China's Experimental Molten Salt Reactor Receives Operating Licence (scmp.com) 100
Interesting Engineering reports:
Chinese authorities have officially given the green light to commission a working thorium-based molten salt nuclear reactor. Currently under construction since 2018, the reactor in question, "Thorium Molten Salt Reactor — Liquid Fuel 1" (TMSR-LF1), is being built at the Hongshagang Industrial Cluster, Wuwei City, Gansu Province.
If successful, the TMSR-LF1 has the potential to open doors for developing and constructing a more extensive demonstration facility by 2030. Additionally, it could lead to constructing a TMSR fuel salt batch pyro-process demonstration facility, which would enable the utilization of the thorium-uranium cycle by the early 2040s...
It runs on a combination of thorium and uranium-235, enriched at 19.75 percent by weight, and can operate at a maximum temperature of 650C for up to 10 years. The liquid fuel design is based on the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment conducted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1960s...
China intends to construct a reactor with a capacity of 373 MWt by 2030 if the TMSR-LF1 succeeds.
Thorium is more abundant than uranium, notes the South China Morning Post — and China is thought to have one of the world's largest thorium reserves. But a thorium reactor should also produce less waste, and using molten salts as both a fuel and a coolant "potentially eliminates the need for large quantities of water, which is a significant advantage in areas where water resources are limited."
India has also been pursuing thorium-based nuclear technologies, including MSRs. The Indian Molten Salt Breeder Reactor project, initiated in the 1980s, aimed to develop a thorium-based breeder reactor. However, the project has faced challenges related to materials compatibility, fuel reprocessing and overall system complexity and has not progressed to commercial-scale use...
China reportedly plans to sell small thorium reactors to other countries as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing's global infrastructure plan.
Thanks to Slashdot reader sonlas for sharing the news.
If successful, the TMSR-LF1 has the potential to open doors for developing and constructing a more extensive demonstration facility by 2030. Additionally, it could lead to constructing a TMSR fuel salt batch pyro-process demonstration facility, which would enable the utilization of the thorium-uranium cycle by the early 2040s...
It runs on a combination of thorium and uranium-235, enriched at 19.75 percent by weight, and can operate at a maximum temperature of 650C for up to 10 years. The liquid fuel design is based on the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment conducted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1960s...
China intends to construct a reactor with a capacity of 373 MWt by 2030 if the TMSR-LF1 succeeds.
Thorium is more abundant than uranium, notes the South China Morning Post — and China is thought to have one of the world's largest thorium reserves. But a thorium reactor should also produce less waste, and using molten salts as both a fuel and a coolant "potentially eliminates the need for large quantities of water, which is a significant advantage in areas where water resources are limited."
India has also been pursuing thorium-based nuclear technologies, including MSRs. The Indian Molten Salt Breeder Reactor project, initiated in the 1980s, aimed to develop a thorium-based breeder reactor. However, the project has faced challenges related to materials compatibility, fuel reprocessing and overall system complexity and has not progressed to commercial-scale use...
China reportedly plans to sell small thorium reactors to other countries as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing's global infrastructure plan.
Thanks to Slashdot reader sonlas for sharing the news.
Re:rsilvergun is chinese too (Score:5, Interesting)
Molten salt reactors are not inherently unsafe, in fact they offer inherent safety features such as an inverse temperature to reactivity relationships that pretty much ensures the reactor cannot overheat.
China is kicking our ass when it comes to nuclear generation technology and development.
The best part... (Score:1)
...is that if you need to season your food, you already have salt available right there. Plus the temperature will heat it up as well. Not bad!
Re: (Score:2)
As Guga showed, molten salt is a horrible medium in which to cook your food.
Another molten salt safety feature (Score:5, Interesting)
Molten salt reactors are not inherently unsafe, in fact they offer inherent safety features such as an inverse temperature to reactivity relationships that pretty much ensures the reactor cannot overheat.
Some are also designed with a safety feature that keeps them from leaking, melting down, or exploding, even if they completely lose power and STAY unpowered:
1) The reactor vessel has a dump pipe that, if opened, drops the whole salt/fuel melt via gravity into a set of containers in the lower part of the containment, shaped so the critical reaction stops and capable of dissipating both the residual heat and further generated heat as the reaction products decay, forever, without powered cooling or ventilation.
2) The dump pipe is closed by cooling it until it's full of a solid block of salt/fuel mix.
3) If cooling fails the plug melts and it dumps. No active system is required to make this happen.
4) Once power is restored and everything is checked out, the salt/fuel mix can be remelted by applied heat, pumped back up (forming a new salt plug in the now-being-cooled dump pipe) and you're back in business. (If power fails during such a restart, once there's enough salt/fuel mix pumped up to be an issue, 3) immediately occurs again. Repeat ad nauseam.)
(That leaves designers having to deal with partial failure scenarios like making sure that, even if the control systems or output heat consumption fail but the cooling of the plug keeps running the reactor still manages to melt the plug before something ruptures.)
Thorium reactor (Score:3)
Thorium-fueled reactors have been proposed as a good solution to a number of the hard problems with nuclear power, not the least of which is that even enriched thorium can't be diverted to be made into bombs. (This one is apparently only partially Thorium fuel, though.)
Will be very interested in seeing if this can be made successful, both technically and economically!
Re:Thorium reactor (Score:5, Informative)
There's no such thing as enriched thorium. Enrichment is the process by which something fissile like Uranium-235 (0.720%) is concentrated from the much more abundant U-238 (99.3%), since you generally need at least 5% U-235 to be suitable as fuel. Usually using various tricks like centrifuges to help "sift out" the heavier isotopes until until a high enough concentration of the lighter ones is reached.
Natural occurring Thorium though is already 100.0% the fertile Th-232 we want for reactors, there's no enriching to be done.
Re: (Score:3, Troll)
Ah, thorium rears its perpetual head in responses about nuclear. If it was all wonderful, we'd already being using it or at least seeing adoption in other countries. We don't because the idea is bollocks.
Re: Thorium reactor (Score:2)
Proponents of Thorium MSRs also explain why the thorium road has ever been taken and the explanations are at least reasonable. You should at least acknowledge their existence and if you want to start a discussion you should start by refuting those with some argument.
Re: Thorium reactor (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Thorium reactor (Score:5, Interesting)
A thorium reactor uses a neutron source (in this case U-235) to transmute non-fissile Thorium-232 to fissile U-233. The U-233 is then fissioned to produce the bulk of the reactor's power.
Here's the thing about U-233: it is a *very* good material for making nuclear weapons. The idea that the thorium fuel cycle is proliferation-proof comes from the fact that the thorium fuel cycle contaminates its U-233 with U-232, which decays to powerful gamma emitters. Those gamma emitters makes the uranium produced by the fuel cycle awkward to work with. But this is not an insurmountable problem. The US managed to make a few experimental nuclear weapons in the 1960s from thorium-bred U-233.
The thorium fuel cycle *mainly* solves a hypothetical problem. Suppose we converted the world economy to run *entirely* on uranium fission. We'd run through our viable reserves of uranium in less than a decade. Since thorium is considerably more abundant than uranium (look on the right side of this graph [wikimedia.org] over atomic number 90), a thorium economy could run for closer to a thousand years before possibly dumping us in a new literal dark age.
Of course we don't run the world on uranium fission because at present generation nuclear plants are uneconomical compared to fossil fuel plants. So it's not really the thorium part of this project per se that's interesting, it's the radically different technology. If this proves to be more economical to operate, it could lead to a shift toward fission power. That'll solve many problems, but if someone tells you there won't be *new* problems created by that transition, they're not being realistic.
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because at present generation nuclear plants are uneconomical compared to fossil fuel plants.
Based on all the added costs to keep 1970's design nuclear power plants "safe but uneconomical". Start implementing 2020+ nuclear power plant designs, that are near impossible to meltdown, don't require an extra containment chamber, don't require hear transfer pressurization, and finally streamline safety and environmental impact requirements and studies out of politics, and suddenly nuke plants become much cheaper to implement. No nuke implementation study factors in the environmental damage from "climat
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a thorium economy could run for closer to a thousand years
Dark Helmet: The way he runs things, it won't last a hundred.
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Actually in the Indian case they specifically went this route in order to be able to create nuclear weapons from their plentiful monazite sands. What you do is start with heavy water reactors that generate plutonium, then use the plutonium and uranium in fast breeder reactors to create more plutonium and also convert the thorium to fissile U-233, and finally use a U-233/thorium mix in thermal breeder reactors.
You may have noticed there's a lot of plutonium being produced and involved in that process... fo
Smells Like Propaganda (Score:2, Troll)
How many years does it take to recreate an experiment from the 1960s?
Per Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]: "This technology was researched through the 1960s, the reactor was constructed by 1964, it went critical in 1965, and was operated until 1969."
This "project" sounds more like make-work than real science.
Re:Smells Like Propaganda (Score:4, Interesting)
I like to shit on China as much as the next person but you're comparing a 7MWt test reactor to a 373MWt production reactor. No they aren't comparable. No the existence of the test in 1960 does not magically mean we know everything we need to know about building a functioning production reactor. At no point in history have we ever gone from single research to full production without intermediate research steps.
This "project" sounds more like make-work than real science.
Your post sounds more like ignorance than real commentary.
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On the other hand, the original also demonstrated problems that they didn't yet have solutions for...
Re: Smells Like Propaganda (Score:3)
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They had potential solutions, but those solutions are untested, so it seems premature to be building the final commercial reactor already instead of another test model.
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From the summary:
It's an experimental reactor (described that way in the headline) that they hope will lead to a demonstration reactor in the future.
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Physics haven't changed. Are there new alloys that won't suffer degradation? That was the original problem.
Re: Smells Like Propaganda (Score:5, Informative)
So yes, progress is being made every day on new alloys that could lead to a successful MSR reactor and we have come a long ways since the 1960s. Computers have also improved enough that we can reliably model effects for engineering purposes that they could not hope to do in the 1960s. We can now accurately compute the decline in strength of a material in a radiation environment over a long period of time.
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Or we could just build the reactor vessel with new and innovative designs and ideas using surplus Boeing carbon fibre rolled into a cylinder in a warehouse with epoxy applied with squeegees, and if anyone points out that it's unsafe go on about our patented real-time vessel health-monitoring system that will prevent any accidents.
Too soon?
Re: Smells Like Propaganda (Score:1)
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So you think the CIA pays shills to influence the 20 real users of this site?
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I'm actually paid by George Soros. Well maybe not for much longer after spilling the beans.
Re: Smells Like Propaganda (Score:2)
Dangit! People keep telling me I'm on his payroll but I never see any paychecks.
Re: (Score:3)
He's much more prompt if you use direct deposit.
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Hopefully you got transitioned over to his son's account.
And really you should ask for a raise as 50 cents is the Chinese rate. Rates are higher in the US.
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And you have been getting the memos on CIA's goals. Do tell and make sure to vouch for their authenticity. As for the State Dept., they comment on current conditions. Surprisingly, so do Slashdot commenters. That they agree at points is just normal since both stem from the same basic culture....well, they do now, not when the former alleged president was attempting shake down Ukraine.
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I first learned about thorium molten salt reactors from talks by Kirk Sorensen.....in 2006.
It wasn't long before there was a diehard group of thorium fanboys who were pooh-poohing any other kind of renewable energy generation & even any other advanced nuclear.
Because thorium MSR were supposed to be so safe & easy to construct.
What a difference a mere 16 years makes...kinda.
I swear the thorium fanboys make the Commodore Amiga, Apple & Tesla fannutters look perfectly sane.
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Safe? Relatively. Easy? I don't think anybody knowledgeable ever said that. What I find most interesting about them is the claim that you can use them to further burn "spent fission waste products".
(OTOH, yeah, you can find stupid comments on all sides of every issue.)
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What I find most interesting about them is the claim that you can use them to further burn "spent fission waste products". /. myth, or an American myth with unknown origin.
No one claims that. It is a
It is physically impossible to "burn" fission products. Regardless of reactor type.
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I'm sorry, but did you read what I wrote as saying or implying that it wasn't true? I didn't mean that at all. I meant, literally, that that was the feature of molten salt reactors that I found most interesting. It's not a claim that most other designs make.
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And that "claim" is a myth.
No reactor - regardless what technology - can "burn" fission products.
That is a no brainer. No idea why you believe otherwise.
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Because thorium MSR were supposed to be so safe & easy to construct.
I'm not sure whom you were hanging out with, but there's nothing about thorium that makes them easy to construct. Safer yes, the inherent reaction is like that, but nuclear reactors aren't as complex and costly to build because of safety, but rather because splitting atoms in a controlled way is actually hard.
You weren't having a discussion with anyone sane. Kind of like the people now saying nuclear power is the solution to our climate goals despite the fact that the entire industry with the pathetically f
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I'm not sure whom you were hanging out with, but there's nothing about thorium that makes them easy to construct. Safer yes, the inherent reaction is like that, but nuclear reactors aren't as complex and costly to build because of safety, but rather because splitting atoms in a controlled way is actually hard.
On the contrary; thorium offers a unique advantage that makes such reactors easier to develop: they can be simulated with low-activity thorium and uranium with external heating in place of fission. All of the relevant chemical processing can be tested with non-radioactive species, and once the reactor itself is polished, it can be filled with the correct fluids, with high confidence of success. It still takes funding though, and that's difficult with the No Reactors Commission in operation.
LFTR is not magic
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thorium offers a unique advantage that makes such reactors easier to develop
So much easier that we haven't successfully done it and ever reactor we've tried has broken down in short order. Look thorium offers some advantages. It also offers some disadvantages. And in neither case will it be a panacea to the nuclear industry.
SCMP used to be independent media. (Score:2, Funny)
Before the CCP invaded Hong Kong. Now it's another CCP disinfo arm. Take everything they say with a reactor full of salt ...
Re: SCMP used to be independent media. (Score:2)
Re: SCMP used to be independent media. (Score:1)
10 year lease??
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Before the CCP invaded Hong Kong. Now it's another CCP disinfo arm. Take everything they say with a reactor full of salt ...
No need. The fact that the Chinese government has been looking into this is not new. Their nuclear industry has been researching and developing their own reactor designs for decades, some of which have lead to actual production reactors in operation right now.
Rather than complaining about the source, what part of the actual message do you find disagreeable or controversial? As it stands, TFS could be a press release from Poh Bear himself and yet there would be no reason to doubt what was said.
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They lead the world in coal pollution while lying about green initiatives, shit like this, pandemics, etc.
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This is not about doing the same thing. Material sciences have advanced a lot and simulation techniques basically did not exist back then.
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IINM, they already did all that. That reactor started operating in 2021, and this is supposedly a follow-on from that:
https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k?t... [youtu.be]
Molten Salt (Score:1)
The term salt covers a lot of compounds.
And how does the reactor convert that heat to electricity? Most reactors turn water into steam and send it through a turbine, and that steam is condensed back to water through a cooling tower.
Also 373 MWt isn't that large for a production reactor, the nearest plant to where I live is about 2GW (thermal) which converts to 647MWe
Re: (Score:3)
Following to an abstract on a related research paper, linked from one of the articles in the summary:
LiF-BeF2-UF4-ThF4 is used as fuel salt and also carrier salt of the primary loop of TMSR-LF, in which the abundance of Li-7 is 99.995% and the abundance of U-235 is 19.75%, and FNaBe is taken as salt of the second loop.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/molten-salt-reactor [sciencedirect.com]
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Beryllium? That will be fun if it ever gets out.
Great job enriching the lithium too.
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I guess you'll never know.
Re:Zero appetite in the US? (Score:5, Interesting)
Pebble Bed was a bad failure in Germany with all 2 prototypes having failed. The THTR-300 got damaged beyond repair after only something like 2 years of operation and the THTR-70 is still a highly radioactive ruin encased in concrete and nobody knows how to dispose of it yet. The Chinese are making a new attempt now based on the old German patents and some new materials. The good thing about the design is that it cannot blow up, because gas-cooled. Without reasonable reliability that is not worth much though.
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It doesn't make financial sense. Look at the tab for completing Watts Bar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Zero appetite in the US? (Score:5, Informative)
Let's have a look at the Watts Bar nuclear plant, as you say. From the article you linked:
- plant cost was $12 billion
- plant is made of 2 units, each rated at 1.16GW
- capacity factor is at 73% over its current lifetime (and the trend seems for it to be going upward)
It is what it is, but can we compare it to a wind farm for instance?
Let's have a look at the Hornsea wind farm [wikipedia.org]. This is a recent one, and an offshore one, so it should be even more in favor of wind power because of the increased capacity factor:
- the current farm (Hornsea 1 & 2) cost $3.36 billion + $6 billion. Let's round it at $9 billion, because we want to be nice with wind power, right?
- its nameplate capacity is of 1.2GW + 1.4GW. So slightly more than Watts Bar, but still something we can compare
- capacity factor over its current lifetime seem to be 47% [energynumbers.info]
Let's add some additional facts: Hornsea is expected to have a 25 year working-lifetime. A nuclear plant is expected to be running for 40 years, and more like 60 when going LTO.
Feel free to do the maths, but saying "it doesn't make financial sense" is a stupid thing to say, when you see that renewables and nuclear plants are basically in the same ballpark when looking at the finance side. If you take into account nameplate capacity and capacity factor that is. And don't get me started on intermitency vs baseload (or on-demand, or whatever you want to call it).
All that to say, your argument does not matter. We should build more nuclear AND more renewables, to tackle the CO2 emissions issue that we have had since 100 years now...
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Feel free to do the maths, but saying "it doesn't make financial sense" is a stupid thing to say
People who have done more than look up wikipedia entries, i.e. those actually doing due diligence are the ones who have said these investments don't make financial sense. The nuclear industry itself suffering from a never ending string of financial bailouts are the ones who say it doesn't make financial sense.
At this point unless the taxpayer builds it, it doesn't make financial sense.
By the way don't compare modern windfarms to nuclear projects started in the 70s (yeah look at the construction date for Wa
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None of the numbers are relevant anymore. Instead look to something like Flamanville 3
So you are not OK to compare numbers from a standard nuclear plant design (whose Unit 2 was built in 2016, so not strictly a 1970 nuclear plant), but you are OK to use a nuclear plant that is the first of its kind and is basically a commercial prototype? That makes sense.
Why not look at Taishan nuclear plant in that case? 2 EPR units, 1.6GWe capacity each, for $8 billion. In operation since 2019. Used lessons learned from Finland and French EPRs to standardize the design, make it more efficient, and reduce
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That's why I said:
And don't get me started on intermitency vs baseload (or on-demand, or whatever you want to call it).
Of course a power source that can have 92% uptime is more valuable than a power source that is dependent on external factors (like the wind blowing).
Interestingly, the VALCOE indicator [wikipedia.org] (value-adjusted levelized cost of electricity) is a metric devised by the International Energy Agency which includes both the cost of the electricity and the value to the electricity system. But I couldn't find a comprehensive study of its value for the different energy sources.
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5 year old technology in an industry that is rapidly advancing. Compare it to current offshore wind costs.
Auctions last year in the UK were down to £27/MWh for offshore wind.
Hinckley Point C nuclear plant is around £130/MWh, and rising. The other new one gets the same deal.
If you want to pay for that nuclear electricity, be my guest. It should be available around 2030.
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Yes, sure [twitter.com].
Fun things with wind farms is that they need either gas/coal plants to complement them, or nuclear. But why bother about the details, right?
That said, it is a good thing that offshore wind is picking up. Unlike you, I am in favor of all low-CO2 emitting energy sources, which when all (nuclear, hydro, solar, wind) used together, can make a grid that is efficient and available 99.999% of the time.
But please, keep opposing viable options in order to push your renewables-only religion.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know who "Ferg" on twitter is, but his numbers look suspect and he doesn't give sources. He shows orders declining, but installations are increasing year on year exponentially. Who is making all those windmills if not the companies he cites?
https://gwec.net/wind-turbine-... [gwec.net]
According to that those companies had a big chunk of the rapidly growing market in 2022.
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I don't know who "Ferg" on twitter is, but his numbers look suspect and he doesn't give sources.
Come on. Why do you insist on making it easy for me? This is a tweet, it's just a few words, and you still missed the source... Did you even look at it?
Sources are:
- watt-logic (independent energy consulting firm)
- bloomberg intelligence
You can find additional sources in this article. Why haven't you heard of it before you might ask? No idea. I submitted a story about that on slashdot back in April [slashdot.org], but you and/or your friends decided to downvote it because it wouldn't fit the narrative that renewables are
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The point is that the slim margins are due to the technology maturing and there being a lot of competition. The market will consolidate, so all those companies are pushing prices as low as they can in the hope of being one of the ones left standing at the end of it.
Meanwhile they have to bribe EDF with guaranteed insane profits just to build a nuclear plant. They tried literally everyone else and they all said no. Even EDF only agreed with Chinese investment, that the UK is now trying to undo.
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Stop moving the goalposts. Every time you are shown to be wrong, you like to stir up another argument that has nothing to do with the initial one.
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How about you address the issue instead of trying to avoid it?
Besides, if you want to talk about being unprofitable, trying to build nuclear plants bankrupted EDF and forced the French government to nationalize it.
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Mate, I adressed your points, and you had no answer for that so you try to shift the argument to something else. This is what you do in every one of your posts.
And to be fair, I already adressed your point in other posts, and you also had nothing to add. You keep repeating the same nonsense all the time, hoping to scare people with lies and inacurate facts.
Besides, if you want to talk about being unprofitable, trying to build nuclear plants bankrupted EDF and forced the French government to nationalize it.
EDF was never bankrupt. If you think this is because EDF was nationalised because of its debts, you just have a very bad understanding of french politics
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Having more debt than the value of your company is being bankrupt.
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Or more accurately I should say having more debt than the value of your company and being unable to service it is legal bankruptcy.
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Having more debt than the value of your company is being bankrupt.
I see. So you're as good of an economist as you are a climatologist.
Firstly, this is not the definition of being bankrupt. Here is the definition for France [insee.fr], but it is the same in every anglo-saxon country too:
A business is in a situation of failure or filing for bankruptcy from the moment when a judicial settlement procedure is opened against it.
This procedure occurs when a legal unit has suspended payments, that is, when it is no longer capable of covering its current liabilities with its available assets
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Let's have a look at the Watts Bar nuclear plant, as you say. Plant cost was $12 billion. Hornsea Wind Farm cost $9 billion.
It's not clear to me whether that cost is just the amount spent to build it, or also the amount used to service the loans taken out for its construction and pay for the risk associated with those loans. Watts Bar -- unit 1 construction began in 1973 and commercial operations began in 1996; unit 2 construction began 1972 and commercial operation began in 2016. Hornsea Wind Farm -- project 1 began construction in 2018 and started supplying power in 2019; project 2 construction began in 2020 and started supply
Now that will be interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
So far nobody has really been able to make that approach work, but material sciences have progresses quite a bit. If they actually can make a Thorium reactor work reliably and then make it economically viable, that would be the first real breakthrough in ages. Will probably take 15 to 20 years or so before success or failure becomes clear though.
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You are sure of a lot of things that are only probably true.
Even if there's no corruption getting in the way, this is a hugely complex operation, and theoretical analysis can't tell you how it's going to work in operation, or what basic thing everyone overlooked.
An actually new model is always dangerous. That's why most designs just alter the shape of the tail-fins. This is a new model, and it's got lots of untested (in this situation) features. And it's expensive. But if it works it's a real feather in
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The real problem with nuclear power is that the established ways of doing it are basically all bad in every regard. Part of that will be because the designs are _old_ and never got optimized. Part is that the approaches used may just not really be viable at all, no matter what you change or optimize. A non-established approach that gets a new design may be better in enough aspects to actually make it a good idea. Or not, but you cannot know before it has been built in a real size and run for a few years.
Nuclear power has advanced substantially (Score:1, Flamebait)
The real problem with nuclear power is that the established ways of doing it are basically all bad in every regard. Part of that will be because the designs are _old_ and never got optimized.
This is simply untrue. There are a lot of newer reactor designs, SMR (small modular reactors) would not even be a thing if what you said is true.
Luckily the entire world is suddenly waking up and realizing that years of anti-nuclear power propaganda has all been lies, and that you need something as stable as nuclear in [euractiv.com]
Re: (Score:2)
wind power will not be a thing for much longer as making wind power turbines is deeply unprofitable even when you raise the price substantially [twitter.com].
You want to hear a fun fact? I submitted a story saying exactly that, back in April of that year [slashdot.org]. It was declined and marked as "Spam" by the renewables-only fanatics on slashdot.
People are willing to bury their head in the sand so much those days...
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Yeah, the writing has been around for a while on wind... and we already know what would end wind would have anyway from the failed wind farms of decades prior.
Sorry your story was axed, that was a good one.
I like solar a lot more but nothing can touch nuclear for reliability and stability of service.
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As usual you demonstrate that you are an idiot with no clue how things work and an overactive imagination. You really can stop demonstrating that, by now we _know_.
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I wonder what the long term plan is. Reuse some nuclear waste?
15-20 years before we know if it works, then they need to scale it up to commercial size. 30-40 years before there is a return on that investment.
Even with the government funding it, that's some long term investment.
Re: (Score:2)
Will probably take 15 to 20 years or so before success or failure becomes clear though.
And by that time, practical fusion will only be 10-15 years away!
Alphatech Research Corp doing this in the US (Score:2)
https://alphatechresearchcorp.... [alphatechr...chcorp.com]
They've run it at the UofU and are now building a larger reactor in Utah.
Meanwhile United States destroying their U-233 (Score:2)
Isn't this the 2nd phase? (Score:2)
IINM, this is the 2nd phase and they've been operating a smaller test one since 2021:
https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k?t... [youtu.be]
Lots of reports on that.
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]