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.
Refreshing not to see the comment section full of anti-nuclear brainlets. For a second I thought Lemmy was a Greenpeace hot-spot.
Anyway…
One good turn deserves another. If others won’t follow because of good example, hopefully other countries will instead follow because of competition.
green peace is cool and all, but nuclear the only way forward, other than asking everyone nicely to use much less energy…
and supposedly the new molten salt thorium reactor design automatically shuts itself off and basically can’t have a meltdown… if that’s real it’s a great way forward….
well, except for all the nuclear waste, but i’m sure they’ll figure that out too….Radioactive nuclear materials comes from the Earth. All one has to do is put it back in the Earth. Finland built a massive underground nuclear waste storage facility, but there are also technologies being developed to reclaim nuclear waste (because only a very small amount if the material actually gets used in the fission process).
pretty sure it’s not so simple….
Remember when it was all the hype when things just started - crazy to see it actually happen
Thanks for the archive link, OP. Shit that site was cancerous
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.
Same thing. You westerners just don’t like acknowledging when your designated adversaries make progress because of your exceptionalism.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes a country will inflate the appearance of problems in an enemy nation in order to stoke resentment at home and justify military action abroad.
In Iraq, we made up a bunch of lies about soldiers murdering babies in incubators. After Vietnam, we had Cold Warriors repeating the POW/MIA lies that suggested they were holding hundreds of American hostages for decades, in order to justify continued sanctions and embargos. The slanders against Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Iran have been relentless, all while the US conducted insidious guerrilla wars that have raped, mutilated, and killed countless civilians.
At some point “Both Sides Are Bad” doesn’t cut it. You have to address your own nation’s sins - the lies, the sabotage, the assassinations and us sponsored genocides - before a rational listener can take criticism of your political rivals seriously.
The Uyghur genocide situation has been confirmed by multiple countries, please don’t start a genocide denial debate here.
Well if you want a first hand account: I went to Shanghai with some friends recently, one has family and friends there, so knows the city. We went to the only lesbian bar in all of this huge metropolis. Note that I’m a guy. But due to being closed down before, the place seemed to be rather glad to have some euro faces in there, as a show for the cop car parked right in front of it the whole night.
My friend also told me, that the amount of beggars was really low this time, because they all got picked up and brought to somewhere else.
So all in all I think it’s an efficiently run country, but you don’t get around pushing some people out if you want efficiency. Humans are all different, if you want to consider everyone’s opinion it takes a lot of time (which China did not have in the last few decades). So some opinions are forced out rather brutally.
But, all in all: Go there, experience it yourself.
I can’t speak to Shanghai. I’ve only been to Hong Kong, Beijing, and Zhuhai - just outside of Macau - and with family (my eight year old niece isn’t much of a clubber yet).
But all the youth culture I experienced there was thriving. Not exactly going up and asking people their preferred sexuality, but there were plenty of groups that had all the iconography of queerness. There’s still a social stigma against queermess that’s held over from prior generations. But there also isn’t mass shootings or vehicular manslaughter targeting queer communities.
My father in law (a diehard libertarian Cold Warrior type) was taken aback at how clean the cities were and how safe he felt the whole time he was there. Might be due to his overexposure to Western cinema that paints China (and Mexico and Brazil and South Africa and really any country without a critical mass of white people) as dens of vice and violence. But for some reason, having streets devoid of poverty in the US is aspirational. Having them devoid of poverty outside the US is dystopian.
The low homelessness might have something to do with China’s stellar public housing policy. The dedication to clean streets and regular maintenance of buildings may have something to do with their prioritization of long term durability over short term profits. And the degree to which they’ve adopted industrial technology makes these enormous, low cost mixed use urban centers possible. It isn’t just random people being wisked away to El Salvador at the whims of a partisan government.
Humans are all different, if you want to consider everyone’s opinion it takes a lot of time (which China did not have in the last few decades).
Chinese civil government doesn’t operate in the same adversarial climate as in the US. You don’t have Crossfire hosts screaming at each other or Palestine protesters and Zionists brawling on college campuses. You don’t have bloggers and AM Radio guys stoking stochastic violence against minorities in order to generate private fortunes or billionaires buying up major publishers in order to suck up to or strong arm political leadership.
Mass Line theory of government tries to be more scientific in it’s approach to polling public sentiment, reaching public policy, and mass marketing changes to traditional views. China’s approach to domestic reform is slower, more small-c conservative, and focused within the party rather than between parties.
Americans don’t understand that system, so it frightens them. But Americans have made an industry of frightening one another. So Sinophobia is just one more buggabo.
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.
“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
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…
Human rights they do have imo, true they execute billionaires who try to screw the rest of the population which in my opinion puts them ahead even more
The fact they don’t let billionaires run rampant improves my view of them a lot and I’m actually happy the ones who try end up dead.
Whatever that link is it doesn’t load for me, UK censorship I guess.
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.
Fake ass western propaganda “genocide” my ass
You’re uncritically guzzling the CIA line
All of the supposed “evidence” comes from Adrian Zenz, who is a religious zealot who thinks it is his “god-given mission to destroy China.”
https://medium.com/@braisedporkblog/debunking-the-uyghur-genocide-a-resource-list-a31dd0ea3d87
Tell it to the American Blacks in prison. Glass houses. We’re all bad.
They’re not being subjected to a genocide.
I’d like to thank the thorium. Great job guys! All around, great stuff!
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
Yes I remember reading about this a while back. It’s one of the main reasons thorium rectors are so much safer.
I remember reading about this one, able to fit in a small area and be moved, but never knew if it was thorium
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/safe-micro-nuclear-reactor-truck
Haven’t read up on much of it, just remembered it in passing.
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.
It’s that thorium is not fissile it’s fertile so separating the thorium from the uranium core prevents more thorium from absorbing neutrons.
So in an emergency it can be air cooled, assuming they set up an intake for that.
For anyone not familiar with thorium…
Thorium is a great nuclear fuel. Much much safer than the uranium we currently use, because the reaction works best only within a narrow temperature band. Unlike uranium which can run away, a thorium reactor would become less efficient as it overheats possibly preventing a huge problem. That means the fuel must be melted into liquid to achieve the right temperature. That also provides a safety mechanism, you simply put a melt plug in the bottom of the reactor so if the reactor overheats the plug melts and all the fuel pours out into some safe containment system. This makes a Chernobyl / Fukushima style meltdown essentially impossible.
There are other benefits to this. The molten fuel can contain other elements as well, meaning a thorium reactor can actually consume nuclear waste from a uranium reactor as part of its fuel mix. The resulting waste from a thorium reactor is radioactive for dozens or hundreds of years not tens of thousands of years so you don’t need a giant Yucca Mountain style disposal site.
And thorium is easy to find. Currently it is an undesirable waste product of mining other things, we have enough of it in waste piles to run our whole civilization for like 100 years. And there’s plenty more to dig up.There are challenges though. The molten uranium is usually contained in a molten salt solution, which is corrosive. This creates issues for pipes, pumps, valves, etc. The fuel also needs frequent reprocessing, meaning a truly viable thorium plant would most likely have a fuel processing facility as part of the plant.
The problems however are not unsolvable, Even with current technology. We actually had some research reactors running on thorium in the mid-1900s but uranium got the official endorsement, perhaps because you can’t use a thorium reactor to build bombs. So we basically abandoned the technology.
China has been heavily investing in thorium for a while. This appears to be one of the results of that investment. Now this is a tiny baby reactor, basically a lab toy, a proof of concept. Don’t expect this to power anybody’s house. The point is though, it works. You have a 2 megawatt working reactor today, next you build a 20 megawatt demonstrator, then you start building out 200 megawatt units to attach to the power grid.
Obviously I have no crystal ball. But if this technology works, this is the start of something very big. I am sure China will continue developing this tech full throttle. If they make it work at scale, China becomes the first country in the world that essentially has unlimited energy. And then the rest of the world is buying their thorium reactors from China.
The resulting waste from a thorium reactor is radioactive for dozens or hundreds of years not tens of thousands of years so you don’t need a giant Yucca Mountain style disposal site
That is assuming they don’t make significant amounts of Fe-60 (2.6 My half-life) by exposing steel pipes to neutron flux. While the fuel itself might have a shorter half-life, other waste still needs to be dealt with.
You absolutely can make a nuke out of thorium-derived material (first in Teapot MET, 1955, then possibly later by India). It’s not widely used because plutonium is similar and in some important ways superior material
The tradeoff in using salt as fuel/coolant is that now almost all the fission products are in soluble form, instead of nice ceramic chemically inert pellets, which makes any spill much worse, and i wouldn’t say it’s safer for this reason - it’s different, and it’s a tradeoff few thought it is worth making. We have figured out how to make PWRs not explode so it’s not that big of a problem. This goes both for uranium or thorium as a fuel
The reason Yucca Mountain is needed is that nuclear waste exists, if US reversed their policy on reprocessing maybe it wouldn’t fill up so quickly. It’s a matter of political will
At least now, the chemical engineering for reprocessing fuel when reactor is on is not there. Maybe it’ll get developed in this project, but this didn’t happen yet. It all has to be weighed against existing alternatives, and it’s possible to breed 233U in normal water-based reactors, so maybe there’s a little reason to make MSRs in the first place. India has some thorium energy projects as well, but they’re slowed down by lack of fissile material to bootstrap it (you can’t fuel reactor using thorium only, it needs some fissile material)
Very nice explanation and only nitpicking, but saying that Thorium is much much safer than uranium implies that uranium nuclear plants are unsafe. In reality uranium nuclear power has one of the best safety records in energy production.
Uranium reactors are for the most part very safe, and I personally think we should consider building more of them. The problem with them is when something goes wrong, it can go very very wrong contaminating a huge area. Now granted more modern reactor designs make that sort of issue much less likely, but the worst case scenario of a uranium reactor, no matter how unlikely, is still a lot worse than the worst case scenario of a thorium reactor.
Thanks for a thorough explanation.
The problems however are not unsolvable
Meaning that they are not solved. I don’t want the grid in my country powered by tech that is not proven safe, reliable, and with a good ROI.
Much much safer than the uranium we currently use
Potentially. It’s not a technology proven in large-scale operational use.
If they make it work at scale, China becomes the first country in the world that essentially has unlimited energy.
If my aunt were to have bollocks, she’d be my uncle.
The “if” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your sentence. And “unlimited energy” is a gross exaggeration. There are still downstream costs and environmental damage.
It’s a matter of implementation versus invention.
If I asked you to build a hundred story skyscraper, that would be difficult, but we already have all of the technical components. All the component problems are already solved- we know how to make high quality steel, we know how to design the frame of such a building, we know how to anchor it into the ground, etc. You just need to put those technologies together in a functional design.
If I asked you to build me a spacecraft that goes faster than light, you couldn’t, because that sort of propulsion system has never been built. And while we have theories on how one might build it, we don’t currently have the capability to build any of those theoretical drive systems even as test articles (mainly because they need things in space larger than we have the capability to launch or will have the capability to launch anytime soon).
But if I asked you to build a thorium reactor, all of the component problems have been solved. We have a lot of coatings that resist corrosion, and so making valves and pipes out of them (and more importantly, designing the system of valves and pipes) takes work but we know how to do it. We understand how to make and process thorium fuel, even if we don’t have much experience doing it.
As for your grid, I don’t want my grade either powered by text that isn’t safe reliable and productive, but the fact is we don’t have that right now. A lot of power still comes from coal and similar shitty sources. So I will absolutely take less shitty.
Yeah I use the word if a lot, but that has a level of probability associated with it. I can say if we figure out a way to generate power from magic pixie dust tomorrow our energy problems will be solved but there’s no probability of that. Here there is a technology that has been known to work since the 1900s, that we have built research reactors on, and that is now being actively developed. The “if” here has a high degree of probability.
Thorium reactors also have an off switch, unlike Uranium reactors. A neutron stream starts the Uranium reaction but the reaction cannot be stopped once started. The reactor just cools the uranium to control the reaction. Lose the cooling system and get a meltdown. Thorium reactors also require a neutron stream but if the flow of neutrons stops, so does the nuclear reaction.
Literally nothing you just said is correct.
Is it wrong that Thorium reactions stop on their own?
It depends how they are designed. Same as regular uranium reactors. Thorium isn’t a reactor fuel after all, it’s what you use to breed more fuel. The actual fuel is still uranium. Thorium turns into uranium-233 then that is the fuel. Normal reactors use uranium-235. Both isotopes can be made to be passively safe.
You do realize you’re on the internet, right? You can look things up first instead of spouting bullshit.
Neutrons?
My mistake. It’s been a few years since I read about this topic.
deleted by creator
Neutrinos almost don’t interact with other matter. You use neutrons to start fission
Mathematics of wonton burrito meals, got it.
You’re confusing subcritical reactors with thorium power
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.
US experiments were broken off because it gives no excuse to attain materials for nuclear weapons. Same excuse everyone else use.
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)
It’s probably as simple as we already have something successful. Why spend time and effort overcoming the challenges to create new reactor technology with many of the same benefits and shortcomings as we already have?
I know the arguments for thorium and can see that being a huge benefit to places without a mature nuclear industry and without developed fuel sources.
Sure it would be somewhat better for us as well, but the biggest limitations will be the same. You’re still impeded by fears of radioactivity even if it is less. You still have radioactive waste to handle even if it’s less and less long lasting. You still have legal and regulatory challenges driving costs and timelines through the roof. Thorium hasn’t won the war of public perception, so is no better in the things that actually impede its use
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.
SMRs too
If only people saying that were aware of their logic flaw of also cutting funding to fusion research
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.
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.
China has its problems, I’m fully aware of the red flags
I see what you did here
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.
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!
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.
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.
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”
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 US 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 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.
Prove it.
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.
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.
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 has 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.
Is it actually a break from that tradition? As tech requires more energy, and militaries become more technological, advancing thorium as an energy source that can be done domestically and no longer needing to rely on as much foreign crude, like Canada is gearing up to provide to them, is also a way to support military applications.
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 by a capitalist state, requiring the USSR and China to develop an equally powerful countermeasure.
Yes
Sure, buddy.
i wasn’t aware they redesigned nuclear from the ground up. why did they pick uranium then?
Because they wanted bombs.
If true, this is a huge step! Congrats to China!
“Strategic stamina” is something that the US used to have but which has disappeared as the country just tries to catch its breath.
America has been strategically sitting on a couch eating strategic cheeseburgers for the past 50 years
America has been destroyed by the politics of the southern strategy.
I mean mostly it was destroyed by
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
Being executed very well through social media companies that cared about nothing but profit, but yes, that led to the strategy you’re describing
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.
So did Europe.
Lmfao no we have not. Also, have you payed your couch rent this month?
Currently, we’re trying to catch our breaths while stabbing ourselves in the lungs
If it’s true, China has energy security for the foreseeable future - as Thorium is usually found along side rare earths, and China has the largest deposits of those. More than anywhere else in the world.
I don’t mean to be a pessimist, but we’ll see how it lasts and scales 😅 it’s certainly promising, but 2MW also isn’t much. I’m curious how large they can scale single reactors, and how close they can safely be to populations - one of the problems with nuclear always ends up being transporting the energy (usually quite far away) once you’ve generated it.
Isn’t the loint of Thorium reactors that they are small and modular, thus highly scalable by multiplying units. Your comment about scaling a single reactor is a cheap rhetorical device to miss the point entirely.
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.
one of the problems with nuclear always ends up being transporting the energy (usually quite far away) once you’ve generated it
I don’t get this part. How is this any different from transporting power from hydro? Quebec transports hydro power from all the way north at the bay to the south and then even sells it to USA.
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.
An interesting aspect of this is when trying to mover power over long distances AC becomes inefficient and High Voltage DC becomes the more efficient option.
Between 2-3% for HVDC vs 6-7% for AC systems when transmitting over 1000km.
2MW also isn’t much
It’s a proof of concept, they’re not actually trying to power anything with this. They’re just checking their math on a small scale before doing the full scale lol
they haven’t demonstrated anything yet, but maybe they will develop something. perhaps. maybe. it’s all uncertain at this point and technology for it doesn’t exist yet.
high voltage transmission lines are a thing, look up where lignite or hydro power plants are situated relative to where people live. this is a solved problem
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Thorium tarnishes to olive grey when exposed to air. This makes it kinda greenish. Green is the color of stamina, so this checks out.
If you’re feeling out of breath, drink a thorium potion!
If I drink the blue potion, I get tingly and my skin starts sloughing off. Must be the cobalt.
It’s got electrolytes!
Then why isn’t viagra green? Checkmate!
It’s temporary stamina, so it’s the cyan at the end of the green bar.
Because it’s for blueing your load.
Thorium? Fucking sweet!
