MALE SPEAKER: Dr. Hargraves has written articles and made
presentations about the Liquid Fluoride Thorine
Reactor-- or LFTR, as we affectionately call it--
and energy cheaper than coal, the only realistic way
to dissuade nations from burning fossil fuels.
His presentation, "Aim High," about the technology
and social benefits of LFTR, has been
presented to audiences at Institute
for Lifelong Education at Dartmouth College,
Thayer School of Engineering, Brown University, Columbia
Earth Institute, Williams College, Royal Institution,
the Thorium Energy Alliance, the International Thorium Energy
Association, Google-- at Mountain View in both 2009
and 2010-- the American Nuclear Society,
The President's Blue Ribbon Commission of America's Nuclear
Future, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
With co-author Ralph Moir, he has written articles
for the American Physical Society Forum on Physics
and Society, "Liquid Fuel Nuclear Reactors"--
that was January 2011-- and "American Scientist,"
"Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors," July 2010.
Robert is a study leader for energy policy
at Dartmouth Ilead.
He was chief information officer at Boston Scientific
Corporation, and previously a senior consultant
with Arthur D. Little.
He founded software firm DTSS Incorporated while
at Dartmouth College, where he was
assistant professor of mathematics
and associate director of the computation center.
He graduated from Brown University with a Ph.D.
In physics in 1967, and Dartmouth College,
AB mathematics and physics in 1961.
It is with appreciation that we welcome
Robert to speak to us here today.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
DR. ROBERT HARGRAVES: Well, besides the climate crisis,
we have an economic crisis.
Here's an example of it in India.
You can look at that picture and see that the Indian economy is
not doing particularly well.
You also notice that they are collecting biofuels, which
is not really an environmentally friendly activity.
The other thing to notice is that that's not
a great source of energy.
And another thing to notice is that these are all women--
women who are quite under-employed in this country.
So there are a lot of problems that
are encapsulated in this photo that we want to try to address.
First thing to notice, though, is government debts.
It's not just the US that has a debt crisis.
It's many of the nations on earth
have a growing debt compared to their gross domestic product.
It's not just us.
How do we solve that problem?
We have the risk of default on the debt.
We have a potential risk of inflation,
if we all print more money.
GDP might contract, destruction of people's savings,
and the collapse of the welfare state in Europe.
There are solutions that are proposed.
The conservatives and Republicans generally say,
let's cut back on spending.
That's the way to solve the debt crisis.
The more liberal economists would say, well,
let's spend more money and get us out of this situation
by sparking economic growth with deficit spending.
Or perhaps we should devalue the dollar and export more.
But that doesn't work if all the countries do that.
That's a zero-sum game.
So what can you do instead?
One example is productivity growth.
And you all in the IT industry should remember the Y2K crisis.
During that crisis, which was caused by people
worrying about the two-digit year number not being enough,
and causing failures and control systems and so on,
many CEOs of Fortune 500 companies were scared.
So they invested tons of money in products
like Google's system.
Or SAP for enterprise-wide software
to control everything from personnel
to purchasing to production control, bills and materials--
the whole package, in multiple locations, multiple currencies.
In fact, that investment paid off.
It did increase GDP.
It's one of the factors that was responsible for the growth
in economic productivity in the US
in the early part of this century.
So what about the idea of productivity growth
to cheap energy, instead of new software?
Cheap energy can make a big difference.
We'll talk about that.
Meanwhile, we have a few crises sitting in front of us.
We have the iconic polar bear, symbolizing global warming.
We have world population growing from perhaps seven billion
today to nine or more.
We're running out of food.
The fish in the ocean are largely
depleted-- at least the large ones that we like to eat.
And don't forget we have wars over natural resources.
This is a picture of a war in Kuwait,
where Iraq invaded for oil and then burned the oil
wells on the way out.
So the competition for natural resources-- particularly,
energy is a problem.
Coal emissions in the US, according
to the Environmental Protection Agency,
and according to the local Cambridge Clean Air Task Force
Group, says that there are 13,000 deaths a year
from respiratory illnesses caused by inhalation
of small particulates, 2.5 microns in diameter and less.
There are perhaps a half a million
or a million such deaths in China and other places
where the particulates are even larger.
In the case of global warming, my concern
mostly is food production.
This is an example of the Rongbuk
Glacier in India, decades apart.
In one case, we had lots of ice flowing down.
In the other case, it's nearly dry.
The glaciers are the source of summer meltwater
that enables agriculture to thrive
year round in these places.
The loss of this kind of water supply
is a threat to food supply worldwide.
Now, that's my biggest take on global warming.
This is a chart of data that was compiled by the CIA.
On the horizontal axis are, for each nation
in the picture, the number of children per women birthed,
on the average.
And on the vertical axis, the gross domestic product
per capita, which is very closely related to income.
One of the things you should notice,
just looking at it instantly, is that the stable replacement
rate of about 2.2 births per woman
is only exceeded in the poorest countries in the world.
Those countries that are relatively well off
from a GDP per capita point of view
have a sustainable, or diminishing, birth rate.
So prosperity is an important stabilizer for population.
If we look closely here, we notice
that that occurs at somewhere around $7,500 per year,
gross domestic product per capita.
That's the number we'd like to get to.
If we could do that, it appears we could really
stabilize the earth's population.
Why?
Because women who are in prosperous countries
have time to get off their chores,
time to relax, time to go to school, time to get jobs,
time to have money of their own and exert the independence
they need to control births.
Prosperity has cut the birth rate.
Prosperity is also largely dependent upon energy.
Now, energy's not the only component
to make a prosperous nation.
We need good government.
We need the rule of law.
We need education.
But we also critically need energy.
And, specifically, we need electric energy--
the kind of power you need for refrigeration, for commerce,
for transportation, for safety, for machine tools.
Everything depends upon that rather useful form
of energy, electric power.
And here, it's about-- again, about 2,000 kilowatt hours
per capita seems to be a number that
is associated with the level of prosperity
needed to control population.
For comparison, the US is off the chart here.
We're at about 12,000 kilowatt hours per person.
Canada, 14,000.
And occasional countries have even more electric consumption.
But somewhere around 2,000 kilowatt hours, or 600 watts
average power per person, seems to be
a number that suggests achieving the prosperity
for stable population.
The other thing to notice is that prosperity
depends upon cheap energy.
This is a "Wall Street Journal" chart.
And the arrows pointing down to the vertical bars
indicate when we've had recessions.
And there's an indication that when oil prices spike,
there's a strong correlation with
diminished economic performance.
Several economists tried to model the economic behavior
as a function of labor, and capital, and energy, and so on.
And their conclusions are that if you
were to take a big world economy and inject,
for free, about a dollar's worth of energy in the form of oil
into it, you can increase the productivity
of the whole economy by about five to one.
We still have cheap oil.
It can't stay cheap, though.
Here's the total investments of the major oil companies
over the last 10 years or so.
It's quintupled!
So if you're spending that much money to explore for new oil,
the prices have only got to go up.
Now, developing nations know full well
that electric power and energy are
critical to their economic development.
And so they are desperately seeking
to get new energy sources.
Coal plants-- there are something like 1,400 gigawatts
of coal plants in production around the world today.
And although we kind of think in the US
we are diminishing that number, as we pass laws and the coal
plants shut here-- some of them--
the number of coal plants worldwide, under planning,
is going to double.
It's going to be another 1,400 watts of power,
doubling CO2 emissions.
So that's the reality of the projections worldwide.
What we do in the US is not so important,
compared to what the developing nations are going to do.
A lot of people say, well, we ought to pass carbon taxes
and get the developing nations to not burn so much energy.
But the developing nations like China say, wait a minute.
The US and the OECD nations gained their prosperity
by cheap energy from burning coal.
Now it's our turn.
How can you say that you achieved your prosperity,
and we can't?
Here's this CO2 emissions per capita of the United States--
a little over 1,000 tons per person.
China says, well, we've only done 76 tons.
When we get to 1,000, we'll talk about it.
And that same story will be repeated in India, Indonesia,
and so on.
Economics is a powerful force.
I like Fareed Zakaria.
He's got a book.
And he tries to point out the importance of economics.
And a very mundane thing is change economics and trade
over the last few decades.
And that's the container.
The container ship has made world commerce
possible-- inexpensively, without pilferage,
in a standardized form.
That trade takes place between a whole network of 250 nations.
So the occasional bilateral treaty
we sign to stop some sort of behavior
we don't like about energy doesn't matter much.
Economics always works around these things.
Economics is the most powerful force, not politics
We need energy cheaper than coal.
We tried politics to contain CO2.
But nations resist carbon taxes.
Even a wealthy nation, like the United States,
will not pass a carbon tax.
And yet, we have conferences where people go and talk
about how to have a political agreement to pass carbon taxes.
And here are all some of the recent failed
conferences that led nowhere.
And yet, we keep trying to do that again.
We need energy cheaper than coal.
That's the only way we can stop people from burning coal.
Provide them with a more attractive and more economical
alternative.
A lot of people say, well, why don't we
just cut back on our power use?
We're gluttons here.
We're using too much energy.
And perhaps we are.
In the US, we generate and use about 434 gigawatts
of power on the average, throughout the year.
So let's suppose that we are really good
and we cut back our electric power use to half of that.
And then the rest of the nations in the world
who want to achieve that good standard of living
we have in the US also achieve that level of use per capita.
That's the projected electric power consumption
for the world, if that scenario I described is true.
So again, what we do in the US is important, a little bit.
But what the earth depends on mostly
is what the rest of the world does,
because there's so many people there.
We need energy cheaper than coal, again.
Now, in the book, I went through a little scenario
to do a very crude model of the costs of electric power
from various sources.
And this is going to summarize these things.
I break costs into three components-- capital cost
recovery for the investment in the power plant,
the fuel it takes, and the operations cost and so on.
Now, given an investment in a power plant like a coal power
plant, a brand-new costs on the order of $2.80 for capital
investment for every watt of capacity that that coal plant
will have.
So we want to convert that capital cost
to the expense of recovering that capital.
So we want to know what is the equivalent payment to achieve
that $2.80 investment.
And you have to learn a little bit about present value,
if you haven't done that.
The question is, would I like $1,000 now?
Or would I like a penny an hour for the next 40 years?
The answer to that depends upon the discount rate you choose.
And people can argue about that.
I picked, in this example, 8%.
But you can do the math any way you like.
And I also picked a lifetime for most things of 40 years.
In the case of coal plants and nuclear power plants,
I picked a capacity factor-- that
is, the time it's running-- of 90%.
That is, you only get your penny back
when the plant's actually running.
Doing that, the math is really easy.
Because $2.80 per watt investment turns out to be 2.8
cents per kilowatt hours.
So the math is easy.
OK, we'll use that I model.
In the lower left of this screen is the only running plant
that actually has the ability to capture CO2.
It's an integrated gasification combined cycle.
It's the kind of power plant that
burns coal in oxygen, instead of air.
So there's no nitrogen oxides in the fuel, or no nitrogen.
It makes it easy to extract the CO2 from the exhaust stream,
because it's only water and CO2.
But it was very expensive to build.
There's only one been built.
That cost was about $4.76 per watt,
just for the capital cost of the plant,
without storing the CO2 anywhere.
Just in the last week, we saw announcements in the "MIT
Technology Review" of two new plants in Louisiana and Canada
that have a capital cost in excess of $9 per watt,
just to get the CO2 out, not to dispose of it.
So carbon capture and storage, which
has been touted by the coal companies as clean coal,
is economically infeasible.
Natural gas-- that's the current darling.
A couple of things here.
One is that the capital cost for natural gas power plants
is relatively low, on the order of $1 per watt,
for the capacity.
And the fuel, right, today is relatively cheap.
Fuel has been as low as $2 or $3 a million BTUs.
And now it's up to five, about.
And that number-- 2.8 cents a kilowatt hour--
is the contribution of the fuel cost.
Again, I just said operations cost in this really simple
model are $1-- a penny per kilowatt hour.
You can do better.
But, I mean, that's to maintain the generator, and the power
station, and the transformers, and all that sort of thing.
That's not unreasonable.
Again, a simple model.
Couple other points, though-- one
is that most of the gas plants in the US
are the ones that were designed to do peaking.
That is, to come online fast, speed up the power,
and generate electricity.
And their efficiency is only about 30%.
That is, 30% of the potential thermal energy
for burning the fuel is converted into electric power.
Whereas the fancier ones that are combined cycle that
have the gas turbines, for which the turbine heats water
to make steam in a secondary generation scheme,
are about 60%.
Much more so-- a bit more expensive to run,
a lot more conservative of fuel, but they
take hours to start up, as opposed to minutes.
So they're not used for backing up wind power.
They're used as energy sources.
They're pretty good.
So that's the situation with natural gas.
In the case of wind, it's very hard,
because you read all the newspapers about how cheap it
is and how it keeps dropping.
OK, my approach was to try and find out what the total capital
investment was to create a wind farm.
Not the wind farm after the subsidies,
after the renewable energy credits,
after the capital tax writedowns, and so on.
Try and find out the real cost, the total cost--
because it doesn't matter who paid.
From a society point of view, or from a global point of view,
it doesn't matter whether it was the taxpayer, the rate payer,
the bondholder-- whoever put the money in.
The question is, as a society, we need to do the right thing.
Because we're talking about a global problem.
So find out that total cost, if you can.
Here's some cost estimates from the EIA--
the Energy Information Agency of the Department of Energy,
which is usually pretty good.
Their example is $2.44 a watt.
But if you look at the price for the Deepwater Horizon--
Deepwater Wind farm, off the coast of Rhode Island,
that was $7 a watt.
Right nearby, Cape Wind is $5.80 for watt.
Their capacity factor is only 30%, though.
So to do the capital cost recovery, remember,
we only would cover that capital cost
when the wind is generating electricity.
So you have to divide that capital cost by .03 in order
to figure that out.
Now--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] number for the table on the left?
DR. ROBERT HARGRAVES: I think so.
I think that's the number I picked.
The Cape Wind cost of the utility,
as a sort of a reasonableness check, is in this range.
They signed contracts with the utilities in Massachusetts.
They have an escalation cause.
And they'll go up to $0.24 an hour, if that happens.
So the model's not crazy.
It's about right.
All right.
So electricity-- same idea.
Here's that Ivanpah plant at Brightsource, is the company.
OK, there again, capital cost recovery-- figuring out,
in this case, I think I used 25% percent capacity factor.
We have to look in the book.
$0.22 a kilowatt hour.
Fuel is cheap.
Ops are about a penny.
Again, here are some examples of capital costs.
And here are some examples of contracted power costs,
but for which the company sells power to the utilities.
So the utilities have been bludgeoned by law and public
utilities into purchasing wind power and solar power
at the prices-- OK-- were the first priority.
And thereafter, go and buy natural gas, or coal,
or nuclear, or whatever.
And here again are some prices that are being paid today.
AllEarth is-- I don't know if [INAUDIBLE] is up and running.
AllEarth is getting paid $0.30 a kilowatt hour.
Remember, coal is about 5.6%, nuclear typically around $0.06
today.
Biomass-- people say, well, that's renewable.
Let's try that.
OK, so I looked again at some examples
of what these units cost to build.
And here are a couple examples.
The fuel, well, delivered to the plant is those numbers.
I called up and I found out what it costs to buy tons of wood.
And put it in a plan.
Figure out how many BTUs you get out of the wood.
And run through the efficiency calculation.
And we get fuel costs about $0.47 a kilowatt hour.
So again, the total-- $0.09.
So my conclusion is, green energy is not
cheaper than coal.
Here's a summary of what we just covered,
right-- on the far left, coal.
Gas today is a little cheaper than coal.
That's why coal use has been diminishing somewhat.
And we can probably see that happening for a few more years.
But the others are more expensive.
Again, the reason the press reports their cheapness
is because of unstated subsidies.
For example, AllEarth renewables in Vermont--
the capital cost of that plant was paid for 30%
by the federal government as a tax credit.
Not only that-- the tax credits, by special exemption,
were not paid at the time the taxes were paid.
They were paid upfront, in advance.
The state of Vermont gave a 30% capital
tax credit to that organization.
They get a $0.24 per kilowatt hour production tax credit.
They get priority on the grid.
They can always sell it.
The utility must take that power whenever they can.
And so on.
And they get $0.30 a kilowatt hour for the electricity they
do sell.
So here's my calculation.
Do your own.
When you're curious, try and find out what the plant costs.
Figure out what the capital cost is, really.
And spread it out over the lifetime and capacity
factor of the plant.
So here's carbon intensity of the electric power sector
worldwide.
It hasn't changed a bit.
So I say, green doesn't work.
Can nuclear work?
Well, back to nuclear for a second.
Alvin Weinberg is a guy who patented--
or was co-patentor-- of the light water reactor that
was used originally in Rickover's submarine, and today
in all the US power plants and most of the ones worldwide.
Rickover was a dynamic and forceful and obnoxious person
who managed to get it installed in the submarines
and also was tapped by Eisenhower to lead
the domestic nuclear power program.
And he basically took the same design
and was going on an aircraft carrier, put it
in a shipping port in Pennsylvania.
And that was the seed for all of the power plants, nuclear power
plants that were built there after.
Not only that-- the Navy was training admirals
and generals-- not generals, admirals and captains and so
on-- to run these nuclear power plants.
And it was a source and supply of skilled nuclear technical
people to run the power plants on land.
But what about yesterday's solid fuel nuclear reactors?
Can they compete with natural gas?
Last year, this plant, out of the blue, shut down.
They said their operations costs alone were such
that they couldn't make money competing
against natural gas, which surprises me.
I'm still flabbergasted why it was so expensive.
At that time, gas was about-- was
making 4.3 cents electricity.
They couldn't do it, even incrementally.
They shut the plant.
And once you shut it, it's basically gone.
Right locally in Vermont, this plant
is shutting down at the end of the year.
Same argument-- can't make money.
So what about the new power plants, the new generation 3
plus plants that Westinghouse is now building?
Two in Georgia, and two in the Carolinas.
That plant costs $6 per watt of capacity.
So it looks to me like it's going
to generate electric power somewhere
around $0.08 a kilowatt hour.
Well, remember coal is about $0.56, so that's kind of tough.
So that doesn't look too promising yet,
unless we can get the cost of those points down.
Which, by the way, China is.
Westinghouse is building those same plants in China,
and their capital cost for the first ones
are $2 per watt, not $6.
So there's something different about the costs in the US.
Those of you who like Bill Gates and his investments
in TerraPower-- remember, he's building
a kind of a power plant, which is cooled by liquid metal.
It's a so-called fast reactor.
In the US, that program was called integral fast reactor
at one time.
This is a PriceWaterhouseCoopers estimate
of the cost of power from that.
Gates would say he's aiming to compete
with other nuclear power plants.
But it's certainly not cheaper than coal.
So we need innovation.
Let's look at the space program as a source of cost innovation.
SpaceX-- remember Elon Musk, right?
And things like PayPal, and SpaceX,
and Tesla, and all those good things.
He saw a cost-innovation opportunity there,
because of the shuttle complexity.
And because of the fact they used 1970s technology.
Now, that kind of rings a bell when
you think about light water reactors in the United States.
So what he did was assemble a small team with low overhead
and design an entirely new rocket engine.
And do it quickly.
Between the time of incorporation
and the first rocket flight was only six years.
The SpaceX Falcon, which is their first product,
flew for $443 million-- compared to the NASA estimate
for what it was going to cost NASA to do it
if the government did that project at $1.44 billion.
So he's proving that sometimes there
is a technical cost-innovation opportunity.
What about liquid fuel reactors instead of solid fuel reactors?
That's my idea.
This is a picture of a liquid fuel reactor at Oak Ridge
National Laboratory.
It's a lot of pipes, and the reactor
in the sort of top middle, on the right a little bit.
Oak Ridge started this way back in 1953.
This man, Richard Engel, is still
a consultant in this area.
He, at that time, was putting together a water reactor.
That is heavy water that had dissolved in a uranium sulfite
salt.
And it generated electric power, as a power plant.
Had all the things about stability
and so on that we like.
They couldn't make it really big enough to generate
commercial power.
But that was their first adventure
in liquid fuel reactors.
Thereafter, Weinberg-- the guy who invented the light water
reactor-- also was the director of Oak Ridge
and a designer and promoter of the molten salt reactor.
So, in this case, the liquid was not water.
It was salt that was melted.
And the salt was a fluoride-- fluorides
of lithium, or beryllium, and so on-- picked
because they have low atomic numbers.
And picked because the fluoride-- fluorine
doesn't absorb neutrons.
So they ran a reactor way back in '54
at a red-hot temperature.
A current reactor is what, 300 degrees centigrade or so?
This is quite hot.
So the proof of concept worked.
Later on, after a lot of machinations,
they tried to put together one that
was going to be more commercially oriented
and that also worked in that time period.
Here's kind of how these things work.
Here's a chart of the nuclides.
The horizontal axis is the atomic number,
the number of protons.
The vertical axis is the atomic weight,
the number of neutrons plus protons.
Right in the middle of the chart,
you see the U-235 symbol for fission.
But if we look up at the top, on the 238 line,
you can see that uranium 238, which
is 96% of all the uranium that's in a power plant reactor today.
That uranium, when it absorbs a neutron in that blue arrow
symbol, it becomes U-2-- I'm sorry.
It becomes U-239, which is unstable.
And over a period of days, it decays, finally
to become plutonium 239, which is a fissile material.
And that fissile material, in turn,
fissions and generates heat and power in a reactor.
Few people realize that in today's power reactors,
we're not only fissioning uranium 235.
A third of the power at the end of the fuel cycle
is from plutonium.
We actually manufacture and burn plutonium
right in the solid fuel reactor.
In the same scheme, Weinberg and crew
pointed out that thorium 232, when
irradiated in the same scheme, becomes uranium 233,
another fissile material.
So there's another avenue and has a technical reason
why that's sort of convenient.
And that is, it can happen at low neutron energies.
So that's what's happening.
Now, we can actually design one of these reactors.
So this is a kind of a busy diagram.
OK, so that big, yellow circle is
meant to be the reactor, a liquid pot or vessel.
And there's a lot of reactions that go on inside there.
At the top left is an example of a U-233 fission
which releases neutrons.
And those neutrons have a couple of purposes.
One is they can promote something like U-238
to become plutonium 239, which could be fissioned and make
power, just as the U-235 or anything else
can release neutrons when fissioned
and promote 232 thorium to becomes fissile U-233.
So it's a good scheme.
It's very-- relatively inexpensive to construct.
It's a highly proliferation-resistant scheme
of things, more so even than today's reactors.
And I'm a fan of this reactor today,
because I think we can build it relatively inexpensively.
It will run for decades, before eventually you
have to change the salt.
Meanwhile, at the top left, there's
a waste-separator thing.
And some of the fission products, like Xenon,
tend to absorb neutrons and impede the reaction.
There's a scheme in these kinds of reactors
to remove some of the fission products on the fly,
in the liquid.
That's the reason why liquid fuel reactors are attractive.
And that is, the online quick processing
makes them relatively inexpensive.
I say that that kind of reactor has
the potential-- $3 per kilowatt hour-- to undersell coal.
Why?
One is-- I looked up some estimates that
had been done over the past decades
for building these kinds of plants.
And I just promoted them up to the current,
I think, 2012 dollars.
And they're in the range of about $2
a watt capital cost recovery.
I'm sorry, $2 a watt capital cost-- that range.
So we're in the ballpark.
But the technical reasons have to do with, principally,
the molten fluoride salt.
Now, the name of my book starts off with thorium,
because it's a short word.
But the real technology key is the liquid fuel form.
The fuel, again, is, again, fluorides
of lithium and beryllium.
Fluorine, lithium, and beryllium all have low atomic numbers.
Good moderators, they slow the neutrons down,
enabling reactions.
Uranium is just dissolved in that molten salt.
The salt, of course, has good heat transfer.
The reaction is taking place right in it.
And so you use that molten salt through a heat exchange.
You're external to the reactor vessel to get the energy out.
The whole thing is an atmospheric pressure.
There is no-- you know, a current light water reactor
is pressurized to, maybe, 150 atmospheres of pressure.
So we have a containment building around it,
just in case that vessel ever explodes somehow.
That's never happened.
But we still have a safety factor,
because of the atmospheric pressure
of the radioactive materials.
Another nice feature of this project
is that there's an overheat protection that
was designed into the original reactor.
And that is a pipe, you can see, that would drain the salt
from the reactor vessel itself into a specialized drain tank.
And that pipe is plugged with salt
that is kept cool with just a fan that blows warm or cool
air on it.
So that, if the thing were to overheat,
or the electric power were to fail,
or something of that nature, that freeze pipe-- freeze
plug-- would just melt.
And the liquid would drain out into a configuration
which can't be critical.
There's no propulse of pressure to spew radioactive materials
everywhere.
We've talked about that.
And the places are typically designed
so that if there was a vessel rupture, or pipe rupture,
or something, the molten salts should spill out and be
contained on the floor of the containment.
Now, the other point is that it's a low-mass project.
This original motivation was to design a jet engine
for an airplane.
So the first reactor designed-- second one designed
was about 1.4 meters in diameter.
It was a beryllium sphere.
And they'd actually started to build that unit.
But they decided not to do it.
The motivation was to have Strategic Air Command
bombers circling Russia for months at a time,
never refueling, powered by these kind of engines.
But eventually, the ICBMs we had were able to supplant bombers.
And we had nuclear submarines at sea
with missiles on them as well.
So this project never got much beyond the first prototype
experiment on the ground, and this design,
for which they did build that beryllium sphere
and started on it.
Compare that to what's going on in China right now.
You know, the construction costs are pretty high.
This, just the dome itself, weighs, what, 780 tons.
They're moving big pieces of equipment around.
The same thing's going on in Georgia
right now, where they're building two more power
plants-- again, Westinghouse's design.
Another point here is that the high temperature
of these reactors generates power much more efficiently
than the lower temperature of today's pressurized water
reactors.
So we can actually cut our water use,
because we're so much more efficient at converting
high-temperature energy to electric power.
And there are versions of this that will actually work with--
Is that picture complete?
Not really, is it?
Hmm.
--with just air cooling.
You can do that.
Another thing that's happening right now
is a lot of investment at Sandia, particularly
in the super-critical CO2 turbines.
Super-critical CO2 is a kind of a-- just think of a liquid,
of CO2.
And you keep compressing it.
And it becomes, at certain temperature and pressure,
a kind of a liquid that's compressible.
And you can make a very efficient device
to convert thermal energy to mechanical energy
to generate power with it.
Plenty of it around.
In the US, 500 tons just would run the whole US electric power
system for a year.
There's plenty of it.
My point is that smaller reactors can actually
be produced in a production line.
Today, we have Boeing aircraft that can make a $200 million
aircraft every day.
We know how to do that.
And making aircraft is sort of the same.
We have the same issues about safety, about materials,
about thermodynamics.
All those things are controlled, and result
in quality production.
The other point here is that, if you're producing something
out of a production line, you have
the benefit of a learning curve.
The concept here is that when you double the number of units
produced, you reduce the unit cost
by a certain percentage called the learning ratio.
Typically, it's around 20%.
In the electronics, high-tech IT industry, it's been about 50%.
OK, and University of Chicago was
conservative in their estimate of 10% in the nuclear industry.
But even so, that makes a tremendous difference in cost,
when we get to producing thousands of units,
instead of two or three, in a production environment.
Again, we could make a-- certainly, a $70 billion a year
industry, just by producing these units.
Suppose we were to do that, one a day.
We could actually cut down the-- by replacing
coal plants, the emissions from coal
in a period of about 40 years.
So just by replacing one a day.
It's possible to do that.
The other things that we can do with high temperatures
from these kinds of plants are have new kinds of fuels.
So, in this example, we're pointing out
that, although you know about electrolysis to make hydrogen
from water, there's also a thermal way
to do it by making it very hot and using
a couple of catalysts-- iodine and sulfur,
or copper and chlorine-- to create hydrogen,
making use of that high temperature.
Not electric power, necessarily.
The Honda Clarity you can buy today runs on hydrogen.
And there are a half a dozen hydrogen cars that you can buy.
Hydrogen is OK as a fuel.
But you've got to compress it in a tank in order to do it.
So it doesn't-- you don't get as much fuel in a car as you would
with gasoline.
But we can also combine hydrogen with these kind of elements
in order to make liquid fuels.
George Olah wrote the book about the methanol economy.
He's a big promoter of that.
Ammonia, surprisingly, is a good fuel.
You have to control it.
Dimethylene's a substitute for diesel fuel.
This car's been touring Europe.
It's an ammonia-powered car.
Suppose you wanted to make carbonation fuels,
like gasoline.
Because we know how to use that.
Where do we get a carbon source that
is environmentally friendly?
That is, other than getting petroleum out of the ground
and burning it.
We want a renewable sort of carbon.
Where can we get something like that to make these products?
One is thought to be taking it out of the air.
And people toy with this all the time.
And the economics of it are sort of marginal, at best.
We're thinking that with really cheap energy
from this kind of reactor, it might
become economically feasible.
But that's again a Sandia project, well thought of.
Just recently, the Naval research laboratories
demoed their process for getting CO2 out
of seawater, rather than air.
There's a lot more CO2 per liter in seawater
than there is in air.
And that makes it an efficient thing.
So they've done that and demonstrated how to make fuel.
And the point here is that the Navy
has experience with nuclear power.
They know-- and they're looking strictly--
they're looking very deliberately--
to using this kind of extraction technology
to make jet fuel at sea from seawater and nuclear power.
And it's not a long way off.
We're talking within the decade.
This demo skid does work.
And it's been demonstrated.
And, in fact, just as a game, they flew a model airplane
with the kind of fuel that they manufactured this way.
So they're pretty pleased about that.
Again, biomass is a source of carbon.
You can get it from farming.
And if we burn that, and it goes in the air,
it gets reabsorbed and comes back in a lot, to the land.
So it's a zero-impact cycle.
But I say, well, don't burn it.
Just use it as the source of the carbon atoms
you need to make the hydrocarbon fuels.
We can make a ton of fuel from 1.7 tons of biomass.
Around the world, we use a lot of dung, right,
and other sorts of products, in order to make fuel.
Same idea.
Instead of burning them, we could use them
as sources for carbon for synthesis.
World cattle dung-- and people in India collect that.
But it's very labor intensive to collect it.
I have to point out that we have a collection process here
already.
So that could be cheap.
Again, back again to the benefits.
A dollar more energy can spark our economic growth,
increase our natural productivity,
allow tax revenues to rise, maybe improve
the government's debt situation.
Again, low cost is critical.
That's the thing we have to watch, all the time.
One of the reasons I've been interested
in the denatured molten salt reactor
is to get that cost down low.
In my books and other talks, I've
talked to all these benefits from the liquid fuel
nuclear reactors.
All these things are possible to do.
But I'm suggesting now that you kind of put it off,
until we get the economic case solved.
If we can get economic liquid fuel nuclear reactors sold
and being produced in mass production,
then we get a chance to having them be accepted worldwide
and delve into these other opportunities
to make use of that inexpensive power.
Again, economics always wins in the long run.
China is under way.
They're building these units.
This guy on the left is the son of the former president, Jiang.
He's got $350 million allocated to projects.
And he has 400 people working on it right now,
trying to build a molten salt cool
version, a sort of stair-step version, by that date.
And a molten salt reactor, per se, in 2020.
Recently, that's been accelerated.
Here's a slide that Jiang used in his talk.
He points out the crisis in China today.
And that is, air pollution has become terrible.
And the people are very upset about it.
So his project has been goaled to going
into commercial production in 2024.
Of course, China's trying one of everything, right?
They've got big dams and four kinds of nuclear reactors
and so on.
But they're pursuing this intensely today.
In the US, today's environment, we can't do that.
We really cannot.
All the rules and regulations of the NRC
are very specific to the light water reactors we have.
And they're being very difficult.
There's no sort of overview risk-informed,
performance-based regulation.
It's "comply with this rule."
And that's how the whole system works.
Cost-benefit analyses, which are used even by the EPA,
are not used in the NRC.
The NRC says safety is paramount.
We make no cost-benefit trade offs.
That's the mental attitude going in.
The idea of the nuclear quality assurance technology,
and rules, and so on is quipped that every nuclear reactor
design has to have a paper that outweighs the reactor.
A lot of the quality and assurance issues
have been substituted for by paperwork.
And so it's quite a difficult thing to do in the US.
TerraPower, Gates' company, has given up.
They're in China, trying to do the preliminary work.
Of the four or five ventures that are in the US
today, trying to do molten salt reactor research,
only one says they want to try and do it in the US.
The EPA, again, has a problem with anything
that has to do with radioactivity.
There is sort of a concept of as low as
reasonably achievable, in terms of limiting
radioactive exposure to people.
And so, the problem with that is it's
created a sort of a horror or fear of radiation
that's been endorsed and encapsulated
in rules and regulations that make it-- again, it
isn't so much the technology and the limits.
But the sort of the attitude of people and so on that
makes it hard to get plants licensed or research done.
So that's the situation we have in the US.
Probably this work's going to come to fruition
outside the US.
So that's my summary.
Low-cost clean energy from liquid fuel nuclear reactors
has two great potentials.
One is to improve the economics of both
the industrialized world that could
use a little shot of GDP boost.
It could also improve the lifestyle
and overcome the poverty of the developing
world without increasing pollution.
And help us solve our energy and climate crises.
Thank you.
I'm open to questions.
AUDIENCE: So I think what I saw in your presentation here
was that you're basing the estimated cost
of these molten salt reactors based
on the cost for a bunch of experimental reactors projected
out to [INAUDIBLE] analysis.
Are there reasons why we think that the commercially produced
reactor-- one that was continuously running
on a experimental one-- would actually be cheaper to run,
and cheaper to build, than [INAUDIBLE]
light water reactors?
What are those reasons?
DR. ROBERT HARGRAVES: The question
is that the presentation cited some old research
papers about the costs.
Is there any reason to believe that in today's world, that
might happen to make the costs as low as I suggested?
I have one friend who's done a lot of design work, ex-MIT guy
who's within the last three or four years designing
our nuclear power plant production facility.
And he's come up with numbers of $0.03 to $0.05
per kilowatt hour for a denatured molten salt
reactor that is in a design that he's right now still got
under wraps.
But yeah, I've seen the papers, seen the calculation.
So it's feasible.
Again, it all depends eventually upon what
are all the sudden rules and regulations
that come into play, if your work is suspended for two years
while there's a hearing or something of that nature that
drives the costs up very rapidly.
So his estimates are in what I would
call a rational regulatory environment.
So that's what we would have to achieve as well, in order
to get those costs in line.
AUDIENCE: And I have a sort of related question, which
is, I think you agree that in the US,
given how people feel about nuclear power today,
we couldn't build a reactor that wasn't obviously
much more safer than the light water
reactors we've built in the past.
Are there reasons to believe that a molten salt
reactor wouldn't potentially be safer?
One of the [INAUDIBLE] seems to be it also would be cheaper.
DR. ROBERT HARGRAVES: Yeah.
The question is, why would the molten salt reactor be safer
than the light water reactor?
First thing I would say is that the light water reactor
accidents have generally been few and not
quite as devastating as you might think,
beyond the Chernobyl issue.
So compared to other energy sources,
the nuclear power, to date, has been quite safer,
in terms of loss of life.
So it's a good source.
The molten salt reactor is designed
with all the experiences people have
had about passive safety and so on.
So again, it isn't so much that it's molten salt.
It's that molten salt enables good engineering with fewer
systems and able to achieve the passive safety that's needed.
So, you know, we won't know until we actually
build them and test them thoroughly.
But I would say universally that people who are designing these
believe that to be absolutely correct.
Please.
AUDIENCE: Let's say that, in 10 years,
the people doing [INAUDIBLE] finally have a breakthrough.
And they achieve net positive fusion energy.
How would you compare the liquid fuel fission reactors
to potential, say, a Tokamak-designed fusion
reactor?
Do you think we would actually have
a world with both of those?
Or do you think that if fusion ever comes,
it will end up just supplanting all the fission designs?
DR. ROBERT HARGRAVES: Well, I think if fusion comes, great.
But it's going to be quite a while, in any case.
The Tokamak designs are still-- people are working hard on.
There's a big project, ITER, in Europe.
We have that facility in California.
And then we also have private ventures in New Jersey,
using, what do they to call it, non-neutronic approaches--
proton on beryllium, I think.
So there's some potential for something to happen there.
Most people don't think it's going to happen.
But it does, wonderful.
If we have two sources, great.
I don't see the downside to fission that a lot of people
do.
AUDIENCE: You mentioned that this molten salt reactor
is less conducive to proliferation.
But I didn't quite follow why.
DR. ROBERT HARGRAVES: I didn't cover that in a talk.
But there's a lot of comments that
have been a bit overstated.
People say, oh, you can't make a bomb out of it,
and this and that.
Well, you know, you can't make a bomb out
of a light water reactor.
It sits there like a plant.
But if you have the technical skills--
like they did in India or South or North Korea, and so on--
you can figure out how to make a special kind of nuclear reactor
that generates, say, either plutonium 239 from uranium 238,
or generates uranium 233 from thorium 232.
You can do that by building a special-purpose reactor
to build material for nuclear weapons, in both cases.
Now, the hangup with the thorium-uranium cycle
is that it also creates uranium 232, which
is a hazardous material in the sense that it decays quickly
and is likely to injure or kill the people working
on the weapons fabrication.
So it's a little harder to use the thorium U-233
cycles to build nuclear weapons that way.
So I would say the denatured molten salt
reactor is highly proliferation resistant.
But nothing is-- anyone with enough money
and enough technology, enough science, could do that.
But the other evidence is that the US
did try to build a U-233 weapon way back,
I don't know, 40, 50 years ago.
And they did one test and they were unsatisfied and never did
again.
So that's the only technical evidence I have for it.
So the answer, again, in summary,
is you can build a nuclear weapon out of almost anything,
if you have all the skills and money and expense.
But even developing nations, like India, Pakistan, North
Korea, and so on, were able to build nuclear weapons
with the technologies that exist today.
So my suggested hurdle is that you only
build reactors that are no more proliferation
resistant than the one we have today,
as we don't want to increase the probability that someone
can build a bomb.
But we can't eliminate it, because we
have all these paths that are in there already.
Please.
AUDIENCE: You showed a table of costs
that compared various forms of energy
as actually produced today in real plants,
and then compared this thing that we don't yet
do that you'd like us to develop.
So I'm curious how they compare to a few other technologies
that we don't yet do today, but people
want to develop in wind and solar and other renewables.
DR. ROBERT HARGRAVES: Now, your question
is, what other technologies are there
that I ought to be looking at in that table?
Is that the question?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, like, most of those were today's cost.
And then you added this one at the end, which is,
here's one we could develop.
And I wonder how it would compare to other things
that you could add.
DR. ROBERT HARGRAVES: Well, you're
talking about things like hydro, for example.
I didn't put hydro in the table because we really
can't expand hydro very much.
It's a nice source.
It's relatively inexpensive.
It's not very polluting.
It's renewable.
It's green.
It's good.
But there aren't too many sites left to do a lot of hydro.
Geothermal, I didn't put in, because it's not
that expandable.
There aren't that many sites where
you can get enough geothermal energy out.
So I tried to pick just the examples that I thought
would produce enough electricity to make a difference.
AUDIENCE: Sure.
No, that's not exactly my question.
My question is, you know, here's the cost of wind,
as done right now.
Here's the cost of solar, as done right now.
Here's the cost of nuclear, as done right now.
None of them do it.
OK, here's the cost of a different way
of doing in theory that could be cheaper.
But isn't there a different way of doing,
you know, solar, that could be cheaper,
that people could also develop within a decade?
Are there things like that on the horizon?
How do they compare?
DR. ROBERT HARGRAVES: I see.
The question is, why didn't I sort of project
the future costs of wind and solar
and see if it might not be cheaper?
And, like I said, I haven't got a good answer to that,
except to say, for example, in the case of solar power.
And it's pretty clear right now that photovoltaic
is going to outrun the concentrated solar.
It's going to be less expensive.
And there is a lot of improvement
in the cost for photovoltaic panels.
It's down now to $1 a watt for the panel.
But the panel is only a part of the plant.
And so the costs for the mounting, for the heliostats
to follow the sun, all those kinds of things
have brought the costs up to the numbers I've suggested.
So maybe there's some opportunity
to reduce costs there.
But again, in the case of solar and wind,
we also have the storage problem.
We don't have energy storage.
So we need to have some kind of backup power
at all times for those.
Go ahead.
AUDIENCE: I gather as an unstated conclusion
of the talk that somehow what's going to happen in the future
is that China is going to actually develop
this technology and start sending it back to us
en masse, right?
You know, here's your two-ton, you know,
power-generation thing.
You can buy it for this much.
And here, you have it, right?
Go get it.
Here.
And so how do you develop here in the States?
DR. ROBERT HARGRAVES: No, you're right.
China has been notorious at capturing
intellectual property.
In the case of the Westinghouse arrangement,
Westinghouse is building four AP 1000s in China.
But China required Westinghouse to surrender all IP
to that product.
And the deal they have is that China
is allowed to build power and export power
plants that are 1.4 gigawatts and up.
So the AP 1,000 is a Westinghouse product.
The AP 1,400 is a China product.
So they have the rights to do that.
And they intend to, I think.
In fact, one of their power companies just went public.
So the same thing would happen with the molten salt reactor.
AUDIENCE: So that makes it like [INAUDIBLE] to actually
make it easier, in the sense that there is some energy
rights and energy technology rights happening.
And unless, you know, similar to the space technology rights,
right, that cannot facilitate new laws and regulations
to make this go forward.
DR. ROBERT HARGRAVES: So I didn't quite
understand this question.
You said is it now between the technology race and the energy
race.
But what is the question?
AUDIENCE: Is that something-- is that a simple message that
could be sold to politicians as a reason
to change regulations that we've tried?
DR. ROBERT HARGRAVES: I'm trying.
I have a whole other topic I've been working
on called radiation is safe within limits.
And at the end of the talk, you can pick up
one of these little brochures.
I'm trying to get the public to understand
the difference between the real harm from radiation
and the regulatory rules that deal with it.
But I don't quite know how to get
the politicians to agree yet.
AUDIENCE: So I think the thrust to this argument
is that the thrust of your talk seemed to be very fatalistic.
China's going to do it.
And that's the end of it, without an exhortation that we
should do something to better change that, which is, I think,
perhaps we all expected to hear.
AUDIENCE: If somebody's going to-- sorry.
If somebody, you know, in China or anyplace else
is going to invent this reactor, and it's going to work,
and it's going to be cheaper than coal-- [INAUDIBLE]
take over the world?
Why not be optimistic?
DR. ROBERT HARGRAVES: Right, good point.
If we're trying to solve the world's CO2 problem,
does it matter whether China solves it or the US solves it?
AUDIENCE: Yep.
AUDIENCE: The reactor with which I am somewhat familiar
is the research reactor at MIT.
And they're routinely getting spreads, shutdowns, emergency
shutdowns due to various monitoring glitches
and all sorts of things they're doing for tests.
And the model that you showed a sketch of is dumping
a liquid-only-when-hot fuel into a tank for it to solidify
in, as far as I can tell.
It seems that would be burdensome to go back
into operation after such a shutdown.
Is that something that, as far as you know,
has been looked at?
DR. ROBERT HARGRAVES: Sure, they're looking at all that.
I'm sure that the design would try to keep it warm.
First of all, it's got-- it has a lot of fission product decay.
It's going to take a long time before that salt would
get cool enough to actually become a solid.
And you'd probably want to have some external heating there
to keep it from getting solid, because it would make
it hard to restart with some salt in all
the pumps and things.
So it could be quite a problem--
AUDIENCE: Excuse me.
I'm sorry.
As you pull off the cap, whenever safety is established,
and dump it back into the reaction chamber, effectively?
DR. ROBERT HARGRAVES: Well, you have to repump it.
If it all solidified, I don't know
how you'd get it restarted.
But yeah, those kinds of issues are up front
with all the people who are working on those projects.
AUDIENCE: But so did you mention that China
is spending, what, some hundred million dollars a year
or more building this design reactor?
DR. ROBERT HARGRAVES: This design reactor
has a budget of $350 million for the first five years.
That was up until a few months ago,
when it was given a new spike of funding--
I don't know what it is-- with the objective of speeding up
the development.
I don't know what the answer to that is.
We could learn.
Jiang himself is going to talk at the American Nuclear Society
meeting in Reno.
I think it's next week.
Please.
AUDIENCE: I saw an article in "Wired" magazine
a couple of years ago.
It really excited me about this stuff.
And one of the things they talked about
was, well, at least when I see nuclear plants now,
they're all right next to the ocean.
They're above ground.
They've got giant cooling powers.
They kind of mentioned that they're
kind of big terrorist targets.
Like if terrorists had a bunch of planes,
they'd crash them into all our power plants.
We'd be kind of out of luck for a long time.
But no one [INAUDIBLE].
And they mentioned that some of these thorium reactors-- maybe
the molten salt [INAUDIBLE] ones-- they could be buried,
sort of to protect them from, like, airplanes, I guess.
But they also mentioned that they could be made smaller.
Like each city could have one, sort of
keep it buried and run for kind of a long time.
Just kind of seal it up and use the power for a long time.
Are those two benefits to these?
Can they be buried?
And can they be much smaller?
DR. ROBERT HARGRAVES: Yes, they-- the question
was, how do you protect these kinds of plants
against terrorist attacks from airplanes and so on?
Can they be buried?
And the answer, ever since 9/11, is
that people are very concerned about that.
So even the AP 1,000 reactor design
is capable of withstanding an aircraft crash.
It won't collapse the dome, nor the big tank of water
that's at the top of it.
Many of the small, modular reactor designs,
like the one being built, were proposed by new scale or by BW,
and are designed to be underground power
plants, for that kind of reason.
And my co-author, Ralph Moir, had a paper with Teller
that designed and showed an underground molten salt reactor
plant.
So, yes, they can be underground.
And that seems to be the strategy
that a lot of new reactors are going to follow.
AUDIENCE: And smaller reactors, right?
DR. ROBERT HARGRAVES: And smaller reactors, yeah.
I'm proposing smaller reactors principally-- well,
a couple reasons.
They're easier to cool in a situation
where you have no external power,
like we had in Fukushima.
And, you know, they're cheaper.
There's less investment up front,
less risk capital for the utility
for the first two or three of these plants.
And because you get the benefit of mass production.
We have a big engineering controversy constantly going
on about the economy of scale and bigger and bigger plants.
But the bigger plants sometimes bring new problems to bear.
So if you give up economy of scale,
you also get, in return, the economy
of the learning curve, because you're
going to produce more units.
So I think the smaller units are going to win out.
Go ahead.
AUDIENCE: Me?
DR. ROBERT HARGRAVES: Sure.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, Bob, a question on your chart showing
the kilowatt cost per kilowatt hour
of the various alternative.
Is there any attempt to include the transmission costs?
Or are transmission costs not relevant?
DR. ROBERT HARGRAVES: I did not include transmission costs.
They can make a difference, if you
are thinking about powering the US with renewables
from long-distance power sources-- something like,
figure a penny per kilowatt hour per 1,000 miles
of high-voltage DC transmission.
Keep that number in the back of your mind
when you're trying to design these things.
Please.
AUDIENCE: Right.
Is the nuclear waste produced by these plants
different in some sense than waste produced by light water
reactors?
DR. ROBERT HARGRAVES: Is the nuclear waste different
than the waste produced by light water reactors?
Yeah, it's quite different.
The light water reactors' waste is
in the same fuel form it went in,
so fuel rods that are then to be disposed
of at some future, undetermined place.
The molten salt reactor can continue to operate and consume
a lot of the sort of actinides-- the heavy uranium--
the heavy elements, like plutonium, americium,
californium, well, and so on.
So the long-lived heavy metal, radioactive products
continue to be consumed.
Now, when you finally stop the reactor,
you're going to have some of those left.
So the amount of that waste per kilowatt hour
that was generated is lower.
But you're still going to have that kind of waste
to deal with at some point.
In addition, both kinds of reactors
generate the fission products-- that is, the cesium or iodine
or whatever it is, xenon, strothium, and so on,
that you've heard of-- which come from splitting
those big, heavy nuclei of uranium and plutonium.
Both kind of reactors generate the same kind
of fission products.
But the decay time for those is on the order of a few hundred
years before they're really more or less benign for handling.
So the answer is, there's less of the waste per kilowatt hour
generated-- less of a long-life waste per kilowatt hour
generated, about the same amount of waste
per kilowatt hour generated for the fission products that
have the shorter lifetimes.
AUDIENCE: So, if we were to, say, try and replace as much
of the coal and natural gas power infrastructure
with liquid thorium reactors instead,
how much would we still need in the mix
to provide peak and on-demand power?
Because I'm assuming even the smaller thorium plants
won't be able to come up on demand to respond to the grid.
DR. ROBERT HARGRAVES: Yeah, the question
is, would you need some kind of peaking plants in addition
to the nuclear power plants, because they
are slow to respond to demand changes?
Well, the current plants are slow,
basically because they were designed that way.
And they could have been designed to be more responsive.
But they haven't.
They are designed to recover all their costs at full power.
So the owners of those plants don't want to turn them down.
Now, the newer plants will have the same issue,
in the sense of, can we-- do we want to turn them down?
The owners will say, no, I want to keep generating money.
So that's the real issue.
You can engineer it to make it go-- turn it down pretty
easily.
The plants do what's called load following.
That is, if you diminish the load on the power plant
by turning off the lights or breaking a pylon
and ruining the load on the plant,
the ability to dissipate heat disappears.
The temperature of the reactor goes up.
And the physics of the reactor designs
shuts it down, or slows it down.
That same principle means it automatically
does load following.
So you can indeed have these plants run at a lower speed
and not require backup from, say, natural gas,
or something like that.
Thank you.