For one billion dollars, you can build so much solar and wind with battery backup storage, it's not even funny. Planned begin for that Natrium plant in Wyoming is sometimes in 2025 - as with so many announced nuclear projects in Asia and Europe, I won't hold my breath. Same goes for Thorium and fusion reactors. Cheers!

Exponential growth vs Linear growth

We need more!

I wish i could write backwards

EIA: "In 2023, solar and wind power accounted for 21% of the electricity generated in the United States from utility-scale facilities, and an additional 73.62 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) from small-scale solar photovoltaic systems..."

This video is old and obsolete. Solar and Wind energy has made great progress. Grid scale batteries and other locations are balancing usage.

awesome but the audio makes it hard to understand. could you possibly make the marker louder and more squeaky in future videos?

the world needs teachers like you.

Dear Energy Prof, Could you do a video on solid-state batteries? Thanks Anthony

With PWR if you do loose the moderator/coolant (LOCA) it is a problem because you still need to remove the decay heat from the reactor. If you cannot replace the coolant with back up make up coolant then the reactor core itself will continue to heat up. This will result in the fuel cladding melting resulting in a major release of radiation.

RBMK, not RMBK.

I'm just burnin' doin' the neutron dance

13:14, error, sea water is salty and conductive unlike fresh water which is insulating

This guy can write neater on glass in reverse than I can on a sheet of paper.

Mind blown 🤯

I’m amazed at how easily he can write in obverse so that we can read it correctly.

Commies were stupid af witht their RBMK- pieces of junk I think that designing an additional fully-passive cooling method will be nice addition to safety to modern reactors in case of EMP or giant solar flare

I started talking just about depleted uranium and homies werent able to understand shit Imagine explaining nuclear reactors to general public 🤨

Recommend Copenhagen Atomics for a plain statement of the possibilities for Nuclear Power applications and why the initial cost of a well done project is easily forgotten after many years of reliable service. Ie it's generally privateering politics that costs the Earth.

I'd account for interests from the acumulated profit each year. Of course, the purpose is just to illustrate the difference beteen the two.

Its amazing they didn't phone the government and say its about to go south if they don't get generators right now. Pretty sure the government would have dropped everything and scrambled some generators on chinooks in a few hours.

STUDY FUEL COSTS THEN COMPARED TODAY. AT LEAST THREE TO FOUR TIMES MORE EXPENSIVE TO FUEL. EVERY TWO YEARS ONE NEEDS TO REFUEL THIS TYPE OF REACTOR AND. ADD DOWN TIME WHILE RELOADING. CERTAIN REACTORS TAKE FOUR YEARS TO BUILD. NO NEED FOR MASSIVE FORGING PLANTS.

USA MAKES HIS REACTOR EXAMPLE OF 1000MW FOR 17,5 BILLION USA DOLLARS. IT TOOK DECADES TO BUILD. A PROVEN FACT. PROFESSOR NOT DOING HIS HOME WORK. CHEATING!

USING DEPLETED URANIUM SEVERAL TIMES IN A HEAVY WATER REACTOR LEADS TO NO "DANGEROUS" WASTE AND A INCREASE IN POWER. NO NEED TO STORE IN WASTE DEPOSITORIES.

HE WANTS WATER CANNONS INSTEAD OF RUBBER BULLETS.

Ok, everyone here understands this. Lets try to make the environmental muppets also understand. Its gonna be really hard, since they actively try not to understand...

When you look at all these insane boutique one off reactors, i just can't believe there isn't a tremendous cost saving to be had by mass producing proven designs. I bet the cost could be halfed just with that, another huge chunk of the cost could be saved by streamlining the absolutely insane beauracratic process.

I can assure you that the water headed back to the river from the condenser is plenty warm.

this aint clear at all.

Interesting mirrors We are not under the nuclear zone ........... So comparing gas with nuclear .................. ??? This concept is not clear sir as .......are not directly under the nuclear ....... I am not residing in your zone ............sir ........so .....it does not influence ..........employee .....and if it influences the employer ....... i am not aware of your benefits ......i am neither an employee nor employer ........

9:50 Anyone who's had M-80's always mentions their ability to blow up a mailbox! 😂

Sure Nuclear power offers a virtually limitless supply of fuel and offers energy densities that are thousands of times wind and solar but the Nuclear Power lobby has no where near the clout in Congress to buy off government regulations. Maybe wind and solar produce mining and manufacturing demands that are extremely dangerous and contaminating but when the wind blows and the sun shines they make energy.Worldwide we’ve only spent 10 trillion dollars but we already get about 3 1/2 % of energy from it.We’re currently gaining on wood though,it’s share is down to only 10%z

I wish we were neighbors, I'd love to have a few beers with you and ask you endless questions. .

This is nonsense. The 216 carbon rods which can be mechanically lowered into the reactor individually are better moderator than water, as the technicians can instantaneously fine tune the balancing of the nuclear reaction in the core . There was nothing wrong with the RMBK design. The reactor wall was 2.5 meter reinforced concrete and the concrete lid on the reactor top was 1000 tons. That's far better than any "containment structure". The engineer in charge, Dyatlov, bypassed all safety measures, which he could do, as in the Soviet Union there was complete trust in the engineer in charge to always do the right thing. It was one man's catastrophically wrong judgement.

Professor you do sound a bit like Homelander

we should apart from improving the computations per unit time per unit volume of circuit, try to decrease the ultimate need for large quantities of simple arithmetic computations per unit time, or lots of arithmetics, per user or per mankind. better mathematics and physics should in theory reduce the dependence on lots of arithmetics. better formulae should reduce the need for large quantities of simple arithmetic operations. there is after all a finite limit to miniaturisation of physical devices. human progress is not likely to have any limits. therefore the ultimate future of human progress lies not in lots of arithmetics but in freedom from lots of arithmetics.

I showed my wife the title. She rolled her eyes and pointed at me.

How does one learn to write backwards in better handwriting than i can do forwards?

His sarcasm and tone sort of takes away from the seriousness of the subject, simply explaining the safeguards without the condescending tone, shows that the question of safety is indeed real, and yet is being addressed with respect to it. Simply put, Just answer the safety issue without the smart ass attitude towards it.

I liked all your lectures except this one. Although better than the typical "scientists are confusing the public and policymakers" method (as Sabine Hossenfelder puts it, absolutely correctly), still playing with the illusion that fusion can be cleaner than (breeder) fission, which is not founded scientifically or from an engineering perspective. Researchers are unwilling or unable to specify the expected volume of decommissioning waste from 1 TWyear of fusion power so we could compare to breeder reactors. It is clear that the lower power density and (significantly) greater complexity and much lower lifetime of fusion (eg. first wall, blanket and superconducting) equipment waste directly translates to orders of magnitude greater than fission product related waste, and at least 1 order of magnitude greater cost and decommissioning waste volume compared to breeder reactors. That latest fair comparison I found is from LANL 1980 (Fusion-Fission-Hybrid) and comes to same conclusion: even if fusion works, we cannot see any advantage (including fuel availability, cost or total waste volume, or even proliferation - breeding is required in any case, and a more complex device and farm of robots offers more possibility to conceal some natU or Th to breed whatever is desired).

Please. More videos.

Weeeeee!

KZbin suggests these videos to me over and over. I always hope there will be more.

Very interesting

Professor, didn't you say in your lecture on Chernobyl that Western reactors use water as moderator, and if water leaks out, the reaction stops. Therefore, Western reactors are inherently safe as compared to the Chernobyl RBMK reactors that use graphite as moderator?

Wow 😳😲

This video does not mention the reason for the RBMK using graphite moderator, which was tied to fuel enrichment cost. When Uranium is mined, only 0.7% of it is isotope 235, which is the "good stuff" that actually fissions. The remainder is isotope 238, which is substantially more stable and which does not fission when absorbing thermal neutrons. It just sits there in the fuel pellet and doesn't do much, except that when it absorbs a fast neutron, it can transmute into Neptunium 239, and then Plutonium 239 - a very undesirable thing in a commercial power reactor. Unfortunately, the laws of particle physics, as applied to power reactor design, mean that natural Uranium with only 0.7% U-235, can't sustain a chain reaction. So power reactor fuel has to be "enriched". This is a process in which the uranium is compounded with Flourine into a gas, Uranium Hexafluoride, which can be passed through centrifuges or osmotic filtration, to increase the percentage of U-235 in the finished fuel. The problem here, is that enrichment is expensive. VERY expensive. It requires building huge facilities, and the pumping of the gas through hundreds of layers of osmosis filters, or centrifuging it, uses a huge amount of electricity. The more enrichment you specify, the more the fuel ends up costing. American light water moderated reactors use fuel enriched to 3.0~3.5% U-235. The Soviet RBMK-1000, which has a very different "neutron economy" due to being graphite moderated, can get by on fuel enriched to the 1.8%~2% range; this costs a lot less for the fuel, although one adverse consequence is that the RBMK has to be shut down for refueling more often (every 12 months on average), whereas American reactors can generally go 18 months between refuelings. Naval reactors in aircraft carriers and submarines use fuel enriched to about 85% U-235, and they can go up to 20 years between refuelings. Enriching fuel to 85% U-235 is mind-bogglingly expensive, but the Military users of this fuel don't have to show a profit to stockholders, and the advantages of having a submarine that can stay submerged for 6 months at a time, outweighs the cost. Incidentally, the Canadian CANDU reactor, can also get by on less expensive low-enrichment fuel thanks to using Deuterium Oxide (heavy water), as the moderator. The deuterium nuclei in the moderator, having a proton and a neutron, can thermalize fast neutrons more efficiently than regular "light" water can, allowing CANDU operators to use less expensive fuel, although producing the required amount of heavy water for a 1,200 mWE CANDU reactor is a pretty expensive up-front cost.

Although I am generally pro-nuclear, I can't disagree with you more regarding existing reactors. They are NOT "passively safe", if you lose cooling they melt down, Fukushima being a recent case in point. This is largely because, in solid fuel rods, the fission products aren't removed, so their decay provides more heat than passive heat removal can remove, thus meltdown. Also I don't like pebble bed, because again you can only burn U-235, the U-238 is wasted, because the silicon carbide container of the fuel that makes up the pebbles melts at such a high temperature that there is no means of reprocessing, thus it's an inefficient one-pass of a rare fuel and leaves many actinides so lots of long term waste. Any pressurized water reactor is unsafe because when you operate a reactor at 200-300 atmospheres, a break in plumbing releases pressure and all the water flashes to steam. A two salt molten salt breeder solves ALL of these problems, can breed U-238 into fissionable PL-239, can breed Thorium-232 into fissionable-233, and can burn all the actinides so all that is left are fission products which will decay to safe levels within 300 years.

Lol, the west is super heavily dependent on Russia for this, Russia can make it better and cheaper than anybody on the planet , the6 just never tell you how dependent you guys still are for Russian energy. 😂

It was an earthquake and a tidal wave, and no one in Japan imagined it could happen.