Or course for India thorium is important because we don't have too much of uranium.
Conversely, India has massive thorium deposits, and almost no uranium.
India has been pursuing a solid fuel based thorium breeder, since 1950, with steadfast
determination of securing energy independence.
Most of that time they've been looking at thorium-oxide fuels, solid fuels, and running
the same challenges with solid fueled thorium that everybody does.
And 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.
Dr. Sinha and his colleagues think that Molten-Salt Breeder Reactor, am I quoting you correctly?
I heard you telling me some time back... that they think that the Molten-Salt Breeder Reactor
seems to be the most suitable candidate for the self-sustainable thorium reaction.
What I think is amazing about molten salt technology is the fact that the thorium fuel
cycle integrates so cleanly with the technology.
The advantage of the molten salt is that processing is much simpler, and it reduces the fuel cycle
costs, and makes a breeder a conceivable economic proposition.
Liquid fuel enables economic thorium breeding.
Thanks to liquid chemistry, and thanks to liquid homogeneity of the fuel.
You can use thorium in existing reactors but the economics aren't there to support it.
In addition, liquid fuel's homogeneity can also enable more efficient consumption of
uranium as well.
With an MSR, those degrees of freedom, that soup, if you will, in a molten liquid state
permits the complete usage of the fissile materials whether they be thorium or uranium
or what-have-you.
So in principle you can make a Molten Salt Reactor using pure uranium.
There's nothing wrong with that.
To compete with thorium-breeding levels of efficiency, a uranium fueled reactor would
need to overcome some additional challenges.
But even the incremental improvements possible by using similar molten salt reactors- fueled
with uranium- would allow us to extract additional energy from our existing stockpiles of spent
fuel.
[Dr.] Leslie Dewan is co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Transatomic Power.
She's one of Time's "30 People Under 30 Changing the World".
And so you and a friend- Mark Massey.
Right after we finished our qualifying exams we figured that this was the smartest we were
going to be for a while.
Mark and I started thinking very broadly just about nuclear reactors in general.
So we looked at the 6 types of Gen4 reactors.
We got our inspiration by looking at the Moment Salt Reactor.
Our fuel is a liquid.
We can leave it in a reactor for as long as it takes to extract essentially all of the
remaining energy in it.
The commercial regulatory structure in the U.S. is currently set up only for Light Water
Reactors.
The uncertainty in the estimates of the cost and timeline effectively block large-scale
private investment in new nuclear reactors- Because no- no investor would want to put
money into a project if they don't have a good sense of when they're going to get a
return, or how much it will cost at the beginning.
The NRC regulations specifically spell out prohibitions against fluid fueled reactors,
even for national laboratories.
You can not operate fluid-filled reactor more than one megawatt without expensive licensing
process running about $150 per man-hour.
The NRC trusts sophomores in college more with Light Water Reactors than they do national
lab scientists with fluid fuel reactors.
It's been there for ages, since Milton Shaw.
Yes, Shaw is the one who actually decided that we weren't going to do liquid-filled
reactors.
He instituted the Catch-22.
We can't do work on Molten Salt Reactors, because we just don't know enough about how
Molten Salt Reactors work.
Ok, can we find out how they work?
No.
Because we don't know how they work.
It's like- WHAT!?!
So it's a demonstration reactor cut-off for liquid fuel reactors is maybe 1 megawatt thermal
vs 10 megawatts thermal for solid fuel reactors.
We'd like the demonstration facility to generate meaningful results for a full size plant.
On the order of 20 megawatts thermal.
Any smaller than that and it really- It becomes a different machine.
Just the thermal hydraulics even will be so different that it wouldn't really be valid
comparison.
You know, the state of Missouri passed a resolution that they want to be the first state to have
Thorium Molten Salt Reactors in their state.
Every state with reactors has their own Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
And there's a provision where they can literally go off on their own.
It's just like highway funds.
If you don't approve drunk driving level of 0.08 it's like- Oh you can do that Wisconsin,
you can do that Illinois.
Say goodbye to 500 million dollars in highway funds though, if you do that.
So they hold a gun to their heads to do that.
Same thing with the NRC.
But- It would be an extraordinary wake-up call, for- Even if one state did it.
Where, if one state was just like- You guys are so out of sync with what current nuclear
technology is, that we absolutely have to, for the health of our state, go on our own.
That- That would be- The NRC I'm sure would have- have great retribution- not my word,
somebody else's.
I thought that was the- When we discussed that, somebody was like- "That would bring
down great retribution!"
I'm sure, like, the great retribution we come down, but at some point, someone would be
like- Hey!?
Why did this state go off on its own and put up with this gigantic huge penalty they paid,
you know?
Why would they do that?
And of and maybe it would become a national conversation and certainly in the decision-making
halls of the power they'd be like- Has something gone so off the rails here that one state
is essentially, in one little way, willing to secede from the union on this?
The current system incentivizes reactor designers to develop their first projects outside of
The United States.
And, in fact, this has already happened.
Some existing nuclear reactor design companies are planning on building their first power
plants overseas.
In Canada, or China, or the Philippines- Because they don't think it will be possible to build
an advanced reactor in the U.S. under the current regulatory system.
We have chosen Canada for a very specific reason.
We have a completely new reactor system with a completely, profoundly, different risk profile.
Canada has a fundamentally different regulatory environment for nuclear power which is, I
would say, very progressive.
We do feel that we have competitive advantage by pursuing this technology in Canada specifically.
Currently there is no way for us to build a prototype facility or move beyond the laboratory
scale work that we're currently doing.
We want more than anything to do this in the U.S., but we've been forced to keep an open
mind with respect to the other pathways we could take.
China is building a supply chain in order to manufacture and distribute Molten Salt
Reactors, and we are not.
We don't do big science anymore in the United States, we don't.
China is.
India is.
The Czech Republic is.
Jan Uhl�r.
He's got a great budget, and he just bought an obscene amount of FLiBe, for pennies on
the dollar, from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, because he's doing big science over there.
And we basically gave it away.
Anything that's different, that's never been done before- It seems like in the nuclear
field everybody wants to be number two.
This is one of the flaws that has impeded innovation in the nuclear energy technology
area, which is that this is a first mover barrier.
Because quite obviously, once the answer comes out as to how NRC will manage that sort of
question- Everybody knows what that answer is and and everybody else can free ride.
On the other hand, the benefits that come from the switch to molten salts, even if we're
using uranium at the same rate that you would with Light Water Reactors, are substantial.
And what we can learn using solid fuel, and what we can develop, can be readily applied
to build liquid-filled reactors as well.
ORNL and Berkeley's respective pebble-bed design both make great use of molten salt
to offer passive safety.
This is a drain tank.
This is a drain tank. -to drain it back down again.
And we've done that a couple of times already.
And eliminate the challenge of high pressure operation.
If you have a little crack on this, and it was starting to weep, it forms a plug.
Self plugging.
It'll self plug.
That's a nice thing about not being under pressure.
In fact, these reactors are intended to be modular, and factory produced.
We e are very interested in a transportable size of these, for some of the things like
supporting individual refineries, or remote power operation.
And ultimately a much less expensive source of energy than today's reactors.
There are vigorous debates that go on about what is the best and fastest path to get this
technology developed.
And I think that, you know, it's good for us to have those debates, and it's good for
parallel efforts in multiple areas to be underway.
The effort on the solid fuel side, I think, it's important that we can target achievable
goals where we can reach certain milestones in a shorter period of time- on the solid
fuel side.
There's just fewer hoops you need to jump through.
Pebble fuel is fairly well understood, it's been being used since like the 70s now.
Well you know them the next best thing that scales up after molten salt science is fluoride
cooled solid fuels.
So if molten salt pebble-bed reactors can be passively safe and less expensive, why
is every single organization shown here investigating, if not dedicating themselves entirely, to
the pursuit of liquid fuel?
There are supreme advantages of dissolving the fuel and fission products in the fluorides,
because you can add and subtract at will.
Solid stuff is always going to be expensive fabrication.
And what do you do with spent pebbles?
They have an inner carbon core surrounded by a TRISO matrix, surrounded by an outer
layer of graphite.
Every time we de-fuel a pebble you can actually assay these pebbles using gamma-ray spectroscopy
to discern what the burn up is of this pebble, and whether it should be placed back into
the core, or whether it should be putt in storage.
Then will you do with the spent pebbles?
There was that much more manufacturing and engineering and thought going into these pebbles,
but ultimately, from a macroscopic, or 50,000 foot view, you still have the same waste problem.
Except its now in a far more engineered and therefore much more difficult medium in which
to go extract that waste and processes it.
Well it's a lot easier to deal with the chemistry if you don't dilute the fuel into the salt.
Chemistry is not- chemistry is not difficult to deal with.
Just think about problems and solve them.
I would pose this question- What is easier?
Running a liquid past a solid in order to transfer the heat?
Or having the fuel be a liquid, and use that in and of itself?
So I would argue that actually combining the two is easier.
Sure it's more chemistry, but so what?
I'm a chemist.
There are lots and lots of chemists, you know, on the planet.
And a lot of them are a hell of a lot smarter than I am.
So, like, go solve the problem.
Oh wait a second- Oak Ridge already solved the problem from 1951 to 1974.