The complete lack of any details may fly on Chinese Central Television and Reuters.com, but I want more when I come to hacker news. What's next? "North Korea boasts development of time machine!"
>The Jiuquan Atomic Energy Complex (Plant 404) is centered on a 400-500MW light water graphite reactor [LWGR] fueled with natural Uranium. The facility includes a pilot plutonium reprocessing plant and a arge-scale reprocessing plant with a capacity of 300-400kg Pu/yr (both use PUREX method). It also includes a Nuclear Fuel Processing Plant for refining plutonium into weapons-usable metals.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/china/jiuquan.htm
>The small reprocessing plant in Gansu was completed about six years ago, but Chinese oversight agencies have not yet permitted it to separate any plutonium—as of last month, just two fuel assemblies have been dissolved in the nitric acid tank at the plant. Full-scale operation is not expected before 2012.
http://carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&...
More about PUREX, reprocessing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing
http://www.inl.gov/technicalpublications/KeyResults.aspx?key...
China has a long-term vision (not really making progress) of closed fuel cycles based on fast breeder reactors. This is the state media reference to "60-fold increase in uranium usage", "3,000 year uranium supply". Since a fast reactor can't burn through fuel entirely in one go (it will fall apart), one of the requirements of a closed fuel cycle is reprocessing: fuel has to be removed from a reactor and re-fabricated. Certain waste products need to be removed, and pure plutonium* isolated for new fuel (this is a chemical separation).
*(Not in every reprocessing method. COEX (mentioned in the Carnege Endowment article, where the French are trying to persuade China to adopt it) co-extracts plutonium with uranium. The pyroprocessing method developed at Argonne (US national lab) co-extracts plutonium with every trans-uranic, so that the resulting fuel is essentially unusable as weapons. China is pursuing PUREX.)
Thorium-based designs seem more realistic and useful, I wonder why this is not investigated more: it is more common than uranium and produces less nuclear waste than uranium-based designs. The US has a lot of it, Europe has a lot of it so it makes sense for countries like France to look at it, etc...
(That's not to concede that SFR failures were entirely commercial -- political obstruction was a large factor too. Both anti-nuclear opposition in general (post-Three Mile Island and post-Chernobyl) as well as specific, extremely misguided opposition to plutonium breeding. Argonne's IFR project was killed for this second reason [2]).
>Thorium-based designs seem more realistic and useful, I wonder why this is not investigated more: it is more common than uranium and produces less nuclear waste than uranium-based designs.
There's no meaningful distinction between FBRs and thorium reactors in fuel supply -- both have theoretically thousands of years of potential, so that it's silly to call this a factor. Nor is there a significant difference in waste production. (Though if I remember right, some minor actinides can only be efficiently destroyed by fast neutrons. This isn't an important difference; MAs are a small component, so you can augment a thermal-reactor fuel cycle with dedicated "waste burners" (e.g. [3] [4]) and still have a mostly-thorium fuel cycle).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300
[2] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/inter...
[3] http://energyfromthorium.com/2009/11/11/lftr-and-msrs-achiev...
I don't think super phenix can be considered as a prototype: as a target production power of > 1000 MW, it is closer to conventional, commercial reactors (those are theoretical numbers, which were never reached, let alone sustained).
Thorium-based reactors are more mature than FBR as far as I understand, and my argument about thorium was against conventional reactors as stated, not fast breeders. As for supply, besides amount, the location also matters a lot. There is thorium in Europe, but little uranium as far I understand, which matters quite a bit.
>Thorium-based reactors are more mature than FBR as far as I understand
Thorium reactors are even less mature than FBRs. Although that's a very loose category, you should distinguish between the extremely different reactor types which burn thorium, such as high temperature gas-cooled reactors (including pebble beds), which were the only commercial thorium reactors (for a short time); and the theoretical molten salt reactors, which unlike HTGRs are breeder reactors. For added confusion, some commercial (both LWR and HWR) reactors can run partially on thorium, but are not self-sufficient without uranium or plutonium fuel.