I write for whomever pays for my scribblings, and that ranges from
Time magazine, the Guardian, Physics world - all sorts of others.
I also addictively write a blog everyday,
sometimes two or three times a day - for the CBS website
called Smartplanet, and I write for them exclusively about energy.
occasionally I dabble in the grown-up job of writing research reports
and that's why I'm here.
John Kutch and Jim Kennedy asked me to summarize my research report:
Emerging Nuclear Innovations -
Picking Global Winners in a Race to Reinvent Nuclear Energy.
It was for Kachan & Co., based in Vancouver.
It came out last November and it's an in-depth accout of the
many nuclear alternatives - not just thorium,
but also molten-salt, pebble-bed, modular, fast-neutron,
fusion - there's a nice section on fusion in it,
and China - which got its own category in the report,
China not being a technology obviously but,
there's a lot going on there and in case you doubt me just ask Jim Kennedy -
who I think has a few thoughts on the subject.
Alternative nuclear technologies, such as thorium are the
"Skype" and the "Google"
compared to big telecoms and big media
of conventional nuclear.
We all know that Skype and Google profoundly have forced old media
and telecom to change their ways.
Alternatives like thorium can do the same thing to nuclear.
When I researched my report last summer,
I called up all sorts of people.
Some of you are in this room and were very generous with your time.
I also attempted to reach the big -
I call them the big three - the big nuclear companies. (so, big telecom, big media)
Arriva, Westinghouse and GEH. I went out of my way to find them,
get them to talk to me about how they view alternatives
or the future of nuclear power.
None of them - None of them would talk to me.
The silence was was profound. I was barely even getting emails back.
Someone once described nuclear power to me as:
"the most complicated way ever - to boil water."
But, my report found that there are better ways -
there are better ways to boil that kettle.
I discovered during my research -
I discovered people like Kirk Sorensen,
were the opposite of Westinghouse, GEH and Arriva.
They were happy to talk,
and talk...
and talk.
As you all know, if you ask Kirk to tell you about thorium,
well be careful what you ask for - you might get it.
But, seriously Kirk is a fantastic educator and ambassador for thorium,
and it seems like I'm always stumbling across videos of him on the internet.
and I never tire of watching.
And, it's not just Kirk.
Again, like I said - Cannon Bryan, and
David LeBlanc of Ottawa Valley Research, Canada - who just spoke,
they were very, very helpful.
All - Kirk, Cannon, and David - They are all in the report as well as
about 20 or 25 other companies.
I won't go on about thorium - much -
because, well that would be preaching to the choir.
I thought for this audience that
it would make more sense to talk about the other "Skypes" and "Googles".
So, Fast-Neutron Reactors:
Now there's some money in this game because
that man on top - who's name you might recognize, he's in it.
TerraPower, and fast-neutron reactors -
China is into fast-neutrons in a big way,
just hold that thought, I'll get on to that in a second -
In face, Bill Bates was over in China
not too long ago and he's attempting to collaborate with them.
There have been some early discussions about
China and Terrrapower working together.
A misconception about Bill Gates's traveling-wave reactor which is his
version of a fast-neutron reactor is that -
people think it's a modular, but it's not.
I interviewed their CEO for the report - John Gilleland
and two others, and they made the point - that's not their first act.
Anyway, it will perhaps be modular down the road but
they're working on a larger reactor than modular.
It will use depleted uranium,
and they say no reprocessing necessary,
so the plutonium beeds and burns in-situ,
and that's one of their big selling points -
you don't have to take anything out to reprocess.
TerraPower says there is a hundred year supply,
the machine is liquid sodium cooled,
they are working with Idaho US National Laboratory,
and as I mentioned - (oh, I misspelled "casting" - okay, they'll dock my pay for that)
but they are casting about for deals in Russia, China, India -
and India's "Reliance Industries" has since invested since the report came out.
They've made a financial investment in TerraPower.
But, they don't think they will have a reactor in place until about 2030.
What about thorium?
Well, they stay their traveling-wave reactor could run on thorium,
but that is not thier initial idea whatsoever.
They're designing it for uranium.
Now, General Atomics -
TerraPower - Bill Gates gets all the press on this type of machine,
but General Atomics is working on one, and their's is modular,
meant to be at about 240 MW capacity,
and they are designing it as much for industrial heat as they are for electricity.
It's called the Energy Multiplier Module (EM2). (I don't know if it is EM2 or EM-squared)
It will use depleted [uranium] and spent fuel and
General Atomics likes to make this big overarching
statement that there is enough of depleted and spent fuel around to
equal 40 Saudi Arabia's worth of oil, or they said 9 trillion barrels.
I did not check their math but their point is,
is that they can use all of this depleted and spent fuel
which starts to get around the problem that Cannon Bryan was just
articulating about - running out of the uranium supply,
and starts to sound like a decent alternative.
The fuel lasts for 30 years, operates at high temperatures,
helium gas cooled,
it does require fuel reprocessing - unlike TerraPower's [design],
but General Atomics says that their's is better than
the traveling-wave because the fuel does not have to be reshuffled
inside the reactor.
Where as, I guess, TerraPower is mechanically shuffling the fuel around.
It says it is deploying a so-called safe reprocessing technique,
based on physical, dry extraction, rather than chemical reprocessing.
They think three to four years for basic research, 10 years to complete a prototype,
and all for about 3 billion dollars of development [costs].
they think the prototype might go in the Savannah River site in South Carolina,
and that they could be read commercially by 2030 or 2025 at the earliest.
Right now, China is building - I think - about 27 conventional reactors,
What I found in my research was that conventional nuclear will level off
at around 2040,
and that fast-neutron reactors will take over and hit 200 GW capacity by 2050,
and 1400 GW by the turn of the century.
I believe those numbers came from the World Nuclear Association.
Last summer they just connected a small test experimental fast reactor.
and they plan to begin building two larger scale fast-neutron reactors.
by 2013, based on Russian designs.
They will begin a design of their own, a larger one - about 1 GW,
in 2017 to be completed by 2020 - that sounds awfully fast, but that's the plan.
China National Nuclear corp has had discussions with TerraPower about
working with them on the traveling wave design.
Pebble Beds: They are gas cooled,
a company in South Africa called QPower
is picking up where the South African government left off.
They had a big, long development project that failed in the end,
and helium gas cooled.
It could possibly use thorium but they are focusing on uranium at the moment.
Thorium is on their radar.
There's a mine not far from them,
a RareCo mine, part of a Canadian company, Great Western Minerals.
RareCo is going to start mining - I believe it's monazite,
I'd have to double check, but they are going to start mining thorium
from nearby where QPower is - this year or next year.
and QPower thinks it might build in the USA, where they say that the
department of energy has given some priority to gas cooled reactors
in its next generation initiative.
Modular: lots of work going on.
Lots and lots of work going on in modular.
I know Kirk is big on modular for thorium but this is something that
the thorium industry is going to have to compete against.
Thorium does not have a monopoly on modular.
One of the main uses for it would be - I think - for industrial heat,
plus for electricity in remote regions -
that currently use very expensive diesel for electricity.
I also liked Kirk's idea of powering US domestic military bases
with modular thorium reactors and
I hope to catch up with Kirk later and find out where that might
stand at this point.
But, some other companies involved in modular are Radix,
based in Long Island, NY.
They're using TRIGA fuel,
which is used in a lot of university research labs.
They're working on a 10 MW reactor.
They are the ones in my mind that stand out with this notion of
putting modular reactors out in the front line - in military combat zones.
Somebody talked earlier today about the hazards of
moving fuel around in Afghanistan.
Well, a modular reactor to the rescue.
They were hoping to get DARPA funding at the time I wrote the report.
Just as the report was going to print,
I found out they did not get the DARPA funding
and that was around last November.
As far as I know, they are still carrying on.
Other modular companies are Nuscale, Hyperion -
and then fusion is not name of a company but is
obviously a technology and we will get more on to that in a second.
I said China got its own category in the report,
and not just for fast-neutron reactors
China could build as many as 100 reactors by 2030,
that's nearly a quarter of all the commercial nuclear reactors operating
operating in the world today - something like 434 of them.
It's going for all sorts of nuclear,
Today, nuclear is just under 2% of China's electricity.
It has 27 reactors under contruction now - all the conventional variety,
including some of the passive cooling designs from Westinghouse.
There are over 100 nuclear companies in China.
This is one thing that made a big impression on me is -
how much of an industry it is there.
And, one company in particular - one of them out of
over 100 companies China National Nuclear corporation,
is alone investing $120 billion dollars in nuclear though 2020,
and they have somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 employees.
China's serious.
Tshinghua (I think I'm saying that right) University - the INET group,
is investigating various possible uses of thorium.
China Academy of Sciences is developing a thorium molten-salt reactor.
Those are both in my report.
And, I found out yesterday - I hadn't heard this before, but
Baronness Worthington who will speak later, was mentioning to me
about an accelerator-style thorium reactor that China is working on.
(I wrote that twice. I guess it really made an impression)
China has a Pebble-Bed [reactor] - at least one.
They are currently building a demonstrator at the Shidaowan facility in Shandong,
and they plan 18 more, each of around 210 watts capacity. [correction, 210 MW]
(Watts? Okay, I'll go with megawatts)
(Did I really write watts or did I just say it?)
(I said watts - I wrote watts too.)
(Don't leave everything you read. Take it from a journalist.)
(Sorry about that. Thank you.)
Fusion:
Here's the big question, I was really struck by this.
If fusion is 30 years away, why are venture capitalists investing?
VCs...
VCs don't go for 30-year returns.
If they wait two years they've waited an eternity, right?
I'll give you some examples of VCs investing in a second but -
this all says to me,
it's part of why I believe that startups will get there first before the big
government funded behemoths like
The ITER tokamak in Cadarache, France,
and the National Ignition Facility in Livermoore, California where
lasers are traveling - 180 lasers or something like that - are traveling
a mile to get to their target about that big.
Eader's is ten stories tall,
and they're huge money sponges.
and that's not to say that good scientific results won't come out of them
but we have several startups
now going at it in an entrepreneurial fashion and I -
I think start-ups will get there before the big guys.
Deuterium, tritium - this is what they're working on at ITER and also at NIF,
ITER and NIF both have very different ways of fusing deuterium and tritium,
but the idea is they fuse, hot neutrons come off, that heat drives a turbine,
which generates electricity or takes oil out of tar sands
or drives whatever industrial process.
some that startups working on the same sort of thing
but in an entirely different fashion,
are General Fusion of Burnaby, Canada
they've raised $32 million and their backers include Jeff Bezos
of Amazon fame,
and a Canadian oil company, Senovus.
There's a lot of interest - well, there is some interest anyway among
the oil sands (or tar sands - whatever your preference) companies,
for using fusion or some sort of modular reactor as a heat source,
to get around their carbon-emitting means of extracting that they use today.
Another fusion start-up is Helion Energy of Redmond, WA,
Unconventional Fusion: It goes by different names - Aneutronic.
Aneutronic does not use neutrons.
It just generates electricity directly,
charged particles come out and that's your electricity,
so it eliminates turbines.
We're possibly looking at a future of electricity generation
from a nuclear reactor without a turbine.
It does not rely on hot escaping neutrons - it tends to fuse
hydrogen and boron, not deuterium and tritium.
It runs much hotter than conventional fusion,
between 1 billion and 2 billion degrees.
So, don't get close. Don't try this at home -
versus a reasonably cool 100 million to 150 million degrees for conventional fusion.
Tri-Alpha, they're a stealth company.
I think they like to be called a stealth company, it adds to their mystique.
They don't talk a lot. They haven't really met the press much that I'm aware of.
They've raised over $140 million in venture funds
including from Goldman Sachs.
Another company, working on the same sort of technologies is called
Lawrenceville Plasma Physics - they're in New Jersey
They're partnering with Iran.
Just last week they have formalized or escalated partners -
they had an informal partnership with Iranian researchers but,
they have signed a contract with the head of the
Plasma Research Department at the Islamic Azad University in Tehran
to jointly develop aneutronic fusion -
and let's see if that gets past the sanctions regulations.
I'm about to wrap-up here.
Thorum Challenges:
Well, opponents say that thorium is not as wonderful as it's made out to be,
in areas like proliferation - anytime I write a blog about thorium,
I get that remark - there's always two or three people that write in and say
"This is nonsense. Thorium is dangerous. It can proliferate weapons."
I'm saying this because - and a few other people have mentioned it today as well,
but this is something that if thorium is going to catch on,
the industry will have to explain this.
It is explaining it - it will have to continue to explain it.
Why mine thorium?
I'll interrupt myself here and say - well, maybe we don't have to mine it.
We've heard from a few speakers today that there's a lot of it already -
already out of the ground, but to go with the thought:
Why mine thorium when we can run reactors on spent fuel and depleted uranium -
as with the fast-neutron reactors that I mentioned earlier?
Thorium is of course up against renewables, fracking,
conventional nuclear - including modular,
China, China, China, and then China is also an opportunity -
as I said, Bill Gates might be partnering there.
His company is not the only one that mentioned to me that they were
possibly interested in working with China, although General Atomics was not.
But of course, beware the intellectual property.
That's it. So, I'm a journalist and you are all doing good things and
if you want to tell me more about how you're saving the planet,
there's some various contact details for me.
Okay, that's it. Thank you.