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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?
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."
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 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
No. The real reason is: To much sodium is bad for you. It increases blood pressure.
Disclaimer: There is no long term research that indicates this, although it seems like it does.
Funny how they always forget that disclaimer.
Disclaimer on the disclaimer: I have lowered my sodium intake.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
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.
No, it requires special alloys for piping the molten salt (fluorides are still corrosive), may require replacing the graphite moderator every 4 years (keep in mind not to allow moisture to come in contact with the salt, HF is nasty for your pipes no matter what material you'd be using), raises challenges in regards with by-product processing. citation if one needs it.
These guys (which played with MSR since '50-es) are saying, while the reactor accident risks are decreased, the processing accident risks are increased (see page 13-15).
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
There is no cladding on the fuel.
This is not a fast reactor. It is thermal.
We don't have a lot of experience with molten salt reactors, which is a large part of what China is researching. Your criticism is at least premature.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
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.
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 :)
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
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/
Toxicity is not a by-product of radioactivity. A [very mildly] radioactive metal like lead-204 is still lead, and will kill you like lead if you are exposed to too much; the fact that it is radioactive is trivial in a case like this. In a case like U-238, the radioactivity of the metal is quite low and the real danger of handling it is heavy metal poisoning.
-- MarkusQ
Great Google tech talk on the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8
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).
1) Nonsense. Fuel costs for nuclear generators are almost negligible. You would not burn the waste because it is cheaper to do so, you would burn them because you don't want to bury them. We don't reprocess currently because of political reasons not economic.
2) Nonsense, you don't even know what reactor you are writing about. LFTR is based upon the molten salt reactor experiment at Oak Ridge. There is no cladding, that is a solid fuel reactor. Salts are incredibly stable. The MSRE was so stable that when the operators want to shut it down, which they did on weekend, they simply turned it off. The hot fuel/salt mixture then melted a plug which allow the fuel/salt to flow into a drain tank leaving it in a subcritical configuration.
3) Nonsense, again you do not know what reactor you are writing about. LFTR would substantially reduce wastes on both ends of the fuel cycle. The front end wastes being the depleted uranium which would be completely eliminated and the backend wastes being the transuranic actinides created when U238 absorbs neutrons. Unlike LFTR which contains no U238, today's LWR fuel pellets are 97% U238 which provides the vast majority of the long lived radiotoxicity that must be contained for 10's of thousands of years. LFTR wastes are substantially less in mass, about 80% reduced in 10 years and down to background radiation levels in about 300 years.
4) Nonsense. What we are talking about is not a fast reactor. More importantly what the Chinese are doing is funding research into commercializing this reactor design, not building commercial reactors. Thanks to the low levels of science education in the U.S. and people like yourself spreading their ignorance and FUD, I doubt the U.S. will ever do the same.