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."

Comments

Re:Where we should have been years ago already

[ShakaUVM]

Seriously, just how paranoid do you have to be to believe in an environmental lobby that can prevail against any industry that sees big, quick bucks to be made?

The environmental lobby has been tremendously successful at interfering with or shutting down projects in America in the last 30 years. They're the real "Party of No".

How out of touch with what environmentalists actually think do you have to be to believe they *don't* know coal is involved in generating electricity?

Oh, they know it, but they'll find something to complain about with every other power plant being proposed, leading them to being de facto supporters of coal/NG power production. Nuclear, wind, solar, tidal - it doesn't matter. The Sierra Club will be there blocking it. The amount of sheer hyprocisy in the environmental movement is so high, I'm baffled how you could possibly support them. They've done more harm to our environment than any other group in America.

Excelsior!

Renewable energy sources are where we'll be in the long run anyhow, because sustainability is, well, *unsustainable*. Unsustainability per se is not a long term problem, because it is a self-correcting problem. The problems with non-sustainable practices are all the things we end up doing to keep the status quo running just a little bit longer; the external costs we dump on the society and the planet because we are facing problems we don't know how to fix in a decade, much less overnight. Deepwater Horizon was an example of that. We pushed our capability to the limit, and because the margins at the limit aren't as generous as we'd like we cut corners.

This entire paragraph is so badly reasoned, I don't even know where to begin.

"Sustainability is unsustainable"? What does that even mean? How is that not a contradiction?

You also have to define what you mean by the long term. We have enough coal and fissionable materials for a *really* long time. Long enough that it doesn't really matter there's a finite limit on it - it's like arguing that solar is nonrenewable because it comes from the sun, that will burn out in a few billion years.

Deepwater Horizon was not an example of pushing external costs on society, because BP is paying for the damages they caused. It is also Oil, which is a totally different ballgame from nuclear.

People equate thinking ahead with doom and gloom.

As a child of the 80s, I am constantly surprised (well, not really) when I still get safe drinking water from the tap (we were supposed to run out), that we've had only one or two species go extinct (it was supposed to be the biggest dieoff in history), that we aren't covered in a layer of trash like in Wall-E, and that the climate is not a hundred degrees hotter or colder than it was in the 80s.

All of these were predictions by the environmental lobby, and all of them were braindead doom and gloom predictions. That's the environmentalist's stock-in-trade.

Well, having low prices for petroleum, coal and natural gas after the 1970s *might* have had something to do with the collapse of the US nuclear industry. ...
Nonetheless, I think we *should* increase our use of nuclear power. We'll probably need to increase our use of natural gas and (ugh) coal. There will be millions spent lobbying to choose one of these technologies and treat it as a silver bullet (which none of them will be). We just have to accept that's a fight we'll have to have, because having failed to convince people to look ahead forty years ago, we can't just wag our finger at them and say, "See? This is what we said was going to happen, even if in the short term oil prices went down." You don't win people over by rubbing their nose in their being wrong.

You do know that Oil has nothing to do with nuclear, NG and coal, right? One is for cars, one is for electricity generation. (Oil is a percent or so of our total energy production, and mainly used as a backstop.)

Well, I *do* want to replace Oil with Coal, but you don't sound like you're really knowledgeable enough to be making an argument along those lines.