For several years, I’ve reported the annual number of visits by foreign nationals to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Each year, of course, the visits list has been topped by China. In 2015, about a fourth of all foreigner visits to ORNL involved citizens of China (1,859).
Readers have raised questions on multiple issues, ranging from the security restrictions at ORNL to the treatment of U.S. scientists when they visit other institutions in other countries.
As a follow-up, I recently asked ORNL how many lab scientists/engineers visited China in 2015 for business purposes. It took a little while, but an ORNL spokesman said there were a total of 138 trips to China by lab staff.
Among the places visited were the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics; Institute of Modern Physics in Lanzhou; Institute of Computing Technology (Chinese Academy of Science); Nuclear Power Institute of China, in Chengdu; China Nuclear Power Technology Research Institute in Shenzhen and the Nuclear Power Research Institute in Shanghai.
Staff members also were in China for conferences, including the 8th International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM 2015) Conference in Beijing in August; the US China CERC-CVS 2015 Technology Annual Meeting and International EV Technology Workshop in Beijing in August; the ICFA mini-Workshop on Beam Commissioning for High Intensity Accelerators in June; the 2015 International Workshop on Quantifying Uncertainties in Land Surface Models in Beijing in May; and the Society of Automotive Engineers in Shanghai in November.
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