- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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.
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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.
interesting, india has 25% of known deposits, thorium reactors would be very useful for them. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/list-of-countries-by-thorium-reserves.html
Thanks for a thorough explanation.
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.
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)
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Literally nothing you just said is correct.
Is it wrong that Thorium reactions stop on their own?
Me opening the comment section knowing that its just gonna be a bunch of racism… like i get it i hate the chinese government as well but give credit to the millions of scientists and people who are actually trying to make life better on this earth. If something isnt american, it can still be nice to have.
I personally believe the CCP is doing an amazing job. Communism is working wonderfully
EDIT: Anti-communists are hilarious. “It’s not communism but capitalism.” And if it is communism, then it is evil because communism bad. Or some made up stuff about uyghurs or queer people.
Authoritarianism is winning.
It’s not communism, it’s state-capitalism
I don’t think it’s communism anymore but the Chinese gov are actually looking after their own citizens in my opinion. I kind wish Xi was in charge of the UK honestly.
They tend to think of everything long term and all of those projects are paying off, also Healthcare free education etc they are investing more in their own population than anyone else. US is in my opinion as UK guy pretty much done they’ve picked a fight that they won’t win.
Their own citizens…except for LGBTQ people or uyghurs of course.
Also most people only see the living conditions of the top 1%. Going to beijing and being amazed by it is like going to hollywood or manhattan and then ignoring the rest of la or upstate ny. And then we havent even gotten to the really bad ones… And then europe also exists. We still exploit poorer countries(which now china also does and the us as well of course) but basically we have the best living conditions in the world and also some of the best places for queer people. Like literally my country that counts as a shithole in europe(hungary) is still somehow one of the best countries by a lot of metrics in the whole world, usually only behind other european countries.
Every time I read a headline about how there’s a genocide in Xinjiang, it’s in the same newspaper that insists Israel Has The Right To Defend Itself and Yemen needs to be bombed to powder.
At some point, it reads like liberal agitprop. An excuse to scare liberals into hating a foreign country so we can justify… what? Tariffs? TikTok bans? Nuclear war?
Same with LGBTQ rights. We’ve got a DOGE department doing a pogrom on “woke” government workers while I still get an earful about how mean China is to minority groups?
What am I supposed to take away from this?
That the world isn’t black and white, and both sides can be awful at the same time.
Sometimes a country will inflate the appearance of problems in an enemy nation in order to stoke resentment at home and justify military action abroad.
In Iraq, we made up a bunch of lies about soldiers murdering babies in incubators. After Vietnam, we had Cold Warriors repeating the POW/MIA lies that suggested they were holding hundreds of American hostages for decades, in order to justify continued sanctions and embargos. The slanders against Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Iran have been relentless, all while the US conducted insidious guerrilla wars that have raped, mutilated, and killed countless civilians.
At some point “Both Sides Are Bad” doesn’t cut it. You have to address your own nation’s sins - the lies, the sabotage, the assassinations and us sponsored genocides - before a rational listener can take criticism of your political rivals seriously.
The Uyghur genocide situation has been confirmed by multiple countries, please don’t start a genocide denial debate here.
Two wrongs don’t make a right. Or are you denying Uyghurs are being persecuted?
Idk… I have my ifs and buts about China. If you don’t believe in human rights, well love China! I’m not saying everyone in China is bad (but there are evil individuals like in US and NK). And watching Human Harvest, jeez…
The “human rights” standard of western imperialist countries is laughable hypocrisy. The US alone makes China look like the paragon of justice.
Tell it to the Uyghurs.
Fake ass western propaganda “genocide” my ass
You’re uncritically guzzling the CIA line
All of the supposed “evidence” comes from Adrian Zenz, who is a religious zealot who thinks it is his “god-given mission to destroy China.”
https://medium.com/@braisedporkblog/debunking-the-uyghur-genocide-a-resource-list-a31dd0ea3d87
Your username is very accurate. You uncritically accept Tankie propaganda supplied by a totalitarian dictatorship.
Well, that and lack of diligently enforced safety standards.
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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.
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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…
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.
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.
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”
Refreshing not to see the comment section full of anti-nuclear brainlets. For a second I thought Lemmy was a Greenpeace hot-spot.
Anyway…
One good turn deserves another. If others won’t follow because of good example, hopefully other countries will instead follow because of competition.
Your comment just makes you sound like an asshole.
Yes. I’ll be an asshole to those that stand in the way of good things. No remorse.
Yes, the universal unqualified good, nuclear fission. No reason to have any concerns in a highly regulated environment like modern day america or china. All concerns completely unfounded, and are just these damn Greenpeace guys getting in the way of progress.
