One of my favorite sayings when it comes to energy and all things technological, as you'll know if you've been reading my work for more than about six minutes, is that we solve today's problems with tomorrow's technology. That's how things have always worked, and, barring some disaster, that's how things will always work.
Energy is one of the best examples of this. Nuclear power, while part of the "today" side of the equation, is also a huge part of the "tomorrow" side. New designs in reactors, ranging from safe, efficient pebble-bed and other fission reactor designs, to thorium molten-salt reactors, and even (eventually) fusion power, will be the energy providers of tomorrow. They'll never completely replace oil and natural gas; for one thing, we depend on petroleum for too many things besides energy. But the future is nuclear.
Now, two claims of breakthroughs may well be getting us a little closer to that nuclear future.
First, in China - and you can color me a little skeptical because of that - the Middle Kingdom is claiming to have made a major breakthrough with a thorium molten-salt reactor, achieving the first thorium-uranium fuel conversion.
An experimental Chinese nuclear plant reportedly just crossed a historic threshold, successfully operating the world’s first thorium-based molten salt reactor (TMSR). The Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics has broken a major scientific barrier by successfully converting thorium to uranium in a historic first.
The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reports that the breakthrough, which took place at an experimental reactor out in the Gobi Desert, is “poised to reshape the future of clean sustainable nuclear energy.”
The process works by using a “precise sequence of nuclear reactions” in which naturally occurring thorium-232 absorbs a neutron, becoming thorium-233. Through a decay process, that isotope breaks down into protactinium-233 and then finally into uranium-233, a potent form of nuclear fuel that can sustain chain reactions for nuclear fission.
Here's the concern: The end result of this process, U-233, can go bang if it's sufficiently pure. This isotope, though, is prone to contamination with non-explosive U-232, depending on how it is produced. The United States successfully detonated a U-233 device in the 1950s, but there are easier ways to produce weapons-grade materials, and China has already shown it can do this.
Thorium, on the other hand, is not weaponizable, but can be used to produce uranium capable of sustaining a reaction. Thorium is also far more common than uranium; in fact, the global supply of thorium is approximately 3 - 3.5 times that of uranium. So, the ability to convert, via neutron capture, thorium into uranium, could be a big deal.
This is, however, China, and every such claim to come out of that country should be taken with a grain of salt - in this case, molten salt.
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And, on the fusion front, a combined UK/Austrian team is making use of an AI program to refine the magnetic fields required to contain a sustained fusion reaction.
Scientists from the UK and Austria have developed a new AI tool that can simulate the superheated plasma inside a fusion reactor.
The tool, dubbed GyroSwin, completes calculations within seconds that would usually take days on the world's most powerful supercomputers.
This could help scientists to understand how to harness the unpredictable power of fusion energy and build the world's first functioning reactors.
Fusion reactors replicate the processes found in the heart of the sun, where hydrogen atoms are smashed together and fused into helium.
However, to create a miniature star on Earth requires heating plasma to around 100,000,000°C and keeping it hot and dense enough for fusion to take place.
Since no material could withstand these temperatures, the plasma is trapped by powerful magnetic fields inside a doughnut–shaped device known as a tokamak.
With the help of GyroSwin's simulations, engineers should be able to fine–tune these magnetic fields to create a stable fusion reaction.
Again, a little skepticism is in order here. An AI tool, to my understanding, is only as good as the information we feed it, and that information does not yet include data on a functioning, sustained reaction in a working fusion reactor. It may be able to perform complex calculations more quickly than humans, even humans working with traditional software, but that's no guarantee that there will be any workable outcome. This AI isn't Marvel's Jarvis, and none of the researchers are the fictional Tony Stark.
Working, grid-scale fusion power is still probably 30-40-50 years off, just as it has been for half a century. It's like the old trick where every step you take reduces the distance to one's goal by half, with the inevitable realization that, at this pace, you'll never reach your goal.
I do think humans will, someday, have workable fusion power, again, barring some calamity. And when we do, it will be the next great leap in energy-density and therefore in human technology and standard of living, making it the technology of tomorrow that changes everything.
But I'm just not quite convinced we are anywhere near that yet.
