You can see the first dynamic of US-China cooperation manifest in a video from INSTANTfirst presentation of the institute in Berkeley, in August 2012. As representative of the institute, INSTANT sent Kun Chen, who had done his Ph.D. at Indiana University and was still in his 30s. The audience was much older: about two-thirds of them appeared to be in their 50s or 60s. Participants tried to assess the practicality of INSTANTThe ambitious plan of A man asked about the budget, which amounted to approximately three hundred and fifty million dollars, spread over five years. Another man asked where INSTANT planned to obtain molten salt, because “to my knowledge, there is no facility in the world capable of producing it.” Chen responded that China has several facilities that can.
It’s hard to tell from the video what the Chinese side got out of these exchanges, but when I spoke with Chen, he emphasized how helpful it was to have interlocutors in the United States. “From the beginning, we didn’t think we could get this far,” he said. Molten salt was no less niche in China than anywhere else. Chen estimated that in 2011, only thirty or forty people in the world were seriously working on using the substance for fission reactors. Connecting with some of these people in the United States made the project possible.
For the Americans, there was curiosity to see how far the Chinese could go with resources that simply did not exist here. Cooperate with INSTANT It was also a way of pushing the American federal government. The logic was: “If the Chinese are doing it, it must be relevant,” Forsberg said.
In this sense, the research and development cooperation agreement that Oak Ridge signed with INSTANT eliminate the middleman. To finance the molten salt loop, INSTANT paid Oak Ridge about four million dollars, according to Chen. With such a loop, researchers could test the materials and all the plumbing components needed to circulate the molten salt. The project also provided a focal point for people working on molten salt in the United States. Speaking to a journalist from MIT Technology ReviewDavid Holcomb explained his motivations. “One of the important things to realize is that a number of key people in molten salt reactors are retiring or passing away very quickly,” he said. “China provides the funding that allows us to transfer this knowledge and gain practical experience in building and operating these reactors.”
This article appeared in August 2016. By 2018, the United States had withdrawn from almost all cooperation with China. “I wouldn’t say it’s a complete surprise,” Chen told me. He and the INSTANT The team believed the relationship would likely deteriorate under Trump. “But this happened very suddenly. It’s similar to what we learned in the tariff issue.”
I asked Chen if he encountered any difficulties once his team went it alone. “The challenges, I think, are first and foremost, first and foremost, whether you have the money,” he said. But the INSTANT the team certainly had that. The Chinese Academy of Sciences extends the project grant every year. In 2018, China pledged 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 power overall by 2050.
At Chen’s first presentation at Berkeley, in August 2012, one of the few young people who asked him a question was a man with a shock of dark brown hair and a large goatee. I had watched the recording several times before realizing it was Mike Laufer, who would help found Kairos Power, a private nuclear company trying to commercialize the high-temperature, fluoride-salt-cooled 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 building a salt-cooled reactor, had a new resonance. Was Laufer, who was a graduate student at the university at the time, already developing a business plan?
Kairos represents a new era for the U.S. nuclear industry. Inspired by SpaceX, he is attempting to rebuild American industrial capacity within a single company. The business model requires a vertically integrated network of facilities capable of making fuel and salt for Kairos, as well as much of what the company needs to build its reactors. The hope behind all this is that by handling things internally, Kairos will be able to offer nuclear power at a competitive price to the market. And it had some success. Last year, Google committed to buying five hundred megawatts from the company by 2035. Kairos is also one of only two U.S. companies with a Nuclear Regulatory Commission permit to build a new reactor. Construction of the reactor building, located in Oak Ridge, began last year. “We are working to get this reactor operational within this decade,” Laufer told me.
