You can mainly copy and paste this line in countless stories on advanced reactors’ technology. Mettled salt cooling systems? Invented in the middle of the 20th century but never marketed. Ditto for several alternative fuels, such as Triso. And, of course, there is thorium.
This single research reactor in China in progress with an alternative fuel speaks volumes about this moment for nuclear energy technology: Many groups are looking for the past for technologies, with a new appetite to build them.
First, it is important to note that China is THE Hot ground for nuclear energy at the moment. While the United States still has the most operational reactors in the world, China quickly catches up. The country built reactors to a remarkable clip and currently has more reactors under construction than any other country from afar. This week, China has approved 10 new reactorstotaling more than $ 27 billion in investment.
China also opens the way to certain advanced reactor technologies (this category essentially includes everything that deviates from the standard plan of what is on the grid today: large reactors that use uranium enriched for fuel and high pressure water to keep the reactor fresh). High temperature reactors that use gas as a coolant are a major intervention area for China– Some reactors that use this technology have recently started, and others are in planning or construction stages.
Now, Chinese state media report that the country’s scientists have taken an important step with a thorium reactor. The reactor appeared online in June 2024, but the researchers say that he recently full of refueling without closing. (Conventional reactors must generally be stopped to reconstruct fuel food.) The main scientists of the project Share the results During a closed -door meeting at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
I will emphasize here that it is not a massive power plant: this reactor is tiny. It generates only two megawatts of heat – less than the Research reactor on the MIT campuswhich rings at six megawatts. (To be fair, MIT is one of the largest university research reactors in the United States, but still … it’s small.)
Be that as it may, progress has been the progress of thorium reactors, because the world has been fully focused on uranium for about 50 years.
A large part of the original research on Thorium has come out of the United States, which pumped all kinds of technologies from different reactors in the 1950s and 60s. An OAK RIDGE National Laboratory reactor in Tennessee which ran in the 1960s used uranium-233 fuel (which can be generated when thorium is bombed with radiation).