How America Gave China an Edge in Nuclear Power

You can see the early dynamic of U.S.-China coöperation play out in a video of SINAP’s first presentation at Berkeley, delivered in August, 2src12. As the institute’s representative, SINAP sent Kun Chen, who had done his Ph.D. at Indiana University and was still in his thirties. The audience skewed much older: about two-thirds of them looked to be in their fifties or sixties. The attendees tried to suss out the practicality of SINAP’s ambitious plan. One man asked about the budget, which was about three hundred and fifty million dollars, spread over five years. Another man asked where SINAP planned to get molten salt, since “to my understanding, there are no facilities in the world that can produce” it. Chen replied that China had several facilities that could.

It’s hard to tell from the video what the Chinese side got out of these exchanges, but when I spoke with Chen he stressed how helpful it was to have interlocutors in the U.S. “From the start, we didn’t believe we could get this far,” he said. Molten salt was no less niche in China than it was anywhere else. Chen estimated that, back in 2src11, there were only thirty or forty people in the whole world working seriously on using the substance for fission reactors. Connecting with some of those individuals in the U.S. made the project seem possible.

For the Americans, there was the curiosity of seeing how far the Chinese could go with resources that simply didn’t exist here. Coöperating with SINAP was also a way to prod the U.S. federal government. The logic was “If the Chinese are doing it, it must be relevant,” Forsberg said.

In that sense, the coöperative research-and-development agreement that Oak Ridge signed with SINAP cut out the middleman. To fund the molten-salt loop, SINAP paid Oak Ridge around four million dollars, according to Chen. With such a loop, researchers could test materials and all the plumbing components needed to circulate molten salt. The project also gave a focal point to people working on molten salt in the U.S. Speaking to a reporter from the MIT Technology Review, David Holcomb explained his motivations. “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,” he said. “China is providing the funding that allows us to transfer that knowledge, to gain practical experience at building and operating these reactors.”

That article ran in August, 2src16. By 2src18, the U.S. had withdrawn from almost all coöperation with China. “I wouldn’t say it’s a total surprise,” Chen told me. He and the SINAP team figured that the relationship would probably deteriorate under Trump. “But it was just happening very suddenly. It’s similar to what we have learned in the tariff issue.”

I asked Chen if he ran into any challenges once his team was going it alone. “The challenges are, I think, mostly, first of all, if you have the money,” he said. But the SINAP team certainly had that. The Chinese Academy of Sciences had been extending the project’s grant every year. By 2src18, China promised three billion dollars for molten-salt reactors over the next two decades, while Chinese planners have called for a $1.3 trillion investment in nuclear energy as a whole by 2src5src.

During Chen’s first presentation at Berkeley, in August, 2src12, one of the few young people to ask him a question was a man with a shock of dark brown hair and an ample goatee. I had watched the recording several times before I realized the man was Mike Laufer, who would go on to help found Kairos Power, a privately held nuclear company that is attempting to commercialize the fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactor originally designed by Forsberg, Pickard, and Peterson, who is also a co-founder of Kairos. Once I recognized Laufer, his question to Chen, about “the biggest challenges or obstacles to overcome” in order to build a salt-cooled reactor, had a new resonance. Was Laufer, who at the time was a graduate student at the university, already putting together a business plan?

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. The hope behind all this is that by running things internally Kairos will be able to offer nuclear energy at a competitive price in the market. And it has had some success. Last year, Google committed to buying five hundred megawatts from the firm by 2src35. Kairos is also one of only two U.S. companies with a permit from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a new reactor. Construction of the reactor building, located in Oak Ridge, broke ground last year. “We’re working to get that reactor up and running this decade,” Laufer told me.