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China has world’s first operational thorium nuclear reactor thanks to ‘strategic stamina’ (www.scmp.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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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[–] -5 points 1 year 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.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year 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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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    one of the problems with nuclear always ends up being transporting the energy (usually quite far away) once you've generated it

    I don't get this part. How is this any different from transporting power from hydro? Quebec transports hydro power from all the way north at the bay to the south and then even sells it to USA.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    You do lose quite a bit of electricity going over long distances, but can overcome that with sheer volume. But that also means the closer the generator to the consumer, the more efficient it’ll be.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    An interesting aspect of this is when trying to mover power over long distances AC becomes inefficient and High Voltage DC becomes the more efficient option.

    Between 2-3% for HVDC vs 6-7% for AC systems when transmitting over 1000km.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago

    they haven't demonstrated anything yet, but maybe they will develop something. perhaps. maybe. it's all uncertain at this point and technology for it doesn't exist yet.

    high voltage transmission lines are a thing, look up where lignite or hydro power plants are situated relative to where people live. this is a solved problem

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