I do really want to thank the United States
Department of Energy. I may have been hard on them in the past, but boy lately
they've really been coming around big-time for the advanced reactor community. Not just for our company but
for for a lot of others. How would you say things have
changed over the last 5 years? In 2012 we had a single large
integrated research project for solid fuel variants of molten salt reactors.
but DOE really wasn't spending any money on liquid fuel systems. The Department of
Energy is also now investing in both solid fuel and liquid fuel. DOE is directing its funding
specifically towards molten salt reactors. DOE founded a campaign on molten
salt reactors so they're actually working on molten salt reactors again. National and international efforts to develop new sources of carbon free
energy are exploring a reactor concept first introduced in the 1950s and 60s:
The Molten-Salt Reactor. Oak Ridge is the lead laboratory for the molten salt reactor campaign,
but there are many contributors. The Office of Nuclear Energy is
facilitating a lot of collaboration between the different national laboratories.
That research is ramping up very quickly. I attended a talk yesterday where
they mentioned the technology working group meetings that took place
in the summer of 2016 as a turning point for the department's interest in this
technology space. When the Department of Energy people saw the enthusiasm, the
diversity, the excitement around molten salt reactors there really was a change
that took place and and I have seen the ramifications of that change since then. A number of other companies
have come out publicly that they are working on molten-salt
reactors and trying to develop them. There are at least 10 different
salt mixtures that are proposed. I'm looking from an operator perspective, if you
need a new component for your machine you're the only who can
deliver me the concept of design I can't order fuel from WESTINGHOUSE
or FORATOM which is standardized. The components are not standardized. When I look at your designs, they're all different.
Do you see this as a risk? So with LWR (Light Water Reactor) technology, everybody who's making LWR's is actually
much closer in their concepts to one another- then even any two of these
MSR concepts are to each other. The nuclear industry is beginning to
realize the diversity of concepts possible within the molten-salt space. I mean,
there is a huge design space there. For a long time people thought
the molten-salt is just one of the things you can do with nuclear,
without seeing it's almost like a whole new alphabet that you can write
with. So I don't think it should come as any surprise that there is a diversity of
concepts. It would be akin to going back to 1962 and saying:
How many people can build PWRs? So in conclusion that's a risk? it is a risk, but I would also say if
you're in the PWR business then you're already in quite
a bit of risk to begin with. You know exactly what you're getting
when you get an LWR. You're getting a pressurized machine that's gonna make
electricity and that only, right? It's not gonna do other missions. The marketplace is gonna be brutal. Several of us are not going
to be here in five years. Different fuels are gonna get weeded down and
frankly it's not that complicated to make that salt. So, once you have a market that wants
a lot of it, you'll get multiple players. You'll be able to buy it from multiple sources. I kind of see this entire field as the computer
or the PC industry in the early 1970s. There were a few startups
and none of them had money. But when there was a breakthrough
everything moved fast, and they all won. I think we can all win,
so I'm not too afraid of that. Can I say something?
No. I was gonna agree with you! I think the analogy to the early
70s computer is very good. You know in the early 70s, when
people were talking about computers, You had big industry
players like IBM saying: What on earth would anybody
want a personal computer for? And to be brutally honest,
they were right. They could not see, from the
things they did with computers, why on earth any regular person would
ever want to manage massive databases or input enormous amounts of financial
information or anything like that. They weren't wrong, they just didn't see a market
that somebody like Steve Jobs could see. He saw people typing documents.
"Oh, we got a typewriter for that!" He saw people keeping track of appointments.
"I have a little notebook for that!" The truth was that none of those things, by
themselves, was enough to get you to buy a PC. But, the aggregate of all of those things:
"We're going to do this, do this and do this..." Was finally enough. Until a very important thing happened in 1995, when people had email
and could send letters to girls. We're all convinced Molten-Salt
Reactors are they way forward, But I feel like there is a different spectrum
of opinions on the use of thorium fuel in Molten Salt Reactors. So I'd like to hear your views in favor or against thorium fuel. Being from ThorCon,
making a thorium converter... Thorium is part of our name, it's also
key to public acceptance in Indonesia. Thorium is viewed differently
than current nuclear reactors. So it gives you the opportunity to have
a conversation with somebody without them having a very strong opinion
when you start the conversation. In truth, for the neutronics, it's a thermal reactor so
Thorium is nicer that way, and it does produce less plutonium. That doesn't mean zero because we got to meet with the
low enriched uranium (LEU) requirements. We've got Uranium-238 in there.
We can make it work either way. If I was a pure scientist I'd say it doesn't matter
but it's not pure science, it's also politics. the most important thing about a new
reactor is not that it's radically different, not that it uses the least amount of fuel, not even that it produces
the least amount of waste, in the developing world it's cost. Number two is cost. Number three is cost.
You have to be safe, but after that it's pure cost. So you've got to look at the
whole reactor design, and say, well what is your total
cost when you're done? And I think we can make a decent
case that a Molten Salt Reactor, either pure uranium or mix of uranium
and thorium, does work well for cost. Okay? From my vantage point,
I don't need reprocessing now. I need cheap power plants now.
Build them before they build those coal plants. And then we'll have the
money to do the rest. Why not built the Molten-Salt Reactor and
once you have earned your first billions then you can probably talk to the
politicians, and then maybe you will be able to deploy something using thorium
which has a better neutron economy or have a better reactor economy.
But, you need some incentive. Today we don't really see the incentive,
we just see a lot of obstacles to it. Why am I using Thorium? Because I want to
eliminate the production of transuranic waste. I want to maximize the use of a resource
that can last for billions of years. And, I want to produce medical radioisotopes
that can only be produced in that way. Personally, I don't think you should use thorium
in a molten-salt reactor unless it's a breeder. I think the whole point of thorium
is to achieve breeding, and to achieve a conversion
ratio greater than 1. I'll bet that's Thomas! I didn't even have to look
to know it was Thomas! If you are below a
conversion ratio of 1, then you are just reducing the
amount of enrichment that you need. And you're only reducing
the amount of plutonium. There's a stepwise effect
that happens at 1. So if I was working on Molten-Salt
Reactors that were not breeders- that did not have a
conversion ratio of 1 or greater, I wouldn't put thorium in them.
I would run them on uranium. I mean thorium is just
displacing Uranium-238. If you got rid of the thorium then
you could run on 5% enriched uranium. I could run about 2% enriched,
if I had no thorium in there. I mean, so what does that do for you? Well, it breeds better in a thermal
spectrum than Uranium-238. But it doesn't breed well enough. It doesn't breed well enough to get to
no fissile needing to be imported, but it reads better and
it produces less plutonium. Most important to me is
the public relations aspect. If you're using the
uranium/plutonium fuel cycle, uranium is easy to play around with
because it's very low radioactivity. Plutonium is very difficult to play
around with at a university level because, well, it's plutonium and they
won't be letting you play with that. On the other hand, thorium and uranium are both
Earth-abundant, low radioactivity materials. All you care about is chemistry
at the university level. As a person from academia where
could we find common ground? What are some common
needs that we could all look at? If ever fuel salt spilled
without a container, what is the volatility of the the
caesium and iodine? There's a lot of speculation that
it simply won't go anywhere. If that is provably true,
then that makes a big difference. We're working on it.
Good! Lars is absolutely right, Universities can test caesium and iodine because
we can get non-radioactive versions of both. All we care about is the chemistry, so all these
chemistry questions that we have are essential. They can begin to be addressed
at the university level. I've come a couple of times to Abilene
to see Rusty's work. We just got back from Penn State and saw
the great setup they had there. I've gone to University of Wisconsin.
Gone to University of Utah. What do we need? We need students
coming out that a played with salt before. That'd be great.
And it doesn't have to be fluoride salt. You can actually get your
hands dirty with cheap salts. Carbonate salts. Nitrate salts. If a student
came that had already melted some salt, and maybe done just even rudimentary
electrochemistry or anything, that person would already be
way ahead of most of the people who are saying can I go work for you,
who've never played with this stuff at all. if someone was younger
than myself and finds molten salt reactors to be a topic of
interest, how should they proceed? First, just get your
technical chops- the whole realm of the STEM disciplines.
Most nuclear engineering programs do an awful lot of math and an awful lot
of physics. Yeah, you need those. But in a Molten-Salt Reactor, the things
that you see a little bit differently for us are- A little bit more physical chemistry.
A little bit more metallurgy. Electromotive series is used for the extraction of
all kinds of things in the metallurgical world. It has been considered for nuclear
reactors, for molten salts, but I don't really think it has been
taken to its logical extreme yet. Applying successively different
levels of voltages to the salt. Last week I was at Penn State
talking with their chemists about this whole idea of an
electromotive series in the extraction of individual elements from fission
products. One of the young researchers there got very excited and he said:
I've been thinking about this for years! I've been thinking about how can we
turn everything from the fission reactor into a useful product stream. And it's like we're having
a meeting of the minds. I said yeah I've been I've been
thinking about the same thing. Almost anything you can think of, if it's
all mixed together it's pretty worthless. You know, if I go mix M&Ms and Chex Mix, and rice and beans and and half a dozen
other things from my pantry in a big pile- Instead of being useful, now all
of a sudden, they're worthless. The only thing to do with that mixture is
scoop it up and throw it in the trash can. But in my pantry, binned in nice little individual
compartments, every single one of those is useful. So in fission, all of these elements
arrive to us in the pile, so to speak. They're all mixed together. Can we, from that, extract
them back into individual bins? In which case, each one
of them would be valuable. I believe that that will be possible. Fluoride salt technology will be
the most straightforward way to do it. I've heard some mentions of chloride salts and
there are things chloride salts are great for. They're great for fast-spectrum operation. But, if you're going to go a thermal-spectrum
operation, you can't beat the fact that- fluorine itself has the highest
electronegativity of anything else. So you can force everything in
the world to want to be a fluoride You can't do that with
everything else, particularly oxides. Oxides are more electronegative
than chlorides, but fluorides are more
electronegative than oxides. So you can take spent fuel
and take it chemically favorably all the way to a fluoride salt
and that's pretty darn important. Because we have an enormous amount of
spent fuel out there that's got to be addressed. So, thanks to the hard
work of people like Sid, there has been an establishment
of the materials compatibility of 3 important classes of materials from the
Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE). Fluoride salts. Graphite. Hatelloy-N.
We know these three work together. One of the reasons we feel
very comfortable proceeding on this technological foundation
is because of this. There's other ways to go, of course.
There's other moderators, and other salts. But these are the three
that we know work. And we know they operate in a state of basic
thermodynamic equilibrium with one another. That is a very comforting
thought as we proceed forward into the future of molten salt reactors. We need Uranium-233 to start
a truly efficient thorium reactor. There's just no two ways around it. There are 2 inventories of
Uranium-233 in the United States. One is at Oak Ridge,
and one is at Idaho National Laboratory. We have been at it for many years
to try to preserve these inventories, and progress is being made. But, the other
great thing about these inventories is- These are going to be the sources of radioisotopes
for targeted alpha medical therapies. As we proceed with the potential rescue
of these inventories, there are benefits that could span worldwide from this. This is our current concept of Flibe Energy's
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR). It fully embraces the idea that
we're going to do chemical processing. And, I hear people talk about proliferation,
I hear this kind of stuff... There are countries that
already have nuclear weapons. Chemical processing doesn't change the fact that
these countries continue to have nuclear weapons. United States is not going to suddenly become
a country that possesses nuclear weapons. We've got them. So does Russia.
So does China. So do several other countries too. I think there's a phrase that should be employed:
"Fissile Security." Rather than "Proliferation." Proliferation happens to countries that
don't have nuclear weapons and get them. it doesn't happen to countries
that already have them. The fuel that that the thorium
molten-salt reactor runs on, Uranium-233, was investigated and rejected for nuclear
weapons over and over and over again- by the countries of the world, so we have
almost 80 years of history to go on now. People could have used this for
nuclear weapons, and didn't. If a country wants nuclear
weapons they have many, many, many, different ways
to get them a whole lot easier. It is gonna make no difference whatsoever
whether or not we build a thorium reactor. I have gone and talked to the IAEA.
I've talked to these people. The whole thing is safeguards. They want to know:
Where is your nuclear material? How many significant quantities
might be present in your uncertainty? And that has to do with how you monitor. That's where a chemical processing
system actually works to your advantage, because it helps you know what's in
there, and to be able to query the salt. You are gonna have to have some kind of
chemical processing system in any MSR- just to keep impurities out,
just to keep oxides and sulphides out. So it's not like like we can say, well we can build
molten-salt reactor with no chemical process. You're going to have some chemical processing.
Maybe a minimal set up, but you will have it. Remember the the fuel cycle study?
They scored every reactor the same. They said: Every reactor, basically,
we consider to be equal. If that's the DOE and NNSA saying that, I think
we can take that as authoritative from the U.S. side. There are many countries
that have successfully utilized chemical reprocessing of nuclear fuel,
that do not have nuclear weapons as I would hasten to point out,
such as Japan and Germany. You can do chemical processing nuclear fluids,
and it has nothing to do with proliferation. If a country wants to have nuclear
weapons they're gonna go get them, and they're sure as heck not gonna
use a molten salt reactor to get them. They're gonna build a graphite natural
uranium pile, just like everybody else did. Or, they're just gonna enrich uranium
to highly enriched levels. But they're not gonna go and surreptitiously rob a reactor- to obtain materials for a nuclear
weapon, I'm sorry it's just absurd. Here's something else that
I feel very strongly about: We have got to be able to do more with
nuclear reactors than just make electricity. We all have these fun little
boxes in our pockets now. We don't have them because
they're great phones. We have them because- they're fun little computers that just happen to
be able to do what phones also used to do. We've got to be the same way with
reactors, we can't just make a electricity. We've got to do a lot of things. There's too many ways to
make electricity in the world. We've got to be into medicine,
be into electricity, heat water, and a whole bunch of other things
that we can't even talk about here. And so, Flibe Energy's concept for the
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) that we're gonna develop gets into using
waste heat, using the gamma radiation, process heat, the thorium supply,
fission products, fissile startup- All of these map together into
different industrial engagements- both with national programs- medical radioisotopes, heavy industries,
and the traditional electricity. The reactor has a lot of applications, and
the technologies that are being developed- to enable that reactor also have
spin-offs into other applications. You have a liquid fuel, you can really
put whatever you want into that fuel, in order to produce products. One of those might be
medical isotope production. Currently, the main focus is on the
introduction of thorium into that fuel cycle, so that you can in-breed Uranium-233 to
continue the reactor as a thermal breeder. But, the opportunities to introduce
other things into either a blanket- or directly into the fuel salt are there for
production of other isotopes of interest. We do things in the reactor to ensure
that thorium will turn into Uranium-233, rather than going down other paths, like the
formation of Protactinium-234 or Uranium-234. But, after fission though,
we can't really control it. After that point it's a statistical distribution of
materials that emerge from the fission reaction. You have fission products that
you could leave in the reactor or you can pull out as quickly as possible. Various steps will change the way
fission products otherwise evolve. One of the most important of those
would be the removal of noble gases. Krypton and Xenon are rather significant
portions of the fission product distribution. If you remove them from the reactor,
which is very easy to do in a molten salt reactor, the gas just comes out of
the salt, then that changes how they would have otherwise
decayed into other fission products. We can imagine right now a
1,000 megawatt nuclear reactor. It doesn't even matter what
kind of nuclear reactor it is. that reactor is going to make
approximately half a billion dollars a year- of revenue, on the sale of electricity,
plus or minus some. But that's that's fairly approximate. So, depending on how
much that machine cost, we can do in our head the mathematics
of how long it will take to pay it back. That machine cost 10 billion dollars,
and it makes half a billion dollars a year... it would take 20 years
just to pay the thing off. Even if running it cost nothing at all. So, there are a lot of human efforts
that are a lot more profitable than that. There's a lot of things people
invest in that promise- returning your money a whole lot faster than
the energy industry, then the utility industry. Things that promise faster profits
tend to attract more investment So- Even though we all benefit
from the use of electricity, even though we're all
grateful for electricity... It's gotten to the point where it's
a marginally profitable industry- much like the airline industry, and thus it doesn't
attract an enormous amount of investment. It certainly doesn't attract
much risky investment. It doesn't draw in the the
serious risk takers out there. They will go and generally
invest in other things. And because it hasn't traditionally attracted
an awful lot of innovation and risk-taking... I think that's why we still have
pretty much the same power strategies and power technologies
we've had for 50 years. I mean you could go back
in time 50 years and, by and large, an engineer 50 years ago would recognize
your average power plant today. You'd walk into a coal plant or a nuclear plant
and he'd say: I know what I'm looking at. Even a combined-cycle natural
gas plant, which is pretty new, would still be fairly recognizable to an
engineer. He'd go: Wow, this is impressive! You know, this is better than what I've seen.
But it wouldn't be something- outside of his realm of understanding.
It wouldn't be shocking to him, if he saw a field of solar
panels, or a windmill. He'd still say:
Oh yeah, I know what I'm looking at. That's because these fields
haven't changed very much. Whereas, if you took a computer hardware expert from 1968 and- you brought him to today and showed him
an "Amazon Web Services" server farm- he would have absolutely
no idea what he's looking at. I mean it would just be completely
and totally different and revolutionary. So why has that technology
progressed so far in 50 years- While energy generation technology has
not proceeded very far in 50 years? I would say a big part of it has been because- one of these categories has promised much
higher profits to its investors than the other. Making coal or nuclear better didn't
seem to be a path to revolutionary profits. Not in the 1960s, 70s,
80s, 90s, zeroes or now. So thus, it has not attracted a lot of
resources to to bring about innovations. I would say that a lot of the people
who are in advanced nuclear now- probably didn't get into it thinking:
I'm on my way to massive profits! They probably got into it because they were on
a more personal quests to do something very significant for the future.
I would put myself in that category. Nevertheless, when you go and talk to
financially oriented people, investors- you're competing for their money against
competing promises of far more dramatic profit. So you have to come up
with a better scheme. And I'm pointing out that generating electricity,
just on first principles, is not terribly profitable. I think a lot of people believe that
there's gonna be a price put on carbon. I think in the long run,
the cost of energy will go up. But within 10 years I don't think we're going
to have radical increases in the cost of energy- for the simple reason that,
particularly North America, we have large carbon fuel reserves.
We have gas. We have coal. We have oil. It's simply the public's taste whether or not
we will go exploit these resources. The appetite, or the stomach
for carbon tax has just not been there. I don't predict that's going
to change anytime soon. So I think, particularly for people
in the nuclear industry, that are hoping- for more expensive energy to make
nuclear more competitive, they're- They're wishing for something that I just
don't think is going to happen anytime soon. I personally wish there was a carbon tax
but I don't think it's gonna happen either. Well, do you believe that
the carbon tax is even practical? It can be effective in
how it's implemented, but- Can you campaign on carbon tax?
And then you run for reelection- Your competitor goes:
That dirty dog he implemented a carbon tax! Throw him out, give me his job,
and I'll get rid of that carbon tax! That's kind of why I worry about politics today. That's pretty much
what happened in Australia. It's kind of like taxing water,
the taxing of things that everybody needs. It impacts the less affluent more than the rich.
Exactly. It's hard to do. You can make an argument that
energy taxes are actually the some- of the most regressive taxes there are
because they disproportionately hit people- that spend more of their income
on energy rather than the wealthy- that spend a rather modest fraction
of their income on on energy. The thing about technology is that- If you can advance technology
it's gonna stay advanced. You might not have the same
foothold you did before. But if you implement the carbon tax, someone else is elected,
they'll shut down the carbon tax. It's not even a permanent win. The carbon tax might indirectly
advance some technologies- But it's not the most direct win as technology
that'll produce low carbon energy inexpensively. Yeah, I tend to think that we are going to
have to make the low carbon option- the most economic option
to have any hope of going forward. We're not going to count on carbon tax
or carbon fees to "level the playing field" as is fond of being said. I think we're going to have to
work towards a situation where a company or utility says:
I'm gonna choose that option because- it's actually the cheapest for me, and
the fact that it's no-carbon is just, it's nice. That's not why they did it. They did it because
it was actually the most cost competitive. I see a lot of people claiming that
that's where wind and solar are. I don't believe it. I think they're making an
awful lot of assumptions in there. The biggest one being that- The grid will continue to be their battery.
Which is the biggest subsidy of all. And that will become progressively
more and more difficult- As we have more and more intermittent,
unreliable energy like wind and solar on the grid. I'm an engineer, and I used to be
in love with with wind and solar. I did a lot of looking and do it a lot of
studying a lot of reading but I can also run the numbers. And I think a lot of the
people who look at wind and solar don't. I came to the conclusion it
wasn't good for the environment. It wasn't. The resources it takes to build solar panels
and windmills these aren't renewable. The rare-Earth magnets, the steel,
the concrete, the fiber, all these sort of things. I mean they are going to
end up in a landfill at some point. There's no recycling plan for these sort of things
and so I really came to the to the belief- that these things are not
good for the environment. They've got great public relations,
but they're not good for the Earth. And I had almost this revulsion
against them at some point. I now feel very strongly that what
a lot of people believe just isn't so. These technologies are not
something that I'm hoping grow. I don't want a wind and solar future,
to be brutally honest, I don't. I want a thorium powered future. It really frustrates me that the nuclear
story has such terrible public relations, and the alternative has such good public
relations, and in both cases it's not merited. I'm an engineer to my to my guts.
I love engineering. I love all that stuff. But the longer I'm in this, this thorium
effort, the more I realized that- the engineering, it's a part of the
challenge, but it's not the biggest part. It's probably, not even by 50%,
the biggest part the biggest part. The biggest challenge is hearts and minds.
Biggest challenge is being able to reach out- to people who don't know about this,
and to be able to help them understand- and to replace, perhaps, images in
their mind now that are very negative- associated with the future,
with energy, with nuclear energy, and to replace them with hopeful
images of how things could be. I think a lot of us are here because we
have those hopeful images in our minds. How many of you are hopeful about the future? How many of you think that the next
generation will have it better than we do? Great! I am so glad to see that, good. We are we're what Weinberg
would call "Techno Optimists." I saw something kind of depressing
in the airport last night, I saw this section in the bookstore called
"Science Dystopian and Fantasy"- I just turned to my wife and go:
Oh my goodness. Have we come to the point- That it's a section in the store? You go back to the 50s, and it
was loaded with Techno-Optimism. You couldn't pick up a book without
reading about "Have Rocket, Will Travel." Or, we're gonna go to other worlds,
and we're gonna do awesome stuff. And we're gonna have this
very bright, exciting future! And people responded to this! They responded to these pictures in their
minds of how things were going to turn out, and how things were going to be different. And then, in the 60s, it was
as if fantasy became reality. We had people walking on the moon. We had giant rockets to other worlds! We had this incredible
flourishing of "Techno Optimism." We had Sid Ball working on the Molten-Salt
Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory! It's almost as if the 60s were a decade of
the 21st century that had been ripped out- of the future and inadvertently stitched
in to the middle of the 20th century. And then something happened,
and I don't know what it was, around 1969, which was five years
before I was even born, It is as if we came to this moment of Peak
Optimism, and I just can't figure out why. We went from this decade of incredible
enthusiasm and optimism about the future, to almost a malaise that I feel like we
haven't quite shaken in the 50 years since. it might have been the moment that
Sid turned off the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment. That that might have been the
moment when I when it happened. By the way, I mean how cool is it,
here's the guy in his 20s who gets to take- MSRE supercritical, and his boss says:
That's cool. Don't worry about it. Oh goodness, I mean, nowadays- You trip and fall at a nuclear power plant
and it is front-page news across the world. It is such a such a crazy overreaction. I think that we need to work hard on getting
positive images out there into the world- of what the future could be like. And the good news is,
we're doing a lot better. Smoking rates are way
down across the world. People are living
longer, healthier lives. There are so many things where
we're seeing improvements. But then there's things where we're
still going in not good directions... The global Alzheimer's plague is just
getting worse and worse and worse, and nobody knows why.
My mother is actually dying of Alzheimer's. I wish there was something we
could do about that with thorium, but I do think there is gonna be something
we can do with thorium about cancer. If you know anybody who's had cancer, or you've suffered from cancer,
you know it can't come fast enough. Many of you know about the relationship between
the thorium fuel cycle and the production of- targeted alpha therapy medicines. This is something that we may
know about, and get excited about, but we need to tell the world about this. Because, as they learn about this, they will
realize how special and unique it will be- to be able to make cancer fighting
medicines using thorium reactors. And how that connection can't be broken. We really have to have thorium reactors to
be able to make these special medicines. That moment is getting closer,
and closer all the time. These messages are beginning to
percolate to the highest levels of power. I can speak particularly from
the U.S. Government perspective. But I also know that this is happening
in other countries as well. They're beginning to understand that
this isn't just an energy solution. It can be a medical solution, it can be
a solution that supports agriculture. A solution that supports water supplies. It can be a solution that supports
the destruction of nuclear waste. The elimination of nuclear weaponry. The promotion of international peace. all of these good things can come out of- the understanding and development
of the thorium fuel cycle. And that is a very compelling,
and exciting thing. Thanks to your efforts,
things really are changing now. I go to a lot of meetings at
the Department of Energy. And I'll tell you something I've noticed
happening just in the last year or two. It is starting to become the case,
when you talk about advanced energy, they are now thinking
about molten-salt reactors. That was not the way it was,
even very recently. They're starting to think about that. They're starting to have
that paradigm shift. Now the bad news is, nobody yet is talking
about thorium. But I am seeing changes. I'm thinking, well, if we could get them
this far, it's not gonna be much longer- before we're getting them
thinking about thorium too. Ten years ago, it was 2010 I think...
Sid, you were at this meeting, the FHR meeting at Oak Ridge in 2010. I remember, I said, how come nobody here
is talking about molten-salt reactors? Somebody told me:
Oh, nobody thinks about that. Well just a few months later, Andreas had the very first Thorium
Energy Conference in London. And oh!
What a great meeting that was. I really see that time as- the nucleation of so much
of this international effort- to support this optimistic future
that we can see around thorium. We've been in business
now for seven years. And funding has always
been our hardest challenge. It still remains the
limiting effect in all this. We have had a little more success recently.
This has to do with the recently announced- Department of Energy grant,
2.6 million dollars. Our partner is the Pacific Northwest
Nuclear Laboratory (PNNL). We are super excited to
be working with PNNL. I think Paul Brett is
right there in front row. I will be working for Paul
for the next couple of years. We're really excited. I can't say enough
good stuff about the guys and gals at PNNL. Some great chemistry out there,
some great understanding. They have developed technology
around nitrogen trifluoride. Nitrogen trifluoride, I think,
may solve one of the central problems- we faced in the chemical
processing of molten salt fuels- which is the aggressiveness
of molecular fluorine. So, with nitrogen trifluoride for the extraction
of uranium from a molten salt. Anybody's who is working
with fluoride salts, it's really important to make
sure your salts are kept purified. You've got to keep oxides and sulphides out of
the salt, even when you're doing experiments Otherwise you're gonna get bad results. If this NF3 technology can
work out this can become- the new de facto standard for
the purification of molten salts. Or, molten fluoride salts, I should say. This is work that's going to,
not just benefit our concept, but could benefit just about everybody
who is working in this arena. I know that many of you are are young,
and an early stage of your career- I want to encourage you that there are exciting,
wonderful developments for you to work on. There are discoveries to be made. We've just scratched the surface,
we've just begun. And thank you so much
for having me here.
Een lijstje met timestamps van verschillende stukken en onderwerpen staat in de comments.
Kirk lijkt heel goed bewust te zijn van 'de echte' problemen die Thorium zal ervaren in de nabije toekomst. Vanaf 24:52 zegt hij een paar interessante dingen over de toekomst van thorium.
Het succes van thorium zal afhangen van ondernemerschap en het aanbieden van superieure waarde, niet van belastingen en wetgeving. En het overwinnen van de 'hearths and minds' van mensen, zal een grote rol spelen in de ontwikkeling en implementatie van deze technologie.
LFTR is een economisch verantwoordelijke manier om minder CO2 uit te stoten, met daarnaast minder luchtvervuiling.
Kolencentrales stoten ook kwikdampen uit, in lage hoeveelheden, maar heeft nog steeds gevolgen voor de gezondheid en het milieu (lange termijn).
De reden om een LFTR te gebruiken in plaats van windmolens en zonnepanelen heeft te maken met de efficiency, dat economische gevolgen heeft.
Meer efficiency in energieproductie maakt energie goedkoper en betaalbaarder. In dat geval gaat het om economische efficiency.