Chinese developing safe nuclear power

[CatInASuit]

A couple of weeks before the latest tragedy in Japan struck, the Chinese launched a new form of nuclear power which should be safer than the current versions used.

The difference is that this uses the common material thorium as its power source instead of uranium or plutonium.

Also, because the fission process is driven by external source of energy, and is not self-sustaining, if there is a problem, it is much easier to turn it off.

More on the story here

Regardless of who is developing it, hopefully it can become a much cheaper and more efficient fuel for the future before we have to totally switch to relying on the sun for power.

[What Exit?]

This sounds intriguing but I already see some errors in the reporting:

The earth’s crust holds 80 years of uranium at expected usage rates, he said.

This is not accurate for several reasons. All estimates I have seen are for longer then 80 years supply between what is already mined and what is still reasonable to mine. Then there is the option of bringing pebble bed reactors up. These would extend the fuel supply by centuries with a large growth.

Dr Cywinski is developing an accelerator driven sub-critical reactor for thorium, a cutting-edge project worldwide. It needs to £300m of public money for the next phase, and £1.5bn of commercial investment to produce the first working plant. Thereafter, economies of scale kick in fast. The idea is to make pint-size 600MW reactors.

This tells me that this tech is not really close to ready for use. Lovely idea, but lets not count on it.

So lets keep planning on better distribution, more solar, more wind, building state of the art cleaner coal plants and tidal projects and etc to solve future energy needs along with safer Nuclear power of all sorts. Hey, someday we might finally make Fusion work, then our energy needs will pretty much disappear.

[Zuul]

Interesting. Despite the crises in Japan, I'm all for more research into and use of nuclear power. But it does sound like this technology is a few years off, if it even makes it that far.

[The Original An Gadaí]

I've always thought that countries like the US, Russia and Canada could reliably depend on nuclear for most of their energy needs. Would there be any practical reasons why they couldn't?
I think from a public safety perspective there are enough completely out of the way, seismically ok parts of each of these countries to place as many nuclear power plants as would be needed. I know, of course, that it wouldn't be possible politically, especially not in light of recent events in Japan.

[What Exit?]

Potentially the large countries like the US, China, Russia, Canada, Oz and Brazil could put large plants concentrations far away from major population centers but then you run into the huge losses in distribution of power. The US wastes something like 20% of the electric we generate in heat waste on the wires and transformers. We need better distribution too along with new sources of power.