It marks the first long-term, stable operation of the technology, putting China at the forefront of a global race to harness thorium – considered a safer and more abundant alternative to uranium – for nuclear power.
The experimental reactor, located in the Gobi Desert in China’s west, uses molten salt as the fuel carrier and coolant, and thorium – a radioactive element abundant in the Earth’s crust – as the fuel source. The reactor is reportedly designed to sustainably generate 2 megawatts of thermal power.
This is such a weird comment, full of “NiCd batteries aren’t good enough so solar/wind are useless because we can’t store the power” energy.
It’s a test reactor, it’s meant to be smaller than the “big boys”, and in a few years it’ll be smaller and more efficient.
Sure, it’s not going to singlehandedly power an entire country, but distributed power is better than localized. 1000 small reactors placed all over means less likelihood of system wide failure than a handful of large ones.
When state-level funding for SMRs is available, it just makes more sense to build normal, GWe-sized reactors instead. For everything else, look up https://awful.systems/comment/7019440