Yes, I remember when Oppenheimer got in trouble, which resulted in all the decent doctors in the country being rounded up and executed based on lies.

As someone that often works for multiple years on pilot and poc projects, can we stop calling those “toys”.

Sorry we don’t have madscientist money here.

That reactor is 2MWt, which is still somewhere about 1000x smaller than actual production reactors. But this is not the issue here, because in MSR the reactor is not the hard part, it’s its entire fuel cycle.

The entire point of having fuel as a solution instead of hard, nonreactive ceramic pellets put in tubes made of refractory metal is that there could be perhaps a way to extract fission products from coolant/fuel, which would prevent neutron capture by these fission products, which makes in turn better use of neutrons, so more fissile material can be bred. Benefit of this is that if that online recycling process can be made to work (big if - unsolved for now) then reactor works always like it’s been freshly refueled. The hard part here is not reactor, it’s the cleaning of fuel while reactor is still online. This has not been demonstrated, instead only new fuel was added, which is something that can be done with CANDU and some other designs where reactor is divided into channels

First attempts at something like this used heavy water acidified solution of uranium nitrate, but this proved too corrosive and also water needed to be pressurized, and also it decomposes when subjected to radiation in this way. Today what is used is FLiBe, which is low-melting salt that doesn’t decompose in this manner, but also is more corrosive and in different ways than water as used in PWRs. If that was the only problem, we would have MSRs left and right, but there are three other big problems

Recovery of excess bred 233U or removal of neutron-absorbing fission products from FLiBe is hard, because you can’t use normal methods used in nuclear reprocessing. There’s no extraction like in PUREX, there’s no ion exchange resin that can survive it, there’s only fluoride volatility and some electrochemical methods, and it all would require significant research before anything close to viable comes up. The salt also probably has to be kept anhydrous at all times. This is the first problem. Maybe this reactor will be used for it, maybe it’ll fail, but there’s a related Problem that doesn’t appear in more conventional reactors. In normal case, you can just leave fuel elements in water until the spiciest isotopes decay so that you don’t have to deal with them. Here, we intentionally work with freshly irradiated, so ridiculously spicy fuel, and intentionally concentrate the most radiotoxic isotopes that are out there. Worse than that, all these fission products are not in form of chemically inert ceramic, these are in form of water soluble fluoride salts and this means that if anything of this gets into soil, it’ll dissolve meaning that either fuel leak or waste stream leak would have much more severe consequences than if it was in conventional form. If you’re trying to say that MSRs are safer for some reason, i’d have some serious reservations.

The other problem is that FLiBe is a good moderator, meaning that any MSR reactor design using this salt is thermal reactor, and we already have this figured out in form of PWRs where we can use water instead. Look up India’s plans for thorium power - they want to use PWR reactors for breeding 233U, with heavy water or not, because this already works and there’s no actual reason for use of this highly experimental and uncertain technology. Keeping fuel rods in reactor for longer time is not an actual showstopper like it was expected in 60s when this concept first surfaced, in fact with advancement of nuclear technology burnup only goes up, i think it already is 2x or 3x what it used to be in early commercial power reactors. If MSR was the only way to make breeding work, we’d probably take effort to manage ridiculous radiotoxicity of this fuel mix, but because both chemical engineering to do so is not there and alternatives that don’t have this problems exist, we don’t. Charitably i’d could describe MSR fuel cycle idea as an highly experimental but promising while also requiring significant research expense. Less charitably, looking at all those years of research yielding nothing, i could also describe it as a dead end grift. You decide

Note that all these problems come up with use of MSR, not thorium. Thorium for nuclear power is fine, but requires reprocessing, and some countries don’t want to do this for diplomatic reasons (americans specifically) (tho i suspect it’s masking the actual reason: some bean counter at westinghouse calculated it’s cheaper to use fresh uranium instead - reprocessing is a lot of dangerous, well-paid, complicated work - in countries where labour costs are lower, or where govt is willing to pay up to have reserve of nuclear material, which amounts to all other countries that have sufficiently advanced nuclear industry, reprocessing does happen. french, chinese, russians, indians, japanese, koreans, and probably a couple more do reprocess their fuel. there’s a couple of countries that send their fuel to manufacturer, and some just discard it underground without reprocessing) (this is also why yucca mountain filling up is a problem of entirely american making, and the only thing that is lacking in order to solve it is political will)

The article makes it very clear its running continuously, which is what they are celebrating

i think you’ve read different article

Chinese scientists have achieved a milestone in clean energy technology by successfully adding fresh fuel to an operational thorium molten salt reactor, according to state media reports.

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?

America has a greater percentage of Americans locked up than China has Uyghurs locked up and we don’t have a Thorium reactor either.

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.

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.

Communism is a goal, not a government system.

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.

The “human rights” standard of western imperialist countries is laughable hypocrisy. The US alone makes China look like the paragon of justice.

Same thing. You westerners just don’t like acknowledging when your designated adversaries make progress because of your exceptionalism.

The new generation of Russian fast neutron reactors use lead and lead-bismuth as coolant, not sodium anymore. They are not proper breeders, as I understood it.

There is no correlation between nuclear weapons production and nuclear power generation. If anything they compete for the same raw materials. They were developed in the same era because that’s when we discovered how to harness fission.

Also depleted uranium is not spent fuel. Depleted uranium is the byproduct of enriching uranium to weapons grade. Given the natural ratios of u238 to u235, there’s an abundance of it from refining nuclear weapons hence why some weapons and armor utilize it.

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.

Yes I remember reading about this a while back. It’s one of the main reasons thorium rectors are so much safer.

Go back to whatever chudhole you came from.

Of course it’s bad. It’s awful. Only a complete moron would think the opposite.

I’m not a patriot. I dont give a shit about my own country. If France is does positive things, good, but it doesn’t I’m going to ignore that our politicians are corrupt or that the Olympics were used to enforce mass surveillance and lock up climate activists.

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.