China to build 150 nuclear reactors- more than rest of world over last 35 years | Hacker News Reader

China to build 150 nuclear reactors- more than rest of world over last 35 years

bloomberg.com

29 pointsren_engineer22 comments

Well, here's reality folks: If you do the math, we don't have enough energy generation to support mass electrification of our transportation system. Not even close.

I did the math on this a couple of years ago by writing a relatively simple simulation that took into account time zones, utilization and portions of the fleet fast and slow charging. The simulation gave a range between 910 GW and 1,400 GW.

This is the amount of additional power generation (above our current capacity) required to be able to support the full replacement of our ground transportation fleet (about 280 million vehicles).

If this were to be done through nuclear, that would mean building about a thousand 1 GW class nuclear power plants.

We can't even build one.

No, it can't be done with solar and wind.

As far as I have been able to determine, nuclear is the only solution. That is, if you want these electric vehicles to actually deliver on the idea of being good for the environment. We would have to manufacture somewhere in the order of 3 billion new solar panels and orders of magnitude more in batteries in order to even dream of doing this with solar. Let's not forget about all else that is required: wired, inverters, mounting structures, transportation, installation, etc. If you look at the entire process, it isn't at all clean. And, at a massive scale, it's even worse. This coming from someone who fully bought into it and installed a 13 kW system to get ready for electric cars, only to later understand that it likely needs to be twice as large, if not larger, to fully deliver on the dream.

Bottom line:

If we want a future where clean electric vehicles replace our gasoline burning fleet, we have to embrace nuclear power like never before. Not only that, we have to make whatever changes might be necessary to the way we do things in order to be able to build nuclear power plants faster than we ever have. If it takes 25 years to build a plant we will never get there. We need a thousand of them. And, yes, they need to be safe. Of course.

>That makes a huge difference because most of the cost of atomic energy is in upfront construction. At 1.4% interest, about the minimum for infrastructure projects in places like China or Russia, nuclear power costs about $42 per megawatt-hour, far cheaper than coal and natural gas in many places. At a 10% rate, at the high end of the spectrum in developed economies, the cost of nuclear power shoots up to $97, more expensive than everything else.

>“People say nuclear is expensive in the West, but they forget to say it’s expensive because of interest rates,” Morin said.

one of the more interesting lines to me

> “People say nuclear is expensive in the West, but they forget to say it’s expensive because of interest rates,” Morin said.

It's still a valid criticism if:

- They could get those high interest rates from the return on other capital projects (nuclear less return than something else)

- All externalities are included in costs

We only have so much labor/material/energy available, and we do have to have some way of allocating them to the things with the most return. The big issue, obviously, is that tons and tons of negative externalities aren't priced in to most economic endeavors, that might make fission look a lot better. It might make it look a lot worse.

Personally I'm hoping Elon/Mackenzie/Gates/Buffet/etc decide to throw a few dozen billion at fusion. I think its time truly is nigh.

If you haven't watched this yet, it's definitely worth your time. Rather than being a super opinionated think-piece, it instead does a fantastic job walking the viewer through:

- high level nuclear fusion engineering performance curves / the engineering design contraint space

- the current state of nuclear fusion research (as of 5 years ago) and

- breaks down why some new smaller reactors will likely begin construction soon and counter-intuitively, the most recently started ones may be completed before a fusion reactor that first broke ground 25 years ago and is still very much being actively built

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4

Also worth noting that interesting things happen when you assume you can have "large" amounts of low-externality energy. Things like "we could use a ton of this energy to remove dispersed pollutants from the atmosphere/groundwater"... things which are very, very, very impractical if you have a limited amount of energy, or if your energy sources have their own negative externalities.

The interest is higher because the risk is higher, the capital costs to build the thing are massive so a loan that defaults would be a big problem. The question is who supplies the loan too, are they government backed in Russia and China? If yes I can imagine that the rates would be quite a bit lower, this kind of state support is illegal in the EU afaik. Most plants will be run as LTOs, at least in western countries favourable to nuclear, and then the interest costs matter less than you think anyway. Then it's pretty much the cheapest source of energy.

Many governments in the West can currently borrow at rates below 1% (which is lower than China), which means that nuclear plants construction can actually be financed at that very low interest rate in the West.

I guess there is a significant “moral hazard” to this approach. This kind of contracts often ends with the contractor milking the state or, at least, treating deadlines, estimates and budgets as indicative-only.

I’m confident that a “SpaceX approach” could drastically reduce its he cost of nuclear, though this is literally the opposite end of state-sponsored nuclear. I have high hopes for SMRs.

They’ve been having a lot of coal problems lately and I don’t believe Xi’s pledges anymore. They are heavily dependent on coal and the main reason we have a climate crisis. I will be happy when they stop polluting but I won’t cheer on any more of his false promises.

The US has contributed more than any other country to carbon emissions, at double China's emissions so far. https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2

Historical arguments are stupid. What happened 1000 years ago doesn’t matter now.

China didn’t even show up to the world summit. They didn’t even show up!

It doesn't even need to be a historical argument. The US emmits 2x the carbon per person today

Many countries are still heavily dependent on coal, including many much richer per capita than China.

China has been invested in nuclear for decades with several power plants coming online in the past couple of years and many more under construction right now. They also have an extensive hydro power programme.

Having a population of 1.4 billion and being the workshop of the world does require a lot of energy and a lot of their emissions are in fact ours that be delocalised there along with the factories.

article actually mentions that their modular reactor designs can be retrofitted into existing coal power plants.

No clue if it will work, but it seems like a genius plan. Obviously it could be propaganda to deflect all the criticism they get for being the world's largest polluter

This is a general point about proposed SMRs (small module reactors). They could just slot into existing brownfield sites.

They are small enough that the exclusion zone around them (in case something goes mildly wrong) is compatible with the grounds of typical coal plants and factories. The inherent stronger safety means you don’t have to be as careful (no need for enormous security, you can bury them underground etc).

They also aren’t yet operational anywhere so this is a bit of a wish list atm.

Without negating any of the risks, I still think nuclear is way better than coal at the moment.

That pollution is due to exported goods – the US and other western countries are essentially offloading their pollution to China, who is more than happy to take the cash and greenify their own infrastructure.

Another discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29151741

They understand that GDP almost exactly matches energy production and utilization, and the cheaper and cleaner you can make that, the better for your economy and industrial power.

> GDP almost exactly matches energy production and utilization

I think that's correct, and it can be seen in data like this[0]. It's worth noting, though, that the energy intensity of economies has been decreasing over time, and higher income countries tend to have lower energy intensity[1].

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/11/energy-poverty-vs...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_intensity_of_econo...

Meanwhile the developed world is shutting down nuclear plants and replacing them with solar made in China by concentration camp slave labor.

To give some statistics, apparently 71% of solar modules are made in China (according to data[0] from 2019). I don't know what percentage of those modules are made using "concentration camp slave labor".

If we're cherry-picking, though, let me point out that some developed countries are building new nuclear plants which increase their dependency on the Chinese government, putting their national security at risk.[1]

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/668749/regional-distribu...

[1] https://www.energylivenews.com/2019/08/16/us-blacklists-chin...

China uses concentration camp slave labour to make solar panels.

The discussion shouldn't be how do we figure out which solar panels are made by slave labour so we can avoid.

The discussion should be how do we move towards decoupling from China.

If we are willing to tolerate concentration camps and slave labour, where do we draw the line? Is there any moral line we aren't willing to cross?

non pay-wall link:

https://archive.md/kYU4h

where are they going to get enough fuel for these? Where will they store the waste?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com