So Westinghouse sold the Chinese 4x AP1000, knowing full well that the Chinese would learn, document and then copy/clone the designs all over. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000
Which is exactly what happened; with the follow-on that any improvements are patented and the patent rights are owned solely by the Chinese:
"In 2008 and 2009, Westinghouse made agreements to work with the Chinese State Nuclear Power Technology Corporation (SNPTC) and other institutes to develop a larger design, the CAP1400 of 1,400 MWe capacity, possibly followed by a 1,700 MWe design. China will own the patent rights for these larger designs. Exporting the new larger units may be possible with Westinghouse's cooperation."
> Westinghouse has agreed to transfer technology to SNPTC over the first four AP1000 units so that SNPTC can build the following ones on its own.
So it seems a bit unfair to say the Chinese somehow reversed engineered the AP1000 design.
This also happened when Combustion Engineering sold the System 80+ design (a derivative of that deployed at Palo Verde) to South Korea. Apparently Combustion Engineering were in financial trouble and did what was necessary to get the deal, although Westinghouse (who eventually came to own the Combustion Engineering intellectual property) are currently disputing this deal.
Better the Chinese actually use the tech than it sets in regulatory deadlock in the US.
Sad to see the US lose freedoms just as rapidly as a Chinese citizens. One one case, onerous regulation and on the other a decrease of personal freedom but the overall result is surprisingly similar.
Civil nuclear power is dead in the west. What value does IP that will never be used have? Why not give it to the chinese and see what they can come up with?
The other side of that coin was Westinghouse realising there is no market for civil nuclear power in North America or Europe at this time on account of the newfound alliance between wind and gas.
The formula is not thought to have been shared, like the plans to the nuclear reactors were shared. Knowledge of gunpowder is thought to have likely been inadvertently transferred through trade along the silk road, by way of the Middle East, where the knowledge of gunpowder was acquired before Europe.
From the latest Information Technology and Innovation Foundation report (June 17, 2024)
Though China built upon a foreign base of technology, it has become the world’s leading proponent of nuclear energy. Chinese firms are well ahead of their Western peers, supported by a whole-of-government strategy that provides extensive financing and systemic coordination.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
* China intends to build 150 new nuclear reactors between 2020 and 2035, with 27 currently under construction and the average construction timeline for each reactor about seven years, far faster than for most other nations.
* China has commenced operation of the world’s first fourth-generation nuclear reactor, for which China asserts it developed some 90 percent of the technology.
* China is leading in the development and launch of cost-competitive small modular reactors (SMRs).
Overall, analysts assess that China likely stands 10 to 15 years ahead of the United States in its ability to deploy fourth-generation nuclear reactors at scale.
* China’s innovation strengths in nuclear power pertain especially to organizational, systemic, and incremental innovation. Many fourth-generation nuclear technologies have been known for years, but China’s state-backed approach excels at fielding them.
* Analysts assess that America and China are likely at par when it comes to efforts to develop nuclear fusion technologies, but warn that China’s demonstrated ability to deploy fission reactors at scale gives it an advantage for when fusion comes online.
* Looking narrowly at scientific publications on nuclear energy, China ranks first in the H-index, a commonly used metric measuring the scholarly impact of journal publications.
* From 2008 to 2023, China’s share of all nuclear patents increased from 1.3 percent to 13.4 percent, and the country leads in the number of nuclear fusion patent applications.
> The GEN IV Forum reframes the reactor safety paradigm, from accepting that nuclear accidents can occur and should be mastered, to eliminating the physical possibility of an accident. Active and passive safety systems would be at least as effective as those of Generation III systems and render the most severe accidents physically impossible.
> Relative to Gen II-III, advantages of Gen IV reactors include:
> * Nuclear waste that remains radioactive for a few centuries instead of millennia
> * 100–300x energy yield from the same amount of nuclear fuel
> * Broader range of fuels, including unencapsulated raw fuels (non-pebble MSR, LFTR).
> * Potential to burn existing nuclear waste and produce electricity: a closed fuel cycle.
> * Improved safety via features such as ambient pressure operation, automatic passive reactor shutdown, and alternate coolants.
Gen IV reactors represent six different technology paths that represent the future of the nuclear industry.
In order to make reactor fuel, this percentage must be increased, via conversion of the metal to uranium hexafloride gas, which is purified via gas centrifuges.
As opposed to this, thorium does not require difficult purification steps, but it does require a neutron source to start a reaction that converts a small portion of it to uranium 233.
From the uranium 235 purification perspective, uranium is an awkward fuel for commercial use.
By international standards, China's ores are low-grade and production has been inefficient, due in part to the remote, mountain location of deposits. In 2022 uranium production was an estimated 1700 tU.
As noted in peer comment uranium is energy dense and relatively little is required.
Also, by global known deposit standards the ore density and ease of mining in parts of Canada, Africa, Australia, Kazakhstan (!!! 43 percent of global uranium production in 2022) dwarf those in most other parts of the world.
For interest, re: Uranium in China, the initial quote here comes from
As I mentioned before on HN [0], ITIF is a Tech pressure/lobbying organization that has been supported by Gates and Schmidt Futures [1][2] (funding Terrapower and lots of next-gen energy startups now).
Fair call and worth mentioning, cheers. I made a deliberate point to highlight the report source but didn't delve into the backend support.
All report producers have some spin direction and agenda, the amount of each varies and some think tanks are more notorious than others for bias (Heartland springs to mind).
That aside, Australia has a small population and at this point in time a rudderless plan for a carbon future; their conservative wing are all in on a nuclear plan that makes little economic sense and pretty much just green lights immediate coal plant expansion and kicking emissions targets down the road, the opposing left and governing wing have been captured by promises of carbon capture from LPG gas producers that are technically more sky than pie.
> Australia has a small population and at this point in time a rudderless plan for a carbon future
I'd disagree.
Australia is going all-in on Green Hydrogen for industrial usecases, and is working closely with Japan and India on this front [0][1] and has basically made production tax free [2].
Ik HNers are very negative in their views about Hydrogen Energy, but the slowness in the industry was due to the lack of funding and capital in the space, along with a relative lack of interest about the technology in the US.
Now that the UAE [3], KSA [4], Australia [0], Japan [5], South Korea [6], USA [7], and India [8] have all begun investing billions in coordination with each other in these projects, we'll see it productionize in a decade - especially because all these countries have FTAs with each other and are working together on Hydrogen capacity and investments (almost $100B at this point just among those 7).
They are actually building everything. They have traditional LWR reactors on legacy designs (VVER, EPR, AP1000), bigger LWRs on homegrown designs (Hualong One etc), breeder reactors (CANDU) new 4th gen pebble bed HTGR using acquired German technology and homegrown development and Thorium based MSRs (TMSR-LF1).
Both. They are advancing tech from Germany, building pebble bed reactos for instance. In fact they do this with every design. They license, build, operate and then they build their own improved version. India did it as well with the CANDU, but they were rather forced to.
A problem with pebble-bed reactors is the cost of waste disposal.
Unlike in traditional LWRs, the fuel is integrated with a solid moderator. All that graphite goes along with the spent fuel. The volume of the spent fuel is therefore much larger than the volume of spent fuel from a LWR. Storage casks will be proportionally more expensive.
TRISO fuel is also more expensive to manufacture than traditional LWR fuel.
Waste disposal is an imaginary problem. A country like China (or the US) produces much more waste from nuclear weapons production than from running the civilian reactors. Why? Because in order to produce weapons grade plutonium you run a uranium reactor for a very low burnup rate. In the US the disposal of the military waste is done at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant [1]. The fact that we don't put there the civilian waste is just a matter of lack of political will. I doubt that China has this type of problems.
What I love about them is that they require a lot of investment, and investment means jobs. The decommissioning of the AVR in Jülich is estimated to cost 2.5 billion euros. That's a lot of jobs! It even translates to American jobs, since the relevant authorities (now public, of course) is planning to export the nuclear waste to USA.[0]
It's a win-win!
But if it required less investment, wouldn’t that free up cash for other investments and jobs? I don’t understand why projects which require more labor would be desirable.
Why is this entire thread pretending that nuclear power is cost effective, even in China? Um, it's not.
Great, China builds 150 nuke plants and all need subsidization to the wazoo. Go ahead.
The future of energy competitiveness is solar and wind buildout, because cheap power wins nation state economics.
I really hope China cranks out a somewhat-competitive nuke plant on LCOE cost, but I really doubt it. But they are doing a LFTR, pebble beds, modular, etc. Meanwhile solar and wind will continue to drop every year, this year's Lazard LCOE report be damned. Perovskites are coming, and sodium ion batteries are coming, and windmills keep getting bigger and better.
The real contribution of China is dropping the cost of solar and batteries to ludicrously low levels. Nukes? Whatever, have fun. If they iron out how to make a competitive hopefully-scalable hopefully-breeding nuke plant? I'll happily eat my words.
In 30 years the cost of solar panels+batteries will have fallen so low that power will be the least important part of any manufacturing process. In fact, it already is for everything but the most commodified, low margin products, things that first world countries have no interest in competing.
China is currently cornering the market on solar panels and batteries and some would say "flooding" the global market to lower costs. If the West doesn't figure out an alternative source for the solar+battery supply chain they could be at the mercy of China in 30 years.
TBF, Nuclear is the most efficient and "cheap" way to lower greenhouse emissions and tackle climate change. It is nice to see China go this way, hopefully they will lower their dependency on carbon and fossil fuel sources for energy generation.
If only the rest of the world would also adopt this mentality; Germany went the other way, rejecting nuclear and they are now dependant on carbon for their energy...
I don’t know what you mean by efficient and “cheap” but even China’s lower costs for nuclear construction vastly exceed the cost of wind and PV solar that China is building. They built more renewable power generation capability in just part of 2023, even adjusted for capacity factor, then all 26 reactors they had under construction. All that remains is storage, and China is also massively dropping the prices on battery grid storage.
I would contend the coal lobby successfully killed terrestrial fission power. It would have been a good replacement in the 60s and 70s when solar was still underdeveloped but now solar has worked out enough kinks that it's intrinsic advantages (larger exposed construction surface allows for better parallelization, less significant failure modes allows for weaker regulatory environment, less significant scaling advantages allows for easier "right sizing" of installations, and others) are going to be hard to surmount.
> Nuclear is the most efficient and "cheap" way to lower greenhouse emissions
This is false. New nuclear is much more expensive than renewables in most cases. It's possible there are places in the world where renewables are particularly expensive and new nuclear could approach being competitive now, but even that will not last as renewables continue down their inexorable experience curves -- experience curves that nuclear has failed to exhibit.
Oh, come on. Nuclear can't help us because it is too slow to be built out and too expensive today while all renewables technologies are cheaper and on a continued downward price trajectory.
New Nuclear won't matter. Keeping existing running is a no brainer.
> Germany went the other way, rejecting nuclear and they are now dependant on carbon for their energy...
This bullshit narrative needs to die. Germany is less dependent on fossil fuels than it has ever been before, and weathered the withdrawal from Russian sources without any serious problems.
(And here's where you move the goalposts to "it could be even less less dependent!!")
> average construction timeline for each reactor about seven years
China have 27 in construction right now, can someone knowledgeable explain why it still takes 7 years to build a single reactor?
I've always read that if we were building more reactors we would get economies of scale, and things would happen quickly.. but that doesn't seem to be the case.
It's also an average over a bunch of different reactor technology, not all of which takes the same time to build.
The main designs they are employing are from the Hualong One, soon to be Hualong Two line. Hualong One takes around 5 years, Hualong Two is a revised design intended to reduce costs and construction time to only 4 years. Which is still a long time in absolute sense but is practically instant in nuclear reactor timescales.
I understand it is much faster than the rest of the world, but my question is why 7 years? Are they simply pouring so much concrete it takes that long for it to all cure.
I mean, massive bridges and skyscrapers get built in 2-4 years, they seem to be a similar complexity.
Actually, if you're building 27 at the same time surely it's easier than building a one off massive building or bridge.
Large buildings almost always take a long time to build; nuclear reactors are large buildings. Authoritarianism allows outside reviews to be skipped, but it doesn't make concrete cure faster. And you've also got to build out grid connections and what not too, which isn't fast.
In theory, Small Modular Reactors are supposed to be something that can be built in a factory setting, and then installed at locations with a smaller construction project; if that works out, that's when you'd get faster construction times.
> In theory, Small Modular Reactors are supposed to be something that can be built in a factory setting, and then installed at locations with a smaller construction project;
IIRC, SMRs have a larger output per KwH of waste, compared to LWRs. I assume that this waste is going to be stored on sight for long periods of time, that will require a decent sized construction project on location as well, won't it?
Also, after 9/11 we required nuclear plants to withstand a direct hit from a 737. Will the factory build SMRs to that spec, or will that be onsite as well (underground?)
Of those being built, most of them began construction in the last 2 years[0]. If you look at the timelines, China is doing much better than others on timelines. For the economies of scale, one needs to only look at the historical example of France (same link).
This issue here is that when you infrequently build reactors you have to reinvent all the tooling to build the sub-components. This is actually what caused the Westinghouse bankruptcy. But your question is about 7 years being a long time. China seems to be pushing that down to 5, but how much time are you expecting? There's always a trade-off here and frankly big projects take time.
I suspect you have an incorrect mental model where you think other energy systems are constructed much faster. I pulled a random US example from the list of photovoltaic systems[1] and so let's look at Westlands Solar Park which is a 2GW facility[2]. We can see planning began before 2014 (since that's when a real estate company was involved), initial demonstrations in 2014 (2MW), construction began in 2020, took another 1-2 years to get 250MW online, another year (2023) to get another 420MW online, and the facility isn't expected to be finished until 2025. So we can say that the time takes is at least 5 years. For reference let's look at Yangjiang, China is doing about 6 on their reactors which are around the 1GW scale. And you'll notice that while staggered, these are often parallel so the whole facility is going online in roughly 10 years, but that's 6GW where past the initial first 8 years, one is going online every year. This example was even slowed down by Fukushima. But you can see they've done that a few times and can tell that that was their foray into building nuclear power, and after success you do more. As long as they have good construction (and we should expect these to be higher quality than many other things in China because there are international inspectors and overseers), then I expect them to even get a bit faster. But the overall timeframe for building isn't significantly worse than building a solar plant of a much smaller capacity.
Currently I don't even know that "most innovative" really matters, compared to "being able to deliver".
Between being by far the biggest market, AND demanding technology transfer here and there, AND using local (chinese) manufacturers and builders (even in some infrastructure export projects!), AND being ready to provide funding for export - well, that's bound to result in decent market competitiveness.
The whole song and dance about technology being known for decades is total nonsense. The devil is in the details, especially in the nuclear reactor industry space.
The article mentions Westinghouse AP1000, but fails to mention that in the end China decided to not use it on a large scale. China is going full on with a different design, called Hualong One [1], which evolved from a French design from the 1980's. The 4 decades of subsequent iteration and improvement were all Chinese.
China also built a small helium cooled gas reactor, HTR-10 [2] in the 90's. It operated it and learned from its operation, and built 2 more reactors of the same type, HTR-PM, each about 20 times larger. They got hooked to the grid late last year. There are too many good things to say about helium-cooled high temperature nuclear reactors. With these reactors in operation, China can learn so many lessons and go in so many directions.
The article's assessment that the US is 10 to 15 years behind is spot on. China deserves all the praise.
It's a monorail on two rails... But the funny part is that they label themselves as "deep tech" and the narrator is wonder what that means.
If you know there are EU grants open for "deep tech", all these weird projects start making a lot more sense. They're bleeding the states on silly ideas. At least it creates short-term jobs.
I don't think there are many people who believe the state shouldn't intervene at all and that humanity will blossom without it. I'm sure most people strive for some kind of balance.
For those of us who are old enough and were born in the USSR, it feels like we've seen how a similar scenario with too much state intervention has played out before. On one hand, we were so proud of putting a man in space before anyone else; on the other hand, we used to hoard a year's supply of toilet paper and other basic necessities.
Honestly, I think the problem for the USSR were more closely tied to early on becoming a military dictatorship than the particular economic ideas that military dictatorship took on.
States have always been able to Get Things Done quickly, at the expense of individual rights (eminent domain, conscription, ethnic cleansing, etc.), and private enterprise has always been able to Get Things Done quickly at the expense of collective rights (union busting, ignoring pollution externalities, discrimination, etc.).
The state is a reflection of the populace. Western populations are presently geriatric and averse to change. So they set up things like NRC so that 50 years will see one reactor open.
Many Eastern populations are young (though aging) and are growth-oriented. Hence the people there lean into the state.
The US, in particular, is all about "never sacrifice grandma for a dollar" which means unlimited dollars are targeted towards grandma. If she says Wind Power is scary then grandma knows best. No surprise that growth-oriented people are anti-state in that universe.
The diffusion of information from innovation is a positive externality, so it makes sense there's a government role here.
But one of the pathologies you see in government-funded activities is sticking with funding because a group has become dependent on it, long after the effort ceased to make sense. Arguably nuclear is in that category now.
It’s both, a good state sets up the rules that help solve the game theoretic tragedy of the commons. Without a good framework and smart investment by the state, the 1000x more individuals in the private sector wouldn’t have been able to physically build the internet.
If you look at the list of the corporate sponsors for this think tank, it is pretty obvious that tech has awoken to what the state can do to foster "innovation and advance".
I'm sure a lot of party officials got plenty of nice gifts in the process of building out nuclear. But still - it got built. I guess we'll see in a couple of decades if the quality didn't get compromised.
It's not like the state doesn't do that in Western nations. Look at solar power in the US. Tax incentives from manufacturing, installation and the end user.
The issue is that the state doesn't have a crystal ball. It's still just picking winners and losers (and often gets it wrong).
It can't predict which technology will be the winner in the end. And in fact it tends to "force" it's choice of technology which can end up retarding adoption of the actual winner.
Imagine if the US government had gotten behind the technology of video cassette recording. It would have gone all in on Betamax.
I'd much prefer the government making it easier for private entities to pursue the research themselves and let the market determine the winner.
State has a lot of power. The tricky part is how to wield this power wisely, when individual people are anything but wise.
Chinese government can do whatever they want, but the result may be two years of Covid Zero lockdowns so that the Great Leader doesn't lose his face, or mass incarceration of Uyghurs because they don't want to give up their religion and identity.
Looking at the current Western politicians, I wouldn't trust them with such massive power either. If you are an American Democrat, imagine Trump having the same unrestrained power as Xi. Is it worth some nuclear power plants built quickly? You decide.
But if you've been to Xinjiang or look at some of the releated bloggers or youtubers, these are obvious rumors. China's freedom of religion is doing better than most countries because the majority of China's people are non-religious and there is no religious conflict.
> China’s innovation strengths in nuclear power pertain especially to organizational, systemic, and incremental innovation. Many fourth-generation nuclear technologies have been known for years, but China’s state-backed approach excels at fielding them.
...not to mention being able to build a nuclear power plant anywhere they like without resistance from the local population, environmentalists etc.
Projects I've seen recently refused permission by the local population in the UK on environmental grounds:
- A data centre using the site of an old landfill.
- A data centre next to an oil refinery.
- A film studio using the site of a disused quarry.
- A solar farm. That one was opposed by Greens.
- A housing development, by a roundabout.
And organised campaigns on environmental grounds against:
- A cycle bridge, built next to a railway bridge. A grade-separated railway bridge, in case you were wondering about safety concerns.
- A sewage works, near greenbelt land. Not on greenbelt land. Servicing a conurbation that currently dumps raw sewage into the local river. Also opposed by Greens, naturally.
Dare I even say that, after writing a forty-five thousand page environmental report for Hinckley, legal objections - based on matters clearly covered by said report - continued?
Or everything to do with HS2? Also, again, naturally most vocally opposed - by vocally, I mean by trespass - near me by Greens.
Or literally any wind turbines visible by anyone. Including offshore.
Our local democracy, like a fair few other institutions I can think of, was built by idiots with no concept that said system could be abused, from inside (I've not mentioned bribery, have I?) and outside. And so it's a tool of abusers. If the only way China could avoid that abuse was to override the locals entirely, that's a shame. But I can't in good conscience say they've picked wrong.
Got to see this first hand. A bunch of environmentalists killed a solar project because supposedly part of it would cast a shadow on a stream that the fish wouldn't like. Ironically, fish often hide under rocks etc, so my guess is the fish WOULD have like the added protection if there actually was a periodic shadow.
The other reality - everyone had nice houses with views and didn't want to see solar panels :) So after fighting and protecting for things like solar, they now only wanted the solar to be forced on folks elsewhere. The project was actually super cool otherwise - an old school type business was going to go green in part with this project.
"was built by idiots with no concept that said system could be abused, from inside"
I think you are being too harsh on said "idiots". These democratic mechanisms were built in times when no one knew what Ctrl-C + Ctrl-V meant, and when it was an order of magnitude harder to organize any campaign.
It is like calling Vauban idiot, because his fortifications are not designed to withstand air attacks. He wasn't in a position to anticipate this way of attack, and neither were the pre-Internet regulators.
Here's a cool one from here in New Zealand - Greenpeace opposed a wind farm because a portion of the energy would be used to make (carbon-free) urea. They were ultimately unsuccessful in their opposition, but they tied it up for 3 years.
China imposed a moratorium on inland nuclear construction following the 2011 Fukushima accident, which impedes nuclear from hitting the 10% of power generation goal.
While surveys show nuclear has public support, Chinese citizens have more negative views towards building reactors inland.
“Considering current social and economic pressures, the Chinese government probably deems it too risky to lift the inland nuclear moratorium and agitate the public further,” commented Philip Andrews-Speed of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies in an interview.
the May 2024 Wilson Centre pushback on nuclear China concerns.
Also a concept of "Ecological civilization" is currently a key part of the CCP policy framework and, regardless of how others see this, wind, solar, and nuclear are all seen as technologies for an ecologically sensible and sustainable future .. currently being paid for with coal expansion for "seed energy" and planned retirement of coal.
I'd think more nuclear would be better for environment. Since sun does not shine around the clock and other renewables have larger negative environmental impact. Batteries for storage is not good either with today's technology.
Pure nuclear, or even as a majority production method, would be fool's errand, though. Unless someone manages to invent small enough reactors that can be started and stopped at will, to adjust a day's power demands. I doubt that can even be possible, though.
Given they don't complement each other, I predict that equilibrium to be unstable: either nuclear or renewables will grow to mostly replace the other, due to economic forces.
But they do complement each other... Nuclear provides the base generation that's online 24/7 while renewables are unstable and able to provide the peak demand.
So Westinghouse sold the Chinese 4x AP1000, knowing full well that the Chinese would learn, document and then copy/clone the designs all over. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000
Which is exactly what happened; with the follow-on that any improvements are patented and the patent rights are owned solely by the Chinese:
"In 2008 and 2009, Westinghouse made agreements to work with the Chinese State Nuclear Power Technology Corporation (SNPTC) and other institutes to develop a larger design, the CAP1400 of 1,400 MWe capacity, possibly followed by a 1,700 MWe design. China will own the patent rights for these larger designs. Exporting the new larger units may be possible with Westinghouse's cooperation."
> Westinghouse sold the Chinese 4x AP1000
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
> Westinghouse has agreed to transfer technology to SNPTC over the first four AP1000 units so that SNPTC can build the following ones on its own.
So it seems a bit unfair to say the Chinese somehow reversed engineered the AP1000 design.
This also happened when Combustion Engineering sold the System 80+ design (a derivative of that deployed at Palo Verde) to South Korea. Apparently Combustion Engineering were in financial trouble and did what was necessary to get the deal, although Westinghouse (who eventually came to own the Combustion Engineering intellectual property) are currently disputing this deal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPR-1000
Better the Chinese actually use the tech than it sets in regulatory deadlock in the US.
Sad to see the US lose freedoms just as rapidly as a Chinese citizens. One one case, onerous regulation and on the other a decrease of personal freedom but the overall result is surprisingly similar.
This seems like a great thing for the environment (geopolitics aside)
Agreed, this seems like a positive outcome for everyone except maybe the private equity people who own Westinghouse.
Yes, it's not like China doesn't already have weapons. The more we can do to help them cut carbon emissions the better.
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But how is the poor Westinghouse megacorp going to make more money if we're just benefitting humanity for free?!
Civil nuclear power is dead in the west. What value does IP that will never be used have? Why not give it to the chinese and see what they can come up with?
> Which is exactly what happened
The other side of that coin was Westinghouse realising there is no market for civil nuclear power in North America or Europe at this time on account of the newfound alliance between wind and gas.
Where can I learn about the alliance between wind and gas?
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I wonder if the Chinese regret sharing gunpowder with the west, what do you think?
The formula is not thought to have been shared, like the plans to the nuclear reactors were shared. Knowledge of gunpowder is thought to have likely been inadvertently transferred through trade along the silk road, by way of the Middle East, where the knowledge of gunpowder was acquired before Europe.
There's also the story of china.
(in this case, I mean porcelain)
Any war technogy is shared in the end. By conquest ot copy, its inevitable.
or paper for that matter
Well, history repeats itself [1].
[1] https://apnews.com/general-news-b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88...
From the latest Information Technology and Innovation Foundation report (June 17, 2024)
KEY TAKEAWAYS
* China intends to build 150 new nuclear reactors between 2020 and 2035, with 27 currently under construction and the average construction timeline for each reactor about seven years, far faster than for most other nations.
* China has commenced operation of the world’s first fourth-generation nuclear reactor, for which China asserts it developed some 90 percent of the technology.
* China is leading in the development and launch of cost-competitive small modular reactors (SMRs). Overall, analysts assess that China likely stands 10 to 15 years ahead of the United States in its ability to deploy fourth-generation nuclear reactors at scale.
* China’s innovation strengths in nuclear power pertain especially to organizational, systemic, and incremental innovation. Many fourth-generation nuclear technologies have been known for years, but China’s state-backed approach excels at fielding them.
* Analysts assess that America and China are likely at par when it comes to efforts to develop nuclear fusion technologies, but warn that China’s demonstrated ability to deploy fission reactors at scale gives it an advantage for when fusion comes online.
* Looking narrowly at scientific publications on nuclear energy, China ranks first in the H-index, a commonly used metric measuring the scholarly impact of journal publications.
* From 2008 to 2023, China’s share of all nuclear patents increased from 1.3 percent to 13.4 percent, and the country leads in the number of nuclear fusion patent applications.
Full report (PDF): https://www2.itif.org/2024-chinese-nuclear-innovation.pdf
In the press: US falling far behind China in nuclear power, report says https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/6/17/us-falling-far-b...
What's a fourth-generation nuclear reactor and what makes it harder to build?
From Wikipedia [1]:
> The GEN IV Forum reframes the reactor safety paradigm, from accepting that nuclear accidents can occur and should be mastered, to eliminating the physical possibility of an accident. Active and passive safety systems would be at least as effective as those of Generation III systems and render the most severe accidents physically impossible.
> Relative to Gen II-III, advantages of Gen IV reactors include:
> * Nuclear waste that remains radioactive for a few centuries instead of millennia
> * 100–300x energy yield from the same amount of nuclear fuel
> * Broader range of fuels, including unencapsulated raw fuels (non-pebble MSR, LFTR).
> * Potential to burn existing nuclear waste and produce electricity: a closed fuel cycle.
> * Improved safety via features such as ambient pressure operation, automatic passive reactor shutdown, and alternate coolants.
Gen IV reactors represent six different technology paths that represent the future of the nuclear industry.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
Its basically just a catch all term that basically means, everything that isn't some form of a pressurized water reactor.
Seems like China also has rather large uranium reserves, unlike many other countries, so it makes a lot of sense for them to go nuclear.
Uranium 235 as a fissile fuel is a very small percentage of the total uranium available (0.720% from the wiki).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium
In order to make reactor fuel, this percentage must be increased, via conversion of the metal to uranium hexafloride gas, which is purified via gas centrifuges.
As opposed to this, thorium does not require difficult purification steps, but it does require a neutron source to start a reaction that converts a small portion of it to uranium 233.
From the uranium 235 purification perspective, uranium is an awkward fuel for commercial use.
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Tbf importing uranium is fairly easy and relatively cheap due to the high energy density.
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As noted in peer comment uranium is energy dense and relatively little is required.
Also, by global known deposit standards the ore density and ease of mining in parts of Canada, Africa, Australia, Kazakhstan (!!! 43 percent of global uranium production in 2022) dwarf those in most other parts of the world.
For interest, re: Uranium in China, the initial quote here comes from
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
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As I mentioned before on HN [0], ITIF is a Tech pressure/lobbying organization that has been supported by Gates and Schmidt Futures [1][2] (funding Terrapower and lots of next-gen energy startups now).
[0] - https://itif.org/our-supporters/
Fair call and worth mentioning, cheers. I made a deliberate point to highlight the report source but didn't delve into the backend support.
All report producers have some spin direction and agenda, the amount of each varies and some think tanks are more notorious than others for bias (Heartland springs to mind).
That aside, Australia has a small population and at this point in time a rudderless plan for a carbon future; their conservative wing are all in on a nuclear plan that makes little economic sense and pretty much just green lights immediate coal plant expansion and kicking emissions targets down the road, the opposing left and governing wing have been captured by promises of carbon capture from LPG gas producers that are technically more sky than pie.
The technical report on Australian power futures: https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Gen...
Some commentary on the nuclear 'plan': https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%...
( webcache link to subscriber article )
and .. ffs I've misplaced an article shredding the opposition plan.
Power for the future is an interesting space ATM. I've appreciated your comments here BTW :-)
> Australia has a small population and at this point in time a rudderless plan for a carbon future
I'd disagree.
Australia is going all-in on Green Hydrogen for industrial usecases, and is working closely with Japan and India on this front [0][1] and has basically made production tax free [2].
Ik HNers are very negative in their views about Hydrogen Energy, but the slowness in the industry was due to the lack of funding and capital in the space, along with a relative lack of interest about the technology in the US.
Now that the UAE [3], KSA [4], Australia [0], Japan [5], South Korea [6], USA [7], and India [8] have all begun investing billions in coordination with each other in these projects, we'll see it productionize in a decade - especially because all these countries have FTAs with each other and are working together on Hydrogen capacity and investments (almost $100B at this point just among those 7).
[0] - https://www.dcceew.gov.au/energy/hydrogen
[1] - https://www.dcceew.gov.au/climate-change/international-clima...
[2] - https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...
[3] - https://www.investmentmonitor.ai/news/abu-dhabi-government-a...
[4] - https://saudiarabien.ahk.de/en/market-information/energy-sec...
[5] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/japan-invest-107-bln...
[6] - https://hk.boell.org/en/2023/04/26/wag-dog-hydrogen-scheme-s...
[7] - https://apnews.com/article/hydrogen-hubs-energy-biden-climat...
[8] - https://www.nbr.org/publication/the-evolving-story-of-hydrog...
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The fact that they are building known and tested nuclear designs is rather a good thing in my mind. Less chance of a major fuckup.
It also illustrates that nuclear is not inherently more expensive. We just make it so with over regulation and lack of scale.
They are actually building everything. They have traditional LWR reactors on legacy designs (VVER, EPR, AP1000), bigger LWRs on homegrown designs (Hualong One etc), breeder reactors (CANDU) new 4th gen pebble bed HTGR using acquired German technology and homegrown development and Thorium based MSRs (TMSR-LF1).
Let's wait until a few get done before we calculate how much it is.
So are they innovating or are they using known and tested designs?
Both. They are advancing tech from Germany, building pebble bed reactos for instance. In fact they do this with every design. They license, build, operate and then they build their own improved version. India did it as well with the CANDU, but they were rather forced to.
Some of China's new reactors are pebble-bed reactors, which I just think are super-cool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor
A problem with pebble-bed reactors is the cost of waste disposal.
Unlike in traditional LWRs, the fuel is integrated with a solid moderator. All that graphite goes along with the spent fuel. The volume of the spent fuel is therefore much larger than the volume of spent fuel from a LWR. Storage casks will be proportionally more expensive.
TRISO fuel is also more expensive to manufacture than traditional LWR fuel.
Waste disposal is an imaginary problem. A country like China (or the US) produces much more waste from nuclear weapons production than from running the civilian reactors. Why? Because in order to produce weapons grade plutonium you run a uranium reactor for a very low burnup rate. In the US the disposal of the military waste is done at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant [1]. The fact that we don't put there the civilian waste is just a matter of lack of political will. I doubt that China has this type of problems.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
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TIL about pebble-bed reactors - they're pretty cool! Obviously not without their trade offs, but they nullify a lot of the issues with PWRs.
What I love about them is that they require a lot of investment, and investment means jobs. The decommissioning of the AVR in Jülich is estimated to cost 2.5 billion euros. That's a lot of jobs! It even translates to American jobs, since the relevant authorities (now public, of course) is planning to export the nuclear waste to USA.[0] It's a win-win!
[0]: https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/vorab/juelich-entsorgung-radi...
But if it required less investment, wouldn’t that free up cash for other investments and jobs? I don’t understand why projects which require more labor would be desirable.
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So what’s the game plan to compete with industry in China in 30 years when they have built out enough nuclear to do anything?
Adtech and LLM-s I guess :)
Why is this entire thread pretending that nuclear power is cost effective, even in China? Um, it's not.
Great, China builds 150 nuke plants and all need subsidization to the wazoo. Go ahead.
The future of energy competitiveness is solar and wind buildout, because cheap power wins nation state economics.
I really hope China cranks out a somewhat-competitive nuke plant on LCOE cost, but I really doubt it. But they are doing a LFTR, pebble beds, modular, etc. Meanwhile solar and wind will continue to drop every year, this year's Lazard LCOE report be damned. Perovskites are coming, and sodium ion batteries are coming, and windmills keep getting bigger and better.
The real contribution of China is dropping the cost of solar and batteries to ludicrously low levels. Nukes? Whatever, have fun. If they iron out how to make a competitive hopefully-scalable hopefully-breeding nuke plant? I'll happily eat my words.
speaking of LLMs, energy grid is one of the bottlenecks predicted in its progress on the nation level...
Fair point, if the one with the most energy wins LLM-s battle then China looks like it will do even better
At least West has chairs, chairs are like people :)
In 30 years the cost of solar panels+batteries will have fallen so low that power will be the least important part of any manufacturing process. In fact, it already is for everything but the most commodified, low margin products, things that first world countries have no interest in competing.
China is currently cornering the market on solar panels and batteries and some would say "flooding" the global market to lower costs. If the West doesn't figure out an alternative source for the solar+battery supply chain they could be at the mercy of China in 30 years.
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So it is autocratic nuclear vs democratic nuclear now? Perhaps we could instead work together to tackle climate change and seek common prosperity ...
TBF, Nuclear is the most efficient and "cheap" way to lower greenhouse emissions and tackle climate change. It is nice to see China go this way, hopefully they will lower their dependency on carbon and fossil fuel sources for energy generation.
If only the rest of the world would also adopt this mentality; Germany went the other way, rejecting nuclear and they are now dependant on carbon for their energy...
I don’t know what you mean by efficient and “cheap” but even China’s lower costs for nuclear construction vastly exceed the cost of wind and PV solar that China is building. They built more renewable power generation capability in just part of 2023, even adjusted for capacity factor, then all 26 reactors they had under construction. All that remains is storage, and China is also massively dropping the prices on battery grid storage.
I would contend the coal lobby successfully killed terrestrial fission power. It would have been a good replacement in the 60s and 70s when solar was still underdeveloped but now solar has worked out enough kinks that it's intrinsic advantages (larger exposed construction surface allows for better parallelization, less significant failure modes allows for weaker regulatory environment, less significant scaling advantages allows for easier "right sizing" of installations, and others) are going to be hard to surmount.
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> Nuclear is the most efficient and "cheap" way to lower greenhouse emissions
This is false. New nuclear is much more expensive than renewables in most cases. It's possible there are places in the world where renewables are particularly expensive and new nuclear could approach being competitive now, but even that will not last as renewables continue down their inexorable experience curves -- experience curves that nuclear has failed to exhibit.
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> Germany went the other way, rejecting nuclear and they are now dependant on carbon for their energy...
As you can see the data does not support this claim of yours. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
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Oh, come on. Nuclear can't help us because it is too slow to be built out and too expensive today while all renewables technologies are cheaper and on a continued downward price trajectory.
New Nuclear won't matter. Keeping existing running is a no brainer.
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> Germany went the other way, rejecting nuclear and they are now dependant on carbon for their energy...
This bullshit narrative needs to die. Germany is less dependent on fossil fuels than it has ever been before, and weathered the withdrawal from Russian sources without any serious problems.
(And here's where you move the goalposts to "it could be even less less dependent!!")
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> average construction timeline for each reactor about seven years
China have 27 in construction right now, can someone knowledgeable explain why it still takes 7 years to build a single reactor?
I've always read that if we were building more reactors we would get economies of scale, and things would happen quickly.. but that doesn't seem to be the case.
7 years is still pretty quick compared to many nuclear projects.
It's also an average over a bunch of different reactor technology, not all of which takes the same time to build.
The main designs they are employing are from the Hualong One, soon to be Hualong Two line. Hualong One takes around 5 years, Hualong Two is a revised design intended to reduce costs and construction time to only 4 years. Which is still a long time in absolute sense but is practically instant in nuclear reactor timescales.
I understand it is much faster than the rest of the world, but my question is why 7 years? Are they simply pouring so much concrete it takes that long for it to all cure.
I mean, massive bridges and skyscrapers get built in 2-4 years, they seem to be a similar complexity.
Actually, if you're building 27 at the same time surely it's easier than building a one off massive building or bridge.
Large buildings almost always take a long time to build; nuclear reactors are large buildings. Authoritarianism allows outside reviews to be skipped, but it doesn't make concrete cure faster. And you've also got to build out grid connections and what not too, which isn't fast.
In theory, Small Modular Reactors are supposed to be something that can be built in a factory setting, and then installed at locations with a smaller construction project; if that works out, that's when you'd get faster construction times.
> In theory, Small Modular Reactors are supposed to be something that can be built in a factory setting, and then installed at locations with a smaller construction project;
IIRC, SMRs have a larger output per KwH of waste, compared to LWRs. I assume that this waste is going to be stored on sight for long periods of time, that will require a decent sized construction project on location as well, won't it?
Also, after 9/11 we required nuclear plants to withstand a direct hit from a 737. Will the factory build SMRs to that spec, or will that be onsite as well (underground?)
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Of those being built, most of them began construction in the last 2 years[0]. If you look at the timelines, China is doing much better than others on timelines. For the economies of scale, one needs to only look at the historical example of France (same link).
This issue here is that when you infrequently build reactors you have to reinvent all the tooling to build the sub-components. This is actually what caused the Westinghouse bankruptcy. But your question is about 7 years being a long time. China seems to be pushing that down to 5, but how much time are you expecting? There's always a trade-off here and frankly big projects take time.
I suspect you have an incorrect mental model where you think other energy systems are constructed much faster. I pulled a random US example from the list of photovoltaic systems[1] and so let's look at Westlands Solar Park which is a 2GW facility[2]. We can see planning began before 2014 (since that's when a real estate company was involved), initial demonstrations in 2014 (2MW), construction began in 2020, took another 1-2 years to get 250MW online, another year (2023) to get another 420MW online, and the facility isn't expected to be finished until 2025. So we can say that the time takes is at least 5 years. For reference let's look at Yangjiang, China is doing about 6 on their reactors which are around the 1GW scale. And you'll notice that while staggered, these are often parallel so the whole facility is going online in roughly 10 years, but that's 6GW where past the initial first 8 years, one is going online every year. This example was even slowed down by Fukushima. But you can see they've done that a few times and can tell that that was their foray into building nuclear power, and after success you do more. As long as they have good construction (and we should expect these to be higher quality than many other things in China because there are international inspectors and overseers), then I expect them to even get a bit faster. But the overall timeframe for building isn't significantly worse than building a solar plant of a much smaller capacity.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_photovoltaic_power_sta...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westlands_Solar_Park#Phases
Currently I don't even know that "most innovative" really matters, compared to "being able to deliver".
Between being by far the biggest market, AND demanding technology transfer here and there, AND using local (chinese) manufacturers and builders (even in some infrastructure export projects!), AND being ready to provide funding for export - well, that's bound to result in decent market competitiveness.
China is innovative, period.
The whole song and dance about technology being known for decades is total nonsense. The devil is in the details, especially in the nuclear reactor industry space.
The article mentions Westinghouse AP1000, but fails to mention that in the end China decided to not use it on a large scale. China is going full on with a different design, called Hualong One [1], which evolved from a French design from the 1980's. The 4 decades of subsequent iteration and improvement were all Chinese.
China also built a small helium cooled gas reactor, HTR-10 [2] in the 90's. It operated it and learned from its operation, and built 2 more reactors of the same type, HTR-PM, each about 20 times larger. They got hooked to the grid late last year. There are too many good things to say about helium-cooled high temperature nuclear reactors. With these reactors in operation, China can learn so many lessons and go in so many directions.
The article's assessment that the US is 10 to 15 years behind is spot on. China deserves all the praise.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-10
> “They don’t have any secret sauce other than state financing, state supported supply chain, and a state commitment to build the technology.”
State, state and more state. I wonder how does this feel for those out there convinced that the state is just a hurdle to innovation and advance.
In Europe we have: state mandated closing of perfectly working plants, cancellation of previously granted new plants permits.
I studied civil engineering at a public university and was told "we are being asked to downsize our physics department".
In these conditions, how can I reasonably believe that state is the solution here ?
I don't disagree, but I found this funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5M7Oq1PCz4 (Adam Something: Tech Bros Invented Trains and It Broke Me)
It's a monorail on two rails... But the funny part is that they label themselves as "deep tech" and the narrator is wonder what that means.
If you know there are EU grants open for "deep tech", all these weird projects start making a lot more sense. They're bleeding the states on silly ideas. At least it creates short-term jobs.
I don't think there are many people who believe the state shouldn't intervene at all and that humanity will blossom without it. I'm sure most people strive for some kind of balance.
For those of us who are old enough and were born in the USSR, it feels like we've seen how a similar scenario with too much state intervention has played out before. On one hand, we were so proud of putting a man in space before anyone else; on the other hand, we used to hoard a year's supply of toilet paper and other basic necessities.
Honestly, I think the problem for the USSR were more closely tied to early on becoming a military dictatorship than the particular economic ideas that military dictatorship took on.
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States have always been able to Get Things Done quickly, at the expense of individual rights (eminent domain, conscription, ethnic cleansing, etc.), and private enterprise has always been able to Get Things Done quickly at the expense of collective rights (union busting, ignoring pollution externalities, discrimination, etc.).
The art is in the balance.
That sounds like sneering at a sports team that's winning "that team is only winning cos they play better together and their manager is better"...
Reminds me of when Greece won the Euros or when Iceland beat England.
It's almost like a band of individuals doesn't make a team and that sometimes you need a conductor at the helm
The state is a reflection of the populace. Western populations are presently geriatric and averse to change. So they set up things like NRC so that 50 years will see one reactor open.
Many Eastern populations are young (though aging) and are growth-oriented. Hence the people there lean into the state.
The US, in particular, is all about "never sacrifice grandma for a dollar" which means unlimited dollars are targeted towards grandma. If she says Wind Power is scary then grandma knows best. No surprise that growth-oriented people are anti-state in that universe.
The median age in China is higher than in the US.
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The state gave us the internet. So I think those people are a small minority or they haven't paid attention.
The diffusion of information from innovation is a positive externality, so it makes sense there's a government role here.
But one of the pathologies you see in government-funded activities is sticking with funding because a group has become dependent on it, long after the effort ceased to make sense. Arguably nuclear is in that category now.
It’s both, a good state sets up the rules that help solve the game theoretic tragedy of the commons. Without a good framework and smart investment by the state, the 1000x more individuals in the private sector wouldn’t have been able to physically build the internet.
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If you look at the list of the corporate sponsors for this think tank, it is pretty obvious that tech has awoken to what the state can do to foster "innovation and advance".
Maybe it depends on what the state actually does..
I'm sure a lot of party officials got plenty of nice gifts in the process of building out nuclear. But still - it got built. I guess we'll see in a couple of decades if the quality didn't get compromised.
It's not like the state doesn't do that in Western nations. Look at solar power in the US. Tax incentives from manufacturing, installation and the end user.
The issue is that the state doesn't have a crystal ball. It's still just picking winners and losers (and often gets it wrong).
It can't predict which technology will be the winner in the end. And in fact it tends to "force" it's choice of technology which can end up retarding adoption of the actual winner.
Imagine if the US government had gotten behind the technology of video cassette recording. It would have gone all in on Betamax.
I'd much prefer the government making it easier for private entities to pursue the research themselves and let the market determine the winner.
State has a lot of power. The tricky part is how to wield this power wisely, when individual people are anything but wise.
Chinese government can do whatever they want, but the result may be two years of Covid Zero lockdowns so that the Great Leader doesn't lose his face, or mass incarceration of Uyghurs because they don't want to give up their religion and identity.
Looking at the current Western politicians, I wouldn't trust them with such massive power either. If you are an American Democrat, imagine Trump having the same unrestrained power as Xi. Is it worth some nuclear power plants built quickly? You decide.
But if you've been to Xinjiang or look at some of the releated bloggers or youtubers, these are obvious rumors. China's freedom of religion is doing better than most countries because the majority of China's people are non-religious and there is no religious conflict.
Well, sure, but the risk is that a bad top down decision can be horrible beyond your dreams.
There is a reason China is near the top of the list when it comes to fastest shrinking countries by 2100.
> China’s innovation strengths in nuclear power pertain especially to organizational, systemic, and incremental innovation. Many fourth-generation nuclear technologies have been known for years, but China’s state-backed approach excels at fielding them.
...not to mention being able to build a nuclear power plant anywhere they like without resistance from the local population, environmentalists etc.
Projects I've seen recently refused permission by the local population in the UK on environmental grounds:
- A data centre using the site of an old landfill. - A data centre next to an oil refinery. - A film studio using the site of a disused quarry. - A solar farm. That one was opposed by Greens. - A housing development, by a roundabout.
And organised campaigns on environmental grounds against:
- A cycle bridge, built next to a railway bridge. A grade-separated railway bridge, in case you were wondering about safety concerns. - A sewage works, near greenbelt land. Not on greenbelt land. Servicing a conurbation that currently dumps raw sewage into the local river. Also opposed by Greens, naturally.
Dare I even say that, after writing a forty-five thousand page environmental report for Hinckley, legal objections - based on matters clearly covered by said report - continued?
Or everything to do with HS2? Also, again, naturally most vocally opposed - by vocally, I mean by trespass - near me by Greens.
Or literally any wind turbines visible by anyone. Including offshore.
Our local democracy, like a fair few other institutions I can think of, was built by idiots with no concept that said system could be abused, from inside (I've not mentioned bribery, have I?) and outside. And so it's a tool of abusers. If the only way China could avoid that abuse was to override the locals entirely, that's a shame. But I can't in good conscience say they've picked wrong.
Got to see this first hand. A bunch of environmentalists killed a solar project because supposedly part of it would cast a shadow on a stream that the fish wouldn't like. Ironically, fish often hide under rocks etc, so my guess is the fish WOULD have like the added protection if there actually was a periodic shadow.
The other reality - everyone had nice houses with views and didn't want to see solar panels :) So after fighting and protecting for things like solar, they now only wanted the solar to be forced on folks elsewhere. The project was actually super cool otherwise - an old school type business was going to go green in part with this project.
"was built by idiots with no concept that said system could be abused, from inside"
I think you are being too harsh on said "idiots". These democratic mechanisms were built in times when no one knew what Ctrl-C + Ctrl-V meant, and when it was an order of magnitude harder to organize any campaign.
It is like calling Vauban idiot, because his fortifications are not designed to withstand air attacks. He wasn't in a position to anticipate this way of attack, and neither were the pre-Internet regulators.
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Here's a cool one from here in New Zealand - Greenpeace opposed a wind farm because a portion of the energy would be used to make (carbon-free) urea. They were ultimately unsuccessful in their opposition, but they tied it up for 3 years.
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> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-23298663
This is not true. People do protest, and project gets cancelled.
That was more than 10 years ago though. Back then, the Uyghurs in Xinjiang could still live in relative freedom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...), people in Hong Kong could still protest etc. etc.
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China isn't building inland nuclear reactors:
From: Don’t Panic US: China’s Nuclear Power Ascendancy Has Its Limits https://www.newsecuritybeat.org/2024/05/dont-panic-us-chinas...
the May 2024 Wilson Centre pushback on nuclear China concerns.
Also a concept of "Ecological civilization" is currently a key part of the CCP policy framework and, regardless of how others see this, wind, solar, and nuclear are all seen as technologies for an ecologically sensible and sustainable future .. currently being paid for with coal expansion for "seed energy" and planned retirement of coal.
Various publications cover this, eg: the French Groupe d'études géopolitiques in: https://geopolitique.eu/en/issues/chinas-ecological-power-an...
and (Wilson Centre again) Ecological Civilization Goes Global: China’s Green Soft Power and South-South Environmental Initiatives https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/ecological-civiliza...
What do they mean by “inland”? The vast majority of the chinese population and industry is near the coast.
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That's a good advantage to have, most fears toward nuclear energy are unfounded.
Environmentalists will kill us all in time. Probably the Western civilization's greatest present threat.
My prediction is that the world will stabilize somewhere around 80% renewables and 20% nuclear. Maybe less. Prove me wrong
I'd think more nuclear would be better for environment. Since sun does not shine around the clock and other renewables have larger negative environmental impact. Batteries for storage is not good either with today's technology.
Pure nuclear, or even as a majority production method, would be fool's errand, though. Unless someone manages to invent small enough reactors that can be started and stopped at will, to adjust a day's power demands. I doubt that can even be possible, though.
In the end it is a matter of economics. Right now there is no path towards nuclear becoming competitive again against wind, solar, battery.
Plus, storage and cleanup costs in case of failures are not even priced in and left to taxpayers.
This leaves nuclear to government actors influenced by lobbyists.
Given they don't complement each other, I predict that equilibrium to be unstable: either nuclear or renewables will grow to mostly replace the other, due to economic forces.
But they do complement each other... Nuclear provides the base generation that's online 24/7 while renewables are unstable and able to provide the peak demand.
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