News and David Fishman's commentary: China's progress toward a molten salt thorium reactor.
I'd thought that the reactor was U-233 as opposed to U-235, and that the point of the thorium was to "breed" the Th-232 into U-233... like getting Pu-239 out of U-238. I'm learning that this is first-generation thinking. (NuScale, for all its merit, is first-generation.)
The Chinese think they can use the uranium (or plutonium... or curium) to spark a reaction (antimatter aside) but then let it carry on with the fertile thorium. That's (per Fishman) why the molten-salt: 1970s-era Rankine RBMK water does slow neutrons, salt does fast ones for this faster generation. Fast neutrons breed the thorium.
That would certainly be a lot cheaper than my idea! And they won't need to create a lot of U-233 and store it and (most worrisome-ly) guard it. And noted in the commentary, not all countries are as lucky as the US in their uranium reserve; China and India are richer in thorium. (As, indeed, is our own Moon.) So they'll need this for their supply-chain.
It is still a (very) large reactor, not a NuScale you just buy for your local community. The reaction still makes U-233 as the process... proceeds; but the Chinese believe they can guard this since it's, you know, being used, in the middle of a reactor. Nobody but an idiot is going to rob the heart of Core-Chan.
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