This has serious potential to get the attention of ==The G.E.==
Please go right the fuck NOW and spam his twitter, his kids' too!
All the fucknut environmentalists who are hippies and not scientists have done this to us. We could have had all-zero-carbon electricity from nuclear power before anybody even knew about global warming.
via Technology Review:
Fail-Safe Nuclear Power
Cheaper and cleaner nuclear plants could finally become reality—but not in the United States, where the technology was invented more than 50 years ago.
The Shanghai Institute’s effort to develop molten-salt reactors, a technology that has sat all but forgotten in the United States for decades, reflects just how daring China’s nuclear ambitions are. Already, the government has invested some two billion Chinese renminbi ($300 million) over the last five years in molten-salt R&D.
Over the next two decades China hopes to build the world’s largest nuclear power industry. Plans include as many as 30 new conventional nuclear plants (in addition to the 34 reactors operating today) as well as a variety of next-generation reactors, including thorium molten-salt reactors…
The first experiments with molten-salt reactors were carried out at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee, under its director Alvin Weinberg in the late 1950s. Today’s Chinese program, in fact, is the fruit of a unique and somewhat controversial partnership between Oak Ridge and the Shanghai Institute. The U.S. research program went on for more than a decade but was eventually shut down in favor of the technology used in the vast majority of nuclear power plants today. In retrospect, that decision contributed not only to the demise of a promising nuclear technology but also to the long stagnation of the industry.
Because they don’t require huge containment structures and need less fuel to produce the same amount of electricity, these reactors are more compact than today’s nuclear plants. They could be mass-produced, in factories, and combined in arrays to form larger power plants.
I was struck by the confidence and idealism of the young scientists working at the institute—an optimism not seen in U.S. nuclear circles in decades.