Thorcon Just OBLITERATED Nuclear Energy’s Biggest Problem

this video is brought to you by skillshare in india the average person uses 964 kilowatt hours of electricity every year in europe this number is 6500 kilowatt hours and for the united states 13 000 kilowatt hours but we've been catching up this number has doubled in the last 20 years and barring some cataclysm we will continue to grow until up per capita electricity consumption and thus lifestyle resembles that of western countries and we're not alone throughout the developing world the need for electricity is increasing our industrial and economic growth depends on it the most common resource to fill this growing need thus far has been coal but coal power plants have an extraordinarily negative impact on public health and with the specter of global warming looming over the horizon this clearly cannot continue luckily solar power is cheap and we have plenty of sunshine thanks to our proximity to the equator but day still turns to night and monsoon clouds cover the entire country for three whole months every year you can manage intermittency by building backup systems around renewables like peak plants and batteries but as a higher percent of the grid becomes more reliant on renewables the costs of managing intermittency start to skyrocket and the peaker plants that fire up when production is down those run on fossil fuels which means you're still producing carbon dioxide and paying a much higher price per kilowatt hour than if the plants were running near 100 capacity so it's not workable to replace coal with renewables completely for that you need a power source that's dispatchable something that produces electricity when you need it luckily we have such a source humanity tamed the power of the atoms seven decades ago and we've tested it at scale in several countries notably france where it provides 70 percent of the country's electricity needs and despite a strong push to phase it out after fukushima they seem to be warming to it again but even the staunchest advocates of nuclear power won't deny that it's getting costly the plants take ages to make there are almost always delays and problems and the public still has a negative perception of nuclear power at least when compared to renewables thor con wants to change all that their reactor design claims to produce safe carbon free energy at costs lower than coal it can run for 60 years and has modules that can be easily replaced and the best thing they can build these reactors in a year far from the five years it usually takes and at a much lower cost what's their secret their reactors won't be built on site as huge civil engineering projects they'll be built and assembled in shipyards jack diwani one of the founders and an mit professor has designed four of the largest oil tankers in the world his solution to the high costs and long time scales of nuclear power projects is to have a design that can be mass produced in a shipyard by people who already have experience with hard deadlines and exacting specifications the plant will be built in modules with work on several happening parallelly then it will be assembled and towed to its final location where it'll sit on the ocean floor and hook up to the local grid sounds incredible doesn't it well let's examine their claims and see how it works but before that let's examine our sponsor skillshare skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes for creative and curious people discover new skills explore existing interests and get lost in creativity it's curated specifically for learning meaning there are no ads and they're always launching new premium classes so you can stay focused and follow wherever your creativity takes you i've been working on youtube success script shoot and edit with mkbhd and it's full of insights about how to think about your workflow your audience and growing your channel whether you're a beginner or an old hand looking for something new skillshare has something for every level of expertise when you join you can try one of skillshare's live classes experience real-time inspiration as you connect with popular teachers while watching and working along with other members and it's not just the lessons skillshare also has a vibrant community where you can connect with fellow travelers for encouragement and inspiration the first thousand of my subscribers to click the link in the description will get one month free trial of skillshare so that you can start exploring your creativity today the key component of thor khan's design is the can this contains a pot through which the molten fuel salt is circulated and the primary heat exchanger through which the heat from fission is transferred to the rest of the plant when a uranium atom splits neutrons are produced these neutrons can either float away get absorbed or cause fission the pot contains rods of graphite and when we pump fuel salt into the pot the neutrons bump into the carbon atoms of the graphite and slow down these slow down neutrons are much more likely to cause fission when the neutrons released from one fission cause one more fission the reactor is said to be critical which means it generates a constant amount of heat the heat would be a problem if it just sat around so the fuel salt is circulated by a pump when it goes to the primary heat exchanger the secondary salt inside absorbs this heat which is then used to generate steam and as long as we remember to keep the steam under our pillow the turbine ferry will exchange it for electricity sometime during the night we call this the rankine cycle and it's what all coal power plants use the upside of this is that the power generation of thorcon's plant can just be from off the shelf components so what if the pump circulating the fuel salt fails the fuel salt will stop circulating and we won't be able to remove the heat from the pot if enough heat builds up the temperature will rise above their working temperature of 700 degree celsius and could weaken the steel here's where the liquidity of the fuel becomes useful remember fission only occurs when there's a moderator so they keep a little segment at the bottom of the pot frozen using helium when the temperature of the fuel salt rises beyond 750 degrees this section melts and the fuel salt does what liquids do it flows to the bottom into the drain tanks there is no moderator here sufficient can't happen but there will still be some heat produced due to the decay of fission products the elements that were formed when uranium split but that will be safely radiated to the cold wall which is a sandwich of water and two layers of steel there is enough water here to continuously remove heat for six months by that point the heat generated by fission products will be minimal and can be cooled by air but there is another property of molten salts that means that it probably won't ever come to this the criticality of a mass of uranium be it solid liquid or gas depends on how close the atoms are to each other when molten salts heat up they expand causing the uranium atoms to move further apart and the number of fission events to go down this is known as a negative temperature coefficient of reactivity the higher the temperature the fewer the number of fission events and because of this the fuel begins to cool down on its own without any operator intervention this also means that they can load follow meaning the power output adjusts itself based on the requirement coming in from the grid with their designs they can do this at a rate of five percent per minute above 50 percent which seems adequate according to eu rules it's a little slower under 50 but it can still be done this is important because there are a lot of renewables being installed and they likely have to work in grids with intermittent energy sources coming back to safety the last feature is one that's common to most nuclear plants three control rods any of which would stop the fission if inserted into the pot but let's be real here nuclear power plants already have an excellent safety record one of the best so while thoricon's design does have a lot of passive safety features they still need to tackle the biggest issue facing nuclear power today the cost so let's see what they're doing on that front the safety features we discussed just now do have a bearing on the cost in most reactors today we use water as a working fluid but to create steam with any reasonable efficiency it needs to be hot like 350 degrees celsius hot and the only way to keep it liquid at 350 degrees is to pressurize it if we lose pressure for any reason it'll turn into steam all at once and expand massively this expansion slash explosion can spread radioactive fission products into the environment which is the main risk with any pressurized water reactor to prevent this almost every nuclear plant has to make a containment building three feet thick walls of reinforced concrete to keep any radioactive material from escaping the molten salt fuel used by thorcon doesn't need high pressure to stay liquid its boiling point is 1400 degrees you're not walking as much of a knife edge there and have a bigger margin for temperature and pressure fluctuations even if the fuel salt does escape the pot somehow it'll just solidify into a solid mass there's no plausible method for dispersing it into the outside world and because of that you don't need a containment building that saves money and time but time is money so really just a lot of money and i didn't know this until we made a few videos about nuclear power but the cost of nuclear fuel is lower than both coal and natural gas you'd think it'd be really expensive to get uranium ore to a state where it's fit to be used in a nuclear plant but it really isn't you need so little of it for an equivalent amount of energy to coal that it's cues perceptions a bit the thing that makes nuclear power expensive is really the cost of borrowing money and how long it takes for the plant to be built because you'll only start getting money back once it's generating electricity here's a great video that deals with the economics of nuclear power in more detail for us it's efficient to know that the faster you can make a power plant the cheaper the electricity since starcon will leave the fabrication of the modules to shipyards a lot of the processes will have fixed costs like two thousand dollars per ton of high precision steel fabrication don't say i never give you knowledge to drop at parties and there are other benefits that come with a metro manufacturing system like definite schedules penalties for delays etc remember the more developed a process the closer the overall cost comes to the cost of the materials this is something every modular nuclear power plant talks about the economies of scale but they'll take a long time to get there in thor khan's case they already have a 3 000 year head start more if we're counting the elves of middle earth and shipyards aren't building ships 365 days a year they have plenty of reserve capacity according to thorcon enough to make 101 gigawatt plants every year that's like quarter of the total nuclear capacity we have today every year okay we'll give them the safety features and low cost but how do they deal with nuclear waste the graphite moderator in the pot will slowly wear out under high temperature and neutron radiation and they'll have to replace it every four years but instead of replacing just the moderator it's easier to replace the entire can the fuel salt will be pumped into a second canister while a thor con ship comes in to replace the first one the second canister will then run the fuel for another four years at the end of the eighth year the fuel salt will no longer be able to sustain fission then they'll pump it into a shipping cask and send it off to one of indonesia's 13 000 uninhabited islands we can reprocess this fuel to use again but uranium is pretty cheap so right now there's no economic incentive to do so but the time may come when we call upon it to make clean energy again possibly in fast neutron reactors like the one designed by elysium you should definitely check out that video too now the reason the fuel is able to last for eight years is because there's some thorium in there too remember how we said the neutrons from fission could float away get absorbed or cause more fission some of the thorium will absorb neutrons and turn into uranium-233 a great fissile fuel and in total 50 of the energy will come from thorium that's been converted to uranium-233 and uranium-238 that's been converted to plutonium it's not a full-on breeder reactor like kirk sorensen's lifter but it can still get that extra mile out of the fuel solid fuel needs to be replaced much sooner due to the buildup of gaseous neutron absorbing fission products inside the pellets thor con will be able to deal with these more easily since they'll bubble out of the liquid from there they'll be guided into a tank where they can safely decay away since fuel is constantly being burned up they'll need to keep topping it off with enriched uranium the next step for thorcon is to build a pre-efficient test facility this will help them see how their reactor responds to different situations they'll generate the heat electrically rather than using fission so this only tests the thermal performance of their salts the pumps etc allowing them to work out all the kinks on the non-nuclear front after this they'll get a 500 megawatt plant commissioned by the indonesian government which they'll bring online after extensive testing and if all goes well they'll look to add three gigawatts of total capacity to indonesia's grid their final journey will likely not be as straightforward as this the fuel they plan to use that is 20 enriched uranium may not be available immediately so they will have to go with a three percent enriched uranium this will require the fuel to be replaced every two years instead of eight they also have to convince a lot of people the russian floating nuclear plant for example wasn't exactly popular with the public fine this is not floating but it's an alien enough concept that is sure to raise some eyebrows not everyone knows that there have been lots of floating nuclear reactors they're actually pretty common and the hundred gigawatt capacity sounds great until you realize that most developing countries don't have that many nuclear engineers the plant may be really easy to operate but will still require a large well-trained workforce because the stakes are really high even one minor accident could set the industry back decades to their credit though they've built the reactor in such a way that catastrophic failure is really unlikely even in case of operator error while researching this topic i found a video where chris anderson was talking about this company if you aren't familiar with the name he's the guy behind ted this person has basically heard every single pitch for future energy battery breakthroughs life-changing technology the whole works most science youtube videos can probably be traced back to some ted talk well this guy also happens to be one of the principal investors of thor con that is not proof that this is the right way to go but it definitely shifts your priors his rationale for backing thor khan is that he sees it as something that's scalable because the machine that builds the machine already exists and yeah if we can mass produce extremely complicated piece of electronics like the smartphones if we can trivialize the manufacture of incredible machines like airplanes and cars then maybe the next step for humanity is mass producing power plants i hope you guys enjoyed this video and found it useful if you did please subscribe to the channel it really helps us out and also a shout out to gordon who has uploaded hundreds of hours of talks and conferences to his youtube channel his work enables a lot of secondary content like ours alright that's all for this time i'll see you really soon bye [Music] you

Channel: Tech for Luddites

Views: 263,838

Keywords: skillshare, nuclear power, thorcon

Id: uljEr4En6iY

Length: 16min 3sec (963 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/roger_ramjett]

Good to see that someone appreciates all the great work that Gordon has done for nuclear (and Thorium).

[u/PepSakdoek]

What's the timeline?

By when will they have this test power plant up and running, and by when can they mass produce?