It marks the first long-term, stable operation of the technology, putting China at the forefront of a global race to harness thorium – considered a safer and more abundant alternative to uranium – for nuclear power.
The experimental reactor, located in the Gobi Desert in China’s west, uses molten salt as the fuel carrier and coolant, and thorium – a radioactive element abundant in the Earth’s crust – as the fuel source. The reactor is reportedly designed to sustainably generate 2 megawatts of thermal power.
US experiments were broken off because it gives no excuse to attain materials for nuclear weapons. Same excuse everyone else use.
This excuse doesn’t make any sense. This myth also needs to die. You can’t get weapons grade materials from fission reactors, and you certainly aren’t converting spent fuel into weapons. The process of refining weapons grade uranium or synthesizing plutonium have nothing to do with energy producing reactors
Uranium was endorsed because it was easier to create a reactor with and didn’t have to deal with the corrosive issue that metallurgy of the early nuclear age into the 50s couldn’t really handle economically.
It gives you a reason to access the materials you need for nuclear weapons.
Who is saying they’re using the fuel for reactors to make the weapons? Just you.
And not that I count it. But they do infact make weapons from spent uranium. They make artillery shells from it. Buy like I said. I don’t even count that.
There is no correlation between nuclear weapons production and nuclear power generation. If anything they compete for the same raw materials. They were developed in the same era because that’s when we discovered how to harness fission.
Also depleted uranium is not spent fuel. Depleted uranium is the byproduct of enriching uranium to weapons grade. Given the natural ratios of u238 to u235, there’s an abundance of it from refining nuclear weapons hence why some weapons and armor utilize it.
Yes. They compete for the same raw material. That’s the whole point. Gives you a perfectly good reason to excavate it.
That’s not a point in favor of why they coexist. The military is going to fund uranium mining one way or the other, given the potency of nuclear weapons as a deterrence, as well as their own militarized applications of nuclear reactors powering aircraft carriers.
The only valid argument for why military planning influenced civilian nuclear power because the military also tested and decided on nuclear power for various applications because it was efficient, reliable and had long term viability with minimal space investment. But even the military came to the conclusion it wanted nuclear power where it could get independent of wanting nuclear weapons.
Edit: And as a bonus, just because this myth is so dumb, Chicago-1 predated the Manhattan project and is directly cited as being an inspiration for the Manhattan project, not the other way around as people keep trying to claim. Even without nuclear weapons we would still have uranium powered nuclear reactors, and they’d probably be more prevalent without all the fearmongers hopping on the big oil bandwagon and spewing propaganda that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Thorium fuel cycle is useful for weapon production. Germany also abandoned thorium despite no interest in weapon production.