

I’m pretty sure they aren’t doing the design part of the research. A lot of the “new” designs that China has been testing recently, have been sitting on US and European shelves for decades, like since the late '60s and early '70s. There’s just not really a way, in the West, to legally set up a test reactor. China can just ignore things like permits and zoning.
Not that I’m aware of. All our nuclear commercial power plants are just plain old nuclear energy boiling water. We’re gonna use a damn Dyson Sphere to boil water…
We have bombs that use a similar starting mechanism, but they aren’t exactly useful energy production.