Furukawa. TTS acquired the FUJI design and some related patents. Chinese thorium MSR project The People's Republic of China has initiated a research and development project in thorium molten-salt reactor technology. It was formally announced at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) annual conference in January 2011. Its ultimate target is to investigate and develop a thorium based molten salt nuclear system in about 20 years. An expected intermediate outcome of the TMSR research program is to build a 2 MW pebble bed fluoride salt cooled research reactor in 2015, and a 2 MW molten salt fueled research reactor in 2017. This would be followed by a 10 MW demonstrator reactor and a 100 MW pilot reactors. The project is spearheaded by Jiang Mianheng, with a start-up budget of $350 million, and has already recruited 140 PhD scientists, working full-time on thorium molten salt reactor research at the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics. An expansion of staffing has increased to 700 as of 2015. As of 2016, their plan is for a 10MW pilot LFTR is expected to be made operational in 2025, with a 100MW version set to follow in 2035. At the end of August 2021, the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (SINAP) completed the construction of a 2MW (thermal) experimental thorium molten salt reactor in Wuwei, Gansu, known as the TMSR-LF1. China plans to follow up the experiment with a 373MW version by 2030. Flibe Energy Kirk Sorensen, former NASA scientist and Chief Nuclear Technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering, has been a long-time promoter of thorium fuel cycle and particularly liquid fluoride thorium reactors. He first researched thorium reactors while working at NASA, while evaluating power plant designs suitable for lunar colonies. Material about this fuel cycle was surprisingly hard to find, so in 2006 Sorensen started "energyfromthorium.com", a document repository, forum, and blog to promote this technology. In 2006, Sorensen coined the liquid fluoride thorium reactor and LFTR nomenclature to describe a subset of molten salt reactor designs based on liquid fluoride-salt fuels with breeding of thorium into uranium-233 in the thermal spectrum. In 2011, Sorensen founded Flibe Energy, a company that initially intends to develop 20–50 MW LFTR small modular reactor designs to power military bases; Sorensen noted that it is easier to promote novel military designs than civilian power station designs in the context of the modern US nuclear regulatory and political environment. An