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.
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.
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.
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
Currently, we’re trying to catch our breaths while stabbing ourselves in the lungs
Removed by mod
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
deleted by creator
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
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.
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!
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.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
You hate China government, not the chinese government.
Where do you get racism? Did you just want to complain about racism?
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.
It’s not communism, it’s state-capitalism
Authoritarianism is winning.
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.
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.
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.
This excuse doesn’t make any sense. This myth also needs to die. You can’t get weapons grade materials from fission reactors, and you certainly aren’t converting spent fuel into weapons. The process of refining weapons grade uranium or synthesizing plutonium have nothing to do with energy producing reactors
Uranium was endorsed because it was easier to create a reactor with and didn’t have to deal with the corrosive issue that metallurgy of the early nuclear age into the 50s couldn’t really handle economically.
It gives you a reason to access the materials you need for nuclear weapons.
Who is saying they’re using the fuel for reactors to make the weapons? Just you.
And not that I count it. But they do infact make weapons from spent uranium. They make artillery shells from it. Buy like I said. I don’t even count that.
There is no correlation between nuclear weapons production and nuclear power generation. If anything they compete for the same raw materials. They were developed in the same era because that’s when we discovered how to harness fission.
Also depleted uranium is not spent fuel. Depleted uranium is the byproduct of enriching uranium to weapons grade. Given the natural ratios of u238 to u235, there’s an abundance of it from refining nuclear weapons hence why some weapons and armor utilize it.
Yes. They compete for the same raw material. That’s the whole point. Gives you a perfectly good reason to excavate it.
That’s not a point in favor of why they coexist. The military is going to fund uranium mining one way or the other, given the potency of nuclear weapons as a deterrence, as well as their own militarized applications of nuclear reactors powering aircraft carriers.
The only valid argument for why military planning influenced civilian nuclear power because the military also tested and decided on nuclear power for various applications because it was efficient, reliable and had long term viability with minimal space investment. But even the military came to the conclusion it wanted nuclear power where it could get independent of wanting nuclear weapons.
Edit: And as a bonus, just because this myth is so dumb, Chicago-1 predated the Manhattan project and is directly cited as being an inspiration for the Manhattan project, not the other way around as people keep trying to claim. Even without nuclear weapons we would still have uranium powered nuclear reactors, and they’d probably be more prevalent without all the fearmongers hopping on the big oil bandwagon and spewing propaganda that couldn’t be further from the truth.
It is a point for them to coexist. It’s called plausible deniability.
What exactly are you trying to argue? That it’s not a good reason for a country to get a bunch of uranium without raising questions?
There was absolutely no incentive to research more about alternative fuels, uranium and plutonium were materials the nuclear powers wanted. For more than just 1 reason…
If countries REALLY wanted nuclear power without Uranium. They would have researched it. Like China have. But no one else has. Well some have, but they all gave up a long time ago.
Sweden was researching it, but decided to go with Uranium, coincidentally, they just happened to also research nuclear weapons… very strange coincidence that… (Sweden was later encouraged to halt all nuclear weapons research)
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.
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?
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.
i wasn’t aware they redesigned nuclear from the ground up. why did they pick uranium then?
Because they wanted bombs.
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.
Good news, mankind should be pushing farther into this technologies… so we finally have our first gen IV reactor? I honestly thought we would never reach them on time.
Plus Thorium rocks
Thanks for the archive link, OP. Shit that site was cancerous
deleted by creator
Uh, what about the THTR-300 that operated at 300MW capacity from 1987 to 1989?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300
It was a total failure, though. Not quite Chernobyl, but it was plagued by incidents.
Honestly, I’m not a nuclear physicist by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m not sure how they plan to emergency cool the reactor to prevent a meltdown if it’s filled with molten salt. Anything colder than molten salt going into the reactor would cause it to be clogged up by not-molten salt.
At least the THTR seemed to have cooling capabilities as the foremost priority.
They put a plug in the bottom that melts if the salt gets too hot and it drains out into a tank that stops the reaction with no moving parts or anyone controlling it. After it cools down they can remelt it and put it back in.
Is this real? Pretty cool if they can actually stop the reaction with such
Yes I remember reading about this a while back. It’s one of the main reasons thorium rectors are so much safer.
I remember reading about this one, able to fit in a small area and be moved, but never knew if it was thorium
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/safe-micro-nuclear-reactor-truck
Haven’t read up on much of it, just remembered it in passing.
From what I’ve watched & read, it’s usually depicted as the freeze plug melts and the liquid salt flows into multiple small holding tanks below it. That way the fuel mass will be physically separated, which helps stop fission on top of any other mitigations like lining the containers with neutron absorbers, etc.
So in an emergency it can be air cooled, assuming they set up an intake for that.
That’s what I tell my partners. They are, thus far, unimpressed.
Remember when it was all the hype when things just started - crazy to see it actually happen
Thorium? Fucking sweet!
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/
