Posted on 03/19/2014 4:28:24 PM PDT by dynachrome
The nuclear race is on. China is upping the ante dramatically on thorium nuclear energy. Scientists in Shanghai have been told to accelerate plans (sorry for the pun) to build the first fully-functioning thorium reactor within ten years, instead of 25 years as originally planned.
“This is definitely a race. China faces fierce competition from overseas and to get there first will not be an easy task”,” says Professor Li Zhong, a leader of the programme. He said researchers are working under “warlike” pressure to deliver.
Good for them. They may do the world a big favour. They may even help to close the era of fossil fuel hegemony, and with it close the rentier petro-gas regimes that have such trouble adapting to rational modern behaviour. The West risks being left behind, still relying on the old uranium reactor technology that was originally designed for US submarines in the 1950s.
As readers know, I have long been a fan of thorium (so is my DT economics colleague Szu Chan). It promises to be safer, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper than uranium. It is much harder to use in nuclear weapons, and therefore limits the proliferation risk.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...
Courtesy ping, even though you have gone to the GREAT ZOT in the afterlife.
I'm with the author. Good luck to them.
“I don’t know enough” that is.
Is there anyone in America that wants a stockpile of thorium?
heh. that’s where I stole the link.
The energy contained in the thorium is about 10-15 times the energy you get from burning the coal.
What we as a country should be doing is processing the coal for the thorium and producing electricity with the thorium. Then, we could use some of the energy produced to take the processed ton of coal and squeeze it to produce petroleum product, like the Germans did in World War II.
The thorium nuclear process is liquified molten salt. This molten salt gives off heat. If you have a problem, the system has a cooled plug which will melt, and release the molten salt into a containment vessel. It then solidifies, with no danger of a runaway reaction.
The only real problem with molten radioactive salts is that they're highly corrosive, and give you problems in that area.
many times safer than what everyone currently uses.
developed by the military for airplanes long ago
Good show, troop.
The original tech crew at ORNL had solutions to the problem with the use of Hastelloy-y and Hastelloy-x...both are high-grade steels with large concentrations of nickle. They also recommended a “core swap” every few years.
Denninger has good stuff. More focused than Zero Hedge.
YouTube Vid
Future Energy, Thorium and the LFTR reactor
(Thorium 101)
44 Minutes
(highly recommended)
That was not a thorium reactor and the reactor never powered the plane.
Mr Jiang visited the Oak Ridge labs and obtained the designs – entirely legitimately – after reading an article in the American Scientist extolling thorium.
I’ve seen it...excellent!
The energy contained in the thorium is about 10-15 times the energy you get from burning the coal.
Wow! We already have a several hundred year supply of available coal in the country. If we extract the thorium, we should be good for thousands of years.
Are you certain about that? I've heard that they're about equal.
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