China is losing its taste for nuclear power | Hacker News Reader

China is losing its taste for nuclear power

technologyreview.com

16 pointszeristor9 comments

"Reactors built with extra safety features and more robust cooling systems to avoid a Fukushima-like disaster are expensive, while the costs of wind and solar power continue to plummet: they are now 20% cheaper than electricity from new nuclear plants in China, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Moreover, high construction costs make nuclear a risky investment. "

So much for the argument that nuclear is cost-efficient if your country just does things the way the Chinese do them.

It seems that if your country is going to invest a given amount of money in replacing fossil fuels, then you get more carbon emission reduction if you put it all in renewables as compared to part renewable and part nuclear.

I think often under appreciated is that nuclear and coal plants are complex integrated machines. And a lot of the components are expensive one off parts, have long lead times, and have to fit together with mating parts perfectly or there is hell to pay.

Where solar and wind plants are simpler flexible cookie cutter designs.

Which means solar and wind can be built quickly. From a cost perspective building something in 2 years has a lot less overhead than building something over 10 years.

It also suggest that coal power will enter a death-spiral, where coal plants will become increasingly expensive to build and maintain due to a lack of scale.

Thing that surprised me is from the IEA, coal fired plants aren't cheap to build. What's cheap to build are combined cycle natural gas plants.

If you want to know where combined cycle natural gas is going in the future, look at GE's stock price.

GE laid off 12k people from its power division last year [1] due to lackluster outlook on nat gas generation. Also, GE's stock price is a poor indicator of future outlook of power generation, due to their financials unraveling [2].

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/12/07/ge-job-cuts/...

[2] https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...

"They knew that if a similar accident occurred in China, the damage wouldn’t be limited to the explosion and nuclear fallout. Such an event would call into question the government’s competence.

There is also the enormous, decades-long expense of the cleanup.

I'm not sure they're quite making the case for it being bad news. From the article, the current reactors aren't being used to full capacity. And China seems to be focussing on renewables rather than falling back on coal.

> China seems to be focussing on renewables rather than falling back on coal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China

China adds renewables as they expand their population, where it makes economic sense.

Unfortunately (for most), this is not a change from the existing course: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45640706

At least they are getting out of nuclear, so yay? I think it's just backpedaling due to the low standards and high operational risk of many Chinese industries.

But with renewable electricity costs falling, these plants are going to be too expensive to compete, and will likely be shut down in the not-too-distant future. This isn't sound financial investing, it's local governments wasting funds to keep up employment, as they so often do in China.

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