When I see "the robot can't take it" that's not the kind of stuff we're talking about?
We're not talking about silicon chips on the end of the probe?
One of the biggest problems with electronics out in radiation zones is
that the chips in all of those components just can't take it. In our case we don't have
electronics in harsh environments. We have a chunk of metal and glass
That really just sits there so we can shine light through it.
We'll be talking about development of online monitoring tools for
molten-salt reactor systems. I am Dr. Amanda Lines.
I work at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)
I and my team work on developing online monitoring systems for
the nuclear fuel cycle in general. Though, the talk that I gave today
was focused on our work supporting molten-salt reactors.
Thanks for agreeing to this interview to supplement your presentation.
How did you get into molten-salt reactors?
We started originally by applying our technology
to pyroprocessing conditions.
Pyroprocessing is of interest as a method for recycling used nuclear fuel.
There are so many opportunities that molten-salt reactors represent, not only
producing energy, but producing heat that can go towards supporting other chemical
processes, perhaps even generating hydrogen to support fuel cells.
There's generation of medical isotopes if you design recycling systems like
several companies are out there talking about doing.
The tools that we're developing are enabling not only our understanding
of the corrosion process and how we can control and optimize for that so
we can improve the lifetime of our vessels. But they're providing tools just so that we
we can understand the salt chemistry in and of itself.
Understanding that is a very important pathway
towards building the future molten-salt reactor.
There are some really great design options right out there right now,
but I mean you can even look at MSRE and compare that to designs of today.
The advancements that are made simply because of
the understanding that was gained on the MSRE.
On our team we tend to focus on chemistry questions.
Is uranium present? How much uranium is there?
What oxidation state is it in? What speciation is that exhibiting?
Is it playing with anybody else in the pool it should not be playing with?
To answer those types of chemistry questions-
one of the best tools that we have is optical spectroscopy.
It's all about taking a fiber optic out to your system,
shining light into your system,
and looking at how that light interacts with your system.
We're actually building tools that monitor the salt itself,
as well as the off gas coming out of our reactor.
The ultimate goal is to provide chemical characterization of what's in there.
In the salt for example: How much uranium? What oxidation state is the uranium in?
In the gas phase, answering questions like: Is iodine present?
Are other fission gases of interest present?
PNNL and ORNL are working to develop
an off gas treatment system for molten-salt reactors.
From providing a route to capture the radioactive species
that escape the salt into the gas phase, to providing us
an alternative route to characterizing what is going on in the salt.
by looking at the gas that's coming off of it.
How many probes would you put in a reactor?
Would they be in every little part of the salt loops?
And does this reflect a cost factor for a mountain salt reactor system?
For example, let's talk about one of the companies
who want a processing loop to harvest medical isotopes.
In that case, in that processing loop, their goal is to remove those medical isotopes-
you'd want a probe before the process and after the process.
That way, you can see the isotopes going in and see what's coming out.
Did you harvest everything effectively?
It's all about putting tools into the system to meet the needs you have.
If you're looking to, let's say, maintain accountancy of your
uranium or plutonium, and it's a loop...
you're going to have to probes in a couple places just to make sure
you're capturing what's going on.
The good news is that there are a lot of different probe types.
A lot of them are being pretty efficiently designed-
to have pretty small footprints. It is something that, in theory,
you could work in without having to dedicate a huge chunk of space
from your molten-salt reactor system.
Glass probes, fiber optics, computing... I mean computing is cheap...
Raman spectrometer that's going to run in the 50k realm.
Probes, computing equipment and fibers and all of that jazz...
Probably going to be another 20, 30K. ($20,000-$30,000)
The real cost is going to be in the analysis package.
You can put any system you want online, and it'll give you a ton of data...
But that data is not necessarily something that operators can use.
That's pretty specific stuff.
What operators want is information.
So, the big lift is building your analysis package-
that can take that data you're collecting online and turn it into-
information that operators can immediately understand and use.
The real heavy lift- that's the type of thing that my team at PNNL does.
We build those data analysis packages.
Oh, that is funny I didn't think it would be software I thought it'd be hardware!
At PNNL we're developing a molecular monitoring approach.
An approach that can give us information on species like HF, I2, T2, DF, and so on-
those molecular species.
At ORNL, Christian and his team are developing an elemental form of analysis.
It can give you things like total iodine, total chromium.
When you combine the molecular, and the elemental, what you get is-
comprehensive, complete understanding of what's actually in your gas stream.
I've heard the idea postulated: Have online monitoring systems-
Could data from online monitoring be piped straight to the IAEA?
So, remote monitoring of reactors in other countries.
In the pharmaceuticals, or the food industry, they use online monitoring all
the time in those systems. A lot of them do set up networks so somebody
at headquarters somewhere can check in on some plant and see what the online
monitoring results are for that given plant. That technology is available and
it's already being used in other fields. For example, if we were monitoring the
salt, one of the things we might be going after, is quantifying
the amount of uranium or plutonium or other species within the salt.
if you can do that online and in real time-
and get a comprehensive look at what's going on in your process-
that's a good way of maintaining accountancy of all material in there-
and ensuring that you can safeguard it appropriately.
Mind going over some basics? Touch on corrosion.
Corrosion in any system is all about the breakdown of your vessel.
Certain species in your vessel leech out, you may start to lose the integrity.
Species in molten-salt such as uranium very slowly pulling out the chromium-
from your vessel system, that can have a number of effects-
making your containment more brittle.
So, if you saw a spike in something that you weren't expecting-
you'd be like, oh hey, something just changed, and this is a concern?
Yes, we can monitor for those quick changes, those off normal conditions.
We can inform operators: Hey! Something has changed! Something's different!
What's a fission product? Fission products are just what you get-
when uranium breaks up into other atoms.
Many of them are radioactive.
They undergo radioactive decay to non-radioactive endpoints
Some of those products are bigger concerns than others.
Especially, if they tend to volatize, and go into the gas phase.
For example: Iodine. Iodine is a fission product.
To make sure that iodine is stationed away somewhere-
so people around the reactor are safe and not exposed to that particular species.
We've got a strong signature, and we've got a unique signature-
which means we can uniquely identify the presence of I2 in the gas phase.
Even more importantly, if we zoom in on some of those bands
and look at how those bands behave,
as we alter pressure of I2, partial pressure, or concentration of it in the gas phase-
we see that as we go from zero to higher pressures, that band grows in.
Which means, we can take the intensity of that band-
plot it as a function of partial pressure of I2, and we can get a calibration curve.
Not only can we identify the presence of I2 in the gas phase, but also quantify it.
Now, I2 is not the only potential species of iodine that we might see in off gas.
There will be others.
We wanted to look at some examples, so we picked ICL.
We got the beautiful signature that we can use to identify and quantify.
We also wanted to take the opportunity here-
to look at some of the other options that we have available to us.
Raman is one form of molecular spectroscopy.
There's also FTIR, fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy.
FTIR is very similar to Raman and very complementary.
But, you can get different kinds of information out of it.
so we used this to look at ICL-
and, we of course got a very nice gas phase signature of ICL-
but, we also got a ton of other information that was pretty exciting.
We could get the signature of the condensed ICL,
and we could even get the signatures of HCL in there-
which is a decomposition product of ICL.
So we could get a ton of information out of this system right here-
and potentially have the opportunity to get even more.
so other chemical species or indirect temperature measurements.
So, overall we're showing that
online monitoring based on optical spectroscopy for molecular characterization-
is a powerful route to give us information
about the molecular species in the gas phase.
And, there are a lot of ways for us to provide this type of information.
I showed you Raman and FTIR. You can build systems that focus-
on one, the other, of whatever. They're both mature.
They're both commercially available.
Testing the equipment is what we did this year.
Next thing is to actually design the system-
that will take that spectral data that we're collecting,
and turn it automatically into information the operators can use.
The example I'm showing you is not from the off gas stuff.
This is a demonstration that we did at PNNL.
Those circles squares and triangles represent grab samples.
Every time we grabbed a sample and set that off to the lab for analysis.
Those numbers line up very nicely with what we were measuring on line.
We're accurately measuring concentration and composition of this stream.
Even more exciting, our online monitoring results were coming out every 30 seconds.
Every 30 seconds we could tell you how much plutonium and uranium was in that stream.
Those grab samples didn't come back for two weeks in the best case scenario.
Some of them even longer.
All this works that I'm talking about really comes with the goal of-
supporting the efficient design, licensing, and deployment of molten-salt reactors.
We go to the Thorium Energy Alliance conference-
and there's a lot of, you know, some of us get pretty frustrated at times-
about the opportunity molten-salt reactors represent, and how we feel
that it's not going as fast as we'd like.
Sometimes there is a lot of pushback against nuclear
and it comes from a lot of different fields.
For a long time one of the biggest... troubles... that nuclear had was public opinion.
But, what's very exciting is that
I think we're starting to see that public opinion shift.
People are starting to understand energy is something they absolutely have to have.
We cannot live without it.
But where we get our energy from? It's important.
As we consider responsible use and climate change and environmental factors.
We need to take a good look at where energy is coming from.
Folks are starting to realize that, yes, renewables, solar, wind are very important-
very useful. but we have to have something to meet base energy needs.
And nuclear is the... nuclear is the option.
I think we're certainly starting to see-
folks from younger generations build more support for nuclear
my brother-in-law he's several years younger than me.
We were chattin, and I said to him: Hey, what do you think about nuclear?
Expecting him to have kind of the standard negative public opinion.
And, he was so funny because, he- He perks up!
He's like: Nuclear! It's the only way we can solve our energy problems man!
Wow that's fantastic!
You're probably also optimistic because you're actually working on the problem.
You're at you're actually doing the work every day.
Nuclear absolutely has to be part of a diverse energy portfolio.
You can't be 100% nuclear. Just like you can't be 100% hydro, or 100% wind.
You have to have "all of the above" in there, to make a complete picture.
Especially a "complete picture" that can keep a nation of our size going.
I certainly think that supporting nuclear is important.
And, I certainly think that that's what the work I do does.
It supports nuclear as an energy industry.
Energy is something that we use in our daily lives and having abundant,
affordable, and reliable energy is something that's absolutely essential.
Not only to maintain the type of lifestyles that we have here, but-
we can start sharing this type of bounty this type of experience-
with folks who don't have that energy, that economic stability, social stability.
Nuclear can really start answering that.
I absolutely love going to work. I love doing what I do.
Going into the lab and working with plutonium, uranium, and these other species.
It's hard to show that people are actually doing this stuff in labs.
Contrast that with NREL. Wind turbines and stuff. All these shots of wind turbines!
I'm just throwing it out there. You might want to shoot video with your phone.
Post it online and let people know.
I'll see if I can encourage my students.
I don't know if I'm quite cool enough to post those videos myself.
Okay, thanks a lot, ah, thanks for taking so much time to... this.