The Navy had reactors. And so, the Air Force had to have reactors. Very, very radical nuclear reactors, totally
different than the kind of stuff we have now, based on the idea that you could take salts
and they would be a really good medium in which to have a nuclear reaction. Well, we were young chemical engineers, at
the time. God smiles on young chemical engineers, who
do these things that in later years will be regarded as crazy. It wasn't that I'd suddenly become converted
to a belief in nuclear airplanes, that the purpose was unattainable, if not foolish,
was not so important. A high temperature reactor could be useful
for other purposes, even if it never propelled an airplane. This is an old facility. Look down before you walk. That's our biggest hazard here, right now. Oh, oh my goodness. Yes, yes, I've modeled this neutronically. It is like a lead pencil, isn't it, basically? Graphite. We just returned from a trip to Oak Ridge
National Laboratories. One of the exciting things the Baroness and
I got to do was tour the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, which was one of these types of
reactors built in the 1960s. It was an experiment that demonstrated many
of the key technologies, although, there are some that still remain to be demonstrated. How long have you been here? I've been here since 1992. There are very few people in mid career in
nuclear energy right now because there's a huge trough. We have a large number of students coming
back into it. Yeah, well the context has changed completely. It has. When we went into nuclear energy, they said,
"What are you nuts? There's no future in that." And it really didn't matter. What do you say? It's the true believers. You could have a molten salt reactor you could
walk around on. Oh! This is so cool. You guys have got to try this. Oh, goodness! That makes you feel really weird! There's something in front of me here. It feels like... I was in seventh grade. I read an Isaac Asimov story about the implications
of what free energy would do. I sort of knew I was going to be an engineer
or scientist just from day one. They said, "What can you do to make a difference?" And that was when I sort of said advanced
nuclear power was something that could make a difference, and low cost, clean energy could
make a huge difference to society. If I'm going to have to get up every day for
50 or 60 years working on something, well, it ought to be something I believe in. Liquid salts are an outstanding heat transfer
media. It really doesn't matter what you're going
to be transferring heat for, whether this be a solar power tower, whether this be a
salt cooled reactor or molten salt reactor, viscosity on it is 30 times larger, but water
is very low viscosity. It's still a very low viscosity fluid. Some people might imagine this is quite a
gloopy, kind of flow moving liquid, but it's actually quite fluid. You're right. It does go through a melt much like a glass,
as opposed to water, which doesn't quite do that. So we want to run it, a 100 C or so above
this, so it does flow nicely. If you go ahead and you repeat doing things
in here, you can see, you start to etch the glass just a little bit. So, what we have to do in a reactor is keep
things very highly reducing. If you put an extra beryllium in there, essentially
giving you a proffered spot to rust. This is all about controlling potential corrosion
of the salts within any vessel that you put it into. The iron and some of the alloy is more soluble
at higher temperatures, and so you will get your heat exchanger where it's at hot temperatures,
you will get metals taken out of the solution and then it gets to the colder end, they'll
do a redeposit, and so you can self plug your heat exchangers, which you would very much
like not to do. Your technique to avoid that is to keep everything
very well reduced so it doesn't corrode in the first place. You'll make it lousy, but there are no strong
chemical reactions that are going to take place between the salt and even direct contact
with water. The hazards on this is the same thing other
than a deep fat fryer, which is I trip, throwing hot oil or hot salt, in this case, on visitors
would be considered a bad thing. But there's nothing else to this. Just make some ice clear liquid. But I'll just pour this out into a little
stainless steel crucible, and you could hear that little snap there was just there was
a little bit of moisture at the bottom of the stainless steel. At 450, this thing is a solid. It doesn't take very long for it to form a
solid again. Isn't that a nice feature? If you had a little crack on this...Sort of
it was starting to weep, it forms a plug. Self plugging. It self plugs. That's a nice thing about, not being under
pressure. On the other hand, if your in design keeps
the vessel hot, it'll stay liquid on there, but that's why you have a guard vessel. If absolute worst case happens and a massive
vessel rupture, well, you still catch it. The Navy program that led to the light water
reactors we have now was well optimized to the needs of the Navy. It actually wasn't very well optimized to
needs of power production. The reason we have that as the base for our
power reactor technology today is because the Navy was prepared to pay the first mover
costs to make one work. Once you've done that, it's extraordinarily
difficult to compete with it, because those first mover cost are very, very high and have
no financial return associated with them. The Navy has built their nuclear submarines
and the Army has taken the same technology as the Navy, the water cooled reactor, and
they're doing their thing. But the Air Force wants to build a new nuclear
powered bomber. Now Weinberg was a practical man and he said,
"Huh. Nuclear powered bomber. That is probably a really, really, really
dumb idea." Dirty little secret was that most of the people
involved in it knew from the get go that it really wasn't practical. In contrast to a submarine where you've got
limited space but you can shield it for the people on the submarine, it's much harder
on an airplane because of the weight. Most of us did not really think that the aircraft
reactor really could work but we did feel that there was a very interesting technology
there that someday could be applied. And I would maintain that Weinberg was absolutely
right in his assessment of the situation back then. He knew that to make the nuclear airplane
work they couldn't use water cooled reactors. They couldn't use high pressure reactors. They couldn't use complicated solid fuel reactors. They had to have something that was so slick,
that was so safe, that was so simple to operate at low pressure, high temperatures, had all
the features you wanted in it. They didn't even know what it was. I think someday this will be looked at as
one of the great pivot points in history that if this program, this nuclear airplane program
had not been established the molten salt reactor would have never been invented because it
is simply too radical, too different, too completely out of the ball field of everything
else for it to be arrived at through an evolutionary development. It had to be forced into existence by requirements
that were so difficult to achieve and a nuclear airplane was that. They began working on this high temperature
reactor. Remember, this was invented before we had
ICBMs or anything like that. This was a doomsday weapon. This was like, "If you're flying this thing
to Russia it's the end of the world." I suppose you'd have to say that it was a
miracle that the homogeneous reactors operated at all, rather than they operated well. Chemical stability in the system was not really
sufficient. It was chemically unstable. The second reactor actually operated very
well. That was the molten salt reactor experiment. There it is. This is the place. These things right over here are the spent
probes. Those things will extend 60 foot in length. They went down the tank did the mounting,
the bubbling, stirring and everything. A lot of them, they stored above the high
bay. When you say high bay... It's taller and we can put planes in because
we can lift things up. You had to go down an additional 25 to get
to the top of the tanks. We had to go inside the tanks. Those things would extend. You've got a pipe within a pipe. The box is the top part of the probe. We had the controls. We could tell exactly how far down the probe
was moving and the weight of it. The probe had feeders on the end of it. It would melt a pool in that salt and would
sink down in it. All those long handled tools they had for
operations, those were... It was almost heroic actions, you would say,
when they were trying to do things. You've got this length of distance. We'd certainly try to design things today
that could be robotically handled. It just would not be designed the same way
as it was at that point. One of the things that I've learned from talking
to some of the old timers at Oak Ridge, these guys are in their 80s now if they're even
alive. People didn't disbelieve that we could build
the machine. They didn't believe that we could maintain
it. Operation of the MSRA was not too difficult. The people that I had working for me, they
all had hound dogs under the porch and old cars out in the yard that didn't run very
well. If anything came up inside the molten salt
reactor, say "We can fix that." How you going to do it? I don't know but we'll fix it. And they did. One time the sample capsule was down in the
pump. Flexible steel cable got tangled up. "We've got bad news. Here's the end of that cable cut off." I said, "What are we going to do?" There's the good old boys for you. They said, "Is there such a thing as fiber
optics? There's the capsule," and they fixed that
capsule out and we were back in business. They had a lot of long handled tools, remote
cameras. And it was challenging, but he felt, despite
the challenge of operating high radiation fields that they were able to operate and
maintain that machine over the course of its lifetime. We worked for several years on an experiment
that proved that you can handle this molten salt reliably, and when things go wrong, we
were to fix. The advantages outweigh the difficulties and
the concept is ultimately going to be a practical application. We still have a few folks who are even operators
here, who are around, we have Syd Ball's office is just literally three over from me. He was at the controls when it reached its
highest power. They told me that was an accident. It sure was! Yeah, there's another way to tell that story,
too. I was running some tests late at night. The device that I was using got stuck in the
wrong place and pulled the rod out. The power went up and up beyond the design
power and then controlled itself and went back down. Everybody was happy. I started out at the lab in 1957 and got onto
the molten salt reactor project, the MSRE, molten salt reactor experiment, mainly in
the instrumentation and controls aspects of it. But I quickly got into the dynamic analysis
which was a lot of fun for that reactor because it's an inherently safe reactor. The dynamics were, let's say, not common to
reactors because it was molten salt instead of water cooled solid fuel. You could change the load on this radiator
by moving the doors down and the reactor would follow the load. I migrated to the MSR program doing the nuclear
and mechanical analysis of the performance of the reactor. Often folks are afraid that a reactor can
run away on them, that a reactor is somehow an inherently unstable system that people
have to always be keeping their eye on lest it get away. Certain designs will be self controlling. In other words, if the power tends to go up
and the temperatures go up, it automatically corrects and shuts itself down or at least
doesn't let it keep going up. Is it very hard to design a molten salt reactor
to be self controlling? The nature of the molten salt reactor, the
one with the fuel mixed in with the salt, is basically inherently safe, and you know,
self controlling. Just about any molten salt concept that has
been seriously considered has been shown to have this stable behavior. If you have the molten salt in the core region
and it heats up, it gets less dense and that means it's less likely to go more critical. In other words, it gets less critical as the
density... Or less reactive. Yeah, less reactive. Well you know, I've been in this energy game
for about 10 years now and no one's ever told me there was a safer, more sustainable form
of nuclear. So I was kind of instantly interested. And, um, I kept thinking about it occasionally. I kept in touch with Kirk a little bit. And then Fukushima happened. This is great. This is just what I wanted to have happen
is her talking to these guys and getting that straight dope. Oh man, it's just perfect. Dick Engel is probably the most knowledgeable
person around these days. I'd never met Syd. I've read all his papers. I've actually extracted all the text, converted
it all, rebuilt... I mean I have... I don't know if there's anybody that studied
his stuff more than me. I've worked with him almost the whole time
I've been here. I was so tickled when I found out he was alive
for the first thing. I mean, how do you feel about the reactor
now? It sounds like it was quite a boring job in
a way, but did you feel fondly towards this reactor design? Oh, yes. It wasn't at all boring. I mean boring in the sense that it was quite
safe. It did exactly what we calculated it ought
to do and that's pretty satisfying. The basic idea is thorium all by itself is
not going to release nuclear energy, but, if you hit thorium with a neutron, the thorium
will absorb the neutron and it will turn from thorium-232 into thorium-233. It's going to decay into protactinium-233
and then it will decay over about a month to uranium-233. Uranium-233, if you hit it with a neutron,
it will fission. In addition to releasing all that energy,
it will release two or three additional neutrons. You need one of those neutrons to go find
another thorium. You need another one of those neutrons to
find another uranium-233 to continue the reaction. You're fissioning uranium-233 but you're making
a new one. You can almost think of it as a pseudo-catalyst. If you had some uranium-233, you could catalyze
the burning of thorium indefinitely. So through this process, you can essentially
implement that very simple thorium cycle. This is what Weinberg and his team were working
on in the 1960s. The molten salt reactor experiment was the
core. After they completed the molten salt reactor
experiment, they went to the Atomic Energy Commission. They said, "Hey, gee, can we have some more
money? We'd like to go now and build the real thing. We'd like to build the blanket and we'd like
to hook a power conversion system on and make electricity." They felt like they'd shot the moon. Well, the Atomic Energy Commission unfortunately
did not share their zeal to continue with the technology. Milton Shaw, who was the head of reactor development
in Washington, called up Alvin Weinberg and he says, "Stop that MSRE reactor experiment. Fire everybody. Just tell them to clear out their desks and
go home and send me the money for fast breeders." Milton Shaw was sold on the sodium cooled
fast breeder reactors. And I am not familiar with why that was. The red line shows the expenditures on the
liquid metal fast breeder reactor. And this graph only begins in 1968. At that point, the United States had already
built several liquid metal fast breeder reactors. It's very hard to see the green line for the
molten salt reactor technology. It's extremely low. And then ultimately it was cancelled. We were competing with the fast breeder people
at Argonne mainly. They just had more political sway than molten
salt reactor. Do you see a prevailing opinion here about
molten salt reactors? We haven't been funded to look at molten salt
reactors. There's no opinions about it? Basic. Oh the opinion is simple. Build IFR. That's it. That's the opinion, OK. The problem with the MSRs is that they've
never done it. They had one at Oak Ridge for a little while. They went through and did a couple little
tests. We realized that we were minor league money
wise compared to the other program. U-233 was tested here and there was a little
bit of U-235 in it. And they added some plutonium-239 in that
fuel mix. Do you know how much plutonium was added? Oh, about 6 - 700 grams. They thought the U-233 was the utopia of uranium
fuel. Do you feel like the program had a sound technical
basis or do you feel like technical problems were the basis for cancellation? Some of the technical reasoning that I heard
for the cancellation was that there was a corrosion problem. Tritium was raised as another issue. We made no effort on MSRE to do anything with
tritium. And there was a perception that managing tritium
was going to be a very difficult if not insurmountable issue. This is the WASH 1222 report from the AEC. Did the people on the program feel like tritium
was an insurmountable problem? We recognized that tritium would have to be
captured and sequestered for the system to be viable but most people thought that that's
something that we should be able to do. Did the people on the program, particularly
the chemists or the material scientists, feel that corrosion was an insurmountable problem
on the program? No, and in some of the subsequent work, subsequent
to that initial shutdown, they did some experimental work that seemed to bode very favorably for
ability to solve that issue as well as the tritium issue, by the way, because we did
do some tritium experiments in that 1974 to 76 period. And those are documented. Were either of you present when the molten
salt reactor program was cancelled in the early 70s? Yeah, we were still working there. I was still working on the system. We were still finalizing reports on the performance
of the MSRE. I didn't see it coming. Mr. President? Since you missed our meeting on breeder reactors,
we sent the message today, Craig. I told Ziegler to tell the press that it was
a bipartisan effort. This has got to be something we play very
close to the vest but I am being ruthless on one thing. Any activities that we possibly can should
be placed in Southern California. So, on the committee, every time you have
a chance, needle them. Say, where's this going to be? Let's push the California thing. Can you do that? Nixon was from California. Hosmer was from Southern California. Chet Holifield, who ran the Joint Committee
on Atomic Energy, was also from California. It doesn't lead me to believe that the President
was seriously considering alternatives to the fast breeder reactor and other paths that
could be taken. It was a focus on what can we do right now
to get jobs. The United States is going to go forward in
building a breeder reactor. Now, don't ask me what a breeder reactor is. All of this business about breeder reactors
and nuclear energy and this stuff is over my... That was one of my poorer subjects, science. I got through it but I had to work too hard. I gave it up when I was about a sophomore. Nixon, by his own admission, was not particularly
well versed in the different types of breeder reactors. Unless you're one of those Ph.D.s, you won't
understand it either. But what I do know is this, that here we have
the potentiality of a whole new breakthrough in the development of power for peace. Maybe it might have benifited our country
a little more if Nixon had been able to acertain the different values of different types of
breeder reactors, and why one might have advantage over another. Representative Craig Hosmer who you heard
on that phone call earlier said that if cost targets are missed "I for one don't intent
to scream and holler about it." So its not hard to see that they could see
great economic benifits accuring to their areas of the country. In that same month, the Atomic Energy Committee
issued WASH-1222 which was an evaluation of Weinberg's molten salt reactor. It was highly critical of several technological
issues that had been encountered during the development of that idea. More importantly, though, it almost completely
ignored the safety and economic improvements possible through the use of the molten salt
reactor technology. This was the main focus of Oak Ridge for decades
and it was very abruptly cut off. It was a very bitter pill to swallow for them. So a lot of these great minds, they thought
their life work had kind of gone to waste. The original shutdown came early in 1972 with
a letter from Mr. Shaw that said, "Thou shalt stop right now." One anecdote that I heard is he said, "Put
your hand on your desk, take everything that has to do with molten salt, sweep it off,
and you're finished." I saved all my documents. I did, too! You had this geographically isolated place
with a huge body of concentrated molten salt knowledge that never got out. We had a corpus of people in Oak Ridge who
knew how to do this in the mid 1970s. They're literally dead and gone now. People worked on the molten salt reactor would
come back and then they'd get shut back down. They'd come back and they'd get shutdown. A lot of people got burned out from that pattern. I've met a handful of them. They're in their 80s. They're not going to do this anymore. What's happened to Paul Habenridge and Peter
Briggs and those guys? Have you kept track of that? You know? Oh, Beach has been dead for a long time. How 'bout Paul? Paul, I have not had any contact with him
so I don't know. Quite a few of them are dead now. That's true, too, yeah. You don't get taught this stuff in nuclear
engineering school. I said one time in an online talk, "You could
get a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering and never learn about this stuff." I got an email a few weeks ago from this guy. It was really funny. He said, "Kirk, I just saw your talk. I wanted you to know I just graduated from
Purdue with my Ph.D. in nuclear engineering and I want to tell you you're absolutely right. I have never heard of this stuff before!" He goes, "I'm going to tell you it's even
worse than that because I'm totally a student of nuclear history and I've never heard of
this. How did I not hear this? He goes it's great though, you're absolutely
right. This is top notch stuff they did and we should
be working on it right now." But it's absolutely possible for you to go
through a normal curriculum and never learn about this. This one time, thick books, spiral bound,
and they just jumbled all over this pallet. I just reached down and picked up two of these
big thick books. At that time, the workman came in who was
going to cart it away. My friend, Yuri Gatt, asked, "What are you
going to do with these books?" The guy says, "Burn them. You can have the two in your hand, but the
rest have to be burned." What Oak Ridge was doing was taking all the
technical manuals, they took up space, and they were taking about one or two of each,
they were putting it in this library called the Central Facility. They were in Oak Ridge where you just couldn't
wander in. The average researcher couldn't go in and
see it let alone did they even know it existed. I've actually looked at Weinberg's papers. His papers are stored at the Oak Ridge Children's
Museum in a walk in closet. You walk in and there's literally filing cabinets
stacked to the ceiling. Nobody has gone through them, catalogued them,
indexed them. At one time, this whole courtyard would have
been full of thousands of specimens. So we could do all kinds of research and testing
on... Right. ...he said. But one day, nickel alloys were at a real
premium, like unheard of recycle value. And he said someone made the decision to come
in. They cleaned out all of our lab specimens
for recycle scrap rates. Oh, really? He said it probably set us back a decade on
some of our ability to roll out quick changes to some of our recipes. "
" "
" Oak Ridge made a lot of these salt loops. It's where basically little circular loops
of plumbing pipe where they would circulate this hot molten salt to see did it corrode
the piping. Then they would run these things for 20 and
more thousand hours of operation. They were valuable artifacts of the molten
salt age. Well, Oak Ridge was throwing them away. Yuri Gatt was like, "No, no, we need these
if and when we restart molten salt." We are trying to demonstrate some of the core
technologies you have to have to make liquid salts a standard heat transfer material. The idea of this loop to retain our expertise
in using high temperature salts, to provide a platform for us to test different components,
different reactor concepts. Above about 600 C, it becomes technologically
very difficult to transfer heat effectively. The loop is designed to run at 700 Celsius. That's about 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit. The whole loop is made out of Inconel 600. Ideally, for salts, you'd use an alloy like
Hastelloy N. Now right you can't really get the right components,
the right shapes using hastelloy N. So we use inconel 600. It's maybe not the best option but it's the
economical one, available option. This one does flow. As the salt flows through it, it sends a sound
wave through and that then measures the doppler shift. These are fluidic diodes. It's a way to control a liquid flow without
using a valve. In normal operation, it goes this way. It comes in this side and out this side. That creates a lot of resistance. It spins around. It comes out. During an accident, the flow reverses. It goes this way. There's not a lot of resistance going from
here just flowing out here, just doesn't spin around. Then there's a heat exchanger. That's another part of the test. Is all the heat localized on the pipes or
do you heat the whole box? Yeah, all the heating is in the pipes, either
in the pipes or on the outside of the pipes. Its trace heated. You can see coils of heating tape. All the pipes will be insulated with about
four inches of insulation. There will be a crucible here. That's where we'll initially load the salts,
pass hydrogen fluoride and hydrogen through it. That will clean out the oxides and different
contaminants inside the salt. Once the salt's clean, we'll pump it into
the storage tank. The salt is allowed to freeze inside of it. That's an issue of salts where you can't have
it just freezing inside of pipes. It expands, breaks. The idea is we're testing a reactor concept
where the fuel would be inside these pebbles. We'll fill it up about this much. 600 spheres will be inside of it. That's where the fission and the heat's created. You got flowing flibe over it. Can I ask what the theory was around using
a solid fuel pebble into the flibe rather than dissolving the actinide into the salts? Currently in this country, we're not really
looking at the molten salt fueled systems. Using a molten salt as a so called working
fluid, it is doing the job of transferring heat from one place to another. Molten salts have what's called a heat capacity. It's the ability to hold onto heat. They're great at it. In the example of your car, you want to move
the heat away from your engine as efficiently as possible and then just disperse that heat. The boiling point of water's only 100 Celsius,
it's only 212 Fahrenheit. Don't ever open your radiator. Why? Because it's under enormous pressure. This building is the size it is, and they
way it is, precisely to accomidate this event. They designed this reactor so if this happens,
all the steam is captured in this building and doesn't get out. It is much, much bigger than the reactor itself. And its all driven by that 1000 to 1 difference
in the density between steam and liquid water. The boiling point of a molten salt however
could be 1,000 Fahrenheit, could be 1,500 Fahrenheit depending on the type of molten
salt. They do it at one atmosphere of pressure. Visiting the potential coolants, water is
the one most commonly used. It operates at relatively low temperatures
and very high pressures. That's exactly what we don't want. We want to operate at low pressures and at
high temperatures in order to achieve high thermal efficiency. Gas can operate at high temperatures but it
has to go to high pressure. Only the salts appear to offer the potential
to go to the high temperatures and at the low pressures. That's a unique combination. Using a molten salt as a working fluid to
move heat around is excellent. Because in the example of a molten salt as
a working fluid in this case, you want as much of that heat as possible. Now, fluoride salts can also contain nuclear
fuels like thorium and uranium. That eliminates a major cost of what we do
today in nuclear which is to fabricate nuclear fuels. Let me tell you a little bit about today's
nuclear fuel. They take these fuel pellets and they slide
them down these zirconium tubes, segregate the pellets along the length of the fuel assembly
according to enrichment. They'll put the most enriched ones in the
middle. Then they'll kind of decrease the enrichment
along the length of the fuel assemblies. It's a ceramic. It's a lot like the stuff your coffee cups
or your cooking ware is made out of, great at going to high temperature but not thermally
conductive and so it gets very hot along the center line of the fuel. This stuff has about the cross section of
a pencil but between the center and the edge will be like 1,000 degrees of temperature
difference. That puts enormous thermal stress on the material
itself. You can't even come close to 100 percent burn,
I mean not even approaching it. If it gets too damaged, it's going to breach
the cladding. It's going to let some of its fission products
out. So you get very, very poor fuel utilization. You remember when you went camping and you
built a fire? Burns the hottest in the middle and the stuff
at the edges isn't getting burned very good. They'll take out about a third new fresh fuel. Then they'll reshuffle the fuel that's already
been in there. They'll move it kind of from the center out
to the periphery. All their money now is coming off fuel supply
contracts. That's how GE and Westinghouse make money
on nuclear power today. They don't build reactors. They sell fuel. Come along and you say, "Hey guess what? I got a reactor. It's got no fuel fabrication to it." Making a fluoride salt by-in-large is trivial. Making a carefully enriched solid oxide is
not. It is not. You could get an aqueous fuel... In this system... "
" You wouldn't put fuel in it. There must be some advantages to doing this
sort of fuel. If you want to use the salt as a coolant,
it's just much, much, much easier to do something that's non-radioactive on this. That's why we have the walk before you fly. The US is electing to go after a salt cooled
reactor at first. Our method of rejecting heat is into the coolant. What we have are planks, about 25 millimeters
thick. You can put whatever kind of test you can
imagine in this area. We could put a solid plated fuel in. That test section can be replaced and others
be put in. Ah. If you're looking down from the top, there
are 18 fuel assemblies arranged in a hexagonal grid. In a solid system, you can't get into the
bulk of the solid fuel. In a liquid system, you effectively have infinite
surface area! It is not to say that the US doesn't recognize
that molten salt reactors have some very interesting, advantageous capabilities, but they are a
more technically challenging thing to do. What is easier, running a liquid past a solid
in order to transfer the heat or having the fuel be a liquid and use that in and of itself? So I would argue that actually combining the
two is easier. Sure, it's more chemistry but so what? I'm a chemist! There are lots and lots of chemists on the
planet and a lot of them are a hell of a lot smarter than I am. So, like, go solve the problem! It uses a fluoride salt as a primary coolant. It uses coated particle ceramic fuel. That's the triso fuel. This is the triso. Essentially these are small kernels. They're smaller than a millimeter. We've got the fuel in the middle and you've
got a multilayer structure. The important thing is the silicon carbide
in here which is actually a gas tight containment. Silicon carbide, even though we're using that
as part of the design, that's part of a test. We're going to find out how that performs
in a salt environment now. We'll be doing natural circulation, safety
testing, corrosion specimens in here, and a pump loop. Figure the next decade we will continue to
use this as a base for our system. And you just happen to hit the timing such
that the induction power supply is out being serviced. The pump is out being serviced here. We're expecting by the end of September to
have the loop pretty well ready to heat up. They're not doing neutronic stand-ins the
way China is. What's the freaking hold up? They've got the last guy in the world who
knows how to make these different kinds of salts. We're not asking for our national lab to do
miracles. We're asking them to- to basically replicate
something they did in 1952 probably. Things went very fast in the 40s and 50s not
only because the regulatory environment because- but also because they were not developing
commercial nuclear power. They were developing it just get a reactor
up, show that it works, do experiments. Nuclear technology is well beyond that now. It's commercial production technology and
so you have to do things differently than we did back then. If you wanted to just do a experiment, yes,
we can compress the scale and we could have something running at very short periods of
time. But that's not what we're looking for now. We're looking to be preferred source for energy
for the nation. And that takes the more time. Back when they were developing the molten
salt reactor, they had numerous, numerous loops that were not fueled. These were ranged from natural circulation
test loops to material testing to pump systems like this. Most of the technologies for a molten salt
reactor as far as thermo-hydraulics, well, they're identical. Ah. They're all very relevant. There are a number of technologies that have
never been done before in salt, that rotating flange up there, gasketed seals, the fact
that we've got ceramic and metal pieces in a single loop. Tons of stuff you're doing with FHR is in
common with what we're... I can certainly see that there are reasons
for looking at thorium reactors, as a follow on and the true molten salt reactor. You have your conventional solid fuel with
a liquid coolant in fixed fuel form with a liquid flowing by it. Your pebble bed is a little bit of a transition
in that the pebbles can kind of percolate up through so you get some movement of the
fuel. Then your next step is a slurry where you've
got smaller particulate moving with the flow. And then the final step is actually just the
fuel in the solution. You can almost imagine a continuum with the
pebbles just getting smaller until finally they're in a solution. Each of these are steps towards a full solution. We'll talk about at lunch different reactor
concepts. We're actually debating internally within
the nuclear lab system, do we want to actually build a prototype reactor that actually demonstrates
some game changing technology for nuclear? That- Yes, you do. Right. But it's going to be a major national commitment
when you're talking those types of numbers in that there's nowhere near that level of
consensus that this is the right path to take forward. And without building that level of consensus,
we're going to stay an interesting technology option for- forever. We will never go- go beyond that. You know, we're funded through literally thousands
of projects that come down from DOE and other government agencies where they say, "We need
you to go do this. We need you to go do that." And, there's no line in the federal budget
that says Oak Ridge National Lab, 1.65 billion, go do good things. So we need something now to add to our grid
with clean nuclear power that's going to get us to these advanced designs. And that relies heavily on the light water
established technology that's with light water reactor. But it seems to me quite odd because it implies
there's some sort of inherent process that we're going through that was dictated from
on high, but actually all of those timings are just a function of how much money and
resource you put into each element. We live in a regulatory environment where
you have to do in situ testing. Creep testing for materials takes a fixed
period of time, you put more money at it, you can't compress the time for long term
creep testing. You mentioned NRC license requirement. That takes a set number of years to get that
done. You can't put more money on that to get that
done any faster than that. So there are- You do reach a point where you
just can't push it any harder. Now, there are other parts of it that are
absolutely resource limited and we could go at more aggressively. We do the best we can with the resources that
are available. But there are people out there who control
the resources. They're not going to make it happen but they
can at least ease the path. It is shifting people's thinking to think
a little but more long term. Right now, there's a lot of focus on assuring
the LWR industry gets, as we talked about, the life extension. Consortium for the Advanced Simulation of
Light Water Reactors, CASL, is an effort to develop high fidelity integrated models of
operating reactors. We're focusing on pressurized water reactors,
new fuels that are more tolerant and resistant to accident scenarios like loss of coolant,
and cladding integrity. So your modeling a physical system. How do you know this is right? These white areas are control rod guide tubes. The center one of these is called an instrument
tube. They can run a fission detector done that
instrument tube and get an axial power distribution. We can compare that. Could you talk a little bit about the versatility
of this with regards to other reactor types, particularly like MSRs? You got to worry about a different type of
coolant and different geometries but you still have neutrons, you still have heat transfer,
you still have structural mechanics, and all that base technology. Then, in fact, the DOE said you must select
and model physical reactors. Show that it's relevant to actual operating
reactors, not a design that isn't operating yet. But, in general, the simulation technology
we're putting together we expect to be broadly applicable to a large class of reactors. This calculation here is looking at a fuel
pellet that might have a chip in it. And what would happen- you operate with a
chip in a fuel pellet, what would happen to the cladding and the stress on the cladding? This actually shows what holds the fuel rod
steady. If you get a gap in here, the rod could vibrate
and wear a hole. For the nuclear industry, for the most part,
I think it's fair to say they're really not interested in novel concepts. They have problems today that they want some
help with. Some of the people that we visiting with in
Oak Ridge over the last few days were retirees who had actually worked on the molten salt
reactor program. An issue that was repeatedly brought up was
it's a very, very different kind of machine than what the nuclear industry's used to. Suddenly here were these young people who
were coming and were showing an interest in their technology that they obviously had a
real fondness for. There's now a whole bunch of people out on
the Internet that are following this, taking such an interest in their sort of pet project
that they clearly loved. One of them said, "Everything I worked on
got cancelled." They feel perhaps that their secret has been
overlooked but I think we're hopefully resurrecting it just in time. A filmmaker in Canada put out a request on
Kickstarter, which is a way to raise funds over the Internet, saying, "I'd like to make
a video. I've done everything up to this point for
about $1,000. I'd like to get $20,000." When we told those molten salt reactor retirees
that 600 people had donated $40,000 on the Internet to make a video about their work,
I can't even tell you how excited they were! Yeah, it was awesome. One of them looked at the other and he said,
"This sounds crazy, doesn't it?!" He was like, "Yes, I'm not sure these guys
are telling me the truth!" Do you think building molten salt reactors
in the future would be a good idea? Oh, heavens yes. Dick, what do you think? I think it would be a very good idea. The people at the lab and other places around
the country that study the global warming situation say that it is a serious problem
down the road. How far down the road I don't expect to see
myself because I'm an old codger. But I think my grandchildren are going to
see a heck of a big problem. Power reactors don't contribute CO2 to the
atmosphere, and umm... so they should, by golly, be pursued. Period. And, not to do it is sort of insane, really. Even if you say that we can still go up into
the polar regions and drill under very difficult conditions without disastrous after effects
or side effects and bring that out, we still have a finite source of fossil fuel materials. Thorium resources are known to be very plentiful. I think it certainly makes a lot of sense
that India is going that way, looking at use of thorium as a fertile material. And I think we should also be looking at that. Well, unlike most people, gentlemen, you two
did something about it a long time ago, and, thank you very much. I greatly appreciate all your work. Thank you. Thank you, and thank you for your time, too. And thanks for dinner. Exact same thoughts for me. Thanks for all your work. Thank you. You're very welcome.
Just to clarify the title of your submission... the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment was being pursued after the initial rush to develop the atomic bomb, and the "head start" given to uranium was in-part due to the favor-ability of using highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium in bombs and that turning Thorium unto U-233 wasn't nearly as attractive from a weapons perspective.
But that weapons "head start" came before MSRE... by the time MSRE was being pursued there was plenty of interest in nuclear as an energy resource, not just weapons.
Kirk Sorensen wrote up a very detailed account of the sequence of events surrounding thorium research...
http://flibe-energy.com/pdf/Sorensen-early-thorium-history.pdf