Thorium Advocate Nuclear Tour of Oak Ridge National Laboratory

We're funded from litterally thousands of projects that come down from DOE and other government agencies, where they say we need you to go do this, we need you to go do that. There is no line in the federal budget that says: Oak Ridge National Labs, $1.65 billion, "Go do good things." The idea of this loop is to retain our expertise in using high temperature salts. We're using an inductive power supply around the test section. Without using fission, it is really the only way to get heat into the system. Consortium for the Advanced Simulation of Light-water reactors, CASL. We're focusing on pressurized water reactors, new fuels that are more tolerant to accident scenarios like loss of coolant and clading integrity. If I'm going to have to get up for 50 or 60 years and working on something - well, it better be something I believe in. Wether this be a solar power tower, or a molten salt reactor, liquid salts are an outstanding heat-transfer media. It really doesn't matter what you are going to be transfering heat for. There are a number of technologies that have never been done before in salt. When they were developing the molten salt reactor they had test loops and materials testing to pump silicon carbide. We are going to find out how that performs in a salt environment now. Weigner was a chemical engineer. The lab is very strong in chemistry. These would not have been possible if we had not have had the Schockley breakthoughs. Chadwick discovered the neutron in 1932 over one generation. Think about how far we came. The beam is coming, the crystals focus it, scatter it down onto the sample. [...] We really are interested in thermoelectrics, heat harvesting, superconductors, magnetic materials, ferroelectric materials. Last summer we irradiated lutetium. 26 patients were treated for brain cancer. People have talked about how terrible highly enriched uranium is. Here's highly enriched uranium being put to very productive uses. It is neither good nor bad. It's what you do with it. Your pebble bed is a little bit of a transition in that the pebbles can percolate up though, so you get some movement of the fuel. I find it ironic the the birthplace of many of our country's nuclear technologies is still run on coal. You are entering a radiological buffer area. This is an old facility. Look down before you walk. No, don't touch it or your hands are going to look like this. I have a small child. It's like a "lead" [graphite] pencil isn't it? Why aren't we building lots of new nuclear reactors? It would be nice to see ORNL regaining that role. Let's work out the best way to do this. We were always nuclear. We just didn't talk about it much. The discussion has been - What's waste and what's not waste? At some point, we are going to want to reprocess [nuclear fuel] likely, and we ought to hold that option open. We would bring the carrier over, line it up with this scale - we were dealing the uranium of less than half a gram measurements. In 1968, they took out the U-235 and added U-233. We shipped it over to storage, and they have the world's collection of U-233. These things right over here are spent probes. You've got a pipe within a pipe. Those things would extend, about 60 feet in length. It is shifting people's thinking to think a bit more long-term. Right now, there is a lot of focus on assuring the LWR industry gets a life extention. Currently in this country, we are not really looking at the molten-salt fuel systems. In 2012, thorium advocates traveled from Huntsville, AB towards Chicago, IL, to attend the fourth Thorium Energy Alliance Conference (TEAC4). Scheduled along the way, was a full day tour of Oak Ridge National Labs nuclear facilities. The entire 8-hour tour was captured on video for an upcomming documentary about thorium's potential as an energy resource. Recording devices included a Zoom H4n, Cannon Vixia HS, Aiptek HD's, Sennheiser 100's and a dozen Sansa 4GB clips, loaded with with open source Rockbox firmware, and - one iPhone. You know, the Navy had reactors - and so, the Air Force had to have reactors. In order to drive a turbine you need high temperatures, so you had to have a high temperature reactor, That led to this thing called the aircraft reactor experiment that was operated in the 1950's. Dirty little secret was that most of the people involved in it knew even from the get-go that it really wasn't practical, But they also felt like this was a good way to solve a lot of the problems associated with high temperature reactors because the navy program that led to the light water reactors that we have now was well optimized to the needs of the navy. It actually wasn't very well optimized to the needs of power production. The reason we have that as the base for our power reactor technology today is because the navy was prepared to pay the the first-mover costs to make one work. Once you have done that, it is extraordinarily difficult to compete with it, because those first-mover costs are very, very high and have no financial return associated with them. The aircraft reactor experiment was essentially an effort to duplicate that model for high temperature reactors. The Achilles heel was - in contrast to a submarine where you have got limited space but you can shield it for the people on the submarine, it's much harder on an airplane because of the weight. So, where we are today: We are the largest science and energy lab within the DOE System. There are some labs that are focused on a particular type of energy technology. You have the National Renewable Energy Lab in Goldman, Colorado - they do renewables. You have Idaho National lab, that's the designated lead lab for nuclear energy. Princeton does fusion. We actually are active in all those areas. Because we are fundamentally a science lab there's a base of scientific understanding in things like materials and biology and so on - that's very useful for energy technology and feeds into it. That science base - you don't know how it's going to impact and where it's going to impact. So, having that portfolio is useful because it is a little bit hard to know where things are going to go. The other reason I think it's important is because when we look energy, the things you need to do to mitigate CO2 emissions, It is actually rigourously true that there is not a single point solution. You've got to make progress in all areas - fairly significantly, in order to be able to do it. That's why we're pushing on all fronts. Often there can be synergies as well, for example concentrated on solar [thermal] power. They use salts as a coolant, so there may be some interesting synergies between [that and LFTR technology]. That's what I mean when I say "you don't know where things are going to go". If you develop materials that perform better in extreme environments they will have multiple applications. And there are other sorts of synergies too in terms of the roles the different forms of energy play in our supply. The fact that you need things to balance off intermittency of renewables and what does that mean in terms of transmission technology, and you've really got to look at it in a fairly integrated sort of way. Are you involved now in the Czech Republic [molten salt reactor research]? From the MSRE days there is this coolant salt and it is used in the intermediate loop. Kirk has probably told you all about this. We're going to use it for experiments in the reactor and give us back information that we can use. - Great. Will that mean that you have depleted your reserves? No, no. We have quite a bit more - I can't remember the amount. There's about five drums. [calculating] - about a ton. It's a very unique material because of the lithium in it. I hadn't realized that the aqueous reactor was done here as well and the fact that these were all liquid reactors does that have to do with the chemistry background of some of these - Yes, the lab was operated by a chemical engineering company so that has a lot to do with it. Wigner was a chemical engineer. The lab is very strong in chemistry. So, when DOE moved and declared in 1948, Argonne [National Labs] as the lead lab for nuclear reactors, they maintained Oak Ridge's Chemical Engineering expertise. Nuclear engineering has always made heavy use of computer modeling, but most of the tools we have now were developed actually a long time ago. They were written in FORTRAN 66 or maybe FORTRAN 77. I don't know. Modernizing that will be valuable even for new directions. For the nuclear industry for the most part, I think it's fair to say that they are really not interested in novel concepts. They have problems today that they want some help with and the DOE is partly responsive to their needs. At ORNL, given your heritage and your aims which are broadly written and give you a lot of scope - I'm interested in how much you can influence the DOE, and back up the chain. We are designed to respond to the priorities that are set by the government. On the other hand we have a lot of technical expertise that can influence those priorities, so there has to be kind of a dialogue that goes on. I said our budget is $1.65 billion. There is no line in federal budget that says: Oak Ridge National Labs $1.65 billion - go do good things. My job would be very different if that were the case. That would give you much more scope. We are funded through literally thousands of projects that come down from DOE and other government agencies where they say we need you to go to this, we need you to go to that, and we have to be responsive to that. We don't set the policy framework - but to the extent that there is a technology based input into that, we do influence it through things like the advisory boards that the DOE has, national academy studies and that sort of thing. We discover new things, researchers come up with new ideas - and those [things] have to somehow be factored back into the future directions for the country. That's one reason why we exist. Maybe we don't get directly funded for that but we are to do those sorts of things. What could ORNL do to get us back to the step-change in reactor design that will get us back to safe, low-waste - What are your personal thoughts on ORNL playing a greater role in bringing the molten-salt reactors back to part of the modern day suite of solutions? Certainly in the U.S. right now we are embarking on a fairly significant debate around the direction for nuclear driven by two things - Fukushima, and also in our case this blue ribbon commission that's looking at the waste question - which is currently unresolved in a kind of spectacular way. I guess that's a fair way to describe it. There is a big discussion about what these two things mean. From our point of view, I think there are some clear directions that have come out of it. For example there is a lot of interest in what are called accident tolerant fuels. What can you do to fuel design that makes it more robust in the event of some unforeseen accident? That gets back to the issue of Fukushima with the Zircalloy and where you go to elevated temperatures and you initiate this reaction that releases the hydrogen that led to the explosions. If you could have fuels that would go to higher temperatures than you would buy more time in your emergency response to restore site power. Some of those ideas actually come out of programs that were driven by novel reactor concepts. One of them that we have been involved in is TRISO fuel which is silicon carbide encapsulated spheres that were driven out of the pebble bed modular reactor concept. Well, that may also be a useful fuel design even for light water reactors in this post-Fukushima environment. With the Blue-Ribbon commission report, if you look at the recommendations, they're really focused more on legislative things than technical solutions. It doesn't say a whole lot about technical. Though I would argue we pretty much have 90% of the technology available but the discussion has been [about] what's waste and what's not waste. What we have been trying to do is get the discussion going in a different way where it's not just focused strictly on a narrow view around isotopics, and is there fissile material that's useful in today's economics but look at the bigger picture and change the discussion. At some point we are going to want to reprocess likely and we ought to hold that option open. In the 1940's and for much of the 1950's there were significantly lower estimates of uranium reserves then are known today. So, they were very, very focused on the scarcity of fissile material. In addition to that the sort of knew there was going to be a Cold War. Well, they didn't know there was going to be a Cold War - but they knew there was going to be some kind of confrontation with the Soviet Union after the war. So, they felt like what U-235 was available was going to be taken by the military. For peaceful nuclear power they felt like there had to be alternatives and that's why they were very interested in things like the thorium fuel cycle. They thought that might be a way you could develop electrical power without trying to compete for a share of a scarce uranium resource. Right now it's still cheaper to dig it out of the ground and refine it than it is to reprocess it. There is no real economic driver for a closed fuel cycle of any sort, whether it's thorium based or uranium-plutonium based, because it's just cheaper to mine it. That situation won't continue forever given global demand on a finite resource. But, that crunch is far enough out that it is very, very difficult for governments to deal with. That may be true about the fuel cycle but the two crunches you mentioned, which are safety which has now taken a much higher priority - the inherent safety of the reactor design. And - the economic crunch. Why aren't we building lots of new nuclear reactors? It's because they cost a lot. There is a challenge for the nuclear industry to find a solution that ticks as many boxes as possible, perhaps the two primary ones being cost and safety. I think you have got stuff here that's happened in the past that can answer those questions. I'm just interested to see what it would take for ORNL to get back to those days where ORNL was building 13 test reactors. It probably never will go back to those days, there's reasons but it would be nice to see ORNL regain that role. Let's work out what is the best way to do this. Well, that's partly why we are trying to drive some of this discussion around the blue ribbon commission. I personally think it's an appropriate time for - certainly for the DOE to reevaluate its R&D thrust within nuclear energy. We have a structure now you could to some extent argue - was set up for a world that doesn't exist anymore. There's about $785 million a year that the DOE invests in nuclear energy programs. That's a lot - it's not what it was back in the day in inflation adjusted dollars. You can do a lot with it and there's enough that's changed in terms of economic drivers, environmental drivers, safety drivers and so forth - it's tricky to move any large organic bureaucracy, but to the extent that technology options can help, that is something we can shoot for. I guess that I would say to complete the discussion that the other piece that we haven't talked about that's important around the fuel cycle reactors, is just nuclear materials in general, and the security aspects of that and what is an appropriate program in terms of maintaining expertise and knowledge relative to nuclear materials. If you are in the nuclear game you're going to have expertise that's relevant for proliferation, you can't completely decouple. You can never defend yourself from someone who is going to develop the technological capbility over here and then underground over there - do something else using the expertise they have. But, at least you can make it so that - it is hard to do them at the same place and the same time. I think that is true of more than just nuclear. Chemical and biological weapons are also part of this equation. Often nuclear gets singled out but you can do a lot of damage with lots of other industrial agents. Some cases are much cheaper actually. David leads our salt cooled reactor work, so he is going to talk about that. This is Kevin Rob, he is in our themohydraulics group. He is helping with the design and analysis of our salt loop that David will show you here. The basic message is that liquid salts are an outstanding heat transfer media. It doesn't matter what you're going to be heat transfering for. Whether this be a solar power tower, or whether this be a salt cooled reactor or a molten-salt reactor - We are trying to demonstrate some of the core technologies you have to have to make liquid salts a standard heat transfer material. The idea of this loop is to retain our expertise in using high temperature salts, provide a platform for us to test different components, different reactor concepts - above about 600°C it because technologically very difficult to transfer heat effectively. The loop is designed to run at 700°C (about 1300°F), The whole loop is made out of Inconel 600. Ideally for salts you would use an alloy like Hastelloy-N, Right now you can't really get the right components, the right shapes, using Hastelloy-N so we use Zinconel-600. It's maybe not the best option but it is the most economical and available option. Currently the loop is designed to run on FiNaK, which has pretty similar properties to FLiBe. It's just a different salt with a different composition. The main purpose of the enclosure is to keep the heat inside. The loop is designed to be about 200 kW and at 700°C, that's pretty hot, We would rather keep the heat in here than out the ceiling or trying to air-condition the room with 200 kW. Do you use that for heating or heat containment? Is all the heat localized on the pipes or do you heat the whole box? All the heating is either in the pipes or on the outside of the pipes. All of the pipes will be insulated with about four inches of insulation. The loop should stay fairly well insulated but it's a fairly large loop and pretty hot. There will be a crucible here, about six foot, nickel - that's where we will initially load the salts, and pass hydrogen fluoride and hydrogen though it and that will clean out the oxides and different contaminants inside the salt. Once the salt is clean, we will pump it into the storage tank - that's here. This is designed where the salt is allowed to freeze inside of it. That is an issue with salts, you can't have them freezing inside of pipes, it expands, breaks. The salt will be stored in here. It is trace heated, you can see the coils of heating tape. We'll heat the whole loop up, pressurize this container and pump the salt into here, within here is a pump. There will be a motor mounted up top, there's a long shaft, and then along the bottom here is the impeller of the pump. There is a picture of it here, it is currently out being assembled. The salt will be pumped though a test section. [such as] this silicon-carbide pipe that - currently is upside down. If you were to imagine it flipped upside down, and inserted in this spot here. There are a couple of different ideas of this test. One is - you often hear about silicon carbide being used for these high-temperature reactors. This is actually trying to use it as one large - section - trying to use it as a structural component. There are some challenges with how do you attach it, keeping it sealed. It has a different thermal expansion so it is tricky to actually use this. One proof of concept is actually using silicon carbide as a structural member. The other part of this test is that we are going to fill it full of these little graphite spheres. You can touch one if you want - they're about 3 cm. We will fill it up - about this much - this is illustrating how it will look with 600 spheres inside of it. The idea is we are testing a reactor concept where the fuel would be inside these pebbles - in here, and that is where the fission and heat is created and you've got flowing FLiBe over it. We're using an inductive power supply which would be located on the outside here, It comes in though the wall here, around the test section and it inductively heats the pebbles. Without using fission, It is really the only way to get heat into the system. Without having all sorts of rods and wires going inside of it, it mocks up what one of these would perform like. Can I ask what the theory was around using a solid-fuel pebble in the FLiBe rather than dissolving the actinide into the salt? currently in this country we are not really looking at the molten-salt fueled systems. So, the driver for the research was either a solid fuel, or the pebble-bed. There must be some advantages to doing this other fuel? Or, is it an extension from a previous research study? It supports the salt cooled reactor project, one of the concepts of the pebble bed. So, it is still relevant to that project. So you could still get an aqueous fuel system going? Well, we wouldn't put fuel in it, not this system in this building. This is the base for an awful lot more of our testing. For example, we will be doing natural circulation, safety testing, within this is the next set of testing, We are doing a lot of corrosion specimens in here, and a pump loop. There are a number of things I'd figure here for the next decade. We will continue to use this as a base for our system, and you just happened to hit the timing such that the induction power supply is out being serviced, the pump is out being serviced. We're expecting by the end of September to have the loop pretty well ready to heat up. The applicability of the molten-salt fueled systems can be tested also in this. Back when they were developing the molten-salt reactor, they had numerous loops that were not fueled. These ranged from natural circulation test loopsm to materials testingm to pump systems like this. So, they are all very relevant. Silicon carbide, even though we are using it as part of the design, that's part of the test. We are going to find out how that performs in a salt environment now. There are a number of technologies that have never been done before in salt in here. That rotatating *** up there, to allow things to shift between there, the fact that we've got ceramic and metal pieces in a single loop, and the nickel-carbon based joints, which we can acutally use gaskets and seals. Most of the technologies for a molten-salt reactor, as far as the thermohydraulics - well, they're identical if you want to use the salt as a coolant, but it's just much, much, much easier to do something that is non-radioactive, so that's why we have the walk before you fly [approach] in here. This may be quite a good way of starting, which is why the Chineese are also starting with the saying that you use a solid fuel system before you go to a liquid fuel system. This one does flow, so as the salt flows though it, it actually sends sound waves though. So, there will be a piece of electronics here and here, which sends a sound wave though and depending on how fast the salt is flowing though it - like the car that is going by, it makes a different sound - doppler effect, there you go. That measures the doppler shift. Could you mention the fluidic nodes? Could you mention what are you going to do with that? These are fluidic diodes, simply put, it is a way to control a liquid flow without using a valve. It's part of a safety system that is used in - the molten-salt reactor I belive had them - and liquid metal reactors. Where, during normal operation, the flow goes one direction though it. and that creates a lot of resistance, it spins around and comes out. During an accident, the flow reverses and goes this way, and there is not a lot of resistance going from here, just flowing out here because it doesn't spin around. So, that's after the particle bed concept tests. That is the next set of tests - to test this idea for the safety system. Then there is a heat exchanger that's another part of the test. The salt goes though here, you add the heat over there, you remove it here - you can see the big ducts. Air flows though it, cools down, and goes back. Here is some of Jeff's FLiNaK. This is a fluoride salt. FLiBe almost looks identical to this. If you go ahead and you repeat doing things in here, you can see it starts to etch the glass just a little bit. Well, etching the glass is a matter that you have set it in the Tennessee moisture and that means that, well it starts to etch quartz on there because quartz is an oxide. Now fluorine is more electronegative than oxygen so it would seem that lithium fluoride would be the preferred chemical form, rather than like lithium oxide. Is that the case? You will get an equilibrium distribution. You provide oxygen to this, and remember this is a solution, and when it is in a solution you will have some oxygen and some fluorine both of them in the solution, and you would like to keep this thing as bound as possible, and as a matter of fact one of the things that keeps FLiBe from even being as corrosive as FLiNaK is that it forms complexes, and oxygen will certainly interfere with its ability to form a complex. The favorable chemical form is still the fluoride. If you have ever gone ahead and had to remove the rust from your bumper on there, fluorines are really good at getting rid of that chrome oxide. It's a very effective technique. That said, corrosion in a fluorine salt is a very simple process, or at least comparatively simple. If you can keep it in the neutral state, and then remember that all the metals in their deposited form, are in their most reduced state. So, what we have to do in a reactor is keep things very highly reducing. That's much like in the molten-salt reactor experiment. They used the ratio of Uranium(III) to Uranium(IV) as the means to control the redox potential, [...] which was just a simple way of controlling the corrosion. We can also just put direct contact with the beryllium metal. If you put extra beryllium in there, there will be a little bit more beryllium than there is fluorine, and that will mean that if there is a free fluorine atom, it is essentially giving you a preferred spot to rust. So this is all about controlling the potential corrosion of the salts within any vessel you put it into. It also is the case that things like heat-exchanger tubings are very thin-walled and if you don't prevent the corrosion you get things like the iron out of some of the alloys is more soluble at higher temperatures, so you will get where your heat exchanger which is at hot temperatures, you will get some of the metals taken out of solution. And then, as it gets to the colder end it will redeposit, and so you can self-plug your heat-exchangers, which you would very much like not to do. Your technique to avoid that is to keep everything very well reduced so that it doesn't corrode in the first place. The point I want to make sure everybody understands is - there are no strong chemical reactions that are going to take place between the salt and even direct contact with water. You'll make it lousy. Indeed. There's no fires, no gross things. The reactors are part of our basic safety. We are having no large volumes of water in our reactor, inside of containment, because I want a low pressure containment on this and if I had a large volume of water - if I had a big enough accident, I could get the water in contact with the hot things, and that would allow me to pressurize containment and that could lead to much more serious accidents. We're just starting to melt this. You can see as it is starting to become more liquid-like. Slushy. Once it gets started, it only takes about a minute to go ahead and liquify. The melting point of this is 454 [°C] and of FLiBe is 459 [°C] so they are very similar salts. Do you have any thorium samples here in the lab? There are a number of thorium samples around. The big issue is that if you haven't freshly separated the thorium, it develops daughter products. It starts becoming something you don't want to hand around. The best way of getting thorium frankly, is go down to a beach in Florida and just dig some sand. The Monazite sands are all over - in fact we use some of the Monazite sands which are in secular equilibrium as a radioactivity standard. Thorium itself has very little [radioactivity] going out. But, in not too many years afterwards, it has built-in it's daughter products. The daughter products products have significant radioactivity signatures, so we try not to hand those around to the guests. The biggest ones I had were put in a beam line at the ORELA, and once you put them in the beam line they definitely were not hand-around [samples]. You can see it looks like liquid. It is still kind-of cloudy. We have to wait another minute or two for it to clear out. It basically looks like water. The viscosity is 30x larger than water but it is still a very low viscosity fluid. Interesting. Some people might imagine this is gloopy or a slow moving liquid, but it is actually quite fluid. It does go though a melt much like a glass, as opposed to water which doesn't quite do that. We don't want to run the reactor at 460°C, as it is tar-like. So we want to run it at least 100°C above this. In all cases I'd like to have it at least 50°C [above this point] so in all cases it does flow nicely. It is not like water or a liquid metal where one degree over melting and it's a very well flowing fluid. And, we are not losing anything though volatility right now? Anything in science terms is hard to say. There are a few atoms that are coming off of this, but it is not toxic. Now, sodium you can hand around but you would not like to go ahead and heat it up in air. This would not be a good idea. As you can see, It moves just like water. The hazards on this is the same as the hazards on a deep-fat fryer - in case I trip. Throwing hot oil or hot salt in this case on visitors would be considered a bad thing. There is nothing else to this, it just makes a nice little clear liquid. I'll just go ahead and pour this out into a little stainless steel crucible, and you can hear that little "snap" there was just a little bit of moisture there in the bottom of the stainless steel there. It is just re-solidifying here. At 450°C, this thing is a solid. So it doesn't take very long for it to form a solid again. Isn't that a nice feature? it is literally difficult in a reactor to actually have a loss of coolant accident. It is one of our issues about designing it so we can pump it out if we ever wanted to, is that it solidifies. It gets too inert too quickly. Yes, it just forms a plug - and well, you can't drain it anymore because it made a plug. In the scenario of a leak, if you had this leak out into a containment room or vessel - the container is at room temperature and the salt is coming out at 700°C, it is going to depend on the volume or mass that comes out. We have designed into our system a "guard" vessel, which is just a half inch thick stainless steel vessel. We don't know - if you had a major rupture - a huge crack across it, which would be a worst case scenario, similar to boiler pressure people in the 1910's who died from all this, Well, no one has ever had one of these types of things [occur] - even if you did, it would just go into the next guard vessel and sit there. But, if you had a little crack, on this and it was starting to weep [liquid salt], it forms a plug. It will just form a plug - it will self plug. On the other hand, if your design keeps the vessel hot, it will stay liquid on there, but that is why you have a guard vessel. It is a fairly inexpensive thing and it is only for an emergency - its only a half inch [thick] stainless steel to catch the whole thing, If the absolute worst case happens and you have massive vessel rupture, well you still catch it. You have your conventional solid fuel [reactor], with a liquid coolant with a fixed fuel form with a liquid flowing by it. Your pebble bed is a bit of a transition in that your pebbles can percolate up though, so you get some movement of the fuel. Then your next step is a slurry where you have smaller particulate moving with the flow, and then the final step is just the fuel in the solution. You can almost just imagine a continuum where the pebbles just getting smaller and smaller until finally they are in solution. These are steps toward a full solution. We have been discussing different reactor concepts. Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light-water reactors: "CASL". Ahh. Oh Wow. I think everyone can see the same thing. It is not the same, unless you have those [VR goggles] on. Yes, this is the set you want. So you could have a molten-salt reactor you could walk around on. Not only are we modeling reactors by computers, but the DOE said that you must model a physical reactor, show that it is relevant to actual operating reactors, not a design that isn't operating yet. Oh, this is so cool. You guys have got to try this. Oh goodness. It makes you feel really weird. There is something in front of me here - it feels like. We are focusing on pressurized water reactors and the core of a pressurized water reactor. It is about 60% of the US fleet. In general, the simulation technology we are putting together will be respectively applicable to a large class of reactors. The reason to focus on PWR's now is that we've got an existing fleet out there with lots of data, and we can execute a proof of principle, comparing with existing reactors. They have some challenges moving forward that we want to help them with. So what are the problems that current reactors are facing that you are trying to solve? Advanced fuels, new fuels that are more tolerant, resistant to accident scenarios like loss of coolant. In this case - the cladding integrity. This calculation here is looking at a fuel pellet that might have a chip in it and what would happen if you operate with a chip in the fuel pellet, what will happen to the stress on the cladding? This actually shows what holds the fuel rod steady, and if you get a gap in here, then the rod can vibrate and wear a hole [into it]. Could you talk a little bit for our guest's benefit about the versatility of this with regards to other reactor types, particularly like MSRs? I want to claim at least 80% of what we have done within VERA is applicable to almost any reactor. So, if you go to MSR's or BWR's, you've got to worry about a different type of coolant and different geometry, but you still have neutrons, you still have heat transfer, you still have structural mechanics and all of that base technology. The current tools that are used do homogenize things and they are able to do that because a lot of very bright people figured out the physics and were able to come up with simplified models. That was necessary because computer power didn't exist to do things like what we are doing now. In fact, the computer power now is just becoming online with Jaguar and Titan - 30 petaflops up to exaflops, We are getting to where we don't actually have to do the modularization step. What's the main advantage to 3D modeling over cross-sectional modeling? What they actually do is they model a full assembly as a single node - actually it's a quarter assembly. At the core level they are not modeling all of the detailed rods. Those are done in our preprocessing step. They model all of the rods and homogenize it, put it in a 3D model - it models part of the fuel assembly as a homogenous piece. You get basically one number for a quarter of this assembly, then you have to construct out of that to do detailed rod distribution. Where that becomes important, you can look at some of these assemblies, like this one is - where there are hot rods here and nominal rods here. You like to pick up that direct interaction between these assemblies in a 3D calculation. There's some physics that we are picking up directly in our 3D model that in current methods are actually picked up in a preprocessing step and reconstructed. How do you know this is right - your modeling of the physical system? The reason that we are picking physical reactors is because they actually do some measurements in the plant. These white areas are control rod guide tubes. The center one of these is called an instrument tube and they can run a fission detector down that instrument tube and get an axial power distribution. We can compare that, and for assemblies that they do those measurements on we can compare overall power of the assemblies. For the detailed power of the individual rods we have to go to very dedicated experiments, called critical experiments where they actually do rod by rod power measurements. We have to use data like that to come up with a validation case for this. Are there any additional modules required to do a fully homogenous liquid fueled form reactor with CASL? You will need the chemical processing module if you want to do that. We've got the physics - radiation transport, fluid flow - a lot of it is infrastructure. We are going though a lot of that now, even for LWRs. How do you specify the geometry? How do you specify the flow? How do you tell it at what rate to process the fuel? But, the fundamental aspects are there. The physics are there. This timeline dates from maybe 10 years ago now, when people were talking about what's beyond generation 3+ and the idea was generation 4. Here are some of the attributes. Economical, enhanced safety, minimizing waste and proliferation resistant. That was the reactor picture. If you look at what we've built and what we are building right now, what has happend to the size of the reactors over time, This is a plot for every reactor built in the United States - its power level over time. First reactor "Shippingport", you can see that was like 60 MW if I remember right. They hovered around 200 MW level and then they started scaling up. In engineering there is a principle for economics of scale vs. power level and size. The last plant that went online in the United States is right here, which is "Watts Bar". These would all be considered large plants. These would all be considered small size. As you can see, we really didn't focus on building anything small after the 1970's. We wanted to improve the economics of nuclear power. The cost of a plant which may be on the order of $5 billion, is a larger capitalization than the value of a utility that will pay to buy it. So, there is a lot of partnering that goes on. It is a very significant economic investment. The company is almost betting their future on the success of this plant. That has raised a lot of issues about whether that's really a sustainable deployment. The US is all based on private capital. The potential answer is small modular reactors - a generation 3++ that will actually fill this gap. We could see larger deployment since the economics are favorable, and that would bridge us into advanced reactors, these gen-IV concepts. Here is some terminology, what is meant by an SMR. These are the IAEA definitions. Less than 300 MWe is small, 300 to 700 MWe is medium and greater than 700 MWe is large. This excludes, of course, research and test reactors. SMR: Some people use this to mean small and medium reactors, so this would be reactors less than 700 MW. In the USA, and this is becoming more common everywhere, SMR means small modular reactor, so these are less than 300 MW per module. You may build multiple modules at one site to get a larger power plant. The multiple modules actually gives you a lot of flexibility as far as when you build things and how you capitalize things. Load demand: You can add these as you need them in small increments and follow your load demand, making that investment as you go along in time to manage your demand growth. Then, you could also match these up against your other sources - intermittent sources, though load-following to provide power. If you look in the USA, this is a chart of the age distribution of our coal plants, - less than 30 MW, 30-60 MW up to greater than 500 MW. This is the number of plants. The blue shows plants greater than 50 years old. The red is less than 50 years old. If you look at the 300 MW [range], all of our plants that are greater than 50 years old that are reaching thier lifetime are less than 300 MW. That matches the size where a small modular reactor can be a very nice fit when you shut down these coal plants, not just because of the age, but you can reduce the carbon emissions and bring in a small modular reactor in place that's the right size. We have a reactor concept called an "Advanced High Temperature Reactor" (AHTR). David will talk about this next - this is based on salt coolant. This is a small modular version we call "SmAHTR". It has a graphite moderated core with TRISO fuel, and FLiBe coolant. It is an integral design with integral heat exchangers and decay heat removal. It is 125 MW, would use FLiBe, run at atmospheric [pressure], and have all the benefits of salt. It has a redundant heat removal system, and Brayton power conversion. This would be a small modular salt-cooled reactor. Are those solid fuel rods in the center? They are not rods, they are plates. They use TRISO fuel, the coated particle fuel. This is a small reactor. I want to point this out. This is a scaled version compared to the new scale of B&W. This is the SmAHTR. This is 50 MWe, 45 MWe, 125 MWe. You can see this is quite a bit smaller, and it is not because the core is smaller. This is the core here, and this is the core down here. Why it is smaller is because the heat exchanger is a lot smaller. You can see that when you go to steam generators, they take up this whole volume here. When you go from salt to salt, the heat exchanger is a lot more compact so you save a lot of space there. This is a diagram of a plant layout of a molten salt reactor. These are 250 MWe units, this was for their two-fluid design (if you are familiar with what that means). You have a module that contains a cell for a reactor, you've got heat exchangers. You've got steam generators out here. You've got dump tanks in here and a storage area in here, and this would actually form a module. If you put four of these things together, you can have four modules on a site, so this is a small modular reactor. Here are your four modules, and it has got some shared systems such as the shared salt processing system. This is one of the first small modular reactor concepts developed. Later they went on to go after a 1 GW class design, but originally it was a 250 MW small modular design. We get all of our power from TVA. They've proposed building an M power reactor at this Clinch River site. You're sitting right in here. Clinch River site is right here. This is where they were going to build the breeder reactor. They proposed building B&W reactors on this site right here. They have engaged the NRC as far as scheduling. The issue is national labs don't build reactors. They are built by companies and you have to go though a lot of design, qualification, demonstration to get there. If you look at a deployment schedule for the Gen-IV designs - that's why I put that slide up first - those may not be ready until 2030 or 2040. We need something to add now to our grid with clean nuclear power that is going to get us to these advanced designs. That relies heavily on the established technology which is the light water reactor. It seems to be quite odd because it implies some sort of inherent process that we are going though that was dictated from on high, but actually all of those timings are just a function of how much money and resources you put into each element. As far as the Gen-IV systems there is a point where you can't accelerate them beyond the technology development. Qualifying the fuel, creep testing for materials, takes a fixed period of time. If you put more money at it you can't compress the time for long-term creep testing. The NRC license requirement takes a set number of years to get that done. You can't put more money on that and get that done any faster than that. You do reach a point where you just can't push it any harder. I think you need to get started. The way you compress the time is you get started agressively toward answering those questions. We cycle politically up and down. At some point I'm convinced that nuclear has got to be a part of the solution. Water is going to be a problem. I mean, there is just many things that nuclear is going to have to fill the void in. So getting the will to actually just get started, and doing materials studies, testing of different concepts, and so forth - will always draw that front-line back. I'm reminded that they always say that the neutron was discovered in 1932, by Chadwick. Think about how far we came in nuclear technologies over one generation. If we could even get close to that, over one generation a lot of these things that we are looking at would be solved. It takes political will. There is always that joke about fusion, that it is always "50 years away" It always has been - for more than 50 years. Partly that is because of the point that you raised which is - It is not correct to talk about it in terms of years away. It depends on how much you invest. So, at some given point in time, [inaudible] If you actually did though, at the end of 50 years you might get [finished?]. Of course what happens is that you don't. The plans change. The resources change. So, it is more of a series of technological challenges away - which at a given level of investment, you can accomplish it in 50 years, maybe 30 years, maybe 100 years, maybe never. But, there is a piece of it, just like Jess was saying - that's incompressable. Because we live in a regulatory environment where we have to do in-situ testing of things. That has a cycle associated with it because you have got to do the test, then you have to wait for things to cool down and then you have to do an examination and make a decision based on what you learned for the next test. That's got an intrinsic time scale to it that more resources don't overcome. There are other parts of it that are absolutely resource limited and you could go at more agressively. The trick is to not get out in front of it. What you wouldn't want to do is throw resources at the problem faster than the intrinsic time limit, because in the end you would squander a bunch of money. You could also spend a lot of money and never get there if you bring it down too low. ITER: The USA is responsible for the US contribution to ITER We could spend $100 million per year and never do it. You've got to ramp it up to $300 million or something, in order to just be able to get over the hump of getting it done. The other thing is, if you look in the USA and you go back 10 years on nuclear power, everybody basically thought that we were going to shut down the plants, put the fuel in Yucca mountain and move on to other things. That's totaly different now. As far as where we are looking at future change, [comparing] a gradual change of over 10 years back to our future - In some ways things are accellerating, in some ways they are not. You have other events that have happened. You have Fukushima. You have an economy downturn. You have a number of things that this all fits together with. $2 per MMBTU natural gas sets you back. Those [things] are not in our control. The other thing is - things went very fast in the 1940's and 1950's, not only because of the regulatory environment, but also because they were not developing commercial nuclear power. They were developing it [as a concept] - just get a reactor up, show that it works, do experiments. Nuclear technology is well beyond that now. It's commercial production technology and so you have to do things differently than we did back then. Our first MSR went online 5 years after the concept came but it only operated for 9 days. Yes, we can compress the scale and we could have something running in very short periods of time, but that's not what we are looking for now. We are looking to be a preferred source of energy for the nation and that takes more time. What is encouraging about what you just said is that you can test out reactor designs relatively quickly, before hurtling off down a new route. Perhaps if we had more experimentation at this stage - I think you are right, the debate is opening up, there is a different set of parameters. The other thing is - I'll say this before Tom does: The modeling simulation now is a whole new tool which we didn't have even just a few years ago. That's why there is all the excitement about CASL that you saw. It becomes a lot easier way to look at all these design variations and narrow down what you actually have to do experiments on. As we identify a few dead-ends on the computer, you will still have to do the testing, you will still have to do prototyping. It doesn't replace it completely but it can hopefully narrow down the possibilities so that the resource demands aren't so high. This is the US salt reactor program that I'll be talking about. I lead the ORNL reactor program working for Cecil in this room and up though the chain as well. I'm the US rep in the international molten salt reactor program though the Gen-IV consortium. The US is electing to go after a salt cooled reactor first. It is not to say that the US doesn't recognize that molten salt reactors have some very interesting, advantageous capabilities, but they are a more technically challenging thing to do. Much for the same reason that the Chineese are persuing a salt cooled reactor before they go after a true molten salt reactor, is the same reason the USA is following [the same process]. As a matter of fact in the last meeting just a couple of weeks ago, the French representative for their molten salt program also acknowledged they would probably want to be building a salt cooled reactor before they went into a salt fuelled reactor as it is a much simpler system. What is a fluoride salt cooled high temperature reactor? Essentially, it uses coated particle ceramic fuel - we will show you some pictures of it, that's the TRISO fuel. It uses a fluoride salt as a primary coolant, It's pool-type. It's basically a swimming pool with loops and heat exchangers around that. As you point out that is a big part of why they are cheaper. Swimming pools aren't multi-inch thick forgings - it's a swimming pool. It is a high temperature reactor. It is done both for the efficiency and because the salts don't melt until around 450°C. Our definition for strong passive safety in this is that there is no requirement for an active response to avoid either core damage or larger off-site release following even severe accidents, and that's ever. This isn't three days, this is ever. If it just goes black you don't have to do anything. Fluoride salt reactors take bits and pieces from all of the other reactor classes, just because we've come after them. Wether it is the molten-salt reactors where you learn things about the fluoride salt coolants, we have the same structural alloys, the hydraulic components - things like pumps, pipes, valves. While we would want very much to advance them from where they were in the 1960's, they will be an identical transfer. TRISO fuel gas cooled reactors: the structural ceramics, this is a high temperature reactor we will look very much like that. We also take [features] from the liquid metal reactors, the passive decay heat rejection, The liquid metal reactors have been the direct reactor cooling systems since the EBR2 which is in the 1960's timeframe. Light-water reactors: We've got a clear coolant. It looks an awful lot like water, it has got a high heat capacity. Basically, our coolant performs an awful lot like water at room temperature. This gives us a very convenient way of doing an awful lot of the prototypic modeling just using water. We're also even taking from the advanced coal plants because they are the people who exist right now who have high temperature power cycles, and so we want to just copy the power cycles that already exist and not reinvent things that other people are doing. One of the things to point out though, is with a high temperature reactor is, once you get into high temperature reactions you can get into the hydrocarbon cycle. That is equally every bit as important as the electricity production. You simply don't get there without getting to a high temperature reactor without some very big efficiency penalties for just actually heating things up electrically. That's it straight. There are economies of scale. There's modular FHR's. If you look at how the AP1000 is being produced right now in China, I was watching them winch in a 700 metric ton module into there and everything is being built in factories and they are just assembling the modules on site. Instead of having each module representing a plant, for this thing - one plant is made up of several modules. The modular concept applies equally well to large as it does to small plants, so you get all the economies of factory fabrication. The small modular reactors however look like really effective local process heat sources where you have things like well - if you are trying to support a refinery and you are producing the hydrogen so you can get 15% more gasoline out of your oil (by adding hydrogen to it). Well, if you want to match the size of this to the refinery you don't want a great big reactor, and the refinery wants you to follow and do what they want to instead of what the grid people want to, so a small reactor really makes some sense. You don't just want to put a great big reactor on an isolated grid because you would make that whole thing unstable. Passive safety: Again, no requirements for off-site power or cooling water - is a big part of what we are looking for. Low pressure combined with high temperature: Essentially low pressure containments. You don't need the meter thick concrete walls, because it is just a building. You need to be below grade, because in today's environment you need to be able to protect against people flying large aircraft into you and you are not going to be able to do that unless you go below grade. However, this is the thing [...] There is an awful lot of technology maturation that needs to be done. We are not ready for commercial deployment. We're not even ready for test reactor deployment quite yet. I'm hoping that we will be ready for a test reactor in the realatively near-term. But, you will need to be able to provide an adequate level of confidence in the technologies. This is going to be a multiple billions of dollars investment on a commercial part or a governement's part, and if you don't some confidence that you are going to get a payback no one is going to spend the money. Lithium isotope separation: We have to reindustrialize it. We already knew how to do it at the commercial level. The mercury amalgam process would be perfectly commercially acceptable. It's not environmentally acceptable. There are a couple of other processes - stimulated moving bed chromatography, as well as some interesting atomic laser vapor isotope separations that are recent that look very promising They're not commercial. Tritium extraction: We produce tritium because we have light elements and neutrons nearby. Tritium goes though metals at high temperature at fairly rapid rates. We can not put out radionuclides into the public environment as a part of normal operations. If we can't capture and trap the tritium we can't operate. On the other hand, this is also an opportunity. It turns out this decays to helium-3 and there is a worldwide shortage of helium-3 for science experiments. We could turn this into a valuable product - once we go ahead and get this solved. Sorry, could I ask: Is that happening already - that tritium extraction R&D? MIT is starting some university level studies on that. There have been a number of conceptual types of studies and there was work done as part of the MSRE program I don't believe that we will be following the same path that they did. Because our technologies - it's just been 40 years and we've got some improved technologies that we think have high promise for trapping the tritium. Some of this is a common interest with the fusion program. Very much so. We are taking advantage of the fact that a leading candidate of the fusion program in the early part of the 2000's was actually FLiBe. It's not currently their leading choice, but they did an awful lot of work with this and because they wanted to get the tritium out - because it is their fuel, they had to develop some of the tritium extraction technologies and we're going to be leveraging that heavily. Safety and licensing approach has to be developed and demonstrated: We're actually fairly easy in comparison to other things, because we're a liquid cooled system with very strong passive safety. We think that with some modification of the existing licensing technique, it will be an evolutionary approach instead of a revolutionary approach to licensing. We have a good solid possibility of getting a licensing done without nearly the sort of hurdles that the gas reactors that we were trying to do which was a full probabilistic base which required the NRC to make a major mental change and I think of them as the battleship. Trying to steer them in a different direction is a lot of work but they are a very good protector if you can get them to agree that you are something that is correct. Structural ceramics: We absolutely have to have them as it is a high temperature reactor. It just does not make sense to put metals right next to the core. We are so far, we are now getting to where things start creep failing at higher temperatures. Fortunately the first structural ceramic was just approved for use in nuclear power. It's graphite - and we need more advanced things, but it's the first time somebody's actually gotten this through the ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code as an engineering material. That was something that wasn't available forty years ago. Technologies advancing: Again, the structured coated particle fuel has to be qualified, so not just the coated particles. We need it in a different form. Everything from this derives from that liquid salt. The big number to see on here, the best one - is the volumetric heat capacity, which just says it is a really good heat transfer agent. It is even better than water. It absorbs a great deal heat very efficiently and efficiently transfers that power. With a boiling point of 1400°C, and we are operating at 700°C, we have this enormous margin to having any problems. The fuel also takes even higher temperatures, and this compares very favorably with anything else that's in here We are using the preferred means of transferring heat, which is why everyone else - even looking in the solar areas - people want to be moving into the liquid salts as the primary heat transport media. Looking at these things for different types of applications: This is our AHTR and it's the below grade version of things and this is the big reactor. 1500 MW central generating station - saying that there's an awful lot of the world that's still is densely interconnected, industrial societies, and they need base load power. it is very difficult for small modular reactors to come up with a way of saying that you're going to be cheaper. It can be they are more financially desirable because you can raise money in smaller increments but it is just difficult to overcome the economy of scale. if you can build a big reactor and you can afford to do it, all of our models tell you: build a big one. That does not mean that we are not also looking at small reactors because there are financial realities. There are some university programs that are looking at a variety of different things as well as the Chinese and the Indians who are the other international people who are interested in salt cooled reactors of different scales. The AHTR is the DOE's primary program focus right now and we're trying to go ahead and look at concepts to see what's the feasibility and understand the technology. The DOE knows we don't build reactors. We go ahead and develop the technologies and try to support the industry as they are doing that. We are using the concept development to say: "Well, I have to have this, but I don't know how to do this". We're trying to understand where are the technology developments to guide our R&D over the next decade or so. So, say the large system - it's a swimming pool reactor, we do have an external loop. The external loop isn't involved in the safety. If you just sheared the external loop off entirely, it would still be a safe reactor so we don't have the accident consequences for this. The reactor vessel is a couple inches thick. It's not a forging, it's not major structural materials, so relatively easy to make. It's a classic loop type reactor, and we're not really spending much time on this part of the reactor because other people need that. The unique parts are this part of the reactor where there is the salt loop. I can go ahead and get a model for this from somebody and say: "Well, that's what a steam plant looks like and what our efficiency will look like", because I could order one of those. Say a - 3400 MWt, 1500 MWe, it's quite conservative in they are only going for a 45% efficiency. Other people have exotic power cycles hooked to those that can give you a much higher efficiency. Again, that is not what we are emphasizing. Say, 50°C across the core, much like a light water reactor, three loops, primary coolant is FLiBe, the uranium oxicarbide variant of TRISSO, 9% enrichment. We are sticking with 9% because we think we can probably get our current enrichment of plants to be able to provide us that so we don't have to pay for people to build new enrichment facilities. Do any of these concepts address being able to do turn-down, effectively? If you look at the controls, they were always designed with the potential for load following. As a matter of fact, you can load follow with today's reactors. What the issue comes out to be is that no one wants to load follow with your low cost systems. Nuclear power plants tend to be very expensive to build and to maintain and to regulate, but they can be very inexpensive to operate, which means that once you have one operating people want to keep them operating. So, that has not been a major focus of these programs but we did have a variety of grid appropriate reactors. There were programs about three or four years ago when we were looking at how do you support grid stability? What about the interest from the military world in very small reactors, like 10 MW? In those markets they aren't driven by economics as much. When we get to certain sizes your best way to do some of these things is make disel fuel using your reactor and use your diesel fuel. Small modular reactors: We're very interested in a transportable size of these for things like supporting individual refineries or remote power operations. If you look at the tar sands and how much of their energy is used in producing their product, certainly these will be very interesting when the USA goes to oil shale. As our production is that you need to cook the rocks, heat the rock up to 600°C or so, to refine and liquefy the oil shale. just from the spatial nature of the distribution it's very difficult of one large reactor and say I want to do 100 square miles of space. It is just not structured correctly. Having a small reactor that you can move to where you need the heat is the appropriate form for that. We think that hydrogen production is the other way how you get into the hydrocarbon cycle because the carbon comes out. Whether it's CO2, whether is comes out of coal, the closer it looks to your end product, the less amount of energy you have to do. There was a nice seed money project that was done here a few years ago here which comes out to nice uranium carbonates of the cycle for the production of of large amounts of hydrogen which only needs 650°C for Thot, and doesn't have any high pressure or hot high-pressure caustic unpleasant chemicals within this is a very interesting cycle. Which it turns out, fits the Tout of our reactor very nicely. We're hoping to be able to over time - learn to couple the reactor into a hydrogen production cycle. Again, FHRs: high-quality is always important in a nuclear power plant. A lot of this you get inherently, you have large temperature margin to fuel failure, good natural circulation coolant. Very good negative temperature reactivity. It shuts itself off rather than going out of control. High radionuclide solubility in the salt. That source term Jess was talking about was: If you actually did have major fuel failure - well, you've converted your reactor into a molten salt reactor, if you go ahead you fail all the fuel. It's a low pressure system. there's no driving force to cause things to go outward in this. Which, also helps you to make containment barriers because I don't need containment barriers to be very strong. It turns out that we're designing a thing with four layers of containment barrier because they're relatively easy to do. You put a stainless steel dome around things and you've got a containment barrier. But we still want have high-quality fuel. Of course you are not going to operate the thing if your fuel is leaking everywhere. Effective decay heat sink into the environment: We're still either a uranium or a thorium system and it will have a substantial amount of decay heat when you turn it off, and we need to be able reject that to the local air or to the ground - we're currently designing it to the air. Passively thermally driven negative reactivities: Because we can heat up as we don't have the boiling issues going on, we can use things like fusible links. You can set melt point alloys that are ten, fifteen or twenty degrees above your normal operating point and all of your control rods are linked by a by a melt point which just passively drop in. you could have a poisoned salt injection system which is just held shut by a melt point system, because we do have a lot more margin and that's something which is distinctive to us because we're not anywhere near temperature limits for short-terms for anything. We just let things heat up until you get to a melt point and stick in a lot of negative reactivity. You have hundreds of hours before you can get even one-in-a-million type failures at 1600°C if you've operated it at low enough temperatures. There is a large volumetric change in the salt with temperature, which says that our passive natural circulation cooling has got a very strong driving force, which means that we can rely upon natural circulation. It gives us the ability of making very large reactors because the natural circulation is not something which is not something that is limited - that I have to wick stuff out to the side. I can go ahead and just continue to use normal types of cooling and just reject it to the atmosphere. which says that my upper limit on my reactor size is actually my grid, not my reactor safety. The coolant viscosity also decreases with increasing temperature which actually tends to reduce the hot spots which is a nice feature to have which is the opposite of helium. Now we we're talking about plates as to why we're doing things so essentially what we have in our design - they look like planks - about 25 mm thick, two layers of fuel right underneath. The reason we have these layers is because our method of rejecting heat is into the coolant. We don't want to wick things out through the walls we want to reject into the coolant because the natural circulation is the means by which we reject the heat, which says that we put the fuel as close as we can into the coolant. If you're looking down from the top, we've got a central hanger - we actually have a control blade in each one of the fuel assemblies and then there are eighteen fuel assemblies arranged in a hexagonal grid. One of our nice advantages is that we have this big MSR program to draw from. This actual configuration was come up with in 1968. We've been following that and Jess was kind enough to point out from one of the old reports, "this was a configuration they had". It certainly is an appropriate configuration, and so if you see this it actually looks like a fairly long thing, it kinda looks like a telephone pole if you look at it. It's about 47 cm across and about 6 m tall - so it's a big core. If you look at the core we have 252 assemblies to configure into making the core, and then there's a down comer round this where the salt comes down and then goes up though the core and keeps the vessel at Tcold, and also provides shielding try to keep the vessel with as low of a neutron flux as possible. The fuel height is 5.5 m. We have both permanent and replaceable reflectors. Our power density is intermediate. It is significantly higher than a gas reactor but much lower than a traditional [light] water reactor. We don't want to drive these things very hard. Things like flow accelerated vibration - some of these things are real pains. When we run the economic model, it says it comes out better than a PWR. Of course it comes out better - we have a higher efficiency for operation, because of the higher temperature, and we have shorter outages because we move our fuel faster. The problem is that - PWR's are real and we're a paper reactor as of yet. If we do things right we will be better, so we have a good target to aim at, but it is not something we can claim right now because we are not there yet. We cannot build one of our reactors. It's just if you could build one it would do that. Neither do any of the small modular reactors have that, really. We are in a world of transition, so you are up against other things that are not real yet. There is an awful lot of promise to this reactor class, even just as a precursor if you want to go further on to a true molten salt reactor. However, there is a awful lot of technology and an awful lot of licensing that still needs to be done before you want to make these a reality. I always end on this one - on Admiral Rickover's slide. I'm sure you've seen this before but - if you don't understand the difference between a paper reactor and a real reactor, this is what we're trying to change, and make us a real reactor but right now we are a paper reactor. That's what we are. How much do decision makers and policy makers within the DOE get exposed to this kind of thinking? If we could get congressmen to take an interest, they aren't going to make it happen, but they can at least ease the path. We spend a lot of time with our congressmen and our senate. Tom Mason will go and give briefings like this. I've given multiple briefings like this. It's just politics right? There's limited resources. That's right. We were just saying I don't think the challenges for nuclear are technical, or engineering even - notwithstanding the fact there is a lot already to do. It's largely political. I agree. It is shifting people's thinking to think a little bit more long term. It is just short term right now. There's a lot of focus assuring the LWR industry gets a life extension. [As well as] moving to small modular reactors, It's politics. There were a bunch of democrats that said "until you figure out spent fuel storage", "We are not going to give you money to do nuclear R&D". And so, it's become a point where they trade. "We will go ahead and support the SMR investment, but you guys need to put a consolidation site together to put spent fuel put in one location". That moves slowly, too slowly frankly. We will also point out that this fuel is not water-soluble. Which, is a neat little thing if you want to store it for very long periods of time. This can be stored and have very much less [issues] than the LWR because, we don't have zirconium on the outside, we don't have oxides. This is not water-soluble. It is a much more stable fuel form - same reasons as it is a much more stable fuel form in a liquid - a nice feature to have. I think the UK, from what I know - They are in a bigger transition mode than we are. Because you are moving from the gas to - Oh yes. - and you've got the one PWR you're going forward with, and there is still not that commitment to industry and obviously all of your industry is still in a flux. Yes. But, you also have the - [chatter] - but you also don't have much [nuclear] infrastructure there. So you haven't lost that yet. No, there are few extra drivers that we have. One is that that - as you say, we don't have that many PWRs. The life extensions are being done, but they can't be going on indefinitely. But, also we have a carbon price. I was out in Bejing and I met with the environment minister. I haven't spoken to the people I really wanted [to]. They came to see us a couple of times. We got a minimum agreement between the DOE and CAS. One thing they are doing, they are doing the thorium MSR. They've shifted to go with the pebble bed first, as they have said a couple of times. It is because it's one step removed from some of the issues with fuel salts, but it also allows them to keep thorium in those pebbles. They are going to do a moving core, but it is going to be pebble-bed. The pebbles will move though the core. We didn't tell you that. They shuffle though the core. You pull them out and if they are burned to their lifetime, you take them out. If not, you throw them right back in - it's a moving core, much like the MSR. This was largely [for] research. Yes, they used it as a prototype for the Hanford reactors, to produce gram quantities of different materials for the war. Then, after the war it was a research reactor. It radiated stuff, produced isotopes - did all sorts of things. And of course, we are so used to sitting behind some kind of computer screen, but obviously none of that. It's just - This was here in the 1940's. These [other items] were all built last year. Yes. These recorders would measure the stacks and monitor. You could shut down if there was a problem. This is the original log. It went critical. You can see right here - "criticality achieved at 5 AM on Nov 4th, 1943". Oh, wow. How did they detect that it went critical? They measured the power. If the power is increasing, then it is critical. It had a one minute period, the power would double every one minute. "14 slugs removed from bucket in back". They had what we called a "rabbit". They could run things into the reactor and out, into a laboratory pneumatically. You can see there is a lot of lead shielding. As things came out of the reactor, they could shield it. That went to a bar that would SCRAM the reactor. Really? There was a handle on that and you had to you would yank it and SCRAM the reactor. They never had to use that until the end and that was when we found out a lot more about self-welding because the balls which were intended to run in there had stuck together. Oh. Are they referring to that little piece of cable? That little cable is a "SCRAM" for this graphite pile that they never used. This reactor started in November 1943 and operated for exactly 20 years. So, what happens is those slugs fall out the back end of the graphite, and they fall down into this canal. Really? Then they would take them over to the next building which is the processing facility. That is how they get them there. You push a slug though a slug falls out into there, into the canal. You'll notice this is at the top of the hill because this series of processes, everything was done gravity fed. and so the tank farm which is the eventual waste in the ponds are at the bottom of the hill. Everything was just started as a gravity-fed system. Amazing really. A lot of foresight. The other thing to note here is these two devices. They don't look special but they are filled with sand. If there is an issue with loss of power and they need to put the control rods in - which are right here, on that side of the reactor - they don't need electrical power. This was designed from the beginning to function in a loss of power situation and to be able to put the control rods in. It had a lot of design features in it that you might not expect with a first reactor. This is pretty much a block of concrete with the pile in the middle. In the center there is a 24 ft x 24 ft x 24 ft cube of graphite with holes in it basically. This is the first reactor to generate electricity. They put a copper tube in the reactor, boiled water and lit a light bulb. That was a high school science kit. This happened in 1948. EBR2 generated electricity in 1951 - this was 3 years earlier. It's funny - I know you're a real materials guy, We're doing design work and so forth but most of what we're doing has to do with materials and supply chain. That is about 70% of what we work on. Materials - What is that the saying? He who controls materials, controls the world? I can believe that. But also, we are talking to people a lot about the supply chain. I think that is important. If you don't have the supply chain - like you said - you can't build the machines. When you were saying in your talk - "We can't build it right now", I'm going "he's absolutely right", and I can list at least five reasons why we can't. But, we can change that - with a few years of concerted effort and good funding. Are you on a committee? I'm on the opposition front bench. I have a responsibility for energy and climate change issues (as a witness). I don't know if that means anything to you, but it just means I'm often the spokesperson who stands up for the opposition party on energy issues. and I've established a caucus and interest group in looking at thorium energy. We use thorium as a shorthand for thorium molten salt. That's attracted some 20+ parliamentarians and the purpose of my trip here is to report back to them so they all know what's going on. How do you braze the metal to the ceramic? How do you do the joints between the metal and the ceramic, because you've got the piping at some point and metal joints, that connection - I know good and well how ORNL was planning on doing it, and I see what they said they were going to do, and i've seen some things I don't like. We aren't going to do that. That joint is... I don't really want to say. I don't know exactly what we're going to do. I have some ideas, I'll share them with you, but I know we're not going to do that. The homogeneous reactor test experiment was in this building right here. You can see it looks pretty old. They built the HRE in here. Then, after they operated that, they had to dig a big hole in the building and dumped the HRE. That reactor was an aqueous solution of uranium nitrate. Gord, there you go. Nail it. There it is. This is the place. Wow. You all will be escorted into the high bay, but you will not have unescorted access anywhere out there. You are entering a radiological buffer area. You do have to wear your (detector) on your neck or waist. That is one of your responsibilities. I should point out we do have a few folks who are even operators here. Syd Ball's offices just literally three over from me. Syd was one of the operators at MSRE here, and he actually had operated this. He was at the controls when it reached its highest power. The first building you see, is the office building we're sitting in right now. It attaches though a breeze-way to 7503, which is the reactor building, the office building - the one story building. The high-bay area is the reactor area itself. Then there are other buildings. That 100 ft stack on the left is the stack we currently use now. to vent the gasses from the enclosures. The initial fuel loading in the reactor was U-235 and U-238, 227,100 grams. In 1968 they changed that fuel charge. They took out the U-235, and added U-233. They thought the U-233 was the utopia of uranium fuel because it had the high energy and high gamma so nobody would want to steal it or have the capability to steal it. So anyway, U-233 was tested here, and there was a little bit of U-235 in it, and they added some Pu-239 in that fuel mix. Question, do you know how much plutonium was added? Oh, about 600 or 700 grams. This fuel was mixed with metal fluoride salts of lithium, beryllium and zirconium. That salt remains in three tanks and those salts have got about 6000 pounds of salt in each tank. The next picture you see is a reactor cell, when they were building the reactor. You see a man standing down on the vessel doing something. You'll notice on the top of the reactor there's an RGRS. RGRS is "Reactor Gas Removal System". That's the system we currently use when we vent the three drain tanks. The drain tanks build up fluorine gas that had to be removed periodically because of the pressure level. We keep the drain tanks below atmospheric pressure. The fluorine builds up through a chemical reaction inside that metal salt, by a radiological process. We vent the head-space from each of the three tanks on a regular basis. Since the reactor has been shut down for a long time, what is it that you are maintaining? Why do you need to maintain the pumps and valves? The salts are maintained in tanks that are isolated with air-driven valves, and we maintain an Ingersol-Rand air compressor system, that maintains the air to keep these valves closed or open. There's dozens of valves involved in this arrangement. You should know that since the reactor has been retired, it will continue to off-gas fluorine. It has only been since 2008 that we regenerated the salt and put in fluorine to volatize the uranium. With the U-233 you reheated the salts, and then fluorinated them. You have got to understand as you go into the high-bay, there has been a lot of work that has gone on in the past several years. Look down before you walk. That is our biggest hazard here right now. Oh. Oh my goodness. Yes, yes. I've modeled this shape neutronically. Can I touch it? Well sure. Don't touch it, or your hands are going to look like this. I have a small child. Is this full-size? Yes. It's like a "lead" pencil isn't it? Basically. Graphite. Who manufactured it? Poco Graphite manufactured this. Having this stuff on my fingers is like the equivalent of being a teenage girl who just hugged her favorite boy-band. This is actually where the tank's at. This is the monitoring system that is on the stack. That is alpha, beta, gamma. This was all hard-pipped in but yet the tanks were suspended. That blew me away when I learned about this. I studied the instrumentation. It was a non-trivial problem to know how full the tank was so they weighed it. That's how they did it. We weighed the traps here. We mounted a strain-gauge - which is still here - on this beam, and the trap was brought over here with a low-boy, a little gadget that we'd pull - a carrier. There's two of them sitting right there. They weigh about 600 pounds apiece. We'd bring the carrier over, line it up with this scale, take the top off of it, and reach down with a hand tool and pick the trap up and hang it onto the strain-gauge and weigh it. We had to weigh it, you know we were dealing with uranium. We had to weigh it in very precise measurements. How precise did you have to be? Oh, less than half a gram. You can stand on the blue part and look at it. Don't touch anything. OK. I won't. Remind me what this is used for? It's for the RGRS to operate the valves. This is to help with the venting of the gasses. I'm not going to put my hands in. No. Put your hands in, we'll have to cut them off. I'm going to put them straight back into my pockets. Thank you. There's a pair of blowers that would blow air over a radiator that would cool the salt before it went back into the reactor. They attach outside the building right here. This is Tennessee, if you dig more than 15 feet or so - - you hit water. This tunnel shows how deep the connection is from the bottom of the reactor vessel over to the drain tanks. That's the sump area. These are the probes that we used. The box is the top part of the probe, that we had the controls. We could tell exactly how far down the probe was moving, and the weight of it and all this stuff. The probe had five zone heaters on the end of it. The end zone heated and it would melt a pool in that salt, and it would sink down into it. When it got in within a few inches, we would start sparging HF gas though this molten salt. The HF would recondition the salt back to its original crystal. We're going to move the salts out of the tank from the storage position. We are going to pressurize the tanks moderately, still keeping them below 50 PSI. This will cause a siphon which will cause the flowing salt to come over into these transportation casks. Oh perfect. Now you can get a video of it. You should be able to see the walls around it, to handle the heat when we bring the salt out of the storage tanks. [inaudible] So, those are newer transportation casks. Those were built for this project. - OK. We were going to take that salt while it was molten and flow it into these transportation casks. When we removed uranium, we shipped it over to a storage facility "3019" - which is on site. They have the world's collection of U-233. There's about a hundred different inventory items over in "3019", and dozens of different forms - powders, plates, liquids, salts, whatever - the salt portion that inventory came from this reactor. The other direction - I'm not allowed to shoot in. But, it looks pretty interesting. The amount of uranium in there dictates security levels. This is a category 2 facility. Basically everything that we photograph, we don't want to give out important information. I don't know what is secure, what they can and can not see. There are people who are trained who can look at those photographs and say, "No, we don't want this shape to go out, we don't want them knowing we have this type of gas in here". It could be as simple as that. Somebody could say, "why do they have argon in their system for"? It may be the key to what they were looking for. We may just have given them that information by a simple photograph. We talked about when cool the head-space off to try to recover uranium though the FSR removal process. This is a room to control that process to know whether we're extracting the gasses off of the head-space and if we are seeing any kind of emissions off the stack - and monitoring that. If it was going though the system, it would come up on our screens and it would tell us about the contaminants off the stack, such as uranium or things of that nature. Basically if we are putting out any uranium or things that are of interest, it would stop the process. Because, that is not what we are supposed to do. We are supposed to be recovering this material. So, if we are not doing a good recovery, then this is our means of telling us if we are doing a good process or bad process. Here you have six peaks. We saw that, but it turned out to be 1290. We were putting uranium out the stack and we needed to stop. Our process wasn't being as efficient as we needed it to be. So, if you were interested in researching MSR, is there any value in maintaining the site as is or is the educational value provided just exhausted and now its like you'd just as soon clean it up? I think so. I think it is a historical facility because of what was done here. But, other than that, it is of limited value. You are learning some things - all the data you're collecting. So if you need to decommission a molten salt reactor, at least we have lots of data. We have lots of data for that, right. This was not designed as a power reactor and wasn't really designed so much with decommissioning in mind. As a matter of fact all those long handled tools they had for operations, those were - it was almost heroic actions you'd say - when they were trying to do things in it and you've got this length of distance. We'd certainly try to design things today that you get robots to do it, and designed so that it could be robotically handled for when you are doing the decommissioning. It just would not be designed the same way as it was at that point. This part of the building that you see is actually the "7503" portion with the high-bay. This part of the "7509" was mainly just office areas. They are just connected by a little breeze-way. Now, when you say high-bay? It is taller. We can put cranes in and lift things up. See that blue thing? Look at what it's sitting on. Those are shield blocks, It's those big, white chunks of concrete. Now, when they were running the actual reactor, those were all in place. When they decided, "OK, we have to de-fuel this", they took them out and moved them over here. How radioactive are they? They're not very [radioactive] if they are sitting out in the open like that. Not very is the answer. These things right over here - the're the spent probes I was talking about. Those right there? Yes. Those are the things we actually used, they went down the tank on mountings. They did the gas additions, did the bubbling and stirring and everything. We have a couple of them in the high-bay - I know you probably didn't get a chance to see them as well, which is why I brought you around here to see them. Those things would extend to 60 feet in length. Because, a lot of them were stored above the high-bay, they had to go down about 20 feet, then you had to go down an additional 25 [feet] to get to the top of the tanks, and then you had to actually go inside the tanks. Those things would extend - you've got a pipe within a pipe. Those are a bit more radioactive because you can see that they've got shielding on there and the caution sign says "Radiation Area" inside there. Did you do a spectrum on those? We're trying to hold on that, because we're not sure from the scrapings wether we're actually seeing an indication of what the salt was or wether what we were seeing what we scraped off was metal off the probe. We don't yet understand whether it was homogeneous or not. So, we don't know whether we got a very good sample of this material or not. People are hesitant about telling people what that is until we find out. I'm really hesitant about it because, that's not my area. Analytical is saying "We don't know, it could be this, it could be the probe, it could be the salt. We don't know if it's stratified, or whether you have a good sample or not". I don't want to have something which just operates for nine days. We are are trying to make a transition to a next generation of power that supplies a great deal of the world's energy for the next century. The DOE directly interacts with congress. The national laboratories are not allowed to petition congress directly. We think our projects are important. We believe there is a great deal of value in fluoride salt cooled high temperature reactors. We think that passively safe reactors are that generate large quantities of power and with the potential of being low cost, should be of a great deal of interest to the world. I particularly think that being able to produce these with domestically produced components, as well as being able to produce hydrocarbons with nuclear power, and reducing our dependence upon imported oil are very important. We're hoping that we can contribute to solving some of the nation's energy challenges. We get a limited amount of money through the advanced reactor concepts program. It is a very small program, but we try to keep it alive and we have a number of people who - I mean, Oak Ridge works as a team. We are a very team oriented organization. that's why you're seeing all the people - the lab director the deputy lab directors - two of them. We've got a number of people who work together and we're all trying to encourage [the] DOE that we believe that this is in the nation's best interest. Providing technical information to the DOE is what we do. You can't lobby congress. We only respond if congress asks for our technical opinions, then we can provide the technical opinions. We are not paid by congress to go lobby them and all of our efforts are things that are under the direction of congress through the US Department of Energy. It is only the DOE's responsibility to go ahead and advise congress. we are slowly making progress. We are always advocating we should go faster. I would think the nation should spend a considerably more amount of money on energy research. This is a very desirable project to be spending money and time on. Do you think you will get to build one in your career? I hope so. I believe I was in seventh grade when I decided I wanted to make my life towards advanced reactors. Really? And so, I have been pursuing this for a great number of years. What did you see in the seventh grade that uh? - I read an Issac Asimov's story about cold fusion and the implications of what free energy would do, and I knew I was going to be an engineer or scientist just from day one. This said ok, what can you do to make a difference? That was where I said "Well, advanced nuclear power was something that could make a difference, and that free energy or very much low-cost clean energy could make a huge difference to society If I'm gonna have to get up every day for 50 or 60 years and working on something, well it ought to be something I believe in." I've worked on reactors my whole career here, even when reactors weren't that popular. Jess and I have similar amounts of experience here and there is a big hole in reactor experience. There is a lot of folks with very gray hair and a lot of recent retirees and there is a lot of some new young people. If you look at the population curve, there is a double-hump curve and we are at the - - bottom of the hump. Jess and I are some of the few that are in this age group. When we said we wanted to go into nuclear energy, people said "what are you, nuts? There is no future in that." - Yeah That really didn't matter. We say say it's the true believers who were left there. Kirk's got a new Facebook update page. It has got he and the baroness holding a graphite rod about the height of the two of them. My name is Steve Burnette and I'm the HFIR plant manager. As you think have heard earlier, HFIR is not a new reactor by a long shot. It was designed in the late 1950's, started construction in 1958 and went online in 1965. The whole purpose of HFIR when it was built, as its name implies - High Flux Isotope Reactor - is to make heavy isotopes, man-made isotopes that no one else can make. The very first year that HFIR ran, it ran for ten cycles. After one year they were able to make 0.5 g of californium-252. What are some of the uses of californium? Californium-252 is a neutron source. Every reactor, whether it is a research reactor or a commercial reactor, or a reactor on an atomic submarine - has to have a source of neutrons to start, californium is that source. In this country, every oil well drilled - they drill down so far, they drop a californium source down there, do a geological mapping, look for certain pockets and do directional drilling to the oil. Also, every coal mine when they pull the coal up, they pull it out and run it by a californium source, and it segregates the high sulfur and low sulfur coal so we can get cleaner-burning coal. Why is californium particularly good for that? Because, it is a spontaneous fissioner. It is one of the only things that will spontaneously fission. You don't have to put it in a reactor to make it fission. It will just do it all by itself. - It makes a lot of neutrons. Then after 9/11/2001, every airport in this country when you put your luggage on the carousel and it goes away, It runs though a instrument that has a californium source in it, and it looks for drugs or explosives in your luggage. Also, when you go though and put stuff on the x-ray machine and they will see something now and then and take a little swipe of it, they put it into a machine with a californium source in it that looks for the same thing. HIFR produces about 80-90% of the world's supply of californium. Only one other reactor in Russia can produce californium. It takes a very high neutron flux [to make]. How much do you make each year? They do it in campaigns. It hasn't been a steady state annual production. HFIR is a swimming-pool type of reactor, light-water moderated and beryllium reflected. From the bridge to the right, is the reactor pool, to the left of the bridge is the spent fuel pool. The reactor is in a pressure vessel about 8 feet in diameter, 17 feet tall. The top of the vessel is 20 feet underwater and then from the top of the vessel down to the fuel is another 9 feet. This is the reactor control room. It is generally live, though the reactor is not running right now. When we're running this is where the reactor operator sits, these are the boards he's watching. The thing that makes HFIR unique is its fuel. We have a sample of the fuel right over here. Here's a full-scale model of HFIR's fuel. If you are commercial power plant making fuel, your fuel would be 12 to 15 feet square, 12 feet deep - metric tons of fuel. You would use uranium that is enriched to 4%. The uranium we use in fuel just occurs less than 1% in nature, so we have to concentrate it to get it to use it in fuel. If you keep concentrating the fuel, the uranium we use in reactor fuel - at 98% you make bombs. 98% bombs, 4% commercial power fuel. HFIR's fuel is 93% enriched. So, that's different. In a commercial power plant you load the fuel up, it runs for 18 months or longer, it runs out of fuel, and you need to shut down and refuel. With our fuel, we load it up, it runs for 23, 24, 25 days, and we shut down. So, if you essentially had this and immersed it in water you'd have a HFIR, right? We would have to have something to control it, something to reflect the neutrons. - Oh, you'd need the reflector ok. Now, this part in the middle where you see these things sticking up, that's what makes HFIR unique. This is our flux trap. That's where we put experiments. There is 31 different rods that go in there, and those 31 positions are the positions we used to make that half of a gram of californium-252 back in 1966. This reactor and the entire facility is all built for those holes. HFIR's claim to fame is that we have more neutrons in this area - in this flux trap, than any other reactor in the world. Everything we do is based on the fact that we have more neutrons here than anything else. In this area we do materials damage studies on certain materials, and we make other isotopes. One of the isotope campaigns we are making right now is selenium-75, that is used as a gamma source to make an X-ray source. Just last summer we irradiated what we call a rabbit - a little small capsule about that long - with lutetium in it. We sent it to the Netherlands and 26 patients were treated for brain cancer with this one capsule. Now, important to me - 20 of the 26 were Americans. You couldn't get that therapy in this country because it wasn't FDA approved yet. But, lutetium - they use if for cancers of the hormone producing glands - thyroid gland, pituitary gland, and so forth. When the Canadian reactor shut down, they contacted us about making technetium. It was down for several years, then other reactors in the world were down. We can make technetium, but the trouble is - it affects all of our other programs. To make technetium, it only takes us about six days to irradiate it. We would be running the reactor for six days, shutdown, have to pull all of it out, put it back in, run six days, shut down again, and pull it out. That would affect our beam rooms and we're overbooked about 4:1. The half-life of molybdenum[-99] makes it not really feasible to produce in this reactor. Our beam facilities are international user facilities. If you want to use the beams here we have a science committee outside of the laboratory - independent of the laboratory - reviews every experiment, and looks for the most scientifically relevant experiment. If you're willing to publish in open literature for everybody to see the results of your experiment, there's no irradiation fee. If you're a proprietary company and you want to do something and keep the data proprietary then you are charged a fee for doing it. It is the same thing with using the in-vessel radiation facilities. If we're making isotopes for somebody, then there is a fee. If we are doing research experiments and they are willing to share with everybody, then there's not an irradiation fee. That sounds pretty awesome. It's true for all of our users. The government funds it to get science out of it. As long as it's open, and available to everybody, that's why we're here. Here is a source of neutrons, here's our fuel. These control plates - the solid part of that plate contains europium. Europium absorbs neutrons. This beryllium reflector reflects neutrons. We drive this inner cylinder down and out of four plates up, until you get a little window right below that common area where there's no europium. It makes a slit - a little window, so now that neutron gets out, hits the beryllium reflector, gets back in and hits the fuel. One makes two - geometric multiplication, and we go critical. If you do that, that fuel burns right in the center out. And then, you don't change that gap, pretty soon it will be like you are driving your car down the road and your car runs out of gas. You just sag out. We measure that heat and as we start to get that way, we open that window a little wider - and burn some more fuel, and open that window a little wider - until 24 days later we've burned the fuel. These are experiment holes in this beryllium. I can put different experiments in here and do radiation studies. One of the things we're doing right now with one of these experiments is - Remember what happened at Fukushima? A tsunami wiped all their cooling out, everything started heating up. Now, commercial reactor fuel has a Zircalloy cladding around it, that holds in the fission gasses. When that fuel got up to 1200°C, that Zircalloy gave off hydrogen, and that's what blew the roofs off the place. Some of the materials studies said that a silicon carbide coating wouldnt give off hydrogen at that temperature. In fact, we've got two Westinghouse fuel elements in here that we are irradiating right now to prove out that concept. No hydrogen. - No hydrogen. The guys that built this weren't any dummies. As an afterthought, even though they were making isotopes, they decided to put four beam tubes in here They put in four tubes, with just a stream of neutrons coming out. Three of those tubes we use for neutron scattering - fast neutron scattering experiments. What you do with that is you look at metals - heavy metals. As the neutrons hit it, it is almost like a scattergram. You measure reflection and you can tell where the atoms are. You can tell in a sample, atom by atom, what makes up your sample. You can tell if that atom is spinning or not, if it is polarized or not, For solid matter - metals - we have the most intense neutron scattering instruments in the world to study that. They are not positive or negative, so you can't use magnets. They come though a tube, though a concrete barrier and come out the end - - so we lose some. Interesting, so you only keep those - - that make it down the tube. In 2004 we took a tube that looked like this - we crammed it up inside one of our beam tubes, and we circulated supercritical hydrogen in that, at 18 Kelvin. We looked at Huntington's disease. Huntington's disease is similar to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. It is a disease of the nervous system that affects the muscles Huntington's is a hereditary disease that affects 1 in 10,000 people. We actually isolated the Huntington protein. We took this isolated Huntington protein, and put it in our "cold" beam, and we looked at a neuron. In fact, we looked at the nucleus of a neuron. In this nucleus, we saw little fuzzy balls that weren't supposed to be there. Since this biological sample was alive, we watched it grow and watched those fuzzy balls turn into long stringers. That's the first time we had ever seen the mechanism for what causes Huntington's disease. Now we're working with the medical community and the people that are working on treatments or ways to treat that, and we have a number of experiments lined up that says "OK, let's apply this treatment". We can see if it is effective or not. That's very exciting. For your short lived radioisotopes, that's the size of the capsule. That's a cylinder cut in half. That's the size of the rabbit that goes down in and back out. So you are talking about a very small batch. Now granted, very small amounts can do phenomenal things. This is a remarkable facility. This has done a lot of good, for the United States, for the world, for humanity. To have a very intense source of neutrons - It is another example of how people have talked about how terrible highly enriched uranium is - I mean here is highly enriched uranium being put to very productive uses. It's neither good nor bad. It's what you do with it. Jess, this has been incredible. I mean this is like, every tour I've had multiplied together times four. It is not lost at all. It is actually the MSRE that is the most unique. It turns out they are actually very excited to have people come and see it. I asked them who else had been in, and they said we had a Japanese delegation - Something has changed. Before, we could never get anybody in there. It used to be people were reluctant because they couldn't go in the HFIR. Why did we come here if we can't even go in there? By the time we left they were showing us everything. So this is a precedent then. We are establishing a precedent. The UK has a very different approach to licensing. You have an analytic approach, which actually is very interesting. Some of your people do a very mathematical and formal approach, it is a different structure. This is why there isn't a common regulatory structure, because each nation - it reflects the history and culture. The US has a very confrontational and litigious way of doing things. The British have very analytic and formal methods. The French are very command structure [based] - that this is acceptable because we said it was. That's why we haven't gotten a unified structure, you see the culture of the nations embedded in their licensing. But, none of them are quick. Oh. No. To some amount you have to say they shouldn't be really quick and easy. There is some significant, serious consideration that needs to be put into this. In your presentation earlier, you indicated that due to the passive safety features, you are going to have a little bit easier task. Indeed. The NRC is not this dragon that you have to worry about. This is how we do things, how do we phrase what we have to do, so it fits within their language so they can be more familiar. It is going to take us a while. There's no question that this is a major effort, but we have to understand what demonstrations will be necessary. How do we get so that we can support their licensing mechanism? I am not trying to tell the NRC how the license a reactor, because they've had many years of experience on doing that, and trying to do a revolutionary new approach to licensing is not going to be within my budget. Yes, but have you had much engagement with them so far? We have had with the people who are in charge of the research and the exploratory, fairly positive reactions but there is no formal because the NRC is a regulatory agency and we're not ready to be regulated yet. We hope to be able to get to a test reactor at some point but we are going to have our first design safety standards meeting, coming up at the ANS summer meeting in June 24th, (2012). We have two members of the NRC who've committed that they're going to be part of us helping to create the design safety standard. They'll be aware of what we're doing as we're doing it, so that when we are ready to come to them it's not a surprise. If you get re-engaged with significant research, a test reactor here would be a good thing to collaborate on, wouldn't it? Oh, very much so. Remember, we're so far from commercial. This is almost all open. We're working with the Chinese. We're trying to get negotiations to work with the Indians. There is no way we would be doing this if this were very near to commercial, where it would be an export control issue, because it's a long way [off] this is still science. And yes, I hope we do get to the point where we do have export control issues and we get companies with proprietary interests but we're not there yet. You see now, I asked these guys, "Have you had any other delegations come though" and they said, "Why would anyone even be interested?" What about other countries? Did the Chinese go there? That is what I asked him. I said India has a thorium research project, China does, Russia does. Did any of them come though? He said the last delegation to come though here was Japan, decades ago. Have you been to other national labs? Are they all as modern, euro... No, no. This one is much more modern than a lot of the other ones I've seen. I'm really surprised actually, because usually they're big. This is the closest thing you'll find in real life to an accelerator driven reactor. It's not an accelerator driven reactor, but it does have an accelerator - a very large accelerator as you can see. A lot of people today talk about accelerator driven reactors. To work they would need a linear accelerator hitting a spallation target. This is using protons to produce neutrons. Instead of fission, we inject protons up here. We ionize them. We accelerate them though this linear accelerator. What propels it? RF (radio) frequency. - magnets These are charged particles so you can use an electric field. You can't accelerate neutrons with those. Radio frequency is tied to it. You get these waves and every time they hit a magnet they are growing. Once you have a voltage difference you can accelerate a charged particle. - Right. Surf the waves. - That's what all this is about. All this is about generating an electric field to change a particle from almost zero energy - - Particles are flying there, and thats straight. In these you are putting electric field gradients and accelerating them [the protons]. These things are literally surfing along the high frequencies, because you are getting very near the speed of light. - about 92% of the speed of light by the time we fling the protons into this accumulator ring. They spin around. As they pulse, it picks up additional protons every time it swings around. You get this proton cloud swinging around the accumulator ring, and then we kick that out when we reach a density of protons. We shoot them down into a liquid mercury target system that's about the size of a Volkswagen. That proton energy striking that liquid mercury target is equivalent to about eight sticks of dynamite and it spalls off neutrons from those big nuclei of mercury. Just like at HFIR for the neutron scattering mission, we use those neutrons then to probe materials, and we do it off these beam lines. What does mercury turn into after spallation? Is it like fission product distribution? It's a dog's breakfast. It turns into all kinds of things. It has a distribution to it like fission products. It is probably not double-*** like fission, because there is not two pieces. No, I don't really recall off the top of my head. It's about with 27 neutrons. It's shredded. So it drops from being mercury to something that's 27 mass units - small. Not quite that small. - You get a whole distribution. We have talked about what would be the isotopic research that would go out and look at what the fission products are in the mercury and others. Spallation products - Spallation products. But we have just not done anything with it. Remember we started seeing [?] target in 2006. Our primary mission is materials, so it's all about at this point, standing up a very young organization and facility that can impact science. There are collateral benefits that we are exploring. For example fission produces a hard neutron flux of about 1 MeV, tops - about 10^13. A few MeV tops. If you want to get into the fusion space, you want super high energy or hard neutrons. 14 MeV is kind of the standard. So what we've done is we have been exploring with the fusion materials folks - we get a lot of hard neutrons here - installing a little rabbit system like at HFIR, where we can actually put materials next to that liquid mercury target, and look at the damage effects from those high-energy neutrons coming off the spallation source. Europe is in the process of building the European Spallation Source, and many of our scientists are on duty there helping them design targets and accelerator systems. ISIS, your accelerator at Oxford is the only thing close to this. Is this the only way to get those high-energy neutrons in a sufficient flux to do materials examination? Yes it is. You could build a fast reactor - a high temperature fast reactor which would give you some higher energy neutrons, But, fission just can't produce neutrons of high enough energy to simulate fusion neutrons, but this can. This does. This does. Is this an important part of the US's contribution to the ITER [fusion] effort? Right now there is no other source to do that material irradiation currently planned in the world, except for ITER. China,