Before anybody gets too excited, it's better to understand what exactly happened.
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.
The real killer feature isn’t "more thorium than uranium" (thorium is already 4× more abundant). The real win is that thorium MSRs can eat the existing mountain of "spent" fuel rods from regular reactors and turn what we currently call high-level waste into electricity while leaving waste that’s safe in a few hundred years instead of tens of thousands. That’s hundreds of thousands of tons of "waste" suddnely becoming centuries of clean fuel. That alone flips the economics on its head.
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.
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.
> Talking about “thousands of tonnes” of nuclear waste is comically misleading when you realise how tiny the volume is.
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.
> Talking about “thousands of tonnes” of nuclear waste is comically misleading when you realise how tiny the volume is.
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?
Long life, high activity nuclear waste represents less than 3500m3 (one Olympic swimming pool), and this, since the start of civil nuclear electrical production in the 50's. World wide.
20 swimming pools of total waste isn't that impressive. I don't want to live near that, but I'm sure I'd we can find a place to put that in that will have minimal impact on people's lives.
Exactly. The waste isn't really a problem. But it doesn't have to be waste. That's the point. All that U235 in 'spent' silos? You can get 60x - 100x its OG power feeding it to nextgen reactors. So cool
I guess you mean the "super hot for centuries" minor actinides (Np-237, Am-241/243, Cm-242/244/245 etc..)? These are less than 1% global waste, but next gen reactors can still eat them. The majority of waste (95%+) is U-235, then Pu, which nextgen also eats.
Many magnitudes of order less than any of: all the steel, glass, aluminium, wood, or plastic, ever produced, and we aren’t yet drowning in cubic miles of any of those.
> The real win is that thorium MSRs can eat the existing mountain of "spent" fuel rods from regular reactors
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.
This can be done in usual breeders like superphenix or bn800. What china wants to experiment with is continuous filtration instead of using breeding+purex/pyroprocessing. Still, it's nothing more than an experiment, china is rather slow with nuclear compared to french messmer and sweden in the past
Fundamentally the problem is that Uranium is so damn energy dense and abundant enough that there's little need to set up these complicated recycling systems. If we start to run out of Uranium then this technology starts to look appealing, but in the modern day it just doesn't make economic sense.
> Uranium is so damn energy dense and abundant enough that there's little need to set up these complicated recycling systems
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.
Uranium can be stockpiled for years in advance, relatively easily. Enough to tide over a small war while you're setting up domestic production. And China should have enough low-grade ores for that.
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.
> Uranium is far, far energy denser than any fossil fuel, and thus much easier to stockpile
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.
A sufficiently large stockpile of uranium gives China time to simply pivot away from depending on imported Uranium (either by building new mines locally or building out solar or such). An equivalent stockpile of oil simply isn't feasible, if only because oil is usually used directly and not via a source-agnostic electrical grid.
I know. I am not saying I got the order of magnitude exactly right, just pointing out beyond a certain threshold the size of the stockpile doesn't matter. I suspect that if a nation state puts its mind to it, stockpiles great enough to last a war are totally possible.
That's not a stockpile, they have to extract and refine it to use it. Russia understood it the hard way with the refineries attacks.
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.
We're not talking about ore, rather fuel. Uranium ore might be inexpensive, I don't know, but converting that ore into fuel is not an easy task. I'm guessing that the reason it's not profitable is that so little of it is actually needed, relative to oil.
There's not that much Uranium actually that's economically sensible to extract. The NEA says in their 2024 report on Uranium [1]:
> 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.
It's a bit different. Higher demand will lead to higher price, opening more options to mine. Now uranium is too cheap to open new mines and exploration
And I hate to pollute this thread with more AI fear-mongering, but AI inference is already showing its effects on the energy sector and it is expected to grow very rapidly. Energy demands may likely grow at a stronger rate than initially expected.
Hm, is that really the case? Nextgen reactors are not just about lowering the cost of U. Or "saving the environment" from waste. Bonuses, sure. Real strength is increasing efficiency, which means: 1) lower buildout costs, 2) faster time to first iphone charged, 3) smaller, safer designs. They're a way around the giganto-plants of the past, on the way to making nuclear power the ubiquitous reliable utility it should be.
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.
The reason TMSR is appealing is that U-233 is hard to use for weapons purposes because it produces a lot of gamma radiation, which makes it hard to work with. There is also the claim that TMSRs are much safer designs than is possible with Uranium. It's possible that if TMSRs were mass produced that we could see them installed in many countries where we don't want to see Uranium or Plutonium reactors for proliferation reasons.
With a Uranium-based reactor you need a) a source of enriched Uranium (see proliferation risks), b) inspectors to check that you're not post-processing fuel rods to extract Plutonium.
With Thorium if the operator country wants to extract the U-233 you think "maybe let them, they won't like it".
With classic pwr rods can't be used for weapons because of parasitic isotopes. At best you need to run the reactor in a specific way that would trigger global attention looking at power fluctuations. And still it'll not be easy afterwards.
You can buy enriched uranium from others.
With th- I'm not sure but don't you need enriched material anyway to kickstart it?
Sorry, but there are quite a few things you are missing. Nuclear engineering is well, nuclear engineering. The first big difference is that you can use the Thorium in a liquid fueled reactor instead of a solid fueled one. This allows you to burn far more of the fuel. For example, 2-4% of a solid fuel rod would fission, while in a liquid fueled reactor you can get to 90+%. This is good economically for 2 reasons: 1) more energy per unit of fuel and 2) the waste lasts far less time.
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.
> When you realize that the only real choices for baseload are FF and nuclear, the real political situation makes sense.
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.
There's also the choice to match our energy consumption dynamically to intermittent power sources (e.g. solar), reducing the baseload demand. This is entirely orthogonal to decisions about where the baseload generation should come from.
doesnt make a difference to the economics of a nuke plant. Fuel consumption is a tiny fraction of the cost of nuke power, its almost all fixed cost - amortized construction costs, operations, etc. You need to run it at as close to 100% always to have any chance at payback & economical $/kw. Thats why they arent getting built.
> Nuclear engineering is well, nuclear engineering.
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.
Radioactive waste is decidedly nasty stuff, but the total volume of it is tiny. There are plenty of chemicals that are just as nasty that were simply buried in the ground in much larger quantities over the years with nary a peep from the population. Nuclear waste is a political problem not a technological one.
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.
Joking here since it would be impractical, but I guess you can bury it under my house. I'd not be bothered at all to live on top of a modern nuclear waste deposit like Finlands.
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.
I'm getting impression that China is trying to position itself as scientific powerhouse before its massive industrial production scheme stops working. Smart move.
My understanding is that reactors will use that plutonium just fine, so the energy you get from a fresh fuel rod is almost exclusively from uranium fission but, as time goes on, an increasingly large share is from plutonium fission.
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.
No, this is a misunderstanding of how fission works.
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.
The notable thing here is that it's a molten salt reactor design, where the fuel is dissolved in a molten salt (FLiBe). This allows online continuous processing of the fuel, unlike with solid fuel rods sealed inside a pressure vessel.
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.
MSRs have some attractive features, but they also have significant drawbacks.
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.
To add to this, even with the shielding provided by water in light water reactors, the neutron exposure is _the_ limiting factor for the reactor vessel.
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.
Many old LWR's have had their reactor vessels heat treated during a maintenance break to undo some of that neutron radiation damage and extend the life of the reactor.
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).
Yes, it's called "annealing". Basically, the core is de-fueled and a huge electric resistive heater is put inside it. Then the entire vessel is heated to something like 600C, and kept there for several days.
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.
You are describing "dry" annealing there. This has not been applied anywhere, as it requires removing and reinstalling the internal support structures inside the reactor vessel.
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.
I wonder if it's possible to run it hot enough for the radiation damage (basically a bunch of dislocations, right?) to just anneal itself out continuously, like how Wigner energy is dissipated in graphite when it's hot enough.
No, this is fundamentally impossible with steel. Annealing works by making the material more "plastic", and this necessarily reduces its tensile strength. Which is the limiting factor for the vessel.
You can make the vessel thicker to compensate, but then you can just make it thicker in the first place and skip annealing.
I think it has a key advantage for China specifically though which is it consumes significantly less water and they have a lot of water poor territory.
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 dear god, no [...] Lead makes the cheapest and best shield.
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.
Lead is fine for shielding of sufficiently energetic neutrons, which can lose energy to lead by inelastic nuclear collisions. But below the threshold for that lead does very little.
Maybe as a special case then as a thin layer before following up with water or PET, or PET impregnated with boron. But would also need an extra layer following it for secondary gamma emission from neutron capture.
Lead is essentially useless as a shield for neutrons that are below the minimum excitation energy of a lead nucleus. Elastic neutron collisions with lead leave the neutron energy essentially unchanged.
I assume this is why an alloy of lead is used in practice. Still doesn't change the fact that graphite is a moderator not a shielding material. Also, structural materials in reactors are usually invisible to neutrons and a sandwich of materials is often used. Different layers do different things. Usually, one layer of shielding and one layer of a material that isn't impacted (much) by neutron flux for structural strength.
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.
A moderator is a neutron shielding material, since it removes energy from the neutrons. That's what moderation is all about. Water is a much better moderator, but graphite still performs the function.
It breeds thorium to fissionable uranium from a starting fissionable uranium starter fuel. It doesn't directly use thorium for fuel.
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.
Eh, U-235 is .7%, not 1%, but also U-238 can be bred into Plutonium. What makes Thorium interesting -besides its abundance- is that U-233 is very difficult to work with, so proliferation concerns are mitigated.
Thorium 232 is the thorium in the cycle yes. And all kinds of nonsense is correct for the daughter products. But in general, to actually use do anything with thorium you need excess neutrons.
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.
> to actually use do anything with thorium you need excess 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.
Sure, if you ignore all the parts of the neutron economy that make it possible to work. The part everyone missed in this discussion is that all of the numbers of neutrons (and their barns) aren't constants. Since the fuel is a fluid, you can use density and shape to improve the neutron economy in the reactor core. Basically, when the atoms are closer together, the economy improves. You can also use a better moderator like graphite since the basic design is safer and the rate of fission is just easier to control.
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.
> That you’re even discussing graphite moderated (?!!) makes this pretty clear.
And why would this be? Is graphite expensive? No it isn't. Also, we created a working one of these designed in the 1960's without computers. You seriously think this is hard compared to other types of engineering we do today?
A LFTR can also do things that a PWR or BWR can't and has several major advantages. But since it uses pencil lead apparently we can't even try it.
Because it has dangerous behavior in real reactors due to the void co-efficient behavior, to the point of… being the cause of the largest nuclear disaster in recorded history?
Not OP but he maybe referring to the new gas cooled gen 4 reactors not Soviet RBMKs. The ones I heard are working with sealed beads of uranium, encased in porous carbon, then some other layers, including some carbide (silicon?). The porosity of carbon absorbs gases but they ultimately stay sealed. The whole thing is helium cooled.
Yeah. I was listening to David Ruzic's video [1] about them getting one of those reactors on campus and when he showed the structure of beads, that's the first thing that popped in my head - at that size how are they going to ensure every single bead has an intact surface.
> Now, the research team is conducting systematic studies on the key scientific issues related to adding thorium, and aims to completethe construction of a 100-megawatt TMSR demonstration project, and begin operation by 2035.
For comparison: A commercial nuclear power plant is 1 gigawatt, a 10x difference. I assume this would be the next step.
The typical 1 gigawatt rating for a nuclear power reactor is measuring electrical output. Given the various inefficiencies, the actual reactor output (as heat) is something like 3x that amount. Whereas a research reactor will be quoted as thermal output.
That to say, a typical commercial reactor might be 30x the power of a 100 MW research device.
At least in this case it's somewhat sensationalized because the US did this in the 1950’s and concluded that it was more economical and simpler to use mined Uranium instead of breeding with Thorium.
This type of progress shows China is capable of moving from an economy that’s build on labor arbitrage or copying others to genuine innovation. It’s also further evidence of the extreme competence of the CCP in governance, which I feel should be acknowledged despite their authoritarian negatives.
> This type of progress shows China is capable of moving from an economy that’s build on labor arbitrage or copying others to genuine innovation
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.
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.
Worse than us? We're conducting a genocide. The "Uighur genocide" is not real, the people creating that narrative were right-wing christian nationalists and none of it held up. We know what a genocide looks like in the 21st century because it's being live-streamed.
Don't buy US propaganda so easily. They want to create a moral equivalence where there is none.
Breeding is a technology looking for a business case.
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.
It also apparently provides a way to make reactors that don’t depend as much on water so they don’t all have to be near the coast.
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.
> also apparently provides a way to make reactors that don’t depend as much on water so they don’t all have to be near the coast
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.
The truth is that nuclear power is not that financially attractive at the present and would the price of uranium rise enough that breeders would become economically viable most countries would just stop bothering with nuclear power altogether.
The cost of nuclear power is almost entirely capex and financing, not opex. Uranium input cost for nuclear power plants is 0.5c/kWh. With breeders you can divide that by about 100.
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.
Capex and financing is still an issue for many countries, and the opex is a non-zero commitment beyond just the fiscal portion. Most countries that pass-over nuclear energy are fairly justified in their decision. The status-quo is still not super psyched about nuclear proliferation.
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.
> The truth is that nuclear power is not that financially attractive
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.
They’re not financially attractive in other parts of the world either. China, a zero litigation single party state, is building some but a tiny % compared to their renewable buildout
"China currently has 58 operable reactors with a total capacity of 56.9 GW. A further 30 reactors, with a total capacity of 34.4 GW are under construction" [1]
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.
Comparing nuclear reactor capacity to solar capacity is misleading because renewable capacity dramatically overstates actual generation. IIRC The capacity factor for solar ranges between %5-%25 of total capacity generated.
That doesn't significantly change the argument. Most solar plants have capacity factors of around 20% (5% might apply to home systems, but not commerical), compared to nuclear which has around 80%. So a factor of 4. So numbers change a bit on the previous poster, China just installed 3x more solar in 1 year than all the nuclear under construction, or they essentially installed the same amout of solar in one year as all existing and under construction nuclear combined. And if we look at projections, next year they likely will install twice as much solar...
While China is often put up as the poster child for nuclear power, they are actually a great example of how nuclear is being overtaken by renewables. China's 2019 plan was that by 2035 nuclear would account for ~8% of generated electricity (up from ~5%). Since then percentage dropped to 4.5% (and the drop seems to be accelerating). Unless something dramatically changes nuclear will account for less than 4% (not the planned 8%) of generated electricity by 2035. All that is due to the raise of renewables (largely solar). I suspect we will not see China build close to those projected 200 GW and the percentage to be even lower, just due to the exponential growth in solar.
Yes yes, one of the usual reflexive context free points repeated every time solar comes up. Whatever the actual capacity factor is(5% is not a serious number ), I’m sure chinas energy planners know that, it’s hardly a gotcha. And still they’ve choose to build solar at a volume massively dwarfing nuclear
(Edit: cycomanic explained it much better and more patiently than me)
I don't think it's reflexive to point out that evaluating the headline numbers like that is misleading. People who are new to the topic will misinformed if they think you're describing an apples to apples comparison.
It's not the litigiousness that makes it expensive. France was producing nuclear power plants at a cost per watt that nearly matches modern China. In fact, the mind-numbing cost overruns seem unique to the US.
france cant do it any more either. Flamanville was 12 years late and [1] 400% over budget. EPR2 is already delayed and over budget and they havent even started building yet!
That might be somewhat true but Flamanville was still about $4/watt while Vogtle 3 and 4 (which were built around the same time) were about $15/watt. It's still hard to place France and the US in the same bucket. The US really is uniquely inept at nuclear costs
The UK does the same thing. In fact, its across the entire west. Its almost as if absurd over-regulation is expensive. The Vogtle plant construction for example had to deal with 3 different tranches of changes to the design caused by regulators. Its not corruption, its over-regulation. If it is corruption, it is corrupt politicians intentionally over-regulating because their backers make lots of money extracting FFs.
They highlight less the advantages from breeding, than other advantages of the molten salt design, like not needing a lot of cooling water, which allows this reactor to operate in the Gobi desert, the possibility of replacing the fuel without halting the reactor and various safety features.
Nuclear reactors don't need a particularly big amount of cooling water.
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.
As the reactor is operating in the Gobi desert and China claims that its main advantage for them is exactly this possibility of operating in the inland arid areas of the country, unlike their current reactors that must be installed only close to the sea, in the part of the country with abundant water, they must have a solution for the cold source that does not involve water.
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.
> As the reactor is operating in the Gobi desert and China claims that its main advantage for them is exactly this possibility of operating in the inland arid areas of the country
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.
The use of water for moderation is one thing, the use of water for cooling is another thing, even if in many reactors water is used for both purposes.
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.
I believe the point was that non-water moderated designs typically operate at higher core temperature than LWRs, so they can reject waste heat at higher temperature (or reject less waste heat per unit of electrical energy produced), and that makes rejection to air more practical.
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.
No, because it would require very high temperature. The air coming out of the compressor of a gas turbine would already be hotter than the water/steam coming out of a LWR. It would likely involve a core temperature of around 1000 C. The turbine inlet temperature of a modern jet engine is at least 1500 C. There would likely be thermal NOx production, so post treatment of the gas might be necessary in an open cycle system.
There is no business case for basic research, but if you stop basic research long enough you will have no business. The United States and its allies seem to have completely forgotten this.
It makes sense for big monopolies like Bell, or the CCP. The investment can be justified if the ones investing are confident they will be able to capture the value and not some competitor.
Bell Labs also served to maintain positive perceptions of the monopoly. Unix was famously developed despite the knowledge that AT&T would not be able to offer it as an independent product.
I don't see how it follows. Anyway it's debatable if the current system with antitrust laws is true capitalism. One of those poorly-defined words that people argue over.
This isn't basic research. The US has had this tech for half a century. There's just no reason to do it. Uranium is plentiful and cheap and arguably safer.
The fuel cost of a NPP has almost no impact on the NPP's operational expenses and a LFTR (like all liquid fuel designs) is a far safer design. Nobody in the energy industry has talked about the fuel cost in nuclear in 50 years. It isn't even a consideration when comparing designs. Waste volume, safety, politics, and construction labor costs are the factors which are considered (also temp of the heat maybe).
Reducing the energy sector to pure business would probably work in the 1990s, but not now, when countries are afraid of strategic dependence on potentially hostile suppliers.
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.
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.
I don't think Australia is having an identity crisis. There won't be research backing from Australia as the Nuclear agenda one party is pushing is essentially a cover story for replacing antique coal plants with gas plants. A genuine Nuclear plan for Australia would include realistic timelines and budgets, and use of other renewables to replace coal plants that are failing today while meeting climate targets. And meeting climate targets is important, because if we don't care about them then coal and gas will remain cheaper than Nuclear for Australia due to having large reserves.
The cost of the fuel is less than 0.1% of the cost of running a NPP. The cost of the fuel has almost nothing to do with the economics of nuclear power. And 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. The amount of incorrect information in this thread is truly shocking. For example, you can make synthetic fuel from a LFTR, you can't from a BWR or a PWR. That might be a valuable feature, don't you think.
> cost of the fuel has almost nothing to do with the economics of nuclear power
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.
> Thorium MSRs don't make sense for the Americas, Europe or Australia. We have plenty of uranium.
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
Thorium is and will always be a less desirable fuel source - except if you don't have access to uranium or are trying to make your MSRs work (which to date have signs of progress but no proof of commercial viability). MSR also inherently unstable due to salt.
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.
This is US tech that China is copying. We could have done this at anytime in the last 60 years. The blocker isn't technology, its scientifically uninformed politics.
No the West doesn't need this technology given its significant amount of uranium supply. Is it a nice to have - sure.
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.
China has engaged in industrial espionage on an unprecedented scale. To the extent there is delusion, it's in American spies being slow to returning the favour.
I mean we're already doing that in many avenues. Solar being the most obvious. The only functioning solar manufacturing plants in the US are Chinese-owned and are only here to take advantage of subsidies.
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)
China is far better at long term societal planning. Ultimately, I expect they will be the ones who can solve the climate crisis, after being one of the biggest contributors to the problem.
Sure, but most of that is from industrial production, and really should be debited on importing nations’ CO2 accounts. Whereas in the US transportation, heating and construction are the main consumers.
Importing nations are already paying for the imports themselves, from which China profits. It seems reasonable that this leaves the responsibility for the energy used on China's side.
Meanwhile Germany just decommissioned its last nuclear reactors. Given the challenges of baseload renewable generation, it's frustrating to watch working infrastructure being dismantled while we're still heavily dependent on fossil fuels.
Us is extending licenses to 80y, heck Switzerland extended benzau to 64y. The expiry date talk is pure nonsense. German nuclear had excellent CF and extremely advanced safety, incl double containment
> Comparing those old conventional reactors to MSR is not suitable at all
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.
By all the doomerism about German and nuclear there is at least Wendelstein 7-x doing frontier work. It's fine to get rid of legacy nuclear if there is a feasible bridge ahead.
Not sure what the point of this comment is. China has its equivalent EAST, France has ITER. Countries can do both fission and fusion research. To me the problem isn't that Germany closed some legacy reactors, but that too little is done into looking into alternative designs.
> Against a background of ongoing protest and low-level sabotage, on the night of January 18, 1982 an RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade attack was launched against the unfinished plant. [0]
> On May 8, 2003, Chaïm Nissim, who in 1985 was elected to the Geneva cantonal legislature for the Swiss Green Party,[17] admitted carrying out the attack. He claimed that the weapons were obtained from Carlos the Jackal via the Belgian terrorist organisation Cellules Communistes Combattantes (Communist Combatant Cells).[18][19]
By the time stellarator designs become economical (tens of years in the most optimistic case), you can cover the entire Germany in PV panels. Or even grow an entire new generation of forrest. So far stellarators look just like interesting vaporware. I mean they are irrelevant to any current energy discussion.
The baseload talking point has never made sense but storage doesn't make it make less sense. Baseload here is definitionally power sources that can't economically follow the demand curve. They carry the exact same problem that intermittent power sources like solar do, in that you need dispatchable power sources to augment them so that they can actually meet demand, the only difference is that the cause of this is that generation stays constant while load varies instead of both generation and load varying.
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.
Baseload is about supplying demand. It'll not go. And to supply it reliably you need firm power. The 500gw statement contains both overlapping bids and just intentions to "think" about deployment. Still, germany would need at bare minimum 3TWh of storage to ditch fossils firming per last winter and deploy even more renewables to charge it. It remains a question how govt will protect investors from cannibalized generation- offshore is already facing problems
The proof is looking at open generation data past winter. Sadly energy charts gives only gwh/day but you can still do some inference about how much fossils were used/how much imported
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.
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
I love it when 45% having an simultaneous outage is acceptable for nuclear power but dealing with renewable variability is a dealbreaker.
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?
I suggest do both.
45% in sweden was 2 units going offline? I even doubt that's 45%. And for most part outages were planned. But that's maybe why swedish govt wants to go with smaller bwrx units. This way you can schedule easier annual maintenance for each unit
Just like during the energy crisis Sweden had another 7 month outage. With the worst week of all with the winter peak consumption happening with 2 reactors having outages.
But it is much easier to pretend that the capacity factor over the lifetime applies and then cry about renewables eating their lunch.
Hahahaha if that ever happens. The government seems to like the idea of nuclear power but not politically bearing the costs of tens of billions in handouts.
Now they’ve soon spent four years dallying without any real progress and the next election is coming up in September.
The question you need to answer is:
Why should a home owner with rooftop solar and a home storage buy 18 cents/kWh + backup (you know, 2 out of 6 reactors having outages when needed the most) when their rooftop solar or home storage delivers?
Germany has the most expensive and dirtiest grid in the developed world. They get the majority of their baseload power from other countries, often generated by nuclear or gas. Also, that you think they have 500 GW of anything that generates power is pretty funny. The only thing your comment says is that you don't understand anything about how power is generated or how an electrical grid works. People like you are why we still use so much FFs. You can't solve AGW with accounting tricks.
PS Maybe ask Spain how that renewable baseload generated power is doing for them.
Germany sourced 57% of all power from renewables in the first 9mo of 2025 [1]. They seem to be doing just fine, might be time to update your talking points
Quickly becoming greener. Are you saying that Germany should stop their renewable buildout and keep their current emissions until the 2040s while waiting for new built nuclear power to ”save the day”?
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.
It didn't make sense to shut down nuclear before coal/gas for Germany. It should deploy both ren and nuclear, even restarts unless it wants to use gas firming.
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.
> ren require by default more transmission due to distributed deployment
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.
Ah yet again a bunch of nuclear hating. It'll be my last reply to you since I don't wanna lose more time here.
GenCost predictions are already failing if you look at the state of current transmission projects in Australia (huge cost increases across the bord, and not just transmission). And for Germany it'll be even harder due to more nimbys (hello sudlink that was protested even by greens at some point) and different weather/generation patterns.
It'll be gradually the same with onshore and even some solar.
Nuclear has advantages beyond CF, like firm generation, less system costs. Even Fraunhofer/bnetza understand this, that's why both are pushing to expand gas to firm renewables(because well, nuclear is out of discussion for em)
French national debt is 3.5 TRILLION, most because of social system. EDF debt is 50bn while debt/ebitda ratio is about 2 (while EON/RWE have a worse ratio) To suggest EDF debt has any meaningful impact here is borderline insane.
HPC CFDs are smaller vs what Germany or UK offers for biomass, or what UK offered for greenvolt, and soon to be in line with what UK will offer for new wind projects in latest AR rounds https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6880d6f8f47ab...
There are some wild numbers there for some tech, HPC looking cheap in comparison
EDF is not subsidized by France, yet. You can consider a one off 9bn nationalization but that's peanuts vs eeg and hardly a subsidy considering debt/ebitda. In fact edf is subject to profit tax called arenh (the one that caused high debt in 2022), soon to be replaced with another profit sharing mechanism. Arenh was mandated by EU so that EDF doesn't erase competition. EDF financials are public and there aren't any mentions about state pouring money except renewables sector. As said, EPR2 will get some subsidies, but make no mistakes, compared to EEG it'll be peanuts.
Mind you, Germany already spent on EEG alone almost 2x the cost of entire french nuclear fleet (looking at public numbers from court/DE) but it still has worse emissions. In a similar timeframe (messmer) france almost finished the job.
On the other hand, both the praised California and South Australia, leaders in ren deployment, do have both worse emissions than France and higher household prices
It's indeed funny to me how people are so concerned about the costs of nuclear but are just fine with full system costs of renewables that strangely, are not that cheap as predicted by orgs like aemo/csiro in Australia and even more so in other markets.
Trying to predict the future based on it is a backwards looking metric. Your link says that it may increase to €23B by 2029. While the EEG in 2020 was €38B in 2025 euros.
It is already rapidly falling as expensive old contracts fall out.
> Offshore in Germany is already facing challenges like in UK and DK.
Love trying to change the topic to off-shore wind. Pretend that onshore and solar faces the same challenges.
Off-shore wind is right on the cusp of viability. With low infrastructure costs and a comitted customer it is. The Danish and German auctions were "negative bid" styles. The developers had to pay for the privilege to build off-shore wind.
The UK capped the CFD too low as per recent increases in interest rates and material costs. An issue which nuclear power is affected by to an even larger degree.
> It'll be gradually the same with onshore and even some solar.
Of course ignoring that 500 GW storge interconnection queue. But that would be daring to lift your eyes.
> Nuclear has advantages beyond CF, like firm generation, less system costs. Even Fraunhofer/bnetza understand this, that's why both are pushing to expand gas to firm renewables(because well, nuclear is out of discussion for em)
I love this magical nuclear plant that soaks up an entire grid load. In reality all grids with nuclear power has tons of peaking since trying to go above the baseload with nuclear power just becomes stupidity.
That was before zero marginal cost renewables entered the picture. Now nuclear itself are becoming peakers. As evidenced by nuclear power all over Europe being forced out of the markets or having to bid negative.
> French national debt is 3.5 TRILLION, most because of social system. EDF debt is 50bn while debt/ebitda ratio is about 2 (while EON/RWE have a worse ratio) To suggest EDF debt has any meaningful impact here is borderline insane.
I love how adding ~€100-200B from nuclear handouts to build the EDF2 fleet is "trivial. A 2.5 - 5% increase in the already extremely bloated French debt is insignificant! Move along!
> Arenh was mandated by EU so that EDF doesn't erase competition.
Because the entire French fleet was built with state aid. But that you conveniently ignore.
> Mind you, Germany already spent on EEG alone almost 2x the cost of entire french nuclear fleet (looking at public numbers from court/DE) but it still has worse emissions. In a similar timeframe (messmer) france almost finished the job.
Again looking backwards. You know we live in 2025? What you're telling me is that 2012 solar was expensive and thus required large EEG. Do you understand that we're not building 2012 solar, we're buiding 2025 solar.
Also love the victim complex.
> On the other hand, both the praised California and South Australia, leaders in ren deployment, do have both worse emissions than France and higher household prices
They're not done yet? Are they claiming to be done?
> It's indeed funny to me how people are so concerned about the costs of nuclear but are just fine with full system costs of renewables that strangely, are not that cheap as predicted by orgs like aemo/csiro in Australia and even more so in other markets.
Because these "full system costs" have never been shown to materialize? They are fossil shill and nuclear bro talking points because they can't deal with reality.
We need to 1.5x - 3x our grids to decarbonize society and industry. The extra costs coming from a renewable grid when already having double or triple the grid size are trivial.
Just like you nuclear bros never talk about nuclear unreliability. It is apparently 100% reliable except when it isn't. And then it also needs fossil gas peakers to manage the peak load because load following nuclear power simply becomes stupid.
You also have the issue of trying to force it on the population. Why should a home owner with rooftop solar and a home battery draw electricity from the grid?
Explain to me how you would deploy a nuclear plant in this grid:
To be fair, a lot of nuclear reactors around the world should be shut down just due to age and outdated designs. However they should also be being replaced with modern reactors, which few people have, which makes shutting them down while we are still largely utilizing fossil fuel power and chemical plants really dumb.
also to remember that thorium is the dominant radioactive byproduct of "rare" earth metal refinement; so they're probably isolating large amounts of it so might as well figure out something to do with it.
Thorium is abundant anywhere where Rare Earths are mined. You can get it almost anywhere. You don't even mine it, you process it out of tailing piles from other mining operations.
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"...
No country has seriously invested in the thorium fuel cycle because it cannot be used to create weapons. Unfortunately, the technology also began to look most promising as an energy source around the same time the Three Mile Island nuclear accident effectively ended all interest in nuclear energy in the United States.
India has shown some of the most interest to date, due to their lack of domestic uranium reserves. But it's been slow going their fast breeder reactor plans were delayed by like two decades. But it is built and it was loaded with fuel last month [0]
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.
Theoretically, perhaps, but I don’t think anyone with a serious interest in weapons would pursue it. From a nonproliferation perspective, I’d guess the infrastructure necessary to remove contaminants from uranium bred through the thorium cycle would be costly and difficult to conceal.
Multiple countries have detonated nuclear bombs using U-233 derived from thorium reactors! [0] Practically I agree with you that thorium is proliferation resistant and if someone is bomb hungry they won't prioritize it, but if you want to set up the bomb and all you have is thorium... The infrastructure wouldn't necessarily be significantly larger or worse than conventional enrichment.
Depends on what you want out of your reactor. You want to make a synthetic fuel, Thorium not Uranium. You want a liquid fueled reactor (because its safer and proliferation resistant), Thorium not Uranium. You want 900C heat instead of 300C heat, Thorium not Uranium.
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 cope is strong here. The only liquid fueled reactors with any operational experience got shut down because of corrosion issues causing major leaks.
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.
Technically true and practically false. Only once has anyone done that. The bomb was considered a dud and the research was ultimately destroyed. So while you could, it would require completely reinventing all the original research that went into making the original one. Lookup operation teapot for more details.
Gates invested in the traveling wave reactor which was a bust. Then he sold his entire investment in nuclear several years ago. He's very rich so perhaps he has other nuclear investments that I'm not aware of but none are in the MSTR space unless they are secret/private.
To be fair, these advances are not being made in China due to "free industry". They have something of a command economy for their critical sectors. So it's unfair not to point out that it's easy to make advances if a nation as a whole points to a hill and says, "take that hill". Of course you can do it under those circumstances.
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.
Interesting claim that the reactor doesn't need water and can be built away from the coast. I thought all reactors used steam to turn a turbine to produce electricity. Something special here?
This type of reactor would probably use super-critical CO2 instead of water to transfer the heat from the reactor to the turbines, so no water. The design is safer that way.
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).
its easy to put china's perspective on expansion of nuclear when you look at how much is planned/being built vs how much is planned/being built for coal/gas vs projected demand...
China has distracted the USA energy focus by dumping cheap solar panels here while continuing to develop advanced nuclear generation capabilities at home.
China is simply betting on all horses: solar, wind, thorium, batteries, coal even, anything to not buy foreign oil and be as independent, self-sufficient as possible.
Seems like it's working too
Exactly. That's less noticed by many people. Just give you two examples:
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.
Yup.. Happens to align somewhat with climate goals too, luckily for the rest of us. Once solar+batteries becomes the cheapest form of generation, the coal usage should also drop, if that isn't already the case
> Once solar+batteries becomes the cheapest form of generation, the coal usage should also drop
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).
That's capacity, not generation. Getting through the accounting tricks that make renewables seem viable is a challenge. 1 watt of nuclear capacity is worth 1.5 watts of FF and 9 watts of renewables. That's because the amount of power from each type of plant is very different due to downtimes of generation. Nuclear runs all the time and refuels for a couple of days every 18 months (depending on the reactor). FF plants run most of the time by require 10x more maintenance downtime. Renewables only make power about 10% of the time. That's how they skew the numbers to make renewables seem viable when they produce a shockingly low amount of actual power. Oh, and if you use renewables for baseload you have to keep a spinning reserve which means they actually increase (not decrease) the amount of CO2 emitted per watt generated.
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
You should tell the folks overwhelming choosing to build and finance renewable power plants! They clearly missed this key point, they’ll surely be grateful you let them know that their renewable investments don’t make sense, and they should have picked nuclear due to it being cheaper overall
We have basically limitless carbon free energy with the tech we have now: solar, wind, batteries, fission breeders, large power grids that can move power around cheaply, etc. Put all those together and we have incredible energy abundance.
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.
I'd love to see as much electrification as possible.
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.
If that’s the case it makes aviation like 6-7%, still low. Coal fired electricity generation is king when it comes to climate change, followed by oil fueled land transport and natural gas. Deforestation is higher too. Aviation is part of the long tail.
Nope, you can't make synthetic fuel at anywhere near a competitive price from electricity. To make a synthetic fuel, the major energy input is heat (yes I know, you use electrolysis to crack the water, its a minor part of the energy required). The only way to make a cheap synthetic fuel is from a nuclear reactor that produces heat in the 900C range (could be 700C or 1100C, but near there). You can't do that with solid fuel reactors, you need a liquid fueled reactor for that. And you need Thorium for a liquid fueled reactor. That's why this design is so popular.
> The only way to make a cheap synthetic fuel is from a nuclear reactor that produces heat in the 900C range (could be 700C or 1100C, but near there). You can't do that with solid fuel reactors, you need a liquid fueled reactor for that
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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…
FF extraction is very profitable and has been for a long time. Those that make money from extraction spend a lot on lobbying. They don't want nuclear power because its the only thing that can really replace FFs. The public opinion angle is just useful idiots being manipulated by people who make money from FF extraction. That makes it far easier to get the politicians to do what they want (kill nuclear).
Before anybody gets too excited, it's better to understand what exactly happened.
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...
The real killer feature isn’t "more thorium than uranium" (thorium is already 4× more abundant). The real win is that thorium MSRs can eat the existing mountain of "spent" fuel rods from regular reactors and turn what we currently call high-level waste into electricity while leaving waste that’s safe in a few hundred years instead of tens of thousands. That’s hundreds of thousands of tons of "waste" suddnely becoming centuries of clean fuel. That alone flips the economics on its head.
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.
1. There is no mountain of nuclear waste.
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.
> Talking about “thousands of tonnes” of nuclear waste is comically misleading when you realise how tiny the volume is.
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.
> Talking about “thousands of tonnes” of nuclear waste is comically misleading when you realise how tiny the volume is.
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?
> Talking about “thousands of tonnes” of nuclear waste is comically misleading when you realise how tiny the volume is.
What is the actual volume?
Long life, high activity nuclear waste represents less than 3500m3 (one Olympic swimming pool), and this, since the start of civil nuclear electrical production in the 50's. World wide.
Global waste is 400,000+ tons (https://www.stimson.org/2020/spent-nuclear-fuel-storage-and-...). Even 1 pool full is ~28,000 tons (UO2 package 8tons/m3). Urainium is dense.
20 swimming pools of total waste isn't that impressive. I don't want to live near that, but I'm sure I'd we can find a place to put that in that will have minimal impact on people's lives.
Exactly. The waste isn't really a problem. But it doesn't have to be waste. That's the point. All that U235 in 'spent' silos? You can get 60x - 100x its OG power feeding it to nextgen reactors. So cool
I wrote about the high energy, long life waste. The part really causing issues.
I guess you mean the "super hot for centuries" minor actinides (Np-237, Am-241/243, Cm-242/244/245 etc..)? These are less than 1% global waste, but next gen reactors can still eat them. The majority of waste (95%+) is U-235, then Pu, which nextgen also eats.
Many magnitudes of order less than any of: all the steel, glass, aluminium, wood, or plastic, ever produced, and we aren’t yet drowning in cubic miles of any of those.
But a disposed sachet from Australia isnt going to enter my cranium here in India... oh wait
You sound butthurt by what the person youre responding to is saying. There's no liability in their statement, its severe optimism.
> The real win is that thorium MSRs can eat the existing mountain of "spent" fuel rods from regular reactors
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...
[2] https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html
Deferring to ye true experts here. My comment was overblown and inaccurate, confusing all next gen reactors with this work. Thanks
This can be done in usual breeders like superphenix or bn800. What china wants to experiment with is continuous filtration instead of using breeding+purex/pyroprocessing. Still, it's nothing more than an experiment, china is rather slow with nuclear compared to french messmer and sweden in the past
Well I'm just an interested outsider. I will defer to the true experts here.
Fundamentally the problem is that Uranium is so damn energy dense and abundant enough that there's little need to set up these complicated recycling systems. If we start to run out of Uranium then this technology starts to look appealing, but in the modern day it just doesn't make economic sense.
> Uranium is so damn energy dense and abundant enough that there's little need to set up these complicated recycling systems
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
Uranium can be stockpiled for years in advance, relatively easily. Enough to tide over a small war while you're setting up domestic production. And China should have enough low-grade ores for that.
Also, they can bring it in by rail from Russia. So they can avoid the seaward path.
China imports substantially all of its uranium from Kazakhstan and Namibia, and a tiny bit from US. Russia is insignificant.
https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/CHN/yea...
> they can bring it in by rail from Russia
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.
> Uranium can be stockpiled for years in advance, relatively easily
So can oil. Energy security is an important priority for a global power.
Stockpiles are good. Own supply chains are better.
Uranium is far, far energy denser than any fossil fuel, and thus much easier to stockpile.
> Uranium is far, far energy denser than any fossil fuel, and thus much easier to stockpile
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.
A sufficiently large stockpile of uranium gives China time to simply pivot away from depending on imported Uranium (either by building new mines locally or building out solar or such). An equivalent stockpile of oil simply isn't feasible, if only because oil is usually used directly and not via a source-agnostic electrical grid.
Is 150 vs 250 years of energy reserves a disadvantage in practice?
> Is 150 vs 250 years of energy reserves a disadvantage in practice?
Reserves != stockpiles.
I know. I am not saying I got the order of magnitude exactly right, just pointing out beyond a certain threshold the size of the stockpile doesn't matter. I suspect that if a nation state puts its mind to it, stockpiles great enough to last a war are totally possible.
Which is why renewables are even better. Zero fuel input.
Well no, no country on earth has 5 years worth of oil stockpile, logistically it's impossible.
Nothing can compete with the energy density of uranium.
Arguably Qatar does, as do most other nations who produce it locally. That is exactly GP's point.
Oil is relatively easily, inexpensively, and quickly mined and refined. Compared to, say, uranium.
That's not a stockpile, they have to extract and refine it to use it. Russia understood it the hard way with the refineries attacks.
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.
We're not talking about ore, rather fuel. Uranium ore might be inexpensive, I don't know, but converting that ore into fuel is not an easy task. I'm guessing that the reason it's not profitable is that so little of it is actually needed, relative to oil.
There's not that much Uranium actually that's economically sensible to extract. The NEA says in their 2024 report on Uranium [1]:
> 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...
Out of curioosity, do they forecast at what point it becomes cheaper to breed than mine?
There are tons of mines which were shut down a long time ago, but could be reopened if there was much of a uranium market again.
The actual efficiency of breeding thorium is so low, it would take a HUGE scarcity to actual make any sense.
Local scarcity, not necessarily global scarcity. Especially during times of conflict. China has no uranium, so this may make sense for them.
Also, currently all transport channels for uranium are oil dependent, which is becoming a scarce resource in the relevant timeline - decades.
China has massive Uranium reserves [https://www.nucnet.org/news/chinese-state-media-announces-di...].
It's a bit different. Higher demand will lead to higher price, opening more options to mine. Now uranium is too cheap to open new mines and exploration
And I hate to pollute this thread with more AI fear-mongering, but AI inference is already showing its effects on the energy sector and it is expected to grow very rapidly. Energy demands may likely grow at a stronger rate than initially expected.
Hm, is that really the case? Nextgen reactors are not just about lowering the cost of U. Or "saving the environment" from waste. Bonuses, sure. Real strength is increasing efficiency, which means: 1) lower buildout costs, 2) faster time to first iphone charged, 3) smaller, safer designs. They're a way around the giganto-plants of the past, on the way to making nuclear power the ubiquitous reliable utility it should be.
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.
The reason TMSR is appealing is that U-233 is hard to use for weapons purposes because it produces a lot of gamma radiation, which makes it hard to work with. There is also the claim that TMSRs are much safer designs than is possible with Uranium. It's possible that if TMSRs were mass produced that we could see them installed in many countries where we don't want to see Uranium or Plutonium reactors for proliferation reasons.
At this point few care about this topic. It's not like it's easy to make a bomb with classic pwr
With a Uranium-based reactor you need a) a source of enriched Uranium (see proliferation risks), b) inspectors to check that you're not post-processing fuel rods to extract Plutonium.
With Thorium if the operator country wants to extract the U-233 you think "maybe let them, they won't like it".
With classic pwr rods can't be used for weapons because of parasitic isotopes. At best you need to run the reactor in a specific way that would trigger global attention looking at power fluctuations. And still it'll not be easy afterwards. You can buy enriched uranium from others. With th- I'm not sure but don't you need enriched material anyway to kickstart it?
Sorry, but there are quite a few things you are missing. Nuclear engineering is well, nuclear engineering. The first big difference is that you can use the Thorium in a liquid fueled reactor instead of a solid fueled one. This allows you to burn far more of the fuel. For example, 2-4% of a solid fuel rod would fission, while in a liquid fueled reactor you can get to 90+%. This is good economically for 2 reasons: 1) more energy per unit of fuel and 2) the waste lasts far less time.
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.
> When you realize that the only real choices for baseload are FF and nuclear, the real political situation makes sense.
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.
You can get +- same efficiency with classic breeding and purex/pyroprocessing
There's also the choice to match our energy consumption dynamically to intermittent power sources (e.g. solar), reducing the baseload demand. This is entirely orthogonal to decisions about where the baseload generation should come from.
That's called load following. That's also a thing a liquid fueled reactor can do that a solid fueled reactor can't.
doesnt make a difference to the economics of a nuke plant. Fuel consumption is a tiny fraction of the cost of nuke power, its almost all fixed cost - amortized construction costs, operations, etc. You need to run it at as close to 100% always to have any chance at payback & economical $/kw. Thats why they arent getting built.
No, it's the opposite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_side_management. Load-following is a good property for a power plant to have, though, especially if the plant is suitable for baseload generation.
You need to go tell the French that what they've been doing for decades isn't possible, then.
EPR has shown that the French have lost the ability to build reactors rapidly and on budget.
> Nuclear engineering is well, nuclear engineering.
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.
> abundant enough
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.
Question is if it's cheaper vs passive seawater extraction of uranyl. China already got it somewhat comparable to classic uranium
It's cheaper with unlimited fusion energy, which defeats the point.
and we still don't know where to store the trash. Thorium seems better (but my knowledge is close to zero here, I must admit:-) )
> we still don't know where to store the trash
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.
No, you really do not.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain
Radioactive waste is decidedly nasty stuff, but the total volume of it is tiny. There are plenty of chemicals that are just as nasty that were simply buried in the ground in much larger quantities over the years with nary a peep from the population. Nuclear waste is a political problem not a technological one.
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 a political problem, maybe.
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.
> peculiar that it's a political problem in pretty much every country
It's a political problem in every country that shares its nuclear heritage from the ashes of WWII.
That's a political problem, not a technical one.
We also know that we could re-cycle nuclear waste with other nuclear plant designs, but the US chooses not to.
What trash? Where’s the waste?
Point to the nuclear waste.
If there’s so much of it somebody must be able to point it out to me.
You know. In US it's yucca mnt, similar to onkalo. Its just not politically pursued as a priority. Recycling is banned
Joking here since it would be impractical, but I guess you can bury it under my house. I'd not be bothered at all to live on top of a modern nuclear waste deposit like Finlands.
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.
Have you come across the ‘coke can of thorium’ vs ‘800 elephants of coal’ guy yet?
Dr Barry Brook. Reading his stuff 15 years ago flipped me.
Russians recycle it
I'm getting impression that China is trying to position itself as scientific powerhouse before its massive industrial production scheme stops working. Smart move.
> trying to position itself as scientific powerhouse before its massive industrial production scheme stops working
Holy shit what a perspective. Put it in a museum. If this is representative, put it on our grave.
My understanding is that reactors will use that plutonium just fine, so the energy you get from a fresh fuel rod is almost exclusively from uranium fission but, as time goes on, an increasingly large share is from plutonium fission.
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.
No, this is a misunderstanding of how fission works.
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.
In principle increasing the conversion ratio from 0.1 to something higher than 1.0 should be doable
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?
CTRL+F protactinium
Once again, nothing.
The notable thing here is that it's a molten salt reactor design, where the fuel is dissolved in a molten salt (FLiBe). This allows online continuous processing of the fuel, unlike with solid fuel rods sealed inside a pressure vessel.
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.
MSRs have some attractive features, but they also have significant drawbacks.
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.
To add to this, even with the shielding provided by water in light water reactors, the neutron exposure is _the_ limiting factor for the reactor vessel.
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.
Many old LWR's have had their reactor vessels heat treated during a maintenance break to undo some of that neutron radiation damage and extend the life of the reactor.
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).
Yes, it's called "annealing". Basically, the core is de-fueled and a huge electric resistive heater is put inside it. Then the entire vessel is heated to something like 600C, and kept there for several days.
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.
You are describing "dry" annealing there. This has not been applied anywhere, as it requires removing and reinstalling the internal support structures inside the reactor vessel.
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.
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2428/ML24282A716.pdf
This was AFAIU a 'dry annealing' on a full scale power reactor: https://inis.iaea.org/records/505bf-gcq02 and https://inis.iaea.org/records/a42j1-np856
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.)
I wonder if it's possible to run it hot enough for the radiation damage (basically a bunch of dislocations, right?) to just anneal itself out continuously, like how Wigner energy is dissipated in graphite when it's hot enough.
No, this is fundamentally impossible with steel. Annealing works by making the material more "plastic", and this necessarily reduces its tensile strength. Which is the limiting factor for the vessel.
You can make the vessel thicker to compensate, but then you can just make it thicker in the first place and skip annealing.
I think it has a key advantage for China specifically though which is it consumes significantly less water and they have a lot of water poor territory.
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.
> One can shield using (say) graphite
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 dear god, no [...] Lead makes the cheapest and best shield.
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.
Lead is fine for shielding of sufficiently energetic neutrons, which can lose energy to lead by inelastic nuclear collisions. But below the threshold for that lead does very little.
Maybe as a special case then as a thin layer before following up with water or PET, or PET impregnated with boron. But would also need an extra layer following it for secondary gamma emission from neutron capture.
I understand this is how accelerator shielding can work, although I think one would use polyethylene rather than PET (it has more hydrogen).
Oh you're right. PET is silly to use. Polyethylene would be the right thing.
Lead is essentially useless as a shield for neutrons that are below the minimum excitation energy of a lead nucleus. Elastic neutron collisions with lead leave the neutron energy essentially unchanged.
I assume this is why an alloy of lead is used in practice. Still doesn't change the fact that graphite is a moderator not a shielding material. Also, structural materials in reactors are usually invisible to neutrons and a sandwich of materials is often used. Different layers do different things. Usually, one layer of shielding and one layer of a material that isn't impacted (much) by neutron flux for structural strength.
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.
A moderator is a neutron shielding material, since it removes energy from the neutrons. That's what moderation is all about. Water is a much better moderator, but graphite still performs the function.
> notable thing here is that it's a molten salt reactor design
Notable, but not unique. The unique bit is it burns thorium.
It breeds thorium to fissionable uranium from a starting fissionable uranium starter fuel. It doesn't directly use thorium for fuel.
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.
> Thorium is about twice as abundant as Uranium
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
Geoneutrino surveys show the Tibetan plateau and western China are full of uranium and thorium:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoneutrino
Economic recoverable reserves are another matter, but there's plenty there.
That's what you learn playing factorio
Eh, U-235 is .7%, not 1%, but also U-238 can be bred into Plutonium. What makes Thorium interesting -besides its abundance- is that U-233 is very difficult to work with, so proliferation concerns are mitigated.
Not really, the US bred several tons of U-233 from thorium in the 60s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
What absorbs the neutrons then?
The thorium cycle is generally neutron negative.
> thorium cycle is generally neutron negative
Source for the fuel cycle?
Thorium 232 -> 233 is neutron negative. But after that you get all kinds of nonsense.
Thorium 232 is the thorium in the cycle yes. And all kinds of nonsense is correct for the daughter products. But in general, to actually use do anything with thorium you need excess neutrons.
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.
> to actually use do anything with thorium you need excess 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.
It’s almost like there is a reason why it’s not commonly used despite all the hype.
Sure, if you ignore all the parts of the neutron economy that make it possible to work. The part everyone missed in this discussion is that all of the numbers of neutrons (and their barns) aren't constants. Since the fuel is a fluid, you can use density and shape to improve the neutron economy in the reactor core. Basically, when the atoms are closer together, the economy improves. You can also use a better moderator like graphite since the basic design is safer and the rate of fission is just easier to control.
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.
Nah, it’s just hard and silly - without a lot of payoff. When there are plenty of easier options for most nations.
That you’re even discussing graphite moderated (?!!) makes this pretty clear.
> That you’re even discussing graphite moderated (?!!) makes this pretty clear.
And why would this be? Is graphite expensive? No it isn't. Also, we created a working one of these designed in the 1960's without computers. You seriously think this is hard compared to other types of engineering we do today?
A LFTR can also do things that a PWR or BWR can't and has several major advantages. But since it uses pencil lead apparently we can't even try it.
Because it has dangerous behavior in real reactors due to the void co-efficient behavior, to the point of… being the cause of the largest nuclear disaster in recorded history?
Not OP but he maybe referring to the new gas cooled gen 4 reactors not Soviet RBMKs. The ones I heard are working with sealed beads of uranium, encased in porous carbon, then some other layers, including some carbide (silicon?). The porosity of carbon absorbs gases but they ultimately stay sealed. The whole thing is helium cooled.
The issue with those is the pellets end up not as well sealed as thought or promised (many, many leaks historically), so then you have other problems.
Yeah. I was listening to David Ruzic's video [1] about them getting one of those reactors on campus and when he showed the structure of beads, that's the first thing that popped in my head - at that size how are they going to ensure every single bead has an intact surface.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@illinoisenergyprof6878/videos
> What is left of the nuclear industry wants to build current designs like the AP1400
That's just Westinghouse. There is a lot of research happening in small and medium-sized reactors.
> There are no technological barriers, this is entirely political
To thorium MSRs? The main barrier is economic.
A better explanation of the significance:
https://www.stdaily.com/web/English/2025-11/17/content_43298...
> Now, the research team is conducting systematic studies on the key scientific issues related to adding thorium, and aims to completethe construction of a 100-megawatt TMSR demonstration project, and begin operation by 2035.
For comparison: A commercial nuclear power plant is 1 gigawatt, a 10x difference. I assume this would be the next step.
The typical 1 gigawatt rating for a nuclear power reactor is measuring electrical output. Given the various inefficiencies, the actual reactor output (as heat) is something like 3x that amount. Whereas a research reactor will be quoted as thermal output.
That to say, a typical commercial reactor might be 30x the power of a 100 MW research device.
Thanks! We've put that link in the toptext as well.
Every other day its "China creates a breakthrough that was never thought possible" and "America shits in hand; Claps."
At least in this case it's somewhat sensationalized because the US did this in the 1950’s and concluded that it was more economical and simpler to use mined Uranium instead of breeding with Thorium.
This post is just an excerpt—it's the first 4 paragraphs of a 29-paragraph article,
https://archive.is/DQpXM ("China reaches energy independence milestone by ‘breeding’ uranium from thorium"–SCMP)
Thanks! - since you've found a readable link, I've swapped https://humanprogress.org/china-reaches-energy-milestone-by-... out for the original source at the top, and put the archive link in the top text.
This type of progress shows China is capable of moving from an economy that’s build on labor arbitrage or copying others to genuine innovation. It’s also further evidence of the extreme competence of the CCP in governance, which I feel should be acknowledged despite their authoritarian negatives.
> This type of progress shows China is capable of moving from an economy that’s build on labor arbitrage or copying others to genuine innovation
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.
> This type of progress shows China is capable of moving from an economy that’s build on labor arbitrage or copying others to genuine innovation
Why wouldn't it?
"extreme competence of the CCP in governance"
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.
Very good. Thought-termination achieved. Branch pruned. Back-tracking...
Now where's my pony?
Yea but afaik China doesn’t have that kind of issue. They do have an issue with anticommunists but I’m not sympathetic to their cause.
They very much d have that sort of issue and worse. Uighurs and other minorities, treatment of gays....
Worse than us? We're conducting a genocide. The "Uighur genocide" is not real, the people creating that narrative were right-wing christian nationalists and none of it held up. We know what a genocide looks like in the 21st century because it's being live-streamed.
Don't buy US propaganda so easily. They want to create a moral equivalence where there is none.
> We know what a genocide looks like in the 21st century because it's being live-streamed.
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.
This came up several times the last few weeks, but never stayed on the front for long. Also no comments.
I guess soon the west has to copy chinas tech.
Breeding is a technology looking for a business case.
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.
It also apparently provides a way to make reactors that don’t depend as much on water so they don’t all have to be near the coast.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1?wprov=sfti1#History
> also apparently provides a way to make reactors that don’t depend as much on water so they don’t all have to be near the coast
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.
Nuclear plants don't need more water than a coal plant of the same power, they both use the same steam turbine with water as cold source.
Emphasis on current market conditions. Relations with uranium mining countries and environmental opposition to uranium mining could shift conditions.
The truth is that nuclear power is not that financially attractive at the present and would the price of uranium rise enough that breeders would become economically viable most countries would just stop bothering with nuclear power altogether.
The cost of nuclear power is almost entirely capex and financing, not opex. Uranium input cost for nuclear power plants is 0.5c/kWh. With breeders you can divide that by about 100.
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.
Capex and financing is still an issue for many countries, and the opex is a non-zero commitment beyond just the fiscal portion. Most countries that pass-over nuclear energy are fairly justified in their decision. The status-quo is still not super psyched about nuclear proliferation.
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.
With recent price drops of solar and storage the difference is now multiples.
This is just plain false. Learn the difference between capacity cost and utilization cost.
It is LCOE outside of the US tariff bubble.
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...
> The truth is that nuclear power is not that financially attractive
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.
They’re not financially attractive in other parts of the world either. China, a zero litigation single party state, is building some but a tiny % compared to their renewable buildout
They need a lot of energy from a variety of sources. China has 30 or so reactors under construction (half or so of all active projects).
"China currently has 58 operable reactors with a total capacity of 56.9 GW. A further 30 reactors, with a total capacity of 34.4 GW are under construction" [1]
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...
Comparing nuclear reactor capacity to solar capacity is misleading because renewable capacity dramatically overstates actual generation. IIRC The capacity factor for solar ranges between %5-%25 of total capacity generated.
That doesn't significantly change the argument. Most solar plants have capacity factors of around 20% (5% might apply to home systems, but not commerical), compared to nuclear which has around 80%. So a factor of 4. So numbers change a bit on the previous poster, China just installed 3x more solar in 1 year than all the nuclear under construction, or they essentially installed the same amout of solar in one year as all existing and under construction nuclear combined. And if we look at projections, next year they likely will install twice as much solar...
While China is often put up as the poster child for nuclear power, they are actually a great example of how nuclear is being overtaken by renewables. China's 2019 plan was that by 2035 nuclear would account for ~8% of generated electricity (up from ~5%). Since then percentage dropped to 4.5% (and the drop seems to be accelerating). Unless something dramatically changes nuclear will account for less than 4% (not the planned 8%) of generated electricity by 2035. All that is due to the raise of renewables (largely solar). I suspect we will not see China build close to those projected 200 GW and the percentage to be even lower, just due to the exponential growth in solar.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
Yes yes, one of the usual reflexive context free points repeated every time solar comes up. Whatever the actual capacity factor is(5% is not a serious number ), I’m sure chinas energy planners know that, it’s hardly a gotcha. And still they’ve choose to build solar at a volume massively dwarfing nuclear
(Edit: cycomanic explained it much better and more patiently than me)
I don't think it's reflexive to point out that evaluating the headline numbers like that is misleading. People who are new to the topic will misinformed if they think you're describing an apples to apples comparison.
The issue is that even with your correction the point stands. You weren't refuting, you were being irrelevant.
As if their massive solar production (and innovation) is market based...
It's not the litigiousness that makes it expensive. France was producing nuclear power plants at a cost per watt that nearly matches modern China. In fact, the mind-numbing cost overruns seem unique to the US.
Here's a Nature article about it:
https://archive.ph/Tpe0j
Seems to me like it's more of a story of corruption than of over-regulation
france cant do it any more either. Flamanville was 12 years late and [1] 400% over budget. EPR2 is already delayed and over budget and they havent even started building yet!
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...
That might be somewhat true but Flamanville was still about $4/watt while Vogtle 3 and 4 (which were built around the same time) were about $15/watt. It's still hard to place France and the US in the same bucket. The US really is uniquely inept at nuclear costs
Flammanville 3 was about €14/W, or about $16/W.
https://mastodon.energy/@Sustainable2050/113695635521714572
The UK does the same thing. In fact, its across the entire west. Its almost as if absurd over-regulation is expensive. The Vogtle plant construction for example had to deal with 3 different tranches of changes to the design caused by regulators. Its not corruption, its over-regulation. If it is corruption, it is corrupt politicians intentionally over-regulating because their backers make lots of money extracting FFs.
China has more uranium reserves and less thorium reserves than the US though
Most thorium: India, Brazil, Australia, US, Turkey
Most uranium: Australia, Kazakhstan, Canada, Russia, Namibia
They highlight less the advantages from breeding, than other advantages of the molten salt design, like not needing a lot of cooling water, which allows this reactor to operate in the Gobi desert, the possibility of replacing the fuel without halting the reactor and various safety features.
Nuclear reactors don't need a particularly big amount of cooling water.
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.
As the reactor is operating in the Gobi desert and China claims that its main advantage for them is exactly this possibility of operating in the inland arid areas of the country, unlike their current reactors that must be installed only close to the sea, in the part of the country with abundant water, they must have a solution for the cold source that does not involve water.
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.
> As the reactor is operating in the Gobi desert and China claims that its main advantage for them is exactly this possibility of operating in the inland arid areas of the country
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.
> other advantages of the molten salt design, like not needing a lot of cooling water
This advantage is conserved by all non-water moderated reactor designs.
The use of water for moderation is one thing, the use of water for cooling is another thing, even if in many reactors water is used for both purposes.
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.
I believe the point was that non-water moderated designs typically operate at higher core temperature than LWRs, so they can reject waste heat at higher temperature (or reject less waste heat per unit of electrical energy produced), and that makes rejection to air more practical.
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.
> very high temperature reactor might even be able to work with an open air Brayton cycle system
Is anyone doing that? Everything I've seen is Rankine.
No, because it would require very high temperature. The air coming out of the compressor of a gas turbine would already be hotter than the water/steam coming out of a LWR. It would likely involve a core temperature of around 1000 C. The turbine inlet temperature of a modern jet engine is at least 1500 C. There would likely be thermal NOx production, so post treatment of the gas might be necessary in an open cycle system.
Westinghouse plans to with their eVinci reactor. It will use an open-air Brayton cycle: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2409/ML24092A122.pdf
There is no business case for basic research, but if you stop basic research long enough you will have no business. The United States and its allies seem to have completely forgotten this.
This isn't basic research, it's applied research. Applied research lives or dies on the plausibility of the ultimate applicability.
It makes sense for big monopolies like Bell, or the CCP. The investment can be justified if the ones investing are confident they will be able to capture the value and not some competitor.
Bell Labs also served to maintain positive perceptions of the monopoly. Unix was famously developed despite the knowledge that AT&T would not be able to offer it as an independent product.
No business sense for scientific research? You know you're completely destroying the argument for capitalism, right?
I don't see how it follows. Anyway it's debatable if the current system with antitrust laws is true capitalism. One of those poorly-defined words that people argue over.
This isn't basic research. The US has had this tech for half a century. There's just no reason to do it. Uranium is plentiful and cheap and arguably safer.
The fuel cost of a NPP has almost no impact on the NPP's operational expenses and a LFTR (like all liquid fuel designs) is a far safer design. Nobody in the energy industry has talked about the fuel cost in nuclear in 50 years. It isn't even a consideration when comparing designs. Waste volume, safety, politics, and construction labor costs are the factors which are considered (also temp of the heat maybe).
Reducing the energy sector to pure business would probably work in the 1990s, but not now, when countries are afraid of strategic dependence on potentially hostile suppliers.
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.
> in current market conditions.
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.
> soon the west has to copy chinas tech
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.
I don't think Australia is having an identity crisis. There won't be research backing from Australia as the Nuclear agenda one party is pushing is essentially a cover story for replacing antique coal plants with gas plants. A genuine Nuclear plan for Australia would include realistic timelines and budgets, and use of other renewables to replace coal plants that are failing today while meeting climate targets. And meeting climate targets is important, because if we don't care about them then coal and gas will remain cheaper than Nuclear for Australia due to having large reserves.
> I don't think Australia is having an identity crisis
That was tongue in cheek. It's being indecisive. I guess that's conserved across the Anglosphere.
The cost of the fuel is less than 0.1% of the cost of running a NPP. The cost of the fuel has almost nothing to do with the economics of nuclear power. And 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. The amount of incorrect information in this thread is truly shocking. For example, you can make synthetic fuel from a LFTR, you can't from a BWR or a PWR. That might be a valuable feature, don't you think.
> cost of the fuel has almost nothing to do with the economics of nuclear power
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.
I don't know of a production NPP that isn't a PWR or BWR online today. One could exist but it would be very very old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_gas-cooled_reactor not that old
> don't know of a production NPP that isn't a PWR or BWR
Is the article about a production power plant?
> Thorium MSRs don't make sense for the Americas, Europe or Australia. We have plenty of uranium.
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
Thorium is and will always be a less desirable fuel source - except if you don't have access to uranium or are trying to make your MSRs work (which to date have signs of progress but no proof of commercial viability). MSR also inherently unstable due to salt.
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.
This is US tech that China is copying. We could have done this at anytime in the last 60 years. The blocker isn't technology, its scientifically uninformed politics.
The blocker is really just cheap Uranium making Thorium unnecessary
No the West doesn't need this technology given its significant amount of uranium supply. Is it a nice to have - sure.
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.
Rickover was breeding with Thorium at Shippingport in the 1950’s. What China did is not new
The entire Chinese way is to copy and steal from the West, its the other way around.
In the present day, this is a delusional take.
China has engaged in industrial espionage on an unprecedented scale. To the extent there is delusion, it's in American spies being slow to returning the favour.
Clearly you have not visited China.
Try it someday. You _will_ be surprised by some of the technologies there.
Yeah technologies they obtained from hacking other countries and their corporations lol
why spend millions and a decade doing R&D when you can just hack American companies and steal it all for free!
Interesting. What surprising technologies do they have?
I mean we're already doing that in many avenues. Solar being the most obvious. The only functioning solar manufacturing plants in the US are Chinese-owned and are only here to take advantage of subsidies.
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)
Lunacy and CCP propaganda
China is far better at long term societal planning. Ultimately, I expect they will be the ones who can solve the climate crisis, after being one of the biggest contributors to the problem.
> after being one of the biggest contributors to the problem.
How many "Made in China" products do you have at home right now? Who is contributing to the problem?
Actually by far the biggest, in terms of total greenhouse emissions (30% of the world). Though other countries emit a lot more per capita.
Sure, but most of that is from industrial production, and really should be debited on importing nations’ CO2 accounts. Whereas in the US transportation, heating and construction are the main consumers.
Importing nations are already paying for the imports themselves, from which China profits. It seems reasonable that this leaves the responsibility for the energy used on China's side.
If you believe that, you also believe that shipping landfill or toxic chemicals to third-worlf countries absolves us for responsibility over them.
A detailed explanation of the Thorium Fuel Cycle [1].
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.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IqcRl849R0
Classic nuclear in china is pretty cheap, 2.5-3bn/unit. They dont have western problems
Meanwhile Germany just decommissioned its last nuclear reactors. Given the challenges of baseload renewable generation, it's frustrating to watch working infrastructure being dismantled while we're still heavily dependent on fossil fuels.
Comparing those old conventional reactors to MSR is not suitable at all. And they were not fully functional past their expiry date.
> And they were not fully functional past their expiry date.
Most of Germany's Nuclear Power Plant could have run for many additional decades. Especially the Konvoi-PWRs from the 80's
Us is extending licenses to 80y, heck Switzerland extended benzau to 64y. The expiry date talk is pure nonsense. German nuclear had excellent CF and extremely advanced safety, incl double containment
> Comparing those old conventional reactors to MSR is not suitable at all
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.
It's not just greens. Decision is jointly made by most parties. Spd is antinuclear. Cdu doesnt care. Afd probably just uses populism
By all the doomerism about German and nuclear there is at least Wendelstein 7-x doing frontier work. It's fine to get rid of legacy nuclear if there is a feasible bridge ahead.
Not sure what the point of this comment is. China has its equivalent EAST, France has ITER. Countries can do both fission and fusion research. To me the problem isn't that Germany closed some legacy reactors, but that too little is done into looking into alternative designs.
Also France. Rip Superphênix
> Against a background of ongoing protest and low-level sabotage, on the night of January 18, 1982 an RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade attack was launched against the unfinished plant. [0]
I'm beyond speechless.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix#Rocket_attack
> On May 8, 2003, Chaïm Nissim, who in 1985 was elected to the Geneva cantonal legislature for the Swiss Green Party,[17] admitted carrying out the attack. He claimed that the weapons were obtained from Carlos the Jackal via the Belgian terrorist organisation Cellules Communistes Combattantes (Communist Combatant Cells).[18][19]
Most peaceful green party member ^^
By the time stellarator designs become economical (tens of years in the most optimistic case), you can cover the entire Germany in PV panels. Or even grow an entire new generation of forrest. So far stellarators look just like interesting vaporware. I mean they are irrelevant to any current energy discussion.
The bridge in case of germany is coal and gas
Germany has a 500 GW interconnection queue for storage.
It will be interesting to see how long the ”baseload” talking point lasts.
The baseload talking point has never made sense but storage doesn't make it make less sense. Baseload here is definitionally power sources that can't economically follow the demand curve. They carry the exact same problem that intermittent power sources like solar do, in that you need dispatchable power sources to augment them so that they can actually meet demand, the only difference is that the cause of this is that generation stays constant while load varies instead of both generation and load varying.
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.
> The baseload talking point has never made sense
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.
Baseload is about supplying demand. It'll not go. And to supply it reliably you need firm power. The 500gw statement contains both overlapping bids and just intentions to "think" about deployment. Still, germany would need at bare minimum 3TWh of storage to ditch fossils firming per last winter and deploy even more renewables to charge it. It remains a question how govt will protect investors from cannibalized generation- offshore is already facing problems
Baseload power plants are already dead in many grids. Or forced to become peakers.
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.
The proof is looking at open generation data past winter. Sadly energy charts gives only gwh/day but you can still do some inference about how much fossils were used/how much imported
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
No data. Just hand waving. Typical.
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.
Ah yes, presenting some out of ordinary situations like an everyday thing, typical for a nuclear hater...
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
I love it when 45% having an simultaneous outage is acceptable for nuclear power but dealing with renewable variability is a dealbreaker.
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?
I suggest do both. 45% in sweden was 2 units going offline? I even doubt that's 45%. And for most part outages were planned. But that's maybe why swedish govt wants to go with smaller bwrx units. This way you can schedule easier annual maintenance for each unit
3 units. 2 unplanned. One being a 7 month outage.
Just like during the energy crisis Sweden had another 7 month outage. With the worst week of all with the winter peak consumption happening with 2 reactors having outages.
But it is much easier to pretend that the capacity factor over the lifetime applies and then cry about renewables eating their lunch.
Hahahaha if that ever happens. The government seems to like the idea of nuclear power but not politically bearing the costs of tens of billions in handouts.
Now they’ve soon spent four years dallying without any real progress and the next election is coming up in September.
The question you need to answer is:
Why should a home owner with rooftop solar and a home storage buy 18 cents/kWh + backup (you know, 2 out of 6 reactors having outages when needed the most) when their rooftop solar or home storage delivers?
Germany has the most expensive and dirtiest grid in the developed world. They get the majority of their baseload power from other countries, often generated by nuclear or gas. Also, that you think they have 500 GW of anything that generates power is pretty funny. The only thing your comment says is that you don't understand anything about how power is generated or how an electrical grid works. People like you are why we still use so much FFs. You can't solve AGW with accounting tricks.
PS Maybe ask Spain how that renewable baseload generated power is doing for them.
Germany sourced 57% of all power from renewables in the first 9mo of 2025 [1]. They seem to be doing just fine, might be time to update your talking points
1. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/energy-industry-relieve...
And it's still one of the dirtiest grids in europe, while having massive household prices per eurostat, highest in eu, despite of heavy eeg subsidies.
Quickly becoming greener. Are you saying that Germany should stop their renewable buildout and keep their current emissions until the 2040s while waiting for new built nuclear power to ”save the day”?
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.
It didn't make sense to shut down nuclear before coal/gas for Germany. It should deploy both ren and nuclear, even restarts unless it wants to use gas firming.
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.
> ren require by default more transmission due to distributed deployment
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.
Ah yet again a bunch of nuclear hating. It'll be my last reply to you since I don't wanna lose more time here.
GenCost predictions are already failing if you look at the state of current transmission projects in Australia (huge cost increases across the bord, and not just transmission). And for Germany it'll be even harder due to more nimbys (hello sudlink that was protested even by greens at some point) and different weather/generation patterns.
EEG is not a backwards system or something of the past. It's still in place and it's projected to grow despite most expensive 20y contracts being gone https://www.ewi.uni-koeln.de/en/news/medium-term-forecast-ar...
The reason is the need to protect investments from self cannibalization. Offshore in Germany is already facing challenges like in UK and DK.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/no-bids-german-offshore...
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/denmar...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66749344.amp
It'll be gradually the same with onshore and even some solar.
Nuclear has advantages beyond CF, like firm generation, less system costs. Even Fraunhofer/bnetza understand this, that's why both are pushing to expand gas to firm renewables(because well, nuclear is out of discussion for em)
French national debt is 3.5 TRILLION, most because of social system. EDF debt is 50bn while debt/ebitda ratio is about 2 (while EON/RWE have a worse ratio) To suggest EDF debt has any meaningful impact here is borderline insane.
HPC CFDs are smaller vs what Germany or UK offers for biomass, or what UK offered for greenvolt, and soon to be in line with what UK will offer for new wind projects in latest AR rounds https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6880d6f8f47ab... There are some wild numbers there for some tech, HPC looking cheap in comparison
EDF is not subsidized by France, yet. You can consider a one off 9bn nationalization but that's peanuts vs eeg and hardly a subsidy considering debt/ebitda. In fact edf is subject to profit tax called arenh (the one that caused high debt in 2022), soon to be replaced with another profit sharing mechanism. Arenh was mandated by EU so that EDF doesn't erase competition. EDF financials are public and there aren't any mentions about state pouring money except renewables sector. As said, EPR2 will get some subsidies, but make no mistakes, compared to EEG it'll be peanuts.
Mind you, Germany already spent on EEG alone almost 2x the cost of entire french nuclear fleet (looking at public numbers from court/DE) but it still has worse emissions. In a similar timeframe (messmer) france almost finished the job.
On the other hand, both the praised California and South Australia, leaders in ren deployment, do have both worse emissions than France and higher household prices
It's indeed funny to me how people are so concerned about the costs of nuclear but are just fine with full system costs of renewables that strangely, are not that cheap as predicted by orgs like aemo/csiro in Australia and even more so in other markets.
The GenCost predictions are excluded already comitted projects.
> EEG is not a backwards system or something of the past. It's still in place and it's projected to grow despite most expensive 20y contracts being gone https://www.ewi.uni-koeln.de/en/news/medium-term-forecast-ar...
Trying to predict the future based on it is a backwards looking metric. Your link says that it may increase to €23B by 2029. While the EEG in 2020 was €38B in 2025 euros.
It is already rapidly falling as expensive old contracts fall out.
> Offshore in Germany is already facing challenges like in UK and DK.
Love trying to change the topic to off-shore wind. Pretend that onshore and solar faces the same challenges.
Off-shore wind is right on the cusp of viability. With low infrastructure costs and a comitted customer it is. The Danish and German auctions were "negative bid" styles. The developers had to pay for the privilege to build off-shore wind.
The UK capped the CFD too low as per recent increases in interest rates and material costs. An issue which nuclear power is affected by to an even larger degree.
> It'll be gradually the same with onshore and even some solar.
Of course ignoring that 500 GW storge interconnection queue. But that would be daring to lift your eyes.
> Nuclear has advantages beyond CF, like firm generation, less system costs. Even Fraunhofer/bnetza understand this, that's why both are pushing to expand gas to firm renewables(because well, nuclear is out of discussion for em)
I love this magical nuclear plant that soaks up an entire grid load. In reality all grids with nuclear power has tons of peaking since trying to go above the baseload with nuclear power just becomes stupidity.
That was before zero marginal cost renewables entered the picture. Now nuclear itself are becoming peakers. As evidenced by nuclear power all over Europe being forced out of the markets or having to bid negative.
> French national debt is 3.5 TRILLION, most because of social system. EDF debt is 50bn while debt/ebitda ratio is about 2 (while EON/RWE have a worse ratio) To suggest EDF debt has any meaningful impact here is borderline insane.
I love how adding ~€100-200B from nuclear handouts to build the EDF2 fleet is "trivial. A 2.5 - 5% increase in the already extremely bloated French debt is insignificant! Move along!
> Arenh was mandated by EU so that EDF doesn't erase competition.
Because the entire French fleet was built with state aid. But that you conveniently ignore.
> Mind you, Germany already spent on EEG alone almost 2x the cost of entire french nuclear fleet (looking at public numbers from court/DE) but it still has worse emissions. In a similar timeframe (messmer) france almost finished the job.
Again looking backwards. You know we live in 2025? What you're telling me is that 2012 solar was expensive and thus required large EEG. Do you understand that we're not building 2012 solar, we're buiding 2025 solar.
Also love the victim complex.
> On the other hand, both the praised California and South Australia, leaders in ren deployment, do have both worse emissions than France and higher household prices
They're not done yet? Are they claiming to be done?
> It's indeed funny to me how people are so concerned about the costs of nuclear but are just fine with full system costs of renewables that strangely, are not that cheap as predicted by orgs like aemo/csiro in Australia and even more so in other markets.
Because these "full system costs" have never been shown to materialize? They are fossil shill and nuclear bro talking points because they can't deal with reality.
We need to 1.5x - 3x our grids to decarbonize society and industry. The extra costs coming from a renewable grid when already having double or triple the grid size are trivial.
Just like you nuclear bros never talk about nuclear unreliability. It is apparently 100% reliable except when it isn't. And then it also needs fossil gas peakers to manage the peak load because load following nuclear power simply becomes stupid.
You also have the issue of trying to force it on the population. Why should a home owner with rooftop solar and a home battery draw electricity from the grid?
Explain to me how you would deploy a nuclear plant in this grid:
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...
To be fair, a lot of nuclear reactors around the world should be shut down just due to age and outdated designs. However they should also be being replaced with modern reactors, which few people have, which makes shutting them down while we are still largely utilizing fossil fuel power and chemical plants really dumb.
also to remember that thorium is the dominant radioactive byproduct of "rare" earth metal refinement; so they're probably isolating large amounts of it so might as well figure out something to do with it.
I wonder if people would think China copied this from the West.
They did copy it from the west. That you don't know this just means you don't follow a niche part of research. Its still true though.
Thorium is abundant in Sri Lanka’s mineral sands. Mined with dredgers at shallow depths 10-100m off the western coast.
Thorium is abundant anywhere where Rare Earths are mined. You can get it almost anywhere. You don't even mine it, you process it out of tailing piles from other mining operations.
Thorium is also a waste product of monazite rare-earth mining.
I think I read recently that this was a US idea that was abandoned that China took up and made it work. Is that accurate?
The US had a similar but not identical reactor in the 60s, the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment
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"...
No country has seriously invested in the thorium fuel cycle because it cannot be used to create weapons. Unfortunately, the technology also began to look most promising as an energy source around the same time the Three Mile Island nuclear accident effectively ended all interest in nuclear energy in the United States.
India has shown some of the most interest to date, due to their lack of domestic uranium reserves. But it's been slow going their fast breeder reactor plans were delayed by like two decades. But it is built and it was loaded with fuel last month [0]
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...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix
Thorium can be used to make weapons via the breeding cycle. It's much less convenient and straightforward than uranium/plutonium, but it is possible.
Theoretically, perhaps, but I don’t think anyone with a serious interest in weapons would pursue it. From a nonproliferation perspective, I’d guess the infrastructure necessary to remove contaminants from uranium bred through the thorium cycle would be costly and difficult to conceal.
Multiple countries have detonated nuclear bombs using U-233 derived from thorium reactors! [0] Practically I agree with you that thorium is proliferation resistant and if someone is bomb hungry they won't prioritize it, but if you want to set up the bomb and all you have is thorium... The infrastructure wouldn't necessarily be significantly larger or worse than conventional enrichment.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-233
Seems presence of U-232 is more manageable than I thought.
Weapons are irrelevant for power generation. No modern classic pwr was used to create weapons- because it's cheaper to have dedicated infra
Also, it’s only energy positive under some specific carefully managed conditions, and is a real pain to make work.
If you have easy access to uranium, you just use it directly instead.
Depends on what you want out of your reactor. You want to make a synthetic fuel, Thorium not Uranium. You want a liquid fueled reactor (because its safer and proliferation resistant), Thorium not Uranium. You want 900C heat instead of 300C heat, Thorium not Uranium.
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 cope is strong here. The only liquid fueled reactors with any operational experience got shut down because of corrosion issues causing major leaks.
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.
You can absolutely make nuclear weapons with U233.
Technically true and practically false. Only once has anyone done that. The bomb was considered a dud and the research was ultimately destroyed. So while you could, it would require completely reinventing all the original research that went into making the original one. Lookup operation teapot for more details.
Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power#Hi...
Well, fible energy is trying to do lots. Gates invested in MSTR (molten salt thorium reactor).
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
Gates invested in the traveling wave reactor which was a bust. Then he sold his entire investment in nuclear several years ago. He's very rich so perhaps he has other nuclear investments that I'm not aware of but none are in the MSTR space unless they are secret/private.
> none are in the MSTR space unless they are secret/private
TerraPower is not secret.
> There are a number of countries being run far better than the US or the EU
It will be funny if China is what convinces the US to be more open to free industry. Opposite day vs the 1970s
To be fair, these advances are not being made in China due to "free industry". They have something of a command economy for their critical sectors. So it's unfair not to point out that it's easy to make advances if a nation as a whole points to a hill and says, "take that hill". Of course you can do it under those circumstances.
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.
China has many capital controls but generally supports industrial activity in the state interest; the US does the opposite.
Historical experiments with alternative fuel cycles, not serious development attempts. A serious development attempt happened in India though.
Yeah, the US had an experimental Molten Salt Reactor in the 60s
Interesting claim that the reactor doesn't need water and can be built away from the coast. I thought all reactors used steam to turn a turbine to produce electricity. Something special here?
Many reactors are built far away from coasts, they need water in general, but artificial lakes, or rivers are enough.
This type of reactor would probably use super-critical CO2 instead of water to transfer the heat from the reactor to the turbines, so no water. The design is safer that way.
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).
There's a danish company building modular container sized molten salt reactors.
https://www.copenhagenatomics.com/
They have built a few prototypes and 'Copenhagen Atomics plans to run its first nuclear chain-reaction at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in 2027.'
Maybe they get production ramped up for 2050 targets, but not on the radar for 2030 targets. Or replacing your antique coal plant today.
its easy to put china's perspective on expansion of nuclear when you look at how much is planned/being built vs how much is planned/being built for coal/gas vs projected demand...
Honest question Is SCMP a real media outlet?
shit, people in china are focusing on japan and didn't talk about this much
[flagged]
China has distracted the USA energy focus by dumping cheap solar panels here while continuing to develop advanced nuclear generation capabilities at home.
China is simply betting on all horses: solar, wind, thorium, batteries, coal even, anything to not buy foreign oil and be as independent, self-sufficient as possible. Seems like it's working too
Exactly. That's less noticed by many people. Just give you two examples:
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.
Seems like a wise thing to do too.
Yup.. Happens to align somewhat with climate goals too, luckily for the rest of us. Once solar+batteries becomes the cheapest form of generation, the coal usage should also drop, if that isn't already the case
> Once solar+batteries becomes the cheapest form of generation, the coal usage should also drop
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.
Luckily it is already the case, and it looks like coal is starting to drop in china
How exactly has it distracted the U.S?
I don't see the U.S rushing to adopt either renewables or nuclear. We're just increasing our fossil fuel burning (natural gas).
> 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).
[1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/
That's capacity, not generation. Getting through the accounting tricks that make renewables seem viable is a challenge. 1 watt of nuclear capacity is worth 1.5 watts of FF and 9 watts of renewables. That's because the amount of power from each type of plant is very different due to downtimes of generation. Nuclear runs all the time and refuels for a couple of days every 18 months (depending on the reactor). FF plants run most of the time by require 10x more maintenance downtime. Renewables only make power about 10% of the time. That's how they skew the numbers to make renewables seem viable when they produce a shockingly low amount of actual power. Oh, and if you use renewables for baseload you have to keep a spinning reserve which means they actually increase (not decrease) the amount of CO2 emitted per watt generated.
> That's capacity, not generation.
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/
> That's capacity, not generation
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...
[2] https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/57582.pdf
You should tell the folks overwhelming choosing to build and finance renewable power plants! They clearly missed this key point, they’ll surely be grateful you let them know that their renewable investments don’t make sense, and they should have picked nuclear due to it being cheaper overall
We have basically limitless carbon free energy with the tech we have now: solar, wind, batteries, fission breeders, large power grids that can move power around cheaply, etc. Put all those together and we have incredible energy abundance.
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.
I'd love to see as much electrification as possible.
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...
If that’s the case it makes aviation like 6-7%, still low. Coal fired electricity generation is king when it comes to climate change, followed by oil fueled land transport and natural gas. Deforestation is higher too. Aviation is part of the long tail.
If grid energy was cheap enough, synthetic fuel for aircraft and trucks would be competitive.
Nope, you can't make synthetic fuel at anywhere near a competitive price from electricity. To make a synthetic fuel, the major energy input is heat (yes I know, you use electrolysis to crack the water, its a minor part of the energy required). The only way to make a cheap synthetic fuel is from a nuclear reactor that produces heat in the 900C range (could be 700C or 1100C, but near there). You can't do that with solid fuel reactors, you need a liquid fueled reactor for that. And you need Thorium for a liquid fueled reactor. That's why this design is so popular.
> The only way to make a cheap synthetic fuel is from a nuclear reactor that produces heat in the 900C range (could be 700C or 1100C, but near there). You can't do that with solid fuel reactors, you need a liquid fueled reactor for that
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?
> 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.
You don't want to discount the cultural attachment people have to what their parents did and their childhood.
> 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.
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.
> 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…
Public opinion here appears to count for nearly jack squat so I don’t buy this explanation at all.
FF extraction is very profitable and has been for a long time. Those that make money from extraction spend a lot on lobbying. They don't want nuclear power because its the only thing that can really replace FFs. The public opinion angle is just useful idiots being manipulated by people who make money from FF extraction. That makes it far easier to get the politicians to do what they want (kill nuclear).
fossil fuel also underpins the us dollar so there’s that too
"Public opinion is obviously much less important in China."
In the US public opinion doesn't really matter either. It's the oligarchs' opinions that matter