Technology

On most of the fediverse, I find discussions really great with no idiots/trolls... apart from technology. Here it seems some get triggered by any tech from outside the US.

This announcement would be seen as a massive breakthrough anywhere else. China has its problems, I'm fully aware of the red flags and government influence. But only a fool would question their technological advances at this point. They are moving ahead at lightning speed, especially in energy and battery tech.

Even on the consumer side, Huawei invested more in R&D last year than Samsung or Intel. Huawei consumer division could have been expected to be dead by now with the chip ban, yet survived and are thriving again. Not because the Chinese were forced to by their phones, Apple still sell in China, but because they innovated like hell. A Chinese buyer has the option today of buying a tri-folding tablet phone with super fast charging or an American designed device with 3 year old tech (chip aside). Americans don't have that choice.

Its also the reason why traditional European car brands are tanking in China. VW can no longer expect to sell on prestige alone. Here in Britain, our consumer tech offering is already almost non existent. We no longer have a true British owned car company. Our famous Mini was sold to the Germans. Jaguar/Range Rover to the Indians. MG to the Chinese. Its depressing. But I do feel fortunate to at least have choice (we can buy a BYD or Xiaomi here) and that I'm not subject to only American tech reporting. BYD will later this year have 7 different car models on sale in Britain vs 6 (soon to be 5) from Ford. This is a paradigm shift, considering for almost the last 20 years Ford had at least 2 cars in the top 5 best sellers in the UK.

Apologies for going off on one. But i'd highly recommend US readers check out Chinese tech sites from time to time (eg carnewschina/huawei central etc) rather than just relying on the verge. Sure not all Chinese tech will be successful, sure some designs may be clones, but the shear scale of investment from China will make them unstoppable. I believe the changing of the guard happened a while ago, where about to see it play out in all industries...

Good news, mankind should be pushing farther into this technologies.... so we finally have our first gen IV reactor? I honestly thought we would never reach them on time.

Plus Thorium rocks

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.

I’d like to thank the thorium. Great job guys! All around, great stuff!

If true, this is a huge step! Congrats to China!

"Strategic stamina" is something that the US used to have but which has disappeared as the country just tries to catch its breath.

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.

Uh, what about the THTR-300 that operated at 300MW capacity from 1987 to 1989?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300

It was a total failure, though. Not quite Chernobyl, but it was plagued by incidents.

Thorium tarnishes to olive grey when exposed to air. This makes it kinda greenish. Green is the color of stamina, so this checks out.