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Well, that and lack of diligently enforced safety standards.
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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Norway has a thorium reactor since 1959
I can't find a clear source on this. Could you help? This one says 2013 http://thorenergy.no/
According to GPT-4.1:
In 1959, Norway achieved a notable milestone by starting up its first nuclear reactor, the JEEP I (Joint Establishment Experimental Pile), located at Kjeller. This reactor was primarily used for research purposes, including early experiments with alternative nuclear fuels such as thorium. While JEEP I itself was not a thorium reactor per se, it laid the groundwork for subsequent Norwegian research into thorium as a nuclear fuel. This early phase demonstrated Norway's scientific interest in thorium, leveraging its domestic thorium resources and contributing to later thorium reactor experiments.
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Scientific advances from China need to have outside confirmation. Because, propaganda and all that
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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
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.
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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.
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this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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