Nuclear Energy
- Thread starter Strangelove
- Start date
Tianwan nuclear power station unit 6 of CNNC (China National Nuclear Corporation), located in Lianyungang City, Jiangsu Province, was successfully connected to the grid for the first time.
Now this is a real blast from the past. I remember reading about the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) announcing their thorium-fueled molten-salt reactor project in January 2011. At the time it caught some minor attention in the news alongside several Western research initiatives and private companies performing R&D into thorium-fueled molten-salt reactors (see Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors). Here's an old news article from 2011:
10 years later none of the Western initiatives or companies have a prototype reactor under construction. But according to the article the CAS are finally getting ready to test their 2MW prototype reactor in Wuwei, Gansu province. It'll be interesting to see if commercial reactors will be available by 2030.
Some years back, I had heard of this project, but there was little information available on its progress since 2018/2019 until this month. This is potentially monumental. If this works, it will be what will ensure that the complete abandonment of the fossil fuel economy. Molten salt reactors and renewables because of their combined MUCH greater efficiency and MUCH greater abundance of their fuels, will bring about much less material scarcity in the world, enabling costs to come down to ensure much greater economic productivity and consumption globally, but as they do not emit GHGs, they will eventually reverse the trend of global warming and climate change, and are also much more boonful as they are much less polluting than fossil fuels
Those hopes have been dashed with electric vehicles. China also has the capability of producing crude oil from plants such as algae that can be refined to make plastics and other petrochemical products.
.jpg?ext=.jpg)
.jpg.aspx)