It marks the first long-term, stable operation of the technology, putting China at the forefront of a global race to harness thorium – considered a safer and more abundant alternative to uranium – for nuclear power.
The experimental reactor, located in the Gobi Desert in China’s west, uses molten salt as the fuel carrier and coolant, and thorium – a radioactive element abundant in the Earth’s crust – as the fuel source. The reactor is reportedly designed to sustainably generate 2 megawatts of thermal power.
I cannot speak for this area of science, but in my field China’s research papers, for example rock mass failure response to complex stress states, are like a god send, really quality work. This is my opinion in my field but if I had to extrapolate… Remember the Soviets with all their propaganda had amazing scientists
Yeah, they had way more horrifying ones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors'_plot
Yes, there were heavy mistakes made, from making stupid decisions to giving positions of power to people who should had been fired. But this happened everywhere, for example the big use of lobotomies to the red scare that caused many scientist like Oppenheimer to get in trouble with the US goverment.
Yes, I remember when Oppenheimer got in trouble, which resulted in all the decent doctors in the country being rounded up and executed based on lies.
They’re also crushing it in the ML space. Half the good AI papers are written in Chinese; one of the startups I worked at had the luxury of hiring a Chinese speaking AI researcher who could read them for us