ThorCon's Thorium Converter Reactor - Lars Jorgensen in Bali

hi I'm Lara she organs and with oricon but you see here to 500 megawatt power plants put is to the shape of large ship that can compete directly with coal can be deployed quickly and it includes everything to the power plant all the way through the electrical switch yard most directly to the transmission lines all these little circles are coal plants either operating or under construction or permanently getting ready to build developing nation as soon as I can afford power is going to buy the least expensive power which in today's world is hope so there's a lot of plans to expand with cold our goal is to give the odd nations another choice nuclear power and price directly competitive with coal in Indonesia nuclear power is reasonably well accepted to 77 percent pro-nuclear attitudes well we've been doing with Indonesia they've got light water reactors but they don't have any regulations for advanced reactors so they've been rewriting the regulations to allow non light water reactors an MSR within their guidance he says world's fourth largest country by population and he's a lot of new electricity before that trip they had blackout for eight hours in the capital city we became popular in the press because the 8-hour blackout was kind of a shock to the capital city this shows you a coal plant with a day's worth of fuel for the coal needs ten thousand tons ten thousands of tons of fuel today and it generates about a thousand tons of waste a day compare that to a nuclear power plant and we need about 0.1 tons of people a day and generate the same amount of waste we need a lot less fuel a lot less mining and you generate a lot less waste these two drawings are to scale once you get past and have generated the steam converting the steam to electricity is the same we're basically the same steam conditions as a coal plant that was done deliberately there are lot of companies that supply two generators for coal plants so the price competition there is pretty progressive that helps us hold the cost down but the other half of the plant is taking the fuel turning it into steam because you've got so much material to handle the coal plant is quite large much larger than powering the island and that leads to lower capex and our fuel costs so we believe that we should be able to compete directly with coal how do we do this a process developed in the u.s. at Oak Ridge National Labs done by the same math key and developing the light water reactor but he felt that we could do a better job what he built was the reactor based on molten salt rather than water a light water reactor uses water as its primary coolant it wants to turn to steam and we could get over a hundred degrees C at one atmosphere your water will turn to steam but 100 degrees C is not hot enough to generate power really so they get it up to 300 degrees C but to keep it liquid they have to put it under 160 are pressing 160 atmospheres of pressure to squeeze it in which means you need thick pipes if anything goes wrong that steam wants out it's going to expand deliver a pressure wave or whatever vessels are containing it that makes the engineering more difficult molten salt reactor experiment was one of the most important and I must say brilliant achievements of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory we're using salt as our primary coolant 500 degrees C or so it will melt to become a liquid very much like water but it won't boil until 1400 degrees C we operate between 565 and 704 so we have about 700 degrees of March and before we boil in other words we will always be a liquid we will never turn to a vapor if there's any kind of problem there's no big pressure and if there is any kind of leak it's going to just spill on the floor like you see how to water Oakridge actually builds a megawatt thermal reactor for to do the prototyping experiments when they finished that learned everything they could they developed plans for what to do next they had several different proposals the most conservative one was salt demonstration reactor the scale of the molten salt experiment reactor that they already did that one was to be 350 megawatts electric not to be a breeder fluid reactor we have more materials to choose from and we're going to ship them to be more of a shipyard production computers are a lot more powerful now we have a lot more software so we can use that to improve the design we've taken that same idea and that's what we're marching forward with just to do it as simple as possible to get to the market as quickly as we can and our main focus is of course safety but keep the cost down where's Thor Khan come from it's a thorium converter you can have plants generate their own fuel so they will take a common material like thorium or uranium 238 and convert it to fissile that kind of a reactor is not as it was something that the world has been trying to do for quite some time the u.s. tried and gave up Frank's tried and gave up Japan tried and a bus the Russians have managed to get a couple going but it's hard it's quite difficult to get a breeder to really work we're satisfied with a converter so it means that we have to keep adding fuel we have to buy enriched uranium and keep adding it our primary concern is cost in 50 100 years that is a problem that does need to be solved but it's not a problem that needs to be solved today uranium-235 will finish it by itself so that's what we have to buy but we can also have thorium 232 and when it gets a neutron it will become 233 which a couple of decay steps become uranium 233 and that's also designed and there's a similar process with uranium 238 if you add a neutron if it comes to 39 then a couple of case plutonium 239 which is beside only three ways that we get physics in our process the core is about 85% 4m and 15 percent uranium 25 percent of our vision comes from uranium 233 that we got from the thorium and about 25 percent comes from different flavors of plutonium that we've generated so we generate about half our own fuel they have to buy off houses over time I can see R&D projects to increase that but the key emphasis now is if the plant built as soon as we camera this is a picture of the full power plant built in the shape of a home based on a tanker design over here we have a vision Island this little strip here on this side of it removal process and heat exchangers before we get to the main turbine and then the generator in front of the turbine you see low pressure people water heaters the deviator and then the high pressure people are here's you've got to heat up the water before you put it into the steam generator and that's the steam generator there once you get through this whole section you've got electricity at 25 kilowatts but also about 25 killing ants in order to put that on a transmission line you need to step it up typically to 275 kilovolts or perhaps even 500 millivolts and the current will step down proportionately so that's what these transformers are we have three transformers for three-phase grid and we store a fourth transformer missus pair because the transformers are probably the most likely component to break and we don't want the delay transformer goes out it needs to be replaced we want to be able to do that very quickly right outside you have the switchyard gear with the circuit breakers and such you're parked right near the shore but you're gonna have an overhead transmission line we also have an option to subsea cable so if you want to park five or 10 or 20 kilometers offshore that's perfectly feasible if you're going to park a long ways off shore for example we looked at one site in Europe between London and Belgium and there we would have to go 50 to 80 kilometers and for that one high voltage DC which is something you can also put in as an option into this switch here you see the big sea water pumps about 15 metres tall they're not small banks big pond of water we use that to remove the decay heat another pond of water here which is a backup for that but as you look at this you can see that the vision Island is a rather small part of the jump includes even and desalination plant make up water for the turbines we have our own built-in crane to move stuff around everything is accessible by hatches the yellow squares those are hatch covers because we're at low pressure we can have very large doors those doors are 10 meters by 10 meters and about 500 tons but the crane can lift them and then it gives direct access to the components inside the power plant so that we could change out anything that needs to be changed for example the steam generator typically will last about 30 years and so we anticipate that we will have to change it out in time to time we have seen in the u.s. light water reactors reinforced concrete containment dome because the pressure can get so high the door and small not big enough to take the steam generator out so when they've kind of replace the steam generator I've had to cut through the concrete to get to the steam generator even have one power plant that got lost because when they cut through the concrete it didn't detention those steel cables first and so the concrete steel delaminated and they couldn't repair it so they lost a power plant in that way for us it's just adorable we lift it so we have two cans one that operates and generates power the other one that has finished his job of generating power and is now in cooldown mode inside the can is the moderator that's graphite and that will wear out after about four years then take the fuel move it over to the other camp let the radiation decay away before we take it out and ship it back for replacing the graphite you can also see heat exchangers here in the steam generator this is a silo Hall region here right above the reactors no strength is low enough that workers can be there full-time back you probably will get less radiation being inside here than if you were up on top this type of bomb will block the cosmic rays and you can see the motors are accessible up here there are some variable frequency controllers that also control the speed of the motors all that sort of thing we want to have access to so we put them up above people the spent fuel is below here which lets us be both a radiation barrier but also the safeguards barrier the door that lets you get two of these complements down here is 400 tonnes and would have IAEA safeguard alarms attached to it you have no reason to want to open those doors on short notice so every four years you need to call the IAEA and it's time to you'll let their expect to have a chance to come and then open it up Luther refueling and that close inspector then reseal that there's also seals and alarms from underneath so there's no way to disable them this is their overhead picture where you can see the different pieces from the nuclear island the heat exchangers the steam generator the turbine you can see the terminal it's a pretty big component and then the generator and then the switch chart over here you see the decay heat removal ponds these are dedicated just for the decay they're not used for the primary heat path that primary path uses one through ocean water forward this gives you the temperatures and the pressures in the various loops we have four loops the primary loop has the fuel salt in it along with officially the fuel but also the vision products will be there they stay inside the can the secondary salt here goes into the can into the primary heat exchanger then comes out mostly hot air goes in at 4:54 and comes out at 6:21 they goes around to a secondary heat exchanger the secondary salt is the salt that is compatible with the fuel salt and is always at higher pressure so if there ever is a leak in the primary heat exchanger leak secondary salt into the primary loop rather than the other way around that way we keep the radioactivity inside the camp then the third loop is nitrates who I use is something we call solar salt it's used in thermal solar plants it is very compatible with moisture there's a leak in the steam generator it won't have any noticeable chemical reaction with the solar salt and also if you have tritium which we will get some pretty on because we have vision and we have brilliant prescient the tritium can go through hot metal so it will go through these heat exchangers but when it gets to the oxygen that's in the nitrate it'll get trapped and it will stay there then that goes through a rather standard turbine generator because we don't have so much material to move we don't have machinery moving ten thousand tons and scrubbers and all that our house smaller than a coal plant and we don't lose power up the flue because Nicole plan you have exhaust gases which you lose about 10 percent of your energy we don't have that so we get efficiencies that are higher than what you'll get in it difficult whole plan typical coal plant will get about 44 percent efficiency if we're in sea water that's at 30 degrees C it's pretty warm sea water we get forty six percent forty six and a half and if we're at 20 degrees C it'll be about forty seven point seven here you get to see a little bit better scale of things you can see a couple of people here who we've taken off the can so you can start to see a little bit of what's inside of it that is the reactor vessel itself there here's the cam this is really where the part of the accent goes on you have the reactor vessel we call it the pot it's full of graphite it's about ninety percent graphite graphite serves as a moderator the slows down the neutrons hits us to be critical so you have a spot here which is nearly spherical in shape gives us our critical mass as soon as you leave there you're in taller pipe do not critical anymore so the fission will stop very quickly as the salt leaves goes up into this header tank where you have a big pump and that pushes Salter out into this blue one which is the primary heat exchanger so it goes in at 7:04 the salt comes out at 565 and the secondary salt goes in and out of that same heat exchanger we're moving the heat from fuel salt to the secondary salt a lot of the fission products will become either xenon or Krypton one of the nice things about liquid fueled reactor is seen on Krypton you not have my solubility in the salt at all they will bubble up they're going to come out so we go ahead and help them come out and then have a sweet gas of helium to push it along into these off gas tanks where radioactive xenon and Krypton can decay away and after its decay for about a week it'll come out of there and go into additional tanks very bottom here you can see a little great thing that's the priests valve the salt is flowing around in this loop here but there's a pipe that leads from the very low slot in the primaries and that pipe has a section that's been flattened and cool teal sprayed on the outside of the pipe it keeps that spot of the pipe cold that freezes the salt and makes a plug to keep seven pipe look if at any time you cut off the flow of cold helium that plug will melt and the fuel salt will drain by grounding down into the drain tanks here 32 of them that are spread around in a circle the exact opposite forming critical mass which spread the fuel out as much as we can it also has a lot of surface area to volume ratio so that there's a lot of surface area to radiate heat from the drain tank into this blue area here which is our pool wall so the cooled wall is steel then about half a meter of water and steel so the heat that's in the fuel will heat up the outsides of these drink tanks and then it'll radiate across this argon gas yeah keep the steel that's on the cold wall which will boil the water that's on the other side of that steel those bubbles will go up so the heat will flow naturally from these out and up you can see more detail the freeze valve design and debunked by Oakridge or their msre we took advantage of all the work they did we needed four times the throughput so we just put that four copies there you can see the platen freeze valve but was warm in this cold wall they would go up and then they'd go over to this radiator which is sitting in that pond of cold water that will heat up that water and cause evaporation will condense the steam that's gone up the cold wall and that will then be returned to the basement where it will come back in at the bottom there are no vowels in the system it's always on there's nothing an operator or Prime Minister can do to stop it freeze valve will open the salt will come down into the drain tanks that are hidden by this nice pretty blue thing and then the heat will be pulled out from there and all of that is something that requires no electricity requires a machinery there's no operator action no maintenance worker can leave about the wrong spot it's what we've observed is that every one of our nuclear accidents I'm involved people during the off days so we've made it so that if a person does the wrong thing that we have to we'll by physics shut itself off and remove the decayed you know dish to this passive cooling we also have lot of spare basement water yeah a terrorist came along with his scuba gear and he welded shut that pipe there's a blowout panel the water that goes in here and turns to steam would expand and press on and blow out that panel and then that will go into a quench pipe that's in the basement water here so that we would be boiling off the water that's in this section and dumping it into this basement that will give us four months to respond in that case though you are willing waiting water this part of this cooling system so you got to get in there but that would be if a terrorist attack the power plant and I would expect you'll be there within four hours not four months this is on the order of 7 meters across and about 12 meters tall and that's providing enough power for 250,000 people so get a lot of power out of a relatively small space we have three shut down rods any one of them can shut down the power plan to stop fission you can see them here they're not very large they're just about this big triple redundancy they're operate with a magnetic catch if you go over temperature the electricity to the magnetic catch is cut off the rods will fall by gravity I mentioned that xenon and Krypton want to come out they are about 40% of division products we can grab 25 or 30 percent of all the fission products by pulling off dance off there's a gas headspace above the head of tank around the tent to let these you know they're going to come out and then we have a sweet gas at about two liters per minute the xenon and Krypton are generated about one liter per hour those going into these tanks they're still inside the cannon to let the most intense part of the radioactivity die down for about a week it goes over into these two very large tanks so that's almost 500 cubic meters worth where the longer the fission products will decay away by the time we get to here we'll be down to just the tritium and Krypton 85 that will go over to a cold trap which will separate out the xenon which at this point is no longer radioactive that into models and we will also separate out the crypto and put that into a bomb and then there's a gunner together any oxygen or tritium that had leaked into the system salt is not corrosive unless you get oxygen and moisture in there so we continuously remove down to parts per million all the oxygen moisture tritium is generated and some of it will go with the salt so with the off gas that will grab that and then we'll compress it and send it back around so we have a closed loop for our helium inside a camp is grant - the moderator neutrons that strike the carbon atoms will move the body place and eventually that makes the graphite sweat so first shrink by 2% and then it will start swelling when it gets back to its original size we say okay it's done now and we need to replace it we don't try to replace it power plant site instead we leave the graphite inside the pot which is inside the can we'll take the whole can out and we put it into a specially designed ship which we call the can ship design for international standards for transport of nuclear materials this ship will also bring a replacement camp so every four years the ship comes behind brings in fresh cans takes out the old cans and brings in fresh fuel takes out field through and that's what this big sturdy crane is for that allows us to do a thorough inspection of all the parts inside the tin so that we can replace any other parts that are wearing out the bearings will have a life of about 16 years with I'll have to be replaced periodically there's filter in there that probably gets replaced every four years it's just a few things that will need to be replaced regularly the primary metals generally will not need to be replaced this ship can take shallow-draft so it can go up rivers as well as go through the ocean bring the knees I think will be almost entirely ocean based but in many other places we need to be able to go up major rivers safety is intrinsic that is it's going to do it automatically without any electricity people or machinery first one is to stop the vision we talked about shut down rods dropping automatically not backed up by salt heating up losing its reactivity as a good form so that stops the vision that's job one job two is to remove the decay heat by having the fuel salt drain into the and radiate their heat into this wall and I'm into the decayed removal pond and the third job is to be sure that we keep all the fission products contained sufficient products are mostly inside the primary you but definitely inside the cannon which is inside the silo inside the hull can is 25 millimetres of steel but has no pressure it's the same pressure on the outside is inside and it doesn't have corrosive gases it's got elia more argon around it so it's in a very benign environment the drain tanks are thinner they're about 10 millimeters thick but again the same thing and their whole diameters so their poop stress is small the camp is at about 350 C so it's not even very warm the drink tank does get warm when the soul is put into it but that doesn't last for a long time so the cumulative Dupre damage is smaller beyond the first barrier we have a second barrier which is the steel that's part of the side of the wall and the floor that's above it that's also a gas tight barrier at 740 degrees C and a few bars pressures so it's under no stress as far as steel is concerned unlike a light water reactor if there is an accident and somehow the salt gets to the first barrier it doesn't push a whole bunch of pressure onto the second barrier and the final one is the chip hull itself 25 millimetres of steel and three meters of concrete 25 millimetres of steel so it's a very robust barrier and it also serves as the barrier against aircraft stream what would happen to this plan if you had something like Fukushima what an earthquake happens it sentence out two ways the first travel is very fast but doesn't induce much motion in fact most people wouldn't notice it but we have sensors to notice it and they have them in Fukushima so in that first wave yet the sensors sought and dropped the shutdown rods and turned off fishing when the main earthquake hit the vision had already been stopped the plant was in shutdown mode the plant survived the earthquake just fine so for the next 45 minutes cooling down and removing the decay tees but then the tsunami in it when the tsunami hit that took out the cooling system then because it wasn't being gold you had problems with decay heat causing the zirconium to release hydrogen and the hydrogen explosion for us we have that same for a scenario the earthquakes would drop the shutdown province and started raining all fishermen stopped we would lose the primary cooling but now we're draining the maximum salt temperature gets to 750 C which is still below even where you start humiliating in degree damage you're still within spec for what the stainless steel oven tolerate we could have a worse accident imagine an earthquake so bad it knocked out all of the electricity right away that's noticeably worse it's really a big benefit to have that first 45 minutes of cooling that kind of an accident would take out any light water reactor around but in our case we lose the power and there's little shutdown run strong and the freeze valve starts to melt takes about 10 minutes for the freestyle to melt and then fuel salt drains and passively pools because once it in the drain tanks the cooling isn't automatic in that case we hit a maximum temperature of 850 C create a very very slight amount of creep damage the worst one would be instance station blackout and triple failure on the shutdown rods so all shutdown rods failed and lost all electricity instantly in that case the temperature starts climbing and what stops the pigeon will be around the salt gets to 800 degree C but that's about 80 seconds and then it climbs from there so at the end of that very bad accident the salt would have gotten to a thousand degrees C and we've suffered creep damage for about half of 1% of the steel life obviously since the shutdown rod said work we would say this can is condemned and replace it but there was no release he-men is very worst of accidents I told you we designed this like a ship North Atlantic storms can give you 9 meter tall waves accelerate your ship by 1g here you see finite element model of the ship the blue line that sort of waiting long is the wave and we did a bunch of different way of patterns we had to do a little bit of adjustment to add some light strength steel here and there where there was a biggest stress but we were able to design this to tolerate one g-forces designing it to be able to be totally meant that we've designed it to tolerate quite severe earthquake what happens with an aircraft strapped for the ask majority of the plane didja stumbles planes are made deliberately to be as light as possible so when they get something salted like what we have the plane itself would just crumble to dust but the engine has some stuarti components in it well we actually modeled was the engine itself flying at 200 meters per second which is a pretty good clip to try to fly when you're down at sea level let's get you're pretty close to supersonic speeds where the plane can just rip itself apart the engine didn't penetrate the steel on the outside then it bumped into all that concrete it pushed the concrete enough that it dented the inner wall by 300 millimeters but it didn't penetrate the inner wall so we were able to survive the maximum speed right at 90 degrees aircraft strike the next question is how we're gonna deal with earthquakes we're going to be resting on the seabed not floating so we will feel a little bit of the earthquake but a fair amount of sand below us if it's not natural sand that will prepare the seabed with the hem the stand won't transmit strong forces if you try to move something hard against the sand you're gonna slide over the top of it rather than moving the whole sand so you can have a strong earthquake here and over 1g the sand will give way so that the hulls only sees about point 3 G's in addition the can is offended with basically shock absorbers so there's an attenuation between how the hull moves and how the camera moves another concern we'd have to watch out for is tsunamis we are after all at sea level the hull is 30 meters taller and typically we'll be in 510 meters of water so you'll have 20 or so meters of pre-board tsunami comes along and it's less than 20 meters it's not going to do much we would recommend you not put yourself in a specific tsunami zone to get a large highways Nami you really need a land structure that looks like a lens to focus that tsunami and focus all that energy goes all space there's relatively few places like that so most of the places you could choose would have much much smaller tsunamis if you are at a place that has a larger potential you can put heavier ballast which means it's floating to the site and we balanced it down we have water and cement to make it heavier so sickness upon what about the waste for nuclear power waste is actually one of our advantages compared to our competitors it's only when you're compared against perfection that you could try to make that a big problem this is a picture of the waste from a coal plant coal plant generates 100 thousands of times more waste than a nuclear lab they generate so much waste they can't afford to put it in containers and make big piles out of it ladies out of it even in the u.s. there's or turn into slush and break its dam and go wipeout town it's happened more than once crews are using heavy equipment to clear away sludge that inundated a neighborhood near Hermann Tennessee five point four million cubic yards coal ash residue that comes from burning coal to create electricity at the power plant that is run by the Tennessee Valley Authority that ash is now entered into the neighborhood entered into the land and most importantly into two rivers here in the Tennessee River watershed this is all the waste from a light water reactor twenty-eight years 450 megawatts and you can see people standing here it's not a radiation area just air cooled they're basically just sitting there in a parking lot the plan is that this is Bhutan's responsibility and they will find an uninhabited island and that will provide enough storage to let you store all of the waste from all the nuclear power plants if you use only nuclear power for generating your electricity for the next hundred years that is baseline plan so if you will last in the plant for 16 years it cools on board for at least for maybe up to 12 years warm before we try to ship it we put it into a special shipping caps and we put that on the can ship when we take it to wherever that storage site is there's option where we can add five meters of length to the hull and then we can store it on board what we've seen in practice in the United States is the government never got around to building the interim storage area so it's been stored on-site if you want to do that we can do that as well we can store inside the hull just invite metres of space 80 years worth of operating plan that also help you visualize them this is not a lot of stuff why do we building issues because that's what we've done before this is the world's largest double hull oil tanker if our founder designed it supervised its building and operated it up for those and the last one took less than a year ago it's about twice the size of one of our plans we have experience we know how to build this we've got a design to make it suitable for the art to build and that can cost ninety million dollars the building we've got an estimate from a shipyard for building 75 percent of the cost for three hundred fifty million dollars which is in line with our estimates of about $2 a lot what's a shipyard look like well we have panel lines divide the design down into blocks that are 300 to 500 tons each and they'll be worked on a parallel so you could have a hundred different pieces of the powerplant being worked on in parallel what the blocks are all finished they are assembled and ride off into the whole ship you can test each block as it's built so each block has finished we're going to test to be sure that all the connections are there and inspected in such Deveny block didn't pass we can go back and rework that block while the other 99 blocks keep on continuing that's how the shipyards can sign contracts for firm fixed price for fixed schedule and plan on building this in a year that's a sharp contrast to building light water reactors where bill time of 10 years is pretty common what you see here in this picture is about five welding machines and one person in the yard they actually run about 80 machines in parallel and one person operating it on this time you see the shipyard itself one of these shipyards could turn out 21 Giga watt power plants each year there's enough surplus capacity in the world to deliver about 200 gigawatts worth of power plants was our design in a year there's a lot of surplus shipbuilding capacity world but that says is we can build these power plants to satisfy the full demand whatever people need we can build on that fast as a contrast to light water reactor where you've got these thick fortunes that only a very few people in the world would make I think there's one in Japan one in France one in China they're limited in how fast they can build up but we can build on so where are we with our program currently in design we expect it'll take about one year from when we get full funding to be able to finish the design specs get them reviewed by vendors it is iam I'd be ready to build something and then about one year to build what we call pre-fishing test platform we test that one for a year again it's pre vision so there's no vision going on so it's not intensely radioactive once we debug we can go to demonstration plant so this would be a 500 megawatt power plant that would take about a year and then about two years or testing that plant at that point will be six years into the program we expect to do this in conjunction with the regulators so they will review the test plans they will be present to witness to test so it won't finish the test they will already have finished their regulatory work and then we need to write up the last little bit of the last test so we should be able to get a license very shortly after we finish the last test and at that point it started production takes about a year to build and about a year to do the start of the tests that need to be done before it can be on grid two years from the time that you have the order site license and you have the local building permits before we can put power on the grid it lets you respond quickly to changes in demand if the plant was cold like it would be when we first installed power plant we use diesel which is about one megawatt electric to preheat the ox oiler and run pumps then we use dogs boiler which is about 50 megawatts thermal to heat up the salt from piping and the turbine generator and it generates steam flow through the turbine we use the century turbine to use that steam to generate 15 megawatts Electric that provides house low power so it can start pumping salts and seawater in such around we can then transition to hot standby or Island mode where we use normal nuclear eat and come down the primary heat transport path to a century turbine all of this would be covered by the nuclear side then we pick up with the century turban and we can sit in that mode for days years and then when you want to ramp up to power up the grid we have to be sure that our control system understands that you are bringing up the grid so we why in the window of what is acceptable behavior we're spending right now 60 year design life or 200 starts I want to push that up to 80 year design life I think there should be no problem with that four year overhaul for a turbines typical is three were pushing a little further to coincide with when we're changing the cans and then we have automatic voltage controls that if you want us to be the primary frequency control or a secondary voltage control we can play those roles I would expect for the demonstration plant our focus will be base load and once that is well in hand that will move on to being able to do more load following this is a test plant full-scale use this electricity for heat since we don't have any fission around 10 megawatts above heat we can use that run puffs at 120% to full speed and verify that we don't get any vibrations in the pipes that everything is snug down appropriately with the right kind of shock absorbers we can even emulate accents for example drayton salt and turn the heaters on there in the drain tanks from mimic the heat that's generated by decay to verify the cold wall will extract that gate and send it up to the decay heat removal part C scale with the people there this is a rather large structure it's about 30 meters cube we can test the salt running at full speed with a small delta T on the salt at a low speed with a large delta T so it can test a lot of things but we can't do full speed and large delta T because I would be too much in transport and we can't test any of the neutronics but it will have thorium and uranium in it it will be the right density the right chemistry I can test the sensors being able to verify the redox and other possessions what is the most critical paths in the best bet if this path they're all good to go I would think that would be the Fukushima type cast do a sudden drain use like heat the salt in the drain tanks light the gate if you look at the accidents both Three Mile Island and Fukushima were accident the final trigger was Katie they didn't give it the safety system is very confined in a small space and this fully passive makes it a lot easier to analyze you look at the safety system a light water reactor you have to have a safety system that can overcome very high pressure and force liquid in there it has to be able to retain high pressure the safety system online water reactor is a very impressive piece of engineering but takes some impressive analysis for the regulator to even decide what I say in our case because it is fully passive is something that is much more clear than it's safe when you get a very complicated system then you guys start thinking about what if this and then this in the back you get a lot of combinatorial it can happen you look at any of the accidents it hasn't been one thing that's failed it's been when you get a combination of three or four things that were seemingly independent that things went bad you need the results from this house when we go for the regulator because they have to sign off that this plant can be safe they have to be convinced I think seeing it work is going to be a lot more convincing than seeing our computer perhaps also this platform will serve as a testbed for design improvements so once we've built it if you have a better idea for what to do with the can quick install it here and test it out here before we put it in a real react likewise for lots of other companies so it becomes a long-term test platform for us all right

Channel: gordonmcdowell

Views: 86,516

Rating: 4.9287534 out of 5

Keywords: ThorCon, Molten-Salt Reactor, Thorium, Advanced Nuclear, Bali, Indonesia, Lars Jorgensen, Thorium Converter, liquid fuel

Id: oB1IrzDDI9g

Length: 39min 20sec (2360 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 03 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/sdrdude]

Super interesting! It's such a good idea, I'm focused on what might be the downsides?

Everyone needs electricity. THAT need is only going to increase. Cleaner and safer are always better. No matter what you believe about fuel sources, they all have impacts on society, especially if they can be depleted, or need to be defended by a military, or when "best used" still cause some pollution.

We need clean & safe solutions. This is really thought provoking. Thanks for your post.

[u/pr-mth-s]

I think there are two reasons, which merge to the proximate reason which is you can barely begin to get the beginning permits, I imagine. Whichever country you are in. oh maybe Bali

One reason, yes, is because the Greens are full of crap (and are too dumb to even know it) and Thorium power would wreck their careers.

The other is a kind of legacy, which may or may not have been legitimate at the time (or now) which I was told second hand by a physicist who worked in the nuclear industry briefly. Possibly kind of like the bottom waistcoat button thing going on since Henry VIII. Except only tracing back to Nixon.. The security agencies may still believe it.

Also if someone does something in China, it does not mean 'the Chinese' are doing it - it means they are considering it.