In a 4 April 2021 three minute read article at the The Institute of Electrical
and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Spectrum magazine web site, Prachi
Pratel reports on the announcement out of China that they are hoping to
have a prototype commercial molten sodium reactor (MSR) using thorium
as fuel undergoing testing next month (September 2021).
They then hope to build multiple commercial reactors by 2030.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Prachi Pratel, IEEE Spectrum
If all goes well with the prototype, says a report in Live Science, the Chinese government plans to build several large MSRs. According to the World Nuclear Association, the country is eyeing thorium MSRs as a source of energy especially for the northwestern portion of the country, which has lower population density and an arid climate.
MSRs are attractive for arid regions because instead of the water used by conventional uranium reactors, MSRs use molten fluoride salts to cool their cores. Uranium or thorium fuel can be mixed into the coolant salt. Thorium MSRs have the advantage of being more abundant and cheaper.
China's experimental reactor won't be the world's first. Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) pioneered thorium-based MSRs in the 1950s for nuclear aircraft propulsion as part of the Manhattan Project. A 7.4 MWth experimental reactor operated at the laboratory over a period of four years—although only a portion of its fuel was derived from uranium-233 bred from thorium in other reactors. This MSR technology was eventually shelved because the Pentagon favored the uranium fast breeder reactor, says Charles Forsberg, Principal Research Scientist at MIT's department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and former nuclear researcher at ORNL.
Scientists in China are now building on the same basic MSR technology developed at ORNL. The Chinese government had a small, short-lived knowledge exchange program with ORNL. But most of the thorium reactor-related intellectual property from ORNL is in the public domain, and China appears to have made some use of it. "The real data mine is the thousands of published reports in 1960s and '70s that are found in the open literature," Forsberg says.
Plus, recent technology developments have made it more feasible to build MSRs, he adds. This includes modern instrumentation that can unveil exactly what goes on in the reactor—but also includes equipment that finds parallel use, such as high-temperature salt pumps used in today's concentrated solar power plants that store heat via molten salts.
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Article here :-
https://spectrum.ieee.org/china-clos...uclear-reactor
Another article at Live Science with additional background on the technology :-
https://www.livescience.com/china-cr...m-reactor.html
