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  • Everybody who likes drain tanks, this is a drain tank.

  • The big goal of this machine here is to simulate how decay heat is removed from this design

  • when there's a shutdown.

  • That is correct.

  • In January 2015, Kirk Sorensen of Flibe Energy toured UC Berkeley's Compact Integral Effects

  • Test for Pebble and Molten Salt Fueled Reactors. Kirk also presented at UC Berkeley...

  • We're going to talk mostly about the chemical processing and a little bit about the power

  • conversion system as well.

  • ...and the University of Utah.

  • The chemical processing of this reactor...

  • Those two presentations are combined in this video.

  • We're in a situation in our country where we're retiring a lot of power generation right

  • now. This is actually happening particularly in the Eastern US where I live.

  • You can almost trace the outline of rivers like the Tennessee and the Ohio based on where

  • these retirements are taking place. Now, there are things we don't like about coal, and there

  • are things we do like about coal. We like the fact that is a reliable energy source.

  • We don't like the fact that it emits a lot of pollution, and it's not a resource that's

  • going to last forever.

  • There are also new regulations that are coming out that are accelerating this change, so

  • we've got a big job to do. We don't really have a great deal of time to do it.

  • We need a source that mimics all of the benefits of coal-fired power, and tries to eliminate

  • the drawbacks. A number of us are convinced that this energy source is going to be nuclear

  • in origin. The reason for that is, the energies of the nuclear are about two million times

  • greater than the energies of the electron cloud -- the energies of chemical energy,

  • the energies that powers a combustion digestion, all the processes we're used to.

  • Yet, out there in the universe, the universe is powered by the energies of the nucleus,

  • changing nuclear states, fusion and fission and nuclear decay. Humanity has only realized

  • this in about the last 70 or 80 years until we've taken our first steps into a nuclear-powered

  • world. I'm convinced that if we are going to be able to enjoy the industrial society

  • that we have, enjoy reliable energy and improve its cleanliness, we're going to have to make

  • this leap, too.

  • We're going to have to make the leap to nuclear energy.

  • I kind of feel bad when I hear that nuclear reactors are being retired. Even though I

  • know that they're not as efficient as they could be, they're still a whole lot better

  • for the environment than spewing dirty coal into the air. What I'd really like to see

  • is the United States building new nuclear resources to replace our reactors that are

  • being retired, the uranium style reactors, and also to be able to replace coal and fossil

  • fuels.

  • The Department of Energy has put the responsibility for these new nuclear reactors though, squarely

  • in the lap of industry. This is a big deal, because for decades in this country after

  • the war, the Atomic Energy Commission made all the decisions about what was going to

  • happen. It wasn't like industry got to say, "Oh, we want to try this, or we want to try

  • They said, "We're going to do this, or you're going to do that, and you'll submit a proposal."

  • But it was not in industry's court to go and make decisions like this, and now it is. This

  • is a relatively new development, and I think it's going to lead to entrepreneurialism because

  • they've squarely put the onus on us to say how nuclear is going to go forward.

  • Make your business case. Make your argument. If you want a nuclear power plant, say why

  • it's better.

  • What kind of nuclear energy then becomes a logical question. We are blessed on this world

  • with nuclear resources, three forms of nuclear fuel, two forms of uranium, and one of thorium.

  • Thorium is about three times more common than uranium, but the uranium we're using today

  • is only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of natural uranium.

  • It's what's called naturally fissile uranium, uranium-235. This is what we're consuming

  • right now for nuclear energy.

  • If you want to make nuclear energy a sustainable enterprise, then you need to go and be using

  • the remainder of these fuels. Thorium has the advantage of abundance. There is an awful

  • lot it, but it doesn't have any naturally fissile thorium. There is no little sliver

  • here that we can point to and say, "This is thorium we can use to start a nuclear reaction."

  • This is one of the reasons why thorium has not been favored for nuclear energy in the

  • early days, but now we've reached a more mature stage, where I think it is time to go ahead

  • and look at implementing thorium as a nuclear fuel. Both thorium and uranium-238 can become

  • nuclear fuels by absorbing a neutron, and this happens inside a nuclear reactor.

  • This is what Glenn Seaborg figured out right here, at Berkeley 70 years ago. Wasn't this

  • was possible? Glenn Seaborg, what a guy. Read all you can about him.

  • If thorium absorbs a neutron, becomes uranium-233, that is now a nuclear fuel. It can fission.

  • It can split, and release energy.

  • Uranium-233, when it's fissioned by a thermal neutron, will produce about 2.3 neutrons net.

  • That's important, because we need a two right here to make this happen in the first place.

  • You've got to have more than two to keep this going.

  • The same thing can happen with uranium-238, which is the common form of uranium, the abundant

  • form of uranium. If it absorbs the neutron, it becomes plutonium-239, and then that can

  • fission, and also release energy. In both ways you can turn these abundant nuclear resources

  • into energy sources. What is the advantage of thorium then? Why think about thorium?

  • Uranium-238 is converted to plutonium through a neutron, but that's thermally fissioned.

  • On that, you only get about 1.9, so you're below two. You're below that threshold. That's

  • why we can't build plutonium breeder reactors in thermal spectrum reactors, just can't do

  • it. There are not enough neutrons.

  • Really, plutonium kicks out enough neutrons. It's just plutonium has a real propensity

  • to eat neutrons, too. If we want to use plutonium efficiently, we really have to go to a fast

  • spectrum, because what happens in fast spectrum is fast neutrons have a much higher probability

  • of fissioning the plutonium without being absorbed.

  • Now, because they have a higher probability of doing that though, they don't have a higher

  • probability of the fission happening in the first place. This is what plutonium looks

  • like to a slowed downed neutron. The blue is the probability that it will fission, and

  • the red is the probability that it will simply absorb the neutron.

  • Each one of these guys is what plutonium looks like to a fast neutron. Every one of those

  • is a better quality hit. You're not going to get an absorption, but you need a lot of

  • it. If you want to have the same amount of cross-section probability, and fast as thermal,

  • you've got to have a lot of fuel, a lot of fuel.

  • This is an advantage of thermal spectrum, because you need a lot less fuel, but because

  • you can't breed in thermal spectrum, the interest has always been for plutonium breeding to

  • go to the fast spectrum. I bring this up because thorium doesn't have this issue. Thorium can

  • go ahead and be used as a nuclear fuel in a reactor with slowed down neutrons.

  • It's called thermalized neutrons. There are a few steps thorium goes through on this way.

  • It first absorbs the neutron and becomes thorium-233, going from 232 to 233. See, the math is not

  • so hard, just plus one. Then that thorium-233 will decay over a period of about a half-an-hour

  • into another element.

  • Protactinium-233. Protactinium is a naturally occurring material. It's part of the decay

  • chain of uranium-235, but protactinium-231, it's got something like, a 172,000-year half-life.

  • This stuff, protactinium-233, has a much shorter half-life, about 30 days. Still, in terms

  • of reactors, that's pretty long. It drives a lot of what I'm going to talk about today

  • with the chemical processing.

  • But ultimately it will decay to uranium-233, as long as it doesn't absorb a neutron, and

  • it has a very quality fission. About 91 percent of the time, it's going to fission rather

  • than absorb, and that makes U-233 the best fuel in the thermal spectrum. It outperforms

  • everything else, and it's one of the reasons we really get a kick out of thorium.

  • There are three options. We can keep bringing U-235, and without getting into issues about

  • seawater uranium, it's just we're using a very small amount, and we're not using a whole

  • bunch of uranium. We can go with the fast freezers I saw yesterday at INL with EVR2,

  • or we can potentially take this tack of a thermal breeder with thorium.

  • The path that we want to go is the thorium, because of its abundance, and because of the

  • fact that we can use it with slowed down neutrons. That makes the reactor design simpler, and

  • quite possibly safer. If you can operate a thorium reactor without any uranium-238 present

  • in the fuel, then you can really reduce the amount of transuranic waste you're going to

  • generate.

  • The reason for that is the thorium absorbing the neutron. Each one of these vertical steps

  • is a neutron absorption. The thorium absorbing the neutron, 90 percent of the time, will

  • be fissioned by the next neutron. At 10 percent of the time, it will go to U-234, which will

  • absorb another neutron, go into U-235. Think of these as like off-ramps off the freeway.

  • If 90 percent of the cars exit the freeway on the first off-ramp, and 85 percent of the

  • cars that are leftover exit the freeway on the next off-ramp, how many are there to make

  • your first transuranic? It's only one-and-a-half percent. With the thorium cycle, you could

  • potentially get down to one-and-a-half percent of the long-lived wastes production of the

  • uranium cycle, and that's a big advantage.

  • On the other hand, when you've got a fuel, like a uranium reactor, it's got a lot of

  • U-238 in it, then it's only one neutron away from its first transuranic. The reason I bring

  • up transuranics is they govern, in large part, our waste disposition strategy. In fact, actinides

  • in general, govern our waste disposition strategy, because they have long half-lives.

  • They have complicated K chains. Our waste disposition strategy is in great part about

  • actinides. Got one of the members of the Blue Ribbon Commission here, so stop me at any

  • time if I screw up here. Here's what we're doing now. This is the red line on a log-log

  • chart. Any line on a log-log chart, tread lightly.

  • This is how long it takes our spent fuel to reach the same rate activities as natural

  • uranium. It's about 300,000 years. If you can keep all the actinides out of the waste

  • stream, then you can really shorten that to about 300 years. One of the goals in the chemical

  • processing system we're going to talk about today is how to keep the actinides out of

  • the waste stream.

  • I hate to even call this stuff that is made by the thorium cycle, waste. Neptunian-237

  • is actually used to produce the material that NASA uses for batteries in their deep space

  • probes. Have you ever heard of the Curiosity Rover on Mars? Anybody heard of that or followed

  • it? That's being powered by plutonium-238, which comes from this neptunium.

  • Anybody following the New Horizons' mission to Pluto, keeping track of that? That's also

  • powered by this stuff, so even our waste, so to speak isn't even really waste. It's

  • something that we could go and make very useful products out of. Like I said, I was at NASA,

  • so I'm really into this kind of stuff.

  • By the way, 2015 is going to be a really exciting year for NASA, because we're going to see

  • Pluto for the first time, and we're going to see the largest asteroid in the solar system,

  • Ceres, for the first time. Cool stuff coming up this year. If you use thorium with this

  • kind of efficiency, something really amazing becomes possible.

  • This was realized almost immediately by Glenn Seaborg. He thought every cubic meter of the

  • Earth has got a certain amount of uranium and thorium in it. It's about two cubic centimeters

  • of thorium and half a cubic centimeter of uranium. If you can use thorium to the kind

  • of efficiencies that we're talking about today, the energy equivalent of these two cubic centimeters,

  • so imagine two little sugar cubes.

  • Think of two little sugar cubes of thorium metal. Milan, can you hold that in your hand,

  • two cc's of thorium? Is that going to hurt you?

  • No, that's not going to hurt you, so you could even imagine doing this. This has the energy

  • equivalent of more than thirty cubic meters of the finest crude oil or Anthracite coal.

  • This is like taking any worthless piece of dirt anywhere in the world, and turning it

  • into a multiple of the finest chemical energy resources we have. That's absolutely amazing.

  • That's something that completely changes our paradigm about relative national wealth, and

  • resources, and so forth.

  • That means worthless pieces of dirt become potential energy mines. Good news is, we don't

  • have to mine average continental crust for thorium. There are lots of places where nature

  • has already pre-concentrated thorium in much greater concentrations than this. The nuclear

  • concept that we would like to put forward involves what's commonly called a small modular

  • reactor.

  • There are a number of different kinds of small modular reactors. A lot of them are proposed

  • to use the same kind of water cooled reactors and uranium that we use today.

  • Our reactor design would be using a molten salt. A molten salt is just that. It's some

  • kind of salt mixture that has been taken to a higher temperature, and then melted. One

  • of the things I think is remarkable about these salts is, they form very stable compounds,

  • a very chemically stable compound. This allows them to serve as an ideal medium inside a

  • nuclear reactor.

  • The process by which we would try to use thorium in the reactor involves introducing thorium

  • into an outer region of the reactor called the blanket. In the blanket, the thorium would

  • absorb the neutron. It would take that first step. Remember, 232 to 233.

  • It's going to absorb a neutron, and it's going to begin the process of becoming uranium-233.

  • As it takes those steps of decay, turning into other elements, protactinium and then

  • uranium, we can employ a chemical separation to remove those new materials from the blanket,

  • and then introduce them into the salt that is going to go in the reactor core.

  • That's the place where the fission reaction is going to take place. That's the place where

  • it's going to generate additional energy.

  • This technology has been demonstrated, to a degree, before. This is a reactor experiment

  • that was built at Oakridge National Labs in the 1960s. It was called the "Molten Salt

  • Reactor Experiment." It was an attempt to demonstrate some of the important technologies

  • that would be used in a thorium reactor.

  • You, nuclear engineers, are probably going to think those are fuel rods. They're not.

  • They're graphite. Fluid was a liquid that flowed through channels in this graphite.

  • The graphite served as the function that water serves in an existing solid-fueled reactor,

  • which is to moderate the neutrons that are being born and fissioned.

  • Except this time, instead of having salts you want a liquid moderator, you've got liquid

  • fuel and a solid moderator.

  • This reactor didn't use thorium, but it did use uranium-233 that came from thorium. It

  • was considered a first step, it was considered that inside part of the thorium reactor concept.

  • It used a heat exchanger to move the energy from the salt that ran through the reactor

  • to another salt that rejected that energy to the environment.

  • This is the radiator that it used, glowing cherry red. It didn't generate electricity

  • with that energy, but it did demonstrate that the reactor was capable of operating in a

  • stable manner, and being very responsive to the people that were controlling it.

  • Here's a picture of what the reactor cell looks like. There's a fellow, if you can get

  • a sense of how big it was.

  • This was not a terribly optimized design. This was something they had put together very

  • quickly, because they had some funding available. It was meant to demonstrate materials and

  • technologies.

  • Ran for about five years and it was very successful. Talked to some of the people that operated

  • the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. I said, "What was it like to run this experiment?"

  • They said, "It was boring. It was boring." I thought, that's exactly what you want to

  • hear a nuclear engineer say. You don't want it to be exciting.

  • Another aspect that was emphasized to me by one of the people that had worked on this

  • reactor, his name was Paul Haubenreich. He said, "You know, lots of people told us that

  • we could build Molten Salt Reactors, but they said they will never be practical. You will

  • not be able to maintain them because of the mobile radioactivity," because of the fact

  • that it's moving around in a loop.

  • He said, "I am more proud of the fact that we maintained that reactor for 20,000 hours

  • successfully, we had a high-up time, than any other aspect of the Molten Salt Reactor

  • I really think that's worth mentioning. This was a first-of-a-kind experiment, and yet

  • they were able to execute so much of their research plan, and have such a high up-time,

  • because of the admirable characteristics of this. Paul is actually that guy in the picture,

  • Here we have the potentiality of a whole new breakthrough in the development of power for

  • peace. That means jobs, jobs for this area. But jobs and power for hundreds, for millions

  • of people all over the world.

  • At that time of that announcement, I was able to announce we were going to have one experimental

  • Unfortunately, in 1969, Richard Nixon decided to cut the funding for advanced research in

  • the Atomic Energy Commission. The Atomic Energy Commission, which was overseeing all of this

  • work, had to make a choice. They had to decide which of these advanced reactors they would

  • continue with. Would it be the thorium one, or would it be reactors that were based on

  • plutonium?

  • They made the decision, unfortunately, to pursue the plutonium reactor, rather than

  • the thorium reactor. This is one of those times in history, we made a big mistake. We

  • had an opportunity to go forward with this thorium technology, and we chose not to do

  • it.

  • Their goal was to build a large plutonium reactor on the shores of the Clinch River

  • in Tennessee. This ended up getting cancelled in the late '70s, when Carter took office.

  • It's one of those things were, I wish that maybe when they had decided not to do the

  • plutonium route, they had gone back and said, "Well, maybe we should have kept going with

  • thorium because thorium showed a lot of promise."

  • Carter was really concerned about nuclear proliferation. He was concerned other countries

  • were going to try to take nuclear technology, and going to use it to make nuclear weapons.

  • The irony is, thorium technology had been rejected back during the Manhattan project,

  • precisely because it was not applicable to the nuclear weapons program.

  • It's one of the reasons why the technologies for the uranium/plutonium were moving forward

  • in the '40s and the '50s and the '60s at a much faster rate than the thorium technology

  • was. Because they were applicable to the weapons program, and the thorium technology was not.

  • Not a great deal was happening in the western world in terms of thorium development for

  • many decades, although the Indians have been pursuing thorium consistently for many decades

  • now.

  • Most of that time, they had been looking at thorium oxide fuels, solid fuels, and running

  • into the same challenges with solid fuel thorium that everybody does. But I was told at this

  • recent conference in fall of 2013, that they now have a group that's starting to look at

  • the molten salt idea.

  • I have been told informally, through friends of this person, that one of the former directors

  • of the Indian nuclear program, when asked, "If you had it all to do again, what would

  • you do differently?" He said, "I would have gone to molten salt right from the beginning."

  • I found out about this technology in about 2000, when I first started NASA. I got very

  • excited. I was thinking about space reactors and so forth, but it didn't take long until

  • I was thinking more about, how do we power our world right here on Earth. If we can do

  • it in space, why don't we do it here on the Earth?

  • I was listening to a fellow out in the hall. Somebody asked him, "Why are you here?" He

  • said, "Because I'm interested in clean air and clean energy and things like that." I

  • felt exactly the same way. That's why I was increasingly interested in something that

  • wasn't in space, but was right here on the ground.

  • Let me get into a little more of the specifics now of what I'm working on now in cooperation

  • with the university here. This has to do with the chemical processing of this reactor, and

  • how you go and remove particular materials, and introduce them in other places in the

  • reactor.

  • This is where I began from, which is a schematic I got from a 1967 document from Oakridge.

  • This was the only thing of its kind.

  • The basic idea is, you've got to move fuel that you've now made in the periphery of a

  • reactor, you've got to remove it chemically, and you've got to introduce it into a different

  • fluid stream in the reactor. You have to take advantage at each step of chemical differences

  • that are there, and things that you know about those materials.

  • I've had to become very, very familiar with slight differences between thorium, protactinium

  • and uranium, in order to understand these particular separation and production sequences.

  • Here's the big picture of the Liquid Fluoride thorium Reactor that Flibe was working on.

  • Essentially, here's the reactor. It's got a lot of graphite in the core. The green fluid

  • is the fuel salt. This is a combination of lithium, beryllium and uranium fluorides.

  • This is the material that's undergoing nuclear fission. The uranium in this is undergoing

  • nuclear fission and generating energy. As that fuel salt is pumped out of the core,

  • it heats another salt, a coolant salt, which is just a lithium-beryllium-fluoride salt.

  • That salt is then used to heat carbon dioxide gas which passes through a gas turbine and

  • generates electricity at high efficiency. This design will generate electricity at about

  • 45 percent efficiency.

  • You mechanical engineers out there will go, "45 percent? That's awesome. That is incredible."

  • For all of you out there that aren't mechanical engineers, they go, "45 percent? Are you kidding?

  • That's like an F minus."

  • You have to believe me. Mechanical engineers get super excited about converting thermal

  • energy to electrical energy. Anything better than about 30 percent, that's considered super-duper

  • great. 45 percent, incredible.

  • On the other side of the reactor, we have the chemical processing system. In the first

  • step, this blanket salt which has thorium in it, is passed through what's called a reduction

  • column. In that reduction column, a metallic stream of bismuth contacts the blanket salt

  • in a counter current fashion. They're going one against the other.

  • Protactinium and uranium that are in that blanket salt are going to dissolve into the

  • bismuth. That allows them then to be removed from the blanket salt. The blanket salt returns

  • back to the reactor to continue generating new fuel.

  • Now that the protactinium and uranium have been removed, they pass through another reduction

  • column into an electrolytic cell. In this electrolytic cell, they are oxidized from

  • being metals into being fluorides at the same time part of the decay salt is being electrolytically

  • split apart into a metal stream. That metal stream is then entering into the bismuth in

  • order to return back to serve as a reductive.

  • The upshot of the whole thing is you're going to move these new nuclear fuels out of the

  • blanket into a decay salt. The reason for this is that one month period. It takes a

  • month for protactinium-233 to decay to uranium-233. You want this to happen outside of the reactor.

  • The reason you want that to do it is because it has a propensity to absorb a neutron inside

  • the reactor if you leave it there. You do not want your protactinium to absorb a neutron,

  • become protactinium-234, which then decays to U-234 which is not a fuel. I'll just stay

  • right there.

  • Neutrons, bad. We don't want neutrons to happen after we've already turned into protactinium,

  • so protactinium goes into the decay salt, decayed uranium comes out.

  • The decay salt is meant to continue...

  • ...to hold that salt.

  • Yeah, but it's a different salt. It's fairly close in composition to the blanket salt,

  • but it's not exactly the blanket salt.

  • Here's the blanket salt coming in. You can see it's got lots of lithium, lots of thorium,

  • 15 ppm protactinium. Here's the decay salt, 68 percent lithium, 29 percent thorium, but

  • 8,900 ppm protactinium. It's got a lot of protactinium.

  • The decay salt is where protactinium is supposed to go and never come out. That's where it

  • lives. What we want to take out is uranium.

  • That decay salt then passes to a decay tank. This is also where we add thorium tetrafluoride

  • as a makeup material over time. It's a very small addition, but this is where thorium

  • enters the chemical processing system.

  • We leave the protactinium outside of the reactor, allowing it to decay to uranium. Once it's

  • decayed to uranium, we're now in a position to implement another cool chemical trick,

  • because uranium will absorb additional fluoride ions in what's called the fluorination column.

  • It will go from being a liquid, uranium tetrafluoride, into being a gas, uranium hexafluoride. That's

  • a separation step that we can employ.

  • The good news is that the other things in the material don't do that. Protactinium doesn't

  • change. thorium doesn't change. lithium-beryllium doesn't change, so it's a way to extract the

  • uranium that we now need to fuel the fuel salt.

  • Here's the fuel salt coming out. I'm going to hold it in the drain tank for a while and

  • cool down, because it's got lots of fission products in it. Then, it's going to be introduced

  • into the fluorinator. This is the fuel fluorinator. This is going to remove any uranium present

  • as UF6.

  • It's very, very important to get high fluorination effect in the sum on this one. This one, it

  • doesn't matter so much. If we miss uranium on this guy, we're going to get it out up

  • there in the redux and it's going to stay in the salt. It's not a big deal, was it?

  • This guy, we really need to get as much of that uranium out as we possibly can, because

  • after the uranium comes out as UF6, the result is going to go to another reductive extraction

  • column, this time using lithium as the reductant alone, no thorium or anything.

  • This reductive extraction column is going to pull all the fission products out. By dialing

  • that lithium up enough, lithium will essentially replace everything in the salt, everything

  • like noble gases which have already come out anyway.

  • It will also pull out uranium. We want to make sure we got the uranium here, not here.

  • The salt having been stripped to fission products in uranium then proceeds to a reduction column

  • where it is contacted with UF6 and with hydrogen gas. That reduces the UF6 from UF6 to UF4

  • and puts it back into the salt.

  • Now we've got a clean salt that has been refueled with uranium and is ready to proceed back

  • into the reactor. The upshot of introducing hydrogen and UF6 together is we're going to

  • make HF. HF is going to come out here and be introduced into an HF electrolytic cell

  • and be split back into the reactants, hydrogen and fluorine for the fluorinators right there.

  • Where do all the fission products go? They come out here as a stream, stream 54, and

  • if we've done this right, there's no actinides in there, because the only actinide we had

  • in the salt was uranium and neptunium and those came out as fluorinated gases and were

  • introduced into the reduction column.

  • If we can do this right, we're going to get an exhaust stream that doesn't actinides and

  • is going to have those favorable decay properties that we want to have over time.

  • Yesterday, I was 50 feet away from the EBR-II, which is a fast spectrum reactor built at

  • INL and I saw the pyroprocessing facility process the fuels. It's very interesting,

  • but I now think this is incredibly simple compared to what I just saw.

  • In the big picture, this system is essentially like the kidney for the reactor. If you think

  • about the flow of the...I wish I had come out with that. It was actually Alvin Weinberg

  • that came out with that concept.

  • Your body, all the time, your bloodstream is always being processed. It's changing the

  • pH of your blood. It's adding glucose. It's taking out waste products. It's an amazing

  • chemical factory, keeping you going.

  • This is an analogy to what we're trying to do in this reactor. We're trying to put in

  • the good stuff. We're trying to take out the bad stuff, so we can keep the thing rolling.

  • If we can do this, there's a very important implication for this. That is that we can

  • run the reactor just about continuously.

  • In today's reactors, we have to shut them down about every 18 months, depressurize them,

  • take the lid off, shuffle about two-thirds of the fuel around, take one-third of it out,

  • put one-third new fuel in. It takes about a month to do that.

  • That's the down time, when those utilities are not making any money, when the reactor's

  • being refueled. To go from a reactor that has to be shut down about every 18 months

  • for refueling to a reactor that can continuously run, because we have this chemical kidney

  • attached to it, represents an economic advantage for a company or utility or an organization

  • that might use a reactor of this type.

  • Nobody wants down time. It doesn't matter what. We don't want our car in the shop. We

  • don't want our factory not running. This technology has the potential to minimize that down time.

  • All this is in containment of course.

  • Yeah, this is all in containment. This is not only in containment. The structure's very

  • similar to what I saw yesterday, hot cells like they had at INL, not just hot radiologically.

  • They would probably be quite hot temperature-wise as well, on the order of 500, 600 degrees.

  • These are high temperature processes, high rad fields, high temperature.

  • Yesterday, at Idaho, they said...It was at the HFEF if any of you have ever been there

  • before. They said, "This facility was manufactured in 1974." I said, "I was also manufactured

  • in 1974."

  • They said, "Nobody's been in there since 1974." I'm a mechanical engineer. I'm not a chemical

  • engineer. I like to talk about power conversion systems. I didn't design the supercritical

  • carbon dioxide gas turbine system, but boy, do I admire those who did work on it, because

  • it really is remarkable.

  • Pierre and I got really excited about this. The very first time, I remember we were emailing

  • each other, we were talking about this. It was about the idea of coupling gas turbines

  • to high-temperature reactors. Pierre had written a paper about molten salt, liquid metal, different

  • reactors that you could couple through what's called an indirect gas turbine cycle.

  • We use gas turbines all the time today to generate electricity, but we're burning gas

  • in them and they're open cycle. They have very low capital costs and that's a great

  • feature. We really do love that about gas turbines.

  • This is what a gas turbine site looks like. Nuclear guys like us would love to get to

  • the point where we could build a reactor that's got this simple of a footprint, that's this

  • fast to put in. I don't think we're quite going to get there, but it would sure be a

  • goal to try to get a whole lot closer to something like this, which is a GE gas turbine installation.

  • Could the advantages of gas turbines be coupled with the reliability of nuclear energy? Because

  • gas is expensive and the price fluctuates. Utilities hate the fact that the gas goes

  • up and down, because they don't know what they're buying when they put a gas turbine

  • in.

  • Yesterday, I was in Salt Lake City, driving from the airport. Sorry, day before yesterday,

  • I was in Salt Lake City. There is a gas turbine plant right where two major intersections

  • of two major freeways are.

  • I thought, "Wow, it obviously doesn't scare anybody at all to put a big power plant right

  • here in this spot." We probably wouldn't get to do that with a nuclear power plant, but

  • that gives you an idea of the versatility and the simplicity.

  • Utilities love the low capital costs. They don't like the price volatility. If we can

  • try to combine the stability of nuclear operation with the low capital cost of existing gas

  • turbine plants, we're going to get a lot closer to something that people are going to be interested

  • in.

  • The thing that's so cool about the supercritical carbon dioxide system is carbon dioxide is

  • used at very high densities in this compared to other gas turbine systems. If you mess

  • around with gas turbine systems, you're used to pretty low-density fluid.

  • If you mess around with steam turbines, you're used to a very low-density fluid in your low-pressure

  • steam turbines. If anybody's ever been to a nuclear plant...Anybody ever been to PWR,

  • BWR? You see the low pressure steam turbine? Is it small? No, big. It's a big old monster,

  • because the steam that's in there is only a few percent of atmospheric pressure. It's

  • pretty close to a vacuum in there.

  • Feast your eyes on this, which is the densities of this carbon dioxide in this system. The

  • lowest we ever get is about 58 kg per cubic meter. Atmospheric air is about one. Water's

  • a thousand. Right before it goes into the main compressor, look at that, you're up at

  • 716ths. That's a fair fraction of water. You're working with a gas that has densities like

  • What do you think that's going to mean for the size of your turbomachinery? Real small.

  • You could conceivably lay out the turbomachinery for this thing on this table, the turbines

  • and the compressors.

  • The heat exchangers are a lot bigger, but we are talking some really, really small turbomachinery.

  • It's all driven by the fact that carbon dioxide at these temperatures and pressures is a really

  • dense gas. That's amazing.

  • The other thing that's really cool about it being a really dense gas is that it's an awful

  • lot easier to compress. Its specific heat changes as it gets close to the critical point.

  • When you go to compress the carbon dioxide in the main compressor here...I'm sorry, here

  • it go.

  • Here's the main compressor here. Here's the recompressor.

  • In the main compressor, it takes a lot less work to recompress the carbon dioxide, because

  • of where it is and its T-s diagram. That's amazing.

  • The recompressor is much more in an ideal gas region of the T-s diagram, but the main

  • compressor is in this remarkable critical region. The upshot of that is we're not used

  • to, in gas turbines, to compression being easy.

  • Compression's always the price you pay for a gas turbine. Steam turbines, they spend

  • very little of their work on compressing water. Because they're compressing a liquid, it doesn't

  • take much work. But gas turbines have to spend a lot of their work on compressing gas.

  • What's the maximum temperature you have on the CO2? For the turbine?

  • This was a 550 C. It can go better than that. I was being intentionally low. This is a fairly

  • conservative turbine in low temperature. This is not trying to go push anything.

  • If you were working with helium, you'd have to go to higher turbine inlet temperatures

  • to get this kind of performance.

  • The other thing about it, this is a 45 percent efficient machine, which is amazing. That's

  • incredible.

  • I've talked to people that are working on the ultra supercritical steam turbine work

  • with the Department of Energy. This is about using coal-fired power plants, trying to push

  • a few more percent of efficiency out of steam turbines. They are working in all kinds of

  • new alloys, this, that and the other, just trying for a few more percent.

  • Here's a system that's running at pretty humble temperatures, and getting 45 percent efficiency.

  • Again, it goes back to those remarkable properties of carbon dioxide, and the cleverness of what's

  • called the re-compression cycle, which is what's implemented.

  • Are any of these commercial?

  • No, none of these are commercial. The Department of Energy has made CO2 gas turbines a high

  • priority. They're putting about $50 million next year, into CO2 gas turbines.

  • Nuclear is just one of the different technologies it's looking at. It's concentrating solar,

  • there's a lot of neat things for them. Fossil is looking at a lot. There's a lot of different

  • variants of it, too. Like when you go to fossil, they use exhaust gasses as a carbon dioxide,

  • and then use these high pressures to help them go and sequester carbon dioxide.

  • There's a lot of clever, interesting things you can do with this cycle. I love it because

  • it really seems to be a very natural fit with the temperatures and the performances on this

  • reactor. It also helps address another important issue, which is, we're going to be generating

  • tritium in this reactor from residual lithium 6.

  • The tritium has to be captured, and I'm assuming in this design, all the tritium makes it to

  • the carbon dioxide. That's one of the reasons I chose carbon dioxide, is because it doesn't

  • have any hydrogen in it. If there's any hydrogen in your CO2, it's tritium, and you need to

  • get it out. There's ways to do that, particularly by taking advantage of some of the lower temperatures.

  • This is not exactly the kind of reactor core that we're going to use, but it's fairly representative.

  • It's mostly got graphite structures inside, and then the fluoride salt flows up through

  • channels in the graphite. Inside the reactor, that combination of the graphite and the salt

  • together are what enables the fission reaction to take place.

  • It has to do because graphite serves the important job of slowing down the neutrons. Salt and

  • graphite together, you can have a nuclear reaction. If you take them apart from one

  • another, the reaction is going to stop. It's just laws of physics, there's nothing you

  • can do to change it. That leads to a super important safety feature, one that I find

  • very compelling.

  • We saw what happened when the reactors in Fukushima were deprived of emergency power.

  • After a while, there were some unpleasant results that took place there, because they

  • were not getting their coolant pumped around, they were not able to keep their fuel rods

  • cool, and some radiation was released.

  • On the other hand in this design, the fuel is already melted. It's melted at a much lower

  • temperature than conventional nuclear fuel melts at. That stuff is ceramic, this is salt.

  • This allows us to use a feature called a freeze plug in order to keep this whole operation

  • running. This is the nuclear reactor vessel.

  • The idea is, if you were to lose all power, then the little blower that's been blowing,

  • keeping that salt frozen in that line stops blowing, and the energy from the reaction

  • melts the salt and the salt drains out into what's called the drain tank. The drain tank

  • doesn't have the graphite in it.

  • There's graphite up here, there's no graphite down here. Without graphite, the nuclear reaction

  • can't happen, it can't take place. You've taken away the two ingredients.

  • I was a boy scout. We always learned you've got to have oxygen and fuel and a flame, and

  • that's how you make it go. In nuclear reactors, you have to have a moderator and fuel. Take

  • them apart and it's not going to work anymore.

  • This very simple feature moves the reactor's fuel into a configuration where continued

  • fission is impossible. It's a fail-safe shutdown system. It doesn't require the operator to

  • be involved, it doesn't require anybody to throw a switch.

  • Even if the reactor is severely damaged, there's a catch pan here. If you were to breach that

  • vessel, the salt would flow down the catch pan and still back into the tank. It is a

  • very, very safe configuration, something that can be used to eliminate a whole class of

  • accidents that we are concerned about today, and something that personally would make me

  • a lot more comfortable with the widespread use of this technology.

  • This is something that was demonstrated at Oak Ridge, back during their operation in

  • the 1960s. They were able to turn off the reactor, melt the salt and drain it away safely.

  • This is another picture of what this drain tank might look like, and how it is designed

  • to reject the generation of energy taking place within the salt, just due to its decay.

  • We're still going to face a lot of challenges in developing this technology, because quite

  • frankly it's been set down for about 40 years now, and we really need to pick it up again.

  • One of the biggest challenges is, we need to get a qualification of the materials we're

  • going to use, particularly a high nickel alloy called Hastelloy N.

  • This is what they built these reactors out of. It was a special alloy that was designed

  • expressly for use with fluoride salts. It works very well. Unfortunately, we don't make

  • very much of it anymore, and we need to get the code of qualification. The good news is,

  • we're talking to the Department of Metallurgical Engineering, so this is a no-never-mind for

  • you guys, right?

  • OK. Good, good. I'm feeling a lot better.

  • Several other things we need to be able to do, we need to be able to remove noble gases

  • from the system. These are some of the fission products. We need to improve our pump designs,

  • heat exchangers, and particularly we need to begin investigating these chemical processing

  • systems.

  • Yesterday I was given a tour of a radia chemistry lab here at the U, where some of these processes

  • are beginning to be investigated, and it was really exciting. I'm hopeful that with further

  • funding and additional people working on it, we're going to be able to investigate even

  • more of these processes, and hopefully really move this technology forward. I think that

  • you can be a great part of that.

  • I'm going to conclude with a quote from Alvin Weinberg. He was the gentleman at Oak Ridge

  • lab, who led the lab as they were developing the Molten Salt Reactor and the thorium fuel

  • cycle. He said, "During my life, I have witnessed extraordinary feats of human ingenuity. I

  • believe this struggling ingenuity will be equal to the task of creating the second nuclear

  • era."

  • I spoke to Dr. Weinberg in 2006, right before he passed away, and he said, "My only regret

  • will be, I will not be there to witness the success."

  • If we are able to bring about a thorium powered world, a clean and sustainable world based

  • on this remarkable energy source, we're going to owe a great debt of gratitude to this man

  • and the hard work that he did.

  • I really hope through working together, we can bring this future a whole lot sooner than

  • we might have thought. Thank you very much for having me here. I'm happy to take any

  • questions.

  • Dr. Dewan testified before one of the house subcommittees about a month ago, about the

  • fact that there is no regulatory mechanism to license new reactor designs.

  • She and I have both participated in DOE activity for the NRC, where they are looking at this

  • problem. They're going and they're saying, "Hey, We realize there's going to be a need

  • for advanced reactors." It's a licensing initiative that's been taking place.

  • They took commentary. My company submitted recommendations and suggestions. A number

  • of people did. We had supporters from the thorium community that attended these public

  • meetings in DC.

  • Our licensing guidelines today were designed around the kind of reactors we have today,

  • light water reactors. We need to pull back and look at nuclear in a more general sense,

  • saying, "OK. That's a kind of nuclear reactor, but there's a bunch of other kinds, and we

  • need to be able to have the guidelines for it."

  • For instance, if you were designing a molten salt reactor, you'd want to have a guideline

  • that said, you're going to have a freeze plug, you're going to have a drain tank. You're

  • going to have those things in your reactor so that if you lose power, it's going to do

  • certain things. That would be part of a new regulatory framework.

  • Of course, that rule would not be applicable to solid fuel reactors, but it would definitely

  • be applicable to a molten salt reactor. We're trying to do the best we can to let the Department

  • of Energy know that there is interest not just in advanced reactors in general, but

  • specifically in molten salt reactors.

  • Thank you for your talk. My question is related to that last concern about draining the core.

  • As I see it, you'd have to separate the liquid fuel into multiple, separated parts so that

  • when you drain the tank, you don't go critical when you drain all the fluid into one place.

  • You can't achieve criticality because there's no moderator. That was the point I was trying

  • to make. Once you separate from the graphite, the criticality is impossible. There's simply

  • not enough fissile content in order to achieve criticality.

  • What about needing to cool that with water or something, to cool decay heated things

  • that are...

  • Yeah, you need to have kind of fingers in there that are taking thermal energy out.

  • Oak Ridge looked at using NaK, using sodium, they looked at using

  • lithium beryllium salt. Looked at using water. There are a lot of pros and cons to either one.

  • There was not a clear, obvious, ''Oh, this is the right one." Right now, surprise, I'm

  • favoring using salt, but there's other possibilities.

  • The big important thing about the drain tank is, the drain tank doesn't have any moderator

  • in it. Without moderator, criticality is impossible. That's not the case with fast-spectrum molten

  • salt concepts. They don't rely on a moderator, so in their case, when they drain, they need

  • to go like that, they need to go to separate drain tanks so that criticality becomes impossible.

  • I can add to that. The drain tank is very hot, up to 700 degrees C, or 900 degrees C,

  • and so radiant heat removal is very feasible. In the thorium design, there's just a large

  • surface area tank, with a panel wall filled with water nearby. You don't need any pumping.

  • One of the issues with the conventional nuclear power is that it has a very slow response

  • time, so with the emergence of renewable energy such as wind, solar, you need to build supporting

  • power plants for when those wind turbines aren't producing. For example, when you put

  • a wind farm in, you need to build a gas-fired power plant to supply the energy when the

  • wind is not available.

  • If what I mention doesn't do any good, backup power because you can't respond to the changes

  • in the grid fast enough. Would this thorium reactor have a faster response time than conventional

  • nuclear, and would that then be a candidate to fill in that gap, when you have renewable

  • energy?

  • Yes, it is more responsive. It is substantially more responsive, and the reason why is, the

  • thing that causes conventional nuclear to lag in its response, it's built up a particular

  • fission product called xenon. It caused solid fuel reactors to be limited in their response

  • times to changes to transience. In a liquid field, the xenon comes out of the fuel just

  • like fizz comes out of soda pop, so it does not limit the response time.

  • That said, though, I will confess to having a little bit of a dim view on the use of wind

  • power. I believe if you've got a reliable source of energy, use the reliable source

  • of energy. Don't turn it off when something unreliable decides to show up.

  • What kind of temperatures would the reactor typically be operating at, and how does that

  • impact the material performance?

  • The salts themselves are not limited very much in their temperature range. They'll go

  • up to about 1,400 C before they start running into trouble. The Hastelloy N material we

  • want to use in the reactor, though, chromium ion migration in Hastelloy metals is what

  • takes place. That accelerates the corrosion of metal, so by staying below 700 C, we really

  • limit that corrosion rate.

  • The beautiful thing about the carbon dioxide gas turbine is that it really has a sweet

  • spot right there at about 500 to 650 C. That's really where it wants to operate, and has

  • the best efficiencies. That gives it a big advantage over other potential gas turbines,

  • which want to go higher and higher in temperature.

  • How much interest is there in this design by the major nuclear power companies?

  • I've spoken to several utilities, and there is growing interest in some of these utilities.

  • There's also been interest at the Electric Power Research Institute, which is the R&D

  • arm for US utilities.

  • I've had several meetings with them. They continue to express interest and want to learn

  • more about the technology. It's growing. We don't have any orders right now, or anything

  • like that. But I think we're talking to the right people, particularly EPRI, about this

  • technology.

  • Are there competing designs, like some of the more breeder reactors that are serious

  • competitors to this?

  • There's other concepts for molten salt reactors that are being put forward. They're not breeders,

  • and they don't use thorium, but they're being advanced for other reasons. There's a group

  • out of Canada that wants to do a uranium fuel molten salt reactor, there's another group

  • that wants to consume nuclear waste out of a molten salt reactor. Both are admirable

  • goals.

  • What I think is amazing about molten salt technology is the fact that the thorium fuel

  • cycle integrates so cleanly with the technology. The thorium is going to be the key to the

  • long-term sustainability of nuclear energy. You can use thorium in existing reactors,

  • but the economics aren't there to support it.

  • It's very difficult to use it as a solid oxide fuel in existing reactors and go through the

  • processing. The advantage to the molten salt is that processing is much simpler, and it

  • reduces the fuel cycle cost and makes a breeder a conceivable economic proposition for a potential

  • utility.

  • Outside the US, there is a large effort going on in China on all reactor types, but the

  • one I focus on is they are working on thorium molten salt reactors. They are putting hundreds

  • of millions of dollars a year into this technology, and that is vastly in excess of anything that's

  • going on in the West.

  • As you saw, this technology was invented in the West, it can benefit everyone. I welcome

  • the fact the Chinese are working on it. We should be working on it as well.

  • What do you anticipate the economical size of your first reactor is going to be in megawatts,

  • and what kind of physical size would it require to put on-site?

  • The first reactor we would build would be a research and demonstration reactor, not

  • terribly dissimilar to the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment you saw. It would not be intended

  • to generate electrical energy. It would be intended to advance the technologies. Probably

  • on the order of just a few megawatts, wouldn't make any electricity, it would just be about

  • doing demonstrations of the different physical things you'd built it out of, the Hastelloy,

  • the graphite, et cetera.

  • Wouldn't be optimized to be very compact, either, because when you're doing development

  • you want to spread things out, so that you can check things.

  • I guess I was asking about what you envisioned?

  • For a first commercial reactor? We're shooting for that 250 megawatt size reactor. This is

  • probably a pretty good sense of about how big that would be, a physical footprint of

  • probably two football fields or so, with coolant systems and so forth.

  • You talked modular, so I'm assuming that means instead of scaling up the reactor to more

  • megawatts, you would add more modules.

  • Exactly. That's the idea, saying rather than building one really big one, if you want so

  • much power, we're going to add that number divided by the modular power, that's how many

  • we'll put in there.

  • That's becoming more interesting to people, because they don't want to have to go out

  • in the field and build reactors. They want to be able to build them in a factory, ship

  • them to a site, and essentially almost plug them in.

  • What's the minimum size?

  • Here's why the minimum size doesn't matter, because the NRC assesses a $5 million a year

  • licensing fee. It doesn't matter how small you can build it. If you don't build it bigger

  • than 50 megawatts, you're not going to make your money back.

  • Your picture implies a large body of water for cooling.

  • This picture was meant to imply that we're going to desalinate sea water with the waste

  • energy of the plant. If we were parked right next to the ocean, yes, we'd very much want

  • to desalinate seawater and provide fresh water in addition to electricity.

  • If you're not next to a big body of water, is there a lot of waste heat?

  • With the highly efficient carbon dioxide system, we're going to reject less waste heat than

  • any other power plant that was going to operate at lower powers. Let's say you had a coal

  • plant at 40 percent, or a conventional nuclear plant at 35 percent. If you're running at

  • 45 percent, you're going to reject less waste heat than that.

  • The other thing too, with this carbon dioxide gas turbine, there's the potential to reject

  • waste heat directly to the air, as well, not even having to use bodies of water.

  • There's an economic penalty for doing that. If you're next to a body of water, you'll

  • probably want to use it. There is the option, though, to potentially put them in places

  • where water isn't present. That's not an option for today's reactors. They have to be located

  • near large bodies of water.

  • Something I thought about a lot with Utah. We have a lot of water out in the eastern

  • US, a lot of places to cool reactors. Here in Utah, we don't have so much. This type

  • of technology would make a lot more sense for Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Nevada, places that

  • don't have nuclear power now, and a lot of that has to do with the lack of cooling water.

  • If it lets a lot of excessive heat into bodies of water, that can have quite an ecological

  • impact.

  • That can be mitigated, and that's common to every form of energy. Even concentrating solar

  • has to cool.

  • Way less than that, though.

  • For the power radiant it has, per unit megawatt it's going to be less waste heat to the environment.

  • How open are you to foreign investment, to get the wheels spinning?

  • Super open. If you know of any...

  • For example, the Emirates, they're looking at...

  • I've been there, talked to them, and they say...I'm not saying I spoke to the Sheikh

  • or anything like that, but essentially what I heard from the people there was, "Kirk,

  • sounds great. As soon as you've built one in the US, let us know. We'll take a good,

  • hard look at it."

  • What I've found as I've gone to Europe, Singapore, Dubai, Australia, everybody still wants the

  • US to go first.

  • To prove it?

  • They love the idea that, "You guys go see if it works, and if it works we'll be happy

  • to take a good, hard look at it."

  • They don't want to research, they just want...

  • The exception to that is China. China is doing it. They're not waiting for anybody, they're

  • going to make it happen.

  • In addition to electrical generation, there's hydrogen generation for fuel cells?

  • There is the potential for that. There is a very interesting hydrogen generation technology

  • that's been developed at Oak Ridge that looks also like it would couple very well to the

  • reactor. Hopefully we're going to be able to investigate that.

  • My follow-up to that is medical isotope production.

  • There's a number of potentially interesting medical isotopes that you could generate from

  • this reactor. One of them comes from the thorium fuel cycle itself. Uranium 233 when it decay

  • to an isotope called bismuth 213. I attended a seminar two years ago, where they talked

  • about using bismuth 213 to fight some of the nastiest cancers you can think of -- leukemia,

  • lymphomas, glioblastoma, which is a terrible brain cancer.

  • The results were amazing, and what they said was, "We are limited on how far we can go

  • with this, because we don't have much uranium 233." Uranium 233 only comes from thorium.

  • If we were operating these reactors, they would essentially be producing a material,

  • just in the course of normal operation, they could change the fight on cancer completely.

  • It's proven, there is medical data to show, it's called "targeted alpha therapy." If you

  • want to look it up, targeted alpha therapy using bismuth 213 is an incredible technique

  • against some of the nastiest forms of cancer, and it's uniquely coupled

  • to the thorium fuel cycle.

  • Revenue stream for the utilities.

  • Potentially, as well. It's just amazing stuff. In the future, when targeted alpha therapy

  • becomes a more widely used form of cancer therapy, we're going to look back on what

  • we did today, as like sticks and stones.

  • I heard a talk at Oak Ridge a couple of years ago, and they were talking about a modular

  • reactor project. If I understood it correctly, it was to be put underground with no large

  • external containment vessel, both for safety and for reducing costs. Is that a possibility

  • with this?

  • The program you're referring to was run by Babcock & Wilcox, it was called their MPower

  • reactor, and it was going to be underground. It did have a full containment built around

  • it, though. It was going to be built at Clinch River.

  • Earlier this year, Babcock decided to dial down their involvement with the MPower project,

  • and just a few weeks ago TVA announced that that site, instead of being specific to that

  • particular small modular reactor, is now going to be hopefully a small modular reactor development

  • site, where they will try whatever reactors are ready.

  • That got me really excited, because I thought, maybe I'm dealt back in the game. Because

  • I would really like to see liquid fluoride thorium reactors developed and operating near

  • Oak Ridge, and the Clinch River site is not far at all from Oak Ridge.

  • Guys, it drives me crazy. The Oak Ridge National Lab, one of our pioneers in nuclear energy,

  • has never been powered by nuclear energy. It's powered by coal. That's just crazy.

  • What is the timeline on this? Will we see it in our lifetime?

  • Yes, you will see it in your lifetime, because that's what I am going to go make sure happens.

  • I'm going to need some help, though.

  • I don't mean for this to be a multi-generational development, although I have instructed my

  • kids they're supposed to continue on the work, no matter what happens to me.

  • I got to tell you, studying Glenn Seaborg's life in considerable detail, I just can't

  • believe how awesome and how fast things can go when you get the right, smart people together

  • and you've got the funds.

  • The Manhattan Project, although it was done by hundreds of thousands of people, if you

  • look at how many people were working in Chicago on reactor design, chemical processing, probably

  • less than a hundred people.

  • Less than a hundred people figured out this whole big thing that became Hanford and all

  • these other parts of it, so it's not a problem that you need to hack thousands of bodies

  • at. It is a problem that can be done, probably better, by a team of 50 to 100 engineers.

  • In the United States there's a large, well-funded though somewhat clandestine anti-nuclear group

  • that's going around targeting nuclear reactors to close them down for whatever pathetic legal

  • or bureaucratic reason they could find. It's [inaudible 54:21] to one. How do you intend

  • to deal with that?

  • A few weeks ago, Vermont Yankee shut down, which had been running for 40 years and sustaining

  • the economy of southern Vermont. A lot of people who are against nuclear came from out

  • of town and pressured the governor and the state to shut it down. They did so. Those

  • people are all gone now, but the people who are going to suffer from that shutdown are

  • still there.

  • Having a clean energy source that's not polluting the air is a great thing. I live 20 miles

  • down went from the Browns Ferry nuclear reactors. They sit on the Tennessee River, and they

  • provide clean energy for Huntsville, Alabama. I'm really, really grateful for that.

  • They're not perfect. They're first-generation reactors. Ultimately, I'd like to see us be

  • putting thorium reactors out there and chewing through the nuclear waste that was generated

  • during the operation of Browns Ferry. Eventually, reactors reach a point where you do need to

  • shut them down. They won't run forever.

  • But I don't like what's happening with reactors that have a lot of life left in them being

  • targeted for shut-down by anti-nuclear groups that then come to town, protest, and leave,

  • and leave the community cleaning up the mess.

  • San Onofre. I'm glad you brought that up. The people of San Diego are looking at a multibillion

  • dollar cost, because San Onofre was shut down years earlier. That reactor could have been

  • generating clean electricity for southern California, and now it's sitting there as

  • a big political liability. Way to go. I think you have one?

  • As far as the idea of activists, it seems like a little education...you could bring

  • the activists into your camp.

  • I certainly hope so, and I've noticed on an individual level that does seem to happen.

  • On the command and control level though, don't seem to make any progress. I bring it up because

  • one time I was with Baroness Worthington, is a member of the House of Lords in London.

  • She used to work for Friends of the Earth. She took me over to their office in London,

  • and we gave them a full briefing. They said, "We're going to be really open-minded about

  • this. We're going to take a look at it." Not long afterwards, I heard the same guy who

  • sat there in my lecture, get up and say, "We're fundamentally opposed to all forms of nuclear

  • power."

  • I wanted to say, "We have the same goals here. We want a cleaner world. We want a safer world.

  • Here's a technology that mitigates the issues that you claim to have with nuclear energy.

  • You told me to my face you could take a look at it. Why can't you take a look at it?"

  • Why are you issuing these close-out statements to people that, "I don't even want to think

  • about anything about it?" What I find a little strange about the conventional environmental

  • groups, is they seem to have unbounded faith that wind and solar are going to improve,

  • and improve, and improve, but they seem to exercise no faith whatsoever that nuclear

  • energy, a technology which right now is one-half of one percent fuel efficient, can ever get

  • any better.

  • I see amazing amounts of potential efficiency improvement possible in nuclear. In a former

  • life I was working for NASA. I spent a lot of time working on solar energy. I don't hold

  • out as much hope that solar energy is going to be a lot more efficient. It can. It's just

  • the problem is it gets a lot more expensive.

  • I used to have a solar cell the size of my business card that was for satellite. It was

  • 30 percent efficient, top of the line, cost more than my car. There's a reason we don't

  • use that technology. We use stuff much less expensive, and much less efficient in solar

  • panels.

  • I have a lot more faith that we're going to be able to improve nuclear, and take advantage

  • of that two million to one improvement in energy density. I wish that faith was shared

  • by some of the more well known environmental groups though.

  • Sounds like that could get small enough to operate large vessels?

  • Absolutely. You would be amazed how much of our pollution is caused by large ships, the

  • ships that are transporting our goods back and forth across the ocean. They burn a fuel

  • called bunker fuel that, I'm told, is kind of like asphalt.

  • It's just about the nastiest stuff you can burn, and so they make lots and lots of pollution,

  • and because they do it on the high seas, it's not considered under anybody's jurisdiction.

  • If you could replace some of those large transport vessels with a clean form of energy, you'd

  • get rid of a lot of pollution.

  • Is it politically or technology-wise, it's slowing down the progress of the LFTR reactor?

  • We need funding, quite frankly. Everything runs on funding. You've got to have the resources

  • to get the engineers, the scientists, the experiments done, the labs stocked.

  • One of the great things I saw yesterday here at the U is due to some investments by the

  • state. You're building laboratories here that are starting to be able to do experiments

  • that are totally relevant to this technology, and that's really exciting. That's showing

  • how an investment that's being made at the state level is going to reap benefits.

  • I really hope Utah gets out in front of this. Nothing would please me more as a fifth generation

  • Utahan to come and see this happen in Utah. Again, thank you so much for letting me come.

  • I really appreciate your attendance today.

  • It's going to be fun to have me visit around the rest of the day. We'll have some tours

  • also, and we'll be able to see some of the stuff that we're doing.

  • That's what I'm here to see.

  • Thank you everyone. It was a really great, inspiring talk.

Everybody who likes drain tanks, this is a drain tank.

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