It will be funny if China is what convinces the US to be more open to free industry. Opposite day vs the 1970s

The French interest in breeder reactors and nuclear reprocessing also originates from a similar concern about lack of domestic access to raw uranium. Though Super-phoenix [0] was a more traditional uranium -> plutonium approach and not thorium. They gave up because just using uranium is way, way cheaper than synthesizing your own fissile materials.

[0] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/indias-prototype...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix

If you have easy access to uranium, you just use it directly instead.

This would allow Western China to also develop reactors to help underpin their renewable and coal energy.

> The interest in MSR technology and Thorium breeding did not disappear however. China's nuclear power production relies heavily on imported uranium,[10] a strategic vulnerability in the event of i.e. economic sanctions. Additionally, the relative lack of water available for cooling PWRs west of the Hu line is a limiting factor for siting them there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1?wprov=sfti1#History

Uranium isn't as ubiquitous as, say, natural gas, and stockpiling it comes with a big heap of physical problems. I can definitely see countries spending on more expensive technology if it comes with more energy security.

That is, as long as we don't build more nuclear power plants.

If you want to increase nuclear power adoption, then you're not going to stay in “current market conditions” for long.

What people need to understand about the cycle efficiency is that when you mine uranium, the fissionable part of uranium (U-235) is only 1% of that uranium, the rest is nonfissionable U-238.

Thorium is about twice as abundant as Uranium (all isotopes). The MSR uses Thorium to create U-233, a fissionable but not naturally occurring Uranium isotope.

So the "unlimited energy aspect" is that about 200-300x more breedable Thorium exists than fissionable U-235.

A MSR nation could also try to breed U-238 into plutonium, which would provide another 100x more breeding stock, although LFTR never talked about U-238 breeding. IIRC the plutonium may be difficult to handle because of gamma rays, but I don't recall exactly.

While I don't have confidence that even LFTR/MSR reactors can get economical enough to challenge gas peakers, it may be possible to make truly price-competitive MSR electricity with the right modular design. I wish the Chinese the best of luck, because if they do it will spur the rest of the world to adopt this about-as-clean-and-safe-as-it-gets nuclear design.

That really isn’t true. The reason Shanghai didn’t expand their maglev to Hangzhou is because residents were worried about electrical magnetic radiation, which I don’t think is really a thing. Nuclear took a long time to get started in China because people thought the government to be inept and corrupt, an image that has only recently faded away in the last decade. Without free elections, public opinion is actually much more important if you want to avoid economically destructive riots.

But this all happens in back rooms, the legal system isn’t very relevant, so if you have an issue but it isn’t a very popular one, you don’t really have any recourse. For example, niche environmental issues, or ones that aren’t widely recognized yet as dangerous…