[HN Gopher] China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025
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       China to Build Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor in 2025
        
       Author : rbanffy
       Score  : 11 points
       Date   : 2024-12-30 21:57 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
        
       | karaterobot wrote:
       | Well, good. It's a shame nobody else has stepped up to do this
       | first. Maybe China doing it first will help get the ball rolling.
        
       | ggm wrote:
       | Commence, maybe. Given their lead in pebble bed, I wonder why?
       | Probably competing teams and competing funding and goals. Thorium
       | was in test decades ago in the USA and its applicability to large
       | scale power with lower proliferation risk is given. I think the
       | article's pointing out how much usable thorium China has as a
       | side effect of rare earth mining may get to the heart of things:
       | people with giant trash piles look for ways to monetise.
        
       | acidburnNSA wrote:
       | Woah, looks like this article has a major error in it right up
       | front:
       | 
       | "The project follows a 2-MW experimental version completed in
       | 2021 and operated since then. "
       | 
       | They completed the TMSR-LF1 back then, and got authorization to
       | turn it on, but have never announced startup or operation, as far
       | as I'm aware. I've actually been bracing for the headline since
       | 2021 because it would be the first time we operated a molten salt
       | reactor since Oak Ridge's MSRE shut down in 1969.
       | 
       | For all its purported benefits, fluid nuclear fuel has major
       | challenges because the extraordinarily radioactive fission
       | products are no longer held up inside the fuel pins, but rather
       | are flowing around the entire primary system, coming into
       | intimate contact with (and plating out on) pumps, heat
       | exchangers, the vessel wall, instruments, valves, etc. etc. My
       | guess is that they ran into some trouble with containing this, or
       | remotely maintaining the primary equipment.
        
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       (page generated 2024-12-30 23:01 UTC)