China has first operational thorium nuclear reactor

I gave a talk at the first Thorium Energy Conference where I offered a projection of when a test reactor could be running using the low-effort-but-high-accuracy method of taking the projections from the Oak Ridge project and moving them up to the present days and got… about now. Folks weren’t happy with that but I said the only thing you can do is start sooner.

The toughest problem identified in the 1970s was that the Hastelloy N alloy they were using had corrosion problems which probably could be fixed. My personal take is that fluoride salt reactors based on Thorium have the problem that they will ruin graphite moderator cores too quickly and that the appealing idea now is to use chloride salts and a plutonium cycle, not least that we can get the plutonium to launch those from spent nuclear fuel. See

https://www.moltexenergy.com/