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China Starts Molten Salt Nuclear Reactor Project
greg_barton writes "The Energy From Thorium blog reports, 'The People's Republic of China has initiated a research and development project in thorium molten-salt reactor technology. It was announced in the Chinese Academy of Sciences annual conference on Tuesday, January 25.' The liquid-fluoride thorium reactor is an alternative reactor design that 1) burns existing nuclear waste, 2) uses abundant thorium as a base fuel, 3) produces far less toxic, shorter-lived waste than existing designs, and 4) can be mass produced, run unattended for years, and installed underground for safety."
If it weren't for the enviro-nuts and not-in-my-backyarders who think electricity magically comes from the socket and not instead from coal plants and the like.
So is it our turn now to steal their patents?
For those of you that think stuff like this is a good idea
http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/index.html
... for the "China syndrome"?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I've been running across tantalizing scraps of info about thorium reactors and their supposed advantages for years. I half thought the theory must be questionable (obviously I'm no physicist) largely because if it were so promising, why would thorium designs not be prevalent in Europe or the US?
This is exciting news. Seems like China is the place to be if you're looking to experiment with new (or old, rediscovered) ideas.
Note the stub says they have initiated R&D. Not that they have a plan or design, etc.
Also one of the more annoying things mentioned on that page are their intention to maintain IP over it. Sigh...
We now face a Molten Salt Nuclear Reactor gap.
However Jimmy from Cub Scout Den 561 assures us that our nation's Sugar Crystal Nucleation Reactors are operating at optimal conditions.
This is infuriating. While the oil and coal shills in Congress and the conservative propaganda networks insist global warming is not real, and while the Greens refuse to have anything to do with nukes, China will be light-years ahead of us in technology.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
Access to abundant, cheap, clean power for personal usage, including single occupant transport, is social justice. It looks like China is going to provide this to its citizens without launching oil wars in the Middle East. I'm not a fan of the current government in China but this a rare gold star for them from me.
...the real reason the government keeps telling us to cut our sodium intake?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Westerners believe that footage from The China Syndrome (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078966/) is passed off as actual working footage of the reactor. Ironically, the footage is real.
The realities of those 4 points: 1)burning existing waste is really expensive and you have to run the reactor at a lower power level so it is not economically viable until uranium becomes prohibitively expensive(30-50 years from now) 2)while thorium is abundant the fuel behavior in a reactor is not as well known and more importantly its much less stable and more prone to clad failure(fuel leaking into the primary coolant) which usually forces an unplanned shutdown or reduction in output power until the next refueling. 3) blatant lie. 4) This is a claim that can only be made after years of experience because we(both the US and China) lack the capability to model fast reactors well.
Generation IV reactors like this one will probably be much more practical in 20 years time, but currently they make little sense unless you don't have access to uranium(ie India).
The US can probably just install a virus into their computers to make the plants worthless. The US might be labeled as terrorists for doing something so dangerous, but it is a small price to pay to hold the temporary status quo.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
...I've initiated a research and development initiative into warp core design.
Advice: on VPS providers
how do they fare against an earthquake?
I though it said MORTON Salt!
Sputnik.
You mean like how China has Siemens install a maglev train "Tester". Then puts the full project on hold until China can reverse engineer it, then tells Siemens, no thanks, we are gonna make our own.
Or how they steal the military tech from EU and US?
Or how they try to reverse engineer Intel kit?
Who the fuck cares about Chinese IP law? If they build it and it works, we steal the fucking plans.
Mmmm Mmm, molten salt and fusion chips.
I quote from the OP link:
"The main task of this meeting are: to take Deng Xiaoping Theory and "Three Represents" as guidance, comprehensively implement the scientific concept of development, conscientiously study and implement the Congress, seventh session of the Fifth Plenum and the Central Economic Work Conference, in-depth study and implementation of the central leading comrades academicians important speech on the General Assembly, in-depth implementation of the State Council executive meeting of the spirit of 105. Review and sum up the knowledge innovation project to mobilize and organize the implementation of the hospital in-depth "Innovation 2020", the deployment priorities in 2011."
If they can actually understand this, I might as well sit in the corner and eat Twinkies for the rest of my pointless life.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
Just view the sodium reactor experiment doc on youtube. Sodium caused a catastrophe in Simi Valley California. Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAHmaEs5cYU
Better reactor designs have been around for a very long time. My dad was studying thorium-fueled plants that cycle helium back in the 1970s (I'm 53). Unlike water cycle plants the helium doesn't contain or pick up other atoms (much), so doesn't become radioactive from irradiation. You build the core out of a pile of fist-sized chunks ("pebbles", hence "pebble bed" reactor) of some glass-like material containing enough thorium. You put some shafts into the ground under the pebble bed and sit the pebbles on a plate made of material that melts before the pebbles do. The shafts slope down and outward at ~45 degrees. If the core for whatever reason gets too hot, the plate melts and the pebbles fall down into the shafts. Each shaft ends up holding a subcritical mass of pebbles, so they just start cooling off and then you bury the whole mess. So a "disaster" is expensive, but not very dangerous, hence the term "walkaway safe" for the design. We could have done this in the 80s. The problems are all political. NIMBY rules. When investors catch on and stop buying up semi-infinite amounts of U.S bonds, we're going to get what we've earned with our cowardice and unwillingness to innovate.
That was the sound of the Chinese Nuclear Power Industry, passing the US Nuclear Power Industry. "But cha can't build bombs from it!!! they cry out". No sparky, and the half-lives are real short (27 days for the one reaction product, 22 minutes for the other). For you kids wondering about the math, If you keep the long half-life stuff around for 5 years, you have 4.35x10^-21 as much radioactive product as you had to begin with. Not saying its inert, just not really radioactive anymore. If they can put 20,000 reactors into production in 5 years, their greenhouse gas problem will be gone in 5 years. In the US, Republicans and Democrats will have been bickering for another 5 years, nothing will have been accomplished, the price of oil will be well over $150 per barrel, Exxon will have well over 90% of the GOP openly on staff, and 100 million Americans will be unemployed. This business of allowing greedy corporations to dictate all of American life hasn't led to greater prosperity. I don't see a lot of prosperous Americans. I see a lot of people barely getting by watching hi-tech jobs go to India, and since they can't afford anything else, they buy cheap stuff from either WalMart or Target (all made in China).
A thorium reactor does not require the expensive hard-to-make enriched uranium fuel rods that conventional pressurized water reactors and boiling water reactors do.
The manufacturers of nuclear reactor technology such as General Electric Nuclear and Westsinghouse Electric make big money from selling the expensive fuel rods and have no interest in reactor designs that dont need such fuel roads.
If they develop the technology, we can purchase the reactors from China. Sounds good. :)
...in case of an accident, will the molten Salt burn through the center of the earth and come out over here? ;)
I see a lot of comments stating something negative about environmentalists because we don't have molten salt reactor technology in development. This has not been the fault of environmentalists at all. This is almost purely the fault of the money making machine that is the military industrial complex, wanting to sell the technology they spent so much precious time developing, despite the factor a superior technology was readily available.
We could have electric cars too, but the patents on many batteries are owned by petroleum industry corporations.
I never saw an environmentalist with a shirt that said, "Down with molten salt reactors!!!" I'm sure given the choice and scientific evidence, most environmentalists would much more readily opt for that rather than the currently in use nuclear power paradigm.
Only a few reactionary environmentalists are anti technology. The vast majority of modern environmentalists just want less chemical waste and incidents of cancer. And to save the polar bears, though it's their own hides they should really be defending.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
I think liberals and conservatives of every stripe would rather spend money on stuff like this than on another war in the middle east for oil. Very few people alive right now see that as anything more than a silly, inevitably futile agenda as the oil WILL run out at some point regardless of who's standing at the nozzle.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Gentlemen, the Russian Ambassador has told us the Communists have the Thorium G Bomb -- and it's powered with **fluoride** yet another communist conspiracy!
Seriously, Dr Strangelove was right. And the melamine for our precious
--hongpong.com
Let them develop it first - it will give us some technology to steal from them for a change...
...if they'll use footage from Dr. Strangelove?
Chuck Norris: Socialism == a thousand years of darkness.
Even worse... When someone replies to you and you click that great little email informing you of this fact, you can end up with everything collapsed, i.e. your comment _and_ the reply, unless your own comment gathered enough points.
But then, /. never reacted to any of my emails concerning design so this will probably stay as it is :)
video clip available?
this is a research and development project . How long do you think it will take to develop ? So in 20 years they will have a workable reactor.
Research and development in the fields of LED lamps, new thermal insulation materials for walls, windows, etc., car weight reduction and so on and so forth would be much more effective way to produce energy by reducing consumption.
Wake me up when we finally have fusion in Livermore, CA.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
From a purely technical standpoint, I don't see why there can't be a transition tax, taxing carbon sources and funding/temporary subsidizing renewable sources, to encourage the economics of the issue. Of course there is resistance to change for those who will have to adapt or lose out economically and politically. Change is like that, it forces people to change.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
If nuclear is safe, why can't they get insurance? If it's so cheap, why do they need $7bn a year in subsidies for nuclear in the US alone?
It's always going to be the *next* version of nuclear reactor that is going to be safe, cheap and plentiful, isn't it?
What's REALLY infuriating are the nutballs who state that wind power is the most expensive, it needs far too much land, looks horrible and so on interminably. If you had not stood in the way of wind turbines you'd not have a problem sourcing clean power in the US.
But, no, you HAVE to have a solution that only a REALLY big business can manage.
Nowadays we talk about open source and patent freedom, but it was invented long ago. They generally called it industrial espionage and theft, but it was essentially the same, learning from the ideas of others... There's a difference from legal or moral perspective, but in practice it's about the same. Copy and improve upon. Just instead of sending an email or discussing in a forum openly, everyone has to hire multiple spies to get information and communicate with the others, and believe (or pretend) that nobody else is thinking of the same ideas. Communication of ideas among groups becomes, let's say, a bit encumbered and limited. But it does happen to some extent.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
We'll very soon know about inherent dangers or flaws, given the Chinese ain't big on Environmental Impact studies... or the telling the surrounding neighborhood squat.
Vermont appears to be embracing the doctrine of efficiency. . . and they're probably about to lose the State's largest private employer - IBM has given warning that if the price of electricity rises the 25% which is expected when they shut down the state's only nuclear power plant next year, IBM will shut down their Vermont facility and move elsewhere. Meanwhile, a Vermont State Senator who sits on key committees related to this issue is on the record saying that the idea that everyone can have all the energy they want is "outdated".
I'm not exactly an "anti-efficiency" person (I use CFL bulbs at home, I try to minimize unnecessary driving, I live with the heat set kind of cool in my apartment and wear sweaters, etc), but you can't just hand-wave over the problem and say you just need more efficiency. Let's work on efficiency, but in the meantime, let's also work on making sure there's enough energy supply for everyone. Like the other poster mentioned, efficiency *and* increased generation, until the efficiency gains make it unnecessary to add more generation.
Also, there's one other thing to keep in mind. Nuclear energy, at least, is NOT SCARCE. There's really not a strong argument for saving a resource which is abundant. We can't possibly exhaust all the nuclear energy available in the world, at least in the time left before the Sun dies, and consumes the earth in fire (which is estimated to be in about 500 Million years, and we know about nuclear energy resources to last something like 700 Million years) - and that's just with fission.
Assuming we crack the fusion 'nut', then not only do we have 700 Million years worth of fission energy, but also Billions (maybe Trillions?) of years' worth of fusion energy.
Efficiency is looking to solve a problem we don't have - energy scarcity. I mean, *yes*, RIGHT NOW, in a world economy largely dependent on fossil fuels, we have energy scarcity problems. But, people resist the very solution to that problem - Molten Salt Reactors running on Thorium can make energy scarcity very much a problem of the past. They are inherently safe, clean, and should be very cheap (compared to current fission plant designs), as well.
...can run unattended for years. So, they set these things up and don't bother paying close attention. The Chinese government has no problem with pollution, so when there IS a problem with one of these plants, I guess we will see all the people wearing masks over their faces in public replaced by radiation suits.
I agree that the USA needs to put more effort into nuclear power generation, but I seriously hope that proper monitoring and precautions are in place, no matter how safe the system is. We need more power generation in this country, BEFORE we have too many people that switch to EVs and put an extra load on the power grid.
Lots of thorium in Ungoro crater. Could also setup a geothermal plant near the center.
After reading TFA and comments and few related articles thoroughly, subject becames painfully obvious.
Last night some old B movie, saber tigers this or that was on local TV... Movie plot shares some points with this Thoriusm topic, although... A point where people think a solution for every problem possible is to "put enough startups" onto them, and some kind of contest... I've read Earthweb too, and while I think very highly of that book, I know full well it's only a fiction... Serious research is really not something you can solve with enterpreneur spirit... It must be solved through healthy goverment funding (notice healthy) and not by pushing more and more money to private companies whose top priority is to help government pals keep their jobs and push more in same direction....
Results are logically only a fraction of what is really possible with same money in less corrupt setup.
I just hope we have enough time left to survive this phase of our civilization. Time before we perish under heaps of garbage (think Wall-E) or worse.
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
They doing this for realsies or will they tell us they've succeeded and show us scenes from that crappy movie where Keanu Reeves invents a fusion reactor?
~Syberz
The way they are making it sound, looks like you could go to your local canadian tire and by one with an extended warranty....man, can't wait for those days to come.
The Chinese must subscribe to "Wired" and read the Thorium article last year...
produces far less toxic, shorter-lived waste than existing designs,
I thought the more radioactive the isotope, the shorter the half-life.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Then you have to drag the slider open (they did seem to make that thing work almost all the time this time around,) scroll to the bottom, mash the button, scroll to the bottom, mash, etc.
That story summation sounds a bit like an over-the-top infomercial with all its claims of how simple it all is. If it was all so simple we'd be doing it already. The electric companies answer to stock holders the same way corporations do, so if you can do something more cheaply with less risk and still make the same money then by economic osmosis that's where the industry would head. Maybe it's going to head there soon, but it can't just be all so simple as the summation surmises.
I think "Chain Reaction" is more relevant to this story.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Wikipedia now has a dozen or so informative articles on Molten Salt Reactors, Liquid Thorium Fluoride Reactors, etc. It's a good place to start. There is a website supporting the LFTR: Energy From Thorium. I note that I believe a lot of the PR out there regarding thorium is produced by a company that presently owns a huge percentage of the mining rights to thorium deposits in the US. Which is fine by me. :)
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Note that the percentages shown in exhibit 28-6 are misleading; they only show just how much fossil fuels are burned in the United States. Why does anything need subsidization?
Build a machine correctly, and it will run - and fail - safely with minimal oversight. Automatic sensors can be installed to keep someone notified of how it's working; beyond that, a good design eliminates the need for 24/7 on-site monitoring and manipulation.
Before you come back with a "Titanic!" analogy, learn how this reactor works, what can go wrong, and how it handles failure. This is "news for nerds", not "news for clueless hysterical neo-Luddites".
Could something horrible conceivably go wrong? Sure. Can we do a risk analysis and determine what the odds & costs thereof are? Sure. Can we design a system to perform a task and mitigate the risks to an acceptable level? Yes - just like the risks of freeway driving have been mitigated to the point where you're not concerned about driving home after work, even though there's a non-zero chance you'll be killed/maimed doing so.
The whole point of this reactor is when it fails, when it heads toward going critical, the physics are such that it just shuts itself down - no explosion, no vented gasses, no need for the public at large wearing radiation suits.
BTW: it's assumed that because we're talking in soundbites, the discussion implies the obvious caveats. Criticizing TFS for not explaining everything in Encyclopedia Britannica sized detail is presumed forgivable.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
-- MarkusQ
The 'catch' seems to be two things, near as I can tell:
1) A regulatory environment which does a good job of keeping us safe, but doesn't know how to handle the emergence of new technologies very well. I believe there are some substantial regulatory hurdles vis-a-vis any new nuclear reactor, which are not appropriate to Molten Salt Reactors, because they are pretty different from conventional Light Water Reactors.
2) R&D - Industry does some R&D, but most utility companies have no interest in spending 500 Million or a Billion dollars on basic research for 10 or 20 years before they'll be able to bring a product to market.
Probably, there'd be some utilities interested in investing in building LFTRs (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors, another name for a Thorium Molten Salt Reactor), but who are not in the business of fundamental R&D. Someone needs to do the R&D first.
If they develop the technology, we can purchase the reactors from China. Sounds good. :)
..we can take a leaf from the Chinese and purchase a batch, sub assemble the next lot, and then completely copy the design :-)
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
The Diablo Canyon Plant in California has been operating safely for almost 30 years now, on a fault line nonetheless. It provides a huge chunk of the power available to the Western seaboard. The license is currently up for renewal, and there are some upgrades under discussion to go along with the new license. This 30 year positive track record, however, has not stopped a local group of protesters (Mothers for Peace, blech) from impeding the licensing process every step of the way.
At every local hearing, engineers and safety experts address, rationally, the concerns of the protesters. At every local hearing, the protesters walk away insisting that the scientists are trying to kill them and bomb the Central Coast. That's not hyperbole, that's literally what I have heard come out of their mouths. So to answer your question, nuclear power, even dated nuclear power plants, can be safe and can produce plenty of electricity to pay for themselves. It really is the enviro-nuts that have a stick up their ass about that big scary thing called science that are holding our society back.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Great Google tech talk on the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8
The problem with wind isn't generation per-se (although that can be an issue) it's that the power can't be stored reliably for any length of time. As a result, you still have to have a base-load generation capacity that's equal to or greater than the maximum power requirements, or you get brown and black outs. This is a result of the fact that wind does not blow all the time and it's proven difficult so far to place the windfarms so that there will always be power available.
We rely on electricity. It needs to be available all the time. Wind cannot promise that at the moment. Perhaps combining wind farms with stored energy hydro would work, but again, it starts to get very expensive indeed when you look at that.
There are technologies being researched that can mitigate the problems of wind power but they're not there yet.
We want to reduce our dependence on coal, gas and oil, and it looks like, at the moment, the competing technology is not there yet. We know nuclear CAN do it, but there's significant hangovers from Three Mile Island, Chernoybl, and other incidents, as well as the link between power generation and weapons. The net result of this is that building any kind of reactor is difficult, and research on it has slowed to a snails pace. It would be wonderful to see that change and safer fission designs researched and implemented. As has been mentioned, the other roadblocks are 1. the bulk of the nuclear price is up-front in the building of the plant requiring sigificant investment and 2. the waste, which even when re-processed is pretty nasty stuff for a while.
Rational thought is the only true freedom
A french company that makes nuclear submarines is proposing a modified version as a power plant. Instead of driving around underwater like subs, this will just sit on the bottom of the ocean making power, and sending it to nearby land via power line. Combine that with the molten salt technology and you have a real winner. If the reactor is 100m underwater, you will never run out of coolant, get a free 100m of shielding, pretty much is terrorist immune. Humans will still do maintenance, the main pressure vessel is 4 stories tall and 100m long, and reached by normal diving methods or submersibles. Since the reactor is built elsewhere, and only dropped into place and plugged in at the end, there is a lot less exposure for nuclear activists to complain at. Not many news reporters will go 12 miles offshore to photograph a protest boat.
We should add the Canadian Deuterium reactor technology to this fun fest.
In the "Graduate" the buzz phrase was plastic.
Today it should be insulation.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/bill_gates.html
Due to such a mistake I am not in any way convinced that the author knows anything at all about the subject matter and for all I know may be a general "analyst" that knows nothing about science or engineering but knows how to cut and paste a few bits from the library (1954 liquids metal handbook as a reference!) and complain about how hard it is to get information about Russian reactors.
After a bit of googling it looks like he really is an engineer from the net (if you can trust facebook) and that ironicly he graduated in the year when I stopped working in power stations (1996). In that year I could have introduced him to some ex-USSR nuclear engineers to solve his complaint since a lot of them migrated. Maybe he does know what he's talking about but a simplistic powerpoint is what it is.