News on China's scientific and technological development.

t2contra said:

I still doubt that China will become the first country to build a commercially viable thorium power plant as its technological sophistication is still not as advanced as the west. The west began the research first and now that they have restarted it, can overhaul China.

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China has broken ground on a 3 billion-yuan ($476 million) nuclear power project that will be the first in the world to put a reactor with fourth-generation features into commercial use, a Chinese energy company said Sunday.

It also marks China's latest move to speed up nuclear power development, which came to a halt after the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan in 2011.

Construction of the project at Shidao Bay in the coastal city of Rongcheng, East China's Shandong province, began last month, Xinhua learned from Huaneng Shandong Shidao Bay Nuclear Power Co Ltd, the builder and operator of the plant.

With a designed capacity of 200 megawatts and "the characteristics of fourth-generation nuclear energy systems," the high-temperature gas-cooled reactor will start generating power by the end of 2017, the HSNPC said in a statement sent to Xinhua via email.

Independently developed by China's Tsinghua University, the reactor has the features of "inherent safety" and "passive nuclear safety" in line with the fourth-generation concept, meaning it can shut down safely in the event of an emergency without causing a reactor core meltdown or massive leakage of radioactive material, according to the statement.

The reactor can have an outlet temperature of 750 degrees Celsius, compared with 1,000 degrees Celsius that can be reached by the very-high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, an internationally-accepted fourth-generation reactor concept.

It can also raise electricity generation efficiency to around 40 percent from the current 30-percent level of second- and third-generation reactors, said the statement.

If it is commercially successful, the reactor's technology and equipment can be exported to other countries in the future, said an HSNPC public relations officer who declined to be named.

"That will be a great boost to China's nuclear industry, as a very high percentage of the equipment is produced domestically instead of being imported," the official told Xinhua by telephone.

The project is part of the HSNPC's broader plan to build a 6.6-gigawatt (GW) nuclear power plant that will require approximately 100 billion yuan in investment over 20 years. If completed, it would be China's largest nuclear power plant, said the official.

The rest of the plan includes four 1.25-GW AP1000 pressurized water reactors and a 1.4-GW CAP1400 pressurized water reactor.

The plan has not yet been approved by regulators. China Huaneng Group, China Nuclear Engineering Group Co and Tsinghua University are investors in the plant. Originally scheduled to be launched in 2011, the construction of the project was put off after a tsunami hit nuclear facilities at Japan's Fukushima plant in March 2011, triggering a nuclear meltdown and public panic.

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How innovative is China?
Valuing patents
Jan 5th 2013 | from the print edition


China has overtaken America again. Its patent office received more applications than any other country’s in 2011. (The numbers were released in December.) But look closer, and the picture is murkier.

In America and Europe, roughly half of patent applications are lodged by foreigners. This used to be true in China, but in the past few years filings by locals have surged to three-quarters of the total (see chart 1). Is this because China has suddenly become more innovative? Or is it because government incentives have prompted people to file lots of iffy patent applications, which the local patent office has a tendency to approve?

In this section
The bloodhounds of capitalism
The bottom line
Cloney ponies
Going Underground
Linguists online
»Valuing patents
Mammon’s new monarchs
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Patents
There is no reliable way to measure a patent’s value. But one can use a rough-and-ready yardstick: in how many places did the inventors seek a patent for the same technology? If it is a good idea, they will try to patent it in lots of places. If they just want to pocket a Chinese subsidy, they won’t bother.

Data from the UN’s World Intellectual Property Office suggest that some of the apparent spurt in Chinese innovation is illusory. Or at least, patents in China are probably less valuable than those in America or Europe.

Hardly any Chinese inventors seek to patent their ideas abroad. Between 2005 and 2009 fewer than 5% did (see chart 2). In America, the figure was 27%; in Europe, more than 40%. Geeks in the West should not relax, but it is not clear that their Chinese rivals have yet outstripped them.

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The magneto-rheology ultra-precision polishing equipment and the ion beam ultra-precision polishing equipment independently developed by the Precision Engineering Innovation Team under the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) achieved the sub-nanometer accuracy in the field of optical element processing and passed the check and the acceptance by national authoritative department in mid-January 2013.

According to experts, the achievement has made China the third country worldwide to master the high-precision optical element manufacturing and processing technology following the United States and Germany, and also the one and the only country in the world to have the capability to develop magneto-rheology polishing equipment and ion beam polishing equipment at the same time.

Nanometer accuracy is hailed as a "crown jewel" of ultra-precision processing technology. In the past 20-odd years, under the leadership of Professor Li Shengyi, the Precision Engineering Innovation Team under the NUDT of the PLA has broken through technical bottlenecks and developed independently magneto-rheology ultra-precision polishing equipment and ion beam ultra-precision polishing equipment, achieving China's sub-nanometer accuracy in the field of optical element processing.

In the past three years, in cooperation with such organizations as the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASTC), the team has promoted the development of China's space optics and high-end equipment manufacturing and developed independently seven types of magneto-rheology polishing machine tools and ion beam polishing machine tools, obtaining significant economic and social benefits.

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The human body vein identification system developed by the College of Electronic Science and Engineering of the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) got approval from security and protection experts on January 9, 2013. This is a new breakthrough in China's biologic feature identification technology.

Biologic feature identification technology is a technology that makes use of those biologic or behavioral characteristics of human body which are collectible and measurable to recognize people. Currently, there are three primary approaches: fingerprint identification, iris identification and facial identification.

According to the briefing, the vein identification system is the third-generation biologic identification technology which is able to recognize a person by scanning the unique vein pattern of the human body. Compared with the three identification technologies mentioned above, the vein identification system is not only fast, stable, reliable, safe and clean, but also difficult to counterfeit, replicate, or lose. Therefore, it proves highly secure.

The vein identification system can effectively prevent various cracking means through its specialized independent processing circuits and high-intensity encryption. It can be widely applied in such fields as security, finance and national defense, and can also be used at important sites such as the security check points at harbors and airports, hospital and disease control zones, parking lots and so forth.

It bears a significant role in improving the security level of our country and safeguarding the safety of people's lives and properties.

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Scattering common-looking faint-yellow particles into oil-polluted seawater, and the oil disappeared and the seawater became crystal-clear dozens of hours later, which happened recently in a naval port of the Navy of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA).

The miracle-working particles are "oil-degrading bacteria" jointly developed by the Naval Medical Research Institute under the PLA Navy and Fudan University. The achievement was successfully tested in naval ports of the East China Sea, the North China Sea and the South China Sea respectively, and passed appraisal by experts recently in Beijing.

Starting with bio-remediation, researchers of the Naval Medical Research Institute under the PLA Navy successfully incubated and isolated highly-efficient oil-degrading bacterial strains and high-yield bio-surfactant bacterial strains from oil-polluted seawater, and succeeded in combining them and establishing highly-efficient oil-degrading colony of bacteria.

They fixed the colony of bacteria onto suspensible microorganisms, creating an oil-polluted organism intensive- handling and remediation system. The system's petroleum hydrocarbon degradation rate can be up to over 90 percent.

More importantly, the system degrades oil into carbon dioxide and water which is harmless to environment. Besides, the system itself can be degraded in a few days, and therefore it needs no reclaim and causes no secondary pollution.

The successful test of the system makes a big difference in using bio-remediation technology to control oil pollution of sea areas of ports/docks and also has great significance in treatment and remediation of marine oil pollution.

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A surge in research into the novel material graphene reveals an intensifying global contest to lead a potential industrial revolution. Latest figures show a sharp rise in patents filed to claim rights over different aspects of graphene since 2007, with a further spike last year. China leads the field as the country with the most patents. The South Korean electronics giant Samsung stands out as the company with most to its name.The figures, compiled by a UK-based patent consultancy, CambridgeIP, highlight how Britain, which pioneered research into graphene, may be falling behind its rivals. Only identified in 2004, graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms making it the thinnest material ever created and offering huge promise for a host of applications from IT to energy to medicine, Flexible touchscreens, lighting within walls and enhanced batteries are among the likely first applications. Early work on graphene by two Russian-born scientists at the University of Manchester, Andrei Geim and Konstantin Novosolev, earned them a shared Nobel Prize in 2010 and then knighthoods. The material - described as being far stronger than diamond, much more conductive than copper and as flexible as rubber - is now at the heart of a worldwide contest to exploit its properties and develop techniques to commercialise it. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, announced further funding for graphene research last month, bringing the total of UK government support to more than £60m. But the tally of patents - an essential first step to turning a profit from a substance still based in the lab - shows how intense the worldwide competition has become. According to new figures from CambridgeIP, there were 7,351 graphene patents and patent applications across the world by the end of last year - a remarkably high number for a material only recognized for less than a decade. Of that total, Chinese institutions and corporations have the most with 2,200 - the largest number of any country and clear evidence of Chinese determination to capitalise on graphene's future value. The US ranks second with 1,754 patents. The UK, which kickstarted the field with the original research back in 2004, has only 54 - of which 16 are held by Manchester University. UK science minister David Willetts, who has identified graphene as a national research priority, said the figures show that "we need to raise our game".

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BEIJING - Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering, or the country's elite think-tank duo, unveiled on Saturday top 10 news events of domestic science and technology progress for the year 2012.

Selected via a vote by academicians from both organizations, the 10 news events are as follows:

-- Three Chinese astronauts on June 24 successfully completed a manual docking between the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft and the orbiting Tiangong-1 lab module, the first such attempt in China's history of space exploration.

-- China's manned submersible, the Jiaolong, set a new national dive record after reaching more than 7,000 meters below sea level during its dive tests in the Pacific Ocean in June.

-- The world's first high-speed railway in areas with extremely low temperatures, the Harbin-Dalian rail, which runs through three provinces in northeast China, started operation on December 1.

-- China on February 6 published a set of full coverage of moon map and moon images with a resolution of seven meters captured by the country's second moon orbiter, the Chang'e-2.

-- The Chinese Sunway BlueLight supercomputer, which was built with domestically produced microprocessors and is capable of performing around one-thousand-trillion calculations per second, on September 11 passed the examination of the experts panel organized by the Ministry of Science and Technology.

-- China on July 29 successfully conducted tests on its new 120-tonne-thrust liquid oxygen and kerosene engine for its new generation carrier rocket, the Long March-5.

-- Research led by Chinese professor Jian-Wei Pan on the experimental demonstration of topological error correction with an eight-photon cluster state marked a breakthrough in quantum information processing research. It was published by the Nature journal in February.

-- Chinese and foreign physicists during the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment have confirmed and measured a third type of neutrino oscillation. That was announced on March 8.

-- The Ministry of Science and Technology announced on January 11 that the country has approved a hepatitis E vaccine developed by researchers from Xiamen University and Xiamen Innovax Biotech Co. Ltd. in east China's Fujian Province.

-- China on October 28 unveiled Asia's biggest radio telescope in Shanghai, which is used to track and collect data from satellites and space probes.

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BEIJING - China's leading scientific institution is aiming to expand its influence by establishing overseas branches around the world, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) announced on Monday. The CAS has started building a comprehensive research center in Kenya, while branches in central Asia, southeast Asia and Latin America are being planned, CAS Vice President Zhang Yaping said at an annual work conference. The branches are expected to increase the CAS's ability to absorb and utilize international technological resources, as well as boost its global influence, attractiveness and competitiveness, according to Zhang. Zhang said the CAS will launch a program to help Chinese scientists deepen scientific cooperation with scientists in other developing countries, as well as help them train scientific and technological staff. The CAS will also recruit more elite foreign scientists, Zhang said. Deng Maicun, secretary general of the CAS, said Chinese scientists made a number of influential achievements last year, including the discovery of factors that control the development of intelligence and the successful test flight of a stratospheric aircraft. Deng said the number of high-level papers published by the CAS has increased by 13 percent year on year, he said.The CAS vowed at the conference to improve the way scientific performance is appraised, stating that it will place less emphasis on publication and quantity when evaluating performance. The CAS also announced that it will carry out research on the cause and control of atmospheric dust following record levels of air pollution that hit multiple Chinese cities last week.

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