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.
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.
That is assuming they don’t make significant amounts of Fe-60 (2.6 My half-life) by exposing steel pipes to neutron flux. While the fuel itself might have a shorter half-life, other waste still needs to be dealt with.
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)
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.
Thanks for a thorough explanation.
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.
Potentially. It’s not a technology proven in large-scale operational use.
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.
Thorium reactors also have an off switch, unlike Uranium reactors. A neutron stream starts the Uranium reaction but the reaction cannot be stopped once started. The reactor just cools the uranium to control the reaction. Lose the cooling system and get a meltdown. Thorium reactors also require a neutron stream but if the flow of neutrons stops, so does the nuclear reaction.
Literally nothing you just said is correct.
Is it wrong that Thorium reactions stop on their own?
It depends how they are designed. Same as regular uranium reactors. Thorium isn’t a reactor fuel after all, it’s what you use to breed more fuel. The actual fuel is still uranium. Thorium turns into uranium-233 then that is the fuel. Normal reactors use uranium-235. Both isotopes can be made to be passively safe.
You do realize you’re on the internet, right? You can look things up first instead of spouting bullshit.
Neutrons?
My mistake. It’s been a few years since I read about this topic.
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Neutrinos almost don’t interact with other matter. You use neutrons to start fission
Mathematics of wonton burrito meals, got it.
You’re confusing subcritical reactors with thorium power