this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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There were small reactors that ran on thorium. Scaling up all the necessary molten salt processing will be pretty hard thing to do, if this thing can even run continously that is
This is the world's largest thorium reactor. There have been other experimental ideas, but not many operational ones. The next largest operational Thorium reactor I can find is called kamini in India, which is 30kw. For scale, China's reactor is 2000kw.
3Okw is a toy. That would power maybe 10 US homes. 2000kw? That's more like 600 homes. Small, but usable. Fits the SMR niche well, actually. Making 1/1000th of the radioactive waste and basically no weapons grade materials locks in there too.
The article makes it very clear its running continuously, which is what they are celebrating. They have successfully refueled it while operating, which is a huge part of the "continuous."
The article is all of 6 paragraphs. It's not a difficult read.
As someone that often works for multiple years on pilot and poc projects, can we stop calling those "toys".
Sorry we don't have madscientist money here.
Why can't we spend $20 billion on a full-scale reactor that may very well not work? Why is science so slow?
Science doesn't have to be slow. Politics and funding are usually the bottleneck.
Yes, but if you increase the funding, they will say "Why is science so expensive?"
yeah either that or sometimes that one biologist illegally gene-editing embryos shows up