Clearly, someone also shot film footage of Glenn Seaborg standing in front of MSRE
Discussing the Thorium fuel cycle.
I can not find this film.
I can not show you any film footage of an operating Molten Salt Reactor.
Only a handful of photos exist.
It is like NASA landed a man on the Moon, and then lost the film.
This makes for an interesting communications challenge.
I was driving home from work in April of 2006,
and I was listening to a piece on the radio from NPR.
And it was talking about the importance of proper branding.
And that M was a bad sound. Muh. It was kind of a-
They were saying L was one of the best sounds. M was one of the worst sounds.
So I'm sitting there thinking about the M S B R. The Mmmuhhh.
You know, the Molten Salt Breeder Reactor and I thought-
Hmmm. Molten: bad. Salt: bad. I thought well how can we fix this?
Well instead of saying Molten we could say Liquid. Because it is liquid. And liquid turns
an M to an L, and according to this L is a lot better letter than an M.
There are a lot of different kind of salts. So if we were more specific on the salt we
could say Fluoride, which is a salt. It's a particular kind of salt.
Breeder is kind of a generic term, and what we're really doing is using Thorium as a fuel.
So all of a sudden there it was, L F T R.
One of the things I learned at NASA was, you really want your acronyms to be sayable. If
they have more than 3 letters, you want to be able to say them like a word.
And it's like it just appeared.
There it was: L F T R. Lifter. You could say it. It was a word.
Well as a marketing student I'd have a lot different approach, but-
Hey, you know what? We need guys just like you. Any other marketing students here?
This stuff- there's almost a branding effort that needs to happen.
How do you tell a story saying this is different?
I used to think, when I was y'alls age, I was an aerospace engineer
I didn't know anything about nuclear.
I thought nuclear power was dumb. I had no interest in it. I was like- Old junk.
Who want to be into that?
It wasn't until I learned about thorium and I reallized these efficiencies were possible
that I began getting really interested.
You know- Don't do New Coke, but what do you do? How do you help people understand that
there really are alternative possibilities out there?
We need guys like you thinking about this. You can come to one of the conferences.
Tell your friends. Tell people about it.
I mean the biggest problem we have is getting the message out.
A guy got on yesterday and he said- Why don't we buy a full page ad?
Because that costs a lot of money.
Why don't you go tell 5 of your friends about it that doesn't cost anything.
And it's probably a whole lot more effective.
It was only developed at Oak Ridge. So no other national laboratories really participated
in the development, which is not true about any other- about most other types of reactors
where the effort was spread and many people participated. This was really only in the
Oak Ridge, before the age of internet.
I think it was some time in 2006 when I discovered Kirk's site- Energy from thorium-
and learned about Molten Salt Reactors.
Kirk Sorensen, he is what brought molten salts to the fore. It's pretty much all on his shoulders
and he should be lauded for that. It's outstanding what he has done.
Kirk gave me some CDs, and then he put them on the internet.
And of course, to me that was a game changer. That was an inflection point.
Before, I sounded like a nut. And I couldn't point- Unless you were physically with me,
and I could bring down- I have a copy of Fluid Fuel Reactors showing the Molten Salt Reactor
in it and the Aircraft Reactor Experiment. Matter of fact, it has a picture and in the
background there's a stepladder shows you the scale. It was half the size of your refrigerator,
and it put out 2 million watts of heat!
And it operated in 1954, I wasn't even on the planet then.
You know, we can have world peace, and we can specialize in what areas that we're good
at, and trade with one another, and not fight over limited resources.
There's some chemical differences between thorium and uranium.
Bleached by water, U compounds were widely dispersed.
And having been scattered far and wide, U compounds today are found as complex, generally
dilute deposits containing mixtures of tetra, penta and hexa-valent uranium.
Unlike uranium, tetra-valent thorium- and it's constantly tetra-valent- resists weathering.
Thorium thus remained concentrated where it first wound up- within easy reach.
Barack Obama, and I've heard other people say this before, they say that there's no
silver bullet to the energy crisis.
Molten salts are truly the best silver bullet for serving mankind. It unlocks thorium economically,
and as we know, thorium is so plentiful in the Earth's crust. It'll come as a byproduct
for hundreds of thousands of years.
And, in fact, if we- on purpose- wanted to mine the granite just for its thorium, we're
not going to run out until the Sun becomes a red giant.
Alvin Weinberg called it burning the rocks. You could literally mine rock just for its
energy content.
Glenn Seaborg realized this in 1944 and he was absolutely dumbfounded with the possibilities
of what it meant for the future.
The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment has operated successfully
and has earned a reputation for eliability.
I think that some day the world will have commercial power reactors of both the uranium-plutonium
and the thorium-uranium fuel cycle types.
Here he was watching nations wage war with each other in World War 2 and realizing this
could be a complete game changer and change the entire energy outlook of the future.
You know EFT bloggers noticed all these guys from China from graduate school computer modelers
started showing up on EFT signing up from Shanghai, Beijing, and they started asking
all these obvious questions about this and that.
How they make the code work.
They were all modelling it, the Chinese government as best as we could tell.
Did you say Chinese is building nuclear reactors so where are they getting the blueprints or
are they developing them?
Well they probably got a whole bunch of stuff from the PDFs from my website.
Gone through your logs to see how many are coming from China?
It's been in the public domain for an awful long time.
I just made it a little easier to get, you know?
China announced to their national press of the existence
of a well funded Molten Salt Reactor project.
And it's being run by a guy named Jiang Mianheng. He got his PhD in electrical engineering from
Drexel University, he was educated in the United States.
The really interesting thing about Dr. Jiang Mianheng is that his father's name is Jiang
Zemin, and he used to be the premier of China. So, when I found that out I thought-
This is not some shmoe here, this is probably someone who's got some resources behind him.
And if he says he's going to go build a Thorium Molten Salt Reactor well then I tend to think
he's probably going to do it.
So, ever since finding that out I've been really encouraging people in the United States,
and England, and Canada, and Japan, and just about anywhere- I said, you know it would
be maybe a good idea if we got going on this because, uh, these guys are probably going
to pull it off, and you know good, I hope they do.
China definitely needs clean energy. Absolutely. And thorium will provide them clean energy
for hundreds of thousands of years.
But, frankly, I'd really like us to be able to do it too. And I'd like it to be something
maybe that we develop rather than that we go buy.
We buy a lot of things from China already. You know, I mean, it's not as if we're not
buying enough things from China. We are definitely keeping them busy.
So let's- you know- let's go develop thorium. And, uh, that's really what I'd like to do.
You know one of the fun things about being mayor is that you come to the science fair
to see some projects of some people that are close to you, and next thing you know you're
standing on stage in front of 1,000 people. It tends to happen.
Hi, I'm Joe Willis, and this is my science fair project- DECARBONIZE ALBERTA,
and this is just a dry-run for a science fair which is in a week.
What is this, you brainwashed your son into being a proponent of the nuclear industry?
Why? Why, man, why?!?
No it's the other way around actually, I was the first critic.
Joe Willis for Decarbonize Alberta.
Wait, what, that's me?
I got a thorium documentary, I watched it with my dad and naturally he fell asleep through
the entire thing.
And I'm telling him how thorium can save the world and he's not agreeing with me at all.
So I put it in the second time, and he falls asleep.
Yeah, I got the gold medal, I got the second consumer science award, and the American Society
of Heating, Refrigeration & Air Conditioning and although that one's name sounds like something
for air conditioning it's for air quality.
I try to portray science as exciting and fun with Katie and Caysie Science Videos. Caysie
is my minature poodle she's 3 years old.
I thought that if we adopted the LFTR then we would have a much better future.
If we educate people, then they may understand nuclear power, and they may become supportive.
You need this stuff explained in layman's terms so the average Joe on the street gets
in the way the average Joe on the street gets
the basic beats of an internal combustion engine.
They made an information package that they tried to be relatively neutral, that they
could give to people and then ask for their opinion on nuclear power.
People were meh- not really opposed, not really in favor.
When they did focus groups where they brought 12 people in, left the same information and
then left the room and let them talk, then went back, pulled the people apart, anonymously,
the approval ratings were amazing.
It's probably you at least get 1 or 2 people that knows enough that the other people trust,
that can explain it to them, so, if we can explain it better to the public
I think that will go a long way.
For me, I think it's education. At all levels. We talked about, on the board, educating candidates
and people in political office. But I think there's also the general public. Make them
aware of what's possible.
And get them interested in the sciences at the lower ages and say, yes, I want to be
working on something that can power the world in the future.
In addition to being an engineer, he really is an educator. He really is a teacher.
And he was beginning to spend more and more and more time- mostly educating.
This stuff, this is laws of physics stuff. I didn't invent it. All I do is promote it.
He got a phone call from a stranger and spent probably 45 minutes
on the phone really being patient with the specifics.
I'm tapping at my watch.
We need to start today to get young people interested in this area. The molten salt chemistry.
The metallurgy. The radiochemistry. Even the civil engineering.
We have to start that supply chain almost from scratch.
Are their labs going to be integrated into this curriculum? Or is there any way to leave
those out? I know that was really the biggest challenge,
getting the supplies to develop a lab for our curriculum.
But still any molten salt is going to require a furnace of some type.
Most of the nuclear engineering schools have lost their operating reactors
in the last 20 years. So they're teaching-
It'd be like teaching you how to operate on a car with a shop manual be no car.
So there's students learning how to run nuclear reactors
with nothing to learn on just sort of reading about it.
China has built a huge network of training reactors. They did it in, like, a couple years.
We did a journey to just about every nuclear engineering school and we said how would you
like to have a salt loop?
It would be just be externally heated. It wouldn't be fueled so it couldn't generate
its own heat, but in every other conceivable way, especially if you had neutronic stand-ins,
you know, it would act exactly like a Molten Salt Reactor would.
You can show the scientific phenomena, the chemical and physical phenomena,
without breaking the bank.
Would that be utilized by other departments as well?
Absolutely!
You'd need an XRD, basically to look at the crystal pre and post.
And those type of equipment span the gamut
from biological sciences to geo-sciences, engineering-
If they're going to have a training reactor it might as well be a Gen 4 training reactor
not a Gen 1. That's what they have now, down at U of I, that's being dismantled.
MIT and Harvard, even they can't afford to
build their own telescope any more just by themselves-
So Harvard and Berkeley and University of Chicago and MIT get together and they all
say we'll pitch in and we'll share it.
So you've got all of these people excited now-
I hope so is everybody excited?- The molten salt reactor-
Well plus you mention nuclear to anyone and their initial reaction is: nuclear energy
oh, there's no way we could learn this stuff
I don't want to do that class it's going to be too hard.
I was really encouraged by the Chicago meeting we were at, was the number of young kids that
were there. And I mean like- I suppose I don't mean kids- like, college age-
How knowledgeable. How enthusiastic.
And that kind of gives me hope.
And I can tell you that is not going on in the conventional nuclear industry.
We haven't produced very many nuclear engineers. I taught a class of senior level engineering
students at Tennessee Tech in the fall of 2010. And there were 13 in the class. And
they didn't even have nuclear at Tennessee so these were Electricals and Chemicals. Um-
5 of them went on to grad school in nuclear engineering because of my course.
I wanted to- like- write the NRC and say- You've told them the best situation you can
possibly have is to be part of a massive decommissioning contract. I mean- How many people want to
spend their careers doing that?
When a nation dreams big, and has fully funded projects, visible to everyone, where a frontier
is getting advanced, daily- Innovations attract smart, clever people.
The prospect of innovation attracts them.
Everyone feels like tomorrow is something they want to invent, and bring into the present.