China is winning the energy arms race — using tech we invented

Our economic realities as Americans are tied directly to energy. But those of us working outside the energy industry must be forgiven for not noticing that in 2022, China began construction on an experimental thorium reactor that requires no water, generates substantially less toxic byproduct, purports and appears be vastly safer than all other reactor designs, and all but eliminates the possibility of meltdown. American citizens should be forgiven for not noticing because in 2022, as you recall, we were suffocating in the various tendrils of psychological operations and captured government.

And when China operationalized the reactor and proved the design, firing it up last month, pulling a positive yield of uranium, Americans were again distracted. Our industries are still captured, corrupted, or sidelined. Our government is still dysfunctional, and it appears we are now, in some very official sense, losing the energy arms race.

Clickbait headlines have suggested that China outright stole the reactor design. The truth is probably even worse.

The Chinese reactor works. It delivers cheap, abundant, safe, clean energy. Congress is silent. Portions of our mainstream media only serve corporate (often energy sector-tied) interests, so they aren’t going to sound the alarm.

Here’s the kicker regarding the United States’ second-place status in this energy battle: Americans funded the entirety of the original research for the thorium reactor in the 1960s at Oak Ridge Nuclear Laboratory. This raises major questions about past, present, and future for the energy and tech sectors.

Of the successful test of the thorium reactor in China, the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics stated in a press release, “This marks the first time international experimental data has been obtained after thorium was introduced into a molten salt reactor, making it the only operational molten salt reactor in the world to have successfully incorporated thorium fuel.”

Clickbait headlines have suggested that China outright stole the reactor design. The truth is probably even worse. If you take blood pressure medication, be forewarned: There is malfeasance here, for sure, but the technology wasn’t stolen from either American corporations or Oak Ridge Laboratory. Oak Ridge Laboratory, in concert with the U.S. government, evidently declassified much of the pertinent research, according to researcher Kirk Sorensen.

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CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images

Sorensen runs the website https://energyfromthorium.com, where portions of the material, now in the public domain, were published. Meanwhile, private American research into what turns out to be a highly feasible and safe energy source has been, at best, scattered and underfunded. What's more, the stultifying (false?) dialectic between environmentalism and first-world living standards has muddied the waters for decades.

Oak Ridge Labs partnered with the Shanghai Applied Physics Institute back in 2015. American research was just simply handed to the Chinese. Meanwhile, we have considerable energy issues in America: prices jumping 10%-20% per year in many states and services often approaching third-world standards in terms of reliability and transparency. We have the highly unstable and contentious AI industry building data centers at a heady pace and signaling orders of magnitude more energy demand in short order. Lastly, we have a contingent of right-aligned Americans squaring up to take on the potential re-industrialization of the country — automobiles, pharmaceuticals, microprocessors, and steel manufacture at all levels could and probably must be re-shored if we as a nation are ever to right the ship.

None of this happens without abundant, cheap energy.

Since the early 2000s, concerns over dwindling cheap oil have confused the public and stymied good-faith efforts to manage the infrastructure, source, and delivery problems that our grand techno-American plans seem to require. Elon Musk's grandfather, Joshua N. Halderman, was involved with M. King Hubbert in the original Technocracy Inc. endeavor, which signaled early alarms about exponential growth meeting finite oil capacity. Elon is a big fan of solar, but one wonders if perhaps now he’d be better off investigating thorium ... if American industry and government can get out of his way, of course.