If you believe in this….

The you should be supporting this: China Details Next-Gen Nuclear Reactor Program

Xu detailed a multi-stage plan to build demonstration reactors in the next five years and deploy them commercially beginning around 2030. The institute plans to build a 10-megawatt prototype reactor, using solid fuel, by 2020, along with a two-megawatt liquid-fuel machine that will demonstrate the thorium-uranium fuel cycle. (Thorium, which is not fissile, is converted inside a reactor into a fissile isotope of uranium that produces energy and sustains the nuclear reaction.)

In all, there are 700 nuclear engineers working on the molten-salt reactor at SINAP, Xu said, a number that dwarfs other advanced-reactor research programs around the world. The team has a preliminary design for a 10-megawatt thorium-based molten-salt reactor, and has mastered some of the technical challenges involved in building and running such reactors, such as the preparation of high-purity molten salts and the control of tritium, a dangerous isotope of hydrogen that can be used in the making of nuclear weapons. Limiting the production of tritium is a key research goal for the development of molten-salt reactors.

While most of the audience at Oak Ridge was familiar with the outlines of the Chinese program, the level of sophistication and the progress to date were startling to many listeners.

“It’s very surprising how far they’ve come in four years,” said John Kutsch, the vice president for business development at Terrestrial Energy, which is developing its own version of a molten-salt reactor. “That shows you what throwing hundreds of researchers at a project will do to speed progress.”

This technology should be rapidly developed. It’s a tragedy the US is not leading the way in a technology they initially developed in the 1950’s.