McClatchie responded by indicating that the U.S. built two molten salt reactors in the 1960s, one of the Molten-Salt Reactor operated from 1965 to 1969. In 1968, they swapped the U-235 fuel for U-233 fuel, and in 1969 they added plutonium to show that that worked as well. MSR was an effective program and all the modern molten-salt programs are planning to build something of this scale and complexity first before moving on to bigger reactors, primarily to build up the experience base with molten-salt reactors. Here is a 2019 update on the progress.
India has announced a three-phase nuclear program leading to a thorium-fueled Advanced Heavy Water Reactor. However, to get the AHWR going, they are going to need a bunch of fissile material, and India is (a) quite short of domestic uranium (hence the interest in thorium), (b) still subject to restrictions on importing uranium, and (c) having trouble enriching uranium. This last issue is technical in nature but highlights that the Indian nuclear program has very good theoreticians but seems to suffer many technical setbacks and delays. These delays are so pervasive that I would call the three-phase program "aspirational" only at this time.
The Czech Republic is doing active research on radioactive molten salts. There are a Canadian group (they developed the CANDU Technology years ago) and two American groups pursuing thorium-fueled molten salt reactors. Per Petersen's group at UC Berkeley and Jess Gehin at Oak Ridge have been doing what research they can on very thin funding, and McClatchie thinks both are actively advising the Chinese (as well as being in informal communication with everyone else).
The Chinese appear to be producing the world's third molten salt reactor design. They are on track to build a small 2 to 10 megawatt research reactor in the next few years, and they have staffed a significant design effort for a small utility reactor (around 100 MW IIRC). Among the first things the Chinese program will do is verify the long-term stability of niobium-modified Hastelloy-N against tellurium cracking. The MSR program found this problem and the probable fix, but did not last long enough to test the fix, but new programs are underway (more).
Original working URL: https://www.quora.com/If-Thorium-LFTR-reactors-are-so-awesome-why-hasnt-anyone-built-one-yet
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