What's not to like? The genius of simply eliminating the principal nuclear safety hazards makes the Moltex SSR look a pretty smart investment to me. Right now it has to be the world's best kept secret for supplying safe, competitive, low-emissions, load-following, energy - globally.
I think we should rather focus on saving battery storage for electric vehicles and avoid to use it for back-up intermittent power sources. Together with nuclear MSRs, both to power battery electric vehicles and the production of clean liquid fuels (like methanol, DME or Fischer-Tropsch Diesel fuels)
@@babyelian77 I also agree with that, however LFP will be made by the gigatons. It's not quite as energy dense but cheaper _and safer_ than today's LMC. These batteries are ~95% efficient at storing electricity. Molten salt, although highly efficient at storing heat, requires the steam or similar process which is less than half as efficient. Thus, large amounts of water is required for cooling. Still, I'd rather use MSRs since requires so little land but the solar/lithium iron phosphate is so much easier to scale from a regulatory point of view. There's also the remote possibility that it would be easier to divert protactinium from the bombardment of thorium by neutrons, to make the weapons grade fissile material, U233, especially if all countries get their hands on easily mass produced MSR. Therefore, these fast (or moderated LFTR) reactors might not gain regulatory approval. We'd be back with some very inefficient "burner" as we have today, leaving actinide wastes that are rad for almost millions of years (instead of just the almost 400 from fission products).
A fascinating talk, it really does appear to probably be a commercially/technically viable technology. This is a burner reactor, I guess there is uranium in the waste stream, could it be made to breed in the future, after the thermal reactor waste piles have been incinerated?. Also, out of curiosity, who uses fision product thermogenerators please?.
Uranium 238 can be bred in fissionable plutonium in a fast reactor although it forms as well in thermal ones. Only some types like Pt240 gives some problems burning it(has its industrial uses though), but in a fast reactor everything above U is fuel. The split fission (a little less than about half the atomic weight of uranium and around half the atom number) .Elements like rhodium and palladium can be recovered from the waste stream stock which is considered waste at the moment. In fact al used up fuel can be recycled and will form a nice resource of scars elements, radio cesium and radio strontium. radio strontium can be used in space thermo-generators. Do not dig that stuff to deep in "end storage" like Yucca mountain". It is precious and will be "mined" in the future. Just let it accumulate, so that a new chemical recovery -separation plant has enough source material available to work on , to be able to work continuously and make the investment in it ,economical. Nuclear waste will be worth money in the future. Storing is as easy as leaving it on a guarded place for X-years. The real nasty radiation stuff has gone after the first 10 years of storage, so handling the material becomes easier with time for this type of solving the waste problem. Use the stuff!! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel
Likely impossible due to unavailability of a material neutron transparent enough (thin) yet chemically inert enough and stable under radiation bombardment to guarantee separation of fuel and blanket salts. Better to run a single fluid and have online reprocessing just for removing neutron absorbing fission products than to run a blanket that also poses a proliferation risk should the salt be tapped off and the 232Th allowed to decay over a month and leave U233 without protection. Thermal breeders just aren't good enough to justify the complications. Going fast means that minor actinides also become fuel instead of neutron absorbers.
From everything I've heard, LFTR is quite possible to do, but not as easy as Kirk Sorensen makes it sound. It will require a lot more research and certification work compared to simpler MSRs like Moltex, IMSR and Thorcon. The main advantage of breeders like LFTR is sustainability: since they run (mostly) on thorium, which is hundreds of times more abundant in Earth's crust than U-235, we'll never run out of fuel. But there's very little political will to pay for the necessary up-front R&D on LFTRs, so investors will naturally flock to reactors like Moltex, IMSR and Thorcon that can plausibly reach the market faster. Even if there was lots of money available for LFTR R&D, simpler mass-produced "burner" reactors would be important for tackling global warming quickly.
@@davidpiepgrass743 You wouldn't necessarily need burners. The EURATOM MSFR or Rosatom MOSART achieve over unity breeding, even without reprocessing, as long as you do not exceed 10,000 days without removing neutron absorbers. At least in theory. www.gen-4.org/gif/upload/docs/application/pdf/2017-05/07_elsa_merle_france.pdf (See page 13, graph on bottom left, derived from Xavier Doligez's PhD thesis). Although if you wanted some margin you would be wise to reprocess once every 1000 days (i.e. 3 yearly) in order to maintain a 1.1 breeding ratio, otherwise you eventually wind up in burner territory. lpsc.in2p3.fr/images/ActivitesScientifiques/Physique_des_Reacteurs/PDF/these_XDoligez.pdf The Doligez thesis identifies an upper limit of 2000 days, beyond which it becomes difficult to maintain chemistry control without reprocessing. (Page 6 of thesis) 2000 days is 5 and a half years or so. But in theory, if you had advanced chemistry control techniques, and you didn't much care for breeding, you could basically go 10,000 days without reprocessing. Which is 27 years: basically the life of a reactor vessel overhaul. The need for ongoing chemistry control will also naturally keep some neutron absorbers away due to low solubilities, but the fast spectrum drops the cross sections of most of the egregious neutron absorbers markedly regardless. Ergo, in the Molten salt Fast reactor, you can throw away the online reprocessing unit of the LFTR and just keep the chemistry control running (metal mesh filters to capture noble metals, gas sparging to remove fission gases, online laser induced plasma spectrometry to monitor redox state of the reactor and add and subtract reductants as appropriate etc.). After 3 years (or 5 years at most) you can remove the current batch of salt, reprocess it, and pump it back into the reactor core after all the maintenance duties have been done, and still get 1.1 breeding. 1.1 breeding ratio is higher than the 1.05 the MSBR or LFTR claims and cuts doubling time from around 14 years to approx 7 or so. Not too bad considering the amount of fissile you can start off with from reprocessed spent fuel; only the new fissile is U-233, allowing for greater thorium use the next time around.
@@davidpiepgrass743 Why not? The reactor itself is simple enough, the processing plant that is associated with it that needs work. His design is the "big" brother to the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment at Oak Ridge, which that design is just to get a working reactor, Weinberg hadn't even given the reprocessing any thought because that was not what they were there to do. If Weinberg had been allowed to continue his work it is very likely that fuel processing "problems" would have been solved as well, but as we now know that President Nixon cut him off so he could siphon jobs for a Pressurized Light Water Reactor in So Cal.
@@Rob_Moilanen Again - political will. Kirk Sorensen said it himself in another video, maybe the early one at Google 2009? He said the time it'll take to do LFTR depends on political will, the current level of which isn't going to cut it. Did you know research reactors at practical sizes (20+ MW) are now illegal in the U.S.? I am highly supportive of campaigns to increase R&D funding, e.g. lets-fund.org/clean-energy/ - it's just hard to get politicians to do worthwhile stuff.
I like how he throws a bone to renewables at the last minute, lol. If your base load is moltex, why would anyone add the expense and complexity to a perfectly clean system? I guess if your region already has them, you could continue to use them, but not replace when their already short lifespan is up.
Renewable energy is the greatest scam ever perpetrated on mankind. Super expensive electricity for no (positive) difference to the environment. Just an expensive way to chop up birds, fry 'em and make a ton of money for Al Bore! The Moltex design looks like a winner and cheap nuclear is the way to go. We are in more danger of a new glaciation period that global warming. We may have to burn coal just to supply enough CO2 to postpone the next Ice Age to make sure Canada is covered by two miles of ice!
The thing is, Moltex doesn't get a choice in the matter. Wind and solar are likely to be a major part of the future clean power grid for two reasons: first, renewable energy has a large head start; Moltex won't be able to open their first plant until at least 2027, and none of the other molten salt companies are likely to start sooner than that. Second, wind and solar have lots of political will behind them. Many groups are calling for "renewable" energy - not "clean" energy, not even "sustainable" energy - in an apparent effort to discourage nuclear power. Nuclear is very much the underdog and Moltex is doing what it has to do in that context.
@@davidpiepgrass743 The more you fight against VRE and call it a "scam" the more pushback that green groups will give. Actually that was the point of setting up this false dichotomy in the first place: Green groups wanted to destroy the prospects of nuclear, and so set up the "soft energy path" to advocate for. First in the US, then spreading to Europe. This soft energy path was pushed forth by Amory Lovins, an oil industry consultant for decades, as a way to eliminate nuclear reactor proposals in the CONUS by promoting "efficiency" and "sustainable biomass" and "distributed renewables". This strategy goes back as far back as the 1970's: Deny the value of nuclear, deny the science of safety and waste desposal, deny all attempts to build nuclear, and delay all projects as long as possible by frivolous lawsuits (see Shoreham et al.). The soft energy path, *which includes the burning of trees and coal* , was explicitly designed to deny nuclear's value proposition. It has been promulgated by Friends of the Earth (founded by donations from an oil tycoon), by Sierra Club (that took millions in donations from Chesapeake Energy, which drills for natural gas), by WWF (that has received sponsorship from Royal Dutch Shell to the tune of millions) - the list goes on: www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/04/wwf-international-selling-its-soul-corporations . What we need to realise is that we are against an international PR machine with unprecedented reach, consumer trust, and marketing money. We are playing the Greens game by reacting dumbly to it and rising to their bait by excluding renewables in retaliation. *@John Dowd, @Greg White* you are being suckered in and playing _their game_ by denying the utility of VRE. We should instead be defusing their argument, as Moltex is doing, by proposing integration with VRE. Jesse Jenkins adroitly explains why a mix of VRE and nuclear is lower cost than either alone (although VRE alone skyrockets in cost, while nuclear does escalate but not to the same degree). ruclips.net/video/F3YMlzK8d0o/видео.html . We should not take the bait, hook, line and sinker.
@@MonMalthias . I suggest a more pernicious reason for the anti nuclear drama. The economic system requires inflation to keep people in debt and working. Cheaper or free energy would cause massive deflation. Therefore the establishment will do everything in their power to prevent energy sources that could be cheaper.
@@thebeautifulones5436 Except that we now live in a world where energy is cheap and getting cheaper. Debt fuelled growth has not maintained energy paradigms, it has upended them repeatedly. From the debt fuelled fracking boom to the debt fuelled renewables boom we are seeing private capital outlay immense expenditures on the promise of profit even as state finance dies a slow death in the West. Time was that the state would shoulder the large capital burdens of large scale infrastructure. Well, that's all but dead now.
Looking at the Moltex website, the answer is yes. Thorium fluoride could be mixed into the coolant salt in order to absorb neutrons in place of hafnium, then the resulting uranium fluoride could be separated offline. However, working with neutrons in thermal spectrum makes more difficult to control power fluctuations due to xenon build-up, thus more research/simulations would be required. Further, suitable moderator need to be defined that chemically works in such environment. Maybe, could it be graphite that fully fills some tubes, to be entirely re-purposed for such scope? The above is what I have understood just looking at the Moltex website and at the presentations here on RUclips.
From what I understand, the trick would seem to lie in separating Protactinium 233 from the salt before it absorbs any more neutrons, then allowing it to decay into the usable Uranium 233 before adding it to the fuel mix, if they can do that efficiently and reliably, then this could be very viable indeed.
@@AximandTheCursed chemical separation is easy. Isotope seperation is hard. The guy who is often referenced as the father of PWR reactors, spent most of his life as a proponent of MSRs - of any cycle.
@@paulmasoner8073 Was aware, and yes going with any MSR would be several steps in the right direction, from what I understand, the main reasons they stuck with PWR-types was due to pressure from the DoD to keep them supplied with a reliable source of plutonium and tritium, which you would not get with a Thorium-based liquid fuel reactor that does not use water.
One thing you did not talk about is the compatibility of this reactor system with renewables. A reactor like this with storage would enable low cost renewable power to be used when available and profitable peaking power when reactor power is needed. The reactor heat could also be use for high value industrial uses too. Since the reactor is producing storage both the peaking power and steady industrial usage could be accommodated. This setup opens up a much greater profit potential than any other conventional nuclear power plant as well as making low cost power from renewables more practical.
Dr Scott said that "nuclear reactors have been blown up" by the misuse of control rods. I did not know that. I would have thought that this would have been a newsworthy event. But I cannot remember reading about it. Very good talk, by the way.
that is most likely referring to the US army's attempts at cheap easily deployable reactors, where early in the cold war they would have a small BWR manned by a small amount of people. In this case it was 2 guys and one of the guys lifted the control rod to fast causing a flash steam situation, impaling one guy to the ceiling, and killing the other two. This incident is called SLR1 i believe or something like that, but many point to this as an example of what happens when you don't properly psychologically test reactor operators. Theres a couple different theories regarding the actions of the man who withdrew the control rod, one is he was showing off, another is he was depressed as his wife had just called prior to the incident and said she was leaving him. This happened early in the days of reactor design, and now no one single person can "recreate" the event.
@@Admiral642 Also, Chernobyl was of caused by the mis-management of the RBMK reactor; they ran it so low that they had to remove nearly all the control rods in order to bring it back up, having poisoned it. The subsequent SCRAM led to a disaster due to the graphite-tipped rods. (I'm sure you know this already!). One could also argue this was misue of control rods. Have a good day!
Salt leaking out would be a containment breach, so lots of money will go into making sure that doesn't happen. Whatever they put underneath the reactor would, I expect, be designed in a way that maximizes heat dissipation in the highly unlikely event of a leak. IIUC, oxygen causes corrosion (when combined with salt), which is one of multiple reasons that the reactor will be airtight and watertight, but is the corrosion slow enough to be irrelevant from a safety perspective? I'm not sure, but I obviously CNSC will ensure that all necessary protections are in place. I'm not sure how radioactive molten salt interacts with water, but I once spoke to Ian Scott who seemed to think it was valuable to use air cooling over water cooling to minimize the chance of contact with water.
A nuclear site license was granted to Hinkley Point C in November 2012, so planning probably started well before then. Buzz about Molten Salt Reactors wasn't really started until 2011 or so, and Moltex was founded, I don't know, maybe in 2015 or so. Besides, a lot of people have a thing for "proven" technologies... building anything new in the nuclear business is hard.
12:00 I don't think that is fair to liquid metal reactors. Molten metallic sodium reacts even less with vessel internals than molten salt. Obviously sodium fires outside the vessel could be an issue if there is a leak, but the EBR-II reactor and the BN-800 both had/have good operating history. I would say water is a MUCH worse coolant than molten sodium. Later in your presentation, 12:20, you even admit that there are corrosion challenges associated with molten salt! I keep editing my comment because I think this presentation has some issues. 17:50 there are many reasons to use molten fuel other than because the reactor is meant for an airplane. It's easy to dissolve plutonium and transuranics into the fuel, it's easy to pull gaseous fission products out of the fuel, and if it's a thermal reactor you can pull other neutron poisons out if you need to. If the fuel is going to be solid, then using molten metal makes a lot of sense and arguments for molten salt are less convincing. Lastly, many of the other MSR designs are also modular, I don't know why the presenter asserts this is the only modular reactor. Okay, one more thing, excess reactivity being a big hazard?? What so you want reactors to refuel with exactly critical fuel and then after 1 second of operation shutdown? How is a nuclear reactor going to operate with some excess reactivity??
Re: 12:00 you may be right, but it is at least correct that sodium coolant is scarier to the average Joe than salt. Also, Moltex plans to use air, not water, as the secondary coolant. Re: 12:20 yes, but IIUC, corrosion is low as long as they keep O2 out, and the corrosion challenge is not so much a safety challenge AFAIK because it occurs slowly and can be monitored. Re: 17:50 Ian Scott did not claim that Moltex is the only company that wants to build small modular molten salt reactors. Re: 27:54 what's so unclear about "excess reactivity is a hazard"? IIUC, traditional LW reactors have substantially more reactivity than necessary and use control rods and such to control it. In part this is because LW reactors are subject to Xenon poisoning while Molten Salt Reactors are not. By not having excess reactivity, control rods are not needed (only shutdown rods/plates), thus lowering costs while eliminating a hazard. Obviously, when you add a new fuel rod you get slightly more reactivity than strictly necessary so that the reactor works for more than "1 second". > How is a nuclear reactor going to operate with some excess reactivity?? Molten Salt Reactors run at a slightly higher temperature when the new fuel is added. The effect of a higher temperature is to lower the rate of fission, so that MSRs can tolerate more reactivity than strictly necessary. The same is true of most other reactor designs, but MSRs have a reputation for being especially good in this regard. From what I've heard, fission stops almost entirely (without using any shutdown rods/plates) if the temperature exceeds 800-900 celcius.
You mentioned Sodium cooled fast reactors, if only because of their metallurgy. As I understand it, President Nixon cancelled the ORNL molten salt project, (which was costing only pennies), and instead he authorised huge sums of money to be spent on developing Sodium cooled reactors. Where are these reactors today? How many kilowatts of electricity do they put into the US grid? So, am I right to say that in spite of being so well-funded, the Sodium Cooled reactors have been a colossal failure? That was certainly the case with the French Superphenix reactor.
If MSR would have meant jobs in California then we would be powering our electric grid with MSR. Believe it or not that was the political reason the sodium breeder was preferred over the molten salt reactor.
Geology 101......The science of igneous petrology looks like its being applied by physicists, engineers, and to design/develop miniature magma chambers that are molten salt nuclear reaction chambers in what geologist’s call a double diffusive fractionating magma (molten salt) chamber that works like a Carnot engine fueled by circulating fractionated concentrated radioactive isotopes U, Th, K in a low viscosity magma/molten salt chamber/reservoir that is bound/clad by a high viscosity reflective chamber surface that experiences periodic fluxuations in pressure and temperature near its threshold of brittle containment failure.
Canada? Has anyone told our gov't that you are doing this? #ClimateBarbie keeps harping on about wind and solar ffs Great presentation. Hope it gets done
"Just weeks after its success in being selected as a winner in the UK government’s Advanced Modular Reactors competition, Moltex is delighted to announce that it has also been selected by New Brunswick Energy Solutions Corporation and New Brunswick Power to progress development of its SSR-W (Stable Salt Reactor - Wasteburner) technology in New Brunswick, with the aim of deploying its first SSR-W at the Point Lepreau nuclear reactor site before 2030." www.moltexenergy.com/news/details.aspx?positionId=106
Why base the future on renewals and nuclear? Why reduce the output of a nuclear plant when there is sun and wind and have double investments in different generators that are erratic and discontinuous . That is what France does at the moment and it gives no advantage in economics, reducing nuclear accident risk , nor barely any saving on operating cost of a NP. The future will be nuclear ALONE, only when solar has some economic advantage market wise (without subsidies) or has some power exchange possibilities with hydro it can be a useful addition. Perhaps p consumption day peaks can be compensated with solar in certain climates-but not in France and Germany. The price of investment in solar and wind is way to high and the technology has it own problems with pollution, large energy losses in transport, and discontinuity . The price of the fuel in a nuclear reactor and its availability is so great that the savings of fuel are negligible compared to the loss of capacity ,together with the double investment in other erratic and discontinuous generating principles. In the present political environment in Green dominated states like the USA and Europe, nuclear has to reduce output when solar and wind are available . That is a drain on the economics of nuclear. But nuclear is virtual CO2 free ,even better than solar and wind. Having the nuclear plant at halve its nominal production level at some of the time, makes no difference to its perceived "danger" or the "waste problem" of nuclear power. It is economical nonsense to fill the gaps in solar and wind production , nuclear should always be base-load and windmills may disappear in the history books as the biggest failure of our time. Electricity production should be 100% by nuclear fission of Th and U. It is the cheapest way for the next 2000 year at least. After that era, fusion can take over. Also the cheap conversion/production of synthetic gasoline ,diesel and methane from coal (or another carbon source like heavy oil or natural gas or even CO2 from the air ) and water ,can form the next develop target for the application of nuclear energy as industrial heat and electrical chemistry.
pretty much agreed, but I wouldn't put too much faith in fusion. even if it does turn out to be technically possible to engineer and build a machine that can reach net positive energy, all of the current front-runners (in terms of funding at least) would be massively expensive. As the likes of Moltex and Terrestrial are demonstrating, fission (using molten salts) doesn't really have any of the safety, long-lived waste, or capital cost disadvantages of solid-fuel and water-cooled legacy nuclear. The other much-touted fusion advantage is endless cheap fuel, but fuel-related cost was never the nuclear fission problem, it was and remains, capital cost. It's looking quite likely that laser ignition and tokamaks will be an order of magnitude more capital expensive than a molten salt reactor - MSRs are what fusion was always promised to be - and with a billion years worth of fuel scattered throughout the solar system. (small caveat for Focus Fusion which would be incredibly cheap if it can be made to work).
@Oliver Mayo Right. There many things that may not happen. We should not limit our options. We should play an ideas numbers game until we find that silver bullet. We should educate ourselves a little. For example the Tokamak will likely not ever be competitive. But for the price of a Tokamak we can explore multiple fusion ideas, that IF they work, would make fusion that everyone would buy. So play policy maker for a minute. Fund an albatross that will eventually work....or fund five alternatives whose premise is Prectical fusion even if they are not guaranteed to work
Which is why coal goes to such lengths to quietly fund antinuclear groups and stir up irrational fear of all things nuclear, they know if allowed to compete on a level regulator playing field nuclear would quickly outperform and crush them.
Let us mor stop there, let us go after the big guys inventions about computers and pharmaceuticals. Nothing is impossible with our lord jesus christ so long as we are faithful and worship Him every single day. Do i hear resistance to a certain group of people now?
Dr. Scott is hard to understand. If we could clean up his audio with a better microphone(s), some de-essing filters and perhaps a permanent sound engineer to travel with him, his clarity could be greatly improved.
What's not to like? The genius of simply eliminating the principal nuclear safety hazards makes the Moltex SSR look a pretty smart investment to me. Right now it has to be the world's best kept secret for supplying safe, competitive, low-emissions, load-following, energy - globally.
Fantastic presentation Ian.
Everyone needs to know that nuclear is cheaper than battery storage (and the buildup of solar and wind needed for 24/7 power.
fireofenergy everyone should know that statement is a blatant lie. Nuclear is twice as expensive as solar.
Adje Boog you compare nuclear steady power supply and solar intermittent. Power intermittence increase cost immensely.
I think we should rather focus on saving battery storage for electric vehicles and avoid to use it for back-up intermittent power sources. Together with nuclear MSRs, both to power battery electric vehicles and the production of clean liquid fuels (like methanol, DME or Fischer-Tropsch Diesel fuels)
@@babyelian77
I also agree with that, however LFP will be made by the gigatons. It's not quite as energy dense but cheaper _and safer_ than today's LMC.
These batteries are ~95% efficient at storing electricity.
Molten salt, although highly efficient at storing heat, requires the steam or similar process which is less than half as efficient. Thus, large amounts of water is required for cooling.
Still, I'd rather use MSRs since requires so little land but the solar/lithium iron phosphate is so much easier to scale from a regulatory point of view.
There's also the remote possibility that it would be easier to divert protactinium from the bombardment of thorium by neutrons, to make the weapons grade fissile material, U233, especially if all countries get their hands on easily mass produced MSR.
Therefore, these fast (or moderated LFTR) reactors might not gain regulatory approval. We'd be back with some very inefficient "burner" as we have today, leaving actinide wastes that are rad for almost millions of years (instead of just the almost 400 from fission products).
Thank you. This is the only way to stop burning stuff in the optimal way. The heat batteries buffering are essential.
Thanks for this. Really interesting.
Similar to GE/Hitachi Prism, but with salt fuel pins and coolant.
So should Moltex team up with them to get their SSR built?
The reactor designs are similar, even if the fuel and coolant are different.
Hope this helps.
Integral design, fuel pins, chloride reprocessing are the similar elements.
But it ends there.
@@MonMalthias
Sure. I was actually quoting Dr Scott. If he says they are similar, its good enough for me.
Pool reactors, fuel pins, low pressure.
A fascinating talk, it really does appear to probably be a commercially/technically viable technology. This is a burner reactor, I guess there is uranium in the waste stream, could it be made to breed in the future, after the thermal reactor waste piles have been incinerated?. Also, out of curiosity, who uses fision product thermogenerators please?.
Uranium 238 can be bred in fissionable plutonium in a fast reactor although it forms as well in thermal ones. Only some types like Pt240 gives some problems burning it(has its industrial uses though), but in a fast reactor everything above U is fuel. The split fission (a little less than about half the atomic weight of uranium and around half the atom number) .Elements like rhodium and palladium can be recovered from the waste stream stock which is considered waste at the moment. In fact al used up fuel can be recycled and will form a nice resource of scars elements, radio cesium and radio strontium. radio strontium can be used in space thermo-generators. Do not dig that stuff to deep in "end storage" like Yucca mountain". It is precious and will be "mined" in the future. Just let it accumulate, so that a new chemical recovery -separation plant has enough source material available to work on , to be able to work continuously and make the investment in it ,economical. Nuclear waste will be worth money in the future. Storing is as easy as leaving it on a guarded place for X-years. The real nasty radiation stuff has gone after the first 10 years of storage, so handling the material becomes easier with time for this type of solving the waste problem. Use the stuff!!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel
What do you think of the blanket design of the LFTR?
Likely impossible due to unavailability of a material neutron transparent enough (thin) yet chemically inert enough and stable under radiation bombardment to guarantee separation of fuel and blanket salts.
Better to run a single fluid and have online reprocessing just for removing neutron absorbing fission products than to run a blanket that also poses a proliferation risk should the salt be tapped off and the 232Th allowed to decay over a month and leave U233 without protection.
Thermal breeders just aren't good enough to justify the complications. Going fast means that minor actinides also become fuel instead of neutron absorbers.
From everything I've heard, LFTR is quite possible to do, but not as easy as Kirk Sorensen makes it sound. It will require a lot more research and certification work compared to simpler MSRs like Moltex, IMSR and Thorcon. The main advantage of breeders like LFTR is sustainability: since they run (mostly) on thorium, which is hundreds of times more abundant in Earth's crust than U-235, we'll never run out of fuel. But there's very little political will to pay for the necessary up-front R&D on LFTRs, so investors will naturally flock to reactors like Moltex, IMSR and Thorcon that can plausibly reach the market faster. Even if there was lots of money available for LFTR R&D, simpler mass-produced "burner" reactors would be important for tackling global warming quickly.
@@davidpiepgrass743
You wouldn't necessarily need burners. The EURATOM MSFR or Rosatom MOSART achieve over unity breeding, even without reprocessing, as long as you do not exceed 10,000 days without removing neutron absorbers. At least in theory.
www.gen-4.org/gif/upload/docs/application/pdf/2017-05/07_elsa_merle_france.pdf (See page 13, graph on bottom left, derived from Xavier Doligez's PhD thesis).
Although if you wanted some margin you would be wise to reprocess once every 1000 days (i.e. 3 yearly) in order to maintain a 1.1 breeding ratio, otherwise you eventually wind up in burner territory. lpsc.in2p3.fr/images/ActivitesScientifiques/Physique_des_Reacteurs/PDF/these_XDoligez.pdf
The Doligez thesis identifies an upper limit of 2000 days, beyond which it becomes difficult to maintain chemistry control without reprocessing. (Page 6 of thesis)
2000 days is 5 and a half years or so. But in theory, if you had advanced chemistry control techniques, and you didn't much care for breeding, you could basically go 10,000 days without reprocessing. Which is 27 years: basically the life of a reactor vessel overhaul.
The need for ongoing chemistry control will also naturally keep some neutron absorbers away due to low solubilities, but the fast spectrum drops the cross sections of most of the egregious neutron absorbers markedly regardless.
Ergo, in the Molten salt Fast reactor, you can throw away the online reprocessing unit of the LFTR and just keep the chemistry control running (metal mesh filters to capture noble metals, gas sparging to remove fission gases, online laser induced plasma spectrometry to monitor redox state of the reactor and add and subtract reductants as appropriate etc.). After 3 years (or 5 years at most) you can remove the current batch of salt, reprocess it, and pump it back into the reactor core after all the maintenance duties have been done, and still get 1.1 breeding.
1.1 breeding ratio is higher than the 1.05 the MSBR or LFTR claims and cuts doubling time from around 14 years to approx 7 or so. Not too bad considering the amount of fissile you can start off with from reprocessed spent fuel; only the new fissile is U-233, allowing for greater thorium use the next time around.
@@davidpiepgrass743 Why not? The reactor itself is simple enough, the processing plant that is associated with it that needs work. His design is the "big" brother to the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment at Oak Ridge, which that design is just to get a working reactor, Weinberg hadn't even given the reprocessing any thought because that was not what they were there to do. If Weinberg had been allowed to continue his work it is very likely that fuel processing "problems" would have been solved as well, but as we now know that President Nixon cut him off so he could siphon jobs for a Pressurized Light Water Reactor in So Cal.
@@Rob_Moilanen Again - political will. Kirk Sorensen said it himself in another video, maybe the early one at Google 2009? He said the time it'll take to do LFTR depends on political will, the current level of which isn't going to cut it. Did you know research reactors at practical sizes (20+ MW) are now illegal in the U.S.? I am highly supportive of campaigns to increase R&D funding, e.g. lets-fund.org/clean-energy/ - it's just hard to get politicians to do worthwhile stuff.
I would assume that gas bubbles would move very fast in a 600C fluid, but not fast enough apparently.
I like how he throws a bone to renewables at the last minute, lol. If your base load is moltex, why would anyone add the expense and complexity to a perfectly clean system? I guess if your region already has them, you could continue to use them, but not replace when their already short lifespan is up.
Renewable energy is the greatest scam ever perpetrated on mankind. Super expensive electricity for no (positive) difference to the environment. Just an expensive way to chop up birds, fry 'em and make a ton of money for Al Bore! The Moltex design looks like a winner and cheap nuclear is the way to go. We are in more danger of a new glaciation period that global warming. We may have to burn coal just to supply enough CO2 to postpone the next Ice Age to make sure Canada is covered by two miles of ice!
The thing is, Moltex doesn't get a choice in the matter. Wind and solar are likely to be a major part of the future clean power grid for two reasons: first, renewable energy has a large head start; Moltex won't be able to open their first plant until at least 2027, and none of the other molten salt companies are likely to start sooner than that. Second, wind and solar have lots of political will behind them. Many groups are calling for "renewable" energy - not "clean" energy, not even "sustainable" energy - in an apparent effort to discourage nuclear power. Nuclear is very much the underdog and Moltex is doing what it has to do in that context.
@@davidpiepgrass743
The more you fight against VRE and call it a "scam" the more pushback that green groups will give. Actually that was the point of setting up this false dichotomy in the first place: Green groups wanted to destroy the prospects of nuclear, and so set up the "soft energy path" to advocate for. First in the US, then spreading to Europe. This soft energy path was pushed forth by Amory Lovins, an oil industry consultant for decades, as a way to eliminate nuclear reactor proposals in the CONUS by promoting "efficiency" and "sustainable biomass" and "distributed renewables".
This strategy goes back as far back as the 1970's: Deny the value of nuclear, deny the science of safety and waste desposal, deny all attempts to build nuclear, and delay all projects as long as possible by frivolous lawsuits (see Shoreham et al.). The soft energy path, *which includes the burning of trees and coal* , was explicitly designed to deny nuclear's value proposition.
It has been promulgated by Friends of the Earth (founded by donations from an oil tycoon), by Sierra Club (that took millions in donations from Chesapeake Energy, which drills for natural gas), by WWF (that has received sponsorship from Royal Dutch Shell to the tune of millions) - the list goes on: www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/04/wwf-international-selling-its-soul-corporations .
What we need to realise is that we are against an international PR machine with unprecedented reach, consumer trust, and marketing money. We are playing the Greens game by reacting dumbly to it and rising to their bait by excluding renewables in retaliation. *@John Dowd, @Greg White* you are being suckered in and playing _their game_ by denying the utility of VRE.
We should instead be defusing their argument, as Moltex is doing, by proposing integration with VRE. Jesse Jenkins adroitly explains why a mix of VRE and nuclear is lower cost than either alone (although VRE alone skyrockets in cost, while nuclear does escalate but not to the same degree). ruclips.net/video/F3YMlzK8d0o/видео.html . We should not take the bait, hook, line and sinker.
@@MonMalthias . I suggest a more pernicious reason for the anti nuclear drama. The economic system requires inflation to keep people in debt and working. Cheaper or free energy would cause massive deflation. Therefore the establishment will do everything in their power to prevent energy sources that could be cheaper.
@@thebeautifulones5436
Except that we now live in a world where energy is cheap and getting cheaper. Debt fuelled growth has not maintained energy paradigms, it has upended them repeatedly. From the debt fuelled fracking boom to the debt fuelled renewables boom we are seeing private capital outlay immense expenditures on the promise of profit even as state finance dies a slow death in the West. Time was that the state would shoulder the large capital burdens of large scale infrastructure. Well, that's all but dead now.
14:25 challenges & solutions of MS reactors
20:00 reactor,parts
Is there any way this design can be used to breed thorium?
Looking at the Moltex website, the answer is yes.
Thorium fluoride could be mixed into the coolant salt in order to absorb neutrons in place of hafnium, then the resulting uranium fluoride could be separated offline.
However, working with neutrons in thermal spectrum makes more difficult to control power fluctuations due to xenon build-up, thus more research/simulations would be required.
Further, suitable moderator need to be defined that chemically works in such environment.
Maybe, could it be graphite that fully fills some tubes, to be entirely re-purposed for such scope?
The above is what I have understood just looking at the Moltex website and at the presentations here on RUclips.
From what I understand, the trick would seem to lie in separating Protactinium 233 from the salt before it absorbs any more neutrons, then allowing it to decay into the usable Uranium 233 before adding it to the fuel mix, if they can do that efficiently and reliably, then this could be very viable indeed.
@@scasc @Scasc xenon is not a neutron cross-section problem in liquid fuels, it literally bubbles out of solution to be captured.
@@AximandTheCursed chemical separation is easy. Isotope seperation is hard. The guy who is often referenced as the father of PWR reactors, spent most of his life as a proponent of MSRs - of any cycle.
@@paulmasoner8073 Was aware, and yes going with any MSR would be several steps in the right direction, from what I understand, the main reasons they stuck with PWR-types was due to pressure from the DoD to keep them supplied with a reliable source of plutonium and tritium, which you would not get with a Thorium-based liquid fuel reactor that does not use water.
One thing you did not talk about is the compatibility of this reactor system with renewables. A reactor like this with storage would enable low cost renewable power to be used when available and profitable peaking power when reactor power is needed. The reactor heat could also be use for high value industrial uses too. Since the reactor is producing storage both the peaking power and steady industrial usage could be accommodated. This setup opens up a much greater profit potential than any other conventional nuclear power plant as well as making low cost power from renewables more practical.
Dr Scott said that "nuclear reactors have been blown up" by the misuse of control rods.
I did not know that.
I would have thought that this would have been a newsworthy event.
But I cannot remember reading about it.
Very good talk, by the way.
that is most likely referring to the US army's attempts at cheap easily deployable reactors, where early in the cold war they would have a small BWR manned by a small amount of people. In this case it was 2 guys and one of the guys lifted the control rod to fast causing a flash steam situation, impaling one guy to the ceiling, and killing the other two.
This incident is called SLR1 i believe or something like that, but many point to this as an example of what happens when you don't properly psychologically test reactor operators. Theres a couple different theories regarding the actions of the man who withdrew the control rod, one is he was showing off, another is he was depressed as his wife had just called prior to the incident and said she was leaving him.
This happened early in the days of reactor design, and now no one single person can "recreate" the event.
@@Admiral642 People come in numbers, not amounts.
@@Admiral642 Also, Chernobyl was of caused by the mis-management of the RBMK reactor; they ran it so low that they had to remove nearly all the control rods in order to bring it back up, having poisoned it. The subsequent SCRAM led to a disaster due to the graphite-tipped rods. (I'm sure you know this already!). One could also argue this was misue of control rods.
Have a good day!
2028 for a working reactor in the UK?
Then you stand a good chance of coming on stream before the French PWR at Hinkley Point !
I don' t understand: what happens if salts leak out the reactor or water/air enter the reactor ?
Salt leaking out would be a containment breach, so lots of money will go into making sure that doesn't happen. Whatever they put underneath the reactor would, I expect, be designed in a way that maximizes heat dissipation in the highly unlikely event of a leak. IIUC, oxygen causes corrosion (when combined with salt), which is one of multiple reasons that the reactor will be airtight and watertight, but is the corrosion slow enough to be irrelevant from a safety perspective? I'm not sure, but I obviously CNSC will ensure that all necessary protections are in place.
I'm not sure how radioactive molten salt interacts with water, but I once spoke to Ian Scott who seemed to think it was valuable to use air cooling over water cooling to minimize the chance of contact with water.
When salt leaks out, the salt freezes again at room temperature, like table salt.
The salt must stay at 600 degrees C to stay liquid.
How can a private person invest in MSR tech today?
Contact Moltex for an Investment Memorandum.
why the hell did the uk not put this tech in when then built hinkley point c?
A nuclear site license was granted to Hinkley Point C in November 2012, so planning probably started well before then. Buzz about Molten Salt Reactors wasn't really started until 2011 or so, and Moltex was founded, I don't know, maybe in 2015 or so. Besides, a lot of people have a thing for "proven" technologies... building anything new in the nuclear business is hard.
Start at 2:10 or 3:09
12:00 I don't think that is fair to liquid metal reactors. Molten metallic sodium reacts even less with vessel internals than molten salt. Obviously sodium fires outside the vessel could be an issue if there is a leak, but the EBR-II reactor and the BN-800 both had/have good operating history. I would say water is a MUCH worse coolant than molten sodium. Later in your presentation, 12:20, you even admit that there are corrosion challenges associated with molten salt! I keep editing my comment because I think this presentation has some issues. 17:50 there are many reasons to use molten fuel other than because the reactor is meant for an airplane. It's easy to dissolve plutonium and transuranics into the fuel, it's easy to pull gaseous fission products out of the fuel, and if it's a thermal reactor you can pull other neutron poisons out if you need to. If the fuel is going to be solid, then using molten metal makes a lot of sense and arguments for molten salt are less convincing. Lastly, many of the other MSR designs are also modular, I don't know why the presenter asserts this is the only modular reactor. Okay, one more thing, excess reactivity being a big hazard?? What so you want reactors to refuel with exactly critical fuel and then after 1 second of operation shutdown? How is a nuclear reactor going to operate with some excess reactivity??
Re: 12:00 you may be right, but it is at least correct that sodium coolant is scarier to the average Joe than salt. Also, Moltex plans to use air, not water, as the secondary coolant.
Re: 12:20 yes, but IIUC, corrosion is low as long as they keep O2 out, and the corrosion challenge is not so much a safety challenge AFAIK because it occurs slowly and can be monitored.
Re: 17:50 Ian Scott did not claim that Moltex is the only company that wants to build small modular molten salt reactors.
Re: 27:54 what's so unclear about "excess reactivity is a hazard"? IIUC, traditional LW reactors have substantially more reactivity than necessary and use control rods and such to control it. In part this is because LW reactors are subject to Xenon poisoning while Molten Salt Reactors are not. By not having excess reactivity, control rods are not needed (only shutdown rods/plates), thus lowering costs while eliminating a hazard. Obviously, when you add a new fuel rod you get slightly more reactivity than strictly necessary so that the reactor works for more than "1 second".
> How is a nuclear reactor going to operate with some excess reactivity??
Molten Salt Reactors run at a slightly higher temperature when the new fuel is added. The effect of a higher temperature is to lower the rate of fission, so that MSRs can tolerate more reactivity than strictly necessary. The same is true of most other reactor designs, but MSRs have a reputation for being especially good in this regard. From what I've heard, fission stops almost entirely (without using any shutdown rods/plates) if the temperature exceeds 800-900 celcius.
Informative but poor comparative example chosen to boost his design over that of some LFTR types
You mentioned Sodium cooled fast reactors, if only because of their metallurgy.
As I understand it, President Nixon cancelled the ORNL molten salt project, (which was costing only pennies), and instead he authorised huge sums of money to be spent on developing Sodium cooled reactors.
Where are these reactors today?
How many kilowatts of electricity do they put into the US grid?
So, am I right to say that in spite of being so well-funded, the Sodium Cooled reactors have been a colossal failure?
That was certainly the case with the French Superphenix reactor.
If MSR would have meant jobs in California then we would be powering our electric grid with MSR. Believe it or not that was the political reason the sodium breeder was preferred over the molten salt reactor.
>>>>> Audio starts at 2:08.
You didn't talk about what waste fuel is left over and what happens with it.
Geology 101......The science of igneous petrology looks like its being applied by physicists, engineers, and to design/develop miniature magma chambers that are molten salt nuclear reaction chambers in what geologist’s call a double diffusive fractionating magma (molten salt) chamber that works like a Carnot engine fueled by circulating fractionated concentrated radioactive isotopes U, Th, K in a low viscosity magma/molten salt chamber/reservoir that is bound/clad by a high viscosity reflective chamber surface that experiences periodic fluxuations in pressure and temperature near its threshold of brittle containment failure.
Dr. Scott is difficult to understand often. He either mumbles his words or there is some audio issue.
Thanks gor your spelling guys ibreally need it!!!
Sirs, of course the oatents has to be understiod and not copied. We dint want snybody to complain about it.
I read „table salt reactor“ haha!
The captioning sucks....
They should let us normal people invest if it will help
Canada? Has anyone told our gov't that you are doing this? #ClimateBarbie keeps harping on about wind and solar ffs
Great presentation. Hope it gets done
"Just weeks after its success in being selected as a winner in the UK government’s Advanced Modular Reactors competition, Moltex is delighted to announce that it has also been selected by New Brunswick Energy Solutions Corporation and New Brunswick Power to progress development of its SSR-W (Stable Salt Reactor - Wasteburner) technology in New Brunswick, with the aim of deploying its first SSR-W at the Point Lepreau nuclear reactor site before 2030."
www.moltexenergy.com/news/details.aspx?positionId=106
@@wwoods66 Good news! Thanks
Why base the future on renewals and nuclear? Why reduce the output of a nuclear plant when there is sun and wind and have double investments in different generators that are erratic and discontinuous . That is what France does at the moment and it gives no advantage in economics, reducing nuclear accident risk , nor barely any saving on operating cost of a NP. The future will be nuclear ALONE, only when solar has some economic advantage market wise (without subsidies) or has some power exchange possibilities with hydro it can be a useful addition. Perhaps p consumption day peaks can be compensated with solar in certain climates-but not in France and Germany. The price of investment in solar and wind is way to high and the technology has it own problems with pollution, large energy losses in transport, and discontinuity . The price of the fuel in a nuclear reactor and its availability is so great that the savings of fuel are negligible compared to the loss of capacity ,together with the double investment in other erratic and discontinuous generating principles. In the present political environment in Green dominated states like the USA and Europe, nuclear has to reduce output when solar and wind are available . That is a drain on the economics of nuclear. But nuclear is virtual CO2 free ,even better than solar and wind. Having the nuclear plant at halve its nominal production level at some of the time, makes no difference to its perceived "danger" or the "waste problem" of nuclear power. It is economical nonsense to fill the gaps in solar and wind production , nuclear should always be base-load and windmills may disappear in the history books as the biggest failure of our time. Electricity production should be 100% by nuclear fission of Th and U. It is the cheapest way for the next 2000 year at least. After that era, fusion can take over. Also the cheap conversion/production of synthetic gasoline ,diesel and methane from coal (or another carbon source like heavy oil or natural gas or even CO2 from the air ) and water ,can form the next develop target for the application of nuclear energy as industrial heat and electrical chemistry.
pretty much agreed, but I wouldn't put too much faith in fusion. even if it does turn out to be technically possible to engineer and build a machine that can reach net positive energy, all of the current front-runners (in terms of funding at least) would be massively expensive. As the likes of Moltex and Terrestrial are demonstrating, fission (using molten salts) doesn't really have any of the safety, long-lived waste, or capital cost disadvantages of solid-fuel and water-cooled legacy nuclear. The other much-touted fusion advantage is endless cheap fuel, but fuel-related cost was never the nuclear fission problem, it was and remains, capital cost. It's looking quite likely that laser ignition and tokamaks will be an order of magnitude more capital expensive than a molten salt reactor - MSRs are what fusion was always promised to be - and with a billion years worth of fuel scattered throughout the solar system. (small caveat for Focus Fusion which would be incredibly cheap if it can be made to work).
@@mjv1121 Also true if FRC or Polywell work. These would make it practical....advanced fuels....no neutrons
Oliver Mayo
Precisely we don’t have much room for error. We must transition to nuclear fission now.
@Oliver Mayo Right. There many things that may not happen. We should not limit our options. We should play an ideas numbers game until we find that silver bullet. We should educate ourselves a little. For example the Tokamak will likely not ever be competitive. But for the price of a Tokamak we can explore multiple fusion ideas, that IF they work, would make fusion that everyone would buy. So play policy maker for a minute. Fund an albatross that will eventually work....or fund five alternatives whose premise is Prectical fusion even if they are not guaranteed to work
@Oliver Mayo With this technology we just don't need fusion even if it is possible,.
Nuclear energy is the safest form of energy by far. Nothing equals the safety, nor the energy density.
Which is why coal goes to such lengths to quietly fund antinuclear groups and stir up irrational fear of all things nuclear, they know if allowed to compete on a level regulator playing field nuclear would quickly outperform and crush them.
your all made. its simple low prressure stuff. make the same one as years ago, get it working NOW. we hsvent got 10 more years.
$
Let us mor stop there, let us go after the big guys inventions about computers and pharmaceuticals. Nothing is impossible with our lord jesus christ so long as we are faithful and worship Him every single day. Do i hear resistance to a certain group of people now?
Why on god's green earth is this in my recommendation
Thry made their riches, our aimis to share new inventions toused,sbused forgotten, 86 people world wide, and it is not for sale ok?
Dr. Scott is hard to understand. If we could clean up his audio with a better microphone(s), some de-essing filters and perhaps a permanent sound engineer to travel with him, his clarity could be greatly improved.