MIT Alumni Designed Micro-Reactor BURNS Nuclear Waste For Fuel

this video is sponsored by morningbrew which way modern human there lie two parts before us either we figure out how to store renewable energy or we figure out how to use dispatchable sources like nuclear power safely and cheaply on this channel we cover both that way no matter who wins we come out on top and this week we're covering a pretty special nuclear reactor that's about the same power output as a wind turbine oclo is a micronuclear reactor that can provide 1.5 megawatts of power now conventional wisdom says that nuclear energy gets cheaper with the scale of your plant but oklaho is trying to pursue a different market places that require reliable source of electricity but are not on the grid remote villages mining communities etc especially those in northern latitudes where the sun is not plentiful enough for solar panels and the only recourse is to run everything on diesel generators these also happen to be some of the more energy intensive places because of the need for heat and electricity to drive industrial processes and are considered really difficult to decarbonize oklo thinks that their aurora reactor may be the solution because they're striking tiny home aesthetic they were even featured on architectural magazine as well as hyper allergic maybe because radiation just like pollen can sometimes make you sneeze anyway apart from being absolutely gorgeous this reactor packs some serious cutting edge technology and i'm not just talking about fold down beds and conceal storage so that would be nice to have the fundamental thing to understand is that there are two types of nuclear reactors ones that have moderators and ones that don't the function of the moderator is to slow down neutrons produced by fission this increases the probability that they'll hit another uranium atom and cause another fission this probability of causing another fission is called cross section and the cross section of a slowed down or thermal neutron is a thousand times higher than that of a fast neutron but you can overcome this just by brute force pack a lot more fissile atoms into the same space and you have a higher probability of a fast neutron hitting one and there's another phenomenon that happens with fast neutrons when they do cause fission more neutrons are produced from that event than from fission with a thermal neutron so while for thermal spectrum reactors you need enrichment of no more than 3.5 percent for fast neutron reactors like oklaho's aurora you need closer to 20 the advantage of this class of reactors is that in the fast spectrum you can burn up a lot of the higher actinides the things that make nuclear waste dangerously radioactive for millions of years and since they can burn up heavy metals other than uranium they can also be fed existing inventories of nuclear waste something that will play well with environmentalists who want to see nuclear waste eliminated but fast neutron reactors have historically been more difficult to operate with almost every country opting for the better known thermal spectrum reactors though i should say here that several of them have put clean energy on the grid over a long working life adding value to the lives of many and you know what else adds value to people's lives today's sponsor morning brew it is not as the name suggests artisanal coffee for hipsters morning brew is in fact a free daily email newsletter delivered to you monday to sunday which gets you up to speed on what's happening around you in just five minutes it's a much better way to start your day compared to doom scrolling every morning just to find out what's up traditional news is dry boring and dense morning brew is witty relevant and informative it gives you everything you need to know about business finance or tech one of the things i learned this week is that zoom our favorite app from last year is losing steam we all heard stories of zoom's enormous growth in 2020. though it's still growing the growth is dropping considerably and zoom stock fell 17 after investors got a peek into the company's post pandemic life do people actually prefer talking to each other face to face or have they given up on talking all together now morning brew is completely free and takes less than 15 seconds to subscribe just click the link in the description below and enter your email id to subscribe to morning brew today so what form does oclose fuel take we know that it's around 20 enriched uranium known in the industry as halo or high sa low enriched uranium but what does it look like well no messing around with carbides oxides nitrites they use straight up uranium metal the first advantage of using metal is that it's an excellent conductor of heat so there won't be any localized buildup of heat on any particular part of the fuel the second advantage is that it's easier to manufacture compared to uranium oxide pellets and easier to reprocess too if you want to go down that route oklaho has a hundred rod slash pins of metal fuel in their core each of the cells consists of a can this contains the fuel uranium metal where fission will happen next there are neutron reflectors that will try to keep the neutrons within the cell and through the middle of the scan will pass the heat pipe bonded to the fuel with sodium this will carry the heat generated from fission to the heat exchangers above where it'll be offered to the turbine ferry for electricity these heat pipes contain small amounts of potassium whose evaporation and condensation will transport the heat there is no coolant circulating through the loops the heat pipes basically act as thermal superconductors so that means that there are no pumps no valves no switches the heat pipes transport the heat with no moving parts zitch and this simplifies the design a ton and cuts down points of failure as well as manufacturing costs it might be liquid sodium cooled in some sense because the sodium does melt during operation but you don't have thousands of liters of it being pumped around like in most sodium cooled reactors it is a very small amount and it doesn't move much at all the benefit of using heat pipes and sodium is that there is no pressure here to spread the nuclear material around unlike light and heavy water reactors these coolants don't need to be pressurized in order to stay liquid at high temperatures at normal pressure there's much less need for thick gigantic reactor vessels and huge concrete containment buildings the footprint of the reactors is also really small because they're using a supercritical carbon dioxide cycle which needs much smaller turbines than steam [Music] when uranium splits pairs of fission products are produced these build up inside the fuel nuclear reactors have different ways of dealing with this uranium oxide pellets used in most reactors today need to be swapped out after a few months thor khan's molten salt reactors let the gaseous fission products bubble out into a dk tank in kirk sorensen's lifters they used the above but also removed solid fission products using reduction by lithium for oklo they leave them inside the fuel the gaseous fission products form voids inside the metal okalo will operate at one percent burn up two to three percent burn up is where you get enough gaseous fission products that they'll start leaking out of the fuel so they do have some margin there if the fission products do leak out then they have a plenum above the fuel rod where they can collect and decay aurora operates for 20 years without refueling so by that time they have long decayed away into stable isotopes but as fission products build up the reactivity of the fuel will decrease firstly because it'll swell up a bit and secondly because some of these fission products love eating up neutrons and for this they have three control drums around the core when the reactor starts up they will absorb the maximum number of neutrons they can thus suppressing the reactivity over the 20 years of operation they'll slowly rotate to reflect more and more neutrons back into the core in order to compensate for the reduced reactivity due to fission products these control drums are completely separate from the control rods which will shut down the reactor within seconds in case the operating temperature is exceeded aurora is built pretty much for one thing to compete with diesel generators in remote communities those are really really cheap to buy but require a lot of fuel according to some quick numbers i threw together it'll cost around 60 million dollars to run a 1.5 megawatt generator for 20 years so that's the price point oklahoma has to beat according to their filing the cost of the plant is 10 million dollars it'll be staffed by two people who don't even need to be licensed nuclear technicians and it has operational costs of 3 million a year that's excluding the fuel which will be provided through a government grant so wait 2 people 3 million that's so with those numbers oklahom's aurora comes in at 70 million dollars [Music] which is honestly much closer than i expected considering that small reactors are not economical and the fact that it's a brand new design without any of the efficiencies of an established system i haven't considered the time cost of money here because compound interest okay fine looking closer three million is probably only for the first reactor because they'll need to study its operation in detail two operators are not going to be paid one and a half million dollars each per year so don't even think of applying and fuel costs haley is expensive and they have to load it all in in the beginning rather than spreading it over a period of time based on the burn up of bare reactor and caroline's statement that they could get up to 60 percent of the total energy out they could recycle it more than 50 times each time adding a bit more enriched fuel and removing some fission products when you consider these factors and the price comes to between 20 and 25 cents per kilowatt hour which is cheaper than the cost of electricity in a lot of these remote places and there's another big reason to consider oklo instead of a diesel generator the reason why we're trying to move away from coal is carbon dioxide over 20 years of time a diesel generator would produce 000 tons of carbon dioxide if you were to take that carbon dioxide and freeze it into dry ice you could make 45 statues of liberty out of it an aurora they load it with around 3 tons of fuel and that would be it for all 20 years amounting to a cube around 85 centimeter on each side and at the end of its life it'll be recycled and used again nuclear power has a lot of strengths amount of concrete and steel required lifetime carbon dioxide emissions safety reliability and it is a one form of dispatchable energy where you get waste and not pollution waste we can deal with recycle it burn it up bury it underground you can't do that for pollution from coal and natural gas oklo has filed a co la with the nrc they've been granted a site at idaho national labs they've been granted fuel and one million dollars to research their recycling process honestly they're much further ahead than a lot of people and this will help other companies as well lots of designs we've covered need hell you as starting fuel kirk wants to use super critical carbon dioxide to prevent tritium from getting out of his reactor and okla getting this far will definitely help others navigate the regulatory system as good as all this sounds i'm not going to pretend that nuclear energy is simple it is not but it's one of the few things that the deeper you look into the better it gets and we've learned to tame difficult things in the past you tend to forget how close to the edge humans live we don't travel in aluminum tubes at 30 000 feet and at a good fraction of the speed of sound because it's fun we do it because it enables a better world and enhances human potential and also because it's fun and that is perhaps how we should look at nuclear energy a difficult but manageable process that we need to beat the final boss of this level and move to the next one [Music] once again thanks to our sponsor morning brew i hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did hit the like button and get into the comments below to join the discussion i'll see you really soon bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Tech for Luddites

Views: 148,881

Keywords: tech for luddites, oklo, oklo nuclear reactor, caroline cochran oklo, morning brew, tiny nuclear reactor, small modlar reactor, smallest nuclear reactor

Id: QIcwqjvrLZU

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Megouski]

Disclaimer: Everywhere i can, I post about the advantages of nuclear and how it is the future etc etc.

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Nuclear has a single problem suffocating it, and will continue to kill it for decades more. No matter how safe it is. No matter if it printed money while giving you a blowjob and resurrecting your passed loved ones, curing cancer and feeding all humans on earth. Literally it wouldn't matter if it did all of this because of one thing: bad pr.

FEAR is the most powerful emotion. More powerful than love, hate, greed and anything else. It wins more often and longer when it is present for extended period of time. What is one of the main causes of fear? Ignorance. What is another? The perceived realization of something unknown and sinister.

Over the last near century, gas, coal and oil industry have slowly pushed this behind the scenes over hundreds of million of people. Worldwide laws were lobbied to allow only half-ass nuclear designs to actually break ground. You think this was an accident? Even shit nuclear energy is amazing for energy generation and low death-per-KWh. However it has one thing other power industries can use as an advantage: the fact that the deaths happen in a catastrophic event, even if it is ultra rare. The nature of the event is devastating enough and SHOCKING enough to instill fear in people for month and years after. People know how coal, oil and gas are cleaned up in general. They dont really understand radiation. They think is going to get them from the wind and the sea and kill them if the eat the wrong kind of fish. etc etc. The point is fear. Fear purchased by making it so poor nuclear is what is in active generation.

Until this sinister bullshit is solved, we will never see a real boom of Nuclear (or most things in the world, like the socioeconomical divides) outside of maybe China. Energy should be nearly free by now, and it is not a limit of technology that keeps it from being so. It is a limitation of the general populations ability to rise above deception and manipulation.

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Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

[u/even-tempered]

LFTR is the best thing to come out of the 20th century. Not only can it burn old nuclear waist but it gives us energy cheap enough for us to desalinate sea water. Now more huge reservoirs of water needed, no more dams, turn arid dry land into fertile land for crops. This alone could stop wars. Also by products that cure cancer and make super batteries.

[u/Adult_InThe_Room]

The Global Oligarchy/Plutocracy must step out of the way and allow thorium-LFTR become a pure not for profit public utilitie.