Everybody who likes drain tanks, this is a drain tank.
The big goal of this machine here is to simulate how decay heat is removed
from this design when there's a shutdown.
That is correct.
In January 2015, Kirk Sorensen of Flibe Energy toured UC Berkeley's Compact Integral Effects
Test for Pebble and Molten Salt Fueled Reactors. Kirk also presented at UC Berkeley...
We're going to talk mostly about the chemical processing
and a little bit about the power conversion system as well.
...and the University of Utah.
The chemical processing of this reactor...
Those two presentations are combined in this video.
In our country we're retiring a lot of power generation right now.
This is actually happening particularly in the Eastern US where I live.
You can almost trace the outline of rivers like the Tennessee and the Ohio based on where
these retirements are taking place. Now, there are things we don't like about coal, and there
are things we do like about coal. We like the fact that is a reliable energy source.
We don't like the fact that it emits a lot of pollution, and it's not a resource that's
going to last forever.
There are also new regulations that are coming out that are accelerating this change, so
we've got a big job to do. We don't really have a great deal of time to do it.
We need a source that mimics all of the benefits of coal-fired power, and tries to eliminate
the drawbacks. A number of us are convinced that this energy source is going to be nuclear
in origin. The reason for that is, the energies of the nuclear are about two million times
greater than the energies of the electron cloud -- the energies of chemical energy,
the energies that powers a combustion digestion, all the processes we're used to.
Yet, out there in the universe, the universe is powered by the energies of the nucleus,
changing nuclear states, fusion and fission and nuclear decay. Humanity has only realized
this in about the last 70 or 80 years until we've taken our first steps into a nuclear-powered
world. I'm convinced that if we are going to be able to enjoy the industrial society
that we have, enjoy reliable energy and improve its cleanliness,
we're going to have to make this leap, too.
We're going to have to make the leap to nuclear energy.
I kind of feel bad when I hear that nuclear reactors are being retired.
Even though I know that they're not as efficient as they could be
they're still a whole lot better for the environment
than spewing dirty coal into the air.
What I'd really like to see
is the United States building new nuclear resources
to replace our reactors that are being retired,
the uranium style reactors, and also to replace coal and fossil fuels.
The Department of Energy has put the responsibility for these new nuclear reactors though,
squarely in the lap of industry.
This is a big deal, because for decades in this country after the war,
the Atomic Energy Commission made all the decisions about what was going to
happen. It wasn't like industry got to say, "Oh, we want to try this, or we want to try
They said, "We're going to do this, or you're going to do that, and you'll submit a proposal."
But it was not in industry's court to go and make decisions like this, and now it is. This
is a relatively new development, and I think it's going to lead to entrepreneurialism because
they've squarely put the onus on us to say how nuclear is going to go forward.
Make your business case. Make your argument.
If you want a nuclear power plant, say why it's better.
What kind of nuclear energy then becomes a logical question. We are blessed on this world
with nuclear resources, three forms of nuclear fuel, two forms of uranium, and one of thorium.
Thorium is about three times more common than uranium, but the uranium we're using today
is only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of natural uranium.
It's what's called naturally fissile uranium, uranium-235. This is what we're consuming
right now for nuclear energy.
If you want to make nuclear energy a sustainable enterprise, then you need to go and be using
the remainder of these fuels. Thorium has the advantage of abundance. There is an awful
lot it, but it doesn't have any naturally fissile thorium. There is no little sliver
here that we can point to and say, "This is thorium we can use to start a nuclear reaction."
This is one of the reasons why thorium has not been favored for nuclear energy in the
early days, but now we've reached a more mature stage, where I think it is time to go ahead
and look at implementing thorium as a nuclear fuel. Both thorium and uranium-238 can become
nuclear fuels by absorbing a neutron, and this happens inside a nuclear reactor.
This is what Glenn Seaborg figured out right here, at Berkeley 70 years ago. Wasn't this
was possible? Glenn Seaborg, what a guy. Read all you can about him.
If thorium absorbs a neutron, becomes uranium-233, that is now a nuclear fuel. It can fission.
It can split, and release energy.
Uranium-233, when it's fissioned by a thermal neutron, will produce about 2.3 neutrons net.
That's important, because we need a two right here to make this happen in the first place.
You've got to have more than two to keep this going.
The same thing can happen with uranium-238, which is the common form of uranium, the abundant
form of uranium. If it absorbs the neutron, it becomes plutonium-239, and then that can
fission, and also release energy. In both ways you can turn these abundant nuclear resources
into energy sources. What is the advantage of thorium then? Why think about thorium?
Uranium-238 is converted to plutonium through a neutron, but that's thermally fissioned.
On that, you only get about 1.9, so you're below two. You're below that threshold. That's
why we can't build plutonium breeder reactors in thermal spectrum reactors, just can't do
it. There are not enough neutrons.
Really, plutonium kicks out enough neutrons. It's just plutonium has a real propensity
to eat neutrons, too. If we want to use plutonium efficiently, we really have to go to a fast
spectrum, because what happens in fast spectrum is fast neutrons have a much higher probability
of fissioning the plutonium without being absorbed.
Now, because they have a higher probability of doing that though, they don't have a higher
probability of the fission happening in the first place. This is what plutonium looks
like to a slowed downed neutron. The blue is the probability that it will fission, and
the red is the probability that it will simply absorb the neutron.
Each one of these guys is what plutonium looks like to a fast neutron. Every one of those
is a better quality hit. You're not going to get an absorption, but you need a lot of
it. If you want to have the same amount of cross-section probability, and fast as thermal,
you've got to have a lot of fuel, a lot of fuel.
This is an advantage of thermal spectrum, because you need a lot less fuel, but because
you can't breed in thermal spectrum, the interest has always been for plutonium breeding to
go to the fast spectrum. I bring this up because thorium doesn't have this issue. Thorium can
go ahead and be used as a nuclear fuel in a reactor with slowed down neutrons.
It's called thermalized neutrons. There are a few steps thorium goes through on this way.
It first absorbs the neutron and becomes thorium-233, going from 232 to 233. See, the math is not
so hard, just plus one. Then that thorium-233 will decay over a period of about a half-an-hour
into another element.
Protactinium-233. Protactinium is a naturally occurring material. It's part of the decay
chain of uranium-235, but protactinium-231, it's got something like, a 172,000-year half-life.
This stuff, protactinium-233, has a much shorter half-life, about 30 days. Still, in terms
of reactors, that's pretty long. It drives a lot of what I'm going to talk about today
with the chemical processing.
But ultimately it will decay to uranium-233, as long as it doesn't absorb a neutron, and
it has a very quality fission. About 91 percent of the time, it's going to fission rather
than absorb, and that makes U-233 the best fuel in the thermal spectrum. It outperforms
everything else, and it's one of the reasons we really get a kick out of thorium.
There are three options. We can keep bringing U-235, and without getting into issues about
seawater uranium, it's just we're using a very small amount, and we're not using a whole
bunch of uranium. We can go with the fast freezers I saw yesterday at INL with EVR2,
or we can potentially take this tack of a thermal breeder with thorium.
The path that we want to go is the thorium, because of its abundance, and because of the
fact that we can use it with slowed down neutrons. That makes the reactor design simpler, and
quite possibly safer. If you can operate a thorium reactor without any uranium-238 present
in the fuel, then you can really reduce the amount of transuranic waste you're going to
generate.
The reason for that is the thorium absorbing the neutron. Each one of these vertical steps
is a neutron absorption. The thorium absorbing the neutron, 90 percent of the time, will
be fissioned by the next neutron. At 10 percent of the time, it will go to U-234, which will
absorb another neutron, go into U-235. Think of these as like off-ramps off the freeway.
If 90 percent of the cars exit the freeway on the first off-ramp, and 85 percent of the
cars that are leftover exit the freeway on the next off-ramp, how many are there to make
your first transuranic? It's only one-and-a-half percent. With the thorium cycle, you could
potentially get down to one-and-a-half percent of the long-lived wastes production of the
uranium cycle, and that's a big advantage.
On the other hand, when you've got a fuel, like a uranium reactor, it's got a lot of
U-238 in it, then it's only one neutron away from its first transuranic. The reason I bring
up transuranics is they govern, in large part, our waste disposition strategy. In fact, actinides
in general, govern our waste disposition strategy, because they have long half-lives.
They have complicated K chains. Our waste disposition strategy is in great part about
actinides. Got one of the members of the Blue Ribbon Commission here, so stop me at any
time if I screw up here. Here's what we're doing now. This is the red line on a log-log
chart. Any line on a log-log chart, tread lightly.
This is how long it takes our spent fuel to reach the same rate activities as natural
uranium. It's about 300,000 years. If you can keep all the actinides out of the waste
stream, then you can really shorten that to about 300 years. One of the goals in the chemical
processing system we're going to talk about today is how to keep the actinides out of
the waste stream.
I hate to even call this stuff that is made by the thorium cycle, waste. Neptunian-237
is actually used to produce the material that NASA uses for batteries in their deep space
probes. Have you ever heard of the Curiosity Rover on Mars? Anybody heard of that or followed
it? That's being powered by plutonium-238, which comes from this neptunium.
Anybody following the New Horizons' mission to Pluto, keeping track of that? That's also
powered by this stuff, so even our waste, so to speak isn't even really waste. It's
something that we could go and make very useful products out of. Like I said, I was at NASA,
so I'm really into this kind of stuff.
By the way, 2015 is going to be a really exciting year for NASA, because we're going to see
Pluto for the first time, and we're going to see the largest asteroid in the solar system,
Ceres, for the first time. Cool stuff coming up this year. If you use thorium with this
kind of efficiency, something really amazing becomes possible.
This was realized almost immediately by Glenn Seaborg. He thought every cubic meter of the
Earth has got a certain amount of uranium and thorium in it. It's about two cubic centimeters
of thorium and half a cubic centimeter of uranium. If you can use thorium to the kind
of efficiencies that we're talking about today, the energy equivalent of these two cubic centimeters,
so imagine two little sugar cubes.
Think of two little sugar cubes of thorium metal. Milan, can you hold that in your hand,
two cc's of thorium? Is that going to hurt you?
No, that's not going to hurt you, so you could even imagine doing this. This has the energy
equivalent of more than thirty cubic meters of the finest crude oil or Anthracite coal.
This is like taking any worthless piece of dirt anywhere in the world, and turning it
into a multiple of the finest chemical energy resources we have. That's absolutely amazing.
That's something that completely changes our paradigm about relative national wealth, and
resources, and so forth.
That means worthless pieces of dirt become potential energy mines. Good news is, we don't
have to mine average continental crust for thorium. There are lots of places where nature
has already pre-concentrated thorium in much greater concentrations than this. The nuclear
concept that we would like to put forward involves what's commonly called a small modular
reactor.
There are a number of different kinds of small modular reactors. A lot of them are proposed
to use the same kind of water cooled reactors and uranium that we use today.
Our reactor design would be using a molten salt. A molten salt is just that. It's some
kind of salt mixture that has been taken to a higher temperature, and then melted. One
of the things I think is remarkable about these salts is, they form very stable compounds,
a very chemically stable compound. This allows them to serve as an ideal medium inside a
nuclear reactor.
The process by which we would try to use thorium in the reactor involves introducing thorium
into an outer region of the reactor called the blanket. In the blanket, the thorium would
absorb the neutron. It would take that first step. Remember, 232 to 233.
It's going to absorb a neutron, and it's going to begin the process of becoming uranium-233.
As it takes those steps of decay, turning into other elements, protactinium and then
uranium, we can employ a chemical separation to remove those new materials from the blanket,
and then introduce them into the salt that is going to go in the reactor core.
That's the place where the fission reaction is going to take place. That's the place where
it's going to generate additional energy.
This technology has been demonstrated, to a degree, before. This is a reactor experiment
that was built at Oakridge National Labs in the 1960s. It was called the "Molten Salt
Reactor Experiment." It was an attempt to demonstrate some of the important technologies
that would be used in a thorium reactor.
You, nuclear engineers, are probably going to think those are fuel rods. They're not.
They're graphite. Fluid was a liquid that flowed through channels in this graphite.
The graphite served as the function that water serves in an existing solid-fueled reactor,
which is to moderate the neutrons that are being born and fissioned.
Except this time, instead of having salts you want a liquid moderator, you've got liquid
fuel and a solid moderator.
This reactor didn't use thorium, but it did use uranium-233 that came from thorium. It
was considered a first step, it was considered that inside part of the thorium reactor concept.
It used a heat exchanger to move the energy from the salt that ran through the reactor
to another salt that rejected that energy to the environment.
This is the radiator that it used, glowing cherry red. It didn't generate electricity
with that energy, but it did demonstrate that the reactor was capable of operating in a
stable manner, and being very responsive to the people that were controlling it.
Here's a picture of what the reactor cell looks like. There's a fellow, if you can get
a sense of how big it was.
This was not a terribly optimized design. This was something they had put together very
quickly, because they had some funding available. It was meant to demonstrate materials and
technologies.
Ran for about five years and it was very successful. Talked to some of the people that operated
the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. I said, "What was it like to run this experiment?"
They said, "It was boring. It was boring." I thought, that's exactly what you want to
hear a nuclear engineer say. You don't want it to be exciting.
Another aspect that was emphasized to me by one of the people that had worked on this
reactor, his name was Paul Haubenreich. He said, "You know, lots of people told us that
we could build Molten Salt Reactors, but they said they will never be practical. You will
not be able to maintain them because of the mobile radioactivity," because of the fact
that it's moving around in a loop.
He said, "I am more proud of the fact that we maintained that reactor for 20,000 hours
successfully, we had a high-up time, than any other aspect of the Molten Salt Reactor
I really think that's worth mentioning. This was a first-of-a-kind experiment, and yet
they were able to execute so much of their research plan, and have such a high up-time,
because of the admirable characteristics of this. Paul is actually that guy in the picture,
Here we have the potentiality of a whole new breakthrough in the development of power for
peace. That means jobs, jobs for this area. But jobs and power for hundreds, for millions
of people all over the world.
At that time of that announcement, I was able to announce we were going to have one experimental
Unfortunately, in 1969, Richard Nixon decided to cut the funding for advanced research in
the Atomic Energy Commission. The Atomic Energy Commission, which was overseeing all of this
work, had to make a choice. They had to decide which of these advanced reactors they would
continue with. Would it be the thorium one, or would it be reactors that were based on
plutonium?
They made the decision, unfortunately, to pursue the plutonium reactor, rather than
the thorium reactor. This is one of those times in history, we made a big mistake. We
had an opportunity to go forward with this thorium technology, and we chose not to do
it.
Their goal was to build a large plutonium reactor on the shores of the Clinch River
in Tennessee. This ended up getting cancelled in the late '70s, when Carter took office.
It's one of those things were, I wish that maybe when they had decided not to do the
plutonium route, they had gone back and said, "Well, maybe we should have kept going with
thorium because thorium showed a lot of promise."
Carter was really concerned about nuclear proliferation. He was concerned other countries
were going to try to take nuclear technology, and going to use it to make nuclear weapons.
The irony is, thorium technology had been rejected back during the Manhattan project,
precisely because it was not applicable to the nuclear weapons program.
It's one of the reasons why the technologies for the uranium/plutonium were moving forward
in the '40s and the '50s and the '60s at a much faster rate than the thorium technology
was. Because they were applicable to the weapons program, and the thorium technology was not.
Not a great deal was happening in the western world in terms of thorium development for
many decades, although the Indians have been pursuing thorium consistently for many decades
now.
Most of that time, they had been looking at thorium oxide fuels, solid fuels, and running
into the same challenges with solid fuel thorium that everybody does. But I was told at this
recent conference in fall of 2013, that they now have a group that's starting to look at
the molten salt idea.
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."
I found out about this technology in about 2000, when I first started NASA. I got very
excited. I was thinking about space reactors and so forth, but it didn't take long until
I was thinking more about, how do we power our world right here on Earth. If we can do
it in space, why don't we do it here on the Earth?
I was listening to a fellow out in the hall. Somebody asked him, "Why are you here?" He
said, "Because I'm interested in clean air and clean energy and things like that." I
felt exactly the same way. That's why I was increasingly interested in something that
wasn't in space, but was right here on the ground.
Let me get into a little more of the specifics now of what I'm working on now in cooperation
with the university here. This has to do with the chemical processing of this reactor, and
how you go and remove particular materials, and introduce them in other places in the
reactor.
This is where I began from, which is a schematic I got from a 1967 document from Oakridge.
This was the only thing of its kind.
The basic idea is, you've got to move fuel that you've now made in the periphery of a
reactor, you've got to remove it chemically, and you've got to introduce it into a different
fluid stream in the reactor. You have to take advantage at each step of chemical differences
that are there, and things that you know about those materials.
I've had to become very, very familiar with slight differences between thorium, protactinium
and uranium, in order to understand these particular separation and production sequences.
Here's the big picture of the Liquid Fluoride thorium Reactor that Flibe was working on.
Essentially, here's the reactor. It's got a lot of graphite in the core. The green fluid
is the fuel salt. This is a combination of lithium, beryllium and uranium fluorides.
This is the material that's undergoing nuclear fission. The uranium in this is undergoing
nuclear fission and generating energy. As that fuel salt is pumped out of the core,
it heats another salt, a coolant salt, which is just a lithium-beryllium-fluoride salt.
That salt is then used to heat carbon dioxide gas which passes through a gas turbine and
generates electricity at high efficiency. This design will generate electricity at about
45 percent efficiency.
You mechanical engineers out there will go, "45 percent? That's awesome. That is incredible."
For all of you out there that aren't mechanical engineers, they go, "45 percent? Are you kidding?
That's like an F minus."
You have to believe me. Mechanical engineers get super excited about converting thermal
energy to electrical energy. Anything better than about 30 percent, that's considered super-duper
great. 45 percent, incredible.
On the other side of the reactor, we have the chemical processing system. In the first
step, this blanket salt which has thorium in it, is passed through what's called a reduction
column. In that reduction column, a metallic stream of bismuth contacts the blanket salt
in a counter current fashion. They're going one against the other.
Protactinium and uranium that are in that blanket salt are going to dissolve into the
bismuth. That allows them then to be removed from the blanket salt. The blanket salt returns
back to the reactor to continue generating new fuel.
Now that the protactinium and uranium have been removed, they pass through another reduction
column into an electrolytic cell. In this electrolytic cell, they are oxidized from
being metals into being fluorides at the same time part of the decay salt is being electrolytically
split apart into a metal stream. That metal stream is then entering into the bismuth in
order to return back to serve as a reductive.
The upshot of the whole thing is you're going to move these new nuclear fuels out of the
blanket into a decay salt. The reason for this is that one month period. It takes a
month for protactinium-233 to decay to uranium-233. You want this to happen outside of the reactor.
The reason you want that to do it is because it has a propensity to absorb a neutron inside
the reactor if you leave it there. You do not want your protactinium to absorb a neutron,
become protactinium-234, which then decays to U-234 which is not a fuel. I'll just stay
right there.
Neutrons, bad. We don't want neutrons to happen after we've already turned into protactinium,
so protactinium goes into the decay salt, decayed uranium comes out.
The decay salt is meant to continue...
...to hold that salt.
Yeah, but it's a different salt. It's fairly close in composition to the blanket salt,
but it's not exactly the blanket salt.
Here's the blanket salt coming in. You can see it's got lots of lithium, lots of thorium,
15 ppm protactinium. Here's the decay salt, 68 percent lithium, 29 percent thorium, but
8,900 ppm protactinium. It's got a lot of protactinium.
The decay salt is where protactinium is supposed to go and never come out. That's where it
lives. What we want to take out is uranium.
That decay salt then passes to a decay tank. This is also where we add thorium tetrafluoride
as a makeup material over time. It's a very small addition, but this is where thorium
enters the chemical processing system.
We leave the protactinium outside of the reactor, allowing it to decay to uranium. Once it's
decayed to uranium, we're now in a position to implement another cool chemical trick,
because uranium will absorb additional fluoride ions in what's called the fluorination column.
It will go from being a liquid, uranium tetrafluoride, into being a gas, uranium hexafluoride. That's
a separation step that we can employ.
The good news is that the other things in the material don't do that. Protactinium doesn't
change. thorium doesn't change. lithium-beryllium doesn't change, so it's a way to extract the
uranium that we now need to fuel the fuel salt.
Here's the fuel salt coming out. I'm going to hold it in the drain tank for a while and
cool down, because it's got lots of fission products in it. Then, it's going to be introduced
into the fluorinator. This is the fuel fluorinator. This is going to remove any uranium present
as UF6.
It's very, very important to get high fluorination effect in the sum on this one. This one, it
doesn't matter so much. If we miss uranium on this guy, we're going to get it out up
there in the redux and it's going to stay in the salt. It's not a big deal, was it?
This guy, we really need to get as much of that uranium out as we possibly can, because
after the uranium comes out as UF6, the result is going to go to another reductive extraction
column, this time using lithium as the reductant alone, no thorium or anything.
This reductive extraction column is going to pull all the fission products out. By dialing
that lithium up enough, lithium will essentially replace everything in the salt, everything
like noble gases which have already come out anyway.
It will also pull out uranium. We want to make sure we got the uranium here, not here.
The salt having been stripped to fission products in uranium then proceeds to a reduction column
where it is contacted with UF6 and with hydrogen gas. That reduces the UF6 from UF6 to UF4
and puts it back into the salt.
Now we've got a clean salt that has been refueled with uranium and is ready to proceed back
into the reactor. The upshot of introducing hydrogen and UF6 together is we're going to
make HF. HF is going to come out here and be introduced into an HF electrolytic cell
and be split back into the reactants, hydrogen and fluorine for the fluorinators right there.
Where do all the fission products go? They come out here as a stream, stream 54, and
if we've done this right, there's no actinides in there, because the only actinide we had
in the salt was uranium and neptunium and those came out as fluorinated gases and were
introduced into the reduction column.
If we can do this right, we're going to get an exhaust stream that doesn't actinides and
is going to have those favorable decay properties that we want to have over time.
Yesterday, I was 50 feet away from the EBR-II, which is a fast spectrum reactor built at
INL and I saw the pyroprocessing facility process the fuels. It's very interesting,
but I now think this is incredibly simple compared to what I just saw.
In the big picture, this system is essentially like the kidney for the reactor. If you think
about the flow of the...I wish I had come out with that. It was actually Alvin Weinberg
that came out with that concept.
Your body, all the time, your bloodstream is always being processed. It's changing the
pH of your blood. It's adding glucose. It's taking out waste products. It's an amazing
chemical factory, keeping you going.
This is an analogy to what we're trying to do in this reactor. We're trying to put in
the good stuff. We're trying to take out the bad stuff, so we can keep the thing rolling.
If we can do this, there's a very important implication for this. That is that we can
run the reactor just about continuously.
In today's reactors, we have to shut them down about every 18 months, depressurize them,
take the lid off, shuffle about two-thirds of the fuel around, take one-third of it out,
put one-third new fuel in. It takes about a month to do that.
That's the down time, when those utilities are not making any money, when the reactor's
being refueled. To go from a reactor that has to be shut down about every 18 months
for refueling to a reactor that can continuously run, because we have this chemical kidney
attached to it, represents an economic advantage for a company or utility or an organization
that might use a reactor of this type.
Nobody wants down time. It doesn't matter what. We don't want our car in the shop. We
don't want our factory not running. This technology has the potential to minimize that down time.
All this is in containment of course.
Yeah, this is all in containment. This is not only in containment. The structure's very
similar to what I saw yesterday, hot cells like they had at INL, not just hot radiologically.
They would probably be quite hot temperature-wise as well, on the order of 500, 600 degrees.
These are high temperature processes, high rad fields, high temperature.
Yesterday, at Idaho, they said...It was at the HFEF if any of you have ever been there
before. They said, "This facility was manufactured in 1974." I said, "I was also manufactured
in 1974."
They said, "Nobody's been in there since 1974." I'm a mechanical engineer. I'm not a chemical
engineer. I like to talk about power conversion systems. I didn't design the supercritical
carbon dioxide gas turbine system, but boy, do I admire those who did work on it, because
it really is remarkable.
Pierre and I got really excited about this. The very first time, I remember we were emailing
each other, we were talking about this. It was about the idea of coupling gas turbines
to high-temperature reactors. Pierre had written a paper about molten salt, liquid metal, different
reactors that you could couple through what's called an indirect gas turbine cycle.
We use gas turbines all the time today to generate electricity, but we're burning gas
in them and they're open cycle. They have very low capital costs and that's a great
feature. We really do love that about gas turbines.
This is what a gas turbine site looks like. Nuclear guys like us would love to get to
the point where we could build a reactor that's got this simple of a footprint, that's this
fast to put in. I don't think we're quite going to get there, but it would sure be a
goal to try to get a whole lot closer to something like this, which is a GE gas turbine installation.
Could the advantages of gas turbines be coupled with the reliability of nuclear energy? Because
gas is expensive and the price fluctuates. Utilities hate the fact that the gas goes
up and down, because they don't know what they're buying when they put a gas turbine
in.
Yesterday, I was in Salt Lake City, driving from the airport. Sorry, day before yesterday,
I was in Salt Lake City. There is a gas turbine plant right where two major intersections
of two major freeways are.
I thought, "Wow, it obviously doesn't scare anybody at all to put a big power plant right
here in this spot." We probably wouldn't get to do that with a nuclear power plant, but
that gives you an idea of the versatility and the simplicity.
Utilities love the low capital costs. They don't like the price volatility. If we can
try to combine the stability of nuclear operation with the low capital cost of existing gas
turbine plants, we're going to get a lot closer to something that people are going to be interested
in.
The thing that's so cool about the supercritical carbon dioxide system is carbon dioxide is
used at very high densities in this compared to other gas turbine systems. If you mess
around with gas turbine systems, you're used to pretty low-density fluid.
If you mess around with steam turbines, you're used to a very low-density fluid in your low-pressure
steam turbines. If anybody's ever been to a nuclear plant...Anybody ever been to PWR,
BWR? You see the low pressure steam turbine? Is it small? No, big. It's a big old monster,
because the steam that's in there is only a few percent of atmospheric pressure. It's
pretty close to a vacuum in there.
Feast your eyes on this, which is the densities of this carbon dioxide in this system. The
lowest we ever get is about 58 kg per cubic meter. Atmospheric air is about one. Water's
a thousand. Right before it goes into the main compressor, look at that, you're up at
716ths. That's a fair fraction of water. You're working with a gas that has densities like
What do you think that's going to mean for the size of your turbomachinery? Real small.
You could conceivably lay out the turbomachinery for this thing on this table, the turbines
and the compressors.
The heat exchangers are a lot bigger, but we are talking some really, really small turbomachinery.
It's all driven by the fact that carbon dioxide at these temperatures and pressures is a really
dense gas. That's amazing.
The other thing that's really cool about it being a really dense gas is that it's an awful
lot easier to compress. Its specific heat changes as it gets close to the critical point.
When you go to compress the carbon dioxide in the main compressor here...I'm sorry, here
it go.
Here's the main compressor here. Here's the recompressor.
In the main compressor, it takes a lot less work to recompress the carbon dioxide, because
of where it is and its T-s diagram. That's amazing.
The recompressor is much more in an ideal gas region of the T-s diagram, but the main
compressor is in this remarkable critical region. The upshot of that is we're not used
to, in gas turbines, to compression being easy.
Compression's always the price you pay for a gas turbine. Steam turbines, they spend
very little of their work on compressing water. Because they're compressing a liquid, it doesn't
take much work. But gas turbines have to spend a lot of their work on compressing gas.
What's the maximum temperature you have on the CO2? For the turbine?
This was a 550 C. It can go better than that. I was being intentionally low. This is a fairly
conservative turbine in low temperature. This is not trying to go push anything.
If you were working with helium, you'd have to go to higher turbine inlet temperatures
to get this kind of performance.
The other thing about it, this is a 45 percent efficient machine, which is amazing. That's
incredible.
I've talked to people that are working on the ultra supercritical steam turbine work
with the Department of Energy. This is about using coal-fired power plants, trying to push
a few more percent of efficiency out of steam turbines. They are working in all kinds of
new alloys, this, that and the other, just trying for a few more percent.
Here's a system that's running at pretty humble temperatures, and getting 45 percent efficiency.
Again, it goes back to those remarkable properties of carbon dioxide, and the cleverness of what's
called the re-compression cycle, which is what's implemented.
Are any of these commercial?
No, none of these are commercial. The Department of Energy has made CO2 gas turbines a high
priority. They're putting about $50 million next year, into CO2 gas turbines.
Nuclear is just one of the different technologies it's looking at. It's concentrating solar,
there's a lot of neat things for them. Fossil is looking at a lot. There's a lot of different
variants of it, too. Like when you go to fossil, they use exhaust gasses as a carbon dioxide,
and then use these high pressures to help them go and sequester carbon dioxide.
There's a lot of clever, interesting things you can do with this cycle. I love it because
it really seems to be a very natural fit with the temperatures and the performances on this
reactor. It also helps address another important issue, which is, we're going to be generating
tritium in this reactor from residual lithium 6.
The tritium has to be captured, and I'm assuming in this design, all the tritium makes it to
the carbon dioxide. That's one of the reasons I chose carbon dioxide, is because it doesn't
have any hydrogen in it. If there's any hydrogen in your CO2, it's tritium, and you need to
get it out. There's ways to do that, particularly by taking advantage of some of the lower temperatures.
This is not exactly the kind of reactor core that we're going to use, but it's fairly representative.
It's mostly got graphite structures inside, and then the fluoride salt flows up through
channels in the graphite. Inside the reactor, that combination of the graphite and the salt
together are what enables the fission reaction to take place.
It has to do because graphite serves the important job of slowing down the neutrons. Salt and
graphite together, you can have a nuclear reaction. If you take them apart from one
another, the reaction is going to stop. It's just laws of physics, there's nothing you
can do to change it. That leads to a super important safety feature, one that I find
very compelling.
We saw what happened when the reactors in Fukushima were deprived of emergency power.
After a while, there were some unpleasant results that took place there, because they
were not getting their coolant pumped around, they were not able to keep their fuel rods
cool, and some radiation was released.
On the other hand in this design, the fuel is already melted. It's melted at a much lower
temperature than conventional nuclear fuel melts at. That stuff is ceramic, this is salt.
This allows us to use a feature called a freeze plug in order to keep this whole operation
running. This is the nuclear reactor vessel.
The idea is, if you were to lose all power, then the little blower that's been blowing,
keeping that salt frozen in that line stops blowing, and the energy from the reaction
melts the salt and the salt drains out into what's called the drain tank. The drain tank
doesn't have the graphite in it.
There's graphite up here, there's no graphite down here. Without graphite, the nuclear reaction
can't happen, it can't take place. You've taken away the two ingredients.
I was a boy scout. We always learned you've got to have oxygen and fuel and a flame, and
that's how you make it go. In nuclear reactors, you have to have a moderator and fuel. Take
them apart and it's not going to work anymore.
This very simple feature moves the reactor's fuel into a configuration where continued
fission is impossible. It's a fail-safe shutdown system. It doesn't require the operator to
be involved, it doesn't require anybody to throw a switch.
Even if the reactor is severely damaged, there's a catch pan here. If you were to breach that
vessel, the salt would flow down the catch pan and still back into the tank. It is a
very, very safe configuration, something that can be used to eliminate a whole class of
accidents that we are concerned about today, and something that personally would make me
a lot more comfortable with the widespread use of this technology.
This is something that was demonstrated at Oak Ridge, back during their operation in
the 1960s. They were able to turn off the reactor, melt the salt and drain it away safely.
This is another picture of what this drain tank might look like, and how it is designed
to reject the generation of energy taking place within the salt, just due to its decay.
We're still going to face a lot of challenges in developing this technology, because quite
frankly it's been set down for about 40 years now, and we really need to pick it up again.
One of the biggest challenges is, we need to get a qualification of the materials we're
going to use, particularly a high nickel alloy called Hastelloy N.
This is what they built these reactors out of. It was a special alloy that was designed
expressly for use with fluoride salts. It works very well. Unfortunately, we don't make
very much of it anymore, and we need to get the code of qualification. The good news is,
we're talking to the Department of Metallurgical Engineering, so this is a no-never-mind for
you guys, right?
OK. Good, good. I'm feeling a lot better.
Several other things we need to be able to do, we need to be able to remove noble gases
from the system. These are some of the fission products. We need to improve our pump designs,
heat exchangers, and particularly we need to begin investigating these chemical processing
systems.
Yesterday I was given a tour of a radia chemistry lab here at the U, where some of these processes
are beginning to be investigated, and it was really exciting. I'm hopeful that with further
funding and additional people working on it, we're going to be able to investigate even
more of these processes, and hopefully really move this technology forward. I think that
you can be a great part of that.
I'm going to conclude with a quote from Alvin Weinberg. He was the gentleman at Oak Ridge
lab, who led the lab as they were developing the Molten Salt Reactor and the thorium fuel
cycle. He said, "During my life, I have witnessed extraordinary feats of human ingenuity. I
believe this struggling ingenuity will be equal to the task of creating the second nuclear
era."
I spoke to Dr. Weinberg in 2006, right before he passed away, and he said, "My only regret
will be, I will not be there to witness the success."
If we are able to bring about a thorium powered world, a clean and sustainable world based
on this remarkable energy source, we're going to owe a great debt of gratitude to this man
and the hard work that he did.
I really hope through working together, we can bring this future a whole lot sooner than
we might have thought. Thank you very much for having me here. I'm happy to take any
questions.
Dr. Dewan testified before one of the house subcommittees about a month ago, about the
fact that there is no regulatory mechanism to license new reactor designs.
She and I have both participated in DOE activity for the NRC, where they are looking at this
problem. They're going and they're saying, "Hey, We realize there's going to be a need
for advanced reactors." It's a licensing initiative that's been taking place.
They took commentary. My company submitted recommendations and suggestions. A number
of people did. We had supporters from the thorium community that attended these public
meetings in DC.
Our licensing guidelines today were designed around the kind of reactors we have today,
light water reactors. We need to pull back and look at nuclear in a more general sense,
saying, "OK. That's a kind of nuclear reactor, but there's a bunch of other kinds, and we
need to be able to have the guidelines for it."
For instance, if you were designing a molten salt reactor, you'd want to have a guideline
that said, you're going to have a freeze plug, you're going to have a drain tank. You're
going to have those things in your reactor so that if you lose power, it's going to do
certain things. That would be part of a new regulatory framework.
Of course, that rule would not be applicable to solid fuel reactors, but it would definitely
be applicable to a molten salt reactor. We're trying to do the best we can to let the Department
of Energy know that there is interest not just in advanced reactors in general, but
specifically in molten salt reactors.
Thank you for your talk. My question is related to that last concern about draining the core.
As I see it, you'd have to separate the liquid fuel into multiple, separated parts so that
when you drain the tank, you don't go critical when you drain all the fluid into one place.
You can't achieve criticality because there's no moderator. That was the point I was trying
to make. Once you separate from the graphite, the criticality is impossible. There's simply
not enough fissile content in order to achieve criticality.
What about needing to cool that with water or something, to cool decay heated things
that are...
Yeah, you need to have kind of fingers in there that are taking thermal energy out.
Oak Ridge looked at using NaK, using sodium, they looked at using
lithium beryllium salt. Looked at using water. There are a lot of pros and cons to either one.
There was not a clear, obvious, ''Oh, this is the right one." Right now, surprise, I'm
favoring using salt, but there's other possibilities.
The big important thing about the drain tank is, the drain tank doesn't have any moderator
in it. Without moderator, criticality is impossible. That's not the case with fast-spectrum molten
salt concepts. They don't rely on a moderator, so in their case, when they drain, they need
to go like that, they need to go to separate drain tanks so that criticality becomes impossible.
I can add to that. The drain tank is very hot, up to 700 degrees C, or 900 degrees C,
and so radiant heat removal is very feasible. In the thorium design, there's just a large
surface area tank, with a panel wall filled with water nearby. You don't need any pumping.
One of the issues with the conventional nuclear power is that it has a very slow response
time, so with the emergence of renewable energy such as wind, solar, you need to build supporting
power plants for when those wind turbines aren't producing. For example, when you put
a wind farm in, you need to build a gas-fired power plant to supply the energy when the
wind is not available.
If what I mention doesn't do any good, backup power because you can't respond to the changes
in the grid fast enough. Would this thorium reactor have a faster response time than conventional
nuclear, and would that then be a candidate to fill in that gap, when you have renewable
energy?
Yes, it is more responsive. It is substantially more responsive, and the reason why is, the
thing that causes conventional nuclear to lag in its response, it's built up a particular
fission product called xenon. It caused solid fuel reactors to be limited in their response
times to changes to transience. In a liquid field, the xenon comes out of the fuel just
like fizz comes out of soda pop, so it does not limit the response time.
That said, though, I will confess to having a little bit of a dim view on the use of wind
power. I believe if you've got a reliable source of energy, use the reliable source
of energy. Don't turn it off when something unreliable decides to show up.
What kind of temperatures would the reactor typically be operating at, and how does that
The salts themselves are not limited very much in their temperature range. They'll go
impact the material performance?
up to about 1,400 C before they start running into trouble. The Hastelloy N material we
want to use in the reactor, though, chromium ion migration in Hastelloy metals is what
takes place. That accelerates the corrosion of metal, so by staying below 700 C, we really
limit that corrosion rate.
The beautiful thing about the carbon dioxide gas turbine is that it really has a sweet
spot right there at about 500 to 650 C. That's really where it wants to operate, and has
the best efficiencies. That gives it a big advantage over other potential gas turbines,
which want to go higher and higher in temperature.
How much interest is there in this design by the major nuclear power companies?
I've spoken to several utilities, and there is growing interest in some of these utilities.
There's also been interest at the Electric Power Research Institute, which is the R&D
arm for US utilities.
I've had several meetings with them. They continue to express interest and want to learn
more about the technology. It's growing. We don't have any orders right now, or anything
like that. But I think we're talking to the right people, particularly EPRI, about this
technology.
Are there competing designs, like some of the more breeder reactors that are serious
competitors to this?
There's other concepts for molten salt reactors that are being put forward. They're not breeders,
and they don't use thorium, but they're being advanced for other reasons. There's a group
out of Canada that wants to do a uranium fuel molten salt reactor, there's another group
that wants to consume nuclear waste out of a molten salt reactor. Both are admirable
goals.
What I think is amazing about molten salt technology is the fact that the thorium fuel
cycle integrates so cleanly with the technology. The thorium is going to be the key to the
long-term sustainability of nuclear energy. You can use thorium in existing reactors,
but the economics aren't there to support it.
It's very difficult to use it as a solid oxide fuel in existing reactors and go through the
processing. The advantage to the molten salt is that processing is much simpler, and it
reduces the fuel cycle cost and makes a breeder a conceivable economic proposition for a potential
utility.
Outside the US, there is a large effort going on in China on all reactor types, but the
one I focus on is they are working on thorium molten salt reactors. They are putting hundreds
of millions of dollars a year into this technology, and that is vastly in excess of anything that's
going on in the West.
As you saw, this technology was invented in the West, it can benefit everyone. I welcome
the fact the Chinese are working on it. We should be working on it as well.
What do you anticipate the economical size of your first reactor is going to be in megawatts,
and what kind of physical size would it require to put on-site?
The first reactor we would build would be a research and demonstration reactor, not
terribly dissimilar to the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment you saw. It would not be intended
to generate electrical energy. It would be intended to advance the technologies. Probably
on the order of just a few megawatts, wouldn't make any electricity, it would just be about
doing demonstrations of the different physical things you'd built it out of, the Hastelloy,
the graphite, et cetera.
Wouldn't be optimized to be very compact, either, because when you're doing development
you want to spread things out, so that you can check things.
I guess I was asking about what you envisioned?
For a first commercial reactor? We're shooting for that 250 megawatt size reactor. This is
probably a pretty good sense of about how big that would be, a physical footprint of
probably two football fields or so, with coolant systems and so forth.
You talked modular, so I'm assuming that means instead of scaling up the reactor to more
megawatts, you would add more modules.
Exactly. That's the idea, saying rather than building one really big one, if you want so
much power, we're going to add that number divided by the modular power, that's how many
we'll put in there.
That's becoming more interesting to people, because they don't want to have to go out
in the field and build reactors. They want to be able to build them in a factory, ship
them to a site, and essentially almost plug them in.
What's the minimum size?
Here's why the minimum size doesn't matter, because the NRC assesses a $5 million a year
licensing fee. It doesn't matter how small you can build it. If you don't build it bigger
than 50 megawatts, you're not going to make your money back.
Your picture implies a large body of water for cooling.
This picture was meant to imply that we're going to desalinate sea water with the waste
energy of the plant. If we were parked right next to the ocean, yes, we'd very much want
to desalinate seawater and provide fresh water in addition to electricity.
If you're not next to a big body of water, is there a lot of waste heat?
With the highly efficient carbon dioxide system, we're going to reject less waste heat than
any other power plant that was going to operate at lower powers. Let's say you had a coal
plant at 40 percent, or a conventional nuclear plant at 35 percent. If you're running at
45 percent, you're going to reject less waste heat than that.
The other thing too, with this carbon dioxide gas turbine, there's the potential to reject
waste heat directly to the air, as well, not even having to use bodies of water.
There's an economic penalty for doing that. If you're next to a body of water, you'll
probably want to use it. There is the option, though, to potentially put them in places
where water isn't present. That's not an option for today's reactors. They have to be located
near large bodies of water.
Something I thought about a lot with Utah. We have a lot of water out in the eastern
US, a lot of places to cool reactors. Here in Utah, we don't have so much. This type
of technology would make a lot more sense for Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Nevada, places that
don't have nuclear power now, and a lot of that has to do with the lack of cooling water.
If it lets a lot of excessive heat into bodies of water, that can have quite an ecological
That can be mitigated, and that's common to every form of energy. Even concentrating solar
impact. has to cool.
Way less than that, though.
For the power radiant it has, per unit megawatt it's going to be less waste heat to the environment.
How open are you to foreign investment, to get the wheels spinning?
Super open. If you know of any...
For example, the Emirates, they're looking at...
I've been there, talked to them, and they say...I'm not saying I spoke to the Sheikh
or anything like that, but essentially what I heard from the people there was, "Kirk,
sounds great. As soon as you've built one in the US, let us know. We'll take a good,
hard look at it."
What I've found as I've gone to Europe, Singapore, Dubai, Australia, everybody still wants the
US to go first.
To prove it?
They love the idea that, "You guys go see if it works, and if it works we'll be happy
to take a good, hard look at it."
They don't want to research, they just want...
The exception to that is China. China is doing it. They're not waiting for anybody, they're
going to make it happen.
In addition to electrical generation, there's hydrogen generation for fuel cells?
There is the potential for that. There is a very interesting hydrogen generation technology
that's been developed at Oak Ridge that looks also like it would couple very well to the
reactor. Hopefully we're going to be able to investigate that.
My follow-up to that is medical isotope production.
There's a number of potentially interesting medical isotopes that you could generate from
this reactor. One of them comes from the thorium fuel cycle itself. Uranium 233 when it decay
to an isotope called bismuth 213. I attended a seminar two years ago, where they talked
about using bismuth 213 to fight some of the nastiest cancers you can think of -- leukemia,
lymphomas, glioblastoma, which is a terrible brain cancer.
The results were amazing, and what they said was, "We are limited on how far we can go
with this, because we don't have much uranium 233." Uranium 233 only comes from thorium.
If we were operating these reactors, they would essentially be producing a material,
just in the course of normal operation, they could change the fight on cancer completely.
It's proven, there is medical data to show, it's called "targeted alpha therapy." If you
want to look it up, targeted alpha therapy using bismuth 213 is an incredible technique
against some of the nastiest forms of cancer, and it's uniquely coupled
to the thorium fuel cycle.
Revenue stream for the utilities.
Potentially, as well. It's just amazing stuff. In the future, when targeted alpha therapy
becomes a more widely used form of cancer therapy, we're going to look back on what
we did today, as like sticks and stones.
I heard a talk at Oak Ridge a couple of years ago, and they were talking about a modular
reactor project. If I understood it correctly, it was to be put underground with no large
external containment vessel, both for safety and for reducing costs. Is that a possibility
with this?
The program you're referring to was run by Babcock & Wilcox, it was called their MPower
reactor, and it was going to be underground. It did have a full containment built around
it, though. It was going to be built at Clinch River.
Earlier this year, Babcock decided to dial down their involvement with the MPower project,
and just a few weeks ago TVA announced that that site, instead of being specific to that
particular small modular reactor, is now going to be hopefully a small modular reactor development
site, where they will try whatever reactors are ready.
That got me really excited, because I thought, maybe I'm dealt back in the game. Because
I would really like to see liquid fluoride thorium reactors developed and operating near
Oak Ridge, and the Clinch River site is not far at all from Oak Ridge.
Guys, it drives me crazy. The Oak Ridge National Lab, one of our pioneers in nuclear energy,
has never been powered by nuclear energy. It's powered by coal. That's just crazy.
What is the timeline on this? Will we see it in our lifetime?
Yes, you will see it in your lifetime, because that's what I am going to go make sure happens.
I'm going to need some help, though.
I don't mean for this to be a multi-generational development, although I have instructed my
kids they're supposed to continue on the work, no matter what happens to me.
I got to tell you, studying Glenn Seaborg's life in considerable detail, I just can't
believe how awesome and how fast things can go when you get the right, smart people together
and you've got the funds.
The Manhattan Project, although it was done by hundreds of thousands of people, if you
look at how many people were working in Chicago on reactor design, chemical processing, probably
less than a hundred people.
Less than a hundred people figured out this whole big thing that became Hanford and all
these other parts of it, so it's not a problem that you need to hack thousands of bodies
at. It is a problem that can be done, probably better, by a team of 50 to 100 engineers.
In the United States there's a large, well-funded though somewhat clandestine anti-nuclear group
that's going around targeting nuclear reactors to close them down for whatever pathetic legal
or bureaucratic reason they could find. It's [inaudible 54:21] to one. How do you intend
to deal with that?
A few weeks ago, Vermont Yankee shut down, which had been running for 40 years and sustaining
the economy of southern Vermont. A lot of people who are against nuclear came from out
of town and pressured the governor and the state to shut it down. They did so. Those
people are all gone now, but the people who are going to suffer from that shutdown are
still there.
Having a clean energy source that's not polluting the air is a great thing. I live 20 miles
down went from the Browns Ferry nuclear reactors. They sit on the Tennessee River, and they
provide clean energy for Huntsville, Alabama. I'm really, really grateful for that.
They're not perfect. They're first-generation reactors. Ultimately, I'd like to see us be
putting thorium reactors out there and chewing through the nuclear waste that was generated
during the operation of Browns Ferry. Eventually, reactors reach a point where you do need to
shut them down. They won't run forever.
But I don't like what's happening with reactors that have a lot of life left in them being
targeted for shut-down by anti-nuclear groups that then come to town, protest, and leave,
and leave the community cleaning up the mess.
San Onofre. I'm glad you brought that up. The people of San Diego are looking at a multibillion
dollar cost, because San Onofre was shut down years earlier. That reactor could have been
generating clean electricity for southern California, and now it's sitting there as
a big political liability. Way to go. I think you have one?
As far as the idea of activists, it seems like a little education...you could bring
the activists into your camp.
I certainly hope so, and I've noticed on an individual level that does seem to happen.
On the command and control level though, don't seem to make any progress. I bring it up because
one time I was with Baroness Worthington, is a member of the House of Lords in London.
She used to work for Friends of the Earth. She took me over to their office in London,
and we gave them a full briefing. They said, "We're going to be really open-minded about
this. We're going to take a look at it." Not long afterwards, I heard the same guy who
sat there in my lecture, get up and say, "We're fundamentally opposed to all forms of nuclear
power."
I wanted to say, "We have the same goals here. We want a cleaner world. We want a safer world.
Here's a technology that mitigates the issues that you claim to have with nuclear energy.
You told me to my face you could take a look at it. Why can't you take a look at it?"
Why are you issuing these close-out statements to people that, "I don't even want to think
about anything about it?" What I find a little strange about the conventional environmental
groups, is they seem to have unbounded faith that wind and solar are going to improve,
and improve, and improve, but they seem to exercise no faith whatsoever that nuclear
energy, a technology which right now is one-half of one percent fuel efficient, can ever get
any better.
I see amazing amounts of potential efficiency improvement possible in nuclear. In a former
life I was working for NASA. I spent a lot of time working on solar energy. I don't hold
out as much hope that solar energy is going to be a lot more efficient. It can. It's just
the problem is it gets a lot more expensive.
I used to have a solar cell the size of my business card that was for satellite. It was
30 percent efficient, top of the line, cost more than my car. There's a reason we don't
use that technology. We use stuff much less expensive, and much less efficient in solar
panels.
I have a lot more faith that we're going to be able to improve nuclear, and take advantage
of that two million to one improvement in energy density. I wish that faith was shared
by some of the more well known environmental groups though.
Sounds like that could get small enough to operate large vessels?
Absolutely. You would be amazed how much of our pollution is caused by large ships, the
ships that are transporting our goods back and forth across the ocean. They burn a fuel
called bunker fuel that, I'm told, is kind of like asphalt.
It's just about the nastiest stuff you can burn, and so they make lots and lots of pollution,
and because they do it on the high seas, it's not considered under anybody's jurisdiction.
If you could replace some of those large transport vessels with a clean form of energy, you'd
get rid of a lot of pollution.
Is it politically or technology-wise, it's slowing down the progress of the LFTR reactor?
We need funding, quite frankly. Everything runs on funding. You've got to have the resources
to get the engineers, the scientists, the experiments done, the labs stocked.
One of the great things I saw yesterday here at the U is due to some investments by the
state. You're building laboratories here that are starting to be able to do experiments
that are totally relevant to this technology, and that's really exciting. That's showing
how an investment that's being made at the state level is going to reap benefits.
I really hope Utah gets out in front of this. Nothing would please me more as a fifth generation
Utahan to come and see this happen in Utah. Again, thank you so much for letting me come.
I really appreciate your attendance today.
It's going to be fun to have me visit around the rest of the day. We'll have some tours
also, and we'll be able to see some of the stuff that we're doing.
That's what I'm here to see.
Thank you everyone. It was a really great, inspiring talk.