The United States, where we're very concerned
about greenhouse gas emissions, uses about 20 percent of the world's energy today. So
if we were to cut our CO2 emissions to zero, we'd still have to worry about the other 80
percent. And the other 80 percent is growing at a tremendous rate as these nations develop.
So we'd have almost no effect of zeroing our own CO2 emissions. Not only do we need to have a source of energy
that is CO2 free, we must also be able to export it and install those kinds of power
plants in all the nations around the world. And the only way to do that is to make them
inexpensive enough that all the nations of the world would rather have them than their
existing coal plants. Today, we have just left Los Angeles. Hi. I'm Robert Hargraves. I'm on a plane flying
to Shanghai International Thorium Energy Organization Conference being sponsored by the Chinese
Academy of Sciences. This organization is actually planning to build a Thorium Molten
Salt reactor. So we're really excited to go to the presentations and see what's really
happening there. And why are you headed there? Well, I'm headed there to give a talk. My
new book is called "Thorium, Energy Cheaper than Coal." And it is my thesis that this
is a nuclear power plant that could actually deliver electrical power less expensively
than coal plants. The objective has to be to keep that price down because that's the
way we can persuade all the nations of the world to stop burning fossil fuels. In the
long run, people always do what's in their own economic self-interests. First, let's start with coal. The US EPA says
coal causes 13,000 deaths a year from respiratory disease caused by particulate inhalation of
particles of about 2.5 microns or less. That's in the US alone. In China, over 100,000. The
UN estimates in the world almost a million people die from coal particulate emissions. One of the problems with global warming that
I find is worst is the lack of food and water caused by the melting of glaciers. Glaciers
normally retain water in winter and release it in summer. But the rivers that are fed
by the Rongbuk Glacier are now becoming less able to provide water during the summer. Without
water, growing food is next to impossible. Population growth depletes food. Since the
1950s, ninety percent of the large fish in the ocean are gone Resource competition can also lead to war.
In 1990, these are the oil wells that were set ablaze by Iraq in Kuwait. So if we did
not have quite so much resource competition, we would reduce the impetus for war. Let's look for a minute at prosperity and
population. These are data from the US Central Intelligence Agency. Each dot represents a
separate nation. On the horizontal axis, children per woman. On the vertical axis, GDP per capita. Nations with the most births per woman are
really the poorest ones. Population scientists
0:03:25.010,0:03:3.120
say about 2.3 children per woman leads to
a stable population. If we just draw that on the graph and look at it, it's the wealthier
nations that have a stable or reducing population. The United States birth rate is about equal
to that that would cause no growth. US population growth is principally by immigration.
How can we fix this? Let's look at prosperity for a second. I arbitrarily
defined prosperity to be about $7500 per year. That line seems to differentiate pretty well
between those nations that have stable populations and those that had growing populations. Interestingly,
that's about the same GDP per capita as China is today. Prosperity depends strongly on energy. Again,
CIA data, annual kilowatt-hours per capita. The US is off the charts at about 12000 per
year. That's average energy consumption rate for
electricity in the US of almost 1500 watts, on average. Places in Africa have electric
consumption of less than 100 watts per capita. It's pretty clear that somewhere around 2000
kilowatt-hours a year is the break even point for achieving prosperity, using electric power.
Now, electric power is not the only way to achieve prosperity. You need education, property
rights, rule of law, medicine and so on. But electric power is critical to prosperity,
because it's the type of energy that is necessary for cooling, for heating, for water purification,
for sewage processing, for medicine, for communications, for industry, for transportation. All those
things depend upon electric power. All the developing nations know this. They
wish to increase their energy use. So you see the non-OECD nations are projected to
have the most growth in energy over the next few decades. How are they going to do it? They're going
to do it by burning coal. Because they don't have money to build $5 billion nuclear power
plants, they will use the cheapest energy source available to them because they
desperately need that electric power. Carbon taxes. Carbon taxes are not an adequate solution. Here's a man, Jeffrey Sachs, who was the leader
of UN Millennium Development Project. He was also the financial advisor to Poland, to Russia
and so on. He is a well-known economist. He says taxes aren't enough. We need a new technology.
And not only that. We need to have that new technology spread to the whole world rapidly
if we're going to have any effect. The China Daily, in 2010, published this little
article. Technology is required to solve this problem. They also argued against carbon taxes.
Here's that same chart, magnified. They point out that, cumulatively, in the US, we are
responsible for about 1000 tons of CO2 per person, whereas in China, it's less than 10
percent of that. So the developing nations argue that the West gains its prosperity by
cheap energy, by burning coal and emitting CO2. So why should the developing nations be denied that right? It's not fair. I'm not trying to make the
argument. I'm trying to point out that it's impossible to reach agreement on such contention. We tried anyhow. We had conferences in Kyoto,
in Copenhagen, in Durban. 30,000 people went to the conference in Durban, to negotiate
a climate treaty. How can 30,000 people agree on anything? How can seven billion people in
250 nations in the world agree to impose taxes on carbon? That is against their individual economic
self interests, on behalf of the whole world's stability. It's not going to happen.
Let's look at the cost of electricity from coal and other sources, because there's also a
green movement that wants to replace coal. Here's the cost of coal. About 2.8 dollars
per watt of generation capacity is the capital cost for coal. In this talk, I use a single
model throughout and I use the financial idea that, if we do capital cost recovery at an
8% cost of capital, over 40 years operating a plant 90 percent of the time,
you get 2.8 cents per kilowatt-hour. So it's easy to remember. 2.8 dollars, 2.8
cents. That's the capital cost. The fuel cost for coal is about $45 a ton delivered to the
plant. That adds about 1.8 cents there. In this model, the cost of coal, for a typical
US plant is about 5.6 cents per kilowatt-hour. People are saying, "We have better technologies
like integrated gasification, combined cycle gas plants." These are coal plants that burn
coal in oxygen, rather than air so that the effluent is only water and CO2.
So, the CO2 could be extracted. But only one of these plants has ever been
built in the US. That very pretty picture is the one in Florida. It's expensive. Natural gas
is another interesting energy source. First of all, if you were going to do the best job
you could, you would use a combined cycle gas turbine, which has a 60 percent efficiency
of conversion from thermal power to electrical power. Buying such a thing costs about a dollar
per watt for capital costs. I used fuel costs now at five dollars per
million BTU to come up with a fuel cost per kilowatt-hour of 2.8 cents. Our operations
costs are standard in this model. That comes to about 4.8 cents per kilowatt-hour. Now, on the other hand, the cost of gas today
is a little lower than that. If that were to persist forever, we could have a low cost
power from natural gas of only 3.7 cents. But actually, we don't use combined cycle
gas turbines very much. We only use natural gas combustion turbines. That would mean it
would be about seven cents. So those are the bogies we want to deal with. Here's the reasons that natural gas prices
will rise. Here is the prices of natural gas worldwide. In Louisiana, about three dollars.
In Japan, about $16. Japan is importing liquefied natural gas more and more because they've
shut their nuclear power plants down. It has changed their balance of trade from a positive
number to a negative one. So that really can't persist for long periods of time. Substitution. Just look at the price, per
BTU of thermal energy from oil versus natural gas There will be substitution. There will
be more emphasis on flex fuel vehicles. That's going to drive up demand for natural gas and
raise the price. Even the Energy Information Administration of the United States says that
it's going to go up. That's why I use five dollars in my model. Let's look at wind. Wind is integrally tied
with natural gas. This number is pretty high, isn't it? The reason is, it costs a lot of
money to build these wind farms. It's very hard to find the right costs. The costs are
generally hidden from the public, so the public doesn't know the subsidies. But here are two
examples. Deep water wind, off the coast of Rhode Island. Cape wind off the coast of Cape
Cod, Massachusetts. These are the costs per watt. But those capital
investments can only be recovered in the 30 percent of the time that wind is actually
blowing. So the capital cost per kilowatt-hour generated is much higher. It's 17.4 cents. Now, the fuel cost is nicely zero. The ops
cost I made the same for all of this model. I got 18.4 percent. I checked that against
the real costs and Cape Wind has negotiated a deal with the state of Massachusetts in
which they will sell power at that price. So I say that model is about right. That's
how much it really does cost. But they're going to hide that number from the rate bearers.
Now, wind turbines increased CO2 emissions. How can you say such a thing? Let me explain
how. First of all, if you had hydro power available, you could use hydro-power to back
up the wind turbines during the lulls. So if the wind turbine is running 30 percent
of the time, the hydro could run 70 percent of the time. In most situations, there isn't enough water
to run hydro constantly. So you only open the floodgates to run the turbines when demand
is high. So if you had wind turbines coupled with hydro, you could in fact, just save water,
in a sense. Not emit more CO2. That's a good pairing. That's the kind of pair that was done
in Denmark, with the hydro facilities in Scandinavia. But I want to go back to the
two kinds of natural gas turbines. The most common one is a combustion turbine,
much like a jet engine. It is only 29 percent efficient in its conversion of thermal energy to
electrical power. But it starts up quickly. It starts up in ten minutes or under approximately.
So as the wind lulls, the natural gas combustion turbine is used to fill in the gaps. The most
efficient gas driven is combined cycle. That has a 60 percent efficiency, twice as good.
But takes a long time to start it up, almost an hour, because not only does it burn gas,
but it also has to run the boiler with the output of the turbines. So it's a little more
expensive, slow to start up, but a lot more efficient when it's running. So let's suppose, for a minute, that we were
planning the energy economy of a nation. We said, "We have a choice to make. One choice
is for 1000 megawatt power plant. Let's use wind turbines with natural gas backups." OK, if we do that, then 30 percent of the
time, we're not using any fuel. But 70 percent of the time, we're using fuel at a rate of
2400 megawatts thermal. OK. Suppose I had only combined cycle gas turbines.
Well, I'd be running it 100 percent of the time at 60 percent efficiency, or less fuel. So I deplete my resource less rapidly. I emit less CO2 by not having installed any windmills to
begin with. Let's look at solar electricity. Capital costs, again, very high. Here are examples. These examples are usually
hidden from the public. Every once in a while I find a news article that gives the true
total cost of it. The costs are not revealed, because people are embarrassed about the deals
that are made, that get subsidies to build these plants. These are the real costs for
Bright Source, for Abengoa and so on. That leads to 22 cents, more or less, capital cost. Solar power, about 23 cents. Is that right?
Well, here are some examples. El Biasa, a Spanish company that's building such a plant,
in Spain, 35 cents. All Earth, a US company, building one in Vermont, 30 cents a kilowatt-hour.
Those are about the right numbers. The public isn't aware of them because they're hidden,
they're averaged out over the whole bill. What's important to society is not who pays,
whether it's the taxpayer or the rate payer or an unlucky investor like the government of Spain.
What matters to society is the true cost. Let's look at those. That's why we're doing this.
Biomass. The cheapest way to use biomass is to burn it. We can talk about ethanol powered
engines and so on, but there's a lot of energy lost in the conversion of the biomass to ethanol.
So let's just burn it. That'll give us the best answer possible. Capital costs, I looked up for a few plants. I used four dollars per watt to build a wood chip burning power plant. I actually visited one. Capital cost recovery,
you see four cents per kilowatt-hour. Fuel? You have to drive trucks around to the woods,
to cut lumber and haul it back to the plant, cut it into chips and burn it. Here are the
typical costs. I convert those costs, in tons, to BTUs, times the efficiency of the plant,
about 9.7 cents per kilowatt-hour. You might say, "How do wood plants actually make money
if they're selling it so expensively?" There are all kinds of, again, rules in the
United States, at least, about getting green energy credits, that are marketed renewable
energy credits to make it possible to do that. So if we want to save the world by under-selling
coal, here are the numbers we have to beat. We might have to go as low as 3.7 cents for
gas if, in the fact, the gas prices never do rise. That's the bogie. That's our objective.
Under-sell those numbers. Can we do it? Everyone in this room probably
knows already how one of these liquid fluoride thorium reactors works. In this example, it's
a two fluid reactor that is fed simply by thorium. It's sort of idealized. It continuously
processes the nobles, which are relatively easy to get out, and the fission products,
which are harder to get out. Weinberg thought that the world's future depended
upon such an inexpensive energy source. Weinberg himself wrote about global warming from CO2.
There's an intermediate step that could be equally effective and a lot less expensive,
the denatured molten salt reactor, that actually does not bother to process the dissolved fission
product fluorides but simply leaves them in a salt for 20 or 30 years, until eventually
it has to be reprocessed, or perhaps just dumped and started all over again. In this example, it's fed with U235, probably
diluted, and U238, at a 20 percent level. That works. Oak Ridge built one of these without
the U238. They ran it on U235. They ran it on U233. The advantage of U238 is that this
kind of reactor is probably the most proliferation resistant reactor that you could scheme up.
Well, can thorium energy be cheaper than coal? That's what I want you to learn. The answer
is, here are seven proposals over the years, to build molten salt reactors. You can see
two dollars is a reasonable number for a target. These are real proposed numbers, inflated
to current dollars. The reason this technology is potentially inexpensive isn't the thorium
so much. It's the liquid fuel form. Because it has excellent heat transfer, allows continuous processing
for fuel additions and fission product removals. It's an atmospheric pressure liquid. So containment
is much simpler. And, it's a room temperature solid, so if there's a problem, the fission
products and so on don't necessarily escape so easily into the environment. The safety systems also contribute to the
low cost. The reactivity is stable, makes it simple to control. It's a thermal reactor,
unlike a fast reactor. There's no meltdown concept. It's as hot as it's going to get. There's no propulsive pressure to push reactive
materials in the environment. There's no large containment dome. That saves money,
saves mass. Let's look at the waste product for a minute. Here is the process for converting
U232 to U233 by neutron absorption in a nuclear power plant, in particular a liquid thorium
reactor. And, if you were to let that go, eventually by more and more and more neutron absorptions,
you could get up to plutonium 239 and perhaps the higher level actinides. But compared to a normal light water reactor,
it takes six more neutron absorptions. So it's much, much less probable to generate
any of that long lived high level transuranic waste. On the other hand, if you had U238
in the mix, one neutron absorption and there you go. So that's the difference. These kinds
of reactors, if you leave the actinides in the solution, can slowly get rid of them by
absorption and potential fission. It's not as good as a fast reactor. But such
a reactor can consume much of its own actinides that are created. And the end result is, although
the fission product waste from all kinds of reactors is about the same and has to be dealt
with very carefully for two or three hundred years, the long lived actinide waste, at least
from a liquid fluoride thorium reactor, is about ten thousand times less. Another advantage: High temperatures mean that you can use closed-cycle
helium Brayton gas turbine cycle with an efficiency of 45 percent, compared to a normal power
plant efficiency of 33 percent. This means a lot less energy has to be discarded into
the environment, which means cooling costs are lower. You can even use an open cycle
Brayton system, where you don't have any cooling water available at all. The efficiency drops
to perhaps 40 percent for that. There's a new technology that may beat both
of those and that is the super-critical CO2 cycle, with a 45 percent efficiency, at reasonably
low operating temperatures. You can see on the diagram, the little red turbine on the
bottom is meant to represent the expected mass of the super critical CO2 cycle. That's
another reason why this could be less expensive. Of course, thorium fuel itself is pretty inexpensive.
Here's a one ton ball. That's about the right size of it. You could
put it on your pickup truck. You could power the city of Boston for about a year. You could
run the entire US on 500 tons. The government has thousands of tons in storage, just sitting around
in the desert. There are millions of tons available worldwide. There's enough thorium
in every country that each country can be guaranteed some level of energy security.
They can't be blackmailed by saying, "We won't give you the fuel." It's pretty inexpensive. Let's look for a
minute about the idea of mass production of small modular reactors. My model here is Boeing
aircraft. They can produce a $200 million unit unit every day. And, aircraft manufacturers
have the same responsibilities as nuclear power manufacturers. They worry about corrosion,
material fatigue. They worry about quality control, CAD/CAM, (computer aided manufacturing).
All those kinds of things. Why can't we produce nuclear reactors the
same way? Then we get the benefit of what's called the learning curve in manufacturing.
This is not a theorem, but an observation, that every time you double the number of units
produced, the average cost drops by something called the learning ratio. In the early aircraft
industry, it was about 20 percent. In the IT industry today, it's about 50 percent.
University of Chicago postulated it would be about 10 percent, which is pretty conservative,
for the nuclear power industry. That's if we do mass production of essentially the same
units. So look at that. We can drop the cost, what,
60 percent or so, after a thousand units of production. So I say learn to develop small
modular reactors at about two dollars a watt, at about the cost of an airplane, $200 million.
Make them affordable to developing nations that can't put in a $5 billion reactor. We
can use small ones near cities. We can gang them together for bigger power
stations. We can allow them to be truck-transported. If we do all that, at $2 a watt, the cost
of fuel is nothing. I use the same number for operations as before. We can hit three
cents per kilowatt-hour, and we can under-sell all the competitive technologies. If we do
this, then we can create a new industry. I'm advocating about a billion dollars investment in the
development stage, for R&D that becomes public domain. Another, perhaps, five billion dollars of
industrial investment, to develop the production capabilities. And then the process of producing
and exporting one a day. What if we do that? What will happen to the CO2 emissions. We
could eliminate in 38 years all the coal plant emissions. All of them. All you need to do
is produce one a day. Having solved that problem, what do we do about fuels for vehicles? With only 650 degree heat, we can get about
45 percent efficiency conversion from thermal energy to chemical potential energy for burning
hydrogen. There are actually hydrogen cars available. The Honda Clarity can be purchased
in Florida today, if you live near one of the dozen or so hydrogen fueling stations.
So they do exist. Ford Motor Company did an internal combustion engine with hydrogen. But hydrogen is not an easy thing to deal
with. For one, you have to compress or liquify it in order to carry it onboard a vehicle. And when
you do that even, it's not nearly as energy dense as these other kinds of fuels -- ammonia,
methanol, which is a gasoline substitute, or dimethyl ether, which is a diesel substitute.
So let's think about carrying that hydrogen with carbon and nitrogen. First, look at ammonia for a minute. More
than one percent of the whole world's energy is used to make ammonia. It's used, principally,
as a fertilizer. A third of the lives on earth depend on food grown from ammonia produced
this way. It's produced now from natural gas. But we can also use ammonia to fuel an internal
combustion engine. This is a University of Michigan experiment. There's a guy in Canada
with a car that runs on this. It's certainly possible. You can even use
ammonia to run fuel cells. These are solid oxide fuel cells, are laboratory scale now.
There's no industrial capability to do these kinds of things. Ammonia really can be handled
safely. People say, "Oh, it's poisonous." Well, gasoline is explosive. You have to look
at what all the risks are. Here's some examples. We'd have to pressurize it to about the level
of a propane tank. Natural gas and hydrogen are pressurized to
much higher levels. There is a spill danger, but you can smell it. It's difficult to ignite.
It is toxic, so you don't want to breathe concentrations of it for a long period of
time. There's no low level toxicity risk, because the human and mammalian cycles naturally
excrete urea. It is toxic to fish, so you have to be careful. There was a report done
in the Midwest, comparing the risks of ammonia and gasoline fuels. Although they're different,
they are about the same. We can make ammonia from solid state synthesis.
It works kind of like that solid fuel cell in reverse. Again, lab scale. NA3 Fuel Association
did some papers on this. They estimated and we adopted it, about 6800 kilowatt-hours of
electric power are consumed per ton of ammonia produced by this process, helped a little
with extra heat. Suppose we did that, at 6800 kilowatt-hours per ton. Translate that into costs. That's about a
penny a joule, for energy from ammonia produced that way, whereas today's gasoline is about
three cents per joule. Remember, a joule is a watt second. Then I looked at the California
state analysis of their gasoline costs. More than half of them are from the crude oil that
goes into the gasoline. So I say, "Well, that's the energy content." The taxes and redistribution, refining
those are all going to be the same. Suppose we used ammonia, what might we get?
We might get a third of that cost, because it's only one cent instead of three, per joule.
We can reduce the cost of the gasoline equivalent. I'm making a leap of faith that engineers
could create refineries that can produce this kind of ammonia fuel as efficiently as do
today's petroleum refineries. Suppose you don't like the hydrogen and you don't like
ammonia, we have to go back to carbon. But we don't want to take it out of the ground.
What are the sources for carbon that do not pollute the atmosphere more? We like to make
these kinds of chemicals. One is the project called Green Freedom, which was done at Sandia.
Never done, just designed. The idea was to use a liquid in the cooling tower of a nuclear power
plant that was saturated with sodium bicarbonate. When sodium bicarbonate is heated, it exudes CO2. That's how baking powder works in your kitchen.
So you can capture that CO2. A guy named Jim Holm in the ThoriumApplications.com
website has another scheme using the cooling canals of a nuclear power plant such as the
one in Florida to do the same kind of thing. So that's a potential way to do that. Of course,
we can also do that by getting carbon from agriculture. Now farming produces about three
tons of dry biomass per acre, per year, no matter whether it's switch grass or corn or
trees, and about half of that is carbon. But let's not burn it, let's not do what the
ethanol people do. Let's use the carbon in it to be the carbon that's going to go into
one of those hydrocarbon fuels. We'll add hydrogen to it in order to create the fuels.
We'll get about a three to one fuel improvement ratio doing that. About 1.7 tons of biomass
would yield a ton of fuel. US farmland is about a billion acres. We use already about a billion tons of fuel
a year and we have to reduce that a lot in order to be able to satisfy our fuel appetite
in the US. But, on the other hand, if we didn't burn coal, we wouldn't have so much diesel
fuel burned in trains. Half of the train traffic in the United States is hauling coal to power
plants. We can electrify the rest of the railroads. We can do better. So we might be able to live
with that source. Cattle dung is burned in a lot of countries
for fuel, but it's a source of carbon, same thing. The world cattle dung is about 2.5
gigatons per year. That could make a lot of fuel if we could collect it and burn it. So
there are other sources of waste hydrocarbons that we can consider as source to make carbonaceous
fuels. In summary, I say: Try and develop this technology
and I advocate public domain ownership of the R&D of the first five years. Produce and
export it. Zero out coal plant CO2 emissions. Synthesize climate neutral fuels. Avoid the
contentious carbon taxes that meetings such a Durban never succeed. Improve world prosperity by raising people
out of energy poverty and that check the overpopulation growth. Reduce the radiotoxic wastes from
the existing things and use the worlds fissile stocks of excess weapons grade plutonium and
U235 and so on to help start up these reactors. Use inexhaustible thorium fuel which is available
in all nations giving energy security and create a walk away safe reactor. Again, cost is the important thing. We need
to have energy cheaper than coal. The designers of that reactor are probably in this room,
so I ask of you to remember there's a tipping point here. If you have energy cheaper than
coal, we can solve that world climate and population problem because it will be in the
economic self-interests of 250 nations to buy those cheaper power sources rather than
burning coal. If we don't make that and people find that
they want to continue burning coal then we'll have the scenario that was outlined by Dennis
Meadows and the Club of Rome. Thank you, Robert. This is Bob Savinsky, from
the University of Hadersfield. Unless I missed it in your talk, you didn't give a comparison
of the cost of electricity from the molten salt reactor with that of conventional nuclear,
nor a comparison with the cost of using thorium, for example, in more conventional nuclear reactors
I just wondered if you could comment on that? We know the capital cost of a conventional
reactor is about five dollars per watt today. The cost of fuel is trivial. So a typical
uranium reactor today is competitive with coal, hydro, natural gas, about five or six
cents a kilowatt-hour. So it is a valid and reasonable source of power today. Thorium
has been used to enhance the lifetime of the fuel rods in previous reactors. I see no reason
why that wouldn't work as well. I was looking the costs for a LFTR reactor,
for a thermal molten salt reactor. As far as I'm aware, that really breaks down into
the costs building the reactor and building the reprocessing. I was wondering if you had
any figures of the ratio of those costs? The best I could do is to find those examples
I showed you. I don't think we can get a really good cost estimate until we have a really
good design, to be honest. I think, however, that the single fluid reactor is bound to
be a lot less expensive. And it's probably going to be the first to market. That was a fascinating talk. It's Bryony [Worthington] here.
I would just say, though, that I think the second half of your presentation gave me great hope
and was really fascinating. The first half, where you talk about the costs of renewables...I
don't see this as a competition between renewables and nuclear. I think they can be complementary
and work together. The reason we're paying a high cost per kilowatt-hour at the moment
is because we want to exactly do what you suggested and have that learning curve development. More deployment, costs come down, and you
find different ways of integrating it into the grid. Let's try and create a big tent here. Let's try and work together. All low carbon sources should work together.
We've got to beat coal. I think the future of renewables is very bright. My question, I suppose, is what do you think
about the integration of intermittent sources of renewable energy with storage systems,
such as heat stores? Thermal stores being used in homes and businesses? Which is what
they're doing in Denmark now. We should allow renewables to try to compete
in this market. But we shouldn't hide from the public the true cost of what's being paid.
So in the long run we need to cut down the subsidies, particularly for ongoing production
costs of electricity. The Holy Grail for renewables is to be able
to store the electric power one day and use it the next and it's very expensive. The only
practical ways, and they're not very practical, that I've seen that work at all are pumped
hydro and underground compressed air storage but both of these lose some energy. The costs of batteries for storing - basically
move the decimal point over one when you're trying to look at the cost of electric power. Arrays of windmills can sometimes back each
other up because when the wind lulls in one place, it may peak in another. But generally,
the storms are correlated and so the wind does need to have backup from fossil fuel plants. Measurements were taken in Ireland where they
were expecting a 12 percent reduction in CO2 from the wind farms presence but in reality,
they only observed a three percent reduction. The reason is that the fossil fuels that had
to back them up had generators that had to start and stop and that causes more fuel to
be consumed. By analogy, in the US, we have cars that have
mileages of say 20 miles per gallon for city driving and 30 miles per gallon for highway
driving. It takes more energy to start and stop the car just as it takes more fossil
fuel energy to stop and start the fossil fuel generation plants. OK, thanks.
As much as I would love to agree, everyone needs to always keep in mind Rickover's discussion between paper reactors and real reactors.
LFTR reactors (not thorium.....that's a fuel, not a reactor design) have the potential to be much better than existing designs.....however there are still unknowns, risks, and challenges, that it's too soon to be accurate with this type of statement. Hopefully over the next decade we reach a point where we can build a LFTR design and see it work. But until then, it's a good potential gen 4 design that is a decade away from NRC approval.
That's a hell of a difference. Some of that is his assumption of 30% capacity factor, which is much lower than current numbers, but I'm not sure where the rest comes from.
14:50 Using NGCT 70% of the time is basically saying we have absolutely no information about when and how hard the wind will blow, and we just turn off the NGCT when the wind starts and turn it back on when it stops. We can, with a good degree of accuracy, predict the wind at least 40 minutes in advance.
15:31 He's using solar thermal plants which are both FOAK and have lost badly to PV. When your capital cost is $1.00/kW instead of $5.60 that's a hell of a difference.
19:58 , the "real proposed numbers" - paper reactors and real reactors. The proposed numbers for very, very few reactors have been anywhere near the final price- in places where we have full and free information. If it's a lot easier to build safely, they probably aren't going to go over by a factor of 10.
24:30 Building a thousand SMR's sounds great, but let's start with the idea that we build eight before it gets to the promised base price. Eight SMR's, 100 MW, $10/W (to get down to $5 or so), we would need $8 billion to kickstart the industry. To be fair, Germany spent about that on kickstarting solar in 2005 alone.
Generally, he uses the same numbers for operations costs for CC gas plants and solar (with basically no moving parts). Very odd choice, very much in his favor.
Synfuel is nice. Charming. But not thorium-specific. Hydrogen, there's a thousand ways to make hydrogen and the iodine-sulfur cycle does have an advantage of using a lot of heat (vs. having to use electricity) but it also makes, umm, sulfuric acid. That might have some maintenance costs.
I want energy cheaper than coal. I just don't know if Thorium MSRs are the way to go. Five years on renewables have made a LOT of progress,and MSRs are ... well, they may have made progress but they're still at "Zero in operation."
I find it interesting that molten salt reactors are always conflated with thorium, when they could just as easily run on uranium, with essentially the same benefits.
Isn't the thorium system crazy corrosive and hard to maintain?
Thanks for sharing, I never thought of having to use fossil fuels to start up wind turbines.