A team of scientists in Shanghai had originally been given 25 years to try to develop the world's first nuclear plant using the radioactive element thorium as fuel rather than uranium, but they have now been told they have 10, the researchers said.
Now working under
"war-like" pressure to reduce smog in cities, the Chinese are about to change the world with American technology, while we watch passively on the sidelines. They will build meltdown-proof thorium reactors that produce no long-term waste, and they will become the first nation on Earth to replace their smog-producing, population-killing coal plants with carbon-free thorium.
Even before this announcement, China was well ahead of any other country in the development of thorium reactors. At the 2013 Thorium Energy Conference in Geneva last fall, Xu Hongjie of the Chinese Academy of Science presented the following timeline (now two years old) for development of their TMSR (Thorium Molten Salt Reactor):
Even with this slow schedule of 2012, they had
334 full time engineers on the project and planned to double that to 750. So one might expect the accelerated timeline to double that again, or even triple it. That should be accompanied by a commensurate increase in their
annual budget of about $400 million. I should also mention that the project has a
high-profile leader: Jiang Mianheng of the Chinese Academy of Science is the son of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin.
Note also from this diagram that the Chinese are planning on using thorium reactors (which typically run at very high temperatures) to produce hydrogen, which can be done with a high-temperature heat source. Most hydrogen today is produced from natural gas, so this is another way to reduce fossil fuel use. Also, if hydrogen is cheap and abundant from non-fossil sources, it can be made into liquid fuels such as gasoline, diesel fuel, and jet fuel using the Fischer-Tropsch process.
If you've never heard of a liquid-fuel thorium reactor (LFTR, pronounced "lifter"), it has many advantages over existing solid-fuel uranium reactors:
- It can't melt down, because the fuel is already liquid in normal operation.
- It is walk-away safe. If the reactor overheats it will shut itself down and cool passively without operator intervention, without water, and without electricity.
- It produces almost no long-term waste, and some designs could use existing long-term waste as fuel.
- It uses thorium, which is three times more abundant in Earth's crust than uranium. In fact, thorium is considered a waste product by rare-earth miners and they would pay you to haul it away.
- It runs at ambient pressure, which means it cannot explode.
- Because of the high temperatures, it can be air cooled instead of water cooled.
LFTR in five minutes:
If you have more time, thorium in 11 minutes.