China mostly builds nuclear reactors to retain the required industrial base to maintain a military nuclear program. Nuclear power is heavily subsidized in China, as it is everywhere in the world. It might be cheaper than in the US or Europe, but its not "cheap".
The Chinese have built a small thorium reactor for research and development, and they went on to build a much larger Thorium reactor which they have refueled on the fly without taking it out of service.
I am still surprised that America hasn’t it treated it like a Sputnik moment, but we live in different times than the mid late 1950s. I think we’re waiting for the Chinese to ship it around the world like EV cars. Imagine a Thorium reactor that can be put into the bowels of a Hospital or an office building basement and supply electrical power.
The Chinese demonstration plant is only 2MW thermal / 300KW electrical with the one currently under construction expecting to up that to 60MW thermal / 10MW electrical.
The difficulty with molten salt reactors is that molten salt is highly corrosive. It will be interesting to see if they are able to make them cost effective.
Please read Directive (EU) 2022/2557 and then tell me how a disgruntled office worker is supposed to do anything they aren't supposed to, given full compliance with the directive. I've seen some preliminary national implementation efforts and it's really serious stuff physical security wise.
I don't think I've ever seen a place fully compliant with all regulations down to the last letter. Somebody inevitably takes a shortcut somewhere. All you can do is push those shortcuts into places they don't matter.
Certainly not the times and culture we live in, but the "test" they tried running at Chornobyl violated their own regulations too…
>>highly radioactive material is within reach of any disgruntled office worker.
Like, how would that disgruntled office worker even reach that highly radioactive material? Especially without killing themselves in the process. Hospitals already have extremely radioactive cobalt sources on premises, and they are 1) impossible to get to by a normal employee 2) would kill said employee if they ever did get to them somehow.
There can be a good bit of time between receiving a lethal dose of radiation, and dying (or incapacitated) from that.
Also sources tend to come with shielding. Some portable, some less-portable. Oh and.. use machinery / robots / whatever, with operator outside the danger zone.
Your "impossible" does a lot of heavy lifting here.
No, it's the normal that does the heavy lifting. A radiation therapy machine does not allow for an easy removal of the source, not without hours of work with specialized machinery. Again, how does a disgruntled office worker do this without immediate attention of security?
>>There can be a good bit of time between receiving a lethal dose of radiation, and dying (or incapacitated) from that
Well, it's really unfortunate, but we have multiple reports from people who have accidentally walked into a room with an open Cesium source at various irradiation facilities - they all reported that they felt incredibly sick in less than a minute. And that's "just" an irradiation source, not an active nuclear reactor. Again, I'm struggling to imagine how a "disgruntled worker" gets anywhere near the actual radiactive material within it.
Thorium-based nuclear research was practically shut down during the Cold War precisely because they realized that you can't make nuclear weaponry out of it. It would have been a very different world otherwise.
Thorium-based nuclear research was practically shut down because:
1. General decline of nuclear power plant building after 1970s in U.S. Why financing research for Thorium-based reactor, when even PWRs and BWRs are not build anymore. The shutdown of sodium-based reactor research is another example.
2. Handling of highly radioactive corrosive molten salts in Molten-salt reactor designs is a big issue. Materials resistant to both intensive chemical corrosion and neutron irradiation were open research problem.
3. Online reprocessing of nuclear fuel necessary for some thorium fuel cycle designs (inside the nuclear power plant) could increase the risk of nuclear proliferation. U.S. government, as a general policy, doesn't like when non-weapon states do nuclear reprocessing.
4. Thorium-based reactor could be used to produce weapon usable Uranium-233. But this production was not necessary, as military Plutonium production reactors were already build.
no, weapons production is unrealated anyway - it's cheaper to do it in special facilities. Thorium was just too late to the party when most units were classic PWR's and BWR's without complicated handling
"Unlike natural uranium, natural thorium contains only trace amounts of fissile material (such as Th-231), which are insufficient to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. Additional fissile material or another neutron source is necessary to initiate the fuel cycle. In a thorium-fuelled reactor, Th-232 absorbs neutrons to produce U-233. Depending on the design of the reactor and fuel cycle, the generated U-233 either fissions in situ or is chemically separated from the used nuclear fuel and formed into new nuclear fuel."
Many of specific issue around design nuclear weapons based on U-233 are classified. But:
"A declassified 1966 memo from the US nuclear program stated that uranium-233 has been shown to be highly satisfactory as a weapons material, though it was only superior to plutonium in rare circumstances. It was claimed that if the existing weapons were based on uranium-233 instead of plutonium-239, Livermore would not be interested in switching to plutonium.
The co-presence of uranium-232 can complicate the manufacture and use of uranium-233, though the Livermore memo indicates a likelihood that this complication can be worked around."
I think the larger concern is containment breach via sabotage and the resulting material release, definitely less than ideal if these things are put under random buildings where you have little perimeter control.
Indeed we live in very different times. If a challenger appears whose success threatens certain aspects of one's worldview rather than compete and improve oneself people figured out that it is much lower effort to adopt a partisan mindset and deny reality. Modern American politics in a nutshell.
They don't need to build reactors just to retain a military nuclear program. They specifically maintain a nuclear deterrent by policy, they don't need an excuse. They build reactors because they need more power. They have 60+ reactors and will have more nuclear the US by the end of the decade. They're also heavily investing in next-gen reactors which they wouldn't need to do if they just wanted a weapons program.
Yes it's subsidized, everything in China is subsidized, that's the best part of a planned-capitalist economy. But it's actually becoming more market driven so they can reduce financial pressure and force efficiency from competition. In 10 years those subsidies are gonna be a lot smaller
it is worth noting that if you were to measure by degree of subsidy, the planned output for nuclear has not really budged, but wind and solar are exploding in China in comparison.
> Even in China, nuclear power is little more than an afterthought. Nuclear’s share of total electricity generation in China fell for the third year in a row in 2024, to 4.5 percent. Nuclear capacity grew by 3.5 GW, while solar capacity grew by 278 GW. Solar and wind together generated about four times more electricity than nuclear reactors.
> Since 2010, the output of solar increased by a factor of over 800, wind by a factor of 20, and nuclear by a factor of six. Renewables, including hydro, increased from 18.7 percent of China’s electricity generation in 2010 to 33.7 percent in 2024 (7.5 times higher than nuclear’s share), while coal peaked in 2007 at 81 percent and declined to 57.8 percent in 2024.
no they dont. For military nuclear program you don't need power plants at all. You either have enrichment for uranium based warheads or a facility dedicated specifically to breed plutonium. Classic PWRs are unsuitable for that. There are ways - but it's so expensive that it's better to do it the proper way
military is unrealated to plants. You are ill informed.
The statement about subsidies is false too for existing plants. IPEX data is public. There are more subsidies for new units because the west is bad at construction but the amount is still not that great. Heck, biomass in EU gets 2x the CFD's vs min profitability limit of french Flamanville...
