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this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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this is toy sized reactor, not even entire technology demonstrator, there are medical isotope/research reactors with power 20MWt and more
OK, but do they run on Thorium?
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.
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