2014-03-19

China Remains a Bright Spot in the Long Term

Projects like these have become impossible in the West. In China, they are up to the challenge.

Chinese going for broke on thorium nuclear power, and good luck to them
“This is definitely a race. China faces fierce competition from overseas and to get there first will not be an easy task”,” says Professor Li Zhong, a leader of the programme. He said researchers are working under “warlike” pressure to deliver.
Good for them. They may do the world a big favour. They may even help to close the era of fossil fuel hegemony, and with it close the rentier petro-gas regimes that have such trouble adapting to rational modern behaviour. The West risks being left behind, still relying on the old uranium reactor technology that was originally designed for US submarines in the 1950s.
U.S. nuclear power is based off of a Cold War era that needed reactors for weapons. Thorium reactors are safer and create less pollution.
The Chinese appear to be opting for a molten salt reactor – or a liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) — a notion first proposed by the US nuclear doyen Alvin Weinberg and arguably best adapted for thorium.

This in entirely different from thorium efforts in the West that rely on light water technology used in uranium reactors. The LFTR has its own problems, not least corrosion caused by the fluoride.

“We are still in the dark about the physical and chemical nature of thorium in many ways. There are so many problems to deal with but so little time,” said Prof Li.
The nation that first develops this technology will have an absolute economic advantage. All energy intensive industrial production would have an incentive to move there. And China will need decades to build enough reactors for itself, giving it a decades long advantage on the West. This could be like the Industrial Revolution was for the West.
China’s thorium drive is galling for the Americans. They have dropped the ball. As I reported last year, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee actually built a molten salt thorium reactor in the 1960s. It was shelved by the Nixon Administration. The Pentagon needed plutonium residue from uranium to for nuclear bombs. The imperatives of the Cold War prevailed.

The thorium blueprints gathered dust in the archives until retrieved and published by former Nasa engineer Kirk Sorensen. The US largely ignored him: China did not.

Mr Jiang visited the Oak Ridge labs and obtained the designs – entirely legitimately – after reading an article in the American Scientist extolling thorium. His team concluded that a molten salt reactor may be the answer China’s prayers. It is playing out just as he hoped.

The Chinese are currently building 28 standard reactors – by far the biggest nuclear push in the world – and working on several research and development fronts at once. This is to break what it calls a “scary” dependence on imported fuel, but also to fight pollution.
The big issues in America are how to pay for free healthcare, immigration, wealth inequality, debt and equality. America is entirely focused on internal divisions and how to split up the wealth it has, while ignoring how to create new wealth. China is focused on the future and building new wealth. Assuming China goes through a major economic crisis in the next few years, it may well be the last time that China is "behind" the West. The next crisis will be in developed world and by the time it comes out of it, China will already be years into a technological and energy revolution.

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