China plans to build the world's first-ever nuclear power station using molten salt as the fuel carrier and coolant, and thorium as the fuel — revealed in a since-deleted report posted on the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics website.
China is planning to build the world's first-ever nuclear power station using molten salt as the fuel carrier and coolant, and thorium as the fuel.
Building on the results of the prototype, the new facility will produce 60MW of heat that will be used to generate 10MW of electricity and hydrogen as part of a larger renewable energy research hub. The project is part of China's campaign to become carbon neutral by 2060, which has seen Beijing funding research into a wide variety of renewable energy technologies including new types of large nuclear reactors and small modular reactors .
They also include a "frozen" salt plug designed to melt if the system overheats or loses power, allowing the molten salt to drain into a reservoir where it cools down and solidifies — stopping the nuclear reaction. Nuclear engineer Tony Irwin, an honorary associate professor at the Australian National University, said the TMSR was an "interesting technology that's got a lot of potential".
A functioning TMSR was built at the Oak Ridge laboratory in Tennessee but it endured a series of issues and malfunctions and was shut down in 1969, with thorium effectively abandoned in favour of uranium.China's researchers are not the only ones who have been working on the technology in recent years.
However, Professor Irwin said molten salt reactors were still too far away to consider for Australia."It's one that obviously everybody's looking at and monitoring, but the commercial path at the moment is still light water reactors in either large or small sizes for more immediate deployment." He said that if thorium was a "bridge too far" then a molten salt reactor using uranium would have all the same safety benefits, apart from the waste being longer-lived.
Molten Salt Reactor Gansu Shanghai Institute Of Applied Physics. Gobi Desert Oak Ridge
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