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.
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.
Mr Jiang visited the Oak Ridge labs and obtained the designs – entirely legitimately – after reading an article in the American Scientist extolling thorium.
I’m interested to see what the continual processing of the thorium radioactive waste will cost. Conventional nuclear reactor waste products don’t require continually processing. It can just be stored.
The molten salt reactor can be fueled from the so called “reactor waste” stored in cooling pools. LWR types with clad fuel burn at best 5% of fuel content before reaching accumulated damage limits. Strip the fuel and actinides from the ceramic base, and dissolve into a carrier salt. Now the fuel can be purified as needed. Estimates place available fuel so obtained at 75 to 150 years supply. Plenty of time to work up to a thorium breeder.
The chemical reprocessing of the fuel onsite is where the Chinese are on a steep learning curve. Reactors in operation generate waste which drain vitality as a parasite does a host. Materials processing will need to be accomplished at the molten temperature of the salt. The processing will resemble aluminum extraction thru electrolysis of molten ore. The engineering details to do this are only now addressed.
Screw that. We want our oil and natural gas and fracking and strip mining and conventional nook plants (with Fukashima meltdowns) that create highly radioactive waste that lasts for thousands of years. Big Oil will never allow thorium plants in the USSR.
Libs/greenies already fiercely oppose it. They say it’s not economically feasible.
I have to smirk at the phrase “fossil fuel hegemony”. That thorium is a lot older than the oil, gas, and coal the greenies whine about.
Let’s face it. Western culture as we knew it is on the decline. There was a time when The United States took the lead in technological innovation.
Now we have Jessie Jackson insisting that affirmative action be implemented in areas where only the best and brightest would gravitate to. China is going to overtake us in so many areas. Sad, but true.
bfl