China Fires Up World's First Thorium-Powered Nuclear Reactor
Months after satellites picked up a massive nuclear fusion facility in China's Sichuan province, the country's nuclear industry has blown the lid off fission tech.
During a private meeting earlier this month, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences revealed the successful operation of a thorium-powered nuclear reactor located in the Gobi Desert. The team had achieved "full-power operation" last June, according to South China Morning Post, and recently succeeded in reloading the reactor while it was powered up — a world first.
It's a major milestone for nuclear power. Thorium offers a more accessible but less weaponizable alternative to uranium, according to the World Nuclear Association, which notes that "thorium-based power reactor fuels would be a poor source for fissile material usable in the illicit manufacture of an explosive device."
The Gobi Desert reactor is a two megawatt research unit engineered to use molten salt as fuel carrier and coolant. A molten salt reactor (MSR) theoretically carries far less risk in the event of a meltdown compared to water-based systems, as salts can carry greater loads of thermal energy at much lower pressure.
In fact, a "meltdown" is basically a non-factor for these systems — the fuel is already molten.
A report sponsored by the US government on MSRs notes that a "possible advantage of the MSR is that the fuel is subject to freezing," so "upon breach of a vessel or pipe... the fuel will disperse, and thus increase its cooling geometry, until it reaches a freezing configuration and thus will be confined to that location and configuration." Basically, imagine lava rolling slowly down a mountain as the air cools it back into rock, compared to a spectacular steam explosion like the incident at Chernobyl.
Curiously, MSRs are nothing new. They had their day in the US back in the late 1940s and early 50s, when American cold warriors dumped nearly $1 billion into developing a nuclear-powered stealth bomber. Congress halted research on thorium-fueled airplanes back in 1961, and uranium more or less became the gold standard, due in no small part to its military potential.
Assumed obsolete, the US' MSR research has since been made public, forming the foundation of the Gobi Desert team's work.
"The US left its research publicly available, waiting for the right successor," said the project's chief scientist Xu Hongjie. "Rabbits sometimes make mistakes or grow lazy. That's when the tortoise seizes its chance."
More on nuclear energy: California Nuclear Power Plant Deploys Generative AI Safety System
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