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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.
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China Set to Begin First Trials of Thorium Molten Salt Nuclear Reactor
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(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.