Me opening the comment section knowing that its just gonna be a bunch of racism... like i get it i hate the chinese government as well but give credit to the millions of scientists and people who are actually trying to make life better on this earth. If something isnt american, it can still be nice to have.
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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On most of the fediverse, I find discussions really great with no idiots/trolls... apart from technology. Here it seems some get triggered by any tech from outside the US.
This announcement would be seen as a massive breakthrough anywhere else. China has its problems, I'm fully aware of the red flags and government influence. But only a fool would question their technological advances at this point. They are moving ahead at lightning speed, especially in energy and battery tech.
Even on the consumer side, Huawei invested more in R&D last year than Samsung or Intel. Huawei consumer division could have been expected to be dead by now with the chip ban, yet survived and are thriving again. Not because the Chinese were forced to by their phones, Apple still sell in China, but because they innovated like hell. A Chinese buyer has the option today of buying a tri-folding tablet phone with super fast charging or an American designed device with 3 year old tech (chip aside). Americans don't have that choice.
Its also the reason why traditional European car brands are tanking in China. VW can no longer expect to sell on prestige alone. Here in Britain, our consumer tech offering is already almost non existent. We no longer have a true British owned car company. Our famous Mini was sold to the Germans. Jaguar/Range Rover to the Indians. MG to the Chinese. Its depressing. But I do feel fortunate to at least have choice (we can buy a BYD or Xiaomi here) and that I'm not subject to only American tech reporting. BYD will later this year have 7 different car models on sale in Britain vs 6 (soon to be 5) from Ford. This is a paradigm shift, considering for almost the last 20 years Ford had at least 2 cars in the top 5 best sellers in the UK.
Apologies for going off on one. But i'd highly recommend US readers check out Chinese tech sites from time to time (eg carnewschina/huawei central etc) rather than just relying on the verge. Sure not all Chinese tech will be successful, sure some designs may be clones, but the shear scale of investment from China will make them unstoppable. I believe the changing of the guard happened a while ago, where about to see it play out in all industries...
China has its problems, I'm fully aware of the red flags
I see what you did here
This announcement would be seen as a massive breakthrough anywhere else.
I don't trust science (or R&D engineering) that's not peer reviewed. Anything else is just marketing hype. Show me hard numbers or GTFO.
China also has a problem with the government lying-- for example, about their claimed reductions in greenhouse emissions. There's no reason to trust self-serving authoritarians without credible corroboration.
BYD will later this year have 7 different car models on sale in Britain vs 6 (soon to be 5) from Ford.
That's an irrelevant metric. Nobody's going to buy a car just because the model range is a bit wider than some other company's. What's relevant is adoption, and then buyer loyalty. It may be that BYD offers cars that people want to buy, but they're subsequently found to be of crap quality or aggressively undermining driver privacy (which other non-Chinese manufacturers have also done).
but the shear scale of investment from China will make them unstoppable
If appropriately rigorous science and suitably disciplined engineering are part of the process, and regulators do their jobs correctly, then maybe. Otherwise it's just throwing money at a problem. Investment doesn't guarantee results. China is certainly capable of getting positive outcomes from tech investment, but it's not guaranteed.
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But it's not a market based solution! It's centrally planned and it's possible no one is even making phat profits from this! Highly unethical!
What are you on about?
Nearly every upvoted comment is in praise of this. Only 2 comments warn caution about Chinese data.
Why do people need to lie and pretend China is this big victim being picked on.
You would never write a paragraph like that in defense of the amount of anti-US sentiment on Lemmy, so it’s not like you actually care about being fair to nations. Posts like yours reek of nothing more than propaganda.
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Jaguar Land Rover may be owned by Tata, an Indian financial holding company, but they're still based in the UK, designed in the UK, built in the UK.
That was broadly the same for Mini too until the most recent generation, where the EV version is actually a Chinese car.
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Refreshing not to see the comment section full of anti-nuclear brainlets. For a second I thought Lemmy was a Greenpeace hot-spot.
Anyway...
One good turn deserves another. If others won't follow because of good example, hopefully other countries will instead follow because of competition.
green peace is cool and all, but nuclear the only way forward, other than asking everyone nicely to use much less energy…
and supposedly the new molten salt thorium reactor design automatically shuts itself off and basically can’t have a meltdown… if that’s real it’s a great way forward….
well, except for all the nuclear waste, but i’m sure they’ll figure that out too….
Yeah, thorium reactors can't meltdown because they need to constantly being powered by thorium, sick you can find anywhere. There's a 2008 or so bill gates Ted talk on nuclear power that talks about it. For better or worse, china is going to lead the world regarding energy (and economy, seeing all those trump tariffs)
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Too bad we do not know which exactly thorium salt mixes they are using, what the materials facing the molten salt at high neutron fluxes are and how they fare long term, whether they use on-site constant or batched fuel reprocessing, whether they kickstarted the reactor with enrichened uranium or reactor-grade plutonium waste and other such questions.
US experiments were broken off because of materials corrosion problem.
US experiments were broken off because it gives no excuse to attain materials for nuclear weapons. Same excuse everyone else use.
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i think that lack of willingness to handle fresh fission products has a part in this, in normal reactor you can just do nothing and win (bulk of most dangerous isotopes decays completely within 5y, not possible to do this with MSR)
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it should perhaps be pointed out that we originally had proposition for both reactors but we ended up with uranium reactors because the US wanted a reason to mine uranium for nuclear bombs and were well aware of the risk difference but didn't care about the potential lives being lost if something went wrong. later, the cost to develop a thorium reactor had no monetary benefits beyond generating power and keeping people safe so no country wanted to invest in it when the uranium blueprints were available, literally because of capitalism.
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Thanks for the archive link, OP. Shit that site was cancerous
Good news, mankind should be pushing farther into this technologies.... so we finally have our first gen IV reactor? I honestly thought we would never reach them on time.
Plus Thorium rocks
Remember when it was all the hype when things just started - crazy to see it actually happen
I’d like to thank the thorium. Great job guys! All around, great stuff!
Uh, what about the THTR-300 that operated at 300MW capacity from 1987 to 1989?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300
It was a total failure, though. Not quite Chernobyl, but it was plagued by incidents.
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