In the coming weeks, fuel assemblies will be loaded into the AP1000 nuclear reactor in Sanmen, Zhejiang province. It will become the world’s first meltdown-proof nuclear power plant. The AP1000 “is a simple, genius solution to reduce the risk of nuclear meltdown,” said Xian Jiaotong University’s Nuclear Science Professor Shan Jianqiang, the author of several university papers on reactor safety and operations. The start of operations at Sanmen will be a shot in the arm for the nuclear industry. The AP1000 was designed and made by Toshiba Corp’s Westinghouse Electric subsidiary. China has 20 nuclear power plants under construction, more than any other country.

China has become the first country to send quantum keys – highly complex encryptions – from a satellite to a base station in Xinlong, Hebei province, and to teleport light particles the other way. The accomplishments are two major breakthroughs in the effort to create an unhackable global communications network. The two experiments mark the completion of the second and third of the three main goals of Micius, the world’s first quantum communications satellite, which China launched last year. The first goal, to send entangled light particles further than ever before, was achieved in June. Entanglement is a phenomenon in which two or more particles can affect each other simultaneously regardless of distance. Entangled particles cannot be described independently of each other. Bai Chunli, President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), said China is now the world leader in quantum communication technologies and is working with scientists from Austria, Germany and Italy. He said Micius will continue to perform experiments until its expected service life expires next year. “The trio of quantum experiments will be central to any global space-based quantum internet,” Karl Ziemelis, Chief Physical Science Editor at Nature Magazine, said. China also plans to build the world’s first global quantum communication network by 2030, the China Daily reports.

More than 480 Chinese doctors and academics associated with published research papers that were later deemed to be fraudulent will be punished for damaging the country’s “international reputation”. U.S. academic publishing house Springer in April retracted 107 papers by Chinese authors that had been published in the journal Tumor Biology. After publication, the company discovered that most of the peer reviews were fake. The punishments would range from being deprived of research funding to being sacked and publicly named and shamed.

China has set out an ambitious plan to leap frog ahead of the United States to be the global leader in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) by 2030. The proposal takes a three-step approach: keep pace with leading AI technology and applications in general by 2020, make major breakthroughs by 2025, and be the world leader in the field five years thereafter. The ambitious plan will be an economic bonanza for the country’s technology firms, as the area defined as core AI is expected to be valued at CNY150 billion by 2020, while AI-related fields are valued at CNY1 trillion, according to the government’s forecast. By 2025, those values will exceed CNY400 billion and CNY5 trillion respectively. Government finance will lead the way in AI research, including the development of supercomputers, and high performance semiconductor chips, software, and the hiring of key talent to lead the field. Up to 26% of China’s gross domestic products (GDP) could be generated by AI-related industries by 2030, making the country the world’s biggest winner from investing in the field, according to a report last month by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). AI technologies are expected to bolster global GDP by 14% by 2030, the equivalent of USD15.7 trillion, by improving labor productivity and spurring consumption, said the report.

China’s Premier Li Keqiang has called for scientists to be given more freedom to operate in their research to help the country’s drive towards greater innovation. Many scientists have complained that there were too many constraints on scientific projects from the government, especially over the management of funds, which was restricting researchers’ creativity, Li said. The Premier criticized officials drawing up plans and quotas for research programs, requiring certain tasks to be done by a specific month. “Which one of the major scientific discoveries in human history was made by planning? Even Newton himself couldn’t plan his discovery of gravity,” Li said. The government should create a more tolerant environment for researchers, especially in studies that could affect the future course of human history, the Premier added. More than 40 government departments and nearly 100 programs were previously involved in the management of scientific funds, according to Minister of Science and Technology Wan Gang. The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said China spent CNY1.4 trillion on research and development (R&D) in 2015, up by nearly 9% from the previous year. Over CNY71 billion, or 5%, went to basic research, lower than most innovation driven economies, whose ratio is above 10%.