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Even as the original experiment with molten-salt technology was winding down in the U.S. in the 1970s, a small group of researchers at the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was launching its own investigation into thorium-fueled molten-salt reactors. But China, which would not start up its first nuclear power plant until 1991, lacked the expertise and the money to develop the sophisticated machinery and expensive materials in advanced reactors.
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Educated at the prestigious University of Science and Technology of China, in Hefei, Chen earned a PhD from Indiana University and worked for several years at Argonne National Laboratory (which, like Oak Ridge, is part of the U.S. Department of Energy). But he came back to China to build a world-changing reactor.

He heard about it in 2009, when he visited Shanghai to present a seminar at the Institute of Applied Physics. A scientist there told him about the thorium molten-salt reactor—a project not yet funded or announced. “Our team got most of the technical documents from the Web—they were posted by the Oak Ridge team,” recalls Xu Hongjie, the director of the molten-salt program, shaking his head in either admiration or amazement at the openness of the Americans. “They posted everything there for free.”

At Xu’s urging, Chen joined the Shanghai Institute in 2010, and today he is in charge of collaborating with Oak Ridge. The U.S. lab is contributing research on materials, control systems, and computer simulations to the project and has built a large molten-salt testing facility that was funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. While some scientists and nuclear-power advocates vehemently oppose the idea of helping China build a world--leading nuclear industry, many Oak Ridge engineers are just eager to see molten-salt reactors built somewhere. “One of the important things to realize is that a number of key people in molten-salt reactors are retiring very fast or passing away,” says David Holcombe, who heads Oak Ridge’s collaboration with the Shanghai Institute. “You can’t just import a new set of staff if we’re going to maintain this capability. China is providing the funding that allows us to transfer that knowledge, to gain practical experience at building and operating these reactors.”
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https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602051/fail-safe-nuclear-power/

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

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