It marks the first long-term, stable operation of the technology, putting China at the forefront of a global race to harness thorium – considered a safer and more abundant alternative to uranium – for nuclear power.
The experimental reactor, located in the Gobi Desert in China’s west, uses molten salt as the fuel carrier and coolant, and thorium – a radioactive element abundant in the Earth’s crust – as the fuel source. The reactor is reportedly designed to sustainably generate 2 megawatts of thermal power.
Thanks for the archive link, OP. Shit that site was cancerous
I’d like to thank the thorium. Great job guys! All around, great stuff!
Is that what they’re calling the 996 now?
Good news, mankind should be pushing farther into this technologies… so we finally have our first gen IV reactor? I honestly thought we would never reach them on time.
Plus Thorium rocks
Uh, what about the THTR-300 that operated at 300MW capacity from 1987 to 1989?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300
It was a total failure, though. Not quite Chernobyl, but it was plagued by incidents.
Honestly, I’m not a nuclear physicist by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m not sure how they plan to emergency cool the reactor to prevent a meltdown if it’s filled with molten salt. Anything colder than molten salt going into the reactor would cause it to be clogged up by not-molten salt.
At least the THTR seemed to have cooling capabilities as the foremost priority.
They put a plug in the bottom that melts if the salt gets too hot and it drains out into a tank that stops the reaction with no moving parts or anyone controlling it. After it cools down they can remelt it and put it back in.
Is this real? Pretty cool if they can actually stop the reaction with such
From what I’ve watched & read, it’s usually depicted as the freeze plug melts and the liquid salt flows into multiple small holding tanks below it. That way the fuel mass will be physically separated, which helps stop fission on top of any other mitigations like lining the containers with neutron absorbers, etc.
Yes I remember reading about this a while back. It’s one of the main reasons thorium rectors are so much safer.
Me opening the comment section knowing that its just gonna be a bunch of racism… like i get it i hate the chinese government as well but give credit to the millions of scientists and people who are actually trying to make life better on this earth. If something isnt american, it can still be nice to have.
Where do you get racism? Did you just want to complain about racism?
Too lazy to scroll down an inch or two to see the comments questioning the tech just because it’s China or making unrelated anti-China comments?
Again, what the hell does that have to do with race? China is not a race.
Anti-China comments aren’t the same thing as anti-Chinese comments.
I personally believe the CCP is doing an amazing job. Communism is working wonderfully
It’s not communism, it’s state-capitalism
I don’t think it’s communism anymore but the Chinese gov are actually looking after their own citizens in my opinion. I kind wish Xi was in charge of the UK honestly.
They tend to think of everything long term and all of those projects are paying off, also Healthcare free education etc they are investing more in their own population than anyone else. US is in my opinion as UK guy pretty much done they’ve picked a fight that they won’t win.
Idk… I have my ifs and buts about China. If you don’t believe in human rights, well love China! I’m not saying everyone in China is bad (but there are evil individuals like in US and NK). And watching Human Harvest, jeez…
The “human rights” standard of western imperialist countries is laughable hypocrisy. The US alone makes China look like the paragon of justice.
Tell it to the Uyghurs.
Tell it to the American Blacks in prison. Glass houses. We’re all bad.
They’re not being subjected to a genocide.
Human rights they have they do execute billionaires who try to screw the rest of the population which in my opinions puts them ahead even more
Their own citizens…except for LGBTQ people or uyghurs of course.
Also most people only see the living conditions of the top 1%. Going to beijing and being amazed by it is like going to hollywood or manhattan and then ignoring the rest of la or upstate ny. And then we havent even gotten to the really bad ones… And then europe also exists. We still exploit poorer countries(which now china also does and the us as well of course) but basically we have the best living conditions in the world and also some of the best places for queer people. Like literally my country that counts as a shithole in europe(hungary) is still somehow one of the best countries by a lot of metrics in the whole world, usually only behind other european countries.
America has a greater percentage of Americans locked up than China has Uyghurs locked up and we don’t have a Thorium reactor either.
I dont give a fuck about the US either. Nice whataboutism tho.
Every time I read a headline about how there’s a genocide in Xinjiang, it’s in the same newspaper that insists Israel Has The Right To Defend Itself and Yemen needs to be bombed to powder.
At some point, it reads like liberal agitprop. An excuse to scare liberals into hating a foreign country so we can justify… what? Tariffs? TikTok bans? Nuclear war?
Same with LGBTQ rights. We’ve got a DOGE department doing a pogrom on “woke” government workers while I still get an earful about how mean China is to minority groups?
What am I supposed to take away from this?
That the world isn’t black and white, and both sides can be awful at the same time.
“Anymore” as if it ever was. Even USSR never claimed to be a communist country
P.S. They claimed to be a socialist, then “developed” socialist country that’s “on the path of building communism”.
Communism is a goal, not a government system.
I don’t know what they are but I know they look after their citizens more than we do, and they’ve really started taking over the entire Tech space in the last few years mainly due to that.
I’m UK but if someone held a gun to me and demanded where would I live USA or China I’d honestly pick China.
I’m Kinda looking forward to the US picking a war then realising China has quantum radar etc and getting schooled, hopefully it doesn’t go Nuclear but I’d still put my own money on China winning.
I’d advise you to read more on how Chinese government and spin dictatorships work. There’s a really good book written by Treisman and Guriev
It’s not really a country you’d choose over US even despite all it’s massive (cough healthcare and consumer protections cough) flaws
Well, that and lack of diligently enforced safety standards.
The government agencies that enforce those standards have been gutted in the US. So. Next point?
I will assume you are European and the above point does not apply as sharply to you, but western empire decay and corruption is slowing eating away all of your criticisms of China.
But freedom of expression! How is that going for you?
But communism! How is capitalism going for the average citizen?Anyway.
This is an amazing breakthrough, the citizens of China are lucky to have a government that seems to care about the well-being of their citizens and plan for the future. For some reason, westerners cannot accept good news from China without feeling that the world is a zero sum game. It’s not, Chinese citizens have a brighter future than us in the west because we have allowed corporations to purchase our governments at wholesale prices.
China is not to blame, well done to China.
This technological breakthrough is amazing, yes, but does not make disappear the constant harassment of minorities, the lack of freedom, the labor camps, the violent repression in Hong-Kong and all the other freaking shit China does on a daily basis.
And thanks for asking about the freedom of expression in Europe, it’s going really fine.
You do agree that America Bad, don’t you?
Say The Thing.
Of course it’s bad. It’s awful. Only a complete moron would think the opposite.
Constant harassment of minorities, lack of freedom, labor camps (El Salvador), violent repression (coming soon). But enough about the United States. Will neoliberalism reach you next?
Norway has a thorium reactor since 1959
I can’t find a clear source on this. Could you help? This one says 2013 http://thorenergy.no/
According to a modern statistical oracle:
In 1959, Norway achieved a notable milestone by starting up its first nuclear reactor, the JEEP I (Joint Establishment Experimental Pile), located at Kjeller. This reactor was primarily used for research purposes, including early experiments with alternative nuclear fuels such as thorium. While JEEP I itself was not a thorium reactor per se, it laid the groundwork for subsequent Norwegian research into thorium as a nuclear fuel. This early phase demonstrated Norway’s scientific interest in thorium, leveraging its domestic thorium resources and contributing to later thorium reactor experiments.
Worse than useless. None of this is shown to be true without a source.
I hope it’s not “worse than useless” (which would mean “misleading”), as my goal was simply to find more identifiers for discussion or research than: norway, thorium, 1959…
I’m sorry to come on so strong – I don’t think it’s worse than useless as a tool to approach the right answers – but as I saw people upvoting this ‘answer’ without doing any checking, it occurs to me that this is how misinformation spreads. I hope my comment makes more sense in that context.
So…
-
Not a Thorium reactor
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Didn’t produce any power
So China still has a win here.
Norway has one of the worlds largest deposits of thorium, but I have ot heard that we had a working reactor, just the principle of one.
If the chinese has indeed made it work I think we need to prepare for USA wanting to annex Norway as well
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Too bad we do not know which exactly thorium salt mixes they are using, what the materials facing the molten salt at high neutron fluxes are and how they fare long term, whether they use on-site constant or batched fuel reprocessing, whether they kickstarted the reactor with enrichened uranium or reactor-grade plutonium waste and other such questions.
US experiments were broken off because of materials corrosion problem.
Sounds like the US should take a page from China’s playbook and steal the design, then claim to have built it on their own.
i think that lack of willingness to handle fresh fission products has a part in this, in normal reactor you can just do nothing and win (bulk of most dangerous isotopes decays completely within 5y, not possible to do this with MSR)
Some of the new Russian reactor types are designed to burn away dangerous hot actinides. MSR need onboard fuel processing to continue to operate anyway.
These are fast reactors and operate on different principles. The coolant there is sodium and while hard to design and run, it’s doable. French had similar reactor but only one and it was shut down. Nice thing about fast reactors is that these can burn even-numbered isotopes of plutonium, useless in water moderated reactor, and give fresh mostly 239Pu plutonium of good quality. weapons grade even, and IAEA doesn’t like it. But who cares since nonproliferation is dead anyway?
I think maybe also the fact that nuclear fusion is definitely frfr only a few years away from being viable, no cap, has contributed to a lack of fission research, too.
If only people saying that were aware of their logic flaw of also cutting funding to fusion research
SMRs too
My broke ass stole all my thorium related stocks years ago, im not a holder
Thorium? Fucking sweet!
On most of the fediverse, I find discussions really great with no idiots/trolls… apart from technology. Here it seems some get triggered by any tech from outside the US.
This announcement would be seen as a massive breakthrough anywhere else. China has its problems, I’m fully aware of the red flags and government influence. But only a fool would question their technological advances at this point. They are moving ahead at lightning speed, especially in energy and battery tech.
Even on the consumer side, Huawei invested more in R&D last year than Samsung or Intel. Huawei consumer division could have been expected to be dead by now with the chip ban, yet survived and are thriving again. Not because the Chinese were forced to by their phones, Apple still sell in China, but because they innovated like hell. A Chinese buyer has the option today of buying a tri-folding tablet phone with super fast charging or an American designed device with 3 year old tech (chip aside). Americans don’t have that choice.
Its also the reason why traditional European car brands are tanking in China. VW can no longer expect to sell on prestige alone. Here in Britain, our consumer tech offering is already almost non existent. We no longer have a true British owned car company. Our famous Mini was sold to the Germans. Jaguar/Range Rover to the Indians. MG to the Chinese. Its depressing. But I do feel fortunate to at least have choice (we can buy a BYD or Xiaomi here) and that I’m not subject to only American tech reporting. BYD will later this year have 7 different car models on sale in Britain vs 6 (soon to be 5) from Ford. This is a paradigm shift, considering for almost the last 20 years Ford had at least 2 cars in the top 5 best sellers in the UK.
Apologies for going off on one. But i’d highly recommend US readers check out Chinese tech sites from time to time (eg carnewschina/huawei central etc) rather than just relying on the verge. Sure not all Chinese tech will be successful, sure some designs may be clones, but the shear scale of investment from China will make them unstoppable. I believe the changing of the guard happened a while ago, where about to see it play out in all industries…
I think Android went pretty horribly since Huawei stopped making contributions, They contributed more than any other company up until the ban including Google who own it.
I kinda expect in about 5 years Harmony is going to take Androids dinner.
But it’s not a market based solution! It’s centrally planned and it’s possible no one is even making phat profits from this! Highly unethical!
This announcement would be seen as a massive breakthrough anywhere else.
I don’t trust science (or R&D engineering) that’s not peer reviewed. Anything else is just marketing hype. Show me hard numbers or GTFO.
China also has a problem with the government lying-- for example, about their claimed reductions in greenhouse emissions. There’s no reason to trust self-serving authoritarians without credible corroboration.
BYD will later this year have 7 different car models on sale in Britain vs 6 (soon to be 5) from Ford.
That’s an irrelevant metric. Nobody’s going to buy a car just because the model range is a bit wider than some other company’s. What’s relevant is adoption, and then buyer loyalty. It may be that BYD offers cars that people want to buy, but they’re subsequently found to be of crap quality or aggressively undermining driver privacy (which other non-Chinese manufacturers have also done).
but the shear scale of investment from China will make them unstoppable
If appropriately rigorous science and suitably disciplined engineering are part of the process, and regulators do their jobs correctly, then maybe. Otherwise it’s just throwing money at a problem. Investment doesn’t guarantee results. China is certainly capable of getting positive outcomes from tech investment, but it’s not guaranteed.
I mean I thought thorium reactors were figured out already? The economics of it and lobbying by big oil was the problem. It ain’t that surprising that China could make a thorium reactor though.
China has its problems, I’m fully aware of the red flags
I see what you did here
What are you on about?
Nearly every upvoted comment is in praise of this. Only 2 comments warn caution about Chinese data.
Why do people need to lie and pretend China is this big victim being picked on.
You would never write a paragraph like that in defense of the amount of anti-US sentiment on Lemmy, so it’s not like you actually care about being fair to nations. Posts like yours reek of nothing more than propaganda.
Posts like yours reek of nothing more than propaganda.
Smells more like bootlicking to me.
scrolled past and saw one for almost every subthread.
Post about western achievements are often taken as granted (except maybe curing cancer), while eastern ones are scrutinised to the smallest of details.
You don’t suppose there might be reason people don’t trust the news coming from a country with no freedom of speech or press?
Yeah yeah, “you can’t believe it until Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk confirm it”
Not Eastern ones, Chinese specifically. Japanese or Korean science is generally trusted, but dictatorships have a tendency of making shit up to look better. We’ll believe it when we see it.
China has plenty of achievements, but also plenty of bullshit vaporware. We’ll see which one this is.
Show me any post about any technological advance that doesn’t have critical comments in the thread.
Jaguar Land Rover may be owned by Tata, an Indian financial holding company, but they’re still based in the UK, designed in the UK, built in the UK.
That was broadly the same for Mini too until the most recent generation, where the EV version is actually a Chinese car.
Mini has been owned by BMW since 2000 and are still made in the UK, Germany and Austria’s Hungary. The EVs are from Great Wall Motors (in China), but they’re going to start assembling them in the UK next year too.
People on Lemmy are really good at seeing past capitalist propaganda, except when it comes to China. At that point it’s just straight up state department talking points.
People on Lemmy are really good at seeing past capitalist propaganda, except when it comes to China.
Any information coming to the West from China is state capitalist propaganda.
Yeah yeah, keep telling yourself that buddy.
I’m sure you also used that cope when Harvard university (that well-known Chinese university) found out that 95.5% of Chinese people are happy with their government, compared to only 38% of USians.
“95.5% of people who are forced to say they like their government say they like their government”
You should be more skeptical, anything that claims to have a 95% approval rating is probably not telling the truth.
Forced by Harvard university? :)
I have no issues believing that number because the Chinese standard of living has been rising substantially as the decades go. That is trivial to confirm.
You’re the one who should be more skeptical of anything that comes from the US. As it stands you don’t believe anything that comes from China, but believe anything that comes from the US about China.
Sounds like you should start applying more neutral standards to how you process information. The world isn’t that black or white.
Prove it.
it should perhaps be pointed out that we originally had proposition for both reactors but we ended up with uranium reactors because the US wanted a reason to mine uranium for nuclear bombs and were well aware of the risk difference but didn’t care about the potential lives being lost if something went wrong. later, the cost to develop a thorium reactor had no monetary benefits beyond generating power and keeping people safe so no country wanted to invest in it when the uranium blueprints were available, literally because of capitalism.
Blaming capitalism for every evil in the world is just dumb. Surely Stalin and Mao started their nuclear programs because of capitalism?
Yup. Capitalism/fascism led to WW2 and the nuclear bombing of Japan, requiring the USSR and China to develop an equally powerful countermeasure.
i wasn’t aware they redesigned nuclear from the ground up. why did they pick uranium then?
Because they wanted bombs.
Yes
Sure, buddy.
Yeah, the title calls this out… “Strategic Stamina”. Something meant countries just don’t have anymore
All nuclear programs were started for military purposes. “Civilian” nuclear power had always been a fig leaf. While the current Chinese thorium effort is a break from that tradition, it’ll be far too late to make any impact.
Who still thinks the South Chinese Morning Post is a legit source after what happened to Hong Kong needs a reality check.
SCMP is one of the most libshit news in China
Also, chill it cracker, it’s news about a reactor, we don’t need your state dept. programming here
Yeah, let’s wait until a reliable source like fox news or CNN confirms it.
Joined 2 weeks ago, spews bs & propaganda.
Also, “cracker” ?? 🥴🤣 Is this supposed to be some very dangerous insult lol
And we certainly don’t need your tankie shit here.
Go back to whatever chudhole you came from.
Chuds would probably try to doxx them for daring to say “cracker” lol
SCMP has always sided with mainland China on crux issues, but I’ve read them on and off for nearly 10 years now and have found them to be very reliable.
In fact, this is exactly what the Wikipedia page for reliable sources says about it too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources
