I'm guessing you've kept up with this MSR stuff, but I'll go ahead and tell you why we didn't use them. CORROSION. On paper, the salts aren't corrosive, but any moisture in the salts will result eventually in HF, or Hydro-Fluoric acid, aka the stuff so strong that getting a few drops on your skin can leach into your blood and cause cardiac arrest. The Hastelloy parts of the original MSRE were inspected under electron microscopes, and they were found to have significant degradation, both from radiation and acid erosion. It didn't help that at the temperatures the reactors run at, the steel actually behaves like a sponge and soaks up radioactive elements from the salt in addition to the rare earth metals that electroplate themselves to the sides. These were all issues that may have been resolvable, but it hasn't been until very recent administrative actions that addressing these issues became an option.
@@flugschulerfluglehrer That reactor ran fine until Dick Nixon shut it down in favor of reactors that provided materials for nuclear weapons. Now that we are reducing our nuclear weapons, the US needs to pursue Thorium as many other countries are.
@@MikeJones-rk1un Nuclear power is the most expensive form of electricity. We simply don’t need it. There are plenty of alternatives, all of them are cheaper. What we actually need is better infrastructure to distribute electricity. E. g. Iceland alone could produce enough electric power for the entire world with geothermal plants if only you could distribute it over the whole planet. The money we invest in nuclear power would be far better spent for infrastructure. Thorium is even more expensive than Uranium, and always will be. There is more than enough Uranium so there is absolutely no good reason to invest in Thorium. And No! Thorium does not cause less nuclear waste than Uranium.
i am overawed at the ingenuity of our forebears. What they were able to pull off 60 years ago... imagine if they'd had the technology we possess TODAY. What they could have accomplished with VR and advanced robotics! So much lost potential...
Ionising radiation and neutrons are toxic to electronics so it's likely that a modern day system would have to use similar methods. The best designs will keep as much equipment as possible outside the radioactive containment. Some people comment about the carbon moderators needing regular replacement, but the Britsh CO2 gas cooled reactors (AGRs) all use a carbon moderator and run at temperatures similar to the Oak Ridge MSRE. Cracks have been found in the carbon, but they have been operating since the mid 1980s with the original cores.
This type of reactor is actually pretty clean. I think most people would be ok this MSR I like it. Better than the dangerous one that we run are all past their time. I like it.
Actually it is a technological nightmare with incredibly high capital costs and a very short lifespan, a decade or two... The alloys that are used degrade, and basically every ten to twenty years you are either replacing all the internal components or shutting it down and scrapping it for a new unit. The contamination in the cooling systems mean that decommissioning the plants is extremely expensive.
Standard PWR and BWR in practice is much easier and safer. There's a reason these aren't running... The fuel isn't exactly satisfied with containment in metal, particularly in the presence of any water, which would be unavoidable if not simply over time. Just because something works doesn't mean it works well, and when there are technologies with track records around, they tend to win out when the stakes are as high as they are with reactors.
Weinberg who held patents for the nuclear submarine reactors always said they were great for small reactors where coolant was always available. But they were too risky for utility scale plants. He was told to be quiet or leave the industry. The U.K. Moltex molten salt reactor does not pump the radioactive fuel as it’s another thing to go wrong. They carry the fuel salt within tubes. It’s cooled by a non fuel salt which transfers heat via convection to heat exchangers. A third salt takes heat away for use. The reactor itself has no moving parts.
seems safer, better, but then I think, the weak point of the Moltex would be the many tubular walls in the reactor; they are exposed to high neutron flux ; (getting slowly weakened by the Wiggener-effect). Kirk Sorensen's and the original Alvin M. Weinberg's concept are less affected by that. More_% of the neutrons and neutrinos are swirling around inside the FLIBE-salt.
Gerhard Schroeder engineered the Energiewende, a turn away from coal and nuclear towards gas. He joined Gazprom not too long after retirement from his position in government in Germany. There are no such equivalent people doing the same in America, whose oil and gas drillers are comprised of hundreds of small outfits without centralised control. Although I suppose one could credit the fracking revolution in the US to decades of government investment; this does not necessarily credit any single individual or party with the push towards a reinvigoration of American fossil reserves.
The new Oak Ridge can be found in Japan, RNK, China, and India. No matter how much better a technology is you need to get past the Oil, Gas, and Coal industry lobbyists to even moderate outdated rules and concepts. They continue to obfuscate and even out right lie to preserve the status quo. They tell WV & PA coal miners they are going to "protect" their way of life while buying coal from KY and Colorado... face it, electrical power production is the least scientifically based entity and most unlevel playing field in existence in the US. It is not world competitive *product* technology because of proliferation fears even though every country we "fear" already has nuclear weapons, many for years and years... it is time to stop the charade and be honest. Using their model and methods handheld electronic calculators would probably just be coming out and they would be 4-bangers... scientific models would likely need to wait another ten years. But the "industry" would be bragging and boasting about how clever we are and how dumb everyone else is to cover the true gap in advancement.
So cool, now build a new ones already :D Remote maintance could be fully automated, pre-programmed and carried out by a couple of arms ^^ mmmm dreamy I can only imagine how painstaking it must've been, to plan and carry out those opperations, almost 60 years ago. I wonder how we ended up with solid fuels. I'm guessing it was because most early "reactors" were just a pile of uranium. And it would probably have seemed logical, at the time, to continue that path. (and also the need for also breeding plutonium)
There are a lot of people who fervently favor the FHR. I'm of the opinion that these people lean much too far to taking small, conservative steps in nuclear power. Some of the biggest perks of FHR are that you get to use NRC policies that are already in place (e.g. your barriers to fission product release are equivalent to or stronger than water reactors) and you don't have to worry about fission product salt chemistry at higher burnup, which may not be very well understood.
If circulating fuel with fission products is a big hurdle there is the concept of stable salt reactor, where fluid-fuel is kept in tubes similar to LWR. Moltex Energy of UK is developing these reactors. Pebbles made of graphite and carbide floats in the salt and pool type designs are not possible. To add, there is positive coolant void coefficient. Any loss of coolant from FHR should be avoided. I'm not convinced that FHRs can be made more economical than existing reactors. If we establish a new fuel infrastructure and build pebble manufacturing factories and reactors, transition to liquid fuel will be pushed to very far future. Fuel transition is always a slow process because of inertia.
The Chinese HTRs are being built at a cost competitive with LWRs at ~$8000/kWh: www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/china-nuclear-fuel-cycle.aspx#R_and_D . $430 million for 210MWe, 80% Cap factor (assumed for FOAK).
You know how you get a free razor, but the blades cost money? Nuclear reactors are sold the same way. Solid fuel pellets are just complicated to be patented so one company has a monopoly on the fuel for that reactor. No one wants to trade that for a much cheaper reactor that burns liquid commodity fuel that any chemical supplier can provide.
Cool, but definitely a proof-of-concept. One failure of a jack bolt, automatic positioner or spreader and you're stuck. Or even the remote arms themselves - are they replaceable on failure? What about failure of the arm-moving motor? Now you can't move it to replace it. We've come a long way in this regard, but its cool to see where we started.
The idea was to have the crane above in a room and have the reactor inside of a "cell". There would be a concrete lid between the two during normal operations. This would allow maintenance to be performed on the crane.
Because 98+ Percent of people in the US are Useful Idiots who know nothing of how the power gets to the light switch when they turn it on, nor do they really care... All they care about is what the sound bite on the Main Stream Media tells them to care about. MSR's would be an amazing future of clean energy independence for our country if only *someone* would listen....
36 hours for core replacement, and the same for Hx replacement. No wonder the startups are going for core replacement instead of engineering long lived cores. You could not say the same for a PWR refuelling outage, an activity that takes hundreds of people hundreds of man hours. How much did these mockups and the MSRE take to build? A few tens of millions of then year money? The same could be done today.
MonMalthias The cost doesn't matter as much as government regulation and public opinion. Whatever the cost to commercialize and mass produce msrs is pocket change compared to what the US government actually pockets every year. If there was a national push for this technology (with the same emphasis for nuclear research as WW2) these reactors becoming a thing 5-6 years down the line would not be much of a surprise. So go tell your friends to thumbs up nuclear power. And tell them to tell theirs.
There is no more of that same push. Not since the end of the space race and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The American Empire stands triumphant in a one-superpower world, its grip almost absolute. Petro-dollars are paid in USD. Hundreds of military bases dot the planet, ensuring prompt global response and projection of power against any rose that dare grow too tall. With victory came complacency and incompetence. Financialisation permitted the economy to grow even as the truly productive parts of the economy came under seige from outsourcing and industrial flight. Universities became hollowed out, to the point that foreign students now comprise the majority of alumni in technical fields and without which STEM programs would shutter. Even in this environment, DoE was able to support nascent fracking and horizontal drilling research from the lab to the well over multiple decades. There has been little effort on the nuclear side. But now with the Marcellus and Permian Basin, America stands to break the back of OPEC and assert even greater dominance. The same cannot be said of a nuclear program that would, at best, benefit only its own citizens and select few partner countries. Petroleum has grown to become more than just energy. It is utility (plastics), transport (asphalt), health (medicines), food (fertiliser and pesticides) and even shelter (insulation). Control the oil and you control the world. There has been a strategic calculation made. Nuclear has fallen by the wayside as a result.
After the Three Mile Island meltdown it was made a criminal offence to allow a nuclear reactor to melt in any way. This alone makes molten salts illegal in the USA.
@@Dave5843-d9m Bullshit, having a light water reactor melt is not the same, a molten salt reactor is just that, it is a heated fluidized salt, and no molten salts reactors are not illegal in the USA. It's just other than the MSRE, nobody wanted to spend money on it. That is thankfully changing, as there are some new initiatives by DOE and the NRC to revisit MSR's.
I built a small one about ten years ago for my off grid cabin 1 pressure cooker Lots of duct tape some copper pipe some knobs of an old radio Oh and 45 gallon drum of salt 🧂
I am trying to work out whether these processes came from the subsea oil industry or were applied to the same. You will encounter similar systems used with ROV units on subsea production wellhead assemblies. I wonder if General Electric and/or Westinghouse supplied campaign funds to the Nixon campaign….just asking 😂
I am a layperson and don't know anything about reactor's and just heard that the Chinese are building a Salt Thorium reactor and decided to look into it. I see that the Americans tested this during the 1960's and decided not to use this type of system in their plants.
Terrestrial Energy, ThorCon Power, and (partly) Terra Power are the folks trying to beat the Chinese to do it. Although TerraPower probably is doing it China. But they are tiny companies not fully funded. However Terrestrial is working in a safe, well organized democratic company with a rational regulatory system. That country has a very long boarder with the USA and powerlines go back and forth. Canada!
@@Rob_Moilanen Everybody looks at the costs vs the contamination. Proponents of MSRs deny that this prototype had serious problems, the technology is more complex than liquid sodium cooled reactors, and the lifespan of the nickel alloys used (Hastelloy and Inconel) are only 10 to 20 years, 20 years is pushing it, and then it has to be replaced. The removed reactor components fully qualify as high-level nuclear waste, tons of it, every pipe and coupler.
Great technology for the 50-60s, totally impressive. In any case, the test model shown is of low power, imagine a commercial one of more than 500 or 1000mw, unviable. As for the type of reactor, apart from its supposed advantages, it is a really bad idea and an operational nightmare.
@@mccaf87 The physics say yes. These are incredibly expensive to build, the technology level required exceeds that of liquid sodium cooled reactors. The contamination and corrosion problems are built into the design resulting in a very expensive reactor with a maximum lifespan of 15-20 years.
What is most astonishing about this film is that even as late as the 1960s people felt that it needed a rather "busy" symphonic sound track to accompany it. I wonder when this frightful practice ceased.
Dangerous, yes. Everything is HOT both thermally and radiologically. The room is at 700ºC, and the radiation field is about 3000 rem. You would be dead in about one second.
@@tomswiftTTT Actually there were not any Nuclides in the system, this is filming a test of the working and associated equipment before it went hot. When it did go hot, the equipment didn't fail, so it was never taken apart and sits as it did in this film.
All of the supporters of these molten salt reactors grossly underestimate how much radiation these things are releasing inside of the plant, well outside of the reactor core. The entire molten salt system is loaded with highly radioactive fission products, the molten salt heat exchangers are so hot, not just thermal heat but high energy gamma and neutron radiation, you die after a few minutes standing next to them after the fuel has been in use. The fuel is highly corrosive, very expensive alloys have to be used, and the life span of the alloy is only a decade or two at most. In order to breed fuel, these reactors require a blanket of thorium or natural uranium, and the fuel salts attack these metals, they are not Hastelloy or Inconel, and reactor burnthrough of the blanket is a real, and documented, possibility.
As amazing as the engineering on display is, it also demonstrates the basic problem with pumped fuel MSRs. Everywhere the salt goes will be massively contaminated and neutron activated, requiring painful 100% remote maintenance on a lot of nontrivial mechanisms. And because the fuel is flowing in a loop, the area subject to these extremely hostile conditions is significantly more than just the reaction volume. I got a kick out of the frozen salt seal... What we've since learned about how frozen salts are subject to self-radiolysis suggests that that would be a bad idea in a real reactor. This effect was what corroded the inside of the MSRE after the salt was frozen in place.
Proof that it's not good enough to know what to do. Somehow you have to convince others. Usually innovative people find leadership difficult. Usually leaders lack imagination or an understanding of anything new. These two personality types plague almost every endeavor.
an almost lost technology from the 1960s. Great video! Just that music is useless. Or wait a moment; that's the one thing we still are capable of making and reproducing in 2020. No Hastalloy-N, no Inconel available in quantities now!
What are you talking about? The US consumes hundreds of tons of both Hastelloy and Inconel every year. Space-X uses it, many other aerospace companies use it. The Delphin 3.0 rocket engine is 3-D printed from Inconel. I recently read that some of the thinnest, strongest, heat resistant microfibers are made from Inconel.
God this music crap!! No wonder the molten salt reactor experiment went nowhere... President Nixon was probably going going crazy at the end of having to listen to this music, no wonder you canceled the program!
Keep these coming!!!! I love these old films!
And those cheerful violins to promote science. 😅
I keep thinking Lassie is gonna turn up any second and start barking at the radiation
She did, and all of her fur fell off!
It's silly we aren't using these already given the amount of development that seems to have gone into the design.
I'm guessing you've kept up with this MSR stuff, but I'll go ahead and tell you why we didn't use them. CORROSION. On paper, the salts aren't corrosive, but any moisture in the salts will result eventually in HF, or Hydro-Fluoric acid, aka the stuff so strong that getting a few drops on your skin can leach into your blood and cause cardiac arrest. The Hastelloy parts of the original MSRE were inspected under electron microscopes, and they were found to have significant degradation, both from radiation and acid erosion. It didn't help that at the temperatures the reactors run at, the steel actually behaves like a sponge and soaks up radioactive elements from the salt in addition to the rare earth metals that electroplate themselves to the sides.
These were all issues that may have been resolvable, but it hasn't been until very recent administrative actions that addressing these issues became an option.
The simple reason is that water is everywhere. And the second reason is that the cores in msr seem to melt down for various reasons.
@@flugschulerfluglehrer That reactor ran fine until Dick Nixon shut it down in favor of reactors that provided materials for nuclear weapons. Now that we are reducing our nuclear weapons, the US needs to pursue Thorium as many other countries are.
@@MikeJones-rk1un Nuclear power is the most expensive form of electricity. We simply don’t need it. There are plenty of alternatives, all of them are cheaper. What we actually need is better infrastructure to distribute electricity. E. g. Iceland alone could produce enough electric power for the entire world with geothermal plants if only you could distribute it over the whole planet. The money we invest in nuclear power would be far better spent for infrastructure. Thorium is even more expensive than Uranium, and always will be. There is more than enough Uranium so there is absolutely no good reason to invest in Thorium. And No! Thorium does not cause less nuclear waste than Uranium.
@@flugschulerfluglehrer < Says there are plenty of alternatives (to nuclear) but doesn't seem to know what they are....
i am overawed at the ingenuity of our forebears. What they were able to pull off 60 years ago... imagine if they'd had the technology we possess TODAY. What they could have accomplished with VR and advanced robotics! So much lost potential...
Ionising radiation and neutrons are toxic to electronics so it's likely that a modern day system would have to use similar methods. The best designs will keep as much equipment as possible outside the radioactive containment.
Some people comment about the carbon moderators needing regular replacement, but the Britsh CO2 gas cooled reactors (AGRs) all use a carbon moderator and run at temperatures similar to the Oak Ridge MSRE. Cracks have been found in the carbon, but they have been operating since the mid 1980s with the original cores.
@@Dave5843-d9m Satellites are radiation hardened...
This type of reactor is actually pretty clean. I think most people would be ok this MSR I like it. Better than the dangerous one that we run are all past their time. I like it.
Actually it is a technological nightmare with incredibly high capital costs and a very short lifespan, a decade or two... The alloys that are used degrade, and basically every ten to twenty years you are either replacing all the internal components or shutting it down and scrapping it for a new unit. The contamination in the cooling systems mean that decommissioning the plants is extremely expensive.
Standard PWR and BWR in practice is much easier and safer. There's a reason these aren't running... The fuel isn't exactly satisfied with containment in metal, particularly in the presence of any water, which would be unavoidable if not simply over time. Just because something works doesn't mean it works well, and when there are technologies with track records around, they tend to win out when the stakes are as high as they are with reactors.
2:07 "This facility is a mock up of a small reactor system, approximately 20 thermal MW in size"
The minimum design size for which the math scales well out to lager values, like 1000+ MW thermal.
Weinberg who held patents for the nuclear submarine reactors always said they were great for small reactors where coolant was always available. But they were too risky for utility scale plants. He was told to be quiet or leave the industry.
The U.K. Moltex molten salt reactor does not pump the radioactive fuel as it’s another thing to go wrong. They carry the fuel salt within tubes. It’s cooled by a non fuel salt which transfers heat via convection to heat exchangers. A third salt takes heat away for use. The reactor itself has no moving parts.
seems safer, better, but then I think, the weak point of the Moltex would be the many tubular walls in the reactor; they are exposed to high neutron flux ; (getting slowly weakened by the Wiggener-effect). Kirk Sorensen's and the original Alvin M. Weinberg's concept are less affected by that. More_% of the neutrons and neutrinos are swirling around inside the FLIBE-salt.
In the Intro : "Operated By Union Carbide Corporation" - well that's reassuring.
BUILD A NEW ONE OAK RIDGE!!!
Gerhard Schroeder engineered the Energiewende, a turn away from coal and nuclear towards gas. He joined Gazprom not too long after retirement from his position in government in Germany. There are no such equivalent people doing the same in America, whose oil and gas drillers are comprised of hundreds of small outfits without centralised control. Although I suppose one could credit the fracking revolution in the US to decades of government investment; this does not necessarily credit any single individual or party with the push towards a reinvigoration of American fossil reserves.
Why? The old facilities work just fine, sure you can update them, but why rebuild when it's not necessary.
Why invest in an energy source that is one millionth as energy dense as nuclear?@@MonMalthias
The new Oak Ridge can be found in Japan, RNK, China, and India. No matter how much better a technology is you need to get past the Oil, Gas, and Coal industry lobbyists to even moderate outdated rules and concepts.
They continue to obfuscate and even out right lie to preserve the status quo. They tell WV & PA coal miners they are going to "protect" their way of life while buying coal from KY and Colorado... face it, electrical power production is the least scientifically based entity and most unlevel playing field in existence in the US. It is not world competitive *product* technology because of proliferation fears even though every country we "fear" already has nuclear weapons, many for years and years... it is time to stop the charade and be honest.
Using their model and methods handheld electronic calculators would probably just be coming out and they would be 4-bangers... scientific models would likely need to wait another ten years. But the "industry" would be bragging and boasting about how clever we are and how dumb everyone else is to cover the true gap in advancement.
Thorcon and Indonesia will make 6x500 MW MSR which is literally a bigger Oak Ridge MSR reactor
So cool, now build a new ones already :D Remote maintance could be fully automated, pre-programmed and carried out by a couple of arms ^^ mmmm dreamy
I can only imagine how painstaking it must've been, to plan and carry out those opperations, almost 60 years ago. I wonder how we ended up with solid fuels. I'm guessing it was because most early "reactors" were just a pile of uranium. And it would probably have seemed logical, at the time, to continue that path. (and also the need for also breeding plutonium)
I do not understand the reason why US national labs and China are doing research on solid fueled FHR (Fluoride Cooled High Temperature Reactors).
There are a lot of people who fervently favor the FHR. I'm of the opinion that these people lean much too far to taking small, conservative steps in nuclear power. Some of the biggest perks of FHR are that you get to use NRC policies that are already in place (e.g. your barriers to fission product release are equivalent to or stronger than water reactors) and you don't have to worry about fission product salt chemistry at higher burnup, which may not be very well understood.
If circulating fuel with fission products is a big hurdle there is the concept of stable salt reactor, where fluid-fuel is kept in tubes similar to LWR. Moltex Energy of UK is developing these reactors.
Pebbles made of graphite and carbide floats in the salt and pool type designs are not possible. To add, there is positive coolant void coefficient. Any loss of coolant from FHR should be avoided. I'm not convinced that FHRs can be made more economical than existing reactors. If we establish a new fuel infrastructure and build pebble manufacturing factories and reactors, transition to liquid fuel will be pushed to very far future. Fuel transition is always a slow process because of inertia.
The Chinese HTRs are being built at a cost competitive with LWRs at ~$8000/kWh:
www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/china-nuclear-fuel-cycle.aspx#R_and_D .
$430 million for 210MWe, 80% Cap factor (assumed for FOAK).
You know how you get a free razor, but the blades cost money? Nuclear reactors are sold the same way. Solid fuel pellets are just complicated to be patented so one company has a monopoly on the fuel for that reactor. No one wants to trade that for a much cheaper reactor that burns liquid commodity fuel that any chemical supplier can provide.
Cool, but definitely a proof-of-concept. One failure of a jack bolt, automatic positioner or spreader and you're stuck. Or even the remote arms themselves - are they replaceable on failure? What about failure of the arm-moving motor? Now you can't move it to replace it.
We've come a long way in this regard, but its cool to see where we started.
It's impressive they were able to get what they did. They were on a shoestring budget and had to make due in addition to the test of time.
"its cool to see where we started" - and ended.
The idea was to have the crane above in a room and have the reactor inside of a "cell". There would be a concrete lid between the two during normal operations. This would allow maintenance to be performed on the crane.
I like the Disney-like music. This would be a perfect 'show' for EPCOT.
This is effing insane
How does this only have 5400 views?
Because only about 5000 people understand how important this was.
Because 98+ Percent of people in the US are Useful Idiots who know nothing of how the power gets to the light switch when they turn it on, nor do they really care... All they care about is what the sound bite on the Main Stream Media tells them to care about.
MSR's would be an amazing future of clean energy independence for our country if only *someone* would listen....
@@IhateRUclips Very true. We have a MSM problem, not an energy problem. Also a swamp/cesspool problem in DC. MAGA
Unfortunately there just really aren't a huge number of people interested in the actual generation of electricity, by nuclear or any other means.
Just add 🐱’s 😂
36 hours for core replacement, and the same for Hx replacement. No wonder the startups are going for core replacement instead of engineering long lived cores. You could not say the same for a PWR refuelling outage, an activity that takes hundreds of people hundreds of man hours.
How much did these mockups and the MSRE take to build? A few tens of millions of then year money? The same could be done today.
MonMalthias The cost doesn't matter as much as government regulation and public opinion. Whatever the cost to commercialize and mass produce msrs is pocket change compared to what the US government actually pockets every year. If there was a national push for this technology (with the same emphasis for nuclear research as WW2) these reactors becoming a thing 5-6 years down the line would not be much of a surprise.
So go tell your friends to thumbs up nuclear power. And tell them to tell theirs.
There is no more of that same push. Not since the end of the space race and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The American Empire stands triumphant in a one-superpower world, its grip almost absolute. Petro-dollars are paid in USD. Hundreds of military bases dot the planet, ensuring prompt global response and projection of power against any rose that dare grow too tall. With victory came complacency and incompetence. Financialisation permitted the economy to grow even as the truly productive parts of the economy came under seige from outsourcing and industrial flight. Universities became hollowed out, to the point that foreign students now comprise the majority of alumni in technical fields and without which STEM programs would shutter.
Even in this environment, DoE was able to support nascent fracking and horizontal drilling research from the lab to the well over multiple decades. There has been little effort on the nuclear side. But now with the Marcellus and Permian Basin, America stands to break the back of OPEC and assert even greater dominance. The same cannot be said of a nuclear program that would, at best, benefit only its own citizens and select few partner countries.
Petroleum has grown to become more than just energy. It is utility (plastics), transport (asphalt), health (medicines), food (fertiliser and pesticides) and even shelter (insulation). Control the oil and you control the world. There has been a strategic calculation made. Nuclear has fallen by the wayside as a result.
I know. Just saying.
After the Three Mile Island meltdown it was made a criminal offence to allow a nuclear reactor to melt in any way. This alone makes molten salts illegal in the USA.
@@Dave5843-d9m Bullshit, having a light water reactor melt is not the same, a molten salt reactor is just that, it is a heated fluidized salt, and no molten salts reactors are not illegal in the USA. It's just other than the MSRE, nobody wanted to spend money on it. That is thankfully changing, as there are some new initiatives by DOE and the NRC to revisit MSR's.
Am I the only one binging all these archived nuclear videos? 😂
I built a small one about ten years ago for my off grid cabin 1 pressure cooker Lots of duct tape some copper pipe some knobs of an old radio Oh and 45 gallon drum of salt 🧂
Impressive Engineering
How much time do you figure would be budgeted to perform these actions? A few days, or a weeks you think?
thunderbirds dejavu
Except it doesn't end in spectacular explosions. F.A.B.
Did "28 feet of head" mean at the density of the molten salt or that of water?
So simple :) what could possibly go wrong ?
I am trying to work out whether these processes came from the subsea oil industry or were applied to the same. You will encounter similar systems used with ROV units on subsea production wellhead assemblies.
I wonder if General Electric and/or Westinghouse supplied campaign funds to the Nixon campaign….just asking 😂
I am a layperson and don't know anything about reactor's and just heard that the Chinese are building a Salt Thorium reactor and decided to look into it. I see that the Americans tested this during the 1960's and decided not to use this type of system in their plants.
The beginning of the WEF agenda... They sabotaged this, and took us off the gold standard the same year.
this is a technology that exists 60 years ago. can they be repeated again now?
Not with the NRC in place and the rules it has. China has no such qualms.
Terrestrial Energy, ThorCon Power, and (partly) Terra Power are the folks trying to beat the Chinese to do it. Although TerraPower probably is doing it China. But they are tiny companies not fully funded. However Terrestrial is working in a safe, well organized democratic company with a rational regulatory system. That country has a very long boarder with the USA and powerlines go back and forth. Canada!
A private company with an employee -> manager -> c-level -> board member structure is not a democracy.
It is an autocracy.
They don't need to, that work has already been done, its time to scale this up to produce power.
@@Rob_Moilanen Everybody looks at the costs vs the contamination. Proponents of MSRs deny that this prototype had serious problems, the technology is more complex than liquid sodium cooled reactors, and the lifespan of the nickel alloys used (Hastelloy and Inconel) are only 10 to 20 years, 20 years is pushing it, and then it has to be replaced. The removed reactor components fully qualify as high-level nuclear waste, tons of it, every pipe and coupler.
Amazing !!
Great technology for the 50-60s, totally impressive. In any case, the test model shown is of low power, imagine a commercial one of more than 500 or 1000mw, unviable. As for the type of reactor, apart from its supposed advantages, it is a really bad idea and an operational nightmare.
no.
@@mccaf87 The physics say yes. These are incredibly expensive to build, the technology level required exceeds that of liquid sodium cooled reactors. The contamination and corrosion problems are built into the design resulting in a very expensive reactor with a maximum lifespan of 15-20 years.
@@mccaf87 lol
14:35 Is that just a standard 3-prong 120v plug?
What is most astonishing about this film is that even as late as the 1960s people felt that it needed a rather "busy" symphonic sound track to accompany it.
I wonder when this frightful practice ceased.
Come to think of it, there must be a whole vault of industrial films with disco soundtracks...
Why do they need to do all the work remotely, is it because the interior area is dangerous for humans?
Dangerous, yes. Everything is HOT both thermally and radiologically. The room is at 700ºC, and the radiation field is about 3000 rem. You would be dead in about one second.
@@tomswiftTTT Actually there were not any Nuclides in the system, this is filming a test of the working and associated equipment before it went hot. When it did go hot, the equipment didn't fail, so it was never taken apart and sits as it did in this film.
Fermi Unit 1 still sits awaiting teardown…
All of the supporters of these molten salt reactors grossly underestimate how much radiation these things are releasing inside of the plant, well outside of the reactor core. The entire molten salt system is loaded with highly radioactive fission products, the molten salt heat exchangers are so hot, not just thermal heat but high energy gamma and neutron radiation, you die after a few minutes standing next to them after the fuel has been in use. The fuel is highly corrosive, very expensive alloys have to be used, and the life span of the alloy is only a decade or two at most. In order to breed fuel, these reactors require a blanket of thorium or natural uranium, and the fuel salts attack these metals, they are not Hastelloy or Inconel, and reactor burnthrough of the blanket is a real, and documented, possibility.
As amazing as the engineering on display is, it also demonstrates the basic problem with pumped fuel MSRs.
Everywhere the salt goes will be massively contaminated and neutron activated, requiring painful 100% remote maintenance on a lot of nontrivial mechanisms. And because the fuel is flowing in a loop, the area subject to these extremely hostile conditions is significantly more than just the reaction volume.
I got a kick out of the frozen salt seal... What we've since learned about how frozen salts are subject to self-radiolysis suggests that that would be a bad idea in a real reactor. This effect was what corroded the inside of the MSRE after the salt was frozen in place.
All of which is even easier today than it was then. Build it with this in mind instead of this prototype.
Look into Stable Salt Reactor, which has coolant and fuel salts separated.
Narrator sounds like John Forsythe.
Asbestos
Mein Gott - the music is crazymaking.
Ron Reagan was the narrator. Molten salt reactors were highly dangerous, and high maintenance.
How can you take a deadly threat seriously with that music?
Proof that it's not good enough to know what to do. Somehow you have to convince others. Usually innovative people find leadership difficult. Usually leaders lack imagination or an understanding of anything new. These two personality types plague almost every endeavor.
USA,USA,USA, you mist the bus..China,China,China, will soon have them up and running ..
an almost lost technology from the 1960s. Great video! Just that music is useless. Or wait a moment; that's the one thing we still are capable of making and reproducing in 2020. No Hastalloy-N, no Inconel available in quantities now!
What are you talking about? The US consumes hundreds of tons of both Hastelloy and Inconel every year. Space-X uses it, many other aerospace companies use it. The Delphin 3.0 rocket engine is 3-D printed from Inconel. I recently read that some of the thinnest, strongest, heat resistant microfibers are made from Inconel.
Integrated graphics card
I think they’re going to need a remotely piloted human or a robot because when you put those lines back on we are going to need hands.
God this music crap!! No wonder the molten salt reactor experiment went nowhere... President Nixon was probably going going crazy at the end of having to listen to this music, no wonder you canceled the program!