‘No quick wins’: China has the world’s first operational thorium nuclear reactor
www.scmp.com
Team working on project reportedly achieves milestone by completing fuel reloading while experimental molten salt reactor was running.

https://archive.is/2nQSh

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.

  • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    5 hours ago

    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.

    • Lord Wiggle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      4 hours ago

      We need to store the waste for thousands of years. This is bad. We are able to recycle the waste for more power but we’re not allowed to because it produces a tiny bit enriched uranium and that’s not allowed by the pact the US and Russia made. But recycling waste is tech from the 70’s and it can reduce the half life of 100.000 years to 100 years.

      Thorium however, is a different story. It doesn’t work with gamma radiation but with alpha radiation. Alpha radiation is the most dangerous form of radiation, but it doesn’t go far and doesn’t go through many things. You can contain it with a piece of paper. Gamma radiation is the least harmful form of radiation but the big issue is it goes really far and goes through almost anything.

      So waste from a Thorium reactor is much less harmful, easy to contain, also has a very short half life (I don’t know how long but it’s really short, as in several years) so Thorium really is awesome. Thorium is also a waste product of many other mining operations so it’s already a form of recycling. The downside of a Thorium reactor is that it’s far more complex than the reactors we know so it’s very hard and expensive to build, more than a regular reactor. So it will cost a lot, takes a long time, but it’s an extremily safe and wise investment.