It marks the first long-term, stable operation of the technology, putting China at the forefront of a global race to harness thorium – considered a safer and more abundant alternative to uranium – for nuclear power.
The experimental reactor, located in the Gobi Desert in China’s west, uses molten salt as the fuel carrier and coolant, and thorium – a radioactive element abundant in the Earth’s crust – as the fuel source. The reactor is reportedly designed to sustainably generate 2 megawatts of thermal power.
Refreshing not to see the comment section full of anti-nuclear brainlets. For a second I thought Lemmy was a Greenpeace hot-spot.
Anyway…
One good turn deserves another. If others won’t follow because of good example, hopefully other countries will instead follow because of competition.
green peace is cool and all, but nuclear the only way forward, other than asking everyone nicely to use much less energy…
and supposedly the new molten salt thorium reactor design automatically shuts itself off and basically can’t have a meltdown… if that’s real it’s a great way forward….
well, except for all the nuclear waste, but i’m sure they’ll figure that out too….Radioactive nuclear materials comes from the Earth. All one has to do is put it back in the Earth. Finland built a massive underground nuclear waste storage facility, but there are also technologies being developed to reclaim nuclear waste (because only a very small amount if the material actually gets used in the fission process).
pretty sure it’s not so simple….
For anyone not familiar with thorium…
Thorium is a great nuclear fuel. Much much safer than the uranium we currently use, because the reaction works best only within a narrow temperature band. Unlike uranium which can run away, a thorium reactor would become less efficient as it overheats possibly preventing a huge problem. That means the fuel must be melted into liquid to achieve the right temperature. That also provides a safety mechanism, you simply put a melt plug in the bottom of the reactor so if the reactor overheats the plug melts and all the fuel pours out into some safe containment system. This makes a Chernobyl / Fukushima style meltdown essentially impossible.
There are other benefits to this. The molten fuel can contain other elements as well, meaning a thorium reactor can actually consume nuclear waste from a uranium reactor as part of its fuel mix. The resulting waste from a thorium reactor is radioactive for dozens or hundreds of years not tens of thousands of years so you don’t need a giant Yucca Mountain style disposal site.
And thorium is easy to find. Currently it is an undesirable waste product of mining other things, we have enough of it in waste piles to run our whole civilization for like 100 years. And there’s plenty more to dig up.There are challenges though. The molten uranium is usually contained in a molten salt solution, which is corrosive. This creates issues for pipes, pumps, valves, etc. The fuel also needs frequent reprocessing, meaning a truly viable thorium plant would most likely have a fuel processing facility as part of the plant.
The problems however are not unsolvable, Even with current technology. We actually had some research reactors running on thorium in the mid-1900s but uranium got the official endorsement, perhaps because you can’t use a thorium reactor to build bombs. So we basically abandoned the technology.
China has been heavily investing in thorium for a while. This appears to be one of the results of that investment. Now this is a tiny baby reactor, basically a lab toy, a proof of concept. Don’t expect this to power anybody’s house. The point is though, it works. You have a 2 megawatt working reactor today, next you build a 20 megawatt demonstrator, then you start building out 200 megawatt units to attach to the power grid.
Obviously I have no crystal ball. But if this technology works, this is the start of something very big. I am sure China will continue developing this tech full throttle. If they make it work at scale, China becomes the first country in the world that essentially has unlimited energy. And then the rest of the world is buying their thorium reactors from China.
Thanks for a thorough explanation.
Very nice explanation and only nitpicking, but saying that Thorium is much much safer than uranium implies that uranium nuclear plants are unsafe. In reality uranium nuclear power has one of the best safety records in energy production.
Uranium reactors are for the most part very safe, and I personally think we should consider building more of them. The problem with them is when something goes wrong, it can go very very wrong contaminating a huge area. Now granted more modern reactor designs make that sort of issue much less likely, but the worst case scenario of a uranium reactor, no matter how unlikely, is still a lot worse than the worst case scenario of a thorium reactor.
You absolutely can make a nuke out of thorium-derived material (first in Teapot MET, 1955, then possibly later by India). It’s not widely used because plutonium is similar and in some important ways superior material
The tradeoff in using salt as fuel/coolant is that now almost all the fission products are in soluble form, instead of nice ceramic chemically inert pellets, which makes any spill much worse, and i wouldn’t say it’s safer for this reason - it’s different, and it’s a tradeoff few thought it is worth making. We have figured out how to make PWRs not explode so it’s not that big of a problem. This goes both for uranium or thorium as a fuel
The reason Yucca Mountain is needed is that nuclear waste exists, if US reversed their policy on reprocessing maybe it wouldn’t fill up so quickly. It’s a matter of political will
At least now, the chemical engineering for reprocessing fuel when reactor is on is not there. Maybe it’ll get developed in this project, but this didn’t happen yet. It all has to be weighed against existing alternatives, and it’s possible to breed 233U in normal water-based reactors, so maybe there’s a little reason to make MSRs in the first place. India has some thorium energy projects as well, but they’re slowed down by lack of fissile material to bootstrap it (you can’t fuel reactor using thorium only, it needs some fissile material)
The problems however are not unsolvable
Meaning that they are not solved. I don’t want the grid in my country powered by tech that is not proven safe, reliable, and with a good ROI.
Much much safer than the uranium we currently use
Potentially. It’s not a technology proven in large-scale operational use.
If they make it work at scale, China becomes the first country in the world that essentially has unlimited energy.
If my aunt were to have bollocks, she’d be my uncle.
The “if” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your sentence. And “unlimited energy” is a gross exaggeration. There are still downstream costs and environmental damage.
It’s a matter of implementation versus invention.
If I asked you to build a hundred story skyscraper, that would be difficult, but we already have all of the technical components. All the component problems are already solved- we know how to make high quality steel, we know how to design the frame of such a building, we know how to anchor it into the ground, etc. You just need to put those technologies together in a functional design.
If I asked you to build me a spacecraft that goes faster than light, you couldn’t, because that sort of propulsion system has never been built. And while we have theories on how one might build it, we don’t currently have the capability to build any of those theoretical drive systems even as test articles (mainly because they need things in space larger than we have the capability to launch or will have the capability to launch anytime soon).
But if I asked you to build a thorium reactor, all of the component problems have been solved. We have a lot of coatings that resist corrosion, and so making valves and pipes out of them (and more importantly, designing the system of valves and pipes) takes work but we know how to do it. We understand how to make and process thorium fuel, even if we don’t have much experience doing it.
As for your grid, I don’t want my grade either powered by text that isn’t safe reliable and productive, but the fact is we don’t have that right now. A lot of power still comes from coal and similar shitty sources. So I will absolutely take less shitty.
Yeah I use the word if a lot, but that has a level of probability associated with it. I can say if we figure out a way to generate power from magic pixie dust tomorrow our energy problems will be solved but there’s no probability of that. Here there is a technology that has been known to work since the 1900s, that we have built research reactors on, and that is now being actively developed. The “if” here has a high degree of probability.
Me opening the comment section knowing that its just gonna be a bunch of racism… like i get it i hate the chinese government as well but give credit to the millions of scientists and people who are actually trying to make life better on this earth. If something isnt american, it can still be nice to have.
I personally believe the CCP is doing an amazing job. Communism is working wonderfully
EDIT: Anti-communists are hilarious. “It’s not communism but capitalism.” And if it is communism, then it is evil because communism bad. Or some made up stuff about uyghurs or queer people.
It’s not communism, it’s state-capitalism
I don’t think it’s communism anymore but the Chinese gov are actually looking after their own citizens in my opinion. I kind wish Xi was in charge of the UK honestly.
They tend to think of everything long term and all of those projects are paying off, also Healthcare free education etc they are investing more in their own population than anyone else. US is in my opinion as UK guy pretty much done they’ve picked a fight that they won’t win.
Their own citizens…except for LGBTQ people or uyghurs of course.
Every time I read a headline about how there’s a genocide in Xinjiang, it’s in the same newspaper that insists Israel Has The Right To Defend Itself and Yemen needs to be bombed to powder.
At some point, it reads like liberal agitprop. An excuse to scare liberals into hating a foreign country so we can justify… what? Tariffs? TikTok bans? Nuclear war?
Same with LGBTQ rights. We’ve got a DOGE department doing a pogrom on “woke” government workers while I still get an earful about how mean China is to minority groups?
What am I supposed to take away from this?
Well if you want a first hand account: I went to Shanghai with some friends recently, one has family and friends there, so knows the city. We went to the only lesbian bar in all of this huge metropolis. Note that I’m a guy. But due to being closed down before, the place seemed to be rather glad to have some euro faces in there, as a show for the cop car parked right in front of it the whole night.
My friend also told me, that the amount of beggars was really low this time, because they all got picked up and brought to somewhere else.
So all in all I think it’s an efficiently run country, but you don’t get around pushing some people out if you want efficiency. Humans are all different, if you want to consider everyone’s opinion it takes a lot of time (which China did not have in the last few decades). So some opinions are forced out rather brutally.
But, all in all: Go there, experience it yourself.
That the world isn’t black and white, and both sides can be awful at the same time.
Sometimes a country will inflate the appearance of problems in an enemy nation in order to stoke resentment at home and justify military action abroad.
In Iraq, we made up a bunch of lies about soldiers murdering babies in incubators. After Vietnam, we had Cold Warriors repeating the POW/MIA lies that suggested they were holding hundreds of American hostages for decades, in order to justify continued sanctions and embargos. The slanders against Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Iran have been relentless, all while the US conducted insidious guerrilla wars that have raped, mutilated, and killed countless civilians.
At some point “Both Sides Are Bad” doesn’t cut it. You have to address your own nation’s sins - the lies, the sabotage, the assassinations and us sponsored genocides - before a rational listener can take criticism of your political rivals seriously.
The Uyghur genocide situation has been confirmed by multiple countries, please don’t start a genocide denial debate here.
Idk… I have my ifs and buts about China. If you don’t believe in human rights, well love China! I’m not saying everyone in China is bad (but there are evil individuals like in US and NK). And watching Human Harvest, jeez…
The “human rights” standard of western imperialist countries is laughable hypocrisy. The US alone makes China look like the paragon of justice.
Tell it to the Uyghurs.
Tell it to the American Blacks in prison. Glass houses. We’re all bad.
They’re not being subjected to a genocide.
Fake ass western propaganda “genocide” my ass
You’re uncritically guzzling the CIA line
All of the supposed “evidence” comes from Adrian Zenz, who is a religious zealot who thinks it is his “god-given mission to destroy China.”
https://medium.com/@braisedporkblog/debunking-the-uyghur-genocide-a-resource-list-a31dd0ea3d87
Where do you get racism? Did you just want to complain about racism?
Too lazy to scroll down an inch or two to see the comments questioning the tech just because it’s China or making unrelated anti-China comments?
Again, what the hell does that have to do with race? China is not a race.
If true, this is a huge step! Congrats to China!
“Strategic stamina” is something that the US used to have but which has disappeared as the country just tries to catch its breath.
America has been strategically sitting on a couch eating strategic cheeseburgers for the past 50 years
If it’s true, China has energy security for the foreseeable future - as Thorium is usually found along side rare earths, and China has the largest deposits of those. More than anywhere else in the world.
I don’t mean to be a pessimist, but we’ll see how it lasts and scales 😅 it’s certainly promising, but 2MW also isn’t much. I’m curious how large they can scale single reactors, and how close they can safely be to populations - one of the problems with nuclear always ends up being transporting the energy (usually quite far away) once you’ve generated it.
Isn’t the loint of Thorium reactors that they are small and modular, thus highly scalable by multiplying units. Your comment about scaling a single reactor is a cheap rhetorical device to miss the point entirely.
Scaling small things up is always a logistics and repeatability issue. Always.
We had.technology to put a capsule of three men on the moon for a week before most humans alive today were born, and yet we haven’t gone back because while both “number of humans” and “length of stay” are fairly simple ideas to scale up, we never had the logistics to create and fuel the one.saturn V launch every other day that a permanent moon base would need.
Heck, the Internet is full of ground breaking improvements that were “buried” by the challenge of scaling up out of a lab.
Thanks for the archive link, OP. Shit that site was cancerous
On most of the fediverse, I find discussions really great with no idiots/trolls… apart from technology. Here it seems some get triggered by any tech from outside the US.
This announcement would be seen as a massive breakthrough anywhere else. China has its problems, I’m fully aware of the red flags and government influence. But only a fool would question their technological advances at this point. They are moving ahead at lightning speed, especially in energy and battery tech.
Even on the consumer side, Huawei invested more in R&D last year than Samsung or Intel. Huawei consumer division could have been expected to be dead by now with the chip ban, yet survived and are thriving again. Not because the Chinese were forced to by their phones, Apple still sell in China, but because they innovated like hell. A Chinese buyer has the option today of buying a tri-folding tablet phone with super fast charging or an American designed device with 3 year old tech (chip aside). Americans don’t have that choice.
Its also the reason why traditional European car brands are tanking in China. VW can no longer expect to sell on prestige alone. Here in Britain, our consumer tech offering is already almost non existent. We no longer have a true British owned car company. Our famous Mini was sold to the Germans. Jaguar/Range Rover to the Indians. MG to the Chinese. Its depressing. But I do feel fortunate to at least have choice (we can buy a BYD or Xiaomi here) and that I’m not subject to only American tech reporting. BYD will later this year have 7 different car models on sale in Britain vs 6 (soon to be 5) from Ford. This is a paradigm shift, considering for almost the last 20 years Ford had at least 2 cars in the top 5 best sellers in the UK.
Apologies for going off on one. But i’d highly recommend US readers check out Chinese tech sites from time to time (eg carnewschina/huawei central etc) rather than just relying on the verge. Sure not all Chinese tech will be successful, sure some designs may be clones, but the shear scale of investment from China will make them unstoppable. I believe the changing of the guard happened a while ago, where about to see it play out in all industries…
But it’s not a market based solution! It’s centrally planned and it’s possible no one is even making phat profits from this! Highly unethical!
Jaguar Land Rover may be owned by Tata, an Indian financial holding company, but they’re still based in the UK, designed in the UK, built in the UK.
That was broadly the same for Mini too until the most recent generation, where the EV version is actually a Chinese car.
I think Android went pretty horribly since Huawei stopped making contributions, They contributed more than any other company up until the ban including Google who own it.
I kinda expect in about 5 years Harmony is going to take Androids dinner.
China has its problems, I’m fully aware of the red flags
I see what you did here
People on Lemmy are really good at seeing past capitalist propaganda, except when it comes to China. At that point it’s just straight up US state department talking points.
People on Lemmy are really good at seeing past capitalist propaganda, except when it comes to China.
Any information coming to the West from China is state capitalist propaganda.
Yeah yeah, keep telling yourself that buddy.
I’m sure you also used that cope when Harvard university (that well-known Chinese university) found 95.5% of Chinese people are happy with their government, compared to only 38% of USians.
“95.5% of people who are forced to say they like their government say they like their government”
You should be more skeptical, anything that claims to have a 95% approval rating is probably not telling the truth.
Prove it.
Forced by Harvard university? :)
I have no issues believing that number because the Chinese standard of living has been rising substantially as the decades go. That is trivial to confirm.
You’re the one who should be more skeptical of anything that comes from the US. As it stands you don’t believe anything that comes from China, but believe anything that comes from the US about China.
Sounds like you should start applying more neutral standards to how you process information. The world isn’t that black or white.
What are you on about?
Nearly every upvoted comment is in praise of this. Only 2 comments warn caution about Chinese data.
Why do people need to lie and pretend China is this big victim being picked on.
You would never write a paragraph like that in defense of the amount of anti-US sentiment on Lemmy, so it’s not like you actually care about being fair to nations. Posts like yours reek of nothing more than propaganda.
scrolled past and saw one for almost every subthread.
Post about western achievements are often taken as granted (except maybe curing cancer), while eastern ones are scrutinised to the smallest of details.
You don’t suppose there might be reason people don’t trust the news coming from a country with no freedom of speech or press?
Not Eastern ones, Chinese specifically. Japanese or Korean science is generally trusted, but dictatorships have a tendency of making shit up to look better. We’ll believe it when we see it.
China has plenty of achievements, but also plenty of bullshit vaporware. We’ll see which one this is.
Show me any post about any technological advance that doesn’t have critical comments in the thread.
Posts like yours reek of nothing more than propaganda.
Smells more like bootlicking to me.
This announcement would be seen as a massive breakthrough anywhere else.
I don’t trust science (or R&D engineering) that’s not peer reviewed. Anything else is just marketing hype. Show me hard numbers or GTFO.
China also has a problem with the government lying-- for example, about their claimed reductions in greenhouse emissions. There’s no reason to trust self-serving authoritarians without credible corroboration.
BYD will later this year have 7 different car models on sale in Britain vs 6 (soon to be 5) from Ford.
That’s an irrelevant metric. Nobody’s going to buy a car just because the model range is a bit wider than some other company’s. What’s relevant is adoption, and then buyer loyalty. It may be that BYD offers cars that people want to buy, but they’re subsequently found to be of crap quality or aggressively undermining driver privacy (which other non-Chinese manufacturers have also done).
but the shear scale of investment from China will make them unstoppable
If appropriately rigorous science and suitably disciplined engineering are part of the process, and regulators do their jobs correctly, then maybe. Otherwise it’s just throwing money at a problem. Investment doesn’t guarantee results. China is certainly capable of getting positive outcomes from tech investment, but it’s not guaranteed.
I mean I thought thorium reactors were figured out already? The economics of it and lobbying by big oil was the problem. It ain’t that surprising that China could make a thorium reactor though.
Remember when it was all the hype when things just started - crazy to see it actually happen
Who still thinks the South Chinese Morning Post is a legit source after what happened to Hong Kong needs a reality check.
SCMP is one of the most libshit news in China
Also, chill it cracker, it’s news about a reactor, we don’t need your state dept. programming here
And we certainly don’t need your tankie shit here.
SCMP has always sided with mainland China on crux issues, but I’ve read them on and off for nearly 10 years now and have found them to be very reliable.
In fact, this is exactly what the Wikipedia page for reliable sources says about it too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources
this is toy sized reactor, not even entire technology demonstrator, there are medical isotope/research reactors with power 20MWt and more
OK, but do they run on Thorium?
There were small reactors that ran on thorium. Scaling up all the necessary molten salt processing will be pretty hard thing to do, if this thing can even run continously that is
This is the world’s largest thorium reactor. There have been other experimental ideas, but not many operational ones. The next largest operational Thorium reactor I can find is called kamini in India, which is 30kw. For scale, China’s reactor is 2000kw.
3Okw is a toy. That would power maybe 10 US homes. 2000kw? That’s more like 600 homes. Small, but usable. Fits the SMR niche well, actually. Making 1/1000th of the radioactive waste and basically no weapons grade materials locks in there too.
The article makes it very clear its running continuously, which is what they are celebrating. They have successfully refueled it while operating, which is a huge part of the “continuous.”
The article is all of 6 paragraphs. It’s not a difficult read.
As someone that often works for multiple years on pilot and poc projects, can we stop calling those “toys”.
Sorry we don’t have madscientist money here.
Norway has a thorium reactor since 1959
I can’t find a clear source on this. Could you help? This one says 2013 http://thorenergy.no/
According to GPT-4.1:
In 1959, Norway achieved a notable milestone by starting up its first nuclear reactor, the JEEP I (Joint Establishment Experimental Pile), located at Kjeller. This reactor was primarily used for research purposes, including early experiments with alternative nuclear fuels such as thorium. While JEEP I itself was not a thorium reactor per se, it laid the groundwork for subsequent Norwegian research into thorium as a nuclear fuel. This early phase demonstrated Norway’s scientific interest in thorium, leveraging its domestic thorium resources and contributing to later thorium reactor experiments.
So…
-
Not a Thorium reactor
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Didn’t produce any power
So China still has a win here.
Norway has one of the worlds largest deposits of thorium, but I have ot heard that we had a working reactor, just the principle of one.
If the chinese has indeed made it work I think we need to prepare for USA wanting to annex Norway as well
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Well, that and lack of diligently enforced safety standards.
.
This technological breakthrough is amazing, yes, but does not make disappear the constant harassment of minorities, the lack of freedom, the labor camps, the violent repression in Hong-Kong and all the other freaking shit China does on a daily basis.
And thanks for asking about the freedom of expression in Europe, it’s going really fine.
You do agree that America Bad, don’t you?
Say The Thing.
Of course it’s bad. It’s awful. Only a complete moron would think the opposite.
And you agree that Germany is bad, right? Say the thing
Do you do this for your own country and its allies, insist that every issue with it is brought up every time it’s mentioned regardless of context, or do you reserve it for the countries that are your countries enemies?
Also, try anti-genocide protestors in Germany that freedom of expression is going fine, lol.
I’m not a patriot. I dont give a shit about my own country. If France is does positive things, good, but it doesn’t I’m going to ignore that our politicians are corrupt or that the Olympics were used to enforce mass surveillance and lock up climate activists.
Too bad we do not know which exactly thorium salt mixes they are using, what the materials facing the molten salt at high neutron fluxes are and how they fare long term, whether they use on-site constant or batched fuel reprocessing, whether they kickstarted the reactor with enrichened uranium or reactor-grade plutonium waste and other such questions.
US experiments were broken off because of materials corrosion problem.
US experiments were broken off because it gives no excuse to attain materials for nuclear weapons. Same excuse everyone else use.
Sounds like the US should take a page from China’s playbook and steal the design, then claim to have built it on their own.
i think that lack of willingness to handle fresh fission products has a part in this, in normal reactor you can just do nothing and win (bulk of most dangerous isotopes decays completely within 5y, not possible to do this with MSR)
I think maybe also the fact that nuclear fusion is definitely frfr only a few years away from being viable, no cap, has contributed to a lack of fission research, too.
If only people saying that were aware of their logic flaw of also cutting funding to fusion research
Some of the new Russian reactor types are designed to burn away dangerous hot actinides. MSR need onboard fuel processing to continue to operate anyway.
These are fast reactors and operate on different principles. The coolant there is sodium and while hard to design and run, it’s doable. French had similar reactor but only one and it was shut down. Nice thing about fast reactors is that these can burn even-numbered isotopes of plutonium, useless in water moderated reactor, and give fresh mostly 239Pu plutonium of good quality. weapons grade even, and IAEA doesn’t like it. But who cares since nonproliferation is dead anyway?
It’s probably as simple as we already have something successful. Why spend time and effort overcoming the challenges to create new reactor technology with many of the same benefits and shortcomings as we already have?
I know the arguments for thorium and can see that being a huge benefit to places without a mature nuclear industry and without developed fuel sources.
Sure it would be somewhat better for us as well, but the biggest limitations will be the same. You’re still impeded by fears of radioactivity even if it is less. You still have radioactive waste to handle even if it’s less and less long lasting. You still have legal and regulatory challenges driving costs and timelines through the roof. Thorium hasn’t won the war of public perception, so is no better in the things that actually impede its use
