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.
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.
i will call MSRs (not thorium power, this is fine) toys until a single 100MWe+ unit gets built up. wanna bet that it won’t happen in 20 years?
Why can’t we spend $20 billion on a full-scale reactor that may very well not work? Why is science so slow?
Science doesn’t have to be slow. Politics and funding are usually the bottleneck.
yeah either that or sometimes that one biologist illegally gene-editing embryos shows up