This is a thorium energy alliance conference
so it has thorium in the name and you would think that we would
be talking about thorium 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 Thorium 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,
your share of all the public roads and houses and Hospital. Everything. it's amazing that you 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 of 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 celebratethat 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 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's 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 in 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]