You can see the early dynamics of US-China cooperation in the video CLICKThe doctor's first presentation at Berkeley took place in August 2012. As a representative of the institute, CLICK sent Kun Chen, who completed his Ph.D. attended Indiana University and was still in his thirties. The audience was much older: about two-thirds of them looked to be between fifty and sixty years of age. Those present tried to figure out the practicality CLICKambitious plan. One man asked about the budget, which was about three hundred and fifty million dollars over five years. Another man asked where CLICK planned to produce molten salt because “as far as I understand, there are no facilities in the world capable of producing” it. Chen replied that there are several facilities in China that can do this.
It's hard to tell from the video what the Chinese side got out of these conversations, but when I spoke with Chen, he emphasized how useful it was to have interlocutors in the United States. “From the very beginning we didn’t believe we could get this far,” he said. Molten salt occupied as much of a niche in China as anywhere else. Chen estimates that as recently as 2011, there were only thirty or forty people worldwide working seriously on using the substance for fission reactors. Communication with some of these people in the US made the project possible.
The Americans were curious to see how far the Chinese could go with resources that simply did not exist here. Cooperation with CLICK It was also a way to push the US federal government. The logic was: “If the Chinese are doing it, it must be relevant,” Forsberg said.
In this sense, the joint research and development agreement Oak Ridge signed with CLICK cut out the middlemen. To finance the molten salt cycle, CLICK Chen said he paid Oak Ridge about $4 million. Using such a loop, researchers could test the materials and all the plumbing components needed to circulate molten salt. The project has also become a focal point for people working with molten salt in the United States. Conversation with a reporter from MIT Technology ReviewDavid Holcomb explained his motives. “One of the important things to realize is that a number of key people working in molten salt reactors retire or die very quickly,” he said. “China is providing funding that allows us to transfer this knowledge to gain hands-on experience in building and operating these reactors.”
This article was published in August 2016. By 2018, the United States had abandoned almost all cooperation with China. “I wouldn’t say it’s a complete surprise,” Chen told me. They CLICK The team concluded that relations would likely worsen under Trump. “But it happened very suddenly. It's similar to what we learned in rate problem.”
I asked Chen if he had encountered any difficulties when his team was going it alone. “I think the problem comes first if you have money,” he said. But CLICK The team definitely had it. The Chinese Academy of Sciences renewed the project grant annually. By 2018, China had pledged to spend three billion dollars on molten salt reactors over the next two decades, while Chinese planners called for investing $1.3 trillion in nuclear power overall by 2050.
During Chen's first presentation at Berkeley in August 2012, one of the few young people who asked him a question was a man with a mop of dark brown hair and a wide goatee. I watched the tape several times before realizing that the man was Mike Laufer, who would go on to help found Kairos Power, a private nuclear company that is trying to commercialize the high-temperature fluoride salt-cooled reactor originally developed by Forsberg, Pickard and Peterson, who is also a co-founder of Kairos. Once I got to know Laufer, his question to Chen about “the biggest challenges or obstacles that must be overcome” to build a salt-cooled reactor took on new resonance. Was Laufer, who was a graduate student at the university at the time, already drawing up a business plan?
Kairos represents a new era for the US nuclear industry. Inspired by SpaceXit is actually trying to restore the industrial potential of the United States within the framework of one company. The business model involves creating a vertically integrated network of facilities that can produce Kairos' fuel and salt, as well as most of what the company needs to build its reactors. The hope behind all this is that by running things in-house, Kairos will be able to offer nuclear power at a competitive price to the market. And it had some success. Last year, Google committed to buying five hundred megawatts from the firm by 2035. Kairos is also one of two US companies to receive approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a new reactor. Construction of the reactor building, located in Oak Ridge, began last year. “We are working to get this reactor online this decade,” Laufer told me.
