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I'm Dr. David LeBlanc, and I
was with Carlton university I've left them to work full time on this. I'm
kind of called the thorium expert a lot but it's molten salt reactors - that's my field.
So, talking about different aspects of how we can design molten salt reactors -
basically breeder or burner - one of the main categories we can differentiate here.
Breeder of course makes its own fuel after startup. You need
fuel to start them though.
If we make just enough we call that breakeven. and that's kind of nice - you don't have fuel
coming in or going out,
but that does require continuous processing to remove fission products from the salt.
A burner design or converter design or what I'm gong to focus on - which is the
DMSR or denatured molten salt reactor,
which is both a converter and denatured.
Anyway, as you can see we already get into broader [categories].
That does need annual fissile makeup,
but it can skip that fuel processing and that is a surprisingly large advantage.
And, just in general much, much, less research and development needed.
and you can really simplify your core design.
Molten Salt Reactor advantages - and
I'll stick the ones that are broad - to all the different ways we can run these:
Increaseed safety, reduced costs, resource sustainability, greatly reduced long-lived waste.
So, in my talks I'll usually try to go through this piece by piece but there's no way I have time -
I want to fit in a lot of
different things.
So, I think that most of the people in the room that know a little bit about molten salts will
agree about the increased safety and
overall reduced costs. I want to focus a little bit on resource sustainability and long lived waste.
To differentiate between breeder and burner -
because - the breeder design, once you start that it is pretty amazing.
Only about one ton of thorium but in
most designs you at least have to work in the chemical processing you might lose a
little bit of thorium.
So its actually up to about ten tons of thorium per gigawatt-year,
but that's still basically free fuel.
Maybe $30,000 worth of thorium giving you $500,000,000
worth of electricity.
But, you must
when you're talking fuel costs, you must add the fuel processing cost
and of course the cost of that starting fissile material.
Converter designs are simpler and only require very modest amounts of uranium -
when running them on low enriched uranium.
Oak Ridge's main design, the MSR, typically about thirty five tons
of uranium per gigawatt-year, 0:02:13.450,0:02:15.880 versus about two hundred tons for a light-water reactor
and those are very specific known costs that up only to about a tenth of a cent
per kilowatt hour. Its really hard to imagine
and improvements.
And, I will say uranium is not the enemy, okay?
Only cheap uranium is unlimited supply. Now, Ken showed us
very important things about the potential bottlenecks in the uranium supply
but in general, if you allow the price of uranium to increase
there's a rule of thumb - if the real price of a a metal or mineral etc doubles,
you basically get about ten times the reserves.
So, we could have bottlenecks, and I agree with that
But,
if you allow the price to rise, let's say [by] $500/kg
that's gonna really hurt light water reactors - not really put them out of business,
but that does next to nothing to these more efficient designs -
its only about $0.02 per kWh
and we have basically
unlimited supplies at that [price].
Uranium mining - it has a bad image but it's only a tiny fraction of world mining -
less than a 0.1%,
and it's good employment.
If uranium is used in these designs, these converters,
we could have all our electricity 2,500 GWe without increasing current mining.
And of course, we're not going to get rid of hydro and of course wind and solar should
play their 10 to 20% percent part.
So, if we do get rid of the old fleet and introduce these,
we beat the sustaining thing with a lot less mining.
Getting on to long-livee waste, fission products are almost all benign after a
few hundred years.
We have a very small number of long lived - and they're really not that
much of an issue.
it's really transuranics - everything above uranium, neptunium, plutonium, etc,
that's the real reason for your "Yucca Mountains", etc, which are repositories -
places you want to put things because you might want to take them back later.
All molten salt reactor designs produce a lot less transuranics,
so we can either keep recycling them continuously back in the reactor
or with the DMSR design - which I'll show more later - we basically keep them in [the reactor].
As long as we're doing that we can have up to a ten thousand fold
improvement over transuranic waste,
compared to conventional once through designs and
even including MOX use doesn't improve things very well.
Re-examining molten salt reactors, They are often thought of as the thorium reactor,
that's that's the label.
But, by mandate they were developed to be breeder reactors to compete with
Sodium Fast Breeders
the belief that time was there is almost no uranium in the world, we'll have a few
years worth of these submarine reactors and
then it will all [have to] be all either fast breeders or Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs).
We now know a lot better. Molten salt reactors can be both burners or breeders but
the choices really have to come down to
pragmatic facts, not ideology or imposed funding mandates that you have to be a
breeder, etc...
But no one can dispute the success of
basically pitching things as thorium - you can't explain to the public that
a reactor is better. They're not going to listen very long or
or have any hope of understanding.
So, I'm not saying to stop this, but I'm saying to kind of realize,
the message I want to try to get across is: Come for the thorium but stay for the reactor.
I didn't have time to make a -
I'll get John to make t-shirts for the next one I guess.
Back to breeders. Researchers do with tend to focus on the
breeder. I was in the same way, I didn't want to look at these converter designs,
for the first few years i was into this.
But, when you really look at the R&D and operational costs of continuous
processing it's a lot higher than people assume.
Salt processing should be much cheaper than with solid fuels.
But, you have to remember - anything nuclear related - things do get very expensive.
Solid fuel reprocessing
conservatively is about $2000/kg,
Now, how much cheaper would salt processing [need to] be - [for] liquid fuels? A lot cheaper -
90% cheaper?
95%? 99%?
When you look at the standard molten salt breeder reactor, that's where we
have the most data,
to match the fuel cycle costs of DMSR processing,
All that processing within need to be less than $1/kg.
I don't think you can say you are going to have a 2000-fold reduction.
Now, other designs will
need to process less, etc.,
but I think this issue gets swept under the rug a little bit too much.
So, when you remove that requirement to breed, you open up all manners of design simplification.
A burner has almost negligible fuel costs assured resources, enhanced anti-proliferation features,
and simpler R&D. So, it appears the obvious choice, and of course at any point
down the road and at the same time we can be investigating breeder options
or convert later.
So, what is this DMSR converter reactor I'm talking about?
Oak Ridge developed this - It was one of the last great advances had
on the molten salt program.
With very little funding, it was developed in the late 1970's.
it was designed to be a gigawatt output, starting up with low-enriched uranium,
as high of an enrichment as they could do safely - for proliferation [concerns],
so they could squeeze in as much thorium as they can to basically make the neutronic
budget a little better.
But, there's no salt processing. Just add small amounts of low-enriched uranium
annually, which we'd buy off the market,
pretty low starting fissile and it's the same thing that other reactors use.
They have better reactivity coefficients than MSBR - people might want to ask me about that later -
it is an interesting fact -
and they only required about 1/6th the annual uranium needs of a conventional reactor.
Or- CANDUs are a little better but these are still much, much, better than CANDU.
And again, that fuel processing cost - there is no fabrication, etc, or a lot less of it,
very small, a light water reactor might be
0.6 cents to 1.0 cents per kWh.
After that 30 year batch of salt, the uranium can be removed and and reused,
that's fairly straightforward.
Transuranics, that
becomes kind of a national choice. If you want
to bury them in the ground, that's your choice,
but I'd like to see them recycled - this is a one-time job.
There's only going to be about one ton of these transuranics in the entire
batch of salt for a 1 GWe reactor.
So, if you assume, we always have to assume a small amount of processing
loss - a tenth of a percent is a
is a typical goal -
and that's the goal when we talk about processing - the other end of the [spectrum]
the pure [Th-U233] cycle -
That really only means 1 kg of transuranics
going to waste over 30 years, and that's actually is good or even better
in most cases that are examined with what we call the pure cycle -
the pure thorium - U233 -
because you're processing a lot more rapidly, more often, etc.
And, this is the only real reactor - I won't get into the details -
you can really say that
this reactor - because we're burning a little bit of low-enriched uranium, we're actually
destroying or transmuting
a fair amount of national radiotoxicity from the ground.
And, in this case, after 300 years, and if we do these things and recycle the transuranics,
we can make the claim that
the planet,
is less radiotoxic than when we started.
After that 300 year waiting period,
where we can trust an engineer to vitrify, or to make things that aren't going
to leak in the water table, etc.
The thorium reactor has -
the pure cycle - has pretty much the same output but they don't transmute as much.
How does a DMSR do so good? Well, I do talks a lot in Canada and
heavy water's sort of king in Canada.
But, isn't heavy water the best moderator?
The big thing is far less
parasitic losses of neutrons.
we don't have any internal structure, no burnable poisons,
and a lot less neutron leakage.
Light water reactor is, typically about 22% of parasitic losses,
and that's not even including fission products.
CANDU is much better at 12% but the DMSR is way down here at about 5%.
So that's really
the real reason they're so good.
Plus, about half of your fission products
actually leave as gasses. The xenon, krypton, and a lot of things that started as
xenon and krypton, come right out,
and of course the most important, xenon-135 that just
absorbs great amounts of neutrons.
Extremely high proliferation resistance, I'll zip through this -
we're not really processing - the salt stays in there for a long period of time.
The uranium is always denatured meaning it's low enough in fissile content,
you can't use it as a weapon.
Any plutonium present - it's really low quality, very dilute, in a very
radioactive salt,
and really hard to remove. Like comparing to light-water Pu,
a lot more spontaneous fission, a lot more heat rate - so if it's virtually
impossible for light-water
spent plutonium to be weaponized,
it should be that much more impossible for these.
These reactors, have no way to sort of put things in and take them out
to put in some kind of fertile material and take it out.
And, some of the last people could say that -
"Well, you could still have enrichment plants". Well we're going to have a lot less of them.
but if you don't like enrichment, we could have a synergy with
say, a natural uranium reactor like a CANDU.
CANDU produces a lot of plutonium actually,
so on a single site a CANDU feeding it's waste plutonium as the
makeup fuel
for several DMSR's.
So, basically natural uranium in, electricity, and fission products out.
No- denatured designs - LFTRs - well LFTRs are supposed to be a
larger category but
everyone has their own ideas of the best ways,
there is interesting non-proliferation features, but
It is true that likely, there's no expert you find on proliferation resistance
that would that would tell you it's an improvement over existing reactors.
It does have advantages,
but these widespread claims of thorium being a solution to proliferation - it's only
going to hurt us in the long run.
And, we've heard that a bit before and it's true.
And John, I love him, and there's no way I could ever be angry at John, he's such a great
guy but -
making these statements, of "thorium is non prolifering, etc", Well, if you use it in the reactor it can be.
The claims of the effects of U-232 - they're greatly exaggerated.
We had a sort of a public flogging at dinner last night of some claims
and
he claims he got it from a reputable source - talking about how a bomb pit
would kill you
a mile away
within five minutes.
The effects of U-232 are greatly exaggerated.
They are important, they are great for detection, etc.,
but it's not gonna kill you instantly
It's not going to kill you - you can sit next to it for weeks or months before you ever get a lethal dose -
and that's after it's built-up for many, many years to build up the daughter products.
so see Dr Ralph Moir's paper or other on the effects here.
Yes, a country developing a graphite pile - that's a lot easier,
but not if you could buy a reactor right off the market that's got tons of U-233.
So, proliferation dangers will always be exaggerated by those who oppose nuclear power,
but I don't think the answer is making similar exaggerations the other way, because
we're going to get caught on these in the end.
So, there is a very good case for all these reactors being
not a proliferation worry, but please
quit the great exaggerations we see.
Okay, getting back off my soapbox here,
Getting back to the Oak Ridge designs which had very little time or
funding on these,
so there's a lot of
fertile ground for improvement -
shorter batches of the salt - I don't really like the 30 year cycles,
As long as you recycle the uranium in these designs because there's a fair amount
of fissile trapped up there and it's fairly easy,
Transuranics can wait, you get a large improvement in the uranium needs.
10 to 15 year batches are what I'd probably more like to see,
And, you can pretty easily get things down about 20 tons of uranium
per GWe year.
So, it's really not that much more than even the breeder cycle.
And, that is just about 10% of a light-water reactor's [need for uranium]. So, again all the world's
electricity - but we're not gonna get rid of hydro, etc.,
so we can actually get by with a lot less mining.
What about no thorium?
I'll just duck the tomatoes coming in here.
Running without thorium actually does have some interesting advantages.
We can start on much more common 5% or lower enrichment,
the neutron economy is not as good, but it's still absolutely excellent compared
to existing reactors.
There's no protactinium,
you don't want a high power density if you have protactinium. There's all
kinds of things with
removing that protactinium,
and typically the melting points of these salts are less when we don't have thorium.
I want to cover a lot of things so I'm not really going to get into new options,
not much ready for public disclosure and I apologize as I said the same thing
last time.
But a very obvious thing is Oak Ridge's work has been
by force on solid fuel, TRISCO fueled, molten salt cooled.
They've come up with a great deal of tricks
for doing that better and it's quite obvious that these same tricks can be used
in molten salt fuel.
Just replace the TRISCO fuel, with just graphite, put the fuel in the salt and
you've got a pretty excellent design as well.
Molten salt reactors in Canada - CANDU6 is a is a good design, available now,
but there's no new R&D for the foreseeable future
since it was sold to SNC-Lavalin.
So, we have an enormous nuclear brain trust basically going to waste.
We went our own way before on the CANDU we can do it again,
and Canada also has unique opportunitys in our oil sands.
And again, our oil sands, most of it is not going be mined - it's all in situ -
where you use steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD),
You make steam, pump it down,
it basically helps heat up and dissolve the oil,
and it gets sucked back up.
They need pretty high-pressure steam, over a 1000 PSI, etc,.
And, there's a lot of things that molten salt reactors can fit in - but I don't really have time.
The oil sands allure - it's always been around in Canada,
long viewed as an ideal proving ground,
you don't need a turbine and that's 30 to 40% of your capital costs already,
you don't need R&D for a new turbine.
Little joke here - but ask the South Africans -
They had to develop for their pebble-bed [reactor] work. They had to develop a whole new turbine,
that was costing as much of more than the entire nuclear program.
And, of course these reactors would be used in a remote situation.
Many studies have shown that the
nuclear produced steam is cost-effective for the oil sands use.
What scared me at first, is well - these old studies had pretty low $/watt
for the nuclear,
but the the cost of the natural gas systems had risen even faster.
And, oil sands producers expect to pay 200 billion dollars on
carbon taxes over the next 35 years,
and those funds are mandated to be spent on clean-tech solutions.
So,
there is
quite a great source [of funds for this development].
So why not conventional nuclear power?
Basically, a study pointed out that the facilities are too large.
We just can't
pump the steam around wide enough to use it,
the pressures are too low and not flexible,
and the steam just can't be
pushed around far enough.
Ideal size is 300 to 400 MW thermal
for a 30,000 barrel per day facility.
Other potential problems [with conventional nuclear methods] -
mainly [are all] about the the steam pressures are too low.
We can talk about that later.
The basic idea is using the (MSR) molten salt reactor
combined with SAGD.
We produce steam [at a]
much higher temperature than needed, so we either save money by doing it at lower
temperatures, or
you use the top end of that steam
tor electricity generation, for generating hydrogen by thermal chemical
or high temperature electrolysis, etc.,
because is there is lot of money that needs to be spent on upgrading of the bitumen on site.
Bottom line, there's there's a massive amount of oil available there.
The molen salt reactors could help us get that out.
Basically,
We want to get off oil. Oil sands can help
molten salt reactors come to being,
And, with time molten salt reactors will bridge not needing that oil in the first place.
But, we could get north america off foreign oil pretty easily.
Very quickly, on the Canadian pieces I'm working on - trying to keep things simple as possible -
I've got a big network of connections around the world etc.
[I'm] working with a group that were going speak here but they couldn't make it down -
very bright guys, worked on how to integrate this [technology] into oil sands.
Biggest news though, is the interest of a large Canadian based engineering firm
which is - it's not really a super-secret - some people might even
guess here - they don't really want to publicize, their they're dotting
their i's crossing their t's, probably publicize soon, so
please don't push them that much.
But, efforts led by ex-AECL member who headed advanced reactor studies,
they're hiring a team and working out collaboration agreements with me.
We've been working towards a consortium including the McMasters and
University of Ontario institute of technology - our two largest engineering schools - along
whith Chalk River labs and most of those talks have been going very good.
It's amazing the the level of interest that we're getting in the university system,
and, of course the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan has their own
great interest in small module reactors, and of course, Oak Ridge.
The CNS - I won't really go into it - bottom line is,
that's our version of the
NRC, talks of them have been very encouraging.
And, they have changed their system to be streamlined for small module reactors.
And again, the government of Saskatchewan is very interested.
Conclusions,
By any standard, molten salt reactors are superior to all other offerings, not just by
marginal improvements.
They were mandated to be
breaders but I really think the simplified converter options appear
to be an obvious route forward, at least for the short term.
It takes large and far-sighted investment but potential returns are enormous.
And, all factors do seem to be pointing toward and ideal focal point
of a broader North American effort to realize this for the world.
Because we're not going to do this without the US, without Oak Ridge expertise, etc., but I
think we can do it a lot easier a little north of the border.