[HN Gopher] China reaches energy milestone by "breeding" uranium...
___________________________________________________________________
China reaches energy milestone by "breeding" uranium from thorium
https://archive.is/DQpXM
https://www.stdaily.com/web/English/2025-11/17/content_43298...
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 329 points
Date : 2025-11-22 17:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scmp.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scmp.com)
| T-A wrote:
| A better explanation of the significance:
|
| https://www.stdaily.com/web/English/2025-11/17/content_43298...
| cubefox wrote:
| > Now, the research team is conducting systematic studies on
| the key scientific issues related to adding thorium, and aims
| to completethe construction of a 100-megawatt TMSR
| demonstration project, and begin operation by 2035.
|
| For comparison: A commercial nuclear power plant is 1 gigawatt,
| a 10x difference. I assume this would be the next step.
| allenrb wrote:
| The typical 1 gigawatt rating for a nuclear power reactor is
| measuring electrical output. Given the various
| inefficiencies, the actual reactor output (as heat) is
| something like 3x that amount. Whereas a research reactor
| will be quoted as thermal output.
|
| That to say, a typical commercial reactor might be 30x the
| power of a 100 MW research device.
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! We've put that link in the toptext as well.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I think I read recently that this was a US idea that was
| abandoned that China took up and made it work. Is that accurate?
| T-A wrote:
| Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-
| based_nuclear_power#Hi...
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Well, fible energy is trying to do lots. Gates invested in MSTR
| (molten salt thorium reactor).
|
| But regulation, while it has its purposes, stifles many things.
| At the same time time it's not even doing what they were meant
| for.
|
| There are a number of countries being run far better than the
| US or the EU
| dmix wrote:
| > There are a number of countries being run far better than
| the US or the EU
|
| It will be funny if China is what convinces the US to be more
| open to free industry. Opposite day vs the 1970s
| bilbo0s wrote:
| To be fair, these advances are not being made in China due
| to "free industry". They have something of a command
| economy for their critical sectors. So it's unfair not to
| point out that it's easy to make advances if a nation as a
| whole points to a hill and says, "take that hill". Of
| course you can do it under those circumstances.
|
| If it's just your company or some trifling consortium
| trying to develop nuclear energy advances in a "free
| industry" environment, the guy who is just slapping up
| windmills, [T Boone Pickens RIP], is just gonna mop the
| floor with you. There's just no way to compete on moonshots
| like that.
| lunar-whitey wrote:
| China has many capital controls but generally supports
| industrial activity in the state interest; the US does
| the opposite.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| Gates invested in the traveling wave reactor which was a
| bust. Then he sold his entire investment in nuclear several
| years ago. He's very rich so perhaps he has other nuclear
| investments that I'm not aware of but none are in the MSTR
| space unless they are secret/private.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _none are in the MSTR space unless they are secret
| /private_
|
| TerraPower is not secret.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| Historical experiments with alternative fuel cycles, not
| serious development attempts. A serious development attempt
| happened in India though.
| lunar-whitey wrote:
| No country has seriously invested in the thorium fuel cycle
| because it cannot be used to create weapons. Unfortunately, the
| technology also began to look most promising as an energy
| source around the same time the Three Mile Island nuclear
| accident effectively ended all interest in nuclear energy in
| the United States.
| retrac wrote:
| India has shown some of the most interest to date, due to
| their lack of domestic uranium reserves. But it's been slow
| going their fast breeder reactor plans were delayed by like
| two decades. But it is built and it was loaded with fuel last
| month [0]
|
| The French interest in breeder reactors and nuclear
| reprocessing also originates from a similar concern about
| lack of domestic access to raw uranium. Though Super-phoenix
| [0] was a more traditional uranium -> plutonium approach and
| not thorium. They gave up because just using uranium is way,
| way cheaper than synthesizing your own fissile materials.
|
| [0] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/indias-
| prototype...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix
| lazide wrote:
| Also, it's only energy positive under some specific carefully
| managed conditions, and is a real pain to make work.
|
| If you have easy access to uranium, you just use it directly
| instead.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| Depends on what you want out of your reactor. You want to
| make a synthetic fuel, Thorium not Uranium. You want a
| liquid fueled reactor (because its safer and proliferation
| resistant), Thorium not Uranium. You want 900C heat instead
| of 300C heat, Thorium not Uranium.
|
| The fuel costs of a NPP are a tiny rounding error. If you
| want electricity and want to build it today, Uranium not
| Thorium. You are using arguments from 50 years ago when
| many incorrect assumptions about cost structure and fuel
| availability were used to make decisions.
| lazide wrote:
| The cope is strong here. The only liquid fueled reactors
| with any operational experience got shut down because of
| corrosion issues causing major leaks.
|
| The pros you mention are theoretical - because the cons
| came out in force when actually tried, and they've been
| tried many times by many different countries.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Thorium can be used to make weapons via the breeding cycle.
| It's much less convenient and straightforward than
| uranium/plutonium, but it is possible.
| lunar-whitey wrote:
| Theoretically, perhaps, but I don't think anyone with a
| serious interest in weapons would pursue it. From a
| nonproliferation perspective, I'd guess the infrastructure
| necessary to remove contaminants from uranium bred through
| the thorium cycle would be costly and difficult to conceal.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Multiple countries have detonated nuclear bombs using
| U-233 derived from thorium reactors! [0] Practically I
| agree with you that thorium is proliferation resistant
| and if someone is bomb hungry they won't prioritize it,
| but if you want to set up the bomb and all you have is
| thorium... The infrastructure wouldn't necessarily be
| significantly larger or worse than conventional
| enrichment.
|
| 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-233
| lunar-whitey wrote:
| Seems presence of U-232 is more manageable than I
| thought.
| polski-g wrote:
| You can absolutely make nuclear weapons with U233.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| Technically true and practically false. Only once has
| anyone done that. The bomb was considered a dud and the
| research was ultimately destroyed. So while you could, it
| would require completely reinventing all the original
| research that went into making the original one. Lookup
| operation teapot for more details.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| Weapons are irrelevant for power generation. No modern
| classic pwr was used to create weapons- because it's cheaper
| to have dedicated infra
| preisschild wrote:
| Yeah, the US had an experimental Molten Salt Reactor in the 60s
| tim333 wrote:
| The US had a similar but not identical reactor in the 60s, the
| Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment
|
| It had uranium-233 from breeding from thorium in other
| reactors.
|
| The main problem with these things is they seem very
| unprofitable. The US reactor ran from 1964 to 1969 and produced
| a small amount of power but is still running about $10m a year
| in decommissioning costs. You thing you can run these things a
| while and think it's over but:
|
| >Sampling in 1994 revealed concentrations of uranium that
| created a potential for a nuclear criticality accident, as well
| as a potentially dangerous build-up of fluorine gas: the
| environment above the solidified salt was approximately one
| atmosphere of fluorine. The ensuing decontamination and
| decommissioning project was called "the most technically
| challenging"...
| _trampeltier wrote:
| This came up several times the last few weeks, but never stayed
| on the front for long. Also no comments.
|
| I guess soon the west has to copy chinas tech.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Breeding is a technology looking for a business case.
|
| It's more expensive than just using fresh uranium in current
| market conditions. It's a way from keeping future uranium
| shortages from making nuclear power more expensive; it's not a
| way to make nuclear cheaper than it currently is.
| NewJazz wrote:
| Emphasis on current market conditions. Relations with uranium
| mining countries and environmental opposition to uranium
| mining could shift conditions.
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| The truth is that nuclear power is not that financially
| attractive at the present and would the price of uranium
| rise enough that breeders would become economically viable
| most countries would just stop bothering with nuclear power
| altogether.
| cpursley wrote:
| > The truth is that nuclear power is not that financially
| attractive
|
| Let me fix that for you: "The truth is that nuclear power
| is not that financially attractive in the bureaucratic
| high cost litigious Anglo-sphere". And that's pretty much
| all infrastructure these days, unfortunately.
| dalyons wrote:
| They're not financially attractive in other parts of the
| world either. China, a zero litigation single party
| state, is building some but a tiny % compared to their
| renewable buildout
| cpursley wrote:
| They need a lot of energy from a variety of sources.
| China has 30 or so reactors under construction (half or
| so of all active projects).
| dalyons wrote:
| "China currently has 58 operable reactors with a total
| capacity of 56.9 GW. A further 30 reactors, with a total
| capacity of 34.4 GW are under construction" [1]
|
| So, yes, but...
|
| China installed 256GW of solar in the first 6 months of
| 2025 [2]. A full year estimate of ~350gw. So, the _total_
| of all nuclear under construction is 1 /10th of the solar
| they installed in _one year_.
|
| Don't get me wrong, its cool to see diversity of non
| fossil sources, glad they are building some, but its a
| niche in their overall energy buildout. And they can only
| build that small niche because they dont have to be
| market priced, its state subsidized.
|
| [1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/ten-new-
| reactors... [2] https://ember-energy.org/latest-
| updates/global-solar-install...
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Comparing nuclear reactor capacity to solar capacity is
| misleading because renewable capacity dramatically
| overstates actual generation. IIRC The capacity factor
| for solar ranges between %5-%25 of total capacity
| generated.
| dalyons wrote:
| Yes yes, one of the usual reflexive context free points
| repeated every time solar comes up. Whatever the actual
| capacity factor is(5% is not a serious number ), I'm sure
| chinas energy planners know that, it's hardly a gotcha.
| And still they've choose to build solar at a volume
| massively dwarfing nuclear
|
| (Edit: cycomanic explained it much better and more
| patiently than me)
| Hammershaft wrote:
| I don't think it's reflexive to point out that evaluating
| the headline numbers like that is misleading. People who
| are new to the topic will misinformed if they think
| you're describing an apples to apples comparison.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The issue is that even with your correction the point
| stands. You weren't refuting, you were being irrelevant.
| cycomanic wrote:
| That doesn't significantly change the argument. Most
| solar plants have capacity factors of around 20% (5%
| might apply to home systems, but not commerical),
| compared to nuclear which has around 80%. So a factor of
| 4. So numbers change a bit on the previous poster, China
| just installed 3x more solar in 1 year than all the
| nuclear under construction, or they essentially installed
| the same amout of solar in one year as all existing and
| under construction nuclear combined. And if we look at
| projections, next year they likely will install twice as
| much solar...
|
| While China is often put up as the poster child for
| nuclear power, they are actually a great example of how
| nuclear is being overtaken by renewables. China's 2019
| plan was that by 2035 nuclear would account for ~8% of
| generated electricity (up from ~5%). Since then
| percentage dropped to 4.5% (and the drop seems to be
| accelerating). Unless something dramatically changes
| nuclear will account for less than 4% (not the planned
| 8%) of generated electricity by 2035. All that is due to
| the raise of renewables (largely solar). I suspect we
| will not see China build close to those projected 200 GW
| and the percentage to be even lower, just due to the
| exponential growth in solar.
|
| source:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
| culi wrote:
| It's not the litigiousness that makes it expensive.
| France was producing nuclear power plants at a cost per
| watt that nearly matches modern China. In fact, the mind-
| numbing cost overruns seem unique to the US.
|
| Here's a Nature article about it:
|
| https://archive.ph/Tpe0j
|
| Seems to me like it's more of a story of corruption than
| of over-regulation
| dalyons wrote:
| france cant do it any more either. Flamanville was 12
| years late and [1] 400% over budget. EPR2 is already
| delayed and over budget and they havent even started
| building yet!
|
| UK cant do it either, see hinkley point c [2]
|
| [1] https://www.nucnet.org/news/long-delayed-nuclear-
| plant-conne... [2] https://www.world-nuclear-
| news.org/articles/edf-announces-hi...
| culi wrote:
| That might be somewhat true but Flamanville was still
| about $4/watt while Vogtle 3 and 4 (which were built
| around the same time) were about $15/watt. It's still
| hard to place France and the US in the same bucket. The
| US really is uniquely inept at nuclear costs
| pfdietz wrote:
| Flammanville 3 was about EUR14/W, or about $16/W.
|
| https://mastodon.energy/@Sustainable2050/1136956355217145
| 72
| hunterpayne wrote:
| The UK does the same thing. In fact, its across the
| entire west. Its almost as if absurd over-regulation is
| expensive. The Vogtle plant construction for example had
| to deal with 3 different tranches of changes to the
| design caused by regulators. Its not corruption, its
| over-regulation. If it is corruption, it is corrupt
| politicians intentionally over-regulating because their
| backers make lots of money extracting FFs.
| arcticbull wrote:
| The cost of nuclear power is almost entirely capex and
| financing, not opex. Uranium input cost for nuclear power
| plants is 0.5c/kWh. With breeders you can divide that by
| about 100.
|
| At least as of a couple years ago nuclear costs just a
| little more than solar plus storage and that's not
| stopping anyone heh.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Capex and financing is still an issue for many countries,
| and the opex is a non-zero commitment beyond just the
| fiscal portion. Most countries that pass-over nuclear
| energy are fairly justified in their decision. The
| status-quo is still not super psyched about nuclear
| proliferation.
|
| There is room to change that, but the cards are very
| heavily stacked in China's favor. America's bad at the
| financing part, fickle when it comes to enforcement &
| supply chains, and ostensibly 2 days away from bailing on
| the IAEA itself. The proliferation-resistance of Thorium
| reactors gives China an export trump card that America
| will struggle to match.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| With recent price drops of solar and storage the
| difference is now multiples.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| This is just plain false. Learn the difference between
| capacity cost and utilization cost.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| It is LCOE outside of the US tariff bubble.
|
| Go ahead a calculate what co-locating ~$52/kWh BESS
| systems alongside an utility scale solar install costs
| per kWh.
|
| https://www.ess-news.com/2025/06/26/china-energy-
| engineering...
| culi wrote:
| China has more uranium reserves and less thorium reserves
| than the US though
|
| Most thorium: India, Brazil, Australia, US, Turkey
|
| Most uranium: Australia, Kazakhstan, Canada, Russia,
| Namibia
| lunar-whitey wrote:
| There is no business case for basic research, but if you stop
| basic research long enough you will have no business. The
| United States and its allies seem to have completely
| forgotten this.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It makes sense for big monopolies like Bell, or the CCP.
| The investment can be justified if the ones investing are
| confident they will be able to capture the value and not
| some competitor.
| lunar-whitey wrote:
| Bell Labs also served to maintain positive perceptions of
| the monopoly. Unix was famously developed despite the
| knowledge that AT&T would not be able to offer it as an
| independent product.
| coliveira wrote:
| No business sense for scientific research? You know
| you're completely destroying the argument for capitalism,
| right?
| HPsquared wrote:
| I don't see how it follows. Anyway it's debatable if the
| current system with antitrust laws is true capitalism.
| One of those poorly-defined words that people argue over.
| pfdietz wrote:
| This isn't basic research, it's applied research. Applied
| research lives or dies on the plausibility of the ultimate
| applicability.
| polski-g wrote:
| This isn't basic research. The US has had this tech for
| half a century. There's just no reason to do it. Uranium is
| plentiful and cheap and arguably safer.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| The fuel cost of a NPP has almost no impact on the NPP's
| operational expenses and a LFTR (like all liquid fuel
| designs) is a far safer design. Nobody in the energy
| industry has talked about the fuel cost in nuclear in 50
| years. It isn't even a consideration when comparing
| designs. Waste volume, safety, politics, and construction
| labor costs are the factors which are considered (also
| temp of the heat maybe).
| adrian_b wrote:
| They highlight less the advantages from breeding, than other
| advantages of the molten salt design, like not needing a lot
| of cooling water, which allows this reactor to operate in the
| Gobi desert, the possibility of replacing the fuel without
| halting the reactor and various safety features.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Nuclear reactors don't need a particularly big amount of
| cooling water.
|
| The thermodynamic cycle needs a cold source though, and
| it's most commonly water. This doesn't depend on the
| reactor design and this is equally as true of coal plants.
|
| As long as you are making electricity out of a
| thermodynamic cycle, you need a heat source (be it a flame
| or a nuclear reaction) and a cold source.
| adrian_b wrote:
| As the reactor _is_ operating in the Gobi desert and
| China claims that its main advantage for them is exactly
| this possibility of operating in the inland arid areas of
| the country, unlike their current reactors that must be
| installed only close to the sea, in the part of the
| country with abundant water, they must have a solution
| for the cold source that does not involve water.
|
| Perhaps they use as a cold source the underground soil,
| though the soil thermal conductivity will limit the
| amount of power of the reactor. This reactor has a modest
| power, which could be explained by this constraint.
|
| If the reactor is as safe as they claim, the moderate
| output power per reactor could be compensated by
| installing many such reactors.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > As the reactor is operating in the Gobi desert and
| China claims that its main advantage for them is exactly
| this possibility of operating in the inland arid areas of
| the country
|
| This is mainly a feature of the reactor being small. If
| you don't have much heat to dissipate, even air cooling
| becomes feasible.
|
| > unlike their current reactors that must be installed
| only close to the sea, in the part of the country with
| abundant water
|
| In reality even current water-cooled reactors can be
| pretty efficient in terms of water use if you design the
| cooling system with that in mind. See the Palo Verde
| Nuclear Generating Station in Arizona.
|
| > Perhaps they use as a cold source the underground soil
|
| I'm not sure this would work, as you'd be storing heat in
| the soil without a real heat drain so the yield of the
| plant would decrease until it reaches zero.
|
| For small reactors air or radiative cooling are an option
| though.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _other advantages of the molten salt design, like not
| needing a lot of cooling water_
|
| This advantage is conserved by _all_ non-water moderated
| reactor designs.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The use of water for moderation is one thing, the use of
| water for cooling is another thing, even if in many
| reactors water is used for both purposes.
|
| A reactor can be moderated with something else than
| water, e.g. graphite, but it may still need water for
| cooling.
|
| The amount of water needed for cooling is much more than
| needed for moderation.
|
| So there is no doubt that many "non-water moderated
| reactor designs" still need copious amounts of cooling
| water.
|
| Any "non-water moderated reactor design" that does not
| have liquid fuel, i.e. it is not a molten-salt design,
| must have a cooling fluid, though the fluid in the
| primary cooling circuit may be not water, but something
| else, e.g. molten metal (e.g. molten sodium) or
| supercritical carbon dioxide.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I believe the point was that non-water moderated designs
| typically operate at higher core temperature than LWRs,
| so they can reject waste heat at higher temperature (or
| reject less waste heat per unit of electrical energy
| produced), and that makes rejection to air more
| practical.
|
| A very high temperature reactor might even be able to
| work with an open air Brayton cycle system, which would
| allow heat to be directly exhausted in that air stream.
| It would probably still need an in intermediate heat
| exchanger so the air wasn't being irradiated with
| neutrons.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _very high temperature reactor might even be able to
| work with an open air Brayton cycle system_
|
| Is anyone doing that? Everything I've seen is Rankine.
| pfdietz wrote:
| No, because it would require very high temperature. The
| air coming out of the compressor of a gas turbine would
| already be hotter than the water/steam coming out of a
| LWR. It would likely involve a core temperature of around
| 1000 C. The turbine inlet temperature of a modern jet
| engine is at least 1500 C. There would likely be thermal
| NOx production, so post treatment of the gas might be
| necessary in an open cycle system.
| dmix wrote:
| It also apparently provides a way to make reactors that don't
| depend as much on water so they don't all have to be near the
| coast.
|
| This would allow Western China to also develop reactors to
| help underpin their renewable and coal energy.
|
| > The interest in MSR technology and Thorium breeding did not
| disappear however. China's nuclear power production relies
| heavily on imported uranium,[10] a strategic vulnerability in
| the event of i.e. economic sanctions. Additionally, the
| relative lack of water available for cooling PWRs west of the
| Hu line is a limiting factor for siting them there.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1?wprov=sfti1#History
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _also apparently provides a way to make reactors that
| don't depend as much on water so they don't all have to be
| near the coast_
|
| Non-water microreactors broadly fall into two categories:
| ones using a different moderator, most commonly sodium, a
| sodium salt or helium; and those using heat pipes. Most
| microreactor designs don't use water.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Nuclear plants don't need more water than a coal plant of
| the same power, they both use the same steam turbine with
| water as cold source.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Reducing the energy sector to pure business would probably
| work in the 1990s, but not now, when countries are afraid of
| strategic dependence on potentially hostile suppliers.
|
| Uranium isn't as ubiquitous as, say, natural gas, and
| stockpiling it comes with a big heap of physical problems. I
| can definitely see countries spending on more expensive
| technology if it comes with more energy security.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > in current market conditions.
|
| That is, as long as we don't build more nuclear power plants.
|
| If you want to increase nuclear power adoption, then you're
| not going to stay in "current market conditions" for long.
| culi wrote:
| I mean we're already doing that in many avenues. Solar being
| the most obvious. The only functioning solar manufacturing
| plants in the US are Chinese-owned and are only here to take
| advantage of subsidies.
|
| Plenty has been learned by the US/West from copying their
| approach to agriculture, robotics in factories, mining, drones,
| etc. Have you seen their electromagnetic catapult technology??
| That stuff seems like its from the space-age! There's even
| plenty of tech that we can't really explain like the all-moving
| wingtips on the new J-50s. (and yes, I'm avoiding talking about
| their supersonic cruise missiles)
| hunterpayne wrote:
| Lunacy and CCP propaganda
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _soon the west has to copy chinas tech_
|
| Thorium MSRs don't make sense for the Americas, Europe or
| Australia. We have plenty of uranium.
|
| Nuclear is receiving solid research backing in both America and
| China. (India is playing too. Austrlia is having an identity
| crisis.) Our different geologies mean there will probably be
| one solution for China, India and North Africa, on one hand,
| and the rest of the world, on the other hand.
| stubish wrote:
| I don't think Australia is having an identity crisis. There
| won't be research backing from Australia as the Nuclear
| agenda one party is pushing is essentially a cover story for
| replacing antique coal plants with gas plants. A genuine
| Nuclear plan for Australia would include realistic timelines
| and budgets, and use of other renewables to replace coal
| plants that are failing today while meeting climate targets.
| And meeting climate targets is important, because if we don't
| care about them then coal and gas will remain cheaper than
| Nuclear for Australia due to having large reserves.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _I don 't think Australia is having an identity crisis_
|
| That was tongue in cheek. It's being indecisive. I guess
| that's conserved across the Anglosphere.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| The cost of the fuel is less than 0.1% of the cost of running
| a NPP. The cost of the fuel has almost nothing to do with the
| economics of nuclear power. And considering a liquid fueled
| reactor makes heat in the 900C range and a AP1400 makes heat
| in the 300C range, they aren't really substitutes for each
| other. The amount of incorrect information in this thread is
| truly shocking. For example, you can make synthetic fuel from
| a LFTR, you can't from a BWR or a PWR. That might be a
| valuable feature, don't you think.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _cost of the fuel has almost nothing to do with the
| economics of nuclear power_
|
| Who said this?
|
| > _considering a liquid fueled reactor makes heat in the
| 900C range and a AP1400 makes heat in the 300C range, they
| aren 't really substitutes for each other_
|
| Nobody said this either.
|
| There are more reactor designs in the world than LFTR, PWR
| and BWR, particularly if we're talking at the demonstration
| scale like this reactor.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| I don't know of a production NPP that isn't a PWR or BWR
| online today. One could exist but it would be very very
| old.
| inejge wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor
|
| Came online ~10 years ago. One could quibble about design
| and construction timelines; the reactor is still half-
| experimental, and the Russians are conducting that
| breeder program _very_ slowly. But it 's not a 1980s
| design frozen in time.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _don 't know of a production NPP that isn't a PWR or
| BWR_
|
| Is the article about a production power plant?
| dgroshev wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_gas-cooled_reactor
| not that old
| riknos314 wrote:
| > Thorium MSRs don't make sense for the Americas, Europe or
| Australia. We have plenty of uranium.
|
| That covers the _input_ side of th equation. Thorium can help
| transform the _outputs_ of our existing reactors into waste
| with orders of magnitude better in terms of dangerous
| lifespan
| boringg wrote:
| Thorium is and will always be a less desirable fuel source
| - except if you don't have access to uranium or are trying
| to make your MSRs work (which to date have signs of
| progress but no proof of commercial viability). MSR also
| inherently unstable due to salt.
|
| I'm glad people are finding more research and hopefully
| this will unlock other tech but this has limited impact on
| the current trajectory of commercial nuclear and the
| designs currently in the labs.
|
| Though the commentary in here does remind me how much hype
| has infused the nuclear space - good thing on the whole as
| long as an eventual AI shakeout doesn't knee cap all the
| good work being done.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| This is US tech that China is copying. We could have done this
| at anytime in the last 60 years. The blocker isn't technology,
| its scientifically uninformed politics.
| gregbot wrote:
| The blocker is really just cheap Uranium making Thorium
| unnecessary
| edm0nd wrote:
| The entire Chinese way is to copy and steal from the West, its
| the other way around.
| jyscao wrote:
| In the present day, this is a delusional take.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| China has engaged in industrial espionage on an
| unprecedented scale. To the extent there is delusion, it's
| in American spies being slow to returning the favour.
| orangeboats wrote:
| Clearly you have not visited China.
|
| Try it someday. You _will_ be surprised by some of the
| technologies there.
| gregbot wrote:
| Interesting. What surprising technologies do they have?
| gregbot wrote:
| Rickover was breeding with Thorium at Shippingport in the
| 1950's. What China did is not new
| boringg wrote:
| No the West doesn't need this technology given its significant
| amount of uranium supply. Is it a nice to have - sure.
|
| For nuclear the playbook goes - design of technology is in the
| west. China copycats the reactor and puts it through their
| deployment engine (see current nuclear deployment). Maybe that
| changes -- but this doesn't prove that.
|
| China pushing the development is fantastic though for the world
| to give their head a shake and finally get back in the game.
|
| MSRs are riding the Oklo hype train and have a long way to go.
| HPsquared wrote:
| The notable thing here is that it's a molten salt reactor design,
| where the fuel is dissolved in a molten salt (FLiBe). This allows
| online continuous processing of the fuel, unlike with solid fuel
| rods sealed inside a pressure vessel.
|
| This unlocks a lot of options for the fuel cycle, including the
| use of thorium.
|
| This work builds on a previous molten salt reactor experiment at
| Oak Ridge, decades ago. There's a whole lore about MSRs.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _notable thing here is that it 's a molten salt reactor
| design_
|
| Notable, but not unique. The unique bit is it burns thorium.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| It breeds thorium to fissionable uranium from a starting
| fissionable uranium starter fuel. It doesn't directly use
| thorium for fuel.
|
| What people need to understand about the cycle efficiency is
| that when you mine uranium, the fissionable part of uranium
| (U-235) is only 1% of that uranium, the rest is
| nonfissionable U-238.
|
| Thorium is about twice as abundant as Uranium (all isotopes).
| The MSR uses Thorium to create U-233, a fissionable but not
| naturally occurring Uranium isotope.
|
| So the "unlimited energy aspect" is that about 200-300x more
| breedable Thorium exists than fissionable U-235.
|
| A MSR nation could also try to breed U-238 into plutonium,
| which would provide another 100x more breeding stock,
| although LFTR never talked about U-238 breeding. IIRC the
| plutonium may be difficult to handle because of gamma rays,
| but I don't recall exactly.
|
| While I don't have confidence that even LFTR/MSR reactors can
| get economical enough to challenge gas peakers, it may be
| possible to make truly price-competitive MSR electricity with
| the right modular design. I wish the Chinese the best of
| luck, because if they do it will spur the rest of the world
| to adopt this about-as-clean-and-safe-as-it-gets nuclear
| design.
| rhoads wrote:
| That's what you learn playing factorio
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Thorium is about twice as abundant as Uranium_
|
| China has thorium, and while less than others [1], it's
| better than they do with uranium [2].
|
| > _it may be possible to make truly price-competitive MSR
| electricity with the right modular design_
|
| Yes. But probably not in the near term with thorium. This
| isn't designed to be cheaper. It's designed to be more
| available to China than being dependent on Russian
| deposits.
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/492031a
|
| [2] https://www-
| pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1800.pdf
| cryptonector wrote:
| Eh, U-235 is .7%, not 1%, but also U-238 can be bred into
| Plutonium. What makes Thorium interesting -besides its
| abundance- is that U-233 is very difficult to work with, so
| proliferation concerns are mitigated.
| fmajid wrote:
| Not really, the US bred several tons of U-233 from thorium in
| the 60s.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
| bilsbie wrote:
| What absorbs the neutrons then?
| lazide wrote:
| The thorium cycle is generally neutron negative.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _thorium cycle is generally neutron negative_
|
| Source for the fuel cycle?
|
| Thorium 232 -> 233 is neutron negative. But after that you
| get all kinds of nonsense.
| lazide wrote:
| Thorium 232 is _the_ thorium in the cycle yes. And all
| kinds of nonsense is correct for the daughter products.
| But in general, to actually use do anything with thorium
| you need excess neutrons.
|
| Even the daughter uranium 233 only produces on average
| 2.48 neutrons per fission, so it's very difficult even in
| a combined lifecycle process to have enough - thorium
| doesn't produce uranium 233 immediately (takes almost 30
| days), neutron capture with that low a ratio requires a
| LOT of thorium, which is going to mostly just suck up all
| neutrons and you won't have any extra for addition
| uranium 233 fissions, etc.
|
| It's quite difficult (impossible?)to have actually work
| without a source of a large amount of additional
| neutrons.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _to actually use do anything with thorium you need
| excess neutrons_
|
| Unless 100% of those neutrons is being absorbed by the
| thorium, this means you'll have neutron flux at the
| boundary. Which, for a liquid moderator, means all the
| pipes and tanks and pumps.
| lazide wrote:
| It's almost like there is a reason why it's not commonly
| used despite all the hype.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| Sure, if you ignore all the parts of the neutron economy
| that make it possible to work. The part everyone missed
| in this discussion is that all of the numbers of neutrons
| (and their barns) aren't constants. Since the fuel is a
| fluid, you can use density and shape to improve the
| neutron economy in the reactor core. Basically, when the
| atoms are closer together, the economy improves. You can
| also use a better moderator like graphite since the basic
| design is safer and the rate of fission is just easier to
| control.
|
| And considering that people made these things work 60
| years ago without modern computers, the idea that its
| impossible or needs 40 years of research seems pretty far
| fetched. What is left of the nuclear industry wants to
| build current designs like the AP1400. That is a great
| idea, but there are things you can do with a LFTR that
| you can't do with an AP1400. The biggest of them is
| making synthetic fuel. The other advantages are the
| amount of waste produced and the fact that you can make a
| LFTR into a waste burner consuming the spent fuel rods
| from a AP1400. The downside is you actually have to fix
| nuclear regulations to do this and getting politicians to
| do that has proved impossible.
|
| There are no technological barriers, this is entirely
| political.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _What is left of the nuclear industry wants to build
| current designs like the AP1400_
|
| That's just Westinghouse. There is a _lot_ of research
| happening in small and medium-sized reactors.
|
| > _There are no technological barriers, this is entirely
| political_
|
| To thorium MSRs? The main barrier is economic.
| lazide wrote:
| Nah, it's just hard and silly - without a lot of payoff.
| When there are plenty of easier options for most nations.
|
| That you're even discussing graphite moderated (?!!)
| makes this pretty clear.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| > That you're even discussing graphite moderated (?!!)
| makes this pretty clear.
|
| And why would this be? Is graphite expensive? No it
| isn't. Also, we created a working one of these designed
| in the 1960's without computers. You seriously think this
| is hard compared to other types of engineering we do
| today?
|
| A LFTR can also do things that a PWR or BWR can't and has
| several major advantages. But since it uses pencil lead
| apparently we can't even try it.
| lazide wrote:
| Because it has dangerous behavior in real reactors due to
| the void co-efficient behavior, to the point of... being
| the cause of the largest nuclear disaster in recorded
| history?
| rdtsc wrote:
| Not OP but he maybe referring to the new gas cooled gen 4
| reactors not Soviet RBMKs. The ones I heard are working
| with sealed beads of uranium, encased in porous carbon,
| then some other layers, including some carbide
| (silicon?). The porosity of carbon absorbs gases but they
| ultimately stay sealed. The whole thing is helium cooled.
| lazide wrote:
| The issue with those is the pellets end up not as well
| sealed as thought or promised (many, many leaks
| historically), so then you have other problems.
| rdtsc wrote:
| Yeah. I was listening to David Ruzic's video [1] about
| them getting one of those reactors on campus and when he
| showed the structure of beads, that's the first thing
| that popped in my head - at that size how are they going
| to ensure every single bead has an intact surface.
|
| [1]
| https://www.youtube.com/@illinoisenergyprof6878/videos
| pfdietz wrote:
| MSRs have some attractive features, but they also have
| significant drawbacks.
|
| The most pressing is that fissionable material is spread
| throughout the fluid, so fission and decay of fission products
| is occurring right up to the edge of the fluid. The walls and
| pipes containing the molten salt, and anything dipped into the
| salt, are exposed to unmoderated neutrons. One can shield using
| (say) graphite, but then damage to that (and soaking up of
| radioactive materials) become issues.
|
| The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment at Oak Ridge was near the
| end of its radiation exposure lifetime when the program ended.
|
| Contrast this to light water reactors. These are designed so
| that no lifetime component sees unmoderated neutrons. There's a
| thick barrier of water between the fissioning fuel and the
| reactor vessel wall and the support structures for the fuel
| bundles. The bundles themselves are exposed, but they are
| replaced for refueling and are not lifetime components.
| cyberax wrote:
| To add to this, even with the shielding provided by water in
| light water reactors, the neutron exposure is _the_ limiting
| factor for the reactor vessel.
|
| The metric to look for is called "DPA" (displacements per
| atom), the number of neutron collisions that a material can
| tolerate before losing enough structural integrity to fall
| below the acceptable limits. The best modern reactor steels
| are at 150-180 DPA.
|
| And a lot of potentially cool reactors like TWR (travelling
| wave reactor) end up being logistically impossible because
| lifetime-limited components will be exposed to multiple
| hundreds of DPAs.
| jabl wrote:
| Many old LWR's have had their reactor vessels heat treated
| during a maintenance break to undo some of that neutron
| radiation damage and extend the life of the reactor.
|
| Not sure whether it would be possible to do something
| similar to a liquid fueled reactor, including all the hot
| pipework. Maybe, but yet another cost. Notably some of the
| recent MSR projects propose replacing the entire reactor
| every now and then (Terrestrial or whatever they were
| called, not sure if they are still around).
| HPsquared wrote:
| I wonder if it's possible to run it hot enough for the
| radiation damage (basically a bunch of dislocations,
| right?) to just anneal itself out continuously, like how
| Wigner energy is dissipated in graphite when it's hot
| enough.
| cyberax wrote:
| No, this is fundamentally impossible with steel.
| Annealing works by making the material more "plastic",
| and this necessarily reduces its tensile strength. Which
| is the limiting factor for the vessel.
|
| You can make the vessel thicker to compensate, but then
| you can just make it thicker in the first place and skip
| annealing.
| cyberax wrote:
| Yes, it's called "annealing". Basically, the core is de-
| fueled and a huge electric resistive heater is put inside
| it. Then the entire vessel is heated to something like
| 600C, and kept there for several days.
|
| It helps the atoms displaced by neutron collisions to
| "snap back" into the correct places in the crystalline
| structure. But it can never restore the material
| completely, and over time the annealing breaks will have
| to be more and more frequent.
|
| It also can't be used for everything. Some pipes will
| experience large thermal stresses if annealed, and some
| components can't be heated properly due to complex
| geometry.
|
| As with everything in engineering, all problems can be
| solved with additional complexity. It's possible to
| design LFTR reactors to be more annealable, but it will
| likely make them impractically complex.
|
| There are also other issues with LFTRs. A significant
| part of the energy production will happen _inside_ the
| pipework carrying the molten salt, as delayed fission
| happens and daughter products decay. This will cause
| inevitable problems with the reactor power control.
|
| Modern light water reactors are engineering marvels. They
| are incredibly compact for the amount of power that they
| generate, and they are now designed with the anticipated
| 70-100 year operating lifetime. Getting LFTRs to the same
| level of maturity might be possible, but it'll require
| literally hundreds of billions (if not trillions)
| invested, just like with the classic nuclear.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| > One can shield using (say) graphite
|
| Oh dear god, no. Graphite is a very good moderator, it is in
| no way a shield. Those two properties are (sort of) opposites
| of each other. Lead makes the cheapest and best shield. Also,
| those parts that are exposed to neutron flux stay radioactive
| for about 10 years. So it shortens their lifetime in the
| reactor but the waste isn't a big issue.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Lead is essentially useless as a shield for neutrons that
| are below the minimum excitation energy of a lead nucleus.
| Elastic neutron collisions with lead leave the neutron
| energy essentially unchanged.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| I assume this is why an alloy of lead is used in
| practice. Still doesn't change the fact that graphite is
| a moderator not a shielding material. Also, structural
| materials in reactors are usually invisible to neutrons
| and a sandwich of materials is often used. Different
| layers do different things. Usually, one layer of
| shielding and one layer of a material that isn't impacted
| (much) by neutron flux for structural strength.
|
| There is a rabbithole for almost all of these material
| choices, especially in nuclear. Not going down that
| rabbithole in a discussion targeted at folks who don't
| spend their lives working in nuclear doesn't make that
| person wrong. It makes them an effective communicator.
|
| PS Lead is a very very common shielding material in
| nuclear.
| pfdietz wrote:
| A moderator _is_ a neutron shielding material, since it
| removes energy from the neutrons. That 's what moderation
| is all about. Water is a much better moderator, but
| graphite still performs the function.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > Oh dear god, no [...] Lead makes the cheapest and best
| shield.
|
| Oh my, definitely no :-) Do not use lead for neutron
| shielding. You're thinking gamma radiation but then we're
| talking apples vs oranges then. You want atoms comparable
| in size to neutrons, so something with plenty of hydrogen.
| Think water or PET (plastic) when you don't want water to
| "leak" when transporting a source. For thermal neutrons
| maybe PET impregnated with boron. Now neutrons may generate
| gamma when captured by hydrogen, then you may want some
| lead for secondary effects like that but I am not sure how
| strong those are.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Lead is fine for shielding of sufficiently energetic
| neutrons, which can lose energy to lead by inelastic
| nuclear collisions. But below the threshold for that lead
| does very little.
| rdtsc wrote:
| Maybe as a special case then as a thin layer before
| following up with water or PET, or PET impregnated with
| boron. But would also need an extra layer following it
| for secondary gamma emission from neutron capture.
| nateglims wrote:
| I think it has a key advantage for China specifically though
| which is it consumes significantly less water and they have a
| lot of water poor territory.
|
| The oakridge experiment ended and not a lot of R&D has been
| done on salt reactors. It makes sense that China is still
| basically in research and testing phases for molten salts.
| api wrote:
| We have basically limitless carbon free energy with the tech we
| have now: solar, wind, batteries, fission breeders, large power
| grids that can move power around cheaply, etc. Put all those
| together and we have incredible energy abundance.
|
| We also have the ability to electrify most transport except maybe
| long haul trucking and long haul aviation. Aviation (ALL
| aviation) accounts for less than 5% of global CO2 emissions,
| which means we could leave that alone and cut elsewhere until we
| have batteries and other infrastructure good enough for that.
|
| Build all this out and it'll be cheaper and more scalable than
| what we currently have.
|
| We in the USA choose to stick with ancient technology because we
| have a sunk cost and an existing political power structure built
| around it. Meanwhile China is eating our lunch. Make America
| Great Again! By... pretending it's 1945 and trying to LARP the
| previous century.
|
| Classic innovators' dilemma at the national level.
| HPsquared wrote:
| If grid energy was cheap enough, synthetic fuel for aircraft
| and trucks would be competitive.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| Nope, you can't make synthetic fuel at anywhere near a
| competitive price from electricity. To make a synthetic fuel,
| the major energy input is heat (yes I know, you use
| electrolysis to crack the water, its a minor part of the
| energy required). The only way to make a cheap synthetic fuel
| is from a nuclear reactor that produces heat in the 900C
| range (could be 700C or 1100C, but near there). You can't do
| that with solid fuel reactors, you need a liquid fueled
| reactor for that. And you need Thorium for a liquid fueled
| reactor. That's why this design is so popular.
| jabl wrote:
| > The only way to make a cheap synthetic fuel is from a
| nuclear reactor that produces heat in the 900C range (could
| be 700C or 1100C, but near there). You can't do that with
| solid fuel reactors, you need a liquid fueled reactor for
| that
|
| Some of the highest temperature reactor concepts use solid
| fuel (see e.g. various VHTR gen4 concepts).
|
| As an aside, some nuclear proponents claiming synthetic
| fuel production as some unique selling point of advanced
| nuclear sounds more like wishful thinking combined with
| admitting being unable to produce electricity at
| competitive price. With the 'electrotech revolution', most
| things will switch to being powered by electricity, leaving
| a relatively modest market for synthetic fuels (long range
| aviation and shipping, mainly, and some chemicals
| production), assuming regulation prevents usage of fossil
| fuels.
|
| > And you need Thorium for a liquid fueled reactor.
|
| No, why would you? You can use U235 in a non-breeding
| thermal reactor (Terrestrial being an example design), or
| you can run the U-Pu breeding cycle in a liquid fueled fast
| reactor (such designs use chloride salts as the fuel
| carrier rather than FLiBe).
|
| > That's why this design is so popular.
|
| So popular that despite being invented in the 1960'ies, it
| hasn't yet progressed beyond the prototype stage?
| nickserv wrote:
| > We in the USA choose to stick with ancient technology because
| we have a sunk cost and an existing political power structure
| built around it.
|
| Yes, and also vast oil and gas reserves China doesn't have.
|
| Also there is strong public fear and dislike of nuclear power.
|
| In countries where there are no or little fossil fuels it is
| mainly this public opinion which has crippled the nuclear
| industry. Germany is a prime example.
|
| Public opinion is obviously much less important in China.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > Public opinion is obviously much less important in China.
|
| That really isn't true. The reason Shanghai didn't expand
| their maglev to Hangzhou is because residents were worried
| about electrical magnetic radiation, which I don't think is
| really a thing. Nuclear took a long time to get started in
| China because people thought the government to be inept and
| corrupt, an image that has only recently faded away in the
| last decade. Without free elections, public opinion is
| actually much more important if you want to avoid
| economically destructive riots.
|
| But this all happens in back rooms, the legal system isn't
| very relevant, so if you have an issue but it isn't a very
| popular one, you don't really have any recourse. For example,
| niche environmental issues, or ones that aren't widely
| recognized yet as dangerous...
| tehjoker wrote:
| Public opinion here appears to count for nearly jack squat so
| I don't buy this explanation at all.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| FF extraction is very profitable and has been for a long
| time. Those that make money from extraction spend a lot on
| lobbying. They don't want nuclear power because its the
| only thing that can really replace FFs. The public opinion
| angle is just useful idiots being manipulated by people who
| make money from FF extraction. That makes it far easier to
| get the politicians to do what they want (kill nuclear).
| tehjoker wrote:
| fossil fuel also underpins the us dollar so there's that
| too
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| "Public opinion is obviously much less important in China."
|
| In the US public opinion doesn't really matter either. It's
| the oligarchs' opinions that matter
| fragmede wrote:
| > We in the USA choose to stick with ancient technology because
| we have a sunk cost and an existing political power structure
| built around it.
|
| You don't want to discount the cultural attachment people have
| to what their parents did and their childhood.
| thenobsta wrote:
| I'd love to see as much electrification as possible.
|
| On the aviation note, sadly, aviation bats higher than its C02
| accounting. Contrails add another 1-2% on top of contribution
| from it's C02 emissions. It's entirely avoidable and could be
| resolved at relatively low cost.
|
| https://contrails.org/faq/#how-are-contrails-contributing-to...
| api wrote:
| If that's the case it makes aviation like 6-7%, still low.
| Coal fired electricity generation is king when it comes to
| climate change, followed by oil fueled land transport and
| natural gas. Deforestation is higher too. Aviation is part of
| the long tail.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| China has distracted the USA energy focus by dumping cheap solar
| panels here while continuing to develop advanced nuclear
| generation capabilities at home.
| ragebol wrote:
| China is simply betting on all horses: solar, wind, thorium,
| batteries, coal even, anything to not buy foreign oil and be as
| independent, self-sufficient as possible. Seems like it's
| working too
| DougN7 wrote:
| Seems like a wise thing to do too.
| ragebol wrote:
| Yup.. Happens to align somewhat with climate goals too,
| luckily for the rest of us. Once solar+batteries becomes
| the cheapest form of generation, the coal usage should also
| drop, if that isn't already the case
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Once solar+batteries becomes the cheapest form of
| generation, the coal usage should also drop_
|
| Marginal versus bulk. It can make sense, economically, to
| keep building coal plants even if solar is cheaper if
| you're building solar as fast as you can and still need
| more power.
| dalyons wrote:
| Luckily it is already the case, and it looks like coal is
| starting to drop in china
| jjcc wrote:
| Exactly. That's less noticed by many people. Just give you
| two examples:
|
| 1.While China scaled up the EV production, the development of
| Hydrogen based technology is still going on. There are some
| progress but lost in the bigger noise of EV.
|
| 2.China became the largest automobile exporter, leading by
| EV. But most people thought that's because EV took over ICE.
| That's partially true because EV dominate the export. What
| the most people missing is a quite portion of export are ICE
| cars. Because the ICE engine from China achieved higher
| energy transformation efficiency than Japanese and German
| cars. Again the information was lost in the EV noise.
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| How exactly has it distracted the U.S?
|
| I don't see the U.S rushing to adopt either renewables or
| nuclear. We're just increasing our fossil fuel burning (natural
| gas).
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _I don 't see the U.S rushing to adopt either renewables or
| nuclear. We're just increasing our fossil fuel burning
| (natural gas)_
|
| This is wrong. Natural gas is falling from 42% of U.S.
| electricity generation in '23 and '24 to 40% in '25E and '26E
| [1]. Renewables, meanwhile, keep marching from 23% ('24) to
| 24% ('25E) and 26% ('26E). (Nuclear falls from 19% ('24) to
| 18% ('25E and '26E).
|
| [1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/
| hunterpayne wrote:
| That's capacity, not generation. Getting through the
| accounting tricks that make renewables seem viable is a
| challenge. 1 watt of nuclear capacity is worth 1.5 watts of
| FF and 9 watts of renewables. That's because the amount of
| power from each type of plant is very different due to
| downtimes of generation. Nuclear runs all the time and
| refuels for a couple of days every 18 months (depending on
| the reactor). FF plants run most of the time by require 10x
| more maintenance downtime. Renewables only make power about
| 10% of the time. That's how they skew the numbers to make
| renewables seem viable when they produce a shockingly low
| amount of actual power. Oh, and if you use renewables for
| baseload you have to keep a spinning reserve which means
| they actually increase (not decrease) the amount of CO2
| emitted per watt generated.
| dalyons wrote:
| You should tell the folks overwhelming choosing to build
| and finance renewable power plants! They clearly missed
| this key point, they'll surely be grateful you let them
| know that their renewable investments don't make sense,
| and they should have picked nuclear due to it being
| cheaper overall
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _That 's capacity, not generation_
|
| Irrelevant. The question is what we're investing in. "The
| U.S" _is_ "rushing to adopt...renewables."
|
| > _FF plants run most of the time_
|
| "CCGT capacity factor rose from 40% in 2008 to 57% in
| 2022" [1]. "In the western United States," meanwhile "the
| capacity value of PV plants can be in the range of 50% to
| 80%" [2].
|
| > _That 's how they skew the numbers to make renewables
| seem viable when they produce a shockingly low amount of
| actual power_
|
| This is a report from Trump's EIA.
|
| [1]
| https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/average-
| utili...
|
| [2] https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/57582.pdf
| MichaelNolan wrote:
| > That's capacity, not generation.
|
| No that's generation. It's on page 49 of the report.
| Table 7d Part 1 "US Regional Electricity Generation" it's
| measured in billions of kilowatt hours.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/pdf/steo_full.pdf
|
| And if anyone is interested I have some of my own graphs
| on top of the EIA data to make it easier to read -
| https://eia.languagelatte.com/
| deadbabe wrote:
| China is far better at long term societal planning. Ultimately, I
| expect they will be the ones who can solve the climate crisis,
| after being one of the biggest contributors to the problem.
| cubefox wrote:
| Actually by far the biggest, in terms of total greenhouse
| emissions (30% of the world). Though other countries emit a lot
| more per capita.
| fmajid wrote:
| Sure, but most of that is from industrial production, and
| really should be debited on importing nations' CO2 accounts.
| Whereas in the US transportation, heating and construction
| are the main consumers.
| cubefox wrote:
| Importing nations are already paying for the imports
| themselves, from which China profits. It seems reasonable
| that this leaves the responsibility for the energy used on
| China's side.
| fmajid wrote:
| If you believe that, you also believe that shipping
| landfill or toxic chemicals to third-worlf countries
| absolves us for responsibility over them.
| lossolo wrote:
| > after being one of the biggest contributors to the problem.
|
| How many "Made in China" products do you have at home right
| now? Who is contributing to the problem?
| SilverElfin wrote:
| This type of progress shows China is capable of moving from an
| economy that's build on labor arbitrage or copying others to
| genuine innovation. It's also further evidence of the extreme
| competence of the CCP in governance, which I feel should be
| acknowledged despite their authoritarian negatives.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "extreme competence of the CCP in governance"
|
| I don't think it makes sense to extrapolate from one particular
| technical field to governance in general.
|
| The US managed to defeat both Nazi Germany and Japan plus
| develop nuclear weapons, all in 1941-5. Was it a proof of
| extreme competence of the US government _in general_? The some
| government tolerated abuse of blacks and forced segregation in
| the South, I would call it a serious governance failure.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Yea but afaik China doesn't have that kind of issue. They do
| have an issue with anticommunists but I'm not sympathetic to
| their cause.
| graemep wrote:
| They very much d have that sort of issue and worse. Uighurs
| and other minorities, treatment of gays....
| tehjoker wrote:
| Worse than us? We're conducting a genocide. The "Uighur
| genocide" is not real, the people creating that narrative
| were right-wing christian nationalists and none of it
| held up. We know what a genocide looks like in the 21st
| century because it's being live-streamed.
|
| Don't buy US propaganda so easily. They want to create a
| moral equivalence where there is none.
| graemep wrote:
| > We know what a genocide looks like in the 21st century
| because it's being live-streamed.
|
| That is naive. Really repressive states control that.
|
| > the people creating that narrative were right-wing
| christian nationalists and none of it held up.
|
| Like the BBC?
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-22278037
|
| There is plenty of evidence that China wants to erase all
| minority cultures and religions.
| segfault99 wrote:
| Very good. Thought-termination achieved. Branch pruned. Back-
| tracking...
|
| Now where's my pony?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _This type of progress shows China is capable of moving from
| an economy that's build on labor arbitrage or copying others to
| genuine innovation_
|
| China has been genuinely innovating in manufacturing techniques
| for decades. If anything, that ingenunuity peaked when Xi began
| his term, and has been degrading as his dictatorial tendencies
| needlessly hamstrung Chinese industry.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > This type of progress shows China is capable of moving from
| an economy that's build on labor arbitrage or copying others to
| genuine innovation
|
| Why wouldn't it?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I wonder if people would think China copied this from the West.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| They did copy it from the west. That you don't know this just
| means you don't follow a niche part of research. Its still true
| though.
| jmyeet wrote:
| A detailed explanation of the Thorium Fuel Cycle [1].
|
| I'm glad China is doing this even though I'm skeptical about
| nuclear power ever being commercially viable. At least they're
| trying different things.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IqcRl849R0
| Moldoteck wrote:
| Classic nuclear in china is pretty cheap, 2.5-3bn/unit. They
| dont have western problems
| hit8run wrote:
| Meanwhile Germany just decommissioned its last nuclear reactors.
| Given the challenges of baseload renewable generation, it's
| frustrating to watch working infrastructure being dismantled
| while we're still heavily dependent on fossil fuels.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| By all the doomerism about German and nuclear there is at least
| Wendelstein 7-x doing frontier work. It's fine to get rid of
| legacy nuclear if there is a feasible bridge ahead.
| p2detar wrote:
| Not sure what the point of this comment is. China has its
| equivalent EAST, France has ITER. Countries can do both
| fission and fusion research. To me the problem isn't that
| Germany closed some legacy reactors, but that too little is
| done into looking into alternative designs.
| preisschild wrote:
| Also France. Rip Superphenix
| p2detar wrote:
| > Against a background of ongoing protest and low-level
| sabotage, on the night of January 18, 1982 an RPG-7
| rocket-propelled grenade attack was launched against the
| unfinished plant. [0]
|
| I'm beyond speechless.
|
| 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix#Rocket
| _attack
| Moldoteck wrote:
| The bridge in case of germany is coal and gas
| empiricus wrote:
| By the time stellarator designs become economical (tens of
| years in the most optimistic case), you can cover the entire
| Germany in PV panels. Or even grow an entire new generation
| of forrest. So far stellarators look just like interesting
| vaporware. I mean they are irrelevant to any current energy
| discussion.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| Comparing those old conventional reactors to MSR is not
| suitable at all. And they were not fully functional past their
| expiry date.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Comparing those old conventional reactors to MSR is not
| suitable at all_
|
| It is given we're talking about perceptions. I see no
| evidence Germany's Greens are suddently rational when it
| comes to modern reactor designs, of which MSRs are one.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| It's not just greens. Decision is jointly made by most
| parties. Spd is antinuclear. Cdu doesnt care. Afd probably
| just uses populism
| preisschild wrote:
| > And they were not fully functional past their expiry date.
|
| Most of Germany's Nuclear Power Plant could have run for many
| additional decades. Especially the Konvoi-PWRs from the 80's
| Moldoteck wrote:
| Us is extending licenses to 80y, heck Switzerland extended
| benzau to 64y. The expiry date talk is pure nonsense. German
| nuclear had excellent CF and extremely advanced safety, incl
| double containment
| AngryData wrote:
| To be fair, a lot of nuclear reactors around the world should
| be shut down just due to age and outdated designs. However they
| should also be being replaced with modern reactors, which few
| people have, which makes shutting them down while we are still
| largely utilizing fossil fuel power and chemical plants really
| dumb.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| Germany has a 500 GW interconnection queue for storage.
|
| It will be interesting to see how long the "baseload" talking
| point lasts.
| gpm wrote:
| The baseload talking point has _never_ made sense but storage
| doesn 't make it make less sense. Baseload here is
| definitionally power sources that can't economically follow
| the demand curve. They carry the exact same problem that
| intermittent power sources like solar do, in that you need
| dispatchable power sources to augment them so that they can
| actually meet demand, the only difference is that the cause
| of this is that generation stays constant while load varies
| instead of both generation and load varying.
|
| Baseload is not, and has never been, a feature. It's just a
| drawback that can be handled so long as only some of your
| power comes from such sources.
|
| Batteries augment base load power sources the exact same way
| they augment intermittent ones, they take power from them
| when there is excess and give power back when there isn't
| making them effectively dispatachable power.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| > The baseload talking point has never made sense
|
| Um, yes it has. When you use solar or wind for baseload, it
| must be backed up by a spinning reserve. When you calculate
| the combined CO2 output of both the renewables and the
| spinning reserve, you learn it is more than just using gas
| by itself (and often it is more than just using oil or
| coal). There has never been a renewable power source used
| for baseload that has reduced CO2 emissions per watt. The
| math and laws of physics basically prevents it from
| happening. You want that to change, learn how to purify
| poly-silica more efficiently. And nobody (and I mean
| nobody) is even working on that. You don't pay for power,
| you pay for power you control with a switch. Power you
| don't control is called an explosion.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| Germany has the most expensive and dirtiest grid in the
| developed world. They get the majority of their baseload
| power from other countries, often generated by nuclear or
| gas. Also, that you think they have 500 GW of anything that
| generates power is pretty funny. The only thing your comment
| says is that you don't understand anything about how power is
| generated or how an electrical grid works. People like you
| are why we still use so much FFs. You can't solve AGW with
| accounting tricks.
|
| PS Maybe ask Spain how that renewable baseload generated
| power is doing for them.
| dalyons wrote:
| Germany sourced 57% of all power from renewables in the
| first 9mo of 2025 [1]. They seem to be doing just fine,
| might be time to update your talking points
|
| 1. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/energy-industry-
| relieve...
| Moldoteck wrote:
| And it's still one of the dirtiest grids in europe, while
| having massive household prices per eurostat, highest in
| eu, despite of heavy eeg subsidies.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| Quickly becoming greener. Are you saying that Germany
| should stop their renewable buildout and keep their
| current emissions until the 2040s while waiting for new
| built nuclear power to "save the day"?
|
| That literally makes no sense at all.
|
| Looking at wholesale prices all of continental Europe is
| quite similar.
|
| Some countries, like Germany, taxes electricity a lot to
| promote efficiency.
|
| Not sure what alternative you suggest?
|
| The French are wholly unable to build new nuclear power.
| So that's not an option either.
|
| Flamanville 3 is 7x over budget and 12 years late on a 5
| year construction program. The EPR2 program is in
| absolute shambles.
|
| Currently they can't even agree on how to fund the
| absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
|
| Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026. And the
| French government just fell and was reformed because they
| are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which
| they can't agree on how to fix.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| It didn't make sense to shut down nuclear before coal/gas
| for Germany. It should deploy both ren and nuclear, even
| restarts unless it wants to use gas firming.
|
| Germany's low carbon twh is unchanged since 2015. What
| changed is it became net importer and demand dropped,
| hence a lot of coal closed.
|
| Wholesale is irrelevant. Taxes are needed to fund
| infrastructure. In case of Germany a big chunk is
| transmission which will be subsidized from 2026 just like
| eeg already is. Example of why- sudlink, but that's just
| for redispatching, ren require by default more
| transmission due to distributed deployment
|
| France is open to subsidize epr2 project. The challenge
| is, edf must first show a bill by EOY and, EC must
| approve state funding, unlike ren subsidies. Epr2 is
| expected to cost about 60-80bn, half being offered by the
| state as 'nice loans'. 40bn is about what Germany pours
| into EEG alone in merely 2y.
|
| Germany can reuse own konvoi designs or try to make a
| deal with khnp and Westinghouse
|
| French debt and electricity/edf are not connected. Most
| of the debt is from pension system because well, work
| hours, pension age and vacation days vs neighbors. Edf
| debt is peanuts in comparison. In fact it's debt to
| ebitda ratio is in normal range.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| Baseload is about supplying demand. It'll not go. And to
| supply it reliably you need firm power. The 500gw statement
| contains both overlapping bids and just intentions to "think"
| about deployment. Still, germany would need at bare minimum
| 3TWh of storage to ditch fossils firming per last winter and
| deploy even more renewables to charge it. It remains a
| question how govt will protect investors from cannibalized
| generation- offshore is already facing problems
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| Baseload power plants are already dead in many grids. Or
| forced to become peakers.
|
| Flexible dispatchable power plants are having a field day
| though.
|
| > Still, germany would need at bare minimum 3TWh of storage
| to ditch fossils firming per last winter
|
| Source please. All these "unimaginable amounts of storage"
| calculations are usually based on not over producing on a
| yearly basis.
|
| We also should not let perfect stand in the way of good
| enough.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| The proof is looking at open generation data past winter.
| Sadly energy charts gives only gwh/day but you can still
| do some inference about how much fossils were used/how
| much imported
|
| There's no such thing as baseload power plant. If solar
| were able to supply the demand with some bess you'd call
| it baseload. What matters is firm power. And yes, Germany
| plans to expand gas plants. It's sad they didn't opt out
| for BWRs that can modulate faster, at 1%/sec
| credit_guy wrote:
| Before anybody gets too excited, it's better to understand what
| exactly happened.
|
| China ran an experimental reactor that achieved _some_ conversion
| of thorium into uranium. More precisely, the conversion ratio was
| 0.1 [1]. This means that for each new fissile atom generated from
| thorium (i.e. uranium-233) 10 atoms have been burned from the
| original fissile inventory.
|
| Now, conversion happens in every nuclear reactor. Some new
| fissile material (generally Pu-239) is generated out of "fertile
| material" (generally U-238). And, surprisingly, that conversion
| ratio is quite high: 0.6 for pressurized light water reactors and
| 0.8 for pressurized heavy water reactors [2].
|
| What China has achieved therefore is well below what is business
| as usual in regular reactors. The only novelty is that the
| breeding used thorium, rather than uranium.
|
| Is this useless? No, it is not. In principle increasing the
| conversion ratio from 0.1 to something higher than 1.0 should be
| doable. But then, going from 0.8 in heavy water reactors to more
| than 1.0 should be even easier. Why don't people do it already?
| Because the investment needed to do all the research is quite
| significant, and the profits that can be derived from that are
| quite uncertain and overall the risk adjusted return on
| investment is not justified. If you are a state, you can ignore
| that. If China continues the research in thorium breeding, and
| eventually an economically profitable thorium breeder reactor
| comes out of that, the entire world will benefit. But the best
| case scenario is that this would be three decades in the future.
|
| [1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chinese-msr-
| achi...
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Conversion_rat...
| jandrese wrote:
| Fundamentally the problem is that Uranium is so damn energy
| dense and abundant enough that there's little need to set up
| these complicated recycling systems. If we start to run out of
| Uranium then this technology starts to look appealing, but in
| the modern day it just doesn't make economic sense.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Uranium is so damn energy dense and abundant enough that
| there 's little need to set up these complicated recycling
| systems_
|
| Uranium is abundant, but not homogenously so [1]. (China has
| some. But not a lot. And it's bound up expensively. And it's
| by their population centres.)
|
| For the Americas, Europe, Australia, southern Africa and
| Eastern Mediterranean, burning uranium makes sense. For
| China, it trades the Strait of Malacca for dependence on
| Russia and Central Asia.
|
| [1] https://www-
| pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1800.pdf
| cyberax wrote:
| Uranium can be stockpiled for years in advance, relatively
| easily. Enough to tide over a small war while you're
| setting up domestic production. And China should have
| enough low-grade ores for that.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Uranium can be stockpiled for years in advance,
| relatively easily_
|
| So can oil. Energy security is an important priority for
| a global power.
|
| Stockpiles are good. Own supply chains are better.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Uranium is far, far energy denser than any fossil fuel,
| and thus much easier to stockpile.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Uranium is far, far energy denser than any fossil
| fuel, and thus much easier to stockpile_
|
| Sure. That doesn't remove stockpiles' inherent
| disadvantages: finiteness and vulnerability. Relying on
| uranium stockpiles would immediately put China at a known
| limit in a war of attrition that wouldn't constrain their
| adversaries.
| Qwertious wrote:
| A sufficiently large stockpile of uranium gives China
| time to simply pivot away from depending on imported
| Uranium (either by building new mines locally or building
| out solar or such). An equivalent stockpile of oil simply
| isn't feasible, if only because oil is usually used
| _directly_ and not via a source-agnostic electrical grid.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Is 150 vs 250 years of energy reserves a disadvantage in
| practice?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Is 150 vs 250 years of energy reserves a disadvantage
| in practice?_
|
| Reserves != stockpiles.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| Which is why renewables are even better. Zero fuel input.
| realusername wrote:
| Well no, no country on earth has 5 years worth of oil
| stockpile, logistically it's impossible.
|
| Nothing can compete with the energy density of uranium.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Arguably Qatar does, as do most other nations who produce
| it locally. That is exactly GP's point.
|
| Oil is relatively easily, inexpensively, and quickly
| mined and refined. Compared to, say, uranium.
| realusername wrote:
| That's not a stockpile, they have to extract and refine
| it to use it. Russia understood it the hard way with the
| refineries attacks.
|
| And no, oil is more expensive (especially nowadays) to
| extract than uranium.
|
| There's a reason nobody ever became rich with a uranium
| mine, all the value is in the plant and the market price
| barely covers extracting it, some mines even closed
| because of the price being too low.
| mc32 wrote:
| Also, they can bring it in by rail from Russia. So they
| can avoid the seaward path.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _they can bring it in by rail from Russia_
|
| Uranium is better for Chinese energy security than oil.
| But this still leaves China at Moscow's mercy. That's not
| too differet, energywise, than the situation is now.
| branko_d wrote:
| China imports substantially all of its uranium from
| Kazakhstan and Namibia, and a tiny bit from US. Russia is
| insignificant.
|
| https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/CHN/
| yea...
| wiz21c wrote:
| and we still don't know where to store the trash. Thorium
| seems better (but my knowledge is close to zero here, I must
| admit:-) )
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _we still don 't know where to store the trash_
|
| We really do. Nuclear waste is less toxic than plenty of
| trash we just bury. And calling it "waste" is a bit
| reductive, given it almost certainly becomes valuable to
| reprocess within another century or two.
| hvb2 wrote:
| No, you really do not.
|
| Long term storage is still up in the air in the US. Yucca
| mountain was the plan but didn't happen
|
| Correct me if I'm with m wrong
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain
| unethical_ban wrote:
| That's a political problem, not a technical one.
|
| We also know that we could re-cycle nuclear waste with
| other nuclear plant designs, but the US chooses not to.
| jandrese wrote:
| Radioactive waste is decidedly nasty stuff, but the total
| volume of it is tiny. There are plenty of chemicals that
| are just as nasty that were simply buried in the ground
| in much larger quantities over the years with nary a peep
| from the population. Nuclear waste is a political problem
| not a technological one.
|
| The crazy part is that people want to insist that the
| sites need to be absolutely safe even if they aren't
| maintained for 1,000 years, but by that point the
| radioactivity would be no more than the base ore anyway
| so demanding these extended timelines doesn't make
| anybody safer. They're just red tape.
| hvb2 wrote:
| It's a political problem, maybe.
|
| It's peculiar that it's a political problem in pretty
| much every country though? I know Finland is well on its
| way for long term storage but that's the only example I
| know of.
|
| There's also quite a few cases where it is a technical
| problem. Gorleben in Germany for example.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _peculiar that it 's a political problem in pretty much
| every country_
|
| It's a political problem in every country that shares its
| nuclear heritage from the ashes of WWII.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| What trash? Where's the waste?
|
| Point to the nuclear waste.
|
| If there's so much of it _somebody_ must be able to point
| it out to me.
| piskov wrote:
| Russians recycle it
| skinkestek wrote:
| Joking here since it would be impractical, but I guess you
| can bury it under my house. I'd not be bothered at all to
| live on top of a modern nuclear waste deposit like
| Finlands.
|
| Waste from modern nuclear power plants seems to be a giant
| nothingburger. And yes, I came from the other side but
| flipped as I learned more about the technicalities, how
| Finland has solved it and how near you need to get hurt.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| Have you come across the 'coke can of thorium' vs '800
| elephants of coal' guy yet?
|
| Dr Barry Brook. Reading his stuff 15 years ago flipped
| me.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| You know. In US it's yucca mnt, similar to onkalo. Its just
| not politically pursued as a priority. Recycling is banned
| jgehring wrote:
| There's not _that_ much Uranium actually that 's economically
| sensible to extract. The NEA says in their 2024 report on
| Uranium [1]:
|
| > Considering both the low and high nuclear capacity
| scenarios to 2050 presented in this edition, and assuming
| their 2050 capacity is maintained for the rest of the
| century, the quantities of uranium required by the global
| fleet - based on the current once-through fuel cycle - would
| likely surpass the currently identified uranium resource base
| in the highest cost category before the 2110s.
|
| Their "high" scenario assumes having a bit more than double
| of today's capacity by 2050; today we have about 4-5% supply
| from nuclear energy worldwide.
|
| [1] https://www.oecd-
| nea.org/jcms/pl_103179/uranium-2024-resourc...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Out of curioosity, do they forecast at what point it
| becomes cheaper to breed than mine?
| lazide wrote:
| There are tons of mines which were shut down a long time
| ago, but could be reopened if there was much of a uranium
| market again.
|
| The actual efficiency of breeding thorium is so low, it
| would take a HUGE scarcity to actual make any sense.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Local scarcity, not necessarily global scarcity.
| Especially during times of conflict. China has no
| uranium, so this may make sense for them.
|
| Also, currently all transport channels for uranium are
| oil dependent, which is becoming a scarce resource in the
| relevant timeline - decades.
| lazide wrote:
| China has massive Uranium reserves
| [https://www.nucnet.org/news/chinese-state-media-
| announces-di...].
| dotancohen wrote:
| And I hate to pollute this thread with more AI fear-
| mongering, but AI inference is already showing its effects
| on the energy sector and it is expected to grow very
| rapidly. Energy demands may likely grow at a stronger rate
| than initially expected.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| It's a bit different. Higher demand will lead to higher
| price, opening more options to mine. Now uranium is too
| cheap to open new mines and exploration
| hunterpayne wrote:
| Sorry, but there are quite a few things you are missing.
| Nuclear engineering is well, nuclear engineering. The first
| big difference is that you can use the Thorium in a liquid
| fueled reactor instead of a solid fueled one. This allows you
| to burn far more of the fuel. For example, 2-4% of a solid
| fuel rod would fission, while in a liquid fueled reactor you
| can get to 90+%. This is good economically for 2 reasons: 1)
| more energy per unit of fuel and 2) the waste lasts far less
| time.
|
| There are also other advantages of a liquid fueled reactor.
| The big one is that it is far easier to run because it self
| regulates. When a liquid heats up it expands (slowing the
| reaction) and when it cools it contracts (speeding up the
| reaction). So its safer to run, makes less waste and gets
| 20+X more power per unit of fuel.
|
| There is one final thing to know about this stuff. A nuclear
| reactor is several billion in infrastructure supporting
| reactors that cost 10s of millions using a fuel load that
| costs less than your car. The way we scale and handle nuclear
| reactors just makes no sense economically. Each NPP is custom
| and they are built so rarely that everything has to be custom
| made. When you start building stock reactor designs with
| consistent supply chains, the cost goes way down. And most of
| the cost is lawsuits, lobbyists and PR. For developed
| countries, using or not using nuclear power is a political
| choice. One that we have been making badly. When you realize
| that the only real choices for baseload are FF and nuclear,
| the real political situation makes sense. Once again, the
| cause is just the excuse, not the real issue.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| There's also the choice to match our energy consumption
| dynamically to intermittent power sources (e.g. solar),
| reducing the baseload demand. This is entirely orthogonal
| to decisions about where the baseload generation should
| come from.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| That's called load following. That's also a thing a
| liquid fueled reactor can do that a solid fueled reactor
| can't.
| dalyons wrote:
| doesnt make a difference to the economics of a nuke
| plant. Fuel consumption is a tiny fraction of the cost of
| nuke power, its almost all fixed cost - amortized
| construction costs, operations, etc. You need to run it
| at as close to 100% always to have any chance at payback
| & economical $/kw. Thats why they arent getting built.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| No, it's the opposite:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_side_management.
| Load-following is a good property for a power plant to
| have, though, especially if the plant is suitable for
| baseload generation.
| jabl wrote:
| You need to go tell the French that what they've been
| doing for decades isn't possible, then.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| EPR has shown that the French have lost the ability to
| build reactors rapidly and on budget.
| credit_guy wrote:
| > Nuclear engineering is well, nuclear engineering.
|
| Not sure I get what you are trying to say. Are you saying
| that you are a nuclear engineer and I am not? Because,
| frankly, the rest of your comment does not read as one
| written by a nuclear engineer.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| You can get +- same efficiency with classic breeding and
| purex/pyroprocessing
| laurencerowe wrote:
| > When you realize that the only real choices for baseload
| are FF and nuclear, the real political situation makes
| sense.
|
| That's not really accurate. Many countries already meet a
| substantial portion of their baseload power requirements
| with renewables and are building out more and more
| renewable generation because it is cheap and fast to build.
|
| This requires dispatchable backup generation to cover low
| wind periods, but that may only need to run a few weeks a
| year. This is by far the cheapest and fastest way to get to
| 90% carbon free power since most of the cost in gas
| generation is the fuel itself rather than the capital for
| the plant.
|
| Nuclear is the opposite so cannot economically fill that
| role so it seems little is likely to be built.
| cryptonector wrote:
| The reason TMSR is appealing is that U-233 is hard to use for
| weapons purposes because it produces a lot of gamma
| radiation, which makes it hard to work with. There is also
| the claim that TMSRs are much safer designs than is possible
| with Uranium. It's possible that if TMSRs were mass produced
| that we could see them installed in many countries where we
| don't want to see Uranium or Plutonium reactors for
| proliferation reasons.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| At this point few care about this topic. It's not like it's
| easy to make a bomb with classic pwr
| cryptonector wrote:
| With a Uranium-based reactor you need a) a source of
| enriched Uranium (see proliferation risks), b) inspectors
| to check that you're not post-processing fuel rods to
| extract Plutonium.
|
| With Thorium if the operator country wants to extract the
| U-233 you think "maybe let them, they won't like it".
| Moldoteck wrote:
| With classic pwr rods can't be used for weapons because
| of parasitic isotopes. At best you need to run the
| reactor in a specific way that would trigger global
| attention looking at power fluctuations. And still it'll
| not be easy afterwards. You can buy enriched uranium from
| others. With th- I'm not sure but don't you need enriched
| material anyway to kickstart it?
| fooker wrote:
| > abundant enough
|
| It's not uniformly distributed. Countries like India, for
| ezample, has an abundance of Thorium but they have to buy
| Uranium for use in any large scale application.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| Question is if it's cheaper vs passive seawater extraction
| of uranyl. China already got it somewhat comparable to
| classic uranium
| fooker wrote:
| It's cheaper with unlimited fusion energy, which defeats
| the point.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Hm, is that really the case? Nextgen reactors are not just
| about lowering the cost of U. Or "saving the environment"
| from waste. Bonuses, sure. Real strength is increasing
| efficiency, which means: 1) lower buildout costs, 2) faster
| time to first iphone charged, 3) smaller, safer designs.
| They're a way around the giganto-plants of the past, on the
| way to making nuclear power the ubiquitous reliable utility
| it should be.
|
| I also like to think of U/nuclear as "Civilizational
| thinking" - it's the only solid power we can trust to stay by
| us through 10,000s of years, through cataclysims, and planet
| migrations, and it's ideal (before we find something more
| abundant, dense, and reliable) to take us from Earth, to a
| multi-planet, local-cluster exploring species, I think.
| pdpi wrote:
| My understanding is that reactors will use that plutonium just
| fine, so the energy you get from a fresh fuel rod is almost
| exclusively from uranium fission but, as time goes on, an
| increasingly large share is from plutonium fission.
|
| In principle, using Thorium would give you the energy from
| Thorium fission, then Uranium fission, then plutonium fission,
| which is pretty cool. However, I suspect you might hit an issue
| here where such a low conversion rate would make the reactor go
| sub-critical.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| No, this is a misunderstanding of how fission works.
|
| When a nuclear reactor is run with mildly-enriched Uranium,
| which is a mixture of Uranium 235 and Uranium 238, it forms a
| self-sustaining chain reaction with the Uranium 235 (which is
| fissile) and a load of the spare neutrons get absorbed by the
| Uranium 238 (which is fertile), converting it into Plutonium
| 239, which is also fissile. But most Uranium 235 reactors use
| a moderator which slows down the neutrons, which makes them
| more likely to cause fission in Uranium 235 but less likely
| to transmute Uranium 238 to Plutonium 239. So most modern
| reactors don't produce much Plutonium. In any case, the
| fission you get from Uranium and the fission you get from
| Plutonium is from different source materials. Once an atom is
| fissioned, it is split into smaller atoms and can no longer
| be fissioned.
|
| Thorium isn't fissile, it's fertile. That is, if you fire a
| neutron at Thorium 232, you get Thorium 233, which decays to
| Protactinium 233, which then decays into Uranium 233, which
| is fissile. You then fire another neutron at Uranium 233,
| which then fissions into much smaller nuclei, giving you
| energy and the neutrons to do the above. The Uranium is no
| longer around after that to form Plutonium. There is no way
| to get any significant amount of Plutonium 239 from this,
| because that would require adding 7 more neutrons to the
| original Thorium 232 and having none of them trigger a
| fission event. The fissions that do occur don't provide 7
| neutrons anyway, so it wouldn't be possible to get a self-
| sustaining conversion of a significant amount of Thorium into
| Plutonium for final fission even if the previous sentence
| weren't true - it would have to be enhanced with some other
| provider of lots of neutrons.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I'm getting impression that China is trying to position itself
| as scientific powerhouse before its massive industrial
| production scheme stops working. Smart move.
| comeonbro wrote:
| > trying to position itself as scientific powerhouse before
| its massive industrial production scheme stops working
|
| Holy shit what a perspective. Put it in a museum. If this is
| representative, put it on our grave.
| keepamovin wrote:
| The real killer feature isn't "more thorium than uranium"
| (thorium is already 4x more abundant). The real win is that
| thorium MSRs can eat the existing mountain of "spent" fuel rods
| from regular reactors and turn what we currently call high-
| level waste into electricity while leaving waste that's safe in
| a few hundred years instead of tens of thousands. That's
| hundreds of thousands of tons of "waste" suddnely becoming
| centuries of clean fuel. That alone flips the economics on its
| head.
|
| Also: passive safety (the thing just drains and freezes if
| anything goes wrong), no pressure vessel, tiny physical
| footprint, way less long-lived actinides, and U-233 is
| basically proliferation-proof because of the hard gamma from
| U-232. Uranium feels cheap and plentiful right now exactly the
| way oil felt infinite in the 1950s. China is playing the long
| game, and this little 2 MW rig lighting up and breeding U-233
| last month is the "Sputnik moment" for the thorium cycle.
|
| So...Three decades? Maybe if the West keeps sitting on its
| hands. China says 10 MW by 2030 and 100 MW demo by 2035. I
| wouldn't bet against them.
|
| So yeah, exciting as hell actually.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| This can be done in usual breeders like superphenix or bn800.
| What china wants to experiment with is continuous filtration
| instead of using breeding+purex/pyroprocessing. Still, it's
| nothing more than an experiment, china is rather slow with
| nuclear compared to french messmer and sweden in the past
| keepamovin wrote:
| Well I'm just an interested outsider. I will defer to the
| true experts here.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| 1. There is no _mountain of nuclear waste_.
|
| Literally almost all the waste that's ever been generated is
| stored on site at the nuclear power plants where it was
| created. That's how little of it there is.
|
| Talking about "thousands of tonnes" of nuclear waste is
| comically misleading when you realise how tiny the volume is.
|
| 2. There is no high level waste that is both very dangerous
| right now, _and_ will remain so for tens of thousands of
| years. It's either highly radioactive for not very long, or
| not very radioactive for very long, but never both.
|
| How do these myths persist in otherwise educated people.
| runeks wrote:
| > Talking about "thousands of tonnes" of nuclear waste is
| comically misleading when you realise how tiny the volume
| is.
|
| What is the actual volume?
| Loic wrote:
| Long life, high activity nuclear waste represents less
| than 3500m3 (one Olympic swimming pool), and this, since
| the start of civil nuclear electrical production in the
| 50's. World wide.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Global waste is 400,000+ tons
| (https://www.stimson.org/2020/spent-nuclear-fuel-storage-
| and-...). Even 1 pool full is ~28,000 tons (UO2 package
| 8tons/m3). Urainium is dense.
| Loic wrote:
| I wrote about the high energy, long life waste. The part
| really causing issues.
| keepamovin wrote:
| I guess you mean the "super hot for centuries" minor
| actinides (Np-237, Am-241/243, Cm-242/244/245 etc..)?
| These are less than 1% global waste, but next gen
| reactors can still eat them. The majority of waste (95%+)
| is U-235, then Pu, which nextgen also eats.
| glimshe wrote:
| 20 swimming pools of total waste isn't that impressive. I
| don't want to live near that, but I'm sure I'd we can
| find a place to put that in that will have minimal impact
| on people's lives.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Exactly. The waste isn't really a problem. But it doesn't
| have to be waste. That's the point. All that U235 in
| 'spent' silos? You can get 60x - 100x its OG power
| feeding it to nextgen reactors. So cool
| nandomrumber wrote:
| Many magnitudes of order less than any of: all the steel,
| glass, aluminium, wood, or plastic, ever produced, and we
| aren't yet drowning in cubic miles of any of those.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| > Talking about "thousands of tonnes" of nuclear waste is
| comically misleading when you realise how tiny the volume
| is.
|
| Yeah, it's really easy to forget how dense these materials
| are. A jug of milk (4L/1gal) weighs 4kg/8.8lb. Milk has
| about the same density as water, 1g/cm^3. Uranium has a
| density around 19g/cm^3, making that same gallon jug weigh
| 76kg/167lb. A metric ton of uranium (1000kg) is about 13
| gallons.
| franktankbank wrote:
| You sound butthurt by what the person youre responding to
| is saying. There's no liability in their statement, its
| severe optimism.
| interestica wrote:
| > Talking about "thousands of tonnes" of nuclear waste is
| comically misleading when you realise how tiny the volume
| is.
|
| You're mixing mass and volume here. From what I can tell,
| their numbers were essentially right. Are you saying we
| don't have thousands of tonnes of nuclear waste produced?
| credit_guy wrote:
| > The real win is that thorium MSRs can eat the existing
| mountain of "spent" fuel rods from regular reactors
|
| That's not true.
|
| The spent fuel can burn in fast reactors. There are hundreds
| of molten salt reactor designs (see for example [1]), and
| some of them are fast reactors.
|
| But thorium MSR are not fast. That's the attraction of
| thorium, it can undergo transmutation (into protactinium,
| which then decays into fissile uranium-233) using thermal
| neutrons. Nobody is proposing thorium MSR as a solution to
| burn spent nuclear fuel.
|
| > So...Three decades? Maybe if the West keeps sitting on its
| hands.
|
| The West does not keep sitting on its hands. There are
| dozens, maybe hundreds of nuclear startups in the West, and
| they are actually making progress.
|
| However, thorium is hard. Very hard. Breeding plutonium from
| uranium is much easier than breeding uranium-233 from
| thorium.
|
| Here's a good post [2] about the thorium myths written by a
| former active HN forum member, Nick Touran. It's a good read.
| But, now, for an even better understanding, you can just ask
| ChatGPT, or any other LLM, how thorium breeder reactors
| compare to plutonium breeder reactors, and which technology
| is closer to reality.
|
| [1] https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/STI-
| DOC-010-4...
|
| [2] https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html
| lbruder wrote:
| CTRL+F protactinium
|
| Once again, nothing.
| tremon wrote:
| _In principle increasing the conversion ratio from 0.1 to
| something higher than 1.0 should be doable_
|
| Is this a typo? I can understand increasing the yield to a
| number slightly below 1, but how do you get more than 1mol
| Uranium from 1mol Thorium?
| inshard wrote:
| Thorium is abundant in Sri Lanka's mineral sands. Mined with
| dredgers at shallow depths 10-100m off the western coast.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| Thorium is abundant anywhere where Rare Earths are mined. You
| can get it almost anywhere. You don't even mine it, you process
| it out of tailing piles from other mining operations.
| ta20240528 wrote:
| Thorium is also a waste product of monazite rare-earth mining.
| perihelions wrote:
| This post is just an excerpt--it's the first 4 paragraphs of a
| 29-paragraph article,
|
| https://archive.is/DQpXM ( _" China reaches energy independence
| milestone by 'breeding' uranium from thorium"_-SCMP)
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! - since you've found a readable link, I've swapped
| https://humanprogress.org/china-reaches-energy-milestone-by-...
| out for the original source at the top, and put the archive
| link in the top text.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| There's a danish company building modular container sized molten
| salt reactors.
|
| https://www.copenhagenatomics.com/
| stubish wrote:
| They have built a few prototypes and 'Copenhagen Atomics plans
| to run its first nuclear chain-reaction at the Paul Scherrer
| Institute (PSI) in 2027.'
|
| Maybe they get production ramped up for 2050 targets, but not
| on the radar for 2030 targets. Or replacing your antique coal
| plant today.
| khaki54 wrote:
| Interesting claim that the reactor doesn't need water and can be
| built away from the coast. I thought all reactors used steam to
| turn a turbine to produce electricity. Something special here?
| nuccy wrote:
| Many reactors are built far away from coasts, they need water
| in general, but artificial lakes, or rivers are enough.
| hunterpayne wrote:
| This type of reactor would probably use super-critical CO2
| instead of water to transfer the heat from the reactor to the
| turbines, so no water. The design is safer that way.
|
| The way water might be used in this design is to make a
| synthetic fuel instead of electricity. In that case, you are
| swapping out the turbines for a process that extracts CO2 from
| seawater, uses electrolysis to crack the water and then a FT
| process to make a (renewable) hydrocarbon fuel (you might even
| use some feedstock to make it more efficient).
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| also to remember that thorium is the dominant radioactive
| byproduct of "rare" earth metal refinement; so they're probably
| isolating large amounts of it so might as well figure out
| something to do with it.
| StarterPro wrote:
| Every other day its "China creates a breakthrough that was never
| thought possible" and "America shits in hand; Claps."
| gregbot wrote:
| At least in this case it's somewhat sensationalized because the
| US did this in the 1950's and concluded that it was more
| economical and simpler to use mined Uranium instead of breeding
| with Thorium.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| its easy to put china's perspective on expansion of nuclear when
| you look at how much is planned/being built vs how much is
| planned/being built for coal/gas vs projected demand...
| motbus3 wrote:
| Honest question Is SCMP a real media outlet?
| yanhangyhy wrote:
| shit, people in china are focusing on japan and didn't talk about
| this much
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