China is building nuclear reactors faster than any other country
economist.com
economist.com
This common flawed claim ignores the metric "How much effort is required to keep the number of deaths low?" which is an essential part of it.
Nuclear is not safe. It is just kept from harming us by a large crew of skilled people and billions of dollars' worth of safety measures.
Solar and wind have no such requirements, so the comparison is a bit like saying that the safest tools are a brush, a broom and a gun.
This is of the order of fractions of pennies when we compare to fossil fuel subsidies. Fossil fuels to the tune of $7 trillion/year[1] and cause 10 million deaths/year.
Air Pollution Kills 10 Million People a Year. Why Do We Accept That as Normal? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/environment/air-p...
> large crew of skilled people
If we stop subsidizing fossil fuels, then the energy markets will be fair, nuclear will win (or at least a major play along with solar and wind) and there will be a ton of skilled workforce. We didn't have a skilled javascript workforce 2 decades ago, now we have millions.
I can't see nuclear winning, it is at least the second most subsidized energy source we have and already more expensive than solar+storage, which is only getting cheaper while the true costs of nuclear are revealed to be larger than any estimates have indicated.
France recently had to pay a 50 bn downpayment for the fictional cost of nuclear they have operated with for decades, and that's just the beginning. In the US, the government covers a lot of the cost, for example by having the army maintain security for spent fuel.
The latest nuclear reactor in europe, Finlands OL3, had to reduce production earlier this year because the market price of electricity was too low. And that's already now, from a plant that is already in place. How can any project making new nuclear plants ever hope to be profitable if existing plants are already (granted, intermittently) losing money?
The first answer to that is to not build a large chimney on the power plant and release all the waste by releasing it into the air. At that point we are now safer than all fossil fuel power plants and can impose a full ban on all use of fossil fuel plants in the power grid. Releasing toxic waste into the environment and into the air must be made illegal.
The second requirement is to do simple repairs and maintenance of buildings. Here we can look at hydro power and see how they often fail at preventing flooding. The effort must be high enough that it can handle bad weather. Anything less should be illegal and severely punished.
So the level of efforts need to be at least at that minimum. We could demand even more, but I am afraid a majority of people would object if we banned all fossil fuel, all hydro, and all nuclear from the grid.
Is this a bad thing? Investing a lot into safety measures to avoid catastrophes seems better than investing significantly less because we assume is safe.
Could you elaborate on why this investment is an argument against nuclear?
I once talked to people that worked at Angra Nuclear Power Plant in Brazil and they said the real danger is actually the spent nuclear fuel. The power plant itself is safe due to many redundant safety measures, continuous tests and monitoring. I don't have a source for this, and don't take my words for absolute truth, I'm not an expert in the subject.
> kept from harming us by a large crew of skilled people
I'm glad to hear people working with nuclear are skilled ;) I assume people working in solar/wind/hydro are also skilled at their craft. And I'm sure you didn't imply that, maybe the phrasing wasn't the best?
It is not an argument against nuclear, it is an argument against the claim that nuclear is safe.
If something requires a large staff of skilled workers and very expensive equipment in order to prevent harmful effects, it is of course not safe - wouldn't you agree?
Solar and wind require skilled people too for sure, but not in order to prevent a catastrophe, which was my point here.
Absolutely, and with renewables that's part of the consideration from the start since everyone is well aware of it.
What you describe is in fact one of the major downsides to nuclear, since they generate so much energy in one point of failure.
Having a (ahem) redundant array of inexpensive devices generating power is much less likely to suffer abrupt and large losses such as the one europe suffered just last week, when their largest reactor went offline for a few days. https://yle.fi/a/74-20061159
If flying was inherently safe (in the same way that solar power is safe), the WTC twin towers would still be standing today.
So comparing solar and nuclear is a bit like saying a broom is safer to the user than a gun, while ignoring the user is in a gunfight.
I appreciate the simile! My argument was aimed against the claim that nuclear is safe because it hasn't killed many people. It is a common claim and I personally find it annoyingly disingenuous. Nuclear should be argued for without resorting to logical fallacies or falsehoods.
(Separately, I believe that solar+storage is the fastest gun in the west) ;-)
Making an a posteriori argument that nuclear is safer is just sticking your head in the sand to the potential harms. Fukushima was hardly over 10 years ago...
Not one person died during the actual meltdown.
Only one death is directly tied to cancer caused by radiation from the disaster.
A bit over 2000 deaths are assigned as being caused or related to the evacuation.
People already live in the evacuation zone again, it's not "irradiated and unliveable for hundreds of years" or whatever. That's fear mongering nonsense.
Here's the thing: every source of energy contains risk.
Solar and Wind are never going to be reliable enough to produce a baseload. If we switch 100% to unreliable but safe energy production like Solar and Wind, then the risk becomes "Our power goes out in the dead of winter and we freeze to death" or "our power goes out during a heatwave and our AC fails so the heat kills us"
Or maybe we need to store all of this in batteries. But storing Potential Energy is always risky, batteries can explode or start incredibly dangerous fires, including toxic fumes. Even something simple like pumping water up a hill as energy storage comes with risk. Or cutting down a tree to burn for fuel, the tree could fall on someone.
We don’t need baseload. You can go 100% renewable just fine with existing technology, at a lower total energy cost than what we have today. You can check out Marc Z Jacobsens studies for some concrete details. Whatever technology we get before we reach 100% will just make it cheaper and easier.
People who think we need baseload don’t take into account everything else we’d have to do to get to net zero carbon. It’s not just the grid. It’s everything. And a lot of that comes with an insane amount of flexible load and energy storage.
Like, all of transportation being battery (or hydrogen for trucks/planes I suppose) electric… you buy a car and you instantly have the energy storage capacity to power your home for a couple of days or so. I’ve got my car set to charge whenever electricity is cheapest right now. It’s dead easy. I don’t care if I charge on Monday or Thursday. South Australia even have vehicle-to-grid up and running already.
Steel and fertiliser production needs to switch to green hydrogen. All that hydrogen production will represent a huge amount of buffered energy. Just build some extra storage tanks and you can handle lower electricity inputs for a few days.
Hell, you can even keep some gas power plants around and feed the hydrogen into those on very rare days with extremely low sun and wind. You can run gas turbines on 100% hydrogen. It’s already demonstrated.
There’s increasingly serious plans about switching gas pipelines in the North Sea to transport hydrogen instead of natural gas. First by making hydrogen from natural gas and storing the resulting CO2 underground. Then later switching to green hydrogen from floating off-shore wind.
Seasonal demand changes in the north will be handled with geothermal heat wells and thermal energy storage. There’s already large buildings that just dump their excess rooftop solar energy into geothermal wells in summer. You get a surprising amount of that back in winter. And of course the geothermal wells gives you “baseload” heat energy as well.
I suspect advanced deep geothermal will become viable for electricity production in many regions within 10 years as well. All those oil and gas people will dump a lot of investments and engineering efforts in it to attempt to leverage their expertise in a new industry.
>> Here's the thing: every source of energy contains risk. Solar and Wind are never going to be reliable enough to produce a baseload.
Are nuclear power plants guaranteed sufficient uptime to provide baseload? Germany faced an energy crisis a couple years ago because too many of their nuclear plants were undergoing scheduled maintenance at once, and were unable to contribute to baseload when Russia cut off Germany’s oil supply.
At least batteries can be stored in a variety of locations, as opposed to one central location that may be susceptible to natural disasters or a terrorist attack. Same with solar and wind farms. Europe was on tenterhooks during the bombing of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant a year back. I don’t think the wind and solar farms that were destroyed during the invasion even made the news.
I agree, everything comes with risk. The point I’m trying to make is that nuclear power comes with unique risks that are inarguably far more horrible than the risk of a tree falling on someone or a solar panel electrocuting a maintenance worker or something.
So, you say bluefirebrand was downplaying the Fukushima disaster. Sure. I can say you're downplaying the Fujinuma Dam, which I'm mentioning because it was destroyed by the same earthquake as damaged the reactor, killing 8 in a downstream village.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujinuma_Dam
It was a very big earthquake. The Fukushima reactor should've been built with that in mind, so nobody gets a free pass on this, I think it is a valid example of "even rich developed nations don't explore and plan for all the risks correctly". But still, the earthquake itself caused way more damage than the reactor.
Chernobyl for example left a huge area uninhabitable. And it's still a mess. When the Russians kicked up dust in there with their tanks recently it caused measurable radiation in a much wider area.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/environment/air-p...
New fossil fueled power plants is being built, and existing one is being modernized rather than decommissioned. They view fossil fuels as being good as far as providing a "reserve energy", meaning the energy needed when the weather do not produce enough energy.
If we we all agree that air pollution and fossil fuels are bad, then this plan is bad. It is very bad. It so bad that we should not be doing it, and we should definitively not have it as the primary plan for this century.
If we agree on this, then the comparison should be between the long list of alternatives where fossil fuels are not involved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerns_and_controversies_at_...
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/china-got-blue-s...
[0] I'd only count it as four; the difference is a fencepost error IMO.
There are proposals to install solar panels in North Africa and run HVDC lines to Europe. There was one recently about running a line all the way to Britain from Morocco.
[0] don't do that, the current cables are optimised for the current transmission distances, so it's simultaneously easy (wider cables have less resistance) and harder (you need to care about earthquakes) to make a different design better suited for global scale
In any scenario, renewables are going to do more of the heavy lifting in displacing coal in China. This framing seems designed to avoid this reality.
> When it comes to energy generated, China’s nuclear stations outperform today’s installed solar capacity (though not wind).
Again, I could argue about the framing here, but their underlying facts are suspect too.
I wonder what their source is, as I believe both wind and solar are above nuclear production as of 2022 and growing at a faster rate.
solar: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-share-energy?tab=ch...
wind:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/wind-share-energy?tab=cha...
solar and wind:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-primary-energy-f...
nuclear:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-primary-energy?ta...
second source that agrees:
https://ember-climate.org/countries-and-regions/countries/ch...
Looking forward here's the IEA on the plan for Chinese carbon neutrality by 2060:
> Renewables-based generation, mainly wind and solar PV, increases seven-fold between 2020 and 2060, accounting for almost 80% of generation by then. By contrast, the share of coal drops from over 60% to just 5%, and unabated coal-based generation stops in 2050.
https://www.iea.org/reports/an-energy-sector-roadmap-to-carb...
I agree that the piece sounds as if it's trying not to mention renewables.
Nuclear probably won’t be the main source but it will be a necessary mow part of the solution.
But even that 18% is already starting to look like it's out of date. Energy generation, battery storage and renewable generation are all growing exponentially and well beyond the government's targets. I think it's much more likely that renewables and storage will vastly outpace nuclear generation, and that 18% estimate will prove to be absurdly high. Once you've got a grid that's 90+% renewables and storage, a few nuclear plants aren't going to make much of a difference.
Can you give any arguments for that surprising statement?
I hope we can agree that solar energy will dry up across all of China on a nightly basis.
Wind strength is also often strongly correlated over large areas. Sweden has learned this the hard way in recent winters.
This is a solved problem through various forms of storage (synthetic gas, pumped hydro, batteries etc).
Nuclear is a solid baseline for sure but I don't think there is a way around the security requirements, which means it will become too expensive to keep around when free energy from the sun can be stored cheaply.
> To wean their country off imported oil and gas, and in the hope of retiring dirty coal-fired power stations, China’s leaders have poured money into wind and solar energy.
Its silly that an article about nuclear can't just exist. Even though it does discuss renewables, all the comments here are just "wut about solar"
There's definately some degree of framing going on here that you'd perhaps not expect from a magazine except in advertorial content.
https://www.iea.org/countries/china
Gives the International Energy Agency overview of the China mix and history 1990 - 2020, in recent years nuclear and wind|solar have increased together from bugger all to roughly similar proportions when compared to the overbearing coal + gas + oil consumption.
IIRC IEA charges for the most recent reports with most up to date tabulations along with a handful of teaser stuff that's up to date.
It seems to me that the government there has an unusual ability to change its policy abruptly.
Or not - they could also decide ditching coal is too hard and abandon nuclear and solar altogether.
But they do have to hold to a plan in order to reach their most recently stated objective.
In 2013, it moved twice as many people as domestic air travel. Today, it's more like 5 times. It's not exactly an unused ghost railway system.
Which is key point, PRC does not have enough air space corridors to scale air travel. 90% of PRC population on west of country, imagine 1.2B people concentrated in western US.
«In 2022, Seoul Gimpo-Jeju continued its streak as the busiest route, with over 15.6 million passengers making the trip at an average of 226 daily flight movements.» If PRC is as congested as you say, wouldn't one of its city pairs be the record holder?
I currently live in Germany, where the population is about 50% denser than PRC, and haven't heard anything about air space corridors here being congested.
The wiki data is covid timeframe, and not indicative.
Jeju's Gimhae airport lists 60k aircraft movements and served 10m passports in 2022. Shanghai's Pudong lists 350K aircraft movements and 30m passengers in 2021. Frankfurt Airport lists 380k aircraft movement and 50m passengers. Most major PRC airports have >300k aircraft movements and move 30-40m people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_busiest_airports_i...
Look at 2020 stats, that's what's saturating limited air corridors. There's 11 airports that moves over 20m people with over 200k aircraft movements. Which is fraction of HSR's near 2B trips. As more chinese get richer and want to travel internally, HSR is only choice. That's without mentioning New years which is impossible to accommodate with air. HSR moves huge number bodies and saves 100s of millions hours vs slow trains trip.
PRC domestic flight delays is well known for anyone that regularly flies in PRC and can compare to west, like EU/NA. The unspoken reason is US military bases in region means coastal flight corridors that are shared with military aviation which gets higher priority. There's a joke that PRC commercial flight would be smoother once they take over Taiwan, because then military aviation can push out away from coastal regions.
Not to mention, the economies of scale have decreased the costs exponentially over time. This is true for metro lines, as well. China builds metro for the cost of some countries building high speed rail.
That's without mentioning PRC _HAS_ to rely on HSR. 90% people on east half of country = not enough flight corridors, which is already highly congested. Only mass transit solution left is HSR, build off domestic tech stack = 100s of billions not going to Boeing or Airbus. Also helps with energy security since it's electrified = 100s of billions saved on oil imports. Indepth analysis of HSR shows roughly 8% return. Win-win-win all around. Same with all the infra building, especially transportation networks in mountainous regions. Bridges that saves a millions of kms of travel = less fossil fuel short term and less energy storage medium long term. Convert steel and concrete into short/medium/long term energy savings.
You may recall that in 2020, they suddenly withdrew the production/export licenses for something like half of the rare earth production on short notice.
God forbid we compare numbers that are right next to each other.
If you consider pumped hydro you might lift 200 tonne of water 500m .. and that's joules in reserve, ready for use.
On the consumption usage side the convention is use joules with rate of consumption - how long will your supply last.
It's annoying as heck and trips people up and adds to confusion .. but there it is.
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1207156597/new-pentagon-repor...
https://www.reuters.com/world/chinas-nuclear-arsenal-more-th...
Instead of lazily pointing out that nuclear is “expensive”, have an honest conversation on the extraordinarily high hurdles we put in 50+ years ago.
Right now even a good-faith conversation amongst experts across different industries seems impossible
Regulations is a huge topic with lots of nuances, effectiveness and various domains; but I just see every thread on HN constantly and incessantly drumming for more Gov intervention. Switch to another thread and first knee jerk reaction, often the top voted comment is about regulations.
I’m not saying at all about getting rid of regulations. They are absolutely necessary but maybe we should be a little more careful about putting them in place?
Specifically I'd say the "refactoring" of regulation. Plenty of regulation around that has correct intent but bad implementation.
I really don’t understand what you’re getting at. Can you connect the dots? It looks like you just wanted to post another anti-government rant and just replied to any random comment to do it.
You make it sound like they stole it but they legally bought it and are building the new nuclear plants in collaboration with Westinghouse.
This is such a weirdly common attitude to US competitors in a western bubble, but I can't figure what motivates so many people to act like such sore losers.
No wonder things like BRICS start popping out. People on the receiving end will justly recognize this attitude as evil.
OP should probably ask (but they won't), how can US slow down China's help to Russia's terrible war on Ukraine, or theft of valuable IP in the free world, or increased aggression against Taiwan and Philippines
If anyone actually wanted to do anything about this "terrible war", they wouldn't using peace agreements as a mean to prepare for war. If Ukraine and it's alies knowingly and willingly made a bet with peoples lives and then kept doubling down on "ceasefire is not an option" - it's only their fault for suffering the consequence and absolutely no one (including China) owes anyone any help in saving their face.
Objective reality exists. No one is going to fall in line with US-centric fake moralizing, based to denying agency to everyone except guys under that flag we don't like.