ceramic and metal pieces all in a single loop. the joints, which are the nickel carbon-based joints, we can actually gasketed seals. this one does flow so as the salt flowsthrough it, send sound waves through.
kinda like the car going byand make different sounds. doppler effect. doppler effect, there you go, that measures the doppler shift. nice. kevin, mention the fluidic diodes. what you can do with that. simply put it's a way to control a liquid flow without using a valve. part of the safety system that's used in the molten salt reactor, had them and also liquid metal reactors,
where during normal operation the flow goes one direction through it. so it would flow, in normal operation it goes this way comes in the side and outside that side. and that creates a lot of resistance. it spins around and comes out. during an accident the flow reverses and goes this way and there's not a lot of resistance going from here just flowing out there because it doesn't spin around. so that's after the particle bed test, that's the next set of tests, is to test this idea
for the safety system. most of the technologies that for a molten salt reactor in the- as far as a thermal hydraulics- well they're identical. if you want to use the salt as a coolant it is just much, much, much easier to do something that's non-radioactive. so that's why we have the walk before you fly. the direction that we've gone with the fhr technology is to look at the use of the same kind of coated particle fuels that have been developed and tested for helium cooled reactors, to get functional commercial reactors operating sooner than we can with liquid-fueled.
there are advantages specific to thorium-fuel over uranium-fuel when it's dissolved in molten salt. but first, let's start with some of the advantages common to all molten salt reactors- even those which use solid fuel instead of liquid fuel. much of their research can be applied to liquid fuel molten salt reactors as well. it's all laying out that fundamental research so that someday a thorium reactor you can look up these papers and these publications that we've written here and be like oh this is how we can do this, you know? we're studying the fundamental science behind it, thorium fuelled or otherwise.
hi my name is grant buster. i'm a graduate student here at thethermohydraulics laboratory at uc berkeley. i work to develop a fundamental understanding of how pebble fuel moves through a reactor core. this is kind of the central column and this would be rotated around it's kind of an annulus- a doughnut-shaped core. some will exit the reactor core quite quickly, while others will be held up for you know, maybe months at a time. every time we defuel a pebble we can assay these pebbles using gamma ray spectroscopy,
to discern what the burn up is of this pebble. and whether it should be placed back into the core or whether it should be put in storage. when you change your fuel type in a light water reactor it's a huge deal. you have to you get the new vendor to design and you have to figure out the compatibility of the new fuel assemblies with the old fuel assemblies and how you're going to shuffle them and then the fuel will stay for three refueling cycles before it's fully spent- it's very complicated. in fact, if you think about how it is that you buy gasoline, compared to how is you buy nuclear fuel these days- buy nuclear fuel, you're locked into your vendor.
you know with gasoline, if you want new gasoline you just go to a different gas station, right? and you fill up your tank with the new gasoline. you don't worry about it being exactly identical. pebbles are very interesting because you can just put in a few pebbles to test. once you verify that the new pebble design that you have is working, you can start to just substitute- because this is a homogeneous bed- new stuff. really, pebble fuel is fairly well understood it's been used since like the 70s now. in germany ther was a helium cooled reactor. it was a dry bed so all the pebblesare weighted downwards.
additionally they drove incontrol rods from the top. if you can imagine-they crushed a lot of pebbles. they didn't like round or make like a nose cone? they did, but it's still a confined bed-there's not a whole lot of movement. all the pedals are weighted under gravity and it was just not a very smart system. but, with our system, everything's buoyant. almost neutrally so. the pebbles are very light so to speak. with molten salt coolant, graphite is less dense than salt, and floats, and therefore
fuel elements want to float. we realized that it might be an advantage that pebble fuel floats if you have pebbles. because in a salt cooled reactor you want to have the coolant in a vessel that has no openings around the bottom- that is a pool type of configuration, which means you don't want to take the fuel outfrom the bottom of the reactor, right? you want to take it from the top. gravity-driven control blades against the buoyancy, with degrees freedom on the bottom. the forces on these pebbles are much much smaller. so all we had to do was to find a 40% scale pebble material that would have the right
density ratio. i went home that evening and went to the kitchen and started taking out my wife's plastic stuff and cutting it up to see what would float and after destroying a lot of perfectly good, you know, plasticware- i finally got around to cutting up a milk jug. this is science at work. science at work. and the stuff floated. and then i looked on the bottom and i looked up the recycled number. we sourced polypropylene tiny little pebbles and have a 13 thousands of an inch tungsten
wire through the center. you can see the tungsten wires. this is the control blade insertion experiment. the blade is kind of a phantom because, plastic, you can't really see it so well. you can see it moving all the pebbles. can see the shadow of it like predator. yeah, yeah. and you can actually image these large beds.we've had to develop our own tomography software. tell whereall the pins are. reconstruct how the actual
three-dimensional pebble bed is, physically.the stress chains that are actually created in these granular beds are quite complex. thewhite lines where the blade was. concentrations of displacements right around the tip, those are the pebbles undergoing the largest amount of imparted force. you gotta see that they are propagated up quite far. but once again- the the forces that we measured were one order of magnitude less than the recommended force limits, so, we have very high confidence that this is a viable shutdown method. will the molten salt provide lubrication? also lubrication, yeah, the lubrication can only help us really. and i don't know if you guys have heard a lot about this but essentially sinap, the shanghai institute of applied science, has a very aggressive program with molten
salt reactors. they're doing a two-pronged approach where they build solid fuel test reactors with pebble fuel, and also molten salt dissolved thorium test reactors as well. thorium? huh? thorium? yeah. yeah, dissolved thorium fuel in the molten-salt. similar to the molten salt reactor experiment in america. why aren't we working on liquid fuel? well our lab is is specifically designed the pb-fhr, the pebble fuel variant. i mean the united states in general. oh- licensing. licensing a liquid fuel reactor commercially, especially in the u.s. right now, is scary. the u.s. is electing to go after salt cooled
reactor at first. it's not to say that the u.s. doesn't recognize that molten salt reactors have some interesting advantageous capabilities, but, they are more technically challenging thing to do to. so what is a fluoride salt cooled high temperature reactor? essentially it uses coated particle ceramic fuel. fluoride salt is a primary coolant. dr. david holcomb is about to describe the safety features of ornl's reactor design. just like the berkeley pebble bed, all the safety features you'll hear also apply to reactors where the fuel is dissolved into molten salt. our definition for strong passive safety on this is there's no requirement for an active response to avoid either core damage or larger off-site release following even severe accidents.
and, that's ever. this isn't three days this is this is ever. if it just goes black you don't have to do anything. large margin to fuel failure. good natural circulation coolant. and very good negative temperature reactivity- shuts itself off rather than going out of control. high radionuclide solubility in the salt. if you actually did have major fuel failure well you've converted your reactor into a molten salt reactor, if you go ahead and you fail all the fuel. it's a low pressure system- there's no driving force to cause things to go outward are this and which also helps you to make containment barriers because i don't need containment barriers to be very strong, turns out we're designing a thing with four layers of containment barrier because they're relatively easy to do. you put a stainless
steel dome around things and you've got a containment barrier. we can use things like fusible links. you can set melt point alloys that are 10 or 15 or 20 degrees above your normal operating point and all your control rods are linked by a melt point and just let them passively drop-in. you can have a poison salt injection system which is just held shut by a melt point system because we do have a lot more margin, and that something which is distinctive to us, because we're not anywhere near temperature limits for short terms, for anything. we just let things heat up until you get to a melt point and you stick in a lot of negative reactivity. you have hundreds of hours before you even get one in a million type failures, at 1,600 c, if you've operated at low enough temperatures, on this. there
is a large volumetric change in the salt with temperature which says that are passive natural circulation cooling has got a very strong driving force, which means that we can rely upon natural circulation, which gives us the ability of making very large reactors because the natural circulation is not something which is limited, that i have to wick stuff out to the side. i can go ahead and just continue to use normal types of cooling and just reject it to the the atmosphere, which says that my upper limit on my reactor size is actually my grid not my reactor safety. by focusing on the areas that give us the most leverage in terms of the benefits to the salt and trying to, in other areas, stay with what's been done historically- it will reduce the sort of number of fences we have
to jump over. i'm raluca scarlat. i'm a phd student at uc berkeley. i do research on fluoride salt cooled advanced reactors. they're cooled by fluoride salts but the fuel is not dissolved in the salt, so it is in solid form. its zoned meaning that you have the blanket of thorium serves a similar purpose as online chemical reprocessing does in the lftr reactor. so this project was built maybe 4 or 5 years ago, and we were considering a very complex core design. so this isn't like multiple fuel regions really in the middle it's going to be just one type of fuel? dark green were pure graphite pebbles for shielding. the green was a thorium blanket. there's a lot of potential but the designs
right now are much more simple with just one fuel lair and one outer shielding lair. you couldn't actually do it then with thorium? the pb-fhr we're designing is 19.x % enriched u-235. so just uranium, yeah. solid fuel is the fundamental barrier which impedes thorium being used as a much more efficient source of energy. we've studied and we tried to identify ways to design solid fuel reactors to utilize thorium effectively, and it's very challenging. their capabilities look, in terms of fuel utilization conversion ratio, look remarkably similar to light water reactors. or course for india thorium is important because we don't have too much of uranium. conversely, india has massive thorium deposits, and almost no uranium. india has been pursuing
a solid fuel based thorium breeder, since 1950, with steadfast determination of securing energy independence. most of that time they've been looking at thorium-oxide fuels, solid fuels, and running the same challenges with solid fueled thorium that everybody does. and i have been told informally, through friends of this person, that one of the former directors of the indian nuclear program, when asked if you had it all to do again what would you do differently, he said i would have gone to molten salt right from the beginning. dr. sinha and his colleagues think that molten-salt breeder reactor, am i quoting you correctly? i heard you telling me some time back... that they think that the molten-salt breeder reactor seems to be the most suitable candidate for
the self-sustainable thorium reaction. what i think is amazing about molten salt technology is the fact that the thorium fuel cycle integrates so cleanly with the technology. the advantage of the molten salt is that processing is much simpler, and it reduces the fuel cycle costs, and makes a breeder a conceivable economic proposition. liquid fuel enables economic thorium breeding. thanks to liquid chemistry, and thanks to liquid homogeneity of the fuel. you can use thorium in existing reactors but the economics aren't there to support it. in addition, liquid fuel's homogeneity can also enable more efficient consumption of uranium as well. with an msr, those degrees of freedom, that soup, if you will, in a molten liquid state
permits the complete usage of the fissile materials whether they be thorium or uranium or what-have-you. so in principle you can make a molten salt reactor using pure uranium. there's nothing wrong with that. to compete with thorium-breeding levels of efficiency, a uranium fueled reactor would need to overcome some additional challenges. but even the incremental improvements possible by using similar molten salt reactors- fueled with uranium- would allow us to extract additional energy from our existing stockpiles of spent fuel. [dr.] leslie dewan is co-founder and chief science officer of transatomic power. she's one of time's 30 people under 30 changing the world. and so you and a friend-
we figured that this was the smartest wewere going to be for a while. mark and we figured that this was the smartest wewere going to be for a while. mark andwe figured that this was the smartest wewere going to be for a while. mark and i started thinking very broadly just about nuclear reactors in general. so we looked at the 6 types of gen4 reactors. we got ourinspiration by looking at the molten salt reactor. our fuel is a liquid. we can leave it in a reactor for as long as it takes to extract essentially all of theremaining energy in it. the commercial regulatory structure in the u.s. is currently set up only for light water reactors. the uncertainty in the estimates of the cost and timeline effectively block large-scale private investment in new nuclear reactors- because no- no investor would want
to put money into a project if they don't have a good sense of when they're going to get a return, or how much it will cost at the beginning. the nrc regulations specifically spell out prohibitions against fluid fueled reactors, even for national laboratories. you can not operate fluid-filled reactor more than one megawatt without expensive licensing process running about $150 per man-hour. the nrc trusts sophomores in college more with light water reactors than they do national lab scientists with fluid fuel reactors. it's been there for ages, since milton shaw. yes, shaw is the one who actually decided that we weren't going to do liquid-filled reactors. he instituted the catch-22. we can't do work
on molten salt reactors, because we just don't know enough about how molten salt reactors work. ok, can we find out how they work? no. because we don't know how they work. it's like- what!?! so it's a demonstration reactor cut-off for liquid fuel reactors is maybe 1 megawatt thermal vs 10 megawatts thermal for solid fuel reactors. we'd like the demonstration facility to generate meaningful results for a full size plant. on the order of 20 megawatts thermal. any smaller than that and it really- it becomes a different machine. just the thermal hydraulics even will be so different that it wouldn't really be valid comparison. you know, the state of missouri passed a resolution that they want to be the first state to have
thorium molten salt reactors in their state. every state with reactors has their own nuclear regulatory commission. and there's a provision where they can literally go off on their own. it's just like highway funds. if you don't approve drunk driving level of 0.08 it's like- oh you can do that wisconsin, you can do that illinois. say goodbye to 500 million dollars in highway funds though, if you do that. so they hold a gun to their heads to do that. same thing with the nrc. but- it would be an extraordinary wake-up call, for- even if one state did it. where, if one state was just like- you guys are so out of sync with what current nuclear technology is, that we absolutely have to, for the health of our state, go on our own. that- that would be- the nrc i'm sure would have- have great retribution-
not my word, somebody else's. i thought that was the- when we discussed that, somebody was like-"that would bring down great retribution! not my word, somebody else's.i'm sure the great retribution would come down, but at some point, someone would be like-hey!?why did this state go off on its own and put up with this gigantic huge penalty they paid, you know? why would they do that? and of and maybe it would become a national conversation and certainly in the decision-making halls of the power they'd be like- has something gone so off the rails here that one state is essentially, in one little way, willing to secede from the union on this? the current system incentivizes reactor designers to develop their first projects outside of
the united states. and, in fact, this has already happened. some existing nuclear reactor design companies are planning on building their first power plants overseas. in canada, or china, or the philippines- because they don't think it will be possible to build an advanced reactor in the u.s. under the current regulatory system. we have chosen canada for a very specific reason. we have a completely new reactor system with a completely, profoundly, different risk profile. canada has a fundamentally different regulatory environment for nuclear power which is, i would say, very progressive. we do feel that we have competitive advantage by pursuing this technology in canada specifically. currently there is no way for us to build a prototype facility or move beyond the laboratory
scale work that we're currently doing. we want more than anything to do this in the u.s., but we've been forced to keep an open mind with respect to the other pathways we could take. china is building a supply chain in order to manufacture and distribute molten salt reactors, and we are not. we don't do big science anymore in the united states, we don't. china is. india is. the czech republic is. jan uhl'r. he's got a great budget, and he just bought an obscene amount of flibe, for pennies on the dollar, from oak ridge national laboratory, because he's doing big science over there. and we basically gave it away. anything that's different, that's never been done before- it seems like in the nuclear
field everybody wants to be number two. this is one of the flaws that has impeded innovation in the nuclear energy technology area, which is that this is a first mover barrier. because quite obviously, once the answer comes out as to how nrc will manage that sort of question- everybody knows what that answer is and and everybody else can free ride. on the other hand, the benefits that come from the switch to molten salts, even if we're using uranium at the same rate that you would with light water reactors, are substantial. and what we can learn using solid fuel, and what we can develop, can be readily applied to build liquid-filled reactors as well. ornl and berkeley's respective pebble-bed design both make great use of molten salt to offer passive safety.
this is a drain tank. this is a drain tank. -to drain it back down again. and we've done that a couple of times already. and eliminate the challenge of high pressure operation. if you have a little crack on this, and it was starting to weep, it forms a plug. self plugging. it'll self plug. that's a nice thing about not being under pressure. in fact, these reactors are intended to be modular, and factory produced. we e are very interested in a transportable size of these, for some of the things like supporting individual refineries, or remote power operation.
and ultimately a much less expensive source of energy than today's reactors. there are vigorous debates that go on about what is the best and fastest path to get this technology developed. and i think that, you know, it's good for us to have those debates, and it's good for parallel efforts in multiple areas to be underway. the effort on the solid fuel side, i think, it's important that we can target achievable goals where we can reach certain milestones in a shorter period of time- on the solid fuel side. there's just fewer hoops you need to jump through. pebble fuel is fairly well understood, it's been being used since like the 70s now. well you know them the next best thing that scales up after molten salt science is fluoride cooled solid fuels.
so if molten salt pebble-bed reactors can be passively safe and less expensive, why is every single organization shown here investigating, if not dedicating themselves entirely, to the pursuit of liquid fuel? there are supreme advantages of dissolving the fuel and fission products in the fluorides, because you can add and subtract at will. solid stuff is always going to be expensive fabrication. and what do you do with spent pebbles? they have an inner carbon core surrounded by a triso matrix, surrounded by an outer layer of graphite. every time we de-fuel a pebble you can actually assay these pebbles using gamma-ray spectroscopy to discern what the burn up is of this pebble, and whether it should be placed back into the core, or
whether it should be putt in storage. then will you do with the spent pebbles? there was that much more manufacturing and engineering and thought going into these pebbles, but ultimately, from a macroscopic, or 50,000 foot view, you still have the same waste problem. except its now in a far more engineered and therefore much more difficult medium in which to go extract that waste and processes it. well it's a lot easier to deal with the chemistry if you don't dilute the fuel into the salt. chemistry is not- chemistry is not difficult to deal with. just think about problems and solve them. i would pose this question- what is easier? running a liquid past a solid in order to transfer the heat? or having the fuel be a liquid, and use that in and of itself? so i would argue that actually combining the
two is easier. sure it's more chemistry, but so what? i'm a chemist. there are lots and lots of chemists, you know, on the planet. and a lot of them are a hell of a lot smarter than i am. so, like, go solve the problem. oh wait a second- oak ridge already solved the problem from 1951 to 1974. solid fuel makes a thorium breeder reactor an economic impossibility. solid fuel impedes the efficient consumption of uranium as well. solid fuel leads to larger stockpiles of nuclear waste, which would be otherwise recycled into energy. and, solid fuel ensures all breeder reactors ever created by humans will inevitably use fast-spectrum instead of the thermal-spectrum. those breeders won't use moderating material to sustain criticality. yes, that is another re-articulation of the oecd report. fast-spectrum.
thermal-spectrum. moderator. you've heard dr. per peterson, kirk sorensen and members of india's nuclear program state that thorium is best suited to liquid fuel reactors. we're about to explore the technical reasons behind this. what these terms mean, and why they're important. we will examine need for ongoing chemistry inside a thorium reactor. and we'll review the science behind all nuclear power, starting at the very basics. but, before we do, i'd like share my feelings about nuclear power. i have no qualm with solid fuel nuclear reactors. they are statistically one of the safest forms of energy generation. hundreds are in operation, and they've been producing pollution-free energy for decades. in fact, today's nuclear power is carbon-free energy' right between solar power and wind power in
terms of miniscule carbon emission. so i'd very much like to see existing nuclear plants continue to operate until we finally stop burning coal for energy. but that isn't happening. can you give me an update on diablo? what update do you need, except to close it down? i cannot believe you are shutting down an operating source of reliable clean energy. in fact, nuclear plants are shutting down faster than new ones are being built. the nuclear industry is a death industry. it's a cancer industry. this is crazy. you are sitting on top of a nuclear weapon. operating reactors are being shut down and replaced with solar and wind power- backed up by natural gas and coal. most the ones that are kind of cute and cuddly-
its energy farming. there's the intermittency problem, you have to have some way of getting energy during those time periods that it's not available. during the day we generate as much electricity as we can using solar. at night, when it's cloudy, we use more natural gas. each year we probably get over 200 days of sunshine. but there's 165 more days without. as big as this solar plant is, it's not enough to meet our customers needs. the plant operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. that's why we need natural gas. the result being higher, not lower greenhouse gas emissions. we are headed in the wrong direction. will a marginally better solid fuel reactor change this? i don't think so. because a
marginally better solid fuel reactor is already under construction. it's a pretty darn good reactor. and it might almost become economically competitive with fossil fuel, if a strong learning curve is established in their manufacture and assembly. it has great passive safety features, designed to survive a fukushima-like loss of power to its cooling pumps. i'd like to introduce you to the ap1000.the ap1000 plant is designed to meet the world's growing need for electricity.so how does westinghouse explain this pressurized water reactor's passivesafety system to the public? as the steam from the in-containment refueling water storage tank fills containment, pressure increases until a certain point is detected by the instrumentation and control system.
then, the instrumentation and control system sends a signal to automatically open redundant, air-operated valves. welcome to the exciting world of the nuclear industry communications.i was surprised looking at the communication of the ap1000, how it didn't seem like it was trying to appeal to a mass audience. they fear if there's any hint, that if you say hey there's a better reactor here. the new all-wheel-drive, all leather seats reactor has arrived, that casts doubt on the predecessors that are still in operation. the valves allow water to flow by gravity from the passive containment cooling water storage tank, located on top of the shield building, to provide additional cooling of the steel containment vessel.
are they trying to tell usthe ap1000 is a particularly safe reactor? i'd also like to introduce you todr. helen caldicott. an ap1000, which is still a light water reactor like the ones you have here, but it's cheaper because it's got less steel and less concrete in it and it's called an eggshell reactor in the industry. so it could easily have an accident it's very dangerous. she's a prominent anti-nuclear activist, and funded the author of this thorium dismissing report.i think you should not put nuclear energy on the table. it sucks the air out of the energy policy discussion. she uses debunked, fabricated visuals to sell books.
well they'll be dying of cancer, but they're not dying from lack of electricity. they might be sweating a bit in the summer. oooh, but you mustn't be too hot in the summer! that's what we've got sweat glands for. and to scare people into protesting operating reactors. and the industry has never, ever, called her out on it. in seattle the ambient levels of radiation went up 40,000x about normal. and i've got a few slides- this is the fallout from fukushima. ambient levels of radiation in seattle went up 40,000x. this was released by the australian radiation service, which is actually come to pass, so his japan and hear you, and the ambient levels of radiation in seattle went up 40,000x above normal. the ambient levels in seattle went up 40,000x above normal.
because of this, dr. helen caldicott knows she can say whatever she wants- with no regard for the truth. parts of tokyo are extremely radioactive. nuclear power produces massive quantities of global warming gas. there are wild boar in germany that almost glow in the dark. about 40% of the food probably in europe is radioactive. more people have died from chernobyl than in the black plague. do you think that the industry should debunk people that are less credible? i think that when somebody makes false statements about nuclear, that's when you need to address those statements specifically. and in some cases you need to demonstrate why the person who made the statement has no credibility. a number of people are making false claims
and they're not getting challenged.what's with the nuclear industry that they don't do that?they don't care, they don't have to. big nuclear is going to survive andas a matter of fact is going to flourish. the industry has a philosophy of as long as nobody's thinking about us, that's a good thing. they like to do their job quietly and hope for the best. look at what westinghouse is doing in china. they have, to my knowledge, 4 ap1000 being built right now, another 12 on order. maybe china's going a little fast but also the chinese government is acutely aware of its pollution. it doesn't like nuclear power. nuclear energy is kind of energy, it is safe. people in the city here, make their life better.
for the oil and the coal is limited source. we are better to not use the coal. the industry can not get much energy from the sun. china is big country so nuclear power is necessary. there were some eskimos- inuits and they had their normal life and they dried their fish and platted the leather and hunted the polar bears and lived in the igloos. and then they got electricity. and then they got television. and then the young men and women lift to go to a better life, and their life was destroyed, that's what i'm talking about. i was in china in 88, there wasn't a single car. there were millions of bicycles. there was one tall building in beijing. and i said, if china goes the way of america and all get refrigerators and cars- we've had it.
there are people who are really using very, very little material and very, very little energy. they are so green. and they are so eager to stop being that kind of green. the main economic and demographic event in the world now is people are getting the hell out of poverty. wires everywhere- because they need electricity to do all the stuff that means being part of the city. how can i change this distribution so that most of this energy is being generated by non-carbon emitting sources, and furthermore how can i grow the pie itself, so that other people in the world can enjoy energy at something a whole lot closer to a western lifestyle? because most of the world especially developing world would love to have these things, and frankly, i think we should want them to have
these things. people always talkabout china's and consumption energy in the emission of co2 of the largest quantity of the world. china export. consumption of the energy in china is not only for china but for the world. but u.s. not only per-capita wise the highest energy consumption country, but also take advantage of other countries to make import of the goods. energy consume the other countries rather than in the u.s. lot of the energy used here in china is not for consume, is for production. a lot of energy consumption- it's an unbelievably optimized process. there's not the same room for improvement, which is largely industrial processes. this is a 200 ton electric arc furnace. the main power source for the furnace
is electricity. so each furnace at max power is about 105 megawatts. so you've been able to drop your power consumption per tonne almost about a third it looks like. probably since the mid- early- 80s. so besides your scrap material input, what's your next largest cost on production? electricity. electricity. in a week's time if both arcs a going, we'll use more electricity than the city of chattanooga uses in a year. yup. wow. in fact, one of those things that we've been chasing is- you know we've got all the waste heat, but it's the nature of it that doesn't lend itself very well to, you know, throwing in a conventional rankine cycle somewhere.
in theory, back of a napkin kind of stuff, maybewe could recover another 20 or 30 megawatts out of the 200 we're sharing between these two furnaces. so we probably captured ninety percent of what's to be captured. chasing the last ten percent is pretty expensive. most people don't understand everything you look, touch, feel, anything that's tangible- there's energy behind it. a lot of it. don't eat any japanese food. no seaweed. no miso. no fish. nothing. i know japanese food is not- i went to a sushi restaurant in new york the other day. a sushi restaurant. people drinking sake, girls all dressed up, with big shoes that they wear these days, everything. and i said- where do the fish come from? they said japan. so i got fish from new zealand. i mean, you have to the same people that demand
fresh fish will be flown in from alaska in cold storage, they're the ones that- oh, we've got to have wind power, we've got to have all these all these options that aren't viable, so... yeah. it's a frustration we felt in this industry. we saw the other day how electrical power was used to make steel from recycled materials. you know those operations couldn't proceed if they thought in 2 hours they might or might not have power. they would not be able to make steel that way. they have to have reliable energy sources. well! mozart and shakespeare wrote by candlelight. oooh! candlelight? i'm writing an article for the international herald tribune now about the future of nuclear power and i ended it
by saying that, and the editor wrote back and said you don't want to encourage people to think they have to go to candlelight again. well what's wrong with candlelight? right! that's right! the world health organization has concluded fossil fuel air pollution kills more than 3.5 million people per year. that's 10,000 people per day. 10,000 people is more than had been killed by nuclear power in the history of the planet. you know, so we have to- we have to be objective in comparing the environmental impacts of different energy sources. until i heard about thorium and began learning about nuclear power i had no idea nuclear power was carbon-free. we have to phase out carbon emissions at a rate of several percent a year. i don't see
any way we can do that without the help of nuclear power. nuclear power is essentially carbon-free energy. and, until fact-checked caldicott's dismissal of thorium- educate your friends and get the word out about thorium. i had no idea how much misinformation has been propagated. as james hansen says at nasa, the godfather of global warming, we've got to stop burning coal- now! germany's now decided that 80% of its energy is going to come from renewables- shortly. the people who argue for all renewables think that- well if we can go from 0% to 10% to 20% renewable then we're on the way and then it will get easier and we'll get 100%. well
it's actually, if you look at the engineering, it's actually the opposite. when you to 20 or 30%, then it gets harder! not easier! ...because of the intermittency of the renewables. but, current reactors can only generate clean energy at questionable prices. long periods between projects and long periods between the task- this is what i would call the ideal conditions for forgetting rather learning. if you're manufacturing you do the same task every week or month or day to depending on the time-step of the factory. these, you don't. you have different people, in different places, to different standards- this is a conditions for forgetting, not for learning. if ap1000's costs can be controlled enough to compete with coal plants, then coal will get cheaper. successfully reducing our dependence
on fossil fuel will result in a glut of cheap coal, oil and natural gas. we need more than borderline competitiveness to keep people from burning those cheaper and cheaper sources of dirty energy. nuclear power plants are capable of much more than producing marginally competitive baseload electricity. so what can they do? let's return to first principles, and then re-examine what it is the human race needs in order to thrive- with minimal impact on our environment. let's take a peek at a future powered by nuclear! this is a little weird. we can radically cut climate change emissions and leave a safe clean world for the future. we don't need to invent anything new! we just need to stop wasting time with distractions
like nuclear power. come on! let's build the future we all want to see! to understand why nuclear power has so much potential requires some effort. it requires you to exercise a little bit of study. which part of this is doable, and could be safe, and could be acceptable in our society, and which part of this is not? and there's a collage of images that the anti-nuclear movement will throw you, usually of nuclear weapons. i hate nuclear weapons. i never want to see nuclear weapons used. i have no interest in that- but i do want to see nuclear power used to make my life, and my children's lives, and your children's lives safer and better. think of the sun's heat on your upturned face on a cloudless summer's day. from 150,000,000 kilometres away- we recognize its power.
when was the last time you watched cosmos with carl sagan? recently actually. yeah? i showed it to my kids a couple years ago. empire strikes back and cosmos were probably two of my formative influences of the age of 6. the sun is the nearest star- a glowing sphere of gas. the surface we see an ordinary visible light is at 6,000 degrees centigrade. but in its hidden interior- super hot gas pushes the sun to expand outward. at the same time the sun's own gravity pulls it inward to contract. a stable equilibrium between gravity and nuclear fire. atoms are made in the insides of stars. the atoms are moving so fast, that when they
collide, they fuse. helium is the ash of the sun's nuclear furnace. the sun is a medium-sized star, its core is only lukewarm 10,000,000 degrees. hot enough to fuse hydrogen, but too cold to fuse helium. there many stars in the galaxy more massive yet, that live fast and die young in cataclysmic supernova explosions. those explosions are far hotter than the core of the sun. hot enough to transform elements like iron into all the heavier ones, and spew them into space. long before the earth, our home, was built- stars brought forth its substance. our planet, our society, and we ourselves, are built of star stuff. now, two of the things that were created in supernova are thorium and uranium. these were different because they were radioactive and
they kept some of that energy from the supernova explosion stored in their very nuclear structure. and some of this thorium and uranium was incorporated into our planet. sinking to the center of the world, and heating our planet. liquid iron circulating around the solid part of the core as earth rotates- acts like a wire carrying electric current. electric currents produce magnetic fields, and that's a good thing. our magnetic field protects us from the onslaught of cosmic rays. a bigger deal- the magnetic field is deflecting the solar wind. if you don't have a magnetic field deflecting the solar wind, over billions of years your planet ends up like mars. because the solar wind will strip off a planet's atmosphere, without the protective nature of the magnetic field. so if we didn't have the energy from
thorium inside the earth we would be on a dead planet. the decay of radioactive elements in the core keeps it moving. let's talk about radioactivity. because i had an erroneous notion of what radioactivity was. i thought, that if you had something that had like a half-life of a day, and you had something had a half-life of a million years, it meant that the dude that was radioactive for a day is like brr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r for a day and then, ooop, i'm done. and the dude with the half-life for a million years is like brr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r for a million years, and then done. ok, so you go- which one of these is more dangerous? well definitely the one that's got a half-life of a million years because that's got to be, like, radioactive
forever, and the dudes that's radioactive for a day that's not a big deal, right? completely wrong! ok? utterly backwards. the dude who is radioactive for a day is really, really radioactive! the dude who is radioactive for a million years is hardly radioactive at all. which one of those two is more dangerous? the one that's radioactive for a day. by a long shot! ok? so you're radioactivity is directly, and inversely proportional to your half-life. if somebody goes to you here's stuff that's got half-life of a million years- scary huh? you go, here give it to me, i'm going to put it in my hand. it's not going to hurt me. agghh! it's not going to hurt me. here's stuff with a half-life of a day- you want to hold it?
no! no, keep it away from me man! that stuff is hot! but it's going away fast too, right? got a longer half-life? less dangerous. and i want to tear my hair out because what i haven't mentioned is radioactive waste. with all out radioactive waste? the main problem is radioactive waste. close down all those reactors, now. with solar and wind and geothermal- geothermal. what's green energy? and they go- geothermal's green energy. okay, do you you know where geothermal comes from? no. comes from the decay of thorium inside the earth. oh. is geothermal renewable?
yes. ok, then thorium's renewable. no it's not you're using it up! well, you're using up thorium as it decays inside the earth. any argument for geothermal, if it is rigorously pursued, is an argument for the renewability of thorium as an energy resource. the majority of american geothermal is harvested in the state of california, which has most of its geothermal energy harvested in the imperial valley. a typical imperial valley geothermal plant produces 40 tons of radioactive waste, every day. and they're saddled with all our radioactive waste, who do we think we are, bob? geothermal is creating 200 times the volume of radioactive waste that nuclear reactors
do, per watt of power. i don't wanna wear a dosimeter. don't want to calculate rems and sieverts. i don't wanna see no clean-up crew. or get zapped before i hear the news. we can get the heat from earth and sun. and hook the wind to make the engines run. if common sense could only start- a chain reaction of the human heart- what a wonderful world this would be! coal and gas plants are able to release radioactive material to the environment in much greater amounts than a nuclear plant would ever possibly be allowed to, because they are considered what's called n.o.r.m. - naturally occurring radioactive materials. for instance, when you go frack a shale and you pull gas out, a lot of radon comes out with that too. burn
the gas that radon being released. nobody counts that radon against the gas. if they did, the regulatory commission would shut the gas plant down. same with coal. and they've spent a lot of money to make sure that regulatory agencies do not regulate n.o.r.m. for a coal or gas plant the way they regulate radioactive emissions from a nuclear plant. if they did we would be shutting down all our coal and gas plants- based on radioactivity alone. a fear of radiation, probably, is the basis of most fear of nuclear power in general. what is radiation? it's simply the idea that there are certain nuclei that radiate things from them. in the process of changingto something else they radiate something. modern physics and chemistry have reduced the complexity of the sensible world to an
astonishing simplicity! three units put together in different patterns make, essentially, everything. the proton has a positive electrical charge. a neutron is electrically neutral. and an electron an equal negative electrical charge. since every atom is electrically neutral, the number of protons in the nucleus must equal the number of electrons far away in the electron cloud. the protons and neutrons together make up the nucleus of the atom. if you're an atom and you have just one proton- you're hydrogen. 2 protons- helium. 3- lithium. all the way to 92 protons- in which case your name is uranium. for any given element, the number of protons must remain the same. but the number of neutrons
may vary. the atomic weight of an atom is the number of protons plus the number of neutrons. natural uranium may contain 142, 143 or 146 neutrons. that means- uranium has 3 natural isotopes. u-234, u-235, and u-238. some elements, such as tin, have a great number of natural isotopes. others, such as aluminum, have only 1. most isotopes are stable. they would never spontaneously change their atomic structure. but some isotopes are constantly changing. they're busy being radioactive. given enough time, this radium-88 isotope will shed energy and change. this is how isotopes in the earth itself emit radiation. the geiger counter detects their presence. a cloud chamber makes these rays visible to the naked eye. each new vapor trail shows that another atom has thrown off a fragment from its nucleus. each
atom does this only once before becoming a different isotope. this activity appears to go on endlessly. that's because there's billions of atoms in that tiny sample. you can't turn decay on and off. if we can turn radioactive decay on and off we can do all kinds of things be we've never figured out how to do it, i don't think we ever will. because we simply can't influence the state of the nucleus like that. hit it with a hammer. boil it in oil. vaporize it. the nucleus of an atom is kind of sanctuary. immune to the shocks and upheavals of its environment. the atoms of each unstable element decay to constant rate. these mouse traps represent atoms that are radioactive. every once in a while, a mousetrap's
spring breaks down and snaps shut. a tiny bit of mass is converted into energy, as an atom changes spontaneously into a lighter isotope. thorium has only one isotope, thorium-232. it has a 14 billion year half-life. ok, so when the universe is twice as old as it is now, thorium will have only decayed one half-life. so based on what i just told you about radioactivity, what does that tell you about how radioactive thorium is? not very. it's hardly at all. ok, uranium, two isotopes. uranium-235, uranium-238, both of course the radioactive. u-238 has a 5 billion year half life. that's pretty old, that's about how old the earth is. that's how old the earth is, that's how old the universe is. uranium-235
on the other hand, much shorter half-life, 700 million years. this is a handful of these uranium-oxide fuel pellets. you see in the picture, the guy's got gloves on. and so you think- he's got gloves on to protect him from the uranium oxide? but now that i've taught you about the true nature of radioactivity, you might go- i dunno kirk i'm not so sure that stuff's so dangerous after all... and you would be correct! he's not protecting himself from the uranium- he's protecting the uranium from himself. that stuff has to stay super pure and super clean, and you don't want to get any of your oils, or grease, or sweat on nuclear fuel that'sgoing to go inside a fuel rod so, that's what the gloves are for.
knowing that some atoms could spontaneously change, in 1939 scientists tried firing a neutron into the nucleus of a uranium atom, the heaviest and least stable atom found in nature. instead of a minor change, from one isotope into another, the uranium atom split into two parts. when an atom is so unstable that it can be split into two by hitting it with a neutron, we call that "fissile". when the fissile atom was split apartthe two fragment parts combined two parts combined were light than the original uranium atom. the missing mass was converted into energy. also released were two neutrons. one free neutron has become two free neutrons. now we have two neutrons. this implied a nuclear chain reaction in uranium.
obviously that's not what we want to do in reactors. most reactors are completely incapable of sustaining that kind of neutron multiplication. you reach a point where only one fission is causing another fission and that is the notion of criticality. it's a state of balance. when you want to bring the reactor power you bring it to super-criticality, to a certain level. you up to you get to where you want to be, and then you level out at criticality. and one of the things i had wondered about for the longest time is it seems like this is such a precise balance. how would it be possible, in an engineer machine, to attain such an absolute perfect situation of balance? and what i found my great interest was- the negative temperature coefficient of reactivity. the reactor will become more reactive as it gets
cooler and less reactive as it gets hotter. this notion of a chain reaction has perhaps been used a number of times to scare people about how nuclear fission reactions really take place in a reactor, as if they are an uncontrolled expansion of the number of fission events. that's not really what happens in a reactor. somebody wondered one time- ok, billion years ago that meansthere's a lot more uranium-235 and natural nuclear reactorsmight have been possible. when you generate electricity from nuclear power you make 200 new elements that never existed before we fissioned uranium. we found in africa, at a place called oklo, in the gabon [africa], 2 billion years ago,
there were scores of natural nuclear reactors there. that were nothing more than uranium ore in the rock and the water would come in and it would lead to a nuclear reaction. and these reactors ran for hundreds of millions of years. so we did not invent nuclear fission, alright? it was done long, long, long before we were here, and very successfully. back when the earth was formed there was a lot more uranium-235 then is now. uranium-235 is like silver and platinum. can you imagine burning platinum for energy? and that's what we're doing with our nuclear energy sources today, we're burning this extremely rare stuff, and were not burning the uranium-238 and the thorium. your uranium in saskatchewan is sorich you don't even have to enrich it.
it's extremely powerful. caldicott is wrong. there is no naturalsource of isotopically enriched uranium. natural uranium's isotopic ratios are identical-everywhere on earth. the amount of uranium in the world finite. if all electricity today was generated with nuclear power there would only be a 9 year supply of uranium left in the whole world. in reality, there is no more a constrained uranium supply, than there is a constrained seawater supply. uranium is water soluble, and it passes from the earth's mantle, to the crust, to the ocean. every year, the ocean contains more uranium than the previous year. what caldicott refers to as "a 9 year supply of uranium" is in fact an infinite supply.
harvesting uranium from seawater is impractically expensive today, but that will undoubtedly change should our uraniummines ever be exhausted. i'm offering you to drill on one of the great undeveloped fields of little boston. those areas have been drilled. no they haven't. my straw reaches across the room. we're pretty inventive when it comes to harvesting natural resources. i drink your milkshake! i drink it up! we are never going to run out of uranium. it is quite literally a renewable resource. for all the difference that distinction makes.
we need to have a realization that we've got about 35 years worth of oil left in the whole world. we're going to run out of oil. as a natural resource, the appeal of thorium over uranium, is that thorium has zero environmental cost to acquire. we can power our civilization on thorium without opening a single thorium mine. it is already a plentiful byproduct of existing mining operations. we need thorium and he needs somebody to get rid of thorium. it's found in tailings piiles. it's found in ash piles. let me tell you how this stuff was discovered- there was a guy named glenn seaborg who worked at berkeley labs in 1942. this was the guy who had discovered plutonium. he thought-
i wonder if we could hit thorium with a neutron and turn it into something? and you gotta remember, fission had been discovered like three years earlier, so they were still in the very beginnings. well, he got this grad student, you know, everyone who's been a grad student knows what it's like when the professor says: all right, i want you to go to the nuclear lab and turn on the neutron bombardment system, and expose this sample and find out what happenes. yep, i've done it sir. i have made something new. thorium did absorb the neutron, it became uranium-233. isn't that cool? seaborg said yes, absolutely. ok, now let's take the next step... poor little grad students... hit it with a neutron, and see if it will fission. because i think it'll fission just just like uranium-235.
ok, yes sir. goes off, does the experiment, comes back and says: yep. you're right. it did fission. you're correct, it is a new form of nuclear fuel. and seaborg poped the really really, really important question, he said- now i want you to go figure out how many neutron came off when it fissioned. because if that number is below 2... we really don't have a story here. sir the number is 2.5. seaborg looks at his grad student, this is december 1942,and he said- you've just made a 50 quadrillion-dollar discovery. seaborg was at absolutely right. he had figured out that thorium could serve as an essentially unlimited nuclear fuel. there really were 3 options for nuclear energy at the dawn of the nuclear era. only one of the materials
in nature is naturally fissile, and that's uranium-235, which is a very small amount of natural uranium, about 0.7%. this was the form of uranium that could be utilized directly in a nuclear reactor. most of the uranium was uranium-238. this had to be transformed into another nuclear fuel called plutonium before it could be used. and then there was thorium. and in a similar manner, to uranium-238, it also had to be transformed into another nuclear fuel, uranium-233, before it could be used in a reactor. ok this is the fast region, this is the thermal region. squiggly lines, blah, blah, blah, blah, and- you can probably tell the entire history of the development of nuclear energy in this one graph, and i'll tell you why. how much energy did the neutron have, that
you smacked the nuclear fuel with? ok how much energy did it have? and then how many neutrons did you kick out when you smacked it through fission? two is a very significant number in breeder reactors. you need two neutrons. you've got to have one to keep your process going, and you have to have another one to convert fertile material into fissile material. ok, look at plutonium... eeeehhhhhh. it's that dip below 2 right there. that's what makes it so you cannot burn up uranium-238 in a thermal-spectrum reactor, like a water-cooled reactor. you just can't do it. the physics are against you. and the reality is, you do lose some neutrons. you can't build a perfect reactor that doesn't lose any neutrons. they look at this and they said, man! we just can't burn uranium-238 in a thermal reactor. it
just can't be done! well, these guys are undeterred, they said well here's what we'll do we'll just built a fast reactor. because, look how good it gets in the fast region. wow! it gets above 2, it gets up to 3! wow, this is really good! well there's a powerful disincentive to doing it this way and it has to do with what are called cross-sections. these are a way of describing how likely it is that a nuclear reaction will proceed. look how much bigger the cross sections are in thermal than they are in fast. how many of these little dots are we going to need to add up to this size? we're going to a lot! so this is why it was a big deal to be able to have performance in this region of the curve. those little bitty dots? they're up here in this part of the curve. ok, this is a fast region, this
is the thermal region. thorium is more abundant than uranium. all we're consuming now is that very, very, very small sliver of natural uranium- but this is not the big deal! no! it's not a big deal that natural thorium is hundreds of times more abundant than the very small sliver of fissile uranium. big deal about thoriumis- that we can consume it in a thermal-spectrum. that's the big with thorium. is it can be consumed in a thermal-spectrum reactor. when you're talking about a thermal-spectrum reactor- of any kind- you have to have fuel and you have to have moderator. and they're both essential to the operation the reactor. the moderator is slowing down the neutrons. and when the neutrons have been slowed down, we call them thermal neutrons or a thermal-spectrum. in a water-cooled reactor we use water, specifically
the hydrogen in the water, to slow down the neutrons through collisions. the graphite in the molten salt reactors, is that a moderator? yes, that's the moderator in the reactor. same idea, except we use graphite as the moderator instead of water. neutrons going in the graphite, hit the carbon atoms, they lose energy, they slow down. now why slow it down? that's the difference when you're going to into that little bitty dot, to the big dot. that's why you want to slow it down. you want the big dot, not the little bitty dot. a thermal-spectrum molten salt reactor has to have the graphite moderator of the core in order to sustain criticality. if the vessel ruptures, recriticality is fundamentally impossible. the drain tank does not have any graphite in it. if something
happens where that fuel drains away from that graphite, criticality is no longer possible, the reactor is subcritical- fission stops. and there's no way to restart it without reloading the fuel back into the core. this is such a remarkable feature. and it really is unique to having this liquid fuel form, and to having something to operate a standard pressure. you can't do this in solid fuel- you do this in solid fuel it's called a meltdown. that's bad. now in a fast reactor, on the other hand, you don't depend on moderator you put enough fuel in the reactor so the criticality is possible even without moderator. in those scenarios, if there's a drain or a spill or something... you need to be careful
about what geometries it could getinto because recriticality is not, from first principles, impossible. it may be impossiblein the design you design. but that becomes design specific. where-as, in a thermal reactor, it is just impossible outside of the lattice of moderator- you can't have a criticality setup. in the thermal region,look who's doing the best. look at uranium-233. look at that.
ok, look at plutonium... eeeeehhhh...it's that dip below 2 right there. you just can't do it. the physics are against you. but uranium-233 on the other hand, okay yeah, it's a little better in the fast, but dang! it's still pretty dang good right here on the thermal. big targets. a lot easier. this fact was not well known, probably tell about the 70s. there was some data that indicated it, but there was enough uncertainty even as late
as 1969 that theatomic energy commission did not feel like it was a safe betto go with thorium. everybody who was pushing thorium said-we like thermal! this is the kind ofreactor we want to build. and everybody who was pushing plutoniumsaid- no, no, no, no, we want a fast reactor! that's the only way to do it. and so what happened is they put resources into the plutonium breeder reactor almost from the get-go. they built the experimental breeder reactor 1 in 1951.
this was the first reactor that made electricity. four little light bulbs here. this is a mock-up of the core. this size was giving off a megawattof thermal energy. how tall is this, how many meters? eight inches. that's the actual size? no, it's scaled down. no, it's full size!
the ebr-1. this was a breeder reactor. it was designed to convert plutonium into energy while making new plutonium. this was not a light water reac- this predated the light water reactor by years! it was a fast breeder. this was 1951, no kidding. enrico fermi and eugene wigner saw the future quite a bit differently. fermi believee that we should really focus our efforts on the fast breeder reactor. it could have a substantial breeding gain, in other words it could make more fissile
material that it was consuming. eugene wigner on the other hand, looked at the same pieces of information and reached a different conclusion which was that thorium was a superior fuel and that it should be realized in a thermal spectrumin a thermal breeder reactor. and this opened up a number of possibilities with coolant and reactor configurations but thorium, in another way, was a rather unforgiving fuel. it did not have a great breeding gain like plutonium had the potential in the fast spectrum. you had to make sure that you are very careful and conserving of your neutrons. you couldn't waste a lot on losing neutrons to structural materials, or losing them to
leaks out of the reactor, or losing them to absorptions in the daughter products of fission. and the thorium also had another challenge- it took about 30 days once it absorbed a neutron to turn into uranium-233. there was a time delay there,between when it absorbed a neutron and when it became new fuel. ferme wondered how it would be that thorium would overcome this problem of the delay from when it absorbed a neutron to when it became new fuel. and wigner had already seen a possible path forward which was to do something revolutionary- build a nuclear reactor out of liquid fuels rather than that of solid fuels.
wigner was not successful in convincingthe bulk of the nuclear community to take the thorium approach. he was his student during the manhattan project. of course i heard about eugene wigner as this great, incredible physicist. i gradually became his assistant, in charge of the nuclear design. and weinberg got it. he got the big picture. he got- we need thorium, we needthermal reactor, we need liquid fuel- i see it. i see what we got to do.
now both thorium and uranium-238 canbecome nuclear fuels by absorbing a neutron. there's a few steps thorium goesthrough on this way. it first absorbs a neutron and becomesthorium-233 going from 232 to 233. and then that thorium-233 will decay over a period of about half an hour into another element, protactinium-233, and protactinium-233 have a half life of about 30 days. in terms of reactors that's pretty long, and it drives a lot of what i'm going to talk about with the chemical processing. but ultimately it will decay to uranium-233 - so long as it does not absorb a neutron - and it has a very quality fission.
about 91% of the time it's going to fission rather than absorb. and that makes u-233 the best fuel in the thermal spectrum, it outperforms everything else, and it's one of the reasons we really get a kick out of thorium. the process by which we would use thorium in the reactor involves introducing thorium into an outer region of the reactor called the blanket. and in the blanket the thorium would absorb the neutron- it would take that first step number, remember, 232 to 233? it's going to absorb a neutron and it's going to begin the process of becoming uranium-233. now, as it takes those steps of decay, turning into other elements, protactinium and then
uranium we can employ a chemical separation to remove those new materials from the blanket, and then introduce them into the salt that is going to go in the reactor core. and that's the place where the fission reaction is going to take place. that's the place where it's going to generate additional energy. this is the machine thatwe would like to design, this is the liquid fluoride thorium reactor. it has a reactor vessel made of hastelloy-n. we know that we have to protect this material from the difficult environment it's going to encounter inside the reactor.
and so that's why the overwhelming majority of the interior of the reactor is composed of graphite structures. graphite structures thatseparate the fuel that flows through these recursivetubes from the blanket. and the blanket fluid surround the entire core the reactor. it's hard to see the boundary between the blanket and the core, but that blanket protects the metallic structures fromthe radiation damage. it protects from neutron flux. it basically keeps that nuclear reaction bottled up in a region of the reactor where it's not
going to cause nearly the damage to material that would otherwise cause. for instance, in a one-fluid reactor where you could have fission occurring right up to the very edge of the metallic structure. in a two-fluid reactor there's a lot of thorium containing fluid between the edge of the core and the reactor wall that absorbs neutrons, gammas, and radiation flux and prevent it from damaging the material. because we know that metal doeshave some severe issues when it's close to the nuclear reaction. but once this fuel leavesthe reactor structure, fission stops.
and so there's not an appreciable neutron or radiation flux outside the reactor to nearly to the degree that there is inside the reactor. so graphite is a very important structural material in this design. it has two different fluids. primary fuel salt highly depleted lithium-fluorideberyllium-fluoride and uranium-tetrafluoride. the blanket fluid is highly depleted lithium, beryllium and thorium tetrafluorides and that's where that nuclear absorption of neutrons taking place in the formation of new fuel. the coolant salt ishighly depleted lithium beryllium. simply call it "bare flibe.
and that coolant salt then is very chemically compatible in the event of this ever an in-leakage into the fuel or into the blanket. because it's essentially the same solvent of which the blanket and the fuel are composed. this is an overall view of the lftr facility. there's the reactor vessel. drain tank. pump. primary heat exchanger. this is the gas heater, it heats a carbon dioxide.there's the carbon dioxide gas turbine.
these are chemical processing facilities for the fuel salt and the blanket salt. and then these are off-gas processing facilities for the xenon and krypton to come out of the fuel salt during operation. if you're not a chemist this next part may be hard to follow. it isn't important to understand every step of the process, only that you consider how much more challenging these stepswould be if the fuel was in solid, rather than liquid form. here's the reactor. got a lot of graphite and the core.
the green fluid is the fuel salt. so this is the material that's undergoing nuclear fission. the uranium in this is undergoing nuclear fission and generating energy. as you can see, the two regions here. there's the fuel salt region and surrounding it in kind of the turquoise blue is the blanket salt region. in the blanket salt, protactiniumis formed from neutron absorption on thorium in the blanket. that blanket salt proceeds to a reductive extraction column where it's contacted with
metallic bismuth that will remove protactinium in any uranium that's present there and return a cleaned up blanket salt back to the reactor vessel. that metallic bismuth stream then proceeds through a series of additional reductive extraction cells and electrolytic cells before ending up in a decay tank. in the decay tank we give the protactinium time to decay to uranium-233. and, actually there's several other protactinium isotopes in there as well- 231 and 232. 232 will also decay to uranium-232. uranium-232 is still presentin the decay tank here because of its formation in the blanket.
so protactinium goes into the decay salt. decayed uranium comes out. and this is also where we add thorium-tetrafluoride as a makeup material. this is where thorium actually enters the chemical processing system. as uranium begins to grow in, in the decay salt, it is removed through fluorination and then it's added to a stream. and, let me pick up from the fuel-salt's perspective- fuel salt is taken out and it's fluorinated also to remove uranium and other gaseous hexafluoride products. those two streams are joined at that point.
the remaining fuel salt, now stripped of its uranium, goes to another reductive extraction column, where metallic bismuthis used to remove lanthanides and long-lived fission products. and then, that stream is returned to a reductive extraction unit where the uf6, the fuel salt and hydrogen gas is used to reduce uf6 back to uf4, bringing it back into solution and essentially refueling the fuel salt, and sending it back to the reactor vessel. the hf that is produced by this reaction goes to an electrolytic cell where it is split back into h2 which is used again forthe reduction, and f2 which is used for the fluorination steps.
so all of this forms a closed-cycle. the upshot of the whole thing is you're going to move these new nuclear fuels out of the blanket into a decay salt. and the reason for this isthat one month period. it takes a month for protactinium-233 to decay to uranium-233. you want this to happen outside of the reactor. and the reason you want that to do it, is because it has a propensity to absorb a neutron inside the reactor, if you leave it there. you do not want your protactinium to absorb a neutron, become protactinium-234, which
then decays to u-234, which is not a fuel. but where do all the fission products go? they come out here, as a stream. stream 54. and if we've done this right there is no actinides in there. this is kind of like a kidney for the nuclear reactor. you know if you imagine that these fluids are like blood- your body does very, very complicated chemical processes all the time in order to keep you alive. it's changing the ph of your blood.
it's adding glucose. it's taking out waste product. if you use thorium with this kind of efficiency, something really amazing becomes possible. every cubic meter of the earth has got a certain amount of uranium and thorium in it. about two cubic centimeters of thorium, and half a cubic centimeter of uranium. if you can use thorium to the kind of efficiencies that we're talking about today, this has the energy equivalent of more than 30 cubic meters of the finest crude oil or anthracite coal. this is like taking any worthless piece of dirt, anywhere in the world, and turning it into multiples of the finest chemical energy resources we have.
i mean that's absolutely amazing. that's something that- that just completely changes our paradigm about relative national wealth and resources and so forth. that means worthless pieces of dirt become potential energy mines. now, good news is we don't have to mine average continental crust for thorium. there's lots of places where naturehas already pre-concentrated thorium in much greater concentrations than this. thorium is so common in the earth's crust, that an average american's yearly energy demand- including industry, and transportation- could be met by a half barrel of everyday rock.
but the key is to very efficiently convert thorium into energy. if we had more of today's reactors in operation, 1 cup of uranium oxide would cover a typical american's yearly energy demand. per-capita, that's the equivalent of burning 54 barrels of oil. every year, for every single american. or, 12 tonnes of coal. or, 53 hundred cubic feet of natural gas, to generate the same amount of energy. 4 grams of thorium can power a middle-class american lifestyle for a full year. that's just 4 grams.
but this can only happen if the reactor is efficiently fueled with chemically homogeneous liquid fuel, if the reactor runs at high temperature, and the power generator is optimized to take advantage of the reactor's high temperature operation. the power generation takes place when fuel salt is pumped through the primary heat exchanger. it then heats the coolant salt. bare flibe then proceeds outside of the containment and heats carbon dioxide. supercritical carbon dioxide gas, at about 550c turbine inlet temperature, which then proceeds through a supercritical carbon dioxide recompression turbine cycle. and that is a highly recuperated cycle that has two recuperation stages and two compression
stages. but ultimately the gas is cooled, compressed, recuperated, and reheated in a closed cycle. the performance of the carbon dioxide gas turbine is such that it leads to very, very compact turbomachinery. the turbo machinery for this entire reactor would easily fit on this stage. probably on half this stage. and if anybody's been to a big reactor before and seen big steam cycle turbomachinery you can appreciate what areduction in scale that is. it's about 45% efficient too, which is really, really attractive.
what kirk describes is something new to this world. high efficiency power conversion enabled by the high operating temperature of molten salt. complete burnup of nuclear fuel enabled by a combination of homogeneous liquid fuel, online chemistry, and thermal breeding. such as alvin weinberg and the team at ornl intended to build until the molten salt breeder program was suddenly terminated. we were minor-league, money-wise,compared to the other program. put your hand on your desk, take everything that has to do with molten salt, sweep it off and you're finished.
i didn't suit coming. shaw says, stop thatmsre reactor experiment. fire everybody. just tell them to clear outtheir desks and go home. and send me the money for fast-breeders. this is the thorium reactor. can you tell me what thethinking is on thorium as a fuel? what the advantages are, what the disadvantages are, what the pros and cons are of thorium? the first commercial reactor operatedin this country at shippingport
was based on thorium fuel. my constituents are alwaysasking me about this- can you make them work?yes, you can make them work. is there an advantage to doing it?i haven't seen it. there's about 4x more thorium on earththan there is uranium. it's, i think, one of thesesort of technological cults. an atom of thorium and an atom of uranium both contain the same amazing millionfold improvement in energy density over coal. it isn't that an atom of thorium contains any more energy than an atom of uranium.
or that natural thorium is much more common than natural uranium. but we don't consume naturaluranium in today's reactors. there's about 4x more thoriumon earth than there is uranium. that number is irrelevant. thorium is 400x ascommon as uranium-235. and we can't harness the full power ofnatural uranium with the thorium breeder. that's a bigger challenge. to fully burn up natural uranium we need a fast-spectrum reactor, such as the integral fast reactor shown in pandora's promise,complete with solid fuel reprocessing facility-
which includes liquid chemistry. or, we need the traveling wave reactor[that] bill gates has invested in. both reactors use solid fuel which becomes heterogeneous as the fuel is consumed. just like today's reactors, any one piece of fuel will eventually become too used up to sustain fission before its energy potential has been fully realized. it is the semi-fissioned fuel which thenmust be reprocessed into new fuel, or treated as waste. the elimination of fuel fabrication, and the elimination of fuel reprocessing, as a distinct step, are essential if you want to harvest the smallest amount of natural resources and
produce the smallest amount of nuclear waste. because the economics of nuclear power don't favor reprocessing fuel, it will always be cheaper to simply dig up more uranium, rather than using every atom you've already mined. the most environmentally friendly wayto operate the thorium breeder is the only way to operatethe thorium breeder. if you stop the chemical kidney,then fission slowly grinds to a halt. the chemical kidney lets us continually remove used-fuel and keep adding fresh-fuel. it is how our thorium fuel can be completely converted into energy and fission products. bill gate's travelling wave reactor is the most ambitious reactor ever proposed
for consumingsolid uranium fuel. years ago, he described it like this-a giant uranium candle-stick being fissioned fromone end to the other. but the realities of heterogeneous solid fuel led to this: constant shuffling of solid fuel rods, in an attempt to ensure the fuel is consumed as uniformly as possible, to sustain fissionas long as possible. is liquid fuel reallythat hard to work with? people recycle cans they recycle papers. why not candles?
i say we put a bin out, let people bring back their old drippings at their convenience. it's like those bags that say i used to be a plastic bottle. we could have a bin that says- i used to be another candle. and when they bring in those candles,we'll put them in another bin that say i used to be another,antoher candle. yeah and then eventually we just have one that says, trust me, i've been another candles. by weight, a paraffin candle stick and gasoline contain about the same amount of energy. why don't carsrun on paraffin wax? because the inside of your car might need to look something like this, or like this.
what process do we run chemicallybased on solids? we don't. everything we do, we use as liquids or gases, because we can mix them completely. you can take a liquid you can fully mix it. you can take a gas you can fully mix it. you can't take a solid and fully mix it, unless you turn it into a liquid or a gas. you know, the people build light water reactors are physicists and engineers. and this is a whole lot of chemistry that they're maybe not so comfortable with. so it's the chemistry of it that makes it so special, but it's also the bit that existing nukes kinda go- you know, oooh, we were going into realms i don't, perhaps, feel comfortable.
in the nuclear space there are other innovators. you know, we don't know their workas well as we know this one, but the modular people-that's a different approach. there's a liquid type reactor which seems little hard but maybe they say all about us, uh. and so,there are different ones. although bill gates traveling wave reactor is still advertised to the public as a mechanical device shuffling naturaluranium fuel rods around. terrapower sought and received a research grant from the department of energy in 2015. it is for the study of a uranium fueled fast-spectrum molten salt reactor.
uh, can you make them work? yes, you can make them work. is there an advantage to doing it? i haven't seen. unless you're using slowed down,thermal-spectrum neutrons. thorium breeding offers no advantageover uranium breeding. dr. lyons report's investigation of molten saltonly includes fast-spectrum, not thermal-spectrum. that is why he sees no thoriumadvantage over uranium. in a single sentence the report dismissed the thorium reactor chemical kidney.
in doing so, the thorium advantageis also dismissed. alvin weinberg knew thekidney would be required. his team knew it before they even started constructing the molten-salt reactor experiment. so it's a bit disappointing to see weinberg's chemical kidney dismissed, as- a drawback that could be potentially eliminated it's an essential tool that will fundamentally change our relationship to atomic power. and they're saddled with allour radioactive waste. who do we think we are, bob? and i want to tear my hair out because what i haven't mentioned is radioactive waste.
the main problem is radioactive waste. we're going to stop creating nuclearwaste and we're going to start creating fission products. when you don't use materialsefficiently you make waste. you make material that should have been used as a fuel, and rather end up as a waste. you have some fissile nuclide. that means- this is a nucleus that if you hit it with a neutron the nucleus begins to distend, and a piece comes off. the smaller piece is about 30 or 40% the original mass of the nucleus, and the larger fission
product is basically what was left over. and so what this leads to-a double humped distribution in the masses of the fission products. on this table you see the smaller fission product highlighted in yellow and then the heavier fission product highlighted in green. and then there's this gap for a while where- there are things that simply are not made by fission. tungsten. gold. mercury.none of those are made by fission. and then when you get to thallium- now you're getting to what's called the decay products.
these are not formed by fission. they're formed when you leave uranium and thorium and plutonium alone for, you know, hundreds or thousands of years theywill decay into these products, and those are shown inthis chart in a pink color. and then, there iswhat's called the transuranics. that's what happens when the uraniumabsorbs the neutron and doesn't fission. it turns into plutonium andamericium and curium and a few others. most of its plutonium. i mean, the overwhelming majorityof transuranics are plutonium.
you get a lot of different things fromfission, but you don't get everything. and that's significant. it's not as if you're dumping the whole periodic table out when you- when you make fission. you get certain elements in a preponderance, and you get some very rarely, and get some not at all. for instance, you can't make gold from fission. when we first load nuclear fuel in a uranium fueled reactor it is entirely uranium and most of that is uranium-238. as it burns down, first at a year,2 years, and then 3 years-
you see the formationof other things. these are the fission products, aswell as some of the transuranics. the hatch at the bottom gives away the fact that most of the rod is still uranium-238. the overwhelming majority is stillthis unburned uranium-238. still most of that potential energy remains to be exploited, in fact the only fraction that has been truly burned is the fraction you see in kind of those light pastel colors. those are the fission products. but the remainder of the materialis unrealized energy. xenon is the most commonof the fission products.
and here is xenon-135 cross-sectionrelative to 2 nuclear fuels. ok, see these little bitty guys? so imagine we're playing dartsor something and throwing them. which one are we going to hit, here? i mean we're going to hit the big red dot. when xenon-135 forms from fissionit really wants to eat your neutron. they're called fission products. they're the product of fission. you split an atom you got smaller atoms-that can poison the fuel itself and kill fission-
unless the poisons can come out of fuel. this turns out to be a big problemfor real nuclear reactors. this was one of the first reactors that was ever built this was the hanford reactor. they turned it on and everythingseemed to be going. and after about a day or two of running it, all of a sudden the power went: peeeeewwwwwww,and dropped like almost to zero. and they left it alone, and after about,you know, 12, 18 hours, all of a sudden: peeeeeewwwwww- it came backup to power again and held there. and they're going, what!?
and then pretty soon it goes:peeeeeewwwwwww. and it drops off again. they're going- it makes no se-we're not doing anything! the thing's like, turning onand it's turning off. and turning on, and turning off. well, what was going on was,the reactor would turn on, and xenon-135 wouldbegin to build up. and as it built up, it would starteating all those neutrons, right? and then went: peeeewwww.
and it would take the reactor back down again. and then after a while it would decay away. once it decayed away: peeeewwww! the reactor would come back on again! so it was following this up-and-down effect. just crazy. i mean these guys didn't even know whatxenon-135 was, 'cause this was like one the first nuclearreactors ever built. this actually was a contributingeffect to the chernobyl disaster,
was the presence of xenon-135. i have a friend i have made online who is a nuclear reactor operator, and he goes: i'm always fighting xenon in my reactor,that's like all we do as operators just try to deal with this stuff. and it's really hard to deal with...in solid fuel reactors. xenon is a gas. what happens to gases in a liquid? they come right out of solution. nasa uses xenon to throw out theback-side of an ion engine.
we used to joke at nasa that xenon was one of the few things worth launching into space because it actually costs about as much as it cost to put up in space. one man's waste is another man's treasure. and it doesn't take a lot of thought to come up with clever ways of utilizing that waste. you can help a lot of people and you can monetize that waste. and you do it safely. and you can do it, in some cases,for very strategic reasons. by extracting the first 4 fission products: xenon, neodymium, zirconium & molybdenum right away you've reducedthe waste stream considerably.
what about the rest? the two troublemakersare strontium and cesium. but even those two could havevery useful applications. strontium-90 could be fabricatedinto little heating modules. cesium-137 could be usedto irradiate food. food irradiation does not cause the food to become radioactive, that doesn't happen. but by irradiating strawberries or lettuce or other leafy vegetables you can kill e-coli. and e-coli does kill people. in fact, it kills a lot of people each year.
think of your home, think of your pantry. now imagine taking everything out of your pantry and pouring it on the floor. so your sugar and your cornflakes and your flour and your baked beans and, you know, everything is in a big pile on the floor. how valuable is that giant mix to you? it's not valuable at all. it's worthless. it's completely worthless. what- all you'd do is shovel it up and you throw in the trash.
what makes the stuff in your pantry valuable is the fact it is separated. the sugar's in one containerand the flower's in another and your cornflakesin another altogether. so what we got with nuclear waste is we've got that pile of everything mixed together. almost every one of those things is useful, isolated and separated from everything else. i might show you some slides- what's really in a nuclear reactor. barium. lanthanum. cerium.
praseodymium. neo- neo- i can't pronounce that. that's the most important slideyou're going to see tonight. and that's what nobody knows! it started in the 40s, as the result of nuclear fission, as a result of splitting of the atoms, you got a lot of rare earth elements. we literally had atomic level control over this and we studied the hell out of them. the idea of splitting matter, and of creating other particles- you're getting into a lot of alchemical realms that i think starts bumping into a lot of people's... religious fears?
we have to have humility and understand who we are, and that we're not- we're not god! we're just fallible human beings who make mistakes and therefore we must eradicate all things nuclear. promethium. samarium. europium. they name them, a lot of themafter themselves, these physicists. gadolinium. terbium.
dysprosium. holmium. thulium. lutetium. hafnium. tantalum. tungsten. what might we use these for? maybe they're so exotic they'll just be curiosities?
we've been there before. that was said of most of the elements that were discovered on the periodic table. for example, who would have thought an obscure semi-metal, germanium discovered in the 1880s would turn out to be the crucial ingredient in the development of transistors? that, 70 years later? neodymium and samarium, regarded for a century as just curiosities... they turned out to be essential to the construction of super-powerful permanent magnets. i hate to even call this stuff that is made by the thorium cycle waste, because neptunium-237 is actually used to producethe material that nasa uses
for batteries in theirdeep-space probes. now if you can operate a thorium reactor without any uranium-238 present in the fuel, then you can really reduce the amount of transuranic waste you're going to generate. and the reason for that is,the thorium absorbing a neutron- each one of these verticalsteps is a neutron absorption. but thorium absorbing the neutron 90% of the time will be fissioned by the next neutron. now 10% of the time it will go to u-234, which absorb another neutron going to u-235. think of these like off-ramps off the freeway. so, i have 90% of the cars exit the freeway on the first off-ramp, and 85% of cars that
are left over exit the freewayon the next off-ramp- how many are there tomake your first transuranic? only 1.5%. so with the thorium cycle you could potentially get down to one-and-a-half percent of the long-lived waste production of the uranium cycle. and that's a big advantage. so here's what we're doing now- this is the red line on a log-log chart. red line on a log-log chart, you know, tread lightly. but this is how long it takes for spent fuel to reach the same radioactivity as natural
uranium, it's about 300,000 years. if you can keep all actinidesout of the waste stream, then you can really shortenthat to about 300 years. it's where it's positioned onthe periodic table. it goes down the chain into differentelements and to the right of uranium are pretty nasty isotopes. but if you start a couple of steps to the left along the periodic table, the waste that it creates it doesn't get down as far as those really nasty elements. so, inherently, by starting up the periodic table by a couple of steps, you take out most
of the nasties in the waste. people are terrified of nuclear waste. those opposed to nuclear power have had 50 years of unchallenged fear mongering on the subject. whatever they put this waste in, it's so hot and radioactive, be it glass, ceramics, metal or whatever will start to disintegrate within 10 years. and they're saddled with all our radioactive waste. tear my hair out because what i haven't mentioned is radioactive waste. americium, einsteinium, neptunium, plutonium.
236 pins or tubes that have the fuel pellets in them make up a fuel assembly. and there are 241 fuel assemblies that make up the reactor fuel load. nuclear waste is mixed together because it is all trapped together in solid fuel rods. with liquid fuel this is no longer the case. thorium goes into the reactor as fuel, and the fission products which come out need no longer be referred to as waste. and it rods break that will release argonne, krypton, xenon, cesium, radioactive iodine and all sorts of things. the scariest way to describe nuclear waste, is to describe its total tonnage, and then
list the most dangerous things contained within. because nuclear waste contains hundreds of different isotopes, this is a list from which anti-nuclear campaigners can choose from like a menu at a restaurant. how radioactive is nuclear waste? as radioactive as the isotopewith the shortest half-life. how long-lasting is nuclear waste? as long-lasting as the isotopewith the longest half-life. let's go have a look at some. in the 90s, the connecticut yankeepower station was decommissioned.
and here, what you can see, is the entire load of spent fuel for 28 years of operations. that produced in its lifetime, from a small nuclear reactor, 110 million megawatt-hours of electricity with no greenhouse-gas emissions. and that's every bit of fuel that was required to do it is sitting there in storage. quietly. happily. causing nobody any problems. and i'm sure you'll agree that's a pretty small facility. let's just have a look at it in the context of the landscape.
it's a pretty place, connecticut, surrounded by state parks. what you see there- that is the source of decades of anti-nuclear fear mongering on the basis of spent nuclear fuel. that's what we've been told to be afraid of. we've been told by generations of anti-nuclear activists to build up in our minds- this- into such a fearful monster that we have to reject it at all costs. even if the cost might be a habitable climate. now, i'm not afraid of it. do you know what i see when i look at it?
i see another 10 billion megawatt-hours of electricity, because that fuel is just waiting to be recycled and reused in a fast reactor. out in the desert in idaho, are the argonne national laboratories. you can see experimental breeder reactor 2. there's the reactor building. and directly attached to it, is the fuel recycling facility. so, the so-called nuclear waste we have sitting in places like connecticut- in that we have the most staggering large quantity of clean fuel. we've already mined it.
the rods generate energy by transforming some of the uranium into different elements. fission products start to build up. we need chemistry to separate them out. but since the fission products are thoroughly mixed with the uranium- pyroprocessing. a nifty technology invented by argon scientists. thing is, they call it pyroprocessing, but it's a molten salt process. they're dissolving thisthing in a molten salt and they're doingelectrochemistry on it. after chopping the fuel rods into small pieces you submerge them in a vat of molten salts.
when you run an electric current through the vat, the uranium and transuranics separate out and form crystals on the electrodes. molten salt can not only be a fuel, it's a way to reprocess or process nuclear fuels, and clean them up for reuse. so, the entrepreneur in me says-hey, wait a second! let's go grab those fuel rodsand go make money off them! i know that i can save lives byusing those isotopes. i know that i can make money, and better society with those isotopes. the promise of turning nuclear waste into energy with liquid fuel has gotten dr. leslie
dewan on cnn, and allowed transatomic power to raise millions of dollars for lab experiments and computer simulation oftheir molten salt reactor. there's enough energy trappedinside those spent fuel rods to power the entireplanet for decades. all the ash that builds up from theburning of coal they put in a big pile. it's called a tailings pile. well, no break this week for crews in tennessee trying to clean up that mess of potentially toxic sludge that oozed across hundreds of acres of land just west of knoxville. crews are using heavy equipment to clear away sludge that inundated a neighborhood near
harriman, tennessee. 5.4 million cubic yards [of] coal ash residue that comes from burning coal to create electricity at the power plant that is run by the tennessee valley authority. that ash is now entered into the neighborhood, entered into the land and most importantly- into two rivers here in the tennessee river watershed. in that ash are heavy metals like lead, mercury, cadmium, and arsenic. you can see the ask. look, they're still digging it- oh, man! look at that!
four years later, still working on it. what did it spill from? it absorbs a lot of moisture, gordon. when we had that big rainstorm it actually took on a lot of water and held it, to where the piles just collapsed and flowed downhill. you say an ash pile washed down, i don't see an ash pile big enough where something- that's because it already washed down. it used to be a mountain. and now it's just a big wash.
pretty much every coal plant has a huge ash tailings pile. this is not unique. they've all got them. this is- this is the the waste of coal. i did some analysis in the uk coal stations. this one probably emits more, but it's about a ton of co2 every 5 seconds. this is my biggest worry. not small quantities ofcontained nuclear waste. but mountains of a low-level chemical waste which can suddenly become toxic pollution.
or worse yet- the chemical pollution we dump directly into the oceans and the atmosphere. so it might not seem like it, but it's the middle of the day here in beijing. the air is so polluted thatits darkened the sky. waste is contained. pollution is uncontained. it is air pollution which kills millions of peopleeach year, including thousands of americans. it is air pollution which increasinglytraps the sun's energy. and, it is air pollution that germany continues to produce- despite their staggeringly expensive deployment of intermittent energy sources.
this is a democratically-elected industrialized nation wasting billions of dollars. it can happen. during the height of wednesday's blackout, fire crews had to free people trapped in elevators. the idea of playing elevator roulette may sound funny but try living with it. let's go, let's go! come on! come on. my baby! put yourself in the middle of california, during the summer of 2000, when blackouts
began to roll across the state. sacramento, san francisco, beverly hills, long beach, san diego. the energy crisis wouldcost california $40 billion. for the second day in a row not enoughelectricity for america's largest state, and the world'ssixth largest economy. i- i can feel for them, i was outof power four times this weekend, for a total of over 10 hours. they simply wasn'tenough electricity available. as the blackouts continued, there werecompeting narratives presented by media.
one such narrative was:this is just an unusual heat wave, generating capacityis going to catch up. today we know-there was much more to it than that. the first thing we heard about this energy crisis is our lights are going to go off in the middle of winter,when we're using half the electricity we normally use during the summer! we had an installed capacity in california at the time of 45,000 megawatts. plenty of power! we only need 28,000 to 30,000megawatts in december.
of course we had blackouts in december. the numbers just didn't add up. we'll had enough power in california, it was never about lack of supply. you know, talking about opec puts me in mind of a simpler time, when the energy interest we were held hostage to were american ones. given the complexity and dryness of the subject it seemed impossible that charges could ever be proven- unless... somehow... somebodyturned up some sort of smoking gun. which brings us to last week- hey john, it's tim.
regulatory's all in a big concern about is we're wheeling power out of california. two enron traders discuss a colleagual manipulation of the california power market. he just f***** california. he steals money from californiato the tune of about- will you rephrase that? ok, he um- he arbitrages the california market to the tune of a million bucks or two a day. right! those greedy mother arbitrageurs! oooohhh!
enron traders started to export power out of the state. i'll see you guys i'm taking mine to the desert. when prices soared they brought it back in. so we ****ing export like a mother******. getting rich? trying to. what are the permutations and combinations of ways to move power around the west? traders would stay after a 12-hour shift and pour over maps of the western energy grid. and i think that's something thatenron knew better than
any other energy marketerin the country, period. we know all of the california load. we know all of the california imports. by shutting down power plants theycould create artificial shortages that would push prices even higher. hey, uh- this is david up at enron. uh huh? there's not much demand for power at all, and if we shut it down, could you bring it back up in 3 or 4 hours?
okay. when you see 30, 35% of their entire capacity down for maintenance on a single day, the price electricity skyrocketing 300%or 400%, you begin to believe something's not smelling right here. we're getting pretty spoiledwith all this money. you said you're a little scaredwe're making a little too much, and i tend to agree with you. at the flip of a switch could just yankthe california economy on its leash whenever they wanted to.
and they did it. and they made so much money! we want you guys to get a little creative-okay... -and come up with a reason to go down. like a forced outage type thing? an industry that went for 100 years,from the days of edison, was very reliable, was all of a suddenturned into a casino. [you] can't treat electricitylike you treat oranges. it's the lifeblood of society.
there would be ample supply available, at the right f****** price. they're f****** taking all the money back from you guys? all the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in california? yeah, grandma millie, man! yeah, now she wants her f***** money back from all the power you've charged her right up- jammed right up her *** for f****** $250 a megawatt hour. california's man-made blackouts began in june of 2000, before intermittent energy sources, such as wind power,had any meaningful presence. back then, almost all energyproduced was of a reliable nature.
there were no questions about clouds in the sky, or how windy it was across the state. there was only a glaring discrepancy between generating capacity, and lack of power. even so, it took actual audio recordings of enron traders joking about poor grandma millie, before everyone could finally agreeon what had happened. that no greater good had been served byskyrocketing energy prices and rolling blackouts. they weren't a necessary teething pain of deregulation, or the kick in the pants needed to get more generating capacity built. enron traders had deliberately constrained california's access to electricity, and they got rich doing it.
it took 4 years to achieve clarityon those blackouts. we might not be so lucky next time. intermittent energy sources donot lend themselves to clarity. when the media talk about peak production capacity, and don't mention capacity factor, that's not clarity. on the best day they're doing pretty well, midday, right? but on the worst day, in january,you've got nothing. but this is what everybody forgets. as if the planet stops rotating, the clouds part, and germany is baking in the sun.
you know, 'cause the sun shines on germany 24 hours a day! tom friedman, the other day, the new york times, brought up germany an example- saying that germanyis 30% wind and solar. most self-described environmentalists believe that chunk is entirely wind and solar. wind and solar. when the media brands germany'srenewable program as one of solar & wind, omitting biomass-that's not clarity. this is not the fault ofsolar and wind technology. they are very useful, so long as we recognize, and plan, for their limitations.
to fully harness intermittent power,we need both a smart grid, and inexpensive energy storage. today we have neither. and i think it is very risky to presumewe will get both. as we deploy renewables, increasingly,wind ends up losing to wind, and solar ends uplosing to solar. they deliver energy,or fail to, at the same time. the greater the solar and wind penetration, the steeper the peaks and troughs in supply. here is a picture of a simulationof supply meeting demand.
the year is 2010, so there is actual demand across the top line for 2010. the supply underneath has been modeled from renewable energy sources by elliston, diesendorf and macgill- in order to demonstrate that it could be met using renewable sources only. with wind, this mountain type profile here's the coming and going of wind generation over the seven-day period. the dark-blue here representssolar pv the yellow here is concentrating solarthermal with storage. blue is the hydro. which leaves this fellow here,and that's biomass.
moving the windmills apart helps. energy storage helps. more transmission lines help. in the real world,we certainly do all these things. wired magazine- they're like- to geta new trunk line to san francisco they, like, went the opposite way. they're like, is that far enoughaway from people? you know, it's longer, and moretransmission loss. the insanity of the nimby thing!
you're not running a high power linethrough my neighborhood! i'll get electromagnetic radiation! germany is a nation buildingtransmission lines, and storing energy, and deploying renewables fromone end of the country to the other. despite all this, they burn moreand more biomass every year and will miss their 2020carbon emission target. if we are going to dismantle everythingand replace it with something different, let's first make surethat different thing is better. between 2010 and 2014, germany switched 7% of their energy supply from nuclear power
to renewables, with coal constantly supplying 43% of germany's energy needs. because germany has been paying 28 billion euro, every year, to subsidize renewable energy- they were able to shut downhalf of their nuclear power plants without burning more coal. but, germany still had toburn stuff to replace nuclear. in fact, the single largest energy source in the german renewable portfolio is biomass. this biomass is called a renewable resource because it's not a fossil fuel, and ultimately comes from plants which can be regrown. however, it is not an environmentally friendly source of power, and it causes air pollution.
in 2015, we exported over 5 million tons of wood pellets. that's in about 5 years. so talk about an explosion! they're clear-cutting our wetland forests. we did work to prove that. they're shipping it over to europe. and they're burning it in power stations. the same forests that we work so hard to protect, the same forests that provide all those benefits. repeatedly, in developed nations, a similar pattern unfolds.
in 2011, california shut down san onofre nuclear generation station. those opposed to nuclear power painted a picture of solar and wind replacing it. what ended up filling the gap was the combustion of natural gas. in 2014, the vermont yankee nuclear station was shut down. it was the fifth-largest source of electricity for new england. it sure looks like the people trying to shut it down thought it would be replaced by renewables. instead, it was replacedby burning oil and coal. nuclear plants close, resulting in more combustion, and more pollution. the only beneficiaries were those providing the alternate source of power.
in the case of san onofre, alternate sources of power were provided to california by its parent corporation, edison international. in the case of entergy's vermont yankee, alternate power was provided to new england by a natural gas power plant owned by entergy wholesale commodities. while a nuclear plant is in operation, the utility pays into a decommissioning fund. this money can not be touched until the plant is ready for retirement. or, when it is taken into early retirement. the owner of the shuttered vermont yankee nuclear power plant have hundreds of millions of dollars stashed away for the decommissioning process.
today federal regulators announcedit can also use that money to deal with spent nuclear fuel. closing vermont yankee released $665 million in decommissioning funds to the utility. closing san onofre will release over $4 billion. pilgrim is next. a 690 megawatt reactor, it produces 14% of the electricity generated in massachusetts. it has a summer capacity factor of 98%, making it a very reliable source of summertime electricity. there's no technical reason to shut down this source of pollution-free energy. however, the decommissioning fund contains $870 million dollars.
with me today i have jigar shah, who was the president of generate capital. he was the founder of sunedison. i'm not here to suggest that solar power should be powering the world, but i think both nuclear and solar and all these other zero carbon fuels can be scaled up to meet the challenge. i have figured out how to get this right in solar, and how to actually win the war. the nuclear guys haven't. they're just saying- if we just put thefacts out people will finally believe us. this is a political battle! and i'm happy to bring my lessons learned from the solar industry to nuclear industry,
but i think that this notion- that we have a functioning nuclear power industry, that has the ability to play the game- is fanciful. there is a fairly straightforwardway to save all those plants. but the nuclear industryhas to actually pursue it. the guys who own pilgrimaren't even trying to save this. it's everyone who doesn't own pilgrimin the nuclear industry saying, oh wouldn't it be nice to save pilgrim? most of the people that you hearare not "the nuclear industry they're just people who advocatenuclear technology. and i know
that i don't garner many friends withinthe industry when i say this, but entergy is perfectly happy to shut down pilgrim, and so our entergy's friends because they all perceive that right now there's an oversupply of electricity. they'll shut down their nuclear plants and people go- so how can they do that? and then of course the answer is, all of them have decommissioning funds already put aside. so they'll come out looking fine on their balance sheet, and they'll drive the price of electricity up for all the restof their generating plants. given all the wind turbines being deployed, it is not intuitive that shutting down nuclear leads to more pollutionand higher energy prices.
california's energy crisiswas a confusing mess too, when you're stuckin the middle of it. it's called global preventive medicine. the earth is the patient now andwe're all physicians to the patient. we're here to serve. and we can save the world. close down all those reactors now! with solar and wind and geothermal- forgetabout all the data and figures and stuff. listen to your intuition, andyou'll know what you've got to do.
dr. helen caldicott has been featured by cnn, the new york times, cbc, democracy now, 60 minutes, and c-span. when helen speaks people make contributions large and small to the organization. the last two chapters of thisbook a very exciting because they give you theprescription for survival! 5, 25, $100,000 to the instituteto support helen and the work that she's doingof ending the nuclear age. i don't say things that are inaccurateotherwise i would be deregistered, i mean, doctors can't lie.
the doctors have been told by their superiors not tell patients that their symptoms are related to radiation. this is the biggest medical conspiracy in the history of medicine, george! i don't you could dismiss the un scientific committee as being part of the nuclear industry. i don't think you can dismiss the very large amount of data- yes i could. -on the... i'm sorry you're saying you woulddismiss the un scientific committee as being part ofthe nuclear industry?
yes, let me tell you george. wow. well then the mind boggles. where does this end? the mind does boggle. the un, and the scientific committee,and the iaea. i mean who else is involvedin this conspiracy? we need to know! i'm testifying at yourdarlington hearing soon.
what am i gonna say? you're all fools. what do you think you're doing? i mean you will need psychoanalysis. these are all the elements in a reactor. she's testified before multiple government panels on the safety of nuclear power. if we move to renewables in a big way- yeah. but you would not be able to havethe kind of power, um- yes you would.
well, i don't think- oh, yes you would. i do think that we would- yes you would. to smelt aluminum to make aluminumrequires huge amounts of energy. we've got to stop usingaluminium cans, that's just crazy. and all this frozen foodis just obscene too! we shouldn't be freezing food, when i wasa kid there was no frozen food we did alright. you know in that winter,it's so hot inside you have to strip! the thermostat should be lowered.
how many use paper towels in the kitchen? yeah, you're allowed to use paperto wipe your bottoms! that's all! i like living the way i live,and i live fairly modestly. we live in a small house, i drivean 18 year old saturn. heh. so we're fairly frugal,but i'm still an american. so that means i use vast amounts ofresources, no matter how frugal i am. when you're in the plane,the hostess hands you a drink with a bloody bit of tree beside it!i don't need that paper serviette!
it just becomes more andmore increasingly difficult to cut out the real big things,to be honest with you. as you walk from room to room,turn off your lights! uh, uh, uh, uh. it's easy to turn off the lightsand to turn down the heat and don't use theair-conditioning at all. but then you quickly run into the idea that-am i not going to fly to that conference? am i going to ride a bike to,you know, the grocery store? we got to stop!- do not!- never!- never use a!- you don't need a electrical gadgetry!
turn them all off! every time you walk into one of those doors and goes "pshhhew" in front of you- that's powered by electricity! cover the place with windmills. it's what we got to do, if we wantto keep using electricity! otherwise, we have to stop using electricity. and think about it, mozart wrote candlelight and so did shakespeare, so the human race has lived for a very long time without electricity. we have lived and survived for3 million years without electricity!
well, what's wrong with candlelight? that's right! dr. helen caldicott's prescription of a candle-lit future, and how it resonates with her audience, brings to mind a penn & teller demonstration,how receptive people can be to fearmongering. can i get you guys to sign a petition? what for? for banning dihydrogen-monoxide. oh yeah, i'll sign that. thank you very much.
our petition woman was gettingsignatures left and right. we're talking, hundreds. it causes a lot of urination.vomiting. can even cause- i'm familiar with it. oh, ok. that's- di. hydrogen. monoxide. water. this is a petition for dihydrogen-monoxide. what it is, is it's a chemical that is found now in reservoirs, and in lakes.
pesticides, different kinds of companiesare using this. and she's not going to lie,or even stretch the truth. not at all. she's just going to talk about what water is, and what it does, using the vocabulary and tone of environmental hysteria. corporations are using itstyrofoam companies, nuclear companies. and now, when they use it in pesticides,when we're washing our fruit and things like that,it's not coming out. it causes excessive sweating.
excessive urination. and it's in the grocery stores, and in our baby's food. stuff like that. we don't know if they thought, but, they signed. if you saw a petition being circulatedwarning dangers of dihydrogen monoxide, how would you alertthe signees to its utter stupidity? of course, you'd just say-dihydrogen monoxide is water. that would end it, right there. but what if you couldn't say that?
this is crazy!you are sitting on top of a nuclear weapon! because there is no common sense about what nuclear power is or isn't. you can have the word "nuclear there's only decades of fearmongering. whatever they put this waste in, it's so hot- -will start to disintegrate within 10 years. you could cite some health studies,statements made by experts in the lucrative fieldof dihydrogen-monoxide... you want us to putwater on the crops? yes.
water? ...but you would be considered suspect.just a shill for "big dihydrogen-monoxide i think this might be gatorade or something, i was just looking for some regular water. you mean like in the toilet?what for? just to- to drink. everyone knows- the safe alternativeto dihydrogen-monoxide is brawndo energy drink.good for your body. great for growing crops. today's discussion around nuclear power, is a lot like trying to debunk such a petition...
without using the word, "water". like, out the toilet? well, it doesn't have to be out of the toilet, but yeah, that's the idea. people are accustomed to decadesof barely competitive nuclear power. accustomed to the message thatnuclear waste is a lurking danger. and people have been convinced thata nuclear accident will kill more people than a single day's worthof fossil fuel air pollution. solar!not nuclear! sponsored by the oil heat institute.yeah, no problem!
yeah, you don't need a furnacejust have solar panels! this is the cynicism ofthe fossil fuel industry. when i've spoken to women's groups,none of them knew how bad coal was. they didn't know it killed people. if you add up all fossil fuel combustion in the united states- just from power plants, the find particulates alonekilled 13,000 people a year. w.h.o. says only56 people died at chernobyl. however! the new york academy of sciencehas translated 5,000 papers from russian!
the chernobyl study by new york academy of sciences- a book called chernobyl by the national academy of science- producedby the new york academy of sciences- according to the new yorkacademy of science- in no sense did new york academy of sciences commission this work; nor by its publication do we intend to independentlyvalidate claims made. the translated volume has notbeen peer-reviewed by the new york academy of sciences,or by anyone else. now, when the national academy of sciences put it out there were pro-nuclear people who were very strong, probably sociopaths.they discredited it.
george monbiot once deferred to caldicott on matters of nuclear power and radiation. after the fukushima disaster and a discussion with caldicott on democracy now- the biggest medical conspiracy and cover-up in the history of medicine, george! monbiot wrote: the anti-nuclear movement, to which i once belonged, has mislead the world about the impact of radiation on human health. the claims we made were ungroundedin science, unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong. we have done other people,and ourselves, a terrible dis-service. helen caldicott, the world'sforemost anti-nuclear campaigner,
has made some striking statementsabout the dangers of radiation. i asked for the sources. caldicott's response hasprofoundly shaken me. none were scientific publications. none contained sourcesfor the claims she'd made. geoge monbiot published our emailexchanges in the guardian... how dare he?so stupid. that revolting little man said [that] after fukushima he's become pro-nuclear. he's either get a cerebral tumoror he's had a psychotic breakdown,
that's my clinical diagnosis. i've listening to a lot of caldicottwhile editing this video. is he being paid?i do wonder. something... something fishy is going on. she says not crazy thingsthan i can possibly include, without giving thisvideo an "r" rating. in our town there was atanother unitarian meeting house. yeah? and it convinced a lot of people in the audience that thorium was a safer alternative.
who presented that? who? two people who- from where? well, they were both connected to thenuclear industry in one way or the other! of course! thorium? but they were very convincing. yeah, they are idiots. these people are mad! now, let me tell you about thorium.
to produce electricity you need to reprocess, like, melt the fuel. then make the fuel rods with uranium-233then put them in the reactor. it is economically totally out of the question, so these men are mad! there's some sort of psychotic element in the nuclear industry... ...it has to do with testosterone and hormone receptorsin the brain. behavior and sex comes into it. all these men operate from their reptilian mid-brains and use their left cortex to justify what their emotions want them to do,and a lot of it's about testosterone and i'm fed up with testosterone!
e=mc2 is a substitute probably for male... will i say it? erection and ejaculation! um, and they like it, and it's the sort of energy that really grabs them. what you are about to hearis the least crazy sounding thing dr. helen caldicott has ever said. that people living near nuclear reactors are more likely to get leukemia. this is either a scary thing to hear... it causes sweating, urination- ...or a terrifying thing to hear... and it's in the grocery storesand in our baby's foods.
...depending on whether or notyou have children. germany did a classic studyof children under the age of five living less than 5 kmfrom sixteen reactors. the incidence of leukemia wasmore than double normal. that study was thenduplicated by the french. so they don't need to do another study! the first one looked at leukemiarates among german children living within 5km of anyoperating nuclear reactor. where 17 incidents leukemia would have been expected researchers instead found 37.
the second study looked at leukemiarates among french children living within 5km of operating reactors. where seven cases of leukemia was expected, researchers instead found 14. in both studies childhood leukemia ratesvery close to reactors are doubled. also, in both studies, researchers strongly cautioned against assuming the increase in leukemia which from any sortof radioactive plant emission. how is it, the researchers involved in both studies saw a doubling of leukemia rates near the reactors, and then argue against any sort of radioactive plant emission as a cause? wouldn't anyone like to know?
and those two studies are classic studies, they don't need any more studies. qed, it's proven! both the french and german studies measured leukemia rates against distance from nuclear power plants. the french study followed the german, and so attempted to address from confounding factors that the german study lacked data for. the french study used 2 geographic models. one was simply distance to the reactor, as the german study had done. the second model incorporated wind direction to more closely model where any emissions
from the reactor would be distributed. excess cases of leukemia disappeared when using the more accurate model, meaning the vast majority of leukemia chaseswere not downwind from the reactors, as one might expect. this curious finding was then explored further in a third study, which saw elevated leukemia rates where nuclear power plants were planned, but had not yet been constructed. there was not yet any radioactive material on those sites. they don't need any more studies. it's proven!
nuclear power plants may be located close to cities and large population centers, but they're not dropped in the middle of housing units. most frequently, in europe and the uk, they're put in the industrial zones of small town. on land previously used for other purposes. the german study's increase in leukemia rates were all clustered where a chemical factory had once operated and later the nuclear power plant had been built. the vast majority of scientific research finds no increase in cancer or leukemia is caused by nuclear power. note again, that researchers of both the german and french studies caution specifically against
presuming that any emission from the nuclear power plants was the cause. so what does caldicott do? she tells her audience that the reports are evidence of exactly that. we've lived and survived for 3 million years without electricity. we can laugh about her prescription of a candlelit future... we've got to stop- do not- never- never use a- you don't need all this electrical gadgetry- turn them all off! -television, dvd, ah, uh, uh, uh, uh, electric carving knives, all the flashing lights- but it comes at the end of a terrifying diatribe.
these look like thalidomide babies. remember when pregnant womenused to take thalidomide? between mischaracterizing good science,and regurgitating bad science, and just flat-out making stuff up... this is a nuclear fallout released bythe australian radiation service- it's an absolutely wicked, wicked industry which kills people. these people should be tried like thenazi war criminals were in nuremberg, and i'm fed up with them! ...it's not until you're scared out of your wits that she suggests- we should
switch from a clean source of lighting,to one of the very dirtiest. if a woman who repeatedly tells audiences easily refutable falsehoods... -and there must be a lawthat people can't lie! people should be sued! doctors can't lie. we would be deregistered. i would be be deregistered. if i lied about medicine- -i would be deregistered. and they haven't sued me, so i'm right.
...if she can motivate people to protest nuclear power, then anyone can. use sort of, descriptive terminology that will get mr. and mrs. joe sixpack sitting at home watching the simpsons and stuff- you know- oh, my god... what about my children!? here's the argument for conventional nuclear power, as heard by joe sixpack... this mysterious form of energy which brings you feelings of distrust if not outright fear, is in fact very safe. there is nothing to worry about here,the situation is under control. we'll store nuclear waste in yucca mountain, even though it is perfectly safe in a dry cask. the waste was moved to cask storagefrom cooling pool, even though it was
perfectly safe in the cooling pool. fukushima radiation didn't kill a singleperson, despite everything you've heard. and utilities are shutting down nuclear reactors one after the other for non-safety related issues, despite all the money ratepayers spent to build them in the first place. i think this is an insurmountablecommunications challenge. there is a logical argument forconventional nuclear power. but it it simply isn't enough to havean argument which makes logical sense. not any more. not after 50 years of communications neglect.
up and atom! up and, at them. up and atom!! up and at them! up! and! atom!!! up and at them!! facts are not persuasive.
they're not. the social science about this is really interesting. if you just present somebody with facts that are contradictory to their core beliefs they actually become more beholdento those core beliefs. murph is bright, but she's beenhaving a little trouble lately. she brought this in toshow the other students. it's one of my old text books. it's an old federal textbook we've replaced them with the corrected versions. corrected?
explaining how the apollo missionswere faked to bankrupt the soviet union. let's say you'd like to land a man on mars. 6% of americans think the moon landingswere faked, and another 5% aren't sure. if you wanted to sway those 11%how would you go about doing it? by arguing over shadows inphotos of apollo 11? or whether a nylon flag wasflapping in a breeze? stanley kubrick was involved fakingthe apollo moon landings. 2001: a space odyssey" was researchfor the apollo footage that was shot. this is the biggest medical conspiracy and cover-up in the history of medicine, george!
it would be more productive to talkabout the existence of ice on mars. how that ice can be split apart into oxygen and hydrogen, and combined with carbon from the atmosphere,to make rocket fuel. avoid debating the contentious pastwhich implies an error in judgement. instead, focus on shared goals,and technological solutions not yet dismissed. where does advanced nuclearultimately take us? is it more appealing than drill-baby-drill? and wind-baby-wind? president kennedy didn't challengethe nation to launch humans into orbit
around the moon for a flyby. the challenge was, specifically,to land on the moon. that was the difference betweenapollo 8 and apollo 11. in britain they have the crown jewels,in america we have moon rocks. and as they say it is it is priceless. it is priceless, and the fact we haven't gone back makes it more priceless. first landing was atthe sea of tranquility, apollo 11. that was chosen becauseit's very close to the equator, they thought it was a very safe site.
as a neil armstrong wasapproaching the landing site though, he noticed therewere boulders everywhere! and i mean- they didn't have mapsthat showed them that kind of detail, and he had to take over fromthe computer with very little fuel left. and he really piloted his way down. i mean, it's one of those stories where-you hear stories you go- that was over playedfor dramatic effect... no! on apollo 11, the more you learn about what really happened, the more scared you get.
you go this guy was in big, big trouble and he pulled it out by sheer ability. he was one of the best pilotsthe united states had and he proved that dayon landing on the moon. he pulled the rabbit out of the hat. apollo 11's touchdown was incredibly risky, and the slightest mistake would have resulted in neil armstrong and buzz aldrin stranded on the moon, waiting to die. in 1962, one of these goals must have seemed far less audacious. in terms of driving technology forward,apollo 8 would have been enough. two major revolutions made the saturn 5possible, and the moon landing possible.
one was the decision tobuild a really big engine. it was a step-changefrom what had come before. over 1 million pounds of thrust. far bigger than anythinganyone had comprehended before. the other revolution, liquid hydrogenon the 2nd and 3rd stages. liquid hydrogen is a very efficient fuel, and it makes the rocket lighter. now we look at it and it looks huge! it looks giant. but you have to remember, this wasactually an extremely lightweight design
compared towhat could have been. moving humans safely in and out of lunar orbit drove life support and propulsion research. the computing requirements alonehelped kickstart the microchip revolution. this is called the j2 engine and this was the other great breakthrough of the apollo program, which was to usehydrogen as a rocket propellant. no one had ever done that before. if you could do it the benefit was tremendous fuel efficiency- the downside was you were starting from square one. it's highly- it's highly explosive and it's super cold
and it's challenging- all kinds of materials that are fine dealing with kerosene- you take 400 degrees below zero-they don't have a prayer. so they had to come up with all kinds of new materials, new seals, new gaskets new piping, new- everything was new,to build the j2 rocket. there was a part of kennedy's speech i've always loved, where he says- we will use new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than ever been experienced. fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch. carrying all the equipment neededfor propulsion, guidance, control,
communications, food and survival. and then return it safely to earth. re-entering the atmosphere at speedsof over 25,000 miles per hour. causing heat about half thaton the temperature of the sun. almost as hot as it is here today. and do all this, and do it right, anddo it first! -before this decade is out, then we must be bold! just grab me a color. a color exterior.
hurry up. yeah, i'm looking for one. c-368. anything, quick. i think we missed it. hey, i got it right here. let me get it out this one, it's a lot clearer. apollo 8's lunar fly-by produced earthrise- the most influentialenvironmental photograph ever taken
apollo 8. an underappreciated apollo mission. most people never heard of it.apollo 8, what's that? excuse me, that was the first timeanybody ever left earth. there was earth. seen, not as the mapmakerwould have you identify it. no, the countries were notcolor coded with boundaries. we went to the moon,and we discovered earth. apollo 8 was enough-to change how we saw ourselves,
and spark an interestin science and engineering. kids wanted to be astronauts longbefore we touched down on the moon. so why was the stated goala risky apollo 11 moon landing, and not the moreattainable apollo 8 fly-by? because one could be articulated easily, leveraging the nation's pop-culture understanding of space travel. apollo 8 was orbitalmechanics and delta-vee. even today, neil degrasse tyson is explainingthe difference between low earth orbit, and honest-to-goodness space.
textbooks, they have to fit the moonon the same page as the earth. so you think moon is muchcloser than it actually is. understanding what made apollo 8worthwhile was not a part of the culture. apollo 11, that was stepping outonto an alien world. we got that. we'd read books about it,watched movies about it. you understood the implicationthe moment you heard it. atomic power used to be communicatedin such simple visionary terms. it held the public's imagination back when it was explained as a source of energy which
would become too cheap to meter,just like a good internet data plan. despite the routine shutting downof domestic reactors, and the deliberate sabotage of california's energy supply,there is still a pathway to abundant energy. but it can not be achievedby solid-fuel, water cooled reactors. because the only thing conventionalreactors have to offer is electricity. the westinghouseap1000 nuclear power plant. a new generation of energy, to powerour homes, and our businesses. designed to meet the world'sgrowing need for electricity. many nuclear advocates arguethat a mislead public
and misdirected regulations have drivenup the cost of nuclear power. i don't disagree. but whether nuclear canbe a bit cheaper than coal, or will remain perpetually more expensive-that's marginal. slightly cheaper nuclear poweris not a game changer. if co2 were taxed, or if westinghouse could lower the cost of each successive ap1000, or if anti-nuclear organizations were effectively called-out on their misinformation, we'd still be stuck in a chicken-and-egg world where utilities lack incentive to saturate the market with clean energy, and energy istoo expensive to spark new industry
which could otherwise thrive. and it's not disruptive tothe existing energy paradigm. and this is a core motivationof the environmental movement, is we don't just wantto replace peter with paul. there is a romantic vocabularythat goes with renewable energy. living in harmony with nature. it's safe. it's free.it's democratic. it's localized. it has an overarching narrative to renewable energy dream that's very attractive. we don't just want to replace fossil fuelswith nuclear & have the same big centralized
power plants, and the same corporations-we want a revolution! we want to change the way the world works! advocates for nuclear energy need to find that narrative, need to find that dream. you need to have that positive overarching vision that goes beyond simply the technological aspect and saying well, it's safe! you know, it's- it's not that bad! it's not as dangerous as you think it is!right? it's got to be something more than that. what molten salt reactors offer,
is what even cutting-edge watercooled reactors like ap1000 can't. molten salt reactors producemore than just electricity. molten salt reactorscan be used in 2 ways. so, they can be used as a form of electricity generation where it is being attached to the grid- and there are no constraintsto where you can site it. you don't even need it to be near water which is often a constraint with existing nukes. so you can put it anywhere, really. so, if there's a coal-fired power station that's running down, put your molten salt reactor at that point and there's already the grid you need.
you're just swapping out the sourceof electricity, the grid's already there. and, i think, that's a perfectlyviable way for it to go, but i think there's also heatfor industrial uses. you might actually see that comeforward first, where these reactors are being sited on industrialcomplexes, to provide heat. because there are not manysources of low-carbon, cheap heat. we have very high operatingtemperatures up to 700 degrees. we can make almost thattemperature in steam. traditional nuclear water cooled reactors- they're warm.
but, running only 300 degrees celsius,making steam that that's less than that? they just really have cut offso much of the potential markets. ammonia, making ammonia,the haber bosch process. fractional distillation of crude oil. and, catalytic cracking of those hydrocarbons. those 3 things require temperaturesabove 450 celsius. and those 3 industries are worth2 trillion dollars a year- on this planet. so you have a little reactor as an industrial site and then just run a pipe of the salt. they have their fuel salts and a heat exchanger for clean salts, not radioactive.
and you can pipe the clean saltand use the heat directly. it also makes the whole thing cheaper, because you save the turbine, which is expensive. a great deal of the priceof electricity will depend on the ability of the reactorto produce co-products. with today's reactors it'sdifficult to desalinate water. if you desalinate water you take away from the electricity production of the reactor. in these, because they're high temperature, there is a potential there to desalinate water. put a great big power plant on the coast. bring in seawater from a couple miles out.
desalinate it. suddenly you're not even pulling waterout of the aquifers anymore! so the river's not touched the lake's not touched, the aquifer's not touched... and anybody see how bigthe pacific is, recently? electricity can be a byproductof providing industrial process heat. a byproduct of desalinating seawater. a byproduct of reducing thelifespan of nuclear waste, and a byproduct ofvaluable fission products. this is an energy revolution to be driven by manufacturing, a need for clean water,
and the anti-nuclear movement's ownfear-mongering over spent fuel rods. such a future isn't very hard to imagine. just as kennedy could easily articulatebroad mission parameters for apollo 11, by saying:"we choose to go to the moon a future of energy abundanceis already part of our pop-culture. it is called star trek. first airing in 1966, it took the concept of abundant clean energy, and ran with it. the thing i liked about star trekwas that it gave you hope that there was going tobe a positive future.
because it was taking place, you know,300 years in the future. i mean, at the time there were race riots that were going on in my town of cleveland. strife and pollution. and here you had this civilizationthat was really healthy. it was exciting and they werepretty much at peace. do you inherently become a bettersociety just because you have access to a more advanced form of energy? i've read some a gene roddenberry'swritings and some of the other writers and their feelings whenthey were doing the show.
yeah, they were talking about dilithiumcrystals and warp drive for the starships, but basically it wasa nuclear-powered society. and that's how we were able to becomepeaceful and live with each other and be able to develop civilization. miss nichols, there's someone who wantsto meet you, he's a great fan of yours. and i expected to turn around and see some young person, uh, and i turned around into the face of dr. martin luther king, and he said, yes, i'm a big fan of yours. and i said thank you very much, and i'm of course i'm leaving the show after this first year and he said- you cannot!
...and i was taken aback and- uh, i- i beg your pardon? he said- don't you know who you are? don't you know what you have? a character with dignityand beauty and intelligence? he said- your most important input is for everyone who doesn't look like us, who sees us for the firsttime as we should be seen. as equals. in peaceful exploration-michelle, you cannot leave. every time mankind has been ableto access a new source of energy
it has led to profound societal implications. you know, the industrial revolutionand the ability to use chemical fuels was what finally did in slavery. you know, people- human beings have hadslaves for thousands and thousands of years. and when we learned how to make carbonour slave, instead of other human beings, we started to learn howto be able to be civilized people and how to use machines to do what weneed, instead of make other people do it. based on a utopian futureof the 60s, this was where some of us wereconvinced we were headed.
technical realizations we've madesince then are pretty simple. fusion is hard. fission is easy-it can even happen in nature. coolant choice is important.nuclear fuel can be liquid. aye, the haggis is in the fire for sure. it is hard to create a tv showabout space exploration without breaking the rules of physics...the stars are just spaced too far apart. but manned exploration of our ownsolar system, permanent outposts on the moon and mars, and sendinga probe under the ice of europa,
those are all doable with everydayfission of a non-water-cooled variety. separate the hydrogen and oxygen. we now have a supplyof rocket fuel on mars! a filling station. so you don't have to carryall your fuel with you. back on earth, star trek features high density human population, unspoiled nature, access to ridiculous amounts of energy- and apparently, no resource constraints worth fighting over. give me a martini, straight-up, with two olives. for the vitamins.gene roddenberry had a
vision of the future where mankindhad overcome many of its problems and desired nothing more thana peaceful quest for knowledge. must be kind of boring, ain't it? a lot has changedin the past 300 years. we've eliminated hunger, want. then what's the challenge? the challenge is to improve yourself-to enrich yourself. is this vision of prosperity and natureas doable as sticking a nuclear reactor on a probe andmelting thru ice?
i've said this many times before,i want to go ice fishing on europa. it has had an ocean of liquid water that's been liquid for billions of years. and every place on earth we findliquid water, we have found life. i want to go ice fishing on europa. lower a submersible. so is this doable? is an ecologically sound earth compatible with 8 billion people living healthy, dignified lives, chasing their full human potential? or is this just another fantasy component of star trek, like warp drive, and teleportation?
we're going to exhaust every optionuntil we finally get clear that actually what matters ismaking clean energy cheap. so that we can live in a world where we mostly live in cities, we have high intensive agriculture, we've got clean energy, we've got clean water, we got recycling your materials... that's a vision of a world where we can all live modern lives, and it does not- it's not- it does not require any uh-it does not require any science fiction. human beings have done amazingly well over the last half century. in 1950 there were just2.5 billion people on earth. today there's morethan 7 billion of us.
everywhere infant mortality hasbeen going down, and almost everywhere people are living longer lives. unfortunately, all of our success has come at a high cost to the natural world. the number of wild animals on planet earth has declined by half since 1970. it seems like we're alwaysusing nature in some ways, but, human save nature by not using it. it's the part of the earth that we don't use that we leave to wild nature. humans use about half of the earth- half of the land surface of the earth- the part of the earth that's not underwater or under glaciers.
of that half, about half of the human impact is meat- or 24% of the earth's surface. another 10% is crops. another 9% or so is for wood production. and this is really amazing, 3% of the earth's surface we use for cities and suburbs- for the places that we live. and what's important about that, is that now half of all humans three-and-a-half billion of us, live in cities and suburbs- and this is going to prove to be a crucial part of how negative impact will peak and decline in this century. if we take the right actions today, the overall size of the human population, and our overall
negative impact on the natural world could peak and decline- not by the end of the century, but within a few decades. many of you know that whalingwas a huge industry in the early 1800s. mostly we hunted whales for their oil. we used their oil as energyto light up our lamps. grand ball given by the whales in honor of the discovery of oil wells in pennsylvania. we save nature by not using it, we save nature by not needing it. we didn't need the whales anymore, we had a better substitute. it was kerosene, made from abundant and cheap petroleum, and, we didn't save the whales
by using whales more sustainably, we didn't save the whales by having more efficient lighting to burn the whale oil more efficiently. we saved the whales by not hunting them. this is new england in 1880. there was only 30% of itforested at that time. most of the rest was farmland. this is new england today. 80% forested. martha's vineyard was reallya large sheep farm in 1900.
today, it's mostly forested. the forests are growing back, why? farms went bankrupt. we mostly didn't needthem for their land anymore. we became more efficient at growingmore food, we grew more food on less land. we saved all of that nature,allowing the forest to grow back because we didn't need it. look at this beautiful green forestthat surrounds hong kong. hong kong is only able to save thatbeautiful nature because it doesn't need it
for growing food orfor using it for energy. and they've made an incredible city,and people worry, you know, they say- well, if you go to the city you'realienated from nature, but look! they can walk intonature from hong kong. nature's right there. that sounds nice for hong kong,but what about poor countries? what about developing countries? what about all the slums? and- we're talking about industrialization, about factories, where the conditions are
terrible and people are treated miserably. that was certainly my view. 20 years ago i was involved in an effort to hold nike and other corporations accountable for their labor practices in other countries, particularly in indonesia. it was a successful effort, and nikedid make some improvements, but 20 years later i wanted to go back. i wanted to see what happened to the workers. had their lives really improved materially? i met this young woman, her name is supartie.
she makes four times more money thanthe people back in the village, farming rice. we're growing much more food on much smaller amounts of land, it's one of humankind's most extraordinary achievements, with great benefits to the natural world. we use half as much the land, per person globally, to provide our food. it's only possible for supartie to live in the city, as long as she doesn't need to make her own food, and we're makingmore food for more of us. in the countryside, when you're a poor farmer you need a lot of kids to you work on the farm, you need a lot of kids to help you in your in retirement. in the city, you can invest more in fewer kids.
and that trend is consistent around theworld- as women become more powerful, more educated, asthey have more income. her grandmother had 13 children, her mother had 6, and you can see it right here. we don't know what's going to happen next. there's one scenario that we keep going up, and another scenario we go down. the high population estimate, where the world goes to 16 billion or more by the end of the century, is a world of low energy, wood energy, wood, dung and charcoal, and large families, mostly in the countryside. a world where the population peaks at 8.5 billion, and then declines by the end of the
century- is a world like supartie is living. higher energy, smaller families, more development, and more opportunity. this is maiyishia. she is one of the 900 remaining mountain gorillas left in the world. she, as a baby, grew up in africa's oldest national park in congo, called virunga. in 2007, her parents and muchof the rest of her group were killed- by men making charcoal for energy. since then, there's been well-meaning efforts to plant trees, to help people in the region burn wood more efficiently, andthe situation has only gotten worse.
when we visited it in decemberof last year, this is an aerial photo that we took above the park. you can see here, here, here, and here-illegal charcoal burning in the park. why?because people need it. over 90% of the peopledepend on wood for fuel. we didn't save the whales by using whales more sustainably, by using whale oil more efficiently, we saved the whales by using a different kind of energy, by using a substitute. supartie uses propane- what we use as camping fuel, similar to natural gas that we all enjoy; it's an important substitute for the 3 billion people that still depend on wood and dung.
as more of us move to the cities, we're going to consume more energy. for everybody to live at a moderate living standard, a basic material-needs-met, the world is going to need to triple,perhaps quadruple the amount of energy it produces from today. propane is a fossil fuel. what are the clean energy options? there's not many. there's solar, there's wind, there's a little bit of geothermal, there's hydro-electric dams, and there's nuclear power plants.
and- solar and wind are wonderful; i've spent much of my professional career advocating for more solar, for more wind, including a wind farm off the coast of cape cod. but solar and wind alone cannot power shanghai at night, and there's a lot of exciting development in batteries, but we're so far away from being able to power cities on batteries. geothermal is great where it's available, and it's not available in many places. hydro-electric dams have mostlybeen built in the rich world. we've mostly dammed the rivers,and even in places like china, many of the rivers havealready been dammed. that means we have to take asecond look at nuclear power.
when i was boy, my aunt took me everyaugust to bittersweet park, where we would remember the hiroshima bombings. we would light candles,and put them on paper boats. i saw a television movie aboutthe aftermath of nuclear war. i was anti-nuclear my entire life. a million people dying right now,or have died, because of chernobyl. you know, i found myself quitedisappointed in myself. and, honestly quite angry at otherswho were propagating that myth. more people have died from chernobyl,than in the black plague.
fear is a really important emotion,but if we allow fear to drive us, we can end up making up decisionsthat actually put us at greater risk. what's so striking is just to go read the original world health organization documents, and read the public health reports. it was a complete shock to me. i mean, i'm reading all the chernobyl stuff and i'm- i'm- i'm kind of not believing it. because it was so out of sync with what i had come to believe. the biggest medical conspiracy and coverup in the history of medicine, george! in order to believe that a million people were killed by chernobyl, which is what greenpeace
and helen caldicott, a number of other people claim- you have to believe there was a cover-up of just massive proportions by the world health organization, by the united nations, by literally hundreds of the world's top public health experts. close down all those reactors, now! with solar and wind and geothermal... ...forget about all of thedata and the figures and stuff. and then i confronted this data, and the challenge of meeting global energy and development needs, and also dealing with one ofour most serious environmental problems, and i've changed my mind.
on top of that rock there must be 500 sea lions on top of that rock right now. this is a nuclear plant in california. you can see here all around it,natural life, sea life exists, because nuclear poweris zero-pollution. and- one of the things we've learnt about energy production is that what you want from an environmental perspective, you want the least natural resource in, the least amount of fuel in, the most amount of energy out, and the least amount of pollution and waste. you can't walk alongside a coal plant and not be affected by the smoke. you can with nuclear.
how do humans save nature? moving people out of their dependence on wood and agrarian poverty; moving away from large families to medium-sized families; access to the modern energy so that the forests are spared, so that forests can grow back from agriculture; the final step, moving toward small families, universal prosperity, and nuclear energy. today we leave half of the earth for nature. can we leave 75% for nature? we're going to need more lands for cities, but given current trends, higher energy, smaller families, more development, more opportunity, we can drastically reduce how much of the
earth we use for wood,crops, and meat production. can we do it? i think we can. why am i so confident? because we've done it before. split, don't emit. what you see behind youare real environmentalists. we're not caught in some dogma from 40 years ago, and that's why they place the goal of beating climate change above the goal of building a bunch of solar and wind.
today, the case for nuclear is being made by environmentalists, engineers, scientists and specifically-climatologists. i thought nuclear power was dumb. i found out that it is azero-carbon power source. i thought the opposite. i was wrong. i used to be stronglyopposed to nuclear power. i was appalled by it. well, nuclear power was evil.
i didn't want to go there. i do have empathy for the people whodisagree with me, because i was that person. people who once opposed nuclear power are the ones speaking the loudest, and the clearest. i understand where you're coming from because i went through the same process. you can reach people. and their message is resonating. on opening night, i polled the audience, and i asked the same question after the film. common sense says... i'm robert stone i'mthe director of pandora's promise.
...explaining the value of nuclearpower shouldn't be this easy. if it was, the industrywould have done it already. have you received any fundingfrom the nuclear industry at all? no, absolutely not. but the nuclear industry is not properly incentivised to solve obvious problems like- explaining what fission is to the public- i would be a complete idiot to have ever taken a dime from the nuclear industry or anyone associated with the nuclear industry. it's an industry that's forgotten to sell its product.
and no other industry acts that way. you know, there are-there are natural gas ads on tv all year long encouragingme to buy their product. airlines, you know, show youpictures of people on beaches. part of the anti-nuclear narrative isthe big, bad, nuclear industry- i would be deregistered. and they haven't sued me. -however, in my experience in advocacy and outreach, actuallystanding up for yourself and being
proud of what you dotends to work quite well. -making it clear thatnuclear power is a carbon-free nuclear power isessentially carbon-free energy. -or even addressing people'sconcerns about fuel rods. for example, nuclear power plantshave been paying into a doe nuclear waste fund for 35 years. permanently housing nuclear wastewas not the responsibility of utilities or the nuclear industry. it was the responsibility ofthe department of energy.
nuclear power plants paid into the waste storage fund, based on how much energy their reactors produced, not how much waste they produced. that's like trying to reduce pollution by paying a head-count carpool tax, instead of a per-gallon gasoline tax. how effective in fighting pollutionwould a carpool tax be? there's no nuclear industry incentivefor addressing the public's fear. no incentive to communicatethat solutions even exist. instead, put nuclear plants into earlyretirement, and free up the billions locked away in theirdecommissioning funds.
such perverse incentives have turned an industry once capable of crystal clear communication into the punching-bagof fake environmentalists. nuclear power produces a substantialamount of global warming gas. nuclear power produces massivequantities of global warming gas. in fact, a nuclear power plant willproduce the same amount of co2 in-toto, as a gas-fired plant-so you might as well just use gas. carbon footprint of nuclear is muchhigher than wind and solar. everything pales in comparison to nuclear! if the nuclear industry wants to correctmisinformation directly, they can do it.
up, and, at them. that is a hundred-million dollarcommunications challenge- up and, at them! -for a multi-billion dollar industry. and atom!!! they haven't sued me. so, i'm right. but they haven't done it- an ap1000 it's called an eggshell reactor in the industry, so it could easily have an
accident, it's very dangerous. -and i don't think they're going to do it. there are growing markets for conventional nuclear around the globe, and we are not living in one of them. as everyday middle-class citizens, we can still advance the cause of clean, abundant energy, without the help of the nuclear industry. that's because anti-nuclear propaganda depends on a single, easily discredited message- safe and sound! -that all nuclear power is the same. thorium.
-reprocess -then make the fuel rodswith uranium-233, put them in the reactor. as if all cars werewood paneled station wagons. there she is! where? right here, it's a wagon! correcting that misconceptiontakes people to a new space- -it convinced a lot of people that thorium who presented that? -one they haven't yet explored, and where they haven't yet formed a strong opinion.
i assumed, like most people, the existing light water reactor was a kind of static technology, and there would be some incremental improvements to it like we improve all kinds of things, but there wouldn't be a fundamental change in the reactor concept itself. and when you present that to somebodywho's been anti-nuclear their whole life, they go, huh?and they think. that's why thorium, like, do you know you can power a reactor with thorium? they go what's that? well, they don't know what it is, but they know it's not uranium and it's not plutonium! it's thorium.
oh, that sounds nice. and, people are generally open to something new and better, rather than- oh, the thing that you've been hating for so long, it's really not that bad?! i think it's an easier sales pitch. and also, quite frankly, the light water reactor isn't like, a horror show- by any stretch of the imagination. but what we have is something- molten salt is just so much better. there's nothing taboo about molten salt reactors. people don't realize that water is just a choice- and that molten salt is already used,
today, in solar energy collecting towers. anti-nuclear groups, the thing they most- attack most vociferously, if you see the attacks against my film? it's about the fourth-generation stuff. it's like- this is bullshit! it doesn't exist! it's all exaggerated! it's all problems! it's like- they've built- tried this for years, it's always been a disaster.
they go after that because it's the most effective deconstruction of all of the things we object to with nuclear power. helping people identify exactly which component of existing nuclear technology is responsible for their concern, and how we can build something better than what they fear, speaks to everyone's faith in our ability to solve problems. talking about advanced nuclearis not doing the same thing, and expecting a different result. it is a new approach, driven by people outside the conventional nuclear industry. and we're finding- that it works.
we're all part of this movement changinghow people perceive nuclear technology- that's redefining what nuclear power can be. i think in a 5 minute conversation,i can open somebody's mind. and talking about next-generation reactors is the way to do it. some folks can start off simultaneouslyopposed to nuclear power- and, advocates of thorium energy. this contradiction sorts itself out, the moment they start fact-checking a caldicott. thousands of people learn about molten salt reactors every day, in somewhat excruciating levels of technical detail.
the pdfs are all public domain. the technical lectures are all free. the molten salt research conducted in our national labs can be piggybacked on by anyone. i started learning myself when i stumbled upon some google tech talks in 2009. casually, part-time, for the next 2 years of my life- i tried to figure out why molten salt reactors were a dumb idea. eventually, i realized not only were molten salt reactors a pretty good idea, but nuclear power itself was nothing like i'd imagined. to anyone concerned about the environment, poverty, exploration or just untapped human
potential, this stuff is inherently compelling. people are drawn to it, just like every other source of clean energy. kennedy didn't have to explainwhat it meant to walk on the moon. you don't have to explain what thepromise of abundant clean energy means. everyone understands this concept. we're just introducing a very real technology, that can actually deliver. i'm a huge advocate of geothermal. also a long-standing environmentalist- and was very against nuclear until quite recently, when i started to realize all of the renewable energy in the world doesn't even come close
to stacking up to our energy demand. then the final tipping point for me, actually, was the opera singer singing about thorium reactors, and i was like- wow, theseguys care a lot about nuclear energy! there must be something behind that. we could have far more clean energy. we can have next-generation nuclear. thorium reactors that have no risk of meltdown. the energy department are just committedto regulating existing nuclear. there's next generation nuclear!
thorium reactors! that could be encouraged. and market-based, american solutions that clean the air, reduce emissions, and grow jobs, make us a more secure country. thorium has the potential to make nuclear energy much safer, and more efficient. i think it's natural to re-examine your beliefs as you age up. nuclear's the best way to go for energyfor the future. you and i are religious fanatics-have been- about nuclear. nuclear's bad.
and we're the ones thenwho should lead the discussion. i remember the intensity of the nuclear debate, i was on the other side of it... this administration does not support department of energy's advanced metal reactor program, and will oppose any efforts to continue the funding for this reactor project. ...but given this challenge we face today? and, given the progressof 4th generation nuclear? go for it!no other alternative, zero emissions! we all know there isn't 4 hours of sun here in michigan every day, and so on those days there's no sun... how am i warming up my pizza?
you don't have to explain what the promise of abundant, clean energy means. we're just introducing a very real technology- that can actually deliver. i'd like to share with you 3 elevator pitches. these have been constructed by me, and not the startups. everyone shown has been inspired by alvin weinberg's work, and the molten salt reactor experiment. just as i have been. while they share many features & abilities, each startup's [molten salt] reactor has a very different focus.
i want to emphasise the wide range of choices we have in pursuing nuclear power, even within the very specific category of reactors which are: thermal-spectrum, liquid-fuel, and graphite-moderatedto sustain fission. in short- the reactor designsadvocated by alvin weinberg. i'm richard weinberg, and i'mthe youngest son of alvin weinberg. he was one of the early players in a concern for carbon dioxide and global warming. carbon-dioxide greenhouse effect is caused by the absorption of the carbon-dioxide molecule. that is what i had worked on 50 years ago. i didn't realize how obscure it was at the time, but it was well known that there was
this so-called greenhouse effect, and coal was going to generate co2- which now is- is a big deal in the world. well i kept hearing about it when i was 16. emissions of carbon is threatening thefuture of our planet and our civilization. we need to find solutions that are going to allow us to meet the energy demands of the growing world population, but do so in a way that doesn't irreparably harm the environment. my name is hugh macdiarmid and i'm thechairman of the board of terrestrial energy. we know that the msr works in a lab. this was demonstrated very clearlyat oak ridge national laboratory
for a number of years. but it must work in the environment ofprivate industry where regulations, costs, and commercialconsiderations drive decisions. hands up terrestrial team. everybody raise your hand so thatpeople will know who to chat with. including [dr.] david leblanc, who is truly the architect and visionary for our technology. i was a physicist by training, andthat often draws one to fusion. i kind of discovered that, hey, this fission stuff, when you really look into it, it's just as good and it's doable.
and all roads kept leading back tothese molten salt reactors. there's many jurisdictions inthe world that would be perhaps more favorable than the us nrc. so canada isn't completely lock-stepwith the united states nrc? no, not in any way. we intend to design and licenseour technology right here in canada. we intend to build the firstdemonstration unit in canada. the nrc is rule-based, so they made the rules around light water reactors, so anything that's not that has to...find a way to fit into those rules,
or slowly get them to change the rules. whereas the canadian regulatoris much more performance-based. the i-msr design offers awalk-away safe level of assurance. zero operator interventioneven with a total loss of site power. if someone is anti-nuclear,if they're at least rational about it, ask them what'stheir problem with it? and the molten-salt reactor approachreally solves a lot of those issues. the i-msr has a much smaller andrelatively short-lived wasted footprint. it burns its nuclear fuel far more completely,generates power with higher thermodynamic
efficiency than solid fuel reactors. together, this leads to creation of only 1/6th of the long-lived transuranic fuel waste- essentially plutonium- per kilowatt-hour, compared to the nuclear plants we have today. our goal in our design is making them as simple as possible, reducing the needed r&d and the needed capital- that's the main problemwith advanced nuclear power is advanced often means more complicated. graphite has a limited life in a reactor core, as i'm sure many in the audience know. we're very happy with the high nickel alloys, or even some stainless steels. but proving a 30-60 year timeline will be a challenge to the regulator, investors, etc.
the question is: can the capital valueof a sealed and replaceable vessel be recovered over its limited life,at current energy prices? from our estimatesthe answer is: yes. it is handsomely recovered,over the 7-year operational life that we estimate forthe i-msr core unit. overnight capital costs comparableto a fossil fuel power plant. operating costs that area fraction of conventional nuclear. i-msr will demonstrate the lowest lifetimecost of energy of any known technology- and by some margin.
uranium consumption per kilowatt-hour will be 1/6th of conventional nuclear. one word that i've said many times to other people changed my whole life, literally, and that one word was thorium- i'm paul, i'm vice president of business development for eastern canada for terrestrial energy. -and i'd never heard of thorium before so i went home and did what everybody does, i googled thorium. it wasn't very long before i was watching youtube videos of david leblanc talking about molten-salt reactors. thorium is a pretty remarkable fuel source and we may, or may not, use it in our designs- but it's really about the reactor itself, and they can be greatly simplified by going
to the use of low-enriched uranium. i guess the expression in canadaor around the world is "shovel-ready". you can't get the hour, the week, the month it takes to explain someone why a reactor is so much better than what we have before. thorium is sort of the the sales pitch,in a sense, but come for the thorium, and stay for the reactor. because it really is the reactor thatthese people that know more about it are trying to get your attention. the liquid fuel gives it the many advantages that many of us in the field love to brag
about, to talk about- safety advantages, the reduced cost advantages, the long-lived wastereduction advantages. they were developed to be breeders,to use thorium in a breeding mode. there is enough uranium in the worldto last literally thousands of years. maybe not millions of years compared to breeder designs, but there is enough to go around. going down this right here whatyou want to do, is borrow from every conceivable synergy from existingsupply chains, and regulation as well. you want to stick to existing script. there are areas where you simply can't,you know, you can't overlap.
because you are, in fact,using entirely different technology. but the first thing is fuel. if you start off withlow-enriched-uranium, then you have a supply chainthat currently exists globally. so the commercial task is to overlap as much you can with what's going on currently. we want to shift the narrativeto an aspirational level. we believe that nuclear energy can realize its potential for safe, sustainable, reliable, and emission-free energy. public policy has been moving, andwill continue to move in only one direction-
rewarding carbon-free alternatives, making it tougher for the others. we believe terrestrial energy is wellplaced to benefit from this changing world, and to contribute in a positiveway to a brighter energy future he was a child of the depression, remember-the idea of poverty and want was very real to him and he felt, and i think he was right,that cheap energy was a key element toward improving standard of living,you know, including nutrition and everything else that comes with it. roughly 1 billion people livelike the us, and there's about six billion others who wish they could.
and they will, as soon asthey can afford it. but, on the way, they're going tobe able to just barely afford it. any energy is better than no energy. and the cheapest right now is coal, and if you look at what's built, it is coal. coal dominates the market by 60-to-80%of all new stuff- not just old stuff, but the new stuff!it's coal. i don't want a world thathas 10x as much coal. thorcon is a collection of people who are primarily retired and primarily comfortable. and i really want to see the poor in the world get the benefits of having some energy.
i've gone over to india, worked inthe orphanages, makes a big difference. eia is kinda hoping that maybe coalwill dominate a little bit less in the future, but i thinkhonestly that's a hope. it won't change unless wedo something to change it. the ramp rate, how much newelectricity we need, is extremely severe. in the last 15 years, chinainstalled more new electricity then is existing in all of the us now. india's about to repeat that process. so we need to build out the equivalent of the entire us electrical network every 10
years or so, and you know- once india's done it's going to be indonesia and then going to move on someplace else. and that pace is going to continuefor 100 years. so the demand, really, is to put out on the order of 100 gigawatts of power, every year. 100 gigawatts of new power, every year. this is a huge, huge market. the size of the whole oil industry today. look around, say, what-what could supply this kind of energy? nuclear is the answer.
the shipyards already put outthat kind of quantity in large ships. so they know how to do that. we can do about 90%of the work in the shipyard. this is an ultra-large crude carrier. one of the world's largest ships was designedand built by the founder of our company. if you look at the world,about 80% of the people live within 500 miles ofthe ocean or a big river. a perfectly reasonable distanceto run a transmission line. this is a 1 gigawatt nuclear island of a power plant, and not the turbines and generators
and the cooling towers and the stuff,but the nuclear island. and it's small compared to the boat. it's, like, 1/4 of the steel. we're talking like 500 tonne pieces onto barges, take them to the site, and assemble them like you're plugging together lego blocks. this boat cost $90 million. so if i can build a 1 gigawatt power plant for anything remotely resembling how much it cost us to build that ship, then we're doing much better than with current technology. we got roughly 1/5th the amountof steel as a coal plant does.
for concrete, we've got about 1/3rdthe concrete that the coal plant does. talk about roughly 6-centsa kilowatt-hour for coal, and about 3-cents akilowatt-hour for thorcon. should-cost: if we set up a manufacturing line, how much does it cost putting in the materials, the skills we have to put in,the labor we have to put in? did-cost: and then what happened whenyou got in with all the regulations? so, we're going to focuson what it should cost. regulations come on a country-by-country basis, and it's going to preclude us from certain countries until theycome to their senses.
the reason that costs a little for that boat, compared to how big it is- you've got a plate to steel on the bottom, you've gotribs going across here. you got robot welders that are welding the ribs to the plate of steel. and you've got one person they're running 5 or 6 different machine simultaneously. we're building the power plants using the same basic technology. actually, in the same yards. so our power plant basically is a boat dug into the ground, with double hull steel, concrete pouredbetween the steel. being able to build power plants at100 gigawatts/year is very much viable.
once we get away from the thickforgings of the reactor vessel that you have withlight water reactors. every 4 years we exchangeour cans, because we have a graphite moderated reactor, and sothe graphite is going to get neutron damage. we have to replace it. and we do that by having sealed cansthat we put on a "can ship" we call it- a specially designed ship. the can ship will haul thoseback to a can recycling center. after we've been doing that for a decadeor so we're going to have some spent fuel,
and that will goto a fuel recycling center. we'll start out with just using simple fluorination and distillation to recover most of the salt. that'll let us recover the saltand the uranium and the thorium. i does not let us recover the transuranics. [in the] future, we wouldanticipate making this a secure site and being able to dothe transuranics extractions. this is a 1 gigawatt power plant site. you see the can-ship here. this little red one is a can.
that's the 250 megawatt electric reactor. and then this is a standard turbine generator. we have no objection to brayton cycle,but we don't want to wait. we don't want to do something that'seven better, but 10 years later. so our goal is driven by-what can you do now? and get started- get going, because-anything nuclear, frankly, beats coal. so if we can make the cost,and get in there and get in the market- then we can fuss aboutreducing waste in the future. we're able to handle, fairly flexibly, what kind of fuel and salt in the same reactor.
we're currently planning on using nabe. sodium-fluoride, beryllium-fluoride as our baseline salt, because we can buy it now. flibe is a little harder to get by,and we don't want our schedule to be dependent onwhen we can buy flibe. so we've started with msre, and wemade sacrifices in neutronics performance, somewhat in economic performance,in order to keep the schedule short. roughly a decade we think we couldbe in volume production. that kind of schedule seems kind of crazy to people used to the nuclear industry. but i'd point out thatcamp century was built in 2 years.
the nautilus was built in 6and that was the very first one. had lots of extra challenges,being a submarine and all. hanford was built in 2 years. it's by those standards,ours is a rather lax schedule. we're doing this primarily outof wanting to see things improve. it'd be nice to get some money out of it, butthat's not the prime motivation by a longshot. go to india. they're happy, but there's a lot about their life that could be quite a bit more comfortable. have water that's clean and running.
have heat, or in case of india, air-conditioning when it's 120 degrees outside. these aren't unreasonable things to hope for. and- i don't have to be the one who decides. you know, let's let them decidefor themselves what they want. i don't think me or somebody else in the us should be making those decisions for them. all of the uranium in the reactor was separated from the intensely radioactive fission products. i shall never forget my wonderment, as i stood next to the unshielded steel cans containing the uranium- that only a fewdays earlier had been mixed with millions ofcuries of radioactivity.
we were particularly proud of this, because that tiny chemical plant was large enough to decontaminate the core of a1 gigawatt molten-salt breeder. you know, in one respecta machine is machine. but i guess anybody who involvedin designs of things get sort of emotionally wedded toone thing over another. and i think the molten-salt breederwas probably the one thing that he really had afeeling in his heart for. there's this hot ideaabout using molten salts. high-temperature isprobably easier than high-pressure.
that was one of the bestdecisions i made, i think, despite the fact the projectwas eventually terminated. but i still think that, well, eventuallypeople will come back to this reactor. so i was born in 1974,which unfortunately, was the same year the molten-salt reactorwas shut down. the whole program ended. so i can kind of mark thebeginning of my life as the beginning of the end forthe molten salt reactor. we're far behind schedule.
and we want topower the world with thorium. and want to eliminate so many ofthe political and social problems that have come about because ofour dependence on other energy sources. really big star exploded.a supernova. and this seded the universewith everything heavier than iron. now, two of the things that were created-thorium and uranium- kept some of that energy from the supernovaexplosion stored in their very nuclear structure. and some of this thorium anduranium was incorporated into our planet. only thorium-msr is going to allow usto produce nuclear power without plutonium.
there are no other options, to makingnuclear power and not making plutonium other than this approach. so this is the classic design forthe molten-salt reactor that came out of the oak ridge effort in the 1970s. it's what we call a single fluid reactor. it is a complex chemical undertakingin order to turn one of these reactors into a thorium breeder reactor. there had been oak ridge studies done onthe 2-fluid reactor, and the 2-fluid reactor is fundamentally different in that itseparates the fuel, the uranium-233 fuel,
in the flibe salt from a blanket flibesalt carrying thorium-tetrafluoride. the challenge of this 2-fluid reactor design though, is the internal geometry of the reactor. the advantage though,of keeping them separate, is- the simplification that can berealized in the reprocessing step. with the 2-fluid reactor it is a straightforward thing to move the fuel that has been bred in the blanket out of the blanket, and get it back into the core, which is where you want it- you want it in the core salt. thorium does not have a volatile hexafluoride. you can fluorinate it, and fluorinate it and fluorinate it all you want- and it will not
change chemical state. it will stay thorium-tetrafluoride. uranium, on the other hand, does havea volatile hexafluoride. and this is why many of us feel uranium-thorium fuel cycleis a perfect fit with molten salt reactor. this same trick doesn't work by theway in uranium-plutonium fuels. they both have volatile hexafluorides, and so you can't undergo a separation using the simple technique of fluoride volatility. one of the things we want to do is to couple to a gas turbine. that addresses tritium migration, but it also gives us the potential to radically reduce
the form factor all the waydown to supercritical-co2. and in fact, one of the original ideas was-to use a molten-salt reactor to drive open-cycle air gasturbines and power a jet! so this is the crazy idea that kicked off the molten-salt reactor. so there's just a little bit of precedent. this 2-fluid reactor design wasalso designed to be modular. to bring new nuclear power plants onlinequickly- they were into small modular reactors before small modularreactors were cool. liquid fluoride reactorswith their low pressure operation
are particularly suitableto modular construction. because one of the hardest things to getaround is the large heavy pressure vessel that's required when usepressurized water reactors. safety is one of the most important reasons to consider, very seriously, molten-salt reactors, and this is because of the clever implementation that was demonstrated in the molten salt reactor experiment of the freeze plugand the drain tank. this is something that perhaps was notgetting enough attention in the early 1970s. now we know, that if we want to have the public accept nuclear reactor technology, it has got to be very safe- and it's got to be something that is easily explained to people.
now i've explained the safety basis of the molten salt reactor to people many times, and i haven't had anyonewho is unable to get it. frozen plug?that's it. that's it!flattened pipe. with electrical heat-resistance heat on that one. so you invented the frozen plug then. a small port in the bottom of the reactor, plugged by a frozen plug of salt. if all power was lost, that plug melted, the fuel drained into this train tank, and the difference between the drain tank and the reactor vessel was the reactor vessel was
not meant to lose any thermal energy. the only place you wanted tolose thermal energy was to give it up in theprimary heat exchanger. three paths. the path we take now which is burning this very, very rare amount of uranium-235. or the path that has been investigated by a lot of advanced nuclear programs, the idea of burning in a fast reactor uranium-238. or this new-old idea, which is using thorium in a thermal spectrum reactor. we could imagine fueling a molten salt reactor with low-enriched uranium.
if we do that, uranium mining and enrichment necessary will be comparable to what we do today in light water reactors. that path was weaponized and it continues to be a concern. option 2, we can imagine fast-spectrummolten-salt reactors. we would not need any moreuranium mining or enrichment. but we're going to have a high inventory. fuel looks small to a fast neutron. and there are chemical separation issues with fast-spectrum molten-salt reactors that are going to be challenging- it's harder to get plutonium and uranium away from one another
in fluoride than it is to get thorium and uranium away from one another. and finally, option 3, which is obviously the option i favor which is the thorium fuelled, thermal-spectrum molten salt reactor. no uranium mining or enrichment are going to be necessary once we're in steady state. and this option will have the lowest of all the fissile inventories. and that fissile inventory won't be plutonium, it will be uranium-233. that third path was not weaponized because the unavoidable contamination of uranium-232, which was realized by glenn seaborg in 1944. what we would propose is to use many of the materials that are otherwise going to go to
waste- to a fully thorium powered future. in this scenario we put both our plutonium, our heu, our u-233- all to productive use along with our thorium stockpiles. so i would make the case that if you have to choose your physical currency from one of these three options- the safestand best bet and most efficient is to use uranium-233 and tochoose the thorium option. our fundamental motivation is that we share the dream that was put forward by dr. alvin weinberg long ago, of a world set free by the use of thorium as an essentially unlimited energy source, and i know it was said earlier that thorium's not a miracle.
to me it is a miracle. it's a miracle that there's a material on earth that has such remarkable energy density, that even worthless dirt is transformed into an energy resource greater than the richest crude oil or anthracite coal or any other resource you can imagine. to me that is- that is truly a miracle. every time mankind been able to access a new source of energy it has led to profound societal implications. human beings had slaves forthousands and thousands of years. when we learned how to make carbonour slave instead of other human beings
we started to learnhow to be able to be civilized people. i really believe that if we don't have access to affordable and clean energy, we will revert. we will go back to the way humans have been for thousands and thousands of years, which is where the powerful and the rich oppress the masses who live terrible lives trying to provide things for just a few people. we live much better lives today because we have learned how to use carbon. okay, what about thorium? thorium has a million times the energydensity of a carbon-hydrogen bond. what could thatmean for human civilization?
going out thousands- tens ofthousands of years into the future? because we're not going torun out of this stuff. once we've learned how to use it at thiskind of efficiency we will never run out. it is simply to common. the last operational molten salt reactorshut down in the united states in 1969. it ran in a remote location. research documents werekept in a walk-in closet. for 3 decades, we didn't even knowthis was an option. then in 2002, ornl's molten saltdocumentation is scanned in pdf
and accessible tosome nasa employees. 2004 kirk sorensen delivers cd-roms fullof molten salt research to policy makers, national labs and universities. dr. per peterson at berkeley receives a copy. 2006 kirk moves the scannedresearch onto his website. 2008 molten salt reactor lectures beginat the googleplex, and are hosted
on google's youtube channel. 2009 the very first thorium conference is held. wired magazine runsa feature story on thorium. 2010 american scientistruns a feature on thorium. international thorium conferences begin. server logs show chinese students downloading molten salt reactor pdfs from kirk's website. 2011
china announces their intention tobuild a thorium molten-salt reactor. in the u.s., flibe energy is founded. transatomic power is founded. 2012 baroness bryony worthington tours ornl'shistoric molten salt reactor experiment, which has never beenmade open to the public. kun chen visits berkeley california,telling us that 300 chinese are working full-timeon molten salt reactors. 2013
terrestrial energy is founded. 2014 thorcon is founded. moltex is founded. seaborg technologies are founded. copenhagen atomics are founded. 2015 a flood of technical details and technologyassessments released by molten salt startups. india reveals their new facility for molten salt preparation and purification.
china announces that now 700 engineers are working on their molten salt reactor program. bill gates' terrapower receivesa grant to investigate molten salt. 2016 just as this video is about to be released- myriam tonelotto releases a feature length documentary about molten salt reactors called:"thorium: nuclear power without risk". dr. james hansen tells rollingstone magazine that we should develop molten-salt reactorspowered by thorium. and oak ridge discovers actual filmfootage of the molten salt reactor itself. produced in 1969, it was forgottenin storage for over 45 years.
it offers up our first and only glimpse of an operating molten-salt reactor. as a communications asset,this is utterly invaluable- and will be fully incorporatedinto future videos. in 2017 i think just aboutanything could happen. the molten-salt reactor experimentwas one of the most important, and i must say, brilliant achievementsof the oak ridge national laboratory. and i hope that after i'm gone,people will look at the dusty books that were written on molten saltsand will say- hey! these guys had a pretty good idea, let's go back to it!back in the 60s, alvin weinberg saw
the msr as a means of addressing energypollution and our need for clean water. desalination would turnthe middle east into farmland. power centers would co-locate energy intensive manufacturing and small modular reactors. surplus power would besold to nearby communities. he knew- energy was the ultimateraw material- the more energy you have, the easier it is to recycle, and usevirgin materials more efficiently. given enough power, we can pull carbonright out of the atmosphere or ocean. one day, on our path towards sucha future, they'll be talking about putting molten-salt reactorin your home state.
it will create manufacturing jobs,and produce electricity for your home. it will charge your electric car- at night. give me a martini,straight-up, with two olives. for the vitamins. you'll do things with energy thatwe can't even imagine. and you'll be kept safe by achemically stable choice of coolant, and gravity poweredpassive safety systems. i don't know when we'll get to that point. everyone's design is different.
everyone's path to market- different. i suspect more than one will succeed. before they do, i want everyone to know what molten-salt reactors are, and why they are. calls to action! if you're at the age of 15 to 19-consider becoming a nuclear, chemical, electrical,or mechanical engineer. if you are from the ages of 20 to 25, andnot one of the aforementioned majors- consider going back to school.
