If we had more of today's reactors in operation,
1 cup of uranium oxide would cover a typical American's yearly energy demand.
Per-capita, that's the equivalent of burning 54 barrels of oil.
Every year, for every single American.
Or, 12 tonnes of coal.
Or, 53 hundred cubic feet of natural gas, to generate the same amount of energy.
4 grams of thorium can power a middle-class American lifestyle for a full year.
That's just 4 grams.
But this can only happen
if the reactor is efficiently fueled with chemically homogeneous liquid fuel,
if the reactor runs at high temperature, and the power generator
is optimized to take advantage of the reactor's high temperature operation.
The power generation takes place when fuel salt is pumped through primary heat exchanger.
It then heats the coolant salt.
Bare FLiBe then proceeds outside of the containment and heats carbon dioxide.
Supercritical carbon dioxide gas, at about 550C turbine inlet temperature,
which then proceeds through a supercritical carbon dioxide recompression turbine cycle.
And that is a highly recuperated cycle
that has two recuperation stages and two compression stages.
But ultimately the gas is cooled, compressed, recuperated, and reheated in a closed cycle.
The performance of the carbon dioxide gas turbine is such
that it leads to very, very compact turbomachinery.
The turbo machinery for this entire reactor would easily fit on this stage.
Probably on half this stage.
And if anybody's been to a big reactor before and seen big steam cycle turbomachinery
you can appreciate what a reduction in scale that is.
It's about 45% efficient too, which is really, really attractive.
What Kirk describes is something new to this world.
High efficiency power conversion enabled by the high operating temperature of molten salt.
Complete burnup of nuclear fuel enabled by a combination of homogeneous liquid fuel,
online chemistry, and thermal breeding.
Such as Alvin Weinberg and the team at ORNL intended to build
until the molten salt breeder program was suddenly terminated.
We were minor-league, money-wise, compared to the other program.
Put your hand on your desk, take everything that has to do with molten salt,
sweep it off and you're finished.
I didn't suit coming.
Shaw says, stop that MSRE reactor experiment.
Fire everybody.
Just tell them to clear out their desks and go home.
And send me the money for fast-breeders.
This is the thorium reactor.
Can you tell me what the thinking is on thorium as a fuel?
What the advantages are, what the disadvantages are, what the pros and cons are of thorium?
The first commercial reactor operated in this country at Shippingport
was based on thorium fuel.
My constituents are always asking me about this-
Does thorium have a place in our nuclear future?
Can you make them work?
Yes, you can make them work.
Is there an advantage to doing it?
I haven't seen it.
There's about 4x more thorium on Earth than there is uranium.
But at the moment uranium is cheap enough that simply doesn't matter.
It's, I think, one of these sort of technological cults.
An atom of thorium and an atom of uranium both contain the same
amazing millionfold improvement in energy density over coal.
It isn't that an atom of thorium contains any more energy than an atom of uranium.
Or that natural thorium is much more common than natural uranium.
But we don't consume natural uranium in today's reactors.
There's about 4x more thorium on Earth than there is uranium.
That number is irrelevant.
Thorium is 400x as common as Uranium-235.
And we can't harness the full power of natural uranium with the thorium breeder.
That's a bigger challenge.
To fully burn up natural uranium we need a fast-spectrum reactor,
such as the Integral Fast Reactor shown in Pandora's Promise,
complete with solid fuel reprocessing facility
which includes liquid chemistry.
Or, we need the Traveling Wave Reactor [that] Bill Gates has invested in.
Both reactors use solid fuel which becomes heterogeneous as the fuel is consumed.
Just like today's reactors, any one piece of fuel will eventually become too used up
to sustain fission before its energy potential has been fully realized.
It is the semi-fissioned fuel which then must be reprocessed into new fuel,
or treated as waste.
The elimination of fuel fabrication, and the elimination of fuel reprocessing,
as a distinct step, are essential
if you want to harvest the smallest amount of natural resources
and produce the smallest amount of nuclear waste.
Because the economics of nuclear power don't favor reprocessing fuel,
it will always be cheaper to simply dig up more uranium,
rather than using every atom you've already mined.
The most environmentally friendly way to operate the thorium breeder
is the only way to operate the thorium breeder.
If you stop the chemical kidney, then fission slowly grinds to a halt.
The chemical kidney lets us continually remove used-fuel and keep adding fresh-fuel.
It is how our thorium fuel can be completely converted into energy and fission products.
Bill Gate's Travelling Wave reactor is the most ambitious reactor
ever proposed for consuming solid uranium fuel.
Years ago, he described it like this: a giant uranium candle-stick
being fissioned from one end to the other.
But the realities of heterogeneous solid fuel led to this: constant shuffling of solid fuel
rods, in an attempt to ensure the fuel is consumed as uniformly as possible,
to sustain fission as long as possible.
Is liquid fuel really that hard to work with?
People recycle cans they recycle papers.
Why not candles?
I say we put a bin out, let people bring back their old drippings at their convenience.
It's like those bags that say- I used to be a plastic bottle.
We could have a bin that says- I used to be another candle.
And when they bring in those candles, we'll put them in another bin
that says- I used to be another, another candle.
Yeah and then eventually we just have one that says, trust me, I've been another candles.
By weight, a paraffin candle stick and gasoline contain about the same amount of energy.
Why don't cars run on paraffin wax?
Because the inside of your car might need to look something like this, or like this.
What process do we run chemically based on solids?
We don't.
Everything we do, we use as liquids or gases, because we can mix them completely.
You can take a liquid you can fully mix it.
You can take a gas you can fully mix it.
You can't take a solid and fully mix it, unless you turn it into a liquid or a gas.
You know, the people build Light Water Reactors are physicists and engineers.
And this is a whole lot of chemistry that they're maybe not so comfortable with.
So it's the chemistry of it that makes it so special, but it's also the bit that existing
nukes kinda go- You know, oooh, we were going into realms I don't, perhaps, feel comfortable.
In the nuclear space there are other innovators.
You know, we don't know their work as well as we know this one, but the modular people-
that's a different approach.
There's a liquid type reactor which seems little hard but maybe they say all about us,
uh.
And so there are different ones.
Although Bill Gates Traveling Wave Reactor is still advertised to the public
as a mechanical device shuffling natural uranium fuel rods around.
TerraPower sought and received a research grant from the department of energy in 2015.
It is for the study of a uranium fueled fast-spectrum Molten Salt Reactor.
Uh, can you make them work?
Yes, you can make them work.
Is there an advantage to doing it?
I haven't seen.
Unless you're using slowed down, thermal-spectrum neutrons.
Thorium breeding offers no advantage over uranium breeding.
Dr. Lyons report's investigation of Molten Salt only includes fast-spectrum, not thermal-spectrum.
That is why he sees no thorium advantage over uranium.
In a single sentence the report dismissed the thorium reactor chemical kidney.
In doing so, the thorium advantage is also dismissed.
Alvin Weinberg new the kidney would be required.
His team knew it before they even started constructing the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment.
So it's a bit disappointing to see Weinberg's chemical kidney dismissed, as-
"a drawback that could be potentially eliminated".
It's an essential tool that will fundamentally change our relationship to atomic power.
And they're saddled with all our radioactive waste.
Who do we think we are, Bob?
And I want to tear my hair out because what I haven't mentioned is radioactive waste.
The main problem is radioactive waste.
We're going to stop creating nuclear waste
and we're going to start creating fission products.
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