Thorium Energy Alliance conference 2022

thank you thank you for being here and I also want to thank John and Vince for creating this conference again and again and again it's really really important for us all of us to be able to come together and and talk about these issues and help build this technology it's really been a grassroot movement for many many years I also want to thank godon for putting the videos online before I came to the first conference I watched many many videos many hours of video that Gordon had recorded and I think also you know we are 100 people here maybe or something but there are many more watching at home and we have to remember that we are we're part of a big Community I also want to thank Kirk Sorensen for in the beginning he was one of the people really got this going um and I'm [Applause] yes I'm really proud to be part of that uh Legacy and try to do my part and our part in coping atomics to to move forward Rusty made a really nice introduction about why we need to solve these problems uh in the world with energy and clean water and all that we summarize this with this uh slogan on the back of our t-shirt most the most of the team members have these T-shirts they wear them every day at the workshop so it's really nice we've gotten a lot of positive feedback from that so I think some of you have seen this before it's the entity consumption of the world and you see that nuclear the orange one is not very big wind and solar is even smaller so the the question you want to ask yourself where do you think it's going to go in the next 50 years is it going to go up like it has the last 100 years or is it going to go down because we choose as humans to spend less energy so can we have a show of hands who think it's going to go up okay and how many things is going to go down okay one guy all right uh I will so I will say say to you if we have to go down like it shows here we probably have to kill two billion people I have my own guesses here about how it's going to look in the next 40 years you know this is what we think all of you are can have your own opinion nobody knows exactly uh what it's going to look like um earlier this week I was at the moments or reactor workshop at Oakridge and and now I've been here for for two days and I think we have to remember uh why forum is important because sometimes it gets lost in all this debate about uranium uh Thor is the only element that can make a breeder reactor in thermal spectrum and this is super important super important and we sometimes forget that and I just want to remind you and everybody at home but it's not enough with Thorn you need a multi-star reactor where you can remove the fission products otherwise you can't have a burrito react and so molds are reactors and thorium they go together and they have really important concept and you you can't just use one of them I mean you can if you want to make research and do the first steps towards developing this technology but if you really want to have a very very large deployment of nuclear energy you need both of them and of course the last thing we will not run out of Thor so coping atomics is all about making moves or reactors and especially thorium reactors on assembly lines or mass manufacturing and we had this idea all the way back from when we started the company back in 2014 that we must be able to mass manufacture this like we do with cars and airplanes and we have a plan to make these assembly lines where we can make one reactor every day and that reactor is a 100mb what thermal reactor it fits inside roughly the size of a 40 foot shipping container and we can deploy them and install them all over the world but I'm going to come back to what are the most important markets for us but before that I just want to summarize quickly what is what is coping atomics all about in sort of five simple bullet points the first one is that we've developed a technology over these last eight years where we believe that we can provide energy at a lower cost than any other Energy System any other and why is that important that's important because price is King if you can provide something at lower cost than the other guys they will oftentimes select you next important thing is that we can take spent fuel from old reactors and reuse that and we can get 10 times more energy out of that fuel once we use it again in a combing Atomic waste burner and that is phenomenal I mean think about other Energy Systems can you think of something where you can take the exhaust from another Energy System and get 10 times more energy out of it it's like Unthinkable and this is what we're dealing with here we have a unique technology sort of between our hands and between all of us and we we have to make sure that this technology gets to the market it's so vital for humans Prosperity um also cooling atomics is is different than many of the other uh nuclear energy vendors because many of them are selling reactors but we want to sell energy we want to build own and operate the reactors we believe that's a way to get to lower cost we will also decommission the reactors afterwards and this means that essentially we're selling energy as a service and I want to reveal something else that I mean sometimes people ask me can you throttle the reactor run at half power yeah we can do that but you're still going to pay for full power because because the the reactor is such that we actually make more money in the long term if it's running at full power so you don't get a rebate I mean you essentially to pay twice as much for your electricity if you run at 50 percent so that in that respect we're probably also different um so what is common atomics we're actually already building a reactor in Copenhagen and I think that's super cool and the rest of the team thinks so too I mean we're not just sitting around and doing paper design and talking about how this could be done and trying to optimize something we're actually building it and we have been building stuff for many years and I will show you a lot of pictures on that later in my slide but we are really really proud that we've actually started building a reactor and then the long-term goal you probably know that Facebook has a billion subscribers and Google has shipped more than a billion Android phones there's not yet a company in the world that has applied green energy to a billion people and we want to be that company uh it's going to be really tough and I hope that we can do this before I die it's going to be a really long journey but we want to try foreign lots of people ask me all the time so so where are you going to install these reactors and what are they going to be used for and I've made this table sort of to to start that dialogue because uh it's a dialogue that I've had hundreds of times this table is not complete but I've just listed for them so you can build reactors on land so new build reactive on land or you can retrofit old power plants typically co-fire power plants or you can put them on bartis there's a couple of companies doing that or you could put nuclear reactors on ships like they do with the aircraft carriers and submarines and and there's talks about doing that for commercial ships and there's also a couple of companies focusing on putting reactions on ship and from a technical standpoint it's all possible no no doubt about it but when we sort of look at the cost of these different deployment there's a very big difference between putting a new build large reactor on the on on land compared to for example putting it on a ship and we have to remember that it actually matters where the reactor goes and it also Matters How big that market is and there's an estimates there of the market size I mean the the market size for new build is huge and and there's only so many whole five power plant where you can replace it oftentimes they are close to the city and you know it's it's got to be custom integrated every time so it's not easy to do like Mass deployment and we are really about all about something where you can deploy a reactor every day that's not easy if you have to customize it for a specific site or a specific ship or something okay our reactors can be used in all these types of deployments but the one that we really like is the first one new build on land and uh and of course we believe that we can deploy it much faster um there's also a lot of discussions about about uranium versus thorium and even discussions about low Envision uranium versus Halo and all this of course I cannot go in details with all this that this is a very deep and long discussion but I've tried to make sort of a very simple slide here with three different columns there's the First Column is the combing atomics waste burner then there's the uranium monitor reactor sort of what people call Generation 4 reactors and then finally there's the uranium light water reactors which are the most well-known reactor out there so I thought those were the best ones to compare so you have to understand with thorium you can get thorium right out of the ground we already mine for other materials where we get form out of the ground but we don't use it with put it back in the ground but we could just refine that form and use it in a reaction we don't need to enrich it or anything but on the contrary if you want to use uranium you have to mine roughly a hundred times more material out of the ground that costs a lot of money to hold all that material out of the ground you have to ship it somewhere you have to refine it you have to you know you have to turn it into uranium hexafluoride and enrich it and it has to be a really really lean product before you can run it through that enrichment the enrichment facilities are very expensive both to build and operate just the fuel supply is 100 times more expensive for Uranium than it is for thorium once we get up to scale so already there I mean we're sort of on a completely different scale of things and then of course the the waste products if you're a waste burner you you basically end up with uh fishing products which only needs to be stored for roughly 300 years whereas with the uranium reactors you you have to do something with the fuel that comes out of those reactors before you can dispose of it or if you just dispose it I mean maybe a hundred thousand years again the energy price because we can load a Kickstarter fuel up front and then we we have a breederer reactor I will show you some pictures later on so you load 180 kilograms of Kickstarter fuel on day one and then you can run that reactor for 50 years and you only have to refuel with thorium I mean this is amazing stuff it's not like these Live Water reactors where you have to refuel every 18 months or something and have to be down for a long time and you have to have all these employees that are trained and yeah so much trouble just run for them it's much easier and of course if you can build them in on an assembly line and when they come out of that assembly line they are quality assured the whole box is completely gas tight and sealed and you ship it out to the place where you where you want to run it and out there you load the kickstarter fuel it you can you can really deploy one every day it's completely different than these Live Water reactions that takes you know sometimes more than 10 years to build and of course also the pressure at the bottom I mean the the pressure is what allows us to make them small basically and this is also really really important and oftentimes this is completely forgotten in the sort of when people talk about nuclear uh and especially Advanced reactors so how much energy you need to invest to build these systems before you can actually start to to get the energy back from running those systems and with wind and solar uh it's it's uh it's not a very good investment but of course it's possible it's doable but this is why wind and solar will never grow to 50 of global energy the hydrocarbons a little bit better light water reactors is of course the winner today but look at the waste burner that we have we use very little steel very little concrete compared to a light Water Reactor and the same amount of energy produced so we are in a completely different ball game and this is of course also the reason why the price that we can manufacture at a lower price and manufacture is much faster all right so that was sort of a little bit of an introduction to why thoraminity and why waste burners now I'm going to talk about some of the milestones and show you some of the pictures of things we've done in coping atomics we've already built the first non-fiction prototype of our first reactor and test that with water right now we are building the next one that we're going to test with fleenac a non-radioactive salt in the beginning of next year and we currently have set up salt production lines where we can produce one ton of flea neck every month and we're getting close to scaling that to two tons every month nobody else in the world has that and if I should really brag about it the salt that we produce at this one ton per month is more clean than some of the samples we we can get from other competitors at 100 gram scale we have figured out a way to make a process to make really clean salt and this is where we can use stainless steel 316. we we don't see a lot of corrosion if we have really clean salt and it but it has also taken us four years to develop that process and I can tell you the most difficult thing was actually to measure consistently how clean it is or so that you can reproduce those measurements again and again and and we're going to set up next year we're going to set up a thorium production line where we can produce Foam Salt the maximum capacity of that new production line is 100 tons of thorium and 10 tons of uranium nobody else in the world has mold and salt production facilities at that scale so we're really proud of that um uh yeah and then of course uh we we plan to be able to start the reactor and run it also similar to Rusty in 2025 and load the fissile kickstarter Fuel and finally we believe that in 2028 we will be able to have the first commercial reactor online so what does it look like uh the design has changed a little bit so basically it's a reactor inside a 40-foot shipping container and it's completely airtight and sealed and if you want to put one gigawatt at one location you put 25 of these reactors next to each other in a long row inside a typical industrial building in our case in our reactor design we have three barriers between the fuel salt and nature and the third barrier is actually around each reactive so the building itself is not part of the safety barrier the building is just there to you know keep the birds out and dust and so on I want to talk a little bit about spend nuclear fuel because that's also some of the questions we get again and again so the up in the left hand corner the uh the drummer is an icon to represent the spent fuel you take that and if you look inside that drum 95 of all the atoms in there are uranium and it's exactly the same uranium atoms as what we got out of the ground through my finding 20 or 30 years earlier that hasn't changed at all so of course if we could separate those we could put them back into nature and they would be natural as everything else but of course the difficult thing is to make that separation but we actually don't think that we're going to put put them back in nature we think that the global uranium Market will be happy to buy all these separate uranium so that's why we say that we send it back to the global uranium Market the last five percent is the dirty stuff that are the fishing products and the train turanics and we need to separate those and the fishing products we can we can send away for storage right away and the last roughly one percent a little bit more is the transuranics and all that dirty stuff the plutonium the neptunium the curium all that stuff we put into our reactor and burn that and it's that is what helps us start the thorn fuel cycle and at the same time we split all those heavy atoms and turn them into fishing products that we later can store okay a little bit about our development philosophy and coping atomics you know that there are probably 20 molten salt reactor companies around the world and most of those have chosen and the more traditional route where you do a paper design and once you have sort of completed your paper design then you go for approval and later on you start building it we thought we wanted to do it differently because we believe in order to optimize these processes and understand this new technology we need to have rapid technology cycles and we wanted to do that with non-radioactive materials and without doing tons of paperwork so we just started doing that basically from day one or actually even before we founded the company we started tinkering in the lab and we've built systems and many of you probably know that we've built very many systems and tested a lot of things and we've learned a lot okay so just a little bit of fun facts about the the company we are roughly 60 people now and we have already done accumulated 70 years of testing of all types of components and I was at the mobile reactor conference earlier this week and I I asked other people like how many years do you think you've tested and most of them said ma we we don't even have one year of accumulated testing yet uh so 70 years is really cool this is the team this picture is a little bit old so the team is bigger now but there's most of the team you can see they're wearing the the same t-shirt as I have here are some examples of some of the test systems that we're building these are sort of the the two images there on the right is sort of a picture taking into the furnace part of the system the one in the middle there's two heat exchangers and a pump and some valves and a filter and a reheater and and at the bottom you see sort of this Square tank with the salt inside and when we when we run these systems we put the tank Under Pressure so that the salt goes up into the pump so that it primes and then we just start pumping and and once we turn off the pump the salt just drains back into the tank and of course we only want to use the same principle in our reactor it works really really well and on the on the right hand side there's an example of a filter system where we have two tanks and we filter so from one to the other and the left image is some of the guys playing with the systems here is uh here's uh some images of the salt production systems uh the the one there on the left is actually lithium fluoride thorium fluoride so a real thorium salt in the middle we have a flea neck and on the right side we have the canisters that's how we are now manufacturing the salt and this is also what we sell to universities and National Labs around the world to help them build molden salt systems we've built a lot of electronic systems and sensors because for example when you have a reactor and you have all this radiation it can endure bit flips and resets and reboots and stuff like that so in our system we've developed a new type of software that where the software runs massively parallel so that it runs on 50 computers at the same same time the exact same software run on 50 computers and then they vote on in each iteration they vote on and see if they agree on the uh on the action of the reactor in the next step and it is highly unlikely that all these uh hundreds of CPUs will have the same bit flip at the same time so therefore the statistics of doing it in this way is really good and therefore we can use sort of consumer electronics instead of this super expensive nuclear heart and electronics and here's another example of some of the sensors and electronics that we're building we have more than 30 different types of electronics and sensor components here's a product that we're really really proud of we started back in 2016 I think it was developing our own pump and that was after talking to a number of the big pump manufacturers in Europe first we ask them do you have a molden salt pump and they say what is a moving salt pump and then and then we started dialogue with them and see can you help us develop one and they said it's going to cost you at least a million dollars and we don't guarantee anything and we're like okay we looked in our bank account back then you know we'll be bootstrapping the company we didn't have a million dollars in the bank so we thought ah what are we gonna do so we decided to develop our own pump and we're really happy today that we actually did made that choice so at the top row there you see the what we call the small pump uh it's a pump that we only guarantee that it runs for 1 000 hours it's for research purposes it's for testing all these components and we've made many of those I think some like 40 of those pumps and we're testing them for thousands of hours and they are not good enough for running in your reactor clearly 1000 hours is not enough so at the bottom there you see our next Generation pump which we call the uh this is the active magnetic bearing pump that means that the rotating parts inside the the pump is levitating on a magnetic field and then therefore there's no no touching parts and or no where and it's known for me industry that pumps like these can run for 20 years without service and it so that we've started developing that but again we needed to develop that for a high temperature for 700 degrees and of course all these electronics and all these magnets and all that stuff also needs to work at 700 degrees and that was sort of a little bit tough and it's not I mean it's still uh in sort of research State it's not ready for shipping to customers yet but this is a this is a product that we're really proud of and uh I'm pretty sure that there's going to run for 10 years inside a reactor so that's a that's a cool development on the right side there there's a picture of one of the pumps inside a one of the loops here's a picture of the first reactor that we're building and testing this is the one where we test with water on the right side you see this octagon where the reactor core is inside in the middle you sort of see a big wall out of stainless steel and everything to the right of that big wall is supposed to be at 600 Degrees in the real reactor and everything to the lift of that wall is supposed to be at room temperature that's where we have the heavy water we use heavy water as moderator and that's also where we have the electronics and all that I should stress that the heavy water is not under pressure it's at room temperature and we cool it like crazy uh to keep it cold because of course it's it's very close to the hot salt inside the core but we've we've demonstrated that that works well and heavy water is a wonderful moderator it's just the best moderator you can get and if you want to make a burrito reactor that's why you want to use a heavy water a little bit about our test Loops many of you have probably seen those on some other pictures on our website or something like that this is the fifth generation of our test Loops we've uh we've had a lot of experience similar to some of the universities that it's not super easy to build these test loops and have no leaks and have pumps and valves and gaskets and sensors and everything work all the time but now we've we've developed these Loops to a a very good standard where we can actually depend on them and and make repeated experiments with the exact same results and and we're really happy to have those we're also selling those test Loops to uh mostly to National Labs and universities around the world and many of our customers more than half of our customers are here in the us and we're very proud to partner with some of the best National Labs and best universities MIT for example and of course we also learned something back from them when they use our loops and test things in them the the test Loop is sort of a it has two barriers so the first barrier is the salt barrier the basically the loop inside where we circulate things and then there's the outer wall so everything inside the loop has an argon atmosphere and of course there's an atmospheric cover gas and the salt circulating salt but there's also an argon in the rest of the loop and of course we monitor all the time the amount of moisture and oxygen in in those and it's really important to get down to very low level love accidents like you know 10 PPM or even lower we had to change our argon supplier because the one we had before couldn't deliver argon that was clean enough for for what we're doing um and we now have 15 Loops running and we are building 10 more Loops so I mean we are by far the leader in the world in testing mode and salt and building these molden saw loops and we also do static salt tests uh these are what we call test tubes they are just small little systems where we can test corrosion gaskets sensors uh different salts at different temperatures but it's not they're not pumped it's just a static salt test and okay so this is also very important we want to we want to provide better tools for the mozzar reactor community and we've chosen to work with the openmc it stands for open Monte Carlo simulation tools and just a few years ago like five years ago it was actually not possible for like some some person who wants to Tinker at home or a student to to sort of design a reactor at home and and test the neutronics but with these tools that we've now developed and released and there very well equipped for assimilating Mozart reactors you can actually make a cat drawing in a in an open source CAD tool export that take it into your openmc simulation tools we've provided all the tool chain for that as open source and then you can simulate your reactor your own perfect reactor design at home and you can sort of experiments with different dimensions to see how well that reactor will work but not only that the three images here that I show at the top row are the reactors from the aircraft reactor experiment the zero power reactor experiment and the Mozart reactor experiment so existing reactors that was running back in the day at Oakridge and of course we're simulating those to make sure that we can get the same criticality values and everything as what they did in the real experiments because we need to make sure that our simulation tools that we can trust the results that comes out of those and also all these CAD models of those the msre all the other reactions are available for open source if you want to download those and play with them and we will continue to put significant efforts into this open Soul tool I I believe that we as an industry need a tool we can all share and compare results and also the University's national app can can use the same thing for free of course so now we're going a little bit more technical for those of you who are engineers and who are interested in nutronics so this chart here shows you the preacher ratio of a reactor there's a few different combinations of reactors here you see that something called R GPU is reactor grade plutonium and then that's of course the best one that's the same as what you put into MOX Fuel and that's the kickstarter fuel if you start with this plutonium that you would normally put into max fuel you get a breeder reactor within three years roughly and then if you started on transubanix which is the the most dirty part of your spend fuel then you also get breeder reactor in roughly three years but it's it doesn't have as good a breeze radio because there's many more dirty things in there to capture your neutrons there's also the Leu which means low and risk uranium five percent risk uranium if you run that in the best case you can actually get up to a level where it's just above a breeding ratio these simulations here are with the carbon carbon composite core and we we really need that if we need to make a really good breeder reactor we can use some other materials but that is our primary Choice and then finally there's the example the red line is the first reactor that we're going to run in 2025 it will have a stainless steel core for the most part and therefore much uh worse Neutron economy and also we will not separate the efficient products which is another important thing so the next three slides that I'm going to show is all about the neutron economy of the reactor the first one here is the reactive grade plutonium the charge on the left side is the you know which Isotopes capture your neutrons and the chart on the right side is how much material of each of those elements do you have in the reactor over the years how do that change over the years and you see that we start the blue colors are plutonium so you see that we we start on plutonium and in the beginning plutonium is capturing a lot of the neutrons but already after in this case here what is that four years five years you basically burned away most of that plutonium and there's very little left and you can see the dark green color is the uranium-233 it sort of builds up over time and start capturing the neutrons and of course when the uranium-233 is capturing the neutrons you also know that that's what's you know generating your power and all the time that thorium is the the orange color the big orange color the thorium is capturing neutrons and being you know converted into uranium-233 if we move on to the next one this is based on transuranics the similar station on the previous Pace ran for 10 years but this one only runs for seven years and you can see that the trenchy ranks there's more dirty stuff in there so it takes more years to burn away the plutonium but eventually we will burn away the plutonium and then the last case here is the case where we run on low and Rich uranium I don't think that there are many other multi-reactor companies that can run on low enrich uranium I think terrestrial energy was one of them but in general most of the other companies want to run on Halo fuel but here you can see that even with low and Rich uranium we actually build up significant uranium-233 and start getting the majority of energy from the uranium-233 already after two years but of course when we have uranium 238 in there we also generates a lot of plutonium and that plutonium will come you know we will burn the plutonium as we go you can see it's sort of steady state across the the image there but we're also generating new plutonium all the time so it's a very similar case to uh um for example a candle reactor light Water Reactor so that was that was my quick introduction to coping atomics [Applause] [Applause]

Channel: Copenhagen Atomics

Views: 20,027

Keywords: copenhagenatomics, technology, greenenergy, sustainability

Id: MnxVdjtnvD4

Length: 30min 34sec (1834 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 28 2022