Small Modular Reactors: The Model T Of Nuclear Energy | Answers With Joe
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- čas přidán 6. 06. 2021
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Small Modular Reactors are shipping container-sized reactors that can be scaled up to meet any energy need. And they may be the future of nuclear energy.
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LINKS LINKS LINKS:
www.bbc.com/future/article/20...
www.bloomberg.com/opinion/art...
www.ncsl.org/documents/enviro...
Kyle Hill's video on Nuclear: • Why You’re Wrong About...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear....
www.nationalgeographic.com/en....
www.thebalance.com/chernobyl-...
www.fisheries.noaa.gov/west-c...
www.world-nuclear.org/informa...
eu.boell.org/sites/default/fi...
www.rolls-royce.com/products-...
www.greentechmedia.com/articl...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...
www.utilitydive.com/news/doe-... - Věda a technologie
"That's more."
Best laugh I've had on this channel in a while.
yeah, made me smile
You don't laugh every monday? He's a pretty funny guy.
@@aserta I'm sure he's made me laugh but every monday? maybe not. but Joe is definitely a talented presenter.
Same lol
OK, OK, I watched it again and really enjoyed it, even on the second time around. Very good, Joe.
Still laughing at the"yeah that's more". X) the delivery is perfect
Do you laugh when someone jingles keys above your head too?
@@oldmandoinghighkicksonlyin1368 I laugh when random people oon the internet complain about strangers' sense of humour for no reason.
@@namanmishra703 I love when people do the same thing they accuse me of doing.
@@oldmandoinghighkicksonlyin1368 Key difference: the "no reason" part.
@@oldmandoinghighkicksonlyin1368 what if? X) have a good life :)
France has the cheapest power in Europe and 80% of it is Nuclear power. They built the same type of reactor in 16 or 19 places and it is a great success story.
And they have the cleanest energy mix in europe too, and did it 40 years ago, but nucular is bad, so no, it is not an option... (and fun fact, they will not renew this system, so in the next decade or two they will either somehow can switch from 80% nuclear to 80% solar/wind, or just build a few nice coal/oil/gas plants, so they can stop using the bad nuclear ones.)
France has NOT the cheapest power in Europe before tax. But they have Low taxes on electricity, so consumer price is lower than other countries. Has Nothing to do with Nuclear and everything to do with taxation.
@@thorin1045 they also technology for recycling spent fuel for decreasing waste
France nuclear industry is in utter bankrupcy. The third largest operator entered in bankrupcy ~2012, the second one (Areva) was bought by the first one (EDF) in 2017 on the verge of bankrupcy and currently EDF (which is owned mostly by the French state) is over € 70,000 millions in debt due the huge operational cost of their fleet of 56 reactors, with one third of those facing the need of either invest massive amounts of money in upgrades (due they will exceed the 40 year lifespan for which they were designed) or even more costly retirement. Nuclear is so incredible expensive than even Bill Gates (one of the richest man in the world) choses to shill nuclear corporations and to try to lure public funds to their delusional projects instead of bursting his own money into them. In fact, I think that if you fill a can with 5 € bills, spraying gasoline over them and set it on fire you probably would get a more cost effective energy source than funding nuclear reactors, of any kind. If you read about the development of newer power plants and how they go in the last 20 years (from Hinkly point C to Flamanville to Oliklouto... ) you will probably reach the conclussion that nuclear power plants do work as a steam-powered locomotive but replacing coal with money bills.
If EDF, with over 60 years operating nuclear power plants and 56 reactors in line, is unable to make a dime with this technology you won't be able to convince me that all those star ups scammers begging funds from the states would be able to make it difference... There's a reason why private investment entirely fleed away from those projects. In my country (Spain) we had up to 14 reactors (now 7 in line) and they probably will be retired in this decade, because they are no longer competitive in the market. Thankfully we didn't put all eggs in the same basket (as France) and neither needed to make nuclear weapons, so for us transitioning to other energy sources is going relatively ok.
@@Buran01 can please provide link for edf bankruptcy, i found only one article and i didn't hear anything about edf bankruptcy. i am not criticising you i am just curious.
At 4:18, “Fukushima Disaster” - misleading image of something that defiantly wasn’t the reactor , very sneaky!
what is it
oh, its apperantly ichihara oil refinery?
@Samurai Nuts Obviously he did.
@@paulbedichek2679 ....Why would he?? He's a clear proponent of Nuclear energy, he literally goes on to say it's one of the safest forms of energy directly after. I'm sure it was just a simple mistake. It's one quick inserted picture that was probably grabbed off of google without double checking the source. I love Joe's content but he's not always 100% accurate with every image he throws up or every single thing he says, and to be fair no one is really. I've seen misplaced or misrepresented images before, but usually they don't change the context. Unfortunately this one did. When you cover the wide variety of topics he does while making videos every week, he's bound to make small mistakes here and there...It's not like he's a nuclear engineer or nuclear physicist, just a dude who tries his best to research a project as well as he can and present it in an entertaining way.
"yeah thats more " has the potential to be a great meme template !!
Definitely working on it rn
I vote for "Yeah that more" to be Joe's new catch phrase.
It was just such an absurd difference.
I'd Say it should Be a meme
Like Ryan George's super easy barely an inconvenience, Joe Scott needs a catchphrase.
But like.... there's just so much good material, good luck trying to find one.
@@joescott oh boi.. Wait I'll go get my nuclear cámara and take a picture, everyone say "Irradiated"!.
Still prefer Fusion, but I like this too.
"uranium is dangerous"
*Laughs in thorium
Thorium works by creating Uranium as part of it's fuel cycle. #themoreyouknow
no please do not laugh in the thorium
that would be bad.
Did Joe do a vid on thorium reactors?
@@KingClovis yes
@@montex66 Though that Uranium isotope is far more stable than the one used in nuclear reactors. Still radioactive but not as dangerous for us.
The "Fukushima Disaster" at 4:18 seems to involve more oil than I remembered. It did not know that the power plant looked like a oil refinery.
And had nothing to do with the reactors failing. Those failures were caused by the backup power supply failing, which was caused by someone thinking it a good idea to place the backup generator's fuel tanks in the basement.
The contamination that was released was from the storage basins holding the fuel rods that were stored there while one of the reactors was being refurbished.
That all got flooded because it was hit with a tidal wave that was several times higher than the highest that was deemed theoretically possible until the day it struck.
@@jwenting A power station suffering a power cut sounds like something out of a 1930's comedy film but, it is a reality.
The solution is unbelievably simple and was considered at the early stages of design, However their were risks with earlier smaller stations that do not exist today.
Put simply, the output of the alternators is stepped up in voltage to reduce the current for transmission, so it is not usable to power the everyday needs of the power station which requires a normal low voltage 3 phase with star neutral national grid supply.
However, adding a delta primary transformer matched to the output voltage of the alternators with a star secondary matched to the grid would provide a 100% reliable backup that is permanently online. Needless to say, a transformer would need to be installed and connected to each alternator.
The cost would be minimal and off load, the transformers would draw no current. Since their would be no moving parts, their is virtually nothing to go wrong. As long as the station has one reactor and one alternator running, they would have emergency power.
In reality, it would be cost effective to use this power to run the station, thus avoiding all the transmission losses. By switching between transformers connected to running alternators, the system would be testing itself 24/7.
Whatever the situation, generators are high risk, since they need fuel which can deteriorate as well as becoming contaminated with water. Without regular running, they can develop numerous faults, mainly due to seals drying out and becoming brittle.
@@wilsjane Normally nuclear powerstations power themselves, but during startup and shutdown they don't generate power while still requiring (some).
Therefore they have connections to the electrical grid as well as backup generators.
It's no doubt the same for all other powerstations out there, they all have computers, electric motors, and stuff like that after all.
@@jwenting That was not the case at Fukushima since they were without power to run the cooling water pumps.
I suspect that their normal power was from their own alternators in reality, but stepped down from their HV output at their external coupling station. Therefore when the HV grid went down it left them without power.
My suggestion was to add the transformers that I suggested within the turbine hall, adjacent to each alternator prior to step up.
Back in the 1950's, my late father wanted this design adopted on our first stations here in the UK, but since they were small with as little as 2 turbines, their was a possibility of both of them being shut down simultaneously. Therefore diesel generators were installed. With todays larger stations their are often around 8 alternators, so the problem no longer exists after the first reactor is commissioned.
Modern aircraft have everything triplicated to protect the lives of a few hundred people, but a nuclear power station that could threaten the lives of thousands has no such triplication for their cooling water which is their life blood.
Commissioning power stations with my father was always fun and a day off school. No one seemed in the least bothered that I was 7 years old and since I needed to understand the full operation I questioned everything. The guys called me " the professor".
How things have changed over the last 70 years. but questionably whether for the better,
As you may have guessed, I am now the retired chartered design engineer. Following this discussion I am tempted to produce a paper for the IET outlining this simple inexpensive triplication.
The IET is the UK institute of engineering and technology, formally the IEE.(institute of electrical engineering) Historically they set the British Standards for electrical engineering in the UK .
@@wilsjane it was exactly what happened at Fukushima. The reactors shut down, meaning no more internal power generation.
At the same time the tidal wave both destroyed the powerlines running into the plant, meaning no more external power supply.
And it caused the fuel for the emergency generators to become contaminated, shutting those down as well.
Result was the coolant pumps lost power, leading to the partial meltdown of the operating reactors.
As a 19 year old student fresh out of a vocational training program and starting a trade union apprenticeship, one of my first jobs was working on the construction of a nuclear power plant. I was fortunate enough to get assigned to a variety of interesting parts of the facility including the containment structures, refueling buildings, and the reactor itself. Since that time over 40 years ago, I have built every other type of power plant that has been connected to the grid. If it produced power, I worked on it. Coal, refuse, biomass, hydro, natural gas, and solar are all the types I have built. As a rational person, I hope
these modular reactors are one of the solutions to the power needs of humanity.
And no, I haven’t forgotten about wind and tidal, which will also play a vital part of our energy future.
Space & the stars(I mean giant balls of fire...Including our own sun) are the future or we die on this planet.
@@DIGITALGANIC while fusion world be a potentially great source of energy, it still has to be proven, with the technology seemingly stuck being 10 years in the future. While we should still pursue it, We should focus more on energy solutions that well work now or in the short term.
@@thundersheild926 turns out nuclear is the cleanest cheapest safest form of energy ever created
And even if fusion is 50 years away there’s no reason everyone shouldn’t be using this
@@KCJbomberFTW Got any evidence supporting that claim?
The USA experimented with modular nuclear power at Idaho Falls that, in 1961, did not end well. Let's hope we've learned a few things since then.
"I'm leaving a lot out." Yeah, I would say so. Like anything actually related to the cause:
- Three Mile Island Reactor #2 was a brand new reactor (Like only a year or two old).
- There was no switch or valve accidentally thrown to drain the cooling pond. It had a known problem with one of the cooling pumps that the previous night's crew tried to address. And it was this pump that started the incident when it failed and then took down the entire second cooling system with it. The cooling pond never emptied.
- The reactor was known to have issues with heat that was scheduled to be addressed later that year.
- The system had an antiquated system of notifying the staff of issues, faults, and warnings, including a printer hooked up to a 300 baud modem that couldn't keep up with the faults and alerts being sent to it and an inadequately designed warning light board.
- A crew that was trained on a completely different type of reactor situations (All were former US Navy submariners trained on reactors for nuclear subs.) who...
- Did the exact opposite of what they needed to do... initially. This caused the group to stop water from going into the containment vesicle initially because they were protecting the wrong part of the reactors.
Basically, it was the perfect storm of things going wrong that ultimately caused Reactor Number 2 to overheat and partially melt. (Yes, the reactor vessel and the fuel in it are now slag, but nothing anywhere close to what Chernobyl's elephant's foot was.) And the team was able to stop the meltdown by the time they got a hold of a rep for the company who made the reactor. It was a perfect storm of a brand new reactor in it's shakeout phase with a few known issues and some bad design flaws that lead to some complacency with the teams running it combined with a crew relying on procedures for a completely different environment, where if any of the variables had been slightly different, this wouldn't have happened.
If you would like a good timeline of events and an excellent breakdown of first and second stories, check out this Lead Dev lecture by Nicolas Means "Who Destroyed Three Mile Island" czcams.com/video/hMk6rF4Tzsg/video.html
Yes I was thinking the exact same thing. Even though that presentation isn’t made by a nuclear engineer nor is the point being made even about the incident itself it is one of the best thorough explanations of the incident to date in my opinion.
Vesicle?
And still the only thing that happened was that the reactor was broken and could not be repaired. That is safety!!!
@@Kian139 Yeah, all my life, I kept hearing people talk about Three Mile Island like it was Chernobyl, and when I saw the video on it, I was like, "Um, there's worse accidents in US history than this." Sure, it was scary and was close to becoming a Chernobyl, but it didn't.
@@jackielinde7568, it was not close to becoming a Chernobyl. It was never even near but a lot of scary stories and wild speculation was reported and people believed it.
"Humans aren't very good and calculating risk."
The understatement of 2020/21
@Karl Zaraiva Plandemic
Humans are a domesticated species.
@Karl Zaraiva I think your understanding is exactly backward.
You misspelled "Governments"
"I made a calculated risk but man am I bad at math..."
When comparing numbers and quantities, the "yeah, that's more" has a visual element to the comparison that helps a lot in quickly getting the point across to the inside of the viewer's head. Keep doing it.
The thing is that you can use the land next to a solar farm. If you compare the actual space occupied, solar wins.
Comparing Nuclear and Solar on a /MWh basis is misleading, Solar needs storage to be usable.
Yeah , nuclear is base load energy.
There's a load of other assumptions that go into calculating the LOCE that can throw out the results to a huge degree so I dismiss that metric most of the time anyway unless I can see how it was calculated.
Atomic
Small
Modular
Reactor
Sounds good to my ears
HaHaaaaaaa!
4:18 That's a picture of the COSMO oil refinery fire in Chiba.
Thank you for continuing to educate about the realities of nuclear safety, SMRs, and the progress being made in this area of technology!
I love nuclear power.
It has always been some kind of forbidden fruit. Something my parents never liked and didn't want to talk about.
Being a rebellious kid, I had to develop an interest in it.
how the tables have turned
@Rusto Autism and cancer were both on the rise over the last few decades due to the increase in people's life expectancy and the odds of poor formed fetuses actually surviving development. However due to better understandings of triggers for cancer has made it start to fall in the last 2 decades though autism is still just as common but more often is it noticed now due to now being publicly understood as an issue. Though obviously while in some cases it's actually a result of the parent's having poor habits during pregnancy that they don't willingly admit (my aunt for example has an autistic kid due to drinking and smoking during pregnancy).
Also I really question the claim you say there were spikes of radiation from the nuclear plant. They are screened 24/7 for leaks and environmental contamination on top of the government testing the buildings as well monthly. It could also be from radon gas which right now is something the US leaves to its citizens to deal with as that's an expensive problem to deal with and expensive to even test if your house has it. The US doesn't require testing for it due to lobbying by the realty businesses not wanting to pay for it themselves.
@Rusto Multiple places in the world have higher background radiation rates than would be *inside* the power plant control room. Yet, they don't have higher incidence of developmental problems or cancer.
@Rusto The big dumb reactors guaranteed those problems. SMRs are used in the navies of the world very safely. This video showed how these problems are solved by SMRs.
The problems of the past will be solved by Rolls Royce type quality with mass production of a proven high quality design.
Thanks for this. My husband works in nuclear. It's so good to see positive and informative videos on the subject
Hope he'll get to keep his job in the future as this new tech really starts to catch on.
The molten salt reactor thorium make more sense to me both in terms of fuel being far more common and the fuel breaking down in a lifetime.
Doesn't it also require less fuel for the same power and the waste is less dangerous?
No nuclear also makes more sense to me because they aren't cost-effective. And thorioum for sure isn't as common or cheap to gather as wind or photons...
@@Buran01 wind and solar are too inconsistent to be the only options. There is enough thorium in just the US to supply the world's current power needs for 100,000 years and the stuff is every where.
Hey Joe, NuScale got licensed. An updated video with comparisons to other green energy would be pretty awesome.
INCLUDING high profile accidents, Nuclear is still the safest kilowatt available.
INCLUDING wartime usage its still gets a tiny kill count compared to gasoline
But at the same time it rendered the most square kilometers per kilowatt hour persistently inhabitable.
Much better than the big time killer, coal.
@@lonestarr1490 That's not true, lol. Nuclear has literally the lowest land consumption per energy produced.
@@vaclavzajac214 I didn't talk about land consumption. I talked about inhabitable land. Like, that's literally what I said. No one's living anywhere near Prypjat today, same goes for Fukushima.
No other power plant of any type is capable of rendering land inhabitable if it goes off. And it stays inhabitable for who knows how long, even if there is no more energy produced there. So it's not the same as land consumption per energy produced.
Or if you want to count it as such, then Chernobyl and Fukushima are still constantly worsening your average. Fine by me.
One option I had thought of when looking at these being tall and almost rocket-like; if you could design units like this to fit into abandoned ICBM silos. The site areas are already sequestered and intended to mitigate fallout, and they're already hardened against catastrophe and attack. When the reactor needs major repair or replacement, it can be extracted onto a loading truck vertically, rotated into transport mode, and driven to a secure facility. And then a new one dropped into the hole to replace it. Of course almost all the ICBM sites are fairly remote so it would require some significant grid. But maybe there's ways to incorporate a similar idea to new construction if this model could be proven out using existing sites. Either way from a security standpoint those facilities were seriously monitored and designed to prevent tampering from even the best trained adversary. So while they could be left basically out in a field, it would be safe.
At the same time, why not fill the surrounding areas with tons of solar and/or wind? Take the site which might be 40 sq km and load the bulk of it with solar panels. But then spaced around would be individual silos with self contained reactors dropped in. Close enough to be efficient while spaced out far enough to prevent any issue with one affecting the other. Then put wind turbines up where it makes sense, (perhaps mounting them to cooling towers?) or even tap into some geothermal depending on conditions. That sort of combined power that looks like a solar farm but actually contains enough nuclear to match any large nuclear power plant, I could see that quickly and quietly gaining mainstream acceptance among the public. Because it would LOOK like green energy. And it honestly would be.
Great idea!
I'm from MT, & the Minuteman missile silos are all over the place. It'd be nice to repurpose them. (My dad used to help the southern missile-men get their trucks un-stuck in the winter.)
Maybe we could just use the radioactives in the warheads to power RTGs in the silos. We can dream.
Why is it funny reading this lmao
Are the silos wide enough and deep enough to accommodate the reactors? Excess width or depth can be filled in, but if we had to widen or deepen the silos, then it would be better to develop new, purpose-built wells. But an EXCELLENT idea, sir. Well done.
@@davidanderson_surrey_bc I think it would depend on the missile the silo was made for (Titan is I think a bit bigger than Minuteman) and then also depends on what the size of the reactor is. Certainly there could be a design made that would fit the diameter of a given silo but since nuclear criticality does actually rely on physical volumes, there must be some size ranges that are ideal.
But thanks.
@@scottwatrous Titan 1 silo is 160 feet deep and 44 feet in diameter. The nuscale power module measures 65 feet tall x 9 feet in diameter, its containment vessel measures 76 feet tall x 15 feet in diameter.
“That’s More” got my instant like
Meme potential
0:22 - I love how you can actually see somebody hurrying away from the epic nuclear blast, bottom left about a third of the way across to the right
"nuclear is expensive and slow . . ." not in France. Illinois EnergyProf has a great series on nuclear and the economics of it. Its slow here because of bureaucracy, inconsistent designs, and so on.
The previous generation of nuclear worked in France. But the current generation has failed to be cost effective.
France's new nuclear plants are years over schedule and hundreds of millions over budget
Mostly inconsistent design that leads to higher cost, that leads to harder to acquired political power and budget for the powerplant and so on---- /even Franch met a lot of the same problems but they have pushed it more
@Paolo Bernasconi Expensive how . . . ?
Watt per dollar fuel cost? Nope.
Watt/dollar over the lifetime of the plant? Nope.
Initial construction? Sure, it can be.
Add a carbon tax, which we should, and it becomes even more favorable.
Also, I'm 100% fine with subsidizing nuclear if it means reducing our carbon emissions. Which power plants aren't tax payers funding again anyways . . . ?
@@majorfallacy5926 Sounds like a modern construction project.
Thank you for this video. Dispelling myths about the safety of nuclear is MUCH needed right now. How do we build The Foundation without Atomics?
Chernobyl, Fukishima, irradiated Northern Pacific, plants built on seismic faults. I guess those are all myths
Let's talk about reality. Carcinogenic, mutagenic, teratogenic, Destroys DNA, destroys immune systems making victims susceptible to every disease under the sun, bioaccumulation in the food chain, nuclear exclusion zones for thousands of years, causes miscarriages, shortens life cycles, destroys quality of life, catastrophies that destroy entire economies, irresolvable waste problems, waste radioactive, toxic ore tailings and radioactive reactors as far as the eye can see, contaminated groundwater, fuel fleas disintegrating like tiny time bombs destroying any living tissue they contact; fission by-products a million times more dangerous than the U-235 that went into the reactors which will be the most dangerous threat to life on earth for longer than mankind has been in existence. Easily the most expensive and dangerous form of energy ever created. But they make great weapons of mass destruction.
@@richardtucker5686 Chernobyl - A reactor built in communist country that had known fatal design defects and had absolutely zero containment structure like Western reactors.
Fukushima - Reactors that melted down because of sheer incompetence on the part of the Japanese government. They refused to follow the advice of engineers that told them to build the reactors on higher ground, refused to place the diesel generators further away from the ocean, and were notorious for relaxed regulation and operator training requirements. The reactor operators not only failed to recognize the the proper function of the PASSIVE COOLING system that would have prevented the meltdowns, they shut the passive cooling system down despite knowing that they did not have any other way to keep the reactors cooled. The accident happened out of complete negligence and ignorance.
Plants built on seismic faults? Amazing how out of all those plants, none of them have had a meltdown directly caused by an earthquake. Even in the case of Fukushima Daiichi, the reactors survived a MASSIVE earthquake without an issue. They had meltdowns due to poor training and regulatory negligence that ignored the advice of experienced engineers. Had the operators not shut down the passive cooling system, there wouldn't have been a meltdown. Had the Japanese government built the reactors at a higher elevation like they were told to do during construction, there would not have been a meltdown. Had the diesel generators been placed at a higher elevation further away from the ocean, there would not have been a meltdown.
@@jackfanning7952 So your answer to science facts is anti-science fear mongering. Great job little guy.
@@hochhaul We don't need no steenkin' science from Dr. Frankenstein. My favorite group is Breezi and the Sol Sisters.
Thank you so much for making this video I’ve been talking about this for years!
As an Irishman, I’m just glad that ‘small’ is becoming fashionable! 🌭
Joe might also bring 'Bejaysus' back into fashion.
???
Don't believe that stupid world map of regional penis sizes that does the rounds on twitter every few years ffs! haha
But is modular????
As The Irishman, I thought you'd object to the suggestion that Jimmy Hoffa was already dead and buried in 1942.
What does your being an Irishman have to do with it?
Joe, answering the cool questions you never asked.
czcams.com/video/thBXZR13Rwg/video.html
Did I ask? No. Does that matter? Hell Nah!
Bro I love your channel
@@Drteomas but the waste is sooooooo minimal. Watch John Oliver’s take
@@Drteomas I think you’re confusing political pundits with brainwashers
Cool stuff, I worked in a nuclear power plant, FACT the natural background radiation OUTSIDE the plant was higher than INSIDE, plus safety protocols were so strict and enforced, chances of pile going critical was higher than you getting a pay raise, so big fan of nuclear power, at any scale, imagine a nuclear Tesla Model X...."whats your range? errr emmm 20 years I think..." .LOL
Yeah there were days where a poor worker who had a radioactive medical procedure done couldn't get out of the protected area because they were setting off the monitors so they had to get hand frisked out. Eventually it became a thing where you had to report any medical procedure where radiation was concerned, that's how sensitive the detection equipment is.
Nuclear car + car crash/poor maintenance = radioactive contamination
I'm a fan of nuclear as a stepping stone to something better/safer. While it has its place let's be real: nuclear waste is a serious problem we STILL haven't solved....so....yeah....
Hello fellow Bärner :)
@@yvanpajevic9680 We have solved the waste problem, deep underground storage for example. You basically put all the waste into a large concrete confinement and put it 100m underground. The concrete stops practically all of the radiation so you can stand right next to it with no significant radiation exposure. The confinement cannot break or something because it's made and tested to survive planes crashing into the vessel, drop from 20 meters onto a concrete floor, earthquakes etc. the solution is there. The main reason we don't dispose the waste yet is because storage sites are under construction and because the waste is still pretty young. Nuclear powerplants are a relatively new thing so most of the waste is not ready for long term storage yet. Young waste has a pretty high activity so it needs to be actively cooled for a few years first.
I would be thrilled to have this in my back yard. Seriously.
“Model T of nuclear reactors”nailed it
Thank you for helping support these ideas. Despite their flaws I think SMR's or Nuclear power in general has a huge role to play in the future. Solar and Wind aren't suitable everywhere, and Nuclear should be everywhere they aren't and provide base load everywhere they are.
Or we could stop stealing from nature and skip the giant solar farms all together. Maybe only in the most utterly barren deserts.
@@jeremyO9F911O2 Low key, totally agree! I think Nuclear in all its facets and fuels should be used for essentially all energy needs. Even if that means synthesizing liquid fuels for mobile/offsite use.
But that take is a little to "radical" to get traction so i'll gladly compromise with more basic "renewable" advocates if they support investment and interest in nuclear power.
@Allen Janco solar and wind take up too much land that is usable for other things
@Allen Janco What I meant is that the efficiency and effectiveness of nuclear is basically independent of where it is deployed. Solar effectiveness is very dependent on your latitude and both wind and solar depend on weather to some degree. A solar farm in the arctic wont be very powerful even if given constant daylight
@@mattg8116 Exactly, energy production isn't a one size fits all solution. What may work in Norway or Iceland, may not be the best carbon free solution for Finland or Canada. Then you have places where storms are prevalent and wind turbines have to be shutdown and solar isn't as effective, the need for backup power and renewable repairs will make a modular fission plant's 24/7 power production a more attractive option, at the least for a base load.
a SMR sounds relaxing :3
8:25 or CANDU, with on the fly refueling... Doesn't need to shut down to change out a fuel rod so no down time just slight loss of efficiency. CANDU also uses electromagnetic control rods and heavy water as a moderator which makes it virtually unmeltdownable. Also can be scaled down to SMR size which is currently in progress. It can also run on the Thorium breeding cycle and can also function with MOX fuel which consumes weaponizable plutonium. And it uses natural uranium instead of enriched uranium which significantly reduces cost and improves stability and it actually has a more complete life cycle, it also reduces the proliferation of nuclear-weapons. It also has mechanical back-ups that can keep coolant flowing in the unlikely case of total long-term power loss. Light water also kills the reaction instead of growing it which allows firetrucks to cool the reactors.
”That’s more” killed me😂 Hilarious.
Do a separate video on Camp Century Greenland
someone already did, i don't remember who tho
LFTR/Thorium reactors Joe? Is this take going to be in this series?
There is a video on Thorium from several years ago. That's actually how I found this channel.
All the best
@@Nemo37K Yea, but there's been a lot of work done with the idea since then. Worth a revisit.
Personally, I'm more interested in using molten salt reactors to reprocess nuclear waste, as he alluded to at the end of the video, than using the Thorium cycle. Mostly because being a net consumer of nuclear waste is beneficial in its own right, producing electricity would simply be a side-benefit. It's not as efficient at producing energy as using Thorium would, but it could support consuming the waste of multiple SMR's and make nuclear more viable until someone finally cracks power-positive Fusion in a generation or two.
@@ShneekeyTheLost Ahh, gotcha. I did not know that. Thank you for the new info!
Perhaps that will be covered in the video on waste and its disposal?
@@ShneekeyTheLost I agree thorium is oversold, but molten salt reactors have a lot of potential. Especially fast spectrum MSRs which, as you say, can consume existing nuclear waste (e.g. Moltex Energ & Elysium Power).
@@Nemo37K Yeah zi realised that after I posted this.. cheers.
Time for an update though perhaps Joe?
_"You know Marry.. Your much more likely to die on the way to the airport than on an airplane"_
Awesome thank you for the information and your time
If I could have one for my house I would probably be into that.
Right next to the water heater
Or here's a better idea rather than individual homes each neighborhood would have its separate
I'm fairly sure they would never give private individuals access to those. Every individual that has one is an extra individual that could decide to disable the safety mechanisms and cause an explosion or dump radioactive material into their garbage or down their toilet. No point in taking such risks when a few dozen of these in a couple of locations could power a whole city.
Hmmm if these can be put inside a shipping container and last 20 years. Just back a trailer up to the neighborhood power grid plug it in and leave of for 20 years. After that pull it out and put the next model in its place. Oh also leave space so you can build a newer upgraded power station every 20 years and just switch the old one off and refurb it so it is never outta date.
imagine telling the guys at work your house has it own nuclear reactor!! lol
I don't think you can compare solar and nuclear power like you did, since solar is intermittent. You would need to factor in the cost of batteries, as part of a stable solar energy supply.
Plus it's inside that peak efficient cost per mw/hr in guessing would be for the most efficient physical locations. But we can't build a city sized solar plant to power every city. And even if we physically could build them, do that in the UK and you would still get way less power most of the year.
@@ge2719 But we could install solar panels on all roofs in the cities and replace the windows with solar panel windows in the south side (which are of course not as efficient as normal solar panels but better than let all this unused solar energy through and heat up the building.)
Solar+storage is the only apples-to-apples way to compare costs
@@scottmuench6855 though even then you're assuming you're replenishing storage at a higher rate than demand. If not the equation is still broken.
Don't forget transport of electricity either. Giant solar farms in a desert seem efficient, but we also have to consider the high voltage cable infrastructure and the losses it generates over distances.
Great information
I love you Joe. Thanks for these videos.
As an employee at Chalk River Laboratories, 11:04 was a real "THERE I AM GARY" moment
I live in Pontiac County, down wind and down river from there. We don't feel all that comfortable with these developments, esp. the near-surface waste heap. .
Lol did you ever use the acronym CRUD?
@@Mr3DBob I understand the concern, I live in Pembroke myself, but trust me, thousands of hours of calculations to work out all the potential impacts of releases of contamination have been made, and we have a really good understanding of the hydrology of the site. The only way the near surface waste disposal facility design could have been approved at all is if it passed an extremely (some would say frustratingly) fine detailed review process. As it stands today the waste has already just been sitting around out on the surface anyway, packed inside bags inside steel drums inside shipping containers. All they're really doing is repackaging the waste and moving it underground, where nobody can crash a plane into it or do anything else crazy like that.
As for the small modular reactor they're planning on putting there, it's actually a pretty neat design. It uses an ultra-low-power-density core, which means that even with no cooling the thing can't get itself hot enough to melt or destroy anything. The tradeoff is that the core needs to be bigger for its power output than a normal reactor, but since this is a lower power reactor anyway the core size isn't a huge problem. The reactor also won't need to be refueled, they'd just switch it on and it could run at full power for 20 years, or lower power for longer.
If you have any questions feel free to ask me or even contact Chalk River, I'm happy to help.
@@loganlabbe9767 "Chalk River Unidentified Deposits", haha.
@@sycodeathman People are fine with coal that kills millions a year but express fear from nuclear waste when that has never harmed anyone in the US and I'm sure Canada is just as safe.a greatvpercentage of radioactive waste is from the medical field having nothing to do with power, nukes save millions each year with the different isotopes they make.
“It’s basically just valves and thermodynamics.”
This describes the human body too.
That reminds me of an interesting fact - the human body approaches the Carnot theoretical maximum of thermodynamic efficiency.
@@buzzsaw838 try to explain that calculation. Is it considered a heat engine, a heat pump or a refrigerator?
What is considered the supplied and the useful energy?
@@migBdk Refrigerator? haha..... anyway (having reread up on it) it is not that is modelled in that manner, point is that glucose is converted to ATP at about 50% efficiency which is then used for myriad things. Carnot engine maxes out at about 60%, can't remember exactly where I read the original calc tbh, pretty sure it was in a physics textbook a while back prof
@@buzzsaw838 carnot efficiency is dependent on temperature difference. Also, it assumes that heat is the driver of motion. Which means that it does not apply to a chemical energy to chemical energy transformation. So it does not seem to make much sense, would be interesting to read original argument.
And, like reactors, we too have the occasional meltdown.
Thanks for yet another video with excellent research and delightful sense of humor
I love your videos man! Awesome stuff :)
I come from a family of coal miners who all died from Black Lung. You never want to see a loved one die that way. it is horrific.
@Charles Brainard other than the nukes that where dropped in WWII only 50 other people have died from radiation poisoning, its the safest form of energy.
Most people's knowledge about nuclear is 50 years out of date.
"ya.....that's more" new meme material 😂
I am so pleased beyond words by the information you have gifted me with. I shall go on to spread it to others.
It's good to know that we have basically everything we need to save the Earth, but people are like, naaaaaaah
It's hard to get people to want to save something when destroying it is so much more profitable.
I just want a 30kW one in my backyard.
Dude, can you say kick ass Tesla Coil? I’m with you.
Scaled down that be like a gaming PC though 30kW would be enough for an small neighborhood.
Just put them in cancer hot-spots like schools.
@@charleslindeman2169 Always gonna be that nuclear ignorant ass commenting
@@charleslindeman2169 Instead of elevating the risk of cancer, such an amount of radiation emitted by the amount of insulated piece of uranium would in fact lower the risk of cancer, since it turns out that minute amounts of nuclear radiation can, counter-intuitively, shield from cancer. This isn't exactly widely known, but now you know.
I want a Mr. Fission for my DeLorean, I'll upgrade it in 20 years.
Combined with that 'flux capacitor' you could journey to all sorts of strange places! :)
I upgraded mine 26 years ago tomorrow 👍🏻
Mr. Fusion.
@@McSkummThat'll be 20 years away lol.
@@contradictorycrow4327 OH!
I'd take fusion power.
Just read that book! Fascinating!
Excellent episode.
Thank you for raising awareness of the actual bennifts and risks of Nuclear power! ♥️ It pains me to encounter so many Engineering professionals and 21st century Engineering students, who are heavily misinformed about Nuclear power.
I love hearing these things. In September I'm going to undertake my nuclear engineering master of science at Politecnico di Milano and I consider it was the best choice I could have ever made.
Hey, you wouldn't happen to know the guys who used those Italian satellites to change the votes for Biden, would ya?
Sadly that Italians vote against nuclear energy, even they import nuclear energy from France.
Is in fact the reason why France and UK are above Italy like GDP
I’m so excited to hear about all this new nuclear technology, the stigma around it is so unnecessary and these small more manageable reactors are such a great way to show what a controlled experience can look like.
Power Systems/Electrical engineer here. Obviously there is much more that could be said and Joe can't say everything... but the most important thing that was left out was dispatchability. You could likely power >90% of an electrical grid with SMRs/nuclear, but with solar and wind, you must have a fast reacting energy source to back up utility-scale renewable energy to provide the reliability that people have come to expect. That backup power source is almost always natural gas. Utility scale batteries are rare and very expensive (not to mention quite dirty from the toxic byproducts from battery manufacturing and disposal). To make a large grid 100% renewable and battery-powered is likely nearly impossible. Nuclear is scalable, reliable, safe (new reactors especially) and clean. I have thoughts on the waste, but I'll hold off until the next video haha.
As our energy needs increase the amount of land needed for solar and wind farms will increase, and the effect on the local wild life could become immense. Nuclear is our best bet for the future
Does your solar LCOE include the cost of storage needed to provide reliable power regardless of day/night and weather conditions?
So thousands of potential points of failure, thousands of points where a terrorist attack could occur, thousands of places to decommission and then store for many years. Instead cover car parks, sides of motor ways, sides of railway tracks, all roofs with solar panels, do agrovoltaics, tidal turbines, wind turbines, energy saving. Biochar can store carbon, and give gas for peakers plants and heat for buildings or processes. It's not just solar!
@@veronicathecow solar was the example given by joe for cost vs nuclear.
You make some obvious important points but the original comment here is also important, cost comparisons that state solar or wind are cheaper than nuclear not just neglect the storage question but compare maximum possible output as if it was mid day sun 24 hours a day.
Comparing Solar potential generation to nuclear is obviously not comparing equals. if you look at actual LCOE's tho, solar costs much less than nukes. Its around 1/2 to 1/3. The unspoken point of modular reactors is that if you don't have to waste years of bullsht studies and government waste, you can cut the costs of nuke
@@veronicathecow Nuclear excels in all of the things you mentioned. Lowest deaths per energy produced, lowest number of accidents per energy produced, lowest amount of material required per installed power, lowest waste per energy produced etc. Speaking of waste and decommissioning, how is waste from old solar panels managed? Renewables are great but they can't power the grid on their own. Solar depends on weather, time and season, wind is unpredictable as well. Hydro is nice but not scalable to the desired quantity, tidal power is a fucking joke and biofuels are literally worse than fossil fuels. I recommend you watching the new Real Engineering's video on biofuel which has a really good quality unlike (no offense, Joe) this one. Or if you don't like using youtube as an information source, just read any paper on the topic. In short, biofuels are devastating to the environment, they take up large amounts of water, land and electricity to produce. Actually, biofuels are energy negative which means that it takes more energy to produce them than what you get out.
@@vaclavzajac214 Hi I agree with re current biofuels. Mostly down to subsidies etc. However doing things in an integrated (permaculture design) can eliminate a lot of these issues. Now money is being spent on large storage these problems will be solved. Gravity storage, battery (Aka Tesla), VTG, Redox flow batteries seem one of the most promising for grid scale. Mostly we need to stop wasting energy! Tidal power is a serious contender, for example czcams.com/video/pdxjlRFjNLU/video.html&t
"The investors weren't wrong to be concerned about accidents..."
Bankers and institutional investors being the go-to source for deep knowledge on nuclear physics, nuclear chemistry and safe power operation. These are the guys that KNOW about atoms. /sarc
Not bankers no, but there are technology investors that _do_ know about these things - or at least know enough to make a call about whether or not the risk is worth their money.
Fusion power is a prime example of this: Aside from ITER and the NIH, almost all serious fusion research is being done by private investors, including everyone's favorite bogeyman Bill Gates. Now do you think Gates went ahead and got himself a degree in nuclear physics? Of course not. No more than he got himself a medical degree or a teacher's license before he started doing vaccine and education work in Africa (long before covid-19 and the magic microchips conspiracy theory).
But he doesn't have to be the guy actually designing a fusion reactor or genetically modifying bacteria in order to _invest_ in those things. He only needs to know enough to judge the risk of failure vs the chance of success and to be able to hire people who _do_ know those topics in depth.
Banks of course could do that as well if they wanted, but its not their priority. Their goal is to make _safe_ investments not gamble on potential future technology. Though a large part of that is simply the difference between being a bank (a large institution with their own investors to please and SEC reports to file and whatever else) vs an absurdly wealthy private individual who can do whatever the hell they want with their ridiculous fortunes. Institutions rarely have "pet" projects or any sort of interest/goals beyond "make more money". Personality isn't a strong driving factor in most cases.
Hey Joe! Love the videos, you should do one on the sierpinski triangle and other random unavoidable patterns!
@6:15 datz moar
Yuh, I gecha. Thanks for giving me a chuckle before DMing
Have you ever talked about thorium?
Do a CZcams search on “Answers with Joe thorium”.
Yes, there is a video about it somewhere in his list of vids
here in the UK we have access to a limited amount of sunshine. go RR!
@just another human lol. yeah.. exxon, BP, and Valero are laughing their asses all the way to the bank.. then when we do actually start to suck the oil wells dry they will suddenly 'discover' a new energy revolution. Right now they are working very hard to make whatever simple concept they have been sleeping on into a very complicated sounding thing that no one should attempt except the professional experts.
I don't actually actively believe this.. just something that is very possible, and depressing. If it were happening we would have no reckoning, and they would succeed with their plan.
@just another human there are really not. as detailed on other videos, there is a reason why 30% or so is the theoritical maximium under ideal conditions. the reason the uk is poor for solar is that they are far from the equator and light has to travel to the surface at an angle. big oil and big gas are more against nuclear than solar because they can get fat contracts supplying "co-power generation". nuclear by contast is 24/7 base load 365 days a year constant.
Hi Joe, It would have been good to briefly mention the base load problem. Otherwise most non-technical people would wonder why we would ever spend anything on nuclear power when solar PV is so much cheaper per MWH.
This is one of the most important issues overlooked by those who dismiss nuclear in favor of 100% solar and wind.
Excellent Video Joe thank you!
You should’ve talk about how Secure these small modular reactors against Terrorism.
I like it. Good for the majority. Personally, though, I still prefer having control over my own energy production. The grid isn't very dependable here in rural NB.
That's fair, but like most home solar advocates it misses the actual conversation. Having an off the grid home is perfectly fine and I wouldn't discourage any rural denizen from such investment. But being off the grid isn't being energy independent, not even remotely. Energy exists within every part of our lives, the tools we use, and the food/fuel we consume. SMRs aren't for powering homes, rather they are for powering everything else. If every home went off the grid for electricity, we still need something else to power commerce and industry.
It's easy to get caught up in finding "the best" form of energy, but it's all context dependant and the right tool should be used for each job. If you can power your own needs, brilliant! nothing should be off the table because it doesn't fit the right political picture.
@@contradictorycrow4327 hey, look, he's such a good pedant!
@@contradictorycrow4327
Might want to tell that to our ancestors. They seemed capable of it. Of course thier lives were not even remotely like our lives today.
But it does prove that you CAN be completely energy independant if you're willing to live a life quite a bit tougher than what most are used to.
It's basically the prequel of Fallout but with semiconductors invented.
It's been too long since I watched one of your videos
You always put so much effort in
Love the work and keep it up
The "WASTE!!!"disguised as a cough cracked me up! Very good & informative vid & then you've got the potential of Thorium.
Joe, I love your videos. They’re entertaining and informative. One video I have been looking for is the one where you go into a room that sends you back in time, then you end up talking to past you about why he now has to go into the room and go back in time. What is the title of that video? I started watching it but didn’t get to finish it.
So I will still be able to have my fission power armor by 2077. Nice.
War never changes.
Fission power? My heart has a hard-on for micro fusion cells. And stimpaks.
@@mikitz same here
I'm still waiting for my very own Mr. Fusion...
The Marshall Islands already got their Mr. Fusion.
Fusion will never be cheap and it’s also radioactive. Waste nuke reactor fuel only happens because PWRs cannot extract more than 4% of the fissile energy. Fast spectrum reactors like Moltex Waste Burner can extract 95 of the remaining 96%. The waste has a 1/2 life of 30 years vs 30,000 years for PWR used fuel.
It’s intrinsically safe works at atmospheric pressure and cannot overheat even if the load (cooling) disconnected at full power.
@@davidelliott5843 Just so you know.
A shorter half life, means that is way more dangerous because it will release radiation more often than something with a half life of thousands of years.
Mr. Fusion... thats the guy datin Ms. Fuscia, right?
@@dylankirkwagner9465 He's a lot like Mr. Potato Head, except instead of being completely emasculated he's merely sterile.
I used to have the little half page format atomic energy commission booklet on SNAP reactors. Definitely something from the '60s!
0:13
The moment I smashed that like button.
Felt amazing.
BASELOAD POWER. We can't run industry on solar panels. I vote SMRs.
I vote hydrogen fuel cells.
I'd love to hear more about the way the small reactors cool themselves. I know all nuclear powerplants need to be near a bi body of water so they can have access to cool water all the time, you mentioned the small reactors cool themselves but I don't get how. I'd love to see mass produced, small, modular reactors that can power small areas independently.
Current PWRs operate about 350C against ambient of about 20C so have a thermal drop available for generating energy of 330C. That's actually not much so lots of water needed to keep cold end of cycle sufficiently cold for Rankin cycle steam turbines. They also need lots of water in reserve to flood the core in case of accidental loss of pressure..
Molten salt and liquid metal cooled rectors operate around 600C against 20C ambient (similar to HELE coal plants) and are essentially unpressurized. The 580C differential allows for the more thermodynamically efficient Brayton cycle operation, where a closed cycle gas turbine extracts heat energy and turns it into electricity. In principle such reactors don't need cooling water to operate, but if it is available may use some to boost efficiency
Actually you have some false perceptions.
Firstly reactors have two cooling modes, primary/normal and fault state. In primary/normal mode a reactor is cooled through the primary heat exchanger(s). In a PWR these are the stream generators, in a BWR there's no heat exchanger and the reactor is cooled directly by the electrical turbine. But essentially you want as much heat as possible to go to power generation and thus the generation process is the primary cooling system.
What Joe was talking about was fault state cooling aka emergency cooling. In a conventional reactor this is usually done with electric pumps and secondary steam condensers. So let's take Fukushima, which was a BWR btw. The earthquake triggered a reactor SCRAM that was successful, meaning that all fission had stopped. However this only phase one of a reactor shutdown, the fuel is still the same temperature and water must be constantly circulated to cool it for a while. Furthermore the fuel is highly radioactive which means that radioactive decay is adding heat as well. Additionally the radiation is breaking water bonds generating free hydrogen and oxygen. Note, all these things happen during normal operation as well. Decay heat is actually positive and gives you a slight boost in efficiency and there's a recombination system that captures the free hydrogen and oxygen and turns out back to water.
But the point is that a reactor in recent shutdown needs cooling too, in PWR there are multiple redundant pumping systems to circulate cooling water at whichever pressure the reactor vessel is at. The BWR at Fukushima has a similar system. The problem is no pumping power no cooling circulation. New designs like the Westinghouse AP1000 incorporate water towers and steam condensers in those towers to use gravity to provide emergency secondary cooling. Fukushima lost power and couldn't maintain decay cooling, the explosions were actually vented hydrogen gas from the reactor. According to Americans operating the same model of General Electric BWR as used in Fukushima there's actually a steam condenser valve that had it been manually opened they theorize that meltdown could have been avoided. They blame poorly trained Japanese operators for not taking this measure. I honestly couldn't say, in WW2 the Japanese navy had almost zero interest in damage control development, but I have no idea if that culture persisted into 2011.
Like I say the AP1000 which is not an SMR uses gravity and cooling towers and generally all passive safe cooling systems incorporate gravity and convection(which needs gravity). I haven't extensively researched the specific reactor Joe features, it's a solid fuel reactor and I'm more interested in fluid fueled reactors. But I can outline the basic philosophy behind most modern passive cooling concepts.
The water tower idea is nice but also kinda very big, SMR doesn't like big and it still uses the primary cooling plumbing to circulate water which is still a potential point of failure. Additionally it also relies on a conventional successful SCRAM which is an active system not passive.
The best practice theory behind passive fault state cooling has two components. First is fission shutdown, you want fission to stop and you don't want a powered system too be needed to stop it. In the case of the solid fuel SMR Joe features I assume the reactor releases the fuel rods and they fall into a chamber with control rods. In a conventional reactor the vessel has a solid bottom and control rods are lowered from above, my assumption is that they are raised from below in this SMR. SCRAMing a solid fuel reactor is done by fully inserting the control rods into the fuel.
You could also drop the control rods into the fuel and it's still a gravity system but this is where we get to the second aspect of a modern passive cooling system. Remember when I said you want as much heat as possible to exit via the primary heat exchanger? Well this concept is the enemy of passive cooling, the heat exchanger is an active system so you primarily design your reactor around active cooling. So the new concept in passive cooling is remove the fuel from the reactor during fault state. In the passive cooling section that you've dropped your fuel into, this section is designed to maximise passive cooling.
Let's switch to molten salt reactors now because they take this concept even further. In conventional reactors water is the coolant and the moderator, the fuel is in rods, and the power level is controlled by the heat exchanger and the control rods. There are three problems with this design, in a fault state the moderator which is what causes fission in the first place is still the coolant meaning you have to use another system to stop fission. Second problem is control rods are like adding weights to a race horse, you're actually wasting neutrons because your freshly fueled reactor has too much fuel and the control rods actually restrict performance. The reason reactors are overfilled is because it's a pressure vessel and they aren't easy to open and close on a regular basis. You must shut down the reactor to refuel it and shutdown takes days and energy too. Lastly the third problem is control rods can break and fuel rods can break, this happened in Chernobyl, the control rods broke and couldn't fully engage.
Now we can take steps to make rods less likely to break, but what if we could eliminate rods all together? Also something has to release the rods to enter passive cooling, that's a point of failure. What if it too could be eliminated? And while we're at it, what if we could solve the overfilled receipt problem too?
Enter the fluid fuel reactor, where the fuel is in the coolant and the moderator is now the rod (though it doesn't need to be rod shaped) and the rod doesn't even need to move. How do you control this reactor? Why by only adding the fuel you presently need and controlling power level via the primary heat exchanger. How do you refuel the pressure vessel? You don't, because it's not a pressure vessel because you're using molten salt as your coolant and it doesn't try to boil on you. So adding fuel is easy. But wait, no control rods, how do you SCRAM? Why you simply drain the coolant fuel mixture into a drain tank, removing it from the moderator rods in the primary chamber ending fission. And your drain tank is passively cooled of course. But wait there's more, remember how I meantioned passive triggers for your emergency cooling system? Well the molten salt reactor uses a freeze plug, what this is is a bit of frozen salt plugging an always open casting in the bottom of the reactor, this salt is kept frozen by an active cooler meaning in a power low the cooler shuts down and the drain plug melts. Or if the reactor overheats it will overwhelm the cooler and melt the drain plug. They even have a drain pan so that should the reactor get punctured the fuel is still trapped and directed into the drain tank.
I hope this enlightened you about cooling.
Oh one other thing, water isn't necessary for cooling, but it is necessary for steam turbines. It's actually the generator that needs the water not the reactor. If you can get your reactor hot enough you can use air cooled reactors and hot gas turbines that are also air cooled. The problem is you can't get a water cooled reactor hot enough for a hot gas turbine. But you can do so with a salt cooled reactor or an air cooled reactor such as a pebble bed.
RE: NuScale Joe says at 10:30 that that "if the core stops generating energy the electromagnets (holding the fuel rods) turn off and the fuel rods fall down in to a pool of cooling water." Not so, the NuScale design uses control rods and contnuously naturally circulating borated water that shut down the core. Fuel rods don't move. Maybe there's another design like that.
.... "that's more".. LOL great line
Are you sure that’s more Joe? Haha. Great video as always!! Oh... and apparently first!
How are you 1 day ago on a video posted an hour ago?
@@user-db1iu2fw8z Patreons.
Looks like you got an 18 hour head start
Hopefully, people will read further on this subject than they get out of this skim over the topic.
SMR'S or VSMR's can replace coal fired and then natural gas powered power plants and produce more power in the same footprint. If CO2 is used instead of water, efficiency goes up and danger goes down. If liquid salt is used in the reactor, fuel burn up goes from single digits up to almost 100 percent while producing more fuel as it burns because you are using the nonfissile parts of the salt bath as a neutron blanket from which more fuel is created.
Conceivably, these reactors could run for many decades without refueling and could be refueled on the fly without shutdown.
They are thermally safe because excess heat causes expansion of the salts and the expansion reduces and then shuts off the reaction. There are no rods to jam or be moved and the final safety is a plug that will melt and drain the liquid into safe cooling chambers.
Finally, no water is needed for cooling or for power production, so plants can be sited almost anywhere from Antarctica to the middle of the Gobi Desert.
The cream on the top is that old fuel rods can have the uranium dissolved from them and then used in liquid salt reactors, taking them up to close to 100 percent use and reducing the long lived waste by orders of magnitude.
Building reactors of any size with fuel rods and water is a sure way to have more disasters. Liquid salt reactors operate at normal atmospheric pressure and CO2 used as the secondary medium is no threat to anyone.
We already had a liquid salt reactor that ran for years with no troubles, but we threw it away for pressurized water reactors. Of course, we took the basic technology and have been powering ships and submarines all over the world for decades.
Why can't we get this great, base load power generation technology in place before we destroy our planet with fossil fuels. The answer is regulations. The military has been doing it for over five decades, testing and documenting nearly every aspect of these liquid metal cooled reactors and yet this is apparently not enough for the NRC. They are making the civilian reactor companies redo all the testing and documentation while our military sits on their hands and keeps all their work under high classification.
The obstacle to progress here is the NRC. While they are dithering, India and especially China are going full speed. If they start turning out these reactors like little automobiles, they will own the world and we will be left in their dust.
0:20 There's someone in the foreground of the footage (towards the bottom left). If comic books have taught us anything, they got super powers.
Well spotted!
Yep, they got the "super cancer power".
Look carefully , it looks like he falls over before running back towards the camera HAHAHAA
Theres 50-60 people standing at a fence. Couple camera's, 1 on top of a car...
More like flash blindness
Great video
Thank you. Yours is the first video on this topic that has mentioned the US Navy has been building these for a while. Since 1952 actually.
Nuclear power may be more expensive than solar without storage, but the cost of energy storage technology will most likely give nuclear power the edge.
the edge would come from all industries that require heat in their manufacturing processes.
nuclear can do that very efficiently - there might be reactors whose sole purpose would be to heat up things, not make a single kwh of electricity.
solar/wind cant do that.
@@mikez2779 This is another reason SMRs are being considered to assist in things from steel and concrete production to H2 generation. Electricity production is just one avenue.
Also, when he was comparing prices he was probably using the peak power output rather then average power for the solar panels, big difference.
I love science and technology 💜
Gut, sehr gut.
As an amateur mad scientist wannabe, I concur.
Thank you, Joe Scott; for an entertaining and informative overview of small nuclear reactor designs currently being thought of for a number of communities. The Price-Anderson Act which you sort of glazed over has a number of deficiencies when considering the liabilities arising from a nuclear incident. The concept of contingent liabilities incurred by vendors and sub-vendors to the reactor project is a Gordian Knot legal conundrum which has never really been worked out practically in any sense. Like you say; there have not been many commercial power accidents and the personnel injury/ lost time accident record for nuclear is phenomenal to say the very least. Many reactors in the commercial environment have had major maintenance costs incurred regarding the U-tube bundles in the water-to-steam heat exchange cycle causing the wholesale change-out of steam generators. The SMR designs currently under consideration by the DOE and others depict a system which would present difficulties when when replacement is needed for the water-to-steam heat exchanger elements and other components as well. The radiological and health physics problems do not shrink in comparison with the size of the machine and other costs seen in big plants [such as a staffed emergency operations center] are simply unscalable. As proposed as stand-alone units the new reactors will undoubtedly display the same heat-rejection characteristics that the large commercial PWR and BWR plants do currently. SMR's will be more salable and indeed practical if the vendors and contractors can use the rejected process heat for companion industrial purposes. An example would be a desalination plant using process heat from the nearby generating station and producing fresh water. Lastly; California renewable energy supplies that State's energy grid with over fifty-five percent of the power at peak and about twenty percent overnight. These numbers are way beyond anyone's expectations back at the turn of the Century when people thought that organic growth of solar and other renewables would never achieve the capacity factor[s] that we are seeing today. The central problem of tomorrow for the United States of America is not clean energy sources as much as it will be clean water supplies for its citizens.
This is my favorite channel thanks for great video and content.
Would you ever consider doing a video on molten salt reactors?
That would be great. Very few people know about the inherent advantages of molten salt reactors. Reactors so safe, you can literally turn the cooling pumps off and the reactor just goes to sleep, no meltdown. czcams.com/video/Sp1Xja6HlIU/video.html
I’m sure that would kill his whole narrative of nuclear unsafe solar good. So he probably won’t. And then there is the less waste and the reuse of waste that already exists to power these.
@@christophergruenwald5054 "I’m sure that would kill his whole narrative of nuclear unsafe solar good." I would say that's what u heard.
"Yeah, that's more!" Thanks, Donald.
I remember in 1992 or 1993 when Ed Teller was the featured speaker at Silicon Valley Engineers Week Banquet. He advocated several small nuclear reactors instead of one big reactor. The smaller ones can be better safely managed and not be so expensive per unit. Few years ago a friend who was a reactor operator in the sub service said for emergency situations there were 30 different procedures to deal with in case of an event. He went on to say for example TMI was so big and complex with so many different fault paths and situations.
a combo of those and traveling-wave reactors would work well together.
When you showed the solar against the city of Dallas: if you outfit each building with solar panels then you pretty much have that area covered. Solar is great, because of this. It doesn't need it take up more space.
That is not outfitting each building, that is replacing each building, street, house, park, church, playground, etc. You want to donate your city?
9:13 nice pun
I've been an SMR fan for 20 years....
Hitachi or Mitsubishi had drop in ones back in the 90's, if I remember correctly...
Maybe Early 2000's...
I remember talking to local village meeting bout an experimental installation, way back then....
Back when they were 2 mil apiece....
Sounds like you have a unique story to tell. I'd love to hear about you traveling to small villages in far off lands in order to install experimental nuclear technology.
@@InfamoussDBZ No travelling. Was my Village here in the Chicago SW burbs... :-)
They declined my suggestion... :-)
They also declined my suggestions for wind and solar installations, as well... :-)
20 yrs later the mayor is revisiting the thought... Go figure... :-)
Fun fact: that first commercial power station you showed at Shippingport? Used a submarine reactor.
Hello Mr. Scott. Thank you for creating an informative video about SMRs. The Canadian province (state) of Alberta, Canada where I live is working with several other provinces in our country to bring this technology into fruition as well. I have high hopes for this tech, and also the other modern nuclear fission technology that you mentioned on your video.
I think the people that dismiss these modern and much safer nuclear tech right now, do it because of misinformation. And they're as bad as the people that dismissed electric cars in the past because they couldn't see the potential.
If for some reason that reactor makes any noise it would be an
Audible
Small
Modular
Reactor
I used to work Nuclear outages. There's a lot of axillary work on the plant systems that takes place during refueling, such as maintenance on the steam generator and a myriad of other systems as well. I will concede, however, that outages for SMNRs would be so short and small in scope that you could feasibly have an in-house crew that was dedicated to the work instead of hiring tons of outside contractors, like a lot of plants do.
"outside contractors" part of the design. NRC is works for GE/Westinghouse. They require plant owners to pay protection money through the nose like the mob. What multibillion dollar machine needs that much work for routine maintenance and the owner cant do it. Designed that way. They steal all the value of the tech, just look at the stupidity and cost of spent fuel disposal (by law must spent crazy money on geologic storage rather than recycling). Its so heart breaking what they did to a tech that should be running our grid for pennies on the dollar clean and no emissions.
Don't forget the recent thorium push. Very well documented and presented Joe!✌
Thorium is viable but the technology with Uranium is so far advanced in comparison. Thorium reactors already exist though.