2l bottle of water, put a little bit of waterin the bottom, now try to balance it. and i couldn't because the weight was really low,i couldn't- -maneuver it fast enough. then he filled itall the way up. now it was much heavier it was much more unstable butthe center of gravity was higher so yeah i was totally able to balance it. rockets are the same way.they're unstable, but you want them to be unstable in a particular kind of way. you want them to be unstablein a way you can control it. i'm an aerospace engineer by training, wentto geogia tech got my masters degree there.
now i spent 10 years working at nasa. thisis the kind of community i was thinking of. it had all the same needsa community on earth would have but it had some very unique constraints. he grew up talking space, living space, didhis 4th grade state report on alabama because of the rocket center. even from our firstdate i knew he was passionate about space. harrison schmitt was the first trained geologist,and only trained geologist, to go to the moon. so he was a guy who knew what the heck tolook for. and so the scientific take was so vast, it almost eclipses all the other missionsput together. during the apollo era you didn't need governmentprograms to try convince people
that doing science and engineering wasgood for the country. it was self evident. and even those not formallytrained in technical fields embraced what those fields meantto the collective national future. we choose to go to the moon.we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not becausethey are easy, but because they're hard. who wants to be an aerospace engineer so thatyou can design a plane that's a few percent more fuel efficient. that doesn't really work.saying who wants to be an aerospace engineer because we need a plane that can navigatethe rarified atmosphere of mars- you're going to attract the very best of those students.
and the solutions to that problem,in every case i've ever seen, have improved life backhere on earth. zero, and liftoff of the atlas 5 with curiosity. it had, like, heat shields and ahypersonic drogue chute. i said this is not going to work. retro-rockets and then a hoist. it was something rube goldbergwould have designed. an suv sized rover was plunked down on mars. how confident were you that this whole sequenceof landing devices would work?
i wasn't confident at all i wasshitting bricks. it was scary. this lander has more than 10 timesas much scientific instrumentation than anything we've sentonto the surface of mars. so it needs more power?needs more power, -as kirk would say to scotty.well the last one was solar this one's got nukes. wait, wait. so you've got anuclear power plant on the rover? it's not a power plant,it's a power source. we're touchy about this becausewhen you use the nuclear word-
one of the two verboten n-words- that's right, that's right. just saying. so when we use that n-word,we try to speak carefully. and it's not like a nuclear power plant with the cooling towers and the turbines and all that.it's a bunch of plutonium that's giving off heat and we use thatto generate electricity. so you found another thing to call it to notspook people when it's launched? yeah.okay.
apollo astronauts used plutonium rtgto power their science equipment. the mars rover curiosityis entirely powered by rtg. and it can run at night.it can run in any season. the other ones had solar panelsthey could only run in the daytime? yup. couldn't you charge a batteryand keep working at night? in the martian winter,your monopower goes down if your solar panelsget covered with dust. so in the martian winterthe sun is very low in the sky?
yeah. the martian exploration rovers oftenfound themselves short on power as dust settledon their solar panels. they were the onlysource of energy, and the martian winterwas approaching. the part of the it that reallybreaks my heart is that we just didn't have powerto drive any more. well, one of them did die,because of the winter- one of the two rovers?
yeah, if the power goes down enoughso that you can't run the heaters at night, then you die. that already happened to one of our previousrovers, so, if you want to do a lot of science, you want a lot of powera lot of instrumentation, you want to last a long timeand run anywhere on mars- send nukes.send nukes. exploring space requires energy. energy to run experiments. energy to scrub carbon dioxidefrom astronauts oxygen supply.
the carbon dioxide removal assembly is beingworked on today inside the destiny laboratory. a short was seen in one of the heating elementsthat you see mike barratt there. he put a filter in there thathelps keep the water pure. that system uses water because obviously water is made ofhydrogen and oxygen. it uses electrolysis, which is passingan electrical current through that water to split the water intohydrogen and its oxygen. the hydrogen is dumped overboard,the oxygen is used to pump into the air- of the station for thecrew members to breathe.
you go to the moon and there's no oxygen atmospherethere's no lakes of water or anything. so it really comes down tonuclear and solar power. they called it the n-word at nasa.they're like- we can't even talk about nuclear. and i said-how can we not talk about it? we have exactly two options for how to makepower in space and this is one of them. europa! another europa. a black and white pictureof a ring of jupiter! why is the earth round?why isn't it square or any other shape?
that's a good question.that's a question i've asked myself. and the answer has to do with gravity- carl sagan was a memberof voyager's imaging team. and it was his idea that voyagertake one last picture. that's here. that's home.that's us. every hero and coward.every creator and destroyer of civilization. every king and peasant.every young couple in love. every mother and father.hopeful child. inventor and explorer. every teacher of morals.every corrupt politician.
every superstar.every supreme leader. every saint and sinnerin the history of our species. on a mote of dust.suspended in a sunbeam. as we explore further from the sun,the utility of solar panels shrink to zero. to illustrate, imagine we can power a space missionorbiting the earth with one solar panel. we'll call this solar panel-the earth panel. if we use earth panel orbitingvenus instead of the earth, we'll get almost twice as muchelectricity from it, because orbiting closer to the sun,more photons will be hitting the panel surface.
the same earth panel orbiting mercury will generate almost 7x as much electricity. mercury is closer to the sun.more photons hit the panel. but when we start movingaway from the sun- in mars orbit-we only get half as much electricity. so to power an identical space mission,we now need 2 earth panels. at jupiter, where only 4% as manyphotons can hit earth panel, we now need 27 earth panelsto power the mission. the distance between earth and the sun iswhat's called an astronomical unit.
earth is 1 astronomical unitaway from the sun. jupiter is only 5 astronomical unitsaway from the sun, but it requires 27xas many solar panels. the relationship is not linear,its quadratic. at saturn, 91 earth panels.uranus [370]. neptune [900]. at pluto, 1500 earth panelsare required to power the mission. somewhere between mars and saturn,our mission became impractical. clouds and haze completely hidethe surface of titan, saturn's giant moon. titan reminds me a little bit of home.
like earth, it has an atmospherewhich is mostly nitrogen. but it's 4x denser. nasa's cassini mission to saturnpulled into orbit, dropped off of itself a little probe. the probe huygens descended down from thecassini spacecraft and landed on titan. hidden beneath lies aweirdly familiar landscape. titan has lots of water.but all of it is frozen hard as rock. in fact, the landscape and mountainsare made mainly of water ice. on titan, the seas and the rain are madenot of water but of methane and ethane.
on earth those molecules form natural gas.on frigid titan, they're liquid. there might be creatures thatinhale hydrogen instead of oxygen. and exhale methaneinstead of carbon dioxide. they might use acetylene instead ofsugar as an energy source. how could we find out if such creatures rulea hidden empire beneath the oil dark waves? the probe huygens landed in one spot.you know it's a big moon, it's 1 of 6 moons biggerthan pluto by the way. what does the other sideof the moon look like? the probe only had battery life for a coupleof hours.
we weren't there long enoughto see how things change. does is snow methane? so these long time baseline questionscan't be answered by 2 hours worth of data. cassini mission was launched in 1997 and saturnis a long way away, it took 7 years to get there. the huygens probe launched from cassini only operated 2 hours. but cassini itself,powered by a plutonium rtg, continues to study saturnand her 62 moons. for how long can plutonium power a mission?how far from the sun can we explore? the sun is constantly shooting out streamsof charged particles in all directions.
this "solar wind" blowsa vast magnetic bubble, it pushes out against thethin gas of interstellar space beyond the outer planets,our heliosphere. there is a border where one ends,and the other begins. turns out there was a massive eruption fromthe sun which eventually reached voyager 1 in april of 2013. it caused the plasma around voyager to vibrateor oscillate and by measuring that sound wave we could measure the densityof the plasma in interstellar space: the space between the stars.
the voyagers move at about 40,000 mph. they gave us our first close up lookat jupiter's great red spot, a hurricane 3x the size of earth. we can now make outfiner detail on jupiter than the largest telescopeson earth have ever obtained. the cloud patters are distinctive and gorgeous.its motion hypnotizes us. 4 days after the voyager 1encounter with jupiter, i was looking at anoptical navigation frame. it became very evident to methere was an anomalous present
in the upper left hand cornerjust off the rim of io. a volcanic plume,in fact a volcanic eruption. the voyagers discovered the first active volcanoon another world, on jupiter's moon io. the voyagers dared to flyacross saturn's rings and revealed that theywere made of hundreds of thin bandsof orbiting snowballs. voyager successfully completed its missionof discovery to the outer planets, but its odyssey into the darknesswas just beginning. 35 years after its launch, voyager 1became the first of our spacecraft
to enter an uncharted realm. until then, we didn't know wherethe interstellar ocean began. oh, hello universe! this morning, the new horizons spacecraftmade the closest ever pass near pluto after being launched almost a decade ago back whennasa had the cash to do cool stuff like this. and wow, the pictures are unbelievable! after nearly a century of near total mysterywe finally know what pluto really looks like. and we have to wait over a year nowfor all the information to come in. it's like opening up a birthday present everyday from now until the end of the next year.
who doesn't love atmospheric data for their birthday?if you're watching honey, hint-hint! and in 2019 - new horizons will start sucking up data once againas it passes by a kuiper belt object at a distance from the sunof 43 astronomical units. compare the performance of cassini, voyagers,new horizons, and the curiosity mars rover against solar andbattery powered exploration. the mars rover, spirit, froze to death,thanks to dust on its solar panels. huygens landed safely on the surface of titan,but nasa only received 2 hours worth of data. and most recently,
the european space agency's2014 achievement, of landing a solar powered probenamed philae on comet 67p. humanity landed a probe on a comet whose path spans bothearth's orbit and jupiter's. every 6 years,comet 67p nears the sun,warms up, and ejects material from its corethrough vents on its surface. every 6 years, 67p freezes once againas it drifts out towards jupiter. solar powered philaewas never designed to survive a full orbit.
but inner orbit study, an appropriatechallenge for solar panels, hit a snag. the landing produced some surprises. philae didn't secure itself to the comet's surfaceand bounced making multiple touchdowns. the final resting site was partly in shadow,receiving less sunlight to recharge its instruments. philae was power-starved and unable to conduct experiments, before freezing to death. hours of operation.decades of operation. neil degrasse tyson is a tireless advocatefor nasa, explaining to politiciansand public what we miss when space explorationis severely financially constrained.
we lost an entire generationof these smart people they became investment bankersor lawyers out of the 1980s and 90s because they had no place for themto take their interest in science. when the merger between boeingand lockheed's business occurred, their merger promisedin the press release $150 million of savings. instead there were billionsof dollars of cost overruns. and entrepreneur elon musk explains how space explorationis launch constrained.
musk created spacex to drastically reducethe cost of launching payload into orbit. space-x was founded to make radicalimprovements to space transport technology. with particular regard to reliabilityand safety and affordability. we have top men working on it right now. who? top. men. but what about poweringspace exploration? most of our rtg fuel, the plutonium-238,was created a quarter century ago. nasa started producing more in 2013,
but the worldwide shortageof rtg fuel is a perpetual constrainton space missions. and while our tiny supplyof plutonium-238 can power exploration missions lasting decadesanywhere in our solar system, the radioactive decay of plutoniumreally does not provide much power. curiosity runs on 100 watts. rolling across the surface of mars, takingphotos, grinding samples, detecting neutrons, monitoring the atmosphere, and sending allthis data back to us- curiosity does all of thison 2 incandescent light bulbs worth of power.
our space missions will never matchwhat we see in movies, or read about inscience fiction novels. this is an invisible constraint. the martian is based on mars direct,a research paper written by nasa engineers. the weight of the rocket fuel requiredfor a round-trip to mars was so enormous it would render the launchship impossibly heavy. we would split the mission up into 2 parts. and we'd send the return vehicle out first with its own return propellant plant.
the propellant would be made on mars. before any humans land on the planet, mars direct uses a small,unmanned nuclear reactor on wheels to power the creation of rocket fuel. so that humans can get from the surface of mars,back up into space. it is 6:53 on sol 19, and i'm alive. obviously. but i'm guessing that's going to comeas a surprise to my crew-mates. that a starving astronaut'sjourney across mars consists of repeatedlydeploying solar panels,
sleeping during the daywhile his vehicle recharges, and then driving at night, is a realistic but unnecessary challengecreated for dramatic tension. had mark watney been abandonedduring a mars direct mission, he'd have ample electricity to journey across mars, thanks tothe small nuclear reactor on wheels it's just a nice little putt-putthe could tow behind his rover. it's not a giant nuclear power plant thatpowers a city, it's just a nice little putt-putt nukesitting in the back of a truck.
look i don't mean to sound arrogant or anythingbut i am the greatest botanist on this planet. similarly, mark watney rations his potatocrop to survive 400 days on mars. i now have 400 healthy potato plants. i dug them up being carefulto leave their plants alive. the smaller ones i'll re-seed.the larger ones are my food supply. the carbon in watney's potato crop tissue does not come fromnutrient rich astronaut poop. it comes from the carbon in the martian atmosphere. photosynthesis is carbon dioxide + photonscreating plant tissue and emitting oxygen.
because there's no shortage of carbon or wateron mars, more photons means more potato. artificial lighting means bigger potatoesthan could otherwise be grown in mars orbit. it is the difference betweenone-half of earth sunlight, and as many photons asthe potato crop can absorb. hey watch him. oh my god!el dorado, the legends are true. that is how illegal grow operationsare routinely busted- simply by monitoring unusual behavioron the electrical grid. this is also why high yield urban farmingrequires so much energy.
you want to see what minimal calorie countlooks like? it has been 7 days since i ran out of ketchup. andy weir put his astronaut on the brinkof freezing to death and starving to death, by downgrading the mars directnuclear reactor to an rtg. even so, nuclear power of some sortwas still required, as the author explains. at one point i considered when he'son his long drive to schiaparelli, i thought, what if the rtg develops a problem? what if it leaks or something like thatand he has to live without it? throws it away and he hasto drive away without it?
there's just no way you'd survive.you are dead. when you see a futuristic and inspiringspace mission on the big screen, it's not being powered by rtg or solar. well what if nasa missionshad access to far more energy? most people don't appreciate howlittle energy nasa has at their disposal to design missions around. the most exciting missionsare not even under consideration because we have no way to power them. we've got 1 liquid water planet in oursolar system, and we've already identified
3 potential hydrospheres that areice covered and far from the sun. right. based on our own immediateexperience its a 3:1 ratio. sure, sure. do we know ifany of them are habitable? we don't, but we gotta go look. a mission to explore under the ice of europawould be the ultimate robotic challenge. solar is out of the question.jupiter is too far from the sun. and batteries can't hold enough power to meltthrough a planet's outer shell of ice. we need something small, lightweight,long lasting and extremely energy dense
to power such a mission. can i just get my favorite missionwhich doesn't exist and isn't funded now? it would be to go to jupiter's moon europa.it has an icy outer surface. the gravitational stress on europa from jupiterand other surrounding moons is pumping energy into it much the same way when you warm upa racquetball by hitting it. you distort it, it bounces back to shape,you're pumping energy into it. that has melted the interior ice. it has an ocean of liquid waterthat's been liquid for billions of years. everywhere on earth where we'vefound liquid water we've found life.
i want to go ice fishing on europa.lower a submersible. aerospace is fricking cool, man. it's awesometo work on rockets and spaceships and everything. i love it. it's like in my guts. i love it. if you want to build a shipdon't drum up people to collect wood. but rather, teach them to longfor the endless immensity of the sea. this was o'neil's vision back in the 70s. we all knew we needed energy.solar energy sure seemed great. this really affected the way i thought.i was like, yeah, sign me up for this. there's no coal on the moon.there's no petroleum. there's no wind either.
and solar power had a real problem. i've worked a lot of my careerin solar powered systems. it's just that, that said- i'm a lot more aware of their limitations. the moon orbits the earth once a month. for 2 weeks the sun goes down and your solar panelsdon't make any energy. i knew kirk sorensen as a young engineer. i ended up getting a job atmarshall space flight center at nasa.
dating back to nasa dayswhen we were looking for deep space power systems outthere for mars and the moon. and all of the systems we hadwere just not going to make it. this is mark watney,astronaut, here on the hermes. you basically point the birdin that direction, you wait 150 days, 36 million miles laterwe should be at mars. ion engines are a real technology.they're not just invented for the book. basically they're particle acceleratorsthat shoot particles very, very fast. so fast, that the particlesgain relativistic mass.
oh, wow. so with less matter you'regetting more momentum change. so you need very, very little mass. all the technology inthe book actually exists. however, some of it is betterthan our current incarnation. so we don't have ion enginesanywhere as powerful as hermes has. but there's nothingpreventing us from making it. we know how to do that.we could scale it up. and everything you do in space,because you don't have any ground
or air or anything to push against,it all comes down to delta-v. to put yourself on a mars interceptyou need a delta-v of about 2.5 km/s which is about 5,000 mph. you can't cheat the system in any way.physics demands that you pay the price. and the amount of fuelthat you have on your ship determines the total amountof delta-v you can have. period. and you need a lot of energy on boardso you need a reactor on board, which my fictional ship has. there were a lot of people who were saying-let's put solar arrays out on mars.
well mars has terrible dust storms. i said, if you were on mars,and you had these solar arrays, and they got coated by dust,you're going to die. take a look. dust storm. headed right for mars one base camp. southern hemisphere coming from the east. these bad boys can covera whole planet and last up to a year. now at this time i was notparticularly excited about nuclear.
i thought- nuclear-isn't that bad or dirty or yucky? i had this vague distaste for nuclear. almost all the nuclear power we use onearth today uses water as the basic coolant. at normal pressures water willboil at 100 degrees celsius. this isn't nearly hot enough togenerate electricity effectively. so water cooled reactors have to run at muchhigher pressures than atmospheric pressure. and this means you have to run a watercooled reactor as a pressure vessel. if that sounds heavy that's because it is. we were looking at a nuclearreactor and they tend to be heavy
and you need to have a large amount of shielding. my dad worked on the snap reactor for nasa.did he really? what my dad did was thathe shook the shit out of it. they would see what broke.then they would fix it, shake it again. see what broke, fix it again.nice. then they ran it for 1,000 hours.up power, down power. they were going to put it in a saturn v rocket.send it to the moon. never did that. send it to the space basethat they never built. put it onto mars but they never did that program.i know. it's a shame.
we presented this at the nuclear and emergingtechnologies for space conference, to accommodate spacetravel or off-world living. that brings in a whole set of more robustvariables that need to be attended to. nuclear reactors in space, like you just said,they are under such extreme conditions. you know, the shuddering ofthe rocket as its going up into space. the g-forces, the vibrational problems. but mass is everything in space,and so if you can have a much lighter reactor let's do it. well your choices are limited.
you're not going to makea light water reactor that you need this really thick pressure vessel. let me diss on water a few more times.it's a covalently bonded substance. the oxygen has a covalent bond with two hydrogens. neither one of those bonds is strong enough to survive getting smackedaround by a gamma or a neutron. and sure enough,they knock the hydrogens clean off. now, in a water cooled reactor, you have a system called a recombiner that willtake the hydrogen gas and the oxygen gas
that is always being created from thenuclear reaction and put them back together. it's a great system as long as it'soperating and the system is pumping. well, at fukushima daiichi, the problemwas that the pumping power stopped. at high temperature h2o can alsoreact with the cladding to release hydrogen. or damage the cladding, releasing radioactive isotopes. these 2 accidents illustrate the need for a coolant which is morechemically stable than h2o. in a community on the moon we wouldlive very close to your power source. this isn't something that'sgoing to be far away.
if the power source were to fail,you're going to die really quickly. so i thought, if i were living on the moonand i was totally dependent on a power source i'd want one that i'd just about feelcomfortable living right on top of. three mile island, chernobyl and fukushimawere all radically different incidents. but what all 3 had in common washow poorly water performed as a coolant when things started to go wrong. steam takes up about 1,000 timesmore volume than liquid water. if you have liquid water at 300 degreescelsius and suddenly you depressurize it, it doesn't stay liquid for very longit flashes into steam.
that's scuba tank, hot scuba tank,full of nuclear material. at three mile island, watercouldn't be pumped into the core because some of the coolantwater had vaporized into steam. the increased pressure forced coolant waterback out, contributing to a partial meltdown. at chernobyl, the insertion of poorly designedcontrol rods caused core temperature to skyrocket. the boiling point of the pressurized watercoolant was passed, and it flashed to steam. it was a steam explosion that torethe 2,000 ton lid off the reactor casing, and shot it up throughthe roof of the building. at fukushima, loss of pump powerallowed the coolant water
to get hotter and hotteruntil it boiled away. these 3 accidents illustrate the need fora coolant with a higher boiling point than water. when you put water underextreme pressure like anything else it wants to get out ofthat extreme pressure. almost all of the aspects of our nuclear reactorstoday that we find the most challenging can be traced back to the needto have pressurized water. water cooled reactorshave another challenge. they need to be near large bodiesof water so the steam they generate can be cooled and condensed.
otherwise they can't generate electrical power. now there's no lakes or rivers on the moon so if all this makes it soundlike water-cooled reactors aren't such a good fit for a lunar communityi would tend to agree with you. you see i had the good fortune to learnabout a different form of nuclear power that doesn't have all these problems for a very simple reason:it's not based on water cooling and it doesn't use solid fuel. surprisingly it's based on salt.
science allows you to look at everyday objectsfor what they really are. chemically and physically. and it really makes you look twiceat the world around you. your table salt is frozen. that's a really strange thing to thinkabout your table salt on your kitchen table. it's frozen. but once they melt they have a 1,000 degrees[celsius] of liquid range. and they have excellent heat transfer properties. they can carry a large amount ofheat per unit volume, just like water. water is actually really goodfrom a heat transfer perspective.
its really good at carryingheat per unit volume. salts are just as good carrying heat per unitvolume. but salts don't have to be pressurized. and that- if you remember nothing else ofwhat i say tonight, remember that one fact. a nuclear reactor is a roughplace for normal matter. the nice thing about a salt- is that it is formed froma positive ion and a negative ion. like sodium is positively charged, and chlorineis negatively charged. and they go- we're not really going to bond we'rejust going to associate one with another. that's what's called an ionic bond. yeah,you're kinda friends. you know, you're-
facebook friends! there you go, facebook friends. alright, well it turns out this is a really good thing for areactor because a reactor is going to take those guys and just smack them all over the place withgammas and neutrons and everything. the good news is they don't really carewho they particularly are next to. as long as there are an equal numberof positive ions and negative ions, the big picture is happy. a salt is composed of the stuffthat's in this column the halogens, and the stuff that's in thesecolumns the alkali and alkaline.
fluorine is so reactive with everything. but once it's made a salt, a fluoride, then it's incredibly chemicallystable and non-reactive. sodium chloride, table salt, or potassiumiodide, they have really high melting points. we like the lower meltingpoints of fluoride salts. sometimes people go, oh you're workingon liquid fluorine reactors, no, no! i am not working on liquid fluorine reactors. i'm talking about fluoride reactors and there'sa big difference between those two. one is going to explode,the other is like, super-duper stable.
i see moving to molten salt fueled reactortechnology as a way to get rid of all the stored energy term problemswe look at in today's reactors. whether it is pressure,whether it is chemical reactivity. even the potential of fissionproducts in the fuel itself to be released. those fission products arebound up very tightly in salts. strontium and caesium are bothbound up in very, very stable fluoride salts. caesium fluoride is a very stable salt.strontium bifluoride another very stable salt. in a light water reactor caesium is volatile, in the chemical state of theoxide fuel in a light water reactor.
that's been one of theconcerns about caesium release. caesium would not releasefrom a fluoride reactor at all. i actually met kirk in a conferencein manchester in the uk- as part of an event put onby the guardian newspaper. hi, i'm kirk sorensen. they'd invited people tocome and present their ideas and kirk was 1 of the 10people that presented. and i can remember sitting on the paneland just being kind of blown away by the fact that there was analternative version of nuclear.
i'm an environmentalist,my passion is climate change and energy. i worked at friend of the earth,a green campaign group in the uk. and i was an anti-nuclear campaigner. but i've become a politician. i will be faithful and bear true alleganceto her majesty, queen elizabeth. that's changed my life quite a lot. i'm still getting used to it really, peoplecall me "my lady" and "the barronnesse." sellafield limited is activelyworking with the 600 people who are going to be losing their jobs at this time.
and everybody in the areais doing their very best to see if these people can find jobs very quickly. sellafield is a unique site in the uk, and i believe it couldbecome home of world leading research into next generation nuclear reactors. such reactors- as well asbeing more efficient in their fuel use- generating no long lasting waste,can be be designed to burn up existing stockpiles ofplutonium held at the sellafield site. despite greater acceptanceof nuclear power
there remain concernsabout nuclear waste. so, in light of this, is there morethe government can do to support r&d into new nuclear designs that will help to ensure we develop the safestand the most efficient reactors? an engineer looks at the world ashundreds of things that are inefficient and should bemore properly designed. when you tell an engineer thatsomething is 20% more efficient he's like, yeah! you tell him it's 50%more efficient, oh my gosh! you tell him it's hundreds of times more efficientit becomes absolutely irresistible.
making solid nuclear fuel is acomplicated and expensive process and we extract less than 1%of the energy from the nuclear fuel before it can no longer remain in the reactor. the solid fuel will begin to swell and crack, and you begin to get this central void. this is actually a gap in the fuel. when the fuel swells to a certain pointthe clad can't hold it any more. and when the clad can't hold it any more it'stime to remove the fuel from the reactor. at this point only a small amountof the energy has been consumed.
wigner didn't like solid fuel. he was a chemicalengineer by training and he thought- what process do we run chemically based on solids?we don't. everything we do, we use as liquids or gassesbecause we can mix them completely. you can take a liquid, you can fully mix it.you can take a gas, you can fully mix it. you can't take a solid and fully mix itunless you turn it into a liquid or a gas. i believe part of this came from wigner'seducational background. he was the only person or almost theonly person who combined great skill as a nuclear physicist withgreat skill as an engineer.
wigner was a chemical engineer by training. he was the only one whocommanded both of those attributes. and so he was able to see boththe engineering and physics aspects. he was a chemical engineer by training andhe knew that in chemical processes the reactant streams are almost always liquidsand gases- they're fluids. and in fluids a completion of the variouschemical reactions are possible. he looked at the nuclear problem and wonderedif the same principle might not apply. and they began investigatingsome very radical nuclear reactors, totally different fromthe stuff we have now.
wigner was not terribly successful in makingconverts in the nuclear community. but he did make one convert,this guy, alvin weinberg. he was his student duringthe manhattan project. and weinberg got it, he got the big picture.we need liquid fuel. i see it. i see what we gotta do. they were into small modular reactorsbefore small modular reactors were cool. small, liquid-core, andthen you have high-efficiency. so there were a couple thingsthat jumped right out at us. the shielding weightbecame reasonable.
all these great benefits,how do we know this can work? quite simply because-because we did it. i got in the car, i live in alabama,and i was able to drive to oak ridge and talk to some of the people there,and i said- hey, i heard long time ago you guysdid this really cool thing. in the 1960s at oak ridge nationallaboratory we ran what was called the molten salt reactor experiment. this was the main focus of oak ridge for decadesand it was very abruptly cut off. it was a very bitter pill to swallow for them.
so a lot of these great minds, they thoughttheir life's work had gone to waste. yeah, long time ago we did a really cool thing.everyone who worked on it is retired or dead now. oh. that's not good. i've got the world's oldest molten salt website. if you find the original copyof the generation 4 report, my url from my website is listedas the only [molten salt] reference. i'm a guy in a garage.i should not be the only reference for this. the other thing is-alvin weinberg wasn't dead yet. to list me while there's so many other documentsare you kidding me?
i actually got an email from richard weinberg,the son of alvin weinberg. well are your father's papers somewhere,have they been examined? he said- most of my father's papers areat the oak ridge children's museum. so i ended up going back to oak ridge. literally there was a bigwalk-in closet with filing cabinets stacked to the ceiling that nobodyhad looked at in decades probably. i'm realizing as i go throughthese oak ridge documents, how limited their distribution was. at the very last page of every one,there's a distribution, about 40 people.
so best case scenario, 40 people read whati'm holding in my hand, 50 years ago. and this is no little thing. this was along research project starting from the 50s, a huge body of research oak ridge did. unfortunately only oak ridgeso it was geographically limited knowledge. there's hundreds of these big thick documents. at one time this whole courtyard wouldhave been filled with these specimens so we could do all sorts ofresearch and testing on it. but one day, nickel alloys were at a real premium.like, unheard of recycle value. he said someone madethe decision to come in,
and they cleaned out allof our lab specimens for recycle. uri gat, a scientist at oak ridge, got meinvolved in molten salt. walking through graphite reactor building, there's this large palettecovered with books, manuals. we kind of stoppedit was in the way of our path. uri was there, and he goes-oh, they didn't tell me again. and i just reached down and picked them up. they were all big thick documentson the molten salt reactor. and i happened to pick 2of the best i possibly could.
the status report of the molten salt breederreactor, the other was the project plan. i just randomly picked them up. the workmancomes and he says- what are you doing here? uri goes-what's going to happen to these documents? the guy goes-these are the excess going to the burn facility. they were burning them. it was a real shame, probably in the 1990s,that needing more space so many documents were being destroyed or shredded. hey, this would be a great for a space reactorwe ought to throw some money at these guys and get all this stuff documented.
nasa was able to get oak ridge and like $10,000 bucks to scan in those documents. a really genuinely beautiful thingto try and share knowledge. there was never a level of uptakefor it at the agency, but amongst individualsa lot of people got very interested. we had dug up that informationfrom oak ridge national labs, thought it was great,and put together several proposals based on it. it has been a lot better. the new policy is, any old documents-if someone in the world is calling about them that makes it important enough to scan.
and as we need them they seem tobe ready to make electronic versions of them that the restof the world can use. we have been able to access, and also to disperse,an amazing amount of information. this was the big problem was,how do you show this is real? you know? it sounds like made up technologywhen you describe it to people. jeeze the molten salt reactorpretty much does what fusion is asking, and were almost developed tothe stage we could start using them so long ago,in the 50s, 60s, and early 70s. you nuclear engineers are probably going tothink those are fuel rods, they're not.
they're graphite. the fuel was a liquid which flowed throughchannels in this graphite. so the graphite serves the function waterserves in existing solid fuel reactors, which is to moderate the neutronswhich are being born in fission. except, this time, instead of havingsolid fuel in a liquid moderator, you've got liquid fuelin a solid moderator. it's so opposite. there they have solid fuel, liquid moderator.molten salt- liquid fuel, solid moderator. uh- water, salt.uh- graphite, no graphite in here.
metal in here, yeah.no metal in here. it's like an opposite reactor. well back around 2004 a gentleman namedkirk sorensen had contacted me by email and came to visit us at berkeley. we'd been working on molten salt reactor technologyand doing some of the early studies of how salts might be used to cool solid fuel reactors. and kirk came into my office.he had a stack of cd-roms. on them was this compendium of reports
from oak ridge national laboratory from the molten salt reactor programof the 1950s through 1970s. and that was a treasure-trove. there was an enormousamount of very useful data. he'd discovered a treasure-trove.this was going to change the world. when i was at nasa i finagled somefunds to get those documents scanned. i made bunches andbunches of copies of cds. for you young people this was almost pre-internet. yeah, we had it, but your website would holdabout 20 megabytes.
cds were really the onlyway to move around big data. sneaker-net was probablythe better way to describe it. i made these for the secretary of energy,delivered them in d.c.- and sent them to lab directors. sent it all out, to these different placesjust sure that they were going to get cds from a random person and put them intheir computer and study them extensively- all 5 gigabytes of them, and come to the same conclusionthat i had and change national policy. i mean of course, right?nobody cared at all.
the only person who cared was per. and i'm really glad that he did because i think he feels the same way aboutthis technology that i do, that it's really exciting. i mean i spent a number of years when ifirst learned about this just asking people- okay, tell me what's wrong with this? tell me why it's not the greatestthing since sliced bread. because really, i'm not a nuclear- i wasn'ta nuclear engineer back then. i didn't want to get involvedif it wasn't important. i wanted someone to come and say,
oh we did this and this and thisand it totally did not work out. that would have been simple.i'd be like, okay, fine. i'll go back to doing my space things. but the fact that- they didn't say that.and they said that- this was a great idea.we really should have done it. that stuck in my- that stuck in my craw for a long time. joe bonometti and i wouldtalk to each other at nasa. and it almost tormented us. i think it really did literally torment joe.
that we weren't working onwhat we felt was the most important thing. it'd be a fantastic helpto the human race in general. it could also be what lends usquite well into space reactors and going to mars, going tothe moon and other places. you need that light,small power source. we need water.we need to grow our food. the sustainability oflong-term colonization of mars is a very real option withthe molten salt reactor. already we're prettyconstrained in fresh water.
we in california areexperiencing this first-hand right now. another application ofhaving lots of energy, is to be able to createfresh water from ocean water. every drop of drinking water on the planetis desalinated with nuclear power- today. i think we should just use a little bit more. and everybody on the planethas all the fresh water they can drink. put a power plant on the coast. bring in seawater from acouple miles out. desalinate it. suddenly you're not even pullingwater out from the aquifers any more.
so the river's not touched.the lake's not touched. i must be missing something. these guys who arereal nuclear engineers, they must know somethingabout nuclear that would- if i knew it then i'd know whywe're not doing molten salt reactors. so i need to go, get my degree,and get an understanding, and then i'll seewhatever it is they see. turns out everything i learned,everything i studied, just made this look better and better.
and these are kind of arcane reasons,but they're very important- like one day i learned how the reactorwould always homogenize its composition. that may not sound like a big deal but toa reactor designer that's a humongous deal. it's just of absolutely incredible performance.i'm sitting here thinking- you guys should build this machineif you only picked one reason it should be for that reason because if would make it so much easierfor you to design and operate the reactor. and i brought it up to my professor-he was talking about how current reactors work- i said did you realize this design would alwayshave a homogenous composition, and he goes-
i never thought about that. from cyberspace, from kirk sorensen, who iswith the nasa marshall space flight center. he would like for you to commenton the molten salt reactor program. the molten salt people included the most famous figures innuclear energy, in particular eugene wigner, are all dying off. we don't have peoplebuilding molten salt reactors now. the molten salt reactor experimentwas one of the most important and, i must say, brilliant achievements
of the oak ridge national laboratory. and i hope that afteri'm gone people will look at the dusty books that werewritten on molten salts and will say- hey, these guys had a prettygood idea let's go back to it. once you learn something, you know, you can'tpretend you didn't learn it and you can't pretend you don't knowwhat a powerful thing this is. and- you can choose to do that.but that's not the moral choice to make, right? to ignore it.to pretend you didn't learn it.
so the moral thing, the right thingto do is to do what we're doing. which is, in my opinion,it's sort of the bare minimum. well i've been in this energy gamefor about 10 years now. no one's ever told me there was a safer,more sustainable form of nuclear. so i was kind of instantly interested. so i kept thinking about it occasionally,and i kept in touch with kirk a little bit. and then fukushima happened. this is great, this is justwhat i wanted to have happen. is for her talking to these guys,and getting that straight dope.
oh, man, it's just perfect. dick engel is probably the mostknowledgeable person around these days, right? i've never met syd i've read all his papers.i've actually extracted all the text from them, converted it all, rebuilt-i mean i have- i don't know if there's anybodywho's studied his stuff more than me. i was so tickled when ifound out he was alive. i mean how do you feelabout the reactor now? it sounds like kind of a boring job in a way. did you feel fondlytowards this reactor design?
oh yes.it wasn't at all boring. i mean boring in the sense- it was safe. it did exactly whatwe calculated it ought to do. and that's pretty satisfying. i think it would unleash a lot of human potentialwhich is currently not being fulfilled. standard of living does correlatequite well with access to energy. throughout her life she hadbeen heating water with firewood, and she had hand washedlaundry for 7 children. and now, she was going towatch electricity do that work.
there's a great talk on tedby hans rosling, how women in the 50s, when they started to have washing machines,became suddenly hugely more productive. to my grandmother,the washing machine was a miracle. washing clothes isa really unproductive task. it's just repetitive,you have to keep doing it. you're not creating anything that'ssustaining anyone really, it's just time wasted. so 2 billion have access to washing machines.and the remaining 5 billion, how do they wash? how do most of the women in the world wash?they wash like this. by hand. it's a time consuming labor,hours every week.
and sometimes they alsohave to bring water from far away. and they want the washing machine! and there's nothing different in their wishthan from my grandmother 2 generations ago in sweden, water from the stream,heating with firewood, washing like that. they want the washing machinein exactly the same way. but when i lecture environmentallyconcerned students they tell me, no, not everybody in the worldcan have cars and washing machines. how many of you don't use a car, and some of them proudlyraise their hand and say-
i don't use a car. and then i put the really tough question- how many of you hand wash your jeans and yourbedsheets? and no one raised their hand. soon as you could get a machine to do thatfor you that time became time for the family and he said that's when he sat down with hismom and started to learn to read with her. and that would happen multiplied over all these women suddenlyhave much more capacity for being more nurturing,being more productive. it's a great empowerer to haveenergy and to do things for us
that are just routine, rote tasks. huge fractions of the developing world,women spend all day looking for sources of water. and, when they get to the water,it is typically filthy. and- parasites, disease, etc. i mean, if you could have clean water,disease and parasite-free water for homes- you would liberate anenormous amount of time. and you'd increase thehealth of the people. there's a lot of thingswe just throw away because the energy to re-use them ismore expensive than virgin material.
dig it out of the ground, turn it intosomething, you use it, you smash it, then you throw it backin a pit in the ground. ultimately it means you just leave one bighole in the ground over here and start filling up another hole over there. is that sustainable? perhaps there's a moreclosed-loop system that could be employed. that's the dream.but that does require energy. that was one of the things that attractedme about the notion of exploring space was that you had to implement that simply to survive. if you were going to live on the moon or mars,there was no pit over here and pit over there.
you better figure out how to make it all stay. every atom of nitrogen or oxygenor hydrogen became precious to you. when i would tell people why are we doingnasa, that was the most effective thing was the whole idea of recycling and whatwe would learn from exploring space. what prevents us from doingthat right now on earth? i mean, why do we have to go to space to learn how to be really,really good recyclers? why don't we recycle like that on earth? it was energy, you know-energy has to be really, really cheap
or the penalty has to be really, really bad. now, in space,the penalty was really, really bad. if you didn't recycle,you ran out of air and water. but, on the ground, to go achievethat dream of a closed loop, you need to have really,really cheap energy. for example in the copper mining space,when they extract the copper- they'll do a first pass, and then leave it as a mound. and they'll wait until the priceof copper goes high enough.
there's a price at which you can justifydoing a second, third or more passes. it's all a function of what's the energyinput and what's the market price. and when those reach parity,you can go in and justify more extraction. well the same is true with recycling materials. if we can bring the cost ofelectricity down far enough, we can conceivably goback and recycle landfills. appliances, we chop up old rail cars.demolished bridges, buildings. whatever. we load scrap into large haul trucks. back up into this bucketand dump scrap inside.
that's dozens of cars.yeah. a lot of cars. that bucket probably has140 tons of scrap metal in it right now. i told them if they seeanything go boom to run behind you. that's still the standard protocol? that's right i've got kevlar on.alright you guys do the same we're all getting behind- so you've been able to drop your powerconsumption per ton almost by a third it looks like. probably since the mid-early-80s. so besides your scrap material input,what's you next largest cost on production? electricity.electricity.
how's your water use?we're evaporatively cooling. we use about 2.5 million gallons a day.so we're pretty big water users. which is about a tenth ofwhat the paper mills use. but you can get far morerecycles on steel or aluminum than you could out of paper or plastic. oh, sure. yeah, actually it is debatable whetherpaper recycling is even that great a pursuit. in some cases it is mandated, but- this is one whereeconomics drive the recycling. but the steel industry is probably one ofthe better models of recycling.
aluminum too would be.there's less given over to waste. if we could make energy cheapenough there's a lot of other products you could make economic to recycle. absolutely. it's easy to forget about thatin our world here on earth because we're so extractedfrom our energy sources. food is at the grocery store. we flush the toilet and the waste goes somewhere,where someone takes care of them. we don't really think about the flow ofenergy that makes all of this possible.
with the energy generated we couldactually recycle all of the air, water, and waste products within the lunar community. in fact doing so would be anabsolute requirement for success. we could grow the crops neededto feed the members of the community even during the 2 week lunar nightusing light and power from the reactor. it kind of was this microcosm that made iteasier for me to understand the bigger picture that we have going on here on earth andhow we can make the bigger picture better. how we can enhance ourquality of life here on earth. when i think of our golden era of space exploration,the late 1950s through the early 1970s-
over that time very few weeks would go bybefore there'd be an article in a magazine, a cover story would extol- the city of tomorrow. i mean why wouldn't we wanta community of the future to be self-sustainingand energy independent? the same energy generationand recycling techniques that could have a powerful impacton surviving on the moon could also have a powerful impacton surviving on the earth. and people love that. they thinkyou're naive to be optimistic. we are going to make thefuture better than the past.
we're going to figure out our problemsand we're going to get past them. what's your project? my project is on reducing carbon emissionsand i choose to do so with nuclear. i talk a bit on the oil-sands,on how nuclear can help. for example generatingthe steam for sag-d. people were mostly interested in the lftr,talking about the thorium. they liked that better as an alternative because uranium really has a bad rap. has it directed you in your life?i want to be a nuclear physicist. you do eh?yeah.
i was going to be a music teacher.i had my heart set on it. that's what i went to school for,music education. when i heard about thorium,i just thought to myself- music is great, i love it,but it's just insignificant to the challenges thehuman race is experiencing. because of my formerexperience as a reactor operator for the u.s. navy, i got it,i understood it right away. i made a 2 minute video fora science video competition. in the 1950s alvin weinberg,director of oak ridge national labs
was tasked with building a nuclear reactor. today we learn that we can runthis type of reactor on thorium. i've been trying to get people inmy generation to do the good stuff that needs to happen onenergy issues for 30 years. the title of my talk is- thorium and molten salt reactors:improving public knowledge and awareness. with us being in chemical engineering we havea background in liquid-liquid extraction- the fission products are moresoluble in the bismuth stream than in the salt stream, so they willbe transferred when they contact.
it was nice to finally have a technical audience.yeah. oh my gosh. it's going to be up to you guys. you high-school students andyou college people, to pull us out. so you can do good for mygrand-kids and everything. and you know what,they get it, they know it. i didn't grow up around oh we gotta fightthe russians we gotta fight the communists. you don't have a searing image of amushroom cloud in your head, probably. no. absolutely not. i really want to work on lftr.i really want to work on thorium technology.
i know everyone i talk to about this technology,we're all engineers so we're all geeky that way, but everyone's super excited here aboutthe potential. because it's really quite cool. we're going to try and get ateacher in every single school to teach molten salt chemistryand molten salt class. i love to see you all here, butit's for me and it's for my children. i've love to see more companiescoming up with codes, coming up with reactor designs,and i would love to jump on board. my desire, when i was a younger man,was to get involved in alternative energy. i hadn't really seen anything aboutthorium or molten salt reactors at all.
and that ted talk was the one wherekirk was in town talking about lftr. thorium has an electromagnetic signature thatmakes it easy to find even from a spacecraft. here's an actual map of wherethe lunar thorium is located. when i pitched this story to wired magazine.there were 6 editors around a table, they're pretty well informedscience and technology journalists, and not a single one ofthem had heard of thorium. we were working on nuclear engines,working on really far out stuff. i'm in this buddy of mine's office. he's got this book on his shelf andthe book was called "fluid fuel reactors".
he used to work at oak ridgenational labs in tennessee and he said- i just went to the library and i gotthis old book. it was written in 1958. i've been meaning to look through it. i said well, hey, can i borrow this book? big old thick book, itwas about 1,000 pages. oh boy. whew! but it was intriguing enough to meand it seemed really different than the kind of nuclearenergy that we have now. they also mention in this booka lot about thorium. thorium, thorium, thorium.
i was like-dude, what the heck is thorium? thorium is a naturallyoccurring radioactive substance found just about everywhere on this planet. we have lots and lots of thorium. and it has some unique properties.one of them is- if you hit thorium with a neutron, the thorium will absorb the neutron- and t will turn fromthorium-232 into thorium-233. it's going to decay into protactinium-233,
and then it will decayin about a month to uranium-233. uranium-233, if you hit itwith a neutron, it will fission. in addition to releasing all that energy,it will release 2 or 3 additional neutrons. alright- so you need 1 of those neutronsto go find another thorium. and you need another 1 of thoseneutrons to go find another uranium-233, to continue the reaction. you've fissioning uranium-233but you're making a new one. you can almost thinkabout it as a pseudo-catalyst. if you had some uranium-233
you could catalyse theburning of thorium indefinitely. when shippingport was shut downfor the last time, in 1982, the examination showedthere was more fissile material, more uranium-233 in the fuelthan there was when they started. thorium breeding worked.it was actually done and demonstrated. not in a molten salt reactor,but in a light-water reactor. well you're really coupling 2 differenttechnologies as far as history proving them out. you have shippingport thatproved the thorium fuel cycle. and then you have molten salt reactorsthat prove the liquid fuel form.
the oak ridge plan was to couple- i mean they designed themsre for a thorium fuel cycle. their design-they didn't do it. that was their plan but they never got there.but it was- it wasn't like somebody said- oh gee put thorium in msri never thought of that before! today's reactors are fueled by arare isotope of uranium: uranium-235. to fuel a reactor with abundantmaterial is called breeding. breeder reactors takenaturally common isotopes
and turn them intoman-made isotopes that can be split apart to release energy. shippingport was a breeder whichused pressurized water as a coolant. to combine pressurized water,with the breeding of nuclear fuel, is a particularly expensive approach. with breeder reactors, coolant choicegreatly impacts the cost of operations. even more so than withinefficient non-breeders. the real object of this reactor is to learn about pressurizedwater reactors for atomic power.
it will not be cheap to operate. it will be no cheaper to operate than wright's kitty hawk wouldhave been to carry passengers around. at the present time,reactor design is an art, it is not a science. we are trying tomake a science out of it. shippingport's thorium fuel load was a proof-of-concept,and not an economic breeder design. at oak ridge, wigner sawmolten salt as a way of economically breeding naturalthorium into uranium-233.
at argonne, fermi sawliquid metal as a way of economically breeding naturaluranium into plutonium. both uranium and plutonium canbe and are of course peacefully used, and alleviate a greatdeal of human suffering. but- i must admit, thereis that lingering notion of how they were usedterribly in weapons at one time, that does make it difficult for the public to acceptforms of energy that have that connection, and- thorium, fortunately,was never employed in that manner and so probably has a neutralfeeling in most people's minds.
they don't really have an opinionone way or the other about thorium any more than theywould about dysprosium or something elseon the periodic table. nein! nein! nein! nein! nein! nein! nein! well this was war time.their plan was to make bombs. they took natural uranium andthey separated those 2 isotopes. they would highly enrich uranium-235from less than 1% up to like 90-plus percent. took big factories, very difficultto do isotopic enrichment. but this is how they made the uranium forthe first nuclear weapon used in war.
this was the bomb at hiroshima.it was called "little boy". then they said- well, what can we do with all thisjunk uranium-238, the 99.3% of it? you could expose it to neutrons,and you could make it into plutonium. now, plutonium is a different chemical elementthan uranium, so they can be chemically separated. because uranium-235 anduranium-238 are identical chemically. there's no chemicaldifference between them. but there is a chemical differencebetween plutonium and uranium, so it was a lot easier to do a chemicalseparation of the plutonium you'd made.
and that's also how they made thenagasaki bomb which was called "fat man". ok, well, maybe we can dothe same thing with thorium. maybe we can expose it to neutrons,and we can make it into uranium-233. uranium will be chemicallyseparable from thorium, and we can go make a bombout of it, right? sounds great. it's a really bad idea, becauseas you made the uranium-233, you were alwaysmaking uranium-232. you didn't make a lot of ityou only made a little bit of it. but, uranium-232 is much moreradioactive than uranium-233.
here's the decay chainthat uranium-232 is on. it jumps down tobismuth-212 and thallium-208 and these 2 decay products putout very, very strong gamma rays. and these gamma raysare just super bad news if you want to go and builda practical nuclear device. because they tell everybodywhere the stuff is, and they kill you. so really quickly they were going, okay, wecan work with uranium-235, that seems okay. we can work with plutonium,that seems okay, but this uranium-233 stuff that's badnews for making a nuclear weapon.
so thorium was just set aside. run! the wolverine.pg-13. well, after the war, they picked up onthis again because now they were thinking- let's talk about making powerinstead of making nuclear weapons. and so what happenedis they put resources into the plutonium-breederreactor almost from the get-go. they built the experimentalbreeder reactor one in 1951. this was the first reactorthat made electricity.
four little light bulbs here.this was a breeder reactor. it was designed to convert plutoniuminto energy while making new plutonium. this was not a light water reactor!this predated the light-water reactor by years! early nuclear pioneers like enrico fermi andeugene wigner saw the future quite a bit differently. fermi believed that we should really focusour efforts on the fast-breeder reactor. eugene wigner on the other hand,reached a different conclusion which was that thoriumwas a superior fuel. and this opened up a number of possibilitieswith coolants and reactor configurations. they by-in-large said:we're going to go the plutonium route.
and one of the reasonswhy, was they developed a great deal of understanding aboutplutonium from the weapons program. they had made the stuff. they had worked with its chemistry. they'd made fuel out of it. they go- we get this. thorium?we haven't really messed with thorium. you know, it wouldbe like starting over. so that propensity there was to goand do what you already knew how to do. and the plutonium was so muchbetter developed than the thorium. because the liquid metal fast breederreactor uses liquid sodium as coolant,
and because sodium has a higher boilingpoint than water at atmospheric pressure, the coolant in a liquid metal fastbreeder does not need to be pressurized. just got a little tiny thin pipe. so then- both types of breeder reactors, the liquid metal fast breederand the molten salt breeder can avoid the costand complexity associated with containing pressurized watercoolant which may flash to steam. however, the chemicalstability of molten salt coolant, and the ability of molten salt to secure radioactive isotopes within strong chemical bonds
is not shared by sodium. it's stored under an oil,to stop air or moisture getting on it. reacts very, very quicklywith air and also with water. the hydroxide is a white crust on the outside. alright, go.booooo. they built the reactorand put it in a sub and ended up cutting the reactorout of the sub and putting a lwr in it. they became disenchanted withsodium cooling rather quickly. what happens if there's a leak?sodium reacts with the air and the water.
well you haven't got air next door toyour sodium surfaces. it's inerted. with liquid metal fast breeders, the advantageof a coolant operating near atmospheric pressure must be weighed against the useof that same coolant which also reacts rapidly to air at high temperature,and violently to water at any temperature. milton shaw wanted alvin weinberg and oakridge to get on the fast breeder funding wagon. weinberg wanted to stay onwith thorium and molten salts. well it was pretty obvious that shawwas completely convinced that lmfbr- with its sodium cooled systemwas going to be successful. if we have a winner here, why spend moneyon what we know is going to be the loser?
this breeding principle holdsthe key to our efficient use of our atomic fuel resourcesof uranium and thorium. this atomic power plant in michigan is namedafter enrico fermi. a breeder type of reactor. great amounts of research and testing go intothe design and construction to make them efficient, and above all, to make them safe. breeder reactor has taken ona strongly negative connotation. in 1966 a liquid metal breederreactor suffered a meltdown. this incident led to the book and song-we almost lost detroit. however, in 1986, twenty years after the accident,another liquid metal breeder reactor,
running at full power, underwenta controlled system blackout. we took ebr-2 to 100% power,and we gagged the safety system so the emergency control rodswould not go in if they were told to. and then we turned offthe main coolant pumps. and you pulled on your helmets! well it sounds dangerous but it wasn't. no control rods were inserted.no human intervention was involved. they just turned off the pumps, and waited. the temperature climbed,held, and then began to drop.
the core tends to expandthermally a little bit as it heats up. the fuel expands the clad expands,the core support structure expands, the core plate underneath expands. and now more neutrons leak out, anddon't contribute to the chain reaction. and now there's natural circulationgoing on inside this big vessel. we can design it so that natural aircirculation on the outside would occur so you would never, everneed to take operator action. the trouble is, these tests were doneabout 2 weeks before chernobyl. yes i was aware of that it was-
and so no one- no one even knewabout this which was a shame. bob? this was not commercialized, right? we were going to. it was called clinch river.i was working on clinch river. and then- we're eliminating programsthat are no longer needed such as nuclear powerresearch and development. this administration does notsupport the department of energy's advanced liquid metal reactor program, and will oppose any efforts tocontinue funding this reactor project. in 1994, during theclinton administration,
the last american breederreactor program was cancelled. this is not a dream. this is real.we know how to do these things. nobody was the light water reactor as themachine on which we would power our civilization using nuclear power for thousands of years. the only question is, which breeder,and how fast do we get to it? i mean, i've got a 1962report to the president and right in there it states,this is a stop-gap technology. i think these early nuclear pioneerswould be absolutely floored to show up today inour nuclear world and go-
gosh, you're still using light water reactors?i mean come on guys- we should have seen moretechnology advancement by now. we should have seen something better. successful breeder reactor testshave never been publicly celebrated. the advantages outweigh the difficulties.you can handle this molten salt reliably- and when things go wrong,we were able to fix. the concept is ultimatelygoing to be practical applications. cancelled, plutonium and meltdown- would be the words most commonlyassociated with breeder reactor.
pandora's promise came out andthey're talking about the fast reactor. is there any uptick in interest in this now? i think it has motivated some peoplewho had been either skeptical of nuclear or were antinuclear to re-think. so i'm robert stone i'm thedirector of pandora's promise, which is the documentarywhich chronicles the conversion of a number of high-profile environmentalistsfrom being anti-nuclear to pro-nuclear. and their process of conversion onthis issue very much mirrors my own. on opening night i polled the audience.
i was actually surprised that 20% admittedto being pro-nuclear art sundance but they raised their hands. q&a after the film, andi asked the same question. and that was the response. until pandora's promise in 2013 there was no compelling video explanationof the liquid metal reactor's safety test for the public to digest. that same year, a video of molten saltresearchers was posted to youtube, explaining how themolten salt reactor experiment
safely compensated foran equipment malfunction thanks to the passive safetyenabled by molten salt. molten salt is inherently safe,you know, self controlling. just about any molten salt conceptthat has been seriously considered has been shown to havethis stable behavior. this is an old facility look down before youwalk, that is our biggest hazard here right now. oh!oh my goodness! yes, yes!i've modelled this shape neutronically. it is like a lead pencil isn't it?yes, it's graphite.
we just returned from a trip tooak ridge national laboratories and one of the exciting thingsthat the baronesse and i got to do was to tour themolten salt reactor experiment, which was one of these types ofreactors that was built in the 1960s. decades ago, we successfullydemonstrated passive safety features of the competing breeder reactors. we took ebr-2 to 100% power, then weturned off the main coolant pumps. the fuel expands the clad expands. now more neutrons leak out, anddon't contribute to the chain reaction.
safety is one of the most importantreasons to consider very seriously molten salt reactors and this isbecause of the clever implementation that was demonstrated in themolten salt reactor experiment. a small port in the bottom ofthe reactor that was kept plugged. and to keep the port plugged, they hasa blower that would blow cool gas over it. so there was a littleplug of frozen salt there. if the power went out,the blower turned off, and the heat would melt thefrozen plug and guess what- sploosh, everything woulddrain out of the reactor-
into this drain tank, and the differencebetween the drain tank and the reactor vessel is that the reactor vessel is notmeant to lose any thermal energy. the only place you wantedto lose thermal energy was to give it up in theprimary heat exchanger. the drain tank on the otherhand is designed to maximize the rejection of thermalenergy to the environment. i'm a mechanical engineer.so all we ever talked about in school was how to add heat to thingsand take heat out of things. one of the hard things aboutdesigning a nuclear reactor
is to design it to not loseany heat while you're running it because you want that heatto go over to the steam turbine. you don't want to lose a bunchof heat in normal operation. but to then turn around and trykeep it cool if something goes wrong. so there's 2 conflicting things. the great thing about liquid fluoride reactorsis you can design them completely separately. you can say here's my reactorand it's designed to make heat. and here's the drain tank andit's designed to cool in all situations. decades ago we turned naturally abundant isotopes of uranium, and thorium, into energy.
shippingport, a light water breeder,was captured on film. the liquid metal fast breederswere also captured on film. and when you present that to somebody'swho's been antinuclear their whole life they go, huh? did you know that? and most people are like-no i never knew that. people say- i never knew that.and they think. that's why thorium, like- do you knowyou can power a reactor with thorium? they go, what's that? clearly, someone also shot film footage
of glenn seaborg standing infront of the molten salt reactor discussing the thorium fuel cycle.i can not find this film. i can not show you any film footageof an operating molten salt reactor. only a handful of pictures exist. it's like nasa landed a manon the moon, and then lost the film. this makes for an interestingcommunications challenge. i was driving homefrom work in april of 2006, and i was listening to apiece on the radio from npr. and it was talking about theimportance of proper branding.
and that m was a bad sound.muh. it was kind of a- they were saying l was one of the best sounds.m was one of the worst sounds. so i'm sitting there thinking about them s b r. the mmmuhhh. you know, the molten salt breeder reactorand i thought- hmmm. molten: bad. salt: bad.i thought well how can we fix this? well instead of saying molten we could say liquid.because it is liquid. and liquid turns an m to an l, andaccording to this l is a lot better letter than an m. there are a lot of different kind of salts.so if we were more specific on the salt- we could say fluoride, which is a salt.it's a particular kind of salt.
breeder is kind of a generic term, and whatwe're really doing is using thorium as a fuel. so all of a sudden there it was, l f t r. one of the things i learned at nasa was,you really want your acronyms to be sayable. if they have more than 3 letters,you want to be able to say them like a word. and it's like it just appeared. there it was: l f t r. lifter.you could say it. it was a word. well as a marketing student i'dhave a lot different approach, but- hey, you know what? we need guys just like you.any other marketing students here? this stuff- there's almost a brandingeffort that needs to happen.
how do you tell a storysaying this is different? i used to think, when i was y'alls age,i was an aerospace engineer i didn't know anything about nuclear. i thought nuclear power was dumb.i had no interest in it. i was like- old junk. who would want to be into that? it wasn't until i learned about thorium andi reallized these efficiencies were possible that i began getting really interested. you know- don't do new coke,but what do you do? how do you help people understand that therereally are alternative possibilities out there?
we need guys like you thinking about this.you can come to one of the conferences. talk to your friends.tell people about it. i mean the biggest problem wehave is getting the message out. a guy got on yesterday and he said-why don't we buy a full page ad? because that costs a lot of money. why don't you go tell 5 of your friendsabout it that doesn't cost anything. and it's probably awhole lot more effective. it was only developed at oak ridge. so no other national laboratoriesreally participated in the development,
which is not true about any other-about most other types of reactors where the effort was spreadand many people participated. this was really only in the oakridge, before the age of internet. i think it was some time in 2006 wheni discovered kirk's site- energy from thorium- and learned aboutmolten salt reactors. kirk sorensen, he is whatbrought molten salts to the fore. it's pretty much all on his shouldersand he should be lauded for that. it's outstanding what he has done. kirk gave me some cds, andthen he put them on the internet.
and of course, to me that was a game changer.that was an inflection point. before, i sounded like a nut.and i couldn't point- unless you were physically with me,and i could bring down- i have a copy of fluid fuel reactorsshowing the molten salt reactor in it and the aircraft reactor experiment.matter of fact, it has a picture and in the background there'sa stepladder shows you the scale. it was half the size of your refrigerator,and it put out 2 million watts of heat! and it operated in 1954,i wasn't even on the planet then. you know, we can have world peace, and wecan specialize in what areas that we're good at,
and trade with one another,and not fight over limited resources. there's some chemical differences between thorium and uranium. bleached by water, uraniumcompounds were widely dispersed. and having been scattered far and wide, uranium compounds todayare found as complex, generally dilute deposits containing mixturesof tetra, penta and hexa-valent uranium. unlike uranium, tetra-valent thorium-and it's constantly tetra-valent- resists weathering. thorium thus remained concentrated where itfirst wound up- within easy reach. barack obama, and i've heardother people say this before,
they say that there's nosilver bullet to the energy crisis. molten salts are truly the best silver bullet forserving mankind. it unlocks thorium economically, and as we know, thorium isso plentiful in the earth's crust. it'll come as a byproduct forhundreds of thousands of years. and, in fact, if we- on purpose-wanted to mine the granite just for its thorium, we're not going to run out untilthe sun becomes a red giant. alvin weinberg called it burning the rocks. you could literally mine rockjust for its energy content. glenn seaborg realized this in 1944and he was absolutely dumbfounded
with the possibilities ofwhat it meant for the future. the molten salt reactor experimenthas operated successfully and has earned areputation for reliability. i think that some day the world willhave commercial power reactors of both the uranium-plutonium andthe thorium-uranium fuel cycle types. here he was watching nations wagewar with each other in world war 2 and realizing this could bea complete game changer and change the entireenergy outlook of the future. you know eft bloggers noticed all these guysfrom china from graduate school computer modelers
started showing up on eftsigning up from shanghai, beijing, and they started asking all theseobvious questions about this and that. how they make the code work. they were all modelling it, the chinesegovernment as best as we could tell. did you say chinese is building nuclear reactorsso where are they getting the blueprints or are they developing them? well they probably got a whole bunch ofstuff from the pdfs from my website. gone through your logs to seehow many are coming from china? it's been in the public domain for an awful long time.i just made it a little easier to get, you know?
china announced to their national press of the existence of a well fundedmolten salt reactor project. and it's being run by a guynamed jiang mianheng. he got his phd in electricalengineering from drexel university, he was educated inthe united states. the really interesting thingabout dr. jiang mianheng is that his father's name is jiang zemin,and he used to be the premier of china. so, when i found that out i thought- this is not some shmoe here, this is probablysomeone who's got some resources behind him.
and if he says he's going to go builda thorium molten salt reactor well then i tend to thinkhe's probably going to do it. so, ever since finding that out i've beenreally encouraging people in the united states, and england, and canada, and japan, and justabout anywhere- i said, you know it wouldbe maybe a good idea if we got going onthis because, uh, these guys are probablygoing to pull it off, and you know, good,i hope they do. china definitely needsclean energy. absolutely.
and thorium will provide them clean energyfor hundreds of thousands of years. but, frankly, i'd really likeus to be able to do it too. and i'd like it to be something maybewe develop rather than that we go buy. we buy a lot of thingsfrom china already. you know, i mean, it's not as if we'renot buying enough things from china. we are definitelykeeping them busy. so let's- you know-let's go develop thorium. and, uh, that's really what i'd like to do. you know one of the funthings about being mayor is that
you come to the science fair to see theprojects of some people that are close to you, and next thing you know you're standing on stagein front of 1,000 people. it tends to happen. hi, i'm joe willis, and this is my sciencefair project- decarbonize alberta, and this is just a dry-run for ascience fair which is in a week. what is this, you brainwashed your son intobeing a proponent of the nuclear industry? why? why, man, why?!? no it's the other way aroundactually, i was the first critic. joe willis fordecarbonize alberta. wait, what, that's me?
i got a thorium documentary,i watched it with my dad and naturally he fell asleepthrough the entire thing. and i'm telling him how thorium can save theworld and he's not agreeing with me at all. so i put it in the second time,and he falls asleep. yeah, i got the gold medal,i got the second consumer science award, and the american society of heating,refrigeration & air conditioning and although that one's name sounds likesomething for air conditioning it's for air quality. i try to portray science as exciting andfun with katie and caysie science videos. caysie is my miniaturepoodle she's 3 years old.
i thought that if we adopted the lftrthen we would have a much better future. if we educate people, then they may understandnuclear power, and they may become supportive. you need this stuffexplained in layman's terms so the average joeon the street gets it the way the average joe onthe street gets the basic beats of an internal combustion engine. they made an information packagethat they tried to be relatively neutral, that they could give to people and thenask for their opinion on nuclear power. people were meh-not really opposed, not really in favor.
when they did focus groupswhere they brought 12 people in, left the same information and thenleft the room and let them talk, then went back, pulled thepeople apart, anonymously, the approval ratings were amazing. it's probably you at least get 1 or 2 peoplethat knows enough that the other people trust, that can explain it to them, so,if we can explain it better to the public i think that will go a long way. for me, i think it'seducation. at all levels. we talked about, on the board, educatingcandidates and people in political office.
but i think there'salso the general public. make them awareof what's possible. and get them interested in thesciences at the lower ages and say, yes, i want to be working on somethingthat can power the world in the future. in addition to being an engineer,he really is an educator. he really is a teacher. and he was beginning to spend moreand more and more time- mostly educating. this stuff, this is laws of physics stuff.i didn't invent it. all i do is promote it. he got a phone call from a stranger and spentprobably 45 minutes on the phone really being patient with the specifics.i'm tapping at my watch.
we need to start today to get young peopleinterested in this area. the molten salt chemistry. the metallurgy. the radiochemistry.even the civil engineering. we have to start that supplychain almost from scratch. are their labs going to beintegrated into this curriculum? or is there any wayto leave those out? i know that was really the biggest challenge,getting the supplies to develop a lab for our curriculum. but still any molten salt is goingto require a furnace of some type. most of the nuclear engineering schools havelost their operating reactors in the past 20 years. so they're teaching-
it'd be like teaching you how to operateon a car with a shop manual but no car. so there's students learning how to runnuclear reactors with nothing to learn on just sort of reading about it. china has built a hugenetwork of training reactors. they did it in,like, a couple years. we did a journey to just aboutevery nuclear engineering school and we said how wouldyou like to have a salt loop? it would be just be externally heated. it wouldn't be fueled so itcouldn't generate its own heat, but-
in every other conceivable way,especially if you had neutronic stand-ins, you know, it would act exactly likea molten salt reactor would. you can show the scientific phenomena,the chemical and physical phenomena, without breaking the bank. would that be utilized by other departments as well?absolutely! you'd need an xrd, basically tolook at the crystal pre and post. and those type of equipment span the gamutfrom biological sciences to geo-sciences, engineering- if they're going to have a training reactor theymight as well have a gen 4 training reactor not a gen 1. that's what they have now, downat u of i, that's being dismantled.
mit and harvard, even they can't afford to buildtheir own telescope any more just by themselves- so harvard and berkeley anduniversity of chicago and mit get together and they all say we'llpitch in and we'll share it. so you've got all of thesepeople excited now- i hope so is everybody excited?-the molten salt reactor- well plus you mention nuclear toanyone and their initial reaction is: nuclear energy oh, there's noway we could learn this stuff i don't want to do that classit's going to be too hard. i was really encouraged by thechicago meeting we were at,
was the number ofyoung kids that were there. and i mean like- i suppose i don'tmean kids- like, college age- how knowledgeable.how enthusiastic. and that kind of gives me hope. and i can tell you that is not going onin the conventional nuclear industry. we haven't produced very many nuclear engineers. i taught a class of senior levelengineering students at tennessee tech in the fall of 2010.there were 13 in the class. and they didn't even have nuclear at tennesseeso these were electricals and chemicals. um-
5 of them went on to grad school innuclear engineering because of my course. i wanted to- like- write the nrc and say-you've told them the best situation you can possibly have is to be part of amassive decommissioning contract. i mean- how many people wantto spend their careers doing that? when a nation dreams big, and hasfully funded projects, visible to everyone, where a frontier isgetting advanced, daily innovations attract smart, clever people.the prospect of innovation attracts them. everyone feels like tomorrow is somethingthey want to invent, and bring into the present. you know, you guys should electan engineer president.
well that's what the chinese do. you know all our politicalleaders are lawyers and all china's political leaders are engineers-heh heh- so- oh gosh. we're going broke.we're mired in debt. we don't have as manyscientists as we want or need. and jobs are going overseas. i assert that these arenot isolated problems. that they are thecollective consequence of the absence of ambition thatconsumes you when you stop having dreams.
if all you do is coast,eventually you slow down, while others catch up,and pass you by. why nuclear energy? especially,after what happened in japan? why molten salt reactor? why thorium? and last but not least, why china is the firstone to eat the crab? that's chinese saying. uh, the chinese academy of sciences hasbegun an effort to develop what they call t-msr, thorium molten salt reactor.and it's really along these same lines. and they are well funded,and well staffed.
we have 300 peopleworking full time on this. they know that those are the samepeople who are going to turn around and operate and maintain those reactors.i give them great credit. it's very compelling work. chinese are definitelyin the lead right now on this. 1994 the state of californiapassed a law of the zero emissions. and gm's ev1 came out in 1996 because they want very much liketo catch the market of the california. the big oils heavilylobbying east coast,
not to follow the sametrack as california did. finally, gm called back all the ev1s fromthe market, and crashed them in 2004. it's- it's- it's something to me like-like- like world war 2 nazi. it's amazing.it's a very scary story here. here is pure electric car developedby chinese academy of sciences. we used to have a dream-if we can produce clean electricity then we can driveour electrical car. however-if you look at this- as of today- it's all gasoline cars.so it makes our job even impossible.
we need a revolutionary something happen.why thorium? and why msr? low pressure here,which give you more safety. we also end up with the high temperature here.we need high temperature. because, if you can go 900 degrees c,then we can use this energy to- convert the co2,which is not the waste at all- is a raw material forour chemicals, in fact. we need the energy to convert them.we need the high temperature. there's all sorts of very, very interesting chemistrythat we have never had the opportunity to look at because we've never had a cheapenergy platform at those temperatures.
with a heat platform likea molten salt reactor you can do any number ofhigh temperature reactions. we're still going to need liquid fuelsfor vehicles and machinery. but we could generate these fuels fromthe carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and from water,much like nature does. we could generate hydrogenby splitting water and combining it with carbon harvestedfrom co2 in the atmosphere- making fuels like methanol,ammonia, and dimethyl-ether, which could be a directreplacement for diesel fuels.
the whole planet's transportation system isgauged toward the consumption of a fossil fuel. there's an entire internal combustioninfrastructure on the planet. imagine carbon neutral gasoline anddiesel sustainable and self produced. -a way of getting the full lifecycle out ofthe infrastructure we've already built up. because you don't want to just abandonthe infrastructure we've already built up. we have trillions of dollars ofinternal combustion machinery around. but we need to at least stopputting more stuff into the air. the opportunities abound.i couldn't even tell you. i just- there's so many possibilities.i wouldn't-
i wouldn't even want to predict.wouldn't even want to. alright, so- this the work that'sactually going on at nrl today, this is not a theoretical possibility. the ocean or rivers, as it's pointed out,is full of carbon dioxide and hydrogen. there's lots of thiseverywhere on the planet. in fact, seven-tenths of the earth'ssurface is covered with water. we are looking here at theelectrolytic cation exchange module. this is on version 3. here's the skid that's used downat naval air station key west.
what's going on is pretty simple.we're pumping electricity into this module up here. we're pulling carbonic acid,hco3, out of the water. by the way, per unit gallon weget about a 92% removal from it. then we're using standard electrolysisto crack water in order to make hydrogen. and what do you do with it? you string the carbon together with your hydrogen,and let's get into the fuels business. here is the spectrum for jp-5, which is thestandard fuel used to run all the aircraft. a bit like a classic bell curve. what you're seeing is the spectrum-
based upon carbon content of the individualhydrocarbons as you make this guy out of oil. so this is anybody. exxon, bp, shell,whoever you want to name it- pulling petroleum out of the ground,fractionally distilling it, and making jp-5 accordingto the military specification. so what happens coming out of ourmachine down at naval air station key west? now look at this,we've got a decay curve. because we're manufacturing the fuelssynthetically we're able to control the carbon content and get a better concentrationof the c10 hydrocarbons that we want than you can get from natural oil.
so what this turns out is that thesynthetically made aviation fuel actually has a higherenergy density and is cleaner. it doesn't have the sulfur compounds in it,it doesn't have the nitrates in it. all of the really nasty stuff that comesout of burning a fossil fuel we don't have, and we have a better power densityprofile making this stuff artificial. if you can do just basic high school chemistry,if we can get hydrogen and co2 from seawater you have the fundamental building blocks rightthere for making any hydrocarbon fuel you want. burn the fuel it will go into the air,it'll get absorbed into the ocean, pulled out of the ocean, turnedinto fuel, burned and back into the air.
so your car works beautifully justas today but it's not running on oil. but it's still running on thesame fuel you have today. it's not a real airplane, i admit it.however, you're looking at it in the air- flying on fuel that was madefrom sea water and electricity. what do you do about civilian aviation?are we going to move to a world where only the highest of our elected officials fly aroundthe world when the rest of us get to walk? because there is no substitute foraviation fuel if you want to get in the air. we're not going to havesolar powered aircraft. we're not going to have hydrogenfuel powered aircraft anytime soon.
we're looking at some total radicaltechnology breakthrough if you want to fly. the hydrocarbonic acid in the ocean is inequilibrium with the co2 in the atmosphere. it's a very simple test. seal up a fish-tank, fill saltwater inthe bottom, don't let any air into it. run your probes in there, pullcarbonic acid out of the bottom. read your co2 level on the air above it andwatch the co2 level in the atmosphere drop. every time you take a piece of carbon out of theocean it is the same as taking it out of the atmosphere. it will pass from the air into the water. when you send an aircraft up inthe air and it's running on fuel
you made by takingcarbonic acid out of the ocean, you have a virtual carbon cycle.you are not adding co2 at all. it's carbon-free fuel that is carbonand burns in our existing engines. so what we're going to do is go throughthe various stages that will be needed to make fuel on the martian surface. i've taken a tray full of ice, and coveredit in sand to represent the martian geology. there's ice caps at the top and this issolid ice, water, and also solid carbon dioxide. we can drill down to get thissolid ice and turn it into liquid. take a screwdriver.heat it up. melt this ice.
by burrowing through ourmartian surface that we've got here, we can turn frozen waterinto liquid water and steam. now we can use electricity topull the hydrogen and the oxygen apart by simply dropping a9-volt battery into our bowl of water. on the negative terminal,which is the fatter terminal, we see bubbles forming, and that'shydrogen gas being formed out of the water. did lewis and clark cross the american continent bringing with them all the food, water andair they would need for their horses for a 3 year transcontinentaltrip of exploration?
no, if they had done that they would haveneeded a wagon train of supplies for every man, and anotherwagon train for every horse, and then of course the wagon train menwould have needed more wagon trains and it would havegone exponential. if you looked at these other missionplans, what you saw was that the majority of the mass they were sendingto mars was the propellant to come back. what is the travel-light and live-off-the-landapproach to mars exploration? this is a little rocket ship forreturning from mars to earth in the terminal stage of the mission.
but no one is in it whenit goes out the first time. they have to be unfueled or this willweigh much to heavy to throw to mars. and then slung below thevehicle not shown in this diagram is a little truck in the back ofthat truck is a little nuclear reactor. you take the water you electrolize it,split it into hydrogen and oxygen, and you suck in the martian air, which is95% carbon dioxide, and now you've got a fully fueled earth return vehicle sitting,waiting for you on the surface of mars. but it wouldn't be practical if youhad to bring the fuel from earth. and in fact we make extra propellant beyondwhat the earth return vehicle needs
so we can operate chemical powered vehicleson the surface of mars for exploration purposes. the ability to make use of local resourcesis not just the key to making the mission cheap, it's also the key to makingthe mission effective. because there's no point going to mars unlessyou can do something useful once you get there. the constellation program wasthe program nasa had started to put people back on the moon and i hadbeen working on it for a number of years. it was good that it got cancelled. it wasa program that was in really big trouble. it was way over budget, it was poorly designed,it was being very poorly implemented. but- i was where with a colleague and shedid trajectory work like i did and i said-
are you disappointed this has been cancelled?i'll never forget what she said to me, she said- kirk, i've been here 30 years. every singlething i've ever worked on has been cancelled. the old strategy, including the constellation program,was not fulfilling its promise in many ways. that's not just my assessment. and i think there is a parallelthere, i think, between what's going on in the nuclear industryand what's going on at nasa. so it sounds like you each worked on a numberof different reactors over your careers. everything i ever worked on got cancelled. not because of him though.
you know the shuttle was a magnificenttechnology development- in 1981. part of the problem was,u.s. held on to the shuttle for 30 years. and in 2011, the shuttle was not such amagnificent technology development any more. because nasa kept holding on the old technology,until finally president bush had to say- we're going to stop doing it. the space shuttle, after nearly 30 yearsof duty, will be retired from service. i think there's a parallel therewith the light water reactor. we built 100-some-oddlight water reactors between the 70s and the 80sand a few into the 90s.
and, as you've seen fromour visit to oak ridge, there's talk about extendingthose reactors 60 and 80 years. and you get into the same sort ofargument of diminishing returns. how long do you hold onto the old technology? i don't see the trajectory as serving anypurpose, because there are processing disadvantages, there are engineering disadvantages,there are material science disadvantages. all of those things are non-issues if youadopt a truly fluid fuel / cooling system. whether you're in spaceor on the moon or on mars. you need something that is basically stupid-proof.right? it's idiot-proof.
and all of the redundancy that is involvedin solid fuel reactors is basically eliminated. desalinating briny water. synthesizing liquid fuel. growing indoor crops. these are how humans can reduceour ecological footprint here on earth- and explore marswithout breaking the bank. in all environments,on earth, and in zero gravity, we want reactors capable of producing largeamounts of power, yet are simple and compact. on earth, small reactors can betransported by train by truck or by ship.
factory construction is muchcheaper than on-site construction. a small reactor also requires less naturalresources to fabricate in the first place. size is even more importantfor off-world application, because launching stuff intospace is so incredibly expensive. we don't want any complex mechanismfor shuttling around solid fuel. much operational complexitytakes place outside a nuclear reactor. the enrichment of uranium.the management of spent fuel. overall, molten salt reactors are much simpler. the greater efficiencyenabled by liquid homogeneity
means less mining, and less wasteper kilowatt-hour generated. unlike today's solid fuel reactors, whichcan only be economically fueled with uranium, it is possible to fuel an appropriately designedmolten salt reactor economically with thorium. almost all of it will ultimately end up fissioning. out of about 1000 kg, about 15 kgof plutonium-238 will be left over, now this is good stuff. plutonium-238 is different thanplutonium-239, the stuff we use in bombs. in fact it's worthless for bombs. this is the stuff nasa usesin its deep-space batteries.
voyager, galileo, cassini, new horizons,all these deep space probes. almost everything that comes out ofthis reactor can be sold for product. and then, it'll make enough uranium-233to replace itself with 1000 kg of thorium. breeding thorium requiresa more complicated design than is required for a uraniumfueled molten salt reactor. the question becomes, do you only wantthe reactor to be as simple as possible? or- do you want the entire fuel lifecycleto be as simple, and efficient, as possible? in space, for most applications, we absolutelyneed our reactor to be as simple as possible. a smaller, lighter reactor is of the utmost importance,for our immediate exploration needs.
the first molten salt reactorlaunched into space will undoubtedly be poweredby uranium not thorium. but eventually, we want to maximize the efficiencywith which we consume natural resources. on earth we do this because we don't like diggingbig holes over here, and dumping big piles over there. on the moon and mars, we mightnot worry about pollution, but we'd be far more constrained inhow we harvest natural resources. thorium is an element found everywhere.it is junk. rare earth mining operations would justas soon pay you to take it off their hands. if you're pulling out rare earths, andyour deposit has- let's say- 8% rare earths,
it may have 14% thorium. every known way to extract rare earthsfrom their mineral concentrates- thorium just literally drops outlike a rock and you have it. the thorium is free. so it's going to bethe most valuable commodity in the world- with almost no value. because the element thorium canbe isolated with basic chemistry, and because molten salt reactorsdo not require solid fuel fabrication, it is possible to mine dirt for energyeven on the moon and on mars. one amazing application of molten saltreactors is to solve the water problem.
we're standing in palo alto,california, in silicon valley, and they are in the midst of one ofthe worst droughts in california history. well, solve the water problem by reverse osmosisdesalination of all that water we have off-shore here- then make veryenvironmentally friendly fertilizers- because you're doingzero-emission energy source- and then solve the food problem.and you can apply that model worldwide. any factory assembledadvanced reactor, brought to market, could help make nuclear powersafer and less expensive. but, it is liquid fueled thorium reactorswhich can completely decouple energy generation
from negative environmental impact. lftr consumes only the unwantedbyproduct of existing mining operations. there's so much rare earths thatwe're throwing away because of thorium. one rare earth andusually one thorium atom. we could solve the rare earth problemwithout opening any new mines and we can solve the energyproblem without mining either. we need the thorium, and he needssomeone to get rid of the thorium. i realized that there was 60 people sittingon the other side of the podium going- do you think there's enough of it?do you think there's a stable supply?
how much thorium do youthink you'll be pulling up a year? and he goes- i think about 5000 tons.he goes- is that a lot? by my calculations,5000 tons of thorium would supply the planet withall of its energy for a year. i said- so your 1 mine, in missouri,would bring up enough thorium- without even trying-to power the entire planet. and he goes- and there's like a zillion otherplaces on earth that are just like my mine. i mean-it's a nice mine, but it's not unique, it's not like this is the oneplace on earth where this is found.
the promise of abundant clean energy hasalready been made by wind and solar advocates. however, those are diffuse andintermittent sources of energy. thorium, when consumed in a molten salt reactor,is incredibly energy dense. and thorium, in a molten salt reactor,can follow energy demand. we did it at a numberof different power levels. you could change the load on thisradiator by moving the doors down and the reactor would follow the load. as the salt would heat up, there would be less fissile material in thenuclear reactor core, and so fission became less likely.
conversely, as the salt cooled down, therewas more material, because the salt was contracting, and fission became more likely. an inherently stable system. in other words, gets hotter, cools down,gets too cool, heats up. so that is a really amazing quality that a nuclearreactor can have and this reactor had it in spades. and then you have other thingslike wind and solar where you can't change the rate of what's coming at all,you just take whatever you're going to get. we have to get beyond burning stuff for energy. and we can go to a dispersed form of energy,which is gathering wind and solar.
or we can go to a more concentratedform of energy, which is nuclear. and the disadvantage of wind and solar thatwill always exist is the amount of labor, energy, and expense of gathering andconcentrating and directing that energy. because energy had to becollected and directed to do work. and nuclear energy hasalready been collected. our national conversation on energy- rarely mentions these concepts:energy density. energy reliability. if we continue to ignore energy density and reliability,we'll wind up in a future like this one- a future where we continue to solve problemsthrough ingenuity and perseverance,
but always with a disadvantage- we won't be using energy to tackle problems,if we've constrained our own access to it. human mechanical energy is so amazing.why can't we use that to create energy? you will never run out of electricity.you never generate any pollution. so half the world is notgoing to generate pollution. we call it- free electric. solar freakin' roadways- -replaces all roadways, parking lots,sidewalks, driveways, tarmacs, bike paths and outdoor recreation surfaces with smart,microprocessing, interlocking, hexagonal solar units!
maintaining a nation of solar highways. manufacturing bicycle-battery-generatorsfor every home. an extremely ambitious idea to replaceour nation's roads with solar panels. the department of transportation has kicked in$850,000. people are actually taking this seriously. despite the media attention they've received,i think these ideas are flat-out crazy. but they're par for the coursein today's energy landscape. they keystone xl pipeline extension- for a while, the entire national energy discussionrevolved around a single pipeline. sometimes it seems, the more difficultan energy source is to harness,
the more attention it receives. if you'll give me a chance to serve, i'll bring the epa and the agriculture departmentand all the people together and we'll use ethanol as a part of our nation'senergy security future! for example, corn ethanol receives7 billion dollars in subsidy each year. corn ethanol'sreturn on energy investment is 1.3 times. only 30% more energy is recoveredfrom corn ethanol, then went into producing it. ethanol is a lousy molecule. i'm sorry,but the farm lobby did a really good job- because they had a lot of money-
to be able to peddle a reallygrossly inferior molecule like ethanol. its got 25% less energy density-per mole- than regular old gasoline. and it costs a hell of a lotmore money to make. even al gore, who was a keyproponent of corn ethanol, acknowledges that thesubsidy was a mistake- the energy conversion ratios are,at best, very small. how does corn's 1.3 timescompare against other energy sources? solar cells return 7 times.natural gas is 10 times. wind is 18 times.today's water cooled nuclear is 80 times.
coal is 80 times.hydropower is 100 times. a thorium powered molten salt reactor canreturn 2000 times the energy invested in it. as another point of reference, 7 billion dollarsis not just our yearly corn ethanol subsidy- it was also nasa'sentire 2015 operating budget. uh- personally if i was going to tryto be living on the moon or mars i would definitely wanta nuclear power source i would consider anything lessto be tantamount to suicide. there's lots of thorium on the surface of the moon.there's lots of thorium on the surface of mars. there are fluorides on mars. for certain.
so you can actually get your fluorine source,your thorium source, your uranium source, and most likely the othermetals that you would need. extract the water from the soils of mars. separate the hydrogen and oxygen.we now have a supply of rocket fuel on mars. a filling station.so you don't have to carry all your fuel with you. there are many advantages to not havingenergy being your scarcest resource in space. set up some other nuclearreactor somewhere else in space. space becomes that frontier. these innovations make headlines.
and those headlines work theirway down the educational pipeline. everybody in school knows about it. you don't have to set up a program toconvince people that being an engineer is cool. this is a video about thorium, molten saltreactors, nuclear power, and energy itself. we look at technical challenges. we look at statements made whichmischaracterize the potential of thorium. and we'll examine some claims that nuclearpower is entirely unnecessary in the first place. this video exists because nasa spent $10,000to digitize reactor research documents in 2004. the documents are public domain, and be accessedthrough ornl's online library or kirk's website.
this is not mystery technology. anyone can learn aboutmolten salt reactors in great detail. in fact, half a dozen privately fundedstartups are working right now to bring modern, factory assembled,molten salt reactors to market. the bug was put in my ear,to think about a new company. i worked 10 years ontechnology development at nasa. technology doesn't develop on its own.it develops when we push it. and the converse is true.when we don't push technology it doesn't go anywhere. these reactors are designedto operate under 1 earth gravity.
they won't be small enough to launchinto space. but unlike a space reactor, these molten salt reactors don'tdepend on nasa to fund development. in fact, the first moltensalt reactor to ever operate, was called theaircraft reactor experiment. it was incredibly compact, and itwas designed to operate without gravity. unless you were physically with me,and i could bring down fluid fuel reactors showing the molten salt reactor in itand the aircraft reactor experiment. they consciously and deliberatelyignored the contribution of convection to heat flow in liquids.they ignored it.
they ignored itfor a very good reason. they were designing anuclear reactor powered bomber. it was going in an airplane. airplanes do interesting things like gointo dives. the force of gravity disappears. convection then stops.convection is a gravity driven phenomena. so they couldn't rely on convection. nasa will be able to crib fromthe aircraft reactor experiment- and an abundance ofmodern reactor designs- to begin work on low gravity-or zero gravity- molten salt reactors.
when molten salt reactors beginpowering our cities and providing fresh water, it will be quickly recognizedthat the best bang-for-the-buck ever attained bya government agency was the scanning ofmolten salt research- performed by nasa for $10,000. in the last third of this century, our independencewill depend on self sufficiency in energy. the united states will not bedependent on any other country for the energy we need toprovide our jobs, to heat our homes, and to keep ourtransportation moving.
beginning this moment, this nation will neveruse more foreign oil than we did in 1977. never. our imports of foreign oil havebeen climbing steadily since 1985, and now stand at 42%of our total consumption. we need a long-term energy strategyto maximize conservation and to maximize the developmentof alternative sources of energy. america is addicted to oil,often imported from unstable parts of the world. this country can dramatically improve our environment,move beyond a petroleum-based economy, and make our dependence onmiddle-eastern oil a thing of the past.
in 10 years, we will finally end ourdependence on oil from the middle east. calls to action! calls to action!if you're at the age of 15 to 19- consider becoming a nuclear, chemical,electrical, or mechanical engineer. if you are from the ages of 20 to 25, andare not one of the aforementioned majors- consider going back to school.