Nuclear plant exempted from regulations as shutdown nears

there was a recent report done by the nuclearenergy 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 onthe case for thorium. it's from britain's national nuclear laboratory. so they say that there is about four timesmore thorium 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 sortof technological cults. melting the fuel rods down in concentratednitric 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. such as shippingport atomic power station. this reactor is going to cost something over55 million dollars, i believe it will produce about a 100,000 kilowatts of power. the real object of thisreactor is to learn about pressurized water reactorsfor atomic power.

it will not be cheap to operate. it will be no cheaper tooperate then write's kitty hawk would have been tocarry passengers around. at the present time reactor designis an art, not a science. we are trying to makea science out of it. rickover built one of these reactors andput it over here in shippingport. a funny-looking submarineshell shaped containment building. get out.that's funny. it is the first full-scale nuclear powerplant for generation of electricity

in the united states. over its 25-year life, shippingport was poweredby various combinations of nuclear fuel including one fuel load of thorium. he wanted to prove you couldmake a light water breeder. he kind of snuck radkowsky inthere to 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 gigantichumongous 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 thenaval reactor program. we used to have a separate navalreactors division here in this lab. they developed and built the reactor for theworld's first atomic submarine: the nautilus. the story of the nautilus is legend. because of its success it was used asa starting point in the development of an advanced designreactor for shippingport. its name: pwr -pressurized water reactor. the reason we have that as the base for ourpower reactor technology today is because

the navy was prepared to pay thefirst-mover costs to make one work. and once you've done that it's extraordinarilydifficult to compete with it because those first mover costs are very, very high and haveno financial return associated with them. i became really quite friendly withrickover and spent better than a year... and that's where helearned 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 sothe air force had to have reactors. the navy has built their nuclear submarinesand the army has taken the same technologies as the navy, the water-cooled reactorand they're doing their thing. but the air force wants tobuild a nuclear-powered bomber! dirty little secret was that most of thepeople involved in it knew from the get-go that it really wasn't practical. in contrast to a submarine where you've gotlimited space but you can shield it for the people on the submarine, it's much harderon an airplane because of the weight. most of us did not really think theaircraft reactor really could work.

but we did feel that there is very interestingtechnology 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 airplanework 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... that 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 asone of the great pivot points of history that if this program, this nuclear airplane programhad not been established the molten-salt reactor would have never been invented because itis simply too radical, too different, too completely out of the ballfieldof everything else- for it to be arrived at through an evolutionary development. it had to be forced into existence byrequirements 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 thelight water reactors we have now was well optimized tothe needs of the navy. it actually wasn't very well optimized tothe needs of power production. the reactor category advocated byalvin weinberg for civilian power production, the molten-salt reactor is covered inonly 2 of the 3 reports dismissing thorium. 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 have toreprocess, like, melt the fuel. then make the fuel rods withuranium-233 then 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 inthe nuclear industry... ...to do with testosterone and hormone receptors in the brain. behavior and sex comes into it. e = m c^2 is a substituteprobably for male... will i say it? erection and ejaculation! um, and they like it, and it's the sort ofenergy that really grabs them.

so let's dismiss that third report bythe anti-nuclear organization ieer, and focus onthe nnl and oecd reports. they do include sections on molten salt. the united kingdom's nnl report correctlyidentifies the advantages offered by molten salt reactors in its molten salt reactor section. that is, page 23. however, the full implications of molten saltreactors are not examined throughout the different sections. for example, proliferation risk and reprocessingare covered as if spent fuel containing uranium-233

will be shuttled between the reactor, a reprocessingfacility, and a spent fuel repository. that is not the case. uranium-233 is both created and fissionedinto energy inside the reactor itself. unlike solid fuel alternatives what emergesfrom the molten-salt breeder does not represent a proliferation risk, nor a reprocessing challenge. a single part of the nnl report illustrateshow this should have gone. page 18. recycling u-233 present some difficult challengesin fuel fabrication because of the daughter products from u-232.

problems. challenges. technological barriers. technical risk. and then, at the bottom- msr is unique inthat it avoids these problems entirely with no fuel fabrication required. the nnl report could easily have a caveatcarved out in every section regarding molten salt reactors. msr impacts every aspect of the thorium fuelcycle, including proliferation.

from a liquid fuel perspective, there's nomeat in this report. the oecd report is another report focusedon solid fuel. like the nnl report, every section goes intodetail about the challenges of thorium with solid fuel reactors, but it does offer a fairlymeaty section on molten salt reactors. 11 pages. does the oecd report evaluate alvin weinberg'sconcept of the molten-salt breeder and identify technical challenges which may impede development? of those 11 pages, in a 133 page report, 1sentence does so. this 1 gigawatt design was a thermal reactorwith graphite moderated core that required

heavy chemical fuel salt treatment with aremoval time of approximately 30 days for soluble fission products, a drawbackthat could potentially be eliminated by using a fast spectrum instead. the remaining 10 pages of molten saltare 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.

in a fast-spectrum reactor, uraniumand thorium perform the same. in a solid fuel reactor,uranium is a superior choice. it is only in alvin weinberg's thermal-spectrummolten-salt breeder reactor that thorium's advantages become clear. and this is what i think is really worthyof consideration- right now we have to make an economic case for why shouldwe consider thorium as a fuel source? we can go and we can mine uranium and we canenrich it and we can essentially burn out the small amount of uranium-235 in that. and you can put an economic quantificationon 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 gramof of u-235 in that fuel represents. so if you want to make an economic case forwhy you're going to use the thorium fuel cycle you better figure out how to turn a gramof thorium into fissile and fission it for less money than that. otherwise nobody's really going to care froman 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 canbut no simpler.

the oecd report evaluates thorium and basedonly on solid fuel reactors and fast-spectrum molten salt reactors. it does not evaluate thorium based on alvinweinberg's molten-salt breeder reactor. when the idea of the breeder was first suggestedin 1943, the rapid and efficient recycle of the partially spent core wasregarded as the main problem. nothing has happened in the ensuing quarter-centurythat has fundamentally changed this. and i'll go further- nothing has happenedin the ensuing 40 years that has fundamentally changed this. weinberg nailed the basic idea.

the media overlook this gaping hole in thereport. no mention of alvin weinberg, the molten-saltreactor experiment or of liquid chemistry. no mention of a buried sentencein the hundred page report. let's reword it for clarity. this one gigawatt design was a thermal reactorwith graphite moderated core, that avoided the drawbacks of fast-spectrum by removingsoluble fission products through the use of chemical fuel salt treatment. the successful breeder will be the one thatcan deal with the spent fuel most rationally, either by the achievement extremely long burnup, or by greatly simplifying the entire recycle

step. we at oak ridge have always been intriguedby this latter possibility. it explains our long commitmentto liquid fuel reactors, first the aqueous homogenous,now the molten salt. the second reactor actually operated verywell, that was the molten salt reactor experiment there it is this is the place. these things right over hereare the spent probes. see those things will extend like 60 footin length, and went down the tank did the melting, the bubbling andstirring and everything.

one of the things that i've learned from talkingto some of the old-timers, people didn't disbelieve that we could build the machine, they didn'tbelieve that we could maintain it. operation of the msre was not too difficult. and the people that i had working for methey 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 saltreactor say hey we can fix that. and they did. he felt like despite the challenges of operatinghigh radiation fields that they were able to operate and maintain that machine overthe course of its lifetime.

i started out at the lab in 1957 and got ontothe molten-salt reactor experiment. the dynamics were not common toreactors because it was molten salt instead of water cooled solid fuel. if it heats up it gets less dense and thatmeans it's less critical- less reactive-yeah less reactive- yeah. i was running some tests late at night. the device that i was using got stuck in thewrong place and pulled the rod out and the power went went up andup beyond the design power

and then controlled itselfand went back down. everybody was happy. after they completed the molten salt reactorexperiment 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 liketo build the blanket and we'd like to hook a power conversion system on and make electricity." they felt like they'd shot the moon. well, the atomic energycommission unfortunately

did not share their zeal tocontinue with the technology. in addition to being athorium guru, weinberg was also the original inventor ofthe pressurized water reactor. he had invented it andgotten his patent for it in 1947. it was a little bit of a tricky thing to havethe 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 asthe submarine intermediate reactor which was

only 60 megawatts, then containment shellwas absolute. it was safe. but when you went to 1,000 megawatt reactorsyou could not guarantee this. he figured there would be anaccident someday where you were not able to maintain thepressure or keep cooling. in some very remote situation conceive ofthe containment being breached. does any of this sound familiar? he was making enough of a stink about thisthe congressional leader named chet holifield told alvin weinberg, he said, if you're soconcerned about the safety of nuclear energy

it might be time for you toleave the nuclear business. and weinberg was really kind of horrifiedthat they would have this response to him because he wasn't questioning the valueor the importance of nuclear energy. if anything he was far more convincedabout that than anyone else. what he was questioning, waswhether the right path been taken in the development of nuclear reactors. do you feel like the program had a sound technicalbasis or do you feel like technical problems were the basis for cancellation? some of the technical reasoningthat i heard for the cancellation was

that there was a corrosion problem. tritium was raised as another issue, we madeno effort on msre to do anything with tritium. did the people on the program feel like tritiumwas an insurmountable problem? we recognized that tritium would have to becaptured but most people thought that that's something that we should be able to do. did the people on the program, particularlythe chemists or the material scientists feel that corrosion was aninsurmountable problem on the program? no. and some of the subsequent experimental workseem to bode very favorably for an ability

to solve that issue, as well as the tritiumissue by the way because we did do some tritium experiments. were either of you present when the molten-saltreactor program was cancelled in the early seventies? we were still working here. we were still working on the system. we were still finalizing reports on the performanceof the msre. i didn't see it coming. mr. president?

since you missed our meeting on breeder reactors,we sent the message today, craig. i told ziegler to tell the press that it wasa bipartisan effort. this has got to be something we play veryclose to the vest but i am being ruthless on one thing. any activities that we possibly can shouldbe placed in southern california. so, on the committee, every time you havea 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 committeeon atomic energy, was also from california. it doesn't lead me to believe that the presidentwas seriously considering alternatives to the fast breeder reactor and other paths thatcould be taken. it was a focus on what can we do right nowto get jobs. now, don't ask me what a breeder reactor is. all of this business about breeder reactorsand 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 havethe potentiality of a whole new breakthrough in the development of power for peace. the fellow on the phone call that we heardearlier said that if cost targets were missed i for one don't intend to scream and hollerabout it. in that same month the atomic energy commissionissued wash-1222. it almost completely ignored the safety andeconomic improvements possible through the

use of the molten-salt breeder reactor technology. milton shaw who was the head of reactor developmentin washington called up he says stop that msre reactor experiment, fire everybody, justtell them to clear out their desks and go home. and send me the money for fast breeders. in any other place, as an organization you'reabandoning this route and going another, well it just gets lost. it is amazing how much they documented. enormous amounts of detail aboutthe work that had been accomplished

and how they haddeveloped the technology. almost all the nuclear power we use on earthtoday uses water as the basic coolant. it's a covalently bonded substance. the oxygen has a covalent bond with two hydrogens. neither one of those bonds is strongenough to survive getting smacked around by a gamma or a neutron. and sure enough, they knockthe hydrogens clean off. now, in a water cooled reactor, you have asystem called a recombiner that will take the hydrogen gas and the oxygengas that is always being created

from the nuclear reactionand 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 illustratethe need for a coolant which is more chemicallystable than h2o. 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 degrees celsiusand suddenly you depressurize it, it doesn't stay liquid for very longit flashes into steam. that's scuba tank, hot scuba tank, full ofnuclear material. at three mile island, water couldn'tbe pumped into the core because some of the coolant waterhad 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 power allowed thecoolant water to get hotter and hotter until it boiled away. these 3 accidents illustrate the need fora coolant with a higher boiling point than water. when you put water under extreme pressurelike anything else it wants to get out of that extreme pressure.

almost all of the aspects of our nuclear reactorstoday that we find the most challenging can be traced back to the need to have pressurizedwater. water cooled reactors have another challenge. they need to be near large bodies of waterso the steam they generate can be cooled and condensed. otherwise they can't generate electrical power. you see i had the good fortune to learn abouta different form of nuclear power that doesn't have all these problems for a very simplereason: 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 ateveryday objects for what they really are. chemically and physically. and it really makes you looktwice at the world around you. your table salt is frozen. that's a really strange thing to think aboutyour table salt on your kitchen table. it's frozen. but once they melt they have a 1,000degrees c [celsius] of liquid range. and they have excellentheat 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 carryingheat per unit volume. 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 saltis that it is formed from a positive ion and a negative ion.

like sodium is positively charged,and chlorine is negatively charged. and they go, we're not really going to bondwe're just 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 reallygood thing for a reactor because a reactor is going to take those guys andjust smack them all over the place with gammas 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, thenit's incredibly chemically stable and non-reactive. sodium chloride, table salt, or potassiumiodide, they have really high melting points. we like the lower meltingpoints of fluoride salts.

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 toreplace our nation's roads with solar panels. the department of transportationhas 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 energydiscussion revolved around a single pipeline.

sometimes it seems the moredifficult an energy source is to harness, the more attention it receives. if you'll give me a chance to serve, i'llbring the epa and the agriculture department and all the people togetherand we'll use ethanol as a part of our nation'senergy security future! even al gore, who was a key proponent of cornethanol, acknowledges the subsidy was a mistake- the energy conversion ratios are, at best,very small. how does corn's 1.3 times compare againstother 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. let's take a peek at a future powered by nuclear! this is a little weird. we can radically cut climate change emissionsand leave a safe clean world for the future.

we don't need to invent anything new! we just need to stop wasting time with distractionslike nuclear power. come on! let's build the future we all want to see! to understand why nuclear power has so muchpotential requires some effort. it requires you to exercise a little bit ofstudy. which part of this is doable, and could besafe, and could be acceptable in our society, and which part of this is not? and there's a collage of images that the anti-nuclearmovement 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 wantto see nuclear power used to make my life, and my children's lives, and your children'slives safer and better. think of the sun's heat on your upturned faceon a cloudless summer's day. from 150,000,000 kilometres away- we recognizeits power. when was the last time you watched cosmoswith carl sagan? recently actually.

yeah? i showed it to my kids a couple years ago. empire strikes back and cosmos were probablytwo of my formative influences of the age of 6. the sun is the nearest star- a glowing sphereof gas. the surface we see an ordinary visible lightis 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 pullsit inward to contract. a stable equilibrium between gravity and nuclearfire.

atoms are made in the insides of stars. the atoms are moving so fast, that when theycollide, they fuse. helium is the ash of the sun's nuclear furnace. the sun is a medium-sized star, its core isonly lukewarm 10,000,000 degrees. hot enough to fuse hydrogen, but too coldto fuse helium. there many stars in the galaxy more massiveyet, that live fast and die young in cataclysmic supernova explosions. those explosions are far hotter than the coreof the sun. hot enough to transform elements like ironinto 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 insupernova are thorium and uranium. these were different because they were radioactiveand they kept some of that energy from the supernova explosion stored in their very nuclearstructure. and some of this thorium and uranium was incorporatedinto our planet. sinking to the center of the world, and heatingour planet. liquid iron circulating around the solid partof the core as earth rotates- acts like a

wire carrying electric current. electric currents produce magneticfields, and that's a good thing. our magnetic field protects us fromthe onslaught of cosmic rays. a bigger deal- the magneticfield is deflecting the solar wind. if you don't have a magneticfield deflecting the solar wind, over billions of years yourplanet ends up like mars. because the solar wind willstrip off a planet's atmosphere, without the protective natureof the magnetic field. so if we didn't have the energy from thoriuminside the earth we would be on a dead planet.

the decay of radioactive elements in the corekeeps it moving. let's talk about radioactivity. because i had an erroneous notionof what radioactivity was. i thought, that if you had something thathad 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 aday and then, ooop, i'm done. and the dude with the half-life for a millionyears 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 moredangerous?

well definitely the one that's got a half-lifeof a million years because that's got to be, like, radioactive forever, and thedudes 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 dayis really, really radioactive! the dude who is radioactive for a millionyears 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! so you're radioactivity is directly, andinversely proportional to your half-life. if somebody goes to you here's stuff that'sgot half-life of a million years- scary huh? you go, here give it to me, i'm going to putit in my hand. it's not going to hurt me. agghh! here's stuff with a half-life of a day- youwant 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 whati 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 comesfrom? comes from the decay of thorium inside theearth. 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 decaysinside the earth. any argument for geothermal,if it is rigorously pursued, is an argument for the renewabilityof thorium as an energy resource. the majority of american geothermalis harvested in the state of california, which has most of its geothermal energyharvested in the imperial valley. a typical imperial valleygeothermal plant produces 40 tons of radioactive waste, every day. and they're saddled with all our radioactivewaste, who do we think we are, bob?

geothermal is creating 200 timesthe 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 radioactivematerial to the environment in much greater amounts than a nuclear plantwould ever possibly be allowed to, because they are consideredwhat's called n.o.r.m. - naturally occurring radioactive materials. for instance, when you go fracka shale and you pull gas out, a lot of radon comesout with that too. burn the gas that radon being released. nobody counts that radon against the gas.

if they did, the regulatory commissionwould shut the gas plant down. same with coal. and they've spent a lot of money to make surethat regulatory agencies do not regulate n.o.r.m. for a coal or gas plant the way they regulateradioactive emissions from a nuclear plant. if they did we would be shuttingdown all our coal and gas plants- based on radioactivity alone. a fear of radiation, probably, is the basisof most fear of nuclear power in general. what is radiation? it's simply the idea that there are certainnuclei that radiate things from them.

in the process of changing to somethingelse they radiate something. modern physics and chemistry havereduced the complexity of the sensible world to an astonishing simplicity! three units put together in different patternsmake, essentially, everything. the proton has a positive electrical charge. a neutron is electrically neutral. and an electron an equalnegative electrical charge. since every atom is electrically neutral,the number of protons in the nucleus must equal the number of electronsfar away in the electron cloud.

the protons and neutrons togethermake up the nucleus of the atom. if you're an atom and you have just 1 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 numberof protons must remain the same. but the number of neutrons may vary. the atomic weight of an atom is the numberof protons plus the number of neutrons. natural uranium may contain142, 143 or 146 neutrons.

that means-uranium has 3 natural isotopes. u-234, u-235, and u-238. some elements, such as tin, have agreat number of natural isotopes. others, such as aluminum,have only 1. most isotopes are stable. they would never spontaneouslychange their atomic structure. but some isotopesare constantly changing. they're busy being radioactive. given enough time, this radium-88isotope will shed energy and change.

this is how isotopes in theearth itself emit radiation. the geiger counter detects their presence. a cloud chamber makes these raysvisible to the naked eye. each new vapor trail shows that another atomhas thrown off a fragment from its nucleus. each atom does this only oncebefore becoming a different isotope. this activity appears to go on endlessly. that's because there's billionsof atoms in that tiny sample. you can't turn decay on and off. if we can turn radioactive decay on and offwe 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 influencethe state of the nucleus like that. hit it with a hammer. boil it in oil. vaporize it. the nucleus of an atomis a kind of sanctuary. immune to the shocksand upheavals of its environment. the atoms of each unstable elementdecay at a constant rate. these mouse traps representatoms that are radioactive.

every once in a while, a mousetrap'sspring breaks down and snaps shut. a tiny bit of mass is convertedinto energy, as an atom changes spontaneouslyinto a lighter isotope. thorium has only one isotope, thorium-232. it has a 14 billion year half-life. ok, so when the universe istwice as old as it is now, thorium will have onlydecayed one half-life. so based on what i justtold you about radioactivity, what does that tell you abouthow 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 abouthow old the earth is. that's how old the earth is,that's how old the universe is. uranium-235 on the other hand, muchshorter half-life, 700 million years. this is a handful of theseuranium-oxide fuel pellets.

you see in the picture,the guy's got gloves on. and so you think- he's got gloves on to protecthim from the uranium oxide? but now that i've taught you aboutthe true nature of radioactivity, you might go- i dunno kirk i'm not so surethat 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 superclean, and you don't want to get any of your oils, or grease, or sweat on nuclear fuelthat's going to go inside a fuel rods, so, that's what the gloves are for.

knowing that some atoms could spontaneouslychange, in 1939 scientists tried firing a neutron into the nucleus ofa uranium atom, the heaviest and least stable atom found in nature. instead of a minor change,from one isotope into another, the uranium atomsplit into two parts. when an atom is so unstable that it canbe split into two by hitting it with a neutron, we call that "fissile". when the fissile uranium atoms splitapart, those two parts combined were lighter than theoriginal uranium atom.

the missing mass wasconverted into energy. also released were two neutrons. one free neutronhas become two free neutrons. now we have two neutrons. this implied a nuclearchain reaction in uranium. somebody wondered one time- ok, billion yearsago that means there's a lot more uranium-235 and natural nuclear reactorsmight have been possible. when you generate electricityfrom nuclear power you make 200 new elements that neverexisted before we fissioned uranium.

we found in africa, at a place called oklo,in the gabon, 2 billion years ago, there were scores of natural nuclear reactors there. that were nothing more than uranium ore inthe rock and the water would come in and it would lead to a nuclear reaction. and these reactors ran forhundreds of millions of years. so we did not inventnuclear fission, alright? it was done long, long, long beforewe were here, and very successfully. back when the earth was formed there was alot more uranium-235 then there is now. uranium-235 is like silver and platinum.

can you imagine burningplatinum for energy? and that's what we're doing with our nuclearenergy sources today, we're burning this extremely rare stuff, and were not burning the uranium-238and the thorium. your uranium in saskatchewan is so rich youdon't even have to enrich it. it's extremely powerful. caldicott is wrong. there is no natural source of isotopicallyenriched 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 withnuclear power there would only be a 9 year supply of uranium left in the whole world. in reality, there is no more aconstrained uranium supply, than there is a constrainedseawater supply. uranium is water soluble, and it passes fromthe earth's mantle, to the crust, to the ocean. every year, the ocean contains moreuranium than the previous year. my straw reaches across the room. we're pretty inventive when it comes to harvestingnatural 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 differencethat distinction makes. about 35 years worth ofoil left in the whole world. we're going to run out of oil. as a natural resource, the appealof thorium over uranium, is that thorium has zeroenvironmental cost to acquire. we can power our civilization on thoriumwithout opening a single thorium mine.

it is already a plentiful byproductof existing mining operations. we need thorium and he needssomebody to get rid of thorium. it's found in tailings piiles. it's found in ash piles. only one of the materials in nature is naturallyfissile, and that's uranium-235, which is a very small amount ofnatural uranium, about 0.7%. this was the form of uranium that could beutilized directly in a nuclear reactor. most of the uranium was uranium-238. this had to be transformed into another nuclearfuel 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. 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 outwhen you smacked it through fission? two is a very significant number in breederreactors. you need two neutrons. you've got to have oneto keep your process going,

and you have to have another one toconvert 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 upuranium-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'tlose any neutrons.

they look at this and they said, man! we just can't burn uranium-238 in a thermalreactor. it just can't be done! well, these guys are undeterred, they saidwell here's what we'll do we'll just built a fast reactor. because, look how good it gets in the fastregion. wow! it gets above 2, it gets up to 3! wow, this is really good!

well there's a powerful disincentiveto doing it this way and it has to do with what are called cross-sections. these are a way of describing how likelyit is that a nuclear reaction will proceed. look how much bigger the cross sectionsare in thermal than they are in fast. how many of these little dots are we goingto need to add up to this size? we're going to a lot! so this is why it was a big dealto 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 thoriumis hundreds of times more abundant than the very smallsliver of fissile uranium. the big deal about thorium is- that we canconsume it in a thermal-spectrum. that's the big with thorium.

is it can be consumed ina thermal-spectrum reactor. when you're talking about athermal-spectrum reactor- of any kind- you have to have fueland you have to have moderator. and they're both essentialto the operation the reactor. the moderator is slowingdown the neutrons. and when neutrons have been slowed down, wecall them thermal neutrons or a thermal-spectrum. in a water-cooled reactor we use water,specifically the hydrogen in the water, to slow down theneutrons 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 graphiteas the moderator instead of water. neutrons going in the graphite, hit the carbonatoms, they lose energy, they slow down. now why slow it down? that's the difference when you're going tointo 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 bittydot. a thermal-spectrum molten salt reactor hasto have the graphite moderator of the core in order to sustain criticality.

if the vessel ruptures, recriticality is fundamentallyimpossible. the drain tank does not have any graphitein it. if something happens where that fuel drainsaway from that graphite, criticality is no longer possible, the reactor is subcritical-fission stops. and there's no way to restart it without reloadingthe fuel back into the core. this is such a remarkable feature. and it really is unique to havingthis liquid fuel form, and to having something tooperate at standard pressure. you can't do this in solid fuel- you do thisin solid fuel it's called a meltdown.

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 equivalentof 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-classamerican lifestyle for a full year. that's just 4 grams. but this can only happen if the reactor isefficiently 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'shigh temperature operation. the performance of thecarbon dioxide gas turbine is such that it leads to very, verycompact turbomachinery. the turbo machinery for this entirereactor would easily fit on this stage. probably on half this stage. and if anybody's been to a big reactor beforeand seen big steam cycle turbomachinery you can appreciate what areduction in scale that is. high efficiency power conversion enabled bythe high operating temperature of molten salt.

complete burnup of nuclear fuel enabled bya combination of homogeneous liquid fuel, online chemistry, and thermal breeding. such as alvin weinberg and theteam at ornl intended to build until the molten salt breederprogram was suddenly terminated. shaw says, stop that msrereactor 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, the disadvantages?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- does thorium have a placein our nuclear future? 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 thoriumon earth than there is uranium.

it's, i think, one of thesesort of technological cults. an atom of thorium and an atom of uraniumboth contain the same amazing millionfold improvement in energy density over coal. it isn't that an atom of thorium containsany more energy than an atom of uranium. or that natural thorium is muchmore common than natural uranium. but we don't consume naturaluranium in today's reactors. 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.

just like today's reactors, any one pieceof fuel will eventually become too used up to sustain fission before its energypotential 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 theelimination of fuel reprocessing, as a distinct step, are essential if you want to harvestthe smallest amount of natural resources and produce the smallest amount of nuclear waste. because the economics of nuclear power don'tfavor reprocessing fuel, it will always be cheaper to simply dig up more uranium, ratherthan using every atom you've already mined.

the most environmentally friendlyway to 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 removeused-fuel and keep adding fresh-fuel. it is how our thorium fuel can be completelyconverted into energy and fission products. people recycle cans they recycle papers. why not candles? i say we put a bin out, let people bring backtheir old drippings at their convenience. it's like those bags that sayi 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, another candle. yeah and then eventually we just have onethat says, trust me, i've been another candles. by weight, a paraffin candle stick and gasolinecontain about the same amount of energy. why don't cars run on paraffin wax? because the inside of your carmight need to look 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 reactorsare physicists and engineers. and this is a whole lot of chemistry thatthey're maybe not so comfortable with. so it's the chemistry of it that makes itso special, but it's also the bit that existing nukes kinda go- you know, oooh, we were goinginto realms i don't, perhaps, feel so comfortable. in the nuclear space thereare other innovators.

you know, we don't know their work as wellas we know this one, but the modular people- that's a different approach. there's a liquid type reactor which seemslittle hard but maybe they say all about us, uh.and so there are different ones. although bill gates traveling wavereactor is still advertised to the public as a mechanical device shufflingnatural uranium fuel rods around. terrapower sought and received a researchgrant from the department of energy in 2015. it is for the study of a uranium fueledfast-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. alvin weinberg new the kidney would be required. his team knew it before they even startedconstructing the molten-salt reactor experiment. so it's a bit disappointing to see weinberg'schemical kidney dismissed, as- "a drawback that could be potentially eliminated".

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'teven know this was an option. then in 2002, ornl's molten saltdocumentation is scanned into pdf and accessible to somenasa 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 scanned research onto his website. 2008. molten salt reactor lecturesbegin at the googleplex, and are hosted ongoogle's youtube channel. 2009. the very first thorium conference is held. wired magazine runs a feature story on thorium.

2010. american scientist runs a feature on thorium. international thorium conferences begin. server logs show chinese students downloadingmolten salt reactor pdfs from kirk's website. 2011. china announces their intention to builda thorium molten-salt reactor. in the u.s., flibe energy is founded. transatomic power is founded. 2012.

baroness bryony worthington toursornl's historic 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 are released by molten salt startups. india reveals their new facility for moltensalt preparation and purification. china announces that now 700 engineers areworking on their molten salt reactor program. bill gates' terrapower receives agrant to investigate molten salt. 2016. just as this video is about to be releasedmyriam tonelotto releases a feature length

documentary about molten salt reactors called:"thorium - far side of nuclear power". dr. james hansen tells rolling stone magazinethat we should develop molten-salt reactors powered by thorium. and oak ridge discovers actual film footageof the molten salt reactor itself. produced in 1969, it was forgottenin storage for over 45 years. it offers up our first and only glimpse ofan 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 experiment wasone of the most important, and i must say, brilliant achievements of theoak ridge national laboratory. and i hope that after i'm gone, people willlook at the dusty books that were written on molten salts and will say, "hey! these guys had a pretty good idea,let's go back to it." back in the 60s, alvin weinberg saw the molten-saltreactor as a means of addressing energy pollution, and the need for clean water. desalination would turn themiddle east into farmland. power centers would co-locate energy intensivemanufacturing and small modular reactors.

surplus power would be soldto nearby communities. he knew- energy was the ultimate raw material...the more energy you have, the easier it is to recycle anduse virgin materials more efficiently. given enough power, we can pull carbonright out of the atmosphere or ocean. one day, on our path towardssuch a future, they'll be talking about putting a 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 energythat we 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 whatmolten-salt reactors are, and why they are.

Tweet

Subscribe to receive free email updates: