Posted on 11/12/2025 7:28:48 AM PST by Twotone
Our economic realities as Americans are tied directly to energy. But those of us working outside the energy industry must be forgiven for not noticing that in 2022, China began construction on an experimental thorium reactor that requires no water, generates substantially less toxic byproduct, purports and appears be vastly safer than all other reactor designs, and all but eliminates the possibility of meltdown. American citizens should be forgiven for not noticing because in 2022, as you recall, we were suffocating in the various tendrils of psychological operations and captured government.
And when China operationalized the reactor and proved the design, firing it up last month, pulling a positive yield of uranium, Americans were again distracted. Our industries are still captured, corrupted, or sidelined. Our government is still dysfunctional, and it appears we are now, in some very official sense, losing the energy arms race.
The Chinese reactor works. It delivers cheap, abundant, safe, clean energy. Congress is silent. Portions of our mainstream media only serve corporate (often energy sector-tied) interests, so they aren’t going to sound the alarm.
Here’s the kicker regarding the United States’ second-place status in this energy battle: Americans funded the entirety of the original research for the thorium reactor in the 1960s at Oak Ridge Nuclear Laboratory. This raises major questions about past, present, and future for the energy and tech sectors.
Of the successful test of the thorium reactor in China, the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics stated in a press release, “This marks the first time international experimental data has been obtained after thorium was introduced into a molten salt reactor, making it the only operational molten salt reactor in the world to have successfully incorporated thorium fuel.”
Clickbait headlines have suggested that China outright stole the reactor design. The truth is probably even worse. If you take blood pressure medication, be forewarned: There is malfeasance here, for sure, but the technology wasn’t stolen from either American corporations or Oak Ridge Laboratory. Oak Ridge Laboratory, in concert with the U.S. government, evidently declassified much of the pertinent research, according to researcher Kirk Sorensen.
Sorensen runs the website https://energyfromthorium.com, where portions of the material, now in the public domain, were published. Meanwhile, private American research into what turns out to be a highly feasible and safe energy source has been, at best, scattered and underfunded. What's more, the stultifying (false?) dialectic between environmentalism and first-world living standards has muddied the waters for decades.
Oak Ridge Labs partnered with the Shanghai Applied Physics Institute back in 2015. American research was just simply handed to the Chinese. Meanwhile, we have considerable energy issues in America: prices jumping 10%-20% per year in many states and services often approaching third-world standards in terms of reliability and transparency. We have the highly unstable and contentious AI industry building data centers at a heady pace and signaling orders of magnitude more energy demand in short order. Lastly, we have a contingent of right-aligned Americans squaring up to take on the potential re-industrialization of the country — automobiles, pharmaceuticals, microprocessors, and steel manufacture at all levels could and probably must be re-shored if we as a nation are ever to right the ship.
None of this happens without abundant, cheap energy.
Since the early 2000s, concerns over dwindling cheap oil have confused the public and stymied good-faith efforts to manage the infrastructure, source, and delivery problems that our grand techno-American plans seem to require. Elon Musk's grandfather, Joshua N. Halderman, was involved with M. King Hubbert in the original Technocracy Inc. endeavor, which signaled early alarms about exponential growth meeting finite oil capacity. Elon is a big fan of solar, but one wonders if perhaps now he’d be better off investigating thorium ... if American industry and government can get out of his way, of course.
It’s really easy when you don’t have to spend billions and billions of dollars on research and development..............
If we were to implement thorium based power here, the Dims would figure out a reason to ban it.
A parting gift to China by Obama - while he was working to destroy America at home
“The Chinese reactor works. It delivers cheap, abundant, safe, clean energy.”
Here’s the thing: I don’t care who invents or creates it.
If this is true, it will be copied all over the world. Royalties? Eff ‘Em.
A principal source of human misery is the lack of cheap, abundant, safe, clean energy.
This is a step is solving a very big problem.
We sold them the rope they will hang us with.
Its a real dilemma. America’s military superiority has depended on cutting edge technical innovation and implementation. Due to lapses in security and generous admission policies to university training programs,the people who steal that data and return to China to implement it for China’s benefit have been very successful. American security over the last 25 years has been porous to say the least.
Now America must have technological research ,innovation and implementation to not only maintain its military edge but its economy. Yet native Americans seem math challenged, do not fill university STEM programs and enter the workforce with useless degrees. How can the tech research, innovation and implementation continue with inadequate personnel? Hence Trump, as much as he may hate it for all its downside, must allow H1B immigration to fill the gaps.
The uneducated become modern serfs. They will never meet their globalist masters.
China is All Fake and it’s really falling apart
and their BBQ wings in space was also Fake , it was an Air Oven that just heated the precooked wings up
Well said!
However, Chinese scientists point out that this is no instant victory. According to Guangming Daily, there are “no quick wins” and technical hurdles remain significant. The corrosive nature of molten salts, for instance, demands custom-built alloys like Hastelloy-N, capable of withstanding both radiation and chemical degradation. These materials must function reliably for decades, under extreme temperatures and in radioactive environments.
The SINAP team used the current 2 MW reactor as a materials testbed, experimenting with corrosion-resistant graphite and metals. These validations are essential before scaling up. Another challenge is thorium’s nature as a fertile, rather than fissile, material. The reactor needs an initial load of uranium-235 or plutonium-239 to start the chain reaction until enough uranium-233 is bred from the thorium.
Furthermore, the online chemical processing required to remove fission byproducts and balance salt chemistry adds another layer of complexity. Unlike conventional reactors that rely on solid fuel rods, thorium reactors must continuously manage liquid radioactive material, which presents unique engineering and safety challenges.
Even waste management remains an open issue. While thorium reactors generate far less long-lived waste, they produce a complex mix of fission products that must be handled with care. China plans to store this waste underground in the Gobi Desert, capitalising on the region’s geological stability and arid conditions.
https://www.neimagazine.com/news/china-refuels-thorium-reactor-without-shutdown/?cf-view
Perhaps if we supply those 600,000 Chinese students with bogus data we can start to turn things around.
“Royalties? Eff ‘Em.”
—————
There is no more certain means of stifling innovation than to steal the product of someone’s work. Yours is a Collectivist idea.
As a young researcher I worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and participated in the development of the Molten Salt Breeder Reactor. (Thorium Reactor)). I was very disappointed when our government abandoned this technology. Still am.
Energy is not related to human misery; in fact, making it cheaper may increase misery. The misery problem is spiritual.
APPROPRIATIONS BILL
....
Project X is a federal priority project.
State authority law that would delay construction shall not be applicable.
Only the Attorney General of the United States or Solicitor General of the United States shall be permitted to bring legal action under environment law. Any resulting court action that would delay construction shall not take effect until by both the Minority and Majority Leaders of the Senate both see fit to ratify the action.
I’m not saying we should ignore the potential threat, but they may have stolen all of our tech, but we see regular events like their brand new billion-dollar bridge collapse, I become very skeptical of their ability to build hi-tech weapons systems that will actually work.
Thorium is lot safer then Uranium and lot more plentiful.
The Thorium known deposits on Earth contain more energy, them all gas, coal, wood, Uranium and other energy sources all together!
From the article:
"...when China operationalized the reactor and proved the design, firing it up last month, pulling a positive yield of uranium, Americans were again distracted. Our industries are still captured, corrupted, or sidelined. Our government is still dysfunctional, and it appears we are now, in some very official sense, losing the energy arms race."Andrew Edwards, writing for The Blaze, calls it clearly ---
"...the United States’ second-place status in this energy battle...."
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