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we're speaking to you from Loyola University Watertower Campus, Kasbeer Hall
and it's the location of the thorium energy alliance future of energy conference #4
jim kennedy and i were not able to say much at the last conference
especially at the request of the folk we were working with
and at the time we were very optimistic that we are just weeks away from some
important bills being introduced but as we found out
that uh...
politics is a strange thing so you know i can sum up the the results
pretty succinctly by saying one party
thought the idea of setting up a central supply chain for rare earths
and a thorium bank to store and use thorium responsibly was a monopoly
uh... thank goodness that the other party only just accused us of being socialists
who were trying to set up a commune for materials and energy
so that all went well
oh, and they said that free markets would fix everything
and we're also told that the USA does not do industrial policy anymore
which is too bad because industrial policy is what made america great
it's also what is making all the asian tigers and
china and even the celtic tiger at one time so prosperous
so i don't think an industrial policy is bad
one that levels the playing field that's not bad
you know a WTO lawsuit can go to hell
when you are the only one playing by the rules it's time to bring some jujitsu
to the table you know if the rules are even we can play that by those rules
better than anyone else we can do this
i live fairly modestly in a small house i drive an eighteen year old saturn
we're fairly frugal but i'm still an american so that means i use vast
amounts of resources no matter how frugal i am
you have that yellow vertical tube there is the reacting chamber
and it goes into a single pump so you don't have redundant cooling pumps
it goes through another head exchanger exchanges heat to another salt
and runs some sort of brayton cycle or advanced steam cycle
supercritical CO2 or something
or you go out to heat loop and you do work with the heat because why would
you lose fifty percent energy
just to make electricity when instead you can take that nice sweet
700-800 degree salt and use it to process maybe
coal into liquid fuels
turned cold from one of the dirtiest energy sources
into maybe one of the cleanest energy sources
are maybe you could make fertilizer desalinate water
you've all heard the stories about what you can do with high temperature process
i run an engineering company and we do engineering consulting and one of the
clients we have asked us to do some engineering find a material replacement
they thought thorium might do that we learned about those vince and i
people want to know what value is there in thorium?
there's no monetary value in thorium it's actually just the opposite of it
if you found a way to get rid of thorium
many companies would pay you to take it off their hands
thorium is a big liability today
it didn't matche his needs but i could never let go of it
it's not going to help them but you know it could save the world
back in the sixties
a real honest to god not paper reactor
ram for 22,000 full power hours at 6 megawatts of heat if you ever
visit oak ridge national lab you can see the MSRE building still there
and it still used as an office building and the remnants of MSRE is still there
once you learn something
you can't pretend you didn't learn it you can't pretend that you
don't know what a powerful thing this is
and you can choose to do that
but that's not the moral choice to make
to ignore it to pretend that you didn't learn it
the moral thing the right thing to do is to just do what we're doing
in my opinion it's sort of the bare minimum
if you know that there is a powerful way to save our society
maybe server mankind in general
but you do nothing about it
then what good are you?
you don't have to be religious
superman or super motivated or an evangelist
to have that attitude because i'm certainly none of those things
that salt wants to be solid
so when the terrorists
fly their plane into the reactor and they crack it open
the fuel salts fall on the curved bottom the swimming pool there
and drain down into the storage tanks
and solidify in a matter of days
a little more controlled thing than a terrorist attack
if somehow the system overheated for some reason there's a salt plug
basically just the same salt that the fuel is
and it is kept frozen by just blowing a fan on it
that's how they did it in the 60's they just blew a fan on a section of pipe
if something like fukushima happened where we lost power
the fan would stop blowing
the plug in the pipe would melt and walla
the whole thing drains down into the containment tanks in lower gallery
rare-earth interests and thorium interests
they have a symbiotic relationship and are working towards getting some
legislation passed
that would allow rare earth production to restart
in the united states and by doing that
we would start at thorium bank
they would take responsibility and accept the liability of
of taking on all of the
thorium and finding uses for it including energy uses
new rules and regulations that pertain just to thorium and
not all nuclear fuels together
because a lot of times what people don't realize is thorium is regulated
the same way that uranium and plutonium is to a great extent
if you're fred's house of radiation remediation
you're going to be like "it's dangerous! it's dangerous!"
they have a very vested interest in keeping this as scary as possible
so it's really a radiation problem the public and decision makers
don't understand...
if we spilled ten kilograms of thorium here it would be a calamity
they would literally tear the the top floor off this building
and they would barrel up every single one of these things
and they'd send it all to the whip
the whole building would have to be decontaminated
that's how they would treat it, even though
visit the exposure lab at the university of cincinnati and they've got all these
gelatin dummies that they actually blow plutonium dust and uranium dust
and see the radiation exposure to this ballistic gel
and how it travels and
old workers that worked on the manhattan project
will their bodies to them
they dissolve the bodys in H F and other acids
they sift it out and see how much plutonium
uranium stuff wound up in their bodies like dontating your body to science
they've got really really good long-term exposure studies of just how much
of the stuff builds up in the body
thorium is not water soluble
it won't build up in your system it goes right through you
we want a set of regulatory decisions made that will help
thorium be used uh... more efficiently and more successfully
or at all i guess i should say
thorium isn't the future of energy
molten salt reactors aren't the future of energy
you are the future of energy
you're the future of energy and i'm not placing my bet
on a grey rock i'm not placing my bet on some machine
i'm placing my bets on the people in this room
so now let's go do this
thank you very much