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.
https://www.copenhagenatomics.com/
They will hopefully run their first reactor in Switzerland by 2026/2027.
China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025
111–120 of 141 posts
Re: China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025
#112Earlier 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…
> This is actually the reason why thorium reactors have been avoided, because it has been considered that it is too easy to separate the uranium 233 from the fuel, which can be used for making nuclear weapons.
This is absolutely not the reason thorium reactors have been avoided at all.
The reality is that uranium enrichment infrastructure existed and fuel isn't a huge part of the cost.
Most of the funding happened in the early days and they were of course using uranium, people back then figured that uranium would run out and were interested in breedres. But pretty quickly, uranium was found to be pretty common.
Uranium is also just better unless you are doing a thorium thermal breeder. And that design only really works well with a pretty complex reactor setup that most people were simply not interested in.
Re: China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't thorium also pretty abundant? Judging by this, the US has around six times as much thorium as uranium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_thorium_r... I've also never really gotten the proliferation concern. I mean, sure, you don't want to sell a breeder reactor to Iran. But why can't you sell one to PG&E? Are we that concerned that…
>A declassified 1966 memo from the US nuclear program stated that uranium-233 has been shown to be highly satisfactory as a weapons material (wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-233#Weapon_material )
From the same article, apparently the infeasiblity is that pure uranium-233 could work, but a normal breeder reactor would also produce a small amount of uranium-232, which is fine for power reactors but not bombs. If you have the resources of the US DoD then you can design a special breeder reactor that uses special thorium, but by that point you could just make one that breeds plutonium out of uranium too.
Re: China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025
#114Earlier 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…
> 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.
This sort of stands in contrast to reality, where the US has sustained insane and constant innovation for a vast stretch of time.
Re: China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, at some non trivial level it’s also true. The petrodollar and the US’s central role in protecting/enabling it is great for US national security.
I think the petrodollar has been given more weight than it deserves. The dollar's utility enabling international trade has more to do with the stability, freedom and general availability, than with the US enforcing it in any way.
Not quite.
You should look, for example, into the events of 1971, specifically, US policy regarding foreign exchange rates. Using dominant US dollar position, the US has achieved re-evaluation of exchange rates favoring US exports. As a concrete example, US Treasury Secretary drove the pressure to open European agriculture markets to US exports, weakening European farming industry in the process. Similar moves were made against Japan and South Korea.
Re: China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025
#116Cool! Hope it works well and convinces more people to try it (if it works out)
Re: China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Women’s rights, gay and trans rights and human rights were hard fought for. Defending them is progress.
Sounds good except the direction in which that last one has been pushed now puts it in direct conflict with the first two. So it's no longer progress.
There is nothing incompatible about womens rightsn and trans rights lmao
Re: China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
> Why would prosperity be a problem?
Excellent question.
Re: China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
> Why would prosperity be a problem? Excellent question.
... I feel like I'm missing something here.
Re: China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/nuclear-dead-end-i... It is just not economically feasible. Money makes the world go 'round and that's often a good thing. I wish you luck convincing a bank to give you a loan for a nuclear plant. They know the math.
Technology can make things cheaper, often a tiny fraction of the previous unit cost. We have plenty of examples of this; why wouldn't it also be true for nuclear power?
Think about the opposite of your question. If it could it already would have, so why hasn’t it? It must not be possible. It doesn’t scale like a cpu or a website. You are still hiring extremely skilled welders, complying with regulations so you don’t Chernobyl half the country, figuring out where to put the waste that is radioactive for longer than modern humans have existed.