‘No quick wins’: China has the world’s first operational thorium nuclear reactor
www.scmp.com
Team working on project reportedly achieves milestone by completing fuel reloading while experimental molten salt reactor was running.

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.

  • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    26 days ago

    this is toy sized reactor, not even entire technology demonstrator, there are medical isotope/research reactors with power 20MWt and more

      • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        26 days ago

        There were small reactors that ran on thorium. Scaling up all the necessary molten salt processing will be pretty hard thing to do, if this thing can even run continously that is

        • mosiacmango@lemm.eeEnglish
          0·
          26 days ago

          This is the world’s largest thorium reactor. There have been other experimental ideas, but not many operational ones. The next largest operational Thorium reactor I can find is called kamini in India, which is 30kw. For scale, China’s reactor is 2000kw.

          3Okw is a toy. That would power maybe 10 US homes. 2000kw? That’s more like 600 homes. Small, but usable. Fits the SMR niche well, actually. Making 1/1000th of the radioactive waste and basically no weapons grade materials locks in there too.

          The article makes it very clear its running continuously, which is what they are celebrating. They have successfully refueled it while operating, which is a huge part of the “continuous.”

          The article is all of 6 paragraphs. It’s not a difficult read.

          • massive_bereavement@fedia.io
            0·
            26 days ago

            As someone that often works for multiple years on pilot and poc projects, can we stop calling those “toys”.

            Sorry we don’t have madscientist money here.

    • Miles O'Brien@startrek.websiteEnglish
      0·
      26 days ago

      This is such a weird comment, full of “NiCd batteries aren’t good enough so solar/wind are useless because we can’t store the power” energy.

      It’s a test reactor, it’s meant to be smaller than the “big boys”, and in a few years it’ll be smaller and more efficient.

      Sure, it’s not going to singlehandedly power an entire country, but distributed power is better than localized. 1000 small reactors placed all over means less likelihood of system wide failure than a handful of large ones.