I work for a construction company that primarily does work on coal power plants. I hope my generation realizes the potential and benefits from nuclear reactors and can utilize the infrastructure we already have in place. Someday I hope I can work on one of these reactors. Thank you for all of your videos.
You said it: "infrastructure". It's not only turbines+generators, it is also the electrical lines and its general integration into the power grid, and roads, and I'm sure more.
@@johanponken yep, infrastructure is the name of the game, and its what makes nuclear extremely good. It has the smallest ground footprint per TW of energy produced. Current reactors can opperate for months on end, only suffering a comparatively small downtime, Molten salt throrium reactors can essentially operate without interruption as they can breed their fuel continuously. They are the perfect baseload energy production for countries that cannot enjoy uninterupted sunlight most of the year. We also lose a lot of energy over long distances so we kind of need power generation at various points on a territory and can't just plop down a gigantic square of solar pannels and use that to supply an entire contient. Most of the world live in temperate climates, where MOST of the year is spent under cloud cover with minimal wind and already have dams everywhere a dam is fit to be built. Essentially while renewables work, they need to be built WIDELY over cappacity to actually work as baseloads, and even then during fall/winter, there can be months of almost no uninterupted sunlight and weeks on end of calm winds where even an over-dimentionned network can't help. Nuclear is the perfect baseload. You can place it almost everywhere, it takes little space to generate a lot of energy, is consistent and works in all conditions. You want to add renewables to the grid so the nuclear plant does not have to run at full power all the time, but its actually much easier to have a grid that can work entirely off nuclear than it is to get one that can work entirely on renewables, at least in the areas of the planet where you don't have 24/7 solar or wind, which is most of the planet. Most fossil plants can already be replaced by nuclear reactors, it does not take a lot to replace them by either small modular reactors or molten salt reactors, pretty much every scientist and engineer knows this to be the way to go, just that the public is lagging decades behind in their understnading of nuclear.
I had one prof like him. Didn't use technology as well, but extensive subject matter expertise and incredibly good at presenting it. Notes from the whiteboard were how you survived the class, but it was engaging, challenging, and is still useful in my professional life today.
@@jamuojisan Life will be unfair to those who don't understand Chinese. In a decade or so, after they have subdued Taiwan, HK, and a good portion of the rest of the world.
I'm in Wyoming, and I think this is great. Although turning cowboys into nuclear engineers might not be as simple as some seem to think. :-) I've sent this to several state legislators who seem hazy about exactly what an "atom" is.
And THAT folks is how you convey a complex message to a general audience. The topic is still highly technical but this excellent presentation gives us the best chance of understanding the subject.
This is 1950 shit. It will disrupt the entire global economy and throw the world into perpetual war for a century. It is interesting. The potential is astounding... but the humans are basically useless and dangerous. We are lucky they let us burn oil.
@@darknase looks like they fixed the 1959 14th experiment run problems. Another 26k hours and no incident. 1. Hopefully none of the technology has been forgotten. 2. I would build these early plants in low population areas, or with good shielding. I always thought that the first experimental thorium reactors should be used for desalination rather than electric.
This is better, and the tech is far more advanced,China after years of work has a 2MW test reactor,while TerraPower is ready with the 345MW with 500MW for 51/2hour storage Natrium system ready to be built in Klemperer Wyoming. I never imagined our NRC would ever license a fast reactor, but Terra Power will try.
@@dennisgarber Typically, coal power plants (which as you know, the idea of this is to build on their area and reuse the existing generation/distribution infrastructure), are away from population centers. Your concern about being away from population centers is already satisfied. Personally, I'd welcome one in my backyard, but I just wanted to answer your question :)
Water with sodium means violent reaction i.e. explosion. Even a leak into air leads to fire. Fire is not a good thing at all to nuclear plant though a bit better than explosion. Do not use sodium as coolant. Use lead. Simple lead with no Bismuth. You do not want the building up of Polodium.
This guy needs to run the Dept. of Energy. We need reactors to pump water over the continental divide for the western United States. There isnt enough naturally occurring fresh water for the west. The solution is NOT to stop using water and hope for the best. Water is valuable, its worth moving vast distances. We. Want. Cheap electricity and water!
In giant _pipelines_ ? AND up and down whole mountain ranges, or would you drill ginormeous tunnels through them? Not sure any of that would be very safe.
Nah, just desalinate the ocean water. Check out what the AEC was coming up with in the 60s and 70s: digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc784269/m2/1/high_res_d/metadc784269.pdf Anywhere from 100 million to 5 billion gallons a day of freshwater with a sub 10ppm level
China had done that experiment with the world's most expensive multi-decade infrastructure project and it failed spectacularly. And that project is based on infrastructure that already existed for centuries. Now they are looking to do what actually makes sense: sea water desalination. The United States could not do an infrastructure project on that scale period. Do not try to fight nature, use what it gives you.
These multi nerd knowledge level comments that I thrive on haha. A comment on a nuclear power video, referencing Star Trek and followed up by princess bride quotes 😂
I always thought that nuclear + massive molten salt energy storage is a no-brainer. And they scale up amazingly well. You need 80.000 cubic meters of solar salt (sodium nitrate +potassium nitrate +calcium nitrate) at the Tmax of a regular sodium reactor, 550C, to provide 1GW of electric power for 8hours. So you "charge up the battery" in your 8h of minimum demand, keep it for 8h of medium demand and release the energy during the 8h of maximum demand. Basically, you can backup an entire GW of electricity production capacity with 80.000 cubic meters of salt. That seems like a lot but it's a tank of 60m diameter by 30m tall, (ok you really need 2, one for the hot salt and one for the cold salt, or just one with a divider). When you run the numbers on nuclear and molten salt storage you realize how photovoltaics + windmills + batteries is basically a decentraliased Goldberg machine that may work, but it doesn't make as much sense
You do realize that nuclear power plants are way more complex than a solar / wind installation + battery banks, right? They're also orders of magnitude more expensive and require orders of magnitude more oversight, the comparison is ridiculous. Calling solar / wind "Goldberg machines" that "don't make much sense" is quite silly, specially when the alternative you're proposing is a molten salt nuclear plant 😅 Guess what? I can't have a molten salt nuclear reactor at home (and even if I were allowed to have one, I couldn't possibly afford to run it), but I sure can have solar panels, a battery bank and even small scale hydro (if there's a stream running nearby). Hell, I could eventually go off the grid, by gradually scaling up my renewable installations at home. Nuclear power makes sense to power industry, but homes can power themselves with renewables + batteries + smart architecture. Nuclear zealotry is as silly and misguided as anti-nuclear zealotry, don't be one of those people.
He is the best Teacher I ever heard. Let’s build these reactors, and do it next to the old coal plants. Thus not wasting infrastructure, that is allready build and paid for. It just makes SO much sense. Give that man a Cigar, and a Nobel price. 🇩🇰🙋🏻♂️🪐👩🏻🚀🇺🇸
Thank you for this video! It's really encouraging to see that we can have walk-away safe, non-CO2-producing electricity generation that can be used in places (and times) where wind and solar don't fit
Doing an interview with TerraPower tomorrow. This video was very helpful in understanding their upcoming project. Thank you so much for posting! I will definitely continue to watch your videos. I hope to someday get a masters in Nuclear Engineering and you are very inspiring
Liquid sodium ignites on contact with air and can do so explosively in certain conditions. This is why the sodium cooling loops were often considered the most dangerous part of breeder reactors.
Waste and safety are most people's chief concerns with nuclear and this solves both almost completely - not to mention all the other advantages. This seems like the power plant we've been waiting for.
I totally love these videos, I wish all of this was available at every school. I'm so hungry to see the evolution of anything nuclear, especially in the waste sector, I feel like there's a lot of hope there for it's use, we just haven't discovered everything yet.
Why is there no more research in that field just baffles me. As far as I remember, this technology started to be developped in the 60ies and since that time almost nothing happened ! This is clearly a better technology than the current technology. It's almost completely safe, less waste (close to none compared to current technology) and much more accessible in term of ressources
Excellent content. The type our politicians should watch to nudge them over the edge to transition to Nuclear. The public acceptance of nuclear hasn't been as high as it is now for a while and seeing this is still long-term (at least longer than a politicians term) investments we should act now. Thank you @illinois Energyprof
Thanks David!! Really appreciated! Now it's just a matter of educating the masses, and I thank you for doing that part!! BTW For the first time in 30 years, I was in your city last weekend. Stopped by Papa Dell's for lunch, to see if it was as good as I remembered from the 70's!
Very well done. A few notes: (1) The nitrate salt storage is off-the-shelf from the concentrated solar world. (2) The Natrium nuclear island (NRC-licensed) is extremely small. Most of the plant is outside of the NRC world and can be built to commercial standards. This reduces cost, along with #1. (3) Fossil fuel pollution impacts are not limited to CO2. There are a lot of other emissions, including fugitive methane, acid rain, etc. (4) On the economics, it's not fair to compare Natrium to coal because in the USA at least, new coal plants are a dead letter. It's also not fair to compare current methane prices because methane is set to get a lot more expensive very soon. (5) Industry is saying "we need a fuel." And Natrium seems to be the leading option, along with the GEH BWRX-300. (6) I'd love to see a segment on the BWRX-300 reactor. It's leapfrogging over NuScale Energy.
There's no one who can so neatly explain Nuclear + Economics better than Illinois EnergyProf. Watching them makes me yearn to know more and more in this domain!
It's really interesting that the U-238 starts acting like a control rod because of the Doppler broadening at higher temperatures. It gobbles up all of the neutrons and fission stops and doesn't restart as the reactor cools because there are, if I understand it correctly, neutrons available to restart the chain reaction.
Another Great Video. Thank you Professor Ruzic for all your efforts. You are a wonderfully brilliant person and educator. I have thoroughly enjoyed all of your videos.
What no one talks about is what happens when you have a fuel element failure in sodium coolant reactor. Cesium boils off at 670 degrees Celsius so if your sodium is hotter than that you get cesium vapor. You probably wouldn't notice it for a long time until it builds up somewhere, and makes an unsafe workplace heat exchanger. You wouldn't notice it till a good distance away from any system leak because it would have to cool down to become solid and settle out. So leaks would make a bigger mess than you would think.
These videos are incredibly interesting! I'll need to find some time to start studying physics. Also, I love it that you always include a section about the economics of each energy source, it's very useful for comparisons.
hello professor, could you talk about the Russian BN800/1200 types of fast neutron reactors and how are those different thanks for the great explanation in this video
I grew up in Wyoming, glad to see that the state is forward thinking. Thanks - Energy Prof for presenting data in such a clear understandable fashion! Also, if memory serves me right, the soviet's used liquid sodium reactors in their titanium hulled Alpha class submarines.
Liquid metal cooled reactors yes, but liquid sodium no. The reactors used on the super-fast soviet alfa-class attack subs were cooled by eutectic lead-bismuth alloy. The primary reason for this was to make them as compact as possible: Sodium is an excellent coolant, but is not so great as radiation shielding, particularly for neutron and gamma radiation since those are the most penetrating. Lead and bismuth are not quite as good as coolants - in principle either metal alone could work, but the reason why the alloy of both is better is because it has a wider liquid range. Anyway, these reactors could be made much smaller than most because the coolant could also function as the radiation shielding - both lead and bismuth are heavy, dense metals so are highly effective as radiation shielding. This in turn allowed the submarine itself to be smaller than it would otherwise have been if it had used a more conventional pressurised water reactor of equivalent power output. The insanely high power to weight ratio of the alfa-class is what gave it such a high top speed - in fact it was so fast that it could literally outrun every torpedo in use at the time the first alfa-class subs went into service. The UK and USA actually developed faster torpedoes in direct response to the alfa-class.
I wonder why Russian sodium fast reactors are not mentioned. The BN-600 reactor is a sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor, built at the Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Station, in Zarechny, Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia. Designed to generate electrical power of 600 MW in total, the plant dispatches 560 MW to the Middle Urals power grid. It has been in operation since 1980 and represents an evolution on the preceding BN-350 reactor. In 2014, its larger sister reactor, the BN-800 reactor began operation.
I feel like so many people base their fear of nuclear power on Chernobyl and Fukushima, believing that the "alternatives" like coal are "safe", completely ignoring the damage that coal powerplants already do.
I like this guy a lot! I’ve watched a great number of his videos on nuclear power. Nuclear has always been the answer. The molten salt thermal storage is really interesting, allowing for the base load to be more variable and supplement non-dispatch-able power is compelling.
The molten salt is also interesting in how it 'decouples' the two aspects of electricity production. For example, a turbine/generator trip can occur and yet the response on the reactor side can be more measured and has much more time to react. This can have some interesting effects on safety analysis. Still early stages and most of the design data seems to be proprietary at this stage, but something to keep watching.
This does seem a bit like a sales pitch, I'd be interested to know: The claim is for a price significantly lower than current LWRs, but sodium cooled reactors have historically been more expensive than LWRs. How has this been achieved, and how reliable are the cost estimates? SFRs have often been plagued with reliability problems - Superphenix suffered very badly from this. How have you addressed this? I hope it succeeds, but the nuclear industry does have a history of overpromising and underdelivering.
Your question is legitimate but based on an illusion. Superphenix admitedly had technical problems (24 months stop after 53 months producing), it was a prototype. This is important, prototypes are heavy investments and have a steep learning curve for the exploitation. That is why it was a european project. But it was also stopped for administrative reasons for a really fucking long time (54 months !!!). Then it suffered political issues and non sense. Imagine, closing a plant you put billions in and that is in working just fine ?! It was time to experiment and gain knowledge for the future... In 1996, it had 95% availability... All in all, the choice of stopping was really hard to comprehend when 99% or more of the population and politician barely get the differences between EPR, BWR, MSR... Now we have a climate crises on our hands, what should we do ?
@@IncHolowind go back to been cave dwellers. We can come back out in about 10,000 years. I kid of course. I'm just wondering if the environmentalist will kill this project as well.
In this case, economy of scale. These are small reactors designed to be manufactured en masse. Just like Nuscale's SMR (which is a PWR). The historical problem with Nuclear power is that each reactor was not only under the most regulatory control of any kind of power, every part had to be built custom made (at least here in the US, France standardized their plants back in the 60s). I suspect that we will see the cost efficiency overtime, as Orgoss put it, Prototypes are expensive, no matter what they are.
@@nathancochran4694 True costs will come down. But will they come down far enough. Solar, wind, and gas in the US have become astonishingly cheap and keep getting cheaper. Sure if you ditch the gas at high enough levels of penetration you have start paying for super expensive storage(or epicly large grid improvements and overbuild). But we might be able to get to 80 or 90% penetration before those costs start getting enormous. And is 20% natural gas really the bottle neck for climate change at that point. Natural gas is also essentially harmless from a safety perspective unlike coal. The obvious choice to handle that last 20% is nuclear. But it might be a better use of money to just use gas and use that money on mitigation or on encouraging less new coal in India. This issue is rarely addressed by the pro nuclear crowd.
French couldn't build the Panama canal,Americans came in studied the medical issues of malaria ,eliminated mosquitos and built the canal.Terra Power is Bill Gates using the info from EBR2.which Bill Clinton moronically cancelled, there are many partners, and computers are more powerful, but you do not want leaks, its explosive when contacting water and our air has water in it.
"Construction will finish in late 2020s" - Note however that the reactor can not be turned on until it has HAELU fuel. It used to be that Russia was (and still is) the largest source for this and it is not created in the US in any significant volume. Due to the sanctions on Russia and its uranium, it is being excluded as a source. This means the US or other NATO/friendly sources will have to be created/secured. It may cause delays in the deployment date of the Natrium reactor. Ideally, we would downblend some more HEU (90%+ enriched) to make HAELU from older US nuclear weapons, but I believe that stopped as well.
Smart move by Terra Power due to the speed of getting it commercial, using the incumbents as partners, giving the solid fuel producers a future, using stranded coal generation capacity and making it load following. This is perfect to make an impact now! However, also need to support companies like ELYSIUM and Moltex.
this is great, but I'd love to see more work on types of fission other than uranium. The nuclear waste disposal problem is non trivial, and has yet to be solved satisfactorily. Less trans uramics is commendable. So is the safety side of this type of reactor.
If we can build this kind of reactors with load following, why do we need renewables anyway? Those just complicate the grid and they need at least one order of magnitude more raw material for the same power output.
Renewables require less coordination, less delays, less inspection, and they can be cheaper. The cost you pay factors in the raw materials. Also less safety risks. While this reactor seems like it is pretty safe there still are risks like the spent fuel pool.
Well for one you can't let people stick sodium-cooled reactors in their garage like how they can put solar panels on their roof. Switching houses to be a little grid-independent just in case of power outages would be prudent: solar and battery backup that at least covers the refrigerator and some lights wouldn't be too hard.
@George Mann The power companies think Wind and Solar is practical as it is now cheaper in many areas, even without artificial subsidies. "virtually zero risk" kind of ignores the fact that high level waste is extremely hazardous and able to self-melt. Yes, if someone is there to check on the pool periodically and fix leaks and add water as needed, it's safe. But it is not "zero risk". Plenty of ways to screw this up. If the most irresponsible, cost cutting company installs solar or wind the worst they can do is cause an electrical fire, not contaminate land.
How different the history of Nuclear power would have been, if engineers had latched onto this method instead of leaving a legacy of so many trans Uranics.
Solid fuel reactor cores are the problem except possibly molten salt cooled pebble fuel reactors. The promising field of research is molten liquid fuel reactors. A caveat with new generation nukes is that they run exclusively on existing nuclear waste or thorium, and all uranium mining and refinement facilities are shut down permanently.
Glad to see the point made that nuclear also needs power storage. Solve power storage and you don't need nuclear. CSP also can use molten salt storage and it is on line now. Solar PV/battery is getting better and cheaper having not yet reached its theoretical cost/performance limits. If this fast neutron tech could solve the existing waste problem somehow it would be worth subsidizing but there is no way it can imaginably be cost competitive even with the clever idea of recycling coal plants. The licensing alone is a nightmarish prospect for that.
In future videos, could you turn the volume up on the Professor's mic? Around -3db to -6db peaks is what you're looking for. You can turn the volume up for the entire video in post as well.
We, the British, starting in the 50s, built three fast reactors. but despite two of them supplying electricity to the grid, were all closed by the mid-80s. Sodium was the cooling medium.
Grrrr, Britain in the laye 50s, 60s, 70s...technologically hamstrung by politics, policies, stagnant thinking and old ideas by stagnant and old leaders. Virtual absolute world domination in 1st and 2nd generation jet aircraft and aerospace engineering, yet the government basically canceled the entire industry. Launched a perfectly suitable rocket to act as a launch platform for intermediate satellite payloads, killed off by the government - the only nation that discontinued its space program after successfully reaching space. I'm not a car guy, but it appears something similar has happened to the British automotive industry. And now you bring up nuclear examples...it seems like the lack of STEM support by Parliament must be/have been extremely frustrating for a wide range of engineers.
I never miss any of your videos. They are all very good!!! That said, please do a video on Allen Weinberg. Also explain anything he could have been wrong about. In my view he predicted climate change in the early '50's and offered the safest path to powering the grid and fighting climate change. I am very interested on your thoughts about this. Many thanks for your good work
To stop cooling a fast reactor isn't a problem or danger. The problem is if you poison the coolant with some light moderator that turns it back into a slow reactor. Then it starts creating transuranics again and blows up. That's probably the danger of fast reactors.
As far as I know, the experiment at EBR-II where they tested the automatic emergency shutdown after turning off the cooling systems was in 1986, not 1968, as shown in the documentary move “Pandora’s Promise” which can be found on RUclips.
Another great video. Thanks for doing these. Now if we could just get the energy industry to move to this approach. States control the power output from solar and wind to control costs (keep them high); I personally witness this with the California state utilities commision shutting down wind generation at times to keep prices high during the day. This approach would remove that control and provide reasonably priced power in a safe manner.
When you do cost comparisons between wind, solar and base sources such as coal or natural gas the costs need to be based on providing a constant amount of power over at least a 24 hour period. That would lead to solar and wind being over built by a factor of 3 to 4 with the included cost of batteries to produce the power for 2/3’s of the day when solar or wind are not available.
Garden variety pressurized water reactors also "stop working" as fuel heats up. Negative fuel temperature coefficient. And btw, PWRs also have negative moderator temperature coefficient. As moderator heats up (less dense, effectively squeezes water out of the core), fewer fissions. Drives core subcritical, Keff less than 1.
Hopefully it won't have the same problems as Fermi 1. I wouldn't _think_ it would, seeing as it's been about 55 years since that reactor's partial melt-down, and we're a bit better with equipping reactors with instrumentation. :)
Hey Energy Prof...I really love your videos...please keep doing what you do. One question about this new variant of the liquid metal reactor...since it can fission the transuranics, does that also mean that we can somehow use these reactors to process our current store of spent fuel and waste...and make our waste problem easier to manage? ✌
Would a hybrid adaptation make sense? Add a solar thermal plant to the sodium loop to generate extra daytime power. Those go up to 510MW. Maybe there's a way to get 1GW peak out of such a design?
If you are going to store thermal energy you can also heat up giant zinc ore reverse refinery type facilities that serve as zinc batteries storing electricity directly.
I work for a construction company that primarily does work on coal power plants. I hope my generation realizes the potential and benefits from nuclear reactors and can utilize the infrastructure we already have in place. Someday I hope I can work on one of these reactors. Thank you for all of your videos.
You said it: "infrastructure". It's not only turbines+generators, it is also the electrical lines and its general integration into the power grid, and roads, and I'm sure more.
@@johanponken yep, infrastructure is the name of the game, and its what makes nuclear extremely good. It has the smallest ground footprint per TW of energy produced. Current reactors can opperate for months on end, only suffering a comparatively small downtime, Molten salt throrium reactors can essentially operate without interruption as they can breed their fuel continuously. They are the perfect baseload energy production for countries that cannot enjoy uninterupted sunlight most of the year. We also lose a lot of energy over long distances so we kind of need power generation at various points on a territory and can't just plop down a gigantic square of solar pannels and use that to supply an entire contient.
Most of the world live in temperate climates, where MOST of the year is spent under cloud cover with minimal wind and already have dams everywhere a dam is fit to be built. Essentially while renewables work, they need to be built WIDELY over cappacity to actually work as baseloads, and even then during fall/winter, there can be months of almost no uninterupted sunlight and weeks on end of calm winds where even an over-dimentionned network can't help.
Nuclear is the perfect baseload. You can place it almost everywhere, it takes little space to generate a lot of energy, is consistent and works in all conditions. You want to add renewables to the grid so the nuclear plant does not have to run at full power all the time, but its actually much easier to have a grid that can work entirely off nuclear than it is to get one that can work entirely on renewables, at least in the areas of the planet where you don't have 24/7 solar or wind, which is most of the planet.
Most fossil plants can already be replaced by nuclear reactors, it does not take a lot to replace them by either small modular reactors or molten salt reactors, pretty much every scientist and engineer knows this to be the way to go, just that the public is lagging decades behind in their understnading of nuclear.
Yeah it ain't 1986 anymore. Nuke is the way to go until fusion is made stable. I hear it's only 20 years out now.
It’s a no brainer
@@mobiuscoreindustries if the safire project project is true it would be even easy too heh
This angers me.
I never had a teacher like him. Life is unfair.
Thanks for being this awesome with this material.
Thank you!
Well said, I feel the same way😊
Well now you do... Just because we are not in a school doesn't mean the information isn't relevant.
I had one prof like him. Didn't use technology as well, but extensive subject matter expertise and incredibly good at presenting it.
Notes from the whiteboard were how you survived the class, but it was engaging, challenging, and is still useful in my professional life today.
@@jamuojisan
Life will be unfair to those who don't understand Chinese. In a decade or so, after they have subdued Taiwan, HK, and a good portion of the rest of the world.
I'm a simple man. I see Illinois EnergyProf. I click like.
501st like.
I'm in Wyoming, and I think this is great.
Although turning cowboys into nuclear engineers might not be as simple as some seem to think. :-)
I've sent this to several state legislators who seem hazy about exactly what an "atom" is.
And THAT folks is how you convey a complex message to a general audience. The topic is still highly technical but this excellent presentation gives us the best chance of understanding the subject.
Aside from the fact that the subject material is fascinating, I just like listening to this guy talk. He has such a pleasant voice.
Love to see these videos, complicated subjects given a friendly face,
This is 1950 shit. It will disrupt the entire global economy and throw the world into perpetual war for a century.
It is interesting. The potential is astounding... but the humans are basically useless and dangerous.
We are lucky they let us burn oil.
i‘m glued to the screen when a new video is published..
thank you so much from switzerland..
Be interesting to see a comparison between this and LFTR tech, energy yield, final waste levels etc
Second that. Or 9th.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment
@@darknase looks like they fixed the 1959 14th experiment run problems. Another 26k hours and no incident.
1. Hopefully none of the technology has been forgotten.
2. I would build these early plants in low population areas, or with good shielding.
I always thought that the first experimental thorium reactors should be used for desalination rather than electric.
This is better, and the tech is far more advanced,China after years of work has a 2MW test reactor,while TerraPower is ready with the 345MW with 500MW for 51/2hour storage Natrium system ready to be built in Klemperer Wyoming. I never imagined our NRC would ever license a fast reactor, but Terra Power will try.
@@dennisgarber Typically, coal power plants (which as you know, the idea of this is to build on their area and reuse the existing generation/distribution infrastructure), are away from population centers. Your concern about being away from population centers is already satisfied. Personally, I'd welcome one in my backyard, but I just wanted to answer your question :)
As a chemistry grad liquid Sodium gives me the shivers. Any kind of leak near water and it's game over.
Water with sodium means violent reaction i.e. explosion. Even a leak into air leads to fire. Fire is not a good thing at all to nuclear plant though a bit better than explosion. Do not use sodium as coolant. Use lead. Simple lead with no Bismuth. You do not want the building up of Polodium.
This guy needs to run the Dept. of Energy.
We need reactors to pump water over the continental divide for the western United States. There isnt enough naturally occurring fresh water for the west. The solution is NOT to stop using water and hope for the best. Water is valuable, its worth moving vast distances.
We. Want. Cheap electricity and water!
the problem isn't the lack of water but rather the fact that it's not fresh. you can just use seawater and apply reverse osmosis.
@@Hamstray Yes, and that could be done and powered more locally. Small reactors. :)
In giant _pipelines_ ? AND up and down whole mountain ranges, or would you drill ginormeous tunnels through them? Not sure any of that would be very safe.
Nah, just desalinate the ocean water. Check out what the AEC was coming up with in the 60s and 70s: digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc784269/m2/1/high_res_d/metadc784269.pdf
Anywhere from 100 million to 5 billion gallons a day of freshwater with a sub 10ppm level
China had done that experiment with the world's most expensive multi-decade infrastructure project and it failed spectacularly. And that project is based on infrastructure that already existed for centuries. Now they are looking to do what actually makes sense: sea water desalination.
The United States could not do an infrastructure project on that scale period. Do not try to fight nature, use what it gives you.
Love your videos, much love from Norway!
Thank you for the amazing presentation, professor.
I also like how liquid sodium can be pumped using electromagnetic induction, solid state pumping integrated into the piping.
I love these videos and this guy's presentation skills. He also really sounds like The Grand Nagus so that's cool too.
Maybe he is The Grand Nagus.
Inconceivable!
These multi nerd knowledge level comments that I thrive on haha. A comment on a nuclear power video, referencing Star Trek and followed up by princess bride quotes 😂
I always thought that nuclear + massive molten salt energy storage is a no-brainer. And they scale up amazingly well. You need 80.000 cubic meters of solar salt (sodium nitrate +potassium nitrate +calcium nitrate) at the Tmax of a regular sodium reactor, 550C, to provide 1GW of electric power for 8hours. So you "charge up the battery" in your 8h of minimum demand, keep it for 8h of medium demand and release the energy during the 8h of maximum demand. Basically, you can backup an entire GW of electricity production capacity with 80.000 cubic meters of salt. That seems like a lot but it's a tank of 60m diameter by 30m tall, (ok you really need 2, one for the hot salt and one for the cold salt, or just one with a divider).
When you run the numbers on nuclear and molten salt storage you realize how photovoltaics + windmills + batteries is basically a decentraliased Goldberg machine that may work, but it doesn't make as much sense
You do realize that nuclear power plants are way more complex than a solar / wind installation + battery banks, right?
They're also orders of magnitude more expensive and require orders of magnitude more oversight, the comparison is ridiculous.
Calling solar / wind "Goldberg machines" that "don't make much sense" is quite silly, specially when the alternative you're proposing is a molten salt nuclear plant 😅
Guess what? I can't have a molten salt nuclear reactor at home (and even if I were allowed to have one, I couldn't possibly afford to run it), but I sure can have solar panels, a battery bank and even small scale hydro (if there's a stream running nearby).
Hell, I could eventually go off the grid, by gradually scaling up my renewable installations at home.
Nuclear power makes sense to power industry, but homes can power themselves with renewables + batteries + smart architecture.
Nuclear zealotry is as silly and misguided as anti-nuclear zealotry, don't be one of those people.
@@Goreuncle Not bad, and good advice at the end.
He is the best Teacher I ever heard. Let’s build these reactors, and do it next to the old coal plants. Thus not wasting infrastructure, that is allready build and paid for. It just makes SO much sense. Give that man a Cigar, and a Nobel price. 🇩🇰🙋🏻♂️🪐👩🏻🚀🇺🇸
Thank you for this video! It's really encouraging to see that we can have walk-away safe, non-CO2-producing electricity generation that can be used in places (and times) where wind and solar don't fit
Doing an interview with TerraPower tomorrow. This video was very helpful in understanding their upcoming project. Thank you so much for posting! I will definitely continue to watch your videos. I hope to someday get a masters in Nuclear Engineering and you are very inspiring
Well?? How did it go? Are you a TerraPower Ranger?
Liquid sodium ignites on contact with air and can do so explosively in certain conditions. This is why the sodium cooling loops were often considered the most dangerous part of breeder reactors.
Waste and safety are most people's chief concerns with nuclear and this solves both almost completely - not to mention all the other advantages. This seems like the power plant we've been waiting for.
I totally love these videos, I wish all of this was available at every school. I'm so hungry to see the evolution of anything nuclear, especially in the waste sector, I feel like there's a lot of hope there for it's use, we just haven't discovered everything yet.
Why is there no more research in that field just baffles me.
As far as I remember, this technology started to be developped in the 60ies and since that time almost nothing happened !
This is clearly a better technology than the current technology.
It's almost completely safe, less waste (close to none compared to current technology) and much more accessible in term of ressources
Excellent content. The type our politicians should watch to nudge them over the edge to transition to Nuclear. The public acceptance of nuclear hasn't been as high as it is now for a while and seeing this is still long-term (at least longer than a politicians term) investments we should act now.
Thank you @illinois Energyprof
Thanks David!! Really appreciated! Now it's just a matter of educating the masses, and I thank you for doing that part!!
BTW For the first time in 30 years, I was in your city last weekend. Stopped by Papa Dell's for lunch, to see if it was as good as I remembered from the 70's!
Glad you like it, and liked Papa Dell's!
Very well done. A few notes: (1) The nitrate salt storage is off-the-shelf from the concentrated solar world. (2) The Natrium nuclear island (NRC-licensed) is extremely small. Most of the plant is outside of the NRC world and can be built to commercial standards. This reduces cost, along with #1. (3) Fossil fuel pollution impacts are not limited to CO2. There are a lot of other emissions, including fugitive methane, acid rain, etc. (4) On the economics, it's not fair to compare Natrium to coal because in the USA at least, new coal plants are a dead letter. It's also not fair to compare current methane prices because methane is set to get a lot more expensive very soon. (5) Industry is saying "we need a fuel." And Natrium seems to be the leading option, along with the GEH BWRX-300. (6) I'd love to see a segment on the BWRX-300 reactor. It's leapfrogging over NuScale Energy.
There's no one who can so neatly explain Nuclear + Economics better than Illinois EnergyProf. Watching them makes me yearn to know more and more in this domain!
It's really interesting that the U-238 starts acting like a control rod because of the Doppler broadening at higher temperatures. It gobbles up all of the neutrons and fission stops and doesn't restart as the reactor cools because there are, if I understand it correctly, neutrons available to restart the chain reaction.
I have never seen such a good presentation made on this specific type of reactor. Thank you
Another Great Video. Thank you Professor Ruzic for all your efforts. You are a wonderfully brilliant person and educator. I have thoroughly enjoyed all of your videos.
The reason many transuranics have long half life is because they are more stable and thus less radioactive and therefore not a major threat
Exactly! This is the part everyone gets backward and the people who understand this do a terrible job of educating. The same can be said for waste.
Thank you!
What no one talks about is what happens when you have a fuel element failure in sodium coolant reactor. Cesium boils off at 670 degrees Celsius so if your sodium is hotter than that you get cesium vapor. You probably wouldn't notice it for a long time until it builds up somewhere, and makes an unsafe workplace heat exchanger. You wouldn't notice it till a good distance away from any system leak because it would have to cool down to become solid and settle out. So leaks would make a bigger mess than you would think.
Thank you, so much. More people need to be educated on this. New nuclear technology is way better than before.
These videos are incredibly interesting! I'll need to find some time to start studying physics. Also, I love it that you always include a section about the economics of each energy source, it's very useful for comparisons.
Wow! Excellent teacher for understanding nuclear technology.
Great talk wish you'd addressed the dangers of sodium fires.
He did, you keep the sodium away from water. In this design, the sodium never leaves the reactor vessel.
Thank you so much for your explanation about small reactors Prof. Ruzic, it was so clear.
hello professor, could you talk about the Russian BN800/1200 types of fast neutron reactors and how are those different
thanks for the great explanation in this video
What makes this video even more fascinating is when you realize he’s been mirror writing all the text and graphs so we see it normally
I grew up in Wyoming, glad to see that the state is forward thinking. Thanks - Energy Prof for presenting data in such a clear understandable fashion! Also, if memory serves me right, the soviet's used liquid sodium reactors in their titanium hulled Alpha class submarines.
Liquid metal cooled reactors yes, but liquid sodium no. The reactors used on the super-fast soviet alfa-class attack subs were cooled by eutectic lead-bismuth alloy. The primary reason for this was to make them as compact as possible: Sodium is an excellent coolant, but is not so great as radiation shielding, particularly for neutron and gamma radiation since those are the most penetrating. Lead and bismuth are not quite as good as coolants - in principle either metal alone could work, but the reason why the alloy of both is better is because it has a wider liquid range. Anyway, these reactors could be made much smaller than most because the coolant could also function as the radiation shielding - both lead and bismuth are heavy, dense metals so are highly effective as radiation shielding. This in turn allowed the submarine itself to be smaller than it would otherwise have been if it had used a more conventional pressurised water reactor of equivalent power output. The insanely high power to weight ratio of the alfa-class is what gave it such a high top speed - in fact it was so fast that it could literally outrun every torpedo in use at the time the first alfa-class subs went into service. The UK and USA actually developed faster torpedoes in direct response to the alfa-class.
I have a history degree but LOVE these videos. You’re a great instructor.
Than You for the lectures-all. Wish to see more...
Love your videos Professor. Hope here in Spain people start changing their mind about nuclear energy, by the moment it doensn´t seem good.
Great setup with the plexiglass for writing. Thanks for uploading this content, very interesting!
These videos are pure gold!
Very fascinating.
I wonder why Russian sodium fast reactors are not mentioned. The BN-600 reactor is a sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor, built at the Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Station, in Zarechny, Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia. Designed to generate electrical power of 600 MW in total, the plant dispatches 560 MW to the Middle Urals power grid. It has been in operation since 1980 and represents an evolution on the preceding BN-350 reactor. In 2014, its larger sister reactor, the BN-800 reactor began operation.
Long term storage of spent fuel is the key to this whole endeavor.
Love these videos. Please keep them coming.
This guy so badass, he can write in reverse.
^.^
That was really interesting, best of luck Thankyou
I feel like so many people base their fear of nuclear power on Chernobyl and Fukushima, believing that the "alternatives" like coal are "safe", completely ignoring the damage that coal powerplants already do.
This makes me wanna move to Wyoming.
I like this guy a lot! I’ve watched a great number of his videos on nuclear power.
Nuclear has always been the answer. The molten salt thermal storage is really interesting, allowing for the base load to be more variable and supplement non-dispatch-able power is compelling.
The molten salt is also interesting in how it 'decouples' the two aspects of electricity production. For example, a turbine/generator trip can occur and yet the response on the reactor side can be more measured and has much more time to react. This can have some interesting effects on safety analysis. Still early stages and most of the design data seems to be proprietary at this stage, but something to keep watching.
This does seem a bit like a sales pitch, I'd be interested to know:
The claim is for a price significantly lower than current LWRs, but sodium cooled reactors have historically been more expensive than LWRs. How has this been achieved, and how reliable are the cost estimates?
SFRs have often been plagued with reliability problems - Superphenix suffered very badly from this. How have you addressed this?
I hope it succeeds, but the nuclear industry does have a history of overpromising and underdelivering.
Your question is legitimate but based on an illusion. Superphenix admitedly had technical problems (24 months stop after 53 months producing), it was a prototype. This is important, prototypes are heavy investments and have a steep learning curve for the exploitation. That is why it was a european project. But it was also stopped for administrative reasons for a really fucking long time (54 months !!!). Then it suffered political issues and non sense. Imagine, closing a plant you put billions in and that is in working just fine ?! It was time to experiment and gain knowledge for the future... In 1996, it had 95% availability...
All in all, the choice of stopping was really hard to comprehend when 99% or more of the population and politician barely get the differences between EPR, BWR, MSR... Now we have a climate crises on our hands, what should we do ?
@@IncHolowind go back to been cave dwellers. We can come back out in about 10,000 years.
I kid of course. I'm just wondering if the environmentalist will kill this project as well.
In this case, economy of scale. These are small reactors designed to be manufactured en masse. Just like Nuscale's SMR (which is a PWR).
The historical problem with Nuclear power is that each reactor was not only under the most regulatory control of any kind of power, every part had to be built custom made (at least here in the US, France standardized their plants back in the 60s).
I suspect that we will see the cost efficiency overtime, as Orgoss put it, Prototypes are expensive, no matter what they are.
@@nathancochran4694 True costs will come down. But will they come down far enough. Solar, wind, and gas in the US have become astonishingly cheap and keep getting cheaper. Sure if you ditch the gas at high enough levels of penetration you have start paying for super expensive storage(or epicly large grid improvements and overbuild). But we might be able to get to 80 or 90% penetration before those costs start getting enormous. And is 20% natural gas really the bottle neck for climate change at that point. Natural gas is also essentially harmless from a safety perspective unlike coal. The obvious choice to handle that last 20% is nuclear. But it might be a better use of money to just use gas and use that money on mitigation or on encouraging less new coal in India. This issue is rarely addressed by the pro nuclear crowd.
French couldn't build the Panama canal,Americans came in studied the medical issues of malaria ,eliminated mosquitos and built the canal.Terra Power is Bill Gates using the info from EBR2.which Bill Clinton moronically cancelled, there are many partners, and computers are more powerful, but you do not want leaks, its explosive when contacting water and our air has water in it.
That's pretty clever.
Breeder reactors can keep re using the fuel until the waste is super safe
Yes, the "Integral Fast Reactor" was designed to do that. I think I have a video on it....
@@illinoisenergyprof6878 we need to bring it back in a smr version and ramp up production
Awesome stuff again! Thanks professor! More please....
"Construction will finish in late 2020s" - Note however that the reactor can not be turned on until it has HAELU fuel. It used to be that Russia was (and still is) the largest source for this and it is not created in the US in any significant volume. Due to the sanctions on Russia and its uranium, it is being excluded as a source. This means the US or other NATO/friendly sources will have to be created/secured. It may cause delays in the deployment date of the Natrium reactor. Ideally, we would downblend some more HEU (90%+ enriched) to make HAELU from older US nuclear weapons, but I believe that stopped as well.
Terrapower is already behind schedule and will not go operational until 2030 at the earliest.
David for president, your the best Prof.
Glad to hear back from ya man.
Smart move by Terra Power due to the speed of getting it commercial, using the incumbents as partners, giving the solid fuel producers a future, using stranded coal generation capacity and making it load following. This is perfect to make an impact now! However, also need to support companies like ELYSIUM and Moltex.
That's really cool.
this is great, but I'd love to see more work on types of fission other than uranium.
The nuclear waste disposal problem is non trivial, and has yet to be solved satisfactorily.
Less trans uramics is commendable. So is the safety side of this type of reactor.
Your videos are excellent, thank you.
Greatest this is one is being built now. We need to begin construction on many more ASAP.
If we can build this kind of reactors with load following, why do we need renewables anyway?
Those just complicate the grid and they need at least one order of magnitude more raw material for the same power output.
Renewables require less coordination, less delays, less inspection, and they can be cheaper. The cost you pay factors in the raw materials. Also less safety risks. While this reactor seems like it is pretty safe there still are risks like the spent fuel pool.
Well for one you can't let people stick sodium-cooled reactors in their garage like how they can put solar panels on their roof.
Switching houses to be a little grid-independent just in case of power outages would be prudent: solar and battery backup that at least covers the refrigerator and some lights wouldn't be too hard.
@George Mann The power companies think Wind and Solar is practical as it is now cheaper in many areas, even without artificial subsidies. "virtually zero risk" kind of ignores the fact that high level waste is extremely hazardous and able to self-melt. Yes, if someone is there to check on the pool periodically and fix leaks and add water as needed, it's safe. But it is not "zero risk". Plenty of ways to screw this up. If the most irresponsible, cost cutting company installs solar or wind the worst they can do is cause an electrical fire, not contaminate land.
@@drewgehringer7813 who would want to put solar or wind in their garage if unlimited and cheap nuclear power is available?
How different the history of Nuclear power would have been, if engineers had latched onto this method instead of leaving a legacy of so many trans Uranics.
That easy US (other countries) wanted more Abombs and that type was "most" studied and understood after so easier to implement.
Solid fuel reactor cores are the problem except possibly molten salt cooled pebble fuel reactors. The promising field of research is molten liquid fuel reactors.
A caveat with new generation nukes is that they run exclusively on existing nuclear waste or thorium, and all uranium mining and refinement facilities are shut down permanently.
Yessssssss new video can’t wait to put this on at bedtime yesssssss
Thank you for the informative talk
This guy is awesome, great lecture
Thanks a lot sir, wonderful presentation
Or we go a step further and implement molten salt in the reactor fuel rods. Such as Moltex Energy fast reactor.
Glad to see the point made that nuclear also needs power storage. Solve power storage and you don't need nuclear. CSP also can use molten salt storage and it is on line now. Solar PV/battery is getting better and cheaper having not yet reached its theoretical cost/performance limits. If this fast neutron tech could solve the existing waste problem somehow it would be worth subsidizing but there is no way it can imaginably be cost competitive even with the clever idea of recycling coal plants. The licensing alone is a nightmarish prospect for that.
So you're actually going to build one. I am looking forward to following the project. Wish I was younger, I'd apply for a job
Glad to see your making videos again
In future videos, could you turn the volume up on the Professor's mic? Around -3db to -6db peaks is what you're looking for. You can turn the volume up for the entire video in post as well.
I would have really enjoyed having a professor like you. I did the engineering route and most of us engineers are just dull.
We, the British, starting in the 50s, built three fast reactors. but despite two of them supplying electricity to the grid, were all closed by the mid-80s. Sodium was the cooling medium.
Grrrr, Britain in the laye 50s, 60s, 70s...technologically hamstrung by politics, policies, stagnant thinking and old ideas by stagnant and old leaders. Virtual absolute world domination in 1st and 2nd generation jet aircraft and aerospace engineering, yet the government basically canceled the entire industry. Launched a perfectly suitable rocket to act as a launch platform for intermediate satellite payloads, killed off by the government - the only nation that discontinued its space program after successfully reaching space. I'm not a car guy, but it appears something similar has happened to the British automotive industry. And now you bring up nuclear examples...it seems like the lack of STEM support by Parliament must be/have been extremely frustrating for a wide range of engineers.
Your a damn good teacher
I never miss any of your videos. They are all very good!!! That said, please do a video on Allen Weinberg. Also explain anything he could have been wrong about. In my view he predicted climate change in the early '50's and offered the safest path to powering the grid and fighting climate change. I am very interested on your thoughts about this.
Many thanks for your good work
To stop cooling a fast reactor isn't a problem or danger. The problem is if you poison the coolant with some light moderator that turns it back into a slow reactor. Then it starts creating transuranics again and blows up. That's probably the danger of fast reactors.
Thanks Prof, another great video 👍
Thank you for watching, endeavor to write as soon as for more enlightenment or tips on investing in crypto
+1•4•6•9•2•2•5•9•2•5•6
As far as I know, the experiment at EBR-II where they tested the automatic emergency shutdown after turning off the cooling systems was in 1986, not 1968, as shown in the documentary move “Pandora’s Promise” which can be found on RUclips.
Another great video. Thanks for doing these. Now if we could just get the energy industry to move to this approach. States control the power output from solar and wind to control costs (keep them high); I personally witness this with the California state utilities commision shutting down wind generation at times to keep prices high during the day. This approach would remove that control and provide reasonably priced power in a safe manner.
This is how I will make my next reactor.
When you do cost comparisons between wind, solar and base sources such as coal or natural gas the costs need to be based on providing a constant amount of power over at least a 24 hour period. That would lead to solar and wind being over built by a factor of 3 to 4 with the included cost of batteries to produce the power for 2/3’s of the day when solar or wind are not available.
Yes, and solar wind will never be overbuilt 4x. The cost and land use would be prohibitive, anywhere in the world.
I love your opening sequence, but I always forget to turn the volume down, in the rush to watch your videos.
Garden variety pressurized water reactors also "stop working" as fuel heats up. Negative fuel temperature coefficient. And btw, PWRs also have negative moderator temperature coefficient. As moderator heats up (less dense, effectively squeezes water out of the core), fewer fissions. Drives core subcritical, Keff less than 1.
Love this content. Please make more!
I hope one of these ideas he describes pans out. Right now, the problems are not technical nor fiscal, but psychological.
Hopefully it won't have the same problems as Fermi 1. I wouldn't _think_ it would, seeing as it's been about 55 years since that reactor's partial melt-down, and we're a bit better with equipping reactors with instrumentation. :)
Should restart the integral fast reactor in the US.
Hey Energy Prof...I really love your videos...please keep doing what you do. One question about this new variant of the liquid metal reactor...since it can fission the transuranics, does that also mean that we can somehow use these reactors to process our current store of spent fuel and waste...and make our waste problem easier to manage? ✌
Would a hybrid adaptation make sense? Add a solar thermal plant to the sodium loop to generate extra daytime power. Those go up to 510MW. Maybe there's a way to get 1GW peak out of such a design?
Always good content, but it seems like the audio quality has gotten worse? Not sure what's going on
If you are going to store thermal energy you can also heat up giant zinc ore reverse refinery type facilities that serve as zinc batteries storing electricity directly.
I wish California would see this