News on China's scientific and technological development.

Passengers on two planes post entries, photos during trial run

Passengers flying with Air China will soon be able to access the Internet during their flights, the company said on Wednesday after a successful trial run.

On Wednesday, Air China passengers on flight CA4116 from Beijing to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, and passengers on flight CA4109 from Chengdu to Beijing became the first in China to use their computers and personal electronic devices to surf the Internet during their flight.

The Internet service started when the airplanes climbed to an altitude of more than 3,000 meters but was powered down during takeoff and landing to comply with Chinese civil aviation regulations.

Several passengers posted entries and photos to show they were using the in-flight Internet service on their Sina Weibo micro-blogging accounts during the flights. Some said they were able to have video chats with family members or friends on the ground.

Fan Cheng, a senior executive at Air China who was on board flight CA4116, took part in a video teleconference that included colleagues on board flight CA4109 as well as staff members at air control and operations centers in Beijing and Chengdu.

Xiao Yang, a singer from the Chopstick Brothers, a Chinese pop duo, performed on flight CA4116 with his partner Wang Taili on board CA4109.

Air China said in a statement on Wednesday that the in-flight Wi-Fi service is able to provide users up to 30 megabytes of bandwidth through a wireless connection with ground telecommunication stations. The system, which is called Air-to-Ground network, boasts cutting-edge 4G technologies, it added.

Live TV programs on three China Central Television channels were also available on both flights, according to the carrier.

But the service is still in its trial phase. The company said it is testing out three of its aircraft equipped with the Internet network. Passengers will not be charged for using the service when it is made widely available, Air China said.

Tried for first time

In July 2013, Air China tested its in-flight Internet service on a flight from Beijing to Chengdu.

Journalists and VIPs invited by the company tested the service, which was developed based on satellite telecommunications technology and offered a narrow bandwidth of up to 864 kilobytes per second. They sent e-mails and browsed news on an online platform.

"By the end of this year, most of Air China's wide-body passenger jets will have been refitted and equipped with access to the Internet," Fan said.

Air China began to develop its own Internet system in 2010, said Zhang Yun, manager of the company's Internet project. He said the system has passed safety and airborne compatibility tests from the Civil Aviation Administration of China and added that the safety of the aircraft will not be compromised if the Internet system is hacked.

Contact the writer at [email protected]

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The team in China and the US used advanced microscopy to witness new connections between brain cells - synapses - forming during sleep.

Their study, published in the journal Science, showed even intense training could not make up for lost sleep.

Experts said it was an elegant and significant study, which uncovered the mechanisms of memory.

It is well known that sleep plays an important role in memory and learning. But what actually happens inside the brain has been a source of considerable debate.

Researchers at New York University School of Medicine and Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School trained mice in a new skill - walking on top of a rotating rod.

They then looked inside the living brain with a microscope to see what happened when the animals were either sleeping or sleep deprived.

Their study showed that sleeping mice formed significantly more new connections between neurons - they were learning more.And by disrupting specific phases of sleep, the research group showed deep or slow-wave sleep was necessary for memory formation.

During this stage, the brain was "replaying" the activity from earlier in the day.

Prof Wen-Biao Gan, from New York University, told the BBC: "Finding out sleep promotes new connections between neurons is new, nobody knew this before.

"We thought sleep helped, but it could have been other causes, and we show it really helps to make connections and that in sleep the brain is not quiet, it is replaying what happened during the day and it seems quite important for making the connections."

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Analysis

Sleeping man
This is just the latest piece of science to highlight the importance of sleep.

A new reason for sleep was discovered last year when experiments showed the brain used sleep to wash away waste toxins built up during a hard day's thinking.

However, there are concerns that people are not getting enough sleep.

As part of the BBC's Day of the Body Clock, Prof Russell Foster argued that society had become "supremely arrogant" in ignoring the importance of sleep, leading to "serious health problems".

These include:

cancer
heart disease
type-2 diabetes
infections
obesity
The reward for more sleep, Prof Foster argues, is we would all be "better human beings."

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China Asks: How much will it cost us to make Solar Cheaper than Coal?

June 5, 2014 by Michael Sankowski


Do you remember when Dr. Evil was going to hold the world ransom for $1,000,000?


This is what we are facing today in Solar – the Dr. Evil ultimatum. The cost to get Solar to coal parity is going to be laughably tiny.

The cost sounds like a lot of money to old people, or to people who haven’t thought it through, or to people who do not know how large world GDP is today and how much we spend on energy already.

But the cost is tiny, and China laughed when they found out the cost.

I’ve been in a twitter argument with Michael Shellenberger. Michael Shellenberger is a sharp guy,so please read what he has to say on Solar. But I think he is missing the big picture about solar. He is:
1.arguing for innovation driven approach to driving solar costs lower
2.arguing for a market driven approach to implementing solar

This is a great approach for something like the a handheld computer like the iPhone, as Steve Jobs found out the hard way with the Newton. But with solar, he’s missing the biggest driver and reason solar is happening today and not 25 years in the future.

Solar is happening right now because China needs Solar to be cheaper than coal in China. Pollution is terrible in China.

Bejing PollutionWe’ve all see the pictures of China’s pollution problem, but here is one just as a fresh reminder of how bad it is there.

China decided back in 2000 they wanted needed to go green due to what was obviously going to be a massive environmental problem. I had friends tell me pollution was a terrible problem for China in the early 2000’s. Everyone in China knew this was a problem that had to get worse because they needed the electricity and energy.

China needed a solution to provide huge amounts of cheap electricity and not cause pollution. There are not many ways to do this. Solar was one possible path to clean and cheap energy way back in 2000, but it was very expensive then, and could not supply much capacity because there were few Solar production facilities.

So the Chinese leadership asked a question:

“How much will it cost to make Solar Cheaper than Coal?

This question has an answer. It turned out to be a dollar value China was willing to pay.

The dollar answer to this question requires knowing a few stylized facts about solar:
1.Solar gets 20% cheaper for every doubling of worldwide installed capacity. This is called Swanson’s Law and has held for at least 40 years.
2.The amount of installed solar is tiny today and was much smaller in the early 2000’s. This means Doubling capacity would cost very little in absolute dollar values in the early days. Even today is quite low. Testing Swanson’s law is “cheap”.
3.Solar plants are extremely quick to develop compared to coal plants, which means the planning and possible cancellation time is very low.
4.The market is willing to pay more for solar than it is for coal.
5.Some increasing portion of the current year cost to test Swanson’s law will be willingly funded by the market because the market will pay more for Solar than it will for coal power.
6.Installation capacity has a high but real upper limit to how much it can grow each year
7.Solar plants have almost 100% of their costs up front, so the financing is an important cost factor.
8.Solar cells last about 30 years, which is longer than the financing term, so the last 10 years are free electricity even if Solar turns out to be a boondoggle during the time you are paying for it.
9.Electrical energy storage costs have their own Swanson’s law.

Analysts at places like McKinsey make models based on observations like this all the time. Industries are given estimated growth rates, and end up with some level of market penetration, with some mitigating factors and limits.

Swanson’s law predicted 20% price declines for every doubling of installed capacity. Since capacity was so low in the early 2000’s, doubling total world capacity a few times would cost just a few billion dollars.

The Chinese leadership turned the model on its head, and asked how much it would cost to get them to get Solar cheaper than coal.

I can imagine the conversation between the Chinese leadership and the engineers who were asking for funding.

“We have a looming environmental problem due to wanting much more electricity.”

“What are some possible solutions?”

“Solar could one day be cheaper and solve both the cost and pollution problems.”

“How much money do you need to find out?”

“A lot, about $10 billion”

At this point the leadership fall on the floor laughing. China is a country where they build entire ghost cities with nobody in them. They build massive public transportation systems in 15 years because they can. Spending $10bn to find out if they can solve both energy and pollution was completely worth it to them.

China found out something even more interesting when they asked this question about the total cost to get Solar to coal parity. The initial, upfront costs to investigating solar would be comically trivial, and they could stop at any time. Finding out if Solar was a possible solution to the energy/pollution problem would be relatively cheap.

I suspect China decided to test Swanson’s law in the 10th plan from 2001-2005. When Swanson’s law held up, they decided to dramatically up production during the 11th plan. This production build out caused the huge price drop in 2008, when the factories built in 2006-2007 began shipping in 2008. Today in the 12th guideline from 2011-2015, China is pushing production to see if they can get cheaper than coal sooner rather than later because pollution is so bad.

Environmentalism is a guiding principle in the 12th guideline – mentioned on page three! The environment is clearly an important part of the Chinese plan – not many ideas are mentioned in the guiding principles, and China takes these principles seriously. Look at how many times sustainable growth is mentioned in the guiding principles.

It turns out Solar will be cheaper than coal for China very, very soon. SunTech estimates Solar will be cost competitive with coal power in China by 2016 and 2017 at the latest. This is in line with what people expect for Solar parity in the United States, given the cost of coal based power.

Still, let’s assume SunTech exaggerating, and the time for Solar/coal parity is really 2018.

Both parts of this assumption are reasonable. Suntech is probably exaggerating the time for Solar to get cost competitive with coal. But it can’t be more than a year or two, because electricity is so much more expensive in China than it is in the United States.

(Aside: Swanson’s law probably needs to be modified a bit. Swanson’s law uses installed capacity as the driver for prices. The driver for solar prices is probably “total potential manufacturing capacity of current solar PV manufacturers”. I am certain someone important in China noticed this by 2008 at the latest.)

Coal power is expensive in China, simply because they need to import coal from Australia. China can’t make the cost of coal lower with cheap wages.

Industrial users in China should pay about 80% more for electricity as similar users do here in the United States. So if unsubsidized Solar is about double the cost of coal here – which we know was true a lifetime year ago – then Solar must be close to coal parity in China today.

It’s important to note electricity prices for China are massively subsidized by the Chinese government even if companies are not paying the cost. Here is a Bloomberg article on this important topic:


“Support to industry totaled about 10 percent of gross domestic product, according to a 2010 study led by Huang Yiping, vice president of the National School of Development at Peking University and former chief Asia economist at Citigroup Inc. That equals about $593 billion.”

So how much was the total cost to China to make Solar Cheaper than their cost for coal power in 2018? It’s going to cost China a total of about a trillion dollars. It will cost China about 2 years of their existing subsidies to make their energy costs cheaper than dirty coal.

China is and was willing to pay this amount to get cheaper, cleaner energy.

Again, remember this $1 trillion was not an all up front cost. China was able to invest about $10 billion over the years 2001-2005 to find out if this could possibly work. China then invested another $100bn to completely dominate the world solar panel market and bring prices close to coal parity in 2006-2010. When Swanson’s law held during this expansion, they decided to go all in, make true parity an explicit goal, and so will spend another $900 billion, for a total of around a trillion dollars.

The total cost to the world is roughly $10 trillion USD. It’s going to take longer to get to coal parity everywhere, so the total amount is going to be high for the entire world. Still, this is a tiny amount of money. That’s right, over the 10 years Solar is getting cheaper than coal, it will cost about 1% of total GDP.

The total cost to the world to get cheaper, clean energy is about 12% of 1 year of GDP. World GDP in 2012 was 84 trillion. During that time, the world will spend about 8-10% of GDP on energy. This ends up being roughly $100 trillion on energy over the same time span.

Here is a link to the spreadsheet I used to get these numbers, called Solar Growth. Note I’ve overestimated China’s investment according to recent figures. Recent figures put it at 20% of the world investment, but I used 40% in this spreadsheet. Lowering the investment to 20% vastly reduces China’s cost calculation.

I don’t have the numbers yet, but it’s pretty clear we’re going to save giant portions of GDP every year by 2030. We’re talking saving 3%+ a year, and growing! This could raise our long term growth rate to 5% or more. (Take that Pikkety! That’s for another post.)

Much of the decline in price was driven by China’s decision, even if the costs are shared globally. You might see a few important things missing in the spreadsheet, which would make the cost actually paid by China far, far lower than $1 trillion.
1.Does not account for foreign income purchasing Chinese Solar panels which would lower the cost to China
2.The sheet assumes the market does not pay anything for Solar power, when the world seems willing to pay a premium for clean energy (Cough, Germany, Cough)
3.Assumed China paid 40% of the world investment in Solar when it is only paying 20%
4.Solar panels last longer than the financing duration, so at some point, solar provides zero cost electricity.

All of these points would reduce China’s paid out cost to get them to cheap, clean energy.

The next 5 year guideline spans from 2016-2020. This is the time frame in which SunTech expects solar to be cheaper than coal in China. I expect another massive buildout for China Solar which greatly exceeds expectations as Solar is economically cheaper than coal for China. Then in 2021-2025, the build will be vast – think Shanghai skyline over 1995-2000

Many people are calling for thousands of coal plants to be built in China in the years from 2020 to 2030. However, if you think about it from the perspective of how China has acted in the past, this does not make much sense. China has shown again and again it is willing to make what appears to be insane levels of investment to achieve goals.

I contend given the current levels of pollution in China, paying a modest premium for energy is completely worth it to them. If Solar ends up being the same cost as coal in just a few years, China will shift over to Solar power in an astonishing way. They will just stop building coal plants, and build an incredible amount of Solar plants instead.

Look at what China did in Shanghai. The city was entirely transformed in 20 years. China put up the equivalent of Chicago in 20 years.

Why would their response to cheap, clean energy be different? It won’t. China had a Dr. Evil moment with Solar, where it was shocked at how little it would cost to get clean energy. They tested Solar and it worked as expected. China is now laughing as they almost certainly preparing to roll out a truly huge amount of solar in the next 10 years.

This is going to drive down Solar prices far more rapidly than anyone expects. They are beginning to put together the information for the next 5 year guideline today and it looks great for Solar. The capacity China will add beginning in 2016 is likely to exceed even the highest estimates, simply because the combination of lower cost and pollution-free energy will be so compelling to China.

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Many people, even fanatical advocates of solar power, are unaware quite how close we are to reaching a critical milestone in the industry. Within a fairly short space of time, solar generated electricity will be fully cost competitive with coal-powered electricity – at least if the governments of the world’s two largest energy consuming nations have their way.

Both the US and China have a stated goal of reducing the cost of solar generated electricity to that level, and quickly. How they are going about it says a lot about how each economic system works.

In the US, despite the complaints of some that a drift toward government control is taking place, private initiative and free markets still rule. The Department of Energy launched the SunShot initiative in 2011, with a stated goal of reducing the cost of solar power to be fully competitive with conventional energy sources by the end of this decade. The program funds grants, incentives and competitions to encourage private sector research that will improve the efficiency and lower the cost of solar energy.

The Chinese, faced with what is in many ways a more urgent need to achieve the same thing, have taken a different approach. In a manner more in keeping with their history and current economic system, they are beating the problem over the head with piles of cash until the desired outcome is achieved. It looks, if this excellent Michael Sankowski piece at Monetary Realism is to be believed, as if they are getting mighty close.

Sankowski maintains that, driven by high levels of pollution and national security concerns, the Chinese government asked a question back in the early 2000s: “How Much Will It Cost To Make Solar Cheaper Than Coal?” The answer was based on Swanson's Law that states that every doubling of photovoltaic (PV) solar capacity results in a 20 percent reduction in unit cost. Testing that theory, because of low levels of production at that time, would only have cost around $10 billion -- a small price to pay for the chance of cheap, clean energy that didn’t rely on importing coal from Australia.

When Swanson’s Law still worked after a couple of doublings of capacity the Chinese government stepped up their efforts. As a result, Suntech now expects the goal to be achieved by 2016, or 2017 at the latest. That’s right: 2016. A couple of years. Of course, Suntech has an interest in exaggerating somewhat, but even so, that is stunningly close.

According to the US Energy Information Administration, coal accounted for 69 percent of China’s energy production as recently as 2011. Cost comparative solar power and a centralized government committed to change will make that number laughable in a few years. (Related Article: Are We At The Dawn Of The Zero Energy City?)

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It should be borne in mind that reducing the cost of solar electricity to parity with coal in China is not the same as it is in America, if for no other reason than that electricity in general, and coal-powered electricity in particular, is more expensive in China than in the US.

SunShot, however, has also been successful, and claims a 60 percent reduction in cost since its inception three years ago. Many believe that their stated goal of solar power at $0.06 per kilowatt hour (kWH) is achievable by 2018. Some of that cost reduction is no doubt down to China ramping up capacity at such a rate and flooding the market, but there have been technological advances over that time, as well.

You can argue all day about which approach is correct. History shows us that innovation from the private sector is the most effective, long lasting change agent there is, but the Chinese approach of heavily subsidizing a massive increase in PV production capacity has been effective. Unfair, short sighted and disruptive, maybe, but effective nonetheless.

Command economies may be terrible at some things but when the rapid marshalling of resources is needed to solve a problem they can be very good at doing whatever it takes.

The simple fact is that with both innovation and increased capacity, the cost of solar energy has fallen considerably over the last few years and continues to do so. If, as looks likely, it does become truly cost comparative with coal in the next few years, then the days of cheap, clean, renewable energy dominating the world’s two biggest energy markets may be closer than you think

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The U.S. government lab behind China's nuclear power push

Dec 20 (Reuters) - Scientists in Shanghai are attempting a breakthrough in nuclear energy: reactors powered by thorium, an alternative to uranium.

The project is run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a government body with close military ties that coordinates the country's science-and-technology strategy. The academy has designated thorium as a priority for China's top laboratories. The program has a budget of $350 million. And it's being spearheaded by the influential son of a former Chinese president.

But even as China bulks up its military muscle through means ranging from espionage to heavy spending, it is pursuing this aspect of its technology game plan with the blessing - and the help - of the United States.

China has enlisted a storied partner for its thorium push: Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The U.S. government institute produced the plutonium used for the Manhattan Project and laid important groundwork for the commercial and military use of nuclear power.

The Tennessee lab, as it happens, helped pioneer thorium reactors. The Pentagon and the energy industry later sidelined this technology in favor of uranium. The Chinese are now enthusiastically tapping that know-how, in an example of how the rising Asian superpower is scouring the world for all sorts of technology needed to catch up to America in a broad array of scientific fields.

Thorium's chief allure is that it is a potentially far safer fuel for civilian power plants than is uranium. But the element also has possible military applications as an energy source in naval vessels. A U.S. congressman unsuccessfully sought to push the Pentagon to embrace the technology in 2009, and British naval officers are recommending a design for a thorium-fueled ship.

In a further twist, despite the mounting strategic rivalry with China, there has been little or no protest in the United States over Oak Ridge's nuclear-energy cooperation with China.

"The U.S. government seems to welcome Chinese scientists into Department of Energy labs with open arms," says physicist and thorium advocate Robert Hargraves. He and other experts note that most of the U.S. intellectual property related to thorium is already in the public domain. At a time when the U.S. government is spending very little on advanced reactor research, they believe China's experiments may yield a breakthrough that provides an alternative to the massive consumption of fossil fuels.

The technology's immediate appeal for China, both Chinese and American scientists say, is that thorium reactors have the potential to be much more efficient, safer and cleaner than most in service today.

The Chinese plan to cool their experimental reactors with molten salts. This is sharply different from the pressurized water-cooling systems used in most uranium-fueled nuclear plants. The risks of explosions and meltdowns are lower, proponents say.

"If a thorium, molten-salt reactor can be successfully developed, it will remove all fears about nuclear energy," says Fang Jinqing, a retired nuclear researcher at the China Institute of Atomic Energy. "The technology works in theory, and it may have the potential to reshape the nuclear power landscape, but there are a lot of technical challenges."

Other advocates agree on thorium's peaceful promise. Republican Senator Orrin Hatch and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, introduced legislation in 2010 calling on the U.S. government to share its thorium expertise.

The unsuccessful bill said it was in U.S. "national security and foreign policy interest" to provide other countries with thorium fuel-cycle technology, because doing so would produce less long-lasting waste and reduce the risk of nuclear proliferation.

Oak Ridge has been free to proceed in spite of that bill's failure.





TURNING BACK THE CLOCK

What China is attempting is to turn the nuclear clock back to the mid-1960s, when Oak Ridge successfully operated a reactor with fuel derived from thorium and cooled with molten salts. The lab also produced detailed plans for a commercial-scale power plant.

Despite considerable promise, the thorium test reactor was shut down in 1969 after about five years of operation. Research was effectively shelved when the Nixon Administration decided in the 1970s that the U.S nuclear industry would concentrate on a new generation of uranium-fueled, fast-breeder reactors. For a range of technical and political reasons, not least the public's fear of nuclear plants, these new uranium reactors have yet to come into widespread commercial use.

The die was cast against thorium much earlier. In the early 1950s, an influential U.S. Navy officer, Hyman Rickover, decided a water-cooled, uranium-fueled reactor would power the world's first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus. Rickover was instrumental in the 1957 commissioning of a similar reactor at Shippingport, Pennsylvania - the world's first nuclear-power station.

Admiral Rickover was a towering figure in atomic energy and became known as the father of the U.S nuclear navy. He had clear reasons for his choice, engineers say. The pressurized water reactor was the most advanced, compact and technically sound at the time. More importantly, these reactors also supplied plutonium as a byproduct - then in strong demand as fuel for America's rapidly growing arsenal of nuclear warheads.

"The short answer is that uranium was good for bombs and thorium wasn't," says Kirk Sorensen, president of Flibe Energy, a privately held thorium-technology start-up based in Huntsville, Alabama.

With the launch of the Nautilus in 1955, a course was set that is still followed today, with most of the world's nuclear power generated from this type of reactor.

Although it does not yield byproducts that can be readily used to make weapons, thorium does have military applications.

The fuel could be used to power Chinese navy surface warships, including a planned fleet of aircraft carriers. China's nuclear submarine fleet has struggled with reactor reliability and safety, according to naval commentators, and thorium could eventually become an alternative.

Top British naval engineers last year proposed a design for a thorium reactor to power warships. Compact thorium power plants could also be used to supply reliable power to military bases and expeditionary forces.

Thorium also has military potential for the United States, experts say. But the world's most powerful military is reluctant to pursue alternatives to its uranium-fueled reactors, because it has operated them successfully for almost six decades.

Joe Sestak, a former U.S. congressman and retired two-star admiral, failed in an effort to get the Pentagon to reconsider thorium in 2009. "It is very hard to effect a change in something that has been established for a long time," he says. Sestak says he was unaware of the extent of cooperation between the U.S. and China on thorium technology.



INTELLECTUAL HOME

Flibe Energy's Sorensen, a former NASA engineer, has plans to build thorium-fueled reactors for commercial use in the United States. Sorensen has been instrumental in reviving global interest in the groundbreaking work of the late American nuclear physicist Alvin Weinberg.

It was Weinberg who led research into molten-salt cooled reactors and thorium when he ran Oak Ridge from 1955 to 1973. Weinberg was eventually fired for his persistent thorium advocacy. But he had some powerful supporters. In his last scientific paper, published shortly after his death in 2003, nuclear-weapons pioneer Edward Teller called for the construction and testing of a small, thorium-fueled reactor.

Oak Ridge remains the intellectual home of this technology. The U.S. Department of Energy lab still has a small research project under way on the use of molten-salt coolants for uranium-fueled reactors. The Energy Department is also funding related research at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

But the ambitious project under way in China could be the best bet to unlock thorium's promise of safe, cheap and abundant nuclear fuel.

Jiang Mianheng, son of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin, visited Oak Ridge in 2010 and brokered a cooperation agreement with the lab. The deal gave the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which has a staff of 50,000, the plans for a thorium reactor. In January 2011, Jiang signed a protocol with the Department of Energy outlining the terms of joint energy research with the academy.

An electrical engineer trained at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Jiang told a conference on thorium in Shanghai last year China's thorium project "is 100 percent financed by the central government."

The protocol stipulates that intellectual property arising from the joint research will be shared with the global scientific community. It excludes sharing commercially confidential information and any other material that the parties agree to withhold. The pact also specifically rules out any military or weapons-related research. "All activities conducted under this protocol shall be exclusively for peaceful purposes," it says.

Jess Gehin, a nuclear-reactor physicist at Oak Ridge, says the pact allows the two sides to share information about their research.

"The Chinese are very aggressive, very determined and programmed to move forward with this technology," Gehin said. "Right now we agree that we should meet routinely, maybe a couple of times a year."

Jiang did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement posted on the Chinese Academy of Sciences website, he said China and the United States "should boost mutual trust and carry out complementary and mutually beneficial cooperation in the study of thorium-based salt reactors, hybrid energy systems and other cutting edge science and technology."



AN ENERGY HEDGE

Beijing's long-term goal: commercialize the technology by 2040, after building a series of increasingly bigger reactors. The Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics is recruiting nuclear physicists, engineers, project managers and support staff, according to a regular stream of job advertisements it publishes online. Its team is expected to expand to 750 by 2015 and eventually include 1,000 researchers.Click to view image: '2a1_1390938970-Molten_Salt_Reactor_1390939241.jpg'

A director at the Shanghai Institute, Li Qingnuan, and other senior researchers are wooing top young talent across China to join the project. After lecturing on molten-salt reactor technology at Sichuan University in April, Li invited students from the audience to apply for positions at the institute, according to a report on the university's website.

China's sprawling network of nuclear-research and industrial companies are gearing up to assist. In early June, the China National Nuclear Corporation, the body overseeing all Chinese civilian and military nuclear programs, announced that state-owned China North Nuclear Fuel Company had signed an agreement with the Shanghai Institute to research and supply thorium and molten salts for the experimental reactors.

The push into thorium is part of a broader national energy strategy. The government wants to reduce its dependence on coal-fired power plants, which account for about 80 percent of the nation's electricity but have darkened its skies. Nuclear energy is a big part of the plan: China aims to have 58 gigawatts of nuclear power on the grid by 2020, an almost five-fold increase from 12.57 gigawatts today.

Thorium is a hedge on that nuclear bet. China has 15 conventional nuclear reactors online and 30 under construction. But energy authorities are also investing in a range of different technologies for the future, including advanced pressurized water reactors, fast-breeder reactors and pebble-bed reactors. China has little uranium but massive reserves of thorium. So, the prospect of cheaper nuclear power with secure supplies of fuel is a powerful attraction.

At last year's Shanghai thorium conference, Jiang described how clean nuclear power would allow China to make a "revolutionary" move towards a greener economy.

The bet on unconventional nukes, he said, explains "why China is the first one to eat a crab" - citing an old Chinese proverb about the individual who dares to make a discovery important to civilization. (Editing by Bill Tarrant
)

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