It's Happening - China Launches World's First Thorium Nuclear Reactor

uranium a material that strikes unease into our collective subconscious for the catastrophic potential that it can unlock from long-lived radioactive waste to react to meltdowns like Fukushima thar Island and Chernobyl to the enrichment to produce the most devastating weapon Humanity has ever devised the atomic bomb around uranium and nuclear in general there exists an aura of the taboo but what if there was a safer alternative that we just haven't really explored yet thorium has long fascinated the Internet it's three to four times more common in the Earth's crust it produces significantly less radioactive waste its

reaction is easier to control to prevent meltdowns and it's much harder to turn into nuclear weapons all these points considered explains the number of comments that I've had on past videos asking when I'll cover it but I like to cover Technologies in active development and I've never found any groups putting forward a series effort to tackle the thorium challenge that has now changed China has just announced the commissioning of the world's first thorium molten salt reactor that's actually two world's firsts the first thorium reactor and the first commercial Molton salt reactor scheduled to be online

by 2029 and China has enough thorium reserves to power their country's needs for the next 20,000 years I want to take a look at how these Technologies actually work and what they will potenti potentially unlock for us and ask ourselves is this the future of nuclear let's start with the easy stuff though how to build a nuclear reactor you know that nonfunctioning nuclear reactor you built yes I Juiced it up a little a molten salt reactor is a type of nuclear reactor where the primary coolant or even the fuel itself is a molten salt mixture

typically molten fluoride or chloride salt there's a good history of experimental designs but no able commercial designs have been realized yet in the mid 20th century there were two experimental molten salt reactors operated in the United States the aircraft reactor experiment which was motivated by the small form factor that molten salt reactors can achieve and the slightly uncreative named molten salt reactor experiment which aimed to demonstrate a nuclear power plant using a thorium fuel cycle in a breeder reactor the general design principle of molten salt reactors is centered around a reactor core through which which

the fuel coolant mixture is circulated in the reactor fision occurs the breaking apart of unstable heavy elements as they are struck by fast moving neutrons this produces lighter elements as well as further fast moving neutrons which are the Heats we talk about when we say nuclear reactors produce usable energy these fast neutrons either collide with further file elements in the reactor to sustain the fision reaction or they strike salt particles and increase the temperature of the molten salt as a whole which is continuously circulated through the system as this now even hotter fluid leaves the

reactor it moves out into heat exchanges to transfer the heat to a secondary fuel Loop which usually drives a steam turbine because secretly everything still runs on Steam turbines and we never left the 1800s the reason molten salt reactors are so attractive to well mostly the internet is because they are in theory much more ele an in their safety but why exactly is that most nuclear reactors use water as a coolant the job of a coolant is to get rid of excess heat energy the downside to water is that it has a boiling point of

100° C meaning that to keep it in liquid form you need to keep it in very high pressure piping if there is a failure in this system not only does your coolant escape and you can now no longer cool down your reactor but that superheated liquid water now turns almost most instantaneously and explosively into a hot gas damaging other systems this is partly what happened during the Chernobyl disaster by comparison though molten salts have a high boiling point often above, 1400° C this removes the need to keep the coolant in high pressure piping and so

reduces the chances of failures and explosions it also means that if there is a leak in the system both the coolant and the fuel exit the reactor further reducing the lik hood of a meltdown as the fuel and the coolant are intermixed and circulated this also reduces the likelihood of hot spots in the reactor design that could lead to structural damage or failure continuous circulation also means that new fuel can be added to the mix without requiring a full shutdown of the reactor for refueling which is a costly and slow process for solid fuel reactors

by consequence this also means that any negative fision products can continuously be removed unlike in traditional re reactors where fision products like Xenon 135 can build up over time absorbing neutrons and causing reactor instability and if you're asking here now why does fion only occur in the reactor and not outside it when the fision fuel is located throughout the system that's largely a question of the density of those fast neutrons that drive the reactor there's significantly more reaction driving neutrons in the Reactor Core than in the rest of the system because there is more reactive

material there in the remainder of the system the neutron flux just isn't sufficient to sustain an ongoing fision reaction so it subsides outside of the reactor this is a good thing in the event of a leak as although your fuel leaks out with your coolant it doesn't present the same level of explosive danger as say a gas or a fossil fuel leak in fact most liquid salt reactors have a simple freeze plug fail safe below the reactor that is kept cold preventing the molten salts Escape in the instance of a power failure the plug UNF

freezes and the liquid salt empties into subcritical drain tanks where the reaction stops as you can imagine this sort of feature is much harder to achieve in solid core reactors that use normal uranium fuel rods there you need to constantly circulate additional coolant until the reaction dies down which if you're very unlucky might take hundreds to thousands of years so now in molten salt reactors we have a really compelling potential reactor design why though is Thorium so often thought of as the best fuel for the job I want to answer that question but first I

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bottom part of the periodic table just two spaces to the left from uranium holding it in your hand it's a soft and silvery metal that gradually darkens as it oxidizes in the air it was first discovered by Swedish chemist yon baselius whose name I've probably butchered back in 1828 he named it after the Norse god of thunder or I guess one of your favorite Avengers he's a friend from work its radioactivity though wasn't discovered for another six years until Marie cury began to study it it was found that in nature thorium typically exists in only

its most stable isotopic form thorium 232 it is technically unstable but it decays incredibly slowly with a halflife of more than 14 billion years basically the same age as the universe you can actually find it in small amounts pretty much everywhere which is one of the advantages it has over uranium estimates indicate that thorium is 3 to four times more abundant than uranium on Earth the vast majority is harvested from a mineral called monzonite which contains a high percentage of thorium phosphate created as a byproduct from mining other rare earth metals but the question is

if it decays very slowly why does it make for such a good nuclear fuel although thorium 323 isn't very file meaning it's not directly usable to Power Nuclear fision it is very fertile meaning it can be bred into a file material here uranium here's how that works first thorium 232 is bombarded until it absorbs a neutron producing thorium 233 this then undergo beta Decay converting a neutron into a proton and changing it into another element Pro actinium 233 there it undergoes beta Decay again converting another proton into a neutron and producing uranium 233 uranium 233

is file and can be used as fuel in a nuclear reactor in fact it's even slightly better than other commonly used nuclear reactive fuels like uranium 235 and plutonium 239 because it absorbs fewer neutrons allowing it to produce on average slightly more than the two neutrons per split and now although this entire process sounds complicated and like it adds extra steps it's actually a real Advantage this breeding process can be done outside of the reactor but I think it's more interesting when thorium is dissolved within the molten salt mix and this breeding reaction occurs continuously

while the reactor operates to do this thorium 232 is combined with a molten salt and a small amount of uranium 233 is added to supply the initial Neutron flux and start the breeding and reaction process which then self- sustains overall what that gives you is a very efficient fuel that combines the safety layer of unreactive thorium with the quick and safe storage of molten salt reactor designs as an added bonus to thorium its Neutron absorption characteristics means that it produces produces fewer actinides the bottom 15 elements of the periodic table which are typically very radiotoxic

and have very long Half Lives the general rule of thumb that I found whilst researching was that most people's opinion on thorium is that its nuclear waste only stays radioactive for about 500 years that's instead of the 10,000 years for uranium and there is about a, to 10,000 times less radioactive byproducts produced using thorium so it becomes reasonably clear that thorium molten salt reactors have have some definitive advantages over conventional reactors so the question remains where on Earth are they this is where the thorium reactor story gets kind of strange Research into how to build

these systems actually stretches back all the way to the end of World War II and continued well into the early '70s starting as a project to make compact nuclear flight propulsion systems molten salt reactor research was led by Alvin Weinberg director of The Oak Ridge National lab over 20 years Weinberg and his team researched built and operated the first molten salt reactors motivated by a dream of building a fision powered desalination plant as part of the Atoms for Peace program this program unfortunately didn't make it past the70s as the US chose to go in the

direction of Cheaper less technically challenging uranium reactors instead which also had the benefit of producing plutonium stockpiles today the Oak Ridge molten salt reactor experiment is viewed as the Holy Grail of thorium molten salt reactor research and many modern projects are taking inspiration from it countries like India which have large amounts of thorium but very little uranium aim to produce 30% of their energy from thorium by 2050 Russia also seems interested announcing that it has developed some thorium based nuclear fuels today though it is China that is leading the world in thorium reactor technology this

is somewhat predicated on the fact that China has massive thorium reserves the exact size of those reserves has not been publicly disclosed but it's estimated to be enough to meet the country's total energy needs for more than 20,000 years they've also made significant investments into the research of these systems as early as 2011 when they invested 450 million into thorium salt reactor research program inspired by the design of the Oakridge laboratory reactor China began construction of the tmsr lf1 in 2018 an experimental thorium salt reactor which was completed in 2021 and interestingly it's kind of

in the middle of nowhere around 120 km Northwest of the city of WOAY in the gansan province in the middle of the GOI desert another huge advantage of thorium salt reactors is that they can be placed in the middle of sparsely populated deserts like this because again they don't need water cooling another perk being that if it's in the middle of nowhere and it does explode fewer people care the reactor was granted a license to begin operation back in 2023 initially operating in batch mode using a closed system for the first five to eight years

before then moving into continuous operation where Fuel and waste can be continuously topped up or removed in my books this one still counts as a largely experimental research activity and can only produce about 2 megawatt of thermal power and doesn't generate electricity at all but according to recent reports the success of this pilot project provided the basis and experience for construction of larger reactors cap AP able of power generation China is Now quickly expanding their scope and ambition for this technology in fact it was only inadvertently announced that this new thorium reactor project was on

the table disclosed as part of a construction plan within an environmental assessment report posted on the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics this reactor facility is scheduled to be commissioned in 2025 and completed and operational in 20129 generating Heat at a maximum of 60 megaw according to the report the reactor still be used for research purposes primarily serving scientists however a wind power base a solar power base station a molten salt-based energy storage Power Station a hydrogen generation system and a thermal power plant will all also be constructed at the same time as the thorium power

plant these different types of energy will all be integrated into a smart grid to provide low cost low carbon stable and sufficient electricity for industrial production so it does kind of sound like this really is the star of usable thorium power in a commercial setting if only for industrial applications at first starting from 2030 though the report goes on to say that there are further plans for commercial modular thorium based reactors with an electrical generation capacity of 100 megaw or more all of this advancement and activity is part of a much larger vision for energy

in China working towards carbon neutrality in 2060 but also working towards a major commercial advantage over other countries ultimately China plans to sell modular thorum reactors as part of their belt and Road initiative positioning themselves as the global superpower for power creation as part of a global development strategy aimed to connect trade networks from China to other parts of Asia Africa Europe and Beyond it's basically a vast and technologically advanced version of the Silk Road the question many companies and countries are asking themselves is if China is making such rapid progress with alternative energy sources

should we be doing the same the US the UK Europe and elsewhere turns out we aren't completely in the dark here in the US we have terra power founded by Bill Gates which has been collaborating with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to restart development of sustainable nuclear energy Technologies the company is moving ahead with building a new natrium reactor in Wyoming this is not yet another fuel source the reactor will use uranium but will incorporate a new type of molten salt system us using sodium hence the name the technology has been around for a while

but they are revisiting it to take advantage of a new energy storage design this time they're planning to store the heat from the sodium molten salt into a chloride molten salt heat Bank this thermal energy can then be used to make electricity when required allowing the nuclear power generation to ramp up and down with the power grid demands this plant is interesting it's designed to produce an impressive 345 megaw and if everything goes well should be in operation by 2030 in Europe initiatives like the nuclear abundant affordable resourceful energy for all or Nar or France

and the rizon of the Netherlands have signed a strategic industrial agreement to advance molten salt reactors especially modular ones this partnership is pretty interesting as naria is combining its expertise in small modular nuclear reactors with theon's knowledge of thorium and molten salt reactors the name of conventions are terrible but we'll forgive them for that what kind of plans do they actually have so far naria is planning to develop an extra small molten salt reactor generating roughly 40 megawatt of energy which they're hoping will be ready for mass production by 2030 the rizon is going in

the other direction with a 100 megawatt thorium molon assault Reactor with a pilot system ready by 2035 which is probably a lot more reasonable in terms of timeline here I'm always slightly aware of the maybe over optimistic timelines that many of the small modular reactor companies out there have made and the price points that they have tried to hit but ultimately have slipped over time we need to follow these initiatives to see how things pan out these are certainly promising opportunities but overall the rate and the energy put into exploring these opportunities doesn't feel to

me to be sufficient for any of these projects to become world leaders in their field although there are obviously still major challenges to overcome in this technology from the fact that molten Sals are highly corrosive which poses a challenge for materials and reactor components that must withstand these harsh conditions to the fact that regulatory framework and safe operation protocols for commercial reactors just haven't actually been developed yet overall when I hear these timelines coming out from China of 2029 for the on time of their first reactors I think that feels kind of ambitious but I

do think it is better to be ambitious in this Arena rather than playing catchup China does have a history now of investing heavily in alternative energy sources the reason solar is so cheap across the world as of nowadays is largely because of European subsidies and China's initiative to drive mass production by mid 2024 the total installed soil capacity in China was approximately 700 gaw with 100 gaw of new capacity added in just the first half of 2024 alone there is clearly a commercial and strategic drive to achieve these technological Feats as quickly as possible particularly

in the context of the changing energy landscape but I want to know what you think I really like looking deeper into this topic than I have before and there was a whole bunch of other pieces to the puzzle that I didn't quite have time to cover is this a win for the world's power transition let me know what you think in the comments section down below and if you like this sort of video leave us a like check out our patreon if you want to support the channel I also recently shared some thoughts on another

technology giant the world's largest Fusion project and the funding problems and delays faced by it and asked should we keep pushing forward on Fusion check that out and thanks as always for watching I'll see you next week goodbye