I really like what you are doing: making the public more aware of CO2 free energy possibilities. I have traveled a lot in Arctic Canada. This region is too remote to be on the grid, has communities too small for current large scale nuclear and has little or no sunshine for half the year. Currently powered by diesel, you illuminate lots of ideas that could provide clean power to this part of the world.
not co2 free, until they find that materials science that uses strong roman concrete that can sequester co2 instead of creating it and learn to mfg high performance, insanely qc intensive steel.
If I were an anti-nuclear activist in the 70's, the most harm I could do to the nuclear industry is to push for increased regulation and become the new regulator. It's hard not to conclude that the NRC is staffed by mostly anti-nuclear double agents.
sorry but the industry earned that penalty cost by faking qc. China built them fast but longevity and safety ain't there. take a 60yr lifespan and convert it to 20 years where the last ten are nail-biters.
brilliant analysis of new possibly breakthrough emerging markets. So much opportunity here. I'd love any new reactors to have inbuilt passive safety and multiple passive redundancies. They need to be disaster proof. Having them at sea is brilliant, we have the DC transmission cable technology to add to that. We could desalinate water, create hydrogen, power industry with SMR's. This could be brilliant. Fusion will be amazing but the energy mix and balance will see a future of abundance.
The problem with nuclear power is the regulation in the United States. The number of staff needed just to deal with the regulatory bodies is about at least four time that needed for conventional power plants. Also required is a simulator for Operator training and the required training staff. These are just a couple of big-ticket items, there are more. Nuclear if the USA is just too expensive.
@26:25, You needed to question Kugelmass on why he thought the UK regulation environment was better than in the US. The same question should be asked about his other customers, Poland and Romania.
I agree; that would have been a great question. I presume that the answer is along the lines of: "the US is a 'checklist' regulator - i.e. follow the checklist; and the UK is a 'concept' regulator - i.e. does the design meet the concept" Simon Irish of Terrestrial has some observations on this.
@@factnotfiction5915 Simon Irish of Terrestrial Energy might have been comparing US regulation with Canadian regulation. In another video, Bret Kuglemass has commented that Canadian regulation is also strict. So I guess the question is why the regulations in the UK, Poland and Romania is better than Canada.
MSRs are illegal to operate in the USA thanks to AEC rule changes signed off by Nixon in 1972 at the same time as he ordered MSRE dismantled and all research material destroyed. The AEC rules don't come out and explicitly SAY "molten fuel reactors are illegal" because the existence and sucess of the MSRE was a classified secret, but the regulations are deliberately worded to make attempting to build one a criminal act the moment nuclear material hits the loop. As just one example, it's impossible to get regulatory approval for Hastalloy N (which is what MSRE used, was developed for that project and is what China's using at TMSR-LF1) Canadian rules follow AEC ones, tso the difficulty there is unsurprising
It's telling that of the three major accidents involving nuclear reactors the only one to result in human fatalities was the one where they didn't bother building a proper containment building. You can get a lot of things more efficient, but the one thing you really want to do the same is a proper containment building. You can make it smaller if you like, just don't make the walls any thinner.
@thewiseperson8748 said, "Thorium is likely to be the only fuel that runs SMR's in the long run, suggesting that a molten salt Thorium reactor is the only configuration that has any real hope for SMR's." Pebble-bed reactors are also capable of using fuel pebbles made from different fuels in the same basic design of reactor (though perhaps not at the same time). Proponents claim that some kinds of pebble-bed reactors should be able to use thorium, plutonium and natural unenriched uranium, as well as the customary enriched uranium. Because the pebble-bed reactor is designed for higher temperatures, the reactor will passively reduce to a safe power-level in an accident scenario. This is the main passive safety feature of the pebble-bed reactor, and it distinguishes the pebble-bed design (as well as most other very-high-temperature reactors) from conventional light-water reactors, which require active safety controls.
Thorium is a marketing term just like SMRs. Thorium as a fuel will only make MSRs (Molten Salt Reactors) more expensive than uranium-based MSRs with no advantages.
Try running an Aluminium smelter with a continuous 500MWe demand with just a Solar farm and Gigabattery packs. The solar would need to have a 2000MW output averaged over 6hours then need at least18×500MWh = 9GWh batteries to get through the nights. That's capital cost of: Solar:4×500,000×$2000/kW= $4billion + Mega-Pack: 9000MWh@$600,000/MWh (= $5.4billion) So Total capital cost/kW. = $(4+5.4)×10⁹/500,000 = $18,800 per kW for a 24/7/365 demand and at 2Watt/m² need at least 100,000Ha taken from the scarce tropical rain forest. C.f Indonesia's 8× ThorCon 500MWe TMSR (foot print 1.17Ha each 500MW unit or 43kW/m²) capital costs of $800 - $1000 per kW (say $940/kW) is .94/18.8=1/20 or 5% of the required capital cost of a stand alone combined Solar + Batteries system wthout considering the destruction of over 1000km² tropical rain forest - (NOTE: Both supply 500MW × (6+18)hours = 12,000MWh/day) Indonesia's expected levelised pre-profit cost is less than $30 per MegaWatt.hour (
Cooling towers are the best way of rejecting heat on the revenue side of the operation. You're not subject to major environmental effects of discharging excess heat into waterways if you can reject direct to atmosphere and in order to be able to make a heat engine work (steam turbine or other electrical generator) you MUST be able to reject heat somewhere. They need a hot side and a cold side to function Cooling towers are mostly associated with coal plants and the temperatures/heat density of MSRs is a good substitute for the thermal energy provided by burning coal/gas If you want to keep deployment costs down you MUST make the reactors work with existing power generation methods and superctitical steam turbines are a good fit for the job that exist already, unlike supercritical CO2 or Brayton turbines which are still only at "experimental" stages (I don't object to using them later, but holding up deployment until they're ready is like holding off until fusion is ready - we don't have that long to wait and the effects of globval warming are potentially far more catastrophic than politicians are letting climate scientists talk about - put it this way "Do sea level rises and climate catastrophes within the lives of our great grandchildren matter if no humans are alive to witness them?" - it really is that dire.
in my youth the lake Michigan coal plant cooling tower made me think it was nuclear, until my 6th birthday and we learned they were dumping hot water into the lake killing all the coho and belching coal tar on the marina destroying the boats. do nuclear plants even need cooling towers? i thought that stupidity went out with the invention of computers.
There already are companies that build nuclear reactors for submarine use and they will probably deliver good and reliable SMRs soon. I know about Rolls Royce - who hasn't built a single car since 1971 but is one of two companies that built large airplane turbines. You really have Edwart Teller's grandson on this episode? Nice!
I wonder if working with the shipyards that build nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers would have a faster success than the cheaper South Korean ones. They also have politicians on their payrolls.
the problem is each individual plant needs the same set of professional crew, more small is an exponential growth of highly overeducated controllers. simulated intelligence can never be trusted to operate and supervise live plants.
The grid is fragile because it is incredibly expensive. Nobody over builds the grid. $million/mile and millions and millions of miles to the 330million people in the USA. Generation is cheap, it is the grid costs that's ignored by the nuclear promoters. Hello, hello 👋 anyone home, hello 👋
@jthadcast we need to keep the grid as a backup because it exists. The new ways of generation and storage at the point of use are becoming cheaper and more practical in replacing fossil fuels.
@@stephenbrickwood1602 it only exists because we pump billions in every year to keep it functional but i'm not saying tear it down but phase it out. if large scale industry went off-grid and small on campus nuclear things could change. have they've actually proven small will work at scale operation, nope but investing in proof of concept is good idea. just speculating here but the mindset in nuclear engineering at school was all about larger production where there are two, three, four or more reactors for a single facility to chase efficiency at production not distribution.
@jthadcast good comment, good thinking. Copy and paste your comments elsewhere as both sides are confusing people. The truth is a little more complicated, but your retelling helps push the politics to the real world.
Whilst the concept of SMRs is good, the need of them is undermined by the need for thermal efficiency on the revenue (steam(*)) side and that converges on "Make them as large as physically possible" - about 1GW output for a steam turbine (3-4GW input thanks to heat engine losses) (*) Or supercritical CO2, or brayton turbines. The point is that ALL electrical generation uses heat energy to generate electrical energy at 25-35% efficiency (CCGTs get higher efficiency by clever heat scavenging tricks) and the bigger the turbine, the greater its efficiency and per-GWh maintenance costs - this is why conventional power plants have been getting bigger and bigger as materials technology allows larger turbines to be built Conventional water-moderated reactors vessels are under amazingly high stresses - they're essentially steam boilers, and this is pushing the state of the art, especially for a boiler that has to be "service free" for 60 years Modularisation is still a highly desireable characteristic. If using MSRs, a 3GW reactor isn't large - and more importantly, being unpresurised means it doesn't need to be fabricated like a steam boiler (ie: it can be factory-manufacturable rather than individually "craft-built") There's another important point to note: a complete 3-4GW MSR (LFTR) and containment building would be about 1/4 of the size of equivalent heat output coal burners, whilst being just as hot - The ramification is that they can be utilised as "drop in" replacements for coal in thermal power stations, everything nuclear kept confined within the MSR building and normal non-nuclear procedures apply on the revenue side (ie: a steam explosion is just a steam explosion, not a radiological disaster) I believe that we will see modular reactors, but they're likely to be "as large as phsyically feasible" and may drive multiple steam (or supercritical CO2) turbines. 10GW isn't beyond the scope of possibility, perhaps even larger. Bear in mind that _every_ existing "burner" thermal power plant needs to be replaced in the next 30-40 years but that accounts for only 30% of our carbon emissions - we need to build more energy output to cover the difference, by a factor I've been estimating at 6-8fold for a long time (It's not just the obvious stuff like transportation and industrial processes. Fertilizer production alone will need at least as much energy input as existing electrical production to be weaned off of oil. The inefficiencies of synthetic fuel production means that cater to aircraft (almost impossible to electrify for longhaul) we'll need massive energy input ("Hydrogen" is so expensive (and dangerous) to compress, cool and transport that it makes more sense to go a few extra steps and invest the energy required to produce liquid fuels. The net energy equation is still lower than trying to ship hydrogen around and less likely to suffer catastrophic failures) PLUS we must build out enough energy generation capacity to allow developing countries to catch up. This is the _only_ way to wipe out terrorism and reduce population growth (wealthier people don't do desperate things and they have fewer children. Deliberately holding people back is a recipe for global warfare) 10,000 nuclear reactors? Yes 10,000 "small" nuclear reactors? No. They're simply not large enough to be viable and trying is a false economy which will most likely result in bankruptcy of those persisting in trying BYW: the industry leader and energy superpower of the mid-late 21st century is most likely to be China, with the USA reduced to a heavily-indebted also-ran. The most promising nuclear technology for low cost, low waste, low risk, proliferation-resistent commercialisation was effectively made illegal by presidential order in 1972 and those rules have not been repealed (Indonesia may be #2)
Indonesia's PPA for 8× walk-away safe ThorCon 500MWe TMSR fabricated on line in a Korean double-hulled bulk-carrier shipbuilding yard at a fully fitted capital cost of $800 - $1000 per kiloWatt. Each of the 500MWe TMSR units, have footprints of 180m×65m = 11,700m² or 1.17Ha. At height of 34.2m the crude volume is 400,000 m³, making your crude cost estimator 500,000kW/400,000m³ = 1.250kiloWatt/m³ or between $1000/m³ to $1250 per m³, (using unit cost of between $800 to $1000 per kiloWatt). An on line production, of these 500MWe TMSR units, at a double-hulled bulk-carrier Korean shipyard that could be capable of producing at least 12GigaWatts a year. (Hope this is useful as if requested I can provide the through-put daily tonnage, as some of the original Florida ThorCon designers previously designed and had built the world's largest bulk-carriers in Korean shipbuilding yards).
I dont buy the idea thst snaller is cheaper. Volume is only likely to be in 10's-100's not millions. Also factory manufactured homes to be assembled onsite, havent turned out cheaper! But manufacturing still make a lot of sense. Experienced building crews will have families and might not want to spend their entire lives moving from place to place.
manufatcuring in ways that allow assembly of readily handleable, transportable pieces makes for vastly reduced costs. Existing reactor pressure vessels cost billions (literally), take 2 years to make (only one manufactirer left), cost hundreds of millions to transport to locations because of their massive unwieldy sizes and are backlogged by 2 decades Not having to contain 200-400 atmosphere water at 350C (_extremely_ corrosive and quite capable of rotting through a 9 inch steel flange in 18-36 months - this HAS happened) relaxes a lot of your engineering requirements for the vessel, as does not needing a containment building needing to hold all that steam/water if it does happen to rupture. Getting water away from the nuclear cycle is key to both improving nuclear safety (lowering risks) and dramatically reducing costs. Attempting to replace the water with flammable/explosive molten metals like sodium undoes most of the gains (See: Santa Susanna reactor, Monju and others) and is a good example of "just because you CAN, doesn't mean you SHOULD" (or in other words, the risks haven't been fully studied vs proven alternatives. If it can burn, escape or fry brains(*) then it shoudln't be inside the reactor loops) (*) Molten lead isn't exactly biologically friendly and the tendency to readily oxidise affects its heat transportation properties anyway. There are good operational (reliability) reasons most Russian Molten Lead reactors were allowed to go cold.
PWRs, regardless of size will always be expensive by their very design. Very high-pressure reactors that produce low output temperatures require specialized, nuclear-certified power conversion equipment. I don't care how you build them, they will be expensive and only produce electricity and no industrial heat. What can be produced cheaply are generation IV reactors. Low-pressure/high-temperature reactors that utilize off-the-shelf power conversion equipment. ALSO they produce high quality industrial heat which is more valuable than electricity.
People are concerned with fuel and waste and danger to operate. LFTR - Thorium fueled molten salt is the safest. Current reactor designs are the worst most dangerous BS design that comes from the nuclear weapons age The video is not detailed enough to take seriously. A floating LFTR makes sense that partly powers hydrogen generators to feed the natural gas grid Otherwise no we do not need more existing design nuclear rsactors
jury is out on material degradation on novel construction and materials. you need 40 years of data on a stable design before jumping to the cost of building multiple plants. abrupt climate change put the stop watch on nuclear energy and the lag is beyond repair
If we continue to premise our analysis of China based upon the belief that the nation cannot innovate, then how on earth are they leading on battery technology, solar, and the production of 7nm Semiconductor Chips? Then what about Taiwan, the last I checked, they are Chinese. Our STEM (Science. Technology. Engineering, and Math) educational outcome is falling behind. China is doing what Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have done, and that is to have an industrial policy.
Your ideas are interesting and even plausible but your focus is a little niche. Consider that people live on the surface of the planet and get a large amount of their protein from the oceans. Japan has been criticised for discharging tritium contaminated water and yet you are considering floating reactors located off shore. Ideally from my own point of view is a stack-able SMR approach where a reactor complex can be built and cost recovery commence in the shortest possible time interval after which the reactor complex can be scaled up by expanding the module and even generator count. IN addition power should be generated and consumed in the same area for maximum efficiency. Large HV transmission lines is hazardous and expensive to both the end user of the power and to the environment. My thinking lead me to considering a different form of national power grid where nuclear generator sites are connected to all adjacent generator sites in a MESH with adjacent generation CELLS power sharing in the event of a generator cell going off line. Ideally the manufacturing should be split between the heat generation, (SMRs), and the turbine or generating equipment. The heat generation could be installed underground and therefore water free generation would be preferable. With SMRs a large user could install their own SMR and generator on their factory site and it could then be mesh connected and supply a revenue to the large user when they supply power directly to the MESH. The modular nature of the SMRs would allow them to be serviced and even replaced without the entire national power grid going down. This would allow a company to manufacture, commission, service and decommission the SMRs under contract with countries that have no nuclear industry and they could maintain the generator side of the power plant if they wish to or that could also be contracted. As a side issue the current generation = load is not good and leaves the power generation subject to failures effectively engineered into the design. Imagine power generation that was 50% higher than need and instead of load shedding to protect the grid think environment. I agree with using carbon from waste and even obtained from the oceans to make synthetic oil using the excess generation of the mesh/grid. The excess generaiton could be paid for as an environmental levy included in the power bills of the end users and things such as desalination plants for environmental inflows and drought proofing could be utilised effectively using free electrical power! Broaden the vision and include everyone. As for the small island nations imagine an old cargo ship refurbished and refitted as a moored power station in the local harbour. Simply swap out the ship come service time! The possibilities are endless if you care to consider things outside of the established views of power needs and consumption. Time for the 21st century thinking we had expected last century!
RobertIrvine , lots of interesting and visionary engineering ideas but I fear you do not address the immediate problem. Nuclear Power is in the doldrums in many western countries. The issue is not engineering, we have been building reactors since the 1950s. Frankly the public does not care about the actual nuclear technology. In their eyes it is all nuclear and most see it as a major business risk from late deliverables and horrendous cost overruns. If the industry is to be resuscitated the first actions must be to demonstrate some successful and highly visible projects. That is where this video is useful. It focusses on fixing the economic and manufacturing problems by using proven technology. After that we may win the space to innovate.
What Bob said. We're talking advanced reactors next week, there are a lot of exciting things happening there! Need to show that we can build these designs with a somewhat easier, or at least more clear, regulatory pathway, fast, cheap, and safe, too.
@@bobdeverell I live in a country that currently has laws that make nuclear power illegal. It was the nuclear policies of the US and its desire to monopolize nuclear weaponry that caused our government at the time to pass such a law in order to placate a vital defence ally. To overcome or overturn such a law ANY nuclear power solution must have vastly better safety of design. It is not good enough to simply expand American or European thinking and to expect the world to simply follow. There are climate change summits, where is the nuclear power summit to which ALL countries are invited? I do not see nuclear power as being profitable as I see it as vital FOR ALL.
@@age-of-miracles Please pay serious attention to the environment and climate because there is a lot of political effort applied in those areas. Can you also address the "Victorian" design of the current global power distribution systems which are dangerous, expensive and an obstacle to inexpensive nuclear power adoption.
@@robertirvine4780 Hi, I understand the rationale for the OZ nuke ban but I don't understand your comment about safety needing improvement. Nuclear power has demonstrated one of the best safety records of all industries, including solar and wind. OZ may have disadvantaged its society by its policy of trying to replace coal with solar and wind. This has resulted in the ongoing need to spend inordinate amounts of taxpayers money on storage projects including Snowy2 and an urgent need to upgrade your grid. None of this would be necessary had you chosen to replace your aging coal stations in-situ with existing nuclear power. Nuclear power stations have a realistic life expectancy of 80-100 years. When all system costs are taken into consideration, today's nuclear is potentially the cheapest forms of clean energy. However amortizing and funding methods must be appropriate to realise these benefits.
Fear and greed are the poisonous obfuscation of fact that creates problems for real knowledge, although you may have been making a sarcastic reference, ..hard to tell.
The USA has currently got 93 Fission reactors, China has about 50 and so does Japan & France. The total number of nuclear reactors globally is only 436. Building 10,000 is NOT feasible. Also the reason China can build them cheaper is because they are using slave labour and not reporting there true cost.
Agree with you 100%. Building 10, 000 fission reactors is not economically feasible. There is also an issue of fuel supply. There are only 255 years of Uranium reserves left for conventional nuclear reactors; scaling up nuclear to 10000 reactors will deplete the Uranium resources in just a couple of decades. Thorium is likely to be the only fuel that runs SMR's in the long run, suggesting that a molten salt Thorium reactor is the only configuration that has any real hope for SMR's.
History has shown that Water Pressurized Reactors are not a good way to build 10,000+ reactors for community power. Let's design something small, better and truly safe for our community.
Who pays for all this high quality production?? The economics are wrong. Gazillion watts of electricity needs Gazillion $ of new grid to the 330million people in the USA.
SMR's will not help. Only enough Uranium for 250 years at present nuclear energy providing a few percent of total energy. If ramped up to replace fossil fuels, the Uranium known reserves would be used up in 30 years. The use of reprocessing creates too much subsidiary nuclear waste. The USA has a terrible legac problem of nuclear waste has not been solved and is a huge problem. This video is wishful thinking. The NuScale SMR project at UTAH has been a financial disaster and is non-viable.
@@chapter4travelsalternative fissile material, the current mining technology would need to be restructured. and we can't get to the available resources without killing the habitat for humans first.
@@jthadcast It already has, check out "Situ uranium mining". Also. we have a few thousand years' worth of fuel already mined and stored. Then there is seawater extraction which has no mining.
Nuclear fission reactors have characteristics that are different to other industries such as automotive. The byproducts of nuclear fission are highly dangerous and toxic. Unlike other products such as automotive or aerospace, nuclear fission reactors operate at criticality that is an inherently unstable condition that must be controlled by active feedback. A nuclear fission power plant exploding spreads permanent nuclear contamination over a region; the dangers of contamination at Chernobyl and Fukushina Dai'ichi are clear examples of the terrible consequences. Thus, the people in the video are naive zealots that are asserting nonsense. SMR's create more nuclear waste per kWh of energy produced than large nuclear reactors. The issue of nuclear waste has not been solved: see the problems at Hanford, Oak Ridge Laboratories, Yucca Mountain repository. As aforesaid, NuScale's experience at UTAH with cost overrun clearly shows that SMR's are not commercially viable. Investors would be insane to invest in SMR's - renewables is a much better investment, especially with flow-battery energy storage.
> The byproducts of nuclear fission are highly dangerous and toxic. But unlike the automotive industry, the byproducts are captured and contained. Which is worse - deadly to humans auto exhaust in the biosphere? or deadlier to humans, but separated from them by meters of concrete and steel? > nuclear fission reactors operate at criticality that is an inherently unstable condition that must be controlled by active feedback You don't appear to understand what 'criticality' means in the nuclear fission sense. Criticality simply means you have a sustained nuclear reaction. It isn't an unstable condition, it is actually a fairly broad range of conditions, which in most reactors (all the Western ones) have a negative reactivity coefficient. (i..e you have to keep turning the reactor up to continue its operation; if you don't, the reactor will eventually stop as the fuel is consumed and it falls below criticality). > A nuclear fission power plant exploding spreads permanent nuclear contamination over a region; the dangers of contamination at Chernobyl and Fukushina Dai'ichi are clear examples of the terrible consequences. Although the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi were not great for those involved, they were pretty mild compared to other accidents. Or even standard operating procedure at a coal plant. Chernobyl - about 65 dead, some 1800 known cancers, and maybe 4000-11000 total. hydro accidents - anywhere from 100s to 1000s to 100,000s dead. natural gas explosions - 10s to 100s dead (and happening every year) coal business as usual - 100,000s dead each and every year from coal emissions
@@factnotfiction5915 I have spoken with nuclear engineers of nuclear reactor design companies and professors at universities and they use the phrase "criticality" to mean a sustained nuclear reaction. A nuclear bomb is merely a beyond criticality where there is a rapid temporal growth in nuclear reaction rate. therefore my use of nomenclature is correct. The other issue that you write about is a falsehood: automotive pollution are of a different nature to nuclear pollution, wherein the former is of a chemical toxic nature whereas nuclear pollution is of a radioactively toxic nature. These are mutually different, hence what you write about is nonsense and shows that your knowledge of the subject matter is immature and superficial.
You are playing the fear card--Chernobyl did explode and did spread contamination, but only because it had no containment building. Chernobyl is the only accident that has caused deaths by radiation, and the most credible UN reports say about 50 died from radiation, and a few hundred from longer term thyroid cancers and difficult to quantify results. The Chernobyl reactor complex had four reactors. The three that didn't explode continued operation for many years. If you want to understand that accident, see the Illinois Energy Professor's video. Fukushima deaths were all from the tsunami and exactly zero from radiation. Several years later one worker died from cancer and his family was compensated. The reactors shut down correctly. The sea wall was insufficient, and the generators to supply backup power were located where flooding was inevitable if the sea wall was overwhealmed. Read the book Fukushima if you want to understand the unfortunate politics that led to the bad choices made. Three Mile Island was a disaster for the investors, but nobody was injured. A small amount of radioactive gas escaped, but the level was not unsafe and was comparable to normal background.radiation. Some reactors will use TRISO fuel which certainly produces more volume of waste as little balls that cannot melt in event of an accident. But the actual mass of waste is the same as any fission process. If you actually study the facts of nuclear energy, you will be less afraid.
@@thewiseperson8748 There seems to be a misunderstanding that an active control is needed to keep a reactor from going super-critical or sub-critical. In a LWR, where regular water is both coolant and moderator, there are three negative feedbacks which keep criticality in balance, the doppler effect in the fuel, the thermal expansion of water and the presence of voids (i.e. bubbles). All three will automatically reduce the reactivity if it goes up. Bret Kuglemass, the founder of Last Energy, gave a good talk about this: ruclips.net/video/CcXzG0WsnNs/видео.html
I really like what you are doing: making the public more aware of CO2 free energy possibilities. I have traveled a lot in Arctic Canada. This region is too remote to be on the grid, has communities too small for current large scale nuclear and has little or no sunshine for half the year. Currently powered by diesel, you illuminate lots of ideas that could provide clean power to this part of the world.
not co2 free, until they find that materials science that uses strong roman concrete that can sequester co2 instead of creating it and learn to mfg high performance, insanely qc intensive steel.
If I were an anti-nuclear activist in the 70's, the most harm I could do to the nuclear industry is to push for increased regulation and become the new regulator. It's hard not to conclude that the NRC is staffed by mostly anti-nuclear double agents.
sorry but the industry earned that penalty cost by faking qc. China built them fast but longevity and safety ain't there. take a 60yr lifespan and convert it to 20 years where the last ten are nail-biters.
brilliant analysis of new possibly breakthrough emerging markets.
So much opportunity here.
I'd love any new reactors to have inbuilt passive safety and multiple passive redundancies.
They need to be disaster proof. Having them at sea is brilliant, we have the DC transmission cable technology to add to that.
We could desalinate water, create hydrogen, power industry with SMR's.
This could be brilliant.
Fusion will be amazing but the energy mix and balance will see a future of abundance.
This is a great series. I couldn't help but notice, however, that you misspelled "cumulative" on the Experience Curve graphic. 🤨
“A warm light for all mankind to share”
This seems like a start up sales pitch, it has seedy written all over it even if its not snake oil
The problem with nuclear power is the regulation in the United States. The number of staff needed just to deal with the regulatory bodies is about at least four time that needed for conventional power plants. Also required is a simulator for Operator training and the required training staff. These are just a couple of big-ticket items, there are more. Nuclear if the USA is just too expensive.
@26:25, You needed to question Kugelmass on why he thought the UK regulation environment was better than in the US. The same question should be asked about his other customers, Poland and Romania.
I agree; that would have been a great question.
I presume that the answer is along the lines of: "the US is a 'checklist' regulator - i.e. follow the checklist; and the UK is a 'concept' regulator - i.e. does the design meet the concept"
Simon Irish of Terrestrial has some observations on this.
@@factnotfiction5915 Simon Irish of Terrestrial Energy might have been comparing US regulation with Canadian regulation. In another video, Bret Kuglemass has commented that Canadian regulation is also strict. So I guess the question is why the regulations in the UK, Poland and Romania is better than Canada.
MSRs are illegal to operate in the USA thanks to AEC rule changes signed off by Nixon in 1972 at the same time as he ordered MSRE dismantled and all research material destroyed.
The AEC rules don't come out and explicitly SAY "molten fuel reactors are illegal" because the existence and sucess of the MSRE was a classified secret, but the regulations are deliberately worded to make attempting to build one a criminal act the moment nuclear material hits the loop. As just one example, it's impossible to get regulatory approval for Hastalloy N (which is what MSRE used, was developed for that project and is what China's using at TMSR-LF1)
Canadian rules follow AEC ones, tso the difficulty there is unsurprising
It's telling that of the three major accidents involving nuclear reactors the only one to result in human fatalities was the one where they didn't bother building a proper containment building. You can get a lot of things more efficient, but the one thing you really want to do the same is a proper containment building. You can make it smaller if you like, just don't make the walls any thinner.
@thewiseperson8748 said, "Thorium is likely to be the only fuel that runs SMR's in the long run, suggesting that a molten salt Thorium reactor is the only configuration that has any real hope for SMR's."
Pebble-bed reactors are also capable of using fuel pebbles made from different fuels in the same basic design of reactor (though perhaps not at the same time). Proponents claim that some kinds of pebble-bed reactors should be able to use thorium, plutonium and natural unenriched uranium, as well as the customary enriched uranium.
Because the pebble-bed reactor is designed for higher temperatures, the reactor will passively reduce to a safe power-level in an accident scenario. This is the main passive safety feature of the pebble-bed reactor, and it distinguishes the pebble-bed design (as well as most other very-high-temperature reactors) from conventional light-water reactors, which require active safety controls.
Thorium is a marketing term just like SMRs. Thorium as a fuel will only make MSRs (Molten Salt Reactors) more expensive than uranium-based MSRs with no advantages.
Try running an Aluminium smelter with a continuous 500MWe demand with just a Solar farm and Gigabattery packs. The solar would need to have a 2000MW output averaged over 6hours then need at least18×500MWh = 9GWh batteries to get through the nights.
That's capital cost of:
Solar:4×500,000×$2000/kW= $4billion + Mega-Pack:
9000MWh@$600,000/MWh (= $5.4billion)
So Total capital cost/kW. = $(4+5.4)×10⁹/500,000 = $18,800 per kW for a 24/7/365 demand and at 2Watt/m² need at least 100,000Ha taken from the scarce tropical rain forest.
C.f Indonesia's 8× ThorCon 500MWe TMSR (foot print 1.17Ha each 500MW unit or 43kW/m²) capital costs of $800 - $1000 per kW (say $940/kW) is .94/18.8=1/20 or 5% of the required capital cost of a stand alone combined Solar + Batteries system wthout considering the destruction of over 1000km² tropical rain forest -
(NOTE: Both supply 500MW × (6+18)hours = 12,000MWh/day)
Indonesia's expected levelised pre-profit cost is less than $30 per MegaWatt.hour (
we are addicted to boxite.
Cooling towers aren't nuclear reactors. Why show them?
Because they look "scary".
I think they should be painted blue for obvious reasons ;)
Cooling towers are the best way of rejecting heat on the revenue side of the operation.
You're not subject to major environmental effects of discharging excess heat into waterways if you can reject direct to atmosphere and in order to be able to make a heat engine work (steam turbine or other electrical generator) you MUST be able to reject heat somewhere. They need a hot side and a cold side to function
Cooling towers are mostly associated with coal plants and the temperatures/heat density of MSRs is a good substitute for the thermal energy provided by burning coal/gas
If you want to keep deployment costs down you MUST make the reactors work with existing power generation methods and superctitical steam turbines are a good fit for the job that exist already, unlike supercritical CO2 or Brayton turbines which are still only at "experimental" stages (I don't object to using them later, but holding up deployment until they're ready is like holding off until fusion is ready - we don't have that long to wait and the effects of globval warming are potentially far more catastrophic than politicians are letting climate scientists talk about - put it this way "Do sea level rises and climate catastrophes within the lives of our great grandchildren matter if no humans are alive to witness them?" - it really is that dire.
in my youth the lake Michigan coal plant cooling tower made me think it was nuclear, until my 6th birthday and we learned they were dumping hot water into the lake killing all the coho and belching coal tar on the marina destroying the boats.
do nuclear plants even need cooling towers? i thought that stupidity went out with the invention of computers.
What about the developers at Lightbridge and the fuel they use?
Well I really tried to get interested but I guess too many words and not enough graphics for me.. 😆
There already are companies that build nuclear reactors for submarine use and they will probably deliver good and reliable SMRs soon. I know about Rolls Royce - who hasn't built a single car since 1971 but is one of two companies that built large airplane turbines.
You really have Edwart Teller's grandson on this episode? Nice!
I wonder if working with the shipyards that build nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers would have a faster success than the cheaper South Korean ones. They also have politicians on their payrolls.
the problem is each individual plant needs the same set of professional crew, more small is an exponential growth of highly overeducated controllers. simulated intelligence can never be trusted to operate and supervise live plants.
can you check seawater? seawater should be drinkable
The grid is fragile because it is incredibly expensive.
Nobody over builds the grid.
$million/mile and millions and millions of miles to the 330million people in the USA.
Generation is cheap, it is the grid costs that's ignored by the nuclear promoters.
Hello, hello 👋 anyone home, hello 👋
we need to end the grid and its capital stranglehold on progress, vulnerability, and waste
@jthadcast we need to keep the grid as a backup because it exists.
The new ways of generation and storage at the point of use are becoming cheaper and more practical in replacing fossil fuels.
@@stephenbrickwood1602 it only exists because we pump billions in every year to keep it functional but i'm not saying tear it down but phase it out. if large scale industry went off-grid and small on campus nuclear things could change. have they've actually proven small will work at scale operation, nope but investing in proof of concept is good idea. just speculating here but the mindset in nuclear engineering at school was all about larger production where there are two, three, four or more reactors for a single facility to chase efficiency at production not distribution.
@jthadcast good comment, good thinking.
Copy and paste your comments elsewhere as both sides are confusing people.
The truth is a little more complicated, but your retelling helps push the politics to the real world.
Whilst the concept of SMRs is good, the need of them is undermined by the need for thermal efficiency on the revenue (steam(*)) side and that converges on "Make them as large as physically possible" - about 1GW output for a steam turbine (3-4GW input thanks to heat engine losses)
(*) Or supercritical CO2, or brayton turbines. The point is that ALL electrical generation uses heat energy to generate electrical energy at 25-35% efficiency (CCGTs get higher efficiency by clever heat scavenging tricks) and the bigger the turbine, the greater its efficiency and per-GWh maintenance costs - this is why conventional power plants have been getting bigger and bigger as materials technology allows larger turbines to be built
Conventional water-moderated reactors vessels are under amazingly high stresses - they're essentially steam boilers, and this is pushing the state of the art, especially for a boiler that has to be "service free" for 60 years
Modularisation is still a highly desireable characteristic. If using MSRs, a 3GW reactor isn't large - and more importantly, being unpresurised means it doesn't need to be fabricated like a steam boiler (ie: it can be factory-manufacturable rather than individually "craft-built")
There's another important point to note: a complete 3-4GW MSR (LFTR) and containment building would be about 1/4 of the size of equivalent heat output coal burners, whilst being just as hot - The ramification is that they can be utilised as "drop in" replacements for coal in thermal power stations, everything nuclear kept confined within the MSR building and normal non-nuclear procedures apply on the revenue side (ie: a steam explosion is just a steam explosion, not a radiological disaster)
I believe that we will see modular reactors, but they're likely to be "as large as phsyically feasible" and may drive multiple steam (or supercritical CO2) turbines. 10GW isn't beyond the scope of possibility, perhaps even larger.
Bear in mind that _every_ existing "burner" thermal power plant needs to be replaced in the next 30-40 years but that accounts for only 30% of our carbon emissions - we need to build more energy output to cover the difference, by a factor I've been estimating at 6-8fold for a long time (It's not just the obvious stuff like transportation and industrial processes. Fertilizer production alone will need at least as much energy input as existing electrical production to be weaned off of oil. The inefficiencies of synthetic fuel production means that cater to aircraft (almost impossible to electrify for longhaul) we'll need massive energy input ("Hydrogen" is so expensive (and dangerous) to compress, cool and transport that it makes more sense to go a few extra steps and invest the energy required to produce liquid fuels. The net energy equation is still lower than trying to ship hydrogen around and less likely to suffer catastrophic failures)
PLUS we must build out enough energy generation capacity to allow developing countries to catch up. This is the _only_ way to wipe out terrorism and reduce population growth (wealthier people don't do desperate things and they have fewer children. Deliberately holding people back is a recipe for global warfare)
10,000 nuclear reactors? Yes
10,000 "small" nuclear reactors? No. They're simply not large enough to be viable and trying is a false economy which will most likely result in bankruptcy of those persisting in trying
BYW: the industry leader and energy superpower of the mid-late 21st century is most likely to be China, with the USA reduced to a heavily-indebted also-ran. The most promising nuclear technology for low cost, low waste, low risk, proliferation-resistent commercialisation was effectively made illegal by presidential order in 1972 and those rules have not been repealed (Indonesia may be #2)
Indonesia's PPA for 8× walk-away safe ThorCon 500MWe TMSR fabricated on line in a Korean double-hulled bulk-carrier shipbuilding yard at a fully fitted capital cost of $800 - $1000 per kiloWatt.
Each of the 500MWe TMSR units, have footprints of 180m×65m = 11,700m² or 1.17Ha.
At height of 34.2m the crude volume is 400,000 m³, making your crude cost estimator 500,000kW/400,000m³ = 1.250kiloWatt/m³ or between $1000/m³ to $1250 per m³, (using unit cost of between $800 to $1000 per kiloWatt).
An on line production, of these 500MWe TMSR units, at a double-hulled bulk-carrier Korean shipyard that could be capable of producing at least 12GigaWatts a year.
(Hope this is useful as if requested I can provide the through-put daily tonnage, as some of the original Florida ThorCon designers previously designed and had built the world's largest bulk-carriers in Korean shipbuilding yards).
what's the up front investment cost for construction and installation? nevermind the political cost of nimby
I dont buy the idea thst snaller is cheaper. Volume is only likely to be in 10's-100's not millions. Also factory manufactured homes to be assembled onsite, havent turned out cheaper! But manufacturing still make a lot of sense. Experienced building crews will have families and might not want to spend their entire lives moving from place to place.
manufatcuring in ways that allow assembly of readily handleable, transportable pieces makes for vastly reduced costs.
Existing reactor pressure vessels cost billions (literally), take 2 years to make (only one manufactirer left), cost hundreds of millions to transport to locations because of their massive unwieldy sizes and are backlogged by 2 decades
Not having to contain 200-400 atmosphere water at 350C (_extremely_ corrosive and quite capable of rotting through a 9 inch steel flange in 18-36 months - this HAS happened) relaxes a lot of your engineering requirements for the vessel, as does not needing a containment building needing to hold all that steam/water if it does happen to rupture.
Getting water away from the nuclear cycle is key to both improving nuclear safety (lowering risks) and dramatically reducing costs. Attempting to replace the water with flammable/explosive molten metals like sodium undoes most of the gains (See: Santa Susanna reactor, Monju and others) and is a good example of "just because you CAN, doesn't mean you SHOULD" (or in other words, the risks haven't been fully studied vs proven alternatives. If it can burn, escape or fry brains(*) then it shoudln't be inside the reactor loops)
(*) Molten lead isn't exactly biologically friendly and the tendency to readily oxidise affects its heat transportation properties anyway. There are good operational (reliability) reasons most Russian Molten Lead reactors were allowed to go cold.
3.6 Roentgen
PWRs, regardless of size will always be expensive by their very design. Very high-pressure reactors that produce low output temperatures require specialized, nuclear-certified power conversion equipment. I don't care how you build them, they will be expensive and only produce electricity and no industrial heat.
What can be produced cheaply are generation IV reactors. Low-pressure/high-temperature reactors that utilize off-the-shelf power conversion equipment. ALSO they produce high quality industrial heat which is more valuable than electricity.
People are concerned with fuel and waste and danger to operate.
LFTR - Thorium fueled molten salt is the safest. Current reactor designs are the worst most dangerous BS design that comes from the nuclear weapons age
The video is not detailed enough to take seriously. A floating LFTR makes sense that partly powers hydrogen generators to feed the natural gas grid
Otherwise no we do not need more existing design nuclear rsactors
jury is out on material degradation on novel construction and materials. you need 40 years of data on a stable design before jumping to the cost of building multiple plants. abrupt climate change put the stop watch on nuclear energy and the lag is beyond repair
Julia should look at the camera instead of a screen or something else in front of her, i find it a litte weird
Old news all of it already done in Russia
If we continue to premise our analysis of China based upon the belief that the nation cannot innovate, then how on earth are they leading on battery technology, solar, and the production of 7nm Semiconductor Chips? Then what about Taiwan, the last I checked, they are Chinese. Our STEM (Science. Technology. Engineering, and Math) educational outcome is falling behind. China is doing what Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have done, and that is to have an industrial policy.
Your ideas are interesting and even plausible but your focus is a little niche. Consider that people live on the surface of the planet and get a large amount of their protein from the oceans. Japan has been criticised for discharging tritium contaminated water and yet you are considering floating reactors located off shore. Ideally from my own point of view is a stack-able SMR approach where a reactor complex can be built and cost recovery commence in the shortest possible time interval after which the reactor complex can be scaled up by expanding the module and even generator count. IN addition power should be generated and consumed in the same area for maximum efficiency. Large HV transmission lines is hazardous and expensive to both the end user of the power and to the environment. My thinking lead me to considering a different form of national power grid where nuclear generator sites are connected to all adjacent generator sites in a MESH with adjacent generation CELLS power sharing in the event of a generator cell going off line. Ideally the manufacturing should be split between the heat generation, (SMRs), and the turbine or generating equipment. The heat generation could be installed underground and therefore water free generation would be preferable. With SMRs a large user could install their own SMR and generator on their factory site and it could then be mesh connected and supply a revenue to the large user when they supply power directly to the MESH. The modular nature of the SMRs would allow them to be serviced and even replaced without the entire national power grid going down. This would allow a company to manufacture, commission, service and decommission the SMRs under contract with countries that have no nuclear industry and they could maintain the generator side of the power plant if they wish to or that could also be contracted. As a side issue the current generation = load is not good and leaves the power generation subject to failures effectively engineered into the design. Imagine power generation that was 50% higher than need and instead of load shedding to protect the grid think environment. I agree with using carbon from waste and even obtained from the oceans to make synthetic oil using the excess generation of the mesh/grid. The excess generaiton could be paid for as an environmental levy included in the power bills of the end users and things such as desalination plants for environmental inflows and drought proofing could be utilised effectively using free electrical power! Broaden the vision and include everyone. As for the small island nations imagine an old cargo ship refurbished and refitted as a moored power station in the local harbour. Simply swap out the ship come service time! The possibilities are endless if you care to consider things outside of the established views of power needs and consumption. Time for the 21st century thinking we had expected last century!
RobertIrvine , lots of interesting and visionary engineering ideas but I fear you do not address the immediate problem. Nuclear Power is in the doldrums in many western countries. The issue is not engineering, we have been building reactors since the 1950s. Frankly the public does not care about the actual nuclear technology. In their eyes it is all nuclear and most see it as a major business risk from late deliverables and horrendous cost overruns. If the industry is to be resuscitated the first actions must be to demonstrate some successful and highly visible projects. That is where this video is useful. It focusses on fixing the economic and manufacturing problems by using proven technology. After that we may win the space to innovate.
What Bob said.
We're talking advanced reactors next week, there are a lot of exciting things happening there! Need to show that we can build these designs with a somewhat easier, or at least more clear, regulatory pathway, fast, cheap, and safe, too.
@@bobdeverell I live in a country that currently has laws that make nuclear power illegal. It was the nuclear policies of the US and its desire to monopolize nuclear weaponry that caused our government at the time to pass such a law in order to placate a vital defence ally. To overcome or overturn such a law ANY nuclear power solution must have vastly better safety of design. It is not good enough to simply expand American or European thinking and to expect the world to simply follow. There are climate change summits, where is the nuclear power summit to which ALL countries are invited? I do not see nuclear power as being profitable as I see it as vital FOR ALL.
@@age-of-miracles Please pay serious attention to the environment and climate because there is a lot of political effort applied in those areas. Can you also address the "Victorian" design of the current global power distribution systems which are dangerous, expensive and an obstacle to inexpensive nuclear power adoption.
@@robertirvine4780 Hi, I understand the rationale for the OZ nuke ban but I don't understand your comment about safety needing improvement. Nuclear power has demonstrated one of the best safety records of all industries, including solar and wind. OZ may have disadvantaged its society by its policy of trying to replace coal with solar and wind. This has resulted in the ongoing need to spend inordinate amounts of taxpayers money on storage projects including Snowy2 and an urgent need to upgrade your grid. None of this would be necessary had you chosen to replace your aging coal stations in-situ with existing nuclear power. Nuclear power stations have a realistic life expectancy of 80-100 years. When all system costs are taken into consideration, today's nuclear is potentially the cheapest forms of clean energy. However amortizing and funding methods must be appropriate to realise these benefits.
Fear and greed are the poisonous obfuscation of fact that creates problems for real knowledge, although you may have been making a sarcastic reference, ..hard to tell.
Carbon is not a bad thing in the atmosphere.
The USA has currently got 93 Fission reactors, China has about 50 and so does Japan & France. The total number of nuclear reactors globally is only 436. Building 10,000 is NOT feasible. Also the reason China can build them cheaper is because they are using slave labour and not reporting there true cost.
Agree with you 100%. Building 10, 000 fission reactors is not economically feasible. There is also an issue of fuel supply. There are only 255 years of Uranium reserves left for conventional nuclear reactors; scaling up nuclear to 10000 reactors will deplete the Uranium resources in just a couple of decades. Thorium is likely to be the only fuel that runs SMR's in the long run, suggesting that a molten salt Thorium reactor is the only configuration that has any real hope for SMR's.
@@thewiseperson8748You know so much. May I ask, Are you a nuclearer engineer.
Building small scale nukes to that quantity is possible and maybe a great idea.
@@jeffmckie7300 No it is not a good idea. It would be an environmental and financial disaster.
History has shown that Water Pressurized Reactors are not a good way to build 10,000+ reactors for community power. Let's design something small, better and truly safe for our community.
Who pays for all this high quality production??
The economics are wrong.
Gazillion watts of electricity needs Gazillion $ of new grid to the 330million people in the USA.
SMR's will not help. Only enough Uranium for 250 years at present nuclear energy providing a few percent of total energy. If ramped up to replace fossil fuels, the Uranium known reserves would be used up in 30 years. The use of reprocessing creates too much subsidiary nuclear waste. The USA has a terrible legac problem of nuclear waste has not been solved and is a huge problem. This video is wishful thinking. The NuScale SMR project at UTAH has been a financial disaster and is non-viable.
The world has enough fissile fuel to last longer than the sun will shine making it limitless. You have been reading anti-nuclear propaganda.
@@chapter4travelsalternative fissile material, the current mining technology would need to be restructured. and we can't get to the available resources without killing the habitat for humans first.
@@jthadcast It already has, check out "Situ uranium mining". Also. we have a few thousand years' worth of fuel already mined and stored. Then there is seawater extraction which has no mining.
Nuclear fission reactors have characteristics that are different to other industries such as automotive. The byproducts of nuclear fission are highly dangerous and toxic. Unlike other products such as automotive or aerospace, nuclear fission reactors operate at criticality that is an inherently unstable condition that must be controlled by active feedback. A nuclear fission power plant exploding spreads permanent nuclear contamination over a region; the dangers of contamination at Chernobyl and Fukushina Dai'ichi are clear examples of the terrible consequences. Thus, the people in the video are naive zealots that are asserting nonsense. SMR's create more nuclear waste per kWh of energy produced than large nuclear reactors. The issue of nuclear waste has not been solved: see the problems at Hanford, Oak Ridge Laboratories, Yucca Mountain repository. As aforesaid, NuScale's experience at UTAH with cost overrun clearly shows that SMR's are not commercially viable. Investors would be insane to invest in SMR's - renewables is a much better investment, especially with flow-battery energy storage.
> The byproducts of nuclear fission are highly dangerous and toxic.
But unlike the automotive industry, the byproducts are captured and contained.
Which is worse - deadly to humans auto exhaust in the biosphere?
or deadlier to humans, but separated from them by meters of concrete and steel?
> nuclear fission reactors operate at criticality that is an inherently unstable condition that must be controlled by active feedback
You don't appear to understand what 'criticality' means in the nuclear fission sense.
Criticality simply means you have a sustained nuclear reaction.
It isn't an unstable condition, it is actually a fairly broad range of conditions, which in most reactors (all the Western ones) have a negative reactivity coefficient.
(i..e you have to keep turning the reactor up to continue its operation; if you don't, the reactor will eventually stop as the fuel is consumed and it falls below criticality).
> A nuclear fission power plant exploding spreads permanent nuclear contamination over a region; the dangers of contamination at Chernobyl and Fukushina Dai'ichi are clear examples of the terrible consequences.
Although the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi were not great for those involved, they were pretty mild compared to other accidents. Or even standard operating procedure at a coal plant.
Chernobyl - about 65 dead, some 1800 known cancers, and maybe 4000-11000 total.
hydro accidents - anywhere from 100s to 1000s to 100,000s dead.
natural gas explosions - 10s to 100s dead (and happening every year)
coal business as usual - 100,000s dead each and every year from coal emissions
@@factnotfiction5915 I have spoken with nuclear engineers of nuclear reactor design companies and professors at universities and they use the phrase "criticality" to mean a sustained nuclear reaction. A nuclear bomb is merely a beyond criticality where there is a rapid temporal growth in nuclear reaction rate. therefore my use of nomenclature is correct. The other issue that you write about is a falsehood: automotive pollution are of a different nature to nuclear pollution, wherein the former is of a chemical toxic nature whereas nuclear pollution is of a radioactively toxic nature. These are mutually different, hence what you write about is nonsense and shows that your knowledge of the subject matter is immature and superficial.
You are playing the fear card--Chernobyl did explode and did spread contamination, but only because it had no containment building. Chernobyl is the only accident that has caused deaths by radiation, and the most credible UN reports say about 50 died from radiation, and a few hundred from longer term thyroid cancers and difficult to quantify results. The Chernobyl reactor complex had four reactors. The three that didn't explode continued operation for many years. If you want to understand that accident, see the Illinois Energy Professor's video.
Fukushima deaths were all from the tsunami and exactly zero from radiation. Several years later one worker died from cancer and his family was compensated. The reactors shut down correctly. The sea wall was insufficient, and the generators to supply backup power were located where flooding was inevitable if the sea wall was overwhealmed. Read the book Fukushima if you want to understand the unfortunate politics that led to the bad choices made.
Three Mile Island was a disaster for the investors, but nobody was injured. A small amount of radioactive gas escaped, but the level was not unsafe and was comparable to normal background.radiation.
Some reactors will use TRISO fuel which certainly produces more volume of waste as little balls that cannot melt in event of an accident. But the actual mass of waste is the same as any fission process.
If you actually study the facts of nuclear energy, you will be less afraid.
@@PorpoiseSeeker People like him are usually not afraid, just a quasi-religious zealots!
@@thewiseperson8748 There seems to be a misunderstanding that an active control is needed to keep a reactor from going super-critical or sub-critical. In a LWR, where regular water is both coolant and moderator, there are three negative feedbacks which keep criticality in balance, the doppler effect in the fuel, the thermal expansion of water and the presence of voids (i.e. bubbles). All three will automatically reduce the reactivity if it goes up. Bret Kuglemass, the founder of Last Energy, gave a good talk about this: ruclips.net/video/CcXzG0WsnNs/видео.html
Make the videos shorter please
Russia already builds reactors in shipyards and floats them. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power_station
left over Soviet not Russian per say.