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….
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)
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
Tell me you don’t know anything about nuclear energy without saying you don’t know anything about nuclear energy.
you don’t know anything about nuclear energy
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.
you don’t know anything about nuclear energy
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….
It’s a lot simpler than the majority of humanity reverting to pre-industrial lifestyles.
you don’t know anything about nuclear energy
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.
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.
I feel like you didn’t read my comment and just wanted to talk about thorium. Which is fine, yes I know it generates less waste and creates its own fuel and all that, I am speaking about nuclear waste as we know it right now, from our hundreds of traditional power plants, the things that MOST people associate with dangers of nuclear waste. Which I explained is not even remotely the problem people think it is, because the actual amount is so small and those thousands of years pass in a blink of an eye deep under earth’s crust.
Thorium is good. Traditional nuclear power is also good.
Yeah but traditional nuclear power can be with much less waste which has a much shorter half life if we recycle the waste, is my point. Less than 100 years instead of thousands. But the recycling process which dates from the 70’s is banned because the process also provides a tiny bit of enriched uranium.
So I’m not against traditional nuclear power, I think we can do much better if we recycle, plus Thorium reactors are a good addition.
so thorium is harmless… unless you eat it.
Don’t eat Thorium kids!
I don’t eat any type of kids, definitely not thorium salted kids.
Your comment just makes you sound like an asshole.
Yes. I’ll be an asshole to those that stand in the way of good things. No remorse.
Yes, the universal unqualified good, nuclear fission. No reason to have any concerns in a highly regulated environment like modern day america or china. All concerns completely unfounded, and are just these damn Greenpeace guys getting in the way of progress.