A long-abandoned US nuclear technology is making a comeback in China

You can mainly copy and paste this line into countless stories about the technique of advanced reactor today. Rock salt cooling systems? It was invented in the middle of the twentieth century, but it was never marketed. The same thing for many alternative fuel, such as Treso. Of course, there is thorium.

This is a single research reactor in China that works with alternative fuel. Many say about this moment for nuclear energy technology: Many groups in the past are looking for techniques, with a new appetite for building them.

First, it is important to note that China the A hot point for nuclear energy now. While the United States still has the most operational reactors in the world, China is causing quickly. The country is building reactions in a wonderful clip and currently has more reactors under construction more than any other country. Only this week, China has approved 10 new reactors, totaling more than $ 27 billion in investment.

China also leads the way for some advanced reactor techniques (this category mainly includes anything deviated from the standard plan of what is on the network today: the large reactions that use fuel enriched uranium and high pressure water to maintain a cold reactor). The high temperature reactors that use gas as a cooler is one of the main areas of concentration in China-where the few reactors that use this technology recently began, and more in the planning stages or under construction.

Now, the Chinese government media reported that scientists in the country have reached a teacher with a thorium headquarters. The online reactor came in June 2024, but the researchers say it had experienced fuel recently without closing. (Traditional reactors should generally stop to renew fuel supplies.) The main scientists participated in the project during a closed meeting at the Chinese Academy of Science.

I will confirm here that this is not a huge power plant: this reactor is small. It generates only two megawatts of heat – less than the search reactor on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which rings in six megawatts. (To be fair, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of the largest university research reactions in the United States, but it is still … it’s small.)

Regardless, progress is progress in thorium reactors, as the world has been focusing entirely on uranium over the past fifty years or so.

A lot of original research on thorium came out of the United States, which pumped resources into all types of different reactor technologies in the fifties and sixties. A reactor in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which was running in the 1960s, used uranium fuel 233 (which could be generated when the thorium is bombed with radiation).