THORIUM: World's CHEAPEST Energy! [Science Unveiled]

yeah so I'm going to talk about Copenhagen  Atomics a Copenhagen startup company and thorium   energy so a lump that size made out of thorium you  can hold it in your hand it's the size of the golf   ball it can provide you with all the energy you  need for your entire life not just electricity   but everything you mean your share of hospitals  and houses and Roads and all the products you use   throughout your entire life it's quite  amazing you can get all that energy out of this   small ball and the cost of a ball like that when  it's mined out of the ground is roughly 100 so   if you live for 100 years it's like one dollar per  year for the raw material to produce all the green   energy you would need for your entire life that is  that is a big opportunity and this is what Copenhagen Atomics is working on developing that technology  of course after you have the sort of the thorium out of the ground you still need a machine  that can convert that metal into energy and   this is what we developed and actually Copenhagen  Atomics is leading the world development in this   thorium energy so it's quite exciting that we're  developing this right here in Copenhagen and   this is what I'm going to talk about today. We  believe a lot that energy equals Prosperity   so that means you know we need a lot of energy  in the world if everybody is going to have   the same level of prosperity as every one of  us here in this room have experience through our   life there's at least five billion people in  the world that would really like to have the   same level of prosperity as what we experience  every day and that's going to take huge amount of   energy and hopefully green energy and and so this  is what we're again trying to develop that energy   source that can more than double the amount of  energy that humans built or produce in this world   and I've given many talks of this over the  years hundreds of talks this one is going to be   a little bit technical because after all it is the  Tech Stage at TechBBQ so essentially   what we want to do is we want to mass manufacture  molten salt reactors and it is a type of nuclear   reactor but it's not like old classical nuclear  it's a different type of nuclear reactor that can   convert this thorium into energy and this is what  we're developing right here in Copenhagen and we want   to mass manufacture it on assembly lines where we  can make at least one reactor every day of course   in the distant future many reactors every day and  you heard that right you know normally we think   about nuclear reactors as something that takes  10 years to build but we actually want to build   one every day on an assembly line and when we then  install it in a nuclear power plant it looks   like this it looks like a regular Distribution  Center in the outskirts of whatever City you're   from because it's just a building and inside the  building there's an array of reactors and those   reactors are what generates the energy you need  25 of our reactor units to produce one gigawatt   of electricity in this particular building is a  project that we're involved in in Indonesia so   Copenhagen Atomics wants to build own and operate the  nuclear power plant so it's not a government that   builds it and operates it's Copenhagen Atomics  or one of our subsidiaries in those countries and we also Finance the power plant so it's a completely different model than the classical   model of nuclear energy that we've known for so  many years so what we make is the Heat and we   we export that heat or sell that heat through  molten salts and then the customer is sort of   in the buildings in the background they will  convert that heat into electricity or Steam for   industrial use I also show this chart a lot of  times because it tells us the history of humans   and energy and how that all fits together when  we started back in 1800 or the when this chart   starts in 1800 we were less than half a billion  people on this planet and now we are eight billion   people so it really tells you what energy can do  it it started so the whole Industrial Revolution   this chart here is for me it's like the crankshaft  of the international economy and of course we have   the media and politicians and stuff and they talk  about all kinds of things for example every now   and then there's a some crisis like the financial  crisis in 2008 there's a small bump in the   chart there was the oil crisis in the 70s another  Small Bump there was the corona crisis 2020 or   2020 another Small Bump but you see how you  know the all the products all the stuff we need   concrete, steel, aluminium all that stuff that takes  huge amount of energy and this chart tells you   how that is made and which type of energy  sources and of course the old energy sources   the the fossil fuels are of course the main driver  of this there's a little bit of classical nuclear   there's a little bit of wind and solar  and those are growing but not super fast   when you ask sort of the average man on the  street here in Europe about you know should we   build more nuclear what they will tell you  is that it's too expensive it takes too long   time to build it's very dangerous and it  leaves behind waste that is a big problem   but what if I told you that this is actually not  true or at least we have solutions to solve those   problems maybe you would reconsider and and what  I find when I've spoken to thousands of people   is that most people when they realize that these  problems can be solved they're really willing to   look at nuclear technology and nuclear energy  in a new light and let me go through some of those   so first of all there's the problem that it is  dangerous well that's completely misinformation   from the media nuclear energy has never been  dangerous and it's still not dangerous if you look   at the international statistics of how many people  die from different types of energy sources you see   here that of course coal is the most dangerous  one you also see that nuclear energy is on par   with wind and solar at the bottom you also see  that um these numbers include both accidents in   Chernobyl and Fukushima so these statistics  are over many decades and of course if those   accidents were not included then it would be of  course even safer so it's misinformation that   is dangerous it has never been dangerous um and  it probably never will be then there's this thing   about radiation people say oh but you remember  the Fukushima power plant it blew up and people   had to be evacuated well first of all it was not a  nuclear explosion it was a hydrogen explosion and   nobody died from that of course it's not supposed  to blow up I agree but nobody died second thing is   that people were evacuated but actually the  radiation level in (most of) the area where they were   evacuated were never at the high level that we  have in for example Stockholm or Rome and nobody   talks about evacuating all the people in Stockholm  or Rome so it's crazy it was a big mistake that   (most of) those people were evacuated and nobody wants to  sort of admit that but it was not dangerous so   stay there and nobody would have died or even get  close to dying if they had stayed so human error   now I want to talk a little bit about some of  the physics behind nuclear energy maybe some of   you guys remember this from your high school maybe  not so all the nuclear energy or all the nuclear   power plants in the world today they run on what  is called uranium-235 it's shown there on the   left and when you hit uranium-235 with a neutron  then you can get it to split it's called fission   and then you get two fission products which are  the two elements on the right and then you get   some neutrons and those neutrons are really really  important because that is what makes it possible   to make a chain reaction and this is why nuclear  Engineers they talk about Neutron economy all the   time when they talk about reactors because if you  don't have the right Neutron economy your reactor   is not going to work and I explain this because  I want to explain how it works with Thorium because   it's a little bit different with thorium when you  dig thorium out of the ground it's the one at   the bottom here at the chart so then it's called  thorium-232 and you hit that with a neutron but it   won't split then it up it's upgraded to Thorium-233  later it decays to what is called pro-tactinium   233 and then further on to uranium-233 uranium-233  is an excellent nuclear Fuel and it will fission   and it will generate enough neutrons to have  an excellent Neutron economy in your reactor   uranium-233 does not exist in nature so it's  man-made and it can only be made in one inside one   of these thorium reactors so that's the difference  between classical uranium-based reactors and   thorium reactors but then once it turns into  uranium-233 it also fission in the same way   as what was shown in the previous chart and then  if you look at how much thorium do we have on this   planet compared to how much of this uranium-235  do we have so we have at least a thousand times   more thorium and thorium exists in all countries of  this world so it's it's very plentiful and we will   never run out of it and of course we can generate  a lot of green energy from it so it used to be   that classical nuclear energy based on this thin  sliver the thin orange sliver of uranium-235   was not called renewable because there was a fear  that we would eventually run out of uranium-235   but we're not going to run out of thorium so  thorium is sort of a renewable energy source   also if you try to compare thorium to  other energy sources that we use today like   oil and gas and coal if you take one kilogram of  each one of them and then show how much energy   you're getting out of it you can see that the  there's some small balls there of of the the   fossil fuels and then there's a huge ball that  doesn't even fit on the slide which is the thorium   it's so much more energy per kilogram it's  actually more than a million times the energy   density of the classical fossil fuels  and then there's the argument about the waste   what do we do about the waste from classical  nuclear energy and do we generate waste from   the thorium reactors well first of all let's talk  about the waste from classical nuclear reactors   so the symbol up there in the left hand side is  the drum it represents the waste from classical   nuclear reactors and if you look inside that drum  95 of that is natural uranium it's the exact same   uranium as with dug out of the ground many years  earlier it hasn't changed at all the problem is   that it's mixed with these last five percent  which is sort of a radioactive and a problem so   if you can separate those two then you  get basically natural uranium and you could sell   that uranium back to the uranium Market but the  problem was in the past it was not economically   viable to make this separation but it is now  and this is why things are changing in these years   so what we can do with the last five  percent after it has been separated we   can take those last five percent those are two  things those fission products. Fission products   are radioactive and they need to be stored safe  for 300 years and above ground so not this very   expensive deep geological storage but you can store  them above ground for 300 years and then there's   the last part the orange part there it's the transuranics and the plutonium and those are   the reason why nuclear waste usually people say  that it needs to be stored for 100 000 years   underground but we can actually take that and use  it as a Kickstarter fuel inside thorium reactors   and when we do that we can generate 10 times  more energy out of the material both the thorium and and those transuranics and plutonium than  the amount of energy we got out of the fuel in   the first place so it's it's sort of an upgrade  it becomes a very very valuable Fuel and that's   also why I believe that in a few years from now  you will see people sort of paying the same as   for gold and diamonds for nuclear waste it's going  to be a very very valuable resource on this planet then I want to talk a little bit about the  technology that we have developed in Copenhagen   Atomics one of the important thing is this special  Reactor Core which is different than all the other   reactors out there in the world and we have taken  patents and trademarks on it it's called The Onion   Core and what is so special about this is that  it's it's almost full of heavy water the blue   colors are the heavy water and the heavy water  is there to slow down the neutrons it's all about   this Neutron economy to get that to work really  well and then the Yellow Part around in the   on the outside is the thorium blanket that  is where the neutrons are captured and that is   where we convert the thorium into this uranium-233  and then that uranium-233 is then transferred into   those fuel channels in the middle which are sort  of the purple color and when the fuel gets in   the fuel Channel then it's pumped with a pump it's  a liquid salt at 600 Degrees so it comes in at   the bottom at 600 Degrees and then one second  later it exits at the top at 700 degrees and this   is when the energy is generated and then during  the time that it you know flows up through that   channel it generates a huge amount of energy and  gives off all these neutrons that are then needed   for for running the chain reaction and and this  is a new type of reactor that we have invented in   Copenhagen and that we're really proud of because  it can really change the price of nuclear energy I   will come back to that a little bit later here are  some examples of the some of the prototypes that   we've built we're not allowed to start a nuclear  Chain Reaction here in Copenhagen at the moment   but what we can do is that we can we can heat  the salt up with electricity and then pump it   around and test all the things with flow rates and  thermal expansion and all these other things that   we need to test and one of the things we need to  test is corrosion so one of the problems that is   a lot of times mentioned on the internet if you  read about molten salt reactors is the corrosion   problem but we've actually already solved that  a couple of years ago and we're also leading the   global development in molten salt technology and  we're selling these salts and this know-how to   universities and National National Labs around the  world so what we do there is we in this particular   image you see on the left hand side you see we  take some samples and we put them inside this   salt at 600 Degrees for in this case 2 000 hours  and then we look at the corrosion afterwards and   you can see at the lower left hand picture that  you get a lot of corrosion actually that the   material get quite damaged if you don't do the  purification but in Copenhagen Atomics we've developed   a process to purify the salt so that we get rid  of the corrosion and then you see on the right   hand side that you know it almost doesn't change  if you run it for two thousand hours and we have   other tests where we run with different types  of salt different number of hours different temperatures and we always get the same results and  this is something that we've been developing for   the last eight years but we cheated a little bit  because there was actually a group of scientists   at the Danish Technical University who have  been developing these purification processes for   more than two decades so we're standing on the  shoulders of giants and we're really happy that   we that we got to know these guys and then this is sort of the last three or the three key selling points of Copenhagen Atomics so with  this new technology we are able to produce energy   at lower cost than any other energy technology  so this is green energy at the lowest energy cost   and we can beat anything from coal or Fusion or  wind and solar anything on price the next thing   that we bring to the table is a new model for  nuclear energy I mean nuclear energy is throughout   all the previous decades it was something that was  you know built by governments owned by governments   you know regulated by governments financed by  governments but we bring a new model to the table   one where we as a company and our subsidiaries we  Finance build own and operate the power plants   and we believe that is a really important part of  being able to provide energy at low cost and then   of course finally the thing that I talked about  in the beginning with the waste we're able to take   spent fuels from all the other types of reactors  out there and convert that and use that with our   thorium reactors and generate 10 times more energy  than than the other reactors per kilogram and also   when we leave waste behind it's the type of waste  that only needs to be stored for 300 years above   ground so it still needs storage but it's a manageable problem so if we go back and think   about that one of the first slides that I showed  that there are these problems okay so people say   that it's too slow and it's too expensive well  it's definitely not expensive now it's actually   the cheapest form of energy and we can build one  reactor every day so those problems are sort of   solved then there's the danger part well that's  a misinformation problem and our reactors are   still going to be one of the safest energy forms  in the world in the decades to come and then   finally of course there's the waste problem  which have also shown that we can solve   so this is what Copenhagen Atomics is developing  here right here in Copenhagen we have a team   of 70 people working every day and we're growing  the team month by month so if you're interested   either as an investor or as a potential  employee please come and talk to us because   we we need all the support we can get to bring  this technology to Market thank you [Applause]

Channel: Copenhagen Atomics

Views: 599,383

Keywords: nuclear, nuclear power, nuclear energy, thorium, technology, nuclear technology, tech, innovation, nuclear tech, molten salt, thorium molten salt, green energy, greenenergypioneers, industry leaders, future of nuclear, nuclear future, technology of the future, advanced technology, innovative technologies, start up, Denmark, Copenhagen Atomics, founder, business opportunity, energy revolution, energy, renewable energy, renewables

Id: U434Sy9BGf8

Length: 17min 31sec (1051 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 22 2023