There was a recent report done by the Nuclear
Energy Agency of the OECD on thorium systems. Can you make them work? Yes you can make them work. Is there an advantage doing it? I haven't seen it. A new paper has just come out on
thorium powered nuclear reactors. Not quite so bullish on
the case for thorium. It's from Britain's National Nuclear Laboratory. So they say that there is about four times
more thorium on Earth than there is uranium. But at the moment uranium is cheap
enough that simply doesn't matter. It's, I think, one of these sort
of technological cults. Melting the fuel rods down in concentrated
nitric acid from the thorium reactor. Extracting [uranium] 233 and then
making more fuel rods with that and putting it in another reactor... It's economically totally out of the question. Go to my web page section on thorium
reactors written by physicists. You just heard three different reports cited. One to a congressional committee on energy. One to readers of The Economist. And one to the audience of Russia Today. All 3 reports overwhelmingly
focus on the challenge of consuming thorium
in solid fuel reactors. Such as Shippingport Atomic Power Station. This reactor is going to cost something over
55 million dollars, I believe it will produce about a 100,000 kilowatts of power. The real object of this
reactor is to learn about Pressurized Water Reactors
for atomic power. It will not be cheap to operate. It will be no cheaper to
operate then Write's Kitty Hawk would have been to
carry passengers around. At the present time reactor design
is an art, not a science. We are trying to make
a science out of it. Rickover built one of these reactors and
put it over here in Shippingport. A funny-looking submarine
shell shaped containment building. Get Out.
That's funny. It is the first full-scale nuclear power
plant for generation of electricity in the United States. Over its 25-year life, Shippingport was powered
by various combinations of nuclear fuel including one fuel load of thorium. He wanted to prove you could
make a light water breeder. He kind of snuck Radkowsky in
there to put the thorium in. The people in charge now of the AEC
were not interested in the breeding. Only problem is the core turned into a gigantic
humongous Swiss watch that had to be that accurate with a million little
springs holding it all together. He was trying to shoehorn different
nuclear physics into an existing system. It made it very complicated
and very difficult to work. He did that under the
Naval Reactor program. We used to have a separate Naval
Reactors division here in this lab. They developed and built the reactor for the
world's first atomic submarine: The Nautilus. The story of The Nautilus is legend. Because of its success it was used as
a starting point in the development of an advanced design
reactor for Shippingport. Its name: PWR -
Pressurized Water Reactor. The reason we have that as the base for our
power reactor technology today is because The Navy was prepared to pay the
first-mover costs to make one work. And once you've done that it's extraordinarily
difficult to compete with it because those first mover costs are very, very high and have
no financial return associated with them. I became really quite friendly with
Rickover and spent better than a year... and that's where he
learned about nuclear power. Was that about 1947? It was 1947, yes. And it was I who urged young Rickover,
the way to make nuclear powered submarine was with the Pressurized Water Reactor. You know, The Navy had reactors and so
The Air Force had to have reactors. The Navy has built their nuclear submarines
and The Army has taken the same technologies as The Navy, the water-cooled reactor
and they're doing their thing. But The Air Force wants to
build a nuclear-powered bomber! Dirty little secret was that most of the
people involved in it knew from the get-go that it really wasn't practical. In contrast to a submarine where you've got
limited space but you can shield it for the people on the submarine, it's much harder
on an airplane because of the weight. Most of us did not really think the
Aircraft Reactor really could work. But we did feel that there is very interesting
technology there that someday could be applied. And I would maintain that Weinberg was absolutely
right in his assessment of the situation back then. He knew that to make the nuclear airplane
work they couldn't use water cooled reactors. They couldn't use high-pressure reactors. They couldn't use complicated solid fuel reactors. They had to have something that was so slick,
that was so safe, that was so simple... That operated at low pressure, high temperature,
had all the features you wanted in it. They didn't even know what it was. I think someday this will be looking at as
one of the great pivot points of history that if this program, this Nuclear Airplane program
had not been established the Molten-Salt Reactor would have never been invented because it
is simply too radical, too different, too completely out of the ballfield
of everything else- for it to be arrived at through an evolutionary development. It had to be forced into existence by
requirements that were so difficult to achieve and the nuclear airplane was that. Well we were young chemical
engineers at the time. God smiles on young chemical
engineers they do things that in later years would
be regarded as crazy. The Navy program that led to the
Light Water Reactors we have now was well optimized to
the needs of The Navy. It actually wasn't very well optimized to
the needs of power production. The reactor category advocated by
Alvin Weinberg for civilian power production, the Molten-Salt Reactor is covered in
only 2 of the 3 reports dismissing thorium. Thorium?
But they were very convincing. Yeah, they are idiots.
These people are mad! Now, let me tell you about thorium. To produce electricity you have to
reprocess, like, melt the fuel. Then make the fuel rods with
Uranium-233 then put them in the reactor. It is economically totally out of the question,
so these men are mad! There's some sort of psychotic element in
the nuclear industry... ...to do with testosterone and hormone receptors in the brain. Behavior and sex comes into it. E = m c^2 is a substitute
probably for male... will I say it? Erection and ejaculation! Um, and they like it, and it's the sort of
energy that really grabs them. So let's dismiss that third report by
the anti-nuclear organization IEER, and focus on
the NNL and OECD reports. They do include sections on molten salt. The United Kingdom's NNL report correctly
identifies the advantages offered by Molten Salt Reactors in its Molten Salt Reactor section. That is, page 23. However, the full implications of Molten Salt
Reactors are not examined throughout the different sections. For example, proliferation risk and reprocessing
are covered as if spent fuel containing Uranium-233 will be shuttled between the reactor, a reprocessing
facility, and a spent fuel repository. That is not the case. Uranium-233 is both created and fissioned
into energy inside the reactor itself. Unlike solid fuel alternatives what emerges
from the Molten-Salt Breeder does not represent a proliferation risk, nor a reprocessing challenge. A single part of the NNL report illustrates
how this should have gone. Page 18. Recycling U-233 present some difficult challenges
in fuel fabrication because of the daughter products from U-232. Problems. Challenges. Technological barriers. Technical risk. And then, at the bottom- MSR is unique in
that it avoids these problems entirely with no fuel fabrication required. The NNL report could easily have a caveat
carved out in every section regarding Molten Salt Reactors. MSR impacts every aspect of the thorium fuel
cycle, including proliferation. From a liquid fuel perspective, there's no
meat in this report. The OECD report is another report focused
on solid fuel. Like the NNL report, every section goes into
detail about the challenges of thorium with solid fuel reactors, but it does offer a fairly
meaty section on Molten Salt Reactors. 11 pages. Does the OECD report evaluate Alvin Weinberg's
concept of the molten-salt breeder and identify technical challenges which may impede development? Of those 11 pages, in a 133 page report, 1
sentence does so. This 1 gigawatt design was a thermal reactor
with graphite moderated core that required heavy chemical fuel salt treatment with a
removal time of approximately 30 days for soluble fission products, a drawback
that could potentially be eliminated by using a fast spectrum instead. The remaining 10 pages of molten salt
are then entirely dedicated to a different Molten Salt Reactor concept. A fast-spectrum Molten Salt Reactor. If you don't know the meaning of:
moderator, fast spectrum, or fission products, then please bear with me. These terms will be explained. In a fast-spectrum reactor, uranium
and thorium perform the same. In a solid fuel reactor,
uranium is a superior choice. It is only in Alvin Weinberg's thermal-spectrum
Molten-Salt Breeder Reactor that thorium's advantages become clear. And this is what I think is really worthy
of consideration- Right now we have to make an economic case for why should
we consider thorium as a fuel source? We can go and we can mine uranium and we can
enrich it and we can essentially burn out the small amount of Uranium-235 in that. And you can put an economic quantification
on the value of a gram of fissile material in the form of LEU [Low Enriched Uranium]. It is on the order of $10 to $15. Out of the ground that's that's what a gram
of of U-235 in that fuel represents. So if you want to make an economic case for
why you're going to use the thorium fuel cycle you better figure out how to turn a gram
of thorium into fissile and fission it for less money than that. Otherwise nobody's really going to care from
an economic basis and so this is why we want to pursue radical simplification in the reprocessing. Want to make it as simple as we possibly can
but no simpler. The OECD report evaluates thorium and based
only on solid fuel reactors and fast-spectrum Molten Salt Reactors. It does not evaluate thorium based on Alvin
Weinberg's Molten-Salt Breeder Reactor. When the idea of the breeder was first suggested
in 1943, the rapid and efficient recycle of the partially spent core was
regarded as the main problem. Nothing has happened in the ensuing quarter-century
that has fundamentally changed this. And I'll go further- Nothing has happened
in the ensuing 40 years that has fundamentally changed this. Weinberg nailed the basic idea. The media overlook this gaping hole in the
report. No mention of Alvin Weinberg, the Molten-Salt
Reactor Experiment or of liquid chemistry. No mention of a buried sentence
in the hundred page report. Let's reword it for clarity. This one gigawatt design was a thermal reactor
with graphite moderated core, that avoided the drawbacks of fast-spectrum by removing
soluble fission products through the use of chemical fuel salt treatment. The successful breeder will be the one that
can deal with the spent fuel most rationally, either by the achievement extremely long burn
up, or by greatly simplifying the entire recycle step. We at Oak Ridge have always been intrigued
by this latter possibility. It explains our long commitment
to liquid fuel reactors, first the Aqueous Homogenous,
now the Molten Salt. The second reactor actually operated very
well, that was the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment There it is this is the place. These things right over here
are the spent probes. See those things will extend like 60 foot
in length, and went down the tank did the melting, the bubbling and
stirring and everything. One of the things that I've learned from talking
to some of the old-timers, people didn't disbelieve that we could build the machine, they didn't
believe that we could maintain it. Operation of the MSRE was not too difficult. And the people that I had working for me
they all had hound dogs under the porch. Old cars out in the yard,
that didn't run very well. If anything came up inside the Molten Salt
Reactor say hey we can fix that. And they did. He felt like despite the challenges of operating
high radiation fields that they were able to operate and maintain that machine over
the course of its lifetime. I started out at the lab in 1957 and got onto
the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment. The dynamics were not common to
reactors because it was molten salt instead of water cooled solid fuel. If it heats up it gets less dense and that
means it's less critical- Less reactive-
Yeah less reactive- Yeah. I was running some tests late at night. The device that I was using got stuck in the
wrong place and pulled the rod out and the power went went up and
up beyond the design power and then controlled itself
and went back down. Everybody was happy. After they completed the Molten Salt Reactor
Experiment they went to the Atomic Energy Commission, they said, "Hey G can we have
some more money? We'd like to go now and build the real thing. We'd like to build the core and we'd like
to build the blanket and we'd like to hook a power conversion system on and make electricity." They felt like they'd shot the moon. Well, the Atomic Energy
Commission unfortunately did not share their zeal to
continue with the technology. In addition to being a
thorium guru, Weinberg was also the original inventor of
the Pressurized Water Reactor. He had invented it and
gotten his patent for it in 1947. It was a little bit of a tricky thing to have
the inventor of the Light Water Reactor advocating for something very, very, very different. He didn't like the fact that it
had to run at really high pressure, he just, he saw that as a risk. But as long as the reactor was as small as
the submarine intermediate reactor which was only 60 megawatts, then containment shell
was absolute. It was safe. But when you went to 1,000 megawatt reactors
you could not guarantee this. He figured there would be an
accident someday where you were not able to maintain the
pressure or keep cooling. In some very remote situation conceive of
the containment being breached. Does any of this sound familiar? He was making enough of a stink about this
the Congressional leader named Chet Holifield told Alvin Weinberg, he said, if you're so
concerned about the safety of nuclear energy it might be time for you to
leave the nuclear business. And Weinberg was really kind of horrified
that they would have this response to him because he wasn't questioning the value
or the importance of nuclear energy. If anything he was far more convinced
about that than anyone else. What he was questioning, was
whether the right path been taken in the development of nuclear reactors. Do you feel like the program had a sound technical
basis or do you feel like technical problems were the basis for cancellation? Some of the technical reasoning
that I heard for the cancellation was that there was a corrosion problem. Tritium was raised as another issue, we made
no effort on MSRE to do anything with tritium. Did the people on the program feel like tritium
was an insurmountable problem? We recognized that tritium would have to be
captured but most people thought that that's something that we should be able to do. Did the people on the program, particularly
the chemists or the material scientists feel that corrosion was an
insurmountable problem on the program? No. And some of the subsequent experimental work
seem to bode very favorably for an ability to solve that issue, as well as the tritium
issue by the way because we did do some tritium experiments. Were either of you present when the molten-salt
reactor program was cancelled in the early seventies? We were still working here. We were still working on the system. We were still finalizing reports on the performance
of the MSRE. I didn't see it coming. Mr. President? Since you missed our meeting on breeder reactors,
we sent the message today, Craig. I told Ziegler to tell the press that it was
a bipartisan effort. This has got to be something we play very
close to the vest but I am being ruthless on one thing. Any activities that we possibly can should
be placed in Southern California. So, on the committee, every time you have
a chance, needle them. Say, where's this going to be? Let's push the California thing. Can you do that? Nixon was from California. Hosmer was from Southern California. Chet Holifield, who ran the Joint Committee
on Atomic Energy, was also from California. It doesn't lead me to believe that the President
was seriously considering alternatives to the fast breeder reactor and other paths that
could be taken. It was a focus on what can we do right now
to get jobs. Now, don't ask me what a breeder reactor is. All of this business about breeder reactors
and nuclear energy and this stuff is over my... That was one of my poorer subjects, science. I got through it but I had to work too hard. I gave it up when i was about a sophomore. But what I do know is this- That here we have
the potentiality of a whole new breakthrough in the development of power for peace. The fellow on the phone call that we heard
earlier said that if cost targets were missed I for one don't intend to scream and holler
about it. In that same month the Atomic Energy Commission
issued Wash-1222. It almost completely ignored the safety and
economic improvements possible through the use of the Molten-Salt Breeder Reactor technology. Milton Shaw who was the head of reactor development
in Washington called up he says stop that MSRE Reactor Experiment, fire everybody, just
tell them to clear out their desks and go home. And send me the money for fast breeders. In any other place, as an organization you're
abandoning this route and going another, well it just gets lost. It is amazing how much they documented. Enormous amounts of detail about
the work that had been accomplished and how they had
developed the technology. Almost all the nuclear power we use on Earth
today uses water as the basic coolant. It's a covalently bonded substance. The oxygen has a covalent bond with two hydrogens. Neither one of those bonds is strong
enough to survive getting smacked around by a gamma or a neutron. And sure enough, they knock
the hydrogens clean off. Now, in a water cooled reactor, you have a
system called a recombiner that will take the hydrogen gas and the oxygen
gas that is always being created from the nuclear reaction
and put them back together. It's a great system as long as it's
operating and the system is pumping. Well, at Fukushima Daiichi, the problem
was that the pumping power stopped. At high temperature H2O can also
react with the cladding to release hydrogen. Or damage the cladding,
releasing radioactive isotopes. These 2 accidents illustrate
the need for a coolant which is more chemically
stable than H2O. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima
were all radically different incidents. But what all 3 had in common was
how poorly water performed as a coolant when things started to go wrong. Steam takes up about 1,000 times
more volume than liquid water. If you have liquid water at 300 degrees Celsius
and suddenly you depressurize it, it doesn't stay liquid for very long
it flashes into steam. That's scuba tank, hot scuba tank, full of
nuclear material. At Three Mile Island, water couldn't
be pumped into the core because some of the coolant water
had vaporized into steam. The increased pressure forced coolant water
back out, contributing to a partial meltdown. At Chernobyl, the insertion of poorly designed
control rods caused core temperature to skyrocket. The boiling point of the pressurized water
coolant was passed, and it flashed to steam. It was a steam explosion that tore
the 2,000 ton lid off the reactor casing, and shot it up through
the roof of the building. At Fukushima, loss of pump power allowed the
coolant water to get hotter and hotter until it boiled away. These 3 accidents illustrate the need for
a coolant with a higher boiling point than water. When you put water under extreme pressure
like anything else it wants to get out of that extreme pressure. Almost all of the aspects of our nuclear reactors
today that we find the most challenging can be traced back to the need to have pressurized
water. Water cooled reactors have another challenge. They need to be near large bodies of water
so the steam they generate can be cooled and condensed. Otherwise they can't generate electrical power. You see I had the good fortune to learn about
a different form of nuclear power that doesn't have all these problems for a very simple
reason: it's not based on water cooling and it doesn't use solid fuel. Surprisingly it's based on salt. Science allows you to look at
everyday objects for what they really are. Chemically and physically. And it really makes you look
twice at the world around you. Your table salt is frozen. That's a really strange thing to think about
your table salt on your kitchen table. It's frozen. But once they melt they have a 1,000
degrees C [Celsius] of liquid range. And they have excellent
heat transfer properties. They can carry a large amount of
heat per unit volume, just like water. Water is actually really good
from a heat transfer perspective. Its really good at carrying
heat per unit volume. Salts are just as good carrying
heat per unit volume. But salts don't have to be pressurized. And that- If you remember nothing else of
what I say tonight, remember that one fact. A nuclear reactor is a rough
place for normal matter. The nice thing about a salt
is that it is formed from a positive ion and a negative ion. Like sodium is positively charged,
and chlorine is negatively charged. And they go, we're not really going to bond
we're just going to associate one with another. That's what's called an ionic bond. Yeah, you're kinda friends. You know, you're- Facebook friends!
There you go, facebook friends. Alright, well it turns out this is a really
good thing for a reactor because a reactor is going to take those guys and
just smack them all over the place with gammas and neutrons and everything. The good news is they don't really care
who they particularly are next to. As long as there are an equal number
of positive ions and negative ions, the big picture is happy. A salt is composed of the stuff
that's in this column the halogens, and the stuff that's in these
columns the alkali and alkaline. Fluorine is so reactive with everything. But once it's made a salt, a fluoride, then
it's incredibly chemically stable and non-reactive. Sodium chloride, table salt, or potassium
iodide, they have really high melting points. We like the lower melting
points of fluoride salts. Human mechanical energy is so amazing. Why can't we use that to create energy? You will never run out of electricity. You never generate any pollution. So half the world is not
going to generate pollution. We call it- Free Electric. Solar Freakin' Roadways- -replaces all roadways, parking lots, sidewalks,
driveways, tarmacs, bike paths and outdoor recreation surfaces with smart, microprocessing,
interlocking, hexagonal solar units! Maintaining a nation of solar highways. Manufacturing bicycle-battery-generators
for every home. An extremely ambitious idea to
replace our nation's roads with solar panels. The Department of Transportation
has kicked in $850,000. People are actually taking this seriously. Despite the media attention they've received,
I think these ideas are flat-out crazy. But they're par for the course
in today's energy landscape. They Keystone XL Pipeline extension- For a while, the entire national energy
discussion revolved around a single pipeline. Sometimes it seems the more
difficult an energy source is to harness, the more attention it receives. If you'll give me a chance to serve, I'll
bring the EPA and the Agriculture Department and all the people together
and we'll use ethanol as a part of our nation's
energy security future! Even Al Gore, who was a key proponent of Corn
Ethanol, acknowledges the subsidy was a mistake- The energy conversion ratios are, at best,
very small. How does Corn's 1.3 times compare against
other energy sources? Solar cells return 7 times. Natural Gas is 10 times. Wind is 18 times. Today's water cooled nuclear is 80 times. Coal is 80 times. Hydropower is 100 times. A thorium powered molten salt reactor can
return 2000 times the energy invested in it. Let's take a peek at a future powered by nuclear! This is a little weird. We can radically cut climate change emissions
and leave a safe clean world for the future. We don't need to invent anything new! We just need to stop wasting time with distractions
like nuclear power. Come on! Let's build the future we all want to see! To understand why nuclear power has so much
potential requires some effort. It requires you to exercise a little bit of
study. Which part of this is doable, and could be
safe, and could be acceptable in our society, and which part of this is not? And there's a collage of images that the anti-nuclear
movement will throw you, usually of nuclear weapons. I hate nuclear weapons. I never want to see nuclear weapons used. I have no interest in that- But I do want
to see nuclear power used to make my life, and my children's lives, and your children's
lives safer and better. Think of the sun's heat on your upturned face
on a cloudless summer's day. From 150,000,000 kilometres away- we recognize
its power. When was the last time you watched Cosmos
with Carl Sagan? Recently actually. Yeah? I showed it to my kids a couple years ago. Empire Strikes Back and Cosmos were probably
two of my formative influences of the age of 6. The Sun is the nearest star- a glowing sphere
of gas. The surface we see an ordinary visible light
is at 6,000 degrees centigrade. But in its hidden interior-
Super hot gas pushes the Sun to expand outward. At the same time The Sun's own gravity pulls
it inward to contract. A stable equilibrium between gravity and nuclear
fire. Atoms are made in the insides of stars. The atoms are moving so fast, that when they
collide, they fuse. Helium is the ash of The Sun's nuclear furnace. The Sun is a medium-sized star, its core is
only lukewarm 10,000,000 degrees. Hot enough to fuse hydrogen, but too cold
to fuse helium. There many stars in the galaxy more massive
yet, that live fast and die young in cataclysmic supernova explosions. Those explosions are far hotter than the core
of the Sun. Hot enough to transform elements like iron
into all the heavier ones, and spew them into space. Long before the Earth, our home, was built-
stars brought forth its substance. Our planet, our society, and we ourselves,
are built of star stuff. Now, two of the things that were created in
supernova are thorium and uranium. These were different because they were radioactive
and they kept some of that energy from the supernova explosion stored in their very nuclear
structure. And some of this thorium and uranium was incorporated
into our planet. Sinking to the center of the world, and heating
our planet. Liquid iron circulating around the solid part
of the core as Earth rotates- acts like a wire carrying electric current. Electric currents produce magnetic
fields, and that's a good thing. Our magnetic field protects us from
the onslaught of cosmic rays. A bigger deal- the magnetic
field is deflecting the solar wind. If you don't have a magnetic
field deflecting the solar wind, over billions of years your
planet ends up like Mars. Because the solar wind will
strip off a planet's atmosphere, without the protective nature
of the magnetic field. So if we didn't have the energy from thorium
inside the Earth we would be on a dead planet. The decay of radioactive elements in the core
keeps it moving. Let's talk about radioactivity. Because I had an erroneous notion
of what radioactivity was. I thought, that if you had something that
had like a half-life of a day, and you had something had a half-life of a million years,
it meant that the dude that was radioactive for a day is like brr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r for a
day and then, ooop, I'm done. And the dude with the half-life for a million
years is like brr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r for a million years, and then done. Ok, so you go- Which one of these is more
dangerous? Well definitely the one that's got a half-life
of a million years because that's got to be, like, radioactive forever, and the
dudes that's radioactive for a day that's not a big deal, right? Completely wrong! Ok? Utterly backwards. The dude who is radioactive for a day
is really, really radioactive! The dude who is radioactive for a million
years is hardly radioactive at all. Which one of those two is more dangerous? The one that's radioactive for a day. By a long shot! Ok? So you're radioactivity is directly, and
inversely proportional to your half-life. If somebody goes to you here's stuff that's
got half-life of a million years- scary huh? You go, here give it to me, I'm going to put
it in my hand. It's not going to hurt me. Agghh! It's not going to hurt me. Here's stuff with a half-life of a day- you
want to hold it? No! No, keep it away from me man! That stuff is hot! But it's going away fast too, right? Got a longer half-life? Less dangerous. And I want to tear my hair out because what
I haven't mentioned is radioactive waste. With all out radioactive waste? The main problem is radioactive waste. Close down all those reactors, now. With solar and wind and geothermal- Geothermal. What's green energy? And they go-
Geothermal's green energy. Okay, do you you know where geothermal comes
from? No. Comes from the decay of thorium inside the
Earth. Oh. Is geothermal renewable? Yes. Ok, then thorium's renewable. No it's not you're using it up! Well, you're using up thorium as it decays
inside the Earth. Any argument for geothermal,
if it is rigorously pursued, is an argument for the renewability
of thorium as an energy resource. The majority of American geothermal
is harvested in the state of California, which has most of its geothermal energy
harvested in the Imperial Valley. A typical Imperial Valley
geothermal plant produces 40 tons of radioactive waste, every day. And they're saddled with all our radioactive
waste, who do we think we are, Bob? Geothermal is creating 200 times
the volume of radioactive waste that nuclear reactors do,
per watt of power. I don't wanna wear a dosimeter. Don't want to calculate rems and sieverts. I don't wanna see no clean-up crew. Or get zapped before I hear the news. We can get the heat from Earth and Sun. And hook the wind to make the engines run. If common sense could only start-
a chain reaction of the human heart- What a wonderful world this would be! Coal and gas plants are able to release radioactive
material to the environment in much greater amounts than a nuclear plant
would ever possibly be allowed to, because they are considered
what's called N.O.R.M. - Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials. For instance, when you go frack
a shale and you pull gas out, a lot of radon comes
out with that too. Burn the gas that radon being released. Nobody counts that radon against the gas. If they did, the regulatory commission
would shut the gas plant down. Same with coal. And they've spent a lot of money to make sure
that regulatory agencies do not regulate N.O.R.M. for a coal or gas plant the way they regulate
radioactive emissions from a nuclear plant. If they did we would be shutting
down all our coal and gas plants- based on radioactivity alone. A fear of radiation, probably, is the basis
of most fear of nuclear power in general. What is radiation? It's simply the idea that there are certain
nuclei that radiate things from them. In the process of changing to something
else they radiate something. Modern physics and chemistry have
reduced the complexity of the sensible world to an astonishing simplicity! Three units put together in different patterns
make, essentially, everything. The proton has a positive electrical charge. A neutron is electrically neutral. And an electron an equal
negative electrical charge. Since every atom is electrically neutral,
the number of protons in the nucleus must equal the number of electrons
far away in the electron cloud. The protons and neutrons together
make up the nucleus of the atom. If you're an atom and you have just 1 proton-
You're hydrogen. 2 protons- helium. 3- lithium. All the way to 92 protons-
in which case your name is uranium. For any given element, the number
of protons must remain the same. But the number of neutrons may vary. The atomic weight of an atom is the number
of protons plus the number of neutrons. Natural uranium may contain
142, 143 or 146 neutrons. That means-
Uranium has 3 natural isotopes. U-234, U-235, and U-238. Some elements, such as tin, have a
great number of natural isotopes. Others, such as aluminum,
have only 1. Most isotopes are stable. They would never spontaneously
change their atomic structure. But some isotopes
are constantly changing. They're busy being radioactive. Given enough time, this Radium-88
isotope will shed energy and change. This is how isotopes in the
Earth itself emit radiation. The geiger counter detects their presence. A cloud chamber makes these rays
visible to the naked eye. Each new vapor trail shows that another atom
has thrown off a fragment from its nucleus. Each atom does this only once
before becoming a different isotope. This activity appears to go on endlessly. That's because there's billions
of atoms in that tiny sample. You can't turn decay on and off. If we can turn radioactive decay on and off
we can do all kinds of things be we've never figured out how to do it,
I don't think we ever will. Because we simply can't influence
the state of the nucleus like that. Hit it with a hammer. Boil it in oil. Vaporize it. The nucleus of an atom
is a kind of sanctuary. Immune to the shocks
and upheavals of its environment. The atoms of each unstable element
decay at a constant rate. These mouse traps represent
atoms that are radioactive. Every once in a while, a mousetrap's
spring breaks down and snaps shut. A tiny bit of mass is converted
into energy, as an atom changes spontaneously
into a lighter isotope. Thorium has only one isotope, Thorium-232. It has a 14 billion year half-life. Ok, so when the universe is
twice as old as it is now, thorium will have only
decayed one half-life. So based on what I just
told you about radioactivity, what does that tell you about
how radioactive thorium is? Not very. It's hardly at all. Ok, uranium, two isotopes. Uranium-235, Uranium-238,
both of course the radioactive. U-238 has a 5 billion year half life. That's pretty old, that's about
how old the Earth is. That's how old the earth is,
that's how old the universe is. Uranium-235 on the other hand, much
shorter half-life, 700 million years. This is a handful of these
uranium-oxide fuel pellets. You see in the picture,
the guy's got gloves on. And so you think- He's got gloves on to protect
him from the uranium oxide? But now that I've taught you about
the true nature of radioactivity, you might go- I dunno Kirk I'm not so sure
that stuff's so dangerous after all... And you would be correct! He's not protecting himself from the uranium-
He's protecting the uranium from himself. That stuff has to stay super pure and super
clean, and you don't want to get any of your oils, or grease, or sweat on nuclear fuel
that's going to go inside a fuel rods, so, that's what the gloves are for. Knowing that some atoms could spontaneously
change, in 1939 scientists tried firing a neutron into the nucleus of
a uranium atom, the heaviest and least stable atom found in nature. Instead of a minor change,
from one isotope into another, the uranium atom
split into two parts. When an atom is so unstable that it can
be split into two by hitting it with a neutron, we call that "FISSILE". When the fissile uranium atoms split
apart, those two parts combined were lighter than the
original uranium atom. The missing mass was
converted into energy. Also released were two neutrons. One free neutron
has become two free neutrons. Now we have two neutrons. This implied a nuclear
chain reaction in uranium. Somebody wondered one time- Ok, billion years
ago that means there's a lot more Uranium-235 and natural nuclear reactors
might have been possible. When you generate electricity
from nuclear power you make 200 new elements that never
existed before we fissioned uranium. We found in Africa, at a place called Oklo,
in the Gabon, 2 billion years ago, there were scores of natural nuclear reactors there. That were nothing more than uranium ore in
the rock and the water would come in and it would lead to a nuclear reaction. And these reactors ran for
hundreds of millions of years. So we did NOT invent
nuclear fission, alright? It was done long, long, long before
we were here, and very successfully. Back when the earth was formed there was a
lot more Uranium-235 then there is now. Uranium-235 is like silver and platinum. Can you imagine burning
platinum for energy? And that's what we're doing with our nuclear
energy sources today, we're burning this extremely rare stuff, and were not burning the Uranium-238
and the Thorium. Your uranium in Saskatchewan is so rich you
don't even have to enrich it. It's extremely powerful. Caldicott is wrong. There is no natural source of isotopically
enriched uranium. Natural uranium's isotopic ratios are identical-
everywhere on Earth. The amount of uranium in the world finite. If all electricity today was generated with
nuclear power there would only be a 9 year supply of uranium left in the whole world. In reality, there is no more a
constrained uranium supply, than there is a constrained
seawater supply. Uranium is water soluble, and it passes from
the Earth's mantle, to the crust, to the ocean. Every year, the ocean contains more
uranium than the previous year. My straw reaches across the room. We're pretty inventive when it comes to harvesting
natural resources. I drink your milkshake! I drink it up! We are never going to run out of uranium. It is quite literally a renewable resource. For all the difference
that distinction makes. About 35 years worth of
oil left in the whole world. We're going to run out of oil. As a natural resource, the appeal
of thorium over uranium, is that thorium has zero
environmental cost to acquire. We can power our civilization on thorium
without opening a single thorium mine. It is already a plentiful byproduct
of existing mining operations. We need thorium and he needs
somebody to get rid of Thorium. It's found in tailings piiles. It's found in ash piles. Only one of the materials in nature is naturally
fissile, and that's Uranium-235, which is a very small amount of
natural uranium, about 0.7%. This was the form of uranium that could be
utilized directly in a nuclear reactor. Most of the uranium was Uranium-238. This had to be transformed into another nuclear
fuel called plutonium before it could be used. And then there was thorium. And in a similar manner, to Uranium-238,
it also had to be transformed into another nuclear fuel, Uranium-233,
before it could be used in a reactor. How much energy did the neutron have,
that you smacked the nuclear fuel with? Ok how much energy did it have? And then how many neutrons did you kick out
when you smacked it through fission? Two is a very significant number in breeder
reactors. You need two neutrons. You've got to have one
to keep your process going, and you have to have another one to
convert fertile material into fissile material. Ok, look at plutonium... eeeehhhhhh. It's that dip below 2 right there. That's what makes it so you cannot burn up
Uranium-238 in a thermal-spectrum reactor, like a water-cooled reactor. You just can't do it. The physics are against you. And the reality is, you do lose some neutrons. You can't build a perfect reactor that doesn't
lose any neutrons. They look at this and they said, man! We just can't burn Uranium-238 in a thermal
reactor. It just can't be done! Well, these guys are undeterred, they said
well here's what we'll do we'll just built a fast reactor. Because, look how good it gets in the fast
region. Wow! It gets above 2, it gets up to 3! Wow, this is really good! Well there's a powerful disincentive
to doing it this way and it has to do with what are called CROSS-SECTIONS. These are a way of describing how likely
it is that a nuclear reaction will proceed. Look how much bigger the cross sections
are in thermal than they are in fast. How many of these little dots are we going
to need to add up to this size? We're going to a lot! So this is why it was a big deal
to be able to have performance in this region of the curve. Those little bitty dots? They're up here in this part of the curve. Ok, this is a fast region,
this is the thermal region. Thorium is more abundant than uranium. All we're consuming now is that very,
very, very small sliver of natural uranium- But this is not the big deal!
No! It's not a big deal that natural thorium
is hundreds of times more abundant than the very small
sliver of fissile uranium. The big deal about thorium is- that we can
consume it in a thermal-spectrum. That's the big with thorium. Is it can be consumed in
a thermal-spectrum reactor. When you're talking about a
thermal-spectrum reactor- of any kind- you have to have fuel
and you have to have moderator. And they're both essential
to the operation the reactor. The moderator is slowing
down the neutrons. And when neutrons have been slowed down, we
call them thermal neutrons or a thermal-spectrum. In a water-cooled reactor we use water,
specifically the hydrogen in the water, to slow down the
neutrons through collisions. The graphite in the Molten Salt Reactors,
is that a moderator? Yes, that's the moderator in the reactor. Same idea, except we use graphite
as the moderator instead of water. Neutrons going in the graphite, hit the carbon
atoms, they lose energy, they slow down. Now why slow it down? That's the difference when you're going to
into that little bitty dot, to the big dot. That's why you want to slow it down. You want the big dot, not the little bitty
dot. A thermal-spectrum Molten Salt Reactor has
to have the graphite moderator of the core in order to sustain criticality. If the vessel ruptures, recriticality is fundamentally
impossible. The drain tank does not have any graphite
in it. If something happens where that fuel drains
away from that graphite, criticality is no longer possible, the reactor is subcritical-
fission stops. And there's no way to restart it without reloading
the fuel back into the core. This is such a remarkable feature. And it really is unique to having
this liquid fuel form, and to having something to
operate at standard pressure. You can't do this in solid fuel- you do this
in solid fuel it's called a meltdown. If we had more of today's reactors in operation,
1 cup of uranium oxide would cover a typical American's yearly energy demand. Per-capita, that's the equivalent
of burning 54 barrels of oil. Every year, for every single American. Or, 12 tonnes of coal. Or, 53 hundred cubic feet of natural gas,
to generate the same amount of energy. 4 grams of thorium can power a middle-class
American lifestyle for a full year. That's just 4 grams. But this can only happen if the reactor is
efficiently fueled with chemically homogeneous liquid fuel, if the reactor runs at high temperature,
and the power generator is optimized to take advantage of the reactor's
high temperature operation. The performance of the
carbon dioxide gas turbine is such that it leads to very, very
compact turbomachinery. The turbo machinery for this entire
reactor would easily fit on this stage. Probably on half this stage. And if anybody's been to a big reactor before
and seen big steam cycle turbomachinery you can appreciate what a
reduction in scale that is. High efficiency power conversion enabled by
the high operating temperature of molten salt. Complete burnup of nuclear fuel enabled by
a combination of homogeneous liquid fuel, online chemistry, and thermal breeding. Such as Alvin Weinberg and the
team at ORNL intended to build until the molten salt breeder
program was suddenly terminated. Shaw says, stop that MSRE
reactor experiment. Fire everybody. Just tell them to clear out
their desks and go home. And send me the money for fast-breeders. This is the thorium reactor. Can you tell me what the
thinking is on thorium as a fuel? What the advantages are, the disadvantages?
What the pros and cons are of thorium? The first commercial reactor operated
in this country at Shippingport was based on thorium fuel. My constituents are always
asking me about this- Does thorium have a place
in our nuclear future? Can you make them work?
Yes, you can make them work. Is there an advantage to doing it?
I haven't seen it. There's about 4x more thorium
on Earth than there is uranium. But at the moment uranium is cheap
enough that simply doesn't matter. It's, I think, one of these
sort of technological cults. An atom of thorium and an atom of uranium
both contain the same amazing millionfold improvement in energy density over coal. It isn't that an atom of thorium contains
any more energy than an atom of uranium. Or that natural thorium is much
more common than natural uranium. But we don't consume natural
uranium in today's reactors. There's about 4x more thorium
on Earth than there is uranium. Thorium is 400x as
common as Uranium-235. And we can't harness the full power of
natural uranium with the thorium breeder. That's a bigger challenge. Just like today's reactors, any one piece
of fuel will eventually become too used up to sustain fission before its energy
potential has been fully realized. It is the semi-fissioned fuel which then
must be reprocessed into new fuel, or treated as waste. The elimination of fuel fabrication, and the
elimination of fuel reprocessing, as a distinct step, are essential if you want to harvest
the smallest amount of natural resources and produce the smallest amount of nuclear waste. Because the economics of nuclear power don't
favor reprocessing fuel, it will always be cheaper to simply dig up more uranium, rather
than using every atom you've already mined. The most environmentally friendly
way to operate the thorium breeder is the ONLY way to operate
the thorium breeder. If you stop the chemical kidney,
then fission slowly grinds to a halt. The chemical kidney lets us continually remove
used-fuel and keep adding fresh-fuel. It is how our thorium fuel can be completely
converted into energy and fission products. People recycle cans they recycle papers. Why not candles? I say we put a bin out, let people bring back
their old drippings at their convenience. It's like those bags that say
I used to be a plastic bottle. We could have a bin that says-
I used to be another candle. And when they bring in those candles,
we'll put them in another bin that say I used to be another, another candle. Yeah and then eventually we just have one
that says, trust me, I've been another candles. By weight, a paraffin candle stick and gasoline
contain about the same amount of energy. Why don't cars run on paraffin wax? Because the inside of your car
might need to look like this, or like this. What process do we run chemically
based on solids? We don't. Everything we do, we use as liquids or gases,
because we can mix them completely. You can take a liquid you can fully mix it. You can take a gas you can fully mix it. You can't take a solid and fully mix it,
unless you turn it into a liquid or a gas. You know, the people build Light Water Reactors
are physicists and engineers. And this is a whole lot of chemistry that
they're maybe not so comfortable with. So it's the chemistry of it that makes it
so special, but it's also the bit that existing nukes kinda go- You know, oooh, we were going
into realms I don't, perhaps, feel so comfortable. In the nuclear space there
are other innovators. You know, we don't know their work as well
as we know this one, but the modular people- that's a different approach. There's a liquid type reactor which seems
little hard but maybe they say all about us, uh.
And so there are different ones. Although Bill Gates Traveling Wave
Reactor is still advertised to the public as a mechanical device shuffling
natural uranium fuel rods around. TerraPower sought and received a research
grant from the department of energy in 2015. It is for the study of a uranium fueled
fast-spectrum Molten Salt Reactor. Uh, can you make them work?
Yes, you can make them work. Is there an advantage to doing it?
I haven't seen. Unless you're using slowed down,
thermal-spectrum neutrons. Thorium breeding offers no advantage
over uranium breeding. Dr. Lyons report's investigation of Molten Salt
only includes fast-spectrum, not thermal-spectrum. That is why he sees no thorium
advantage over uranium. Alvin Weinberg new the kidney would be required. His team knew it before they even started
constructing the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment. So it's a bit disappointing to see Weinberg's
chemical kidney dismissed, as- "a drawback that could be potentially eliminated". The last operational Molten Salt Reactor
shut down in the United States in 1969. It ran in a remote location. Research documents were
kept in a walk-in closet. For 3 decades, we didn't
even know this was an option. Then in 2002, ORNL's Molten Salt
documentation is scanned into PDF and accessible to some
NASA employees. 2004. Kirk Sorensen delivers CD-ROMs full
of Molten Salt research to policy makers, national labs and universities. Dr. Per Peterson at Berkeley receives a copy. 2006. Kirk moves the scanned research onto his website. 2008. Molten Salt Reactor lectures
begin at the Googleplex, and are hosted on
Google's YouTube channel. 2009. The very first thorium conference is held. Wired Magazine runs a feature story on Thorium. 2010. American Scientist runs a feature on Thorium. International thorium conferences begin. Server logs show Chinese students downloading
Molten Salt Reactor PDFs from Kirk's website. 2011. China announces their intention to build
a Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor. In the U.S., Flibe Energy is founded. Transatomic Power is founded. 2012. Baroness Bryony Worthington tours
ORNL's historic Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, which has never been
made open to the public. Kun Chen visits Berkeley California,
telling us that 300 Chinese are working full-time
on Molten Salt Reactors. 2013. Terrestrial Energy is Founded. 2014. ThorCon is Founded. Moltex is founded. Seaborg Technologies are founded. Copenhagen Atomics are founded. 2015. A flood of technical details and technology
assessments are released by molten salt startups. India reveals their new facility for molten
salt preparation and purification. China announces that now 700 engineers are
working on their Molten Salt Reactor program. Bill Gates' TerraPower receives a
grant to investigate Molten Salt. 2016. Just as this video is about to be released
Myriam Tonelotto releases a feature length documentary about Molten Salt Reactors called:
"Thorium - Far Side of Nuclear Power". Dr. James Hansen tells Rolling Stone magazine
that we should develop Molten-Salt Reactors powered by thorium. And Oak Ridge discovers actual film footage
of the Molten Salt Reactor itself. Produced in 1969, it was forgotten
in storage for over 45 years. It offers up our first and only glimpse of
an operating Molten-Salt Reactor. As a communications asset,
this is utterly invaluable and will be fully incorporated
into future videos. In 2017 I think just about
anything could happen. The Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment was
one of the most important, and I must say, brilliant achievements of the
Oak Ridge National Laboratory. And I hope that after I'm gone, people will
look at the dusty books that were written on molten salts and will say, "Hey! These guys had a pretty good idea,
let's go back to it." Back in the 60s, Alvin Weinberg saw the Molten-Salt
Reactor as a means of addressing energy pollution, and the need for clean water. Desalination would turn the
Middle East into farmland. Power centers would co-locate energy intensive
manufacturing and Small Modular Reactors. Surplus power would be sold
to nearby communities. He knew- energy was the ultimate raw material...
the more energy you have, the easier it is to recycle and
use virgin materials more efficiently. Given enough power, we can pull carbon
right out of the atmosphere or ocean. One day, on our path towards
such a future, they'll be talking about putting a Molten-Salt Reactor
in your home state. It will create manufacturing jobs,
and produce electricity for your home. It will charge your electric car- at night. Give me a martini, straight-up, with two olives. For the vitamins. You'll do things with energy
that we can't even imagine. And you'll be kept safe by a
chemically stable choice of coolant, and gravity powered
passive safety systems. I don't know when we'll get to that point. Everyone's design is different. Everyone's path to market- different. I suspect more than one will succeed. Before they do, I want everyone to know what
Molten-Salt Reactors are, and why they are.
I'm not a fan of murder, but if Helen Caldicott died I would be genuinely happy
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