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China has world’s first operational thorium nuclear reactor thanks to ‘strategic stamina’ (www.scmp.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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https://archive.is/2nQSh

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.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (8 children)

If it's true, China has energy security for the foreseeable future - as Thorium is usually found along side rare earths, and China has the largest deposits of those. More than anywhere else in the world.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (7 children)

I don't mean to be a pessimist, but we'll see how it lasts and scales 😅 it's certainly promising, but 2MW also isn't much. I'm curious how large they can scale single reactors, and how close they can safely be to populations - one of the problems with nuclear always ends up being transporting the energy (usually quite far away) once you've generated it.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Isn't the loint of Thorium reactors that they are small and modular, thus highly scalable by multiplying units. Your comment about scaling a single reactor is a cheap rhetorical device to miss the point entirely.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago

Scaling small things up is always a logistics and repeatability issue. Always.

We had.technology to put a capsule of three men on the moon for a week before most humans alive today were born, and yet we haven't gone back because while both "number of humans" and "length of stay" are fairly simple ideas to scale up, we never had the logistics to create and fuel the one.saturn V launch every other day that a permanent moon base would need.

Heck, the Internet is full of ground breaking improvements that were "buried" by the challenge of scaling up out of a lab.

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