[ExI] China building a Thorium molten salt reactor
Stuart LaForge
avant at sollegro.com
Sat Sep 28 15:15:36 UTC 2024
China will start building a Thorium-based molten salt reactor in 2025.
It is expected to start generating power in 2029-2030.
https://www.neimagazine.com/news/china-to-build-worlds-first-thorium-molten-salt-npp-in-gobi-desert/?cf-view
China has announced the construction of a nuclear power plant that will
be fuelled by liquid fuel based on molten thorium salt. The Shanghai
Institute of Applied Physics (SINAP) has been engaged in research in
this area since 2011 focusing on liquid fluoride-thorium reactors
(LFTRs). The construction of a prototype of a thorium molten salt
reactor (TMSR) with a capacity of 2 MW began in September 2018 and was
reportedly completed in August 2021. China is seeking to get full
intellectual property rights to this technology.
Now China plans to build the world’s first NPP based on molten salt in
the Gobi desert. Construction will begin in 2025 with the aim of
developing safer and more environmentally friendly nuclear energy. The
reactor does not need water for cooling, since it uses liquid salt and
carbon dioxide to transfer heat and generate electricity.
In 2022, SINAP received permission from the Ministry of Ecology and
Environmental Protection to commission an experimental MTSR. This is the
first nuclear molten salt reactor since the United States stopped its
molten salt test reactor in 1969. The application for the operation of
the experimental reactor was considered in China in June 2023, it was
considered to be fully compliant with safety requirements.
The reactor will use fuel enriched in less than 20% U-235, with a
thorium reserve of about 50 kg and a conversion factor of about 0.1.
FLiBe – a eutectic mixture of lithium fluoride and beryllium fluoride
containing 99.95% lithium-7 will be used, and the fuel will consist of
uranium tetrafluoride (UF4).
It is expected that the implementation of the project will begin with
some refuelling online and removal of gaseous fission products. However,
after 5-8 years, all fuel salts will be disposed of for processing and
separation of fission products and secondary actinides for storage. The
reactor will launch an ongoing process of processing uranium and thorium
salts with the operational separation of fission products and secondary
actinoids. If this project is successful, China plans to fully
commission a 373 MW reactor by 2030.
------------------------------------------
I hope that this is a wake up call to the West. NIMBYs be damned; if we
don't get started on something similar, then China will be eating our
lunch by the end of the next decade. Burning coal to power our Tesla EVs
is not a viable alternative.
Stuart LaForge
More information about the extropy-chat
mailing list