China–US partnership may produce advanced nuclear reactors by 2030

MIT Technology Review : This weekend marked the 50th anniversary of the first molten-salt reactor experiment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. At a celebratory workshop at the lab, Xu Hongjie, the director of the molten-salt reactor program at the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (SINAP), revealed details of the progress SINAP has made in developing commercial advanced reactor technology. SINAP and Oak Ridge joined forces in December 2011 to investigate both salt-cooled and salt-fueled reactors. According to Xu, the project has made more progress than any other advanced reactor program. SINAP intends to build both a 10-MW prototype solid-fuel reactor and a 2-MW liquid-fuel, thorium–uranium reactor by 2020 and to set them up commercially by 2030. SINAP has 700 nuclear engineers working on the project, which makes it by far the largest advanced reactor project in the world.