This April, in a speech given at the Shanghai branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the physicist Xu Hongjie announced a breakthrough. For over a decade, his team had been working on an experimental nuclear reactor that runs on a lava-hot solution of fissile material and molten salt, rather than on solid fuel. The reactor, which went online two years ago, was a feat in itself. It is still the only one of its kind in operation in the world, and has the potential to be both safer and more efficient than the water-cooled nuclear plants that dominate the industry. Now, Xu explained, his team had been able to refuel the reactor without shutting it down, demonstrating a level of mastery over their new system.
Ok-Mathematician8461 on
I just love how Americans 1) assume that if China does something well then by definition America is somehow losing and 2) assume that if China and America have a collaboration then it is the Americans giving Chinese scientist a lift up, not the other way round. Which is really weird considering how many scientists China trains compared to the USA and how many of them are working in America. So it sort of sounds more like China giving America a lift up.
reflect25 on
The title is a lot negative about china than the actual content. anyways hopefully the new nuclear power plants succeed in either country
> Kairos represents a new era for the U.S. nuclear industry. Inspired by SpaceX, it is effectively trying to rebuild U.S. industrial capacity within a single company. The business model calls for a vertically integrated network of facilities that can fabricate fuel and salt for Kairos, and can manufacture a large share of what the company needs to build its reactors.
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> In getting to this point, Kairos initially benefitted from U.S. partnership with China on molten-salt research, and is now reaping the rewards of the recent pro-nuclear turn in American domestic industrial policy. The money that China put into U.S. research in the early twenty-tens pushed development of the fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor from theoretical work into practical experimentation, and the salt loop that SINAP paid for at Oak Ridge National Laboratory yielded a report of molten-salt pumps, which dovetailed with one of Kairos’s early priorities.
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This April, in a speech given at the Shanghai branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the physicist Xu Hongjie announced a breakthrough. For over a decade, his team had been working on an experimental nuclear reactor that runs on a lava-hot solution of fissile material and molten salt, rather than on solid fuel. The reactor, which went online two years ago, was a feat in itself. It is still the only one of its kind in operation in the world, and has the potential to be both safer and more efficient than the water-cooled nuclear plants that dominate the industry. Now, Xu explained, his team had been able to refuel the reactor without shutting it down, demonstrating a level of mastery over their new system.
I just love how Americans 1) assume that if China does something well then by definition America is somehow losing and 2) assume that if China and America have a collaboration then it is the Americans giving Chinese scientist a lift up, not the other way round. Which is really weird considering how many scientists China trains compared to the USA and how many of them are working in America. So it sort of sounds more like China giving America a lift up.
The title is a lot negative about china than the actual content. anyways hopefully the new nuclear power plants succeed in either country
> Kairos represents a new era for the U.S. nuclear industry. Inspired by SpaceX, it is effectively trying to rebuild U.S. industrial capacity within a single company. The business model calls for a vertically integrated network of facilities that can fabricate fuel and salt for Kairos, and can manufacture a large share of what the company needs to build its reactors.
…
> In getting to this point, Kairos initially benefitted from U.S. partnership with China on molten-salt research, and is now reaping the rewards of the recent pro-nuclear turn in American domestic industrial policy. The money that China put into U.S. research in the early twenty-tens pushed development of the fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor from theoretical work into practical experimentation, and the salt loop that SINAP paid for at Oak Ridge National Laboratory yielded a report of molten-salt pumps, which dovetailed with one of Kairos’s early priorities.