China Starts Molten Salt Nuclear Reactor Project

Posted by Soulskill on Monday January 31, 2011 @05:18PM from the high-sodium-high-energy-diet dept.

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."

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Re:Where we should have been years ago already by profplump · 2011-01-31 17:26 · Score: 5, Insightful

Well that and the conflation of defense-industry nuclear materials production with energy production -- thorium reactors are almost certainly better for generating power, but they don't help you build nuclear bombs, so they get less funding (or at least they have historically).