‘No quick wins’: China has the world’s first operational thorium nuclear reactor
www.scmp.com
Team working on project reportedly achieves milestone by completing fuel reloading while experimental molten salt reactor was running.

https://archive.is/2nQSh

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.

  • xor@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    92·
    23 hours ago

    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….

    • cdkg@lemm.eeEnglish
      81·
      17 hours ago

      Yeah, thorium reactors can’t meltdown because they need to constantly being powered by thorium, sick you can find anywhere. There’s a 2008 or so bill gates Ted talk on nuclear power that talks about it. For better or worse, china is going to lead the world regarding energy (and economy, seeing all those trump tariffs)

      • xor@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        11·
        17 hours ago

        i did see that TED talk… i saw someone say that’s just the reactor design that’s safe, and uranium couldn’t melt down in that type of reactor either….
        but that was just some comment and i’m not qualified to speculate on it… but meltdowns are the biggest problem with nuclear, imo….

        i think we should just dump all of our nuclear waste off the coast of japan… and hopefully generate some kaijū

    • Rakonat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      32·
      11 hours ago

      Tell me you don’t know anything about nuclear energy without saying you don’t know anything about nuclear energy.

        • Rakonat@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          7 hours ago

          I know enough to know that if you’re worried about pollution from Nuclear then you should be worried about all the waste products in production of solar panels which can be extremely toxic. And that if you’re specifically talking about the amount of radiation a megawatt reactor will produce in it’s life time you should never venture anywhere close to a coal burning plant because the amount of radioactive material they let loose into the atmosphere is orders of magnitudes greater than you could get from a uranium reactor, with thorium reactors being predicted and shown in small scale testing to have significantly less dangerous byproducts left over. With several theories and proposed designs for fusion and thorium reactors that could recycle spent fuel and further reduce the amount of high level waste a facility would have at the end of it’s life cycle, because unlike all other forms of energy generation, the nuclear facilities contain and keep their waste products on site for decades and only transfer it off site during decommissioning.

    • Tattorack@lemmy.worldEnglish
      42·
      22 hours ago

      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).

        • Rakonat@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          11 hours ago

          It’s a lot simpler than the majority of humanity reverting to pre-industrial lifestyles.

        • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          17 hours ago

          For the amount of actual nuclear waste, it kind of is. Earth is so huge and the amount of waste so small, that you could bury literally ALL of it under a mountain somewhere and chances are high that it would never see daylight again nor would never be found by anyone in the future.

          Even despite this, extraordinary measures are taken to make sure nothing escapes the containment until such time that Earth’s crust has completely rolled down into the mantle or the mountain erodes, which by then it wouldn’t be nuclear waste anymore.

          • Lord Wiggle@lemmy.worldEnglish
            31·
            16 hours ago

            We need to store the waste for thousands of years. This is bad. We are able to recycle the waste for more power but we’re not allowed to because it produces a tiny bit enriched uranium and that’s not allowed by the pact the US and Russia made. But recycling waste is tech from the 70’s and it can reduce the half life of 100.000 years to 100 years.

            Thorium however, is a different story. It doesn’t work with gamma radiation but with alpha radiation. Alpha radiation is the most dangerous form of radiation, but it doesn’t go far and doesn’t go through many things. You can contain it with a piece of paper. Gamma radiation is the least harmful form of radiation but the big issue is it goes really far and goes through almost anything.

            So waste from a Thorium reactor is much less harmful, easy to contain, also has a very short half life (I don’t know how long but it’s really short, as in several years) so Thorium really is awesome. Thorium is also a waste product of many other mining operations so it’s already a form of recycling. The downside of a Thorium reactor is that it’s far more complex than the reactors we know so it’s very hard and expensive to build, more than a regular reactor. So it will cost a lot, takes a long time, but it’s an extremily safe and wise investment.