Thorium Reactors: Why is this Technology Quite So Exciting
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- Опубликовано: 8 фев 2025
- Is thorium the key to safe, sustainable nuclear power? Explore its history, game-changing potential, and the global race to harness this abundant element in the quest for a cleaner future.
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I never met someone who is against nuclear power and who also knows how it works.
Yep, my concern isn't the power generation side of things, it's the waste. I know you can build reactors that process the waste products again, but the US doesn't, as far as I'm aware. I believe France is the only one currently doing so.
@@sinocte ONE MORE TIME FOR THE MORONS THAT CAN’T READ! THE ONLY REMAINING STORAGE ISSUES COME FROM STUPID PEOPLE WITH NO KNOWLEDGE THAT ARE EMOTIONALLY IRRATIONAL. OF THE SHUT THE HECK UP, EVERYTHING WOULD BE FINE!
the waste problem is a solved issue. For decades. The only reason it’s still a “problem” is because people are overly emotional.
@@UpperDarbyDetailing And simpsons lol
@@Nerdixy the Fallout series doesn’t help either honestly. People still think “nuclear waste” is glowing green goo that can leak out of steel barrels.
You clearly havent met many people. Scientific community is pretty polarised on this topic, mostly due the failures of failproof reactors.
I did an almost 200 page paper on Thorium as a nuclear fuel while in college, about 17 years ago now. My professor was a tree hugging regard and didn't want to even accept the paper. I had to file a dispute with my college and wait six months for the college to hand out a passing grade while refusing to acknowledge the professors bias.
Lots of problems in higher education in the US.
@@Scientist538 worldwide.
Wow, 6 months? I had a similar issue in University with a prof. Made a meeting with the college Dean, explained it to her face to face and left her my paper with her. I had an A within two weeks of my issue with the prof.
Just incredible. How these people get into positions to teach students is mind blowing...although, I suspect this professor is simply on contract and is dirt cheap for the University to hire.
wow, could you share this paper?
As someone who has been advocating for thorium fuel cycle reactors for well over 40 years, this is music to my ears. The MSRE reactor at Oak Ridge worked reliably for over 15000 hours. The only reason it was not developed further is that U235 reactors produce plutonium to make bombs and so most research was put into those.
Molten salt reactors are much safer as they can't melt down, they produce less high level waste and no enrichment of the fuel is necessary.
40 year's talking/thinking about thorium and and never ever build ...
@@jacobhavinga9402 I'm a Physicist in a different field - Astrophysics - so I've never been in a position to influence the nuclear policy of the UK.
@@atticushexcel9567 We have to put up with a lot of those on youtube.
Yes, from, my discoveries, I too thought it was a political decision.
Molten salt is solid at room temperature this creates a maintenance nightmare until it's warmed up it will clog a heat exchanger as well as pipes. It will require an enormous amount of input energy even before the reactor starts up. The ytuber ignored this issue. Sodium is very reactive compared to water with other elements this triggers the need for maintenance and/or special materials to reduce the need for maintenance. That would make the reactor much more expensive to make and maintain. The reactor at Oak Ridge is experimental. Cost effectiveness must factor in the design. Availability of thorium is just one piece of the puzzle.
Back in a day, Engin Arık, a Turkish particle physicist was exitedly talking about Thorium and its capabilities as an energy sources and how plentiful Turkey had it naturally. She died in plane crash with two students and three colleagues. Some says to this day it was an assasination and an investigation is still ongoing
homi j.bhabha too died in plane crash and it was definitely a assassination though the reason behind that was different.
I've heard similar stories from Iraqi's who were related to nuclear scientists that were assassinated by either Americans or Persians.
@@narcissus79Persians ehhh?
It WAS an assassination.
Mossad
Just tell the Military they can use a shipping container sized 100MW thorium reactor to power laser weapons on their bases and they'll be ubiquitous in 5 years.
Its sad how accurate this is 😅
Best way to take down drones.
The larger ships can have them too...
I feel like powering the Navy's ship-based lasers or rail guns is probably all the military support you'd need to get your final approval. Especially when you consider the benefits of eliminating one of the worlds largest consumers of petroleum fuel in the form of marine diesel fuel.
Just one of those 100MW shipping container sized reactors could power an Arleigh Burke Destroyer in it's current configuration, and then some. That leaves plenty of space to cram whatever next generation weapon system you come up with into the belly of the ship where your old Gas Turbine Engines and Generators were taking up space.
There's your selling point to the military, right there.
You can’t fit a 100mw gas plant in a shipping container let alone a reactor. They require an entire water cycle that would take more space than any marine engine.
i mean with the research in Directed energy weapons as air defense may make this far more likely than you're joking.
10:13
The waste is significantly more radioactive, but that's actually what you want.
because of half-lives, you want waste that is very hot so that it decays away very quickly, you don't want very stable stuff that's slightly radioactive for 10,000 years
Well, a lot depends on whether they are able to handle that very radioactive material; high level radiation is also known to do harm to machines. So whatever mechanisms they would have to move fuel rods or whatever, it might need some serious design improvements.
right! People don't understand that the big problem of nuclear waste is not the highly radioactive material but the lower level stuff...in large quantity...radioactive for 10,000, 40,000, 100,000 year
@@wyldhowl2821 If you could have it hot/radioactive as hell for 30 or 100 years and in that time period have it decay to nothing...that is what you want
That is afaik also the thing with waste from fusion reactors. For one, you don't have much stuff that radiates on its own, but you have the little bit that is in there irradiate the reactor components. And then, the stuff is so active, it will be mostly down to normal when stored for a few decades in some old underground salt mine, of course separated enough to not re-irradiate each other.
@@wyldhowl2821 In Uranium Fuel cycle you get the splitting products (up to 30 years half live) and the Trans-Uranics (10000 years half live). With Thorium you do not get the Trans-Uranics, so your waste is just the short lived splits.
That is why 1. the stuff is more active per kg, and 2. needs storage for 3 centuries at most.
We already have the machinery to handle the split products.
Clean Core Thorium Energy (US based) is working with Canadian Nuclear Labs to test and certify Thorium based fuel rods for existing CANDU reactors. If it passes validation, Canada may be the first country to actively generate power with Thorium in a commercial setting this century, without a new reactor design.
Not surprised they're doing with CANDU reactors, they're the safest, most reliable design of nuclear plant in the world (not the most efficient, but my uncle who worked at the Pickering Nuclear plant says he wouldn't want any other plant in the world in his community as their safety and reliability design is second to none). Every CANDU sold to other nations also have flawless safety records with no serious issues once in their long history.
China claimed to be building one a couple of years ago. They also just completed a pebble type reactor that is also a step forward in itself. But a Swiss company is working on a modular product with mass production of modular reactors as the goal. Would love to see it. Imagine local reactors to reduce transmission losses on top of the other thorium based benefits.. finally a safe green power solution. I hope they all work out.
Which company? @@simondymond8479
@@simondymond8479sounds almost too good to be true. But I hope it works out. How dangerous are they if attacked?
@@simondymond8479 claimed is the pertinent word. Communists make a lot of wild claims that are usually proven years later to be untrue.
Thanks!
I love that the Indian Point 1 reactor had an initial thorium core. It was replaced in core 2 with low enriched uranium purely because the uranium core was more ecnomical.
No. That was always the plan. Thorium is no fissile. It needs to be converted to Uranium 233 by absorbing a neutron so it can create a self perpetuating breeder reaction with Thorium fertile material and Uranium 233 fissile material. However to kick start this Uranium is required to kickstart production of Uranium 233 and stockpile it.
@@pisquared1827 And U-233 can be used to make weapons.
@@markrobinowitz8473
Yes, but the fissile U233 can be tracked during transport or in weapons from their U232 gamma ray emissions from space, and it is lethal if handled, so proliferation is impossible without being detected, and terrorists cannot steal it without dying very quickly. What is it you do not understand about that?
@@markrobinowitz8473
Again, NO! Why do you think everyone went for Plutonium 239 based nuclear weapons? U233 is a really bad nuclear weapons material - U233 needs to be bred from a fertile material like Pu239 (from Th232 instead of U238), so it is an artificial element. However mined Thorium has a small proportion of Th231 in it which is difficult to separate out. The small proportion of Th231 when irradiated in the breeder reactor creates a small amount of U232 which is highly radioactive and emits strong gamma ray emissions, but because it is strongly radioactive, its half life is only 69 years, which means radioactive waste from the Thorium cycle returns to background levels after about 300 years or so, compared with 450,000 years half life for Uranium cycle waste ( and about 1 million years to return to background radiation levels). This is what is really good about the Thorium cycle in terms of the environment.
As far as weapons are concerned, the small amount of strongly gamma emitting, harmful to human exposure due to the small amount of difficult to separate U232 in the U233 fuel produced makes it difficult to steal or reprocess the U233 fuel rods because anybody handling the rods without heavy shielding and mechanical handling systems will die very quickly, anybody who might manage to smuggle out these fuel rods for weapons or other illicit use will find it impossible to hide these because the Gamma ray radiation will make it easy to locate and track the materials from satellites or drones. It is also a really bad material for nuclear weapons because it can be tracked easily by drones or satellite, and the Gamma ray radiation also exposes the operators and electronics within weapons systems to radiation damage. Gamma rays also interferes with the operation of electronics.
Basically, If you want to spread use of safe nuclear power with environmentally friendly spent fuel waste, and do not want nuclear proliferation, the sale of Thorium breeder reactors with U233 fuel rods, and a system of fuel reprocessing and waste management associated with the Thorium/U233 cycle is the best way to achieve that.
India didn't get enough credit for this.
The first commercial nuclear reactor in the USA was at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, and it had a thorium-blanketed core that bred more fuel than it consumed- and it was a conventional PWR! No molten salt needed. It would be a cool topic for a Megaprojects viseo for sure.
Yup,
Dresden first, then Shippingport, then Rowe.
I tried to get a closer look at Rowe but even though it's completely dismantled security is tight.
Even more interesting since it was basically a standard Navy reactor with the the third core having thorium. First two used uranium isotopes in the blanket.
Adm Rickover was the one behind using thorium in the Shippingport reactor.
Australian government against it ,but buying nuclear submarines, that's our sharp polies at work ,what hope have we got
Actually, shippingport started with uranium and ran that way for years. Core load 3 was the thorium experimental core. Note that I consider Shippingport as a "experimental" reactor as it was not designed as a pure commercial power plant.
In the meantime I believe that the USA built 3 commercial thorium cycle power plants and had them online before Shippingport core load 3.
He missed big time on the history of commercial thorium cycle power plant reactors (5 were built). It did not work out as it cost a lot more to covert thorium ore into reactor fuel than it cost to convert uranium fuel into modestly enriched reactor fuel. I have posted a long post with a lot of details as a main response.
You totally overlooked the light water breaded reactor created by replacing the core of the Shippingport reactor with a Thorium cycle core near Pittsburgh in the 1970s. It was constructed, tested, and put into power production. It generated approximately the same amount of power 60MW as the older core it replaced. The plant ran for several years supplying power to the grid before the core was dissected and analyzed to confirm there was more fissile material in the core than when it was put into service. Given the constraints of retrofitting this core into what was already an obsolete 1950’s vintage reactor this was a very successful demonstration which was largely carried out on time and on budget.
Shippingport demonstrated without question that breeding is possible in the thermal spectrum, which is a major advantage since it needs only a tiny fraction of the fissile to start a reactor. Processing thorium in solid oxide fuel is very difficult, but relatively easy in the fluoride form used in molten salt breeders.
Was the reactor deep fried before it was installed?
To be honest this is one of the worst researched vid I've seen Simon deliver - it feels like it was written about 6 years ago (as that's how out of date a lot of the info is).
@@ferky123. Yes, lightly breaded and deep fried!
Reagan shut it down I, believe just because it was built by Carter
To think of the years we wasted...glad to see the push is now on for Thorium reactors.
Every time i see a thorium video, i smell bull s**t. It just feels like massive overhype with the people supporting it thinking that nuclear energy is just about putting spicy rocks into water and having the turbine spin.
It doesnt help that the one time i met a dude with a doctorate in nuclear engineering and asked him about the subject he basically laughed me out of the room.
@@balinthehater8205 Like it or not, that is the direction (molten-salt reactors) the world is now moving in. Japan, China, Denmark, UK, US, India, etc... I'd be rich if I had a penny for every time an "expert" laughed at something...then was proven 100% wrong. Thanks to the demand for power from AI data centers, EVs, etc...we have no choice but to go nuclear, and molten-salt reactors are now the obvious choice.
"Political and technical hurdles may have largely sidelined thorium fuel and molten-salt-reactor research for the last five decades, but both are definitely back on the drawing table." - IEE Spectrum
1000 years goes by faster than you think.
- William the Conquerer
You're some 40 years early with this comment ;)
@@noinfo5630 yeah but it's still wild that that was said almost 1000 years ago.
He definitely never said that.
@@seaneasthamdon’t be a party pooper
@@seaneastham ”Anyone who claims I didn’t say that is dead wrong.”
- William the Conqueror
7:33 *Looks like Thorium is back on the menu boys!!”
Dana Durnford's Nuclear for Dummies sez it's just a never ever ending, self perpetuating disease factory from hell, causing all known diseases or all 10,000 of them just to boil a kettle.
@@FoxWolfWorld What about their control rods? They don't need those!
That’s the comment I came looking for
@@Gilgwathir Yes control rods are still used, I think to slow neutrons so they'll react with the Thorium and U-233 elements in the salt and not just wizz out of the reactor core. I think most designs raise them into the core rather than lower them such that if power is lost they fall and the reactions slow on their own.
@@smallduck1001001 exactly the opposite: they're lowered into the core, so that in case of power outage they can just be released and "fall in" by gravity.
Also (iirc) thorium reactors (or more specific, the mentioned French (Super)Phénix) are/were fast breeders. Meaning there should not be much moderation to NOT slow down the neutrons too much (hence "fast").
I have been a proponent of thorium energy since I first read about its apparent potential, several decades ago. The fact that it doesn't support the construction of nuclear weaponry seems the biggest benefit to me. The greater abundance of thorium, promise of a large reduction in nuclear waste and an intrinsically safe nuclear reaction are the frosting and garnishes that top the cake. Very well crafted and informative video!
Proliferation (along with cost of mining virgin uranium) is why the US and UK stopped commercial spent fuel reprocessing, and why France only does so once into unrecyclable MOX Fuel. Turns out it's the fastest way to get weapons-grade material, which India demonstrated with one of its earliest warheads made from recycled fuel.
The global availability of thorium is likely one of the reasons it isn't being used. The status quo needs a fuel that the supply can be controlled for profit and political control.
And as yet *another* nice bonus to thorium, that I didn't hear Simon mention, while you can't really make nuclear bombs out of the remnants, you *do* still get the radioactive isotopes that are used in nuclear medicine.
I generally agree except this is not a very well crafted video: as is typical for this Whistler ignoramus, it also contains sloppy misinformation, e.g. his claim at 7:30 that the French SuperPhénix was a Thorium reactor, whereas it was in fact a sodium-cooled fast-breeder of plutonium fuel: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superphénix
@@foobarrel9046 I did not know that but looked at the wikipedia article you referenced. Thank you for the information!
No kaboom? No funding
I live in the small town of Kollam, South of India. It is only a half an hour drive to Karunagappally which has one of the largest natural deposits of Monazite. We can literally walk on beaches with this black sand. This place also has one of the highest recorded background radiation. The people native to the coastal areas seem to have acquired a sort of resistance to this background radiation since their ancestors have lived in these areas for generations.
The people inhabiting coastal Southern India haven't acquired 'resistance' to the increased background radiation. Your perspective is informed by the Linear No Threshold dosing model which has been shown to be complete bunkum. Instead, google the 'Hormesis' model for radiation dosing (e.g. Google "Radiation Hormesis vs LNT"). In other words a 'little bit' of radiation is actually good for your body health because it activates your DNA repair mechanisms in a similar way that an 'adjuvant' provokes and improves the body's response to a vaccine. The human body can tolerate up to 100mSv per year before red blood cells start showing signs of deformation. This is the first hint that the body's DNA repair mechanisms are no longer keeping up with the rate of DNA strand breakages caused by incident ionising radiation. And therefore this is the *real* threshold or first indicator of an increased cancer risk at this sustained dosage level.
According to Google pointing to a 2009 NIH PubMed paper, "Background radiation and cancer incidence in Kerala, India-Karanagappally cohort study", the upper limit of background radiation dose in Karunagappally is 70mSv/year. The research paper found no correlation of increased leukaemia risk caused by high background radiation among the population.
As a passionate Thorium Energy Cycle evangelist this region is on my 'bucket list' of places to visit.
Am I right in thinking that December-January is the nicest time of the year to visit Kerala? I.e. this time of year is when it's 'least hot' and 'least humid'?
I'd love to walk the beaches, pocket geiger counter in hand, and scoop up 500g of this 'hot' monazite sand and try and bring it back to New Zealand 🤓. But I suspect it would fritz and freak out the airport security X-Ray scanning machines! 🤣
No resistance, but health problems.
The people inhabiting coastal Southern India haven't acquired 'resistance' to the increased background radiation. Your perspective is informed by the Linear No Threshold dosing model which has been shown to be a very 'shady conclusion' from disputed experiment construction. Instead, lookup the 'Hormesis' model for radiation dosing (e.g. "Radiation Hormesis vs LNT"). In other words a 'little bit' of radiation is actually good for your body health because it activates your DNA repair mechanisms in a similar way that an 'adjuvant' provokes and improves the body's response to a vaccine. The human body can tolerate up to 100mSv per year before red blood cells start showing signs of deformation. This is the first hint that the body's DNA repair mechanisms are no longer keeping up with the rate of DNA strand breakages caused by incident ionising radiation. And therefore this is the real threshold or first indicator of an increased cancer risk at this sustained dosage level.
Look up a 2009 NIH PubMed paper, "Background radiation and cancer incidence in Kerala, India-Karanagappally cohort study", the upper limit of background radiation dose in Karunagappally is 70mSv/year. The research paper found no correlation of increased leukaemia risk caused by high background radiation among the population.
As a passionate Thorium Energy Cycle evangelist, this region is on my 'bucket list' of places to visit.
Am I right in thinking that December-January is the nicest time of the year to visit Kerala? I.e. this time of year is when it's 'least hot' and 'least humid'?
The resistance part sounds implausible to me. The human body is amazing but developing resistance to radiation is beyond its capability (same as, say, the capacity to fly)
According to your logic if people in a family are getting shot by bullets many times and this continues to many generations, the next generation kids should be born bulletproof
The US has mass piles of known thorium 'ore' available. It was found often where Uranium was found and mined, so much of the 'overburden' was Thorium 'ore' and was just put into mass piles ready to be 're-mined' without having to 'dig' much.
Funny that isn't it....
@stevenewsome427 yes haha 😄 😊
I 'find' your copious 'use' of single-quotes 'disturbing.'
@@syntaxusdogmata3333 ThEn I wILl TrY An0ThEr TeChNiQuE
Correct. Thorium is more waste than useful, which is why it has a negative "price".
One of the great benefits of Thorium Molten Salt reactors is their operating Temp/Pressure regime. Compared to Uranium reactors they operate at high temperature and low pressure, which is ideal for high thermal efficiency and low construction costs (+higher safety). Uranium PWR reactors operate in exactly the wrong operating range for high efficiency and low cost
Dumb & unobtainable: Corrosion destroys reactor plumbing. Salt caking breaks off in chunks, hits the circulation pump & damages it. All of the previous MSR reactors were fueled with Uranium & not thorium & there were also molten sodium reactors fueled with Uranium. The Sodium reactors were never economical. France, Japan ended there Sodium reactors because of high maintaince & high operating costs. MSR would be much worse.
@@guytech7310 cry
@@guytech7310 I've also heard that corrosion is a problem, but that's an engineering problem, not a physics problem.
@@guytech7310 Yes - You are so right. It's like the original Henry Ford Quadricycle. This thing had a lot of bugs if you look at a picture of it today. SInce, Ford didn't immediately create a Mustang, he should have given up. Ever see the Wright Brothers plane at Kitty Hawk? They should have given up! Don't try! Men can't learn from their mistakes. Designs can never be improved. Problems can never be solved.
@@daniellarson3068 OK smart donkey, Ford didn't invent cars, he figured out a way to mass produce them.
Thorium is a solution to a problem no one asked to be solved. Its like asking some to amputate a health hand just to prove its possible.
Decades spent on building & operating breeder reactors, and they all turned out be failures, and cost billions more to clean up & decommission. Doing the same thing over & over & expecting different results is just plain stu pid.
India is also doing some valuable research in the field of thorium based nuclear energy. KAMINI is the name of the reactor in which thorium is used as nuclear fuel.
I was hoping you would address emerging technologies that could handle the propensity for corrosion in molten salt heat exchangers. It was my understanding that corrosion was one of the biggest hurdles for adopting this fuel sournce.
Yep. The test reactors used fluoride salts. Super duper corrosive. There have been a lot of strides made in materials science since the late '60's.
There is a good bbc or video , how they solved it but it cost goes up.
The major corrosion issue is if water gets into the chain. Molten salts by themselves are not terrible. Add any amount of water and they become terrible.
@@onenote6619Thank god water is rare, it’s not like it’s falling from the sky…
@stefanwerner5799 Yeah, because thorium reactors are totally open pits that frequently get rained on.
Can I just say I LOVE how you present this content? The music is so up beat and happy. Almost techo-y
I do want to say i have really enjoyed and appreciated your content over probably the last year or so since i found your channels, so thank you fr
I remember my dad bringing me to a power engineering conference before I actually became a power engineer (Canadian term for boiler operator). One of the presentations was on Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LiFTR). My 19-year-old brain exploded... not by the technical breakdown of how it all worked, but simply the fact that it was already in development and got canned because it was too expensive/underdeveloped and you couldn't make bombs with the byproducts. Liquid fuel, held in-place by a plug that opens when it loses power - which has a negative reactivity coefficient - and is a SALT. A containment breach means the gases made by the fissile material would react with the air and crystallize on the nearest hard surface, nearly-eliminating a radioactive fallout scenario. The benefits outweighed the costs, to me back then, and they still do. I'm glad to hear it's still being studied and I hope to see it implemented in my lifetime.
Sam’Nella Academy has a funny explanation of the science of a thorium reactor. Plus the animations are insanely high end!
i will always remember Sam pushing the thorium if it got rowdy
Unfortunately his video was riddled with technical errors. I watched it and I'm a nuclear reactor designer, and it was pretty bad.
insanely high end
some of the best animation in the industry
He is actually the best expert in the field.
@@whatisnuclear I mean, for the most part he's a layman trying to explain it in layman's terms. Of course it'll be technically incorrect, but the general idea is worth putting out there. Because once people know, they'll look at videos like THIS and see _actually_ how thorium works, making them understand better the process. Sam's video was primarily just to inform people it exists.
Great to see Kirk Sorenson get credit.
He rescued this technology from the burn bin. And, it's just what we need to move asteroids out of the way.
hes a great guy we owe a lot to him
I'm glad people are talking about thorium again. It was about 10 years ago when I looked into it and was excited about the potential.
Sam O’Nella vibrating in the back
That was my very first thought
I wrote an essay in highschool 15 years ago about the viability of thorium nuclear power. I cant believe people took this long to even consider it. It's been possible for decades.
In Sydney Australia we have had a nuclear hospital for 50 years already ,don't listen to Greata
It has been known about since WW2 back in the 1950’s. My Dad worked in a nuclear reactor. They rejected Thorium because it was, at that time, technically difficult to achieve. Also, it was wanted for NUCLEAR WEAPONS!!!!! Dad left his job because he realised this and he became a peace activist. He went on the first anti-nuclear march from London to Aldermaston.
You missed that 5 commercial sized thorium nuclear power plants were built in the 1960's - 1980's. Its not that some of the designs did not work (they worked quite well). Its that it turns out that the cost to convert thorium ore into reactor fuel was (and to my knowledge still is) much more costly than to convert uranium ore into modestly enriched reactor fuel. Economics alone killed thorium.
We have proven core designs for BWR and PWR reactors and about 80% of the worlds nuclear power plants would likely be running on thorium cycle cores today if it was more economical. No one in any country is doing that - or even talking of doing that.
See my long post under the main heading for more details.
That’s awesome.
Thank you for sharing
A lot of existing mine tailings is considered "contaminated" by thorium; few have ever considered extracting it from such tailings on purpose.
This is esspecially the case around Rare Earth Mineral mines. Many were closed because of all the pesky Thorium contaminating them. This is one of the reasons China is a big supplier. Not worried of radioactive tailings.
Until practical Thorium reactors are developed, the demand for Thorium is extremely low so it is largely just a waste product. But just remember, at one point oil was considered to be nearly useless too.
thorium is minimal, compared to nuke..theres a mountain of radio active rock, in BC. right by the h/way..4 ft from road..
They will. For the USA, there is almost no deed to actually MINE for thorium, what with all those tailings. They don't even need to process it. Just run it though the "breeding" jacket on the reactor. There is a CERTAINTY that such recycling will happen.. For disposed of U-235, we can get 100X the energy out of the spent rods as the LWR and PWR reactors ever got out of it. Which means that one year's worth of nuclear waster can give us 100 years of power from the exact same rods.
@@rodh1404 Also Uranium, "useless brown stuff" next to the then coveted Radium for its glow in the dark paint application...
And here in the UK we just hope the wind blows at a constant rate and the sun shines but not too intensely.
We'll wait for someone else to produce it, then let them build power plants that fund their country like we do with nuclear power and France.
Roughly the same plan Germany has...
This is what happens when we let greta thunberg types tell us what we can do.
@@jimjackson4256Ok, simple-explanation person …
Ah! Is THAT why you keep throwing good money after bad, desperately trying to get Hinkley Point C working?
Homi Bhabha might be the dopest name ever given
Dude was a pretty chill guy. Brothers would have loved to have him over at their crib
I’ve always been a fan of Bhabha Scattering
Nuclear waste if properly managed is very very safe, properly more safe then any other form of waste. People are too scared of Nuclear waste for the wrong reasons. Plenty of real research to back me up
Hard to trust that it will always be properly managed. Given our history it's probably likely to be mismanaged
@@davidcroslin5753identical to storage for a single day.
@@Banks4004it doesn’t need to “always” be properly managed, just when it’s first stored. After that it could sit in your yard and the background radiation would be lower than it is NYC’s Central Park.
We have the ability to recycle a majority of the waste that Nuclear Power creates. It’s just a matter of developing the infrastructure along side of newer plant technology. Such waste could be used for things like cancer fighting drugs and other industrial products. Over 90% of the waste can be recycled and yet we’re still dealing with the legacy attitude of ‘Nuclear Bad’.
Dumping something for someone else to deal with in the future is small minded and ignorant
1:30 - Chapter 1 - The principle ; the technology
7:55 - Chapter 2 - Substantial advantages
13:00 - Chapter 3 - A coming energy revolution ?
The coming thorium revolution is coming whether the US government wants to take part or not. It is happening in numerous other countries. We may have to have industrial plants buy their own LFTRs from Copenhagen Atomics in order to have any thorium reactors in the USA. And I imagine the government will block such purchases as long as they can. LFTRs can be downsized to meet small community needs. And Copenhagen Atomics is literally planning to make LFTRs on an assembly line, reducing the reactor costs by HUGE amounts.
I remember talking molten salt and thorium reactors with the smart kid in my elementary school 20 years ago haha.
We will be still talking about them in 20 years.....then we might start seeing them
@@bradmodd7856 No, we won't. Except that they are need to produce more fissile Uranium 233 for nuclear warheads - and do that cheaper than "traditional" reactors. Which they don't.
Slow and steady is the way for anything Nuclear.
I live about 10 miles from the DOE’s (currently) newest reactor, the FFTF. This facility has been slated off and on for decommissioning over the last 2 decades, but absolutely needs to be brought back on line as a burner reactor, or to produce very short-lived isotopes for medical use. There’s so much potential, just sitting here in our shrubby desert in eastern Washington. I’m hopeful that enough time has passed since the “demonization” of nuclear power of the late 70s that something might finally be done.
RIP FFTF 1980-1992 and ???
*laughs in sad german nuclear reactor supporter*
So much whining about the evil of nuclear reactors and now the GREEN PARTY prefers leaving coal reactors online over even considering doing ANYTHING with nuclear....
To be fair they failed at pretty much all their talking points once those came into contact with reality but still...
Ditch the Isotopes for medicine. All it does increase the risks of cancer & other autoimmune diseases. Cut Carbs, Sugar & consumption of processed foods loaded with chemicals.
yes scientific ignorance has always been a major problem and it gets worse every decade .
Very easy to get the ignorant in a state of emotional panic over stuff they do not understand , the Chicken Little / sky is falling syndrome .
@@Rovert_0987 I wouldn't just chalk it up to scientific ignorance. There's nuclear waste to deal with. You have to store that on site, and pay people for the next 10,000 years to protect it. So no company is going to step in to run them, unless they cut corners and pollute the area. No state is going to green light a trip to Yucca on their roads; the results of an accident or terrorist attack are too high.
Your children, if you had any, stand a significantly higher chance of dying from leukemia. The Germans shut down their reactors for a reason, even their engineering and procedural rigor running their fission nuke plants was not enough for them to avoid them measuring significantly higher childhood leukemia for many miles around, despite NO MEASURABLE LEAKS. (Thorium is a total scam when it comes to its occupational environmental safety: it produces only slightly less toxic waste than "normal" fission nukes, the waste still is mortally dangerous cancer causing ionizing radiation-producing in quantities too small to measure, and while 20% breaks down more quickly than uranium fission waste, THE REST remains toxic for MILLENIA, AND it has the added danger and cost of the fuel creation process which converts thorium ore into the unstable isotopes actually used in the reactor, and that process in itself is so dangerous that humans can't do it, it has to be done completely robotically. The only advantage is some third world countries like India have reserves of the ore, unlike uranium ore, which is largely in South Africa, the US, and Australia. It's actually a lie to call these "thorium" reactors, as the fuel actually used is a highly toxic and unstable nucleotide very similar in many way to enriched uranium.
Thanks very much Simon. This tech has been ABSURDLY ignored by all the "clean energy" crowd. Its properties are Ideal and the arguments against it focus mainly on the need to spend a few tens of billions to get this off the ground... and absurd pittance given the benefits.
The corrosion issue looks to be mainly solved with special alloys and working with a more purified fuel. (Certainly cheaper than multiple centrifuge treatments required for Uranium).
When I hear "experts" claim its a problem and then ignore latest solutions and even conflate solid fuel thorium reactors with liquid salt, I smell the stench of lobbyists.
So again. A sincere Thank You.
They ignore it because they can’t make money off of it.
@@markmeador nonsense
The main issue is it isn't yet commercially available whereas cheap renewables are.
@@GregQchi But its not a this or that scenario. Renewables do not work all the time. Sun doesn't always shine. The wind doesn't always blow and batteries can't fill in the gap. They can do a couple of hours interruption but not 8 hours a night and the wind can be unpredictable.
So as a Base load - you need something that always works to fill in the gaps.
LFTRs are perfect for this. They can also be brought to the moon for those mining exeditions for water.
$50 billion and 15 years would get us there (this is NOT fusion and vastly superior to existing reactors). You can have one running a Carnival Cruise liner... no chance of a nuclear disaster even if it sunk in a fishery. No race to unload the bunker fuel before it polluted the region.
So it would work in Conjunction with renewables as the clean safe affordable Base load. Many pundits keep harping on the "fact" that it would take years and gobs of cash to get there. It would take a little $50 billion vs all the hundreds of billions pumped into Solar and Wind in the form of rebates, etc. 15 years is the new 150? No. It wouldn't take long and wouldn't take alot to get it done.
The payoff would be a new nuclear navy with completely safe (and somewhat more compact) reactors... so that even destroyers could be nuclear powered and remove a Major logistical problem.
The potential is Massive. The down side is trivial.
@@avgjoe5969 constructing wind farms on the ocean is not only cheaper but it's safe... completely safe. How about somebody build a Tesla coil and we actually get that s*** working... Free power for all, broadcast through the air. Hello? Is this thing on?
The hate against nuclear needs to stop.
It's fear rather than hate
@JustAnotherAccount8 Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.
While renewable energy is getting more efficient every year nuclear is still dumb
IKR
@@slyfoxcoffee9642 All mechanisms to harness "renewables" are built using fossil fuels, a finite resource. We need to generate far more power than what renewables will be able to produce in order to bridge the gap to sustainable next gen power before fossil fuels are exhausted. If we are lucky and are able to make the jump to next gen, then we have enough power to create elements from scratch and resource scarcity becomes less of a problem.
Its so inspiring to see that the kids that grew up watching sam o'nella where so inspired by his work
Been waiting to see this get traction for so many years.
This is a well researched and correct evaluation of Thorium reactors.
The only thing he missed is that the plutonium produced is super useful as fuel in RTGs to power long range space probes and big rovers.
100MWh in something the size of a shipping container is INSANE. That's hundreds, possibly thousands of homes powered by something that could damn near fit in my driveway. You could scatter those bastards like jacks just about anywhere and have entire cities powered by a system with numerous inherent redundancies that could kick in and pick up the slack should one or more go offline for some reason.
And it doesn't go boom. It literally CANNOT go boom. Thorium has a very narrow range of temperatures where its at peak reactivity. If it gets too hot, the reactivity of the fuel salts goes down; fewer reactions means less heat, meaning it cools itself down. I repeat: IT COOLS ITSELF. If, by some malignant miracle, you end up WITH an emergency scenario, a freeze plug you can cool with a simple fan can melt and dump the fuel into a wide, flat storage container so it doesn't react.
Thorium is fucking COOL. The fact we decided against safely, cleanly powering our country and, instead, wasted our time developing a bunch of useless garbage bombs that just sit around in silos doing absolutely god damned NOTHING fills me with disgust. We've got another shot. Don't screw it up again. Don't listen to the hippies and the uneducated and the uneducated hippies. Let us get. This. Show. On. The. ROAD, ALREADY!
@@Hagunemnon excuse me, radioactive fission happens independent of temperature.
I agree with everything you have written here.
That is just the nuclear reactor. It needs to be connected to a half a city block sized power plant with a control room, and put into a containment building, to make any electricity.
You would be amazed at how small a 1GW+ sized nuclear reactor is. But you would be stunned at how large the rest of the power plant is.
Hey if someone can produce multiple working rectors that can be proven to work as advertised, on their own coin, then wonderful. Cost plus energy creeps need not apply. We know how that works. Gov money is tax and should not be used to develop technology, cuz the gov sucks at it.
@@highbrass7563:
You agree that 100 MW = 100MWh?
That is senseless. Did you even watch the video or see the shipping container?
nice to see different people making videos on Thorium.
I remember almost a decade ago when I first heard it brought up as a futuristic power source, and I do love me some nuclear power.
i've worked at oakridge plant in the 80s & 90s and they don't really care about anything unless they can make it go "Boom" in a spectacular way. or make a bye product that goes Boom in a spectacular way.
Did you work with the Oak Ridge Boys? Were they good co-workers?
@@KippinCollars i worked there as a contractor building research facility's yes they were good people to work for the scientist where kinda weird
At about 7:00 he glosses over the real reason, imo, that uranium gained credence over thorium: the by-products can be used in nuclear warheads. Nixon decided to defund Oak Ridge primarily for that reason. I think a concerted AI-aided development cycle for thorium reactors is more than warranted.
Nixon? You mean Congress
This is what Th fanboys always say, but it is really BS. Virtually all of the Pu239 created in the US for weapons came from dedicated MILITARY reactors at Hanford and Savannah River, NOT from commercial reactors. The reason the EBR-II project continued and MSRE project didn't is all about maturity of the Tech. The EBR-II was simply much farther along demonstrating it's feasibility than the MSR and if you're cutting budgets and can only afford to continue with one, the one that's closer gets the money....simple as that.
In the international community it looks much less “evil” if you make nuclear weapons out of the natural byproducts of your power grid. I mean, the plutonium is RIGHT THERE, might as well use it, amiright?
With Thorium reactors, you’re forced to build facilities _specifically_ dedicated to manufacturing the resources needed for your weapons. And that makes you look “evil,” even if it’s a necessity in today’s world to ensure that MAD can remain relevant. Politics are bizarre.
@@OneBiasedOpinion The "facilities" required for Pu extraction tend to be much easier to detect (i.e. a PUREX plant). For a Th MSR, you can tap directly into the Neutron poison removal circuit to remove Pa233 and all you need to build is a shielded tank and wait (some designs include that tap as default). It is arguably much easier to slowly collect a small amount of material undetected in this way vs. the Pu239 extraction route which yields more material faster. So the question becomes which is more dangerous 1) states we know are building nukes that build a comparatively large number, or 2) states which can build a small number clandestinely.
Real reason is money, Thorium is not going to replace traditional PWR is its more expensive. sorry.
Really glad to see you bringing this to the masses, big fan of thorium and Kirk Sorenson. The more people that follow the progress and show interest the better.
Sam O'Nella academy was truly a trail blazer
Very nice summary of a snail paced technology improvement
At least it is more promising than fusion. It actually works.
Commenting for the algorithm. Been trying to spread the benefits of thorium reactors for 2 years now. I love it.
Great job, been hoping they become more popular for years
What materials are used for pipes and pumps that will be in contact with the molten fluoride salt?
i'm old enough to remember hearing about Thorium batteries and reactors 20 years ago and wondering,"wtf?! why arent they everywhere?"
It's a wee bit disturbing/odd that people are only now paying attention to thorium. Many of us have been vocally advocating for molten salt thorium reactors for a long time. Hell, we've even managed to get some congress-critters onboard and have addressed both the House and Senate.
It's pretty well-accepted that thorium was no longer given any research dollars (back in the fifties) because we wanted the waste from uranium in order to make weapons.
We've got plenty of them. It's time for thorium now. It has been time for thorium for *decades*.
The AEC only understands LWR. Until they learn LIFTERs, the industry in the US is screwed.
Governments won't do it because it 'costs too much', and they are only ever concerned with re-election.
If it might tank the economy even just a bit, then it's a nono for politicians.
Because up to this point?
Its a method that has shown itself to be technically really hard to control and economically so expensive it will not have industrial viability any time soon.
Two test reactors 50 years ago neither of which ran for more that two years.
And now one chinese project that stays very tight-lipped - and one japanese one that was stopped after hardly a year for the same problems - and one indian one that has recently been postponed for the fourth time.
We have no idea if this ever gets cheap enough to get scaleable. It doesnt look too good.
In the end all youtuber tech enthusiasm is worthless when capital cant project a profit.
The times where states pumped billions of taxpayermoney into fission plants no matter the cost of the produced electricty? Are finallycoming to an end.
@@FischerNilsA Expensive? It's the political will and the lack of weaponisation of by products that is the problem. If thorium had a fraction of the hundreds of billions that fission has had thrown at it, we would all be thorium powered, now and forever. And profit? Keep profit for the entrepreneurs who make nice phones and vacuum cleaners. A staple necessity like energy production, which is actually a matter of national security, should always be run by the state, for the people. Why the fuck should your and mines essential needs make some random fucker, who didn't invent the shit, into a multi millionaire?
@FischerNilsA Your talking about fusion right? Thorium threatens the status quo nuke industry as well as fusion research dollars.
Sam o'nella told me this first
Great to hear this technology being championed!
Simon always on the ball with relevant topics. Love the work yall do.
The Protactinium problem is the major obstacle here. The Thorium fuel cycle produces this first which must be allowed to decay to U-233 in isolation for several weeks. It must be quickly extracted from the reaction chamber before it can absorb a neutron itself (which it is VERY fond of doing) and starting a very nasty decay chain of its own. So the hurdle here is chemistry based - quickly separating the Pa-233 from the thorium salt, isolating it from neutron radiation for several weeks, then separating the U-233 from the decaying Pa-233 and re-injecting it into the reaction chamber to be burned.
that makes sense as without that step the molten salt reactor would become a ticking bomb
Cheap, almost free energy? Well we can’t have that.
-US Government, probably
Best I've seen yet on this subject. It is impossible to cram all the information of the subject into 20 minutes, but this hits every major and important point quite well. Bravo
There are a number of tangential subjects that make the impact even better. For example, we largely do not recycle materials because that is an energy intensive process that often makes the resulting product more expensive than non-recycled sources. This could easily change that problem, because despite the point that current expenses make the development quite expensive, it should be underlined that this is only because it is in a development phase. Those expenses evaporate as the technology matures, meaning that the cost per megawatt of electricity drops way, way below what it costs by all other methods of production.
Another point is about gasoline. We still have an appetite for liquid fuels. We've known how to make gasoline and related products from water for a long time. The problem has always been that the energy input required to do it at scale would produce gasoline at some $20 a gallon (that's a guess, it could be higher). It so happens that the temperature at which these reactors operate is right about perfect for the process used to create liquid fuels from water and some other ingredients (carbon, for example). At some point it should be practical to include liquid fuel production as part of the process of generating electricity, so you get two sources of energy from one system, and since it consumes carbon (not pulling it out of the ground), the fuel is technically carbon neutral. The energy input costs would be low to the point that the fuel would not only be cheaper than petroleum sources, but not dependent on the price of petroleum, ending international problems that arise from the trade of petroleum. Only oil futures holders and related companies would object.
Like I opened here, there's way too much to include in 20 minutes, and I bet even two hours wouldn't cover bullet points of 1/3rd of the important related benefits to this technology. The downsides are not only minimal, but falling. Human knowledge of engineering (especially materials knowledge) is ready to meet this challenge in ways never before available to us. The timing has turned into advantage.
So, only the most profitable and ubiquitous industry in the world upon which the entire power structure of modern geopolitics rests would have any objections.
Should be sunlit uplands just around the corner then. Cool!
f you want REAL info, go on RUclips and search for "Kirk Sorenson LFTR". He has lots of straight information, right from a nuclear engineer - the guy who actually started all this hoopla. Watch some of his. You will learn. I found him in 2011 or 2012.
Quick nitpick, 3:25 The U233 is not "a byproduct of the fissile reaction," the U233 is a daughter product of a neutron capture. In a "fissile reaction," (a fission event) the daughter products would be chunks of the original atom.
What is the significance of this distinction?
@ There a few different kinds of nuclear reactions. The neutron doesn’t change the thorium into uranium, it changes it into a different kind of thorium that then naturally turns into the uranium.
@@adamredwine774 how does the resultant uranium affect the system?
The resultant U-233 is “fissile” and could theoretically be weaponized
The significance is that a fission reaction (I.e. the splitting of the atom) is what produces the vast majority of the heat. This heat would come from U-233, not Thorium.
Technically when thorium “eats” a neutron without causing fission it actually hurts the neutron economy and the nuclear reactor needs to be designed around this (using iterative computer simulations)
Thorium was also used as a "seed" blanket at the Shippingport PWR to breed more fuel than it consumed.
Well, ALL Thorium reactors are breeders. Thorium is not fissile, but can be bred to create U232 which is.
Can I get a Thorium blanket for my bed? Sounds toasty warm!
This might be the first video/news I’ve watched since November that made me feel some semblance of hope
From all the information that has been out there, it seems that the best plan would be to not look at Thorium as a replacement for Uranium reactors, but as a way to use the biproduct from those reactors to start up thorium reactors and to then create more fuel for the Uranium reactors. Add uranium recycling into the mix, and it has the potential not just to provide energy but have the ability to reduce the nuclear waste we already have.
Thorium is converted into U-233. Thorium isn't fissile, It has to be converted into U233 to be used produce energy.
Thorium does solve the nuclear waste problem, just makes it worse & more difficult to handle. Not to meantion the health rise to mine Thorium & deal with the enviromental problems caused by Thorium mining. Anyone that thinks Thorium is a great idea, should volunteer to work in a Thorium mine!
The first commercial nuclear PWR in the USA (Shippingsport) did exactly this with a thorium-blanketed uranium core.
IT is the best method to get people to accept molten salt reactors by presenting them as a pollution reduction / waste management system that magically produces some electricity as a by product of making the Uranium / plutonium safe .
hus it becomes a worrying problem solver not another problem to worry about .
As an aside, burning coal produces more radio active waste that all of the reactors on the planet added together .
There is a lot of stuff in what is called "fly ash" than most can appreciate because coal is not just strait carbon .
@@Rovert_0987 Good thing we have alternatives to nuclear and fossil fuels.
Other potential designs exist for reacting waste fuel too. I suppose it depends how much needs to be disposed of that way.
0:16 but then who would buy all the coal and oil and supply trillions of dollars to those poor oil and coal barons?
There's about a century of coal left. About 50 years of oil and gas. Hence all the wars for fossil fuels. Nuclear and green energy is being developed due to energy necessity more than it is for climate reasons. Given there are not enough fossil fuels to burn to even cause significant environmental damage.
The point is, coal barons days are numbered no matter what.
Same with bio reactors.
Let em go broke. They can buy into thorium if they want to get with the times and a piece of the pie
The answer to that is the chemical industry. Coal and oil are used in tons of industries other than energy generation. Or did you think the mineral oil you use to lubricate your cars engine just appeared out of thin air?
Next one or soon Simon, Pebble bed reactors. Thanks for you Vids.
*opens can*
I wonder why the AVR was not mentioned.
Pebbles just adds complexity. No need for those when we have molten salt reactors.
Hot liquid in a pipe is as simple as it gets.
@@Merecir PBRs are molten salt COOLED, not molten salt FUELLED. The complexity comes in the minging fuel form factor called TRISO. 'On paper' TRISO fuel performance looks 'superior'. Until you look closer whereupon the devilry is revealed in the detail. TRISO's best-effort ever FIMA (Fission per Initial Metal (ie U or Pu) Atom) efficiency under 'ideal conditions' is 18%. The TRISO advocates would say (nominally rightly so) that this is 3x more efficient than the FIMA efficiency of the predominant 'steam-age' approach to fission (ie 5-6% FIMA efficiency for PWR/BWR/PHWR). BUT... when it's done for useful life, TRISO is nearly 'impossible' (outrageously expensive) to recycle compared to standard solid fuel rods. Your only disposal option for spent TRISO is Deep Geological Repository 'forever'.
In sharp contrast to them all, fluid fueled molten salt has 94-95% FIMA efficiency when you do continuous online FP extraction and fluoride/chloride salt (re)conditioning. From a chemist's standpoint this is 'easy'. This is also what leads to the drastic reduction in HLW quantities and shortened timeframes for FP management (300 years for 120kg/GW-year for Cs137 and Sr90 combined)
This deserves so much more attention!!!
Not developing Thorium energy production is a crime against humanity.
My belief: its power production will only start after artificial intelligence is implemented as police world wide.
@@HumanName-zv2jv The powers that shouldn't be are way behind on their plan. 2020 was a mistake all things considered and if they're not careful they'll mess up again and if my experience of irredeemable people is anything to go by, their ego will be bruised and they will make more mistakes. As long as we keep throwing sand into the machine they will keep making mistakes.
Not transitioning to purely renewables is an even bigger crime.
Or they have already developed it but do not want to release it for puny people like you and me.
Excellent video! In India it would mean all the beaches get mined for it which was the plan for a while bu thtere are environmental concerns about turtle nesting sites etc. The problem previously with Thorium is the high energy gamma radiation they would emit compared to the proven PWRs used in submarines. So, it would have to be a purely civil effort to get Thorium reactors. You have neglected to mention that the molten salt reactors have operational issues that prevent them from being deployed post Three Mile Island where the invested got written off with an operator error leading to a meltdown, if similar happened in a Thorium reactor it would be a waste of money and would be more likely to happen, as passive safety features in PWR designs now mean they are likely to survive Three Mile Island (and even Fukushima) and still be operable. Also, terrorist would probably use Thorium reactor fision products for dirty bombs rather than conventional nuclear weapons and it would create the same effect. They can also use Thorium in breeder reactors to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons with a nuclear reprosessing industry to reprocess the nuclear waste. Thorium is about burning up the spent fuel from conventional nuclear reactors and weapons programs using Thorium in the mix. The cheapest greeen option for the UK would be to use the legacy Rolls Royce PWR design for nuclear submarines from 50 years ago as an SMR and make one for each city in a small wire solution rather than develop the National Grid to accommodate electric car charging to connect up the offshore windfarms to cities with small cables connecting them to the grid. The UK could become a world leader in nuclear decommisioning and reprocessing by championing Thorium reactors in the rest of the world, as a £1trillion industry it will be the most valuable in the UK.
@megaprojects9649 - I'd like to see your reply to this comment!
UK won't be doing anything like that, they are bad at such programs, just look at their current Hinckley Nuclear Plant C & HSL2!
Optimism is good, but reality is always different.
@BlackHawkTejas it's because of the UK pension fund managers not investing UK pensions in these projects but instead in the third world for greater returns. They get more commission but cost of living in the UK goes up.
Mag-Thor is the other wacky use for thorium.
Sure, your airplane part is radioactive, but it has the right metallurgical properties!
The very low radioactivity of thorium is probably dimensions lower than the solar radiation you get on a flight.
@@noinfo5630 Would it be possible to make the stuff into nuclear batteries for home use?
Mag-Thor sounds like the name of a superhero.
I mean, define the level of radioactivity and I might not even mind. Many people today are unaware that they’re almost constantly being exposed to minute levels of radiation every day. If airplanes are slightly radioactive, but the dosage is well below any relative safety levels, it’s a non-issue in my book.
Sam o nella ensured i clicked on this video
India is investing big on Thorium reactors 🎉🎉🎉
As I understand it, India is NOT doing LFTRs. That is their loss.
@@stevegarcia3731what's an LFTR?
@@stevegarcia3731India is rather doing three stage breeder reactors .
They should invest more in hygiene before anything else.....
And you should invest in your manners @@Антон-м1я1ф
The whole Nuclear bomb fear from reactor grade fuel is absolutely ridiculous.
Yeah....that whole Chernobyl thing was blown way out of proportion, wasn't it? Really it was little more than a burnt out light bulb, without any of the devastating consequences that normally trail behind a nuclear bomb.....right? I mean, that's kind of what you're saying, isn't it?
@TheSnoeedog ungodly negligence was also apart of that tbf but im with you lol
@@TheSnoeedog huge difference between a chemical explosion caused by the heat of a nuclear reactor vs the explosive power of a nuclear bomb, just saying. Yea the explosion blanketed a ton of area with radioactive residu, but it didn't completely flatten an entire city to the ground. Two very different consequences of harnassing the atom, but not much more destructive than having a waterdam break and kill hundreds. Energy and attempting to contain it has consequences.
@MrPbhuh
Not to mention that the reactor wouldn’t have had any issues if the government didn’t cut corners on the reactor and incentivize negligent behavior. The causes of Chernobyl have basically been completely eliminated in modern nuclear energy production.
@@MrPbhuh Do you think the people who have irrational fears about nuclear power are more worried about being vaporized in a second or spending days, weeks or even months in intractable agony as their organs fail, their skin falls off while their very existence poses a significant risk to the safety of any loved ones who come by to see them off...all while their homes, communities, schools, wildlife and water supply are poisoned to the point that they must be destroyed and abandoned?
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were abominable travesties that I'm not trying to diminish/trivialize. But it's my understanding that Chernobyl was far more devastating to the environment. Dr. Google says that *The Chernobyl disaster affected a much larger area than the bombing of Hiroshima, and the radioactive contamination from Chernobyl is still present today, while the radiation in Hiroshima is not.*
And when I go out, I'd much rather it be done in a fraction of a heartbeat than some long drawn out affair. I'm fine with nuclear power. I just think if you take the time to tease out/unpack what you think "The whole Nuclear bomb fear from reactor grade fuel" thing actually consists of, you'll find that whether by bomb or meltdown, the fear is of the power/potential itself. Yes, it would be ridiculous to think that a reactor core meltdown would spring 1800m (500m?) into the air to create an airburst of fast neutrons over the affected area is, in fact ridiculous... *BECAUSE REACTORS ARE NOT BOMBS* But the fear that a reactor can fail with all of the ....excitement of a nuclear bomb, albeit without the fireball, is entirely reasonable.
But I'm in my forties and I'm scared of spiders, so I'm almost certainly biased
I've been trying to find thorium reactor companies to invest in for a decade. With modern materials and processes, the drawbacks are easy to overcome for the most part.
The reactor design needs a LOT of funding, most investors want short term stable returns. Uranium reactors are proven, known, and with clear regulatory hurdles. And Uranium reactors aren't exactly being built often.
Attitudes are changing, and energy security concerns should see this change soonish.
I'm a firm believer in recycling.
The recycling of glass metals, plastics, and paper-products takes enormous amounts of energy!
That's where these reactors would help!
The main problem is the regulators making it almost impossible to accomplish a working design without it taking decades
Guess there are numerous, but take a look at Copenhagen Atomics. They will start tests with Thorium in Switzerland in 2026. They have come far. There is plenty of information on the web.
Flibe Energy and Copenhagen Atomics.
The former is a straight forward modernization of a proven ORNL design; the first genuinely small and modular reactor, before SMR was coined and came into common abuse. The rendering on their site is of a 4x 250MWe module plant, comparable to a large 1 GWe reactor today, at a fraction of the size and complexity.
The latter demonstrates that you can potentially scale thorium breeders down to 100MWth and still be far more economical than today's reactors at 30 times that size, even in aggregate. It may contain more technical risk, but both would be invaluable in the market.
Breeder reactor of India is awesome.
A couple of big errors. First the Oak Ridge reactor was fueled by U235 not Thorium. Second it is easy to extract the plutonium from a thorium molten salt reactor.
One can also extract u233 without the u232 if one separates the U232 once it form. The half life for Pr 232 is much shorter than Pr 233.
Hi Fountain Valley,
I wouldn't call them big errors. Oakridge knew well the potential of thorium reactors and wanted to built one, but their funding was canceled before they could do so. Second, the thorium fuel cycle produces FAR less plutonium than regular reactors. Yes, it is easier to extract the plutonium than from the reactors designed in the 1950's, but there is far, far less plutonium to extract.
A U238 breeder reactor need to absorb one neutron to become plutonium PL 239. Which then has a 65% chance to fission (which is great, that fission is the payout). However a thorium reactor has to have Th232 absorb a neutron. It transforms into U233 which has a 90% fission chance. If it doesn't, it must absorb 2 more neutrons to become U235, which has an 85% chance of fissioning. If that does not fission, it has to absorb 3 MORE neutrons to reach Pl239, which has the 65% chance to fission mentioned above.
That is a lot of neutrons that have to be absorbed, and 2 extra high probability fissions which cut off the path to plutonium. The thorium fuel cycle produces 4 orders of magnitude less long lived radioactive wastes.
See:
marspedia.org/LFTR
Warm regards, Rick.
The MSRE was run on both U-235 and U-233 bred from thorium, and the little plutonium that is produced from the thorium fuel cycle is Pu-238, which is of great value for deep space missions, and zero value for weapons. It was a research reactor, and while the video mentions that shutdowns were common, the implication is wrong; they turned it off every weekend, because it was that easy.
@@Th-233 shutdown AND startup is very easy. So, yeah, they just shut it down when everyone went home on Friday so they didn't have to pay to staff it... why not?
It's actually one of the safety features of MSRs (all MSRs, not just thorium), the shutdown and start up so easily there's far less incentive not to.
@@RicksPoker If one desires Pu-239 for the purpose of weapons, they do not rely on the separating it from the reactor fuel. U-238 is placed within the reactor specifically for the purpose of breeding Pu-239 and removed after spending a relatively short period in the reactor when compared to the time the reactor's fuel remains. I see no reason U-238 could not be introduced to a reactor which operates on the thorium fuel cycle.
The wraith? When did the undead get involved? 17:06
Meaning a faint trace of something
One of the many safety aspects of a MSR is it runs at one atmosphere. No need for giant high pressure vessels and no potential Fukushima like explosions.
Fukushima did NOT explode.
The ONLY reactor explosions in history were the S-1 reactor and Chernobyl.
Fukushima DID meltdown but it did NOT explode.
Do a thing called RESEARCH. Hint: it's more than "hey Google" or wikipedia.
It’s pretty simple MSR reactors in the US weren’t stopped because they didn’t work, or were plagued with problems, it was because the US NAVY had already approved LWRs for Submarines. So it was easier to go with them for the AEC as opposed to continuing MSR research for civilian power plant use. It was a shame because they are much safer, high heat and low pressure.
I've read articles and seen several other videos about thorium and the topic of thorium reactors. This is the best!
never been this early to anything.
Bot
@@dominicwaghorn6459OK bot
If you're not early then you're late.
Last time i came this early, I now get called Dsd.
@@wreckincrew2714 unless you're a wizard
"hey kids, can I tell you a secret?"
"closer"
"Nuclear energy, it's not a bad thing"
Sam O'Nella Acadamy said "Thorium Rocks" 😂
0:33 and oil interests.
I'm glad someone said it
BP and Exon have been shaping the world through streets and cars and mining and drilling... no one wants to admit they were responsible for the political global warming push back.
Several major oil companies got into the nuclear business, but the uses of oil aren't the same as electric generation.
Saud and magnets
@18:37 -- _"It won't look like the current fight over Rare Earth Elements..."_
It's even better than that. One of the main reasons why REEs are so rare is because many of them tend to be found along with Thorium. And since Thorium is radioactive, that means all the "tailings" from the mining operation are considered to be "nuclear waste" which requires all kinds of special handling, making the whole enterprise unprofitable. But if a commercial use existed for Thorium, then the mining of REEs would be unleashed, making them far more available at a much lower price.
I expect the new US admin to solve this regulation issue. It would totally change things.
One of the main advantages of Thorium reactors is they don't make Plutonium, but one of the main drawbacks of Thorium reactors is they don't make Plutonium.
No weapon, no research money.
@@dancooper4733 You can literally make a weapon out of it. Thorium decays into Uranium.
Try to contain a liquid rather than a solid.
10:34 this is the only reason we're not using Throium Reactors to power Nuclear Power Plants. Because the Reactor we use now was design for that specific purpose first, the powerplant was built later as a means of cost cutting for the military.
Indian Thorium Reactors will be game changer in energy security....
Nationalism will be the death of us all
1. India
2. Brazil
3. Australia
4. US
Top four countries with Thorium reserves.
1/2 brics. 1/2 USA.
Brazil would be so incredibly rich if it weren't for corruption. My mom is Brazilian and I'm always amazed how many resources it has and also how technological advanced they are compared to their neighbours. If only it weren't for the corruption robbing it from the people.
@EbonyPope yeah, huge population too. They are doing well these days supplying China with foodstuffs.
@@EbonyPope Being resource-rich normally doesn't translate to a prosperous country.
Check "resource curse".
@@surturiel Sure but they are actually pretty wealthy to begin with. They are a developing country not a third world one. If you look up Subway in Rio de Janeiro you'll get what I mean. I live in Germany and they have whole shops and fitness centers there clean and impeccably desinged. They have the money. That is not the problem. It's not just the resources that was just one thing that came to mind. They are leaders in hydroelectric power among many other things. Brazil is no slouch and they have huge growth potential which is why many countries have ties to them. But again as I said most of the money doesn't reach the people thanks to corruption.
Superphenix is was neither a molten salt reactor nor powered by thorium. Superphenix was a plutonium powered fast breeder reactor. The MSR / Thorium folks don't much like fast breeders as both are breeder reactors.
Simon got A LOT wrong in this video and its really unfortunate to see how badly he got so much wrong or construed in a way to aid a very clearly biased argument in ways that only harmed his credibility for researching a topic. Really disappointed on this one.
@@Rippedyanu1it's a recurring issue with his videos.
As I heard recently regarding a conspiracy theorist: it sounds convincing when you don't know anything about the topic, the more you know and it, the less convincing it becomes.
Switzerland has a moratorium on nuclear plants/reactors, so no, we won't see Waste Burner in 2026 here...
@@Rippedyanu1 The video was peppered with errors, but most actually undersell the potential of thorium rather demonstrating any bias. Nuclear is complicated topic and it is difficult to appreciate much less convey the many consequential nuances in such a short video. If you can get a handle on the physics though, and are wiling to invest the time, you will discover that thorium and molten salt are the keys to realizing the true potential of nuclear.
Fast breeders are an oxymoron; fast reactors require a huge amount of fissile, and breed slowly. The only case where they make sense, is if their excess neutrons are used to breed thorium to U-233 for thermal spectrum thorium breeders, which only need a small fraction of the fissile, allowing many more to be started. Breeding plutonium is flat out stupid, and will never be economical, so expect subsidies.
@@Th-233 Fast reactors are good for burning waste, medical isotope production and when high temperature heat is more desirable than nuclear fuel cycle efficiency. They're also closer to commercial viability than thorium thermal breeders.
For countries with significant amounts of waste, building fast reactors to burn it should be the highest (nuclear energy) priority. Don't get me wrong, we should keep pursuing thorium thermal breeders, they're the ultimate fission solution.
Until then, building CANDU style reactors for safe nuclear power right now is the best option for countries without heavy forging manufacturing capacity and no enrichment supply chain, like Australia. Fast reactors are built in proportion to burn the waste. As soon as thorium thermal breeders are ready, start building them instead.
How you can make an item about Thorium and not mention a SINGLE WORD about the difficulty (or rather: near-impossibility) of creating a reactor vat that can withstand the hot molten salt for any period that makes sense economically (as opposed to operating in a lab for a limited time without any regard to being economically viable) is absolutely beyond me. Are you effin kiddin me?
David "Rocket Man" Adair has long been an advocate for Thorium reactors.
I want a Side Project on Simon's watch collection.
India and Australia have largest thorium reserves in this world. Australia will sell those instead of using .
And india will use them to make india a strong manufacturing power . We need cheap energy
I suppose but India has plenty of their own reserves to last for a couple of millennia.
Largest reserves don't matter. MANY countries have enough thorium sources of their own. It is COMMON in the Earth's crust.
Australia can't even bring themselves to use existing nuclear power. There's almost no chance that they'll investigate using Thorium even though it's safer and holds more promise.
Yep- Australia loves to sell shit and craps on its citizens. Our Government is all about the short-term buck, not the long term investment. Hence why we have a shit housing situation, no clear direction with our power industry and an economic-inflation crisis that no one can afford.
As a Australian we have nearly every rare earth element and we back it into a shipping container and sell everything, why Australia doesn’t have any type of reactor is mind boggling to me!!
I'm so glad people are talking about Thorium. ❤ Thorium is the future!
Its worth noting that the Molten Salt reactors used with Thorium can also be used with Uranium and would make those reactors considerably safer.
You haven’t seen me on the toilet if you’re talking nuclear waste
Nice
This is a well-researched and accurate analysis and assessment of the Thorium reactor.
Superphénix wasn't a moltensalt or even a thorium fueled reactor. Superphénix was a sodium cooled fast reactor, in fact it still is the largest FBR that has ever operated (1200 MWe). The same goes for the FBR in india. The goal of a FBR on uranium is the same as a thorium reactor, being to close the fuel cycle. Working with a closed fuel cycle either on thorium or uranium will result in radioactive waste that is harmful for 300 years instead of 10.000 years.
The indians are actally working on Th-U fast reactor concepts, even if the U-Pu cycle is better suited for fast reactors. They have loads of Th but basically no U reserves.
@@mateboros8230 Okay, do you have more information on this? I am aware that they are very interested in the Th-U cycle but currently the only experimental reactor under construction is the PFBR (470 MWe). That's what's being refferend to in the video, that's why i mentioned the FBR being a sodium cooled one.
As far as i'm aware the indians mainly use heavy water reactors so that they can use their own natural uranium (reserves of 30 000 tons) without enrichment needed.
I hate how the advantages of MSR reactors are always fully attributed to Thorium. A Uranium-based MSR has almost all the same performance and safety benefits as a Thorium-based MSR does.
A Thorium MSR is a breeder reactor, so you need to compare it's performance and fuel efficiency to other breeder reactors, rather than to standard Uranium burner PWR or BWRs.
Also, CANDU reactors have been thorium-ready since inception.
Your partially on track, but MSR are a dead end. No way to solve the corrosion problems, Caking issues (damaging pumps) and no viable way to extract actinides neutron poisons that build up in the salt.
@@guytech7310 Just no?
From 1964 through to 1969, a test was ran for one. While early prototyping issues, lack of wide scale manufacturing for the materials needed existed - the conclusion found: It was viable. They did test runs up to 6 months at a time, tested fuels including Uranium 233, Uranium 235, and Plutonium.
It worked.
Corrosion is NOT the issue. Embrittlement is. But materials research was conducted to find solutions for such with the alloy they started with. There were issues with Xenon (the Neutron Poison you were talking about) and yes - they solved for removing it: Yes removing it.
I could go on but - the reason MSR's weren't developed, nor returned to are:
1. Cold war meant nuclear weapons was all the rage.
2. Jimmy Carter - a president I'm beginning to hate more the more I learn about him - banned Fuel reprocessing which put a damper on any sort of initiatives to start more nuclear power plants.
3. There are no real experts in it - if you want something to get up and running, MSR's need some more development. CANDU works right now. And SMR's and such are being developed based on proven tech.
and I could go on.
So ya: No.
MSR are not a dead end. Someone just needs to complete the research project - but that will take funding, and that funding is going to be difficult to come by with the current political climate, though: That may change in the next few years.
I think breeder reactors are more worthy of a video than thorium reactors .... their benefits are far superior than these of the thorium reactors. And it is proven technology.
@@formes2388 I realize that I read a lot of the reports on it. Have you? Corrosion was a problem & testing with Molten salts on materials during the 1980s, 1990s did not find a viable solution. All of the reports & data is available on line. MSR testing didn't end in 1969 or with Carter. The continued to do development on a MSR testing different materials, pumps, & other components, just without operating a fueled reactor.
Back in the 1990s & early 2000s work was done to address the corrosion problems using ceramic coatings on pipes, but deemed a failure because of cracking. No one has solved the caking problem which chunks of solidified salts accumulate on reactor services, break loose and damage the circulation pumps.
Third, no viable options to effectively remove waste products from the Molten salt. Only viable option is to abandon mixing in the fuel with the molten salt & go with traditional fuel rod assemblies, but because of actinide neutron poisons, the fuel rods would have to be remove & reprocessed to remove the waste, which was the main objective of MSR design.
Thorium also has the problem with Th232 which is a neutron poison & cannot be easily separated from U233 using chemical processes.
Liq. Sodium reactors are more practical than MSR, but those are already deemed economical failures.
Nuclear power is likely dead in the US, as no utility wants to build any new reactors. Only if the gov't or a major company pays for all the costs would they consider it.
The bigger problem is going to be oil shortages in the next 10 years or less as global Oil production peaked in 2018 & is in permanent decline. Only the US (Via) shale had any significant production increases, and 3 of 4 shale sweet spots are fully drilled out. TX Permian is turning out be a flop as most of the Shale Oil is very light hydrocarbons and Shale Drillers are barely profitable. For Drilling to increase the price of Oil must increase to a $90/bbl minimum. Once global shortages & very high Oil prices unfold it will trigger an economic depression, Killing any new Nuclear power plans.
There are few things in life i enjoy more than learning about radioactivity
...says the guy flying the flag that'll get us nuked
@@zimriel oh yes Ukraine defending itself is gonna cause a nuclear war fuck off tell that to Putin
@@zimrielThat isn't a real threat in the bigger picture. If you want to talk unstable nuclear threat comment on Israël flags.
@@zimriel Which is not at all going to happen. Get yo scaredy cat ass outta here
@@zimrielOk, Putin-American
I thought we were much closer to MSR than 40 years.