Scientists in China are about to turn on an experimental thorium reactor that’s believed by some to be the Holy Grail of nuclear energy because it’s safer, cheaper and has less potential for weaponisation.
ABC News reported that construction on the thorium-based molten salt reactor was expected to be finished this month, with the first tests to begin as early as September.
“Thorium is a metallic element with radioactive properties, close to uranium on the periodic table, which was considered as an alternative fuel source when the US was first developing nuclear energy technology in the 1940s,” ABC News said.
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The United States set up an experimental thorium-based molten salt nuclear reactor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee but eventually shut it down and abandoned thorium in favour of uranium in the early 1970s.
The new reactor at Wuwei, located on the edge of the Gobi Desert in northern China, is an experimental prototype designed to have an output of just 2MW. The plan is to develop a series of small molten salt reactors each producing 100MW energy.
Molten salt plants don’t use water for cooling like traditional nuclear power plants and so can be built in desert areas, such as China’s sparsely populated western regions. The first commercial plants using the new technology are scheduled to come online in 2030.
Nigel Marks, an associate professor of physics at Curtin University, told ABC News that China pushing ahead with thorium as a nuclear fuel was an exciting development.
“They’ve effectively reactivated a research program that the US mothballed back in the 60s,” Dr Marks said.
“Who knows, maybe in a different climate with some different economics they could make it work.”
Thorium has several advantages over uranium. Firstly, the radioactive waste from thorium only needs to be stored for about 500 years, compared to several thousand for uranium. It’s also much more difficult and time consuming to make weapons-grade uranium out of thorium.
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Also, using molten salt instead of water means a reactor can’t melt down in the same way as traditional water-cooled reactors. Molten salt reactors are also potentially cheaper because they don’t need to be pressurised to keep the coolant water from turning into steam.
Dr Marks said China was diversifying its energy generation.
“They’ve got a couple of different technologies, and there’s loads of different reactor designs they’re pursuing across their whole nuclear sector,” he said.
“So they’re giving it a good shot, and I’m really interested to see what happens.”
