That reactor is 2MWt, which is still somewhere about 1000x smaller than actual production reactors. But this is not the issue here, because in MSR the reactor is not the hard part, it’s its entire fuel cycle.

The entire point of having fuel as a solution instead of hard, nonreactive ceramic pellets put in tubes made of refractory metal is that there could be perhaps a way to extract fission products from coolant/fuel, which would prevent neutron capture by these fission products, which makes in turn better use of neutrons, so more fissile material can be bred. Benefit of this is that if that online recycling process can be made to work (big if - unsolved for now) then reactor works always like it’s been freshly refueled. The hard part here is not reactor, it’s the cleaning of fuel while reactor is still online. This has not been demonstrated, instead only new fuel was added, which is something that can be done with CANDU and some other designs where reactor is divided into channels

First attempts at something like this used heavy water acidified solution of uranium nitrate, but this proved too corrosive and also water needed to be pressurized, and also it decomposes when subjected to radiation in this way. Today what is used is FLiBe, which is low-melting salt that doesn’t decompose in this manner, but also is more corrosive and in different ways than water as used in PWRs. If that was the only problem, we would have MSRs left and right, but there are three other big problems

Recovery of excess bred 233U or removal of neutron-absorbing fission products from FLiBe is hard, because you can’t use normal methods used in nuclear reprocessing. There’s no extraction like in PUREX, there’s no ion exchange resin that can survive it, there’s only fluoride volatility and some electrochemical methods, and it all would require significant research before anything close to viable comes up. The salt also probably has to be kept anhydrous at all times. This is the first problem. Maybe this reactor will be used for it, maybe it’ll fail, but there’s a related Problem that doesn’t appear in more conventional reactors. In normal case, you can just leave fuel elements in water until the spiciest isotopes decay so that you don’t have to deal with them. Here, we intentionally work with freshly irradiated, so ridiculously spicy fuel, and intentionally concentrate the most radiotoxic isotopes that are out there. Worse than that, all these fission products are not in form of chemically inert ceramic, these are in form of water soluble fluoride salts and this means that if anything of this gets into soil, it’ll dissolve meaning that either fuel leak or waste stream leak would have much more severe consequences than if it was in conventional form. If you’re trying to say that MSRs are safer for some reason, i’d have some serious reservations.

The other problem is that FLiBe is a good moderator, meaning that any MSR reactor design using this salt is thermal reactor, and we already have this figured out in form of PWRs where we can use water instead. Look up India’s plans for thorium power - they want to use PWR reactors for breeding 233U, with heavy water or not, because this already works and there’s no actual reason for use of this highly experimental and uncertain technology. Keeping fuel rods in reactor for longer time is not an actual showstopper like it was expected in 60s when this concept first surfaced, in fact with advancement of nuclear technology burnup only goes up, i think it already is 2x or 3x what it used to be in early commercial power reactors. If MSR was the only way to make breeding work, we’d probably take effort to manage ridiculous radiotoxicity of this fuel mix, but because both chemical engineering to do so is not there and alternatives that don’t have this problems exist, we don’t. Charitably i’d could describe MSR fuel cycle idea as an highly experimental but promising while also requiring significant research expense. Less charitably, looking at all those years of research yielding nothing, i could also describe it as a dead end grift. You decide

Note that all these problems come up with use of MSR, not thorium. Thorium for nuclear power is fine, but requires reprocessing, and some countries don’t want to do this for diplomatic reasons (americans specifically) (tho i suspect it’s masking the actual reason: some bean counter at westinghouse calculated it’s cheaper to use fresh uranium instead - reprocessing is a lot of dangerous, well-paid, complicated work - in countries where labour costs are lower, or where govt is willing to pay up to have reserve of nuclear material, which amounts to all other countries that have sufficiently advanced nuclear industry, reprocessing does happen. french, chinese, russians, indians, japanese, koreans, and probably a couple more do reprocess their fuel. there’s a couple of countries that send their fuel to manufacturer, and some just discard it underground without reprocessing) (this is also why yucca mountain filling up is a problem of entirely american making, and the only thing that is lacking in order to solve it is political will)

As someone that often works for multiple years on pilot and poc projects, can we stop calling those “toys”.

Sorry we don’t have madscientist money here.

The article makes it very clear its running continuously, which is what they are celebrating

i think you’ve read different article

Chinese scientists have achieved a milestone in clean energy technology by successfully adding fresh fuel to an operational thorium molten salt reactor, according to state media reports.

I know enough to know that if you’re worried about pollution from Nuclear then you should be worried about all the waste products in production of solar panels which can be extremely toxic. And that if you’re specifically talking about the amount of radiation a megawatt reactor will produce in it’s life time you should never venture anywhere close to a coal burning plant because the amount of radioactive material they let loose into the atmosphere is orders of magnitudes greater than you could get from a uranium reactor, with thorium reactors being predicted and shown in small scale testing to have significantly less dangerous byproducts left over. With several theories and proposed designs for fusion and thorium reactors that could recycle spent fuel and further reduce the amount of high level waste a facility would have at the end of it’s life cycle, because unlike all other forms of energy generation, the nuclear facilities contain and keep their waste products on site for decades and only transfer it off site during decommissioning.

It’s a lot simpler than the majority of humanity reverting to pre-industrial lifestyles.

For the amount of actual nuclear waste, it kind of is. Earth is so huge and the amount of waste so small, that you could bury literally ALL of it under a mountain somewhere and chances are high that it would never see daylight again nor would never be found by anyone in the future.

Even despite this, extraordinary measures are taken to make sure nothing escapes the containment until such time that Earth’s crust has completely rolled down into the mantle or the mountain erodes, which by then it wouldn’t be nuclear waste anymore.

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.

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

The “human rights” standard of western imperialist countries is laughable hypocrisy. The US alone makes China look like the paragon of justice.

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.

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?

Same thing. You westerners just don’t like acknowledging when your designated adversaries make progress because of your exceptionalism.

No, that was only possible because of the southern strategy of the 60s-90s, which pivoted electoral weight to the section of our country most enamored with fascist racism.

You do lose quite a bit of electricity going over long distances, but can overcome that with sheer volume. But that also means the closer the generator to the consumer, the more efficient it’ll be.

Scaling small things up is always a logistics and repeatability issue. Always.

We had.technology to put a capsule of three men on the moon for a week before most humans alive today were born, and yet we haven’t gone back because while both “number of humans” and “length of stay” are fairly simple ideas to scale up, we never had the logistics to create and fuel the one.saturn V launch every other day that a permanent moon base would need.

Heck, the Internet is full of ground breaking improvements that were “buried” by the challenge of scaling up out of a lab.

Go back to whatever chudhole you came from.

Yes, I remember when Oppenheimer got in trouble, which resulted in all the decent doctors in the country being rounded up and executed based on lies.

Of course it’s bad. It’s awful. Only a complete moron would think the opposite.

I’m not a patriot. I dont give a shit about my own country. If France is does positive things, good, but it doesn’t I’m going to ignore that our politicians are corrupt or that the Olympics were used to enforce mass surveillance and lock up climate activists.

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…

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