>> So, let me start my introduction.
Can you start rolling please?
>> Okay, rolling.
>> Okay, thank you.
So, today we have Kirk Sorensen to talk about
Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactors for us.
To give everybody the general context, in
the 1950s the--a bunch of Air Force Engineers
were tasked with the problem of putting a
nuclear reactor inside an airplane to power
it flying through the air.
This is a fool's errand, terrible idea but
the idea they have for doing it was fabulous.
They--they designed a Thorium fueled, molten
salt-based reactor.
Ran at incredibly high temperatures it's very
efficient.
It was a thermal spectrum, I can let Kirk
go on and on about that.
But the idea died in the late 1960s and early
1970s.
And it died I believed fundamentally because
of the terrible way to make a nuclear bomb.
It can be done but it's a terrible way.
And so, given the choice, the US did not have
the facilities to do it, dedicated civilian
program with no overlap at all with the military
program that they had.
They had conserved resources, they killed
off the Fluoride program and they went with
the nuclear--with the Uranium fuel cycle.
And that's what we've been going with ever
since.
Now, developing nations today, a lot of them
want nuclear weapons, they face a similar
problem.
And so they're choosing Uranium cycle as well.
But the Thorium cycle is really interesting
if you don't want to make a nuclear bomb.
And, like I said, there's a ton to say about
it.
And I think Kirk has a huge amount queued
so I'll let get him going.
This is Kirk Sorensen, thank you very much.
>> SORENSEN: Hi.
Thank you very much.
I'm very excited to be here today at Google
and I'm actually excited because I almost
didn't think I was going to make it yesterday
with my flight problems and so forth.
But it's a great day to be talking about this
topic.
Anybody know what today is?
>> NASA.
>> SORENSEN: That's right, NASA.
Today is the 40th anniversary of man's first
walk on the moon.
I actually worked for NASA, so, I have a little
bit of a special feeling about that today.
But, I saw in the paper yesterday.
"What's our next giant leap?"
And I think they're referring to space and
I would like to think that what we're going
to talk about today might be that next giant
leap.
Both for our country and for the world.
And so I'll plunge right into it.
The tile of my talk is "Lessons for the Liquid-Fluoride
Reactor."
We've had three tech-talks so far on this
topic from some very bright folks and--a number
of you have probably already attended them
so I'm going to try to synthesize some of
the things--there are going to be some overlap
for those who haven't heard it before but
it's also going to be some additional information
for those who've watched those tech-talks.
And my general approach is going to be chronological.
I'm going to kind of start through time at
the beginning, nominally not the very beginning
five billion years ago, the super nova, but
a little--a little more recent than that and
I'll take you to that.
But before I begin, I'm going to kind of give
you a real quick summary of why this is so
exciting.
The potential energy that's in Thorium is
really staggering, I mean it represents an
enormous amount of energy that's equivalent
to far more energy than we find in our chemical
based-fuels like coal and natural gas and
even the way we use nuclear fuel and Uranium
today.
We can power the whole world on a whole lot
less Thorium then we use Uranium or any of
these other fuels today.
And at the same time, we can do it much more
efficiently.
We can fully burn up the Thorium in this reactor
versus only burning up part of Uranium in
a typical light water reactor.
Alright, so, how did it all begin?
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,
Thorium was discovered and there was nothing
particularly special about Thorium when it
was discovered it was, you know, just another
"T" to add on the list.
For some reason, there are lot of "Ts" on
the periodic table and Thallium, and Thorium
and Thulium and they all kind of run together.
And I taught my little girls the periodic
table recently and it's kind of hard to tell
them apart.
But there was nothing particularly special
to say about Thorium when it was discovered,
until Marie Curie figured out that "Oh my
goodness.
This stuff's radioactive."
And that was a really revolutionary idea.
The whole principle of radioactivity, "Where
is this energy coming from?"
Three kinds of radioactivity there's alpha
emission, there's beta emission, and there's
gamma emission, but the basic idea is this
stuff, matter, that we thought was immutable
actually changes.
And you being the one who--how can it change
it and does it keep going and what is it changing
into?
And--and all this stuff was completely theoretical
for years, I mean they spent the first half
of the 20th century breaking down this idea,
the idea of the decay chains.
We find that there's four natural decay chains
and there's four of them because an alpha
particle has a mass of four.
So, every time you drop an alpha, you change
by four and so that's why there's four decay
chains.
Now, one of them is extinct, Neptunium here,
but the other three we find in nature.
And they're the source of all of our naturally
radioactive materials but before even this
could be understood, a few conceptual breakthroughs
had to happen.
One of them was is we had to understand nuclear
fission was possible and boy think about in
the early 20th century the idea that the matter
was immutable and the nuc--and the atom could
never change and find out it could not only
change, it could change radically and give
off a lot of energy.
And to understand the nucleus and to realize
all these principles.
These all laid the foundations for our first
lesson for LFTR which is, that once you figure
out how matter really works, you realize that
nuclear fission is an incredibly dense source
of energy.
And I would say it's probably the source of
energy for how to power our industrial society
in the future.
And I'll try to substantiate that as I go
through.
The nature because of those three chains--those
four decay chains I'd showed you, one of them
is extinct.
Nature gave us three options for fuel.
The one on the top is what we use all the
time and now paint yourself in--in the late
1930s, early 1940s.
This is when they figured out that Uranium
235 could fission.
And then they came over to the United States.
This idea came to the United States not far
from here, over in Berkeley.
And Glenn Seaborg told the students, "Hey
go figure out if we can make something fissile
a lot of Uranium 238."
Which is much more common and found out they
could, they could make Plutonium.
And then Seaborg who had a very, very fertile
mind, began to figure out that, "Hey you know
what?
I'll bet if it's worked on Uranium 238, I'll
bet it would work on Thorium too."
And sure enough they figured out that all
three of these could be made to make nuclear
energy.
So what's the distinction between them?
Well, again it's a wartime scenario.
So the first question was, "How do we turn
it into a weapon?"
And in this--you know if I--from my editorial
I was thinking, "This to me is one of the
great tragedies of nuclear energy.
That it was discovered in context of a war."
Now, I kind of weigh that saying, "You know
what, if it hadn't been for the war, perhaps
it would have never been--perhaps the resources
would have never been expended to make this
happen."
I don't know.
But it is a sad thing to me that all of these
were initially evaluated in terms of their
destructive potential.
But nevertheless, this is how it happened.
Naturally Uranium, they figured out that they
could isolate that U-235 and they could make
a bomb out of it and that was Hiroshima in
1945.
They also figured out you could take the remaining
Uranium and you could irradiate it and you
could make Plutonium and you can make a bomb
out of it.
Now what about Thorium?
Could you irradiate that make a bomb out of
it?
Well, it turns out it's not--it's a, it's
a really bad idea.
And the reason it's a really bad idea is because
it's inevitably contaminated with Uranium
232.
And Uranium 232 is decaying and throwing off
gammas and basically screwing up your weapon.
It's trashing your explosives, it's trashing
your electronics and it's telling everybody
where it is.
So, it didn't take this smart level-headed
guys back then, who didn't have anytime to
mess around, awhile to figure out that.
"We don't want to do it this way.
This isn't a good idea."
And it's not really something you can get
away from either.
A very, very small U-232 really makes handling
U-233 extremely difficult.
So the first lesson for LFTR is Thorium's
no good for--I'm sorry, second lesson for
LFTR, Thorium's no good for nuclear weapons.
But if its wartime, this fact isn't really
going to help you very much.
So, here we are 2009, we can take a different--we
can take a different perspective on it.
So, as they looked into how to build a reactor--we've
all seen this picture before, the chain reaction,
I'm sure.
You know, sometimes I've wondered if this
picture hasn't done more to dissuade future
nuclear engineers from getting into the craft
than almost anything else I've ever seen because
the na--the natural inclination when you look
at the picture is, "Wow, this is bad, this
is getting away on us.
This is--this is a--this is not controllable.
I don't like this thing, you know, and then
that was certainly my impression the first
hundred times I ever looked at it.
But then I went to Nuclear Engineering School
and they taught me about what criticality
is.
And this is another word that's kind of entered
our vocabulary in a negative way.
Oh, my goodness, it's going to go critical
like that's a really bad thing, but turns
out criticality is just a state of balance.
If you have 10, 000 fissions and you get 10,
000 more fissions, that's critical, your reactor
going to stay at the same fission rate.
If 10,000 fission lead to less, then it's
sub critical, if they lead to more it's super
critical and rates change but I mean these
could be controlled and how can they be controlled?
Let me give you an analogy how it works in
a real reactor.
You know, it's impossible to get perfect criticality
through any natural--I'm sorry, through any
artificial means we know.
We can't make a fission reaction rate perfect
to--to 10 decimal places.
The good news is is we don't have to.
Nature will do it for us.
If we--to construct a system that feeds back
on itself and has a response, then it will
naturally dial itself into criticality.
And the analogy I use is a mass on a spring,
you know, if you try to put the mass at just
the right location where the spring balances
the force of the mass being pulled down, it's
pretty hard to just know exactly where that
point is.
But you let it go and what happens is the
spring will--will gradually take you into
the right place, the same with a reactor.
We create mechanisms in the reactor that feed
back to the fission ray and we make mechanisms
that make the fission rate and heat proportional
to one another so--I'm sorry--inversely proportional
to one another.
So as the reactor gets hotter, fission becomes
less likely, as the reactor gets cooler, fission
becomes more likely so what happens it will
naturally dial itself in to just where it
needs to be critical.
So take away from this is criticality is not,
is not a big scary thing.
In fact, we can build reactors quite straightforwardly,
this was the first reactor that was built
in Chicago, it's just a big pile of Uranium
and, and graphite bricks.
And the trick to doing all this is what's
called the "Temperature Coefficient of Reactivity."
This is, a long word to explain a simple concept
which is, you want your reactor to naturally
control itself and you can do this.
In a normal reactor it happens because as
water expands, it becomes less likely to slow
down the neutrons and that decreases the fission
rate and so, the reactor will self-control.
We can build self-controlling reactors, reactors
are not--are not--are not necessarily twitchy.
Now don't get me wrong you can build bad reactors,
you can build bad reactors that have bad reactors
that have unpleasant characteristics but you
can build good reactors too and, and that's
the kind we built here in the west, is reactors
that are strongly self-controlling.
Okay, after the Manhattan pro--well after
the--the--the army really took over, Enrico
Fermi and Eugene Wigner said "Well gee, what's
the right way to go forward, we want to turn
what we've done in to something that's good
for humanity.
We want to--we want to make energy."
And Fermi's approach was--he said "Well gee,
we really ought to--we really ought to base
it on Plutonium."
And the reason why is, Plutonium is going
to make lots of extra neutrons in fast fission
and fast fission is the way to go--we want
to build a fast-breeder reactor.
And Wigner says "No, that's not such a good
idea."
Thermal fission is the way to go, we want
to use slowed down neutrons and by doing that
we're going to have safer reactors, we're
gonna have easier to control reactors, we're
going to be able to employ those mechanisms
that I was talking about that control natural
criticality.
And the only way do this was to use Thorium,
so this was kind of a fork in the road back
during the Manhattan projects is, one guy
went off one direction to go work Uranium,
Plutonium, the other guy went the other direction
to work Thorium and Uranium, Uranium-233 I
should say.
And the reason a Thermal reactor's so different
from a fast reactor's, it's almost hard to
see at this scale but this is what these nuclei
look like to neutrons, I mean if you were
a neutron in a reactor, going around you would
see up here on the top row, that's the thermal
spectrum.
You know, big targets and the blue represents
if you hit it you are going to cause a fission
and the red represents if you hit it, it's
just going to absorb, it's just going to eat
the neutron.
So you see, look, Plutonium's a big target
but most of the time you hit it, actually
about a third of the time, you hit it, you're
just going to get eaten rather than cause
a fission.
On the other hand Uranium-233, most time you
hit it you're going to cause a fission rather
than an absorption.
Now look down here at the fast spectrum, if--you
can't see it at this scale but most of the
time you--you hit the--you hit at the nuclei,
you're going to have a fission, the problem
is you don't hit it very often.
So a thermal reactor gets a lot better fuel
efficiency, you need a lot less fuel to get
the same amount of heat.
The upshot of that is a thermal reactor like
LFTR can get about--can get about, five times
more heat per unit fissile fuel than a fast
reactor can.
So that was another basic reason to go this
direction.
So some of the lessons for LFTR, only Thorium
can be fully consumed in a thermal spectrum
reactor.
You can't do this with, with natural Uranium,
you have to have a fast beat or reactor for
that.
and so it's a basic fork in the road that
says "Hey you know this is a basic advantage
of those three fissile fuels, we really ought
to be thinking about Thorium because it has
it's basic advantage."
So how does Thorium make energy?
Well, starting with Thorium 232 it absorbs
a neutron, it becomes Thorium 233, that's
what doesn't last very long.
It decays really quickly to protect Thorium
233.
Now Protactinium's chemically distinct from
Thorium you know, it tastes different and
so you can separate it chemically in a way
that you can't isotopically and then the Protactinium's
go to decay the Uranium 233 and that's the
good stuff, that's your fuel.
Now it gets hit by a neutron, it's going to
cause a fission and throw off some more neutrons
that will continue the nuclear process and
also convert more Thorium to energy, so this
is how you burn Thorium, this is how you burn
up in a reactor.
It's a four-step process and because all these
decay processes take time, you can't burn
Thorium all up at once, you know, it's not
that you can load a reactor up and it's going
to go off.
Thorium represents a great way to store energy
because you can only release that energy at
a very measured rate in the reactor.
A friend of mine brought this today, this
is a, this a hundred grams of lead and, of
course this isn't Thorium but its kind of
analogous because it's almost as heavy as
Thorium, a hundred grams of Thorium would
represent your lifetime energy consumption
if it was used in a liquefied reactor.
So it would have been really neat if we could've
actually let you hold a hundred grams of Thorium
and, and even I actually investigated this
to see if we could bring a hundred grams of
Thorium here.
We found out that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
has these concerns about that, you know, so
I don't know why, I mean Thorium is natural,
it's out in rocks.
You've walked over far more than a hundred
grams of Thorium in your life I can guarantee
that.
But I'm going to hand these around to you
and I want you to imagine, just for a moment,
that you are holding your lifetime supply
of energy and think how cool it would be if
it was really Thorium.
>> [INDISTINCT]
>> Oh, they did?
Okay.
Okay.
Looks like we've got some actual Thorium ore
to pass around and I don't think it's quite
a lifetime supply of energy but it's an awful
lot.
So, nature was very kind to give us this stuff.
In fact, sometimes I just think, you know,
this is a great blessing that we happen to
live on a planet that has this much Thorium.
And then it turns out all the other planets
do, too.
You know, NASA's figured out there's lots
of Thorium on Mars, and the moon, in fact,
we have maps of the moon's Thorium deposits
because Thorium can tell you where it is.
It says, "Here I am.
Come get me.
I'm right here."
So, it's not going around this stuff, on the
Earth or any other planet either.
Okay.
So, going back to Eugene and--and--and Enrico,
you know, he asked a really logical question
to Wigner.
He said, "How are you going to use this stuff?
How are you going to prevent losses, because
that Protactinium is going to gobble up your
neutron?"
Wigner, I really think, was one of those minds
that was accidentally transplanted from the
future back into the past.
I mean, he was just so, so, so far ahead of
everybody else.
And he said, "We're going to build a fluid
fuelled reactor, that's how."
And the reason why, is his background was
in chemical engineering.
As a chemical engineer, he was used to dealing
with everything in fluid form.
When you used chemicals or you'd use reactants
and so forth, you do it in--if you got a solid,
first you just turn it into liquid and when
you're done you can turn it back into solid.
But you do everything as a liquid.
And so his principle, basically, going into
this is that we're going to do it as a liquid.
And here was the basic idea, we were going
to have this liquid core that had the Uranium
233 in it and it was going to be fissioning
and it was going to be throwing these neutrons
out and it was going to be turning Thorium
into Uranium 233.
Then you were going to just chemically isolate
this, because like I said they taste different,
you know I don't mean that literally, right?
Don't eat Thorium.
But--they're going to isolate it and then
they were going to put it back in the core.
So, you just kept doing this process and that
was how you were going to make it work.
Okay.
So, one of the basic advantage is is in fluid
form you can get past a lot of the drawbacks
of using Thorium.
When used in solid form, you run into those
problems of U-232 as much but there's another
one but I didn't have the art skills to mention
on the slide and that's Xenon 135.
Xenon 135 is the biggest neutron poison we
know of.
It just loves eating neutrons.
I wanted to make a picture of it on the map,
it's like, it's like looking at Jupiter next
to Pluto or something like that.
I mean it is just huge and it gobbles up neutrons.
And this was a real problem when they built
the first few reactors.
And Wigner realized, "Now, if I had this in
liquid form, that Xenon, being a gas, will
just come right out."
So, that's a very big deal.
If we had reactor operators here today they'd
be happy to tell you all the troubles they
have battling Xenon in solid fuelled reactors.
It's a real pain in the tail when you--when
you run a real reactor.
This was a big advantage for them.
So, off they went in different directions.
Fermi's group building the first liquid metal
fast breeder reactors in Idaho.
And then Wigner's group in Oak Ridge, building
what's called an aqueous homogeneous reactor.
This was not a Molten Salt Reactor, this used
Uranium and water.
And, well, I love this picture, a beaker of
liquid equals a thousand tons of coal.
That's actually a--that's actually a solution
there of--what is it?
Uranyl nit--Uranyl sulfate dissolved in heavy
water.
And they really ran this thing and it had
a lot of advantages but it had one basic disadvantage.
There was no aqueous form of Thorium.
You couldn't dissolve Thorium into water.
You could dissolve Uranium into water but
you couldn't do it with Thorium.
And that was a real problem as they tried
to build fluid fuelled reactors.
They didn't know how to solve it.
They worked on it, they worked on it, but
it didn't go anywhere.
Well, every now and then something sucker
punches you from a direction you're not ready
for.
And this is what happened to these guys at
Oak Ridge.
They had this program to build and aircraft
reactor and most of them thought it was pretty
hokey.
They didn't think it was a good idea.
In fact, Alvin Weinberg, who ran the lab said,
"You know, it wasn't like we all suddenly
believed that nuclear airplanes were a good
idea.
It was the only way that we could keep building
reactors.
That the purpose was unattainable if not foolish
was not so important.
A high temperature reactor could be useful
for other purposes even if it never propelled
an airplane."
So, in the--in one of the earlier examples
of scientists using the government's money
and the military's money, they definitely
took a surprise and said, "Okay.
Sure, we'll build you an aircraft reactor."
And it was, boy, it was super hard because
one of the basic problems with solid fuel--you
burn solid fuel really hard and it begins
to striate and it's not very thermally conductive
and you get radiation damage and all your
fission product gases are trapped in there,
and the worst one being that Xenon 135 it
just gobbles up neutrons.
In fact when you run a reactor really hard,
you make a lot of xenon.
It makes it very difficult to control.
You can get what's called xenon transients
where the reactor wants to shut down and I
don't have time to go into the details of
this but you can only imagine if you're flying
a nuclear bomber over Siberia and you run
the reactor too hard and the engineer goes
back and says, "Captain, we're going to have
shut down for 9 hours because the xenon's
overriding our reactivity control."
"Okay that's fine, I'll just--I'll just put
down right here on the--on the snowfields
of Siberia and wait for my xenon to decay
away."
No, that's not an option, that's a really
bad day.
So, they learned really quick.
They're like "Man, we have got to have a reactor
that does not have this problem."
And the guy's at Oak Ridge were just scraping
their heads going, "God, how are we going
to do this?
Because we know this water version isn't going
to work, what can we possibly make this out
of?"
Somebody had the great idea, "Say hey, what
about a fluoride?"
Well what's the fluoride?
Fluorides are salt, salts are really, really
chemically stable.
We use salts all the time, I brush my teeth
this morning with some sodium fluoride.
And the nice thing about salt--about fluorides
is because they're so darn happy being what
they are, they can go to really high temperatures
and they don't have to have high pressures.
This was sort of the beginning of the idea
like, "Okay.
Sounds good so far, I can see where you're
going."
They're sort of the inherent physical married
to the idea but they thought, "Gee, can we
build a reactor out of this stuff?"
And this was the birth of the liquid fluoride
reactor.
So say "Can we dissolve uranium and flour--and
thorium into salt?"
Well, it turns out yeah, you can.
It's really easy in fact, you can dissolve
uranium tetrafluoride and thorium tetrafluoride
into the salt and guess what?
You can actually theoretically make a reactor.
Now again, this was still theoretical, okay,
check.
It'll dissolve good, we know we've got a--an--a
liquid form of thorium now but can we really
make a reactor out of it.
So they built this guy.
The aircraft reactor experiment, this was
the first liquid fluoride reactor.
This thing ran for about 100 hours at some
of the highest temperatures ever achieved
by a nuclear reactor and what's even cooler
about it was it did it at atmospheric pressure.
This wasn't some big high pressure reactor,
this was running at essentially ambient pressure
and they found out it was self-controlling.
And do you remember I told you guys about
the temperature coefficient of reactivity?
How do you make a reactor self-controlling?
They made it self-controlling because as the
salt would expand, there was less fuel in
the core and so the reaction rate would slow
down.
And as the salt got cooler and got denser,
there was more fuel in the core and the reaction
rate would increase.
So they found that this reactor just basically
ran itself, you know, as they would increase
the heat removal, it would power up, as they
would decrease the heat removal, it would
power down.
Now again, go back to the cockpit of the airplane.
This is a great thing if you're the pilot,
you don't want to have 15 guys sitting in
the back trying to run your reactor.
You want to put your hand on the--on the throttle
and go vroom.
And you want that reactor to go "Yeah, here
we go."
you know, and power right up.
And that's what this reactor could do because
of that very strong negative temperature coefficient
reactivity.
This reactor wanted to follow whatever you
wanted.
You didn't have to use control rods or move
it around.
It was self-controlling and it was chemically
stable, they figured out that, yeah, you could
have fission and it would still not screw
up the fuel.
This is a picture of the Air Force colonel,
Colonel Gassner who was shutting down the
reactor for the last time.
They only ran it for 100 hours, it was just
a sort of "see if it worked".
Okay, after that, boy they got so excited.
They wanted to build a really big version
of it.
They call it the Fireball and it was going
to be like 60 megawatts and it was going to
show how this was--was really going to power
an airplane.
But what happened was--oh, here--here's a
great picture showing you what this salt looks
like.
It looks a lot like Palmolive, you know, if
you ever had a--you ever had to go wash the
dishes with Palmolive.
2 like that liquid but it doesn't run like
that.
You--you go and think it's really viscous,
it's not--actually runs a lot like water.
So it's--you can pour it.
Now--now it's hot, don't get me wrong you
don't want to pour it in your hand.
But it-but it has about the consistency of
water, has great heat transfer properties
as well.
Okay, so a lesson from LFTR to extract from
all this is, sometimes the right answer comes
at a completely unexpected direction.
That's what the aircraft reactor program was
to Weinberg and Wigner.
And those guys trying to use Thorium, it was
not at all what they expected.
And fluoride fuel is the only way to build
a high temperature, high powered institute
reactor.
You build it out of solid fuel, you're going
to be fighting your xenon, there's no way
around that.
Except Fast spectrum--indication of problems.
Okay.
So, Weinberg after the Aircraft Reactor Program
began to go caput, he's like "You know, I
never really wanted the Aircraft Reactor program
anyway.
I wanted a civilian Reactor Program."
I love this quote, "Until then I had never
quite appreciated the full significance of
the breeder but now I became obsessed with
the idea that humanity's whole future depended
on the breeder."
Now when he says breeder, he means the ability
to burn up thorium, that's really what he's
saying.
We tend to think of liquid metal breeders,
that's really what he's talking about and
I understand that kind of zeal and passion
because I feel the same way myself.
I really feel like this discovery of Thorium
and its potential Earth shattering consequences
for us and that indeed if we are going to
have a sustainable industrial society on this
planet, that it's going to be dependant on
this technology.
So he began to put together a small team and
get funding from the Atomic Energy Commission
to continue designing this.
Now he had a basic advantage.
It was really easy to separate Thorium and
Uranium.
And this is another great trick that nature
gives us.
If you pack Uranium in solution with fluorine
gas it will turn into Uranium hexafluoride,
which is gaseous.
And that will just come right as a solution.
So, it was a one step process to remove the
fuel that you're making from what it is that
will become the fuel, in this case the Thorium.
This trick doesn't work in Uranium Plutonium
but it does work in Thorium Uranium because
of the particular chemical characteristics
of that fuel.
So again nature is--nature is kind.
Lesson for LFTR.
The ability to separate this stuff is a big
deal and you can do it at high temperatures.
You can do it at high radiation fields.
It's inherently chemical process.
There's no cooling off that's required.
So, this got them even more excited and then
serendipity struck.
One day, they were meeting in 1959 and they
found out the Atomic Energy Commission wanted
to build experiments.
And so they had to cost less than a million
dollars.
The guy who did--the guy who ran the--what
will be--what I'm about to explain you, the
Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, he wrote the
proposal in a day.
How many of you guys could write a proposal
for a nuclear reactor in a day?
Yeah, I couldn't do it either but--all right,
Chris could do it, Chris--But what happens
sometimes in the real world is when people
wants stuff they don't want to be patient
for it.
They want the answer right then.
They want the proposal.
So, you got to be ready.
And to keep things simple he just wanted to
simulate the core of what it was they wanted
to build.
He wanted to have it bigger.
He wanted to have it--have more power but
there are all these limitations based on what
the Atomic Energy Commission wanted.
So this is what the Molten Salt Reactor experiment
looked like.
It was a bunch of graphite fuel elements in
that tank and then they would flow the fluoride
fuel through it.
And here it is sitting in its hot cell.
You can see the reactor kind of in the middle.
There's the salt pump and the heat exchangers.
So, you'd run the--you'd run the salt through
the core and it would get hot and then it
would give up its heat to the heat exchanger
and then it would all be driven by these pumps.
And they ran this reactor for about five years
from 1965-1969 and during that time, it demonstrated
a lot of the features that we would want ultimately
in LFTR. Online refueling, they did it.
This is actually a capsule and they would
load it up with new fuel and they just dropped
it in the reactor and they were just kind
of--the fuels in the capsule just dissolve
away.
When they wanted to take out the Uranium,
they use Fluorination.
They showed that that worked.
They could remove all the Uranium.
Actually did that 1968.
And then they did a sample where they took
out some of the fuel and they distilled away
all the good stuff out of the fuel and they
just left behind the waste.
So, each of these steps was really demonstrated
successfully in the MSRE.
And they have this fantastic safety feature.
It's called the freeze plug.
Now, because the fuel is so hot, if you cool
it down it will--it will freeze.
And it will lock up in the pipe and so they
had a little blower over a flattened section
of pipe and it kept--it kept part of the salt
just frozen right there in the pipe.
So, the whole idea was if you lost all power
to the reactor if you turned all the lights
off, all the juice off, all that would happen
is that Freeze plug would melt and the salt
would drain out into a drain tank that was
passably cooled.
Now this is so cool because this reactor--in
most reactors you have to take the coolant
to the reactor in an emergency situation.
And that makes them hard to build because
you got to have the regular core be able to
run and make power 99.9% of the time but in
an emergency case, you got to be able to get
the emergency cooling in and override everything
else you designed for all the other times.
This reactor was the complete opposite.
You could have the core just do what it was
supposed to and if there was an emergency
it would send the fuel to the safe place.
It would send the fuel to the place where
it was going to be passably cooled.
So, fantastic safety feature.
And one of the ones that they demonstrated
in the MSRE--in fact these guys on Friday
afternoons they wouldn't want to leave the
reactor running over the weekend.
So they'd just go in and they turn off all
the power and the salt plug would freeze.
The thing would drain into the tanks.
It would lock--it would freeze up over the
weekend they'd come back on Monday.
They turned the heaters on.
They pumped it out of the tanks back up into
the core.
So, I mean they did this over and over, over
again.
Fantastic safety feature.
Here's a picture of the building the MSRE
is in today.
Now, that's not actually the MSRE but, uh,
it's down--it's actually right below that
concrete slab.
I was there a few years ago and--and got to
see the buildings.
So if you ever get a chance to go out to Oak
Ridge National Labs, you know, tell them to
take you over to the old MSRE building ORNL
7503.
Okay.
So lessons for LFTR from the MSRE.
You got to be ready to demonstrate your idea
because when the time comes you're not going
to get much warning.
They're going to want the answer and a working
example is worth stacks of documents and theories.
So, one of things I love to tell people like,
you know, "How do you know this works?"
And I go "We'll, they did it.
It really works."
And they demonstrated not all but most of
the features that are pertinent to this reactor.
Well after doing that, they really wanted
to investigate how to build the real thing
and they began to go through different design
concepts for what would be called the Molten
Salt Breeder Reactor, The MSBR.
Some had pebbles, some had prismatic filaments
but the basic idea was that you were going
to have these sections in the middle that
would run the core salt and you're going to
surround the whole thing with a Thorium blanket.
Kind of like that schematic that we showed
earlier.
This was about where they--where they stopped
on this--on this design.
It's a little hard to see but the fuel would
get pumped up through the middle, go up to
the top and then come back down in an annulus.
And it--it led to a lot of plumbing problems
and some very tight tolerances on graphite.
And that was a real concern for them because
they didn't know how graphite was going to
respond under irradiation.
And here's more pictures just showing what
the reactor looked like in the building.
But the really appealing thing about this
approach was they had this super simple fuel
cycle.
I mean you would make the--you would make
the fuel, you would fluorinate it out, you
would introduce it to the core, you'd burn
it up.
When it was time to reprocess the core, you
take out the fuel, you distill off the good
stuff and you were just left with fission
products.
So, it was just a super simple closed nuclear
fuel cycle.
Here it is in--in more schematics.
I'm--I'm going to leave all these slides,
make them available to you so you can peruse
these at your leisure.
A lot of these things I'm, I'm flying through
because we don't have a lot of time.
But I want you to, to get an idea for the
depth of the work they did.
Now, the real problem they had was with graphite.
Graphite would swell--or first it would contract
and then it would swell under irradiation.
And as they began to realize this they thought,
"A lot of our plans for how we were going
to build this reactor aren't going to work
just because of tolerancing and how graphite
is going to change."
and so forth.
So, they had to--they had to move away from
the two-fluid reactor, it had a plumbing problem.
So, for us we got to realize that the plumbing
problem's got to be understood and managed.
And I--I think it can be, I have some really
good ideas with that.
But the overall appeal of the two-fluid reactor
is still great and it really comes from that
very, very simple fuel cycle.
Well, after the two-fluid they moved to a
one-fluid and it's like they traded one set
of problems for another.
Now, the Thorium and the Uranium were mixed
together in one fuel.
The core was a lot simpler it was just these--it
was actually very, very simple.
It was just these prismatic fuel elements
of graphite--I'm sorry not fuel elements,
prismatic elements of graphite.
You'd pump the salt in the bottom, it would
flow up through all the graphite elements
and then it would be pumped up out the top.
So, it was a very, very simple reactor design.
Unfortunately the simplicity in the reactor
led to complications in the reprocessing.
The reprocessing went from being easy to hard.
And the basic reason for that is it's very
difficult to separate Thorium from the fission
products.
They chemically are very similar.
In the two-fluid approach, the Thorium wasn't
mixed with fission products because fission
wasn't taking place where the Thorium was.
The Thorium's in the blanket, the Uranium
is in the core.
It's easy to separate Uranium from fission
products, it's hard to separate Thorium.
So, that's why it got complicated.
So, a lesson for LFTR, fixing one problem
can create another and the other problem you
create often is bigger than the first.
So, maybe we should be thinking about a two-fluid
reactor, everybody who's on my forum knows
that I'm a big advocate for the two-fluid
reactor.
Okay.
Well, if you want to have a reactor that is
fairly compact, you have to think a little
bit about, "Why are reactors not so compact
today?"
And this shows what a containment structure
looks like in a typical light water reactor.
Here's the reactor which, although it's big,
is not nearly as big as the containment structure.
The reason that containment is so big is because
the water in the reactor--if the reactor is
breached somehow the water will flash the
seam.
That water is being held in about 3,000 psi
of pressure.
So, if you breach the--the reactor or the
steam generators or the pipes, that's all
going to flash to water.
So, your containment has to be big enough
to hold all that steam under pressure.
And in fact at the Watts Bar reactor they
have these huge ice condensers that are just
there to condense the steam that would come
out in the case of the reactor breaking or
being breached.
On the other hand with the fluid reactor technology,
we have these really close-fitting containments.
Because even if you were to go and breach
the side of the reactor--well the first thing
that would happen is the salt would probably
come out and freeze and plug the hole.
Because it's not under pressure and the outside's
cooler than the inside.
So, that's that, that, that would be nice
thing but if you managed to get it out it
would kind of go "glug, glug, glug".
It would fall down the side it would hit this
pan and it would roll down into the drain
tank.
So, there's no evolution of--of--of steam.
There's no chemical reaction that's going
to take place.
And either way whether you do terrible damage
to the reactor or shut it normally, it's going
to end up in the drain tanks.
So, that's a really nice feature if you want
to think about deep levels of safety, if you
want to think about really inherent possibilities
of safety.
So, lesson for LFTR, if you want a close-fitting
containment, don't have anything that changes
phases or undergoes violent reactions like
liquid sodium.
That's the nice thing about this reactor.
All right.
So what happened to this, well part of it
was is the Atomic Energy Commission was being
run by a guy named Milt Shaw.
And he was very driven to build the liquid
metal fast breeder reactor.
These are Weinberg's he said "Milt tackled
the LMFBR project with Rickover--Ricko" you--you
know what that word is.
Dedication will be into any that stood in
his way.
This caused problems for me since I was still
espousing the molten-salt breeder.
Milt was like a ball he--he enjoyed congressional
confidence so his position in AEC was unassailable.
It was clear he had little confidence in me
or in ORNL.
After all, we were pushing molten-salt and
not the fast breeder.
More than that, we were being quite troublesome
over the question of reactor safety.
I didn't mention this earlier, Allen Weinberg
invented the light-water reactor.
He holds the patent on that design that is
so prevalent in the world today.
He knew its--its capabilities and its limitations.
He felt like this was a better approach but
that was not a popular opinion of the time.
There was a congressman who ran the Joint
Commission on Atomic Energy, Chet Holifield
and they were having a conversation, he and
Milt and Alvin and Congressman Holifield got
exasperated and said "Alvin if you are so
concerned about the safety of reactors, I
think it may be time for you to leave nuclear
energy."
So what happened was Alvin Weinberg, the Wernher
Von Braun of Oak Ridge got fired and he got
fired because his opinions were variance with
those of the Atomic Energy Commission and
Congressional Leadership.
He called Nuclear Energy a Faustian bargain
and he promoted the molten-salt breeder.
So, very important lesson for LFTR, even if
you invented the light-water reactor, your
bosses will still fire you if you get in the
way of their plans.
>> [INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: The comment was that Rickover
was even worse than the Atomic Energy Commission.
He owned a huge chunk of the Navy and--sorry,
what's the last part?
>> And Congressional Approval.
>> SORENSEN: And Congressional approval.
So, these guys, were in--were in--were in
very powerful positions.
Okay, so we'll set that part of the story
down for awhile and pick up a very interesting
part of the story which is, what do we do
now?
What are we facing now?
Well if we look at spent nuclear stuff that
comes out of our reactors.
And we look at the radiotoxicity of the three
parts of that.
The fission products, the Uranium, the spent
nuclear fuel we can see that the radiotoxicity
of the fission product drops off rather rapidly
over about 300 to 500 years.
On the other hand, the unburned fuel the Plutonium
has a much longer radiotoxicity.
So, if you can go and--if you can go and remove
that or not create it you can have a radiotoxicity
over the long run that's much lower than even
Uranium ore.
Now how do you do this in a Thorium Reactor?
Well the basic physical advantage you have
of Thorium is you're starting at mass number
232, and you've got to march pretty far up
the chain before you get to Plutonium up at
239.
And as you march up that chain there's two
big on-ramps called fission where you--where
you're probably going to get turned into energy
so the upshot of it is--is you can run a Thorium
reactor in a way where you will make very,
very little Plutonium.
In fact if you pull out the Neptunium you'll
make no Plutonium at all.
But if you don't you're going to have a very
small amount of Plutonium.
On the other hand in a Light Water Reactor
that uses of U230A, you're going to make Plutonium
on your very first step.
You going to absorb a neutron, you're going
to make Plutonium 239.
And it's not as good of a fissile fuel.
You begin marching though these higher actinides
and their capture-to-fission ratios and a
whole bunch of other stuff I don't want to
get into.
But what it means though is, if you want to
avoid making the long-lived stuff, your best
bet is to start with--with Thorium.
So, avoid making transuranics while you make
power and this is possible if you use the
Thorium approach.
Now, today we've got spent nuclear fuel accumulating
from our nuclear reactors.
A typical one gigawatt reactor will make about
35 tons of spent nuclear fuel each year and
what they do is they take this fuel which
is very hot because of the decay of the fission
products and they put it in these cooling
pools and it cools down.
The radioactivity in the heat generation drop
exponentially over time but we're accumulating
this stuff.
Here's, here's a graph that really opened
up my eyes.
This is, this is the amount of spent nuclear
fuel we have and this line right here represents
how much we can legally put in Yucca Mountain.
Now we'll get to Yucca Mountain in just a
minute.
But you can see that, it's not going to be
long before our rate of generation's spent
nuclear fuel is going to have Yucca pretty
full.
And then even if we expand Yucca Mountain
which is perfectly possible.
Yucca Mountain could be--could hold a lot
more spent nuclear fuel than it does, it doesn't
take all that long to get there.
Especially the constant 100 Gigawatts we're
making today.
If we start building more nuclear reactors
and having more power then--And I mean when
I say nuclear reactors I mean light water
reactors, we're going to hit those limits
a lot sooner.
This is a really big deal for a government
that's trying to figure out what to do with
spent nuclear fuel.
Under current nuclear regulations--under current
regulations we can't hold all the spent nuclear
fuel we're going to create, in Yucca Mountain.
And especially if we build, we build a lot
more of these LFTRs.
So this was the approach that's been advocated
in the Department of Energy for the last seven
or eight years or so.
It's now no longer being advocated but this
is what they had said is, we're going to take
spent nuclear fuel and we're going to go separate
it and we're going to make fuel for a fast
burner reactor rather than a fast breeder
reactor.
We're going to go and we're going to burn
it up and then that's going to reduce the
amount of the transuranic waste that we're
going to send to Yucca Mountain.
Now, our current approach to nuclear reprocessing--this
is often called aqueous reprocessing or Purex
or Urex or some variants of Herex--and it's
based on dissolving nuclear fuel in nitric
acid and liquids and so forth.
You have to let the nuclear fuel cool down
before you do, quite a bit in fact, and it's
a very complicated process.
Because like I said before, the first thing
you do is you're taking a solid and you turn
it into a liquid.
And then once you turn it to a liquid, you're
trying to separate all the piece parts and
the components out, and then at the end you're
trying take this liquid and turn it back into
a solid again.
And so, our typical approach to reprocessing
is quite complicated and quite expensive.
Now, the French have--they've really mastered
this, I mean, they have a facility at the
Hague where--where they do this but it's a
big facility and they spent a lot of money
to make this work.
We know it's possible but it's difficult.
Now, on the other hand, the reprocessing we
talked about in the fluid--in the flood reactor's
really simple.
We just fluorinate the blanket and we introduce
it into the core and on a batch scale--on
a--on a batch scale approach, we can go and
we can process out that core.
This doesn't has to be done really regularly.
It can be done on a longer time scale.
So, this is a complete nuclear fuel cycle
boiled down to just a handful of steps.
Okay.
So, the natural question to ask is, "Is there
anything that this fluoride reactor technology
could do for our existing light water spent
fuel problem?"
And the answer is, "Yes, absolutely."
Because the first step we do with normal Uranium
Oxide that we mine is we turn it into a fluoride.
That's the--that's how it's put into a gaseous
diffusion plant.
Chris asked me to ask whoever is on the VC
to mute the mic.
So, I'm going to assume whoever you are, you
know what that is.
Okay.
So, here's the composition of spent nuclear
fuel most of it is unburned Uranium.
Then there's this ZIRC, which is mostly Zirconium,
that's the cladding that goes around the outside
of the fuel element.
There's some hardware that's used to pull
the fuel elements in and out of the core.
Now you see that it says TRU 0.7%, that's
the long live nuclear waste, that's the stuff
that really drives a place like Yucca Mountain
to say, "What are we going to do with this
stuff?" because the other--that's the fission
products.
They are very radioactive right now, but because
they are so radioactive, they're decaying
quickly.
They're going away and within a few hundred
years they'll drop below background levels
of radiation.
The fission products are not our long term
waste problem.
The long term waste problem is the transuranics.
They are the ones that have thousand year
half-lives and so forth.
Okay.
So, what could we do about this?
We could fluorinate that oxide fuel.
We could change it from being oxides and make
it into fluorides.
And then once we got all these fluorides we
can start using all those same chemical tricks
that we use on LFTR but now use it on spent
nuclear fuel.
We take out the Uranium as Uranium Hexafluoride.
We bubble fluorine gas through it and take
it all out.
Now, Uranium that's been in a reactor is basically
no different than the Uranium that's been
in the ground.
In fact my vote for it would be to just go
stick it in a cave somewhere because it's
no different than the Uranium that's sitting
anywhere else.
What's really--what we want to do is to burn
up those transuranic isotopes and there's
a number of different ways we can do it.
We could do that in LFTR, we could do it in
variations of LFTR that use of fluorides and
salt fluorides.
But the idea is we want to burn this stuff
up and not make it into a long term problem.
We want to isolate those fission products
and let them decay away and then we want to
use LFTR to stop making more transuranic waste.
Because we run LFTR, we can avoid making the
transuranic waste.
It's probably not stupid.
>> If you take Uranium [INDISTINCT] ...fission
products...
[INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: Yes, yes.
>> [INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: Other.
>> ...because that means that, like the vast
majority of uranium never fissions.
>> SORENSEN: The vast majority of uranium
never fissions, you're absolutely right.
So, you get--the question was--is, where are
the fission products?
And there in the other category and then he
made a comment that the vast majority of the
Uranium never fissions and that's correct.
In a light water reactor the vast majority
does not fission.
Okay.
Now if we could take this approach, the way
we're going now is this red line, you see,
if we wait for it to get to the same radiotoxicity
as Natural Uranium Ore, we're looking at,
you know, 300,000 years.
If we go ahead and take out the Plutonium
and the Uranium we can get up to 9,000 years,
which isn't that impressive to get it to there.
But if we remove all the Plutonium, Uranium
and the minor actinides that the unburned
fuel, so to speak, we can get that down to
300 years.
That's basically the curve for just fission
products.
And that green curve is where we can get with
LFTR, we can get there and even though we
haven't been using LFTR, we've been using
light water reactors, we can still go use
this fluoride reactor technology to go and
remove those transuranics and to destroy them.
The Uranium, we just go stick in the ground
somewhere or we could re-enrich it or do whatever
we want with it.
I have another request for a mic to be muted
by the VC.
>> Whoever is on the VC turn off your mic.
>> SORENSEN: Okay.
That was Chris.
Better listen to him.
>> Okay.
>> SORENSEN: Okay.
So, my lesson for LFTR.
We can use these Fluoride reprocessing technologies
to fix the problem that we have right now
handling spent nuclear fuel.
And then we can use the results of that to
start new LFTRs that don't contribute to the
problem in the future.
So, this is really the break in nuclear technology
that I'm proposing that we take is to say
let's go in this Thorium direction.
This direction that we ignored for so long
that was proposed at the very dawn of the
nuclear age.
And let's use this approach to solve our long
term nuclear problems.
I want to show you the waste generation because
a lot of times I read criticisms of nuclear
power that are based around how much waste
you generate.
And so I started it with the assumption that
we were going to make a giga-watt year of
energy and I used an anti-nuclear site to
give me these numbers.
So, I figured it would be considered fairly
conservative if I used the Anti-nuclear site.
There's better sites than this but--the whole
idea is to get a gigawatt year of energy in
a Uranium fuelled reactor we're going to mine
about 80,000 tons of Uranium containing 0.2%.
Now, there are some sites that have a lot
better than that.
There are some sites that have much higher
water grades than that some that are worse.
So, I mean take that for what it's worth or
scale that for the grade of Uranium.
>> You said 80,000 but it says 800,000.
>> SORENSEN: I'm sorry 800,000, my, thank
you.
Thank you for catching me on that.
Okay.
Now--and after we go and we make all this
stuff we're going to be left with, you know,
35-40 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and
that's where we are today.
This is what we do today.
Now, contrast that with the Thorium approach.
Now, who's got the--who's got the Thorium?
Ian, you got the Thorium?
Okay.
Now, I don't recall exactly what is the percentage
of Thorium in this rock.
What would you say it was, Ian?
>> Half percent.
>> SORENSEN: Half percent.
Okay.
So, I'm going to show there "half percent."
>> High grade ore for Thorium is 20.
>> SORENSEN: Okay.
And a high grade ore for Thorium is 20 % so
I'm going to--I'm going to show you.
>> [INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: Here we go, this is the piece
of half a percent--this is a shell right,
Ian?
>> I don't know if that's the shell or not
[INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: This is from the Lemhi Pass in
Idaho.
This piece of rock right here contains about
half a percent of Thorium.
And I believe about 25 milligrams of Thorium,
is that correct?
>> Yeah.
That has sufficient energy to orbit an SUV.
>> SORENSEN: Sufficient energy to orbit an
SUV that's pretty exciting.
Okay.
So here--there's something perverse about
that but I don't what it is.
Okay.
So, here I am, I'm holding this piece of rock
right here with half a percent of thorium.
If I had two hundred metric tons of this rock,
I would go and I would process it to get out
roughly a metric ton of Thorium.
And If I did that, I would be able to put
that Thorium in a LFTR and I'd be able to
burn it up completely to U-233.
And I would make about 0.8 metric tons of
spent nuclear fuel.
That would just be the fission product.
So, 200 tons of this rock is not so hard for
me to imagine.
We can probab--I'm not--how much do you think
200 tons of this rock?
I bet we could put a pile of it in this room.
I don't know, we might break the floor.
But I mean you're talking about a gigawatt
year of energy.
This is just a staggering amount of energy.
And there's a lot, there's a lot more where
this came from in the Lemhi Pass of Idaho.
So, this is pretty exciting to have a technology--Weinberg
called it burning the rocks.
He said, he said "Boy, this is so good that
you can literally mine rock just for its energy
content."
In fact I did a calculation that if you took
the average crust of the earth--a cubic meter
of average crust has about 12 grams of Thorium
in it.
And that would be enough to power your life
for about 10-15 years.
In--in Western standards.
So, that's an awful lot of energy.
That's a, that's a pretty neat rock.
Yes sir?
>> You still have 8% [INDISTINCT] ...fission
products...
[INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: Okay.
Those are--yeah.
That's a good question.
He said you still have a--in fact you still
have the same mass.
You don't really change mass much as you burn
this up.
So, if you burn up a ton of Thorium you're
going to get a ton of fission products.
The fission products are, like I said, they're
very highly radioactive, there's a whole bunch
of them from a...
>> Some of them are not radioactive [INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: Okay.
Yeah.
They all are born very radioactive but because
they're so reactive within a week half of
them have decayed to stability.
I was really amazed when I started doing the
calculations.
How fast fission products find stability.
They do it really quickly.
So, in a week you have about half are stable
and about a year you have 75% are stable.
So, you can actually go and take that waste
and you can begin to isolate it for interesting
things in there, things like Rhodium.
Anybody know what Rhodium is?
It's worth about 10 times more per ounce than
gold.
You can extract it, it's stable after about
10 years there's no radioactive Rhodium left
in the spent fuel.
So--and there's other things you can extract
from spent fuel that are very useful.
In fact, some of the most useful things in
spent fuel are radioactive isotopes, things
like Strontium 90, Cesium 137, that could
be used to a, gee, what's the word, irradiate
food and destroy pathogens.
There's a number of very interesting things
that you can do with these things.
But right off the bat, we're talking about
a much smaller waste form.
And a waste form that's in a way that we can
then isolate the pieces that we're interested
in much more easily because they're liquid.
Okay.
So, I'll come back to the chart I showed at
the beginning, which was starting with 250
tons of Natural Uranium that came out of our
mining process went up with 35 tons of spent
fuel.
But one ton of Natural Thorium will give us
the same amount of power and within ten years
83% of those fission products are stable and
can be sold.
Yes sir?
>> [INDISTINCT] what makes Thorium [INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: The thing that makes the Thorium
fundamentally more energy dense is that we
can burn it all up in a thermal spectrum.
In a thermal spectrum reactor, both of these
are thermal spectrum reactors, you can only
burn a part of the Uranium in a thermal spectrum
reactor.
The only way to burn up all the Uranium is
to go to a fast spectrum reactor.
>> [INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: And Chris mentioned we would
reach it all the way to pure U-235 but then
what happens is you get fuel failure before
you are able to burn it all up.
So.
>> [INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: Yes the most--the most--you're
right.
The most abundant natural isotope of Thorium
is Thorium 232.
And that is the fuel for this versus in a
light water reactor, the most abundant isotope
is U-235 which is only 0.7%.
>> You get big savings because obviously Uranium
has to be enriched [INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: Yes.
>> [INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: The comment was--is, in order
to use the Uranium it has to be enriched.
And you can see most of the Uranium ends up
never going to the reactor.
It ends up as depleted Uranium at the enrichment
plant.
Only 35 tons of it actually goes into the
reactor, versus in Thorium we can use it all
in this approach.
So, does that help answer your question?
That's the basic, I mean, if you take Uranium
and Thorium together they both have the same
energy density, if you fission them all up.
The real advantage is the ability to fission
up the Thorium all the way in a thermal reactor.
That's the big hit in--in--in the Thorium
Fluoride approach.
Okay.
And then just--again showing some of these
slides I showed at the beginning, if we take
this approach and we take this radical increase
in energy efficiency, and I love it when people
talk about efficiency is our low hanging fruit.
That's what we need to go out for first, I
go, "Yup, absolutely.
Let's go after efficiency."
I'll give you 301 improvement on efficiency
by going with Thorium and the Fluoride reactor
over Uranium.
This is--in conclusion, this gives us options
for inherently safe proliferation resistant
economic nuclear power that can last thousands,
if not millions of years.
It's really fun to run the numbers on this
and find out just how good this really is.
It's almost staggering and you--and if you
get the feeling, oh man this really could
be the answer, this could be a--the silver
bullet than enables us to power our industrial
society.
And this also offers real options for solving
the long term issues surrounding our existing
light water fuel, our spent nuclear fuel.
And ultimately preventing the formation of
new transuranic waste.
And finally, I want to thank Google because
it's fun to be here.
And I love Gmail, and I love your search engine,
and almost all the stuff I have done on this
has been thanks to Google.
So, I could not have done anywhere near the
work I've done if it hadn't been for Google.
And you didn't even charge me for it.
You guys are awesome.
Thank you so much and thank you for having
me today.
>> As we end the talk just before questions,
I'd like to give a shout out to Virginia Gillerman,
who's a Geologist at the Idaho Geological
Survey.
She got us these rocks at the last minute.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks a lot, Virginia.
>> I'll be around for questions.
We had a few but anybody have any more questions?
Yes, sir, right there?
You, all right, you go first.
>> [INDISTINCT]
>> I hate to say it, that was a such good
question but it was long, I can't--the cache
is over flooded, could you actually come up
here and say your questions, I would appreciate
that.
>> [INDISTINCT] it's going to be short now
that I set it up.
So, just to understand what you were saying
in principle the, one of the big advantages
of this Thorium process is that we breed Thorium
into Uranium and then these two species are--are
chemically extractable as opposed to being
two isotopes when you enrich Uranium you have
to do an isotopic separation which is much
harder.
So then my question is and I think you sort
of went through this with some of the chemistry
but just so--if you could give me a concise
answer.
This should be possible that Uranium 238 and
Plutonium 239 you could breed Uranium and
then chemically separate those two species.
But no one ever talks about that.
>> SORENSEN: You're absolutely right.
You can breed Uranium 238 to Plutonium 239
and you can do a chemical separation of those
two.
Couple of things with that, that's exactly
what they want to do in Fast breeder reactors.
They were just--first of all, they're using
solid fuel so they have to irradiate the target,
the blanket.
The Uranium 238 blanket for a certain period
of time before it's economically advantageous
to take it out and actually separate out the
bred Plutonium and then go and make new what
they called Driver fuel to go in the core.
So your first disadvantage is you're using
solid fuel now that--that can be overcome.
You can imagine doing fluid fuel versions
of the Uranium-Plutonium approach.
But in the other part is, is that beautiful
chemical trick I showed you where you could
fluorinate the Uranium out and leave the Thorium
and then work in Uranium-Plutonium.
They are too similar to each other.
But if you go to try the fluorinate out Plutonium
from Uranium what will happen first is all
the Uranium will come out.
So, if you're--if you're fluorinating the
blanket of Uranium you're going to end up
fluorinating all of it versus the stuff you
want.
And then it's really--it's really one of the
reasons nobody has really ever seriously proposed
doing it this way.
The other part of it is, is going back to
that basic idea that chemistry--I mean I'm
sorry, the neutronics.
You can't burn up the Plutonium effectively
unless you go to the fast spectrum.
So these effects work together to make this
process.
It's not impossible or inconceivable but from
an engineer approach this is basically a whole
lot more difficult than doing it this way.
One thing I love about this as an engineer
is like look at this to go, there are really
tangible straightforward easy to do already
been demonstrated steps.
That are based on well understood chemistry
that's been around a hundred years that we
can go and do and make this happen.
This isn't that hard comparatively.
So--was that--would that answer your question?
Okay.
And we can get anybody who has a question--if
you have a long question please just come
up and say it in the microphone.
Ma'am?
You ask the question is anyone actually doing
this?
Was that your question?
Is anyone actually building this?
No darn it.
Why not?
I know, I think the exact thing, "Why not?"
you know.
It's a great idea.
I had a slide, I took it out this morning.
It showed a pile of cash and I said Lessons
for LFTR.
Don't fool yourself this can cost a lot of
money.
So, it's a good thing I'm here, you know.
Yes Sir?
The question was, given proper funding and
a will to do so, how long would it take to
work these things out?
I've kind of--it's a very good question I
thought about it all myself.
I kind of broke into a couple of different
categories.
The first one I would call the Manhattan Project
Approach.
The Manhattan project Approach is everybody
gets a phone call that says "Stop what you're
doing, work on this.
We're throwing the whole national effort at
it, everything's at your disposal."
I think if we took that approach, which would
be my favorite actually, I honestly think
we could have a prototype up and running in
probably two or three years and we could have
production reactors being built in five years.
Now, truly I don't think that's going to happen.
You know, that is just only in brutal war
time scenarios do you really get that one.
The next level I call the Skunkworks Approach.
And the Skunkworks approach is you get good
funding, you get favorable political consideration,
you have the--the means and so forth you need
but people are still working 40 hour weeks,
you know.
They go home to their wives and children at
night, with their husbands or whatever.
And you live a regular life.
In that approach I could see us being to a
prototype reactor in about five years and
to a production series of reactors in about
10 years.
That would be the scenario I'd see there.
And then there's what I call the Business
as usual Approach which is an extrapolation
of what we're doing today.
In that approach nothing ever happens and
we never build this and we never get any further
than where we are now.
So hopefully we will--I would really like
to shoot for the Skunkworks Approach because
I think that is a reasonable approach to consider.
Lars?
I worked for the government and I've discovered
that there's an enormous variation in how
things cost depending on the skill and the
quality and the competency of the people executing
it.
Given competent intelligent people who are
executing this with a minimum of Mickey Mouse,
my estimate would be we could be to that prototype
reactor probably for three to four hundred
million dollars.
That would be my guess.
With Mickey Mouse and fooling around and goofing
off, billions.
So--but we don't want that we want smart people
and people who are working hard.
Man this is a fun place to come.
Lars?
>> Your estimate of 2-3 years that correlates
pretty well to the Manhattan project--that
was basically a two year project.
>> SORENSEN: The comment was the estimate
of 2-3 years correlates pretty well to the
Manhattan project.
And one of the things that I wanted to mention
when I was talking about the Plutonium up
there we showed, Plutonium for bombs versus
Thorium.
Plutonium was a laboratory curiosity.
I mean they discovered it in 1941 it was like,
"huh look Plutonium".
And from 1941 to 1945 when they actually dropped
a working Plutonium bomb on Nagasaki.
I mean you got to remember they went from,
"gee it exists" to "oh my goodness we can
make it" to "oh my goodness we are making
a lot of it" to understanding the metallurgy
and the fabrication and so forth.
Plutonium has crazy metallurgical properties.
It has, like, some eight different crystalline
phases and they all change depending on temperature.
I mean it was a--it was a devil to figure
out how to use Plutonium, how to stabilize
it and all these other tricks.
But I mean they were throwing unlimited national
resources at it essentially, at the brightest
minds on earth.
And they went from lab curiosity to working
system in four years.
So, I mean things can move really fast when
you have smart people who have nothing else
to do but do this.
And you read their mail.
>> [INDISTINCT] the original MSRE was a five-year
project.
The idea [INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: He means come--the original MSRE
was a five year project and that's--I love
that because that shows--they got the go in
1960 and they turned it on in 1965.
I'd say they knew way less about how to do
this than we know now.
In fact, they learned so many things from
running the MSRE that we would be able to
just skip right to having this enormous database
of knowledge.
Sir?
>> [INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: The question is, is there any
other countries that are looking at this,
yes.
There are other countries that are looking
at it.
Probably the most active program that's going
on this right now in the Czech Republic.
I had the good fortune to sit down with one
of their fluoride chemists.
His name is Dr. Jan Hulik--I'm sorry Uhlir,
sorry I confused him with you.
Dr. Jan Uhlir, and I sat down with him a few
weeks ago.
He is at a nuclear research institute there,
outside of Prague.
And they are doing great work with fluorination
and destroying spent nuclear fuel and we went
through--he gave a talk and I went through
all these points and it was just really clear
that they were really in the lead.
There is another group in France probably
about 20 or 30 strong that is also working
on this.
There's some interest in Japan.
There's great interest in Thorium in India
but not in this approach.
They are taking a solid core approach and
I really think they are taking the wrong approach
because it's going to take them a long time
to realize the benefits of Thorium by going
the solid core route.
Whereas, if they went the liquid fuelled route
it would happen a whole lot faster.
But India says more about Thorium than anybody
else.
I mean they're absolutely committed to becoming
energy independent on Thorium.
And I would love to help them go and do it
the way that will take a whole lot less time
and money so.
Sir?
>> What's the best size for a Thorium reactor?
[INDISTINCT] make it small [INDISTINCT] or
making it bigger?
>> SORENSEN: The question was, "what's the
best size for a Thorium reactor?"
And let me jump back and show you something.
That's a great question.
It enables me to tell you something that I
didn't get to say in the talk which is one
of the big problems when you went from the
one-fluid to the two-fluid.
Let me bring this up.
That Thorium blanket also acts as a neutron
shield and its kind of a good place for neutrons
to go to die.
When you make that all one fluid, you get
fission throughout the volume of the reactor
and you get a lot of neutron leakage.
So what that meant when they went from one-fluid
to two-fluid was they could only make them
big.
And if they made it much smaller than about
one gigawatt electric, they couldn't continue
to burn Thorium.
They couldn't get a conversion ratio of one.
>> That's a one-fluid reactor?
>> SORENSEN: That's a one-fluid reactor whereas
if you go with the two-fluid reactor because
of the basically almost think of it like an
optical density of that blanket but in neutronic
terms.
If you go with the two-fluid reactor, you
can scale way down and you can scale way up.
So, the two-fluid reactor gives you remarkable
versatility and size.
I would say probably the practical lower limit
on a two-fluid is probably down, at a megawatt.
I mean you can build reactors that have less
thermal output than that, but they just don't
get any smaller, you know, you want it--what's
the size of which the physical dimensions
start--stops scaling down.
I would say probably down somewhere between
one to five megawatts.
And then how far up do you want to go?
Pretty much as far as you want.
I mean we could conceive building ten-gigawatt
LFTRs, but we have some power plant operators
here in the audience that said "No, that that's
not such a good idea."
You want to--you want to actually--it's ironic,
we talk about a lot about decentralized power.
This really lends itself to that approach
very well because you can imagine building
400 megawatt units or 100 megawatt in dispersing
them much more throughout our grid in the
way we do today with big systems.
And that promotes grid stability, these are
very stable operators.
They, they strongly follow the load and they
don't care if the sun is shining, or the wind's
don't blowing or anything else.
So, it would be really good for a National
Grid to have a whole bunch of these.
Yes, sir?
>> [INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: Okay.
It's going to be a long one.
>> So there--there are two elements to your
talk.
The building of a LFTR and burning up existing
spent fuel.
In reality, those two things are--are quite
separate.
They merely--they both depend upon the technology
of, of fluorinated separation.
Is that correct?
>> SORENSEN: They both--you're right, they
both do depend upon the technology.
But I would say they would go hand in hand
in the sense that if you were just to use
fluoride chemistry to try to separate out
these products from the light water fuel and
not destroy them, you probably wouldn't go
the fluoride chemistry route.
You'd probably stick with aqueous reprocessing.
But if you're then using those waste to feed
in to a new generation of LFTRs that aren't
going to produce the transuranic wastes, and
are going to burn up what it is you've already
made, then those two start to go really hand-in-hand
with one another.
So, I mean, if we were starting from a clean
sheet of paper, if we were a country who had
no nuclear power and we wanted to start our
nuclear economy as intelligently as possible,
we'd probably want to just go straight into
LFTR.
But right now, we have this heritage of our
light water reactors and the spent nuclear
fuels.
We need to think about, how we are going to
address this problem.
I mean, I sometimes debate with anti-nuclear
people on the internet and some of my friends
do too, and one of the things that really
bothers me, is when they say, "Oh, we need
to shut down our reactors because of the waste
problem."
And I go, "well, it's still going to be there
if you shut down all the nuclear reactors.
It's not going to magically disappear, you
know."
You got to figure out what to do with it.
And this is a way to transition into a future
that produces the power we need, but doesn't
keep having this problem.
Yes?
>> So where does the [INDISTINCT] waste.
Where does that go in, here?
>> SORENSEN: The question was, "You take the
transuranics and the waste, where does that
go in here?"
That could potentially replace the U-233 as
the initial fissile load.
You got to start this thing with something,
you just can't start it with pure Thorium.
It's got to have some fissile material to
start it.
The idea I really like is to have a few LFTRs
that are kind of dedicated to this work on
some really secure site.
And you would just feed them, this junk from
the light water reactors.
And then you would pull all of their U233
that they're making out, and not feed it back
into that reactor, but to go start other LFTRs
with it.
So, you could start most of your lifters clean
on U-233.
And you could have a few of them just kind
of dedicated to chewing through this transuranic
waste.
Did I answer your question?
>> Yes.
>> SORENSEN: Okay.
Let's get--well, we can talk more after.
I don't know have much time we have.
Do we need to--keep going?
Okay great.
Go ahead, sir.
>> Does this have any use in space?
>> SORENSEN: Does this have any use--what
is so funny.
The question was, "does this have any use
in space?"
That was the very first thing I looked at
with this because, you know, I worked for
the NASA.
And I got interested in this, from a friend
who worked at Oak Ridge.
And he said "you know this would make a great
space reactor."
And we spent a few years looking at it.
It has some advantages for space.
In fact, I would really like to go try it
out.
We probably wouldn't build LFTR though, for
space.
We would probably just have a fluoride reactor
that was being fed fissile fuel continuously.
We wouldn't probably go to the trouble of
trying to breed into Thorium or so forth just
because you're really driven in the space
reactor to minimize mass at all possible instances.
I wanted to look at LFTR but when I started
to running the numbers, I was like, "No.
This isn't the right answer for space.
I'll just feed it fissile material and let
it go out to Jupiter rather than"--Now, if
we wanted to build a base on the moon or if
we wanted to terraform Mars on the other hand,
if you want a long-term fuel supply, yes.
Go with LFTR, in fact, I think this should
make great power plant for terraforming Mars
you know.
Kind of showed my space cadet side there.
Yes, sir?
>> [INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: The question was is in my historical
recap I kind of trailed off with, with the
one-fluid reactor and its problems.
I didn't make the overt connection but when
Weinberg got fired from Oak Ridge, their political
protector was gone.
And it was not long thereafter before the
Atomic Energy Commission commissioned a report
called Wash 1222.
As I like to call it White Wash 1222.
That was a review of the technology.
It was very negative.
It focused almost exclusively on kind of little
minor nits in the engineering development
technology.
Completely ignored the safety, completely
ignored the waste, completely ignored the
proliferation and just said "hey, you got
these little issues."
The irony was that by the time the report
was issued, two of the three issues they focused
on had already been solved by the Oak Ridge
researchers.
And--but from a political stand point they
were swimming upstream.
They were--they're going the wrong direction.
What happened was the program was cancelled
in 1974, it was briefly reinstated in 1976
and they canceled again.
A bunch of Oak Ridge guys did try to kind
of keep the torch burning probably into the
80's.
But I got there a number of times; I've met
with the some of the old-timers.
There's really almost nobody there now who
was involved in this.
There are just a bit of all of them.
There is one individual but the vast majority--the
vast majority of them are dead.
The rest are retired or in old folk's homes
and I asked one of my [INDISTINCT] I even
go to the old folk's home and talk to them
and the guy says "Don't.
You don't want to do that.
They're--you would just embarrass them."
I said, "Okay, that's a good point."
Is Oak Ridge still the place to do this?
I don't think there is necessarily a central
nexus anymore for this.
That's why I think any country could go and
make this.
Any reasonably sized country could really
go and make this happen.
Personally, I'd love to see United States
do it, you know.
I mean, I think this would be a fantastic
project for a nation who developed this technology.
But there is no reason why any reasonable
sized country couldn't go and make this happen
quite successfully within their national resources.
Yes, sir?
>> What's the biggest obstacle?
Was it funding?
Is it political?
>> SORENSEN: The question, "What's the biggest
obstacle?
Is it funding?
Is it political?"
Right now, since there's zero funding, I would
say it's funding.
But I actually think there's a whole lot better
chance of making that problem go away.
One of the basic problems is, is this stuff
is completely different than what they do
in the nuclear world today.
A few weeks ago, I was at the American Nuclear
Society Conference in Atlanta.
And I mean, this is like the nexus of all
of your best and brightest engineers in the
field.
Yet nobody knows about this stuff.
I don't mean that in a discouraging way.
These are very, very smart people.
They just--I've almost finished my master's
degree in Nuclear Engineering.
In that time I had one course that talked
about breeding.
And during that course, about ten minutes
of it talked about Thorium.
And during that ten minutes none of it mentioned
fluoride reactors.
So, it's entirely possible to go to nuclear
engineering school and get a PhD and have
never been exposed to any of this stuff that
I told you about.
And then when you do go get in the field and
you learn how to run real reactors and solid
core and you learn how to control control
rods and run the feed water and all this other
kind of stuff.
I mean this technology is completely different.
It's like the difference between a typewriter
and a word processor.
You'll get the same thing in the end but what's
under the hood is just utterly and completely
different.
So, I think the real nuclear industry looks
at this and they go "You know, what are we
going to do with it?
We'd be starting from scratch."
So it's great for an entrepreneur but it's
rough for the legacy folks who would--who
would want to get into this.
>> [INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: The question was "The real nuclear
industry looks at this and says, 'Nuclear
power is safe.
Why change?'"
And you know the assertion here is not so
much over safety.
I mean the safety record of the nuclear industry
is really, really impressive.
It's--it--you would be hard pressed to find
an industry that has had less "deaths per
megawatt hour," the nuclear industry.
And I'd stand that up against hydro, wind,
solar, or any other which sounds surprising
until you find out, you know, people really
get killed building renewable energy systems.
Putting up windmills and putting solar panels
on the roof and things like that.
You can get killed doing that kind of thing.
As a friend of mine told me at a nuclear site,
if you drop your donut on the floor you'll
come back five minutes later, there'll be
a circle painted around it and there'll be
ten inspectors around it with clipboards,
and there'll be review--a safety review commissioned
to try to figure out why it was you dropped
your donut, you know.
So I mean these guys really run safe.
And I think the incentive here is really to
get past the waste concern and to get to those
higher fuel efficiencies.
And the safety is great, you know.
I don't want to come here and talk about an
unsafe reactor but I think that's the real
incentive.
Chris?
>> I think that our first incentive is that
the nuclear industry today makes the most--all
their money making fuel.
The Nuclear energy--industry today makes all
their money making fuel elements.
It's very expensive, it's very exacting, little
zirconium cans with precisely measured oxides
inside.
This would make all the fuel kind of at-the-plant
and it would--that revenue stream would go
away.
And that's a--it's a huge revenue stream and
none of the incoming players are really interested
in designing a reactor that cuts off their
big revenue stream in the future.
>> SORENSEN: That's excellent point he makes
because a lot of times back in the 60's, reactor
vendors would sell reactors at a slight loss
in order to lock in a long term fuel fabrication
contract.
It's almost like the razor blade's approach.
You sell the razor--you sell the unit cheap
and then you sell the blades expensive.
And so the whole cost structure around today's
nuclear is really not amenable to this approach
that has cheap, simple, easy to process fuel.
Yes sir?
>> [INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: The question was--is--the things
I've said are true for countries that already
have existing nuclear industries.
What about emerging countries who are doing
everything on their own?
Why can't they start here?
And the most obvious example to me, this is
India.
India is a really interesting situation because
they were cut off from purchasing nuclear
equipment when they tested their bombs in
the 1970's.
But there's a school of thought that I pretty
much subscribe to that says that was--that
was probably not a good idea.
That India really did not deserve to be treated
that way.
India has done remarkable things in nuclear
energy and could they start and go this direction?
Absolutely.
In fact, I would love to bend the ear of--of
Indian powers-that-be and say, "Hey, this
is a way for you to get to your goals with
thorium a whole lot more quickly than the
approach you're taking."
But in India there is a lot of inertia to
continue on the path they're going.
It's a different kind of inertia than we have
here but it is nevertheless a strong inertia.
But I think India is the most logical country
in the world to go after this.
Ma'am?
>> [INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: The question was "Are we or anybody
else tied in the Obama administration?"
Several of my friends and I on our own time,
did reach out to both the Obama and McCain
Campaigns previous to the election.
No, we don't treat this as a partisan thing.
The energy is for everybody.
And we were not able to meet with anyone from
the Obama campaign but we did have an opportunity
to talk with Senator McCain's chief energy
advisor, Jim Woolsey.
He was a former director of the CIA.
He really embraces--he thought it was a great
approach.
In fact his quote was "Call me on November
5th and we'll do something about this."
Well, you know McCain did not get elected,
Obama did.
I do think though that the goals of the Obama
administration are absolutely congruent with
this approach and I think they would find
it very interesting.
Oh, sorry?
>> [INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: The questions is "Does Steve
Chu know about this?"
Not to my knowledge.
There was a quote that came out that was attributed
to him when he was asked by a congressional
representative about this technology.
I have reasons to think that there were some
errors in the quote saying about how the reactor
was corrosive and--and there were uncertainties
and so forth.
I--you know, it's far better to get into afterwards,
but as far as I know the secretary has not
been briefed on this.
Although I would love to have the opportunity.
Sir?
>> [INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: What are the implications for
nuclear proliferations?
Well, we go back to some of the fundamentals,
which are that the Uranium 232 signature makes
this stuff very, very difficult to work with.
Now, the proliferation game is one you can
place so many what-if's with is--it's really
hard to get it to everybody's satisfaction.
Almost like you can get a one sigma and two
sigma and three sigma but you're not going
to get everybody.
But one piece that I think is very compelling
for this is because we've got this fuel in
a fluid form, we can do what I call "just
in time denaturing."
We can dump Uranium 238 into the core and
into the blanket and we can trash the quality
of any Uranium that's in there and we can
do that in a very, very short period of time.
You can't do that with solid fuel elements.
You can't take a solid fuel element and all
of a sudden change it's isotopics like that.
But you can with liquid and the implication--oh,
I'm sorry.
The implication for that though is, if you
had a secure facility, and you were under
some type of threat or attack, I mean you
could literally push a button and you will
make sure that nothing in there would ever
be remotely, conceivably useful for a weapon.
The downside of that is you then destroy the
ability of the plant to ever make power again,
you know, so...
>> You destroy that fuel?
>> SORENSEN: You just--I mean you destroyed
that fuel, so what you'd have to do is you
then have to take all that fuel out, you drain
it all, you have to restore it with new fuel.
But it would be a serious economic hit to
push that button, you know.
But there are scenarios where--where that
could be conceived.
I hate to get in the proliferation game because
there are so many what-ifs about it.
And one of the things that really blows, is
if you look at how countries really developed
nuclear weapons, they do the same way we did
it in the 1940s.
You build a pile of graphite, natural uranium,
and they made plutonium and they take it out.
That's how people develop nuclear weapons.
They don't use power reactors.
Last question.
>> Dave?
>> On a more positive note...[INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: On a more positive note.
>> What other applications could you use the
LFTR for in its distributed generation form,
like processed heat?
[INDISTINCT]
>> SORENSEN: The question was, "What other
applications can we use LFTR for and its distributed
processed heat?"
One of my favorites is the ability to use
the waste heat for desalinization.
Because we couple this reactor to a high temperature
gas turbine, we can then turn around and use
"wasty"--which normally is waste, we have
to throw it away to desalinate sea water.
I think that would probably a very, very nice
thing to have here in California as you tackle
water issues and concerns.
And pretty much any coastal place in the world
I think would be very interested in getting
desalinated sea water.
We can take the electricity from LFTR and
we can use that to create synthetic fuels.
One of them would be ammonia which we could
synthesize from atmospheric nitrogen and from
hydrogen that we'd split from water.
Another one that I'm very interested is called
dimethyl ether.
They can be synthesized from methanol and
you can synthesize the methanol from atmospheric
carbon dioxide and also from hydrogen that
you split from water.
So, you can imagine LFTRs running kind of
flat out all the day long to make power for
everybody and then at night when everybody
turns off their lights and go to sleep, they
switch over to "let's make--let's make fuel
for people" or charge your electric cars.
So, we know that to tackle our global warming
concerns, we're going to have to go after,
number one, coal, and number two, transportation.
And I really think that between this and electric
cars and some of these fuels like dimethyl
ether or ammonia, we can make a big difference.
Also one of the ones that excites me is the
thought, "ammonia is the basis of fertilizer
and fertilizer is the basis of modern agriculture."
Right now, our fertilizers are made predominantly
from hydrogen from natural gas.
Without fertilizer, five out six people on
this planet would be dead because we would
not be able to sustain the agriculture that
keeps our population alive.
We need to be able to make ammonia for fertilizer
and do it in a non-carbon emitting way and
that's a very exciting possibility.
All right, thank you so much.
>> [INDISTINCT]
>> I believe we're already turned off.
Look I'll just cut it for us.
