It used to be said that "science fiction plus time equals science fact".
Now it's pretty clear that this is only the case if you add "plus moving it to China".
Could I get a ELI5 on what a thorium nuclear reactor is and why it's important, etc?
Thorium is less reactive than uranium and less likely to meltdown. They need to add a kickstarter to the thorium to get it to react and it is easier to control this kickstarter than it is to keep uranium from reacting.
Also, there is more thorium in the earth than uranium.
kickstarter
I'm so sleepy today - even after my morning coffee that it took me a few seconds to realize that was the dictionary word and not a mention of the website.
In addition to what others mentioned, traditional reactors need a lot of water for cooling so they have to be constructed close to large bodies of water. Meanwhile, molten salt reactors can be built anywhere.
With uranium, over 99% of it is an isotope that can't be used in a reactor. So, you have to process it and create a bunch of 'depleted uranium' waste to make fuel-grade enriched uranium. Meanwhile, thorium is the opposite and over 99% of it can be used in a reactor. Also, the ores it's found in are usually more concentrated than uranium and don't form pockets of dangerous radon gas, so it's safer, cheaper and more efficient to mine.
As a fuel it also has better thermal conductivity, a higher melting point, and it also produces fewer long-lived radioactive isotopes, so instead of taking tens of thousands of years to become safe, the waste can cool off in just a couple of hundred years (which still sounds like a long time, but it's not "building crazy doom bunkers so our descendants don't accidentally dig it up" long).
Also, the ores it's found in are usually more concentrated than uranium and don't form pockets of dangerous radon gas, so it's safer, cheaper and more efficient to mine.
Right now the US is mining/transporting uranium in the Grand fucking Canyon. Besides risking a natural wonder of the world with rich cultural and scientific history, it also risks the native lands of the Havasupai tribe which would be permanently displaced if an environmental disaster occurred there.
Interesting. What are the downsides of these?
One small downside, as mentioned elsewhere, is that you need to add a fissile isotope to get the thorium 'going', and because thorium has a high sintering temperature you have to heat it up a lot to make it into fuel rods or pellets, so fabricating the fuel is more complicated.
Also, once the thorium is combined with the starter isotope it gives off a lot of gamma radiation so you have to handle it remotely - this is kind of a benefit too though, as it makes it really easy to detect thorium fuel handling so it's hard to secretly proliferate.
However, these downsides supposedly won't affect 'molten salt' reactors, which are nuclear reactors using salts of the radioactive isotopes in liquid form. Liquid fuel is easier to make than solid fuel rods, and to prevent meltdowns you can build the reactor vessel to have a plug at the bottom that melts if the temperature gets too high, so the fuel will pour into an underground vault, physically spreading it out and stopping the reaction. As a failsafe it's so dumb and simple that it's basically impossible to fuck up. And lastly, the reactor would use liquid metal as a coolant instead of high pressure water, so there's no chance of a steam explosion (which is what happened at Chernobyl) making it much, much safer.
But this reactor design is still just in the prototype stage... or it was, until China just set about building the world's first!
The downsides are we haven't done it before.
i really hope countries like mali, niger, and burkina faso get some of these plants running. it will break the brains of anglos.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
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