Looking at energy issues and green solutions, and now increasingly reporting on the phenomenon, which includes zero point energy, zero gravity, and many more mysteries of Non Human Intelligence, NHI.
Tuesday, 11 March 2025
MSR reactors are popping up in many places now!
https://spectrum.ieee.org/chinas-thorium-molten-salt-reactor
exerpt:
The attraction of thorium is that it can help achieve energy self-sufficiency by reducing dependence on uranium, particularly for countries such as India with enormous thorium reserves. But China may source it in a different way: The element is a waste product of China’s huge rare earth mining industry. Harnessing it would provide a practically inexhaustible supply of fuel. Already, China’s Gansu province has maritime and aerospace applications in mind for this future energy supply, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency.
Scant technical details of China’s reactor exist, and SINAP didn’t respond to IEEE Spectrum’s requests for information. The Chinese Academy of Sciences’ environmental-impact report states that the molten-salt reactor core will be 3 meters in height and 2.8 meters in diameter. It will operate at 700 °C and have a thermal output of 60 MW, along with 10 MW of electricity.
Molten-salt breeder reactors are the most viable designs for thorium fuel, says Charles Forsberg, a nuclear scientist at MIT. In this kind of reactor, thorium fluoride dissolves in molten salt in the reactor’s core. To turn thorium-232 into fuel, it is irradiated to thorium-233, which decays into an intermediate, protactinium-233, and then into uranium-233, which is fissile. During this fuel-breeding process, protactinium is removed from the reactor core while it decays, and then it is returned to the core as uranium-233. Fission occurs, generating heat and then steam, which drives a turbine to generate electricity.
But many challenges come along with thorium use. A big one is dealing with the risk of proliferation. When thorium is transformed into uranium-233, it becomes directly usable in nuclear weapons. “It’s of a quality comparable to separated plutonium and is thus very dangerous,” says Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. If the fuel is circulating in and out of the reactor core during operation, this movement introduces routes for the theft of uranium-233, he says.
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