China prepares to test thorium-fuelled nuclear reactor | Hacker News Reader

China prepares to test thorium-fuelled nuclear reactor

nature.com

199 pointsmm321213 comments

This is a main selling point of having a high proportion of your politicians having an engineering background. They will have an understanding of technical subjects and more willingness to authorize technical projects, unlike lawyer based government in the West.

Not just that, Chinese politicians also understand what key technologies (or even whole companies) to prioritize buying or stealing from the West, like EV and battery tech, renewables, networking, robotics, AI and semiconductors.

While German politicians still ask for the internet to be printed for them.

The lack if strategic thinking, and subjugation by the US, of Germany has been made painfully clear with the Covid vaccine. While the UK made sure that the Oxford vaccine went to British pharma, the German let Pfizer take over BioNTech's vaccine.

Germany got through the pandemic with about half as many infections and deaths per capita as the UK. The vaccination rates are almost the same as the UK by now.

So I wouldn't call this a great strategic victory for the UK. Especially since it also cost them quite a bit of goodwill in Europe.

All the blaming of the UK seems to have been really blatant scapegoating that went unchallenged because it fit with what the media wanted people to believe, though. The UK suffered the same shortfall in yield of the AstraZeneca vaccine as everywhere else, though to a slightly lesser extent early on as the production line here got funded earlier and the early teething troubles sorted out sooner. We were also far more reliant on the AZ vaccine than the EU, as they themselves liked to point out in order to argue they actually did a good job. This meant the yield and blood clot issues had a much bigger impact here. The UK government just did a far better job of limiting the impact of this by ordering more vaccines early on, basing their rollout on what AZ could actually deliver, and better public communications about the safety of the vaccine. There's no reason the EU couldn't have done the same other than their own decisions - AZ was quite keen to set up larger-scale manufacturing for the EU, and they could easily have negotiated a provision like the UK's requiring timely notice of how much vaccine would actually be delivered. They just didn't because they didn't seem to understand why this was necessary.

BionTech needed a large partner for clinical trials and initial prodcution. The IP is still largely Biontech, they now have a significant production footprint as well. Not to bad, plus huge global sales. And the mRNA know-how mostly stayed with Biontech. For once I don't see any lack in strategy here.

Germany has large pharma companies and could have made sure one of them was picked in the same way the UK did.

Plainly, this was a war situation with countries brought to their knees and Germany handed production of a key weapon that they had developed to a foreign entity. In such a situation IP means nothing if you don't control the factories. Compare to the UK who very clearly understood the situation and intervened. That's serious lack of sovereign strategy and assertiveness on Germany's part, but, again, I don't think they are willing to, or even can, say 'no' to the US.

which subjugation? BioNTech is a German company based in Mainz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioNTech

Yes and AZ fumbled the clinical tests (still not approved by the FDA) and production (not "their fault" to be fair, they had little experience in vaccines, and the viral vector ones are hard to scale up).

Pfizer seems to be much more on point on the fabrication and regulatory aspects, it was a much needed partner.

> While German politicians still ask for the internet to be printed for them.

Just as a funny little tidbit here, I've been trying to gather documents to apply for my permanent residence here in Germany. When I got to one document proving I had been contributing to retirement, I was lucky to find that the German authorities had an online service for it. So I went to request my documents, but, in the name of saving paper, they were going to mail me a copy.

> While German politicians still ask for the internet to be printed for them.

Austrian here, but its funny how Europe in general is still so walled from technology, I'm not just talking about people don't know how to use apps or that. Im a developer and I've worked remotely with clients from Silicon Valley and now I work with local companies and I must say the wiligness to learn something new and to explore new things is just not there.

The current company has a product almost 20 years old and still runs on old Java code. Which is fine, dont fix what is broken, but now we need to rewrite everything in new Tech stack, and thats where I come in, I got hired to help the transition. However, the people are so not in to work on something new.. they just want their Eclipse and Java. I dont know if this is a culture thing or what, but they are just not fans of technology as it seems.

Don't fix something that is NOT broken* Typo

Hey, I've had clients in California who decided two years ago to rewrite a Rails app in PHP because it's too expensive to find rails developer, so switching to a LAMP (litterally, postgres and nginx are also out) is cheaper...

It's what their new CTO was familiar with and he wanted to get something more familiar.

>While German politicians still ask for the internet to be printed for them.

as a tech guy, I must say I don't like reading anything on screen. Not even retina display. Something about having light emitting to my eyes makes it uncomfortable. Paper are just more pleasant to read. Hope they come up with better E-Ink type of tech soon.

While I understand (and agree) that reading is more comfortable on paper than on a screen. I hope this doesn't mean you print out every e-mail and pdf and even sometimes websites, which still happens surprisingly often here.

> Something about having light emitting to my eyes makes it uncomfortable.

How do you feel about dark mode with an OLED screen for true black (pixels off)?

The ecosystem has improved a lot in the past few years and most major OSs and applications now support it. For browsing the web, there's DarkReader[0] which works very well (on Android you can use it with Firefox).

While I've never been particularly sensitive, most of my book reading nowadays happens at night with the lights out, on a 6.67" OLED display with low brightness, pure black background, and amber text.

[0] https://darkreader.org/help/en/

DarkReader is great but the slow down is huge.

I use it in Static mode which is a lot faster (afaik it just applies a CSS style). Doesn't look too bad either.

An exception is Angela Merkel, who holds a PhD in Quantum Chemistry.

And she's done amazing work we need in order to stop climate change now hasn't she

It actually surprises me a lot how little effect it seems to have, at least in her case, to understand what science is telling you

It's almost as if she's not a dictator and the majorities both in her party and the German population are not in favor of appropriate measures to lower emissions.

That's why she worked so hard on getting all German nuclear plants phased out and ended up having the tax payer pay huge fines for that decision to power companies right?

That's also why she recently said: "Das Internet ist Neuland" right? There are technical people and then there are people that grinded through their PhD. Sometimes those two are the same, sometimes they're not.

Jezz isses halt da...

The Red/Green "environmentalist" government legislated the nuclear phase-out. in 2002 before Merkel's time.

She initially reversed it when she came to power, but she had to reverse the reversal when German public opinion overwhelmingly rejected nuclear power due to the huge risk of tsunamis in Germany after 2011.

> While German politicians still ask for the internet to be printed for them.

That's actually somewhat reassuring. I still print of long PDFs, because I actually want to read long documents rather than skim.

I worked for Canada's largest telco and colleagues would regularly print emails they had sent to me and then bring it to my desk asking if I'd seen it... also the newly hired Director of Network had to stop an all-hands meeting to ask what IPv6 was and the final straw for me was being told in a meeting of VPs that a huge push for 2016 would be to get a fax line into every business.

You wonder how stuff gets this way in some companies...

... and then you realize it's because everyone who knew better saw it as a dumpster fire and found another job.

That is so untrue!1!! Our State Minister for Digitällizäyshun appeared in hot attire at a gaming convention, and one can, or at least could talk/meet with her on Clubhouse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothee_B%C3%A4r

VORRSICHT! (gräphicäll contännt, mäntäll präppärräyshun äddvyzzed!)

[1] https://www.klatsch-tratsch.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/do...

[2] https://www.gameswirtschaft.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Do...

[3] https://images.derstandard.at/img/2019/04/10/dorotheebaer.jp...

Vee häff ze paua to shrink wrap all of you!

Jaja. So is dat. Echt jetzt.

Jawollja!

I guess that's the silver lining for us Indians. We are so poor we can't afford printer paper or toner. So we have to use a digital display.

Actually I am kidding, both paper and toner are cheap here but we are not luddites like you guys :)

The Soviets also had many engineers as their leaders, it was something of a fashion; didn’t seem to help much.

It worked quite well at first - I mean they had Sputnik, Gagarin etc. not bad for a country that was some backwards serfdom just half a century before.

But then they lost their ambition - a major point being when they stopped trying to develop their own computing technology and just reverse engineered IBM chips instead.

"But then they lost their ambition"

I rather say, it has to do with economic realities: there was a joke in eastern germany something like:

we got no toilet paper, but a cosmonaut, hurey.

edit:

"Keine Bretter für die Laube

Für das Auto keine Schraube

Für das Klo kein Papier

Aber Kosmonauten haben wir"

non rhyming translation:

"No wood for the hut

no screw for the car

no paper for the toilet

but a cosmonaut we got"

Weird parallel with this American Song:

"A rat done bit my sister Nell. (with Whitey on the moon) Her face and arms began to swell. (and Whitey's on the moon) I can't pay no doctor bill. (but Whitey's on the moon) Ten years from now I'll be payin' still. (while Whitey's on the moon) The man jus' upped my rent las' night. ('cause Whitey's on the moon) No hot water, no toilets, no lights. (but Whitey's on the moon)

-- Gil Scott Heron

Probably not so surprising: those who struggle with their bare existence, are not so thrilled with money shot into space, compared to the better off.

(but Bezos on the moon)

Nah, they run out of German engineers + without futher commercialization of science there is no way forward. There is many good concepts, but almost none got out research phase.

That's because the Soviet leadership made the error to slip into the cold war confrontation, as a result, most of their science and industry was narrowly focused on developing military hardware. The Chinese had Zhou Enlai, who made the effort to avoid such a turn of events (incidentially Zhou Enlai wasn't an engineer at all).

However there were alternatives: once in office, Beria made an effort to get rid of East Germany, in an effort to end the cold war. However the rest of the polibureau ousted and executed Beria, because they feared that all this was too destabilizing (then they got the Hungarian uprising under Khrushchev, which was much worse; also Krushchev later fired his co-conspirators in the coup against Beria - Malenkov and Molotov) See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria#First_Deputy_P...

I am not entirely sure about it, but the question of who is on top seems to make a big difference, when talking about a very authoritarian political system.

They were lacking a market economy, which China has largely had since the late 1980s.

They also had questionable engineers and scientists a leaders, that's why horrors like Lysenkoism and the RMBK reactors became a reality.

Lysenkoism was a fully political distortion: a politician (Stalin), not the scientists community, decided (for political reasons).

The RBMK wasn't an horror, it was simply meant to exploited in a certain way, and containment was integrated. At the Chernobyl plant the guys committed a serious boo-boo (the very possibility of a disaster is common to all designs, there is no absolutely full-proof design, especially if the guys can shunt actuators/fiddle with captors/whatever).

Not really. It was a combination of factors, including the usafe operation by its staff. Disregard for safety had been a generalized problem with this reactor during all stages of its development, before the accident occured.

"According to the Soviet experts the prime cause of the accident at the Chernobyl NPP was “...an extremely improbable combination of violations of instructions and operating rules committed by the staff of the unit” [3]. This conclusion sets a full responsibility for the accident at the Chernobyl NPP on its staff. Participants of the Post-Accident Review Meeting [2] also accepted the Soviet version. However, it was incorrect. This was demonstrated in 1990 by the commission of the State Committee for Atomic Safety Survey of the USSR which concluded that the main reasons of the Chernobyl accident were serious shortcomings in the design of the Chernobyl reactor as well as inadequate documents regulating a safe operation of the reactor [4]. Various errors, that were made during the turbogenerator testing by the personnel of the fours unit of the Chernobyl NPP, according to the commission, could only contribute to the development of the accident."

  https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:1490526
  https://www.rri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/NSRG/reports/kr79/kr79pdf/Malko1.pdf

Although wanting to agree, it just isn't clear that it is a sustainable advantage. America has traditionally crushed opponents by having a small aggressive government on top of a large, free & wealthy population. If someone competes with the US by having a more competent government that is only exceeding the US in the area where it is weakest.

The best nuclear engineer in the Chinese government isn't going up against the US political establishment, they are facing off against people like Bill Gates or the US nuclear industry's Elon Musk equivalent. Although the US population isn't as relatively wealthy as they once were so the traditional strategy might not work out.

This is apparantly one of the reasons actions around the ozone hole got broad support. Margaret Thatcher had been a chemist before getting into politics, she understood the science that was being presented to her when the issue first became apparant. She was able to convince Reagan that this was a real issue that was going to affect us all and was something we could fix. Obviously there were lots of other factors at play (there were technical solutions that were largely ready to adopt), but it helped.

I often wonder how different things might be right now if Al Gore had been a well known republican, whether acceptance of anthropogenic climate change wouldn't have been such a political issue, or if all the other forces at work would have been the same.

> This is a main selling point of having a high proportion of your politicians having an engineering background.

At what price for democracy and for human rights? And how is China progressing on transitioning to renewable energy? Hint: it doesn't [0].

(Not that western lawyer-led nations do better...)

Having promised a reduction of 65% by 2030 [1], I guess they do count on those nuclear projects working out in the end, but at their scale and with 85% of their energy consumption coming from fossil fuels [2], they do seem to have their work cut out for them.

[0] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-carbon-emissions... [1] https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/targets/ [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

In China (I live there since 201708) the nuclear program is winding down (the most recent nuclear plant, Taishan, started 14 months ago and already has one reactor stopped after a leak). Nuclear plants produce less than 5% of the gridpower, and they plan for it to produce 7.7% of the gridpower by 2035!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China#Future_...

Renewable energy plants produce 27.32% of the gridpower, and projects are everywhere.

Carbon emissions are growing simply because the economy is booming even faster.

>> unlike lawyer based government in the West.

Maybe for state-backed projects. That "lawyer-based" government means very strong and predictable rules that protect investments. It starts with property law. People building big things, thing bigger than skyscrapers, want strong ownership rights enforced by a responsive legal system. The west has that. China does not. Protecting fixed assets in placed like China or Egypt means keeping politicians and soldiers on side, most often by giving the government a large ownership stake in the project. That limits innovation. That limits mobility.

"Owning skyscrapers" is kind of the opposite of innovation.

China seems to be the only country still exploring new nuclear fission technologies commercialization at government level. In the US and other western countries it is mostly by commercial companies so I feel China probably will take the lead in nuclear in the next few decades. As this requires decades long planning and commercial companies are unable to work unless they get quick results. I previously submitted about China's plan to convert nuclear waste to glass for easier storage. So China seems to have planned to use a lot of nuclear power in the future and has also made plans for storing the nuclear waste. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28507599

I’m not sure the race between government entities and the private sector always favors the former, even when it comes to R&D. A prime (no pun intended) example of that is the race to sequence the human genome.

I don’t think that’s the example you think it is - HGP was a US government project. Private companies went on to commercialize gene sequencing, but the R&D was started by the public sector.

That’s not really accurate. Celera ran in parallel to the HGP, and (at least for a while) generated superior results at 1/10th the cost.

They started 8 years after HGP (which was a 13 year long project), used data from HGP, and only ever sequenced a mouse genome.

To be fair that's lots more money involved and needed in nuclear research. Of course that the private sector can also get hold of that amount of money but because of the way greater sums involved it needs to "show results" sooner rather than later.

Those using government funds can label it as "military research" or something similar and then they're looking at a least a few decades of no-one asking them where the money went and why.

This assumes that Chinese nuclear producers follow all the rules strictly and there is no corruption involved. The Japanese people lost their trust in the government and companies to keep things safe, which is what killed the industry in that country. While China isn’t going to face similar voter pressure, one accident like Fukushima could make things really chaotic quickly.

Even with Fukushima, nuclear is far safer than coal.

It doesn’t matter. Public perception will do nuclear in faster than a slow killing coal plant (not that Japan does much new coal, they’ve doubled down on LNG).

Likely true (I don’t know the source you’re referencing) given cancer risk associated with coal etc. But single nuclear events and fears associated with them stand out to voters, long term health implications of coal or other adverse effects of other power alternatives likely do not.

China has no voters, so they don't need to be worried about public opinion(for now).

Furthermore, the effects of air pollution are more evident there so it's easier to sell the tradeoff, IMO(I know almost nothing about China, TBH).

China has a lot of polling stations, they can crawl social media to get what is annoying citizens. They also have a long and rich workers uprising and rebellion.

There is enough to be worried about.

There are absolutely voters in China. True, the candidates for elections are vetted by the party but the cynical might say there is little difference between that and the primary/convention process in US politics.

The CCP central leadership often responds to public opinion when local leaders are shown to be corrupt/incompetent (or scapegoated for other reasons).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China

Nuclear is by far the safest energy source globally. E.g:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/rates-for-each-energy-so...

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-safest-source-energy...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

Even the old, poorly maintained, shitshow reactor park we have been stuck with has evidently been safer than everything else.

I’m trying to work out what is driving deaths by wind power. People falling from turbines during installation?

Clearly it's bird people.

Yes, when you are building a lot of turbines, it by necessity involves a lot of work in dangerous conditions, so people fall

I've not checked your sources, but the most recent data I've seen suggest that solar and wind have passed nuclear now in terms of safety.

And this was predictable for a while since the deployment was just starting (e.g. most of the deaths are in the construction phase and then the panels generate for decades afterwards.) and the stat is in deaths per TWh.

Note that similar applies to carbon intensity, both pay up front in carbon terms and then work off that debt. Comparing old solar Vs newly installed solar is a similar fudge to nuclear vs solar, and gives misleading conclusions.

Nuclear is much better than coal, but it's hard to find a positive comparison to modern renewables without really cherry picking old data.

Clicked one link, 2012 data, another has 2012 in the URL. A third, published in 2018 is using the 2012 data, I think I've made my point.

More up to date:

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

I agree that 2012 is too old for solar and wind.

I've seen that summary. I'm sceptical:

Their references (2007,2016) do exclude some significant accidents and do not account well for total accumulated deaths.

I have not researched any better sources myself, however.

Nuclear is also a hell of a lot safer than hydopower.

The failure of just a single dam - the Banqiao in China in 1975 - killed more than 150,000 people.

Way more than all the deaths from nuclear power, ever.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/event/Typhoon-Nina-Banqiao-dam-fa...

One disaster... in China... skews the stats because of the high death toll. I can see how that information could be taken both ways.

One disaster... in Soviet Russia... skews the nuclear incident stats as well. What's the point you think you're making?

> One disaster...

Okay, let's look at Wikipedia[1]. Random example. Val Di Stava Dam Italy 1985, 268 fatalities. Many, many more than were killed directly by Fukushima, but fewer than were killed by the stress of evacuation.

Read the list. More than one dam failed, but the fatalities are accepted fatalistically and shrugged off. It seems like there is a double standard here.

Disclosure: I think that as of 2019 nuclear is uneconomic and not worth building, but if the choice is between nuclear and fossil fuels, nuclear wins hands down in safety terms.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_...

I prefer stats over anecdotes, and both hydro and nuclear do well objectively on safety, so there's no need to use rhetorical tricks to distort things.

The stats say there have been more than one of each kind of failure, and removing the outliers doesn't really change things.

Wasn't the dam to primarily to prevent flooding, rather than enable power generation?

Anyway I don't think it makes sense to compare hydro where the risk dynamics are simple, to nuclear where they are complex and require great long-term competency to mitigate.

And then the resulting flood destroys an industrial chemical complex and the dynamics shift to complex and long term.

This keeps coming back, albeit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24301436

And this sort of ordeal may be way more of a concern with a nuke plant.

It's important to point out Fukushima was supposed to be decommissioned long time before it's accident. Unfortunately they had to keep it going as there was nothing to take it's place to generate the energy needed.

Heh, I've heard it many times, the only problem with nuclear energy is politics.

In particular Fukushima was in a stupid place, engineers were well aware of the the many 100s of years of experience with earthquakes in the ring of fire and calculated that a large expensive wall would be required to protect plant. The sensible place to put the plant was in a different prefecture.

Politics intruded, the plant was put in a stupid place, and the expensive wall was shrunk.

I'm afraid that this is a problem which won't go away anytime soon:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-58026038

They leak was minor and not a risk, but they fact that they didn't follow best practices speaks volumes.

Hold on, you're overstating things here. When Fukushima was built they studied the topology of the surrounding oceans and the best models of tsunami generation at the time put the sea wall at Fukushima high enough to block everything they thought was possible from the strongest typhoons and tsunamis. The theory was wrong, there was a report in 2008 that concluded that a tsunami could possibly be large enough to overtop the sea wall. Furthermore, they didn't need to build some large expensive wall, they excavated the existing cliff in order to bring it down to 10 meters. They could have stopped at 15 meters if they had known that those waves were possible during construction.

https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Tepco-Rem...

Selecting where to put a nuclear plant is mostly restricted by politics. "Not in my back yard" is a political issue, not an engineering one. Another point to consider, is that today's engineering is much safer than in Fukushima days.

> Politics intruded

You cannot have a massively expensive and centralized energy source without having huge political, military (!) and economical implications. And risks of corruption and coverups.

There is no "intrusion". This is an intrinsic problem of such technology.

> one accident like Fukushima could make things really chaotic quickly

The way to substantiate this is to look at data because otherwise it would lead to unnecessary scaremongering, precisely the things holding nuclear energy back amongst other reasons (cost, etc.)

Put it in another context with far greater consequences than Fukushima disaster - the current Coronavirus pandemic and possibility of links to Wuhan Lab, one accident and it shut down the world and caused millions of deaths. Far more than all nuclear tragedies combined. Not to mention, the economic toll and far reaching consequences of the society.

Kind of boggles my mind why the society doesn't look at Level 5 bio labs in the same exact or more serious way than Nuclear power plants. Even if Wuhan lab hypothesis is incorrect, we should have more resources and focus on how to make these GoF studies/Level 5 labs secure, and essentially as safe as nuclear power plants or better. Public awareness just isn't there.

Origins of Coronavirus should be investigated with 100x more rigor than 6 people touring the facility from WHO for 3 days only to see presumably a massive coverup.

Thorium seems to be a safer technology.

Also, it's a fallacy to think the CPC simply ignores popular sentiment. Fukushima had as much of an impact in China as it did in Japan - all new plants were paused (http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/16/china.nuclea...) and it may have factored into the decision to go all-in on solar and wind power over the past decade instead.

> Also, it's a fallacy to think the CPC simply ignores popular sentiment.

That's what I meant by:

> While China isn’t going to face similar voter pressure, one accident like Fukushima could make things really chaotic quickly.

and there is no known corruption involved...

Also nuclear is a brittle technology, disrupt society (refugee-crisis or a economic crisis) and the technology decays and degrades fast.

> disrupt society and the technology decays and degrades fast.

This applies to every electricity generation method except small-scale hydro, and maybe small pockets of coal.

Everything else needs advanced materials manufacturing - high-tech steels, fluids and ceramics for oil drilling and fracking, rare earth mining for magnets for wind turbines, all kinds of crazy stuff for PV.

Small-scale hydro and small-scale coal can't support society.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/energysource/2012/02/16/the-thi... Here they say that the Thorium based design is inherently safer: "Thorium-based reactors are safer because the reaction can easily be stopped and because the operation does not have to take place under extreme pressures. Compared to uranium reactors, thorium reactors produce far less waste and the waste that is generated is much less radioactive and much shorter-lived."

That actually has nothing to do with thorium and everything to do with the coolant configuration. Any low-pressure coolant reactor system can make that claim, with any fuel cycle. Molten salt, liquid metal, organic, you name it.

Safer doesn't mean safe. You still need to be disciplined about operating them, and the way China has handled other kinds of power plants in the past makes some people (specifically in China) nervous.

Germany also has a state backed research program. This, however, has been cut after Fukushima and the political decision to not rely on nuclear energy anymore. People got scared, understandable, hence, the decision back than had a huge support.

China is a technocratic autocracy. Although they rely on the approval of the masses, they can plan long term, instead from election to election. And they calculate whether it's worth or not to manipulate the public opinion on certain topics.

Germany is doing a huge disservice to everyone by continuing to burn coal instead of keeping (to say nothing of expansion) their nuclear power stations. I understand knee-jerk reactions to huge events like Chernobyl, but they should not last this long.

I think French nuclear energy companies profited off that handsomely.

It wasn't a knee-jerk reaction, at least not in proper context. German nuclear exit was organized in the 90-2000s, formally under the red-green Schröder government, then delayed under the conservative government afterwards (so called Ausstieg vom Ausstieg) and then again overturned after Fukushima.

It's largely a secular trend in most of the world as nuclear energy usage has continued to fall, mostly for financial reasons.

The first exit was surprisingly well planned, for the time. Obviously back then climate change wasn't even close to as urgent as it is now. The overturned Ausstieg-vom-Ausstieg was a knee-jerk reaction to a change in public opinion, a change that included traditionally conservative voters.

And after securing the nuclear exit and leaving political office Schröder got a board seat at the Nordstream gas pipeline project. How... convenient.

Germany was going to switch to renewables? Yeah, haha, good one.

indeed. it was the major public opinion back then to get out asap. You can say, it had a democratic stance.

Planned shut down for coal is 2038 in Germany (17 years from now). Or quite possibly a bit sooner if the green party manages to negotiate that in a potential 3 party government negotiation that might be kicking off end of this month.

There's this myth that Germany started burning more coal in response to the nuclear shut down. That kind of never happened. Coal proportion in Germany has been slowly shrinking for years, just like in most of the rest of the world. Peak coal was around the same time Fukushima happened. It actually dropped almost as fast as nuclear in the years after: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

The only thing other than renewables that has had any growth in Germany is gas. But it's not nearly as much as the amount of coal and nuclear that disappeared from the market. The real story is that the energy market has nearly doubled in 20 years in Germany. Fossil fueled plants combined are now only about 40% of that. With coal gone and the overall market continuing to grow, that will drop to single digit percentages pretty soon. Like nuclear in Germany today.

The French nuclear market is slowly shrinking as well. They too are shifting to renewables and are slowly shutting down aging nuclear plants from last century. They are still building a few new plants of course but it does not compensate for the lost capacity. A lot of aging plants are reaching their end of life in the next decades. Most of them will not be replaced probably. And with decades long planning cycles, you can kind of tell by noticing that plans for those are simply not being conceived. Just not a thing. Most ongoing nuclear construction in Europe is many years late, billions over budget, and simply the result of planning cycles that started in decades ago.

Every kW of capacity in a nuclear plant that got shut down could instead have been used to burn less coal. Instead we replaced nuclear with renewables. I don't think that's the right order to do things if saving CO2 is the main objective.

Nuclear had been a problem for years. Every attempt to transport nuclear waste was paired with very disruptive protests to block those transports. That made an expensive solution even more expensive and it made politicians involved look bad too. Germany is a crowded place; NIMBYism can make or break a political career and this was a never ending PR nightmare for conservative politicians. It made them look bad. Just not worth the trouble given how small the nuclear proportion was in the German market. Just trying to emphasize here how completely and utterly uncontroversial this nuclear shutdown has been locally.

Up until Fukushima there were still new plants being considered/pondered/dreamed off (those plans looked increasingly less likely to ever happen). 2011 was the year when renewables became the one and only answer to future proofing Germany's energy needs.

Nuclear became part of the problem instead of the solution. No more new plants was an easy and extremely popular decision across the political spectrum. Which immediately raised the sensible question what to do with the remaining old ones. Which was promptly answered by "lets just get this over with and move on with renewables". There only was around 16GW of nuclear capacity at the time, 8 of which is gone by now. The rest is going in the next few years. It wasn't that big of a deal replacing one expensive source of energy with another that wasn't that cheap either (at the time).

Germany was not ready to do that with coal twelve years ago because at the time it was still most of its energy generation so it simply couldn't. That simply isn't true anymore. Renewables are now cheaper and coal is now the expensive option in the market. Once coal is gone, the next obvious target will be gas and oil plants (around 4% of the market).

… used to burn less coal.

Here's some bad news: the albedo effect of coal smoke is supressing global warming by about 1,5°C - about half of the warming to date.

We don't just have to shutdown coal: we have to capture a lot of the 2000 GT already in the atmosphere.

Which is why all the IPPC projects assume enourmous CCS.

Burning more coal doesn't make the problem of sucking all the carbon out of the atmosphere any easier.

It's the water vapor that reflects light / IR and increases the albedo.

Evaporate more water using waste heat from nuclear plants, industrial plants, or just by building huge vertical pipes that use convection to push warm damp air a kilometer up. Produce more clouds!

This all can be done without burning (additional) carbon to power it.

I think my comment has been misunderstood (my fault).

Under no circumstances is burning more carbon helpful.

Indeed, in France the 'nuclear success story' led to a state law (2015-992, from 2015, the "loi relative à la transition énergétique pour la croissance verte") stating that the part of nuke-produced electricity must fall to less than 50% in 2025, from 72% then, and that renewable sources must replace it.

In France nuke-power is backed by gas (which produced 7.9% of the gridpower in 2019).

The sole reactor currently planned (Flamanville-3) is a complete disaster, more than 11 years behind schedule, it will cost at least 19 billion € (initial budget: 3.7 billion ).

The difference is that France is already producing about half as much CO2 as Germany, despite Germany having much more wind/solar. That's the power of not throwing away your huge investments in nuclear power.

This is such a great point. No modern "democratic" government will risk nuclear development. It's far too scary to general population. Even if they do some how invest in nuclear technology, no one would want it in their back yard.

The United States, United Kingdom, France, Slovakia, India, South Korea, and Finland all have new power reactors under construction. These are all democracies.

This is a 2 MWt research reactor. The US operated a 7.5 MWt molten salt thorium fueled reactor at ORNL from 1964-1969; I wouldn't consider the technology new.

No, that reactor was uranium-fueled, not thorium-fueled.

It used U-235 then switched to U-233 bred from thorium in a separate reactor (but still partially testing the thorium fuel cycle). They did this to simplify the design by not needing to incorporate the breeding elements into a novel new reactor design so they could focus on measuring the reactor's performance. I think it's fair to say it was thorium fueled, just in two separate stages (U-233 only comes into existence by breeding thorium).

The long term plan was to next make a breeding version of the reactor and use thorium directly but development was cancelled.

Well I suppose the characterization as thorium-fueled is debatable. In any case, it was certainly designed to study the prospects of an actual liquid fluoride thorium reactor. The current reactor can be viewed as an application or successor to that experiment, and it's based on the same design with modern improvements; TFA did point this out.

This could be good for the world when it comes to climate change, nuclear being the most powerful way to cut emissions and China being one of the biggest polluters right now.

How are we measuring "powerful" here?

It's widely accepted that renewables, efficiency, carbon fees and global legislation are the leading ways to cut emisions.

Nuclear is cool tech, it just seems people are strangely monomaniacal about it and I've never understood why.

Maybe it's like "flying cars" and it caught people's attention at an early age and persists as a idea even when it's not actually as generally useful as decent public transport and city planning.

> It's widely accepted

By whom? The benefit of nuclear power is that it is low on CO2 emissions (unlike fossil fuels) and can produce sufficient amount of power for an industrial society (unlike renewables)

No one important, just every government in the world.

I agree on your first point (and posted some stats that back it up) but not on your second.

Just stop for a moment and ponder, who has a strong financial motive to spread the idea that renewable energy (and carbon fees and all that other stuff) is not a good solution.

Have you noticed that the thing that links nuclear boosters is their opinion on renewables being useless?

> who has a strong financial motive to spread the idea that renewable energy (and carbon fees and all that other stuff) is not a good solution.

Do you mean that renewables (wind, solar, what else?) can't produce enough energy for the industry is just an opinion not a fact? I'm happy to see the data that would refute it.

I'm not sure what fact you're claiming is just my opinion, but I'll happily look up reliable sources for you if you have a specific question.

The fact that currently available renewable energy technologies can't produce enough energy for currently existing industrial societies.

Okay so we agree on that fact.

I think we need to build lots more renewables, and every government in the world has plans to do so, which is a good thing.

It seems a weird stance to take though, since existing nuclear also can't do that and would similarly need built out. Are you sure you're trying to support nuclear? Because that sounds like an argument for the fossil fuel status quo.

I mean technologies, not capacities. Yes, we'll need to build more nuclear plants to cover the needs of the society, but the technology used would be roughly the same.

But the same trick will not work with renewables to my best knowledge. We can't realistically place enough wind turbines or solar panels, say, in Germany or in France to cover their energy consumption.

Oh, right I misunderstood.

So no, we don't agree on that then.

Renewables and related tech is more than capable of powering a modern civilization. In fact it's better at doing that than any other option, including a nuclear heavy mix.

Ironically, the bits that I'm most fuzzy about renewables working well for (because they're not the low hanging fruit that we can immediately do) would also need to be done to move to a mostly nuclear powered civilization since it's basically about electrification of fossil-carbon-based process.

You don't hear much talk about it because absolutely no-one, especially the people who bang on about it on internet forums, thinks there's any chance at all of nuclear being a potential replacement for all fossil fuels, so it would be a waste of time to even draw up such plans.

Luckily, you can just take all the renewable plans drawn up by the actual governments for their actual plans and then just scale up the nuclear element and scale down the renewables to get some idea if it would work.

And it would work, at much greater cost in money, carbon, time and blood than doing it with renewables.

Which people seem to know on some level, but argue about trivialities and gotchas as if they didn't.

If you have any specific concern about what renewables can't do, I'll happily provide some sources to show why you're misinformed, and why a heavily nuclear grid will hit the same issues at a greater cost.

> who has a strong financial motive to spread the idea that renewable energy (and carbon fees and all that other stuff) is not a good solution.

Idk, Europe? Since we're buying those solar panels from China it can't possibly be China right? (Or just say what you mean so we don't have to guess at it)

I was suggesting that the people you see around online who claim very vocally to like nuclear power, actually can't help but undermine their own message because they feel the need to bash reneweables at the end of their comments.

They almost certainly get their news via a fossil-fuel funded media-political complex that has a long and very well-documented history of lying about climate change, its causes and its solutions.

And the propaganda has worked. Even when they think they're defending nuclear power and being rational most of their talking points don't even make sense except from the point of view of maintaining the fossil fuel status quo.

It's all very weird and fascinating.

Just a comment, another benefit of this kind of molten-salt reactor is that it is very hot: ~650°C c.f. ~150°C for steam.

So not only does it theoretically produce electricity better using e.g. CO2 in the Brayton cycle, but the heat can be used - possible in conjunction with a turbo air heater - to use for industrial heat.

There are a lot of very lucrative industrial processes that need high temperatures.

Modern steam turbines use pressurised steam at about 600 - 650°C, so the 650°C is not by accident.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_turbine#Thermodynamics_o...

> so the 650°C is not by accident.

Yip, above that temperature metal alloys start corroding quickly.

The challenge for renewables isn't to produce an aggregated sufficient amount of power, but production intermittency.

In Europe wind alone has many times the capacity (see https://www.sussex.ac.uk/news/media-centre/press-releases/id... )

Production intermittency will solved thanks to continent-scale deployment, storage, smartgrid...

Harnessing energy from renewables is eventually a zero-sum game: you can never generate more energy than the sun inputs into Earth's atmosphere, and every bit of energy we extract is no longer available for nature to use. It's not a sustainable practice if we assume that as a society advances technologically, it requires ever more energy per citizen (and no, the various green initiatives have not disproven that assumption -- they reduce energy waste, not energy usage).

Unlike renewables, fuel-based energy sources like nuclear (and coal/gas) do not reduce the amount of energy available to Earth's biosphere.

> you can never generate more energy than the sun inputs into Earth's atmosphere

This is 100% a feature and not a bug.

> It's not a sustainable practice

The very opposite. If we want to slow down climate change we need exactly zero-sum energy sources that do not release extra heat into the atmosphere.

> if we assume that as a society advances technologically, it requires ever more energy per citizen

Nothing in your claims indicates that is not possible to produce more energy using renewables.

> if we assume that as a society advances technologically, it requires ever more energy per citizen (and no, the various green initiatives have not disproven that assumption

Citation needed.

The sun provides such ridiculous amounts of energy that we needn't worry about that limit for quite some time. Also, the assumption that we need more and more energy per citizen as we advance seems dubious. In developed countries energy use per citizen has been stable or declining for quite some time now.

Renewables don't compete with nature, there is more than enough energy from the sun.

It's in fact the opposite, the sun radiates too much energy, that's how we get to global warming when not enough gets radiated back into space. Using nuclear adds even more energy, renewables don't.

> It's widely accepted that renewables, efficiency, carbon fees and global legislation are the leading ways to cut emisions.

Coal tops Wind as primary electricity source in Germany presently.

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-coal-tops-wind-as-primary-elec... https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/coal-ov...

When you close your nuclear reactors, say hello to Coal.

This is just cherry-picking from noisy data in order to tell a misleading narrative.

If you look at the actual development of electricity generation in Germany [1], it is very clear that nuclear power (pink) was replaced by renewables (bright green) and not by coal (brown and dark green).

[1] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38...

That's excellent, but we should be replacing coal, not nuclear. At least not in this order. By having renewable replace nuclear you win nothing and coal keeps polluting just as much as it did before because you're not replacing coal. So yes, killing nuclear first obviously causes more pollution from coal.

Please have a careful look at the plot again. The electricity production from coal dropped by something like 50% in the last 10 years.

Of course Germany's ancient nuclear reactors could have been kept running by a bit longer, but the overall effect would not have been dramatic. On the other hand, old GE-designed boiling water reactors suffered a bit of an image problem after three of them melted down in Fukushima.

then why not got rid of coal first, keep nuclear until renewables can be a sole source of energy?

As far as I understand because it is politically unfeasible in Germany. They officially prefer renewable sources since 2000 and nuclear was to be used as a bridging technology, however they decided to phase it out ASAP after the Fukushima disaster, see ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source... )

In Russia, state owned company Rosatom builds incredibly cool things like fast breeder reactors and floating nuclear power station.

It's also currently building 35 nuclear reactors around the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov

In France as well with the caveat that the French government is constrained by EU subsidies laws and political risk (nuclear energy is a political risk), not to mention financing limitations as well.

Countries like Iran would like to, but they are not allowed to.

Couldn't you say something very similar about space?

> In the US and other western countries it is mostly by commercial companies

> this requires decades long planning and commercial companies are unable to work unless they get quick results.

and yet that didn't stop SpaceX from leapfrogging entire nation-states in rocket technology, being the first to develop fully reusable rockets that land themselves, and as a result, are by far the cheapest option for launching things like commercial satellites.

I don't see why commercial companies can't accomplish similar things in the nuclear power space.

Well, SpaceX did all that mostly on government money, as NASA was by far the largest buyer of SpaceX rocket launches, and directly invested hundreds of millions of dollars on top of that (and are still doing so).

> As this requires decades long planning and commercial companies are unable to work unless they get quick results.

There are western startups working on thorium powered molten salt reactors, see this 2019 video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps8oi_HY35E, from another comment in this thread [1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28563477

Why is the picture of the linked article reminding me of this scene

[1] http://thebigpicturemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/...

from [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX_1138 ?

> China seems to be the only country still exploring new nuclear fission technologies commercialization at government level

Maybe you should head over to the US Department of Energy website and take a look [1], [2].

[1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/advanced-reactor-technologies

[2] https://www.energy.gov/ne/our-budget

Commercialization being the operative word.

Nuclear research is nice, but doesn't help one bit compared to building reactors even with 50-year-old tech.

If we are talking commercialization, then DoE awarded more than $1 BN to NuScale to develop small modular nuclear reactors [1] . They could go live sometime this decade.

This thorium experimental reactor in China, is just that, an experimental one. If everything goes well, they'll have a commercial version in 2030, but it's way to early to estimate how likely this is.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2020/10/29/the-futur...

> Molten-salt reactors are just one of many advanced nuclear technologies China is investing in. In 2002, an intergovernmental forum identified six promising reactor technologies to fast-track by 2030, including reactors cooled by lead or sodium liquids. China has programmes for all of them.

The west is so fucked. Meanwhile in the UK we’re reintroducing Imperial units, getting the UAE to invest in our infrastructure and fighting inane culture wars on Twitter.

The lack of proactivity and long term planning for things that matter, combined with academia’s lurch towards publishing treadmills instead of truly novel innovation means we are surely going to fall behind. At this point China’s future hegemony is all but assured.

Congratulations. You just discovered the simple fact of life that you can do everything much faster when you don't need half your population to agree on it and don't need to spend your whole focus on getting their approval to be reelected.

I just hope you understand what you wish for.

It's just another person not learning enough from history.

Soviet Union actually looks better... before their fall

As someone who lived through the cold war, I can tell you the Soviet Union never looked "better".

Maybe I was just the one crazy person who thought the Soviet lifestyle and society was dreary, but I don't think I was. If you think the soviets looked better, you're likely looking at the past through rose colored glasses. Most people would have done anything they could to avoid living that "better" soviet life.

Many people literally lost their lives trying to escape that "better" soviet life style.

At least in Germany, the communist part was actually looking better very early after the war. It was of course soon overtaken economically by West Germany.

Conflating long-term, strategic planning with authoritarianism, as you have done, is perhaps part of the problem.

It’s a failure of the current political class, not a failure of the system.

In the past western politicians have gotten us to the moon, introduced universal healthcare and created the New Deal. All whilst operating as a democracy.

It seems to me that modern politicians have lost sight of the power they wield to enact change. They’ve certainly lost the ability to convince the electorate of any given position.

They’ve become reactive, self-interested hucksters. We need politicians with vision, integrity and backbone. Not authoritarianism.

We lost our best and brightest to the corporate machine. Young intelligent people don’t aspire as much to a life of service anymore, but a life of getting paid.

Not sure how we inspire the bright people to get back into the civil service.

I think the problem is incentive and of course money.

In past, western politicians didn't had to appease the mass as most people didn't use to live the modern life we do today. And the lobby we see today simply didn't use to exists. Now we have turned so much greedy that we only see short term advantage.

But China is different. In democracy votes are important. For China party is important. Party is eternal for them so they need to develop manufacturing, improve energy. CCP needs to think about their party future too because they might have to fight against whole world. As a result we can even see recent crackdowns, investment in research like nuclear etc.

What I feel is if more 50% of people are greedy/bad/egocentric democracy simply doesn't work. And the way housing/inflation/ overwork of printers democracy is prone to more harm.

Of course all of the above is my personal opinion so please don't feel afraid to post your opinions :)

Thank you.

The US was barely a democracy under FDR. FDR was the closest the US got to a dictatorship. There's a reason term limits were put into place.

We've had decades of leading innovation with Democracy.

Just because the current state of affairs is more concerned about trendy topics like wokeness instead of 10 year plan for the future doesn't mean we're want authoritive governments.

The majority of western world probably wasn't in favour of austerity, declining the welfare state and huge tax breaks for the rich and powerful, but it still happened. The people behind the buttons just have a different economic model what they perceive as progress.

welfare on debt is not an economic model. "Saving" to pay debts is not wrong

Good news. China will likely prove thorium reactors work and then sell them to other nations. US&EU will give lectures to the world on renewables and how terrible nuclear power is, yet will keep using their coal plants. Plans on shutting coal will keep moving indefinitely into the future - 2020, 2030, 2040, yadda

https://www.power-eng.com/coal/eia-u-s-coal-fired-generation...

https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/coal-ov...

I hope they have acquired all the intellectual property for this like 5G. It's hilarious to see USA and UK deny access to chinese technology while trying to get around their intellectual property

It's worth mentioning IP law is applied on a per-territory basis (i.e. you have to register your IP in every territory you would like it enforced, and that territory's courts are solely responsible for its enforcement in that territory). Many countries government have laws which restrict IP in national security concerns [0], which nuclear reactors may come under. Furthermore, patents require the innovation used is published publicly, which may not be desirable for sensitive technologies like nuclear reactors. Trade secrets and the like are more likely to be used in this particular case.

[0] - https://www.wipo.int/pct/en/texts/nat_sec.html

More likely: China will pollute much of their countryside and waste billions on corruption and inefficiency. Also, China is polluting their air to a much higher degree than any western nation, and can't keep up with rising demand. Radioactive waste spilling into ground water would be a catastrophe.

Meanwhile, actual democracies can't place nuclear reactors and other facilities wherever they please. Citizens would object.

Corruption is indeed still a problem in China.

But to call them inefficient? I think you're wrong. They are extremely efficient when the government has an idea, it's executed quickly with minimal regulation and red tape getting in the way.

They also don't make as many mistakes as they use to as a developing nation. Credit where it's due, they recently got a space probe orbiting Mars and that's no easy feat [1]

You sound like you don't know much about thorium reactors and i suggest some basic reading like [2]. They are much safer than conventional reactors. Your concerns about waste leaking is uninformed as the reactors themselves require much less design safety considerations.

Before anyone accuses me of being pro-china government, their human rights and transparency are extremely sketchy and i can see why it's hard to trust them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianwen-1 [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/energysource/2012/02/16/the-thi...

I think you have an inflated opinion of the Chinese government. Inefficiency is the very definition of corruption. Look at the real estate sector. Look at the high speed rail sector. Look at food security scandals. Their inability to contain animal diseases like African Swine Fever.

I shudder at the thought of this kind of government (and civilian extensions thereof) handling radioactive material at an unprecedented scale.

In such a case smart other nations may only buy with a complete technology transfer, just like China did and does.

US and EU already have poured tens of billions into Thorium reactors in the hope to make nuclear power less horribly expensive. It didn't work out.

Meh I dunno about that! The US poured a few tens of millions into the molten salt breeder reactor program and a few more on the indian point 1 initial thorium breeder core. That's about it in the USA. In Europe, ok there was the THTR-300 which was a pretty big project. This is fluid fuel thorium though, which is quite a lot different from solid fuel. We have spent nearly nothing on fluid fuel so far.

Now if you want to talk about breeder reactors in general (namely on the uranium-plutonium fuel cycle), then yeah that's in the many billions range. That was more for infinite world-scale sustainability rather than cost specifically. LWR converter reactors have always been known to be cheaper than breeders.

I hope China succeeds.

For all this talk about climate change dangers, the West is taking the most suboptimal approach.

China is also building a huge number of coal plants, unfortunately.

You aren't wrong. They have enormous energy problems thus are building everything at breakneck speed. They are however commited to carbon neutrality by 2060 so there is good reason to believe they intend to scale back coal as soon as they are able in favor of their nuclear and renewable generation is that capacity comes online.

China lives or dies on the approval of it's populace and they have made it abundantly clear that air quality and public health are what they care about and so it will be so.

I think they said their peak would be at around 2030~2040 then it would decrease to being carbon neutral.

I'm not a big fan of China's huge emissions growths over the last decade, but, on the other hand, they have a pretty good track record of coming up with plans and sticking to them, and they do have a plan.

Which is exactly why we should be hoping this works. Given the way the Chinese economy works - being state controlled and all - if it takes off I expect they will start replacing coal plants with this, well before EOL. In the West it would he much harder to do that.

China seems to have a tendency towards big, high-profile projects that they can use to project a narrative of technological superiority but don't fit into any kind of useful overall strategy. I wouldn't be surprised if they build a bunch of these, brag about how advanced it makes them, and then just carry on building and using coal as the workhorse of their power grid. This wouldn't work nearly so well in a country with a free presss.

If and when they scale up manufacturing of thorium MSRs (and/or alternative designs also being trialled), they can retrofit those reactors in place of the coal furnaces and retain the majority of the investment in each power plant - the turbines, water supply, cooling systems, generator, transformers, substation and transmission connections.

In the mean time they have electricity. I think it's what an engineer would do.

It's a shame that India hasn't jumped on the Thorium train. India has plenty of Thorium (some call India the "Saudi Arabia of Thorium"). India desperately needs to shut down its coal power plants and replace them with something safer (like a Thorium reactor)

That would require really powerful industry, and political will. While the former may be more or less present, the latter is apparently concentrated on totally different issues.

More than political will, it requires co-operation from the people. If you do not convince people that a thorium reactor is safe and necessary, the progress on the reactor will be stalled by public protests and frivolous lawsuits. By the time work actually begins, elections will be around the corner and you will be soon voted out of power to be replaced by someone who's sole motive will be to reverse all the work done for reactor.

It is my understanding that India's reliance on coal stems at least in part from close ties between politicians and coal companies. India is pretty well suited for renewables too, yet they choose to burn more coal.

Agreed, however It also has plenty of coal and cheap labor, which makes coal fired power plants economic.

> It's a shame that India hasn't jumped on the Thorium train.

I have been hearing about this all my life. And I don't think we will see any progress in our lifetimes. We have a cultural problem with over-promising and under-delivering regardless of who is in power.

We cannot even get regular nuclear power plants installed without interference from foreign NGOs interfering in Indian politics, local anti-nuclear fear-mongers and Christian churches.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudankulam_Nuclear_Power_Plant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%27s_three-stage_nuclear_... It's trying, but progress is slow

In Germany we had a thorium reactor running in production, that was shit down because of issues:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300

Apt typo ;)

Reason: fuel pebbles getting stuck in feed lines somehow causing small amounts of radioactive material to be leaked, if I'm reading and summarizing this right. Transporting pebbles seems like the least hard thing about nuclear energy, interesting.

the THTR-300 was a prototype system. It's a pitty that they didn't follow through with the next generation. I hope that the Chinese have studied the design of the THTR-300.

"As was determined in 1989, dismantling would begin after approximately 30 years in safe enclosure."

30 years waiting time before one can start to demolish the reactor. That shows how dangerous this technology really is.

Very interesting. A potential safer and cheaper operating costs. A somewhat more complex design is required though. The west need to focus on nuclear again to stay competitive. Too bad that we don't have true leaders anymore. But only people who are afraid to make choices and play it safe.

Lots of countries have parties with leaders and politicians making clear and strong arguments for pushing for more nuclear power. The one thing all these parties have in common is that almost no one votes for them.

> people who are afraid to make choices and play it safe.

Where it should be noted that playing it safe does not refer to anything physical. Playing it safe for climate means nuclear, playing it safe for accidental deaths means nuclear, playing it safe for your election campaign... somehow, that means anti-nuclear.

Great! There are western startups working on thorium energy as well. For example, this video of a Danish startup Seaborg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps8oi_HY35E

What happens if the CCP uses its dictator powers to rapidly transform China into a low-carbon economy and then starts leveraging the carbon credits system to heavily penalize and stymy western rivals?

Then we all benefit by having less carbon being added to the atmosphere every year.

They save the world from the worse man-made catastrophe in history?

The least of our problems is any country moving to carbon neutrality too early.

Unfortunately, China is nowhere near carbon neutrality, and is not really moving in that direction with any speed at the moment.

Just read it and it seems obviously very impressive that they managed to switch from uranium to Thorium. But I do wonder how their trials of fusion reactors are going. Not too long ago there were breakthroughs in this tech. Perhaps if more work got put into this we could finally break the needed gap and produce more power that we put into it. Thus making it a viable and clean power source of the future.

Fusion is still a lab experiment.

If a fusion reactor with an energy gain of 100 and stable operation in the 10_000_000 second range were announced tomorrow, we would be only 20 years away from breaking sod on the first commercial-scale plant -- if the process goes very smoothly.

From there it would be only 30 to 50 years before fusion was making a significant contribution on a global scale, if it can compete commercially.

If I remember correctly they're also paying into ITER, which afaik is the most promising thing in the works right now (not counting DEMO that's barely started planning), so that'll take a while still.

Do we know which design it is ?

chinese design

You think it has a Made in PRC sticker?

Graphite-moderated FLiBe salt fuel with air-dump final heat rejection.

Very exciting stuff. I hope they succeed and others can use it as a model.

China is really copying everything from the west, even the bad ideas.

What about the weapon-making-ability from these reactors ?

What about it? China already has access to nuclear weapons.

1. there is a theoretical pathway from the Protactinium product.

But its easier to just start a weapon from natural uranium.

China already has nukes.

China turns my head weekly at this point. The West is just depressing government by rent seekers.

(Not a China spambot: just wish politicians weren't all the same)

Agree about the second part.

China's government seems to be taking The Stepford Wives as an instruction manual.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stepford_Wives

Fair play to the lads!

And the nuclear waste they will send to Taiwan.

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