It's Happening - China Launches World's First Thorium Nuclear Reactor

China just announced the construction of the Wolds First nuclear power plant fuelled by molten Thorium salt.

0:00 The Thorium Opportunity
1:45 How Do Molten Salt Reactors Work?
6:32 Ad Read
7:56 Why Is Thorium So Compelling?
11:37 The World's First Thorium Salt Reactor
18:35 Conclusion

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[DrBenMiles]

This is genuinely an awesome product - I've be playing with it for a week straight now. Slightly concerned that Gimli, my dog 🐶 is the highest radiation source in my house. What does this mean... Is he ok... Possible super powers in his future...(?) Send help...

[Afrobelly]

"secretly everything still runs on steam turbines, and we NEVER left the 1800's" Had me dying, . It's SO TRUE

[traildude]

A cousin who worked at Hanford was arguing for thorium as far back as 1990. He and some colleagues tried to get the companies that ran Hanford to look to the future and invest in development, to no avail. The big problem was that executives were not immune to the scare about nuclear power and the fact that temperatures would rival those of lava made thorium seem more dangerous still,

[logenvestfold]

If Norway wasn’t so busy with oil they could have found a way to harness the power of Thor

[Username]

Starting up a molten salt reactor isn't hard. Making a metal reactor chamber that doesn't corrode away while holding 1200°C salt allowing for a lifespan to be profitable is hard.

[lynnebalzer]

Not only is thorium 3-4 times more abundant than uranium, as you said, but over 99% of uranium, U-238 is not fissile (able to be split when hit with a neutron). In order to use it, the mix must be enriched by removing some of the U-238 and leaving a higher percentage of U-235. This is very expensive. In contrast, thorium is 100% usable. A sample is hundreds of times less expensive than uranium. The main drawback to thorium is that a molten salt mixture is corrosive and can eat away at the container it is in.

[marginbuu]

Thorium desalination plant. Seawater is boiled to produce steam. After using the steam to generate power, it gets condensed and harvested as water. The brine gets reused as new material for the molten salt. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

[krakhedd]

The meltdown of a molten salt reactor can be 100% walk-away-safe mitigated and is not a concern at all; the chemistry works out such that as it drains, the salt rapidly cools and stops being able to flow and mix and that stops the fission

[tomshackell]

This video is somewhat misleading. The Chinese TMSR-LF1 is in fact a *uranium* burner, not a thorium breeder reactor. The primary fissile material is standard Uranium-235, and the plant will burn essentially the same amount of U235 as any other nuclear reactor, it will also require the same amount of mined uranium as a standard reactor. The TMSR-LF1 removes some fertile U238 from the fuel and replaces it with fertile Th232 instead. However, the vast majority of the power still comes from good old fashioned fissile U235. Describing it as a "thorium reactor" is like describing a standard gasoline engine running on E5 (5% ethanol, 95% gasoline) as an "ethanol engine". It is, however, a molten salt reactor - which is a lot more interesting.

[BDnevernind]

It's not "the Internet" that thorium MSRs appeal to, it's ordinary people who don't own stock in legacy power companies and don't have a stake in producing weapons grade plutonium.

[nicholasconder]

Using molten salt has one further advantage. It avoids something that caused a couple of the explosions at Fukushima and may have contributed to the Chernobyl disaster. It has been shown when the zirconium cladding on the fuel rods gets exposed to air, the steam begins to react with the hot metal and the metal oxidizes, releasing hydrogen gas. It is known that at least one of the explosions at Fukushima was a hydrogen, not steam, explosion. If the system does not contain any water, this reaction cannot occur.

[EmilM-pbhn]

It is definitely a win. Anyone disagreeing with Nuclear simply does not know nuclear. It is literally that simple. Learn everything about nuclear, all it's history and it's reactor types, and you've now learned the best way forward for a world that's conquered completely clean energy forever.

[zomgneedaname]

You should give props to Kirk Sorenson who literally saved the files of the ORNL MSR as it was on the way to the shredder, published it online which was ignored by congress but picked up by chinese academics. Probably single handedly changed the course of Thorium reactors in human history.

[GMATveteran]

One additional advantage China has in the pursuit of Thorium power is its widespread deployment of UHV power grids, which enables profitable electricity transmission across far longer distances with lower transmission loss relative to conventional power lines. This enables the PRC to place Thorium power plants in far more remote locations, & take advantage of massive amounts of under-utilized land in its interior. This provides both economic & security benefits.

[ioandragulescu]

@13:16 I remember watching a documentary some years ago where the oak ridge scientist, old and dying and very frustrated that nobody cared about their decades old research, just gave it for free to chinese scientists. And then the media in the US started to pay attention to them, in a negative way of course. Was such a shame that their work was forgotten all this time. Also I do remember reading about some experimental thorium rector in Norway.

[MrGottaQuestion]

Thorium requires more neutron bombardments to become a long-lived trans-uranic (heavier than uranium) isotope. A molten salt reactor can continuously filter out the protactinium and uranium before the fuel receives sufficient neutrons to become a trans-uranic. For this reason, a molten salt reactor running on thorium can theoretically avoid the vast majority of long-lived isotopes. Even better, using long-lived trans-uranic isotopes is also possible, as in neutron flux these will eventually split. All these elements are either fertile (being able to receive neutrons to become fissile) or fissile. This means a molten salt reactor could also theoretically burn up 100% of the long-lived nuclear waste. This would result in highly radioactive, short-lived nuclear waste. Solid reactors don't do this because of gaseous fission products destroying the solid fuel elements. Thought this was an important point to share, which the video glossed over.

[laura-ann.]

Not mentioned in this video: the primary reason the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment was ultimately considered to have "failed", was that the flouride salt used was damaging the Hastelloy piping at a much faster rate than anticipated. It is well known that neutron bombardment causes embrittlement of most steel alloys, specifically, it increases the nil-ductility transition temperature of the steel, but in the case of the MSRE, the hot flouride salt was not only chemically attacking the pipes and valves, it was also reducing the ductility, a dangerous condition because embrittlement can result in catastrophic failure of a pipe from even a minor impact or vibration stress, for example, if a high-speed gate valve is triggered to slam closed in some type of shutdown emergency. The salt damage to the piping was so widespread, that the engineers determined that the entire piping system needed to be replaced after only 5 years; this would be completely unacceptable in a commercial power plant. I wonder how the Chinese have solved this problem in their molten-salt reactor? At the time that the MSRE was built in the 1960's, Hastelloy was the most corrosion-resistant alloy known, maybe the Chinese engineers have come up with something better?

[SugarGlider]

Meanwhile Germany just demolished their plants in favor of... Coal? What?!

[elrictraver]

Legit, I'm just happy someone is finally utilizing this tech we've had for 70 years.

[barlimanbuterbur]

In 2007 Turkish Prof. Dr. Engin Arık ve Prof. Dr. Şenel Boydağ and their team is died in a suspicious plance crash. The team was working on Thorium Nuclear Reactor.