China Advances Abandoned US Nuclear Technology (technologyreview.com) 59
Chinese scientists have achieved a significant nuclear breakthrough by successfully refueling a thorium-based reactor while it remains operational, according to reports from Chinese state media.
The experimental 2-megawatt thermal reactor, which came online in June 2024, represents the revival of technology originally developed and abandoned by the United States in the mid-20th century. The milestone was revealed during a closed meeting at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where project leaders shared results demonstrating the reactor's ability to be refueled without shutdown -- a capability conventional uranium reactors lack.
Though small compared to MIT's 6-megawatt research reactor, this achievement shows China's accelerating nuclear ambitions. The country has surpassed France in nuclear generation and recently approved 10 new reactors worth over $27 billion in investment. This thorium reactor joins other revived nuclear concepts, including molten-salt cooling systems and high-temperature gas reactors, as developers look to the past for solutions to advance nuclear energy's future.
The experimental 2-megawatt thermal reactor, which came online in June 2024, represents the revival of technology originally developed and abandoned by the United States in the mid-20th century. The milestone was revealed during a closed meeting at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where project leaders shared results demonstrating the reactor's ability to be refueled without shutdown -- a capability conventional uranium reactors lack.
Though small compared to MIT's 6-megawatt research reactor, this achievement shows China's accelerating nuclear ambitions. The country has surpassed France in nuclear generation and recently approved 10 new reactors worth over $27 billion in investment. This thorium reactor joins other revived nuclear concepts, including molten-salt cooling systems and high-temperature gas reactors, as developers look to the past for solutions to advance nuclear energy's future.
Keep sending them in (Score:2)
You're delusional (Score:2)
Thorium (and nuclear electricity in general) is economical delusion.
Each and every kWh generated costs 4-10x more than any other electricity source. It was economically viable in the 60ies. Not today.
China builds some reactors. If you look at the curve showing the size evolution of their nuclear bomb arsenal, you know why they need uneconomical reactors to produce more plutonium.
Let's be real, here... (Score:5, Interesting)
US "abandoned" a drive to fund thorium reactors with tax dollars and regulatory approvals because of public sentiment on nuclear anything. We could have probably figured this out. The snags like extreme corrosion were probably solvable with tech we had years ago.
Re:Let's be real, here... (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree, it wasn't until millennials started having kids that the tide changed on nuclear sentiment. Boomers and Gen X were fine being anti-nuclear while oil was cheap. Russia invading europe didn't help the oil industry. Uranium ore is cheap and widespread enough that nuclear is a viable option and probably from a defense perspective much cheaper than oil as we don't have to protect our energy interests with military spend in the turbulent middle east. You can store a decade's worth of uranium ore in a pile on the ground less than an acre in size.
With the sole exception of Germany, Russia single-handedly convinced europe that Nuclear was a Good Idea. It cost a lot of lives but the silver lining is the next generation is staunchly pro-nuclear at this point.
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As someone from Gen-X, I've always supported nuclear power. I never understood my mom's hippie friends protesting clean power.
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It seems like we've solved the problem by storing it in granite caverns, but the anti nuclear brigade have a zero tolerance policy, so instead we're just storing it in effectively swimming pools on the surface instead of granite caverns that aren't part of groundwater systems. Finland recently opened up a facility that looks up to the task
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I'm a Gen Xer, if they fix the waste problem then I'll be on board.
Maybe they should also solve the problems of it being too expensive, too long from breaking ground to first light, too cumbersome, etc. as well.
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Uranium ore is cheap and widespread enough that nuclear is a viable option
I was with you until that point. Most of the world including the USA and France are quite dependent on former soviet "-stans" for Uranium supply (and in the case of France, it's former colonial territories). The ore is not as ubiquitous as you make it out to be, and it certainly does nothing to help energy independence.
With the sole exception of Germany, Russia single-handedly convinced europe that Nuclear was a Good Idea.
I think you're living in a different reality to the rest of us. Precisely no one except a few right wingers are promoting nuclear as a good idea. Most of Europe including France themselves ar
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"Dependent" is pretty strong. The US imports 22% of its uranium from Kazakhstan and 10% from Uzbekistan. Most of the balance comes from Canada and Australia.
The US and France import uranium from places like Kazakhstan because it's cheap. That doesn't mean it's not available elsewhere.
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Europe has lots of Uranium. We just do not mine it anymore since roughly 1990.
Re:Let's be real, here... (Score:5, Interesting)
https://world-nuclear.org/info... [world-nuclear.org]
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They abandoned Thorium because it doesn't breed Plutonium-239 https://world-nuclear.org/info... [world-nuclear.org]
Most of the countries that have nuclear power don't have nuclear weapons, so I'm thinking for them this would actually be a feature.
Re: Let's be real, here... (Score:1)
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It is now - for countries that already have nuclear weapons, and want to keep anyone else from getting them.
(Except it really isn't. Thorium reactors are inherently breeder reactors, since thorium isn't fissile until it's turned into U-232 in exactly the same way that U-238 is turned into Pu-239, exposure to neutrons. The technology of the US thorium reactor wasn't well suited to it, however, at least not as cheaply, and the government was funding the research as part of building up the nuclear arsenal. Chi
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Only problem with your statement: It is not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
There is no Pu at all in the Thorium fuel cycle. The article I reference only mentions Pu in the Uranium fuel cycle. You may have gotten confused there.
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I can be used to produce it by mixing the U-238 into the coolant. Which is exactly how the thorium is turned into uranium. The exact same process. Different chemical process to separate it out, but the transmutation is the same.
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It does make Uranium 233 though, which can be made into a bomb, and successfully tested by the US at the Nevada Test Range in 1955 as part of Operation Teapot.
As a potential weapon material, pure uranium-233 is more similar to plutonium-239 than uranium-235 in terms of source (bred vs natural), half-life and critical mass (both 4–5 kg in beryllium-reflected sphere).[8] Unlike reactor-bred plutonium, it has a very low spontaneous fission rate, which combined with its low critical mass made it initially attractive for compact gun-type weapons, such as small-diameter artillery shells.[9]
A declassified 1966 memo from the US nuclear program stated that uranium-233 has been shown to be highly satisfactory as a weapons material, though it was only superior to plutonium in rare circumstances.
So yeah, while it doesn't make Plutonium, it still makes materials that can be used to make nuclear weapons.
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Exactly. The only reason the US wants nuclear reactors is to maintain its nuclear arsenal. Thorium-based reactors are useless for that.
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There's a YouTube video or three that have audio of President Nixon on a phone call trying to get all nuclear power research into California as something of a favor to fellow politicians and to donors in that state. Research on thorium as a source of energy was not happening in California so after Nixon pushed on this hard enough the labs doing thorium reactor research closed up. They did save plenty of documents though, and they've been scanned and posted to the internet by thorium energy advocates like
Re: Let's be real, here... (Score:1)
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Say "hypersonic" three times and Habitual Linecrosser will explain that to you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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because of public sentiment on nuclear anything.
Heh. The public doesn't trust a for-profit org to not cut corners with safety, and they have reason to do so.
It's not a tech thing, it's the humans running it that people are fearful of and I don't blame them. I hope anybody who feels compelled to mod my remark down will at least look up the methane leak in Aliso Canyon, California. The local populace's health was not their first priority.
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The US abandoned the technology because it wasn't suited to producing plutonium for atomic bombs, and when you rely on government funding for research, you research what they government wants, which was bomb making technology. The public largely didn't care one way or the other.
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It did make Uranium-233 though, which according to a declassified government 1966 memo "uranium-233 has been shown to be highly satisfactory as a weapons material, though it was only superior to plutonium in rare circumstances."
We already had Hanford making plutonium, and Savannah River enriching uranium. There wasn't any use for making a third nuclear fuel for explosives that didn't have any advantages, so that was the end of Thorium reactors as far as the US Government was concerned in the cold war.
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The U233 produced in thorium reactors is mixed with U232, which is very difficult to separate and highly radioactive, which poses great obstacles to using it for bomb making purposes.
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And yet the boys at Los Alamos managed it well enough to create a U233 weapon that was tested in 1955 at the Nevada Test Site.
Plutonium separation from reactor-irradiated uranium is also rather dangerous and highly radioactive, btw.
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Yes; I did not say that it's impossible, only that it's very difficult. And then they never did it again, because it was easier to do with the conventional isotopes such as Pu239 and U235.
In all isotope chains there are candidates for use as fissile bomb material, but some are just not worth the effort to use.
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Lots of things have been done once. Sometimes, once is enough to prove it's not the right direction.
Aside form more difficult, it's also more expensive, and the US was in the process of making thousand of nuclear bombs, so cost was a factor.
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India tried U-233 bombs, and went to U-235. Yes, it can be done, but it's not optimum. And plutonium is far better, and that's what the US wanted.
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The problem is that it gets all lumped together. Conventional nukes are a very bad idea and a very bad deal economically, the smaller the worse on the economics side.
Molten-salt _cooling_ is quite problematic as, for example, France found out. Whether the design China is testing is viable or not remains to be seen. The French mostly had problems in the area of material sciences. Relevant advances may or may not have solved these problems.
THTR also needs significant research, mostly material sciences. Which
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Then Richard Nixon, the Patient Zero of a staggering amount of all that currently ails and poisons our nation, joined forces with some Democratic senators from California. This epic nuclear engineering brain trust declared that s
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They were HTGRs. Each fuel rod was a little breeder with enough U233/235 to start the thorium fuel cycle within that rod. The new Chinese ones are MSBRs, which means that the thorium fuel cycle can continue in the molten salt without each fuel unit of fuel requiring some amount of uranium to kick off the thorium fuel cycle.
There's nothing fundamentally special about an MSBR, and the US could have built these back in the 60s as well.
He
It's Economics, Dummy. (Score:2)
>>public sentiment on nuclear anything.
Nah. It's economics, dummy.
Incorrect information (Score:3)
demonstrating the reactor's ability to be refueled without shutdown -- a capability conventional uranium reactors lack
CANDU uranium fission reactors support on power refueling [www.nfb.ca] allowing them to be refueled without being shutdown. This is a capability that has existed for a long time.
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Let's have a little context about "abandoned" (Score:5, Insightful)
The US Molten Salt Reactor Experiment from the 1960s operated at over 7MW, and was also successfully refueled in operation. So without denigrating China's accomplishments with this reactor, they're just reproducing what we already did sixty years ago. But it's a necessary step if there's going to be future progress in thorium fuel cycle technology.
The MSRE wasn't *abandoned*. The experiment finished successfully, with all of its research goals met. It successfully showed that the technology was physically workable. It was never followed up because, at least at the time, the technology wasn't economically viable. Until fission power generation expands to make the supply of uranium a constraining economic factor, the technology probably won't be economically viable. But it's a good that someone is working on it.
Also, with respect to China surpassing France, this has nothing to do with thorium reactors and everything to do that China is 20x the population of France, so everything is bigger. They consume 25x the number of eggs France does too -- but it's because they're larger, not because they get their eggs from super chickens. France gets 63% of its power from nuclear, China gets about 5%. Another way to look at it is that China, with 20x the population, has 1.3x the nuclear generating capacity. About half of China's nuclear generation capacity come from reactors based on a 1980 French design.
But the size of the domestic market and the political commitment to developing advanced nuclear power technology leave no doubt in my mind that China will be the world leader in nuclear power in the coming decades. The thorium research is part of that political commitment, but I don't think it will be of practical importance anytime soon.
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I would certainly hope not! Super Chicken [wikipedia.org] was a rooster, not a hen!
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Until fission power generation expands to make the supply of uranium a constraining economic factor
Ironically it is for countries other than Russia. Very few countries have significant proven reserves of uranium and the biggest of them doesn't want to get it out of the ground (which is a shame because Australia is an nice stable western country). If if the Russian invasion of Ukraine has proven anything it's that economics need to consider energy security as well. Uranium is not a path to energy security for the west. ... except for Canada.
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Uranium is not a path to energy security for the west. ... except for Canada.
Shhhh! We're trying to downplay that - there's already been too much '51st state' talk...
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They also discovered serious intergranular corrosion when they decommissioned the molten salt reactor. Whether the Chinese found some alloy that does work is a fair question.
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Alloys that are useable in molten salt reactors we have since nearly a century.
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The MSRE clean up turned into a fiasco, and other similar experimental reactors have had major problems too. I don't know why anyone throws money at it now, it's been tried and it still needs massive amounts of investment with a high probability of finding new issues before it becomes commercially viable.
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>> They consume 25x the number of eggs France does too
Wrong industry.
China uses 25x more plutonium than France.
Well (Score:2)
At least we'll be able to see those commies glowing a night. Will save tons of money on night vision batteries alone.
Manchurian Candidate (Score:1)
Having paralyzed the US with political correctness and organized religion, China can sit back and use our economy and technology against us, then take over as they always intended to do back during the Mongol invasions.
But why? (Score:2)
Here tell around Slashdot et al. China is the greenyest of the green goodie greenies building out more solar than everybody everywhere put together times x10!!1 Why would they need or want nuclear power? Why did China commission >30 GW of new coal power and start building out >94 GW of coal power in 2024?
Solar solves all of that. It's cheaper. There is no point to any of these legacy technologies when you can just solar.
I'm told.
MIT reactor (Score:2)
I've been in the MITR and don't see why
it is being mentioned here. It's traditional
uranium, not thorium. And it's purpose is to be
a neutron source for things like developing medical
treatments and testing and transforming materials
for things like superconductivity research.
The reactor has no turbines or anything,
and doesn't make any electricity.
Not to be confused with the tamarack down
the street at the MIT Plasma Fusion Center.
Sadly, that one does not make any electricity either.
But I'm sure it will, within