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Let's see!
What?
Your body...
is here!
Spray-Fist!
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Almost all of the nuclear power we use on Earth today uses water as a basic coolant.
The Heavy Water Reactor will use about 0.7% of the uranium's energy value,
and the Light Water Reactor will use about half-of-1-percent [0.05%].
They both do terrible.
When you went camping and you built a fire, the stuff on the edge
isn't getting burned very good.
The same principle.
They'll take out a third of the fuel, and then reshuffle fuel out to the periphery.
The solid fuel will begin to swell and crack.
This is actually a gap in the fuel.
When the fuel swells the clad can't hold it any more,
it is time to remove the fuel from the reactor.
At this point only a small amount of the energy has been consumed.
When we first load nuclear fuel it is entirely uranium and most of that is Uranium-238.
As it burns down, at a year, 2 years, and then 3 years-
You see those are the fission products, and then these transuranics.
The hatch at the bottom gives away the fact that
the only fraction that has been truly burned
is the fraction you see in kind of those light pastel colors.
In Light Water Reactors, if you allow fuel to be uncovered
and heat up the zirconium cladding will react with steam to form hydrogen.
So they have a series of emergency systems
designed to always keep the core covered with water.
We saw the failure of this at Fukushima Daiichi,
you know they had multiple backup diesel generators,
and each one probably had a very high probability of turning on.
The tsunami came and knocked them all out.
Anna, tell me what the latests is, in relation to the third nuclear explosion?
How worried are people?
The news said, "Oh, we've had a nuclear explosion!"
I was like, no we didn't. It wasn't a nuclear explosion,
it was a hydrogen gas explosion.
The oxygen has a covalent bond with two hydrogens.
Gamma or neutron knock the hydrogens clean off.
Let me diss on water a few more times.
At normal pressures, water will boil at 100 degrees Celsius.
This isn't nearly hot enough to generate electricity effectively.
So water cooled reactors have to run at over 70 atmospheres of pressure.
You have to build a water cooled reactor as a pressure vessel.
The number one accident people worry about with this kind of reactor,
all of a sudden- pressure is lost in the reactor.
Water that's being held at 300 degrees Celsius flashes to steam.
Its volume increases roughly by a factor of 1000.
This building is the size it is and it's the way it is precisely to accommodate this event.
When you put water under extreme pressure
like anything else- it wants to get out of that extreme pressure.
Physical mechanisms.
A dispersion term.
Yeah, that can mobilize cesium and iodine.
Almost all of the aspects of our nuclear reactors today
that we find the most challenging can be traced back
to the need to have pressurized water.
As long as the reactor was as small as the submarine intermediate reactor
which was only 60 megawatts,
then containment shell was absolute. It was safe.
But when you went to 1,000 megawatt reactors you could not guarantee this.
Weinberg was the original inventor of the Pressurized Water Reactor.
He had gotten his patent for it in 1947.
It was a tricky thing to have the inventor of the Light Water Reactor
advocating for something very, very, very different.
Molten Salt Breeder was one thing that he had a feeling in his heart for.
Molten Salt was one of the best decisions I made I think.
High temperature is easier than high pressure.
He didn't like the fact that it had to run at really high pressure.
In some very remote situation conceive of the containment being breached-
Making enough of a stink
the congressional leader Chet Holifield told Alvin Weinberg,
"If you're so concerned about the safety of nuclear energy-
-it might be time for you to leave the nuclear business."
And Weinberg was really kind of horrified that they would have this response to him
because he wasn't questioning the value or the importance of nuclear energy.
He was questioning, had the right path been taken?
The Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment was one of the most important, and I must say,
brilliant achievements of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
You nuclear engineers are probably going to think those are fuel rods, they're not.
They're graphite.
The fuel was a liquid that flowed through channels in this graphite.
Instead of having solid fuel in a liquid moderator-
liquid fuel in a solid moderator.
One of the hardest things to get around is the large heavy pressure vessel
that's required when you use Pressurized Water Reactors.
Water is really good from a heat-transfer perspective.
It is good at carrying heat, per unit-volume.
Salts are just as good at carrying heat per unit-volume,
but salts don't have to be pressurized.
And, that- If you remember nothing else of what I say tonight, remember that one fact.
Once they melt they have a 1,000 degree Celsius of liquid range.
Science allows you to look at everyday objects for what they really are.
Chemically and physically.
And it really makes you look twice at the world around you.
Your table salt is frozen.
That's a really strange thing to think about your table salt on your kitchen table.
It's frozen.
A nuclear reactor is a rough place for normal matter.
The nice thing about a salt is it's formed from a positive ion and a negative ion.
Sodium is positively charged, and Chlorine is negatively charged.
And they go, we're not really going to bond we're just going to associate one with another.
That's what's called an ionic bond.
Yeah, you're kinda friends.
You know, you're-
Facebook friends!
There you go, facebook friends.
Alright, well it turns out this is a really good thing for a reactor
because a reactor is going to smack those guys all over the place
with gammas and neutrons and everything.
The good news is they don't really care who they particularly are next to.
As long as there are an equal number of positive ions and negative ions,
the big picture is happy.
A salt is composed of the stuff that's in this column the halogens,
and the stuff that's in these columns the alkali and alkaline.
Fluorine is so reactive with everything.
But once it's made a salt, a fluoride-
then it's incredibly chemically stable and non-reactive.
Sodium chloride, table salt, or potassium iodide, they have really high melting points.
We like the lower melting points of fluoride salts.
Liquid fluoride reactors with their low pressure operation
are particularly suitable to modular construction.
Sometimes people go, oh you're working on liquid fluorine reactors, No, no!
I am NOT working on liquid fluorine reactors.
I'm talking about fluoride reactors and there's a big difference between those two.
One is going to explode, the other is like, super-duper stable.
In the chemical conditions you have with water, highly oxidized conditions,
cesium and iodine are very volatile.
Where-as in a salt reactor?
There is nothing that cesium loves more than fluorine.
It will compete with anything else to grab ahold of fluorine.
Caesium fluoride is very low volatility, and very high solubility in salts.
So no aerosols.
Safety is one of the most important reasons to consider, very seriously, Molten-Salt Reactors,
and this is because of the clever implementation that was demonstrated
in the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment of the freeze plug and the drain tank.
This is something that perhaps was not getting enough attention in the early 1970s.
Now we know, that if we want to have the public accept nuclear reactor technology,
it has got to be very safe-
and it's got to be something that is easily explained to people.
Now I've explained the safety basis of the Molten Salt Reactor to people many times,
and I haven't had anyone who is unable to get it.
Frozen plug?
That's it.
That's it!
Flattened pipe.
With electrical heat- resistance heat on that one.
So you invented the frozen plug then.
A small port in the bottom of the reactor,
and to keep the port plugged
they had a blower that would blow cool gas over it.
So there was a little plug of frozen salt there.
Well if the power went out, the blower turned off,
and the heat would melt the frozen plug, and guess what?
Everything would drain out of the reactor into this drain tank,
and the difference between the drain tank and the reactor vessel
was the reactor vessel was not meant to lose any thermal energy.
The only place you wanted to lose thermal energy
was to give it up in the primary heat exchanger.
The drain tank on the other hand is designed to maximize
the rejection of thermal energy to the environment.
One of the hard things about designing a nuclear reactor
is to design it to not lose any heat while you're running it, but to then turn around
and try keep it cool if something goes wrong.
So there are two conflicting things.
The great thing about liquid fluoride reactors is you can design them completely separately.
You can say here's my reactor and it's designed to make heat.
And here's my drain tank and it's designed to cool in all situations.
If something happens where that fuel drains away from that graphite-
criticality is no longer possible, the reactor is subcritical- fission stops.
And there's no way to restart it without reloading the fuel back into the core.
This is such a remarkable feature.
And it really is unique to having this liquid fuel form,
and to having something that can operate at standard pressure.
You can't do this in solid fuel- you do this in solid fuel it's called a meltdown.
Making solid nuclear fuel is a complicated complicated and expensive process.
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."
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.
I shall never forget my wonderment, as I stood next to the unshielded steel cans
only a few days earlier
had been mixed with millions of curies of radioactivity.
We were particularly proud of this, because that tiny chemical plant
was large enough to decontaminate the core of a 1 gigawatt molten-salt breeder.
Thorium does not have a volatile hexafluoride.
You can fluorinate it, and fluorinate it and fluorinate it all you want-
and it will not change chemical state.
It will stay thorium-tetrafluoride.
Uranium, on the other hand, does have a volatile hexafluoride.
And this is why many of us feel that the uranium-thorium fuel cycle
is a perfect fit with Molten-Salt Reactor.
This same trick doesn't work by the way in uranium-plutonium fuels.
They both have volatile hexafluorides, and so you can't undergo a separation
using the simple technique of fluoride volatility.
Can you tell me what the thinking is on thorium?
The first commercial nuclear 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?
I see no compelling reason to move towards a thorium cycle.
There was a recent report by the Nuclear Energy Agency of the OECD on thorium systems.
Can you make them work?
Yes, you can make them work.
Is there an advantage to doing it?
I haven't seen it.
Does the OECD report evaluate Alvin Weinberg's concept of the molten-salt breeder
and identify technical challenges which may impede development?
Of those 11 [Molten Salt Reactor] pages, in a 133 page report, 1 sentence does so.
This 1 gigawatt design was a thermal reactor with graphite moderated core
that required heavy chemical fuel salt treatment with a removal time
of approximately 30 days for soluble fission products,
a drawback that could potentially be eliminated by using a fast-spectrum instead.
In a fast-spectrum reactor, uranium and thorium perform the same.
In a solid fuel reactor, uranium is a superior choice.
It is only in Alvin Weinberg's thermal- spectrum Molten-Salt Breeder Reactor
that thorium's advantages become clear.
Let's reword it for clarity.
This one gigawatt design was a thermal reactor with graphite moderated core,
that avoided the drawbacks of fast-spectrum by removing soluble fission products
through the use of chemical fuel salt treatment.
The successful breeder will be the one that can deal with the spent fuel most rationally,
either by the achieving extremely long burn up,
or by greatly simplifying the entire recycle step.
This is kind of like a kidney for the nuclear reactor.
This is how long it takes our spent fuel to reach the same radioactivity as natural uranium,
it's about 300,000 years.
If you can keep actinides out of the waste stream,
you can really shorten that to about 300 years.
It's where it's positioned on the periodic table.
It goes down the chain into different elements.
But if you start a couple of steps to the left along the periodic table,
inherently, you take out most of the nasties in the waste.
If you use thorium with this kind of efficiency, something really amazing becomes possible.
Every cubic meter of the Earth has got a certain amount of uranium and thorium in it.
About 2 cubic centimeters of thorium, and half a cubic centimeter of uranium.
If you can use thorium with the efficiencies that we're talking about today,
this has the energy equivalent
of more than 30 cubic meters of the finest crude oil or anthracite coal.
This is like taking worthless piece of dirt, anywhere in the world, and turning it into
multiples of the finest chemical energy resources we have.
I mean that's absolutely amazing.
Now, good news is we don't have to mine average continental crust for thorium.
You can see that uranium-235 is like on par with silver and platinum.
Can you imagine burning platinum for energy?
And that's what we're doing with our nuclear energy sources today,
we're burning this extremely rare stuff, and not thorium.
As a natural resource, the appeal of thorium over uranium,
is that thorium has zero environmental cost to acquire.
We can power our civilization on thorium without opening a single thorium mine.
It is already a plentiful byproduct of existing mining operations.
Bleached by water, uranium compounds were widely dispersed.
Scattered far and wide, uranium compounds today
are found as complex, dilute deposits
containing tetra, penta and hexa-valent uranium.
Unlike uranium, tetra-valent thorium- and it's constantly tetra-valent- resists weathering.
Thorium thus remains concentrated where it first wound up- within easy reach.
When your deposit has 8% Rare Earths, it may have 14% thorium.
One Rare Earth, and usually one thorium atom.
There's so much Rare Earths that we are throwing away because of thorium.
Rare Earth materials are used to make hi-tech products like advanced batteries
that power everything from hybrid cars to cellphones.
We want our companies building those products right here in America.
But to do that American manufacturers need
to have access to Rare Earth materials, which China supplies.
So I have a friend who's trying to start a Rare Earth mine in Missouri.
And all he wants the government to do is let him put the thorium aside for future use.
So I asked him, Jim, how much thorium do you think you'll be pulling up a year?
He goes- I think about 5,000 tonnes. Is that a lot?
There was 60 people sitting on the other side of the podium going-
do you think there's a stable supply?
5,000 tonnes of thorium would supply the planet with all of its energy for a year.
So your 1 mine would bring up enough thorium, without even trying, to power the entire planet.
It's found in tailings piles.
It's found in ash piles.
And he goes- And there's like a zillion other places on earth that are just like my mine.
It's a nice mine, but it's not unique,
it's not like this is the one place on Earth where this is found.
We could use thorium about 200x more efficiently than we're using uranium now.
This reduces the waste generated over uranium by factors of hundreds,
and by factors of millions over fossil fuels.
Why nuclear energy?
Why Molten Salt Reactor?
And why Thorium?
And last but not least, why China is the first one to eat the crab?
That's Chinese saying.
Chinese Academy of Sciences has begun an effort to develop what they call T-MSR:
Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor.
It's along these same lines.
They are well funded, and well staffed.
We used to have a dream- if we can produce clean electricity
then we can drive our electrical car.
However, as of today it's all gasoline cars.
So it makes our job even impossible.
We need a revolutionary something happen.
It's very compelling work.
Chinese are definitely in the lead right now on this.
Why thorium?
Why MSR?
Low pressure here, more safety.
We also end up with the high temperature.
We need high temperature.
Then we can convert the CO2 which is not the waste at all-
is a raw material for our chemicals, in fact.
We need the energy to convert them, but we need the high temperature.
China export.
A lot of the energy here in China is not for consume, is for production.
We saw the other day how electrical power was used to make steel from recycled materials.
We load scrap into large haul trucks,
and they back up into this bucket and dump scrap inside.
[Bill Gates] A lot of energy consumption is largely industrial processes,
unbelievably optimized processes.
There's not the same room for improvement.
It's the nature of this waste heat-
It doesn't lend itself very well to conventional Rankine cycles.
We've probably captured 90% of what's to be captured.
Chasing the last 10% is pretty expensive.
Those operations could not proceed
if they thought in 2 hours they might or might not have power.
They would not be able to make steel that way.
They have to have reliable energy sources.
So you've been able to drop your power consumption
per ton almost by a third it looks like.
Probably since the mid-early-80s.
Besides your scrap material input, what's your next largest production cost?
Electricity. Electricity.
This is a recycling facility.
An electric arc furnace turns scrap metal into steel alloy for automobiles,
consumer products, and infrastructure such as pipes and bridges.
This is a sorting facility.
We are all familiar with sorting, as we put bottles aside for funding drives.
Do not mistake sorting for recycling.
Sorting is labor intensive.
Recycling is energy intensive.
This steel recycling plant runs 24/7.
Without reliable clean energy, a closed-loop society becomes impossible.
Most people don't understand everything you touch, feel, anything that's tangible-
there's energy behind it. A lot of it.
That was one of the things that attracted me about the notion of exploring space
I'm an aerospace engineer by training, went to Geogia Tech got my masters degree there.
Now I spent 10 years working at NASA.
This is the kind of community I was thinking of.
If you were going to live on the Moon or Mars, there was no pit over here and pit over there.
Every atom of nitrogen or oxygen or hydrogen became precious to you.
When I would tell people why are we doing NASA, that was the most effective thing was
the whole idea of recycling and what we would learn from exploring space.
What prevents us from doing that right now on Earth?
I mean, why do we have to go to space to learn how to be really good recyclers?
Why don't we recycle like that on Earth?
It was energy, you know- Energy has to be really cheap
or the penalty has to be really, really bad.
Now, in space, the penalty was really, really bad.
If you didn't recycle, you ran out of air and water.
But, on the ground, you need to have really, really cheap energy.
I've worked a lot of my career in solar powered systems.
It's just that, I'm a lot more aware of their limitations.
The moon orbits the Earth once a month.
For 2 weeks the sun goes down and your solar panels don't make any energy.
It's easy to forget about that in our world here on Earth
because we're so extracted from our energy sources.
Food is at the grocery store.
We flush the toilet-
and the waste goes somewhere, where someone takes care of them.
We don't really think about the flow of energy that makes all of this possible.
With the energy generated we could recycle all of the air,
water, and waste products within the lunar community.
In fact doing so would be an absolute requirement for success.
We could grow the crops needed to feed the members of the community
even during the 2 week lunar night
using light and power from the reactor.
It kind of was this microcosm that made it easier for me to understand
the bigger picture that we have going on here on Earth
and how we can make that bigger picture better.
How we can enhance our quality of life on Earth.
We're still going to need liquid fuels for vehicles and machinery.
We could generate hydrogen by splitting water
and combining it with carbon harvested from CO2 in the atmosphere-
making fuels like methanol, ammonia, and dimethyl-ether,
which could be a direct replacement for diesel fuels.
Imagine carbon neutral gasoline and diesel sustainable and self produced.
Well, the Atomic Energy Commission unfortunately did not share their zeal
to continue with the technology.
Put your hand on your desk, take everything that has to do with Molten Salt,
sweep it off, and you're finished.
Stop that reactor experiment, fire everybody.
I didn't see it coming.
The project was terminated.
But I still think that people will come back to this reactor.
I hope that after I'm gone people will say- Hey-
these guys had a pretty good idea let's go back to it.
We share the dream that was put forward by Dr. Alvin Weinberg long ago,
of a world set free by essentially unlimited energy source.
To me it is a miracle.
It's a miracle that there's a material on Earth
that has such remarkable energy density,
that even worthless dirt is transformed into an energy resource
greater than the richest crude oil or anthracite coal
or any other resource you can imagine.
To me that is- that is truly a miracle.
When I pitched this story to Wired Magazine.
There were 6 editors around a table, and they're pretty well informed
science and technology journalists, and not a single one of them had heard of thorium.
Richard Weinberg, He said- Most of my father's papers are at the Oak Ridge Children's Museum.
Literally there was a big walk-in closet.
I'm realizing as I go through these Oak Ridge documents,
how limited their distribution was.
At the very last page of every one, there's a distribution, about 40 people.
So best case scenario, 40 people read what I'm holding in my hand, 50 years ago.
Around 2004 Kirk Sorensen came to visit us at Berkeley
because we'd been working on Molten Salt Reactor technology
and doing some of the early studies.
He had a stack of CD-ROMs.
And that was a treasure-trove.
We have been able to access, and also disperse, an amazing amount of information.
Kirk gave me some CDs, and then he put them on the internet.
That was a game changer.
That was an inflection point.
Unless you were physically with me, and I could bring down 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.
In 2010, some of you may remember President Obama in his State of The Union Address said-
We need more production, more efficiency, more incentives,
and that means building a new generation
of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.
-and both sides of the aisle, Republican, Democrats, stood up
like he'd just talked about motherhood or apple pie, or saluted the military.
We're all at Oak Ridge, the morning that we showed up one of the Oak Ridge guys
came in with an announcement from the Chinese Academy of Science-
We're going to do this, we're going to own the I.P. [Intellectual Property].
So you would think, someone in our government would say-
Maybe you shouldn't keep giving away this information?
Coming back, what will be built?
Again it's Light Water Reactors.
I don't understand what's going on here?
Why are we spending money to build reactors based on
the same concept that we have been building ever since World War 2 ?
I believe that the light water reactors for the foreseeable future will be a bridge
between the industry of today and an industry of tomorrow.
What we've got is not a bridge to tomorrow but a protection of the status quo.
The current system incentivizes reactor designers to develop their first projects
outside of The United States.
And, in fact, this has already happened.
The NRC regulations specifically spell out prohibitions against fluid fueled reactors.
You can not operate fluid-filled reactor more than one megawatt
without expensive licensing process.
We'd like the demonstration facility to generate meaningful results for a full size plant.
On the order of 20 megawatts thermal.
Any smaller than that and it really- It becomes a different machine.
Just the thermal hydraulics will be so different
that it wouldn't really be a valid comparison.
Canada has a fundamentally different regulatory environment for nuclear power
which is, I would say, very progressive.
We do feel that we have a competitive advantage pursuing this technology in Canada.
We don't do big science anymore in the United States, we don't.
China is.
India is.
The Czech Republic is.
Jan Uhlíř.
He's got a great budget, and he just bought an obscene amount of FLiBe,
for pennies on the dollar,
from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, because he's doing big science over there.
And we basically gave it away.
Currently there is no way for us to build a prototype facility
or move beyond the laboratory scale work that we're currently doing.
We want more than anything to do this in the U.S.,
but we've been forced to keep an open mind
with respect to the other pathways we could take.
So we formed Flibe Energy to realize modular, 2-fluid, Molten-Salt Reactors
that implement the thorium fuel cycle.
We're the town that put man on the Moon.
Its also well located in the United States connected to an extensive rail network.
We're also fairly close to Oak Ridge National Labs,
the birthplace of the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment, which ran for almost 5 years
and demonstrated fundamental compatibilities of the graphite, salt,
and the Hastelloy material which contains the reactor.
Very successful, I've had the good please of speaking with
some of the gentlemen who worked on this project long ago.
Do you think building Molten Salt Reactors in the future would be a good idea?
Oh, heavens yes!
Dick, what do you think?
I think it would be a very good idea.
It would be tragic if we don't follow this and end up buying another technology
from foreign powers in other parts of the world.
China currently makes my squash rackets and pretty soon
they're going to be making my reactors if we don't turn this around a little bit.
China's developing this thing very rapidly with the help of our national labs.
With the Department of Energy.
They've publicly said they're going to control this.
How is it that we created it here, the ultimate gift to humanity,
and how is it that China will deliver this system and not the U.S.?
It would be crazy for us to give up the technology
that we developed back in the 1960s to another country.
It may not seem like it, but it is the middle of the day here in Beijing.
The air is so polluted that its darkened the sky.
But the thing is, speaking as an internationalist,
if you want to do something about global warming, it would be a great thing
if China built thorium based reactors instead of coal plants.
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 that's really what I'd like to do.
The last operational Molten-Salt Reactor shut down in the United States in 1969.
It ran in a remote location.
Research documents were kept in a walk-in closet.
For 3 decades, we didn't even know this was an option.
Then in 2002, ORNL's Molten Salt documentation is scanned into PDF
and made accessible to some NASA employees.
2004.
Kirk Sorensen delivers CD-ROMs of Molten- Salt research to national labs and universities.
Dr. Per Peterson at receives a copy.
2006.
Kirk moves the scanned research onto his website.
2008.
Molten-Salt Reactor lectures begin at the Googleplex,
hosted on Google's YouTube channel.
2009.
The very first thorium conference is held.
Wired Magazine runs a feature story on Thorium.
2010.
American Scientist runs a feature on Thorium.
International thorium conferences begin.
Server logs show Chinese students downloading Molten-Salt Reactor PDFs from Kirk's website.
2011.
China announces their intention to build a Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor.
In the U.S., Flibe Energy is founded.
Transatomic Power is founded.
2012.
Baroness Bryony Worthington tours ORNL's historic Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment,
which has never been made open to the public.
Kun Chen visits Berkeley California, telling us
300 Chinese are working full-time on Molten-Salt Reactors.
2013.
Terrestrial Energy is Founded.
2014.
ThorCon is Founded.
Moltex is founded.
Seaborg Technologies are founded.
Copenhagen Atomics are founded.
2015.
India reveals their new facility for molten-salt preparation and purification.
A flood of technical details and technology assessments are released by molten-salt startups.
Including LFTR EPRI, a collaboration between Flibe Energy and Southern Company
to assess technological readiness
of Flibe Energy's Molten-Salt Breeder Reactor design, the LFTR.
China announces that now 700 engineers are working on their Molten-Salt Reactor program.
2016.
Peter Thiel, an investor in the Molten- Salt startup Transatomic Power
contributes over a million dollars
to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
Myriam Tonelotto releases a feature length documentary about Molten-Salt Reactors called:
"Thorium - The Far Side of Nuclear Power".
Dr. James Hansen tells Rolling Stone magazine that we should develop
Molten-Salt Reactors powered by thorium.
Oak Ridge discovers actual film footage of the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment itself.
Produced in 1969, it was forgotten in storage for over 45 years.
It offers up our first and only glimpse of an operating Molten-Salt Reactor.
2017.
To propel this new era of American energy dominance,
first we will begin to revive and expand our nuclear energy sector
which produces clean, renewable and emissions-free energy.
President Donald Trump observes Nuclear Power is both
a renewable resource, and an emissions-free source of energy.
A complete review of U.S. nuclear energy policy
will help us find new ways to revitalize this crucial energy resource.
And I know you're very excited about that, Rick.
H.R.590 Advanced Nuclear Technology Development Act
is passed through The House of Representatives.
Flibe Energy reveals LFTR49, a new 2-fluid reactor
designed to turn thorium into life saving medical isotopes.
Like original LFTR, a machine that recycles wasted material
such as mine tailings and coal ash piles.
And now, used fuel rods into enormous amounts of energy.
Back in the 60s, Alvin Weinberg saw the Molten-Salt Reactor
as a means of addressing energy pollution and the need for clean water.
Power centers would co-locate energy intensive manufacturing and Small Modular Reactors.
Surplus power would be sold to nearby communities.
He knew- energy was the ultimate raw material
the more energy you have, the easier it is to recycle,
and use virgin materials more efficiently.
Given enough power, we can pull carbon right out of the atmosphere or ocean.
China announced their plans to develop and commercialize
a thorium fueled Molten-Salt Reactor in 2011.
I'd finally like a President of the United States to know
what Molten-Salt Reactors are, and why they are.
Every time mankind has been able to access a new source of energy
it has led to profound societal implications.
The Industrial Revolution and the ability to use chemical fuels
was what finally did in slavery.
Human beings have had slaves for thousands and thousands of years.
And when we learned how to make carbon our slave, instead of other human beings,
we started to learn how to be able to be civilized people
We live much better lives today because we have learned how to use carbon.
Okay, what about thorium?
Thorium has a million times the energy density of a carbon-hydrogen bond.
What could that mean for human civilization?
Going out thousands- tens of thousands of years into the future?
Because we're not going to run out of this stuff.
Once we've learned how to use it at this kind of efficiency we will never run out.
It is simply too common.
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