I've worked in Nuclear Generation since 2002. Quick comment. Any "solution" that's ultimately decided upon will take at least 15 years to fully implement. That's about how long it takes to construct a power plant. Also, regardless of how environmentally friendly it is, anyone who attempts to build a facility will almost certainly get hit with at least a dozen lawsuits from environmental groups before they even break ground. Those lawsuits often take years to overcome. My company has tried to build two facilities in the last 20 years, and every single project was ultimately scrapped because it became too embroiled in lawfare and public outcry. There's other factors, of course, but that's what we're facing. There is a lot of regulatory red tape and numerous legal battles. Overcome that, and it's going to take another 15 years to see any benefits.
What about SMR..... there is no way the SMR's take 15 years.... yes they still have to go through regulatory hurdles as they should, but the Nuclear Boogyman will likely come down if as expected SMR demonstrate their safety records. The anti carbon, green people are going to have to make some choices on what they want to support and it ain't solar/wind as the substitute for base load electricity, even with all the advances in the various battery storage.
Also, SMRs can be mass produced. If the USA does not do it, someone else will. The technology was proven way back in the 1960's. If we are lucky, it will be Japan.
True, but wind and solar still REQUIRE natural gas at a minimum of 30% of the power mix so its not really a solution. No nation has ever done better than that without dispatch-able hydro resources and they are pretty much all accounted for today. The CO2 output for Solar, Wind, transmission lines and smart grid with the required duplication to make reliable power is not much better than running everything on 100% combined cycle gas. Nuclear and to some extent hydro are the only reliable power sources we have that are low carbon. Remember on days where there are plenty of wind and solar weather much of the infrastructure is already idled due to over supply, but you still need massive duplication for the winters and poor days to meet needs. Its like having to hire 100 employees so that at least 20 show up for work everyday. Some days all hundred show up but there is only 20 needed. For this to work most days will have 50-60 show up for work so that you have the resources you need on tight days. For a company like Fedex, they hire temporary workers for 60 days and rent trucks to make their holidays work, but those folks have other jobs the rest of the year as do the trucks. T I'm not sure how you do this with wind and solar and its massive seasonal and random variations. It will get to the point that half the power or more of solar and wind needs to be wasted to have the capacity to get us through the low points in the year. Nuclear is hard, but its doable. France got their grid to 80% nuclear and no industrialized nation of size has come close to that.
I'm just going by what I've read, but if there hasn't been a meltdown of a reactor, built after the sixties (Fukushima being he most recent example) and we've solved the nuclear waste problem by making it a solid rather than a liquid. Wouldn't having to convert to thorium just set us back to square one effectively by having to go through all the trial and error that we did with uranium? Meaning, meltdowns and more general negative connotations toward nuclear energy as "unsafe." If we've finally gotten good at producing uranium based energy. Why take the radical left turn to basically reset the whole process that got us here?
Thorium is interesting and solves little on its own. Two other aspects need to be adressed: - Molten Salt address any risk of explosion from current pressurized systems. - Breeder reactors address the issue of storage and nuclear waste. The issue is that there is so much to be done. Yet doing any single thing in nuclear requires fighting the bureaucracy, the scaremongers, the hippies on top of convincing the money guys...
Molten salt will never be a thing due to a materials issues. Its a catch 22. Any vessel that can withstand the radiation and neutron flux for 50 years, will need to be high in nickel. Fluoride destroys high nickel steel in a very short time. If you use low / no nickel steel, the radiation and neutron flux destroy the reactor vessel in a short time. Its a no win
The hippies I know are pro nuke these days. The bigger fight is with government bureaucracy including local and state. In the northeast, local and state regulations can prevent an energy project from ever seeing federal government consideration. Another big issue here would be the NIMBY people who will fight until they themselves don't have electricity. Going forward; I think future energy demand will overcome those obstacles because people are going to want electricity no matter what.
Most will be done in France, India, China, Japan and Russia. What US does won't matter much. Japan already has one of the world's largest declared stockpiles of Pu, over forty tonnes. They say it is for energy security. China has bought up much of the world's supply of Thorium. They are stockpiling it and are also developing molten salt and pebble bed reactors to burn it.
Yes, a lot need to be done but so far that looks way simpler then fusion power. So far there is no better then nuclear alternatives for baseload power generation then nuclear anyway.
In a Molten salt reactor (MSR) consuming thorium as its raw fuel, while you might produce very, very small amounts of plutonium (with other actonites) you can simply leave it in the fuel salt where it will be burnt up to generate energy - you never take it out of the reactor. The plutonium produced in this way is very fractional (much less than a quarter mentioned by PEter) unlike in a uranium 238 fuel cycle which produces significant amounts. This is due to the different decay cycles. Reduced waste, enhanced safety and a simplification of the fuel cycle are the other reasons to prefer MSR. I would also argue that the reactor costs are likely to be cheaper once the initial prototypes are out of the way.
They are not economically feasible and will never be that way for commercial services due to maintenance costs. MSRs are corrosive to the structure of the reactor and there really isn't a solution to this problem.
Reference acticle: For high-temperature application, the corrosion of the metallic containment alloy is the primary concern. Un- like the more conventional oxidizing media, the products of oxidation of metals by halide melts tend to be soluble in the oxidizing media. www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1868062
@@TheBaldr Yeah, the real problem with them is that the salts mentioned are florides. Very nasty and corrosive by themselves. The material science from the corrosion was not up to snuff in the '60's when they had the first MSR's. Maybe they have some new approaches, but that is the limiting factor.
Yeah- you don’t easily get to Pu239 from Th232 or U 233. This talk is simply based on incorrect information. The possibility of using bred U233 as a bomb core exists but probably hasn’t been tested as far as what can go wrong. Also the Pu in aging power reactor waste is rarely just 239, and the other isotopes are unusable because of their ability to be xplode and destroy the lab and surrounding building way before you get to a critical mass. Bomb reactors are specialised.
You’re missing the other benefits of thorium. It’s literally everywhere in the soil in such amounts as to make mining viable. It also can be recycled into the same reactor which means 98% gets “burned off” and the remaining 2% only lasts a few centuries vs several millennia.
Terrestrial Energy is developing a Molten Salt reactor that uses Uranium as its fuel. It still burns the fuel much better than a normal reactor. Theoretically, it could burn nuclear waste from other reactors like they do in France. So yes, thorium's everywhere, and it's cheaper, but nuclear isn't expensive because of the cost of fuel.
Thorium is a by product of much mining, specifically rare earth mining. You don't even need to open a mine, you could just process tailings and get all the thorium you need forever. This is the reason that rare earth mining doesn't happen in the USA any more. There's so much Th in the tailings that they end up being classified as low level nuclear waste. No mining company wants to deal with that.
Mr. Zeihan is WRONG FOUR things wrong 1) A much Higher Percentage of Thorium can be used -- a Uranium fuel rod can last 6 years -- whereas Thorium can Last 50 years 2) This means that the Thorium waste is MUCH LESS radio-active * 3) you can produce electricity from a Thorium plant @ 1 atmosphere of pressure instead of 7 atmosphere 3a) This means you can NOT get a Fukushima nuclear disaster * 4) When uranium OVER heats the reaction increases this is how you get a Fukushima nuclear disaster * 4) Thorium operates in a Temperature range -- when Thorium OVER heats it shuts down 4a) This means you can NOT get a Fukushima nuclear disaster
no. Because the only problem for nuclear energy is not the fuel,but the regulations that since the 80s have killed the western nuclear industry. Especially in europe in countries like germany or italy. This is why russia ,china ans s.korea are still able to build nuclear powerplants in less than 4/5 years.
The registration is not the core issue IMHO it is stupid people doing totally idiotic shit in the name of saving the planet! Nuclear power is one of the most green ways to get power that actually works! Probably only second to geothermal energy if geography allows for it. But most green partys in Europe are entrenched in the opinion that its something bad. Yes nuclear weapons are terrifying and in a perfect world they should not exist, but then again in a perfect world war should not exist too. Like lots of problems with the modern world I believe that education is the way to solve this issue or at least it's a step in the right direction!
Nah the times to build a NPP there have increased as well. Its more like 5-10 years now. Also Chinas plans to build 45 new reactors is tiny compared to their current renewables installation rate of 140 GW a year. They clearly aren't betting on nuclear being their main energy provider
This is a gross oversimplification. That waste can be reprocessed into MOX fuel, which can be burned in normal reactors. Then there are fast neutron reactors (in actual operation in China and Russia), you can use them to reduce waste with 10k years half-life to ones with 200 year h.l. Nobody seems to mention that each "used" rod, is still 95% fuel and only 5% waste, which we don't process, because there was no need.
interesting. I thought the fuel rods were recycled and used again but Peter said that is not the case in the US. Shouldn't the US recycle these rods if they are 95% still usable fuel and to decrease waste?
It was in the early 1950's when Los Alamos figured out that liquid nitrate solutions of fissile material derived from reprocessing could be weaponized without any expensive technology required. All the containers and the entire reprocessing system are designed to prevent accidental criticality in fissile nitrate solutions.
The three biggest pluses for Thorium reactors are that they are not high pressure reactors, meaning they are much safer in that way, that they are fail safe; if the heat builds up, the thorium automatically drains from the reactor needing nothing but gravity, that they can use what is currently waste as their core fuel. Not only is there less plutonium, but there is less of the other dangerous byproducts. There's a difference between waste that drops significantly in radioactivity in hundreds of years vs waste that takes thousands of years to reach the lower radiation levels.
ruclips.net/video/xQYiFyd-ah4/видео.html&lc=UgxuVSc9rgcxS214RZN4AaABAg see my comment. It has nothing to do with the Thorium. Thorium is currently all hype without any economic reasons.
It's not Thorium reactors that are low pressure but liquid fuelled molten salt reactors of any type that are low pressure. Also, fuel for a fission reactor has to be "fissile". Thorium is "fertile" so the fissile from Th232 breeding is U233 - the "other fissile" Uranium. That is what creates the neutron source to generate the heat and sustain the chain reaction - not the Thorium. You can put pure U233 into a MSR and it will run fine. That is exactly what they did at the MSRe at ORNL in the 1960s.
Most of nuclear “waste” can be recycled to make new fuel since it still contains 90% of its potential energy. Countries like France also do this. Also, Yucca mountain is not “oversubscribed” since it sits empty due to federal and state politics. The more I watch Peter’s video, the less confident I am about the information he presents.
Yeah, when it comes to this detailed science stuff he's getting out of his specialty of geopolitics between world capitols and leadership. I know some basics on the whole nuclear power issue and science behind it, more than Peter but nowhere near enough to make detailed comments on it.
Peter you only told half the story about on site storage in cooling ponds. It’s only stored in cooling for 5 years because it has to be - it’s literally too hot and needs to be cooled down. After it’s cooled sufficiently, it’s put into a dry cask and stored on site. These casks are extremely durable and very hard to move, so damaging or stealing them isn’t easy.
Spent fuel only stays in a cooling pool for a few years. After that it goes into dry casks which are also on site. Then they could be transferred elsewhere in those casks if the chance came up.
I love Peter Zeihan but not on this topic. He keeps leaving things out and gets it wrong on the topic of bomb making with the spent nuclear fuel/unused nuclear fuel.
WBN2 + Vogtle3 =2 new plants on line, not 1 as you stated, Vogtle 4 started fuel loading on 17 AUG 23 and plans to go on line first quarter 2024 so we are closer to 3 new plants on line than 1 as you stated. Thanks for taking a look at Thorium. The weapons side of the nuke power mix is just one of many advantages of Th, other advantages include 1) A Th reactor was design built and operated at Oak Ridge back in the day - It's much much further along as developed tech than other nuke techs 2) The genre of Th reactors is better understood as molten salt reactors - of which there are many incarnations some of which can burn spent PWR/BWR waste as part of their fuel cycle. 3) Short lived isotopes in waste vs long lived isotopes is a complex topic but the Th power cycle produces less long live waste - a huge advantage. 4) Reactor design - molten salt reactors run at very low pressure just slightly above atm. pressure - PWR/BWRs run at high pressures - making MS reactors less subject to pressurized release of nuclear materials. 5) Th offers many safety advantages which include means for the fuel to reconfigure and shut down without human intervention. 6) Geopolitical considerations - China's TMSR-LF1 is moving forward, leaving the US behind. General comment. Final note - The useful power in Th reactions come from U233 which is not good for weapons. PWR/BWR technologies were adopted primarily to supply the weapons makers and to power ships and subs. Th/MS reactors can be optimize in ways that PWR/BWR cannot making Th/MS the tech of choice if one wishes to have abundant, safe, & cleaner power. Keep looking at Th/MS Peter - listen to voices outside the weapons complex - those guys are married to the old inefficient power cycles.
"PWR/BWR technologies were adopted primarily to supply the weapons makers " -- no, PWRs are very bad for making plutonium as you have to shut them down to extract the spent fuel. All the plutonium made for British and French nuclear weapons came from gas cooled reactors not PWRs.
Best comment, thanks, saved me from having to write something similar and you did a better job :). I would add the tech, being much safer, lends itself to smaller, even modular reactors, which will bring production costs waaaay down and improve national distribution. Kinda sad Peter focused on the weapons grade aspect and I'm not even sure he got that right.... Copenhagen Atomics did an interesting presentation recently, looks hopeful, quite a few companies with ideas but most are criminally underfunded, while people throw untold $billions into fancy fusion reactors which will probably never work, and then and scream about how climate change is going to doom civilisation. It's just absurd.
A quick correction. Thorium's main advantage is that its relatively abundant and cheap. Its about three times as common as uranium and has been nearly untapped by any major industrial process. Its dug up as a byproduct of other mining all the time. Since nuclear power is ultimately another non-renewable resource, it makes sense to use the more abundant power source if we are going to have to rely on it for a while.
@@michaelbritton2172 There is some truth in what you say, but the difference between U238 and Thorium is instructive. In a Thorium reactor, Thorium is the fuel and it is consumed, releasing useful energy. This is unlike U238 which absorbs neutrons and then becomes nuclear waste... long-lived nuclear waste. So U238 is a problem; Thorium is not a problem. In all these respects I compare Th to U235. Plus Thorium is produced as a byproduct when you dig-up Neodymium that is needed for wind-turbines and electric vehicles. Thorium is 3 times more abundant than Uranium and it is >300 times more abundant than U235. You can read the work of Alvin Weinberg (the guy who taught Rickover about Nukes) to learn why Thorium should power human prosperity.
Cheap uranium is running low and most of the industry is owned by russia. There certainly is a supply problem and Thorium would be a nice alternative... if molten salt reactors were in any shape or form practical.
Also an economic problem in turns of keeping existing reactors running. The way competitive electricity markets are structured (Paying equally for all production) make it very difficult for nuclear plants to operate profitably, in fact many are loosing 10's of millions every year and are reliant on state subsidies to even keep existing plants operating. Old designs have very little access revenues outside of the wholesale market (Lik ancillary services), and recently are starting to lose bids in capacity markets.
The sequestering of the waste is definitely a physical problem, and a long term one at that. We are basically kicking the can down the road, making it the problem of some future generation. That said, climate change is the more pressing problem as well as a worse problem than nuclear waste for future generations. Climate change might already be causing irreversible changes, but perhaps those changes can be mitigated by using nuclear energy. It’s quite ironic that the Greens created a political environment that now threatens the physical environment. Idealism can be just as dangerous as brutal cynicism.
Reprocessing spent uranium fuel generates usable uranium, plutonium, and “ash”, which is the spent part of the fuel. Mixing the plutonium with the ash makes it non-bomb grade. The plutonium can be mixed to the point where it is non-bomb grade, but still reactor grade.
@@Simple_But_Expensive - True, but all sorts of things can be used for dirty nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. If by "spent uranium" you mean a Plutonium-rich mixture, that would be among the worst possible ingredients.
I usually agree with your videos. I think you missed 4 other reasons for thorium. 1. Thorium reactors can not melt down. 2. Thorium is 1000 times more common than uranium. 3. Thorium uses 98% of the fuel that goes in to the reactor. 4. Thorium reactors can use up spent uranium rods. Please interview Kirk Sorensen
>1. Thorium reactors can not melt down. That has more to do with the fuel being in molten salt form. Uranium can be molten salt too. >3. Thorium uses 98% of the fuel that goes in to the reactor. That has more to do with the fuel being in molten salt form. >4. Thorium reactors can use up spent uranium rods. That has more to do with the fuel being in molten salt form.
It's not like current nuclear is bad but thorium is going to swoop in and save it. No. Even if you take a proven uranium design from 1960s, it's still vastly better than any other form of producing energy we have. The problem is public stupidity and the politics that stem from it.
India has enormous thorium reserves, and they have spent the equivalent of $100 billion in R&D trying to make this technology work... But there is not one single working demonstration reactor burning thorium anywhere in the world. The molten salt reactors are more technically difficult than liquid sodium cooled reactors, and the molten salt is highly corrosive, hot spots can easily form, and burn through. This technology was tested in the US with uranium, not thorium as fuel. I cannot find a single example of a working prototype reactor that actually burns thorium, and India has thrown real money at this with no tangible results.
@@rtqii I calling BS on India spending a 100 Billion in R&D - Please provide a valid reference. Also, Research reactor 'Kamini': India has been operating a low-power U-233 fuelled reactor at Kalpakkam since 1996
I suspect Thorium is the element of choice for fission reactors (though it is not fissile itself), however I suspect considering the length of time to build a reactor plus the cold war produced a strong bias to uranium as it can produce fissile bombs.
Beautiful green country he walks through. Someone should take the time to give Peter a full rebuttal on this complex issue. Even a guy like me recognizes that there is great error in this talk. There is also some obfuscation. I like this guy's other videos and think neither are intentional and there is no ill intent intended in this one. Thorium could be a great energy source for the future.
Yucca is just a hole in the ground that will not take nuclear waste. Doing so would solve one of the challenges in expanding nuclear power in the US, and therefore compete with other "green" tech. So it'll never happen. The issue isn't technical. It's political. Money talks.
Nuclear waste is actually one its advantages. All forms of energy production have toxic waste. For example, manufacturing solar panels produces 300 times more toxic waste per Terawatt hour over the lifetime of the panels or power plant. This figure comes from Environmental Progress, a Berkeley, California, nonprofit. Nuclear produces relatively tiny amounts of waste. Many people don't seem to understand this. Also, today's nuclear waste is tomorrows nuclear fuel. 4th gen breeder reactors can use nuclear waste as fuel.
Copenhagen Atomics are developing thorium SMRs. They have the advantage of availability of Thorium, short half-life waste, ability to burn up conventional waste and fail- safe meltdown
@@Peter-rw1wtWhat are you talking about? 6:45 Thorium must be converted to U-233 in the reactor. U-233 produce all the long lived waste U-235 would do. Neutron ctivation of reactor pressure vessel produce the same amount of long lived waste?
Yup. Nuclear waste is either low level stuff like gloves and napkins. Those is easy to deal with, or it's high level waste, spent fuel. These are chunks of dense metal oxides in ceramic or glass. They're highly contained and stable. People usually complain about CO2 and pollution. Nuclear not only produces no CO2, its waste outputs are very small volume stuff that is easily contained.
Plutonium out of a PWR is not terribly viable for making weapons because most of the PU is 240, which is hot. Both radiation and thermal hot. And it's very hard to separate PU isotopes. There has been one weapon the US tested with Pu240, so it can be done by a nuclear weapons' state, but apparently it requires a cooling system on the weapon to keep exciting things from happening. To make weapons grade Pu you want short irradiation, not 18 months of irradiation.
The Pu used for Operation Teapot was produced by a UK Magnox reactor and/or a heavy water reactor (I believe that is correct). Magnox is a type of nuclear power / production reactor that was designed to run on natural uranium with graphite as the moderator and carbon dioxide gas. It is not a standard type of Light Water Reactor that is deployed commercially. Nobody will ever build another Magnox reactor. A nation-state would usually build a heavy water reactor or an old French design like North Korea to produce Pu. The North Korean 200MWe reactor was designed to use graphite as a moderator, and CO2 as a coolant. 2 This reactor design is an efficient source for weapons-grade plutonium.
@@shawnnoyes4620 The key factor for converting uranium to plutonium, in a reactor, is the ability to move fertile material in and out of the reactor, without shutting it down and waiting for everything to cool. An early American reactor had tubes running through the core that were filled with uranium slugs. At pre-determined intervals, new slugs were added at one end of the tubes and the old slugs that were pushed out the other end were collected and the plutonium extracted. Candu reactors were considered to be proliferation risks, because they were designed to be refueled, while running at full rated power.
-I was hoping to see these comments here. All correct. the longer the uranium fuel cooks in a core, the more of the bred Pu-239 absorbs a neutron to produce Pu-240. Pu-240 spontaneously fissions, releasing neutrons, which makes Pu-240 a contaminant in Pu-239. The presence of neutrons in a bomb core increases the neutron density while being compressed so quickly that the compression process cannot proceed to the point of maximum. Hence, a contaminated bomb core will prematurely pulse and separate the core materials before it can reach it's full potential. The degree of contamination determines how far the fissioning can proceed. More contamination means less fissioning. The cores with contamination produce fizzles or duds. All said, power reactor fuel that cooks the fuel for extended periods, cannot produce bomb grade Pu-239. As Richard Bell says, a refueling on-the-fly must push fuel out of the reactor before it overcooks and produces too much Pu-240 contamination in the Pu. If a country like Iran wants to clandestinely produce weapons Pu-239, then they declare they are going to build a large medical isotopes reactor because the production of Mo-99 for Tc-99m SPECT scans requires that the U targets be removed from the neutron flux in a 6.5 day operating cycle (Mo-99 has a 66 hour half life so targets should be removed after about 3 half life irradiations for maximum efficiency). Under that regime only very negligible amounts of Pu-240 are produced in the Pu-239 of the targets. That is why medical isotope reactors are licensed separately from research reactors by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and all materials sent to foreign medical reactors from US DOE enrichment facility for this purpose are very closely monitored. I have worked in both the medical isotope business and the nuclear weapons business over the past 45 years. Designed an operated medical reactors, and well, did unmentionable stuff at the NTS.
@@richardbell7678 Candu also runs on unenriched uranium -- it can be seen as a perfect machine for turning unenriched uranium to plutonium, avoiding messy isotope seperation steps.
A small correction, the Yucca Mountain storage complex in Nevada never came online due to litigation and opposition from both political parties and Nevada residents. That's why the waste has been stored on site at the reactors because the legally designated location is stuck in a political limbo and there is no other authorized locations for the waste to be stored.
Correct, also to add insult to injury.....Due to the rampant fear of nuclear anything, due to GROSS ignorance, Most states refuse to let any nuclear materials travel through them for fear of accidental release.
I live in Nye County Nevada, home of Yucca Mtn. County residents are overwhelmingly FOR Yucca mtn as long as we get assurances that should the land or water become contaminated, we are bought out so we can move. PERIOD. That sounds fair to me. We want it for the jobs/economy. The county will access property taxes on the land use. Taxes are low in Nye county. Congress need to take action and authorize Yucca Mtn.
This was my lane in school. As a geologist, my focus was on isotopes for most of my college career. I drill oil wells now because these mining idiots don't make any money but its still a side interest of mine. No, Thorium isn't going to solve these issues overnight. We don't recycle any of our spent fuel at this time. I'd start with that.
The waste stream from thorium salt reactors is 1/20 ,of a light water or cando reactors. They are walk away safe. The operate at much lower pressure. They do not require a vessel that is forged and machined in one piece. We buy our reactor vessel's from the Japanese. Because we lack the ability to manufacture them.
Number one reason to go to thorium is not proliferation. Though that is a bit harder. It's the difference between using something that is more rare than gold vs something that is almost as common as dirt.
Economically viable thorium is not as common as dirt though. It's about 4 times as abundant as uranium which is definitely more abundant but not "common as dirt".
This very much depends on your definition of economically viable because the total difference is shocking. You also have to take into account that the usable isotope of uranium is only a very small fraction of the total uranium on the planet whereas with thorium, pretty much what you see is what you get. Not only that but most of the fuel in light water reactors turns out to be wasted. Sure there are also issues with thorium but if it was allowed to develop, it's hard to see how it couldn't be way better. In fact the inventor of light water reactors pretty much said as much.
Also, I think thorium is easier to build in a power plant because it is not a high pressure system. And it has a salt plug that if it overheat drains all the molten salt and stops the reaction. This means it is much safer and not as heavy duty to build as a uranium plant.
I still think thorium reactors are the best solution. Yes, they are not a perfect solution but they are better than anything else we are trying to do. Probably the best solution I have seen suggested is many small thorium reactors serving local regions rather than the massive reactors we have seen until now. From what little I have learned about thorium reactors, the main benefit had to do with the likelihood of Chernobyl type meltdowns. They are a lot less dangerous in that respect.
"...thorium reactors are the best solution". Research the small pebble bed reactors using graphite spheres in helium gas. It is the other gen 4 solution that is equally a "best solution".
I think the heat exchanger was a big problem with the test reactors. You don't put water over the rods in liquid reactors . Have to move the fissile material but that eats away the heat exchangers. Also I think one of the big pluses are they pretty much can't go critical even if you scale them. The liquid expands and becomes less dense attenuating the reaction and you can put a plug in the bottom that melts away at very high temps. I believe they can still be used as breeders though not sure on this
Thorium molten salt reactors are breeders because the thorium is not fissile. The thorium salt is in the breeder jacket where it transmutes to U233. This is then pumped to the core where it under goes fission. It's important to note the Oakridge MSR (built for just $30M) never ran on thorium it was fuelled instead by U235 and some U233. It was intended to demonstrate the feasibility of a liquid nuclear fuel cycle. Weinberg the MSR project leader sought funding for a thorium version but got the sack instead. A Thorium MSR would necessarily be somewhat different to the Oakridge machine because the radiological and chemical environment is different. The Chinese are developing this. They are seeking nuclear power plants that require little or no water for use in the western desert part as of their country. MSRs are ideal for this as they get away from the large amounts of water necessary for pressurized water reactors.
All reactors can go critical. Critical is steady state operation. Supercritical is power increasing, Subcritical is power decreasing. Prompt supercritical is kiss your kiester goodbye it's a nuclear bomb. Modern reactors can't reach prompt supercriticality. Chernobyl is about as close as anyone has ever gotten. Pressurized water reactors can have steam explosions which are very bad, Fukushima bad. Low pressure reactors are much safer. Hastelloy steel is resistant to molten salt corrosion so that problem has been largely solved. Yes, Thorium reactors can be breeders but fuel separation is a nightmare. Usually they're just designed to consume any fuel they breed. You've got a good handle on it 9/10.
@@jimgraham6722 It does not eliminate the need for cooling tower water (or river/lake/ocean water)- which is by far the largest use of water in a power plant to condense steam and cool equipment. The water circulating in the primary loop of a PWR and the steam cycle is a trivial quantity in comparison.
@@perryallan3524Not correct, it's all related to the second law. PWRs operate at 300C hot side and around 250C cold side at a pressure over 100 atm. They use the Rankin cycle and are cooled by water. To extract the energy from such systems you need large amounts of cooling water, for the cool side, typically a rivers worth or at least a substantial lake. Additionally, PWRs are required by regulation to have a large amount of cooling water in reserve to cool the core in event of a primary loop failure. This is because exposure of the core to air will cause a melt down. Typically enough water is needed to flood the core for a couple of weeks until the decay heat has ebbed. This had to be done in the Three Mile Island accident. Molten salt reactors on the other hand operate at around 650C hot side and about 550C cold side. They are not pressurised above about 3 atm. They are cooled by gas (typically carbon dioxide) using the closed loop Brayton cycle which dumps surplus heat to air via a heat exchanger (this was the Oakridge MSR), or these days such heat is more likely to be used to power a Rankin cycle turbine. These are the so called dual cycle plants. We know this arrangement works because it is the same cycle used in modern coal fired HELE plants except here the coal furnace as simply replaced by a molten salt reactor. Such plants can't meltdown because the core is already molten. Therefore emergency core cooling water supplies aren't needed. In the unlikely event of an emergency the molten salt can be simply drained from the reactor into a lead lined container under the reactor, where the nuclear reactions stop and the decay heat absorbed by the latent heat of the lead. All in all, very little water is needed. What is used, is mainly used to keep the roses growing in the surrounding gardens.
Love your content Peter, but you need to do some fact checking here. With molten salt thorium reactors there is no plutonium and very minimum uranium (for bomb making). The fact that they also produce waste that is much less radioactive and can actually “burn” highly radioactive waste from current reactors is a plus. But I do agree with you that viable thorium reactors are 10 years away and will probably be 10 years away for the next 30.
And please, Peter, learn how to pronounce "nuclear" (like the nucleus of the atom)- not "Nuc-ye-lar" (there is no such thing)... It's really annoying to hear you repeatedly mis-pronouncing this over and over.
Fun Fact: The United States' first power reactor, Shippingport, ran a 100% thorium core and demonstrated net breeding in a LWR. E.g. enough new fuel was bred to compensate for reprocessing losses. The ability to isobred also drives a lot of the conversation around thorium because it mean only fission products go to waste. This reduces the waste actinides by about 97% upon complete implementation. @Zeihan_on_Geopolitics--- @humbleeagle1736
I used to work with molten salt reactors for chemical production. It's difficult enough to keep them tight and prevent plugging when the salt is only 400 degC. The mind boggles at the thought of trying to operate these systems at 800 degC and with radioactive poisons mixed into the salt melt. This is way beyond the technology of today...
All of the MSR designs will operate at much higher temperatures than that, so will avoid the problems you experienced. Leak-free flanges were also solved for these systems decades ago.@@MrDael01
The thorium reactor design I've seen around on YT uses molten salt coolant and I don't think there are fuel rods. The big draw is that it uses most of the energy available in the fuel, instead of using just a couple percent and then burying it as "waste". The proliferation claim is that it produces U233 (I think), which is a strong gamma emitter that'll kill the workforce that tries to make it into bombs. If we're going to do nuclear, we should use approached that get most of the energy out of the fuel, whether it's molten salt thorium or uranium reprocessing and breeders. Agree it's going nowhere without a change of heart from government and the public, sadly.
Viewers here need to recognize that Peter is not an expert on everything, but he thinks well enough of himself to where he will attempt to answer anything. This is clearly not an area where he is an expert. Thorium solves so many more problems in nuclear power than just nuclear weapons related issues and that is not anyone's primary reason for wanting thorium
I've never heard that argument for thorium. It's been a bit for me but the arguments I have heard were in regard to it being high yield and far more safe to work with.
Overall this is accurate, but there are a few specific points that are important enough to correct. I work in research on the nuclear fuel cycle and options for reprocessing/transmutation of waste. - Thorium isn't a proliferation risk because of plutonium, it holds a high risk because another fissile isotope of uranium (U-233) is a required part of the thorium fuel cycle. Unlike uranium fuel cycles where plutonium-239 is mixed with non-fissile isotopes of the same element such as Pu-238 and Pu-240, U-233 makes up a vast majority of the uranium isotopes and can therefore be extracted using chemical means. Thorium is not fissile, U-233 is the actual fuel which is created through a neutron absorption in Th-232 and a beta decay. This U-233 is fissile enough to make a bomb and in some thorium fuel cycles it is relatively easy to extract and some designs require complete separation. - Used nuclear fuel from light water reactors is not only stored in the cooling pools. Those are meant for fuel recently in the reactor to let them cool down and a large amount of radioactive elements decay and give off energy soon after being in the reactor. After they are cool enough, they are moved to large concrete containers that are located on site, but built and maintained by a separate private company. These containers do not allow for any escape of radiation or proliferation and are well guarded, but are expensive and paid for by the utility (and indirectly by the federal government and taxpayers through lawsuits). - We don't have Yucca mountain and we probably never will. The official stance of the DOE is that Yucca is the only long-term repository option, but after >2 billion in nuclear, geological, and social scientific studies and some pre-construction work, the project was mothballed and all funding cut. This is mostly a political problem, but Yucca had some real issues which are known by the industry such as capacity constraints, overreliance on engineering barriers because of unfavorable conditions (water intrusions, environmental corrosion, etc.), and a much higher rate of diffusion of isotopes through the walls to the environment than options like granite.
Close. Also, it is very highly unlikely that anyone that might steal spent reactor fuel would live long enough to make something usable out of it. The spent fuel is extremely radioactive, as are most of the isotopes in it. Many of the elements in spent fuel are very toxic. Except plutonium, it is so toxic as to make arsenic look like M&Ms. So much so that if you had 10 Kgs of plutonium and were able to micronize that metal, it would be more lethal as a aerial dispersed weapon than a nuclear bomb. I don't worry about bad guys stealing spent nuclear fuel.
Yeah, you can't steal it when it comes out of a reactor because it's absurdly radioactive. And then to actually get anything useful for weapons you need a huge industrial plant costing many many millions. So you need to build this secret multi-acre plant full of horribly toxic chemicals or very sophisticated equipment only usable for one thing, then steal tons of spent but old fuel rods and get them to you secret lair where your team of experts will... Nope.
One nice thing about thorium tractors he didn’t mention is that they are far less likely to melt down. Didn’t realize that it was almost as bad for proliferation, though, and this is the first time I heard an explanation for why we don’t recycle spent fuel rods.
Uranium Hexafloride boiles at 56c. Uranium 235 (fissile, usually 2% of the fuel rod) does not turn into plutonium, U238 (98%) does. Most of the energy in a used fuel rod comes from the plutonium that came from the U238. The fuel rod becomes spent when it has accumulated enough "other" stuff that isn't uranium or plutonium, and that stuff is sucking up all the good neutrons. At this point, reprocessing the fuel rod, the plutonium can be mixed down and reinserted into a reactor, or diverted to a bomb. Liquid fuel reactors, uranium or thorium, do not require reprocessing. Since the "other" stuff can be removed without taking the fuel out of the reactor. In theory a reactor like this, using uranium, running in a trustworthy country, can not divert plutonium to weapons. In less honest countries, you could use thorium in stead. Thorium is MUCH harder to use for weapons, even if no one is watching. Even if you managed it, it would make the worst nuclear bomb in history... far more dangerous to you than your enemy.
the Pu can be used to make new fuel (MOX) as you mentioned but it cannot be used directly as bomb material. Pu is the name of the element but it consists of different isotopes just as Uranium. In order to make a bomb from the spend fuel you first need a complicated and expensive way of seperating the Pu from all the other products after which you need isotope enrichment to seperate the Pu-239 from the other Pu isotopes.
Just a few points - I believe Thorium (liquid salt) reactors can be modified to diminish the Plutonium by-product problem. Also, with Thorium, it is much more difficult to attain fission. This is bad news for engineers, but good news for everyone else. It means they're extremely safe and don't need the huge safety systems required by uranium-cycle reactors. Unlike the Uranium single-reactor model, Thorium reactors can be "stacked" with additional reactors being added as necessary.
As a correction, thorium does not decay into plutonium. Pu is a by-product but the reason is that Th is not fissile, so U or Pu is needed to provide the neutrons to cause fission, so Pu becomes a by-product.
Peter, you know alot about rare-earth elements. You have been the clearest voice telling how the green transition requires more resources than we can possibly mine. Please recall that one of the biggest problems mining rare-earth elements is that Thorium comes along with them. It is literally a waste-product of rare-earth mining. So if we plan to access strategic minerals, it is good to have a use for the Thorium. Please don't overlook this.
A better source of information regarding thorium is Copenhagen Atom ⚛️. They been developing a new reactor and have a lot of research put into their approach.
They are spinning a lie that corrosion is not an issue when its known that it is in fact a huge issue (so huge that it is what stopped further development of MSR's in the early 1970s). While the pure salt with the pure fuel itself is not corrosive. Once you start the atomic reactions you get daughter and waste elements/products generated and the salt fluid becomes extremely corrosive to common alloys. Now there is a theory that if you can separate out enough of these daughter and waste elements/products that the fluid will be a lot less corrosive. However, no one has ever shown that this can in fact be done as they have never had any working molten salt fluid with all the daughter and waste elements/product to test it. In the last 15 years a lot of research has looked at this issue using super-allows, and the Chinese just built a test reactor because they believe that they have found a specific super-alloy combined with a theoretical side stream separation process that will adequately control the corrosion issue so that long term reliable MSRs could be built. It may be a decade or more before we know if they have a solution. Based on my experience in the nuclear world and reading the history of many test reactors I suspect that they may have to rebuild their side stream separator process several times to get something that works and is reliable. I know of 2 other MSR test reactors planned looking at the same issues just using different processes. Copenhagen Atom is just another (out of many) investor scams generating jobs that will keep some people busy for a decade or more on something that won't work just because they can con some investors out of the money.
@@anderssvensk4317 They are never going to have a reactor up and running. I spent a good part of my life in the nuclear power world and I laughed when I saw their videos and explanations. They have absolutely no clue of what is needed for nuclear plant design or regulatory approvals. They are flat out lying that corrosion is not an issue in a running molten salt reactor. It was so bad at Oak Ridge that they could not find any suitable alloy to even try to build a better design in the early 1970's. The last 15 years has seen a number of countries spend a lot of $$$ looking at super alloys hoping to find one that would work. At the same time the concept of side stream separation of the very corrosive daugther and chemical products formed from a running reactor has been proposed. But no one has proven it will work - or what it takes to make it work well enough to control the corrosion rate. The Chinese just built a molten salt thorium test reactor at 1/4 the size of the late 1960's era Oak Ridge test plant. They believe that they have a suitable super-alloy and a viable side stream separation plant that will allow them to adequately control the corrosion rate such at a multi-decade life would be possible (which is needed for any nuclear power plant to be economical). It may be a decade before we know if they have something that works well enough for them to build a larger test reactor (which is their plan if this one works). A prototype power plant in the 50-75 MWe output would follow, and only after it ran well without problems would commercial power plants be desiged with their super alloy and whatever they find works for side stream separation to keep the circulating molten salt clean enough to limit corrosion (at Oak Ridge the daughter and other chemicals built up and the corrosion rate got worse every day the reactor ran). Companies telling us that the pure salt and pure thorium itself is not corrosive is just blowing smoke. That's not what's going to be circulating in an operating reactor.
Note. The Candu uses 7 mil not 35 - 50 mil fissionable fuel, so you just oxidize the yellowcake and you're done. Second it can, depending on how you operate it, spit out waste at 300 PPM (or 0.3 mil) fissionable. They also don't need 13 inch thick pressure vessels (available ONLY from Combustion Engineering's Chattanooga works), they don't need to be shut down to refuel, and have a 120 year design life (Yes you might change the turbo-generator at 60 years, and all the instrumentation at 30 year intervals, the various heat exchangers at either), they've also survived the failure that terrifies the US PWR designers - a main pressure vessel crack - some 13 meters long. That reactor is still in service, and was shut down normally on that occasion. Problem is it is NOT INVENTED IN THE US so the US won't approve it.
Also there is an experimental Thorium based fuel called ANEEL which is being tested in CANDU reactors using the same fuel bundle form factor. Pretty neat eh?
In Toronto, the steam cooling tower causes stable high pressure weather pattern over the area. We had heatwave and clear skies under high electric needs ( the business week) and rain and unsettled weather on the weekends as less steam is cooled. They had to operate at 3% of capacity at best to not mess with weather.
Peter might be able to explain a great many things! His attempt to explain the Thorium issue, is NOT one of them! I think he needs to stick to geo-politics, because this video SUCKS!
Good point. I just wanna know why he thinks we should sell it to terrorist nations anyway? If we have to never produce any technology that could be misused in the wrong hands, then we shouldn't even be making steak knives.
Peter grossly misstates the entire Uranium-Thorium cycle. Instead of creating Plutonium, it creates more fissile fuel that cannot be used in a nuclear weapon as well as a very 'hot' byproduct U-233 that is difficult to handle, which makes it very unusable for the typical 3rd world nation-state like Iran or Pakistan to deal with. Also with a Uranium-Thorium molten salt reactor, the fuel is kept in a molten state, which is not only more efficient thermally since it can provide both industrial scale heat as well as electrical power, but it also significantly stretches our available supply of U-235, the stuff that makes nuclear chain reactions work. So that instead of having fuel for maybe another hundred years or so for nuclear reactors, we have enought fissile (uranium) and fertile (thorium) fuel for literally thousands of years.
Third-world states like India have already detonated U-233 nuclear weapons. The US described it as highly satisfactory as a weapons material. Thorium won't help with nuclear proliferation.
Pakistan already has the bomb, and Iran already has enrichment facilities, so those countries aren't particularly good examples of places where Thorium reactors would result in a lower proliferation risk. Let's take Indonesia instead. You build a bunch of MSR there. Put a U-238 blanket around the thorium reactor and you get plutonium, which you can still use to make weapons, despite not having a Uranium based LWR.
I don't understand why we have to sell these to terrorist states anyway? Who says we have to make one that is safe enough to sell to iran or north korea or any other insane leader country? Are we to reject all technology that could possibly hurt somebody in the wrong hands? If that's true, we can't even make simple steak knives.
As a Physicist I would like to address a couple of issues, 1st the US produces tons of Thorium as a byproduct of other industries annually, for example the production of other rare earth materials. 2nd is that Thorium does not utilize rods it uses a salt mixture that is "Liquid" and as a result uses a totally different type of reactor vessel that is actually safer to use than the current High Pressure water reactors we currently utilize. Lastly and I think the most important thing, the spent fuel is dangerous for only about 300 years as opposed to our current means which is several hundred thousand years as the fuel actually consumes itself in the process of generating the fission, we need to generate the heat for steam.
You clearly don't understand different reactor designs: Thorium reactors have been built as Light Water PWRs, Heavy water reactors, multiple designs of high temperature gas reactors (including 2 commercial power plants which failed, and pebble beds), and one molten salt reactor that had corrosion issues from the daughter products and other chemicals produced in the circulation fluid so bad that they could not see a way forward in the early 1970's. Many countries have been trying to get thorium reactors to work for decades. The Chinese currently think they have a good chance at at least controlling the corrosion rate with a new super alloy and using side stream separation of daughter products and other chemicals to control the level of such corrosives in the circulating fluid. They built a test reactor and started it up a few months ago. It will likely be a decade or so before we know if they have found an adequate solution.
The benefits of Thorium is largely that it is 97% more efficient. The other major point is that those who promote Thorium are advocating Molten Salt Reactors with Thorium reaction happening inside of a molten salt jacket. The huge difference is that a MSR can't melt down because the boiling point of salt is far above the temperature where the reaction takes place regardless of whether the element is Thorium or Uranium. With Light Water Reactors the water has to be pressurized and that makes the reactor more expensive and the meltdown issue remains.
TMSR-LF1 (液态燃料钍基熔盐实验堆; "liquid fuel thorium-based molten salt experimental reactor") is a 2 MWt molten salt reactor (MSR) pilot plant located in northwest China, completed in 2021.
Peter - I suggest - as others have - that you and everyone else look closely at the molten salt core systems that are currently evolving - some of which are actually well developed and mostly just lack a parts supply chain. Demonstration reactors using this method were actually first built almost half a century ago. Salt core (either CL or F salts) address many of the weaknesses of PWRs using Uranium and potentially deal with the existing inventory of spent and unprocessed fuel. The current Uranium based reactor designs "won" for a combination of reasons of expediency and the Plutonium that could be acquired for nuclear armament. In short, liquid salt core reactors are absolutely viable both economically and technologically. The hold up is resistance from existing economic interests and political leadership.
@Zeihan_on_Geopolitics-- Would love to and find out where I might be getting it wrong. I'm by no means a nuclear engineer - somewhat read on it, and have listened to lectures by industry experts on it - combined with a long history of watching the successes and failures of the anti-nuclear and environmental movements.
@Zeihan_on_Geopolitics-- Another one - this guy is *great* - from 2018 - Ed Pheil & Elysium Industries. Suffice to say, there's a lot more activity in this than most people realize. I haven't checked on them recently, will have to do that. ruclips.net/video/aHsljVnY6oI/видео.html&ab_channel=gordonmcdowell
@@TFT-bp8zk Chemistry is the physics of the most outer orbitals (so chemistry is just a - more or less - trivial corner case of physics). But this NOT, what fission and decay chains are all about.
A lot of this is way off Peter. Eg "a thorium reactor's plutonium production rate would be less than 2 percent of that of a standard reactor, and the plutonium's isotopic content would make it unsuitable for a nuclear detonation." Wikipedia - wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power, but I've also read it in a lot of other places. You are definitely not saying this; "using Thorium .. you are only getting a quarter less plutonium" 3:06. 2 vs 75, a bit of a difference. So clearly your subsequent points are also incorrect.
I haven't been able to find where Peter got his numbers on this, but one quote on wiki from a single nuclear engineer likewise isn't much to go on, even if the engineer in question is a pioneer in the field. I haven't been able to corroborate the 2% number from a reputable source, either. Really wish it were easier to get verifiably good info on this.
Nuclear engineer here. A lot of the details in this aren't totally right but the conclusions mostly are. Despite advanced reactors solving a lot of interesting problems in nuclear though, it's worth mentioning that current gen reactors are safer than solar power and the biggest issue with cost is not building enough to drive supply chains towards higher efficiency and gaining experience for construction workers. I work on advanced reactor designs and believe in them but mostly we need to build a lot of current technology as quickly as possible
This is what frustrates me so much. 'With technology X we will have safe nuclear power generation.' WE ALREADY HAVE IT!!!!!! We just need to build more and then work hard, yes very hard but it's worth it, on the waste side. Fukishima survived a staggering outlier earthquake perfectly, then in a worst case scenario got flooded because of poor decision making that had nothing to do with the reactor, and still more people died from being relocated than from the plant accident itself. Of course you're right, new tech is good all around, there may be real improvements on the horizon, I'll trust you to know that better than me, but economies of scale on current tech would help a lot and more plants are exactly what we need to fill gaps with wind/solar. Anyway, I'll shut up, but it drives me nuts. Thanks for commenting.
The US had a supposed 10 megawatt thorium breeder MSR operating from 1965 to 1969. It operated for over 13,000 hours (about 40% uptime) and generated electric power but never exceeded about 7 Megawatts due to over heating. The program was defunded after the demo run. Yes, there were problems and weaknesses revealed during the test run. My question: 55 years after the test is a thorium MSR a viable commercial endeavor?
I suppose you are thinking of the MSR at Oak Ridge. It ran on U-233, not thorium, it was a demo project for MSR. There are videos from Kirk Sorensen here where he interviewed the original scientists, who concluded that the MSR experiment was quite successful, felt the engineering challenges (mostly metals, valves, and the like) would be straightforward to solve. The liquid fluoride thorium reactor has different challenges.
This is the first PZ video that seems completely under researched. From the little I now about the subject, the biggest benefit is safety. I believe the Chinese are building one (maybe two) Thorium (liquid fluoride thorium reactor or LFTR) reactors. Their success or failure will definitely add much needed data to any meaningful discussion of this subject
Peter, interesting fact: The Fort St. Vrain Nuclear Power Plant right near you, in Platteville, Colorado, was designed to use a fuel mix that contained thorium.
Peter Zeihan, you have a fairly incomplete understanding of this. And if it weren't pointless to write comments on RUclips -- since nobody reads them -- I'd write a long explanation that addresses some of what you're missing. But instead I'll keep it short. a) There are a large number of different molten-salt reactor designs. They don't use fuel rods. Molten-salt is really the key technology here, not thorium. Many of these reactors can burn thorium but they can also burn uranium. b) Most molten salt reactors make it quite difficult to make nuclear weapons because the fuel itself is not sufficiently enriched to make bombs with. In addition to that everything is kept all mixed together and not separated. To make bomb material you'd have to separate out certain isotopes from the molten salts. That's a non-trivial thing. And if someone can do that with molten salt reactor fuel then they can do the same with raw uranium yellowcake. Or in other words they would already have nuclear bombs. c) The nuclear waste issue has been solved. Look up wasteburners. There are a number of proposed wasteburners. But look up Moltex Energy. The fact that you haven't heard of this should set you back. Whoever you've been listening to either doesn't really know all that much, or they are trying to hide this.
“Hi Peter” I think further consideration for molten salt reactor should be looked into. They do not use rods and supposedly burn up 99% of the fuel. They ran a test thorium reactor for four years. Many negative articles about thorium place it in solid form as in fuel rods “as a light water reactor“ that’s not Molten Salt Reactor. I think a further look may be appropriate. Check out Kirk Sorensen.
Slowly the World is realizing that going to 100% renewables is impossible. Hitting 5% is a gargantuan task. Net zero is never going to happen. Not by 2050. Not in this century. However, nuclear is the best answer we have to provide the scale and capacity of clean energy we must have to function as a civilization. Interestingly, Portugal said they ran ran on 100% renewables a week ago for 5-6 days. They also managed to build this capacity under a dictatorship, which also required a tremendous amount of capital. So, I can assure you this energy isn't free and it costs the Portuguese far more than conventional sources like natural gas would
Lmao when Portugal ran on almost 100% renewables the main power source were wind turbines which weren't installed until the 2000s. The dictatorship endend in 1974
My understanding from multiple sources is that thorium reactors could react a larger number of reaction produces leaving you with less wast. Secondly using a molten salt design you can remove the melt down risk. Third molten salt for the heat transfer reduces significantly the containment requirements over high pressure water cooling. I think the plutonium proliferation problem could be worse because there is incentive to do chemical extraction of non fissile material on site. Not a physicist but I did take some classes (none about nuclear reactors)
They're not stored in cooling ponds, at least not for long. After a little while (after they've stopped producing a significant amount of heat) they're stored in dry casks. The casks are next to indestructable & could be left there for hundreds of years if necessary. While burying the waste is ultimately the best thing, reprocessing what we can out of the dry cask storage first would be good as there isn't an unlimited supply of fissionable material in the world so at some point recycling is going to be necessary (unless we have fusion by then).
Your basic premise that adoption of nuclear power is impeded by a concern over weapons proliferation and not environmental hysteria is a false premise.
I had actually never heard of Thorium being a good option because it reduces Plutonium waste. I mostly have heard about other benefits, so, it could very likely still be worthwhile.
You can thank our stupid government for getting in the way of any nuclear progress since the 1970s. They stopped all nuclear education in the schools and Treated nuclear power like it was witchcraft.
A 2011 MIT study concluded that although there is little in the way of barriers to a thorium fuel cycle, with current or near term light-water reactor designs there is also little incentive for any significant market penetration to occur. As such they conclude there is little chance of thorium cycles replacing conventional uranium cycles in the current nuclear power market, despite the potential benefits.
Current US law states that the fuel assembly has to be an approved design. Because the fuel in an MSR is molten, there is no fuel assembly. Therefore, it will take a literal act of congress to get an MSR.
@@michaelbritton2172 Even with an act of Congress, the NRC would find a way to ban it. Even if Congress told the NRC they must accept liquid fuels, they would simply delay the licensing process by 50+ years and stop it that way.
It is not really practical when we know how to do it with U235 and Pu. And using Pu from spent nuclear fuel? BS. Please show me or reference the Uranium Enrichment Process - Gas Centrifuges that are being used for Pu 239, 240, 242 :)
Mostly agree but I'm confused - it seems like he's implying P-239 can't be used for energy generation, and is otherwise only high grade waste or weapons production. But that's not correct - we can use the plutonium itself to produce energy. Yes, there will always be the fear that it could be used to produce more weapons, but there are costs to every form of energy production, and I believe psychological costs should be prioritized below more tangible costs.
Won't happen. The Greenies who are convinced that the world is going to end because of climate change are the same people that are scared of nuclear power. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever until you realise that they don't actually want ANY solutions. Solutions would make them irrelevant, but immobilising fear gets them more votes. Politics. 🤦 Now go check out what Dr William Happer thinks about rising CO2 levels. You may sleep easier at night. All the best.
@@cmleibenguth If Copenhagen Atomics gets it "right", then we have a good chance. :) Solar and Wind will not get it done. There is NOT enough copper from a mining perspective to support that fantasy.
No it won't, efficiency is the key. Power loss with traditional power lines is staggering. I would love to know what Peter thinks about hardening the grid to solar activity
I believe the real reason for Thorium is that it wouldn't require a nucleair plant that can have a run away meltdown proces without active cooling i.e. making it safer to use as power plant.
Just reiterating; the real advantage of Thorium is safety. Since it's a liquid at reactor temperatures it's relatively easy to build a physical fail-safe system that vents the reaction mass into a large catch basin where it won't be concentrated enough to cause a chain reaction if the reactor starts overheating. Having a meltdown is much, much less likely in such a system.
The original test reactor had an open drain pipe out the bottom with a desk fan blowing over it. The fan cooled it enough to plug it. When the power went out, the plug melted and the reactor contents drained out.
Thank you, Peter, for dashing my hopes. I was not aware of the limited aspect of Thorium. I truely thought is was an answer to the power and nuclear waste problems. As always you are very incite full, and informative. Kudos!
This is not Peter's expertise. Thorium is an answer if we want it to be. It's proliferation-safe, not because it's completely impossible to make weapons within its fuel cycle, but because it's hard enough so that any would-be nuclear weapons state would stay clear and instead build a dedicated plutonium-producing uranium-based reactor on the side. It does solve the waste problem, as it uses all of the fuel and not just 3.5% (so the volumes are reduced to 1/20-th or less), and it can eat old waste. Also it is abundant enough for us to never run out of fuel. But otoh, ordinary reactor tech is good enough for the foreseeable future, and the current roadblock is overregulation and extreme safety requirements driving costs, which isn't really what thorium solves.
@@jesan733 Conventional Uranium fueled PWRs and BWRs are already "proliferation-safe, not because it's completely impossible to make weapons within its fuel cycle, but because it's hard enough so that any would-be nuclear weapons state would stay clear and instead build a dedicated plutonium-producing uranium-based reactor on the side." - Thorium is a solution for a problem that does not exist from a proliferation standpoint.
@@michaelbritton2172 but dealing with molten salts is fraught with all kinds of logistical difficulties. James Maheffey's "Atomic Accidents" is a recommended read. Lots of issues with molten salt development/research reactors over the years. There's a reason that Rickover rejected the concept for Navy deployment.
Not sure who is doing the research but there are a bunch of reactors that were commissioned in the eighties and nineties, rather than the 1973 he noted. And most were started after that date as well. Spent rods have typically been stored onsite in concrete casks, not in water pools. And the biggest problem with Yucca Mountain is that many towns don't want nuclear waste shipped through on rail. I guess the number of derailments might have something to do with that.
The biggest problem with nuclear power is that people were introduced to fission in Hiroshima and no matter how safe it can be made for power generation, there is a fear that surpasses reason in the public view. It is still much safer than mining coal or drilling for oil, but it’s more acceptable somehow when those risks are chiefly to miners and drillers rather than the somewhat more democratic (though much lower) risks of a nuclear power plant accident.
It doesn't help that teaching school children nuclear power was like witchcraft.. it leaves the populace nuclear ignorant and afraid. And if other energy competitors have it their way, they'll stay ignorant and afraid.
From what I understand, if you build a fast-breeder reactor, it can use the waste from normal reactors as fuel? Proliferation concerns are even worse as if can be tuned to produce even more plutonium that a normal reactor but it would solve the waste issue?
It depends on the type of fast reactor and how it is configured. You are referencing a certain type of Sodium Fast Reactor. Natrium cannot breed Pu. That is the Bill Gates reactor. A Molten Salt Chloride Reactor can be configured not to breed Pu but consume Pu, too.
A different note to consider is that burying nuclear waste has a major hidden danger we are only just now starting to become aware of: Fungi are the dominate eukaryotic life of the deep lithosphere & they are more than capable of feeding on/bioeroding the containers used to store said waste. We burried waste because we thought there wasn't much of an ecosystem down there but work in Geomycology has shown otherwise. It is more of a mystery and perhaps even more dynamic than the deep ocean. We need to be careful going forward how we interface with deep earth bioms.
I'd like to see / hear a debate between Kirk Sorensen - a Thorium fuel cycle advocate who has studied the original Thorium reactor developed by Weinberg at Oak Ridge National Laboratory - and Peter. That would be worth watching.
Just so you know, China's experimental 2GW LFTR reactor received regulatory approval to begin operations in June 2023. They had a target for the reactor going critical in September 2023, but I haven't been able to find out if it started operating on time.
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I've worked in Nuclear Generation since 2002. Quick comment. Any "solution" that's ultimately decided upon will take at least 15 years to fully implement. That's about how long it takes to construct a power plant. Also, regardless of how environmentally friendly it is, anyone who attempts to build a facility will almost certainly get hit with at least a dozen lawsuits from environmental groups before they even break ground. Those lawsuits often take years to overcome. My company has tried to build two facilities in the last 20 years, and every single project was ultimately scrapped because it became too embroiled in lawfare and public outcry. There's other factors, of course, but that's what we're facing. There is a lot of regulatory red tape and numerous legal battles. Overcome that, and it's going to take another 15 years to see any benefits.
What about SMR..... there is no way the SMR's take 15 years.... yes they still have to go through regulatory hurdles as they should, but the Nuclear Boogyman will likely come down if as expected SMR demonstrate their safety records. The anti carbon, green people are going to have to make some choices on what they want to support and it ain't solar/wind as the substitute for base load electricity, even with all the advances in the various battery storage.
Also, SMRs can be mass produced. If the USA does not do it, someone else will. The technology was proven way back in the 1960's. If we are lucky, it will be Japan.
True, but wind and solar still REQUIRE natural gas at a minimum of 30% of the power mix so its not really a solution. No nation has ever done better than that without dispatch-able hydro resources and they are pretty much all accounted for today. The CO2 output for Solar, Wind, transmission lines and smart grid with the required duplication to make reliable power is not much better than running everything on 100% combined cycle gas. Nuclear and to some extent hydro are the only reliable power sources we have that are low carbon. Remember on days where there are plenty of wind and solar weather much of the infrastructure is already idled due to over supply, but you still need massive duplication for the winters and poor days to meet needs. Its like having to hire 100 employees so that at least 20 show up for work everyday. Some days all hundred show up but there is only 20 needed. For this to work most days will have 50-60 show up for work so that you have the resources you need on tight days. For a company like Fedex, they hire temporary workers for 60 days and rent trucks to make their holidays work, but those folks have other jobs the rest of the year as do the trucks. T I'm not sure how you do this with wind and solar and its massive seasonal and random variations. It will get to the point that half the power or more of solar and wind needs to be wasted to have the capacity to get us through the low points in the year. Nuclear is hard, but its doable. France got their grid to 80% nuclear and no industrialized nation of size has come close to that.
@@FrankJDurante Eventually something will have to give, but even SMRs are struggling to gain traction. Just ask NuScale and Utah.
I'm just going by what I've read, but if there hasn't been a meltdown of a reactor, built after the sixties (Fukushima being he most recent example) and we've solved the nuclear waste problem by making it a solid rather than a liquid. Wouldn't having to convert to thorium just set us back to square one effectively by having to go through all the trial and error that we did with uranium? Meaning, meltdowns and more general negative connotations toward nuclear energy as "unsafe." If we've finally gotten good at producing uranium based energy. Why take the radical left turn to basically reset the whole process that got us here?
Thorium is interesting and solves little on its own. Two other aspects need to be adressed:
- Molten Salt address any risk of explosion from current pressurized systems.
- Breeder reactors address the issue of storage and nuclear waste.
The issue is that there is so much to be done. Yet doing any single thing in nuclear requires fighting the bureaucracy, the scaremongers, the hippies on top of convincing the money guys...
Not hippies any more, it's "woke" jokes.
Molten salt will never be a thing due to a materials issues. Its a catch 22. Any vessel that can withstand the radiation and neutron flux for 50 years, will need to be high in nickel. Fluoride destroys high nickel steel in a very short time. If you use low / no nickel steel, the radiation and neutron flux destroy the reactor vessel in a short time. Its a no win
The hippies I know are pro nuke these days. The bigger fight is with government bureaucracy including local and state. In the northeast, local and state regulations can prevent an energy project from ever seeing federal government consideration. Another big issue here would be the NIMBY people who will fight until they themselves don't have electricity. Going forward; I think future energy demand will overcome those obstacles because people are going to want electricity no matter what.
Most will be done in France, India, China, Japan and Russia. What US does won't matter much.
Japan already has one of the world's largest declared stockpiles of Pu, over forty tonnes. They say it is for energy security.
China has bought up much of the world's supply of Thorium. They are stockpiling it and are also developing molten salt and pebble bed reactors to burn it.
Yes, a lot need to be done but so far that looks way simpler then fusion power. So far there is no better then nuclear alternatives for baseload power generation then nuclear anyway.
In a Molten salt reactor (MSR) consuming thorium as its raw fuel, while you might produce very, very small amounts of plutonium (with other actonites) you can simply leave it in the fuel salt where it will be burnt up to generate energy - you never take it out of the reactor. The plutonium produced in this way is very fractional (much less than a quarter mentioned by PEter) unlike in a uranium 238 fuel cycle which produces significant amounts. This is due to the different decay cycles. Reduced waste, enhanced safety and a simplification of the fuel cycle are the other reasons to prefer MSR. I would also argue that the reactor costs are likely to be cheaper once the initial prototypes are out of the way.
They are not economically feasible and will never be that way for commercial services due to maintenance costs. MSRs are corrosive to the structure of the reactor and there really isn't a solution to this problem.
Reference acticle: For high-temperature application, the corrosion of the
metallic containment alloy is the primary concern. Un-
like the more conventional oxidizing media, the products
of oxidation of metals by halide melts tend to be soluble
in the oxidizing media. www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1868062
@@TheBaldr Yeah, the real problem with them is that the salts mentioned are florides. Very nasty and corrosive by themselves. The material science from the corrosion was not up to snuff in the '60's when they had the first MSR's. Maybe they have some new approaches, but that is the limiting factor.
@@robadamson1 There have been improvements in both the metallurgy and using doped salts to counteract the corrosive proprieties.
Yeah- you don’t easily get to Pu239 from Th232 or U 233. This talk is simply based on incorrect information. The possibility of using bred U233 as a bomb core exists but probably hasn’t been tested as far as what can go wrong. Also the Pu in aging power reactor waste is rarely just 239, and the other isotopes are unusable because of their ability to be xplode and destroy the lab and surrounding building way before you get to a critical mass. Bomb reactors are specialised.
You’re missing the other benefits of thorium. It’s literally everywhere in the soil in such amounts as to make mining viable. It also can be recycled into the same reactor which means 98% gets “burned off” and the remaining 2% only lasts a few centuries vs several millennia.
The amount of economically minable thorium and uranium is about the same despite thorium being more common in the earth's crust.
Terrestrial Energy is developing a Molten Salt reactor that uses Uranium as its fuel. It still burns the fuel much better than a normal reactor. Theoretically, it could burn nuclear waste from other reactors like they do in France. So yes, thorium's everywhere, and it's cheaper, but nuclear isn't expensive because of the cost of fuel.
Thorium is a by product of much mining, specifically rare earth mining. You don't even need to open a mine, you could just process tailings and get all the thorium you need forever. This is the reason that rare earth mining doesn't happen in the USA any more. There's so much Th in the tailings that they end up being classified as low level nuclear waste. No mining company wants to deal with that.
We‘re sitting on a 5000C molton iron core.
Dig a little deeper and you get the energy without mining Thorium…
Mr. Zeihan is WRONG
FOUR things wrong
1) A much Higher Percentage of Thorium can be used -- a Uranium fuel rod can last 6 years -- whereas Thorium can Last 50 years
2) This means that the Thorium waste is MUCH LESS radio-active
* 3) you can produce electricity from a Thorium plant @ 1 atmosphere of pressure instead of 7 atmosphere
3a) This means you can NOT get a Fukushima nuclear disaster
* 4) When uranium OVER heats the reaction increases this is how you get a Fukushima nuclear disaster
* 4) Thorium operates in a Temperature range -- when Thorium OVER heats it shuts down
4a) This means you can NOT get a Fukushima nuclear disaster
no. Because the only problem for nuclear energy is not the fuel,but the regulations that since the 80s have killed the western nuclear industry. Especially in europe in countries like germany or italy. This is why russia ,china ans s.korea are still able to build nuclear powerplants in less than 4/5 years.
The registration is not the core issue IMHO it is stupid people doing totally idiotic shit in the name of saving the planet! Nuclear power is one of the most green ways to get power that actually works! Probably only second to geothermal energy if geography allows for it. But most green partys in Europe are entrenched in the opinion that its something bad. Yes nuclear weapons are terrifying and in a perfect world they should not exist, but then again in a perfect world war should not exist too. Like lots of problems with the modern world I believe that education is the way to solve this issue or at least it's a step in the right direction!
How wonderful to live in a place unencumbered by pesky regulations and tiresome compliance issues 🤭
Which might also be why the world's worst nuclear accident likewise occurred in Russia.
Nah the times to build a NPP there have increased as well. Its more like 5-10 years now.
Also Chinas plans to build 45 new reactors is tiny compared to their current renewables installation rate of 140 GW a year. They clearly aren't betting on nuclear being their main energy provider
Okay Vivek.
This is a gross oversimplification. That waste can be reprocessed into MOX fuel, which can be burned in normal reactors. Then there are fast neutron reactors (in actual operation in China and Russia), you can use them to reduce waste with 10k years half-life to ones with 200 year h.l. Nobody seems to mention that each "used" rod, is still 95% fuel and only 5% waste, which we don't process, because there was no need.
interesting. I thought the fuel rods were recycled and used again but Peter said that is not the case in the US. Shouldn't the US recycle these rods if they are 95% still usable fuel and to decrease waste?
I think there is only 1 operating commercial facility (with 3 reactors) that is capable of running on MOX. The Palo Verde station in Arizona.
Peter admitted it was a gross oversimplification so you're just spinning your wheels dude.
@@heyman5525 Its not just an oversimplification, its a strawman argument. No one is recommending using Th in a PWR/BWR.
It was in the early 1950's when Los Alamos figured out that liquid nitrate solutions of fissile material derived from reprocessing could be weaponized without any expensive technology required. All the containers and the entire reprocessing system are designed to prevent accidental criticality in fissile nitrate solutions.
The three biggest pluses for Thorium reactors are that they are not high pressure reactors, meaning they are much safer in that way, that they are fail safe; if the heat builds up, the thorium automatically drains from the reactor needing nothing but gravity, that they can use what is currently waste as their core fuel. Not only is there less plutonium, but there is less of the other dangerous byproducts. There's a difference between waste that drops significantly in radioactivity in hundreds of years vs waste that takes thousands of years to reach the lower radiation levels.
Yeah the technology looks promising ... one day. I think I would go with thorium just to keep that door wide open.
ruclips.net/video/xQYiFyd-ah4/видео.html&lc=UgxuVSc9rgcxS214RZN4AaABAg see my comment. It has nothing to do with the Thorium.
Thorium is currently all hype without any economic reasons.
Came here to say this.
I agree, but the salt that drains is more U-233 than thorium.
It's not Thorium reactors that are low pressure but liquid fuelled molten salt reactors of any type that are low pressure. Also, fuel for a fission reactor has to be "fissile". Thorium is "fertile" so the fissile from Th232 breeding is U233 - the "other fissile" Uranium. That is what creates the neutron source to generate the heat and sustain the chain reaction - not the Thorium. You can put pure U233 into a MSR and it will run fine. That is exactly what they did at the MSRe at ORNL in the 1960s.
Most of nuclear “waste” can be recycled to make new fuel since it still contains 90% of its potential energy. Countries like France also do this. Also, Yucca mountain is not “oversubscribed” since it sits empty due to federal and state politics. The more I watch Peter’s video, the less confident I am about the information he presents.
He is a smart guy and has mastered "speaking with a confident tone" on all manner of topics.
He said oversubscribed, as in the space is already spoken for
Dude is a demographer that manages to speak confidently on thorium, mexican cartels, Chinese political factions, climate change. List goes on
Yeah, when it comes to this detailed science stuff he's getting out of his specialty of geopolitics between world capitols and leadership. I know some basics on the whole nuclear power issue and science behind it, more than Peter but nowhere near enough to make detailed comments on it.
Also, they aren’t sitting in ponds, they are only in ponds for a short time, most is in dry cask.
Peter you only told half the story about on site storage in cooling ponds. It’s only stored in cooling for 5 years because it has to be - it’s literally too hot and needs to be cooled down. After it’s cooled sufficiently, it’s put into a dry cask and stored on site. These casks are extremely durable and very hard to move, so damaging or stealing them isn’t easy.
Spent fuel only stays in a cooling pool for a few years. After that it goes into dry casks which are also on site. Then they could be transferred elsewhere in those casks if the chance came up.
I love Peter Zeihan but not on this topic. He keeps leaving things out and gets it wrong on the topic of bomb making with the spent nuclear fuel/unused nuclear fuel.
WBN2 + Vogtle3 =2 new plants on line, not 1 as you stated, Vogtle 4 started fuel loading on 17 AUG 23 and plans to go on line first quarter 2024 so we are closer to 3 new plants on line than 1 as you stated. Thanks for taking a look at Thorium. The weapons side of the nuke power mix is just one of many advantages of Th, other advantages include 1) A Th reactor was design built and operated at Oak Ridge back in the day - It's much much further along as developed tech than other nuke techs 2) The genre of Th reactors is better understood as molten salt reactors - of which there are many incarnations some of which can burn spent PWR/BWR waste as part of their fuel cycle. 3) Short lived isotopes in waste vs long lived isotopes is a complex topic but the Th power cycle produces less long live waste - a huge advantage. 4) Reactor design - molten salt reactors run at very low pressure just slightly above atm. pressure - PWR/BWRs run at high pressures - making MS reactors less subject to pressurized release of nuclear materials. 5) Th offers many safety advantages which include means for the fuel to reconfigure and shut down without human intervention. 6) Geopolitical considerations - China's TMSR-LF1 is moving forward, leaving the US behind. General comment. Final note - The useful power in Th reactions come from U233 which is not good for weapons. PWR/BWR technologies were adopted primarily to supply the weapons makers and to power ships and subs. Th/MS reactors can be optimize in ways that PWR/BWR cannot making Th/MS the tech of choice if one wishes to have abundant, safe, & cleaner power. Keep looking at Th/MS Peter - listen to voices outside the weapons complex - those guys are married to the old inefficient power cycles.
"PWR/BWR technologies were adopted primarily to supply the weapons makers " -- no, PWRs are very bad for making plutonium as you have to shut them down to extract the spent fuel. All the plutonium made for British and French nuclear weapons came from gas cooled reactors not PWRs.
Really good summary. Other countries are leading on this. Hope their successes trigger the us to invest in this area.
Aside from some slight quibbling I'd do about the weapon ind connection, this is a pretty accurate and informed statement. Well said.
Best comment, thanks, saved me from having to write something similar and you did a better job :). I would add the tech, being much safer, lends itself to smaller, even modular reactors, which will bring production costs waaaay down and improve national distribution. Kinda sad Peter focused on the weapons grade aspect and I'm not even sure he got that right....
Copenhagen Atomics did an interesting presentation recently, looks hopeful, quite a few companies with ideas but most are criminally underfunded, while people throw untold $billions into fancy fusion reactors which will probably never work, and then and scream about how climate change is going to doom civilisation. It's just absurd.
Thanks for the insights
A quick correction. Thorium's main advantage is that its relatively abundant and cheap. Its about three times as common as uranium and has been nearly untapped by any major industrial process. Its dug up as a byproduct of other mining all the time. Since nuclear power is ultimately another non-renewable resource, it makes sense to use the more abundant power source if we are going to have to rely on it for a while.
You said that very well. To expand further: Thorium is all usable. Compared to Uranium where 99.3 percent is NOT USABLE!
@@jwestney2859Thorium isn't fissile like U-235. It doesn't produce neutrons. You should compare thorium to the U-238.
@@michaelbritton2172 There is some truth in what you say, but the difference between U238 and Thorium is instructive. In a Thorium reactor, Thorium is the fuel and it is consumed, releasing useful energy. This is unlike U238 which absorbs neutrons and then becomes nuclear waste... long-lived nuclear waste. So U238 is a problem; Thorium is not a problem. In all these respects I compare Th to U235. Plus Thorium is produced as a byproduct when you dig-up Neodymium that is needed for wind-turbines and electric vehicles. Thorium is 3 times more abundant than Uranium and it is >300 times more abundant than U235. You can read the work of Alvin Weinberg (the guy who taught Rickover about Nukes) to learn why Thorium should power human prosperity.
Nuclear's more of a political problem than having physical supply issues.
Cheap uranium is running low and most of the industry is owned by russia. There certainly is a supply problem and Thorium would be a nice alternative... if molten salt reactors were in any shape or form practical.
@@4203105 > sea water has uranium. There's plenty to go around.
Also an economic problem in turns of keeping existing reactors running. The way competitive electricity markets are structured (Paying equally for all production) make it very difficult for nuclear plants to operate profitably, in fact many are loosing 10's of millions every year and are reliant on state subsidies to even keep existing plants operating. Old designs have very little access revenues outside of the wholesale market (Lik ancillary services), and recently are starting to lose bids in capacity markets.
The sequestering of the waste is definitely a physical problem, and a long term one at that. We are basically kicking the can down the road, making it the problem of some future generation.
That said, climate change is the more pressing problem as well as a worse problem than nuclear waste for future generations. Climate change might already be causing irreversible changes, but perhaps those changes can be mitigated by using nuclear energy.
It’s quite ironic that the Greens created a political environment that now threatens the physical environment. Idealism can be just as dangerous as brutal cynicism.
@@MarcosElMalo2 our resources are better spent on renewables than nuclear. So the greens did nothing wrong here.
Reprocessing spent uranium fuel generates usable uranium, plutonium, and “ash”, which is the spent part of the fuel. Mixing the plutonium with the ash makes it non-bomb grade. The plutonium can be mixed to the point where it is non-bomb grade, but still reactor grade.
Yes, but it can still be separated into weapons-grade material.
And you also need deuterium and tritium for this process and that isn't infinite
There's no free lunches
@@davidingle8983 deuterium and tritium are fuels for fusion, a complete different type of power. Uranium, plutonium, and thorium are used in fission.
@@joeanonimous1105 and spent uranium can be made into a dirty bomb.
@@Simple_But_Expensive - True, but all sorts of things can be used for dirty nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. If by "spent uranium" you mean a Plutonium-rich mixture, that would be among the worst possible ingredients.
I usually agree with your videos. I think you missed 4 other reasons for thorium.
1. Thorium reactors can not melt down.
2. Thorium is 1000 times more common than uranium.
3. Thorium uses 98% of the fuel that goes in to the reactor.
4. Thorium reactors can use up spent uranium rods.
Please interview Kirk Sorensen
>1. Thorium reactors can not melt down.
That has more to do with the fuel being in molten salt form. Uranium can be molten salt too.
>3. Thorium uses 98% of the fuel that goes in to the reactor.
That has more to do with the fuel being in molten salt form.
>4. Thorium reactors can use up spent uranium rods.
That has more to do with the fuel being in molten salt form.
It's not like current nuclear is bad but thorium is going to swoop in and save it. No. Even if you take a proven uranium design from 1960s, it's still vastly better than any other form of producing energy we have. The problem is public stupidity and the politics that stem from it.
India has enormous thorium reserves, and they have spent the equivalent of $100 billion in R&D trying to make this technology work... But there is not one single working demonstration reactor burning thorium anywhere in the world. The molten salt reactors are more technically difficult than liquid sodium cooled reactors, and the molten salt is highly corrosive, hot spots can easily form, and burn through. This technology was tested in the US with uranium, not thorium as fuel. I cannot find a single example of a working prototype reactor that actually burns thorium, and India has thrown real money at this with no tangible results.
@@rtqii I calling BS on India spending a 100 Billion in R&D - Please provide a valid reference. Also, Research reactor 'Kamini': India has been operating a low-power U-233 fuelled reactor at Kalpakkam since 1996
I suspect Thorium is the element of choice for fission reactors (though it is not fissile itself), however I suspect considering the length of time to build a reactor plus the cold war produced a strong bias to uranium as it can produce fissile bombs.
Beautiful green country he walks through. Someone should take the time to give Peter a full rebuttal on this complex issue. Even a guy like me recognizes that there is great error in this talk. There is also some obfuscation. I like this guy's other videos and think neither are intentional and there is no ill intent intended in this one. Thorium could be a great energy source for the future.
Yucca Mountain is not "oversubscribed," it has yet to even open. We have NO operational waste storage facility.
Actually there is the WIPP in New Mexico. It sequesters items contaminated with PU from making bombs. It’s not certified to handle Spent Fuel sadly.
@@keystonekabes - Fair enough. I was referring to the far greater mass of spent fuel and other nuclear waste from commercial reactors.
@@keystonekabes It was designed to do that. Reference Dr. James Conca youtube videos for a recent discussion topic from 2022.
Yucca is just a hole in the ground that will not take nuclear waste. Doing so would solve one of the challenges in expanding nuclear power in the US, and therefore compete with other "green" tech. So it'll never happen.
The issue isn't technical. It's political. Money talks.
@@shawnnoyes4620 I see no technical or geological reason why dry casks ought not be disposed of in WIPP.
Nuclear waste is actually one its advantages. All forms of energy production have toxic waste. For example, manufacturing solar panels produces 300 times more toxic waste per Terawatt hour over the lifetime of the panels or power plant. This figure comes from Environmental Progress, a Berkeley, California, nonprofit. Nuclear produces relatively tiny amounts of waste. Many people don't seem to understand this. Also, today's nuclear waste is tomorrows nuclear fuel. 4th gen breeder reactors can use nuclear waste as fuel.
Copenhagen Atomics are developing thorium SMRs. They have the advantage of availability of Thorium, short half-life waste, ability to burn up conventional waste and fail- safe meltdown
@@Peter-rw1wtWhat are you talking about? 6:45 Thorium must be converted to U-233 in the reactor. U-233 produce all the long lived waste U-235 would do. Neutron ctivation of reactor pressure vessel produce the same amount of long lived waste?
Yup. Nuclear waste is either low level stuff like gloves and napkins. Those is easy to deal with, or it's high level waste, spent fuel. These are chunks of dense metal oxides in ceramic or glass. They're highly contained and stable. People usually complain about CO2 and pollution. Nuclear not only produces no CO2, its waste outputs are very small volume stuff that is easily contained.
Plutonium out of a PWR is not terribly viable for making weapons because most of the PU is 240, which is hot. Both radiation and thermal hot. And it's very hard to separate PU isotopes. There has been one weapon the US tested with Pu240, so it can be done by a nuclear weapons' state, but apparently it requires a cooling system on the weapon to keep exciting things from happening. To make weapons grade Pu you want short irradiation, not 18 months of irradiation.
The Pu used for Operation Teapot was produced by a UK Magnox reactor and/or a heavy water reactor (I believe that is correct). Magnox is a type of nuclear power / production reactor that was designed to run on natural uranium with graphite as the moderator and carbon dioxide gas. It is not a standard type of Light Water Reactor that is deployed commercially. Nobody will ever build another Magnox reactor. A nation-state would usually build a heavy water reactor or an old French design like North Korea to produce Pu. The North Korean 200MWe reactor was designed to use graphite as a moderator, and CO2 as a coolant. 2 This reactor design is an efficient source for weapons-grade plutonium.
@@shawnnoyes4620 Correct. The French UNGG reactors were, like the British Magnox, "partly" used for generating plutonium for nuclear weapons.
@@shawnnoyes4620 The key factor for converting uranium to plutonium, in a reactor, is the ability to move fertile material in and out of the reactor, without shutting it down and waiting for everything to cool. An early American reactor had tubes running through the core that were filled with uranium slugs. At pre-determined intervals, new slugs were added at one end of the tubes and the old slugs that were pushed out the other end were collected and the plutonium extracted.
Candu reactors were considered to be proliferation risks, because they were designed to be refueled, while running at full rated power.
-I was hoping to see these comments here. All correct. the longer the uranium fuel cooks in a core, the more of the bred Pu-239 absorbs a neutron to produce Pu-240. Pu-240 spontaneously fissions, releasing neutrons, which makes Pu-240 a contaminant in Pu-239. The presence of neutrons in a bomb core increases the neutron density while being compressed so quickly that the compression process cannot proceed to the point of maximum. Hence, a contaminated bomb core will prematurely pulse and separate the core materials before it can reach it's full potential. The degree of contamination determines how far the fissioning can proceed. More contamination means less fissioning. The cores with contamination produce fizzles or duds.
All said, power reactor fuel that cooks the fuel for extended periods, cannot produce bomb grade Pu-239. As Richard Bell says, a refueling on-the-fly must push fuel out of the reactor before it overcooks and produces too much Pu-240 contamination in the Pu. If a country like Iran wants to clandestinely produce weapons Pu-239, then they declare they are going to build a large medical isotopes reactor because the production of Mo-99 for Tc-99m SPECT scans requires that the U targets be removed from the neutron flux in a 6.5 day operating cycle (Mo-99 has a 66 hour half life so targets should be removed after about 3 half life irradiations for maximum efficiency). Under that regime only very negligible amounts of Pu-240 are produced in the Pu-239 of the targets. That is why medical isotope reactors are licensed separately from research reactors by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and all materials sent to foreign medical reactors from US DOE enrichment facility for this purpose are very closely monitored.
I have worked in both the medical isotope business and the nuclear weapons business over the past 45 years. Designed an operated medical reactors, and well, did unmentionable stuff at the NTS.
@@richardbell7678 Candu also runs on unenriched uranium -- it can be seen as a perfect machine for turning unenriched uranium to plutonium, avoiding messy isotope seperation steps.
A small correction, the Yucca Mountain storage complex in Nevada never came online due to litigation and opposition from both political parties and Nevada residents. That's why the waste has been stored on site at the reactors because the legally designated location is stuck in a political limbo and there is no other authorized locations for the waste to be stored.
Correct, also to add insult to injury.....Due to the rampant fear of nuclear anything, due to GROSS ignorance, Most states refuse to let any nuclear materials travel through them for fear of accidental release.
I live in Nye County Nevada, home of Yucca Mtn. County residents are overwhelmingly FOR Yucca mtn as long as we get assurances that should the land or water become contaminated, we are bought out so we can move. PERIOD. That sounds fair to me.
We want it for the jobs/economy. The county will access property taxes on the land use. Taxes are low in Nye county.
Congress need to take action and authorize Yucca Mtn.
This was my lane in school. As a geologist, my focus was on isotopes for most of my college career. I drill oil wells now because these mining idiots don't make any money but its still a side interest of mine. No, Thorium isn't going to solve these issues overnight. We don't recycle any of our spent fuel at this time. I'd start with that.
I've actually been in Yucca Mountain. Not really the best solution.
The waste stream from thorium salt reactors is 1/20 ,of a light water or cando reactors. They are walk away safe. The operate at much lower pressure. They do not require a vessel that is forged and machined in one piece. We buy our reactor vessel's from the Japanese. Because we lack the ability to manufacture them.
Number one reason to go to thorium is not proliferation. Though that is a bit harder. It's the difference between using something that is more rare than gold vs something that is almost as common as dirt.
But the availability of uranium isn't one nuclear's big problems right now.
Economically viable thorium is not as common as dirt though. It's about 4 times as abundant as uranium which is definitely more abundant but not "common as dirt".
There is an estimated 80,000 years of nuclear fuel on the ocean floor.
This very much depends on your definition of economically viable because the total difference is shocking. You also have to take into account that the usable isotope of uranium is only a very small fraction of the total uranium on the planet whereas with thorium, pretty much what you see is what you get. Not only that but most of the fuel in light water reactors turns out to be wasted. Sure there are also issues with thorium but if it was allowed to develop, it's hard to see how it couldn't be way better. In fact the inventor of light water reactors pretty much said as much.
The fuel is an almost insignificant part of the TCO for nuclear power.
Also, I think thorium is easier to build in a power plant because it is not a high pressure system. And it has a salt plug that if it overheat drains all the molten salt and stops the reaction. This means it is much safer and not as heavy duty to build as a uranium plant.
I still think thorium reactors are the best solution. Yes, they are not a perfect solution but they are better than anything else we are trying to do. Probably the best solution I have seen suggested is many small thorium reactors serving local regions rather than the massive reactors we have seen until now. From what little I have learned about thorium reactors, the main benefit had to do with the likelihood of Chernobyl type meltdowns. They are a lot less dangerous in that respect.
"...thorium reactors are the best solution". Research the small pebble bed reactors using graphite spheres in helium gas. It is the other gen 4 solution that is equally a "best solution".
Meltdowns are rare and you are still 1000000x more likely to die in a plane crash than be injured in a nuclear accident
I think the heat exchanger was a big problem with the test reactors. You don't put water over the rods in liquid reactors . Have to move the fissile material but that eats away the heat exchangers. Also I think one of the big pluses are they pretty much can't go critical even if you scale them. The liquid expands and becomes less dense attenuating the reaction and you can put a plug in the bottom that melts away at very high temps. I believe they can still be used as breeders though not sure on this
Molton salt reactors can be used with any fuel, not just thorium, so all of the criticality prevention measures can be had with uranium fuel cycles.
Thorium molten salt reactors are breeders because the thorium is not fissile. The thorium salt is in the breeder jacket where it transmutes to U233. This is then pumped to the core where it under goes fission.
It's important to note the Oakridge MSR (built for just $30M) never ran on thorium it was fuelled instead by U235 and some U233. It was intended to demonstrate the feasibility of a liquid nuclear fuel cycle. Weinberg the MSR project leader sought funding for a thorium version but got the sack instead.
A Thorium MSR would necessarily be somewhat different to the Oakridge machine because the radiological and chemical environment is different. The Chinese are developing this.
They are seeking nuclear power plants that require little or no water for use in the western desert part as of their country. MSRs are ideal for this as they get away from the large amounts of water necessary for pressurized water reactors.
All reactors can go critical. Critical is steady state operation. Supercritical is power increasing, Subcritical is power decreasing. Prompt supercritical is kiss your kiester goodbye it's a nuclear bomb. Modern reactors can't reach prompt supercriticality. Chernobyl is about as close as anyone has ever gotten. Pressurized water reactors can have steam explosions which are very bad, Fukushima bad. Low pressure reactors are much safer. Hastelloy steel is resistant to molten salt corrosion so that problem has been largely solved. Yes, Thorium reactors can be breeders but fuel separation is a nightmare. Usually they're just designed to consume any fuel they breed. You've got a good handle on it 9/10.
@@jimgraham6722 It does not eliminate the need for cooling tower water (or river/lake/ocean water)- which is by far the largest use of water in a power plant to condense steam and cool equipment. The water circulating in the primary loop of a PWR and the steam cycle is a trivial quantity in comparison.
@@perryallan3524Not correct, it's all related to the second law. PWRs operate at 300C hot side and around 250C cold side at a pressure over 100 atm. They use the Rankin cycle and are cooled by water.
To extract the energy from such systems you need large amounts of cooling water, for the cool side, typically a rivers worth or at least a substantial lake.
Additionally, PWRs are required by regulation to have a large amount of cooling water in reserve to cool the core in event of a primary loop failure. This is because exposure of the core to air will cause a melt down. Typically enough water is needed to flood the core for a couple of weeks until the decay heat has ebbed. This had to be done in the Three Mile Island accident.
Molten salt reactors on the other hand operate at around 650C hot side and about 550C cold side. They are not pressurised above about 3 atm. They are cooled by gas (typically carbon dioxide) using the closed loop Brayton cycle which dumps surplus heat to air via a heat exchanger (this was the Oakridge MSR), or these days such heat is more likely to be used to power a Rankin cycle turbine. These are the so called dual cycle plants. We know this arrangement works because it is the same cycle used in modern coal fired HELE plants except here the coal furnace as simply replaced by a molten salt reactor.
Such plants can't meltdown because the core is already molten. Therefore emergency core cooling water supplies aren't needed. In the unlikely event of an emergency the molten salt can be simply drained from the reactor into a lead lined container under the reactor, where the nuclear reactions stop and the decay heat absorbed by the latent heat of the lead.
All in all, very little water is needed. What is used, is mainly used to keep the roses growing in the surrounding gardens.
Love your content Peter, but you need to do some fact checking here. With molten salt thorium reactors there is no plutonium and very minimum uranium (for bomb making). The fact that they also produce waste that is much less radioactive and can actually “burn” highly radioactive waste from current reactors is a plus.
But I do agree with you that viable thorium reactors are 10 years away and will probably be 10 years away for the next 30.
And please, Peter, learn how to pronounce "nuclear" (like the nucleus of the atom)- not "Nuc-ye-lar" (there is no such thing)... It's really annoying to hear you repeatedly mis-pronouncing this over and over.
@@Seabrook57 He says it sort of like "W" does.
I wish you had commented on the possibility of using molten salt nuclear reactors to solve some of the nuclear industry’s safety problems.
Fun Fact: The United States' first power reactor, Shippingport, ran a 100% thorium core and demonstrated net breeding in a LWR. E.g. enough new fuel was bred to compensate for reprocessing losses. The ability to isobred also drives a lot of the conversation around thorium because it mean only fission products go to waste. This reduces the waste actinides by about 97% upon complete implementation. @Zeihan_on_Geopolitics--- @humbleeagle1736
I used to work with molten salt reactors for chemical production. It's difficult enough to keep them tight and prevent plugging when the salt is only 400 degC. The mind boggles at the thought of trying to operate these systems at 800 degC and with radioactive poisons mixed into the salt melt. This is way beyond the technology of today...
What safety problems; nuclear already has a better safety record than everything else by orders of magnitude.
@@MrDael01 Then I guess time is flowing backwards, because the first MSR was operated in the 50s.
All of the MSR designs will operate at much higher temperatures than that, so will avoid the problems you experienced. Leak-free flanges were also solved for these systems decades ago.@@MrDael01
The thorium reactor design I've seen around on YT uses molten salt coolant and I don't think there are fuel rods. The big draw is that it uses most of the energy available in the fuel, instead of using just a couple percent and then burying it as "waste". The proliferation claim is that it produces U233 (I think), which is a strong gamma emitter that'll kill the workforce that tries to make it into bombs. If we're going to do nuclear, we should use approached that get most of the energy out of the fuel, whether it's molten salt thorium or uranium reprocessing and breeders. Agree it's going nowhere without a change of heart from government and the public, sadly.
9 out of 10 programmers on social media agree: Thorium is the future of nuclear engineering
Pretty funny. Unfortunately 9 out of 10 neuclear engineers aren't so optimistic. But I do hope the problems with Thorium are solved eventually.
It will happen, when uranium is expensive enough. Not any time soon. But I believe thorium is easier than fusion. (Usually I'm wrong, though.)
According to social media all things are either OMG or WTF. On social media everyone is an expert except perhaps...real experts?
...and of course "real experts" are just part of the conspiracy
@@hartunstart So... what languages do you develop in?
Viewers here need to recognize that Peter is not an expert on everything, but he thinks well enough of himself to where he will attempt to answer anything. This is clearly not an area where he is an expert. Thorium solves so many more problems in nuclear power than just nuclear weapons related issues and that is not anyone's primary reason for wanting thorium
Peter and his commenters and subscribers really elevate the discussion. Great short vids. Thanks to all.
All I want for Christmas is a Where in the World is Zeihan? Game or book!! Also, good briefing, again.
I thought the answer was you
I've never heard that argument for thorium. It's been a bit for me but the arguments I have heard were in regard to it being high yield and far more safe to work with.
Overall this is accurate, but there are a few specific points that are important enough to correct. I work in research on the nuclear fuel cycle and options for reprocessing/transmutation of waste.
- Thorium isn't a proliferation risk because of plutonium, it holds a high risk because another fissile isotope of uranium (U-233) is a required part of the thorium fuel cycle. Unlike uranium fuel cycles where plutonium-239 is mixed with non-fissile isotopes of the same element such as Pu-238 and Pu-240, U-233 makes up a vast majority of the uranium isotopes and can therefore be extracted using chemical means. Thorium is not fissile, U-233 is the actual fuel which is created through a neutron absorption in Th-232 and a beta decay. This U-233 is fissile enough to make a bomb and in some thorium fuel cycles it is relatively easy to extract and some designs require complete separation.
- Used nuclear fuel from light water reactors is not only stored in the cooling pools. Those are meant for fuel recently in the reactor to let them cool down and a large amount of radioactive elements decay and give off energy soon after being in the reactor. After they are cool enough, they are moved to large concrete containers that are located on site, but built and maintained by a separate private company. These containers do not allow for any escape of radiation or proliferation and are well guarded, but are expensive and paid for by the utility (and indirectly by the federal government and taxpayers through lawsuits).
- We don't have Yucca mountain and we probably never will. The official stance of the DOE is that Yucca is the only long-term repository option, but after >2 billion in nuclear, geological, and social scientific studies and some pre-construction work, the project was mothballed and all funding cut. This is mostly a political problem, but Yucca had some real issues which are known by the industry such as capacity constraints, overreliance on engineering barriers because of unfavorable conditions (water intrusions, environmental corrosion, etc.), and a much higher rate of diffusion of isotopes through the walls to the environment than options like granite.
I find everything you post fascinating. Thank you.
Close.
Also, it is very highly unlikely that anyone that might steal spent reactor fuel would live long enough to make something usable out of it.
The spent fuel is extremely radioactive, as are most of the isotopes in it.
Many of the elements in spent fuel are very toxic.
Except plutonium, it is so toxic as to make arsenic look like M&Ms. So much so that if you had 10 Kgs of plutonium and were able to micronize that metal, it would be more lethal as a aerial dispersed weapon than a nuclear bomb.
I don't worry about bad guys stealing spent nuclear fuel.
Yeah, you can't steal it when it comes out of a reactor because it's absurdly radioactive. And then to actually get anything useful for weapons you need a huge industrial plant costing many many millions. So you need to build this secret multi-acre plant full of horribly toxic chemicals or very sophisticated equipment only usable for one thing, then steal tons of spent but old fuel rods and get them to you secret lair where your team of experts will... Nope.
We have robots for that.
@@oldsol7396 Have you processed spent fuel yourself?
One nice thing about thorium tractors he didn’t mention is that they are far less likely to melt down.
Didn’t realize that it was almost as bad for proliferation, though, and this is the first time I heard an explanation for why we don’t recycle spent fuel rods.
Uranium Hexafloride boiles at 56c. Uranium 235 (fissile, usually 2% of the fuel rod) does not turn into plutonium, U238 (98%) does. Most of the energy in a used fuel rod comes from the plutonium that came from the U238. The fuel rod becomes spent when it has accumulated enough "other" stuff that isn't uranium or plutonium, and that stuff is sucking up all the good neutrons. At this point, reprocessing the fuel rod, the plutonium can be mixed down and reinserted into a reactor, or diverted to a bomb.
Liquid fuel reactors, uranium or thorium, do not require reprocessing. Since the "other" stuff can be removed without taking the fuel out of the reactor. In theory a reactor like this, using uranium, running in a trustworthy country, can not divert plutonium to weapons.
In less honest countries, you could use thorium in stead. Thorium is MUCH harder to use for weapons, even if no one is watching. Even if you managed it, it would make the worst nuclear bomb in history... far more dangerous to you than your enemy.
the Pu can be used to make new fuel (MOX) as you mentioned but it cannot be used directly as bomb material. Pu is the name of the element but it consists of different isotopes just as Uranium. In order to make a bomb from the spend fuel you first need a complicated and expensive way of seperating the Pu from all the other products after which you need isotope enrichment to seperate the Pu-239 from the other Pu isotopes.
Just a few points - I believe Thorium (liquid salt) reactors can be modified to diminish the Plutonium by-product problem. Also, with Thorium, it is much more difficult to attain fission. This is bad news for engineers, but good news for everyone else. It means they're extremely safe and don't need the huge safety systems required by uranium-cycle reactors. Unlike the Uranium single-reactor model, Thorium reactors can be "stacked" with additional reactors being added as necessary.
Great Topic! This not been covered nearly enough! Very interested in the results from China two test projects.
As a correction, thorium does not decay into plutonium. Pu is a by-product but the reason is that Th is not fissile, so U or Pu is needed to provide the neutrons to cause fission, so Pu becomes a by-product.
We can manage uranium safely and efficiently. The new small modular reactors are very safe. Let’s just move forward with increased uranium use.
If the reactors are built in the cities.
If I remember correctly, a thorium reactor's main appeal is (or could be) safety and a potential reduction in size, not non-proliferation.
Peter, you know alot about rare-earth elements. You have been the clearest voice telling how the green transition requires more resources than we can possibly mine. Please recall that one of the biggest problems mining rare-earth elements is that Thorium comes along with them. It is literally a waste-product of rare-earth mining. So if we plan to access strategic minerals, it is good to have a use for the Thorium. Please don't overlook this.
Most people don't know that reactors can produce rare earth elements. No mining necessary.
@@johnnycarson67do you have reference?
A better source of information regarding thorium is Copenhagen Atom ⚛️. They been developing a new reactor and have a lot of research put into their approach.
They are spinning a lie that corrosion is not an issue when its known that it is in fact a huge issue (so huge that it is what stopped further development of MSR's in the early 1970s). While the pure salt with the pure fuel itself is not corrosive. Once you start the atomic reactions you get daughter and waste elements/products generated and the salt fluid becomes extremely corrosive to common alloys.
Now there is a theory that if you can separate out enough of these daughter and waste elements/products that the fluid will be a lot less corrosive. However, no one has ever shown that this can in fact be done as they have never had any working molten salt fluid with all the daughter and waste elements/product to test it.
In the last 15 years a lot of research has looked at this issue using super-allows, and the Chinese just built a test reactor because they believe that they have found a specific super-alloy combined with a theoretical side stream separation process that will adequately control the corrosion issue so that long term reliable MSRs could be built.
It may be a decade or more before we know if they have a solution. Based on my experience in the nuclear world and reading the history of many test reactors I suspect that they may have to rebuild their side stream separator process several times to get something that works and is reliable.
I know of 2 other MSR test reactors planned looking at the same issues just using different processes.
Copenhagen Atom is just another (out of many) investor scams generating jobs that will keep some people busy for a decade or more on something that won't work just because they can con some investors out of the money.
@@CAVALRY19D maybe they don't want to disclose to much of what they are doing until they have a reactor up and running.
@@anderssvensk4317 They are never going to have a reactor up and running. I spent a good part of my life in the nuclear power world and I laughed when I saw their videos and explanations. They have absolutely no clue of what is needed for nuclear plant design or regulatory approvals.
They are flat out lying that corrosion is not an issue in a running molten salt reactor. It was so bad at Oak Ridge that they could not find any suitable alloy to even try to build a better design in the early 1970's. The last 15 years has seen a number of countries spend a lot of $$$ looking at super alloys hoping to find one that would work. At the same time the concept of side stream separation of the very corrosive daugther and chemical products formed from a running reactor has been proposed. But no one has proven it will work - or what it takes to make it work well enough to control the corrosion rate.
The Chinese just built a molten salt thorium test reactor at 1/4 the size of the late 1960's era Oak Ridge test plant. They believe that they have a suitable super-alloy and a viable side stream separation plant that will allow them to adequately control the corrosion rate such at a multi-decade life would be possible (which is needed for any nuclear power plant to be economical). It may be a decade before we know if they have something that works well enough for them to build a larger test reactor (which is their plan if this one works). A prototype power plant in the 50-75 MWe output would follow, and only after it ran well without problems would commercial power plants be desiged with their super alloy and whatever they find works for side stream separation to keep the circulating molten salt clean enough to limit corrosion (at Oak Ridge the daughter and other chemicals built up and the corrosion rate got worse every day the reactor ran).
Companies telling us that the pure salt and pure thorium itself is not corrosive is just blowing smoke. That's not what's going to be circulating in an operating reactor.
Note. The Candu uses 7 mil not 35 - 50 mil fissionable fuel, so you just oxidize the yellowcake and you're done.
Second it can, depending on how you operate it, spit out waste at 300 PPM (or 0.3 mil) fissionable. They also don't need 13 inch thick pressure vessels (available ONLY from Combustion Engineering's Chattanooga works), they don't need to be shut down to refuel, and have a 120 year design life (Yes you might change the turbo-generator at 60 years, and all the instrumentation at 30 year intervals, the various heat exchangers at either), they've also survived the failure that terrifies the US PWR designers - a main pressure vessel crack - some 13 meters long. That reactor is still in service, and was shut down normally on that occasion.
Problem is it is NOT INVENTED IN THE US so the US won't approve it.
Also there is an experimental Thorium based fuel called ANEEL which is being tested in CANDU reactors using the same fuel bundle form factor. Pretty neat eh?
In Toronto, the steam cooling tower causes stable high pressure weather pattern over the area. We had heatwave and clear skies under high electric needs ( the business week) and rain and unsettled weather on the weekends as less steam is cooled. They had to operate at 3% of capacity at best to not mess with weather.
P-Zed's ability to explain things in a succinct and precise manner is so admirable.
Love this channel for that reason.
yeah. Just spewing out tons of information he would have been put in prison for life for in 1945.
@@EndingSimple that might explain why he is constantly running around in the middle of nowhere
It's not always easy to tell when the listener is non-American, but there are zigns :)
Peter might be able to explain a great many things! His attempt to explain the Thorium issue, is NOT one of them! I think he needs to stick to geo-politics, because this video SUCKS!
That doesn’t mean that he spewed accurate information
Great video! Love the simple explanation.
You can not make Plutonium-239 from Thorium-232. Can anyone explain how he came up with that assumption?
Simple - he made it up, because Peter is OWND (often wrong, never in doubt)
No matter. You can't make bombs from reactor grade plutonium anyway because too much of it is Pu240.
Good point. I just wanna know why he thinks we should sell it to terrorist nations anyway? If we have to never produce any technology that could be misused in the wrong hands, then we shouldn't even be making steak knives.
Peter would be such a blast to have as a corp mate in EVE online :)
Thanks for all of your concise conjecture.
Peter grossly misstates the entire Uranium-Thorium cycle. Instead of creating Plutonium, it creates more fissile fuel that cannot be used in a nuclear weapon as well as a very 'hot' byproduct U-233 that is difficult to handle, which makes it very unusable for the typical 3rd world nation-state like Iran or Pakistan to deal with. Also with a Uranium-Thorium molten salt reactor, the fuel is kept in a molten state, which is not only more efficient thermally since it can provide both industrial scale heat as well as electrical power, but it also significantly stretches our available supply of U-235, the stuff that makes nuclear chain reactions work. So that instead of having fuel for maybe another hundred years or so for nuclear reactors, we have enought fissile (uranium) and fertile (thorium) fuel for literally thousands of years.
Third-world states like India have already detonated U-233 nuclear weapons. The US described it as highly satisfactory as a weapons material. Thorium won't help with nuclear proliferation.
Pakistan already has the bomb, and Iran already has enrichment facilities, so those countries aren't particularly good examples of places where Thorium reactors would result in a lower proliferation risk. Let's take Indonesia instead. You build a bunch of MSR there. Put a U-238 blanket around the thorium reactor and you get plutonium, which you can still use to make weapons, despite not having a Uranium based LWR.
I don't understand why we have to sell these to terrorist states anyway? Who says we have to make one that is safe enough to sell to iran or north korea or any other insane leader country? Are we to reject all technology that could possibly hurt somebody in the wrong hands? If that's true, we can't even make simple steak knives.
As a Physicist I would like to address a couple of issues, 1st the US produces tons of Thorium as a byproduct of other industries annually, for example the production of other rare earth materials. 2nd is that Thorium does not utilize rods it uses a salt mixture that is "Liquid" and as a result uses a totally different type of reactor vessel that is actually safer to use than the current High Pressure water reactors we currently utilize. Lastly and I think the most important thing, the spent fuel is dangerous for only about 300 years as opposed to our current means which is several hundred thousand years as the fuel actually consumes itself in the process of generating the fission, we need to generate the heat for steam.
In India they use use solid fuel rods of thorium, and the Shippingport reactor had a solid thorium core.
All of the same things can be said about a uranium-based MSR except it's a simpler and cheaper reactor.
You clearly don't understand different reactor designs: Thorium reactors have been built as Light Water PWRs, Heavy water reactors, multiple designs of high temperature gas reactors (including 2 commercial power plants which failed, and pebble beds), and one molten salt reactor that had corrosion issues from the daughter products and other chemicals produced in the circulation fluid so bad that they could not see a way forward in the early 1970's. Many countries have been trying to get thorium reactors to work for decades.
The Chinese currently think they have a good chance at at least controlling the corrosion rate with a new super alloy and using side stream separation of daughter products and other chemicals to control the level of such corrosives in the circulating fluid. They built a test reactor and started it up a few months ago. It will likely be a decade or so before we know if they have found an adequate solution.
Somebody explain to me where you get the 239 nucleons needed to make Plutonium when you start with Thorium?
Yeah, Peter usually understands technology well, but he struck out here.
Yes, Peters little missive was a big ZERO.
@@donmeares3652Elvis told him that
The neutrons come from the nuclear fission in the reactor. But it takes an unreasonable amount to get to Pu-239.
The other by-products (aside from plutonium) of the Thorium reaction are useful.
The benefits of Thorium is largely that it is 97% more efficient. The other major point is that those who promote Thorium are advocating Molten Salt Reactors with Thorium reaction happening inside of a molten salt jacket. The huge difference is that a MSR can't melt down because the boiling point of salt is far above the temperature where the reaction takes place regardless of whether the element is Thorium or Uranium. With Light Water Reactors the water has to be pressurized and that makes the reactor more expensive and the meltdown issue remains.
I am very impressed with the quality of the response to this video. Peter has very educated followers.
TMSR-LF1 (液态燃料钍基熔盐实验堆; "liquid fuel thorium-based molten salt experimental reactor") is a 2 MWt molten salt reactor (MSR) pilot plant located in northwest China, completed in 2021.
shh people here only want to hear about China's coming collapse. I think its been producing power for a year now.
Peter - I suggest - as others have - that you and everyone else look closely at the molten salt core systems that are currently evolving - some of which are actually well developed and mostly just lack a parts supply chain. Demonstration reactors using this method were actually first built almost half a century ago. Salt core (either CL or F salts) address many of the weaknesses of PWRs using Uranium and potentially deal with the existing inventory of spent and unprocessed fuel. The current Uranium based reactor designs "won" for a combination of reasons of expediency and the Plutonium that could be acquired for nuclear armament. In short, liquid salt core reactors are absolutely viable both economically and technologically. The hold up is resistance from existing economic interests and political leadership.
@Zeihan_on_Geopolitics-- Would love to and find out where I might be getting it wrong. I'm by no means a nuclear engineer - somewhat read on it, and have listened to lectures by industry experts on it - combined with a long history of watching the successes and failures of the anti-nuclear and environmental movements.
@Zeihan_on_Geopolitics-- Another one - this guy is *great* - from 2018 - Ed Pheil & Elysium Industries. Suffice to say, there's a lot more activity in this than most people realize. I haven't checked on them recently, will have to do that.
ruclips.net/video/aHsljVnY6oI/видео.html&ab_channel=gordonmcdowell
0:12 Fission and decay chains are never CHEMICAL reactions...
Everything that happens around decay is chemical.
@@TFT-bp8zk Chemistry is the physics of the most outer orbitals (so chemistry is just a - more or less - trivial corner case of physics). But this NOT, what fission and decay chains are all about.
Peter, you left out the much shorter storage time for thorium reactor waste. It is very important
A lot of this is way off Peter. Eg "a thorium reactor's plutonium production rate would be less than 2 percent of that of a standard reactor, and the plutonium's isotopic content would make it unsuitable for a nuclear detonation." Wikipedia - wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power, but I've also read it in a lot of other places. You are definitely not saying this; "using Thorium .. you are only getting a quarter less plutonium" 3:06. 2 vs 75, a bit of a difference. So clearly your subsequent points are also incorrect.
I haven't been able to find where Peter got his numbers on this, but one quote on wiki from a single nuclear engineer likewise isn't much to go on, even if the engineer in question is a pioneer in the field. I haven't been able to corroborate the 2% number from a reputable source, either. Really wish it were easier to get verifiably good info on this.
Please make one video about the recent developments in modular reactors.
Nuclear engineer here. A lot of the details in this aren't totally right but the conclusions mostly are. Despite advanced reactors solving a lot of interesting problems in nuclear though, it's worth mentioning that current gen reactors are safer than solar power and the biggest issue with cost is not building enough to drive supply chains towards higher efficiency and gaining experience for construction workers. I work on advanced reactor designs and believe in them but mostly we need to build a lot of current technology as quickly as possible
Is Peter right about the detail that spent fuel rods contain plutonium, and that recycling the spent fuel rods purifies it?
This is what frustrates me so much. 'With technology X we will have safe nuclear power generation.' WE ALREADY HAVE IT!!!!!! We just need to build more and then work hard, yes very hard but it's worth it, on the waste side. Fukishima survived a staggering outlier earthquake perfectly, then in a worst case scenario got flooded because of poor decision making that had nothing to do with the reactor, and still more people died from being relocated than from the plant accident itself. Of course you're right, new tech is good all around, there may be real improvements on the horizon, I'll trust you to know that better than me, but economies of scale on current tech would help a lot and more plants are exactly what we need to fill gaps with wind/solar. Anyway, I'll shut up, but it drives me nuts. Thanks for commenting.
@@ThadBrownNo one at Fukushima died from radiation. people died because of a tidal wave. I don't understand why this simple fact cannot get out?
The US had a supposed 10 megawatt thorium breeder MSR operating from 1965 to 1969. It operated for over 13,000 hours (about 40% uptime) and generated electric power but never exceeded about 7 Megawatts due to over heating. The program was defunded after the demo run. Yes, there were problems and weaknesses revealed during the test run. My question: 55 years after the test is a thorium MSR a viable commercial endeavor?
I suppose you are thinking of the MSR at Oak Ridge. It ran on U-233, not thorium, it was a demo project for MSR. There are videos from Kirk Sorensen here where he interviewed the original scientists, who concluded that the MSR experiment was quite successful, felt the engineering challenges (mostly metals, valves, and the like) would be straightforward to solve. The liquid fluoride thorium reactor has different challenges.
This is the first PZ video that seems completely under researched. From the little I now about the subject, the biggest benefit is safety. I believe the Chinese are building one (maybe two) Thorium (liquid fluoride thorium reactor or LFTR) reactors. Their success or failure will definitely add much needed data to any meaningful discussion of this subject
Great explanation, thanks
Plutonium can be used in reactors just like U235. Breeder reactors can reuse U235 and turn it into P242. Endless fuel as far as I am concerned.
Peter, interesting fact: The Fort St. Vrain Nuclear Power Plant right near you, in Platteville, Colorado, was designed to use a fuel mix that contained thorium.
Thorium reactions' waste also has a much smaller half-life so its waste isnt radioactive for as long.
3:15 don't underestimate that slightly more difficult process on the back end.
It's more complicated than that snd you know it.
Peter Zeihan, you have a fairly incomplete understanding of this. And if it weren't pointless to write comments on RUclips -- since nobody reads them -- I'd write a long explanation that addresses some of what you're missing.
But instead I'll keep it short.
a) There are a large number of different molten-salt reactor designs. They don't use fuel rods. Molten-salt is really the key technology here, not thorium. Many of these reactors can burn thorium but they can also burn uranium.
b) Most molten salt reactors make it quite difficult to make nuclear weapons because the fuel itself is not sufficiently enriched to make bombs with. In addition to that everything is kept all mixed together and not separated. To make bomb material you'd have to separate out certain isotopes from the molten salts. That's a non-trivial thing. And if someone can do that with molten salt reactor fuel then they can do the same with raw uranium yellowcake. Or in other words they would already have nuclear bombs.
c) The nuclear waste issue has been solved. Look up wasteburners. There are a number of proposed wasteburners. But look up Moltex Energy. The fact that you haven't heard of this should set you back. Whoever you've been listening to either doesn't really know all that much, or they are trying to hide this.
“Hi Peter” I think further consideration for molten salt reactor should be looked into. They do not use rods and supposedly burn up 99% of the fuel. They ran a test thorium reactor for four years. Many negative articles about thorium place it in solid form as in fuel rods “as a light water reactor“ that’s not Molten Salt Reactor. I think a further look may be appropriate. Check out Kirk Sorensen.
Slowly the World is realizing that going to 100% renewables is impossible. Hitting 5% is a gargantuan task. Net zero is never going to happen. Not by 2050. Not in this century. However, nuclear is the best answer we have to provide the scale and capacity of clean energy we must have to function as a civilization. Interestingly, Portugal said they ran ran on 100% renewables a week ago for 5-6 days. They also managed to build this capacity under a dictatorship, which also required a tremendous amount of capital. So, I can assure you this energy isn't free and it costs the Portuguese far more than conventional sources like natural gas would
Lmao when Portugal ran on almost 100% renewables the main power source were wind turbines which weren't installed until the 2000s. The dictatorship endend in 1974
My understanding from multiple sources is that thorium reactors could react a larger number of reaction produces leaving you with less wast.
Secondly using a molten salt design you can remove the melt down risk. Third molten salt for the heat transfer reduces significantly the containment requirements over high pressure water cooling.
I think the plutonium proliferation problem could be worse because there is incentive to do chemical extraction of non fissile material on site.
Not a physicist but I did take some classes (none about nuclear reactors)
Dr. Weinberg thought it was the answer, but the department of energy had other thoughts
They needed the PU-239. All other concerns were secondary and still are.
They were only thinking in terms of bomb making factories and that is not needed anymore.
They're not stored in cooling ponds, at least not for long. After a little while (after they've stopped producing a significant amount of heat) they're stored in dry casks.
The casks are next to indestructable & could be left there for hundreds of years if necessary. While burying the waste is ultimately the best thing, reprocessing what we can out of the dry cask storage first would be good as there isn't an unlimited supply of fissionable material in the world so at some point recycling is going to be necessary (unless we have fusion by then).
Your basic premise that adoption of nuclear power is impeded by a concern over weapons proliferation and not environmental hysteria is a false premise.
Not every country is america
I had actually never heard of Thorium being a good option because it reduces Plutonium waste. I mostly have heard about other benefits, so, it could very likely still be worthwhile.
Ah the old LFTR solution I've been hearing about off and on since about 2003
great stuff love the knowledge
They have been talking about thorium reactors since the early 80s but that's really all they done.
Can't do anything but talk about them until they're allowed to do something more.
China is working on thorium reactors. A company in Denmark has said to have solved the problems of thorium reactors.
You can thank our stupid government for getting in the way of any nuclear progress since the 1970s. They stopped all nuclear education in the schools and Treated nuclear power like it was witchcraft.
A 2011 MIT study concluded that although there is little in the way of barriers to a thorium fuel cycle, with current or near term light-water reactor designs there is also little incentive for any significant market penetration to occur. As such they conclude there is little chance of thorium cycles replacing conventional uranium cycles in the current nuclear power market, despite the potential benefits.
Current US law states that the fuel assembly has to be an approved design. Because the fuel in an MSR is molten, there is no fuel assembly. Therefore, it will take a literal act of congress to get an MSR.
@@michaelbritton2172 Even with an act of Congress, the NRC would find a way to ban it. Even if Congress told the NRC they must accept liquid fuels, they would simply delay the licensing process by 50+ years and stop it that way.
I've never heard anyone mention that the reason for Thorium would be because it's more difficult to turn into weapons.
It is not really practical when we know how to do it with U235 and Pu. And using Pu from spent nuclear fuel? BS. Please show me or reference the Uranium Enrichment Process - Gas Centrifuges that are being used for Pu 239, 240, 242 :)
@@shawnnoyes4620 that is just right.
I'm still waiting for someone on here to say: why not just refuse to sell it to terrorist nations? Wouldn't that fix any question about such a thing?
@@johnnycarson67 I agree. But even terrorist nations cant make weapons from commercial reactors. Its a non-issue.
Mostly agree but I'm confused - it seems like he's implying P-239 can't be used for energy generation, and is otherwise only high grade waste or weapons production. But that's not correct - we can use the plutonium itself to produce energy. Yes, there will always be the fear that it could be used to produce more weapons, but there are costs to every form of energy production, and I believe psychological costs should be prioritized below more tangible costs.
Just use breeder reactors and take the risk. The risk from climate change is at least as great as the risk from nuclear proliferation.
Not even close and nowhere near on the same time scales
Won't happen. The Greenies who are convinced that the world is going to end because of climate change are the same people that are scared of nuclear power. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever until you realise that they don't actually want ANY solutions. Solutions would make them irrelevant, but immobilising fear gets them more votes. Politics. 🤦
Now go check out what Dr William Happer thinks about rising CO2 levels. You may sleep easier at night.
All the best.
@@cmleibenguth If Copenhagen Atomics gets it "right", then we have a good chance. :) Solar and Wind will not get it done. There is NOT enough copper from a mining perspective to support that fantasy.
Temperature in June at vostok ice station was -125 degrees below zero fahrenheit. What "crisis" are you thinking?
Operations Safety is a big benefit of Thorium.
No it won't, efficiency is the key.
Power loss with traditional power lines is staggering.
I would love to know what Peter thinks about hardening the grid to solar activity
I believe the real reason for Thorium is that it wouldn't require a nucleair plant that can have a run away meltdown proces without active cooling i.e. making it safer to use as power plant.
Just reiterating; the real advantage of Thorium is safety. Since it's a liquid at reactor temperatures it's relatively easy to build a physical fail-safe system that vents the reaction mass into a large catch basin where it won't be concentrated enough to cause a chain reaction if the reactor starts overheating. Having a meltdown is much, much less likely in such a system.
The original test reactor had an open drain pipe out the bottom with a desk fan blowing over it. The fan cooled it enough to plug it.
When the power went out, the plug melted and the reactor contents drained out.
It's only part of liquid in molten salt reactor, there are different technologies where it can be used as solid like sodium cooled reactor.
Actually most of spent fuel is stored on site in dry storage casks not in storage pools.
Thank you, Peter, for dashing my hopes. I was not aware of the limited aspect of Thorium. I truely thought is was an answer to the power and nuclear waste problems. As always you are very incite full, and informative. Kudos!
This is not Peter's expertise. Thorium is an answer if we want it to be. It's proliferation-safe, not because it's completely impossible to make weapons within its fuel cycle, but because it's hard enough so that any would-be nuclear weapons state would stay clear and instead build a dedicated plutonium-producing uranium-based reactor on the side. It does solve the waste problem, as it uses all of the fuel and not just 3.5% (so the volumes are reduced to 1/20-th or less), and it can eat old waste. Also it is abundant enough for us to never run out of fuel.
But otoh, ordinary reactor tech is good enough for the foreseeable future, and the current roadblock is overregulation and extreme safety requirements driving costs, which isn't really what thorium solves.
@@jesan733 Conventional Uranium fueled PWRs and BWRs are already "proliferation-safe, not because it's completely impossible to make weapons within its fuel cycle, but because it's hard enough so that any would-be nuclear weapons state would stay clear and instead build a dedicated plutonium-producing uranium-based reactor on the side." - Thorium is a solution for a problem that does not exist from a proliferation standpoint.
The benefit of thorium comes with the enhanced safety of a molten salt reactor. No meltdown. No steam explosion.
@@michaelbritton2172 but dealing with molten salts is fraught with all kinds of logistical difficulties. James Maheffey's "Atomic Accidents" is a recommended read. Lots of issues with molten salt development/research reactors over the years. There's a reason that Rickover rejected the concept for Navy deployment.
Not sure who is doing the research but there are a bunch of reactors that were commissioned in the eighties and nineties, rather than the 1973 he noted. And most were started after that date as well. Spent rods have typically been stored onsite in concrete casks, not in water pools. And the biggest problem with Yucca Mountain is that many towns don't want nuclear waste shipped through on rail. I guess the number of derailments might have something to do with that.
Peter is now a nuclear power expert.
What could go wrong?
The biggest problem with nuclear power is that people were introduced to fission in Hiroshima and no matter how safe it can be made for power generation, there is a fear that surpasses reason in the public view. It is still much safer than mining coal or drilling for oil, but it’s more acceptable somehow when those risks are chiefly to miners and drillers rather than the somewhat more democratic (though much lower) risks of a nuclear power plant accident.
It gets highly politicized therefore and becomes a crusade against energy independence.
It doesn't help that teaching school children nuclear power was like witchcraft.. it leaves the populace nuclear ignorant and afraid. And if other energy competitors have it their way, they'll stay ignorant and afraid.
From what I understand, if you build a fast-breeder reactor, it can use the waste from normal reactors as fuel? Proliferation concerns are even worse as if can be tuned to produce even more plutonium that a normal reactor but it would solve the waste issue?
It depends on the type of fast reactor and how it is configured. You are referencing a certain type of Sodium Fast Reactor. Natrium cannot breed Pu. That is the Bill Gates reactor. A Molten Salt Chloride Reactor can be configured not to breed Pu but consume Pu, too.
A different note to consider is that burying nuclear waste has a major hidden danger we are only just now starting to become aware of: Fungi are the dominate eukaryotic life of the deep lithosphere & they are more than capable of feeding on/bioeroding the containers used to store said waste. We burried waste because we thought there wasn't much of an ecosystem down there but work in Geomycology has shown otherwise. It is more of a mystery and perhaps even more dynamic than the deep ocean. We need to be careful going forward how we interface with deep earth bioms.
I take everything Zeihan says with a grain of salt since he mentioned that he's a partner of Pakman...
I'd like to see / hear a debate between Kirk Sorensen - a Thorium fuel cycle advocate who has studied the original Thorium reactor developed by Weinberg at Oak Ridge National Laboratory - and Peter. That would be worth watching.
Just so you know, China's experimental 2GW LFTR reactor received regulatory approval to begin operations in June 2023. They had a target for the reactor going critical in September 2023, but I haven't been able to find out if it started operating on time.
@@imreszabo6075 Thank you for that update. Our regulatory approval system is atrocious and inexcusable.