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China Power

China Plans To Build the World's First Waterless Nuclear Reactor (interestingengineering.com) 258

Posted by BeauHD from the first-of-its-kind dept.
AltMachine shares a report from Interesting Engineering: Government researchers in China unveiled their design for a commercial molten salt nuclear reactor that is expected to be the first in the world to not utilize water for cooling. As the reactor won't need water it can be deployed in desert regions, allowing operators to utilize otherwise desolate spaces in order to provide energy for large populations. The molten salt reactor is powered by liquid thorium instead of uranium. Molten salt reactors are expected to be safer than traditional uranium nuclear reactors, as thorium cools and solidifies quickly in the open air, meaning that a leak would theoretically result in less radiation contamination for the surrounding environment.

China expects to build its first commercial molten salt reactor by 2030, and the country's government has long-term plans to build several of the reactors in the deserts of central and western China. China's new system works by allowing thorium to flow through the reactor, enabling a nuclear chain reaction before transferring the heat to a steam generator outside. The thorium is then returned to the reactor, and the cycle repeats. The concept of a nuclear reactor powered by liquid salt instead of uranium was first devised in the 1940s. However, early experiments struggled to find a solution for problems including the corrosion and cracking of pipes used to transport the molten salts. The reactor "could generate up to 100MW" of energy and power about 100,000 homes, according to the report. "The reactor itself will only be 10 feet (3 meters) tall and 8 feet (2.5 meters) wide, though the power plant itself will be larger as it incorporates other equipment including steam turbines."
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China Plans To Build the World's First Waterless Nuclear Reactor

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  • So many things wrong with the summary ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 22, 2021 @09:08PM (#61610181)
    Let's start with this not being the first waterless reactor, by a long-shot. There have been several experimental molten salt reactors, pebble bed reactors, liquid sodium reactors, and most precede this one by decades.

    • There have been several experimental molten salt reactors....

      But this is a commercial one.

      • AGR... Several in operation in the UK... Last time I looked.

        But this one doesn't use water to condense the steam - I guess us the point. It still uses water, but inside the system.

        I wonder how they condense the steam...

        Anyway, all good. Well done China.

        • Wrong "why". I was asking why mention molten salt when talking about the first "waterless" nuclear reactor when everyone knows that CO2-cooled reactors were the first widespread ones. That's not a statement to desirability, just to historical priority.

          • Re: So many things wrong with the summary ... (Score:5, Informative)

            by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Friday July 23, 2021 @01:28AM (#61610601)

            The summary is very poorly written, even by Slashdot standards.

            They are confusing "coolant" with "heat sink". Nearly all reactors use water as the heat sink, either directly by dumping heat into a river, lake, or ocean, or by using evaporative cooling towers.

            This reactor uses air as the heat sink.

            But the summary implies that it uses water (steam) as the direct coolant of the molten salt.

            There are many questions TFA doesn't answer. Like why are they building in a desert? Why are they going straight to a commercial reactor when MSR design wrinkles haven't been resolved?

            Anyway, I wish them luck. A working and cost-effective Thorium-MSR design can go a long to solving global warming.

            • Technically the reactor plants that are using cooling towers are ultimately using the atmosphere as their heat sink as well: the evaporated water condenses, sometimes very quickly, with the heat rejected into the air through phase change.

            • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              Building in a desert is an odd choice because they still need a lot of safety equipment, except that now it has to work in extreme temperatures and a very dry environment too.

              They have replaced the water with air cooling, but if the air cooling fails they will still have a situation where the plant suffers severe damage due to latent heat output from the reactor after it has SCRAMed. So they must have backup generators, which need fuel and have their own thermal limits.

              Also if you have desert available you

              • Building in a desert is an odd choice because they still need a lot of safety equipment, except that now it has to work in extreme temperatures and a very dry environment too.

                Nukes in the desert away from natural sources of water are not new, Palo Verde for example uses sewage water to run in the Arizona desert and is the largest total generation plant in the US.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Jack9 ( 11421 )

              > Like why are they building in a desert?

              Because China has invested heavily in Africa and is actively nation building, in a version of the US Imperialism of the 20th century.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Because molten salt hits the holy grail of "high temperature low pressure". And if the reactor starts to get too hot, the fuel can be drained out into a container with non-reactive geometry.

        • Re:So many things wrong with the summary ... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Maury Markowitz ( 452832 ) on Friday July 23, 2021 @09:01AM (#61611403) Homepage

          > Because molten salt hits the holy grail of "high temperature low pressure".

          That holy grail does not exist. Oh, people have been claiming it has for a long time, just like the "real" holy grail, but invariably when they actually built such a reactor the LWRs proved to have better performance.

          When all of this started in the 1950s, the US largely chose LWRs. Insert your favorite conspiracy theory as to why, it doesn't make a difference. That's because all the other countries knew the US was going LWR and deliberately chose some other technology for [insert holy grail here].

          So for instance, Canada went heavy water because that meant you [holy grail] don't have to enrich fuel, which we all knew was going to be a huge problem by the 1970s. And the UK chose CO2 cooling because [holy grail] it couldn't cause steam explosions and ran hotter which allowed you to have better thermal efficiency. And the French, who had no uranium supply, started a huge breeder program to close their LWR fuel cycle. Even Germany got in, eventually, using helium cooling for even higher efficiency and super-safe fueling.

          And then they actually built these things and they all got hammered by two problems.

          One was that they all sucked. CANDU, arguably the best of them, requires a much larger reactor vessel if you want to run on non-enriched fuel, and demands large amounts of really expensive D2O, so they simply can't compete economically. Magnox and AGR were even larger, absolutely enormous cores and little to make up for it and have been compared economically to the Concorde and the UK is now building LWRs. The French designs were complete disasters and completely abandoned.

          And the other part of the one-two is that none of the problems they meant to solve actually panned out. Fuel reserves grew faster than it was being burned and fresh fuel costs something like 10x less than breeding it. Enrichment, which was indeed a problem, led to people just solving the enrichment problem. And so forth.

          Its fascinating to watch the LWR, which is (now) clearly the best design from any economic measure and beat all comers fair and square, is now being denigrated. And not because there's anything wrong with it, I challenge you to provide proof of any *existing* reactor design that will outperform AP1000 by any economic measure, but because even that high-point of engineering design isn't enough.

          The nuclear industry has done a perfectly good job of design over the years. These alternatives will do nothing to address the fact that even the cheapest designs are not completive. All the design in the world won't change the fact that the PV industry got cheap by using cast-off equipment from the chip industry which invests about 1/5th as much money as the entire nuclear industry *every year*.

      • Re:So many things wrong with the summary ... (Score:5, Informative)

        by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Friday July 23, 2021 @05:37AM (#61610915)

        Because it is one of the options. Different designs have different characteristics, this is _not_ "one size fits all".

        While I do not like nuclear because of high cost, corrupt operators, unsafe operation and unsolved waste-storage question, it will still be interesting to see what they come up with. This thing may be the first new reactor design that actually goes productive in a long time.

        As to "waterless", this seems to be incompetent reporting. I guess the point is that it does not use up water for cooling. Conventional designs either blow steam up a cooling tower (losing water) or need to be close to a river or large body of water for cooling. Both approaches are unsuitable for dry areas. This one may use air for that last-stage cooling, it is not clear from the article. If China has solved the problem of keeping liquid Thorium salt from corroding pipes, valves, heat-exchangers, etc. that would be a pretty impressive material sciences breakthrough. If the manage to re-condense whatever liquid they use to generate the steam to drive the turbines without the need for cooling water, that would be impressive as well.

        It is hard to tell whether the whole thing is propaganda or whether they really have solutions for the critical questions. There have been some really stupid "innovations" coming out of China recently, but there also have been some impressive demonstrations of technological capabilities.

        • If this is propaganda then it will only drive the USA to work on the technology so as to not be left behind. What would be the point of this propaganda? Incentivize the USA to work on the problem so that they can steal the solution? If it doesn't work then it doesn't help them to let the world think it works.

          If this does work then expect the USA to have its own working prototype 24 months later.

          • That would depend on the intended audience. Domestic and international messaging can be at odds. They may intend this as domestic PR - "Hey, look how effective the CCP is!" - rather than a competitive brag to other nations. Of course, there's no reason it can't be both, but if you aren't familiar with how governments churn out and direct their messaging then it often seems like they're doing things that don't make sense.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by gweihir ( 88907 )

            24 months for a hard material sciences problem? Basically impossible. Make that 10 years at the very least.

            Incidentally, the US is getting left behind in many areas, especially in energy creation, storage and distribution.. Why would this be different?

        • Please read my other comment. [slashdot.org]

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by gweihir ( 88907 )

            "Waterless" refers to the last cooling stage here, not the first one. You seem to have missed that tiny detail.

            • No, I most certainly didn't. The comment I was responding to was talking about "the first waterless reactor", NOT "the first waterless plant" -- and so was I.

    • Re:So many things wrong with the summary ... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Thursday July 22, 2021 @10:01PM (#61610311)

      The summary seems to be mixing up coolant, which carries heat from the fission site inside the reactor to the steam feed for the generator turbine, with heat sink, which is where the spent generator heat is dumped into the environment.

      It has long been noted that using molten salt as a coolant would enable reactors to run at a higher temperature, and at ambient pressure, than current pressurized-water reactors. Higher operating temperature would enable reactors to be built in deserts, with dry air to be used as the heat sink.

      • Higher temperature means more efficient energy conversion, all else being equal.

        Ambient pressure means a lot of design and safety issues get easier to handle, and you don't have to wait for one of the few places in the world that can manufacture pressure vessels for reactors to fill your order.

      • The summary seems to be mixing up coolant, which carries heat from the fission site inside the reactor to the steam feed for the generator turbine, with heat sink, which is where the spent generator heat is dumped into the environment.

        It has long been noted that using molten salt as a coolant would enable reactors to run at a higher temperature, and at ambient pressure, than current pressurized-water reactors. Higher operating temperature would enable reactors to be built in deserts, with dry air to be used as the heat sink.

        Water is used to condense the steam from the steam turbines in the secondary loop, so the operation temperature of the primary is not the issue.

    • Re:So many things wrong with the summary ... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by allcoolnameswheretak ( 1102727 ) on Friday July 23, 2021 @02:42AM (#61610697)

      The concept of a nuclear reactor powered by liquid salt instead of uranium was first devised in the 1940s. However, early experiments struggled to find a solution for problems including the corrosion and cracking of pipes used to transport the molten salts

      There's a nice documentary on Netflix on Thorium reactors (titled 'Thorium'), that are supposedly much safer than contemporary Plutonium and Uranium reactors. According to the documentary that interviews people involved in the research, the only reason why we don't have safe Thorium reactors today is that research on them was stopped because of the cold war: Thorium could not be enriched to create nuclear weapons.

      • I thought it was mainly because molten salt is incredibly corrosive. If the Chinese figure this out maybe we can copy them for once

      • that are supposedly much safer than contemporary Plutonium and Uranium reactors

        Non-existing devices are indeed some of the safest ones.

        Thorium could not be enriched to create nuclear weapons

        Almost no nuclear weapons are made by means of enrichment. Almost all of them are made by means of element transmutation.

  • "transferring the heat to a steam generator outside."

    How do you generate steam without water?

    • Re:Waterless? (Score:4, Funny)

      by bobstreo ( 1320787 ) on Thursday July 22, 2021 @09:19PM (#61610203)

      "transferring the heat to a steam generator outside."

      How do you generate steam without water?

      If it's China, probably lead. They like to use lead for everything, allegedly including children's toys.

    • Re:Waterless? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Todd Knarr ( 15451 ) on Thursday July 22, 2021 @09:24PM (#61610211) Homepage

      Heat exchangers. They're using "waterless" somewhat loosely, the turbine circuit uses water but the primary coolant loop for the reactor uses molten thorium salt (which is also the fuel source). The primary loop is coupled to the steam circuit by a heat exchanger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment has a good description of the system with diagrams.

      • If they are also condensing the steam in a radiator type heat exchanger then I would agree that is waterless. Evaporating off the waste heat from the condensers uses a lot of water.

        But waterless reactors that use steam circuits to generate electricity have been around since EBR-1. And the graphite moderated ones might be even older.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by e3m4n ( 947977 )
        but he has a point.. why tout it in such a way that makes it think that pressurized water reactors are a bad thing? or that for some reason, this could work in a desert with no access to water at all? For some reason, there are people on /. that think nuclear reactors chew through water consumption. They do not seem to understand that the primary cooling loop is a closed loop system. Its the secondary plant, the steam plant, with the turbines, that need a heat sink for the turbines. You need both a heat sin

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Current nuclear reactors do "chew through water consumption" for last-stage cooling. The water is then unsuitable for further cooling, either because it has evaporated (cooling tower) or because it it too warm (river/lake/sea cooling). Please read up on the tech before claiming nonsense, as you do not seem to understand the basics. You may want to start with how a basic heat engine works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

          The Chinese seems to claim that they can do last-stage cooling without using water now,

          • Molten-salt though has one advantage over PWR designs: the primary loop demands much less in the way of cooling. In a PWR design the primary loop itself needs cooling to prevent the water from exceeding it's boiling point. In an MSR design it's operating at low pressure and down near the salt's melting point so there's no need for a massive cooling gradient (the normal problem in an MSR design is keeping the primary "coolant" hot enough to stay molten). The heat exchangers off the primary loop are almost en

            • PWR, the ones I ran, operated at 2000psi. There still existed some nucleic boiling in the core by design, but not enough to create a steam bubble that blocks the flow of coolant to the fuel channels. Rod height controls reactor temperature and the coolant (moderator) controls reactor power. In the event of a failure of the primary coolant cooling pumps the procedure is to immediately shut the valves to the steam generators (cut off steam production) so that the coolant gets warmer. As the temperature rises
          • Your clearly are an idiot or just dont pay attention to anything anyone wrote. Too busy planing your next statement I suppose. What does 8yrs running navy nuclear plants say about basic heat exchanger operations? I was running those goddamn things before you were even born. What do you think a condenser is? There are two stages of heat exchangers btw. The main steam generators are nothing more than heat exchangers from the primary to secondary loops to turn feedwater into steam at around 550psi. The second

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by gweihir ( 88907 )

              Nope. But you are clearly vastly overestimating your own insight into things. You seem to have trouble with basic Physics as well and you seem to completely fail to understand the cooling-situation of a reactor that sits in-land with no large body of water or other continued water-supply available. Seems to me you are a one-trick pony that cannot even think a tiny bit outside of the only relevant situation you know.

              Also, why do you think you are older than me? Or have looked at reactor tech longer? Pure arr

              • Unless you were operating reactors in the 80s I am definitely older than you. Hell I probably fought in my first war before you were born. Im nearing retirement age here. your description of water to condense steam is not, in any way, limited to nuclear power. ALL steam plants run on the same principles. The only thing different in the secondary loop steam plant on a nuclear vessel is the steam generators themselves. Downstream of a JP5 boiler, the rest of the engine-room is identical. It does not matter i

      • Heat exchangers. They're using "waterless" somewhat loosely, the turbine circuit uses water but the primary coolant loop for the reactor uses molten thorium salt (which is also the fuel source).

        Waterless in this case isn't being used loosely. They are using it to mean that the reactor doesn't consume or need a supply of water. Specifically all other reactors to date, even ones which didn't have water in their primary cooling loop still have a water heat exchanger condensing / cooling the return of whatever is running through the reactor loop.

        In theory if it works, this one won't have a water heat exchanger and can be run and operated without sucking in tones of freshwater every day.

      • As a kid when I learned how Nuclear Energy worked, I was kinda disappointed, it is just a 19th century steam generator with a new fangled heat source. Science fiction and popular media at the time, made it seem like a technology you can possibly shrink down into a battery size, where the nuclear reaction somehow will coax the electrons to move. While in real life, if is just boiling water to spin a turbine.

        While Nuclear power would solve a lot of our CO2 pollution problems today, it needs to be heavily reg

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Joce640k ( 829181 )

      "transferring the heat to a steam generator outside."

      How do you generate steam without water?

      It's right there in the first line of the summary: "...the first in the world to not utilize water for cooling."

      • "transferring the heat to a steam generator outside."

        How do you generate steam without water?

        It's right there in the first line of the summary: "...the first in the world to not utilize water for cooling."

        Which isn't accurate if you're using a heat exchanger to transfer the heat into water.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          "transferring the heat to a steam generator outside."

          How do you generate steam without water?

          It's right there in the first line of the summary: "...the first in the world to not utilize water for cooling."

          Which isn't accurate if you're using a heat exchanger to transfer the heat into water.

          This is obviously about last-stage cooling. They do not say what they do instead though.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by e3m4n ( 947977 )
      thank you

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      This is about last-stage cooling being waterless.

  • 'First' and 'Waterless' (Score:5, Informative)

    by theshowmecanuck ( 703852 ) on Thursday July 22, 2021 @09:29PM (#61610233) Journal
    Let's review the first sentence in the actual article.

    Government researchers in China unveiled their design for a commercial molten salt nuclear reactor that is expected to be the first in the world to not utilize water for cooling, a report by South China Morning Post (SCMP) explains.

    If China is to be believed, this is not an experimental design. If the word 'first' is misused in this context, please show the actual first commercial molten salt reactor. I'm no fan of China, but they have been leading the world in researching the use of thorium reactors for quite some time. Thorium wasn't developed by the USA because it was more difficult to build a reactor from than thorium, and most also presume because it is much harder to get weaponizable fissionable materials from thorium reactors, if at all.

    And it is 'waterless' in terms of not using water in the reactor itself. It is actually a much safer design than uranium reactors that rely on immersing the fuel in water for cooling and moderation. As well, the waste products have half lives in decades, not thousands of years.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jaa101 ( 627731 )

      And it is 'waterless' in terms of not using water in the reactor itself.

      Which means their statement that "As the reactor won't need water it can be deployed in desert regions" is, at best, really misleading.

      • I simply read it as 'more apt to be deployed where water is not abundant'.

        After all, if they can carry the material to build the reactor and other products needed for its operation, they can also transport a limited amount of water.

      • Which means their statement that "As the reactor won't need water it can be deployed in desert regions" is, at best, really misleading.

        Not misleading at all. The *reactor* doesn't need water, at all, but the turbine loop does contain water .
        The entire plant doesn't *consume* water since the turbine loop is closed so it can be deployed in desert regions.

        That's the biggest problem with other designs. Nuclear powerplants continuously consume a fuckton of water to cool the reactor as the reactor and the turbine loop are one and the same.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by N1AK ( 864906 )
        It really isn't if you understand what they are talking about and think for a couple of seconds. Requiring a relatively small amount of water to run steam turbines in a closed loop is not remotely the same as needing a gigantic body of relatively cool/cold water to cycle through the plant for cooling. The first can be managed with a few tankers, the latter means that in many cases we literally use the sea in order to have a big enough body of water.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Nope. The "waterless" they talk about is the last stage cooling. This is where a conventional design uses a river/lake/ocean or evaporates water in a cooling tower. In both cases, the water is unsuitable for further cooling and hence the reactor "consumes" water.

      They do not say what they do instead though. My guess is this thing has a high-temperature last stage and that could make air-cooling viable.

    • And it is 'waterless' in terms of not using water in the reactor itself.

      No. It's not "waterless" in terms of the reactor loop. There are several designs like that. In this case they are referring to it being "waterless" in terms of it not relying on an external water supply to feed a heatexchanger to cool the reactor loop.

      This would literally be the first reactor in the world not reliant on a steady supply of external cooling water. It is "waterless" in that it can be built in a desert away from lakes, rivers, and oceans. It's not "waterless" in that it has no water. The turbin

  • Not The First, or even Second (Score:5, Informative)

    by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Thursday July 22, 2021 @09:32PM (#61610239) Journal
    Britain used Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors [wikipedia.org] which used CO2 with the first prototype being in 1962. Then there were sodium cooled reactors [wikipedia.org] which could "breed" the plutonium fuel they used creating some obvious problems.

    So while this design is clearly vastly superior to either of the above and an extremely interesting development it is in no way the first or even second "waterless" reactor design that has been operational. Of course all the designs, including the new one, still use a steam-based heat exchanger to generate energy so it's just the rector cooling that is waterless.

    • Right, and ORNL in the US had a working thorium salt reactor. Not commerical but full working reactor:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nojayuk ( 567177 )

        ORNL in the US had a working thorium salt reactor

        No they didn't. If you actually read the Wikipedia article referenced you will find the researchers used uranium (U-235 and later U-233) in the molten salt reactor, never thorium. It's a common mistake, possibly encouraged by the various Powerpoint cowboys scrabbling for funding while trying to push the idea of thorium-fuelled reactors today.

        I've not read the article but the synopsis above is not promising -- "liquid thorium" is a bad start, "waterless" is

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by e3m4n ( 947977 )
      Hey this is China. They mastered revisionist history when Julius Caesar was still in power. Ok I exaggerate a bit, but not much. You dont very well sell a lot of Calgon by calling it soap. You market it as 'ancient chinese secret'. Its been the Chinese way for hundreds upon hundreds of years. I study chinese martial arts and even some of the masters will occasionally admit that half of what they shovel is bullshit to keep people coming back. Granted it takes a night out after a seminar or symposium, when yo

    • Britain also used the Windscale air-cooled reactors which caught on fire, discharged a large amount of radioactive material into the air (more than Three Mile Island, substantially less than Chernobyl or Fukushima), but was generally hushed up.

      • Britain also used the Windscale air-cooled reactors which caught on fire, discharged a large amount of radioactive material into the air (more than Three Mile Island, substantially less than Chernobyl or Fukushima), but was generally hushed up.

        And they renamed it Sellafield because they did such a bad job of hushing it up that the name Windscale became synonymous with radioactive pollution.
        So in about 30ms, Sellafield became synonymous with radioactive pollution.

    • Actually according to the summary it is. Both the examples you list still use water for cooling the primary reactor loop. The issue here isn't what flows in the reactor, it's the metric fuckton of water that flows through the condenser which makes even these "gas-cooled" reactors or "sodium cooled" reactors unsuitable for use in areas where a large supply of water is unavailable.

      The way I understand this, this reactor will not consume water for cooling, and it very much seems to be the first of its kind.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      If you follow both your Wikipedia links you will notice that the Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors and the sodium cooled reactors do in fact need water.

      While they use has and sodium to transfer heat from the reactor to a heat exchanger, they both need water to remove heat from the system and if the supply of water is removed they will overheat and go into meltdown. As such they could not be built in a desert like they are claiming this one can be.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        They claim they can to the last-stage cooling without water. All other water is in closed loops.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      "Waterless" refers to last-stage cooling here.

  • The SRE and the EBR were both sodium cooled. BTW, this is just a hint how difficult it is to maintain a molten-salt reactor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • So is thermal stress.

    It's gonna be cool if it works, but I wouldn't be surprised if it leaves the designers feeling...salty.

  • Without Bitcoin miners, the demand for power to generate electricity is no longer there.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/c... [wsj.com]

    • China has a lot of power demand which is consistently growing and a lot of power still produced via fossil fuels. As it turns out some countries are actually trying to meet their targets for green energy and if you can do that by incorporating a better nuclear reactor, your getting safer and cleaner energy.

    • Don't forget electric cars , all the power from petroleum being replaced by electrical power means a hell of a lot more demand on the grid.

  • I'm not fan of China but I hope this works the way they expect it to because China has lots of coal energy plants that are... well, they are polluting like crazy. Also, the thorium needed is easy to obtain because my (rudimentary) understanding is that it's regular thorium that they blast with x-rays. This means you don't need to mine literal tons of uranium and then put it through a bunch of centrifuges. The waste from LFTRs is also drastically reduced with a much shorter half-life (30 years for cesium

    • I agree with all your points but saying China is polluting like crazy is a bit off. Crazy means outside the standard deviation and we should consider pollution in terms of per capita since electricity demand in a modern world is primarily in terms of individual demand. Unless we are purposing some standard of pollution per square mile/km than the comparisons are not fair and waste in general is never really considered in these terms but rather again per capita.

      Now the discussion of China having too many peo

  • uh, thorium (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ahodgson ( 74077 ) on Thursday July 22, 2021 @10:17PM (#61610361)

    Isn`t the bigger news in this a commercial thorium reactor

    • Re:uh, thorium (Score:5, Insightful)

      by quintessencesluglord ( 652360 ) on Thursday July 22, 2021 @11:38PM (#61610459)

      And more importantly-

      It isn't being being developed in the west.

      The hegemony of west is starting to fall (for better or worse).

      • Liberal Democracy being supplanted by Communist Dictatorship sounds like worse to me.

        But we'd also have to presume that China isn't lying about it for PR and that they do complete the reactor on schedule, at full capacity and without cutting corners that cause it to fail a few years later. Also that the West doesn't build any, or doesn't build better ones.

    • Isn`t the bigger news in this a commercial thorium reactor

      Not really. Thorium IMO is uninteresting compared to a reactor design which could be built anywhere and doesn't require a fuckton of water for cooling. Sure thorium is a technical marvel in and of itself, but one of the biggest problems for nuclear is it's highly restricted on location.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's a 100MW demonstrator. Just being connected to the grid does not make it a commercial reactor.

  • China Plans To Build the World's First Waterless Nuclear Reactor

    This is factually wrong. There were several gas-cooled reactors that used gas in a gas turbine directly. Moreover, Russia has sodium-cooled BN-600 reactor in commercial service right now. And BN-1200 being designed.

    • Precisely none of them were waterless all still relying on water to cool the reactor loop making them unsuitable for putting in a desert.

  • The Chinese government is authoritarian and does not tolerate opposition and we do not approve. It does however appear to make rational long term decisions. We have dreamed in the West for years of a nuclear power program that was not just an offshoot of nuclear weapons production. The Chinese seem to actually be going there. The Chinese will of course be able to sell thorium reactors to any takers as they do not help in the construction of nuclear weapons. Another missed opportunity following on from solar cell manufacture. We need to wake up.

    • The Chinese government is authoritarian and does not tolerate opposition and we do not approve. It does however appear to make rational long term decisions.

      Sure, as long as you want decisions to lead to more oppressive authoritarianism.

  • Molten salt uranium (Score:3)

    by Voice of satan ( 1553177 ) on Friday July 23, 2021 @06:22AM (#61610989)

    For the curious there are also projects of molten salt uranium reactors. I don't know how advanced they are. It seems to be the molten salt reactors are being discussed as "potential" for ages now.

  • It's been claimed that Mark Twain said history doesn't repeat but it does rhyme. The USA and Soviets got into a race to space where the Soviets made the first few gains. Once they got the attention of the USA then the USA decided it was not going to lose. We put men on the moon.

    China is making some gains on nuclear power. My guess is that we will see rhymes of the space race, and the USA will decide that falling behind in nuclear power is not acceptable. China may make a few early gains on the USA but

  • Another use. (Score:3)

    by kqc7011 ( 525426 ) on Friday July 23, 2021 @07:00AM (#61611057)
    This small plant can easily supply enough energy for a 50 million gallon per day reverse osmosis desalination plant, even in the Middle East where the oceans salinity has the greatest ppm / mg/L. 50 million gallons per day of desalinated water can turn a large sandy area into fairly productive food producing land. The Carlsbad Desalination Plant out of San Diego is said to use 40MW of power to produce 50 million gallons of potable water per day.

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