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China reaches energy milestone by "breeding" uranium from thorium
https://archive.is/DQpXM https://archive.is/DQpXM
https://www.stdaily.com/web/English/2025-11/17/content_432984.html https://www.stdaily.com/web/English/2025-11/17/content_43298...
- T-A 1y agoA better explanation of the significance: https://www.stdaily.com/web/English/2025-11/17/content_432984.html https://www.stdaily.com/web/English/2025-11/17/content_43298...
- cubefox 1y ago> 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.
- allenrb 1y agoThe 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.
- dang 1y agoThanks! We've put that link in the toptext as well.
- jonplackett 1y agoI think I read recently that this was a US idea that was abandoned that China took up and made it work. Is that accurate?
- impossiblefork 1y agoHistorical experiments with alternative fuel cycles, not serious development attempts. A serious development attempt happened in India though.
- T-A 1y agoYes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power#Hi...
- jbverschoor 1y agoWell, 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
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- dmix 1y ago> 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
- bilbo0s 1y agoTo 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.
- _trampeltier 1y agoThis 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.
- pfdietz 1y agoBreeding 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.
- NewJazz 1y agoEmphasis on current market conditions. Relations with uranium mining countries and environmental opposition to uranium mining could shift conditions.
- SirHumphrey 1y agoThe 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.
- cpursley 1y ago> 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.
- dalyons 1y agoThey’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
- HPsquared 1y agoThe 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.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> notable thing here is that it's a molten salt reactor design Notable, but not unique. The unique bit is it burns thorium.
- AtlasBarfed 1y agoIt 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.
- rhoads 1y agoThat's what you learn playing factorio
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- api 1y agoWe 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.
- HPsquared 1y agoIf grid energy was cheap enough, synthetic fuel for aircraft and trucks would be competitive.
- hunterpayne 1y agoNope, 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.
- jabl 1y ago> 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?
- SoftTalker 1y agoChina has distracted the USA energy focus by dumping cheap solar panels here while continuing to develop advanced nuclear generation capabilities at home.
- ragebol 1y agoChina 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
- DougN7 1y agoSeems like a wise thing to do too.
- ragebol 1y agoYup.. 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
- dalyons 1y agoLuckily it is already the case, and it looks like coal is starting to drop in china
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> 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.
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- deadbabe 1y agoChina 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.
- cubefox 1y agoActually by far the biggest, in terms of total greenhouse emissions (30% of the world). Though other countries emit a lot more per capita.
- fmajid 1y agoSure, 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.
- cubefox 1y agoImporting 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.
- fmajid 1y agoIf you believe that, you also believe that shipping landfill or toxic chemicals to third-worlf countries absolves us for responsibility over them.
- lossolo 1y ago> 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?
- DeathArrow 1y agoI wonder if people would think China copied this from the West.
- hunterpayne 1y agoThey 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.
- SilverElfin 1y agoThis 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.
- inglor_cz 1y ago"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.
- tehjoker 1y agoYea 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.
- graemep 1y agoThey very much d have that sort of issue and worse. Uighurs and other minorities, treatment of gays....
- tehjoker 1y agoWorse 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.
- graemep 1y ago
- jmyeet 1y agoA 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IqcRl849R0
- Moldoteck 1y agoClassic nuclear in china is pretty cheap, 2.5-3bn/unit. They dont have western problems
- hit8run 1y agoMeanwhile 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.
- BoredPositron 1y agoBy 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.
- p2detar 1y agoNot 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.
- preisschild 1y agoAlso France. Rip Superphênix
- p2detar 1y ago> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix#Rocket_attack
- preisschild 1y ago> 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 ^^
- credit_guy 1y agoBefore 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-achieves-conversion-of-thorium-uranium-fuel https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chinese-msr-achi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Conversion_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Conversion_rat...
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- jandrese 1y agoFundamentally 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.
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- inshard 1y agoThorium is abundant in Sri Lanka’s mineral sands. Mined with dredgers at shallow depths 10-100m off the western coast.
- hunterpayne 1y agoThorium 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.
- ta20240528 1y agoThorium is also a waste product of monazite rare-earth mining.
- perihelions 1y agoThis post is just an excerpt—it's the first 4 paragraphs of a 29-paragraph article, https://archive.is/DQpXM https://archive.is/DQpXM ("China reaches energy independence milestone by ‘breeding’ uranium from thorium"–SCMP)
- dang 1y agoThanks! - since you've found a readable link, I've swapped https://humanprogress.org/china-reaches-energy-milestone-by-breeding-uranium-from-thorium/ 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.
- Hikikomori 1y agoThere's a danish company building modular container sized molten salt reactors. https://www.copenhagenatomics.com/ https://www.copenhagenatomics.com/
- stubish 1y agoThey 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.
- khaki54 1y agoInteresting 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?
- nuccy 1y agoMany reactors are built far away from coasts, they need water in general, but artificial lakes, or rivers are enough.
- hunterpayne 1y agoThis 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).
- throwawaymaths 1y agoalso 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.
- StarterPro 1y agoEvery other day its "China creates a breakthrough that was never thought possible" and "America shits in hand; Claps."
- gregbot 1y agoAt 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.
- Moldoteck 1y agoits 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...
- motbus3 1y agoHonest question Is SCMP a real media outlet?
- yanhangyhy 1y agoshit, people in china are focusing on japan and didn't talk about this much
- cykros 1y agoThis docuseries done by Erik Townsend from about a year or so ago on the need for nuclear and the looming energy cliff gets into some very high quality details and seems to be something the crowd here may be interested in: https://www.energytransitioncrisis.org/ https://www.energytransitioncrisis.org/