It marks the first long-term, stable operation of the technology, putting China at the forefront of a global race to harness thorium – considered a safer and more abundant alternative to uranium – for nuclear power.
The experimental reactor, located in the Gobi Desert in China’s west, uses molten salt as the fuel carrier and coolant, and thorium – a radioactive element abundant in the Earth’s crust – as the fuel source. The reactor is reportedly designed to sustainably generate 2 megawatts of thermal power.
For anyone not familiar with thorium…
Thorium is a great nuclear fuel. Much much safer than the uranium we currently use, because the reaction works best only within a narrow temperature band. Unlike uranium which can run away, a thorium reactor would become less efficient as it overheats possibly preventing a huge problem. That means the fuel must be melted into liquid to achieve the right temperature. That also provides a safety mechanism, you simply put a melt plug in the bottom of the reactor so if the reactor overheats the plug melts and all the fuel pours out into some safe containment system. This makes a Chernobyl / Fukushima style meltdown essentially impossible.
There are other benefits to this. The molten fuel can contain other elements as well, meaning a thorium reactor can actually consume nuclear waste from a uranium reactor as part of its fuel mix. The resulting waste from a thorium reactor is radioactive for dozens or hundreds of years not tens of thousands of years so you don’t need a giant Yucca Mountain style disposal site.
And thorium is easy to find. Currently it is an undesirable waste product of mining other things, we have enough of it in waste piles to run our whole civilization for like 100 years. And there’s plenty more to dig up.There are challenges though. The molten uranium is usually contained in a molten salt solution, which is corrosive. This creates issues for pipes, pumps, valves, etc. The fuel also needs frequent reprocessing, meaning a truly viable thorium plant would most likely have a fuel processing facility as part of the plant.
The problems however are not unsolvable, Even with current technology. We actually had some research reactors running on thorium in the mid-1900s but uranium got the official endorsement, perhaps because you can’t use a thorium reactor to build bombs. So we basically abandoned the technology.
China has been heavily investing in thorium for a while. This appears to be one of the results of that investment. Now this is a tiny baby reactor, basically a lab toy, a proof of concept. Don’t expect this to power anybody’s house. The point is though, it works. You have a 2 megawatt working reactor today, next you build a 20 megawatt demonstrator, then you start building out 200 megawatt units to attach to the power grid.
Obviously I have no crystal ball. But if this technology works, this is the start of something very big. I am sure China will continue developing this tech full throttle. If they make it work at scale, China becomes the first country in the world that essentially has unlimited energy. And then the rest of the world is buying their thorium reactors from China.
Very nice explanation and only nitpicking, but saying that Thorium is much much safer than uranium implies that uranium nuclear plants are unsafe. In reality uranium nuclear power has one of the best safety records in energy production.
Uranium reactors are for the most part very safe, and I personally think we should consider building more of them. The problem with them is when something goes wrong, it can go very very wrong contaminating a huge area. Now granted more modern reactor designs make that sort of issue much less likely, but the worst case scenario of a uranium reactor, no matter how unlikely, is still a lot worse than the worst case scenario of a thorium reactor.
Thanks for a thorough explanation.
You absolutely can make a nuke out of thorium-derived material (first in Teapot MET, 1955, then possibly later by India). It’s not widely used because plutonium is similar and in some important ways superior material
The tradeoff in using salt as fuel/coolant is that now almost all the fission products are in soluble form, instead of nice ceramic chemically inert pellets, which makes any spill much worse, and i wouldn’t say it’s safer for this reason - it’s different, and it’s a tradeoff few thought it is worth making. We have figured out how to make PWRs not explode so it’s not that big of a problem. This goes both for uranium or thorium as a fuel
The reason Yucca Mountain is needed is that nuclear waste exists, if US reversed their policy on reprocessing maybe it wouldn’t fill up so quickly. It’s a matter of political will
At least now, the chemical engineering for reprocessing fuel when reactor is on is not there. Maybe it’ll get developed in this project, but this didn’t happen yet. It all has to be weighed against existing alternatives, and it’s possible to breed 233U in normal water-based reactors, so maybe there’s a little reason to make MSRs in the first place. India has some thorium energy projects as well, but they’re slowed down by lack of fissile material to bootstrap it (you can’t fuel reactor using thorium only, it needs some fissile material)
The problems however are not unsolvable
Meaning that they are not solved. I don’t want the grid in my country powered by tech that is not proven safe, reliable, and with a good ROI.
Much much safer than the uranium we currently use
Potentially. It’s not a technology proven in large-scale operational use.
If they make it work at scale, China becomes the first country in the world that essentially has unlimited energy.
If my aunt were to have bollocks, she’d be my uncle.
The “if” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your sentence. And “unlimited energy” is a gross exaggeration. There are still downstream costs and environmental damage.
It’s a matter of implementation versus invention.
If I asked you to build a hundred story skyscraper, that would be difficult, but we already have all of the technical components. All the component problems are already solved- we know how to make high quality steel, we know how to design the frame of such a building, we know how to anchor it into the ground, etc. You just need to put those technologies together in a functional design.
If I asked you to build me a spacecraft that goes faster than light, you couldn’t, because that sort of propulsion system has never been built. And while we have theories on how one might build it, we don’t currently have the capability to build any of those theoretical drive systems even as test articles (mainly because they need things in space larger than we have the capability to launch or will have the capability to launch anytime soon).
But if I asked you to build a thorium reactor, all of the component problems have been solved. We have a lot of coatings that resist corrosion, and so making valves and pipes out of them (and more importantly, designing the system of valves and pipes) takes work but we know how to do it. We understand how to make and process thorium fuel, even if we don’t have much experience doing it.
As for your grid, I don’t want my grade either powered by text that isn’t safe reliable and productive, but the fact is we don’t have that right now. A lot of power still comes from coal and similar shitty sources. So I will absolutely take less shitty.
Yeah I use the word if a lot, but that has a level of probability associated with it. I can say if we figure out a way to generate power from magic pixie dust tomorrow our energy problems will be solved but there’s no probability of that. Here there is a technology that has been known to work since the 1900s, that we have built research reactors on, and that is now being actively developed. The “if” here has a high degree of probability.
Thorium reactors also have an off switch, unlike Uranium reactors. A neutron stream starts the Uranium reaction but the reaction cannot be stopped once started. The reactor just cools the uranium to control the reaction. Lose the cooling system and get a meltdown. Thorium reactors also require a neutron stream but if the flow of neutrons stops, so does the nuclear reaction.
Literally nothing you just said is correct.
Is it wrong that Thorium reactions stop on their own?
It depends how they are designed. Same as regular uranium reactors. Thorium isn’t a reactor fuel after all, it’s what you use to breed more fuel. The actual fuel is still uranium. Thorium turns into uranium-233 then that is the fuel. Normal reactors use uranium-235. Both isotopes can be made to be passively safe.
You do realize you’re on the internet, right? You can look things up first instead of spouting bullshit.
Neutrons?
My mistake. It’s been a few years since I read about this topic.
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Neutrinos almost don’t interact with other matter. You use neutrons to start fission
Mathematics of wonton burrito meals, got it.
You’re confusing subcritical reactors with thorium power
The resulting waste from a thorium reactor is radioactive for dozens or hundreds of years not tens of thousands of years so you don’t need a giant Yucca Mountain style disposal site
That is assuming they don’t make significant amounts of Fe-60 (2.6 My half-life) by exposing steel pipes to neutron flux. While the fuel itself might have a shorter half-life, other waste still needs to be dealt with.
On most of the fediverse, I find discussions really great with no idiots/trolls… apart from technology. Here it seems some get triggered by any tech from outside the US.
This announcement would be seen as a massive breakthrough anywhere else. China has its problems, I’m fully aware of the red flags and government influence. But only a fool would question their technological advances at this point. They are moving ahead at lightning speed, especially in energy and battery tech.
Even on the consumer side, Huawei invested more in R&D last year than Samsung or Intel. Huawei consumer division could have been expected to be dead by now with the chip ban, yet survived and are thriving again. Not because the Chinese were forced to by their phones, Apple still sell in China, but because they innovated like hell. A Chinese buyer has the option today of buying a tri-folding tablet phone with super fast charging or an American designed device with 3 year old tech (chip aside). Americans don’t have that choice.
Its also the reason why traditional European car brands are tanking in China. VW can no longer expect to sell on prestige alone. Here in Britain, our consumer tech offering is already almost non existent. We no longer have a true British owned car company. Our famous Mini was sold to the Germans. Jaguar/Range Rover to the Indians. MG to the Chinese. Its depressing. But I do feel fortunate to at least have choice (we can buy a BYD or Xiaomi here) and that I’m not subject to only American tech reporting. BYD will later this year have 7 different car models on sale in Britain vs 6 (soon to be 5) from Ford. This is a paradigm shift, considering for almost the last 20 years Ford had at least 2 cars in the top 5 best sellers in the UK.
Apologies for going off on one. But i’d highly recommend US readers check out Chinese tech sites from time to time (eg carnewschina/huawei central etc) rather than just relying on the verge. Sure not all Chinese tech will be successful, sure some designs may be clones, but the shear scale of investment from China will make them unstoppable. I believe the changing of the guard happened a while ago, where about to see it play out in all industries…
China has its problems, I’m fully aware of the red flags
I see what you did here
I think Android went pretty horribly since Huawei stopped making contributions, They contributed more than any other company up until the ban including Google who own it.
I kinda expect in about 5 years Harmony is going to take Androids dinner.
This announcement would be seen as a massive breakthrough anywhere else.
I don’t trust science (or R&D engineering) that’s not peer reviewed. Anything else is just marketing hype. Show me hard numbers or GTFO.
China also has a problem with the government lying-- for example, about their claimed reductions in greenhouse emissions. There’s no reason to trust self-serving authoritarians without credible corroboration.
BYD will later this year have 7 different car models on sale in Britain vs 6 (soon to be 5) from Ford.
That’s an irrelevant metric. Nobody’s going to buy a car just because the model range is a bit wider than some other company’s. What’s relevant is adoption, and then buyer loyalty. It may be that BYD offers cars that people want to buy, but they’re subsequently found to be of crap quality or aggressively undermining driver privacy (which other non-Chinese manufacturers have also done).
but the shear scale of investment from China will make them unstoppable
If appropriately rigorous science and suitably disciplined engineering are part of the process, and regulators do their jobs correctly, then maybe. Otherwise it’s just throwing money at a problem. Investment doesn’t guarantee results. China is certainly capable of getting positive outcomes from tech investment, but it’s not guaranteed.
I mean I thought thorium reactors were figured out already? The economics of it and lobbying by big oil was the problem. It ain’t that surprising that China could make a thorium reactor though.
But it’s not a market based solution! It’s centrally planned and it’s possible no one is even making phat profits from this! Highly unethical!
What are you on about?
Nearly every upvoted comment is in praise of this. Only 2 comments warn caution about Chinese data.
Why do people need to lie and pretend China is this big victim being picked on.
You would never write a paragraph like that in defense of the amount of anti-US sentiment on Lemmy, so it’s not like you actually care about being fair to nations. Posts like yours reek of nothing more than propaganda.
Posts like yours reek of nothing more than propaganda.
Smells more like bootlicking to me.
scrolled past and saw one for almost every subthread.
Post about western achievements are often taken as granted (except maybe curing cancer), while eastern ones are scrutinised to the smallest of details.
Show me any post about any technological advance that doesn’t have critical comments in the thread.
Not Eastern ones, Chinese specifically. Japanese or Korean science is generally trusted, but dictatorships have a tendency of making shit up to look better. We’ll believe it when we see it.
China has plenty of achievements, but also plenty of bullshit vaporware. We’ll see which one this is.
You don’t suppose there might be reason people don’t trust the news coming from a country with no freedom of speech or press?
Yeah yeah, “you can’t believe it until Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk confirm it”
Jaguar Land Rover may be owned by Tata, an Indian financial holding company, but they’re still based in the UK, designed in the UK, built in the UK.
That was broadly the same for Mini too until the most recent generation, where the EV version is actually a Chinese car.
Mini has been owned by BMW since 2000 and are still made in the UK, Germany and Austria’s Hungary. The EVs are from Great Wall Motors (in China), but they’re going to start assembling them in the UK next year too.
People on Lemmy are really good at seeing past capitalist propaganda, except when it comes to China. At that point it’s just straight up US state department talking points.
People on Lemmy are really good at seeing past capitalist propaganda, except when it comes to China.
Any information coming to the West from China is state capitalist propaganda.
Yeah yeah, keep telling yourself that buddy.
I’m sure you also used that cope when Harvard university (that well-known Chinese university) found 95.5% of Chinese people are happy with their government, compared to only 38% of USians.
“95.5% of people who are forced to say they like their government say they like their government”
You should be more skeptical, anything that claims to have a 95% approval rating is probably not telling the truth.
Forced by Harvard university? :)
I have no issues believing that number because the Chinese standard of living has been rising substantially as the decades go. That is trivial to confirm.
You’re the one who should be more skeptical of anything that comes from the US. As it stands you don’t believe anything that comes from China, but believe anything that comes from the US about China.
Sounds like you should start applying more neutral standards to how you process information. The world isn’t that black or white.
Prove it.
Too bad we do not know which exactly thorium salt mixes they are using, what the materials facing the molten salt at high neutron fluxes are and how they fare long term, whether they use on-site constant or batched fuel reprocessing, whether they kickstarted the reactor with enrichened uranium or reactor-grade plutonium waste and other such questions.
US experiments were broken off because of materials corrosion problem.
i think that lack of willingness to handle fresh fission products has a part in this, in normal reactor you can just do nothing and win (bulk of most dangerous isotopes decays completely within 5y, not possible to do this with MSR)
It’s probably as simple as we already have something successful. Why spend time and effort overcoming the challenges to create new reactor technology with many of the same benefits and shortcomings as we already have?
I know the arguments for thorium and can see that being a huge benefit to places without a mature nuclear industry and without developed fuel sources.
Sure it would be somewhat better for us as well, but the biggest limitations will be the same. You’re still impeded by fears of radioactivity even if it is less. You still have radioactive waste to handle even if it’s less and less long lasting. You still have legal and regulatory challenges driving costs and timelines through the roof. Thorium hasn’t won the war of public perception, so is no better in the things that actually impede its use
Some of the new Russian reactor types are designed to burn away dangerous hot actinides. MSR need onboard fuel processing to continue to operate anyway.
These are fast reactors and operate on different principles. The coolant there is sodium and while hard to design and run, it’s doable. French had similar reactor but only one and it was shut down. Nice thing about fast reactors is that these can burn even-numbered isotopes of plutonium, useless in water moderated reactor, and give fresh mostly 239Pu plutonium of good quality. weapons grade even, and IAEA doesn’t like it. But who cares since nonproliferation is dead anyway?
The new generation of Russian fast neutron reactors use lead and lead-bismuth as coolant, not sodium anymore. They are not proper breeders, as I understood it.
These were not supposed to be breeders, but this is only due to agreements that are ignored ny now. Technical capability is there
I think maybe also the fact that nuclear fusion is definitely frfr only a few years away from being viable, no cap, has contributed to a lack of fission research, too.
SMRs too
If only people saying that were aware of their logic flaw of also cutting funding to fusion research
US experiments were broken off because it gives no excuse to attain materials for nuclear weapons. Same excuse everyone else use.
Thorium fuel cycle is useful for weapon production. Germany also abandoned thorium despite no interest in weapon production.
Sounds like the US should take a page from China’s playbook and steal the design, then claim to have built it on their own.
If true, this is a huge step! Congrats to China!
“Strategic stamina” is something that the US used to have but which has disappeared as the country just tries to catch its breath.
America has been strategically sitting on a couch eating strategic cheeseburgers for the past 50 years
America has been destroyed by the politics of the southern strategy.
I mean mostly it was destroyed by
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
Being executed very well through social media companies that cared about nothing but profit, but yes, that led to the strategy you’re describing
No, that was only possible because of the southern strategy of the 60s-90s, which pivoted electoral weight to the section of our country most enamored with fascist racism.
So did Europe.
Lmfao no we have not. Also, have you payed your couch rent this month?
Currently, we’re trying to catch our breaths while stabbing ourselves in the lungs
If it’s true, China has energy security for the foreseeable future - as Thorium is usually found along side rare earths, and China has the largest deposits of those. More than anywhere else in the world.
I don’t mean to be a pessimist, but we’ll see how it lasts and scales 😅 it’s certainly promising, but 2MW also isn’t much. I’m curious how large they can scale single reactors, and how close they can safely be to populations - one of the problems with nuclear always ends up being transporting the energy (usually quite far away) once you’ve generated it.
Isn’t the loint of Thorium reactors that they are small and modular, thus highly scalable by multiplying units. Your comment about scaling a single reactor is a cheap rhetorical device to miss the point entirely.
Scaling small things up is always a logistics and repeatability issue. Always.
We had.technology to put a capsule of three men on the moon for a week before most humans alive today were born, and yet we haven’t gone back because while both “number of humans” and “length of stay” are fairly simple ideas to scale up, we never had the logistics to create and fuel the one.saturn V launch every other day that a permanent moon base would need.
Heck, the Internet is full of ground breaking improvements that were “buried” by the challenge of scaling up out of a lab.
one of the problems with nuclear always ends up being transporting the energy (usually quite far away) once you’ve generated it
I don’t get this part. How is this any different from transporting power from hydro? Quebec transports hydro power from all the way north at the bay to the south and then even sells it to USA.
You do lose quite a bit of electricity going over long distances, but can overcome that with sheer volume. But that also means the closer the generator to the consumer, the more efficient it’ll be.
An interesting aspect of this is when trying to mover power over long distances AC becomes inefficient and High Voltage DC becomes the more efficient option.
Between 2-3% for HVDC vs 6-7% for AC systems when transmitting over 1000km.
2MW also isn’t much
It’s a proof of concept, they’re not actually trying to power anything with this. They’re just checking their math on a small scale before doing the full scale lol
they haven’t demonstrated anything yet, but maybe they will develop something. perhaps. maybe. it’s all uncertain at this point and technology for it doesn’t exist yet.
high voltage transmission lines are a thing, look up where lignite or hydro power plants are situated relative to where people live. this is a solved problem
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it should perhaps be pointed out that we originally had proposition for both reactors but we ended up with uranium reactors because the US wanted a reason to mine uranium for nuclear bombs and were well aware of the risk difference but didn’t care about the potential lives being lost if something went wrong. later, the cost to develop a thorium reactor had no monetary benefits beyond generating power and keeping people safe so no country wanted to invest in it when the uranium blueprints were available, literally because of capitalism.
Yeah, the title calls this out… “Strategic Stamina”. Something meant countries just don’t have anymore
All nuclear programs were started for military purposes. “Civilian” nuclear power has always been a fig leaf. While the current Chinese thorium effort is a break from that tradition, it’ll be far too late to make any impact.
Is it actually a break from that tradition? As tech requires more energy, and militaries become more technological, advancing thorium as an energy source that can be done domestically and no longer needing to rely on as much foreign crude, like Canada is gearing up to provide to them, is also a way to support military applications.
Blaming capitalism for every evil in the world is just dumb. Surely Stalin and Mao started their nuclear programs because of capitalism?
Yes
Sure, buddy.
i wasn’t aware they redesigned nuclear from the ground up. why did they pick uranium then?
Because they wanted bombs.
Yup. Capitalism/fascism led to WW2 and the nuclear bombing of Japan by a capitalist state, requiring the USSR and China to develop an equally powerful countermeasure.
Thorium tarnishes to olive grey when exposed to air. This makes it kinda greenish. Green is the color of stamina, so this checks out.
If you’re feeling out of breath, drink a thorium potion!
If I drink the blue potion, I get tingly and my skin starts sloughing off. Must be the cobalt.
It’s got electrolytes!
Then why isn’t viagra green? Checkmate!
It’s temporary stamina, so it’s the cyan at the end of the green bar.
Because it’s for blueing your load.
Thorium? Fucking sweet!
That’s what I tell my partners. They are, thus far, unimpressed.
My broke ass stole all my thorium related stocks years ago, im not a holder
“Strategic Stamina,” Is that what they’re calling the 996 now?
Scientific advances from China need to have outside confirmation. Because, propaganda and all that
I cannot speak for this area of science, but in my field China’s research papers, for example rock mass failure response to complex stress states, are like a god send, really quality work. This is my opinion in my field but if I had to extrapolate… Remember the Soviets with all their propaganda had amazing scientists
They’re also crushing it in the ML space. Half the good AI papers are written in Chinese; one of the startups I worked at had the luxury of hiring a Chinese speaking AI researcher who could read them for us
Yeah, they had way more horrifying ones:
Yes, there were heavy mistakes made, from making stupid decisions to giving positions of power to people who should had been fired. But this happened everywhere, for example the big use of lobotomies to the red scare that caused many scientist like Oppenheimer to get in trouble with the US goverment.
Yes, I remember when Oppenheimer got in trouble, which resulted in all the decent doctors in the country being rounded up and executed based on lies.
They all do. It’s called peer review
Huge amounts are found to be faked or inaccurate. It’s a big issue in academia and has been for decades now.
Good thing only Our Enemies use propoganda
totally unrelated but did you hear Tesla’s are at MOST two years away from breaking 1000km range? well they were in 2015. so they’ll definitely have a thousand km range in 2017. I guess we need to see if time really is cyclical and this is for the next cycle’s 2017
Well, that and lack of diligently enforced safety standards.
The government agencies that enforce those standards have been gutted in the US. So. Next point?
I will assume you are European and the above point does not apply as sharply to you, but western empire decay and corruption is slowing eating away all of your criticisms of China.
But freedom of expression! How is that going for you?
But communism! How is capitalism going for the average citizen?Anyway.
This is an amazing breakthrough, the citizens of China are lucky to have a government that seems to care about the well-being of their citizens and plan for the future. For some reason, westerners cannot accept good news from China without feeling that the world is a zero sum game. It’s not, Chinese citizens have a brighter future than us in the west because we have allowed corporations to purchase our governments at wholesale prices.
China is not to blame, well done to China.
This technological breakthrough is amazing, yes, but does not make disappear the constant harassment of minorities, the lack of freedom, the labor camps, the violent repression in Hong-Kong and all the other freaking shit China does on a daily basis.
And thanks for asking about the freedom of expression in Europe, it’s going really fine.
Constant harassment of minorities, lack of freedom, labor camps (El Salvador), violent repression (coming soon). But enough about the United States. Will neoliberalism reach you next?
You do agree that America Bad, don’t you?
Say The Thing.
Of course it’s bad. It’s awful. Only a complete moron would think the opposite.
Thank you
And you agree that Germany is bad, right? Say the thing
Do you do this for your own country and its allies, insist that every issue with it is brought up every time it’s mentioned regardless of context, or do you reserve it for the countries that are your countries enemies?
Also, try anti-genocide protestors in Germany that freedom of expression is going fine, lol.
I’m not a patriot. I dont give a shit about my own country. If France is does positive things, good, but it doesn’t I’m going to ignore that our politicians are corrupt or that the Olympics were used to enforce mass surveillance and lock up climate activists.
Norway has a thorium reactor since 1959
I can’t find a clear source on this. Could you help? This one says 2013 http://thorenergy.no/
According to GPT-4.1:
In 1959, Norway achieved a notable milestone by starting up its first nuclear reactor, the JEEP I (Joint Establishment Experimental Pile), located at Kjeller. This reactor was primarily used for research purposes, including early experiments with alternative nuclear fuels such as thorium. While JEEP I itself was not a thorium reactor per se, it laid the groundwork for subsequent Norwegian research into thorium as a nuclear fuel. This early phase demonstrated Norway’s scientific interest in thorium, leveraging its domestic thorium resources and contributing to later thorium reactor experiments.
So…
-
Not a Thorium reactor
-
Didn’t produce any power
So China still has a win here.
Norway has one of the worlds largest deposits of thorium, but I have ot heard that we had a working reactor, just the principle of one.
If the chinese has indeed made it work I think we need to prepare for USA wanting to annex Norway as well
-
Worse than useless. None of this is shown to be true without a source.
I hope it’s not “worse than useless” (which would mean “misleading”), as my goal was simply to find more identifiers for discussion or research beyond those provided: norway, thorium, 1959…
I’m sorry to come on so strong – I don’t think it’s worse than useless as a tool to approach the right answers – but as I saw people upvoting this ‘answer’ without doing any checking, it occurs to me that this is how misinformation spreads. I hope my comment makes more sense in that context.
Who still thinks the South Chinese Morning Post is a legit source after what happened to Hong Kong needs a reality check.
SCMP has always sided with mainland China on crux issues, but I’ve read them on and off for nearly 10 years now and have found them to be very reliable.
In fact, this is exactly what the Wikipedia page for reliable sources says about it too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources
SCMP is one of the most libshit news in China
Also, chill it cracker, it’s news about a reactor, we don’t need your state dept. programming here
And we certainly don’t need your tankie shit here.
Go back to whatever chudhole you came from.
Chuds would probably try to doxx them for daring to say “cracker” lol
Joined 2 weeks ago, spews bs & propaganda.
Also, “cracker” ?? 🥴🤣 Is this supposed to be some very dangerous insult lol
Yeah, let’s wait until a reliable source like fox news or CNN confirms it.
this is toy sized reactor, not even entire technology demonstrator, there are medical isotope/research reactors with power 20MWt and more
OK, but do they run on Thorium?
There were small reactors that ran on thorium. Scaling up all the necessary molten salt processing will be pretty hard thing to do, if this thing can even run continously that is
This is the world’s largest thorium reactor. There have been other experimental ideas, but not many operational ones. The next largest operational Thorium reactor I can find is called kamini in India, which is 30kw. For scale, China’s reactor is 2000kw.
3Okw is a toy. That would power maybe 10 US homes. 2000kw? That’s more like 600 homes. Small, but usable. Fits the SMR niche well, actually. Making 1/1000th of the radioactive waste and basically no weapons grade materials locks in there too.
The article makes it very clear its running continuously, which is what they are celebrating. They have successfully refueled it while operating, which is a huge part of the “continuous.”
The article is all of 6 paragraphs. It’s not a difficult read.
As someone that often works for multiple years on pilot and poc projects, can we stop calling those “toys”.
Sorry we don’t have madscientist money here.
In this context what does poc mean?
Proof of concept.
Why can’t we spend $20 billion on a full-scale reactor that may very well not work? Why is science so slow?
Science doesn’t have to be slow. Politics and funding are usually the bottleneck.
Yes, but if you increase the funding, they will say “Why is science so expensive?”
yeah either that or sometimes that one biologist illegally gene-editing embryos shows up
i will call MSRs (not thorium power, this is fine) toys until a single 100MWe+ unit gets built up. wanna bet that it won’t happen in 20 years?
That reactor is 2MWt, which is still somewhere about 1000x smaller than actual production reactors. But this is not the issue here, because in MSR the reactor is not the hard part, it’s its entire fuel cycle.
The entire point of having fuel as a solution instead of hard, nonreactive ceramic pellets put in tubes made of refractory metal is that there could be perhaps a way to extract fission products from coolant/fuel, which would prevent neutron capture by these fission products, which makes in turn better use of neutrons, so more fissile material can be bred. Benefit of this is that if that online recycling process can be made to work (big if - unsolved for now) then reactor works always like it’s been freshly refueled. The hard part here is not reactor, it’s the cleaning of fuel while reactor is still online. This has not been demonstrated, instead only new fuel was added, which is something that can be done with CANDU and some other designs where reactor is divided into channels
First attempts at something like this used heavy water acidified solution of uranium nitrate, but this proved too corrosive and also water needed to be pressurized, and also it decomposes when subjected to radiation in this way. Today what is used is FLiBe, which is low-melting salt that doesn’t decompose in this manner, but also is more corrosive and in different ways than water as used in PWRs. If that was the only problem, we would have MSRs left and right, but there are three other big problems
Recovery of excess bred 233U or removal of neutron-absorbing fission products from FLiBe is hard, because you can’t use normal methods used in nuclear reprocessing. There’s no extraction like in PUREX, there’s no ion exchange resin that can survive it, there’s only fluoride volatility and some electrochemical methods, and it all would require significant research before anything close to viable comes up. The salt also probably has to be kept anhydrous at all times. This is the first problem. Maybe this reactor will be used for it, maybe it’ll fail, but there’s a related Problem that doesn’t appear in more conventional reactors. In normal case, you can just leave fuel elements in water until the spiciest isotopes decay so that you don’t have to deal with them. Here, we intentionally work with freshly irradiated, so ridiculously spicy fuel, and intentionally concentrate the most radiotoxic isotopes that are out there. Worse than that, all these fission products are not in form of chemically inert ceramic, these are in form of water soluble fluoride salts and this means that if anything of this gets into soil, it’ll dissolve meaning that either fuel leak or waste stream leak would have much more severe consequences than if it was in conventional form. If you’re trying to say that MSRs are safer for some reason, i’d have some serious reservations.
The other problem is that FLiBe is a good moderator, meaning that any MSR reactor design using this salt is thermal reactor, and we already have this figured out in form of PWRs where we can use water instead. Look up India’s plans for thorium power - they want to use PWR reactors for breeding 233U, with heavy water or not, because this already works and there’s no actual reason for use of this highly experimental and uncertain technology. Keeping fuel rods in reactor for longer time is not an actual showstopper like it was expected in 60s when this concept first surfaced, in fact with advancement of nuclear technology burnup only goes up, i think it already is 2x or 3x what it used to be in early commercial power reactors. If MSR was the only way to make breeding work, we’d probably take effort to manage ridiculous radiotoxicity of this fuel mix, but because both chemical engineering to do so is not there and alternatives that don’t have this problems exist, we don’t. Charitably i’d could describe MSR fuel cycle idea as an highly experimental but promising while also requiring significant research expense. Less charitably, looking at all those years of research yielding nothing, i could also describe it as a dead end grift. You decide
Note that all these problems come up with use of MSR, not thorium. Thorium for nuclear power is fine, but requires reprocessing, and some countries don’t want to do this for diplomatic reasons (americans specifically) (tho i suspect it’s masking the actual reason: some bean counter at westinghouse calculated it’s cheaper to use fresh uranium instead - reprocessing is a lot of dangerous, well-paid, complicated work - in countries where labour costs are lower, or where govt is willing to pay up to have reserve of nuclear material, which amounts to all other countries that have sufficiently advanced nuclear industry, reprocessing does happen. french, chinese, russians, indians, japanese, koreans, and probably a couple more do reprocess their fuel. there’s a couple of countries that send their fuel to manufacturer, and some just discard it underground without reprocessing) (this is also why yucca mountain filling up is a problem of entirely american making, and the only thing that is lacking in order to solve it is political will)
The article makes it very clear its running continuously, which is what they are celebrating
i think you’ve read different article
Chinese scientists have achieved a milestone in clean energy technology by successfully adding fresh fuel to an operational thorium molten salt reactor, according to state media reports.
This is such a weird comment, full of “NiCd batteries aren’t good enough so solar/wind are useless because we can’t store the power” energy.
It’s a test reactor, it’s meant to be smaller than the “big boys”, and in a few years it’ll be smaller and more efficient.
Sure, it’s not going to singlehandedly power an entire country, but distributed power is better than localized. 1000 small reactors placed all over means less likelihood of system wide failure than a handful of large ones.
When state-level funding for SMRs is available, it just makes more sense to build normal, GWe-sized reactors instead. For everything else, look up https://awful.systems/comment/7019440
A small test reactor paves the way for bigger, more practical reactors. You can’t start with a full-sized gigawatt model; you need to test and validate your designs at a small scale first.
take the thinly veiled racism elsewhere
what the fuck are you talking about
