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China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025

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Re: China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025

#101

Post by numpad0 »

maeil wrote: post #92
russli1993 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol, abortion is perfectly legal in China, the government doesn't control women's bodies. Certain policies are more set and less up to discussion after a period of experimentation. Political system in China is more geared towards not letting human or interest groups desires reflected in national policies. Instead, national policies reflect the common good and common sense. And political system helps to unify common s…

> For example, no prostitutions Maybe I'm misreading, what do you mean by this? China has plenty of prostitution in case that's what you meant. > the government doesn't control women's bodies. Peng Shuai might have something to say about that. Or she would, if doing so wouldn't have cost her career.

It's not rare across East Asia that prostitution is outright illegal without exceptions, except its enforcement is selectively applied based on never spoken but established criteria. Same for pornography.

I think it's also probably true that Chinese government don't control specifically women's bodies. Chinese spoken languages always used singular they by default.

Re: China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025

#102

Post by dalyons »

zizee wrote: post #43
HDThoreaun wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now for the real reason, voters dont want to.

They don't want to what? Don't want to give up poorly designed regulations? Or do not want nuclear power? The latter is largely due to the anti nuclear movement, as sponsored by the petroleum industry. This will go down in history as one of the biggest self-owns in trying to protect the environment. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...

Don’t want to be forced to pay a premium for the most expensive mainstream form of power generation.

Re: China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025

#103

Post by wodderam »

tim333 wrote: post #98
lokimedes wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China has a portfolio strategy when it comes to nuclear technology (and energy systems in general).

They are pretty diverse with all technologies. Browsing Alibaba it's amazing the range of stuff you can get. It's almost a free for all without too much worries about regulation whether cars, nuclear, viral gain of function, high speed trains etc.

Kai-Fu Lee gives great insight into the engineering culture in AI Superpowers.

What I get from that book is they have a culture of a free for all that anything can be copied and ripped off so there is no standing still to admire your work.

Innovate or get copied and innovated out of existence.

A stark contrast to what we have evolved in the US. Innovate and then use the profits of innovation to buy legislation that eliminates competition.

There is no mystery how this plays out over a 50 year time window.

Re: China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025

#104

Post by merb »

cyberax wrote: post #28

Eh. Just like the first reactor, this is going to be a toy for scientists. Thorium reactors are a dead end. Just keep building regular PWRs, operating on regular fuel (maaaaaybe MOX fuel). That's it. It's a proven, scalable method.

I‘m not in favor of nuclear at all. But I do not like the term ‚are a dead end‘. If everybody would do that we would probably not have blue led‘s and that would’ve hindered the growth of many modern computing devices.

Re: China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025

#105

Post by acidburnNSA »

adrian_b wrote: post #84
godelski wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uranium is pretty abundant. The US has a lot, China twice as much, Kazakhstan a lot more, and Australia puts everyone to shame. Thorium isn't ready to be fuel and must be enriched (granted, you need to do this for uranium too but some is naturally in a fissile state). So there's things like breeder reactors that enrich during the cycle but this is challenging and presents other issues such as turning it into weapons…

Thorium is more abundant than uranium and as said in the article China already has huge amounts of extracted thorium as a waste product from the extraction of rare-earth metals. Thorium must not be enriched and it cannot be enriched like uranium, because it has only one isotope with a long life, thorium 232, which is the only natural isotope. Natural thorium is not usable as a fission fuel, but it can be transformed…

You're right that thorium can't be enriched because there's only one isotope. It needs to be bred to Uranium-233 to work. However, breeding has been more expensive and costly than enrichment, and this is the crux of why thorium use wasn't expanded in the past. To breed thorium to uranium-233, you need a breeder reactor, and you need a chemical separation facility. Together, these are more expensive to build and operate than a centrifuge and simpler non-breeder reactor.

In this sense, I disagree that the process is orders of magnitude simpler. I'd argue that it's the opposite!

The idea that thorium-derived material can't be easily used to make nuclear explosives is an unfortunately persistent myth. You can easily make very nice weapons material from thorium. As the Livermore weapons designers once said:

"If today's weapons were based on U-233, [we] would have no interest in switching to plutonium" [1]

[1] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/79078

Re: China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025

#106

Post by lazide »

mullingitover wrote: post #82
roenxi wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on what, China is too successful as it stands? Maybe they need to handicap themselves to appear less threatening? The contribution that the finance people in the US made was to - accurately - identify that if they moved all the investment overseas then the US wouldn't need to work as hard. They were correct. The result has been massive leaps and bounds in Asian prosperity and living standards. Which is good for…

> Typically countries are supposed to promote the interests of the people living inside the borders instead of build up competitors Maybe the optimal solution isn’t always doing a Prisoner’s Dilemma betrayal of the competitor.

Typically the leadership of countries does whatever benefits them personally, rather than (actually) care about the interests of the people living inside its borders.

The rare cases where that doesn’t happen, it’s usually because the people living inside the borders actually hold them accountable/align interests. Or people get really lucky.

Re: China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025

#108

Post by [deleted] »

adrian_b wrote: post #84
godelski wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uranium is pretty abundant. The US has a lot, China twice as much, Kazakhstan a lot more, and Australia puts everyone to shame. Thorium isn't ready to be fuel and must be enriched (granted, you need to do this for uranium too but some is naturally in a fissile state). So there's things like breeder reactors that enrich during the cycle but this is challenging and presents other issues such as turning it into weapons…

Thorium is more abundant than uranium and as said in the article China already has huge amounts of extracted thorium as a waste product from the extraction of rare-earth metals. Thorium must not be enriched and it cannot be enriched like uranium, because it has only one isotope with a long life, thorium 232, which is the only natural isotope. Natural thorium is not usable as a fission fuel, but it can be transformed…

[deleted]

Re: China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025

#109

Post by dmd »

topspin wrote: post #39
karaterobot wrote: post #2

Well, good. It's a shame nobody else has stepped up to do this first. Maybe China doing it first will help get the ball rolling.

Their ball is already rolling. They put a pair of high temperature gas cooled pebble bed reactors into operation a little more than a year ago. They're actively exploring every avenue of nuclear power without restraint, including thorium and fast breeders. It hasn't yet occurred to the Chinese that the prosperity afforded by abundant energy is a problem they're supposed to be solving.

> the prosperity afforded by abundant energy is a problem they're supposed to be solving.

What does this mean? Did you misplace a word somewhere? Why would prosperity be a problem?

Re: China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025

#110

Post by archibaldJ »

wodderam wrote: post #103
tim333 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are pretty diverse with all technologies. Browsing Alibaba it's amazing the range of stuff you can get. It's almost a free for all without too much worries about regulation whether cars, nuclear, viral gain of function, high speed trains etc.

Kai-Fu Lee gives great insight into the engineering culture in AI Superpowers. What I get from that book is they have a culture of a free for all that anything can be copied and ripped off so there is no standing still to admire your work. Innovate or get copied and innovated out of existence. A stark contrast to what we have evolved in the US. Innovate and then use the profits of innovation to buy legislation that e…

Nah.. it doesn't work that way.

True Innovation comes from the heart, and most mainland Chinese have lost touch of their hearts - you can even see that foreshadowed in ài the character for Love (爱/愛)。The simplified version just pretended the heart 心 is not in the center of it..

You may have step-by-step progress in China, like going from 110 to 111.

But there have never been and will never be any 0 to 1 kind of innovation in China.. maybe at most gimmicks and copying orchestrated by the Beijing State itself.

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