Update | How China hopes to solve nuclear waste issue with hybrid fusion-fission reactor at top secret facility
China will build a new hybrid reactor that can burn nuclear waste via a combined fusion-fission method by 2030.
China will build a new hybrid reactor that can burn nuclear waste via a combined fusion-fission method by 2030.
This could give a potentially dramatic boost to China's attempt to switch to more environmentally friendly energy production methods, by recycling the waste produced by traditional nuclear plants into more electricity.
Traditional nuclear power plants produce large amounts of waste, the primary component in which is uranium-238, which cannot be used by current fissile-based reactors. The proposed hybrid reactor will use nuclear fusion to burn u-238 and could in theory recycle the waste from traditional reactors into new fuel.
The project is being developed at the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics in Sichuan, a top secret military research facility where China's nuclear weapons are developed.
The scheme was first reported by the Science and Technology Daily, a newspaper run by the official Ministry of Science and Technology.
A viable fusion reactor is nowhere in sight, not to mention a hybrid. It's like talking about hybrid cars before the internal combustion engine was invented.
Fission, which occurs in all commercial reactors nowadays, splits an atom in half, while fusion merges two atoms in one.