China To Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor In 2025 (ieee.org) 106
In 2025, China plans to start building a demonstration thorium-based molten-salt reactor in the Gobi Desert. IEEE Spectrum reports: The 10-megawatt reactor project, managed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (SINAP), is scheduled to be operational by 2030, according to an environmental-impact report released by the Academy in October. The project follows a 2-MW experimental version completed in 2021 and operated since then. China's efforts put it at the forefront of both thorium-based fuel breeding and molten-salt reactors. Several companies elsewhere in the world are developing plans for this kind of fuel or reactor, but none has yet operated one. Prior to China's pilot project, the last operating molten-salt reactor was Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, which ran on uranium. It shut down in 1969.
Thorium-232, found in igneous rocks and heavy mineral sands, is more abundant on Earth than the commonly used isotope in nuclear fuel, uranium-235. But this weakly radioactive metal isn't directly fissile -- it can't undergo fission, the splitting of atomic nuclei that produces energy. So it must first be transformed into fissile uranium-233. That's technically feasible, but whether it's economical and practical is less clear. The attraction of thorium is that it can help achieve energy self-sufficiency by reducing dependence on uranium, particularly for countries such as India with enormous thorium reserves. But China may source it in a different way: The element is a waste product of China's huge rare earth mining industry. Harnessing it would provide a practically inexhaustible supply of fuel. Already, China's Gansu province has maritime and aerospace applications in mind for this future energy supply, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency.
Scant technical details of China's reactor exist, and SINAP didn't respond to IEEE Spectrum's requests for information. The Chinese Academy of Sciences' environmental-impact report states that the molten-salt reactor core will be 3 meters in height and 2.8 meters in diameter. It will operate at 700 C and have a thermal output of 60 MW, along with 10 MW of electricity. [...] But many challenges come along with thorium use. A big one is dealing with the risk of proliferation. When thorium is transformed into uranium-233, it becomes directly usable in nuclear weapons. "It's of a quality comparable to separated plutonium and is thus very dangerous," says Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. If the fuel is circulating in and out of the reactor core during operation, this movement introduces routes for the theft of uranium-233, he says.
Thorium-232, found in igneous rocks and heavy mineral sands, is more abundant on Earth than the commonly used isotope in nuclear fuel, uranium-235. But this weakly radioactive metal isn't directly fissile -- it can't undergo fission, the splitting of atomic nuclei that produces energy. So it must first be transformed into fissile uranium-233. That's technically feasible, but whether it's economical and practical is less clear. The attraction of thorium is that it can help achieve energy self-sufficiency by reducing dependence on uranium, particularly for countries such as India with enormous thorium reserves. But China may source it in a different way: The element is a waste product of China's huge rare earth mining industry. Harnessing it would provide a practically inexhaustible supply of fuel. Already, China's Gansu province has maritime and aerospace applications in mind for this future energy supply, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency.
Scant technical details of China's reactor exist, and SINAP didn't respond to IEEE Spectrum's requests for information. The Chinese Academy of Sciences' environmental-impact report states that the molten-salt reactor core will be 3 meters in height and 2.8 meters in diameter. It will operate at 700 C and have a thermal output of 60 MW, along with 10 MW of electricity. [...] But many challenges come along with thorium use. A big one is dealing with the risk of proliferation. When thorium is transformed into uranium-233, it becomes directly usable in nuclear weapons. "It's of a quality comparable to separated plutonium and is thus very dangerous," says Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. If the fuel is circulating in and out of the reactor core during operation, this movement introduces routes for the theft of uranium-233, he says.
Hoping it works (Score:5, Insightful)
Regardless of geopolitics, if successful, this is great for humanity and likely to help with CO2 emissions. They might actually get it built in time and on budget too.
I'm not sure why they bring up proliferation. That is not a risk since China already has plenty of warheads. Anyone else who wants one would be much better served by going down the same path as everyone else's weapon programs. It's much harder to blaze the trail with completely unproven technology. As we can see with India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea and probably Iran soon, any reasonably advanced and highly motivated country can do it using uranium without anyone being able to stop them.
Re:Hoping it works (Score:4, Insightful)
You forget about theft. China isn't some Marxist paradise where everyone is happy, especially the CCP and its graft problem, not to mention graft in the rest of Chinese society. So yes indeed, proliferation IS a problem.
And if it were to make a dent in CO2 emissions, the technology would need to be use in many countries, so the proliferation problem gets worse.
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so the proliferation problem gets worse.
Graft, CO2, or Thorium/Uranium?
Re:Hoping it works (Score:5, Interesting)
Proliferation from thorium MSRs is overstated.
Yes, they produce fissile U-233.
But they also produce U-232, which is non-fissile and a hard gamma ray emitter.
Separating U-232 and U-233 is very difficult, and anyone in the vicinity of the centrifuges is gonna die.
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The risk is from protactinium-234, which is easily separatable through reprocessing and decays to fissile U-233 in about a month. From video on this, Pa-233 and Pa-234 have huge cross sections and are best removed. That doesn't mean you can't just make one without reprocessing, it just won't be almost 100% fuel efficient. Russia's BN-600 fast reactor is supposedly ~77% fuel efficient without reprocessing (this reactor is closer to the US's shelved Integral Fast Reactor - they are breeder reactors)
But yeah,
Re:Hoping it works (Score:5, Insightful)
China is responsible for 35% of the world's CO2 emissions. [wikipedia.org]
Thus, even if China is the only one doing it, it would indeed make a "dent" in emissions if widely deployed in country.
Still, if they get it working, then it can spread further to other countries.
I'm kind of sad that the USA might find itself having to contract with China to get working economical nuclear technology again, but it's better than not having it.
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even if China is the only one doing it
India is also working on a thorium MSR, but the Indians are behind the Chinese.
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Yes, India's adventure with thorium shows quite well how financially sensible the prospect is, as the Indians have been at it for nearly 70 years with zero results.
There is one molten metal reactor series still in operation and it is the Soviet BN-XXX, of which BN-600 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-600_reactor) was the first, BN-800 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor) is the second, and the projected BN-1200 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-1200_reactor) would be the third, if it really star
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It's a bad joke that a literal lifetime of development later and they are building a tiny 10MW demonstrator to try to figure out if this time they can build something that isn't an expensive white elephant.
The technology doesn't work, never will work, and even if it did it wouldn't be competitive on cost. The only innovation is that somehow people keep getting money for this old rope.
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Well, when people go all the way in, the technology does work (e.g. burning various plutonium species that breed naturally in the "normal" fuel reactors, as well as the BN-s), but your typical regulatory and development environments are such that hard work doesn't pay off, so there is little enough of it.
Regardless of the reactor type, the real key limitation - our inability to produce (or certify) reactor vessel steels that can withstand high temperatures in a radiation environment - is still here, and t
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It's not a regulatory problem. It's that every attempt to build one ended in some kind of failure, and investors are unwilling to keep throwing money at something that doesn't have a clear future return. What is the market for them on a grid dominated by renewables?
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1) Costs of nuclear, including breeders, are to a large extent a regulatory problem.
- A large portion of nuclear costs exist because of the unnecessary and complex regulations, certification procedures and the associated corruption. The driver for a lot of this is the irrational fear of nuclear power that exists because of ignorance and is stalked by vested interests from the pseudo-green, oil-and-gas sponsored anti-nuke lobby.
- Technology advances are blocked by the heavy regimes for obtaining research per
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The reason for the regulatory stuff is that it's basically an unlimited insurance liability that the government has to take on, because no commercial insurer would touch it.
The examples you gave didn't work properly and revealed problems that have yet to be solved.
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The reason for the regulatory stuff is that it's basically an unlimited insurance liability that the government has to take on, because no commercial insurer would touch it.
LOL.
No. The real reason is that it is a large and unlimited feeding rack where a metric shitload of ignorant "experts" and lawyers (and the politicians they front for) get very, very fat.
The examples you gave didn't work properly and revealed problems that have yet to be solved.
Yeah? Really? I'm all ears, what specific significant problems have been revealed by, say, BN-800 that have "yet to be solved". Links to technical reports, please.
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Wait, you actually believe that
A) Russia would tell us about problems
and
B) Russia has solved all the problems that proved intractable for us.
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Okay, so you've got nothing. Thought so.
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All you've got is "let's build a Russian reactor!"
Good luck with that, and the insurance.
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Let's recoup your attempt:
You: no breeder reactors exist, "every attempt to build one ended in some kind of failure".
I: yes, they do exist, here's three examples with long operational history
You: "The examples you gave didn't work properly and revealed problems that have yet to be solved."
I: what specific significant problems have been revealed?
You: crickets
Try again :)
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The Chinese reactors are stated to be experiments ("Demonstration")
The Indian efforts have not yielded success after 70 years, as per the article.
Why do you think that the Chinese or Russia have the same regulatory environment that Europe/The USA have?
Back when Tianeman Square happened, China happily killed
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Same reason why russkies operated the RBMK reactors like those in the infamous Chernobyl plant.
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It is an open question if they actually reprocessed plutonium, but the possibility for dual mode - power and breeder - was included in the design of their "channel-type" reactors from the outset, as their specialized reactors were too expensive and burdensome to maintain.
The design and operation history is discussed at length in this book, if you're interested and have the time and inclination:
https://elib.biblioatom.ru/tex... [biblioatom.ru]
AFAIK there is no English translation, but these days it is less of a problem.
Re:Hoping it works (Score:4, Informative)
this is great for humanity and likely to help with CO2 emissions.
No. This is a 10 MW reactor, which is nothing.
That's enough power for one neighborhood or one factory.
We should be disappointed that China's 2 MW reactor is being scaled up so slowly.
China needs 10 GW reactors, not 10 MW.
order 1000 of them on aliexpress (Score:3)
if you need 10GW just order 1000 them on aliexpress...
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Nobody else is doing this faster, so why do you say they're not fast enough? What expected rate of progress are you comparing it to?
Like any new tech, they'll build more once they validated the concept. Looking at the rate of traditional nuclear projects in China, it seems they can crank out about 3-5 GW of new capacity per year, which absolutely does make a difference. If thorium turns out to be safer and more economical, this should accelerate significantly.
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Nobody else is doing this faster, so why do you say they're not fast enough?
Because it's not fast enough.
Just because others are doing even worse doesn't excuse China's slow progress.
What expected rate of progress are you comparing it to?
I'm comparing it with all the new coal plants being built.
they'll build more once they validated the concept.
China has already built a 2 MW MSR.
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But the fact is, parent is right. It's 10MW.
This isn't going to make one iota of a difference in any realistic scale.
The best it can do, is serve as inspiration for people to build plants of actual consequence.
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A windmill is what 2MW? The experiment is clearly for theory not practical. The headline is bullshit. They arent building a Thorium reactor. They are building a U-233 reactor. Apparently it currently costs $46million to make 1kg of U-233. While I find the subject interesting to study, unless there is a cheap or free source of neutron flux to expose Th-232 to, its not going to be cheap or easy. I need to see your U-232 reaction because thats new info. The reaction I saw was Th-232 + N -> Th-233(beta-) -
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U-233 isn't the end product.
U-233 is fissile. It absorbs neutrons and fissions while emitting several neutrons.
Overall, the reaction chain produces enough neutrons to keep the reactor going.
The problem is that you can't start with Th-232. You need some U-233 to kick-start the reactor.
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I assumed the u-233 was made externally. Traditionally we tried to keep neutron absorbers away from the reactions unless you want to halt the reactions. Th-232 and Pa-233 are both neutron absorbers. Seems like you wouldnt want them anywhere near the reactive mass. So your saying instead of halfnium control rods your dispersing a predetermined anount of thorium to absorb neutrons in order to both breed more u-233 as well as curb reactivity?
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One of the advantages of a liquid fuel design is that the two most significant fission product poisons (iodine and xenon) can easily be removed from the solution since they are gasses at those temperatures. This frees up a large fraction of the neutron budget which can then be used to transmute thorium into uranium.
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Thorium reactors are started with U-235.
Is that what China uses?
U-235, U-233, and Pu-239 can all be used. There are advantages and disadvantages to each.
The problem with U-233 is it comes contaminated with U-232, which is a dangerous gamma emitter.
U-235 and Pu-239 are proliferation risks.
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The big ones are between 14 - 16MW, the biggest is 20MW, obviously the two largest ones are Chinese products.
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Each!
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uhh not even fucking close. You suck at both math and research. 1 nuclear reactor on a aircraft carrier is 550MW of thermal power not electrical. 500mw indeed. SMH
https://www.ewea.org/wind-ener... [ewea.org].
How much electricity can one wind turbine generate?
The output of a wind turbine depends on the turbine's size and the wind's speed through the rotor.
An average onshore wind turbine with a capacity of 2.5–3 MW can produce more than 6 million kWh in a year – enough to supply 1,500 average EU households with electricity.
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So, I was off by a factor of 5, but still 50 households is FUCKING NOTHING in a country of 1.4 Billion people, you fucking asshat.
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again, bad at math. 500 divided by 2.5 = 200. you were off by a factor of 200 not a factor of 5. how much power someone uses is irrelevant to the peak load of a generator. a single windmill makes 2.5MW of power under perfect conditions. Thats with peak wind and peak efficiency.
The OP you replied to pointed out the fact that a 10MW reactor is clearly not a production reactor but a theory-to-practice prototype. When a single windmill produces 2MW then just 5 windmill begins to reach the output of this reacto
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No one knows - yet - how to build or run a 10GW reactor.
The biggest "conventional" nuclear reactors are around 1.5GW, with a handful slightly above it.
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
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Building a 10 GW or even 100 GW nuclear reactor is no big deal. There are no special engineering challenges and reactors of that size would substantially more cost effective to build because construction and operation costs scale less than linearly.
The only problem is finding practical ways to consume all energy. Nobody wants a 100 GW point source of electricity on the grid because even if you build the transmission lines to distribute all that power one plant would be such a large fraction of the supply th
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If 10GW was not a big deal, we had them.
You have a point with "single point of failure", though.
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There's a reason that 1-2 GW is the upper limit of electrical generation plants regardless of type. We could build 10 GW coal or natural gas power plants but don't because the limiting factor is distribution and grid stability, not the generators.
Re:Hoping it works (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a certain amount of logic to scaling something slowly so you don't accidentally blow radioactive hazardous waste all over the region you built it in.
Slower is smoother, smoother is faster.
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Uneconomic. (Score:2)
>> this is great for humanity and likely to help with CO2 emissions.
Nope, it is not.
1) Not economic
2) Too small, 10MW is nothing
3) unproven
Same investment in renewable will yield 100x more kWh, so reduce CO2 100x more.
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Nope, it is not.
1) Not economic
2) Too small, 10MW is nothing
3) unproven
The same could be said of many solar power projects but we see all kinds of money dumped into those.
Molten salt reactors were proven to work many decades ago. There's no question that we can sustain fission, extract heat, then convert that to some kind of useful work. What is being worked on is the engineering challenges of cost and safety. Even then the safety issues are largely solved. A concern from early experiments that with the heat and corrosive salts the materials that make up the reactor could
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Molten salt reactors were proven to work many decades ago.
Not really. So far nobody solved the problem of corrosion, the molten fluoride salt produces hot fluorine radicals that can eat through pretty much _anything_. And fission byproducts (including iodine, gallium and other nice elements) would remove any passivation film on any material.
Regular pressurized-water reactors are now expected to last for 75-100 years. A thorium reactor would last at most 5 with the best possible materials.
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We have resistant alloyed since several decades, probably even 50 years.
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It's not a problem in normal reactors because these byproducts are confined inside the fuel tablets, which themselves are confined in fuel rods. And the reactor vessel walls are in contact only with pure water.
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Well, your knowledge is outdated.
And I am to lazy to google in English to find relevant links.
The current molten salt reactors obviously use alloys that work, right?
If you want to know the names of the alloys, you have to google that/research that your self.
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The fundamentals of alloys ..... are Chemistry. Not Physics.
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Solar power would certainly not be as prevalent as it is now if it was held to the same standards as nuclear power on proving to be economic before any prototypes could be produced
What kind of nonsense false dichotomy is this?
Please point out the several hundred square miles of Earth still regarded as uninhabitable from a "solar power accident" 40 years ago and maybe you'll realize why the two generation schemes have different regulatory standards to get permission to operate. The only way solar power kills someone is if they fall off the god damn roof, or electrocute themselves.
Also, please tell me the average cleanup and decommissioning cost of a solar power generation facility af
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Solar is proven technology, from very small domestic installations to massive farms. Payback guaranteed. It's so cheap that people are putting it on their south facing balconies.
Thorium reactors have been failing for 70 years now. Another 10MW mini demonstrator isn't going to be the breakthrough it needs.
Might be economic (Score:2)
Post above stress it is only 10MW and it should be 10GW.
But vertical scaling is not the option.
If China finds a way to produce it at low cost (at which it excels) - 1000 of such reactors can bring 10GW.
And ability to put reactor where it is needed, without the extra cost of transmission lines would do wonders for the poorer half of the world... powering Chinese mines and factories all over the world...
If they are able to mass produce small reactors with their technology and fueled with their cheap thorium -
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10MW is about the same as 5 wind turbines.
Why the hell would they spend all the money and time to build 1000 * 10MW reactors at $100+m per with the waste streams they would produce and multi-year ramp-up time, when they could build 5000 wind turbines at less than $10m per, and have it all operating next year?
This isn't a commercial design. It's a scale-up research design on the way to making bigger, more economical designs that make sense to build multiple of. It's also why they're building it in the midd
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I'm not sure why they bring up proliferation.
Because anything "nukular" scares them as they view all nuclear technology through the lens of producing weapons.
As stated by others here any thorium molten salt reactor would produce enough U-232 and U-234 to make the U-233 worthless for weapons. U-232 is a strong gamma emitter and likes to spontaneously fission, while U-234 is an isotope that likes to eat neutrons.
In a nuclear reactor a spontaneous fission isn't a concern since fission would be happening all the time. A spontaneous fission could be help
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You have to mention proliferation in any article talking about breeder reactors to add some existential angst (i.e. human interest) and also to provide a credible reason why China is actively developing this technology and the US stopped in the sixties.
Ignore the proliferation risk (Score:1)
China already has nuclear weapons. And uranium-233 isn't the isotope of choice for bombs.
Not that China cares about the Union of Concerned Scientists. Does anyone? They've been crying wolf for decades.
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Here's a question for them: Is a drowned city morally superior to one hit by a nuclear bomb? Are people who starve to death because of crop disruptiong because of climate change better than those that die to violence? How about those that die of the various diseases caused by pollution?
Basically, in my mind the avoidance of nuclear power, one of the cleanest we have, has killed more people than all the nuclear bombs used in war.
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"Is a drowned city morally superior to one hit by a nuclear bomb"
A city drowned by a 1 mm per year sea level rise is much superior to one incinerated by a nuclear bomb. The former leaves plenty of time for a leisurely and orderly evacuation. The latter does not.
Otherwise you are correct. Greenpeace shutting down nuclear in favor of coal has killed lots of people.
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Except that Greenpeace never was in favour for coal.
Re: Ignore the proliferation risk (Score:2)
"Basically, in my mind the avoidance of nuclear power, one of the cleanest we have"
It involves more lifetime CO2 release than solar or wind, so no and also no. Nuclear is more expensive and less clean than other options.
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Not really. They're within fractions of each other. And all orders of magnitude less than hydrocarbon power.
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It's close up to solar, but far from wind. But it has all of its other effects downstream, and costs far more. You could spend that money more effectively by spending more of it on renewables (and redundant infrastructure for the same, that would also carry more current in the aggregate) and solve your problems with where the wind isn't blowing without creating nuclear waste.
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China provides 95% of all rare earth elements, which are strip mined and because of no pollution concerns and just dumped into radioactive landfills. They can undercut the west because they really have to have pollution controls. Also, China requires manufacturing to be done in country - yep, your solar panels and wind turbines have to have parts like motors manufactured in China to get their cheap rates. The benefit of building a thorium reactor in China is radioactive waste (thorium) that is found with r
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The GQP party operates on the principle if they deny the existence of a problem, then they can profit off the industries producing the problem.
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Re:Ignore the proliferation risk (Score:4, Insightful)
i still see a uni-party.
Politicians in democracies inherently tend to be similar because the most likely position to get them elected is the position that most people in the country have. Thus, there are no politicians proposing "death to the children; electrocute Bambi". The way that you get change is by identifying tiny differences between groups of politicians and amplifying them by voting systematically for the ones that are slightly better than the others. For example, if you believe in "death to children" then in the UK you vote for Reform UK or the Conservatives because, even though they won't admit it, they have a record of taking money away from families, so they are the closest you can get.
The idea of a "uni-party" is a mind virus designed to disable people's effective ability to operate in a democracy. By trying to get people to think "all politicians are the same" instead of "some politicians are slightly different", the people who are talking about a uni-party are trying to get the people they are addressing to stop voting or take less care when they vote, thus eliminating their influence on the politicians.
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Much of that in the USA is due to Citizens United where we have legalized corruption. When you have one jackass that can threaten to "primary" anyone who doesn't fall in line, and that is legal, that shows a country in decline.
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It just means the existing political divide does not represent your opinions.
The USA clearly are two parties, with opposed idea on e.g. abortion rights, openness to immigration, the level of rivalry with China, the level of cooperation with Europe, the level of commitment with international organizations (UN, NATO, WHO) and their decisions (e.g. participation in the Paris climate agreements), the level of taxpayer money support to the conflict in Ukraine. (There certainly are more topics, but as an external
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Except in the case of insurance companies which are abandoning places experiencing severe weather and rising sea levels due to climate change. Such as Florida [newsweek.com].
What you can do... (Score:4, Insightful)
When you don't have anti-science conservatives that block EVERYTHING that might actually improve things, then things like this could actually get done.
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Wait, what? Since when did conservatives stop people from toying with thorium reactors?
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This is the sort of thing that you want the government behind and working on. If you leave it to the private sector, you end up with projects that get dropped due to a change in the economy, such as, "Interest rates went up, we can't borrow that much money for cheap!". Conservatives being against the government doing things and trying to push EVERYTHING to be privatized is how you kill projects like this.
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. . . I guess? Historically, Republicans have been far more pro-nuclear than Democrats.
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It's the Left that has been blocking nuclear power. The high upfront capital cost of the reactors doesn't help either.
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Nuclear is simply too expensive. Look at the Barakah plant in the UAE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
No leftists to get in the way and it ended up costing way dollars and time than estimated.
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The wiki page does not look "that bad" - after all they built 4 reactors simultaneously.
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Fast reactors can burn 70%-99.5% of their fuel (depending on reprocessing) and modern ones don't need massive, expensive containment vessels (you can bury them if you're worried about, say, an aircraft crashing into them, they're passively safe). 1950s Light water reactors burn between .5 to 5% of their fuel and require massive and expensive containment vessels. Light Water Reactors ARE too expensive, no argument there. Fast fission designs are the way to go - we can even promote nuclear waste (U-238) to pl
The USA will follow in about three years (Score:3)
History tells me that whenever some adversary to the USA proves some technological leap then the USA will meet or exceed that feat in less than 3 years. We've seen nuclear power reactors built in less than 3 years before, we can do it again. If or when China has a thorium-fueled molten salt reactor producing power to their electrical grid then that's motivation for people in the USA to dust off some of the old and nearly forgotten thorium molten salt reactor designs from decades ago. Some of the men that worked on these reactors are still around and apparently have a decent recollection of what they did, possibly they have notes that they kept that are not in some archive.
When it comes to weapon proliferation risks from thorium reactors there's nothing to worry about with U-233. There's two big problems that hasn't been solved. First, nobody has built a working U-233 bomb. There's been tests with bombs that had U-233 as part of the core but they were considered "fizzles". That doesn't mean they didn't make a big hole in the ground, it means that they did not meet expected yield so the belief is that little of the U-233 had undergone fission upon detonation. The second and likely larger issue is that a molten salt reactor that uses thorium as fuel will see U-232 and U-234 being mixed with the U-233. There's no easy way to avoid production of U-232 and U-234 in a thorium molten salt reactor, and once mixed in with U-233 it is difficult to separate. The process to separate U-233 from other uranium isotopes is identical to that of separating U-235 from U-238 in natural uranium, if anyone has that capability then they could avoid the expense of operating a reactor and just mine and process naturally occurring uranium instead to make weapons.
What is likely a much larger concern is producing Pu-239. I wish I could recall the details but I had a conversation online with some nuclear engineers that claimed thorium fueled molten salt reactors could be used to produced valuable Pu-238. Pu-238 is a relatively short lived isotope that is highly valued by NASA as RTG fuel, RTG is for radioisotope thermal generators or "nuclear batteries". Again I don't recall the details but I did some math on how much Pu-239 would be produced in addition to the Pu-238, something about the math didn't look right to me, and I'm not a nuclear engineer. In my math I was able to show that what would come out the end would be weapon grade Pu-239. I presented this to the nuclear engineer, again this is through an online forum much like this so we never met, and it seems he at least halfway agreed with me. I don't recall anything that flat out said my math was correct, I did see promotion of Pu-238 production from molten salt reactors had stopped as well as other evidence I was correct. If someone believes otherwise then they can dig up the numbers and do the math themselves.
I'll stress this again since I know someone will want to fight me on this. I don't recall all the details, but I do recall that the math was rather trivial for someone with some first year university level understanding of chemistry, physics, and statistics. Under the right conditions a thorium molten salt reactor could produce weapon grade plutonium. U-233 is not the problem, it is plutonium. It's easy to prevent weapon grade plutonium from being extracted from such a reactor, and if anyone tried it should be abundantly obvious. Plutonium producing reactors have been found from space before with satellites, it's likely that a molten salt reactor producing weapon grade material would be just as obvious as a traditional water cooled solid fuel reactor doing the same.
Re:The USA will follow in about three years (Score:4, Interesting)
A reactor burning pure U-233 would produce very little in the way of transuranics.
The thing about a liquid fuel reactor though is that since you don't need to disassemble it or even shut it down to add more fuel you have an unprecedented flexibility in terms of what you can burn. Within certain limits you can use almost any fuel mixture.
The most obvious way to scale up a MSR industry is to start out burning a traditional U-235 / U-238 fuel mix while you breed U-233 from thorium. Then once U-233 production is sufficient you can quit enriching to obtain U-235 and just replace it with U-233 while still using U-238 (natural unprocessed uranium) for the bulk of the fuel. If for example your MSR design can tolerate 10% U-233 (U-235) / 90% U-238 then you can scale up the industry ten times faster than if you tried to start out using 100% U-233 from the very beginning.
At some point in the future when you are no longer increasing the reactor count at a rate that exceeds the achievable breeding rate of U-233 you can start increasing the U-233 / U-238 ratio until eventually you no longer need U-238 at all.
Along the way you can decide how to allocate your spare neutron budget. When you no longer need to breed U-233 as rapidly as possible some of those spare neutrons can be used to dispose of problematic isotopes, decommissioned nuclear weapons, etc, but in the early stages you are running reactors that use a substantial amount of U-238 so they would produce as many transuranics as traditional reactors produce.
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A reactor burning pure U-233 would produce very little in the way of transuranics.
I agree, but further into your comments you mention having a traditional U-235/U-238 mix fuel in with the thorium. If there's U-238 in the fuel then that's going to produce Pu-239. Do you perhaps see the issue now?
What I've seen proposed as the "starter fuel" for thorium reactors is plutonium. By using plutonium than enriched uranium it keeps uranium isotopes other than U-233 to a minimum, and that simplifies the chemistry. Or something like that, it gets complicated quickly so I'm not sure how to summa
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History tells me that whenever some adversary to the USA proves some technological leap then the USA will meet or exceed that feat in less than 3 years.
I think you have blinders on here. An easy example would be the Chinese high-speed rail system, or the Japanese system, or even the rail systems found in much of Europe. While not all of the U.S. is suitable for this (e.g.: the plains states), the eastern seaboard would benefit enormously. But we can't get our act together and have a pitiful system. And the Chineses have created a comprehensive high-speed rail system covering an area roughly the size of the U.S. (including Alaska). Amtrack's coverage of the
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fuck off macTROLL
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The technology those men developed doesn't work. That's why it was abandoned.
In the unlikely event of China's one working, which realistically we won't know for at least 15 years because it takes that long to see if there are any medium term problems, the US could steal their technology... But probably won't, because by then renewables will have completely dominated the industry with unbeatable lower costs.
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Not even close - it was abandoned because Richard Nixon wanted to protect his home state's construction of dozens of light water reactors. Alvin Weinberg said he had a great new reactor design that was passively safe and Nixon fired him and buried the project to protect jobs in California. Actual issues were discovered decades later during cleanup and have modern solutions.
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We keep having people claiming they have some new wonder design that can't fail. They never work out.
Just use lead (Score:2)
Russia is planning to finish a 200 MW pure lead fast reactor in 2026. MSR is decades away at best and sodium is a dumpster fire. Lead is the closest of the next gen designs after sodium.
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Russia already has fast reactors - BN-300, BN-600, BN-800, BN-1200 (in development). No idea about lead reactors, but way ahead of the US, which abandoned them in 1994 (thanks John Kerry, do some research next time).
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BN-300 caught fire all the time. BN-600 has some redundant systems so it can keep running while shit catches fire and all the nukees are using that single example to maintain their fantasy of liquid sodium cooling not being batshit insane.
Nukees brought the failure of fast reactors on themselves. Decades of sodium fires forgotten because of ONE reactor not needing a costly shutdown. No, bad nukees ... don't get sodium on the concrete. I suspect the only fix will be to push their noses in the liquid sodium,
Molten salt reactor to be built in US (Score:2)