Why Thorium will be a Game-Changer in Energy
This is a thorium energy Alliance conference so it has thorium in the name and you would think that we would be talking about thorum all the time but think about all the talks that have been here it's mostly about uranium right that sucks we should be talking about thorium because thoriumm can do something unique and special that uranium cannot do and I've been pissed off by so many conferences that call it like Advanced reactors or whatever when it's not it's like light water reactors and I really think we should try to have a conference for example this one where we sort of look into the future and not into the past and so part of my talk today is about why I think thorium is special and I know many of you know this already but I hope some of my slides will give you courage to talk differently to your neighbors and friends and colleagues so I think many of us got excited about an image like this where the ball the size of a golf ball can supply with all the energy you need for your entire life not just electricity but everything Transportation all the products you need all your share of all the public roads and houses and Hospital everything it's amazing that you can can get all that energy out of this little ball and it cost only less than $100 so if you live for 100 years it's $1 per year that is amazing and that's why I think most the people in this room are here but the problem is we don't have the machine that can take the energy out of that ball and that's what we're trying to build and I know a few others who are trying the same and hopefully within a few years it will happen and I think we should all celebrate that like crazy we've been at this for quite a while now so thorium not only does it have unique properties in terms of being able to produce a huge amount of energy but there's also lots of thorium and a lot of times when you talk to uranium people they say there's a three or four times more thorium than there is uranium which is technically true but all the uranium reactors I know they run on uranium 235 and you know that orange little sliver there that uranium 235 it's very rare and you can't really use it you have to enrich it and everything so in reality there's a thousand times more thorium than there is uranium available to us I mean you can always debate about uranium and sea water and all that but thorium is just a lot easier to get to one thing that proves that is we already do mining for other materials and we get Thorium out of the ground when we do do mining for rare earth and gold and copper and shit and that thorium alone that we already get out of the ground today would be enough to power the entire electricity of the whole planet we don't need to open one additional mine so that is also amazing and you can't say that about uranium I mean now we we they said at cup 28 we need three times more uranium and everybody's scratching their head where's that going to come from and what about enrichment facilities and what is it called like fuel production and everything and of course the uranium price already went up just because they start talking about it so a lot of times when you talk to sort of the people from the general public they will tell you that nuclear ah it's too expensive it takes too long to build it has this awful waste and it's dangerous and I hope some of my slides today can sort of help you tell them what you think I agree that classical nuclear is too expensive and too slow no doubt about it it sucks but I think we should try to sort of rethink what can we do about that how can we solve that problem that it's too slow and too expensive I offer some ideas today and I hope we can have more discussions over a beer later then then people say it's dangerous that's definitely a hoax I mean nuclear is not dangerous I'll get back to that in some of my slides later and then they say oh there's all this awful waste ah yeah it is not the best waste I agree but maybe we can do something about it I mean let's try to look at it in a positive light then there's these guys that says oh there's these new reactors small modular reactors Advanced modular reactors generation four there's even people talking about generation five now Molten salt reactors high temperature reactors all this crap it doesn't change anything it's still the the old stuff that we've had for I don't know seven decades so please when you talk to your neighbor or your colleague about copenhagen atomics please don't call us a small modular reactor or Advanced reactor generation four or five or whatever we are something completely different from all these other okay so I'll try to sort of give you some ideas of how you can talk about the difference between uranium and thorium so here is a list of properties you could say for solid fuel reactors it's sort of I want you to go home don't trust me go home and look this up for yourself this is sort of the average numbers for solid fuel reactors you know those designs they last for 60 years maybe with extensions you can look up the uranium price on the web right now it's at 4500 for 5% enriched uranium in those those type of reactors you can get 1 to 2 GWh out of every kilogram of fuel some reactor designs are a little bit better than others but that's sort of the average for solid fuel reactors and you know that most of them take between 4 and 15 years to build I mean maybe one is a little bit faster and definitely some are a little bit slower but that's sort of the average and the price of electricity from solid fuel reactors are between 60 and 120 dollars per MWh electric so how does that compare to thorium do you think do you think thorium is the same sort of roughly the same ball game a few people are shaking their head most of you are just holding your breath so I had to compare it to copenhagen atomics and again some of these numbers you cannot look up but let's talk about so our design is also sort of 50 year lifetime plus maybe extensions the price for thorium is $50 per kilogram we've already ordered tons of thorium so I know this price because that's what we paid for it course just like uranium the price might go up or down but since there's so much thorium in the world I think it's more likely to go down than to go up in the future if one kilogram of thorium you can get 22 GWh of energy out of that thermal energy and then how fast can we build this well I've also been at some of the previous conferences and the goal for copenhagen atomics is to build one reactor every day but of course we also need to deploy them and deployment is a little bit more difficult so I would expect that in the beginning for a 1 gigawatt power plant it would take 18 months to deploy that and later on when we sort of get things up to speed we should be able to deploy in six month a one gigawatt power plant because it's not built on site it's truly modular it arrives on trucks and then the price of energy for for these type of reactors is between $20 and $40 per megawatt hour so again completely different ball game and I've made sort of a column with the differences so you don't have to do the calculation in your head you can see on most of these things we are an order of magnitude better than solid fuel reactors and so I don't think we should compare ourselves to all the old reactors I believe that our reactor is like a jet airplane and the old reactors is like a horse carriage I mean it's not the same thing yeah so we want to mass manufacture these reactors and we've planned this through the whole like development of our reactor the way we planed the whole company we want to make one reactor every day you know that car factories they can easily make a thousand cars every day and our reactors have less components than a modern car so of course we can easily assemble one reactor every day I mean we don't start in the morning and finish in the evening we have sort of an assembly line and and the reactors move down the assembly line and then they come out at the end one comes out every day the problem is not so much to mass manufacture these the problem is to deploy one reactor every day that's a difficult challenge to get approvals to deploy one reactor every day and we're working on that I love to spend some more time on that but I've limited time so I've decided to do that some of year but there's one more thing I want to point to is you guys have done a physical labor where you dig a hole in the ground or move some things and you're sweating and you're working really hard and then you know that you're not as strong as a horse so it's you're not doing one horsepower actually on average like an adult man that works really hard he can do 150 watts of work with our muscles and you can't work 24 hours you have to sleep and eat and stuff aswell so if you try to calculate this type of reactor this reactor can produce 42 megawatt of electric energy 24/7 so if you try to calculate how many people it would take to do the same amount of work it's actually amazing it's more than a million people to do the same work ofcourse we don't do that we buy electrical motors and have them do pumping or whatever and robots are coming that's what they say at least and those robots will also need electrical energy to work but think about it you know I think this could change the future of how we live and play on this planet because if we make one of these reactors every day some country let's say some island state somewhere they call copenhagen atomics and say we want to buy 300 of your reactors we say yeah okay let's make an agreement and then we and then we deliver 300 reactors to them that's the same as having 300 million workers added to your country that's more than there are workers in the entire United States so I think this idea of deployment can really change a lot of countries and let's see what will happen all right I announced that I would talk more about danger and nuclear energy I heard at least several talks today where they say ooh this is a safer nuclear and I call bullshit on that so let's talk about the numbers the way I see the numbers I mean you don't have to agree but I think at least we can have a little bit of fun talking about the numbers in a different view so I'm sure all of you have seen this before coal fired power plants are the most dangerous type of power plants we have they kill the most people I think many of us believe that roughly 1 million people die every year from coal fired power plants it's not only from air pollution it's also from mining and from shipping all that coal and everything so 1 million people right and coal fired power plant has been going on for many decades so if you sort of go all the way back to the second world war and calculate how many people died it's probably more people than died in in the second world war from coal fired power plants so I don't know if you think it's dangerous so if you have something that can slow down the growth of coal fired power plants how can that be dangerous and nuclear energy if we look at nuclear energy it's not very dangerous like a thousand times less dangerous than coal fired power plants and if you look at those numbers for nuclear energy then they also include the death from mining and you know that it's really really difficult to get a reactor approved because the reactor have to be super duper standard like really safe but you know how much time we spend on making it safe to mine uranium not so much what about when there is an accident I mean if you build thousands of something eventually there is going to be an accident right we we can't really make 0 accidents so when there is an accident and we've had a few accidents Chernobyl and Fukushima how many people actually die I don't know a few people a few people in in Fukushima one guy but then when an accident happens then there are some humans that come in and say oh we should do something like for example in in Fukushima they wanted to have evacuation more people died from that evacuation than from the reactor itself so it's not the reactor that is dangerous it's the people that are dangerous the the people that make wrong decisions in in Chernobyl it was even worse you know when there is an accident and there's iodine you're supposed to get iodine iodine tablets and they had the iodine tablets but there was a guy who decided that it shouldn't give the ID in tablets to the people because it might scare them and that's the that's the thing that killed the most people in Chernobyl it's a stupid mistake by one guy is there any really big regulations around that to void that stupid people make stupid mistakes no not at all so the the whole like trying to make nuclear more safe it's a hoax and it's it's just trying it it's a hoax by uh I don't know anti- nuclear people to try to hold nuclear energy back and I think we should just stop this and and honestly when I hear some of you saying that new nuclear or mol reactors or small modular reactors is more safe I think you're doing it a disservice to the industry because what you're really saying is I want to slow down nuclear and I want to make it more expensive that's what you're saying and that's not what we need and um and then also um well I should go to the next slide for that so there's also this um misunderstanding of radioactivity we hear this again and again especially if some of us is interviewed by the media they they say oh but is your reactor radioactive uh yeah it is oh then it must be dangerous okay uh like what are you talking about um of course most of you know electricity and you know you you probably know that this a 1 and a half volt battery is not dangerous and I don't know if you know where you learned that but I assume that all of you know that 1 and A2 volt batteries are not dangerous I also assume that all of you know that high voltage power lines like 1,000 Volt or 10,000 volt is dangerous I mean if you touch 1,000 volt you might die you're not guaranteed to die but you might die and it's a little bit similar if there's the kilometers per hour if you drive 1,000 kilm an hour in some crazy car you might die it's dangerous but um but if you drive 100 km an hour I'm sure many of you have done that even within the last week and I don't think you feel it's super dangerous but but I also think you know that it's not risk-free and of course it's the same with with radiation I mean there's levels of radiation that are super dangerous and there's also radiations levels of radiation that is not dangerous and um so of course I should say that uh there is no physics that that makes a connection between voltage and kilometers per hour and radiation I mean I made this comparison but the way I made that comparison is at what level do people die and and when you look at radioactivity a one seed might kill you it's not super likely but you might die from one SE if you get 10 seevers ah it's not good right it's like 10,000 kilovolts or whatever it's not a good idea um but if you get 20 Mills which is the limit for radiation workers nobody has ever died for that from that we don't know any evidence that anybody has ever died from that so that's the same as a one one and a half volt battery and you know I I I never seen anybody spend millions of dollars on making one and a half volt battery safe but I've seen people spend millions of dollars and trying to make 20 Millers safer and every time you guys talk about allara or lnt or whatever what you're really talking about is how can we kill more people from coire power plants every time there's a meeting about alar or lnt or whatever you know that delays and makes nuclear energy more expensive so it it's a it's again it's a disservice to the people of this world to try to make nuclear even safer um I mean there's there's actually people who live in areas of the world where there's 100 Millers you get 100 Mills per year in your house so they live in that house for their whole life and there is no statis statistic evidence that they get more cancer than the rest of us so 100 m is a little bit like driving 100 km an hour I mean we know that you know every now and then there might be a problem but most of the time it's not dangerous so um yeah I hope you can use that scale for something then I want to talk a little bit about the sort of the the development plan of copenhagen's atomics uh we have we've divided our development into these six Milestones uh we started 10 years ago and the most time we've spent on developing the technology for the first 10 years um we have developed unique pumps for mol reactors uh we have developed a unique uh Molen all Reactor Core it's called The Onion core it has unparalleled efficiency compared to any other reactor we've ever seen so that's one of the things we developed I'll talk about it a little bit later uh We've also developed a method to purify salt because if you purify the salt and get rid of moisture and oxygen and everything you get less corrosion and some people say oh corrosion is a big problem for molor reactors I think we've solved that we don't bother to run with expensive materials we can use stainless steel 316 and run that for many years no problems with corrosion um so we've spend a lot of time on doing basic uh development of technology for for mol reactors and we also sharing that with the industry uh we're selling some of the technology to other players in the industry um all right and then um the second milestone there is we're developing uh non-fishing prototypes so we have already built two reactors fullscale reactors the same size as our commercial reactor and we're running those with non-radioactive materials so basically fenx salt uh in our Workshop in Copenhagen uh so we heat it up with electricity and we pump the salt around and we do all kinds of tests with thermal expansion and thermal cycling and uh heat exchanges and all these things we need to test before we can go to to a real reactor and the first real reactors for our development um plan is a one megawatt test reactor that we plan to run in 2026 so very similar to ACU what ACU is doing but the difference is that our reactor has the onion core and it's using thorum as a blanket so it it will be the first thorum Molen Sol reactor in the world I think let's see um so uh the the that that first test react we're going to run it for one month and we're going to run it at one megawatt so it's basically just a test and the reason why we run it for a short amount of time and and small power is then we can transport the things around on the roads afterwards uh we we would really like to be able to move it around especially the fuel um so that's the reason for that but as but like I said it's it's a fullscale reactor it's the same reactor design as the commercial reactor we've just not run it at full power so as soon as we have that up and running we will we will move towards the first commercial reactors uh and once we have proven that the commercial reactors are working and they are uh providing energy and selling energy and they can run for a number of years uh then we will start the mass manufacturing sort of in the early 2030s um and I think we will go just directly to making one reactor every day and of course right now we're trying to get our heads around how do we actually deploy all those reactors and that's a whole talk by itself so you will have to wait till maybe next year to hear about that um and then finally the the really really really big goal is is Milestone number six where we want to make a thorum breeder reactor in thermal Spectrum uh that's going to that's going to be cool when we do that um that's 2035 uh a little bit about our reactor design um so it's um I talked about in the beginning that we have this ball out of thorum and we want to make a machine that can convert it into energy very very efficiently uh and this is sort of a cartoon drawing of what it would look like um if you um if you look inside in the middle there we have the schematics of an onion core sort of a cut through in the section View and then uh right next next to that there's an insulation wall uh and that's because inside the the 40ft shiping container there's a a cold region and a hot region the cold region is sort of blue and it's room temperature the hot region is a little bit orange and it's uh usually 600° and then you have a number of heat exchangers that takes the Heat and uh get the the heat um that is produced from the hot salt out to the customer and the the heavy water we use as moderator needs to be cooled all the time uh roughly 5% of the energy that is produced by the reactor goes into heat in the water and we need to take that out so there's a number of heat exchangers sending the water out for cooling um and then uh you could see at the bottom there's a number of Tanks so when we shut down the reactor all of the liquid up in these Heat exchangers and the Reactor Core will drain into the tanks at the bottom and uh basically we do that just by stopping the pumps as soon as we stop up the pumps everything will drain down into the tanks and then when we start the pumps again it will start running so basically to to shut down this reactor you just cut the power to the box then it will stop so it's a very simple mechanism um and you you also see the thick line around that sort of the thick gray line around it that is the third barrier so we need free barriers between the radioactive salt and people outside and the third barrier is sort of a very very thick wall of Steel so half a meter thick steel wall to protect the reactor from what's coming from outside but also if something happen inside the reactor it will protect people outside uh and uh half a met thick wall of Steel is uh very doable um a little bit about the onion core so it's it's roughly 2.3 m in diameter and it's mostly full of water it's of course heavy water heavy water is a a really really good moderator and and then you have a thorum blanket and you see how the blanket is constructed so that it it encapsulate the whole reactor core and that's really important um because this way we optimize the um or minimize the leakage neutrons uh most reactors especially fast reactors they have neutrons flying out of the core like some fast reactor designs have half of the neutrons flying out of the core and you know Neutron economy is really really important if you want to have uh great fuel economy in a nuclear reactor so how can it be great if half the neutrons are just lost out uh with this kind of thign blanket we can get uh Neutron leakage down to 2% no reactor has ever uh been this efficient um and uh and of course in the blanket we breed uranium 233 uh from thorm uh some people say oh you extract protactinium no we don't extract protactinium we extract all the different uranium species in the blanket and then we put them into the fuel salt uh and the fuel salt of course being the orange colored channel in the middle that is where the heat is produced um and of course the heavy water is there to moderate or slow down the neutrons uh so how can you have 600° hot salt right next to cold water well you need a little bit of insulation we have roughly one in of insulation between them and that's enough because the majority of the heat in the water doesn't come from from uh heat radiating from the hot channels to the cold channels the vast majority more than 90% of the heat in the water comes from slowing down the neutrons so I mean we need we need to cool the water anyway so so we only need a little bit of insulation like roughly one inch um to make sure that the water doesn't boil and of course we have to cool the water all the time so our reactor if you get look at a 1 gaw power plant it would look something like this with a an array of reactors in these cocoons H in this case we would need 25 reactors for one gaw plant and then some additional uh empty cocoons so that we can swap swap things around and the whole idea with this power plant is that no humans go inside this this building for 50 years it's running for 50 years of course you you can go in there if you want to but uh we don't want to have a human mess of things so everything in there is remote control like remote control cranes remote control forklifts and and and then somebody from the uh you could say operation room controls what's going on in there um that building produces heat and then uh and then we transfer the heat through some pipes over to some buffer tanks and then you can see there's a line of steam G generators so if you want to make Steam you you you can run a steam um turbine or or use the Steam for some uh industrial process uh so I said in the beginning how can we how can we con Str struct a machine that can convert thorm into energy and I think we are closer than ever to make that happen this is one of our test reactors that are now running in Copenhagen when I say running it's again it's heated by electricity and it's pumping the salt around it's not uh fishing uh going on or Chain Reaction going on yet but uh but we're getting close to that point um and uh here's a picture from inside where you see the the onion core and some of the pipes and the heat exchanges and heaters and other things pumps um so that was a lot of information and I don't expect you to remember all of it of course it will be available on video so you can always watch this video or other videos on our YouTube channel uh we try to come out with videos sort of every month or something so there's a little bit uh new things but but I I hope that you can at least remember these free things when you talk to your neighbor or your colleague next week uh so because we've developed thorm eny to a new level we can produce eny at a lower price price than any other energy technology including Fusion or wind and soil or oil and gas so we are not afraid of competition we can beat anyone on price uh we you also know that nuclear energy uh for the longest time it has been financed and operated by governments at least financed for the most part um or secured by governments but we think this is going to change we we think that in the future uh the nuclear industry should become a commercial industry uh we don't want uh taxpayer money to run our reactors uh coping atomics will finance build own and operate the reactors at a customer site and we believe most of our customers will be customers that make Commodities such as ammonia aluminum you know other things hydrogen um and uh and then we will upate our plant at their facility but we will finance the capex up front the capital cost of building it and we will run it and then we sell the heat to the customer on a long-term contract and then the final thing I want to note is that the cing atomics reactor is also uh capable of running on spent nuclear fuel um unfortunately it's a little bit difficult to get approvals to get some nuclear spent nuclear Fuel and and show that you can run on that so we have postponed that a little bit into the 2030s to get that get up and running with that we really happy to see that cuyu for example spoke earlier today is working on that um in our reactor design if you take spent fuel from a classical nuclear reactors uh we can get 10 times more energy out of that fuel uh than what came out of it in the in the in the old reactor so it it's a significant higher uh say burnup or value coming out of spent fuel then first time it was used and uh and then we will store the efficient products for the first say 50 uh 100 years so that the 90% of the radioactivity from the fishing products has decayed away before we give the fishing product back to the uh government or the state where the energy was produced so we we still want to to take the the fishing products and give it back to the country in which we're operating and of course they have to accept that that's part of the deal um but I I think it's much easier for a country to get fishing products that are already 100 years old and have very little radio activity Le left than them and fishing products only needs to be stored above ground for maybe 300 years in total before you you don't have to protect them anymore uh so it's it's a very different way of looking at nuclear waste than how we look at it today from spent nuclear fuel um yeah so that concludes my my talk uh I hope some of you have some questions um [Applause]
2024-05-07 14:37
