Breitbart.com reports: “The California-based Middlebury Institute of International Studies published research this week that showed China has constructed a prototype nuclear reactor that could fit aboard a large surface vessel – a sign that China is making progress toward building a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

At the present time, only the United States and France have nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. The U.S. has 11 of them, while France has one, the flagship Charles de Gaulle.

China has three aircraft carriers, one of them an aging Russian design commissioned in 2012 as the Liaoning. The most interesting of the three ships is the Fujian, launched in 2022 and ominously named for the Chinese province opposite Taiwan.

The Fujian was domestically built and is far more advanced than the other two carriers, approaching the capabilities of America’s carriers in several key respects, although it is considerably smaller than America’s Nimitz and Gerald R. Ford-class ships. One of the Fujian’s most significant features is that it uses catapults to launch planes, as America’s carriers do, instead of the harrowing ‘ski slope’ launch ramp on the bow of China’s older carriers…”