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Title: China Achieves Thorium-Uranium Conversion Within Molten Salt Reactor

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/11/05/...

Longtime Slashdot reader hackingbear writes: South China Morning Post, citing
Chinese state media, reported that an experimental reactor developed in the
Gobi Desert by the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Shanghai Institute of Applied
Physics has achieved thorium-to-uranium fuel conversion, paving the way for
an almost endless supply of nuclear energy. It is the first time in the world
that scientists have been able to acquire experimental data on thorium
operations from inside a molten salt reactor according to a report by Science
and Technology Daily. Thorium is much more abundant and accessible than
uranium and has enormous energy potential. One mine tailings site in Inner
Mongolia is estimated to hold enough of the element to power China entirely
for more than 1,000 years. At the heart of the breakthrough is a process
known as in-core thorium-to-uranium conversion that transforms naturally
occurring thorium-232 into uranium-233 -- a fissile isotope capable of
sustaining nuclear chain reactions within the reactor itself. Thorium (Th-
232) is not itself fissile and so is not directly usable in a thermal neutron
reactor. Thorium fuels therefore need a fissile material as a 'driver' so
that a chain reaction (and thus supply of surplus neutrons) can be
maintained. The only fissile driver options are U-233, U-235 or Pu-239. (None
of these are easy to supply.) In the 1960s, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory
(USA) designed and built a demonstration MSR using U-233, derived externally
from thorium as the main fissile driver.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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