Thorium Debate / Molten Salt Reactor Forum @ ThEC2018

the core developers are joined me it's Kirk sourcing from live energy talk to us earlier today about his lifter design and in Lars from Thor con and as Island molten salt reactor then Charles from Seaborg oxides compact design and then Ralph from NRG in our Gees as history and sort of a research laboratory but now is a privately owned company so that wasn't like all of these guys to answer before we take questions for the audience's we've already heard about the work that you're doing your your design of what what is the biggest hurdle for you and your company and and what's your hope for or plan to overcome that girl so what's the biggest hurdle for you you know I know various people have had various levels of success with this I know C Board recently got some got some great funding and Denmark congratulations to them but you know we've been in business now for seven years and and fundings always been our hardest challenge a little more success recently but it still remains the the limiting effect in all this I do really want to thank though the US Department of Energy lately I I may have been hard on them in the past but boy lately they've really been coming coming around big time for the advanced reactor community not just for our company but for a lot of others and and I know that Thor Khan has also been a recipient of a do a funding and you're pretty happy about that right sir okay so yeah I'd echoed the comment about funding it's paired with politics the investors they're not so scared about the technology they're scared that the politicians won't let them build it and the politicians are scared they don't want to stick their neck out supporting at least a controversial topic like building a nuclear power plant unless they see that we actually have real money to build one with so we have a chicken-and-egg and it's it's a dance to try it can you take a baby step forward and then I can go back to the vest and get a baby step forward but yeah it's been a road well it's not I'm not saying that funding is easy but I'm not going to say funding is the hardest challenge I think licensing there's a lot of claims in moto salt reactors and also around thorium that that we need to go out then prove it's true it's just not enough that it works in simulations or on paper you need to show that it's true and that comes in stages and it takes a long time and and one of the issues today is that the regulatory system is closed for some reactions that that are already there so so so that's a really really big challenge I think it can't be done and and I actually think it's somewhat challenging that a lot of people is trying to change the regulatory system too because ultimately the molten salt reactor should comply to the same safety regulations as anything else namely that it's safe reactors in general have tried to get around that and and but in doing so they have made a very very hot regulation regime that is that it's now hard for us to overcome because we have to comply to the same regulations that can be done it's just a tremendous amount of work and we saw today energy I think it was talking about this loop which is 50 million euro to do a simple loop test and that test is not enough alone I think it can be done easy and cheaper than 50 million for that loop but but we need a series of such experiments and and a big challenge yeah now I wanted to say technology because we provide services to startups about its funding and licensing yeah we have funding but it's for research and not for scaling up to the real qualification and the integral of testing we have a license to operate the reactor so we could build the experiment that I am following from from a little bit of a distance the discussion between startups and regulatory commission and of course what I'm really interested in is what what is in the end the Commission the Regulatory Commission going to ask from the from the from the startups so that is not even clear at the moment so I would have to say licensing let me let me just comment I don't mean to be the the Junior Nuclear Regulatory Commission person here but I've gone to enough meetings and particularly in Washington DC and I've heard enough people from the NRC talk at least from the US perspective that they'll say hey you know we're not gonna be your we're not gonna hold you up we're not gonna be the ones they're gonna stop you they do say come to us with a complete application in other words don't show up with ideas don't go up and say molten salt reactors are great because he's you know fine maybe molten salt reactors are great because but you've got to come to us with a design and then you've got to give us a design and you got to let us look at it and we have to be able to ask you questions about it and and get the information we need if we reach the end of that we'll give you a license but but we're not going to give you a bad time just because you're different in private discussions with a number of people from the NRC they recognize the simplified nature of of an abundance of aspects of the molten salt reactor that they realized oh this is gonna be easy this is very difficult right now it's all field reactors this will be a piece of cake bonesaw branches but then there's other things of course off gas handling is one nobody talks about off gas handling but yet the NRC is gonna be real interested in that so I I can see where the regulator is coming from they want to have about 200 million dollars worth of design work done before they're ready to tell you whether you get a license but as Lars puts it you know you guys to get that money you know and you have to take a step and you have to get a step forward with your investors Canada goes forward and says okay well we're going to give you this kind of baby step approach we're gonna let you do a little we'll tell you a little you do a little more a kind of thing I think the u.s. is moving in that direction I know that they're watching carefully the Canadian regulator and they're trying to move out so that the Regulatory Commission's are going to ask you to bring the evidence that you think is needed the a completed design and then they'll then they'll ask you a bunch of mean questions after that I mean you're making me defend the NRC again it was said in humor I mean it let's all be realistic though we want nuclear regulatory services nobody wants to live in a country that doesn't have nuclear regulatory services we don't want somebody messing around with nuclear technology in an unsafe way I want to live in a country with nuclear regulatory services so in behalf of our fellow citizens we owe it to them to respect the regulatory bodies and to try to do everybody's trying to do the best job that they can you know and we can - alright let's take some questions from the audience being from thorak on thorium converter thorium is part of our name it's also key to public acceptance in Indonesia thorium is viewed differently than current nuclear reactors so it gives you the opportunity to have a conversation with somebody without them having a very strong opinion when you start the conversation in truth for the neutronics it's a thermal reactor so thorium is nicer that way and it does produce less plutonium that doesn't mean zero because we got to meet with the low enriched uranium requirements so we've got u-238 in there we can make it work either way if it was a pure scientist I'd say it doesn't matter but it's not pure science it's also politics the most important thing about a new reactor is not that it's radically different not that it uses the least amount of fuel not even that it produces the least amount of waste in the developing world it's cost number two is cost number three is cost you have to be safe but after that it's pure cost so you got to look at the whole reactor design to say well what is your total cost when you're done and I think we can make a decent case that a an MSR either pure uranium or with a mix of uranium and thorium does work well for cost okay and from my vantage point I don't need reprocessing now I need cheap power plants now and build them before they build those coal plants and then we'll have the money to do the rest all right I'm sitting next to to Lars I might get a whack in the head when I say this but personally I don't actually think you should use thorium in a molten salt reactor unless it's a breeder I think the whole point of thorium is to achieve breeding and to achieve a conversion ratio greater than one so I'll bet that's Thomas yeah I I didn't even have to look to know it was Thomas if you are below a conversion ratio of one then you are just reducing the amount of enrichment that you need and you're only reducing the amount of plutonium there's a stepwise effect that happens at one so quite personally if I was working on molten salt reactors that were not breeders that did not have a conversion ratio of one or greater I wouldn't put thorium in them I would run them on uranium for me why am i using thorium because I want to eliminate the production of transionic waste I want to maximize the use of a resource that can last for billions of years and I want to produce key Medical Radio isotopes they can only be produced in that way that's why I want to do thorry no rebuttal I gotta give the other guy a chance so so it's not that I don't see thorium is a great thing um a few years back I mean when we started we wanted to use thorium there's some nice implications for thorium one really nice application which is where we started this if you mix thorium and nuclear waste you can actually get this nuclear waste to reduce over time and get rid of some of the old nuclear waste while you're producing uranium 233 for for modern or for the next generation thorium reactors and that's that's a nice feature and there are also a couple of other nice features but like there's four times more thorium so we have four hundred of thousands of years instead of tens of thousands of years from immediately available sources but then not long into our development project process we kind of realized that let's list the pros and cons here and if you list what are the the upsides in using molten salt reactors and thorium in two different lists you see that there's basically 50 upsides from molten salt reactors and and one or two small ones not even important ones from from using thorium then you list development effort needed and you just see that ten percent of the effort in deploying a thorium operating motor soldier axis is the molten salt reactor so you you at least you you need five times to work to deploy a thorium using molten salt reactor so basically the strategy it's not that we don't want to use thorium we actually hope to use thorium but there's some thorium is an X a night which behaves different chemically than the other X and adds it gives a lot of proliferation issues and you need to talk to the IAEA and politics on on a scale where it's it's inside its behind close for their walls because it's its proliferation issues so there's a lot of issues with this but then why not build them all to soldier X and once you have earned your first billions then you can probably talk to the politicians and then maybe you will be able to deploy something using thorium which is has a better Neutron the economy or had a better reactor economy but you need some incentive and today we don't really see the in sense if we just see a lot of obstacles to it then then now using the word thorium we could use that more because there's a big community here who has been using a thorium a lot and a lot of people have been using it and it's actually going into politics now that the word our problem is when we look at communication we kind of see that when you say the word thorium reactor I am I at least it used to be a scientist and and humble doing business but but as a scientist kind of I don't like the feeling of saying thorium reactors because it's not a defined word what is a thorium reactor is it like they want to do with dorkon and in Norway know the story energy in Norway where they want to put thorium into a conventional reactor because in that case it's a conventional reactor which is slightly with a slightly improved neutral economy okay that's nice or is it a molten salt reactor with thorium and it's reducing a blanket because then it's basically very suited for weapons is it I mean no so there's a lot of different uses so when the word is not defined you kind of talk to all of these different talk about all of these different technological branches and and that's problematic because out there when people are evaluating what you can do they will be looking at motor salt reactors and they will take the con list of developing thorium and that's not the case so separating the two into molten salt reactors and thorium is somewhat important to us yeah I would say okay okay because you gotta give brauch or else not a director design so just very briefly I think that each startup has a lot of battles to fight and they have to pick their battles so I can really understand why some of them simply want to start with five percent enriched uranium it's the easiest to come by and the easiest way to start a reactor and the other thing is that it's the level of reprocessing that you want to do so if you decide not to do any reprocessing then you probably very very probably cannot build at Orion breeder so then that's very different for a short amount of time for two days so yeah maybe if I could like it exercise a rebuttal opportunity here for trolls I would say what's a thorium reactor a thorium reactor is a breeder if you're one point over greater on conversion ratio you're a thorium reactor because now you're actually consuming thorium as a fuel he's right if you're below 1.0 you're not consuming thorium as a fuel now as I said a moment ago why use thorium if your conversion ratio is less than 1 personally I wouldn't I wouldn't because honestly if your conversion ratio is less than 1 that means you are still having to feed this machine fissile material you're gonna have to feed it u-235 you're gonna have to be - plutonium your feet of something but it's otherwise it'll turn off it'll run out of reactivity now if you have a reactor like that and you're trying to run it let me let me rebut it why not even a molten salt uranium reactor because one of the great advantages of molten salts is that they are continuously march nice reaction ores you put stuff in it gets mixed with everything else just like me making cookies in the in the mixer at home you know everything gets all beat together well that's actually a big advantage of solid fuels is you can put a solid fuel assembly in the core that has a higher than average enrichment you can shuffle it around over a few cycles and you can pull it out at a lower than average enrichment we do this all the time in PWRs this is how they fuel can do is guess what you cannot do this in a molten salt reactor so if you're running like two percent average enrichment you're trying to refuel you're putting something in that's a higher than average enrichment you base put in a lot of u-238 that you don't mean to put in i don't think i'm sorry i don't think a uranium fuel molten salt reactor makes sense because you cannot keep the reactivity up and eventually you have to throw away the fuel a month ago we were at we were at the molten salt reactor workshop at Oakridge and David LeBlanc of terrestrial energy who is building a uranium-fueled molten salt reactor got up and said our fuel cycle performance is basically what a PWR is I mean that's basically where we're at and I thought well you know good let's build PWR then I mean we have to offer the world something radically different now a uranium-233 started breeder thorium salt reactor like the lifter that our company is working on has orders of magnets less transionic production it has about the same fission product production per unit thermal power it can get better electrical power because it's got a higher power conversion efficiency from it's super super supercritical carbon dioxide gas turbine sorry Joe likes giving me I really think that we're going to have to offer the world something considerably better now let me talk a little bit about proliferation and developing countries you heard my rap my row on this before the thorium reactor is not going to be a factor that makes a country decide to proliferate nuclear weapon so if a country wants nuclear weapons they have many many many different ways to get them a whole lot easier than that is going to make no difference whatsoever whether or not we build a thorium reactor I have gone and talked to the IAEA I've talked to these people the whole thing is safeguards they want to know where is your nuclear material how many significant quantities might be present in your uncertainty and that has to do with how you monitor that and that's where a chemical processing system actually works to your advantage because it helps you know what's in there and be able to query the salt you are gonna have to have some kind of chemical processing system in any MSR just to keep impurities out just to keep oxides and sulphides out so it's not like we can say well we can build molten salt it has no chemical process you gonna have some chemical processing you might have a minimal set up but you will have it but this issue of proliferation of fissile security of safeguards I've gone and talked to the people of the do-e and when they scored you remember the the fuel cycle study they scored every reactor the same they said every reactor basically we consider to be equal in terms of can we secure it can we say you know that the study I'm talking about I know did a couple years ago I read that I said okay they basically said there's no difference and if that's the DOA and NSA saying that I think we can take that as a Thorat ativ from the US side so okay my turn for rebuttal I would say the most important thing about a new reactor is not that it's radically different not that it uses the least amount of fuel not even that it produces the least amount of waste in the developing world it's cost number two is cost number three is cost you have to be safe but after that it's pure cost so you got to look at the whole reactor design to say well what is your total cost when you're done and I think we can make a decent case that an MSR either pure uranium or with a mix of uranium and thorium does work well for cost but wouldn't it work better for you to just run straight uranium it runs about the same no actually I get my thorium just this place yeah 238 so if you got rid of the thorium you could run five percent enriched and be good I run about two percent enriched if I have no thorium any know I mean so what is that really doing for you well it breeds better in a thermal spectrum than uranium 238 peasant breed well enough it doesn't breed well enough to get to know fissile needing to be important but it breeds better and it produces less plutonium most important to me is the public relations aspect so it's PR yeah I didn't know that for the in regards to proliferation I would point out that the US has been pretty active at trying to shut down and remove all HEU from all research reactors they go through a fair amount of trouble to help countries redesign their research reactors in order to pull the HEU out and get it returned to the United States I would not be terribly optimistic about getting HEU into your reactors there's not an issue with u-233 I don't think that changes the argument it does because u-232 has a strong gamma in fact safeguards guys actually love u-232 because even the trace amount of YouTube I didn't know this there's even trace amounts of u-232 present in most US origin HEU and I had to really scratch my head to figure out how on earth it happened it happened because of the way they ran the k-25 enrichment facility because it was running on material that had actually been in the Hanford reactors before it went there and if you went with straight virgin uranium you would not have any u-232 trace even in HEU but we do in u.s. origin stuff and they monitor it to the parts per trillion so to have a heavily contaminated u-233 sample from their perspective is a piece of cake to follow the safeguards guys at Oakridge brought this up with me on some of the same guys you're talking to but the way they put it is this stuff would be incredibly quantifiable and traceable from that now is it going to stop a determined adversary they would say no I would say no but I would say determined adversary I think isn't gonna worry about making u-233 determined adversaries gonna go make a graphite natural uranium pile or he or she's gonna just enrich natural uranium it has no trace on it so hgu is not equal to u-233 u-233 is made it's not enriched and the United States is beginning to wake up to this it's beginning to come around a u-233 start is essential to running a thorium reactor now of course we have very little u-233 in the world we got to get a lot more and I understand Lars is Eli share it in in a lot of ways you know the the whole idea the enemy is that the better is the enemy of the good but I don't think we're that far away from being able to move forward on a true thorium reactor cycle with u-233 start I don't think it's that far and one of the neat things about having a variety of companies is you have different strategies and that's and that's a beautiful thing that each of you can pursue your own design the way you want and one thing I want to want one thing up oh one selfish question I want to ask you as a as a person from academia that's wanting to advance molten salt reactors and using thorium in them my question for you would be what what what could we do for you where where could we find common ground what are some common needs that we could all look at so it last question focuses on our differences this question focuses on where we have common ground and common struggles that could get help from others run around and look at that real quick okay I'll stop we have common ground one place Volta salt reactors then we can figure out if we should use thorium later okay so so what what in what a molten salt reactors maybe more specific for me okay it's clear reprocessing chemistry so all of the steps in reprocessing needs R&D and scale-up and some of them are more mature like the the fluorination step I think but but but that's I think where aren t really is needed to still yeah can I just second that underway if we if we are to ever get to thorium we need like multi billion many years research programs in in reprocessing okay and from my vantage point I don't need reprocessing now I need cheap power plants now and build them before they build those coal plants and then will have the money to do the rest they will Ally up will team up yeah the other thing I'd like to have is to see what is the volatility of the the cesium in the iodine if you ever got fuel salt spilled without a containment there's a lot of speculation that it simply won't go anywhere if that turns out to be true and provably true that makes a big difference we're working on it good Lars is absolutely right there are a lot of things we could be doing with salt and I'll tell you the great thing about the thorium fuel cycle okay if you're using uranium plutonium fuel cycle uranium is easy to play around with because it's very low radioactivity plutonium is very difficult to play around with at a university level because well it's plutonium and they won't be letting you play with that on the other hand thorium and uranium are both earth-abundant low radioactivity materials and all you care about the chemistry at a university level so yes we could be doing a lot at the university level we could be testing these like caesium and iodide because again we can go and get natural non radioactive versions of both of those guys all we care about is the chemistry so all these chemistry questions that we have that are essential to the operation of the processing system I can't believe you said three billion dollars man you're the guy who wants to do it for twenty million dollars I didn't say three million I said I said multi billion okay Multi survey there is there is so much of this chemistry that can begin to be addressed at the university level and I'm really looking forward to you know I've kind of a couple of times to Abilene to see Rusty's work I feel like I've just been running around the country talking to different places we just got back from Penn State and saw the great setup they had there forgotten University of Wisconsin's gonna University Utah been up to two pnnl they don't count because they're DOA and they're just awesome you know but there's a lot that can be done at the University of what do we need we need students coming out that a plate was solved before you know they'll be great and this doesn't have to be fluoride salt you can actually get your hands dirty with cheap salts like like carbonate salts and nitrate salts that you can you know just man if a student came out that it already melted some salt and maybe done just even rudimentary electrochemistry or anything with them that person would already be way ahead of most of the people who are saying can I go work for you who've never played with this stuff at all so yes bring us graduates who've done stuff like that that'd be great okay let me take another question from the audience look at the signs they're all different you'll use different backgrounds different approaches different strategies you see disaster risk or an opportunity for the white board I mean I would just say I think the nuclear industry is beginning to realize the diversity of concepts possible within the molten-salt space I mean there is a huge design space there they for a long time I think people have thought the molten-salt is just one of the things you can do with nuclear without seeing it's almost like a whole new alphabet you can write with so I don't think it should come as any surprise that there is a diversity of concepts there's a lot of different what you see here is you see a guy trying to do the thorium fuel cycle you see a guy trying to save the world and you see a guy trying to build a really amazingly different kind of machine you know and that's a fact yeah so with your LWR technology everybody who's making LW RS is actually much closer in their concepts to one another then even any two of the MSR concepts are to one another they're far more diverse at the same time you know exactly what you're getting when you get an l WR you're getting a pressurized machine that's going to make electricity in that only right it's not going to do other missions you make a very good point and and to be honest I don't think that's going to change anytime in the near future I mean it would be akin to going back to 1962 and saying how many people can build PWRs it is a risk but I would also say if you're in the PWR business you're already in quite a bit of risk to begin with oh I would also say that if you look back to before when LDL w RS or PWRs dominated there were many different reactors and many different solid fuel structures you needed to come up with the marketplace is going to be brutal several of us are not going to be here in five years I can't tell you which ones but I think the different fuels are going to get weeded down to a few players and frankly it's not that complicated to make that salt so once you have a market that wants a lot of it you'll get multiple players and you'll be able to buy it from multiple sources i ôm is just making it cheap enough that you would just buy a new reactor actually we might even ship you two just to begin with so you can just juice the back up and no and I actually don't think that that we won't we will all disappear and that a few of us might disappear III kind of see this this entire field as the computer or the PC industry and the early 1970s nobody believed in that it was just I mean personal computers it'll never happen it'll never happen right and and and there were a few startups working on this and none of them had money but when there was a breakthrough everything moved fast and they all want I mean none of them are round anymore they were all annexed by a larger companies by the world supplies train with which they which they basically disrupted but but this is how I see it I think we can all win so so I'm not so afraid of that No [Laughter] [Applause] to me it seems I mean just from a bit of a distance and coming from R&D that for operator it will be great because they get cheap fuel from multiple sources but the burden is on the fender because they get to sell the reactor but after that everybody can supply the fuel even if you need to for me the problem is with the fender they need a different structure of revenue laughing yeah and and not everybody here has the objective of being necessarily a vendor you know even if libe we haven't decided yet if we want to relinquish the role of operator we're actually rather interested in that role and and I was actually gonna agree with trolls here I think the analogy to the early 70s computer is very very good you know in the early 70s when people were talking about computers you had big industry players like IBM saying what on earth would anybody want a personal computer for and to be brutally honest they were right they could not see from the things they did with computers why on earth any regular person would ever want to manage massive databases or input enormous amounts of financial information or anything like that they weren't wrong they just didn't see a market that somebody like Steve Jobs could see he saw people typing documents oh we got a typewriter for that he saw people keeping track of appointments I have a little notebook for that the truth was none of those things by themselves was enough to get you to buy a PC but the aggregate of all of those things was finally enough I don't bite you I remember the first time we got our Apple 2 C was 6 128 K of RAM and I just thought oh my goodness and my dad said what we can do with this $2,000 - I was $2,000 in 1980 $5 mind you and I can do this we're doing this and over time that was that was what happened until a very important thing happened in 1995 when people had email and could send letters to girls then the world took off well I didn't want to end on that note but maybe we're gonna have to go wait because of time we have to stop and I apologize but we we really must thank the board and the panel here and move on so please help me thank all four of these [Applause] you

Channel: Thorium Remix

Views: 39,754

Rating: 4.8967743 out of 5

Keywords: nuclear, thorium, MSR, Molten Salt Reactor, Ralph Hania, Troels Schönfeldt, Lars Jorgensen, Kirk Sorensen, debate, forum, ThEC2018

Id: 2x7do-_MTD0

Length: 33min 0sec (1980 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2019