https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-28/china-thorium-molten-salt-nuclear-reactor-energy/100351932
Scientists in China are about to turn on for the first time an experimental reactor that's believed by some to be the Holy Grail of nuclear energy — safer, cheaper and with less potential for weaponisation.
Construction on the thorium-based molten salt reactor was expected to be finished this month with the first tests to begin as early as September, according to a statement from the Gansu provincial government.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
China Set to Begin First Trials of Thorium Molten Salt Nuclear Reactor
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 41 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
(1)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 29 2021, @02:03AM (13 children)
..and more economical at mining and destroying the planet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 29 2021, @05:16AM
Q: Where will you find most of Australia's electric vehicles?
A: in open-cut mines.
(Score: 5, Informative) by PinkyGigglebrain on Sunday August 29 2021, @06:17AM (11 children)
you really don't know much about MSRs and Thorium as a fuel do you?
Some MSR [wikipedia.org] basics.
Why Thorium is better as a fuel [wikipedia.org].
And for those who are not very literate here is a video about both of them with lots of pictures and simple words. [youtube.com]
Read and watch those and you'll have some lovely facts to try and dispute instead of showing your ignorance.
A few key facts
The average Neodymium mine already produces about 5000 tons of Thorium a year as a "waste" product already. That is enough to power the ENTIRE world's energy needs for a year.
Molten salt fuel has to be kept contained to fission, if it loses containment it shuts down. THEY CAN NOT MELT DOWN.
A MSR can recirculate the waste products and "burn" them up, reducing not only the amount but cool down time needed for the waste products.
Molten salt reactors are under almost ambient pressure, no risk of a explosive steam release.
Any cracks or leaks in a MSR tend to be self sealing since when the fuel cools it hardens.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 29 2021, @06:23AM
Hold your horses Pinky! All in good time, there's plenty of oil and gas to be drilled first.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 29 2021, @07:13AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjM9E6d42-M [youtube.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Sunday August 29 2021, @01:42PM (7 children)
You are asserting as facts many things that are so far theoretical projections. They may well be right, but it's inappropriate to have certainty in them.
OTOH, I really hope that the molten salt reactors live up to their promise. Especially if they can consume the waste from the current reactors as fuel supplements.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sgleysti on Sunday August 29 2021, @04:40PM
Moltex Energy is working with the government of New Brunswick in Canada to construct a Stable Salt Reactor capable of burning reprocessed CANDU reactor waste as fuel by the early 2030s. https://www.moltexenergy.com/our-first-reactor/ [moltexenergy.com]
The Stable Salt Reactor concept seems excellent from an engineering and economic standpoint. Here's a good talk on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8ApH-0YHkA [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PinkyGigglebrain on Sunday August 29 2021, @07:02PM (1 child)
A valid point, and I will fully concede that MSR/Thorium fuel still has some technical, social, and political hurdles to clear.
Everything in life is based on "theoretical projections", even the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. We assert it as fact because we believe it to be true based on experience and the evidence we have on hand, but it is not 100% certain that it is true so its nothing more than a projection. Just one with a VERY high probability of being right.
In the case of MSRs and Thorium fuel I've read the articles, watched the videos on both sides of the subject, since only a fool ignores the potential dangers of a technology while embracing it. and come to the personal conclusion that MSR/Thorium is a path that is worth advocating and following. The technology is not perfect, it still has it's long term issues like every other energy source Humanity is currently using, and there are still some things that need to be perfected but it is better than the majority of energy technologies we currently use in terms of safety, reliability, scalability, low environmental impact and long term viability. Even solar and wind have some negative environmental impacts that have been mostly ignored until recently.
Its not "certainty", its faith. Faith that something is true based on the evidence available.
Look at some of the things we are certain of; Hawking radiation, proton decay, fusion as a viable commercial power source, renewables that can meet Humanities rapidly growing energy needs indefinitely, etc..
Some of those are based on hard math, others on little more than wishful thinking. All of them have no confirmed observational proof to back them up and yet people still accepts them and believes them to be 100% true.
It all comes down to how much faith you have in the theoretical projections and validity of the facts those projections are based on.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Sunday August 29 2021, @11:08PM
I recently found myself in an argument when I said that something was an "interesting theory"; the person thought I meant "idea" or "perception" when I meant "scientifically verifiable theory", and had to requalify it a few times as "scientific theory".
Hence, I propose "scientific faith". The math is there, the science is there, the independently observable evidence (modulo the, uh, big interstellar telescope illuminati cartel) is there that the up-to-date theory matches the to-date observations, which is different than the vernacular "faith" [dumbingofage.com].
Example: "Crisis of scientific faith": we propose an update to the model, publish, and move on. You know, like we have every time it happened in scientific history.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 30 2021, @08:02AM (2 children)
There is already some info from experimental verification for this, check the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment [wikipedia.org] from Oak Ridge in the 60s. While not a completely finished plant (missing the actual breeding from Thorium) it was in operation for several years demonstrating the possibility of molten salt systems.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by HiThere on Monday August 30 2021, @01:46PM
Yes, some preliminary tests have been done, but they haven't been done on any current design. So the approach is guaranteed to have certain capabilities, but it's not guaranteed what the costs will be, or whether it can be done at scale, or...well, lots of things. Many designs work fine in the lab, but fail on even pilot projects. In some fields it's well over half of the designs that fail, I don't know about nuclear reactors.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by FatPhil on Monday August 30 2021, @05:33PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Monday August 30 2021, @12:52PM
You sure about that? I mean, they've been studying the things since the 40s, and built a MSR test reactor in 1965 that ran for 13,000 hours: https://www.ornl.gov/molten-salt-reactor/history [ornl.gov]
And it seems likely that other experimental reactors have been built and tested as well.
Granted, I'm not sure just how many stress-tests and failure modes they really subjected it to, or how many other experimental reactors have built. And there's often some surprises when scaling things up from experimental prototype to commercial scale. But it's not like the things are purely theoretical either.
(Score: 5, Informative) by PinkyGigglebrain on Sunday August 29 2021, @08:03PM
forgot to mention that the MSRs being brought on line in China are not some totally new untested technology.
The USA had two test MSRs working at the Oakridge nuclear test facility back in the 1960's. The safety features mentioned are experimentally proven proven facts, not theoretical projections.
At the end of the week the techs would sometimes shut down the reactor by turning off the cooling systems and let the core over heat, which melted a freeze plu on a drain to the emergency holding tank which allowed the molten salt fuel to spread out into a non critical shape and cool off away from the moderator, making the self sustaining fission events stop. This feature is present in all current MSR designs that I know of.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 29 2021, @03:27AM (24 children)
> believed by some to be the Holy Grail of nuclear energy
Fusion is the holy grail of nuclear energy.
Thorium reactors still produce, essentially forever, dangerous radioactive waste.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jun/23/thorium-nuclear-uranium [theguardian.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 29 2021, @04:06AM (4 children)
Energy from Fusion is 2 orders of magnitude above fission but compared to chemical reactions fission releases 5 orders of magnitude more energy. https://why-infoloommedia.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Similarities-between-Fission-and-Fusion.jpg [netdna-ssl.com]
But people like you are the reason we'll be buying our MSRs from China rather than making them ourselves
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Sunday August 29 2021, @04:28AM (1 child)
I'll take helium for 500 Alex.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PinkyGigglebrain on Sunday August 29 2021, @08:14PM
you do know that one of the biggest hurdles in Fusion power is going to be fuel right?
None of the current fusion projects are expected to be able to ever sustain pure Hydrogen fusion events, the temperatures and pressures are just too far beyond anything Humanity can manage in the foreseeable future.
The current path plans to use isotopes of Hydrogen and Helium, namely H2 and He3, which fuse at lower temperature and pressures.
But getting enough He3 is going to be hard, it is incredibly rare on Earth and expensive to concentrate into usable concentrations. A proposed method is to use the neutrons from the fusion reactions to breed He3 from Lithium in a blanket that will surround the fusion core. The method hasn't actually been proven to work at the scale and efficiencies needed to make a fusion power plant self sustaining in regards to fuel supply.
Why do you think everyone is talking excitedly about harvesting He3 from Luna?
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 29 2021, @04:37AM
It's kind of tough on "people like you" that you have to convince "people like them" before you can have your dirty nuclear power plant, presumably NIMBY.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 29 2021, @05:07AM
It's more like less than one order of magnitude. For example, deuterium+tritium fusion converts about 0.5% of its mass into energy. This source [tandfonline.com] claims that a fission bomb converts about 0.1% of its fissionable mass into energy.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by driverless on Sunday August 29 2021, @05:31AM (3 children)
It's also not nearly as peaceful as advocates make out: India's three-stage nuclear power program is built around the fact that (a) the country has huge supplies of thorium and not much uranium but also (b) the fact that to use thorium you need to convert it into fissile U233. For that they use their PHWRs to produce plutonium which they can then use in fast breeder reactors to produce even more plutonium, and then finally produce U233 from thorium in thermal breeders. So they end up with an awful lot of fissile uranium and plutonium from this carefully-chosen thorium process.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sjames on Sunday August 29 2021, @05:53PM (2 children)
That's not a problem of thorium reactor, that a problem of making weapons material on purpose and then using a tiny fraction of that to kickstart thorium reactors as an excuse.
India was already producing fissile plutonium before thorium reactors were even considered.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday August 29 2021, @11:52PM (1 child)
Sure, I was more pointing out that if you're intent on warmongering then you can get there just as easily via an appropriately chosen thorium route.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday August 30 2021, @01:39AM
Actually, that will be quite hard. India did NOT do that. They did it with PHWRs. The only part thorium played was a thin excuse tacked on at the end. Note that the U.S. went with enriched uranium over thorium in order to make sure it had enough weapons grade material.
Separating U232 from U233 is harder than separating u235 from U238.
(Score: 5, Informative) by PinkyGigglebrain on Sunday August 29 2021, @06:42AM
Your right, the U-233 is what actually gets split in a Thorium reactor, meaning there isn't much of it at any one time and what there is gets used in situ. It can also be easily removed from the fuel chain when the reactor is decommissioned and used elsewhere as a fuel in a new reactor.
The actual waste products from a Thorium fuel chain are only dangerous for a few hundred years, while a Uranium fuel chain is in the order of thousands. Also, in the case of the Thorium fuel chain that waste can be "burned up" in properly designed reactor into shorter lived isotopes reducing the storage time even more.
Even Fusion reactors will produce radioactive waste. The neutrons generated irradiate the containment vessel and the parts near it. When those parts are replaced or the plant is decommissioned it will be a very large and radioactive mass that will need to be stored for about as long as the waste products from Thorium and Uranium reactors.
If we are to cut green house gases we need to use every thing we can. MSRs may not be perfect but they are far far cleaner and better than coal and other fossil fueled power plants and we have the tech to build them today, when we need them.
Fusion may be better but it is still decades away from being a viable energy source. Thorium MSRs are here now, and they are safer and cleaner than the current generations of Uranium solid fuel LWTR reactors like Fukushima.and Chernobyl
Some facts you might not be aware of [youtube.com]
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 29 2021, @07:52AM (2 children)
Anti-nuclear bullshit.
"(half life: 15.7 million years)" which would have a radiation level so low you would need a damn good lab to detect it. Fission products are either highly radioactive OR long-lived, you don't get both.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 29 2021, @04:43PM (1 child)
But you still don't want it hanging around your thyroid gland for a decade.
(Score: 4, Informative) by PinkyGigglebrain on Sunday August 29 2021, @07:50PM
we live surrounded by radioactive isotopes and other radiation sources. Ever hear of "Background radiation"?
Fun factoid;
Short lived isotopes are the most dangerous, they tend to emit a LOT of radiation in a very short time. Iodine-123 has a half life of ~13 hours, enough of it will give you radiation poisoning which will kill you long before you could get cancer from it. Since it concentrates in the Thyroid gland it can be dangerous, it's why you hear about iodine tablets after a nuke accident. It is also used in Thyroid cancer treatment. Can make the patient so radioactive for a week that almost everything they come in contact with is considered "low grade nuclear waste"
Long lived isotopes, like U233 and the others mentioned might put out a gamma ray photon or neutron every so often but unless you had a LOT of it in your body you would likely be dead long before enough of had decayed to endanger you within your lifetime.
Most of the deaths from radiation exposure after Chernobyl that you hear about were people who worked close to the still active melted core, it wasn't the long lived isotopes that killed them, it was high energy neutrons being spit out by the continued fission events in Uranium fuel. MSRs won't do that, if the fuel gets spread out it stops fissioning, and since it's a liquid it would naturally spread out in the event of a big leak. And since it needs a moderator, usually carbon rods, once it was away from those the fission would stop.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 3, Informative) by khallow on Sunday August 29 2021, @12:40PM (4 children)
Or using it as nuclear fuel in the reactor like a non-idiot. And as the AC replier noted, please tell us more about the scary-dangerous isotope with a half life of 15.7 million years. You'd probably die from iodine poisoning before you could intake enough of it to cause any sort of measurable radiation damage. For example, a microgram of Iodine 131 (yes, that's a millionth of a gram) would have a similar level of radioactivity to a kilogram of Iodine 129 (this includes the higher energy of the decay products of Iodine 131 BTW in addition to the huge difference between a half-life of 8 days versus 15.7 million years)
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 29 2021, @04:45PM (3 children)
I believe that's the sound of the lesser-spotted volunteer who wants to store this in their back yard.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 29 2021, @05:22PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 29 2021, @07:37PM (1 child)
As much Iodine as you want.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 29 2021, @11:40PM
(Score: 5, Informative) by sjames on Sunday August 29 2021, @02:30PM (4 children)
U232 has a half life of 69 years, not 160,000. Technetium-99 is "so dangerous" that we routinely inject people with technetium-99m for medical imaging which then quickly becomes technetium-99.
Further, the U232 easily absorbs a neutron in a thorium reactor and becomes U233 which then fissions. In other words, it gets burned up rather than decaying. It also means that if terrorists try to extract the uranium from a thorium reactor to make a bomb, they're gonna have a bad time.
With a half life of 15 million years, the I-129 is stable for most practical purposes. A fair amount of it will likely be burned up by the reactor operation.
So, in addition to a couple important errors of fact in your linked article, there are also a few omissions where the author failed to consider the entire lifecycle of the elements in the reactor. Also a bit of panic over "the R word" by someone who apparently isn't aware of naturally occurring radiation that has existed in the environment since before life evolved on Earth.
So we can either sit around with our thumbs up our butts waiting for the fusion that has been "right around the corner" for my entire life (literally) or we can move forward now with a good technology that would actually help us cut CO2 emissions (which have actually had a notable effect during my lifetime).
As a side note, even if the friendly space aliens appear tomorrow with a gift of cheap easy to operate fusion technology (NOTE: I'm not holding my breath for that one), we will STILL need a few fission reactors of some sort to produce the valuable radioactive isotopes we use in industry and medicine.
(Score: 1) by arcade on Sunday August 29 2021, @05:35PM (2 children)
Fusion has been right around the corner your entire life? It's been "50 years away" my entire life .. :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 29 2021, @07:39PM
Think of it like a guiding star. Plus velcro and biro pens! Or am I getting mixed up with Mars missions...
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday August 31 2021, @12:11AM
Where do you live? It's been only 20 years away for all of *my* life.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 29 2021, @11:42PM
Even then, fusion will have scary-dangerous radiation. We can't win playing from this deck.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Monday August 30 2021, @01:35PM
Actually most fusion promises to be *really* nasty, including all the "easy" reactions that are most likely to be used early on.
True, it doesn't directly produce short- or meduium-lived radioactive isotopes as reaction products, but what it does produce is *far* more neutron radiation per watt-hour than any fission reaction. Which means the reactor vessel shielding, and everything inside takes a massive neutron dose, rapidly becoming itself radioactive and/or mechanically unsuitable for its function (e.g. neutron embrittlement, transmutation, etc) so that it needs to be replaced, generating a *huge* flow of low-grade nuclear waste.
There are so-called aneutronic fusion reactions that don't generate neutrons, the proton-boron (pB) reaction being the easiest as I recall - unfortunately even that one is vastly more difficult to trigger than the "easy" reactions (100s of times higher energy levels required), to the point that the late Dr. Bussard's Polywell team are the only ones I recall even suggesting their reactor could manage to trigger such a reaction (and in fairness, I believe they successfully demonstrated such a milestone as part of their erstwhile Navy funding) Sadly, I've not heard of any progress from them since their Navy funding ran out.
Meanwhile one of the great appeals of a MSR thorium reactor over virtually every other kind of fission reactor is that it can keep recirculating the waste, generating more power in the process, until it's all broken down into short-lived radioactive isotopes that only need maybe a few decades to decay to ambient levels.
For that matter, even with existing reactors, the waste storage problem could be mostly solved by reprocessing the waste to extract the still-useful fuel, as was common in the early days of nuclear energy before advances in uranium mining drove down the cost of fresh uranium fuel (most reactors can only consume 5-15% of the available fuel before the products choke the reaction). By definition highly radioactive waste doesn't last very long, only decades to centuries before it reaches ambient levels, and storing waste for only a century isn't a huge problem. But when you store it still mixed in with unused fuel the radiation from the waste slowly causes the fuel to fission, continuously generating fresh waste until the fuel is eventually consumed over many thousands of years.
(Score: 2) by corey on Sunday August 29 2021, @11:42PM (1 child)
Great news. For humanity anyway, I really hope they get it tested, going and learn a lot. We need more of this tech across the globe to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It’s smart too (for China). In 15 years time if you are desperate to lower your emissions and don’t have much sunshine, China is your man.
(Score: 2) by corey on Monday August 30 2021, @05:12AM
Doh. Meant to be “Go China”, not ”Hi”. Phone keyboard swipe function loves changing my communications. Kinda like a MITM with a bad sense of humour.