Thorium: An energy solution - THORIUM REMIX 2011

Uranium and heavy water reactor will use about 0.7 percent energy value, and Light water reactor will use about half of one percent. They both did terrible. At normal pressure, water boils at 100 degrees Celsius to be. This is not nearly hot enough Effectively to generate electricity. So water cooled reactors are over 70 atmospheres Pressure. You have to build a water cooled reactor as a pressure vessel. Number one Accident people worry about ... The lost water pressure is being held, is at 300 degrees Celsius [makes splashing sound] splashes out of steam. An increase in volume by about a factor of 1000. If you are not urgent The fuel in the reactor coolant, it can overheat and melt. That's what drives the design of this building. In this case, the steam is captured This building..
Reactors we have today use uranium oxide fuel. This is a ceramic material chemically, Stable but not very good at transferring heat. If you lose pressure, you lose your Water, and soon your fuel will melt down and release the radioactive fission products It is..
So they have a series of emergency systems that keep the core covered Water. We have seen the failure of the Fukushima Daiichi. They had multiple backup diesel generators, And each one probably had a very high probability of turning over. Tsunami came and knocked down Out of all of them..
People always say, "What is nuclear power safe?" And the first thing I say is "which one?" Nuclear power is a thousand different ways. A car safe? Well, One?.
I have had the good fortune to know a different form of nuclear power. Liquid fluoride thorium reactor. We can fully burn up the thorium in this reactor versus only burning up part of uranium A typical light water reactor. It is not the water cooler and it's not based on the use of solid fuel. It is not based on the fluoride salt A nuclear fuel. You can get them from their warm 400 degrees Celsius , But the fact of the throat to try to perfect a nuclear reactor to generate power. Here The real magic - they do not work in high pressure. They do not use water For the reactor coolant and there's nothing that is not going to change in a big concentration. Unlike solid fuel that can melt down if you stop cooling them, these liquid fluoride Fuel is already melted. Normal operation, you have a little guy's frozen salt that you've kept frozen More cold gas flowing out of the pipe. If there is an emergency and you lose everything Your nuclear power plant capacity, a little blower stops blowing frozen plug, Salt melts, and the liquid fluoride fuel inside the reactor drains out of the veins According to another tank and a drain tank line. In water cooled reactors, usually from the power plant to provide Circulating water and to prevent a meltdown. But if you lose the ability to LFTR, it's close Yourself down all without human intervention. A staggeringly impressive level of safety, even if the physical damage to the reactor. Thorium is a naturally occurring nuclear fuel that is four times higher in the world Crust than uranium. So lifetime supply of energy dense that you can hold a thorium Palm of your hand strength. We could use thorium about 200 times more efficiently We're now than uranium. LFTR almost entirely to the release Thorium Energy, the reduction of waste generated over uranium by factors of hundreds, And the millions of fossil fuel factors. We still need liquid fuel for the vehicles and equipment, but we can generate The liquid carbon dioxide from the atmosphere from the water, much like a Nature. We can produces hydrogen by splitting water and combining with carbon CO2 from the atmosphere in the building, from the ammonia as fuel, methanol, and dimethyl Ether, which can be transferred directly to diesel fuel. Imagine carbon neutral gasoline and diesel, sustainable and self - created. You can see that uranium-235 is on par with silver and platinum. Can you imagine burning Platinum for energy? That is what we have today with our nuclear energy sources, We're burning this extremely rare stuff, and we're not burning thorium. Some people are kind of environmentalists, and they say, "Listen, nuclear power is not Durable. We are going to run out of uranium. "I'm OK, I'm to the point that, if we are to produce Today, talking about nuclear technology. We have 5 billion tons of coal in 2007, used 31 Billion barrels of oil and 5 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, along with 65.000 tons, The world's energy production of uranium. I have a friend who is trying to start a rare earth mine in Missouri. "Jim, how much thorium You can not cut out to be a year pawing? "He goes," I think 5,000 tons. "5000 Tons of thorium would supply the planet for a year, all of its energy. he goes "And there's like a zillion other places in the world are like mine. It's a nice Mine, but it is not independent, it's not like this is the one place on earth where this is found. " Each time, mankind has been able to access to a new source of energy, it has led to deep Societal implications. The people were slaves for thousands and thousands of years. When We learned how to make carbon our slave, instead of other people, we begin to learn How civilized people will be able to. Thorium is a million times the energy density of a carbon-hydrogen bond. What could that Mean for human civilization? Because we are not going to run out of this stuff. We will Never run out. It's just a very common. Our Facebook page, the gender demographic is about 87 percent male, 13 percent female. I have been a proponent of nuclear power not to. For the right price ,? It allows us to continuously consume that I believe is unsustainable. Do you think that will prevent us from other energy consuming? If we were running it. Yes. I think we re-use it and things will start to ration Just opposite to the creation of a new one. Solar and wind, then what? The sun will always shine, the wind will always blow. Those who support our lives. A diet of thin gruel. Yes. I believe that we have not really appreciate what we have, and I speak for myself. So you intuitively perceive wind and solar as an energy source that does not With the same value as oil and gas. Currently we have told them to use the opportunity, and I think if we amplify outreach Both wind and solar, then we're going to be looking at a very large cut. So you recognize that wind and solar are environmentally invasive forms of energy production? They Put a lot of areas..
Yes..
In order to prevent the destruction of the environment ignore the limits of how much air And we have solar.
We are incorporating a variety of them will be used. Within the framework of already existing. I actually looked at with this in my own house. If I covered the house with solar panels to I had a lot of problems and it was not nearly enough. Their performance went down. Every single time I go on the roof to clean the solar panels I will be putting my life The risk..
We have roofers, we have people that professionally. My brother is a roofer. It's a rough job. That's why the 21-year-old was out of its roof roofs and big money because he was putting his life at risk just like coal, miners..
It's a good thing you have to understand the power supply from the curb, right? Yes. I..
The low quality of life, low energy lifestyle will almost certainly correlate to the Lifestyle..
However, efficiency gains are being pursued and we could probably have 25 percent Out of our energy consumption, that's not nearly enough to eliminate the need for fossil Fuel..
Elizabeth May, you know, he might be saying, and probably will agree with me, "We should More energy efficient lifestyles, pursue "absolutely. When you oil sands / tar sands development in Calgary came to the debate, you set up sort An expectation of what would be acceptable. You said certain return on energy efficiency. Some nuclear technologies that I think are quite promising, liquid fluoride thorium reactor. Our policy is very simple to understand, no nuclear. Is there more nuance demanded there ... concerns about nuclear energy can be addressed with The technology of the future? Since the Greens have a policy against nuclear energy, something we should reconsider The new technology, which is being discussed but do not yet exist? I guess the answer is, Of course..
Greens globally found some reason to re-assess nuclear, but we only have a limited amount Means. If you want to reduce green house gases. So you want to apply the dollars in ways that Most of the time the employment is possible to reduce the green house gas construction That investment..
We waste 60 percent of all the energy that is used in Canada. And that's because of inefficient Building and transportation design. Our infrastructure is designed for cheap and abundant energy. So, no surprise, there's lots and lots of waste. If you want to do is improve productivity With which we use energy. When you look through the whole hierarchy of choices and options that we have and we are There is a long list of options that work quite well, the list because nuclear energy It's not terribly reliable, it's hugely expensive capitol cost, very few jobs created and it Only to produce electricity. It is almost 14 years from when you project forward to when it Construction cost overruns, and it is famous for. Risk of accidents, long lived nuclear waste That has to be kept out of the biosphere for a quarter of a million years. Risk In terms of nuclear proliferation for military use, you do not have to look at the Issues for nuclear to fail. We should pursue more energy efficient lifestyles, absolutely. How far to go, even though I can? Will It will be enough, so we do not need to have better and newer forms of energy generation? I do not think so. I'm not even close. You can not see wind and solar as ... We have been trying to put solar and wind online for decades. Still on the order About one percent of total energy production in the United States. Wind is quoted in terms of Its power. You will say this is a three megawatt windmill. If I have 3,000 Megawatt nuclear plant, 1000 of these windmills are equivalent to this one. Wind Only about 15 percent of the flow of time, one out of six. That correlation becomes absolutely meaningless now, because one of the running time and The other one is only running one out of six times. If you had a car and you thought "I Do not get in my car and turn the ignition to go to, and I have a one in six chance Going from the car to turn. "What would be useful would be in that car? The wind industry says, "That's OK, Chelsea, you need to have six cars." Energy is all about reliability. Nothing could address those concerns by using batteries which are making great advances. More than a laptop?.
It's a very, very expensive proposition to use battery backup for the grid. Do not have Was never able to be accomplished on a grid level before because of how much it costs A store a watt hour battery. Some of you are not even looking at lithium-ion, you're looking at cheap batteries. You know, you Such as lead-acid, really looking at cheap batteries. Since you need a lot of them. It's good A bunch of lousy ones than to get a few really good guy. If we had a high-conducting or ... what you call them? Superconducting?.
Intermittent power from multiple sources. If you want a power transmission line, you want to reward the economic field You. You have to show how electricity is about to be thrown into that line Always. Otherwise, it's not worth building, cost too much money. So the idea that "OK, there'll be a wind farm here, there's going to be a solar The array, and there's going to be a wind farm over here, and one of these three times Will work at any time, but we'll have the ability. All the transmission line. "I mean That's just silly. People who propose that have not run the numbers. People do not want to see power plants and power transmission line. They will not fight Tooth and nail against power transmission line. We need a reliable energy source That is close to where the energy is needed to be consumed. I know what you can get more women on board. OK..
Go on Oprah..
Oh! How can I get her book club? Many of you have been part of a class in nuclear science and the politics surrounding that. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you very much, Kiki, I'm glad to be here. Hey, you are a pretty techy group, right? There was no sign of what was about hacking. There is such a thing as Nuclear hacking..
I'm very happy here with you today and be a part of this discussion. The answer is energy cheaper than from coal. All sorts of things that give us the advantage and they're all based on energy. Based on the assumption that we are willing to sacrifice the lives of 160 million people From the sea rise, climate change, and so forth, then January 2011, we need to start reducing CO2 emissions by four percent a year ... Well, are we doing that? I saw Star Wars when I was two years and ten months old. It is my earliest memory. My In fact, I believe that the fact that parents do not think about the details until I From the day it happened. He later said it was a place I could talk about. I spent 10 years working at NASA. At the beginning of my time there in 2000, this type of I was thinking of the community. It was the same world as a community need , But had some very unique constraints. No moon, no coal, no petroleum has There is no natural gas, there is no wind, there is no atmosphere. The moon orbits the earth once A month. For two weeks, the sun goes down and your solar panels will not be any power. If you want to try to store enough energy in batteries for two weeks, it's simply Is not practical..
I was silent nuclear power. I had no interest in it. I said, "Ah, old junk was like, That would be shared? Would "It was not until I realized that these efficiencies were Possible that I began getting really interested. I'm in this buddy of mine's office .. He's got this book on his shelf and the book was called "The Fuel Reactors". He used to work in Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Labs Said, "Yes, way back when, they were doing some of this stuff at Oak Ridge," he goes "I went to the library and I got this old book." He said it was written in 1958 "I have been meaning to look through it. I knew a little bit but not very much." I have a book, taking a big old thick book, it was about 1,000 pages, struggling really Hard to try to grasp the nuclear concepts, but intriguing enough to book And it seemed to me that we are now really different than the kind of nuclear power. They Also mentioned in this book a lot about thorium. Thorium, thorium, thorium, radioactive metal. I Such as "Dude, what the heck is thorium?" But enough of that research was intrigued as much as I can. I was reading online, I was reading blogs especially Rod Adams. Taxpayers United States sent me to sea in submarines. I've been living in an environment That was 100 percent nuclear powered. It's something that people do not hear about. Nobody in the world knew that a self - sustained fission chain reaction is possible even up Until somewhere around 1938. Very few people understand all these options available Nuclear power..
Now with liquid fluoride thorium reactors, no high-level waste material is generated And it can also reduced stockpiles of existing waste. So given that, the more the government Can test the technology? The reality is that we have waste, so it's not going to improve the nuclear waste. Please forgive my ignorance, but what is thorium? If only my O-level science teacher could see me now. It is the name of the Norse god Thor And I know the noble baroness will be pleased to know that it's dimorphic and there All sorts of other information that he can find in Wikipedia, as indeed, I do not. My Lord, my Lord, my Lord .... The Department of Energy cited my website as the single technical source for the molten Salt reactor in their Generation IV when they first published it. People say, "Well it's Quite an honor, "No, it is actually very pathetic because I'm Joe garage. Sitting This is the single technical source you came up with a website? Administration understand all the options available? No. Does anybody really Clearly understand that nuclear energy is a completely disruptive technology? Liquid fluoride thorium reactor, I saw some of you kind of smile when it Up And that does concern me a little bit. What you are not hearing that ... what LFTR Are you hearing about the molten salt reactors that's not there? I would be really surprised if our leadership knows about this. I do not read them Blog. That we have an Internet today is going to ultimately make the difference. You know we had Bronze Age and we had Iron Age and we had the Industrial Revolution. I think hundreds of years from now, they'll say there was a Thorium Age that began. Let me tell you how this stuff was discovered. There was a guy named Glenn Seaborg who worked Berkeley Labs in California in 1942. This was the guy who discovered plutonium. Arrival He discovered plutonium stopped thinking, "I wonder if we can turn hit thorium with a neutron Some of it. "You have to remember, fission had been discovered three years ago, so They were still very beginnings. So he got this grad student. You know, everybody who's been a grad student knows what it is Like when a professor says, "Okay. I'd like to turn to go into the nuclear lab The neutron bombardment system and expose this sample of radioactive material What. ".
"It's a war now, is not it, sir, right? I am on the front lines. Maybe" "Yes, you are. Maybe" "Okay. Yes, sir. Of course. I wanted. Go" So the grad student went off, and he did. And he came back to Seaborg, and He said, "Yeah, I've done it, sir. I have made something new. Thorium did absorb the neutron. It becomes uranium-233. Well? Not that " Seaborg said, "Yes, absolutely. Okay, now take the next step, poor little grad student out! I want to go back. Now I want you to hit a neutron and see if it will fission. I think it'll fission. I'll remember. Just like uranium-235 fission. " "All right. Yes, sir." Goes off, you do comes back and says, "Yeah, you were right. It was splitting. You are correct. This is a new form of nuclear fuel. " Then Seaborg popped the really, really important question. He said, "Now I want you to go figure How many neutrons came off when fissioned. Because that number is below 2, we really There's not a story. If this number ... you come back and say it's like 1.5, then ... Funny actually goes back to the book. But the number 2 above, then, is that A big deal. ".
Goes back, comes back. "Sir, the number of 2.5." Seaborg shows her grad students. It's December 1942, and he said, "You've just made $ 50 quadrillion discovery. " Grad student was like "Uhh!" Seaborg was absolutely right. He had figured out that thorium could serve as an essentially Unlimited nuclear fuel. He knew how abundant thorium was in the crust of the earth. And He realized that through this process, if you had some uranium-233, you could catalyze The burning of thorium indefinitely. You are uranium-233 fissioning, but a new decision. So it's not really a catalyst The true chemical sense that a catalyst is not consumed in the reaction. But you can Think about it as a pseudo-catalyst. So we'll take it from first principles .. Let's talk a bit about what nuclear fission is. You have fissile nuclei. That means this is a nucleus. If you hit it with a neutron, it Going to fission and split into two pieces, two fission products. And more importantly, This one neutron is going to spawn the formation of two or three additional neutrons. Why do we care? Here's why we care ... For every kilogram of fissile material will produce as much energy as 13,000 barrels Tel. Nuclear fission is a million times more energy-dense a chemical reaction. Advancements in technology have changed the civilization of a whole lot more modest this..
When you fission something, it breaks into these two pieces, but they're radioactive. Why are they radioactive? This is a chart that shows the number and the number of protons and neutrons. Now, if the number of protons and number of neutrons were the same, all of these isotopes This will be nice line right here, you see? But they do not do that. At the beginning, it is a roughly equal number of protons and Neutron. However, they get heavier, they definitely get on the very neutron-rich. You see these black dots? And all the other people who are permanent radioactive nuclides. The strong nuclear forces holding the nucleus together, the protons are pushing the nucleus Apart. OK, all the positively charged protons, they want to rip the thing apart. The Neutrons are adding more of that strong nuclear force glue, holding everything together and They are not adding Push- it-apart stuff. Way down here are uranium and thorium and they have about one and half times as many Neutrons as protons. When you burst them in half the two pieces that you get inherit But it's the wrong ratio for the ratio. They are the ones that are here, they wanted to be more like One and a quarter instead of one and a half. They have too many neutrons. Nature has a nifty process for fixing this little problem This is called beta decay. A neutron essentially turns a proton and it spits out an electron. When you fission a nucleus why is what you get out radioactive? And it has to do The proton and neutron balance. What you have done is wrong, even though the balance It was right for what you started. These are the mass numbers of each of those and they assume two broad peaks of distribution. This is the smaller fission product and this is the larger fission product because each Fission generates two of them. However, because they are rich in beta decay of the neutron star A couple of times before they reach a stable nucleus. Now just talk a minute about radioactivity because I had a misconception of what Was radioactivity. I think that if you have something like a half-life of Day, and you had a half-life of a million years ago, it meant that the dude That was a day for radioactive brrrrrr for like a day and then, "Opp I am." He said and Dude with half a million years of life and make a million years brrrrrrrrr. So this is a more dangerous you go? Not good, got a half-life of A million years because that's got to be like radioactive forever and the dude's radioactive For a day that's right, not a big deal? Completely wrong. OK. I'm back. The dude who is radioactive for a day is really, Really radioactive. Dude that's radioactive for a million years is hardly radioactive Everything. One of those two is more dangerous? One that is radioactive for a day Long shots..
So your radioactivity is directly and inversely proportional to your half-life. So all these Guys that have real short half-lives, very ,, very dangerous, but they are going away real Quick. This guy, 2.3 million years, no problem. It's not going to hurt you. this is not right Radioactive nearly enough. Thorium and uranium, now what? Both are naturally occurring materials. Thorium has been Only one isotope thorium-232. It has a half-life of 14 billion years. So when the Universe Is twice as old as it is now, thorium will have only decayed one half-life. You can tell it how radioactive thorium is? Hardly at all. Why it is still around. Uranium, two isotopes uranium-235, uranium-238 Both, however, are radioactive. U-238 has a half-life of 5 billion years, that's beautiful Old, how old the earth, how old is the Universe. On the other hand has a much shorter half-life of uranium-235, seven hundred million years. OK. How on earth is this thing? Most of the earth is made of oxygen. Does not Curious? 46 per cent of the Earth's crust, such as oxygen. Because everything is oxidized, The rocks, then silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, a bunch of stuff. Well here is thorium at 10 parts per million, but the other thing that we think That is even less common; Beryllium, tin, tungsten. Here's uranium, two and a half parts Per million. Tungsten, aluminum, mercury, silver, no surprise where is gold? It Why do girls want to do it to them. Now that we have been looking at uranium-235 as if his own thing. It's less than One percent of uranium, it's about 0.7 percent of the uranium. You can see that uranium-235 Par with the abundance of silver and platinum. Can you imagine burning platinum for energy? It would just be nuts. It's nuts. Which Literally what we're doing with our nuclear energy sources today. We're burning this extremely Rare stuff and we're not burning the common stuff, the uranium-238 and thorium. We Mango with that stuff. Some people who are kind of environmentalists, they say, "Listen, nuclear power is not sustainable." They say to me, "We're going to run out of uranium." I said, "Okay. I will yield that point If we're talking about today's nuclear technology. On the other hand, if we start The other thought that we could not change the story. " Thorium all by itself is not going to release nuclear energy. But if you hit the thorium With a neutron, the thorium will absorb the neutron and it will turn from thorium-232 In thorium -233. Thorium-233 has a half-life of only 20 minutes, so it's really radioactive? Oh yeah, smoking radioactive, really, really hot stuff. It's not going to decay into protactinium-233, There are a half-life of about a month. So beautiful, warm knitted fabrics. You probably do not want to mess with this stuff. Then It will decay over about a month to uranium-233, which has a half life of about 160,000 years, And much less radioactive. Uranium-233, if you are hit by a neutron it will fission. In addition to releasing All that energy, it will release two or three additional neutrons. You need one of those Neutrons to go find another thorium and you need to find another one of those neutrons Other uranium-233 to continue the reaction. Some of these fission products have a really big propensity to eat neutrons. The way they They call it a cross section explaining the nuclear reactions. How is possible Will react? One of those fission products named xenon-135, and here Cross section relative to two nuclear fuels. Check out this little bitty? To compile Playing darts or something, and throwing them. Which one are we going to hit? When xenon-135 forms from fission, look at all these chain, blah, blah, blah. Where 135? Okay, that's not an uncommon event in the form of special. Xenon-135 Has a half life of nine hours. It's very radioactive, but during that nine hours, it really wants Eat your neutron..
This turns out to be a big problem for real nuclear reactors. It messes up how To manage because of the existence of xenon. This actually was a contributing effect Chernobyl disaster was the presence of xenon-135. And it's really hard to deal with The solid fuel reactors. Xenon was such a big deal, in fact, this was one of the first reactors That was never built. This was the Hanford reactor in Washington. They built this during Manhattan project to make plutonium for nuclear weapons. When they first built it, they turned it on and everything seemed to be going. After Day or two of running it, all of a sudden the power went and dropped almost to zero. They are, for example, "What the heck is that?" There was, and they could not figure it. They left It alone, and after about 12 or 18 hours it went and it came back up to power again, and It is held there. They are, for example, "What?" Doing, and pretty soon it goes and drops off again. They're Going, "This makes no sense, that we are not doing anything! Turning on and turning things Off, and turn it on and turning it off. " What was going on, the reactor would turn on, and xenon-135 would begin to build up. And it built up, it would start eating all these neurons, right. And they were It would take the reactor back down again. Then after a while away, it would decay once it decayed away [makes ascending plane Sound] the reactor would come back on again. So it was following this up and down effect. Just crazy, I mean, not even to know what xenon-135 was, because this was One of the first nuclear reactors ever built. Luckily for us, the guy who built this reactor This guy, Eugene Wigner. He was unbelievably brilliant, maybe one of the smartest guys who ever lived. Victorious Nobel Prize. He would lie in bed, trying to figure out "How far ahead of the Germans We are? Where do you think they are? "He was just always gaming it and trying to figure He thought, "What could possibly be wrong in this machine I built." He goes, "Well, That there could be something that we'll be very, very absorptive of neutrons will. And that's something we might decay quickly. And it was really absorptive and it decayed Quickly, the reactor would do ... this! " He did not know what it was yet! He was just hypothesizing the existence of such a thing! And So when this machine of his started doing this, he goes, "I know what's going It. "There were a bunch of places to keep extra fuel, and he was able to override Atmosphere. I mean, we're really lucky he did this, or we would not have been able to finish Manhattan Project. So they are able to complete the creation of plutonium in order The first nuclear weapon. They took natural uranium, and they separated those two isotopes, highly enriched it in Uranium-235. They'd take uranium-235 from less than one percent of the 90-plus percent. And this was really hard. It took the industry is very difficult to do isotopic enrichment. But this is how they made the uranium for the first nuclear weapon used in war. this The bomb at Hiroshima. It is called "Little Boy," and because they are not tested, Already knew it was going to work. Then they said, "Well, what can we do. This is all junk uranium-238, 99.3 percent What? "Well, Seaborg had already figured it out, you expose it to neutrons, and you It may be plutonium..
After a short cooling-off period, the now highly irradiated fuel rods were transported 200 from the Hanford plant in the area. Now, plutonium is a different chemical element than uranium, so they can be chemically separated. The process minute amounts of plutonium yielded. Weight, the most expensive element Planets..
Things are different chemically and isotopically like a bazillion times easier than individual It is. Because uranium-235 and uranium-238 are chemically identical. There are no chemicals The difference between them. But there is a chemical difference between plutonium and uranium, So it was a lot easier to do a chemical separation of the plutonium you'd made. And that's how they made the first nuclear weapon, the Trinity blast in New Mexico, and That they made the Nagasaki bomb, Fat Man. Seaborg says, "OK, well, maybe we Thorium can do the same thing. Maybe we expose it to neutrons, we can be The uranium-233. Uranium will be chemically separable from Thorium, and we can go This is not a bomb. "Right? Sounds great. So they started looking at it, and it turns out, no, it's a really bad idea because, Are you ready to uranium-233, you were always making uranium-232. The decay chain That is uranium-232. It jumps down one year, three days, 55 seconds, 0.16 seconds, And it jumps down - bismuth-212, thallium-208 and these two decay products There are also gamma emission. They are very, very strong gamma rays out. And these gamma rays are super bad news if If you want to go and build a practical nuclear device. Because, number one they kill you When you work on them, number two, they tell everybody who's got gamma ray detectors where The stuff is..
In fact, soon they were going, OK, we can work with uranium-235, that seems OK, We are with plutonium, it seems to work OK, but this uranium-233 stuff has bad news for Making a nuclear weapon. Thorium was set aside as a potential nuclear weapons fuel all during the war. After War, they again because now they were thinking, "Let's talk Instead of making a nuclear weapon power. "This is a chart that shows absorption propensity Each of these different nuclear fuels as a function of neutron energy. It's called thermal energy, this means they slowed way down. It Fast energy, that means a neutron is still going really fast. Look how much bigger Heat faster than they are in cross-section. What's this guy down here, this is fast times 25. Taking this row, barely, because you can These little bitty dots, see, because I've blown it by 25. You can see some proportions Here. Now what these colors mean is the red means it's going to absorb the neutron And blue means it's going to absorb the neutron and fission. What do you want, you want blue. Dark blue is good. Well, lots of blue, because when you Hit these dudes with neutron, you want them fission. Look at plutonium, wow, big target, right? But one-third of the time it will To eat the neutron in thermal fission. It's not good. On the other hand, in fast fission, Look at that, wow, was going to fission almost all the time. We like that was, but look how Many of these little dots we are going to need to add up to this size. We are going to need A..
How much energy did the neutron have that you smack the nuclear fuel with? How to Power How many neutrons they have and then you kick out when you smack it to fission? These little bitty dots, they appear in this part of the curve. This is the fast region, The heat in the region. On the thermal region, who is doing., Appearance Uranium-233, approximately 2.3. Look at plutonium, is that deep low two right. what is this It can not burn uranium-238 in a thermal-spectrum reactor like water Or like a water reactor like a CANDU reactor. You will not be able to use it. So they look at that and say, man, we can not burn uraniun-238 The thermal reactor. It's just not possible. This is not deterred, they said, "Well, Here's what we'll do, we'll just build a. Fast reactor, because look how good it gets Fast region, wow, it gets above two, three, wow! It's really good! "This was The idea of ​​the creation of the fast breeder reactor, a reactor that was based around Fast neutrons and plutonium fuel. But on the other hand, uranium-233, OK, it gets a little better quickly, but dang It's still pretty damn good right in the thermal. Big targets, a lot easier, everybody who is pushing thorium said, "We like thermal. This We have the kind of reactor, "everybody who is willing to build and is pushing plutonium said," No, No, no, we want a fast reactor, that's the only way to do it. " What we really do, we did not do this one. In fact, all our reactors Today, burning uranium-235 which is like burning platinum, very, very, very rare. We Do either one of these paths ultimately. Start this great division, There was going to thorium or is it going to be plutonium. Wigner was not successful in convincing the nuclear dump Thorium method. They said, "We are going to go to the plutonium route.'re" One The reason was they had developed a great deal of understanding about plutonium From the weapons program. They had made the stuff. Their chemistry was working with. They are out of the World Cup in fuel. They go, "We are. Thorium? We have not really messed with Thorium. It would be like starting over. " That instinct was to go and do what you already knew. Plutonium There was so much better developed than the thorium. So, Wigner was not terribly successful Changes in the nuclear community. Alvin Weinberg - he was not a convert. She was his student during the Manhattan Project. Weinberg got it. He has the big picture. "We need thorium. We need thorium reactor. We Liquid fuel needs. I see it. I do not see what we've got. "Weinberg got a job offer Director of Oak Ridge National Labs in 1955. He was 35 years old. He was a year younger Than I am. I'm sitting there going, I am, "Dude, when Weinberg was my age he was running Oak Ridge National Lab. What am I doing? I am. In a basement somewhere. " [Laughter].
I'm just teasing..
I do not think it's good for my mom's basement. So he goes to Oak Ridge and Wigner said, Alvin ", you've got there, because you've got See if you can go to the thorium. It's important. "Alvin got it. Here is a quote from his book. He said, "Until then I had not fully appreciated the full Significance of the breeder. "When talking about breeder he actually means the thorium Reactor. "But now I became obsessed with the idea that humanity's whole future depended Feather on. "The idea that if you do not use the power of thorium, we It's not going to be. We it is not possible to uranium-235. One of the first things that happened when he was Oak Ridge, the Atomic Energy Commission was And he said, "You done in the reactor business. We're giving all the reactor Argon National Labs in Chicago is about to work. Not part of the agreement " Argon National Labs was fully going for the plutonium fast breeder. That was the whole Things were not plutonium fast breeder. Right off the bat, Weinberg was like, "Oh my gosh! What are we going to do about that?" The time, the Air Force said, "The navy has built their nuclear submarines and the Army has Come along and they have taken the same technology as the Navy, the water cooled reactor. They're Doing their thing, but the Air Force wants to create a nuclear-powered bomber. "That's what Just sound crazy?.
It was just absolutely nuts. Weinberg was a practical man, and he said, "Hah, nuclear powered bomber? It's probably Really dumb idea. ".
But the military has a lot of money, "It was not that I'd suddenly become converted to a belief in drama Nuclear airplanes. It is rather this was the only way open for ORNL for continuing The reactor development. The objective was unattainable if not foolish. Not important " "A high temperature reactor could be useful for other purposes even if it is struck An airplane. "He knew that the nuclear airplane work, they could not use water reactors. They could not use high-pressure reactors. They could not use complicated solid Fuel reactors. They have to have something that was so slick, which was safe, that It was simple, operated at low pressure-high temperature, and had all the features It wanted. They do not even know what it was. If this nuclear airplane program had not been established, to the molten salt reactor , Have never been invented, because it is simply too radical, too different, too, fully Otherwise, it is all out for the ball fields will be arrived at through an evolutionary Development. It was forced into existence by requirements that were so difficult Achieve, and then nuclear airplane was. So they began working on this high temperature reactor, and here was their idea. The reactor Was going to produce this high temperature heat. It was going to be ducted into a turbo Jet engine. The air was going to be sucked in, compressed. Then instead of a burner here That would be like a fuel injection combustion system, you would have this heat exchanger With a reactor. It would make the air hot, then the air would exhaust through the turbine And pushed..
So it's the same idea as a jet engine, it's just the heat source was the reactor rather More fuel combustion. Remember this was invented before we had ICBMs or anything Like that. The doomsday weapon. If you're flying this thing to Russia, it is End of the world. So they do not know what kind of reactor this, and they will Began to work and came up with the molten salt concept. They did not know if it would work, so this built this proof of principle reactor, called Aircraft Reactor Experiment. They circulated the liquid fluoride salt in these tubes Two and a half megawatts of thermal power generation. Xenon is a gas. What an event for the liquid gas. The gaseous fission product xenon Just come right out of the salt. If you can not imagine what happened to poor Wigner in his Washington reactor happened Dude flying to Russia? He would be like, "This is your captain speaking. We're going to have Make an emergency landing over Siberia. Xenon level's just getting a little too high The reactor back there, we're just going to be imposed on the tundra here for nine hours On the old xenon's going to come down. We'll be lighting up and taking off shortly. " You know, I mean that's not going to work. And in 1954 ran for about 11 days. It was the highest temperature reached. A nuclear reactor has ever gotten up That's the point..
And proved to them that, essentially, their notion was correct - that you could sustain Nuclear fission reactions inside a salt, that it would operate at high temperature and low Pressure, it was very stable. And because it was not as stable salt, Will be warm, there will be less fissile material in the nuclear reactor core, and So fission became less likely. Conversely, as the salt water, the more material, because the salt was contracting, And fission became more likely. The engineers out there, that's a dynamically stable system. It gets hotter, cools down, gets too cool, heats up. Well this time, it was around 1960. ICBMs were going great. We'd perfected air to air refueling. The Air Force was going, "Oh, man, you know, I do not think we really need that Nuclear bomber anymore. " Weinberg petitioned the Atomic Energy Commission in the United States, and he got for the money little bit. He got enough to build a demonstration reactor that was supposed to be less 10 megawatts. They built it, and it was called the Molten Salt Reactors Experiment. Placed it From 1969 to 1965..
It is proved that thorium was a great fit in this reactor. This is a two fluid, molten salt reactor design called. What about the molten salt reactor LFTR and vice versa? LFTR a molten salt reactor. All are LFTRs molten salt reactors but not all molten salt the reactors LFTRs..
This core fluid, a lithium beryllium there. Salt, with uranium tetrafluoride. If you want to do now you want to move that fuel you've made from the blanket Core. Here's how you do it. You can take this stream of this blanket salt off and you This is fluoride volatility column. You hit the salt with fluorine gas, and what should I do. It is ... Uranium has two kinds of fluorine It does not have the uranium tetrafluoride, four fluoride ions, and there's uranium hexafluoride, Six fluoride ions..
Uranium hexafluoride is a gas. Uranium tetrafluoride is resolved. If you hit it with fluorine it will start to bubble out of the salt, just like bubbles Your pop. And that's great because this is a neat trick. This is a way to get your Uranium product to come out of the blanket and leave everything behind. This does not work if thorium also had this same trick. If thorium would turn into hexafluoride A gas, we'd be up the creek. But these little miracles of nature. So you can sit there and pound thorium with fluoride all you want. It's not going to change. It's not going to be solved. But uranium uranium hexafluoride, a gas that will come as. Now you need to move it into the core salts. So you bring a stream of core salt Here and you introduce this uranium hexafluoride here. And now you are a little willing to hydrogen Gas..
Hydrogen from UF6, "Hey man say, I want those two fluorines a whole lot worse Not more. "Ahh! UF6 gets stuck up at the gas station, has two fluorines UF6 to UF4 to drop back to you. Whoop! It is not the solution. So now, you've refueled your core salt with uranium tetrafluoride. Cool trick, huh? If you're constantly on your reactor refueling, all the time. You're always refueling The core with new uranium-233. And uranium-233 is being consumed but the neutrons The construction of a new uranium-233 fission. Okay, well out of the top of this column comes hydrofluoric acid - HF. You have to send down The electrolyzer unit. You can hit it with some electricity and the HF will split Hydrogen gas and fluorine gas. And guess what - now you've regenerated your two reactants. So your fluorine and your hydrogen are ready for duty again to make this trick work. This is a piece you can actually buy off the shelf. So this is fantastic! It closed Here's how to fuel your new bike here. You're essentially converting thorium In power. First into U233, and then into energy through fission. Now of course you're By using up some thorium doing this. So you need to have a little feed of thorium fluoride, You need to feed some new thorium into the blanket to make up for the thorium Consuming. Very efficient response. Let me introduce you to a typical nuclear reactor. Watts Bar Plant in Tennessee, I've actually been to this nuclear reactor before. this There's a difference between being the newest nuclear reactor in the United States. This came online In 1996. Big pressurized water reactor vessel. 150 atmospheres, solid nuclear fuel. The fission. Water is being pumped through. It Getting hotter. The water then goes through a steam generator and in another loop of water Steam is being raised. It goes to the turbine, the turbine, which spins the generator Makes electricity..
The steam turbine. And when I was at Watts Bar this is the part I got to go See..
There was dust skitch on something! Now you have a coal plant And seen the same steam turbine, because they use the same technology at a coal plant. It Nothing like this. A coal plant is dirty, it's smelly, it's filthy, and it's dripping. This thing was almost antiseptic in the way it look. The need for that?.
I do not know. So I'm standing next to the machine. You can not really see a person, you can yay high here..
The low-pressure turbine. And this is the turning of the shaft. Now in front of this guy is this little thing called the high-pressure turbine. And You can really see it. You see the big three low-pressure turbines but you do not High-pressure turbine. High-pressure turbine is little bitty. This is a third the size of do not like The originator. The high-pressure turbine is making about two-thirds of the torque Turning the shaft..
Low-pressure turbines are about one-third of the torque that's turning Beam. This little guy is doing almost all the work and these big, big, big guys Hardly doing anything. When the steam goes into the high-pressure turbine, it's dense. It's got a lot of energy And a small amount. If you blow it down, it goes across the high pressure turbine The low-pressure steam. That's why these machines are so darn big. Because the steam that's heating them Already, the vast majority of lost energy is not going to be denied. The reactor itself, the reactor vessel up here is where all the control rods slide And out of the core. And then there's these four steam generators, as big if not bigger Compared to the very high pressure reactors, and they have done. There are four of them. Look at that. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Primary Pipe..
The number one accident people worry about with this kind of reactor is what's called Double-ended pipe break. One of these eight pipes, for whatever reason, shears. And a sudden, pressure is lost in the reactor. That water that's being held water Pressure at 300 Celsius by 150 atmospheres, when you lose pressure it flashes to steam, Almost instantly to steam. And when that happens, its volume increases roughly by a factor 1,000. So what was yay dense is now dense material. The other thing that happens is steam does not take away heat nearly as well as liquid water From a surface. So all of a sudden your fuel rods are not being cooled nearly as effectively They were before. Now fission will stop because one of the things is the water Is slowing down neutrons. So without the water the fission reaction stops. Not Or are some of the control rods. The reactor will be stopped immediately. But Still be generating heat from those fission products. Here's what you'll have to double. Pipe break. You get full control Vessel filled with water. Now, I do not want to tell you all this because I'm trying to focus on the negative Here. I am telling you this because this is what drives the design of this building. this The building is the size it is and it's the way it is precisely to accommodate this event. They've designed this reactor so if, all the steam is captured in this building And not available..
Look at the size of the reactor. Look at the size of the containment building. It's huge. It is much bigger than the reactor and it's all driven by that thousand to one difference The concentration of the vapor and liquid water. Now if this happens, you have to figure out A way to get water back on the fuel rods to cool them. So they have a series of emergency The reactor system and they operate at all different stages of pressure. So the idea is if you're still at high pressure and you've got to get water in there, we've Has a system for that. If you've lost something. Your pressure and you've got to get water There, we've got a system. If you've lost all your pressure. We've got Get water in there, we've got a system for that. So there are a lot of systems Then there are backups to those systems, and high blood pressure, and it's all driven By the use of water..
Yes, sir?.
The control rod missile shield to keep the control rods from punching a hole Roof if the steam explosion reaches the reactor chamber? Precisely. The control rod drive mechanism. The rods. If you breach this part, Say the welding failed, and this thing "boom" and can shoot the control rods, That keep them from doing bad things, such as a hole in the top of the punching. It actually did happen one time. That was an army reactor and they did not have a containment Building. One poor guy got impaled to the ceiling by a control rod so ... That's got to be the coolest way to die. It was a real bad day. If he does not happen to him was impaled radiation. The pinhole camera spotted several locations and sources of high gamma radiation activity Outside the reactor vessel presumably from reactor components blown from the core by 500 psi blast the ball. The reactor vessel is about nine inch thick steel. When you've got nine inch thick steel And it has to be nuclear grade and it has to be perfect, you can not go and weld nine Inch thick steel. It's not the way they are. They forge it in one piece. Not much People have the capability to build a 10-meter diameter, 20-meter long, single piece, nine Inch thick forging. In fact, there is not just one place in the world you can build this. It's a place called Japan Steel Works in Japan. It's a limiting factor because you say "I want to build lots and lots of nuclear reactors." You're going to build a new heavy forging, which is really just for this task, or you Going to wait a long time to get your reactor in line to go do this. I have several times more water diss. Here's why water is not such a thing for the inside of a nuclear reactor. Number One, it can not hack the temperature, we already talked about that. Number two, it's covalently Substance pair. Oxygen covalent bond with two hydrogens. Neither one of those Bonds is strong enough to survive around by a gamma or a neutron smacked. They're Just going too fast. Sure enough, they knock the hydrogens clean. Water reactor, now, would you say that a system recombiner Hydrogen gas and oxygen gas, which is being created from the nuclear reaction And resist them together, because chemically they'd be a lot of water rather than being hydrogen And oxygen. It's a great system as long as it is not pumping the operating system. Well at Fukushima Daiichi, the problem was that the pumping power off. When pumping Power off, the water was still getting busted apart. Hydrogen is real light, and even though It wants to get with oxygen again it will dissociate fairly quickly. Hydrogen will be Sitting at the top of the vessel and the oxygen in a layer below it, and then will sit Water..
The designers of that particular reactor had intentionally designed it so that you Vent the hydrogen outside of the containment building. This has always been kind of controversial. They ducted the hydrogen up to the upper deck of the reactor, which were outside the containment. They just kind of a sparse steel frame structure up there. And one, two, three, we It happened to be on the news. First one filled with hydrogen to a certain point, got roaring. News said, "Oh, we had a nuclear explosion." And I'm like, "No, we did not. It was not Nuclear explosion. It was a hydrogen gas explosion. "It did not burst the containment. I do not want to diminish it, but it's not nearly as scary as it was ringing. It One, two, three occurred. About an hour after the tsunami hit reactors were closed. Fission was long gone When the tsunami came along. But reactors were still managing decay heat. Tidal wave Came and destroyed the diesel generators, but they still had batteries and those batteries Ran for about eight hours. That eight hours was the most important time of all. If you had to pick eight hours to Make sure that the pumps were still working, those first eight hours were the most important Time. When the batteries ran dry and the pumps stopped, the reactor was obtained The worst part of its decay heat comedown. It was still going on, decay heat does not Off, and it continues even in spent fuel. The decay heat continued to build. Heat was Being removed from the reactor. Why did not they use the power of the reactor to run the pumps? Because the reactor Had been turned off..
This shows if you do stupid designs, something bad will happen, even after 40 years. A friend Mine was GE's first nuclear safety engineer and he worked on the Fukushima plant, and They will be meeting with the TEPCO officials and engineers and they would all nod their Heads in long meetings and say "we'll do, we do," and then they go off after Meeting and do whatever they wanted. That's why you had a 45-foot to 15-foot sea wall Wave coming over, and diesel generators and fuel in the basement. It has nothing to do with nuclear power, it has to do with bad management and you do not Even a simple factory that design was planned. I'm sure you could talk to Japanese representative here about TEPCO management getting kicked out years ago Fraud and other things. They've had a history. Talk to me about today's nuclear fuel, because that's common to both boiling water reactors, pressurized water reactors and CANDUs. A handful of these uranium oxide fuel pellets. The guy's got gloves on and it's easy to think he's got gloves to protect him from Uranium oxide, but now that I've taught you about the true nature of radioactivity, you "I'm not so sure that stuff can be dangerous after all," and you would be correct. He is 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 do not want to get any Oils, or grease or sweat on nuclear fuel that's what's going to go inside a fuel rod For gloves..
They take these fuel pellets and slide them down these zirconium tubes and they actually Will segregate the pellets along the length of the fuel assembly according to enrichment. Among them will be the most enriched ones. Middle, and then they'll kind of decrease. Along the length of the enrichment fuel assemblies. It's really, really expensive To fabricate solid fuel. Back in the day, their business model for how to make a nuclear reactor was sometimes As called a "razor blades business model," in other words sell reactors to utilities The cost of a long-term supply contracts in order to lock them. It's good money for them, because once somebody's bought your reactor, they're going to buy Your Westinghouse 17x17 array fuel. They're to go "Hey, GE, what kind of deal is not going to Can you give me this "and will be called" Dude, you are. I do not have the reactor, "you're With that guy, there's no market out there once you build the reactor, you use the Fuel. If you decide to change the price, well, that's tough. The reactor. It's got its lid off, and then they'll fill the whole thing up A layer of water, so they make the whole thing into a swimming pool. This whole meet Wise up to water, because the water is radiation shielding. They take the fuel assemblies And the spent fuel pool. This is what they talk about every 18 months From the reactor. They'll take out about a third of the fuel and then they'll load in about A third new fresh fuel and then they'll reshuffle. Fuel that has already been done. They'll It moved from the periphery to the center. It is the "Lord of the Rings," "The Great Eye is not like looking," no, it really is not Eye. Here's what it really is. It's a cross-section of nuclear fuel. This is uranium oxide and When you put it in a reactor, not the things xenon. One, it's a gas, So, way, way, way less dense than solid fuel. When you make this gas, it starts to To break up the solid structure of the fuel. The solid fuel will begin to swell and crack and the gasses, krypton and xenon Begin to fill up, and you begin to get this central void. This is actually a gap in Fuel. Fission product gasses will accumulate here. Wigner was not solid fuel. He was a chemical engineer by training and he thought, "What What kind of industrial process do we run chemically based on solids? "He goes," We do not. Everything We do not, we use as liquids or gasses because we can mix them completely. "You can A liquid, you can fully mix. Are you gas, you can fully mix. You can not take And if you turn it into a solid and fully mix into a liquid or gas. Give you an idea, here's what we do today. We make this solid uranium oxide fuel and There is a pellet, and then we put them in these big reactor fuel elements, zirconium Tubes that are like 12 feet long and about this big around. We then stick them And a couple of years of their enlightened reactor. We only burn up a small amount of Uranium that, we take it out and we stick it in a spent fuel pool. It is not Very efficient..
The heavy water reactor will use about 0.7 percent energy value and the light water ... United States Reactors, we're extracting about half of 1 percent of the energy that Of uranium. You can imagine the boss is going to say, "I have developed a new system", "Well How efficient is it? "" It's less than 1 percent "," Excuse me, what did you build? I Need to go work on that again, "You know. We just simply would not accept this. I'm an engineer. If you're that far off 100 percent, man I want to get a whole lot closer And Weinberg did too. They wanted to use the power of almost 100 percent. Molten salt reactor experiment was the core part of it. They do not have a blanket It is around, they just wanted to see if they work, they could get the first step to Was successful..
After completed the molten salt reactor experiment, they went to the Atomic Energy Commission they said "Hey, G, can we have some more money? We'd like to go now and build. The real thing. We'd like to build the blanket. And hook a power conversion system Make electricity, "they felt like they'd shot the moon. Unfortunately Atomic Energy Commission Do not share their zeal. They had invested very heavily in an alternative technology, the plutonium fast breeder reactor Based on solid fuels and turning abundant uranium-238 into plutonium -239, and then burn This reactor. It involved a whole different set of technologies that were much more In line with the light water reactors. It's funny, even at that time 50 years ago, no one thought Light water reactor, the heavy water reactor would be around very long. They were just Simply too inefficient in their use of nuclear fuel. Like I was saying, the Atomic Energy Commission, said, "Hey, guess what, we're putting all this Money fast breeder. We are doing all this. Companies lined up to do the fast breeder. They actually Monroe, Michigan built a. It was a meltdown before. They were undeterred, They are moving forward and so they told Weinberg to take a hike. The story gets a little more complicated too because in addition to being a thorium guru, Weinberg was the original inventor of the pressurized water reactor. He was discovered In 1947, it acquired the public, so it was a little bit of a tricky thing The inventor of the light water reactor advocating for the very, very, very different. And got a little worse than that too, because Weinberg was never really crazy about Light water reactor. He did not like the fact that it was not really high pressure. There would be an accident someday where you were not able to maintain the pressure or To keep it cold. There is a meltdown that could have lead to a release of radioactivity. Any of this sound familiar? And he was making enough of a stink about this that there There was a congressional leader named Chet Holifield ... A member of the joint Congressional Atomic Energy Committee ... Who told Alvin Weinberg, he said, "If you're so concerned about the safety of nuclear energy, It may be time for you to leave the nuclear business. "He was not questioning the value Or the importance of nuclear energy, if anything he was far more convinced about that than Someone else..
What he was questioning was whether the right path been taken in the development of nuclear reactors. He was particularly well suited to make that question because his role as Inventor of predominant technology so he was quietly shown the door. After he had left Oak Ridge you can imagine things did not go well for the research team did not Atomic Energy Commission, a report WASH 1222 I like to call it white 1222 wash..
Because they really are very over three nitpicked, very small issues about the reactor and said, Here's the big problem. I can not go forward until these are resolved. When It came time to talk about the safety and performance of the reactor there may be Some safety advantages that have not been quantified yet regarding this approach but you know we Just can not really be sure about that. Burns me up because I think big, big, big mistake the United States has been walking Away from this..
So they put all their chips fast breeder reactor and that did not work very well for them. They start building one in Tennessee. The program ended up getting canceled by Carter In 1979 and was briefly resurrected by Reagan in 1981 and then canceled again. So that What happened to fast breed reactor in the United States, put in a couple of countries Go with..
French eighties they built Phénix and Superphénix and then they went to the end Up shutting down there fast breeder too and the Japanese tried it but they were But one called Monju and it has been shut down since the mid 90s. Then a few months ago they turned it back on and then somebody dropped a crane in liquid Sodium and then they shut it off again, so you know everybody has tried the fast breeder Reactor. I think the Russian's are trying it. I have some good friends in the nuclear industry. They are very big advocates of the fast breeder Reactor. The common name is the integral fast reactor. I'm not the biggest fan a reactor That is full of liquid sodium. If any of you are chemists in here you probably recall sodium There are a great infinity for just about everything. What are your thoughts on the traveling wave reactor? The traveling wave reactor is another form of a liquid metal fast breeder reactor. It A particularly difficult implementation of that reactor. That reactor is already hard The first place of the traveling wave they make it even more complicated We are going to leave the fuel in the reactor is for the lifetime of the reactor. Physical deflagration wave broadcast, a nuclear conversion and burning wave. Why Earth would you take such a hard reactor and make it even harder to what end? What Your goal? And all I've been able to read as far as their goal is that they want Never or recycle fuel is replaced. At the end of their life their concept is to just bury the thing in the ground holidays It's there. I'm thinking, "You do not leave a pool of liquid sodium bunch of plutonium Underground for an extended period of time that is a bad disposal option. " They have attracted Bill Gate who of course is an extremely wealthy man. If Bill Gates If he wants to save a lot of money to get in touch with me and I can talk to him Traveling wave..
She will not return my calls. Do not feel bad. I used to be so into fusion, specially helium-3 fusion in the mood, mining. Oh my God! I did Read a lot of books about that stuff. Is a magical fusion. If we make that happen it would be magical. I took this fusion class when I was at Georgia Tech, and I will never forget it. We start Studying and I go, "Man, this is really hard." Charged particles do not want to get near each other. Both are accused of naked nuclei, positive Charged, they want to avoid each other. My professor was a really great way of putting it. "It did not want to turn the mini golf." He says, "You know how you have mini-golf in the volcano, and the volcano's got Hole at the very top, and you've got to putt your ball in a way that goes all the Up the side of the volcano, and 'phwep!' Shower hole. "He goes," Okay. The fusion does not like. Tell a nucleus, and the volcano is the scattering effect is like. So any time you want to go to a nucleus from another nucleus, it scatters; It rolls Up the mountain and it rolls down the side, it rolls over here ... and only the When you do not quite get it right corner of the volcano. Now " The problem with fusion, he goes, "You can not steer the ball, you have to have enough temperature You can order it all the way up the side of the volcano and fall, and then If you have enough balls because you have to steer the mini golf park "can not, The concentration, "and then because they're flying all over the place, you've got to Make sure that no fence around the mini golf park so far away they are. "Do not it Imprisonment..
He said, "Those are your three things, density, temperature, and confinement, to make fusion . Happened ".
I said, "Dude, that's really hard!" So, I came up with another analogy, "So, I guess Mini golf park except now the volcano was flush to fission, the hole was almost This big around, the balls are going slow, and every time the ball goes in the hole, Two more balls come out. " He goes, "Yeah, it's pretty good." I've looked at focus fusion, I've never steam-piston fusion, I D: - helium-3've looked at P- and boron, and all these other kind of things and I'm still going, "I'm not buying. Still. ".
If you are going to say that the business case is not there. That's what you're saying. It's just damn hard! I mean, a fusion reactor, 10 keV, which is like a big vacuum tube 15 patrillion degree, and then inside this are superconducting magnets that are held The liquid helium, and all that is jacketed in a lithium blanket that will breed megacuries Tritium, which then will be injected into the reactor is driven by these giant Neutral-ion beams..
I mean, it's like, "Oh my gosh! We can do these things more complicated then it is?" And even then you can not hold the confinement for more than a few microseconds in the Tokamak Configuration, which is the most favored and desired. Thorium's actually a little bit more down to earth. If you have the liquid form, go to the ball To make that technology commitment, 50 years from now, people of course will go, " The answer to that! " Fusion is so hard that we can build a fusion reactor, and we can have 100 PhDs working It is. Fission is so easy that we can take out of Islam, a couple of high school, train Them for a few months, and they can be running a nuclear submarine. Want to build a reactor to bring energy for the oil sands. This will be the perfect opportunity. Well, if we have a reactor like this, we need the oil sands? I mean, look at me that way! I do a lot about oil sands, I know, but I know that It's a particularly hard way to get oil. People will get a whole lot of oil in the Middle East Cheaper from their place then people can get it from the oil sands. If I can not beat them, A million, maybe we ought to do. If you have the oil sands just a little tiny bit cleaner, then they would perk up Their ears, as opposed to clean energy in and of itself because of some relationship They know..
I SAT on the plane next to a guy who was in the oil business, and he was telling me all About the oil sands, and how much money they're making and so forth. I was just sort of sitting It is there, to hear ... Gas ... How much does gas cost here? A ten dollar ... for a dollar? A ten dollar cost of gas? Yes, it's expensive, because we have more gasoline, which I think is a good idea on the tax. What do you pay for gas? I, like you're paying for gas $ 3.50. Really?.
I thought gas was cheaper in America! The Canadian dollar is almost on par, is not it? Oh wait ... you all do it in liters! We pump your car with gas and go, "I'm in my car, twelve gallons of gas pumped. You know how much napalm that would make? If I die, I will be dropped on a village 5,000 little children! "You know, and you're like," No! Of course I am! No. Going to get My car and drive 300 miles on it! "I mean, it's all about what you do not This stuff is inherently good or bad, it's just how you do it. You know that does not earn one, my friends, is a concept when we Discussion, "Oh, so and so, uranium, can not enrich" I do not go to offense, "but we are talking What can anybody do? "I mean, uranium and uranium, and it's just not like us Monopoly on the stuff. The same thing goes for things like plutonium. Plutonium is ... I'm not the biggest fan. I'm not crazy plutonium plutonium fast-breeder reactor, but Nothing good or bad about plutonium. Plutonium is right. It's what you would do with it. Now, we've made a lot of plutonium reactors. What are we going to do it? We are going to drop it in a hole in the ground, or are we going to feed it to a reactor like LFTR and make power out of it? I do not think that things are a whole lot smarter. The other day I was debating some anti-nukes, and they were getting on because they LFTR Said, "Oh, this is going to use uranium. Are you from nuclear weapons, I know!" I said, "I It would be all over that! Take nuclear weapons, take them apart, put Uranium out, burn it up, make electricity! If you want to leave it in the bomb? What You want it? ".
The Navy has as many reactors as we have in the civilian world. Safety concern Posture that the US would be if we did not have this nuclear capability. If Submarines Stay underwater and under the polar ice cap. If you look the ground forces today, We feel the power, if we could cut that down surprise a lot of people use. Power Are used for good purposes. So, we can fight at night, take out enemies without losing our own soldiers Because we have energy powered capabilities. We have sensors, radios, all sorts of things there Give us the advantage, and they're all based on energy. The way that we're sustaining Say we're trucking liquids over the ground. When was waiting to go into Iraq since we began invasion in 2003 some of generals Spare parts or supplies out forward because the convoys were busy carrying fuel and water. More significantly the lives of half the cost, our losses in Iraq are associated with Supply chain..
If we do not carry all that liquid - 80 per cent of the supply chain - we have To find another way, something called an adaptive brigade. This can strengthen Its own power and water and not really have to be resupplied for say a month at a time. If you need energy during the day, put about a hundred acres of solar panels. No threat to you, that might not work too well because you safe The whole perimeter and so now all your soldiers spend their time patrolling the hundred acre Solar farm..
If we had a reactor that was so safe and simple and economical that you could take It is to the battlefield and use it, and then when you leave, leave it for the host Nation and they run it. Prosperity is related to energy. If we were about 2,000 kilowatt hours Electric power every year they have a chance of achieving prosperity. Now, of course, Prosperity depends upon the rule of law, good government, property rights, education, however Electric power for heat, light, transportation, safety is a critical element Prosperity today..
Developing countries know this. Energy in coal use is growing rapidly in the developing Country. They want to achieve that level of prosperity and they're being supported By Peabody Coal..
The National Academy of Sciences of the United States towards the freshwater fish America now has dangerous levels of mercury in its flesh. And that mercury is coming from Coal burning power plants. My levels of mercury came back 10 times what is considered safe amount of EPA-. I Dr. David Carpenter, who was told by a national authority on mercury toxins, that woman Levels of mercury in her blood to be with my children with cognitive impairment Permanent brain damage. I said, "What do you mean she might have?" And he said, "No, no, no. The science is very Clear now. "Her children would have some level of permanent neurological impairment, Probably as a permanent IQ loss in the five to seven points. There are now 640,000 children born in this country every year who've been exposed Dangerous levels of mercury in their mother's wombs. Ozone and particulates from coal burning Power plants kill 60,000 Americans a year. A million asthma attacks, a million lost workdays Per year..
That part of the cost of coal that they do not tell you about when they say "Oh, it's Only, you know, ten cents a kilowatt hour. " The two light-water reactors and use too much energy and not CANDUs They leave behind two classes of materials. One is the actual fission products - that When you do stuff fission. Then what is transuranics said. It What is when the uranium absorbs the neutron and does not fission, and turns Plutonium, americium and curium and few other, most of it is plutonium. transuranics overwhelming majority of the plutonium. So when you talk to people About waste disposal, they say, "What's the concern?" Well, most of the stuff Only uranium fuel. It's no more radioactive than it was when you stuck, and it Not really a concern. And fission products are highly radioactive when they are created, but they decay Quick. They are not really long-term radioactivity. It is they decay very rapidly, The transaction. There are some of them that have very long half-lives but that means Radiation levels are extremely low and they do not really pose a hazard. The real challenge with spent fuel management is the presence of the transuranics - plutonium, americium, curium - because they have moderate half-lives and they have complicated decay Chain. When you are with a sword-like leaves and bell - shaped white flowers of a tree looking at the mountain or a disposal site you say, "What are we going That is not it? ".
LFTR advantage over the basic approach is that we will not transuranics form. We cremated Up essentially all of the fuel in this process because we do not remove fuel from the reactor Until it's a fission product. General idea is you uranium, thorium do not want, or else you end up in the waste stream Which is a pretty straightforward proposition in this fluid-fueled reactor. So our waste The story is a lot different. You can then turn around and go back and make some Waste that has already been created in our uranium-fueled reactors and potentially destroy those long Transuranics lived through fission. Waiting them out to decay is a very slow process. For example, plutonium 239 ,, has a 24.000 Year half-life. It's going to be waiting a long time to corrosion. Over On the other hand, you can fission it and then those fission products will decay very rapidly And you get an energy release and a neutron release, both of which are good. A, U-233 kilograms of the roughly what we've got. That'll fission. Ninety percent of. We can make about 500 to $ 600 million in electricity and another 50 or $ 60 million fission Of uranium-235. Almost all of it will ultimately end up fissioning. Out of about Thousand kilograms, about 15 kilograms plutonium -238 to left. It's good Merchandise. NASA is desperate for this stuff. Plutonium-238 plutonium-239, a different cloth We use the bomb. In fact it's worthless for bombs. The radioisotope thermoelectric generator plutonium-238 and this is based on The only way that we've been able to search the outer solar system. The United States is unique. It is the only country in the world that has sent space probes beyond the Asteroid Belt And based on this technology have been. Short answer, we have become the stuff .. It 'S gone. We've used it all up. The Russians used to sell us something. They've sold us all Their inventory. It's gone. NASA's got billions of dollars of deep space missions hinging on this enough Merchandise from the battery to run out of things to call home. We will be LFTR. If you've heard sometimes about us saying "We are the 99 percent fuel burn and there One percent left ", the one percent left is that stuff and it's not nearly as much importance Stuff we burn up..
In addition, it will make medical molybdenum-99. We are about to shut down one reactor in Canada that is molybdenum-99. 2015 for treatment. There are hundreds of thousands of patients that do not have Molybdenum-99 that they need for diagnostic procedures when they do not get to do that. We can make molybdenum-99 just in normal course of operation and we can remove it very easily. Four natural decay chains of alpha-emitting there radioisotopes. One, U-238 to begin with ,, U-235, Thorium-232, and then there's one that's extinct because it has no long-lived precursors It is. It was there in the supernova billions of years ago. It's gone now. It is, U-233 on Decay chain. There is a special product, bismuth-213, that may be smart Bomb against cancer. They are a pair bismuth-213 antibody. That bismuth only has a half-life of 45 minutes, so it's very radioactive, and it will not go away Quick. But at that time, that antibody can go out cancer cells. Bismuth decays And alpha particle goes through the cell, and it kills the cancer. Radiation Technology We use in cancer therapy today, they're all based on beta-emitting isotopes, not alpha-emitting Isotopes. They have a big kill radius. They're not very directable. It's OK, but it's really not Not a smart bomb..
Alpha-admitting isotopes are really rare. It's hard to get them. It's hard to get Right kind, right chemical one that will lock onto the right thing that's close enough Being stable that even after it decays, it does not just decay ten more times Body. Bismuth-213 is a decay away from being. And it's especially good against dispersed blood, leukemia, cancer, such as cancer ,. Not tumorous cancers, where to go with a big hard lump that you can cut Surgery, however, which is hard to get stuff. Pancreatic cancer - you get pancreatic cancer, You're probably looking at a death sentence, that's how bad it is. Here's the problem, bismuth-213 and bismuth-213 is unique in this capability can only Be generated from the decay of uranium-233. I sometimes even lie in bed thinking, if my kid had leukemia, how hard I have to work On getting this therapy ready for them to save lives and if it's that important, why I'm not going full bore on it now? How much did it cost to do? What is your ballpark figure? The Home Depot stuff, or ... No. No, I think the first unit which is probably going to be ordered 20/30 megawatts Electric is - we're looking at several hundred million dollars to develop that, but then Taking a step beyond that to utility-class scale reactor, probably another several hundred Million dollars..
You're probably looking at a billion dollars to bring it up to utility-class, but when That's really not going to do your consideration. It is not all that much money The engineering and then the regulation is a huge question mark. It's actually a lot of money, not in a sense. I've learned it's not about the number, it is uncertainty about the number. You can You can now go to an investment bank, "I want to build and oil drilling might say Platform and it's going to cost 12 billion dollars, "and they will write you a check For that reason, you can go and say, "I've built 50 of these platforms before, here About where the price came out. It's not going to this area, which is currently in production will have to go This is a lot of oil, it would not be here. This recovery is not going to take this long Depending on how much oil we are the other 50 times. "They go to a lot of Uncertainty in doing this. LFTR you do not start making a full ... ... But the little pieces. Take some of these by-products and you use that money This is a first stage to start making money ... Are you sure that we do not have ethernet plugged into the back of your head somewhere? We're doing wireless here. I do not think. You repeat the question? No..
No. I'm sorry, the question is not covered by an NDA. We got some smart people in this room. We are taught aerospace engineering to development costs and unit costs Separate category. It's like you build a fighter and you spend billions of dollars to design It is, but then you run off copies for 20 million dollars apiece. It's how they build 737s Or other airplanes..
If you want to go, "What's the unit cost going to be?", Because this is going to have to think Will be a lot less expensive than what we have today if we set the development in another Column..
Because, number one, low pressure operation. That is one of the largest. When you do not have 96 steel pressure vessels, there are gigantic concrete containments. Number two, you do not Fuel weaving. You will not be rich. And you do not build it Approach to disposal as we do today. Those two features right away is a big deal. Number three is the safety systems. High blood pressure, Security is always an abundance of water to keep the reactors cooling system Core covered with water. So, if a system has 99 percent reliability; Well, you need to The other has to do so that you can get 99.9 and maybe statisticians Mad at me, I might be doing it wrong. That makes the conventional reactors so expensive the containment vessel And you've touched on that. Maintaining all the security apparatus around In order to get the fissile material is not diverted for military purposes. I scratched my head about that because we have done with the existing reactors, at least reactors The United States, do not use highly registered uranium. Well, it's one of the fears around security reasons. Whether It's real or not -.
Yeah, I guess I would have to challenge whether it's real or not. It was not many years ago that we are about to show parties of visitors On-site and actually show them what good condition and how safe it is. It's just Since 9/11, we have had to stop inviting visitors. We've always had a very open policy; We are very keen to show people how good we are and how safe the plant. It Very difficult to convince yourself that things are safe, because you can not see what's going Over..
Even the plutonium inside the reactor is what's called reactor-grade plutonium, which does not Appropriate..
Try going to any facilitate in North America now, they have SWAT teams and - I've toured a nuclear power plant. We've really when we went there. I What was the basis of that exactlysure, whether they were worried about theft of fissile Material - that would be pretty hard. I went to drama and core depressurize, the The lid off, get access to all the spent fuel, somehow remove it from the spent fuel pool In some sort of transport cask, take it off the site to a reprocessing facility that