a much better scenario than the unstoppable chain reaction of traditional reactors oh good lord no it is not unstoppable today we're looking at one of Cold Fusion's videos specifically this will change everything how China won the thorium nuclear energy race uh not sure what race they're referring to because there are no active thorium reactors that are producing electricity on the grid and this thumbnail is a picture of an artist rendition of a tokamac a type of fusion reactor so not sure what's going on here for those of you who don't know me I'm Tyler Folz i'm a nuclear engineer with a little over 10 years of experience in the commercial nuclear power industry from engineering to operations to emergency response i don't think you know everything there is nuclear but I can certainly share some knowledge let's see hi welcome to another episode of Cold Fusion in the quiet deserts of China's Gansu province something extraordinary just happened what's claimed to be the world's first operational thorium reactor has come to life and what makes this extra remarkable is that they did it okay I've heard of this one that's a 2 megawatt thermal research reactor so compared to the nuclear power plant that I worked at which was close to 4,000 megawatt thermal that's not exactly a lot of energy i mean it's a it's a step along the way but I'm not sure what's groundbreaking all using declassified American research it's an incredible story for decades thorium has been whispered about as the holy grail of nuclear energy it's meant to be cleaner safer and almost impossible to weaponize um cleaner yes it produces less transeuranic elements so overall the waste is less dense in terms of the radioactivity of spent fuel that's true however if you're talking in terms of emissions in terms of manufacturing it's about the same as a uranium based nuclear reactor it's not safer first off the thorium itself isn't your active ingredient it absorbs a neutron becomes thorium 232 absorbs a neutron comes thorium 233 couple of beta decays later you have uranium 233 so you're actually still using uranium here and safety depends on reactor design not the fuel type and many thorium reactors are indeed breeders they require higher neutron flux and carry risk just like any other advanced system so again we're talking comparable do I think they're safe yes they're as safe as a conventional uranium nuclear reactor which is still pretty safe and not weaponizable um it's not impossible to make a weapon from a thorium reactor uranium 233 can be used to make a weapon but it's not practical it's also not practical to use spent fuel from a conventional nuclear reactor to make a weapon this is actually more contaminated with uranium 232 which is more of a gamma emission so this part of the waste is actually more challenging than a uranium 235based conventional reactor so again we're talking about a wash um compared to um conventional technology in fact 5 years ago on this very channel I explored the theory of thorium in one of my videos but today it's a reality but this isn't just okay I haven't seen that video but the theory of thorium we're not in talking scientific theory at this point we're talking about the idea of using it to produce electricity the scientific milestone it's a glimpse into a future where energy innovation isn't driven by pro so where it said operational it is an operational reactor but it's not but it's an operational research reactor not to dismiss the technology but call me when they have some call me when they're producing some on the grid cuz there's more there's additional challenges with producing power at scale making electricity you need to have your support systems but essentially you have a boiler not a power plant but by public investment and it shows what happens when we decide to bet on long-term research for a payoff in the order of half a century in this episode we dig deep into the big picture of a better safer nuclear energy called thorium reactors we'll also try to separate the hype from the reality and believe me I'll be factchecking all of that because it sounds like hype because it's really not now don't get the wrong idea i am pro- thorium reactors i also think they're highly overrated and they will complement not replace uraniumbased reactors and note that I'm saying thorium and uranium when I'm referring to thorium being the ingredient that turns into uranium 233 versus uranium 235 so ultimately saying thorium reactor is a little bit misread misleading but to avoid for the purpose of avoiding confusion just like this video does when I just like I think this video will do I'll say thorium when I'm referring to fision using uranium 233 spawned from thorium as opposed to uranium 235 used in a typical reactor that you see all over the world operating today if the Chinese test proves successful and scalable could this prove to be a turning point in the history of energy production or is it not all it's cracked up to be let's take a look those balls are kind of fun i mean thorium like uranium is just you know a shiny metal you are watching Cold Fusion TV i wonder what their thoughts on actual Cold Fusion are that's a whole topic for another video but I I'll pin that in the comments if you want to hear my take on it thousand tons of thorium would supply the planet with all of its energy for a year so your one mine would bring up enough thorium without even trying to power the entire planet it's found in tailings piles it's found in ash piles we could use thorium about 200 times more efficiently than we're using uranium now this reduces the waste generated over uranium by factors of hundreds and by factors of millions over fossil fuels so it will reduce waste but not zero and it's it's exciting for the idea of using thorium but it still does produce some long live vision products and handling of uranium 233 and the protectinium 233 the intermediate step between thorium 233 and uranium 233 does create reprocessing complexity and new types of waist stream so there's new types of waste that doesn't that isn't really produced very much for uranium 235based reactors that will be produced here the point is no reactor type and I'm going to add no energy generation type eliminates the need for waste management i mean fossil fuels have carbon emissions wind and solar they just have a short lifespan and materials used in manufacturing those aren't exactly made for long-term sustainability i'm not saying we should move away from wind and solar either i'm just saying every source of energy has their drawbacks i'm And I want to see more thorium but I'm tired of people acting like it's the end all be all energy source cuz let's face it there isn't one now it would be good because it would diversify nuclear energy's portfolio [Applause] [Music] but before we get started just some quick housekeeping cold Fusion episodes are now available on Spotify so we've had to burn fossil fuel since the industrial revolution we've had to burn fossil fuels to turn on our lights cook our food and power our lives it works but the downside is serious air pollution billions of dollars in healthare expenses and millions of preventable deaths both thorium reactors and uranium reactors don't have any are emissionfree when it comes to generation now when it comes to construction because they require materials to build that come from factories that rely heavily on fossil fuels involved in their value stream that's where emissions come in when you look at levelized cost of energy same is true for wind and solar but even if you take that into consideration the cost per megawatt we're talking far less with nuclear in general than coal natural gas biomass and then in the wake of World War II came the nuclear age nuclear power was different it was amazingly efficient and seemed like the future but over time there were problems with it public image and fears of nuclear disaster that's a shame uh public image killed nuclear inv advancement and there were some economic issues but really the PR failure is the biggest one which is a shame enter thorium thorium appears to be the perfect solution it's abundant it's less volatile and less reactive than uranium um yes thorium itself is because thorium itself isn't actually what you're fisioning the uranium 233 is actually releases more energy than uranium 235 that's a good thing that means that you're going to produce more energy but the term less volatile I do not agree with reactivity is up so in a way you can actually be more efficient with that the problem is thorium doesn't work by itself and the other thing you don't have to have all thorium or all uranium 235 you can have a mixed fuel group so the uranium 235 starts some fisions the thorium 232 absorbs some neutrons couple of beta decays later hey you have some uranium 233 so you're effectively using both this already happens in conventional nuclear reactors with the exception just with different materials because conventional nuclear reactors use uranium 235 with uranium 238 the 235 is fistle and produces your energy but uranium 238 does not not counting a few fast neutrons that are few and far between but uranium 238 absorbs a neutron becomes uranium 239 couple of beta decays later you have plutonium 239 which is fistle and is more reactive so towards the later on in core life you're actually making a little bit more energy for your given amount of fuel you still stay at 100% power but little changes in reactivity are faster because the plutonium 239 is a little bit more reactive so as far as a concept yeah it's been around a nuclear plant powered by thorium can't suffer from a nuclear meltdown no so again we're talk the fuel types got nothing to do with it we're talking about nuclear design characteristics what a lot of people get confused is this is referring to molten salt reactors i mean after all they're already melted down you You can't be more pulled over than already pulled over right but seriously molten salt designs are passively safe and can drain in a cooling tank so it's a design feature not a fuel feature you can have that with thorium fuel with mixed fuel with uranium fuel solid fueled thorium reactors are just as meltable as the uranium ones if cooling is lost safety comes from redundancy passive decay heat removal and negative reactivity feedback with thorium and uranium thorium isn't some sort of magical unobtanium it's still a metal that can melt under extreme conditions in the Chinese reactor for instance if things do get out of hand that's because they're showing the molten salt part you can have this with uranium too it's got nothing to do with it being thorium plug at the bottom of the reactor melts automatically the fuel then simply drains out using gravity that is an example of a passive safety system that uses gravity gravity can't fail at least I've yet to see it fail but yes it's because of this passive safety system not because of thorium a much better scenario than the unstoppable chain reaction of traditional reactors oh good lord no it is not unstoppable control rods stop the reaction you do an emergency shutdown it stops the reaction in about 2 seconds and even if an operator doesn't manually do it there are so many built-in safety functions that trigger this uh stop reactor trip or reactor scram it's all the same thing the point is all the control rods fall in in about 2 seconds and there it shut downs the reactor it shuts down the reaction mission accomplished for added context to give you a picture of just how efficient thorium reactors are just look at this chart it shows the ratio of energy this is for molten salt reactors not thorium reactors and this is an estimated return on investment molten salt is new technology and here I don't know this exact source but I'm willing to bet we're talking operating costs not costs of constructing the more complicated piping systems you would need for a molten salt reactor as well as the chemical plant you'd have to put next door to make all of your molten salt again not saying we shouldn't do it but you need to pay attention to what goes into these things out to energy in the purple bar is a thorium molten salt reactor and the blue bar next to it is a traditional nuclear reactor you can have thorium lightwater reactors too and you can have uranium molten salt reactors and you can even have hybrids mixed fuel in either design and also that's just lightwater reactors if thorium is proved successful it's clear to see why it's worldchanging stuff especially when compared to any previous form of energy production despite what would be world changing is if we all embrace nuclear power in general both uranium and thorium cuz those are all I agree in the same since you compared it to wind solar and fossil fuels then sure ultimately that's what you got to do thorium's immense potential compared to hundreds of uranium based nuclear reactors and that looks like a Mr clean magic eraser they remain as mythical as a unicorn there's only one operational thorium reactor and it's hidden away in the Gobi Desert and by operational I mean they're using it for research not generating electricity china may possess the world's sole reactor but the twist is it was built on American research we're all at Oakidge the morning that we showed up one of the Oakidge guys came in with an announcement from the Chinese Academy of Science we are going to do this we're going to own the IP so you would think someone in our government would say "Maybe you shouldn't keep giving away this information." The Chinese achievement was announced by head of the thorium reactor project Zu Hong during a closed- dooror meeting at the Chinese Academy of Science he stated quote "The US left its research publicly available waiting for the right successor we were that successor we mastered every technique in the literature then pushed it further we are now at the frontier of global nuclear innovation end quote so it's exciting that they're making something out of this i mean say what you will about leaving stuff available for the Chinese to take it from the Americans i mean hey but it's a research step not a technology domination here and you could argue that it's still behind Oak Ridge with the molten salt reactor experiment that was done back in the 1960s now granted I like the idea of this is a renaissance if you will of rediscovering old technology but I don't agree with that statement so okay let's back up a bit and learn what a thorium reactor actually is let's see here firstly thorium is a naturally occurring element found in rock deposits it serves as the fuel for the reactor when thorium is hit with neutrons like uranium um found in rock deposits mean you mine it orbs instead of splitting eventually turning into a fistle material uranium 233 um that they skipped a couple of beta decays but sure maybe they're just trying to explain it fast but yeah thorium 232 doesn't magically absorb a neutron and become uranium 233 without a couple of intermediate steps but I won't harp on that too much a fistle material is one that splits apart when neutrons are blasted at the atoms when this happens specifically thermal neutrons it is possible for uranium 238 to fision but it involves fast neutrons and the probability still isn't great energy is released that can then be converted into electricity usually by heating steam and driving a turbine unlike uranium the naturally occurring thorium 232 is not fistle meaning it cannot sustain a nuclear reaction on its own however it is fertile so it can be transformed into a fistle material but it needs a helping hand getting there for thorium to become a useful fuel source it first has to be blasted with neutrons turning it into thorium 233 which beta decays into protactinium which is why you're going to need uranium or plutonium for that matter something file to act as your neutron source to produce it at scale so that's the other myth that that thorium will fision by itself which it will not and will not need uranium you need uranium in your thorium reactors and to start your reaction 233 the protectinium can be extracted which decays into uranium 233 a usable fuel okay there you go there really were three options for nuclear energy at the dawn of the nuclear era there was uranium 235 which was the file form of uranium this was the form of uranium that could actually be utilized directly in a nuclear reactor most of the uranium was uranium 238 this had to be transformed into another nuclear fuel called plutonium before it could be used and then there was thorium and in a similar manner to uranium 238 it also had to be transformed into another nuclear fuel uranium 233 before it could be used in a reactor now this process does now you could even use the uranium 238 uh 235 natural mix um can do reactors use them but they they use a stronger moderator heavy water that's um uses dutyium instead of um hydrogen one because it needs that cuz the odds just simply aren't there with just light water for uh using uranium work well with traditional nuclear reactors because they use solid fuel rods and pressurized water cooling it's much harder to extract things mid-reaction when fuel is in solid form enter molten salt reactors the molten salt impossible fuel for this reactor is rather we go this is the oak this is direct footage from the oak bridge experiment different from that used in solid fuel reactors here salt flows from a pipe which is heated to keep the salt molten at 1200° F the salt does not react with air it flows like water but does not boil to recap molten salt reactors use liquid fuel which makes it much easier to isolate protactinium and continue the thorium fuel cycle if done right molten salt reactors can be way safer than the standard watercooled reactors key word if done right I mean that's true if done but done right involves having robust safety systems i would argue that doing lightwater reactors right puts them in the same tier of safety latter of which must be kept under insanely high pressures to stop the water from boiling away molten salt reactors yep in pressurized water reactors there's also boiling water reactors there's also gas cooled reactors and operate at low pressure and as mentioned are set up in a way low pressure but high temperature point is you got to get that energy somewhere if you're going to produce things at scale the temperature of these molten salt reactors are higher than that of um lightwater reactors that in the case of an emergency the fuel is automatically drained away avoiding the chance of this happening the first step in a nuclear nightmare as far as we know at this hour no worse than that but a government official said that a breakdown in an atomic power plant in Pennsylvania today is probably the worst nuclear reactor accident to date keep in mind this was before Chernobyl and it was contained limited radiological release um the biggest casualty was the PR outfall from this even though vision products were secure containment worked meaning this was bad this reshaped the industry they added additional safety systems both in retrofits and in new builds within the US it was expensive it scared a lot of people but it didn't hurt anyone at least not directly there was no apparent serious contamination of workers but a nuclear safety group said that radiation inside the plant is at eight times the deadly level so strong that after passing inside the plant all right so they need to be clear inside the containment building as in not where they let people in so not like outside here at the guard shack or by the cooling towers or anything like that another example of bad PR through a three foot thick concrete wall it can be measured a mile away it can be measured but it's not at but it's not at deadly doses burst was yet to come the earthquake created a power blackout at Fukushima Deichi nuclear plant the emergency generators started but did not run for long so this was an example of a beyond design basis accident with Fukushima and it was bad but not Chernobyl bad the cooling pumps did not restart and about 45 minutes later the tsunami reached the nuclear plant the entire new plant quickly became out of control that was due to hydrogen buildup starting March 12th 2011 one of the six reactor units exploded followed not long after by two others releasing an unprecedented amount of nuclear radiation into the air no not unprecedented it wasn't nearly as much as Chernobyl part and some reasons for that is the reactors already safely shut down and they were allowed to decay chernobyl was operating and they went prompt critical which is why the radioactive release was so much worse what makes thorium special um it turns into uranium 233 despite not being a readyto-use fuel and requiring complex processing if done right thorium could be a superior alternative to uranium for four reasons number one it's abundant thor that's true um it is naturally abundant um by a factor of three is everywhere it's in the earth's crust in rocks and it's at least three times more abundant than uranium in China alone you can even extrapolate that if you look um underwater for both uranium and thorium but right now there's not enough nuclear plants that anyone's seriously considering it to be worth that cuz there's really so much uranium and thorium that's available not underwater there's enough thorium reserves to power the country's energy needs for the next 20,000 years number two it's safer it's not safer better nuclear plant designs are safer but that doesn't have to involve thorium as I mentioned earlier thorium itself isn't fistle and while that sounds like a downside it can actually be a good thing it grants more control over the reaction some prothorium advocates also No no it really does not um it's going to involve the similar control systems such as control rods and negative reactivity coefficients no it's no more controllable in fact if you're having to control things like liquid metals that could actually make it more complex not harder not less safe but more complex and the point is it's just how you engineer the thing emphasize that thorium is quote proliferation resistant mean that's because it produces harmful byproducts that are more close to the things that you need to get your hands on i would argue that uranium has the similar thing meaning that you can't easily make bombs with it but you can't easily make bombs from uranium or plutonium either others say that these safety claims are exaggerated just as the risks of nuclear reactors are but also because of the reactor design the use of molten salt as a coolant eliminates the need for high pressure water systems like traditional designs reducing the risk of accidents like a steam explosion number three it's clean yeah um you won't have to worry about steam explosions because you don't use as much steam in the primary systems you you are going to have to worry about molten salt leaks though so it's just different stuff you need to design about thorium reactors also don't emit greenhouse gases and unlike uranium waste which remains hazardous for tens of thousands of years another example of these fake barrels um that is not where highle nuclear waste goes they are not in barrels they were in massive dry cask storage after being stored in spent fuel pools so yeah that's fake stuff thorium waste becomes safe in just a few hundred years um they actually overestimated now safe um when I say when they say safe I think they mean close to zero it's going to be above background radiation uranium for tens of thousands of years but as far as safe levels uranium is going to be at acceptable levels after about 500 years and thorium more like 100 so yes thorium is better but a lot of people exaggerate how long it is for both in the case of China obtaining thorium could come at almost zero effort surprisingly thorium is actually a waste product of its rare earth mining industry we can power our civilization on thorium without opening a single thorium mine it is already a plentiful byproduct of Yeah they do a lot of crazy mining over there so that's good that they can use some of it they just have to separate it which isn't no effort but it's good that it's accessible existing mining operations number four it's efficient thorium generates up to 200 times more energy than uranium to put it into context just say you have No not 200 i don't buy that let me see where they're getting their information from two batteries one is uranium and one thorium if the uranium battery gives you 1 day of power a thorium battery of the same size would power you for 6.5 months okay they yes we can multiply by 200 but um all right I'm not sure where they're getting this number from if they're talking uranium 233 versus uranium 235 it's a little more but despite all of this molten salt reactors have largely been stuck in the experimental phase for decades why aren't we working on liquid fuel the United States in general oh licensing licensing a liquid fuel reactor commercial especially in the US right now is scary the new Yeah there's a lot of regulatory hurdles with new technology and part of it is it just doesn't have the industry maturity so it's the second mover bias more like fourth or fifth nuclear status quo remained unchallenged not even after countless reactor meltdowns no one's made any moves to put the molten uh countless reactor meltdowns come on also this looks like an explosion at Also this isn't a nuclear plant the significant ones that involve melting were that involved energy production reactions were 3M Island Fukushima and Chernobyl were there others yes there were others that happened at in the experimental stage but not countless i had a class where we studied every single nuclear accident it's one of the things that's required to get your license when operating a nuclear power plant in the United States the class was a little over an hour and it included criticality accidents in addition which didn't involve anything melting saw reactor theory into practice until now over in China Shu and his team developed the reactor technology from American declassified research of the 1960s the US was testing this very same technology but chose not to develop it further instead they focused on uraniumfueled pressurized water reactor technology that 1960s research in that time period your goal was let's make some electricity but let's also make some weapons and in the thorium stream the uh lack of the slightly less proliferation is seen as a disadvantage back then was known as Oakidge it was the closest America came to thorium power but why did they stop we'll look into that now to make things that blow nrc regulations specifically spell out prohibitions against fluid fil reactors you cannot operate fluid fil reactor more than 1 megawatt without expensive license process after the Hiroshima bomb tipped the scales of power in America's favor the US was keen to develop more nuclear weapons much of that work happened at Oakidge National Laboratory in Tennessee director Alvin Weinberg also began looking into alternative less weaponizable nuclear methods thoriumfueled molten salt reactors were what he settled on the molten salt reactor experiment ran from 1965 to 1969 the results were incredibly promising it quickly became the holy grail of thorium research as the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists states quote "All molten salt reactors are based in one way or another on the molten salt reactor experiment that operated at Oakidge from 1965 to 1969." End quote build off existing technology why not following the vision of Alvin Weineberg he was the director of Oakidge National Labs from the 50s to the 1970s and he had a vision of how we could use thorium to advance beyond the current constraints of our society in terms of fossil fuels hydro power and existing nuclear technology one of the amazing parts about his vision was how this could transform not only the US economy but many other places in the world some of which don't have the resources that we have in terms of fresh water or arable land this is a vision he had of how thorium reactors could be used to desalinate water grow crops in desert areas to Oh so I didn't realize he even looked at the extracting thorium from seawater portion if he's talking about that part of ocean that's interesting really truly change the economic balance of the world but then the experiment was shut down in his book Alvin Weinberg questioned quote "Why didn't the molten salt system so elegant and so wellthought out prevail there were no technical reasons why the molten salt reactor was not pursued." End quote for what so putting aside the political cold war let's make weapons 2 argument there were still some engineering channels that remained unsolved fuel separation the protectinium 233 doing that in real time was still more challenging corrosion control using liquid hightemp salts going to degrade over time graphite moderation which they had back then also degrades and everything being radioactive liquid 600 plus C maintenance is a problem they didn't have the remote handling tech the radiation heart materials and off gas cleaning systems and there was no large scale industrial road map to back that up so it wasn't all bombs but that was some of them during the Cold War uranium fever was at an all-time high the Pentagon needed faster breeder reactors that could fuel the nuclear arms race in short nobody cared that thorium was safer so they're not really So those aren't really breeder in the similar in the sense of were you breeding your own fuel it's more of you're making plutonium to make weapons at the same time or that it wasn't suitable for weaponry that somewhat defeated the point weineberg's vision on the other hand was brought to an end in the early 1970s and I think this was a very sad moment in the history of our country and probably in the history of the world because an entire direction Yeah cuz we could have invested in that stuff back then and have it still would have been technology that wasn't there in the 1970s but it probably could have been here by now with investment in the required support systems using liquid metal technology of potential development was being ended at that moment by uh a a not wellthoughtout comment by Congressman Holoffield who was very powerful so Weinberg's pursuit of thorium appears to have had a great deal to do with why he was fired from his position coming back what will be built again it's lightwater reactors i don't understand how what's going on here why are we spending money to build reactors based on the same concept that we have been building ever since World War II it wasn't all about politics though according to Alvin in the 1950s and60s nuclear power was dominated by physicists who thought in terms of solid fuel pins reactor physics and neutron behavior all the while the key to safer nuclear power lay in chemistry quote so I can't speak for what people thought in like physicists and universities back then but everyone at least from before I went to college to after that are talking about the same sort of thorium technology all the time differences in different fuel types different reactor types but just not being there and a and with fusion as well it's uh it's actually kind of sad the more I think about it one of the reasons why I didn't get into research I wanted to get into operations our problem is not that the idea is poor it's that it's different from the mainstream and too chemical to be fully appreciated by non-chemists end quote you can teach it we'll look at the I mean these are nuclear engineers we're talking about chemistry is really part of it points to what Alvin is saying in the last section of this episode but for now let's see what happens next that's a shame so the Oakidge experiment was defunded alvin was reassigned and the Thorium blueprints gathered dust that was until the 2000s at that time NASA engineer Kirk Sorenson was researching ways to power a community on the moon kirk stumbled across Oakridge's research on molten salt reactors and thorium and he was mesmerized by thorium's energy density it was so high that you could theoretically hold a lifetime's worth of energy in your hand and it was abundant on both the earth and you can do that with uranium too depending on what you mean by lifetime like all you would need to power your household but yeah I just still look back and mesmerized with nuclear energy in general is ultra energy dense the moon Kirk got to work to get the message out about thorium he was convinced that if the United States hadn't abandoned thorium research the country could have been energy independent by the early 2000s but alas his thorium enthusiasm fell on deaf ears but here the story takes a major turn while it also involved mass electric car usage if you're including man seemingly everyone was ignoring what he had to say one country did notice the potential china there were thousands of reports sitting there in public archives with insights that could shape the next generation of energy and the Chinese researchers realized that a thoriumfueled molten salt reactor could solve their growing energy needs and also secure their national interests in 2009 China's thorium keep in mind that those images they showed was a typical refueling cavity using water um none of that was molten salt project formally took shape construction began in 2018 there were hundreds of scientists who worked day and night for years dissecting declassified American documents they're they're they're showing pictures of a of a reactor that uses water replicating experiments and designing new materials and many of them were on site for more than 300 days per year project lead Zu would summarize the situation by saying quote "Rabbits sometimes make mistakes and grow lazy that's when the tortoise seizes its chance and seized the chance they did in 2023 China's Thorium molten salt reactor achieved a sustained nuclear chain reaction and by June of 2024 the reactor was operational it's amazing so 60-year time skip and they're just at roughly similar levels as Oakidge i'd say still a few years behind because of how long that one operated all right here's now we come to the reality check we may be closer than ever before to a thorium powered future but there are still many things to consider i would argue we were closer in 19 in the 1960s before it was shut down hard contrary to popular belief there have been a number of commercial thorium plants in the past and that's since the late 40s in Germany India the Netherlands and the US but none of them survived past the 1980s well why is that some plants did have design problems but there's more to it it turns out that the process of extracting thorium from ore and converting it into a fertile fuel for nuclear purposes was a lot more expensive than doing the same thing for uranium the pessimist view is that economics killed thorium and nothing else as mentioned nothing else but yeah thorium can produce 200 times the energy of the equivalent uranium no it it can't i don't know where they're getting that number from best I can guess is the relative abundance of thorium 232 numbers versus the natural abundance of uranium 235 sitting with uranium 238 so you're assuming you get 100% out of your thorium 232 conversion into uranium 233 total fuel utilization that's got to be what what they think they're getting from that no it's similar energy profision and thorium has to be breeded to uranium 233 i don't know what those exact numbers are but it's not the 200 but this requires the reprocessing of the fuel you can't just run the plant and burn up all the thorium and that's because as the plant would keep running at some point the accumulation of waste products affects the operation of a thorium core and as you it's possible to design it where you can refuel it online but ultimately you need to shut the plant down anyway because you're going to have to do maintenance on the non-nuclear systems you know the steam turbine the part that makes the electricity you need to take generators feed water heaters offline and replace them every now and then to keep this up and keep the plants running longterm is expensive and another clarification a lot outages are going to be longer it's possible they'll be less frequent than 18 to 24 months but they're going to be longer people do say that the reason that thorium hasn't caught on was that it can't be used for weapons but it's more along the lines that it's more expensive to use it as a weapon which is a good thing in the end I guess and then there's the problem of material science for molten salt reactors that wasn't a bad that wasn't a bad debunker dehawk on their part the salt is extremely hot and ends up being corrosive to its surroundings materials that can survive this long term are hard to come by but the Chinese seem to be working on the issue they've built a custom alloy called hastoy n so let's say that thorium can do what the thorium proponents say it can nations could power entire cities there would literally be no need for fossil fuels expensive and shortlived wind turbines you'd have to electrify every single vehicle not impossible but it's going to take a complete infrastructural revamp rather than just power generation or even solar panels that degrade over time that they do plus since molten salt reactors don't need water cooling they could run in deserts or even space thorium is also common on the moon and easy to find here's an actual map of where the lunar thorium is located you can get thorium and you can also get some helium 3 in the regal lift while you're up there so you can go ahead and have some fusion let's go ahead and throw some of that in while we're at it thorium has an electromagnetic signature that makes it easy to find even from a spacecraft with the Don't get me started on helium 3 fusion by the way generated from a liquid fluoride thorium reactor we could recycle all of the air water and waste products within the lunar community in fact doing so would be an absolute requirement for success thorium critics say that a lot of the promising claims are oversimplified and the road to thorium will be a real long slug china has made some ser maybe I'm one of those people but I'm going to say I mean it in it involves that with any sort of developing new technology again I would still like to see it happen moves but it's still early days case in point the Chinese test reactor is actually tiny and it's not a full-fledged power plant it's rated for 2 megawatt of heat for context MIT's research reactor on campus a regular nuclear reactor although the biggest campus reactor in the US is three times that size research reactors are toys um I essentially played on one as part of getting my uh my license to um to operate the big one but there's also plans for a 60 megawatt Chinese reactor to be operational by 2030 the Chinese scientist pulled off a world first and again he's the footage that he's showing are not of thorium reactors uh this was this is also a research reactor that uses uranium fuel they added fresh fuel to the thorium reactor while it was running that proved that continuous operation is possible and these are all pulse type reactors that are used in research mainly because hey you know you have fullome control rods and then you have a nice blue prompt critical flash prompt critical being safe and control in this type of reactor do not do that with a commercial reactor lest you have yourselves another Chernobyl i mean it's also basically impossible with modern designs but still china may not be alone copenhagen Atomics plans to test a molten salt thorium reactor in Switzerland i did another video on their stuff that was uh interesting 26 after this they plan to mass manufacture them at scale other countries are moving but at a slower pace india which has the world's largest thorium reserves have been researching thorium for ages but refused to sign the nuclear non-prololiferation treaty and that slowed progress there's multiple startups in the US that are trying to revive the molten salt reactor development and there's other startups in other countries but most of this development remains mostly on paper but even if it is early days it's encouraging that people are trying the Thorium story shows the power of public research and how past R&D can seed waves of innovation decades later but it also shows how easily research momentum can stall so I'm glad they've kind of introduced the other side of this this video is saying China won the nuclear energy race if they did the race wasn't particularly exciting because the race isn't to build a lab scale prototype it's to one commercialize it two regulate it three fuel it and maintain it sustainably for the long term and four to if you're looking at it as a thorium versus uranium thing to out compete uranium or at least add as a significant portion of markets to share which is going to take mass mass production of them massive learning curves massive upscaling you're going to need your 3,000 4,000 megawatt reactors in addition to your small modular reactors using thorium so nobody including China has achieved that and I still think the closest our civilization has been was during the peak of the Oakidge experiments back in the 1960s after all that one was bigger that one was over 7 megawatt thermal which is still dinky but a good bit bigger as Zu Hong put it quote "To achieve something meaningful in this field you must have perseverance and prepare to dedicate 20 to 30 years to one single pursuit." End quote so there's red hot views on either side of the Thorium debate is it the clean revolution of the future or do we cut our potential losses and No I want it in there too but please don't overrate it just say what it is stick with what we know that is the question so I'd love to hear what also uh people love showing cooling towers the nuclear plant that I worked at didn't actually have cooling towers it just had a really really big reservoir you don't need cooling towers you don't necessarily need a reservoir you can pick one or the other or both depending on your size and energy demand they're also not unique to nuclear you've se I've seen cooling towers for coal and natural gas plants as well you guys think these days everyone is talking about fake so I'd love to hear what you guys think well you've heard my spiel thanks so much for the recommendation and thanks so much for watching