China reaches energy milestone by "breeding" uranium from thorium
scmp.com
scmp.com
China ran an experimental reactor that achieved some conversion of thorium into uranium. More precisely, the conversion ratio was 0.1 [1]. This means that for each new fissile atom generated from thorium (i.e. uranium-233) 10 atoms have been burned from the original fissile inventory.
Now, conversion happens in every nuclear reactor. Some new fissile material (generally Pu-239) is generated out of "fertile material" (generally U-238). And, surprisingly, that conversion ratio is quite high: 0.6 for pressurized light water reactors and 0.8 for pressurized heavy water reactors [2].
What China has achieved therefore is well below what is business as usual in regular reactors. The only novelty is that the breeding used thorium, rather than uranium.
Is this useless? No, it is not. In principle increasing the conversion ratio from 0.1 to something higher than 1.0 should be doable. But then, going from 0.8 in heavy water reactors to more than 1.0 should be even easier. Why don't people do it already? Because the investment needed to do all the research is quite significant, and the profits that can be derived from that are quite uncertain and overall the risk adjusted return on investment is not justified. If you are a state, you can ignore that. If China continues the research in thorium breeding, and eventually an economically profitable thorium breeder reactor comes out of that, the entire world will benefit. But the best case scenario is that this would be three decades in the future.
[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chinese-msr-achi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Conversion_rat...
Also: passive safety (the thing just drains and freezes if anything goes wrong), no pressure vessel, tiny physical footprint, way less long-lived actinides, and U-233 is basically proliferation-proof because of the hard gamma from U-232. Uranium feels cheap and plentiful right now exactly the way oil felt infinite in the 1950s. China is playing the long game, and this little 2 MW rig lighting up and breeding U-233 last month is the “Sputnik moment” for the thorium cycle.
So...Three decades? Maybe if the West keeps sitting on its hands. China says 10 MW by 2030 and 100 MW demo by 2035. I wouldn’t bet against them.
So yeah, exciting as hell actually.
Literally almost all the waste that’s ever been generated is stored on site at the nuclear power plants where it was created. That’s how little of it there is.
Talking about “thousands of tonnes” of nuclear waste is comically misleading when you realise how tiny the volume is.
2. There is no high level waste that is both very dangerous right now, and will remain so for tens of thousands of years. It’s either highly radioactive for not very long, or not very radioactive for very long, but never both.
How do these myths persist in otherwise educated people.
Yeah, it’s really easy to forget how dense these materials are. A jug of milk (4L/1gal) weighs 4kg/8.8lb. Milk has about the same density as water, 1g/cm^3. Uranium has a density around 19g/cm^3, making that same gallon jug weigh 76kg/167lb. A metric ton of uranium (1000kg) is about 13 gallons.
What is the actual volume?
You’re mixing mass and volume here. From what I can tell, their numbers were essentially right. Are you saying we don’t have thousands of tonnes of nuclear waste produced?
That's not true.
The spent fuel can burn in fast reactors. There are hundreds of molten salt reactor designs (see for example [1]), and some of them are fast reactors.
But thorium MSR are not fast. That's the attraction of thorium, it can undergo transmutation (into protactinium, which then decays into fissile uranium-233) using thermal neutrons. Nobody is proposing thorium MSR as a solution to burn spent nuclear fuel.
> So...Three decades? Maybe if the West keeps sitting on its hands.
The West does not keep sitting on its hands. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of nuclear startups in the West, and they are actually making progress.
However, thorium is hard. Very hard. Breeding plutonium from uranium is much easier than breeding uranium-233 from thorium.
Here's a good post [2] about the thorium myths written by a former active HN forum member, Nick Touran. It's a good read. But, now, for an even better understanding, you can just ask ChatGPT, or any other LLM, how thorium breeder reactors compare to plutonium breeder reactors, and which technology is closer to reality.
[1] https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/STI-DOC-010-4...
Uranium is abundant, but not homogenously so [1]. (China has some. But not a lot. And it's bound up expensively. And it's by their population centres.)
For the Americas, Europe, Australia, southern Africa and Eastern Mediterranean, burning uranium makes sense. For China, it trades the Strait of Malacca for dependence on Russia and Central Asia.
[1] https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1800.pdf
https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/CHN/yea...
Uranium is better for Chinese energy security than oil. But this still leaves China at Moscow's mercy. That's not too differet, energywise, than the situation is now.
So can oil. Energy security is an important priority for a global power.
Stockpiles are good. Own supply chains are better.
Sure. That doesn't remove stockpiles' inherent disadvantages: finiteness and vulnerability. Relying on uranium stockpiles would immediately put China at a known limit in a war of attrition that wouldn't constrain their adversaries.
Nothing can compete with the energy density of uranium.
Oil is relatively easily, inexpensively, and quickly mined and refined. Compared to, say, uranium.
And no, oil is more expensive (especially nowadays) to extract than uranium.
There's a reason nobody ever became rich with a uranium mine, all the value is in the plant and the market price barely covers extracting it, some mines even closed because of the price being too low.
> Considering both the low and high nuclear capacity scenarios to 2050 presented in this edition, and assuming their 2050 capacity is maintained for the rest of the century, the quantities of uranium required by the global fleet – based on the current once-through fuel cycle – would likely surpass the currently identified uranium resource base in the highest cost category before the 2110s.
Their "high" scenario assumes having a bit more than double of today's capacity by 2050; today we have about 4-5% supply from nuclear energy worldwide.
[1] https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_103179/uranium-2024-resourc...
The actual efficiency of breeding thorium is so low, it would take a HUGE scarcity to actual make any sense.
Also, currently all transport channels for uranium are oil dependent, which is becoming a scarce resource in the relevant timeline - decades.
I also like to think of U/nuclear as "Civilizational thinking" - it's the only solid power we can trust to stay by us through 10,000s of years, through cataclysims, and planet migrations, and it's ideal (before we find something more abundant, dense, and reliable) to take us from Earth, to a multi-planet, local-cluster exploring species, I think.
With Thorium if the operator country wants to extract the U-233 you think "maybe let them, they won't like it".
There are also other advantages of a liquid fueled reactor. The big one is that it is far easier to run because it self regulates. When a liquid heats up it expands (slowing the reaction) and when it cools it contracts (speeding up the reaction). So its safer to run, makes less waste and gets 20+X more power per unit of fuel.
There is one final thing to know about this stuff. A nuclear reactor is several billion in infrastructure supporting reactors that cost 10s of millions using a fuel load that costs less than your car. The way we scale and handle nuclear reactors just makes no sense economically. Each NPP is custom and they are built so rarely that everything has to be custom made. When you start building stock reactor designs with consistent supply chains, the cost goes way down. And most of the cost is lawsuits, lobbyists and PR. For developed countries, using or not using nuclear power is a political choice. One that we have been making badly. When you realize that the only real choices for baseload are FF and nuclear, the real political situation makes sense. Once again, the cause is just the excuse, not the real issue.
That’s not really accurate. Many countries already meet a substantial portion of their baseload power requirements with renewables and are building out more and more renewable generation because it is cheap and fast to build.
This requires dispatchable backup generation to cover low wind periods, but that may only need to run a few weeks a year. This is by far the cheapest and fastest way to get to 90% carbon free power since most of the cost in gas generation is the fuel itself rather than the capital for the plant.
Nuclear is the opposite so cannot economically fill that role so it seems little is likely to be built.
Not sure I get what you are trying to say. Are you saying that you are a nuclear engineer and I am not? Because, frankly, the rest of your comment does not read as one written by a nuclear engineer.
It's not uniformly distributed. Countries like India, for ezample, has an abundance of Thorium but they have to buy Uranium for use in any large scale application.
We really do. Nuclear waste is less toxic than plenty of trash we just bury. And calling it "waste" is a bit reductive, given it almost certainly becomes valuable to reprocess within another century or two.
Long term storage is still up in the air in the US. Yucca mountain was the plan but didn't happen
Correct me if I'm with m wrong
The crazy part is that people want to insist that the sites need to be absolutely safe even if they aren't maintained for 1,000 years, but by that point the radioactivity would be no more than the base ore anyway so demanding these extended timelines doesn't make anybody safer. They're just red tape.
It's peculiar that it's a political problem in pretty much every country though? I know Finland is well on its way for long term storage but that's the only example I know of.
There's also quite a few cases where it is a technical problem. Gorleben in Germany for example.
It's a political problem in every country that shares its nuclear heritage from the ashes of WWII.
We also know that we could re-cycle nuclear waste with other nuclear plant designs, but the US chooses not to.
Point to the nuclear waste.
If there’s so much of it somebody must be able to point it out to me.
Waste from modern nuclear power plants seems to be a giant nothingburger. And yes, I came from the other side but flipped as I learned more about the technicalities, how Finland has solved it and how near you need to get hurt.
Dr Barry Brook. Reading his stuff 15 years ago flipped me.
Holy shit what a perspective. Put it in a museum. If this is representative, put it on our grave.
In principle, using Thorium would give you the energy from Thorium fission, then Uranium fission, then plutonium fission, which is pretty cool. However, I suspect you might hit an issue here where such a low conversion rate would make the reactor go sub-critical.
When a nuclear reactor is run with mildly-enriched Uranium, which is a mixture of Uranium 235 and Uranium 238, it forms a self-sustaining chain reaction with the Uranium 235 (which is fissile) and a load of the spare neutrons get absorbed by the Uranium 238 (which is fertile), converting it into Plutonium 239, which is also fissile. But most Uranium 235 reactors use a moderator which slows down the neutrons, which makes them more likely to cause fission in Uranium 235 but less likely to transmute Uranium 238 to Plutonium 239. So most modern reactors don't produce much Plutonium. In any case, the fission you get from Uranium and the fission you get from Plutonium is from different source materials. Once an atom is fissioned, it is split into smaller atoms and can no longer be fissioned.
Thorium isn't fissile, it's fertile. That is, if you fire a neutron at Thorium 232, you get Thorium 233, which decays to Protactinium 233, which then decays into Uranium 233, which is fissile. You then fire another neutron at Uranium 233, which then fissions into much smaller nuclei, giving you energy and the neutrons to do the above. The Uranium is no longer around after that to form Plutonium. There is no way to get any significant amount of Plutonium 239 from this, because that would require adding 7 more neutrons to the original Thorium 232 and having none of them trigger a fission event. The fissions that do occur don't provide 7 neutrons anyway, so it wouldn't be possible to get a self-sustaining conversion of a significant amount of Thorium into Plutonium for final fission even if the previous sentence weren't true - it would have to be enhanced with some other provider of lots of neutrons.
Is this a typo? I can understand increasing the yield to a number slightly below 1, but how do you get more than 1mol Uranium from 1mol Thorium?
Once again, nothing.
This unlocks a lot of options for the fuel cycle, including the use of thorium.
This work builds on a previous molten salt reactor experiment at Oak Ridge, decades ago. There's a whole lore about MSRs.
The most pressing is that fissionable material is spread throughout the fluid, so fission and decay of fission products is occurring right up to the edge of the fluid. The walls and pipes containing the molten salt, and anything dipped into the salt, are exposed to unmoderated neutrons. One can shield using (say) graphite, but then damage to that (and soaking up of radioactive materials) become issues.
The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment at Oak Ridge was near the end of its radiation exposure lifetime when the program ended.
Contrast this to light water reactors. These are designed so that no lifetime component sees unmoderated neutrons. There's a thick barrier of water between the fissioning fuel and the reactor vessel wall and the support structures for the fuel bundles. The bundles themselves are exposed, but they are replaced for refueling and are not lifetime components.
The metric to look for is called "DPA" (displacements per atom), the number of neutron collisions that a material can tolerate before losing enough structural integrity to fall below the acceptable limits. The best modern reactor steels are at 150-180 DPA.
And a lot of potentially cool reactors like TWR (travelling wave reactor) end up being logistically impossible because lifetime-limited components will be exposed to multiple hundreds of DPAs.
Not sure whether it would be possible to do something similar to a liquid fueled reactor, including all the hot pipework. Maybe, but yet another cost. Notably some of the recent MSR projects propose replacing the entire reactor every now and then (Terrestrial or whatever they were called, not sure if they are still around).
It helps the atoms displaced by neutron collisions to "snap back" into the correct places in the crystalline structure. But it can never restore the material completely, and over time the annealing breaks will have to be more and more frequent.
It also can't be used for everything. Some pipes will experience large thermal stresses if annealed, and some components can't be heated properly due to complex geometry.
As with everything in engineering, all problems can be solved with additional complexity. It's possible to design LFTR reactors to be more annealable, but it will likely make them impractically complex.
There are also other issues with LFTRs. A significant part of the energy production will happen _inside_ the pipework carrying the molten salt, as delayed fission happens and daughter products decay. This will cause inevitable problems with the reactor power control.
Modern light water reactors are engineering marvels. They are incredibly compact for the amount of power that they generate, and they are now designed with the anticipated 70-100 year operating lifetime. Getting LFTRs to the same level of maturity might be possible, but it'll require literally hundreds of billions (if not trillions) invested, just like with the classic nuclear.
A somewhat lower temperature "wet" annealing process has been applied to two test reactors. I don't think it's been applied to any full scale power reactors.
Not the whole reactor vessel though, just one critical circumferential weld seam.
(As mentioned in the second link, other VVER-440 reactors had previously been annealed, I'm sure one could find information about them as well.)
You can make the vessel thicker to compensate, but then you can just make it thicker in the first place and skip annealing.
The oakridge experiment ended and not a lot of R&D has been done on salt reactors. It makes sense that China is still basically in research and testing phases for molten salts.
Oh dear god, no. Graphite is a very good moderator, it is in no way a shield. Those two properties are (sort of) opposites of each other. Lead makes the cheapest and best shield. Also, those parts that are exposed to neutron flux stay radioactive for about 10 years. So it shortens their lifetime in the reactor but the waste isn't a big issue.
Oh my, definitely no :-) Do not use lead for neutron shielding. You're thinking gamma radiation but then we're talking apples vs oranges then. You want atoms comparable in size to neutrons, so something with plenty of hydrogen. Think water or PET (plastic) when you don't want water to "leak" when transporting a source. For thermal neutrons maybe PET impregnated with boron. Now neutrons may generate gamma when captured by hydrogen, then you may want some lead for secondary effects like that but I am not sure how strong those are.
There is a rabbithole for almost all of these material choices, especially in nuclear. Not going down that rabbithole in a discussion targeted at folks who don't spend their lives working in nuclear doesn't make that person wrong. It makes them an effective communicator.
PS Lead is a very very common shielding material in nuclear.
Notable, but not unique. The unique bit is it burns thorium.
What people need to understand about the cycle efficiency is that when you mine uranium, the fissionable part of uranium (U-235) is only 1% of that uranium, the rest is nonfissionable U-238.
Thorium is about twice as abundant as Uranium (all isotopes). The MSR uses Thorium to create U-233, a fissionable but not naturally occurring Uranium isotope.
So the "unlimited energy aspect" is that about 200-300x more breedable Thorium exists than fissionable U-235.
A MSR nation could also try to breed U-238 into plutonium, which would provide another 100x more breeding stock, although LFTR never talked about U-238 breeding. IIRC the plutonium may be difficult to handle because of gamma rays, but I don't recall exactly.
While I don't have confidence that even LFTR/MSR reactors can get economical enough to challenge gas peakers, it may be possible to make truly price-competitive MSR electricity with the right modular design. I wish the Chinese the best of luck, because if they do it will spur the rest of the world to adopt this about-as-clean-and-safe-as-it-gets nuclear design.
China has thorium, and while less than others [1], it’s better than they do with uranium [2].
> it may be possible to make truly price-competitive MSR electricity with the right modular design
Yes. But probably not in the near term with thorium. This isn’t designed to be cheaper. It’s designed to be more available to China than being dependent on Russian deposits.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/492031a
[2] https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1800.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoneutrino
Economic recoverable reserves are another matter, but there's plenty there.
Source for the fuel cycle?
Thorium 232 -> 233 is neutron negative. But after that you get all kinds of nonsense.
Even the daughter uranium 233 only produces on average 2.48 neutrons per fission, so it’s very difficult even in a combined lifecycle process to have enough - thorium doesn’t produce uranium 233 immediately (takes almost 30 days), neutron capture with that low a ratio requires a LOT of thorium, which is going to mostly just suck up all neutrons and you won’t have any extra for addition uranium 233 fissions, etc.
It’s quite difficult (impossible?)to have actually work without a source of a large amount of additional neutrons.
Unless 100% of those neutrons is being absorbed by the thorium, this means you'll have neutron flux at the boundary. Which, for a liquid moderator, means all the pipes and tanks and pumps.
And considering that people made these things work 60 years ago without modern computers, the idea that its impossible or needs 40 years of research seems pretty far fetched. What is left of the nuclear industry wants to build current designs like the AP1400. That is a great idea, but there are things you can do with a LFTR that you can't do with an AP1400. The biggest of them is making synthetic fuel. The other advantages are the amount of waste produced and the fact that you can make a LFTR into a waste burner consuming the spent fuel rods from a AP1400. The downside is you actually have to fix nuclear regulations to do this and getting politicians to do that has proved impossible.
There are no technological barriers, this is entirely political.
https://www.stdaily.com/web/English/2025-11/17/content_43298...
For comparison: A commercial nuclear power plant is 1 gigawatt, a 10x difference. I assume this would be the next step.
That to say, a typical commercial reactor might be 30x the power of a 100 MW research device.
https://archive.is/DQpXM ("China reaches energy independence milestone by ‘breeding’ uranium from thorium"–SCMP)
China has been genuinely innovating in manufacturing techniques for decades. If anything, that ingenunuity peaked when Xi began his term, and has been degrading as his dictatorial tendencies needlessly hamstrung Chinese industry.
Why wouldn't it?
I don't think it makes sense to extrapolate from one particular technical field to governance in general.
The US managed to defeat both Nazi Germany and Japan plus develop nuclear weapons, all in 1941-5. Was it a proof of extreme competence of the US government in general? The some government tolerated abuse of blacks and forced segregation in the South, I would call it a serious governance failure.
Now where's my pony?
Don't buy US propaganda so easily. They want to create a moral equivalence where there is none.
That is naive. Really repressive states control that.
> the people creating that narrative were right-wing christian nationalists and none of it held up.
Like the BBC?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-22278037
There is plenty of evidence that China wants to erase all minority cultures and religions.
I guess soon the west has to copy chinas tech.
It's more expensive than just using fresh uranium in current market conditions. It's a way from keeping future uranium shortages from making nuclear power more expensive; it's not a way to make nuclear cheaper than it currently is.
This would allow Western China to also develop reactors to help underpin their renewable and coal energy.
> The interest in MSR technology and Thorium breeding did not disappear however. China's nuclear power production relies heavily on imported uranium,[10] a strategic vulnerability in the event of i.e. economic sanctions. Additionally, the relative lack of water available for cooling PWRs west of the Hu line is a limiting factor for siting them there.
Non-water microreactors broadly fall into two categories: ones using a different moderator, most commonly sodium, a sodium salt or helium; and those using heat pipes. Most microreactor designs don’t use water.
At least as of a couple years ago nuclear costs just a little more than solar plus storage and that’s not stopping anyone heh.
There is room to change that, but the cards are very heavily stacked in China's favor. America's bad at the financing part, fickle when it comes to enforcement & supply chains, and ostensibly 2 days away from bailing on the IAEA itself. The proliferation-resistance of Thorium reactors gives China an export trump card that America will struggle to match.
Go ahead a calculate what co-locating ~$52/kWh BESS systems alongside an utility scale solar install costs per kWh.
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/06/26/china-energy-engineering...
Let me fix that for you: "The truth is that nuclear power is not that financially attractive in the bureaucratic high cost litigious Anglo-sphere". And that's pretty much all infrastructure these days, unfortunately.
So, yes, but...
China installed 256GW of solar in the first 6 months of 2025 [2]. A full year estimate of ~350gw. So, the total of all nuclear under construction is 1/10th of the solar they installed in one year.
Don't get me wrong, its cool to see diversity of non fossil sources, glad they are building some, but its a niche in their overall energy buildout. And they can only build that small niche because they dont have to be market priced, its state subsidized.
[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/ten-new-reactors... [2] https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/global-solar-install...
Here's a Nature article about it:
Seems to me like it's more of a story of corruption than of over-regulation
UK cant do it either, see hinkley point c [2]
[1] https://www.nucnet.org/news/long-delayed-nuclear-plant-conne... [2] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/edf-announces-hi...
Most thorium: India, Brazil, Australia, US, Turkey
Most uranium: Australia, Kazakhstan, Canada, Russia, Namibia
The thermodynamic cycle needs a cold source though, and it's most commonly water. This doesn't depend on the reactor design and this is equally as true of coal plants.
As long as you are making electricity out of a thermodynamic cycle, you need a heat source (be it a flame or a nuclear reaction) and a cold source.
Perhaps they use as a cold source the underground soil, though the soil thermal conductivity will limit the amount of power of the reactor. This reactor has a modest power, which could be explained by this constraint.
If the reactor is as safe as they claim, the moderate output power per reactor could be compensated by installing many such reactors.
This is mainly a feature of the reactor being small. If you don't have much heat to dissipate, even air cooling becomes feasible.
> unlike their current reactors that must be installed only close to the sea, in the part of the country with abundant water
In reality even current water-cooled reactors can be pretty efficient in terms of water use if you design the cooling system with that in mind. See the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in Arizona.
> Perhaps they use as a cold source the underground soil
I'm not sure this would work, as you'd be storing heat in the soil without a real heat drain so the yield of the plant would decrease until it reaches zero.
For small reactors air or radiative cooling are an option though.
This advantage is conserved by all non-water moderated reactor designs.
A reactor can be moderated with something else than water, e.g. graphite, but it may still need water for cooling.
The amount of water needed for cooling is much more than needed for moderation.
So there is no doubt that many "non-water moderated reactor designs" still need copious amounts of cooling water.
Any "non-water moderated reactor design" that does not have liquid fuel, i.e. it is not a molten-salt design, must have a cooling fluid, though the fluid in the primary cooling circuit may be not water, but something else, e.g. molten metal (e.g. molten sodium) or supercritical carbon dioxide.
A very high temperature reactor might even be able to work with an open air Brayton cycle system, which would allow heat to be directly exhausted in that air stream. It would probably still need an in intermediate heat exchanger so the air wasn't being irradiated with neutrons.
Is anyone doing that? Everything I've seen is Rankine.
Uranium isn't as ubiquitous as, say, natural gas, and stockpiling it comes with a big heap of physical problems. I can definitely see countries spending on more expensive technology if it comes with more energy security.
That is, as long as we don't build more nuclear power plants.
If you want to increase nuclear power adoption, then you're not going to stay in “current market conditions” for long.
Thorium MSRs don't make sense for the Americas, Europe or Australia. We have plenty of uranium.
Nuclear is receiving solid research backing in both America and China. (India is playing too. Austrlia is having an identity crisis.) Our different geologies mean there will probably be one solution for China, India and North Africa, on one hand, and the rest of the world, on the other hand.
That was tongue in cheek. It's being indecisive. I guess that's conserved across the Anglosphere.
Who said this?
> considering a liquid fueled reactor makes heat in the 900C range and a AP1400 makes heat in the 300C range, they aren't really substitutes for each other
Nobody said this either.
There are more reactor designs in the world than LFTR, PWR and BWR, particularly if we're talking at the demonstration scale like this reactor.
Came online ~10 years ago. One could quibble about design and construction timelines; the reactor is still half-experimental, and the Russians are conducting that breeder program very slowly. But it's not a 1980s design frozen in time.
Is the article about a production power plant?
That covers the input side of th equation. Thorium can help transform the outputs of our existing reactors into waste with orders of magnitude better in terms of dangerous lifespan
I'm glad people are finding more research and hopefully this will unlock other tech but this has limited impact on the current trajectory of commercial nuclear and the designs currently in the labs.
Though the commentary in here does remind me how much hype has infused the nuclear space - good thing on the whole as long as an eventual AI shakeout doesn't knee cap all the good work being done.
For nuclear the playbook goes - design of technology is in the west. China copycats the reactor and puts it through their deployment engine (see current nuclear deployment). Maybe that changes -- but this doesn't prove that.
China pushing the development is fantastic though for the world to give their head a shake and finally get back in the game.
MSRs are riding the Oklo hype train and have a long way to go.
Try it someday. You _will_ be surprised by some of the technologies there.
why spend millions and a decade doing R&D when you can just hack American companies and steal it all for free!
Plenty has been learned by the US/West from copying their approach to agriculture, robotics in factories, mining, drones, etc. Have you seen their electromagnetic catapult technology?? That stuff seems like its from the space-age! There's even plenty of tech that we can't really explain like the all-moving wingtips on the new J-50s. (and yes, I'm avoiding talking about their supersonic cruise missiles)
How many "Made in China" products do you have at home right now? Who is contributing to the problem?
I'm glad China is doing this even though I'm skeptical about nuclear power ever being commercially viable. At least they're trying different things.
Most of Germany's Nuclear Power Plant could have run for many additional decades. Especially the Konvoi-PWRs from the 80's
It is given we're talking about perceptions. I see no evidence Germany's Greens are suddently rational when it comes to modern reactor designs, of which MSRs are one.
I'm beyond speechless.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix#Rocket_attack
Most peaceful green party member ^^
It will be interesting to see how long the ”baseload” talking point lasts.
Baseload is not, and has never been, a feature. It's just a drawback that can be handled so long as only some of your power comes from such sources.
Batteries augment base load power sources the exact same way they augment intermittent ones, they take power from them when there is excess and give power back when there isn't making them effectively dispatachable power.
Um, yes it has. When you use solar or wind for baseload, it must be backed up by a spinning reserve. When you calculate the combined CO2 output of both the renewables and the spinning reserve, you learn it is more than just using gas by itself (and often it is more than just using oil or coal). There has never been a renewable power source used for baseload that has reduced CO2 emissions per watt. The math and laws of physics basically prevents it from happening. You want that to change, learn how to purify poly-silica more efficiently. And nobody (and I mean nobody) is even working on that. You don't pay for power, you pay for power you control with a switch. Power you don't control is called an explosion.
Flexible dispatchable power plants are having a field day though.
> Still, germany would need at bare minimum 3TWh of storage to ditch fossils firming per last winter
Source please. All these ”unimaginable amounts of storage” calculations are usually based on not over producing on a yearly basis.
We also should not let perfect stand in the way of good enough.
There's no such thing as baseload power plant. If solar were able to supply the demand with some bess you'd call it baseload. What matters is firm power. And yes, Germany plans to expand gas plants. It's sad they didn't opt out for BWRs that can modulate faster, at 1%/sec
Now you want a firming nuclear plant? First it needs to be reliable, we can't have a system collapse when 45% is offline like happened in Sweden in October and May this year.
Then it needs to be dispatchable.
Nuclear power when it runs at 100% 24/7 all year around except a tiny maintenance window costs ~18 cents/kWh.
Are we looking at a 50% capacity factor? And not collapsing when 50% are having outages?
So ~60 cents/kWh?
I love how new built nuclear power becomes completely farcial when put into real world constraints.
German npp had a cf of 90%, providing for 4-5ct/kwh like https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte...
For generation data, go to https://www.energy-charts.info/index.html?l=en&c=DE , pick any 4 day interval in each month from dec to feb last year. Look how much twh was generated from fossils and imported. That's what you need to replace
The logical inconsistencies are amazing.
You do know that a 90% averaged capacity factor and simultaneous outages of 45% doesn’t have to be a disjoint set?
Yes. Way way easier, cheaper and faster using renewables and maybe all storage.
Or are you suggesting that we should stave off renewable implementation, continuing with the current emission, and wait until the 2040s for new built nuclear power to come online?
PS Maybe ask Spain how that renewable baseload generated power is doing for them.
1. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/energy-industry-relieve...
That literally makes no sense at all.
Looking at wholesale prices all of continental Europe is quite similar.
Some countries, like Germany, taxes electricity a lot to promote efficiency.
Not sure what alternative you suggest?
The French are wholly unable to build new nuclear power. So that’s not an option either.
Flamanville 3 is 7x over budget and 12 years late on a 5 year construction program. The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026. And the French government just fell and was reformed because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
Germany's low carbon twh is unchanged since 2015. What changed is it became net importer and demand dropped, hence a lot of coal closed.
Wholesale is irrelevant. Taxes are needed to fund infrastructure. In case of Germany a big chunk is transmission which will be subsidized from 2026 just like eeg already is. Example of why- sudlink, but that's just for redispatching, ren require by default more transmission due to distributed deployment
France is open to subsidize epr2 project. The challenge is, edf must first show a bill by EOY and, EC must approve state funding, unlike ren subsidies. Epr2 is expected to cost about 60-80bn, half being offered by the state as 'nice loans'. 40bn is about what Germany pours into EEG alone in merely 2y.
Germany can reuse own konvoi designs or try to make a deal with khnp and Westinghouse
French debt and electricity/edf are not connected. Most of the debt is from pension system because well, work hours, pension age and vacation days vs neighbors. Edf debt is peanuts in comparison. In fact it's debt to ebitda ratio is in normal range.
Which has been calcualted by GenCost to add up to ~€10B for Australia. That is less than the subsidies a single reactor needs.
> France is open to subsidize epr2 project. The challenge is, edf must first show a bill by EOY and, EC must approve state funding, unlike ren subsidies. Epr2 is expected to cost about 60-80bn, half being offered by the state as 'nice loans'. 40bn is about what Germany pours into EEG alone in merely 2y.
This is very typical of nuclear bros. You can never look forward. The EEG is a backwards looking metric, a ton of extremely expensive solar was added 10-15 years ago which still get paid.
You can look at the historical cost of the EEG system to see it decreasing.
- 2019: €27B
- 2020: €30B
- 2021: €17B
Those payments support 153 GW of infrastructure. Again you do realize as soon as we compare with new built nuclear power, adjusting for capacity factors, it just becomes lunatic to suggest nuclear power?
The question is where we spend our money today. The subsidy needed for renewable deployment in 2025 is 0. As can be seen by the 16 GW built without subsidies.
> The installed capacity of renewable installations not eligible for payments under the EEG was 16.2 GW
That's just equivalent to a few nuclear reactors. Nothing big!
> Germany can reuse own konvoi designs or try to make a deal with khnp and Westinghouse
Or they can just let the French folly continue and see the state finances crash when loaning becomes even more expensive.
> French debt and electricity/edf are not connected. Most of the debt is from pension system because well, work hours, pension age and vacation days vs neighbors.
It becomes connected when the state subsidizes nuclear power to enormous amounts which could have gone to balance the budget.
> Edf debt is peanuts in comparison. In fact it's debt to ebitda ratio is in normal range.
I love this sleight of hand. Debt to ebitda is fine, when considering that Hinkley Point C gets a completely insane 17 cents/kWh. And that the state will subsidize the EPR2 program.
EDF is fine if the state takes all the costs. So funny.
It had uranium-233 from breeding from thorium in other reactors.
The main problem with these things is they seem very unprofitable. The US reactor ran from 1964 to 1969 and produced a small amount of power but is still running about $10m a year in decommissioning costs. You thing you can run these things a while and think it's over but:
>Sampling in 1994 revealed concentrations of uranium that created a potential for a nuclear criticality accident, as well as a potentially dangerous build-up of fluorine gas: the environment above the solidified salt was approximately one atmosphere of fluorine. The ensuing decontamination and decommissioning project was called "the most technically challenging"...
The French interest in breeder reactors and nuclear reprocessing also originates from a similar concern about lack of domestic access to raw uranium. Though Super-phoenix [0] was a more traditional uranium -> plutonium approach and not thorium. They gave up because just using uranium is way, way cheaper than synthesizing your own fissile materials.
[0] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/indias-prototype...
If you have easy access to uranium, you just use it directly instead.
The fuel costs of a NPP are a tiny rounding error. If you want electricity and want to build it today, Uranium not Thorium. You are using arguments from 50 years ago when many incorrect assumptions about cost structure and fuel availability were used to make decisions.
The pros you mention are theoretical - because the cons came out in force when actually tried, and they’ve been tried many times by many different countries.
But regulation, while it has its purposes, stifles many things. At the same time time it’s not even doing what they were meant for.
There are a number of countries being run far better than the US or the EU
TerraPower is not secret.
It will be funny if China is what convinces the US to be more open to free industry. Opposite day vs the 1970s
If it's just your company or some trifling consortium trying to develop nuclear energy advances in a "free industry" environment, the guy who is just slapping up windmills, [T Boone Pickens RIP], is just gonna mop the floor with you. There's just no way to compete on moonshots like that.
The way water might be used in this design is to make a synthetic fuel instead of electricity. In that case, you are swapping out the turbines for a process that extracts CO2 from seawater, uses electrolysis to crack the water and then a FT process to make a (renewable) hydrocarbon fuel (you might even use some feedstock to make it more efficient).
Maybe they get production ramped up for 2050 targets, but not on the radar for 2030 targets. Or replacing your antique coal plant today.
1.While China scaled up the EV production, the development of Hydrogen based technology is still going on. There are some progress but lost in the bigger noise of EV.
2.China became the largest automobile exporter, leading by EV. But most people thought that's because EV took over ICE. That's partially true because EV dominate the export. What the most people missing is a quite portion of export are ICE cars. Because the ICE engine from China achieved higher energy transformation efficiency than Japanese and German cars. Again the information was lost in the EV noise.
Marginal versus bulk. It can make sense, economically, to keep building coal plants even if solar is cheaper if you’re building solar as fast as you can and still need more power.
I don't see the U.S rushing to adopt either renewables or nuclear. We're just increasing our fossil fuel burning (natural gas).
This is wrong. Natural gas is falling from 42% of U.S. electricity generation in '23 and '24 to 40% in '25E and '26E [1]. Renewables, meanwhile, keep marching from 23% ('24) to 24% ('25E) and 26% ('26E). (Nuclear falls from 19% ('24) to 18% ('25E and '26E).
No that’s generation. It’s on page 49 of the report. Table 7d Part 1 “US Regional Electricity Generation” it’s measured in billions of kilowatt hours.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/pdf/steo_full.pdf
And if anyone is interested I have some of my own graphs on top of the EIA data to make it easier to read - https://eia.languagelatte.com/
Irrelevant. The question is what we're investing in. "The U.S" is "rushing to adopt...renewables."
> FF plants run most of the time
"CCGT capacity factor rose from 40% in 2008 to 57% in 2022" [1]. "In the western United States," meanwhile "the capacity value of PV plants can be in the range of 50% to 80%" [2].
> That's how they skew the numbers to make renewables seem viable when they produce a shockingly low amount of actual power
This is a report from Trump's EIA.
[1] https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/average-utili...
We also have the ability to electrify most transport except maybe long haul trucking and long haul aviation. Aviation (ALL aviation) accounts for less than 5% of global CO2 emissions, which means we could leave that alone and cut elsewhere until we have batteries and other infrastructure good enough for that.
Build all this out and it'll be cheaper and more scalable than what we currently have.
We in the USA choose to stick with ancient technology because we have a sunk cost and an existing political power structure built around it. Meanwhile China is eating our lunch. Make America Great Again! By... pretending it's 1945 and trying to LARP the previous century.
Classic innovators' dilemma at the national level.
On the aviation note, sadly, aviation bats higher than its C02 accounting. Contrails add another 1-2% on top of contribution from it's C02 emissions. It's entirely avoidable and could be resolved at relatively low cost.
https://contrails.org/faq/#how-are-contrails-contributing-to...
Some of the highest temperature reactor concepts use solid fuel (see e.g. various VHTR gen4 concepts).
As an aside, some nuclear proponents claiming synthetic fuel production as some unique selling point of advanced nuclear sounds more like wishful thinking combined with admitting being unable to produce electricity at competitive price. With the 'electrotech revolution', most things will switch to being powered by electricity, leaving a relatively modest market for synthetic fuels (long range aviation and shipping, mainly, and some chemicals production), assuming regulation prevents usage of fossil fuels.
> And you need Thorium for a liquid fueled reactor.
No, why would you? You can use U235 in a non-breeding thermal reactor (Terrestrial being an example design), or you can run the U-Pu breeding cycle in a liquid fueled fast reactor (such designs use chloride salts as the fuel carrier rather than FLiBe).
> That's why this design is so popular.
So popular that despite being invented in the 1960'ies, it hasn't yet progressed beyond the prototype stage?
You don't want to discount the cultural attachment people have to what their parents did and their childhood.
Yes, and also vast oil and gas reserves China doesn't have.
Also there is strong public fear and dislike of nuclear power.
In countries where there are no or little fossil fuels it is mainly this public opinion which has crippled the nuclear industry. Germany is a prime example.
Public opinion is obviously much less important in China.
That really isn’t true. The reason Shanghai didn’t expand their maglev to Hangzhou is because residents were worried about electrical magnetic radiation, which I don’t think is really a thing. Nuclear took a long time to get started in China because people thought the government to be inept and corrupt, an image that has only recently faded away in the last decade. Without free elections, public opinion is actually much more important if you want to avoid economically destructive riots.
But this all happens in back rooms, the legal system isn’t very relevant, so if you have an issue but it isn’t a very popular one, you don’t really have any recourse. For example, niche environmental issues, or ones that aren’t widely recognized yet as dangerous…
In the US public opinion doesn't really matter either. It's the oligarchs' opinions that matter