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
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….
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.