In recent years, with the continuous improvement of technological level, all walks of life have entered a new stage of development, but at the same time, the energy consumption is getting bigger and bigger. In order to ensure the supply of social energy, human beings have begun to find ways to find various renewable energy supply channels, and nuclear power energy technology is one of them.
For this technical field, my country can be said to have spent a lot of effort. After years of hard work, Gansu Wuwei thorium-based molten salt reactor was finally born. Its advance advantage once shocked the world. Its appearance not only means that my country's nuclear power technology has led the world, but to some extent, it has also improved the nuclear power technology standards.
Gansu Wuwei thorium-based molten salt pile, perhaps many people don’t know about it. The thorium-based molten salt reactor can also be called a liquid thorium fluoride reactor. It mainly uses molten salt fuel and thorium-232 elements to achieve the conversion between thorium-uranium by circulating the production capacity . The molten salt reactor uses thorium as raw material. It is actually an adventure attempt, but it is also a great breakthrough.
Because before that, almost all the raw materials used in national nuclear power technology were uranium and plutonium. Not only that, its nuclear power device is also the first device in the world that can meet the needs of the development of commercial molten salt reactors. Therefore, the success of nuclear power technology this time represents that my country is moving towards a new technological field.
Gansu Wuwei thorium-based molten salt pile began to be constructed as early as 2018. After more than two years, it was officially launched in 2021. After that, electromechanical installation and power debugging began, and it is reported that it can be put into use soon to benefit the public. In people's eyes, the process from construction to use of molten salt piles seems to be smooth and natural. However, in fact, at the beginning of its construction, it also encountered many unimaginable challenges.
First of all, the construction project is located in the earthquake zone and is also a northwest wind outlet. If an accident occurs, it may cause serious disasters. Although the surrounding area of the project is relatively remote, it is not very far from the residential area. In addition to being a wind power, northwest wind can also bring strong wind and sand. If the nuclear reactor is built here, it is easy to cause ecological disasters.
More importantly, earthquake zones often have frequent earthquake activities, and many destructive earthquakes have occurred in the past. Coupled with the impact of the northwest wind vent, it is indeed a challenge that cannot be underestimated. Secondly, at that time, my country's related technologies on nuclear energy of thorium-based molten salt reactors were not mature and had insufficient experience. Not only my country, but many advanced countries' research on this technology was stagnant for a long time. Even the United States had only studied lava reactors, and it was forced to suspend due to technical difficulties.
last project construction takes a long time, and many problems may arise in this process. According to the construction plan proposed by the National Academy of Sciences, it is expected that the completion time will be in 2030. The reason why it takes so long is mainly because technical problems are difficult to overcome. The principle of the thorium-based molten salt reactor is to use lava to achieve the purpose of heat transfer, so as to conduct the heat produced by nuclear reaction . On this basis, it is converted into electrical energy by steam evaporation through water vapor.
However, the metal fluoride contained in the lava system has a certain degree of corrosion resistance and will corrode the container or pipeline during the reaction, especially at high temperatures. At that time, many countries did not find corrosion-resistant materials to solve this problem.
In addition, Gansu Province has serious shortcomings in energy management and consumption technology. There is an oversupply of electricity produced by new energy. It cannot be consumed in time, and it is difficult to transport it out in a short period of time, resulting in a large amount of waste. Continuing to develop nuclear energy not only cannot solve the urgent problem, but may also bring more trouble and need to face many unknown things.
However, even though there are many problems, the Gansu Wuwei thorium-based molten salt pile has overcome all difficulties and been successfully built, and it did not cause any disaster during the construction process. It was built earlier than the expected of Academy of Sciences . It has to be said to be a great miracle, especially it also has several advanced advantages that people pay attention to.
The advantages of Gansu Wuwei thorium-based molten salt reactor have a high safety factor. Some professionals pointed out that the power generation technology of thorium-based reactors has high safety and is far higher than other nuclear power technology reactors, and there will be almost no high temperature burning. This is mainly due to its special internal design. Once the temperature is higher than the predetermined value, the freezing race in reactor will start to melt, and molten salt will flow into the emergency tank, making the nuclear reaction unable to continue, thus achieving the purpose of cooling. The cooled substance will automatically solidify, without any impact on the ecological environment, and the degree of harm will be greatly reduced.
has good thermal conversion efficiency. The core fuel used in Wuwei thorium-based molten salt repository in Gansu is a thorium-uranium mixture. Its melting and boiling points are 550 degrees Celsius and 1400 degrees Celsius respectively, which can provide a normal pressure and high temperature environment of 700 degrees Celsius. When the liquid fuel enters the core and undergoes a fission reaction, thermal energy will be produced, and its heat can enter the critical state again after absorption and recycle it.
Therefore, the thermal efficiency of is much higher than that of previous nuclear power technologies. Generally speaking, the reactor hotspot conversion efficiency is before 45%-50%, and there is more heat available.
has environmental compatibility. The substance that exerts a cooling effect in the reactor is composite fluoride salt. It is different from uranium and plutonium reactors and does not require ecological water resources. Therefore, it has good environmental compatibility. Even if there is no assistance from seawater around the project, it can operate normally. Resources are abundant. Compared with uranium and plutonium, thorium is more abundant, and related mineral resources are vast and widely distributed in the lower layers of the earth. For example, fluorite mines contain a large amount of thorium. If the thorium ore resources can be fully utilized, it can ensure that humans will not lack electricity in the next 20,000 years.
The successful construction and implementation of the Wuwei thorium-based molten salt reactor in Gansu not only means the country's outstanding achievements in the nuclear power technology level, but also establishes my country's leading position in the global nuclear power field. I believe that in the near future, the thorium-based molten salt reactor can play its role and contribute to the sustainable development of society's .
