China embraces Thorium

This topic was created by MachDiamond .

  1. MachDiamond Silver badge

    China embraces Thorium

    To keep up with their growth, China is looking to add LFTR technology to the energy mix. Just as Britain had a vibrant space program in the 1960's, the US did a great deal of research into Thorium reactors. All this work is now wasted by handing it over to the middle kingdom for free with a smile.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/9784044/China-blazes-trail-for-clean-nuclear-power-from-thorium.html

  2. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

    Well, I wouldn't say the technology is wasted, if someone is using it.

    It was being wasted before anyone did anything with it, now it's finally being purposefully employed. This is a good thing. Should the Chinese get the things up and running, then we'll have to buy their bit of the technology off them, and they'll have earned that money. It would be better if we'd continued nuclear research and modernised our industry, but the public decided they didn't want that. Now they may be changing their mind in the UK, but I'm not sure that's the case in America and certainly not in Germany (where they've just killed their nuclear industry at the same time as most of their renewables industry).

    1. MachDiamond Silver badge

      IAS, it's the licensing of patents back from China that bothers me. They are very good at taking things upmarket. They may license certain technologies until than have a manufacturing base (or are shown that one is profitable) after which they will no longer sell licenses without a purchase of physical products. If that continues, they will only sell complete systems. I've seen it happen in many industry's and it's a good move on their part, but sucks for the rest of us.

      Germany never had a renewables industry. The feed-in tariffs have made the whole thing an economic sham. Did they sign the Kyoto agreement? I wonder how they are going to hold up their end while replacing their nuclear reactors with coal plants if they did.

      LFTR may have failed in its seed in the US since it doesn't produce weapons grade nuclear material and at the time it was being developed, that's what politicians wanted, lots of bombs to protect the country from the USSR.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re. WMDs

    Yup, this is indeed the case.

    I did look into using LFTR for "Enterprise" (thats the BTEDan project) a while back.

    The problem is that the chemicals needed are very toxic, although to some extent if something does go wrong it is a lot safer than a conventional reactor and as the core is molten the existing containment is far more effective.

    It would also work nicely in zero gravity, convection still works with a slight alteration in geometry and most of the components can be fabricated here on Earth with the incomplete parts sent up by standard Falcon 9/SLS when available.

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