China has built a Thorium molten salt reactor

PlacidCasual · 12 Oct 2021 at 11:43

olivier renault said:
Curious to see how it's gonna develop. The only downside I can see is nuclear waste. And it's suppose to be far better at it than current reactor technology. Could even recycle some of the waste. Will see how realistic that is. Will be funny when they start competing on the international energy market.

I'm far from being an expert on nuclear technology but I have done some research on the subject over the years. One of the possible benefits of molten slat reactors in general is that high grades of waste with longer half lives can be broken up by the "spare" neutrons into shorter half life easier to manage products. If we were serious about nuclear technology it's likely that we would be trying to design specialist motlen slat reactors specifically for this purpose so we could substantially reduce the size and scope of the waste problem. Molten salt reactors enable lots of different passive safety measures combined with far lower energy density water steam cycles. As a consequence the Three Mile Island and Fukishima style meltdowns are far far lower risks. Honestly I was saying it 20 years ago, we should be involved in a crash program to build and deploy cookie cutter molten slat reactors and target a low cost energy energy economy.

Angilion · 12 Oct 2021 at 11:43

mattyfez said:
From what I know, thorium reactors were a competing technology with uranium reactors during the 'R&D' stages.
Uranium won out as it can be weaponised so it had more uses despite being a much dirtier and dangerous technology.
Thoruim reactors don't produce the toxic waste that needs to be buried for thousands of years, for example.
And if they blow up its 'just' an explosion rather than wrecking miles of surrounding land for years to come with radioactive contamination.

The shorter the half life of radioactive waste, the more radioactive it is. So it's not entirely a good thing when the radioactive waste produced is radioactive for a much shorter period of time. One of the suggested benefits of thorium reactors is that one of the products is such a potent gamma emitter that it would make it very difficult for terrorists to make and use a thoriuim reactor to make a nuclear bomb or even a "dirty" bomb because they'd be irradiated to death long before they could do so.

It is possible to weaponise a thorium reactor. It was very difficult in the 1950s, but it was done then and knowledge and technology has improved a lot since the 1950s. All thorium reactors are breeder reactors. They have to be - breeding fuel is a required part of the cycle because thorium isn't fissile. So widespread use of thorium would be a proliferation risk.

There are good things about using a thorium reactor, but it's not all plain sailing and I think we should be cautious about over-selling it.

mattyfez · 12 Oct 2021 at 11:45

Thoruium reactors can actualy recycle existing nuclear waste:

https://www.machinedesign.com/learn...-between-thorium-and-uranium-nuclear-reactors

Angilion · 12 Oct 2021 at 11:52

mattyfez said:
Thoruium reactors can actualy recycle existing nuclear waste:

https://www.machinedesign.com/learn...-between-thorium-and-uranium-nuclear-reactors

As can any other fast breeder reactor.

Andrew_McP · 12 Oct 2021 at 11:57

V F said:
We're too busy appeasing the tree huggers.

No, its because our version of science is racist!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-58795079
Problem solved. We'll be world leaders again by this time next year... world leaders in beating ourselves up, which could be useful in cracking fusion, where beating particles together is crucial. Personally though I'd put my money on the Chinese and thorium rather than fusion and fantasy.

D.P. · 12 Oct 2021 at 12:50

200sols said:
Nuclear is one of the safest and cleanest forms of energy production we have.

And also one of themost expensive

BUDFORCE · 12 Oct 2021 at 12:56

mmj_uk said:
China's rapid technological progress is nothing compared to the wests massive progress on destroying its own manufacturing industry, white privilege, gender neutral language, censorship of anything that offends and being able to stop far left loons from blocking motorways. We're definitely winning this one lads.

Its funny, also isn't at the same time.....

200sols · 12 Oct 2021 at 12:59

D.P. said:
And also one of themost expensive

Compared to the cost of continuing to burn fossil fuels and runaway climate change the cost is insignificant.

aardvark · 12 Oct 2021 at 13:02

D.P. said:
And also one of themost expensive

probably cheaper than gas is now!

aardvark · 12 Oct 2021 at 13:04

also, coal fire power stations put far more radiation into the atmosphere than a nuclear plant.

arknor · 12 Oct 2021 at 13:05

this place is cool too uses the suns rays to melt salt and generate power

UK is still in the dark ages with a few wind mills in the sea and no energy storage seemingly

PlacidCasual · 12 Oct 2021 at 13:23

Point to a country other than Norway with any decent energy storage on a grid capacity level. As far as I'm aware they don't exist. Sure there are air storage, thermal salt storage and a teeny tiny bit of pumped storage out there but against actual grid level demands they nibbling around the edges. Dinorwig is great for instance but it is designed for a very specific purpose covering the grid against a nuclear station trip long enough to get other generation turned on to cover it.

BowdonUK · 12 Oct 2021 at 13:57

It makes me wonder if we're going to end up with another ww2 situation, when Nazi Germany were way ahead in some technologies, then just before they came to fruition we got in to a fight with them and took over their research (more the US - Operation Paperclip).

SPG · 12 Oct 2021 at 14:00

Indeed, you could almost argue decentralising the world's power supply a world grid for want of a better world.

Again Nuclear is fine till it goes wrong and it will go wrong.

Angilion · 12 Oct 2021 at 14:21

SPG said:
Indeed, you could almost argue decentralising the world's power supply a world grid for want of a better world.

Again Nuclear is fine till it goes wrong and it will go wrong.

The same is true of everything. Nuclear fission has proven to be safer than almost anything else (and nuclear fusion would be safer still).

But even if it wasn't - what's the alternative? Not speculative alternatives that might or might not exist at some unknown point in the future, like a worldwide grid and enough excess electricity to offset all the transmission losses and the political will to routinely share electricity between different countries and the ability to build the required farcical degree of overcapacity that would be required for renewables even with a world grid and impossibly perfect transmission, let alone the realistic transmission losses over the thousands of miles that would be the routine practice in such a setup. The alternatives that exist now. We have a choice between fission, burning carbon-based fuel and the collapse of civilisation.

If we're getting into speculation on what might exist in the future, the obvious answer is nuclear fusion. May as well make it one of the various forms of fusion even safer than D-T fusion. Problem solved. Oodles of electricity, cheap as chips, no pollution, no waste products at all, fuel that's hyperabundant anywhere and everywhere that humans could live in and most of the places they can't live in.

Speculation is fun and interesting and key to better methods in the future. But you can't power civilisation with speculation. We need something that works now.

soundb0y · 12 Oct 2021 at 14:23

How many new state of the art reactors can China invent and build before we can put in one railway line?

This is why we are screwed

mattyfez · 12 Oct 2021 at 15:35

soundb0y said:
How many new state of the art reactors can China invent and build before we can put in one railway line?

This is why we are screwed

Sad but true.

mattyfez · 12 Oct 2021 at 15:40

Angilion said:
The same is true of everything. Nuclear fission has proven to be safer than almost anything else (and nuclear fusion would be safer still).

But even if it wasn't - what's the alternative? Not speculative alternatives that might or might not exist at some unknown point in the future, like a worldwide grid and enough excess electricity to offset all the transmission losses and the political will to routinely share electricity between different countries and the ability to build the required farcical degree of overcapacity that would be required for renewables even with a world grid and impossibly perfect transmission, let alone the realistic transmission losses over the thousands of miles that would be the routine practice in such a setup. The alternatives that exist now. We have a choice between fission, burning carbon-based fuel and the collapse of civilisation.

If we're getting into speculation on what might exist in the future, the obvious answer is nuclear fusion. May as well make it one of the various forms of fusion even safer than D-T fusion. Problem solved. Oodles of electricity, cheap as chips, no pollution, no waste products at all, fuel that's hyperabundant anywhere and everywhere that humans could live in and most of the places they can't live in.

Speculation is fun and interesting and key to better methods in the future. But you can't power civilisation with speculation. We need something that works now.

^this.

Conventional nuclear reactors should only really be seen as a stop-gap for the energy crisis, whilst better solutions are built into the long term strategy, wheather that be better nuclear, maybe thorium... or 'green' wind/tidal/hydro/solar... or a combination of all the above.

The UK seems to be very much the lame donkey in this horse race though, paying the french (at least partly) to build conventional reactor in france and then buying the electricity back from them... maybe a a slight discount but yeah, great long term thinking there

Tefal · 12 Oct 2021 at 15:54

SPG said:
Indeed, you could almost argue decentralising the world's power supply a world grid for want of a better world.

Again Nuclear is fine till it goes wrong and it will go wrong.

Tbf a global power grid might as well just be a global space heater

Tefal · 12 Oct 2021 at 15:55

mattyfez said:
^this.

Conventional nuclear reactors should only really be seen as a stop-gap for the energy crisis, whilst better solutions are built into the long term strategy, wheather that be better nuclear, maybe thorium... or 'green' wind/tidal/hydro/solar... or a combination of all the above.

The UK seems to be very much the lame donkey in this horse race though, paying the french (at least partly) to build conventional reactor in france and then buying the electricity back from them... maybe a a slight discount but yeah, great long term thinking there

Uk and rolls royce are hopefully going to sucxed with the small modular reactor method

https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactors.aspx

They want to build 16 of them them