Kirk Sorensen - The Promise of Thorium in Meeting Future World Energy Demand

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This is not really a good technical explanation of LFTRs in general, rather it's a pretty reasonable (if a bit lengthy) explanation of one specific design; the FLiBe design. Nice to see videos from TU Delft, my university :)

TL;DW: Video starts with a fairly lengthy discussion on the ORNL MSR and the usual pros/cons of Th-232 LFTRs. He then explains FLiBe, which is a Hastelloy-N vessel filled with LiBeFn, lots of graphite tubes which carry fuel ([LiBeFn]-UF4), breeding fuel ([LiBeFn]-ThF4). 250MWe modules, no further hard specs (it's a paper design). The facility concept can use CO2 turbines (for higher temperature than steam turbines, i.e. higher thermodynamic efficiency, one of the advantages over LWRs).

He goes over the processing, of which the actinide-removal is the main difference from other LFTR concepts (it uses Bi). Another big deal is the completely closed-cycle operation, even including Xe/Kr storage.

He then goes into the problems, which are of course Hastelloy-N not being rated, heat exchanging from liquid fluoride, the omnipresent tritium issue and some minor issues. He also mentions short lifetime issues.

As far as LFTR design videos go, this one is refreshingly technically detailed. Good watch, especially if you're interested in the subject and have seen a lot of videos about it already.


I'm not quite sure what the 'misinformation' is that OP would like to disspell. Obviously, given that this is Kirk Sorensen, he's going to try to emphasize the perceived advantage of fuel abundance and the lack of plutonium in LFTR breeders and simultaneously dismiss most of the barriers to realization. Anyone trying to counter this is going to do the reverse. LFTRs aren't a universally bad thing, nor are they a universally good thing. There's lots of good arguments to be made either way, depending on how fast it will be possible to build these things and where in the world you live.

At least this is a proper and honest video that doesn't try to sell 'mobile thorium reactors in your basement'-bullshit. I've had quite enough of that.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 9 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/demultiplexer πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Feb 21 2016 πŸ—«︎ replies

Why is this post being spammed every two days or so? I have seen it reapear sever times this week.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 4 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/Verzingetorix πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Feb 22 2016 πŸ—«︎ replies

By "work" you mean "completely theoretical and not one reactor is currently built and running".

I will believe it when they finally turn one of these things on.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 2 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/[deleted] πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Feb 22 2016 πŸ—«︎ replies

Thorium is a bad idea because it's too late. It's going to take 10 -15 years to do the research needed to create a production reactor, 10 -20 years after that to build a production reactor, then 20 -30 years after that for it to break even on costs. That's 2055 at the earliest. By then, solar and wind will be so cheap, the reactor would have gone bankrupt decades earlier. Not to mention the head start fusion has on it. We definitely should have been working on Thorium 40 years ago, now it's too late.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 1 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/Rodman930 πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Feb 22 2016 πŸ—«︎ replies

OP, liquid fluoride = liquid salt?

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 1 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/derkevevin πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Feb 22 2016 πŸ—«︎ replies

looking at his posting history OP might be some kind of weird LFT reactor advocate.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 1 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/theblaah πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Feb 22 2016 πŸ—«︎ replies

Thank god someone finally set the record straight

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 1 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/saidyep πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Feb 22 2016 πŸ—«︎ replies

Thorium probably still is 20+ years away from commercialization, if ever. http://www.billdietrich.me/Reason/ReasonNuclear.html#Thorium By then, renewables plus storage will be so cheap that they will be driving every other form of energy out of the market.

πŸ‘οΈŽ︎ 1 πŸ‘€οΈŽ︎ u/billdietrich1 πŸ“…οΈŽ︎ Feb 22 2016 πŸ—«︎ replies
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All the way from the United States: Mr. Kirk Sorensen, founder of Flibe Energy systems in Alabama. Kirk was a NASA space engineer and during his quest to find a power source he struck upon the thorium reactor and he was one of the firs to recognize the potential. Let me just review a few of the amazing discoveries that have brought us here this day and give you a sense of when they happened and how far back this goes. It begins with Glenn Seaborg at the University of California in Berkeley who first discovered uranium-233 from... that it could be formed from thorium, and he also discovered it was fissile and that it was possible to form a breeding cycle from this, and these amazing discoveries were happening though in a period of war, and so the question was: could it be applied to wartime purposes? He also discovered the issue with uranium-232 contamination and this is what caused thorium and uranium-233 to be set aside for the remainder of the war as something not applicable for nuclear weapons. Nevertheless it was very applicable for nuclear power reactors, and this was picked up after the war at Oak Ridge National Laboratory under the direction of Alvin Weinberg who originally (his chemists) conceived of the molten salt reactor and realized they would have some tremendous advantages. They built the first molten salt reactor in 1954 and not long thereafter they began to realize that thorium and the molten salt reactor ideas can be brought together in a new concept: the thorium molten salt reactor, and this would make an ideal reactor for generating electrical power for civilian use, for people. And so they started a program in 1957. They discovered a material; they called "INOR-8." We now know it as Hastelloy -N, that it would be suitable for molten salt reactors and it would be able to carry the materials in a sufficient duration. They built a reactor out of Hastelloy-N, called the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment, in the early 60s. They ran it until 1969 when they were ordered to shut it down even though it was still running very well, and they continued their studies into the 70s when the whole program unfortunately was cancelled because of a change of priorities in America as far as funding. And this had a ripple effect on other molten-salt reactor programs that were taking place around the world as we now know, even in China, they were working on molten salt reactors and they set their work aside after the Americans stopped working in the early 70s. So I was born in 1974, which unfortunately was the same year the molten salt reactor was shut down. The whole program ended, so I can kind of mark the beginning of my life as the beginning of the end for the molten salt reactor. So I'm 40 years old and it's been 40 years. We're 40 years past due in getting this job done! And it's another reason I feel such a passion to work on this, is because we're far behind schedule, and we want to power the world with thorium, we want to eliminate so many of the political and social problems that have come about because of our dependence on other energy sources. Political mistakes and poor information led to the cancellation of molten salt reactors. It was *not* a technological problem, and many of the key materials compatibility questions were answered to satisfaction during the operation of the molten salt reactor. Safety, as we know now, is something that is paramount in the minds of the public. This is something that perhaps was not getting enough attention in the early 1970s. Now we know that if we want to have the public accept nuclear reactor technology it has got to be very safe, and there's got to be something that is easily explained to people. Now I've explained the safety basis of the molten salt reactor to people many times and I haven't had anyone who's been unable to get it, except for some PhDs, who sometimes struggle with the...with the idea. But all regular people seem to have no problem understanding the, uh, the drain, and the salt, and so forth...like that. I'm convinced that the molten salt reactor represents the best confluence of performance, safety, and technological readiness of any of the reactors on the drawing board right now, and, obviously, I know I must share this enthusiasm with many of you in the room, otherwise we would not be here. But I hope that we can go forward and share a lot of this enthusiasm, a message, with other people. To introduce thorium: thorium is about three times more common than uranium, and if you consider the very tiny sliver of uranium that we're using now to power reactors; this little tiny bit of uranium-235--- then it's vastly more common than that but only All of this story of though is fertile along with the majority of the uranium and these were both be converted into fuels for nuclear energy this is the discovery that Glenn Seaborg made in the early 1940s at both thorium and uranium-238 could be converted into fissile materials have an energy release The downside though the difference between the two was that only thorium could produce enough neutrons in the fission of its daughter uranium-233 to sustain this process. Plutonium simply did not produce enough neutrons. In order for plutonium to produce enough neutrons you had to go to what's called a fast reactor and this has led to traditionally the interest in fast spectrum nuclear reactors. They are the machines that allow uranium to potentially be sustainably consumed, because they increase the number of neutrons available from the fission reaction. There's a big disadvantage on the other hand though to going to fast reactors and that is that nuclear fuel itself is far less reactive to a fast neutron than to a thermal neutron, so I'm a simple mind. I wanted to draw a simple picture This is what plutonium looks like to a thermal, slowed-down neutron and this is how many atoms of plutonium it would take to equal that same probability of absorption in the fast spectrum every single plutonium atom looks tiny to a fast neutron But they look very big to a thermal neutron, so there's a big advantage there for going ahead and saying, let's look at using a thermal reactor and thorium being the only fuel that can be sustainably consumed in a thermal spectrum reactor, and this was covered earlier by some of the wonderful speakers this morning. Now sustainable consumption of nuclear fuel is essential if we are going to reduce the production of long-lived nuclear waste Acted eise's was earlier mentioned constitute the bulk of the long-lived nuclear waste risk if we can exclude actinides from the waste stream then the decay of fission products reaches the level of natural ore and only about 300 years So how do we sustain a breeding cycle, a fuel consumption cycle, and how do we keep actinides out of the waste stream? These are going to be some of the subjects of my presentation today. Three paths the paths we take now which is burning this very very rare amount of uranium-235 or the path that has been investigated by a lot of advanced nuclear programs the idea of burning in a fast reactor uranium-238 or This new idea well this new old idea. I should say which is using thorium in a thermal-spectrum reactor So let's look at each of these three fuel options through the perspective of a molten-salt reactor assuming we are going to use a molten salt reactor for each case we could imagine fueling salt reactor with low enriched uranium If we do that the uranium mining and enrichment necessary will be comparable to what we do today in light-water reactors So there's really not going to be a big delta (or difference) between what we're doing now as far as from a mining and enrichment perspective using today's reactors, or using molten salt reactors if this is our fuel for them There's another challenge too, and that's also how are we going to add uranium-235 fuel, because that's really what's running the reactor, and discard uranium-238 while retaining plutonium and these other transuranics. How are we going to keep the actinides in the system, because you've got to move a lot of material through a reactor like this. Option two: we can imagine fast-spectrum molten-salt reactors---these have been considered. In these cases we would not need any more uranium mining or enrichment, but we're going to have a high inventory, because as I mentioned earlier, each of those fast neutrons ...uh, fuel looks small to a fast neutron. And there are chemical separation issues with fast-spectrum molten-salt reactors that are going to be challenging. It's harder to get plutonium and uranium away from one another (in fluoride) than it is to get thorium and uranium away from one another. Chloride still is another option. And finally option 3, which is obviously the option I favor, which is the thorium-fueled, thermal-spectrum molten-salt reactor. No uranium mining or enrichment are going to be necessary once we're in steady state, and this option will have the lowest of all of the fissile inventories and that physical inventory won't be plutonium, it will be uranium 233. The chemical separation is straightforward in each case What is our waste profile going to look like it's going to be strongly dependent on the chemical processing strategy But the chemical processing strategy. I'm going to outline today is based around thorium in the thorium fuel cycle So as I mentioned before Low-enriched uranium is going to require much more uranium mining, much more uranium enrichment. If we go fast-spectrum, we're not going to need the uranium mining or the enrichment we're going to need efficient chemical processing, but we're going to have the largest fissile inventory of plutonium, and that's what it will be. This is a picture of the Rocky Flats storage facility where the U.S. used to keep a great deal of its plutonium but with the thorium molten-salt reactor option: no mining, no enrichment, no thorium mining either because thorium is recovered from rare earth mining operations, and rare earth mines are already bringing up so much thorium it's vastly in excess of what we're going to need to power the entire world on thorium. So even thorium mining is not going to factor into this. We are going to need efficient chemical processing and fissile recovery to make sure that we can turn some of today's fissile resources into fuel for future LFTRs. And this option is going to have the minimum physical inventory of any of these options, and that fissile material will be uranium-233. So I would make the case that we need to choose very wisely if we want to entertain having a future nuclear-powered society, what our fissile currency will be? Is it going to be uranium-235, which is rare, which we obtained from natural uranium via enrichment? That first path was weaponized and it continues to be a concern as we see today with the discussions going on over Iran, how sensitive the idea of uranium enrichment is. The second path: are we going to breed plutonium from natural uranium in a fast breeder? A variation of that path was also weaponized in the production of reactors at Hanford, and in other countries as well, and it continues to pose international concern as we see in North Korea. Or will we choose uranium-233 as our fissile currency? from thorium in a thermal breeder reactor. That third path was not weaponized because of the unavoidable contamination of uranium-232 which was realized by Glenn Seaborg in 1944, and it would not be weaponized by a nation-state because there are much simpler alternatives---in other words---enriching natural uranium or making plutonium. And it would not be weaponized by a sub-national group because they would have no idea If their design would detonate, and testing would be necessary, which would be far beyond their resources. So I would make the case that if you have to choose your fissile currency from one of these three options, the safest and best bet, and most efficient, is to use uranium-233 and to choose the thorium option. If we are going to make this decision: which poses the biggest threat in the long term? Will it be plutonium, or will it be uranium-233? Would say uranium-233 represents the safest option; it was never used in production nuclear weapons, and only in a handful of experiments whose results were of dubious performance, and this is another one of the reasons why it was not considered. Let me introduce the work I'm doing on the liquid-fluoride thorium reactor. This is based strongly on the work that came out of Oak Ridge National Labs in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They had investigated two different kinds of thorium breeder reactors. They called them generally the two fluid and the one fluid reactors and the two fluid reactors There was a separate blanket that contained the thorium and a fuel salt that contained the uranium 233 They abandoned the two-fluid design thinking it was too challenging and went with the one fluid design later And the one fluid design seemed to offer a simpler core design, but the chemical processing was more complex I have become convinced from my research since 2004 that the two-fluid design despite its core design challenges represents the best bet in the long run And I'm going to try to talk a little bit about that today Here is the impetus that is moving is so strongly though towards Thinking about what are we going to do with our nuclear future in the United States? We call it the retirement cliff the United States has more nuclear reactors in any other country it used to be over a hundred Reactors, but it's just in the last few years retirement to be increased and this graph is several years old and the Accelerating pace of reactor retirements is going to mean that the United States is going to lose its nuclear Capability within the next twenty to thirty years if you value nuclear energy as a carbon-free energy Source as a reliable energy Source is a cost-effective energy source then this effect has to be has to be mitigated there has to be the construction of new nuclear Technologies in order to compensate for the retirement cliffs, but what should those be it's commonly believed This is a copy of The Economist site. I got a couple of years ago That said nuclear energy the dream that failed ladies and gentlemen. This is incorrect all right. This is absolutely not right and I want to submit that in your minds that nuclear energy is not the dream that failed if anything it is Humanity's best hope for the future and as an aside. I have to wonder Why when I see a oil spill or a natural gas explosion? I don't see on the cover of The Economist next week natural gas the dream that failed, but that's an aside Nuclear energy is a big space, and there's a lot of different ways to design nuclear reactors. We happen to have chosen Really one maybe two of these routes but there is a big big big design space they're both in solid and fluid fuels and When we talk to people about nuclear we have to help them understand We're thinking about that big family of options not just about the one or two that they may know My company we believe in the vision of a sustainable prosperous future powered by these advanced nuclear reactors And we think thorium is the best way to go there will be products from these reactors beyond electricity particularly things like desalinated water Perhaps even chemicals hydrogen production medical Radio isotopes in a variety of other useful items that can come about from the production of these reactors I formed five energy in 2011 in order to develop this technology because I was not seeing it going forward in the United States And I wanted to change that our goal is to provide the world with affordable and sustainable energy water and fuel This is the machine that we would like to design. This is the liquid fluoride thorium reactor It has a reactor vessel made of Hastelloy n which we talked about earlier today because of the issues that were brought up about Hastelloy n we know that we have to protect this material from the difficult environment It's going to encounter inside the reactor and so that's why the overwhelming majority of the interior of the reactor is composed of graphite structures Graphite structures that separate the fuel that flows through these recursive tubes from the blanket and the blanket fluid surrounds the entire core the reactor It's hard to see the boundary between the blanket and the core but that blanket protects the metallic structures from the radiation damage that was discussed this morning it protects the the metallic structures from Neutron flux it basically keeps that Nuclear reaction bottled up in a region of the reactor where it's not going to cause Nearly the damage to materials that it would otherwise cause yeah for instance in a one fluid reactor where you could have fission occurring Right up to the very edge of the metallic structure in a two fluid reactor There's a lot of thorium containing fuel or thorium containing fluid Between the edge of the core and the reactor wall that absorbs neutrons gammas and radiation flux and prevent it from damaging the material because we know that that metal does have Some severe issues when it's close to the nuclear reaction Nevertheless there's going to be other metallic structures. There's going to be Primary heat exchangers and so forth but once this fuel leaves the reactive structure fission stops And so there's not an appreciable Neutron or or Radiation flux outside the reactor to nearly the degree that there is inside the reactor so graphite is a very important structural material in this Design it has two different fluids The primary fuel salt is a highly depleted lithium fluoride beryllium fluoride and uranium tetrafluoride And that uranium is mentioned by dr. Kloosterman is a combination of uranium 233 and a number of other uranium isotopes The blanket fluid is highly depleted lithium beryllium and thorium tetrafluoride And that's where that nuclear Absorption of neutrons is taking place in the formation of new fuel the coolant salt is highly depleted lithium beryllium I simply call it bare Flibe and that coolant salt then is very chemically compatible in the event that there's ever an in leakage into the fuel or into the blanket because it's essentially the Same solvent of which the blanket and the fuel are composed the design objectives for this reactor is about a 250 megawatt electric or 600 megawatt thermal core a conversion ratio of 1 or greater pretty close to 1 we don't want to We're not designing this to be an appreciable breeder or design You know to make as much fuel as it consumes the design life is yet to be determined because of issues about the material concerns fuel salt is separated from blanket by graphite tubes and And very importantly the graphite and the thorium blanket shield the reactor vessel from the thermal Neutron flux and and that's an important consideration When thinking about the limitations of metallic structures in molten salt and in a nuclear environment? This is an overall view of the modular nature of the the lifter facility there's the reactor vessel drain tank pump primary heat exchanger This is the gas heater it heats carbon dioxide. There's the carbon dioxide gas turbine These are chemical processing facilities for the fuel salt and the blanket salt And then these are off gas processing facilities for the xenon and Krypton that are going to come out of fuel salt during operation the entire reactor cell is located below ground and a shield and structure and and shielded against external impacts and events the Chemical processing system this is no snow, but it shows some of the steps that will take place in the chemical processing system These steps include the reductive extraction of metals from metallic using metallic bismuth And then the fluorination of the fuel salt using fluorine gas to remove uranium and other gaseous hexafluoride components there's also electrolytic cells that will be used to restore reductants back to the metallic bismuth and Electrolytic cells that will be used to break apart hydrogen fluoride back into reacting gases like F 2 and H & H 2 This is the overall processing and flow diagram of the lifter as you can see the two regions here There's the fuel salt region and surrounding it and kind of the turquoise blue is the blanket salt region in the blanket salt Protactinium is formed from Neutron absorption on thorium in the blanket that blanket salt proceeds to a reductive extraction column Where it's contacted with metallic bismuth that will remove protactinium in any uranium That's present there and return a cleaned up blanket salt back to the reactor vessel that metallic bismuth stream then proceeds through a series of additional reductive extraction cells and electrolytic cells before ending up in a decay tank in the decay tank we give the Protactinium time to decay to uranium 233 and actually there's several other protactinium isotopes in there as well 231 and 230 to 232 will also decay to Uranium 232 so uranium 232 is still present even in the decay tank of the of the blanket because of its forming or even the decay tank here because there was formation in the blanket as uranium begins to Grow in in the in a decay salt though. It is removed through fluorination and then it's added to a stream and Let me pick up from the fuel salts perspective fuel salt is taken out And it is fluorinated also to remove uranium and other gaseous hexafluoride products those two streams are joined at that point the remaining fuel salt now stripped of its uranium goes to another reductive extraction column where Metallic bismuth is used to remove lanthanides and long live fission products And then that stream is returned to a reductive extraction You know where the uf6 the fuel salt and Hydrogen gas is used to reduce Uf6 back to you of for bringing it back into solution and essentially refueling the fuel assault and sending it back to the reactor vessel The HF that is produced by this reaction goes to an electrolytic cell where it is split back into h2 which is used again for the reduction and F2 which is used for the fluorination steps So all of this forms a closed cycle this explains how the chemical processing takes place The power generation takes place when fuel salt is pumped through the primary heat exchanger it then heats the coolant salt I mentioned earlier, which is just bare Flibe that bear fly bin proceeds outside of the containment and heats carbon dioxide supercritical carbon dioxide gas At about 550 degrees C turbine Inlet temperature, which then proceeds through a supercritical carbon dioxide recompression turbine cycle And that is a highly recuperated cycle that has to recuperation stages and to compression stages, but ultimately the gas is cooled compressed Recuperated and reheated in a closed cycle the performance of the carbon dioxide gas turbine is such it leads to very very compact Turbo machinery the turbo machinery for this entire reactor would easily fit on this stage probably on half this stage And if anybody's been to a big reactor before and seen big Steam cycle turbo machinery you can appreciate what a reduction in scale that is it's about 45% efficient - which is really really attractive So these three processing objectives I mentioned the three reductive extraction columns - floor inators the hydrogen reduction column And the electrolytic cells all of this is designed to close the thorium fuel cycle inside this machine is dr. Kloosterman mentioned earlier We're not going to be moving materials off the side outside of the containment vessel we're going to be taking care of all of these Chemical processing steps inside the reactor vessel inside a closed environment and really the only The only application needed is electricity electricity to split Electrolytically some of the components that then chemically drive the operation of the entire cycle fission product off gases were also mentioned in the last talk and it's important for these to be removed along with the noble metals that They sometimes contain and and also held for a period of time about a month for xenon And this is a notional design for the off gas process system for the lifter If we are able to accomplish these goals and to implement the thorium fuel cycle at this level efficiency Let me try to give you a vision of what this can mean for the future imagine a cubic meter of Common continental trucks found anywhere on earth so this is average earth anywhere inside a cubic meter on average There is about two cubic centimeters of metallic thorium and about Half a cubic centimeter of metallic uranium if we were to reduce them to metals obviously their oxides in the earth But if these two cubic centimeters of thorium were used as fuel in the lifter is so described They would have the energy equivalent of over 30 cubic meters of the finest anthracite coal or crude oil out there in other words transforming average continental crust into an energy resource That surpasses the finest energy resources we know of from a chemical basis. This is an absolutely incredible Opportunity then for the human race to now realize an energy source that is so vastly in excess of what we have from our finest chemical energy sources and How the Weinberg called it burning the rocks? Glenn Seaborg realized this in 1944 and he was absolutely dumbfounded with the possibilities of what it meant for the future what it meant for here he was Watching Nations waged war against one another world war two and realizing that this could be a complete game-changer And changed the entire energy outlook of the future Now of course there are challenges That remain before us before we're going to be able to build these reactors obviously we need to get the materials code Qualified we need to work on almost every system of the reactor because the work was set down as I mentioned in 1974 and only recently at small scale has it been picked back up again several key issues that I'm that I would really like to Call attention we need to be able to isotopically separate lithium And and that's in order to reduce the amount of tritium production We need to preserve our existing uranium 233 inventory as modest as it is we need to be keeping it And we need to have a greater investigation of fuel cycle safeguards for the system I'm confident they can be implemented, but there needs to be a lot of work done on that in the medium-term we need to be working on the power conversion system development and each of the steps in the chemical processing system I would also like to see greater investigation of an a desalination Cooling system with the gas turbine that way we could use that 55 percent of thermal energy That's coming off the gas turbine and put it to productive use generating clean fresh water in the longer run We're going to need to build this lot this materials database lifetime in order to build reactors that in the last 10 20 30 40 Years finding out which things are important and which things we can mitigate through proper reactor design and proper temperatures well I would like to see us investigating burning up plutonium in molten salt reactors for waste reduction in uranium 233 generation And I ultimately dream of things like molten salt reactors powering cargo ships So a conclusion I'd like to leave you with some important thoughts only Thorium MSR is going to allow us to produce nuclear power without plutonium There are no other options Than making nuclear power and not making plutonium other than this approach in the 43 years since 1972 the potential this technology has not diminished, but we are faced with the consequences of our inaction I Worked ten years working on technology development at NASA and one of the messages I wanted to convey to people was technology doesn't develop on its own It develops when we push it and the converse is true when we don't push technology. It doesn't go anywhere We're facing 40 years of inaction and we need to restart technology development and work on solutions these technology challenges My personal confidence is very high that we will find acceptable solutions to these issues we will be able to Redress them and ultimately implement the thorium MSR and realize its incredible advantages Thank you very much, and I greatly appreciate your attention Mr.. Surgeon Thank you so much for this extremely in somatic and energetic presentation with power systems yours I'm sure we'll have this demos are in the very near future Yeah, my name is all that I go from one of your beginning slides you said this this Invention didn't go through because of poor political choices I'm a member of parliament, so I'll be one of your Decision-makers how do we transform the idea about nuclear energy because that's what we call it It's nuclear energy And if I discuss nuclear energy within the lower house everybody thinks about Fukushima And Three Mile Island and all the problems Associated with it how do we educate people? that this is a different type of nuclear energy with the potential for the future I don't envy you your challenge for you I Think your challenge might be marked much greater than mine You have asked exactly the right question how do we educate the people on this and I? Wish I had a very succinctly Have in 2015 that were not present in 1995 or 1975 or 1955 the first one of those being the Internet we have a way to produce high-quality Informational videos and get them out there. I was particularly impressed by a piece on radioactivity that was done I think by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Organization last year and it just explained radiation in very simple terms It was very accurate But it did it in a way that diffused people's fear it helped them understand Radioactive materials are part of the real world and I looked at that I thought wow this is the kind of thing we need many more of these things we need them in Dutch we need them in French we need them in German we need them in English you know we need them in Portuguese and Japanese and we need to be explaining to people Here is why nuclear energy is not a strange bizarre Terrible item often when I give this presentation I begin by showing how we are able to have life on Earth now because of the Behavior of you and thorium inside the Earth's crust keeping the earth molten and helping people understand these natural flows of energy That have kept our world habitable we have to think Nuclear radioactive materials for this so before you think oh, this is awful We our planet would be as dead as Mars without radioactive materials that have been present for billions of years so that's one of the things I like to do to help begin to explain to people that these are not strange and and an Abnormal substances these are part of the world that that we live in and and they've been responsible for many good things that We enjoy in fact the existence of life on Earth can be directly traced back to that To help them then begin to understand that nuclear is not strange or abnormal or unnatural Helps begin to move them into the idea of how we can harness nuclear fission for energy And why the fact that nuclear fission does not release carbon dioxide that it is a controllable? Technique and that it is something that if we use the fuels properly as I explained here The supply of fuel will literally last hundreds of thousands if not millions of years The technologies we've talked about today are are controllable in other words they can be implemented into an energy grid with other energy sources Particularly energy sources that may not be as reliable that's an advantage and An economic argument to appeal to constituents as well to say Wouldn't you like your country to be able to own its own future in terms of energy supply many countries my own included are highly dependent on other countries for their energy supply and Most every country I've spoken to would really like to be energy independent This is a technology that allows any country to become energy independent I would wager to say even within the borders of Luxembourg there are enough Thorium deposits in order for a lobster burger to be energy independent if they're so desired although thorium is very cheap And there's lots of places you can buy it outside of Luxembourg, but this is something that perhaps I'm I'm kind of throwing ideas out to here But I hope some of these may be useful because as I said you have a very difficult job And yours is most important because there's a leader you will have to convince the people to think seriously about this as a future Possibility people from the media are as quickly writing as you are talking. That's what I noticed My name is to set my question is hearing all this. Why isn't capital not flowing into the development of these type of reactor well There are some flows of capital that are that are following this If I might trace back to the last question though in most of the countries that I've traveled to the first question that Investors have had for me is what will the government think of this as we go forward And and I want you to know as a preface to that I fully accept the role of government Licensing and regulation and nuclear. There's there is simply no future We can imagine where governments do not license and regulate nuclear energy, so that is a given What needs to happen though is there does need to be? improvements in licensing regimes and probably several of the other speakers today are going to talk about that that make it more transparent for Capital markets to be able to say if we do this what can we expect to happen or what as a license? regulator Do you want to see take place? At what stages and we will go and try to show that to you for instance I've spoken to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission the United States and I said do you want me to show you how this is safer than what we have today and by and large Much of the response has been no we want you to show how you adhere to each of these steps that we've laid out I said well these are fine steps if I was a pressurized light water reactor but my machine doesn't even have some of the items in here that you're talking about nor can it undergo the the Accidents that you're worried about so these things are gone from the beginning They're designed out from day one and did you have a regulatory approach that recognizes that and says? Let's talk about objectives rather than exactly how to accomplish the objectives everyone wants safety it is nobody wants to have nuclear accidents or Radioactive releases that harm the public least of all nuclear engineers, that's why we're fascinated by a technology that could potentially eliminate the root causes of this taking place, and so I think that a Regulatory reform, which will be instigated that the political level will be the required step needed to free up capital markets Much, yes, there's another question go ahead. Yes, baby. Just love it A member of the Senate in the Netherlands and in fact. I'm the only physicist in the entire Senate That's exactly what all of the problems lies when I look around me every week I noticed two men this lack of knowledge about the physical sciences in general and about nuclear energy in particular, so it would help tremendously if only a few people in this audience would take the courage and get active in politics and Change the tremendous lack of knowledge that I experience every week. Please your comments My first comment was that the question No my first no III do have a comment my first comment is how fortunate the Dutch people are to have at least one senator Who has a background in physics? In the United States of America we don't have any So yes, it would be wonderful if more engineers scientists doctors teachers pursued politics it seems that lawyers seem to be more attracted to that field of Unfortunately, yes. You are the construction costs of molten salt reactor significantly higher or lower different than a traditional light water reactor We anticipate the construction costs will be significantly lower because of the operation of low pressures as was mentioned earlier and the reduced safety infrastructure needed because of the you've eliminated essentially somebody of the accents narrows But furthermore let me expand that answer a little bit if you look at the steel Concrete all the materials and even go in today's light water reactors And then you look at the final cost the materials only account for a few percent of the final cost and then you add Fabrication and and transportation all the things I have a friend who's a professor at UC Berkeley, and he's added this all up But he said I can only account for about 25% of the cost of the light water reactor Where's the other 75% of the cost we both looked easier and said the regulation you know? So if you've got a machine even today's machines that really are probably four times more expensive than they should be There really needs to be a question answered Are we as societies as free societies deploying our? Capital not just capital from banks and so forth but our capital is people our capitals time and resources Properly, and it's nuclear Regulation proceeding intelligently I will leave that as an open question to people far more qualified than I to answer Can you give an estimate of the electricity price a? Great deal of the of the price of the electricity will depend on the ability of the reactor to produce Co products because each of those Co products will be able to reduce the the burden of the reactor for instance with today's reactors it's difficult to desalinate water if you disseminate water you take away from the electricity production of the In these reactors because they're high-temperature there's a potential there to disseminate water and so that may be a very large co product that could reduce the Burden of price on on the consumer, I think if we were looking at strictly from an electricity production basis It should be comparable if not less than today's like water reactors that probably will not happen in the very first one just as it Did not happen in the first like water reactor But will happen as we have developed a number of them and and begun to build that that design basis for it But I really do think that there are going to be many co products that are going to be able to reduce the cost Of the electricity from the reactor, okay, I wish you all the success you need to fly and thank you very much for being here
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Channel: gordonmcdowell
Views: 33,858
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: LFTR, Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, Kirk Sorensen, Flibe Energy, Thorium, Thorium Reactor, nuclear power, thermal breeder
Id: ODea3YaTmKw
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 36min 0sec (2160 seconds)
Published: Thu Jun 25 2015
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