China to activate world's first 'clean' nuclear reactor in September

[Judi Lynn]

By Ben Turner - Staff Writer about 8 hours ago

Plans include building up to 30 reactors in partnered nations.

Chinese government scientists have unveiled plans for a first-of-its-kind, experimental nuclear reactor that does not need water for cooling.

The prototype molten-salt nuclear reactor, which runs on liquid thorium rather than uranium, is expected to be safer than traditional reactors because thorium cools and solidifies quickly when exposed to the air, meaning any potential leak would spill much less radiation into the surrounding environment compared with leaks from traditional reactors.

The prototype reactor is expected to be completed next month, with the first tests beginning as early as September.

As this type of reactor doesn't require water, it will be able to operate in desert regions. The location of the first commercial reactor, slated for construction by 2030, will be in the desert city of Wuwei, and the Chinese government has plans to build more across the sparsely populated deserts and plains of western China, as well as up to 30 in countries involved in China's "Belt and Road" initiative — a global investment program that will see China invest in the infrastructure of 70 countries.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/china-creates-new-thorium-reactor.html?utm_source=notification

[sabbat hunter]

1. Doesn't need water as a coolant

But still needs water that it can turn to steam to turn the turbines.

[cstanleytech]

4. Main benefit is that if there was an issue that causes an accident that

the risk to people and the environment is greatly reduced or at least it is in theory.

[NNadir]

7. Are you familiar enough with the design to say they won't run on Brayton cycles? n/t

[NNadir]

2. It will actually be something like the 500th "clean" reactor.

The reactor is not strictly, "the first of a kind," either, except perhaps in terms of scale. It's a revived version of a reactor that operated half a century ago in Oak Ridge.

The reactor was not cancelled because of corrosion. It was canceled because the thorium/U-233 cycle was not consistent with the weapons infrastructure of the U-238/Pu-239 cycle.

China does have huge piles of thorium left over from the isolation of lanthanides, so there's that. No mines are required.

The author of this news item has a limited understanding of nuclear engineering which shows. The point made about the solidification of thorium oxide is just silly. It is not actinides like uranium or plutonium that are volatile. It's fission products.

[CloudWatcher]

3. Not a fan

... the main byproducts of a thorium nuclear reaction are uranium-233, which can be recycled in other reactions, and a number of other byproducts with an average “half-life” (the time it takes for half of a substance’s radioactive atoms to decay to a non-radioactive state) of just 500 years.

Oh well ... "just" 500 years half life. Hey, it's better than Plutonium-239 which has a half-life of 24,000 years.

Can I just store it in my backyard until it's decayed enough to be harmless? Letsee, after a mere 3000 years I'll only have 1/64th of the original amount. So it'll be fine!

Given our wondrous track record, I'm going to guess the waste will just be dumped somewhere and they'll hope nobody notices anytime soon.

[cstanleytech]

5. Every type of energy production is going to have its negative impacts though even solar and wind

have negative impacts in varies ways.

[CloudWatcher]

8. Negative impacts

True, but generating wastes that will be dangerous for thousands of years seems like a whole lot of buy-now-pay-later insanity.

A quick google of "cost/benefit ratio of nuclear energy" pulls up lots of sources that state that the costs of waste management and disposal are being passed to the consumer as part of a plant's normal operating costs.

Which is pure nonsense since long-term disposals of high level waste are not happening anywhere in the world. So I'd really like to know the amount of money that's being set aside to pay for the eventual disposal.

But how can you even start to compute the cost of disposals when the waste needs to be securely stored for thousands of years? The US has no facilities. The world has no operational facilities. There is one in Finland that is being built (Onkalo) that will hold a little:

Scheduled to commence operations in 2025, the Onkalo nuclear waste repository is expected to hold approximately 6,500t of spent nuclear fuel over an estimated operational life of 100 years.

Which is nice ... except that it's tiny. From https://psmag.com/ideas/the-hiding-place-inside-the-worlds-first-long-term-storage-facility-for-highly-radioactive-nuclear-waste

Over a quarter of a million tons of high-level nuclear waste in need of final storage is presently thought to exist globally, with around 12,000 tons being added to that figure annually.

Just for grins ... let's do some approximations. Those 12,000 tons of yearly new waste is almost 2 "Onkalo" per year that we need to build. Oh, and we need about 38,000 Onkalos to store the 250,000 tons that are already in short-term storage.

And ... the cost of Onkalo is (very roughly speaking) about 2,500 million Euro (inis.iaea.org). If I've not flubbed my math, that's about 95000 trillion Euro to store the existing waste with a yearly expense of 5 trillion Euro each year to bury the newly generated waste.

And yeah, I'm assuming that the "Onkalo" unit cost is fixed, when it's of course unfathomable. I would expect some savings from economies of scale but also more expense to try and use less ideal burial locations.

I'd really like to see just how this long term disposal is going to happen and who is going to pay for it before building one more plant.

[hunter]

9. As the world burns... as the seas rise... as the frequency of catastrophic weather events increase..

Nuclear power didn't do that.

Fossil fuels did.

We get away with neglecting long term storage of nuclear waste for now because it mostly just sits there, going nowhere, doing nothing. The volumes of radioactive waste in comparison to other similarly dangerous, but non-radioactive, wastes are small.

Fossil fuel wastes, on the other hand... these are a nightmare.

[CloudWatcher]

12. Fossil fuels are not the answer, but neither is nuclear power.

High level nuclear wastes don't "just sit there" ... they need active cooling to prevent them from melting and leaking and making a giant dangerous mess.

My point is that nuclear energy is extremely expensive. It doesn't seem that way because we're not paying the price up-front.

We need to dump both fossil fuels and nuclear energy and switch quickly to renewables. And yes, time is running out (or has already run out).

We'll soon be in the situation where changing what we're burning makes no difference anymore and geo-engr'ing will be the only way out the the cess pool we've built.

[hunter]

13. I used to believe that, but I changed my mind.

The math of the anti-nuclear activists is false and their imaginary "renewable energy" utopia is incapable of supporting the existing human population.

We humans have worked our way into an ugly corner.

If we continue to burn fossil fuels billions of us will suffer and die.

If we abandon our high technology high energy industrial economy billions of us will suffer and die.

Fissionable fuels are the only energy source capable of displacing 100% of our fossil fuel use. Which is what we MUST do.

I say this with great reluctance. I'm some kind of Luddite. Give me a garden and my art and a shack to live in and I'm happy. I've been an invisible dumpster diving crazy homeless guy with a very small environmental footprint.

Even with supplemental wind and solar energy approaching 50% of all power generation natural gas power plants will not save the world.

There's more than enough natural gas in the ground to destroy the world as we know it.

Renewable energy experiments in California, Denmark, Germany, and Texas have failed. We have hard numbers now.

Nuclear energy is not expensive. Solar and wind energy fantasies are. We pay for them in the destruction of the natural environment that supports us, and even in the cost of our electricity.

France closed its last coal mine twenty years ago and paid off all the older miners with pensions and free housing.

Anti-nuclear Germany is still destroying entire villages and forests to mine coal, and they suffer some of the most expensive electricity in the world.

Worse, they are increasingly dependent on Russian gas. That will not end well.

I live in California. On a good day 85% of my electricity comes from non-fossil fuel sources. At this moment 47% of my electricity is generated by fossil fuels, almost entirely natural gas. That's not good enough.

[BlueWavePsych]

16. Ditto

The math of the anti-nuclear activists is false and their imaginary "renewable energy" utopia is incapable of supporting the existing human population.

[NNadir]

11. OK then. Let's destroy now and worry about it later.

These anti-nuke arguments are tiresome and frankly ignorant and morally appalling.

The infrastructure of a nuclear power plant is designed to last a significant portion of a century. The first Westerm nuclear reactor, built in the 1950's using 1940's technology ran until 2003.

The real problem with anti-nukes is that they are mindlessly selfish and are unwilling to pay for benefits to future generations; they're pure "what's in it for me," consumer types.

There is not one anti-nuke who complains about the accumulation of used nuclear fuel who even understands remotely what's in it.

In general they know no chemistry, no physics, no science whatsoever, and spit out mindless statistics that scare them, but not people who understand the aforementioned topics.

Nor are they willing to understand that while they whine endlessly about tens of tons of largely solid by products, they are spectacularly disinterested in the containment of billions of tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste being dumped indiscriminately on all future generations and, in fact, all forms of life, nor are they interested in the millions of human beings killed by dangerous fossil fuel waste every day.

People are dropping dead in the streets from extreme temperatures. But...but...but... used nuclear fuel.

Here is the most recent full report from the Global Burden of Disease Report, a survey of all causes of death and disability from environmental and lifestyle risks: Global, regional, and national comparative risk assessment of 79 behavioural, environmental and occupational, and metabolic risks or clusters of risks, 1990–2015: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015 (Lancet 2016; 388: 1659–724) One can easily locate in this open sourced document compiled by an international consortium of medical and scientific professionals how many people die from causes related to air pollution, particulates, ozone, etc.

The nuclear power industry is now more than half a century old. I often challenge the lazy people to open it's comprehensive epidemiological analysis to show where and when used nuclear fuel has killed as many people who will die in the next 10 hours from air pollution.

They never do, because they can't.

In the mind of these bean counting clerks, "nuclear is 'too expensive'" but climate change and the death of six to seven million people per year from air pollution is not "too expensive.' Mining the shit out of the planet to build the lipstick on the gas pig, so called "renewable energy" is not "too expensive" even though all that crap will be landfill in 25 years.

Used nuclear fuel is a precious resources for future generations. One would need to open science books and scientific papers to understand why that is, but in general, most people, at the expense of all future generations, are too lazy and too poorly educated to be bothered.

[NNadir]

6. What is the "half-life" of the mercury and lead we dump from dangerous fossil fuels while...

...waiting for the so called "renewable energy" nirvana that has not come, is not here, and will not come?

In the last 10 years,. between 60 and 70 mlliion people died from air pollution while anti-nukes whine insipidly about 500 years from now, or depending on their level of ignorance, 1,000,000 years from now, a billion years from now.

From my perspective, since I understand nuclear engineering, opposing nuclear energy is the intellectual and moral equivalent of being antivaccination.

Ignorance kills people.

[hunter]

10. Similar reactors could run on depleted uranium.

The U.S.A. has 1.2 million tonnes of depleted uranium sitting around so we probably don't have to build thorium fueled reactors for a long time, if ever.

[BlueWavePsych]

14. Glad to see Thorium reactors becoming mainstream.

Been waiting for these since Fukushima.

[hunter]

15. Google translate does a fairly good job on the original paper this livescience article is based on.

http://www.j.sinap.ac.cn/hjs/EN/10.11889/j.0253-3219.2021.hjs.44.070601

I used the "RichHTML" link.

Items of interest (to me, anyways)

-- Runs 1250 days without refueling

-- The total volume of the molten salt is 2.72 cubic meters.

-- This model reactor requires uranium enriched to 19.75 % in almost equal part with thorium to run.

-- The reactor is very similar to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment.

-- This paper has many references to research done at ORNL.

The wikipedia article on Liquid fluoride thorium reactors isn't bad. (It's even got some stuff on the Brayton cycle... )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor