China's quiet energy revolution: the switch from nuclear to renewable energy

I am still very pro-nuclear but it seems PV + wind + battery storage are coming down in price much faster than people expected and it just makes sense to build more since the incremental cost is so low, especially compared to something like nuclear. That said, there's no reason to not pursue both options, which apparently China is doing but at a slower pace for nuclear.

And you don't spend 10,000 years hoping & working to make sure nothing goes wrong with the 95% of fuel (unburned) & decommissioned reactors debris you wind up with in the end.

There are good tech answers to try to decrease these problems, but they'd involve building more advanced nuclear fuel lifecycle reactors. Which no one is going to fund. Especially since waste seems to be externalized from generation.

But I don't necessarily disagree with you.

With solar we can externalize the environmental damage almost 100% if the panels are manufactured somewhere else. We would install them somewhere else if we could, too. With nuclear there is always some underlying amortized risk of problems, and this perceived risk is impossible to externalize. Again, what is important is the perception of damage rather than actual damage.

Of course I’m also not quantifying the actual damage from either one. I’m not sure which one is worse in terms of raw material extraction or CO2 emissions per lifetime KWh produced. I checked and it seems solar might be higher for CO2. But that difference isn’t going to matter if nuclear doesn’t get built.

You can vaguely do this DIY today using the long life radioactive glow sticks and some solar panels and get a constant power device but its very inefficient and too expensive for the power it produces and its half life is too short.

There is I think no viable way to make that business reality. The government intervention would be absurdly high and it would never make it to market even if the cost of the device was economically competitive with a Solar or Wind setup. This is one of the ways Solar and Wind became dominate, they scale really well from the small to the large, especially solar which the panels on the roof of a house are the same in a multiple MW power station.

You'll need to dig through all the wind turbines and dams to find them though. The PNW has better choices than solar anyway.

Most/all solar panels that exist currently can not be recycled in a way that makes ecological or economical sense. Their operational lifetime is NOT "sustainable", nor is their economical lifetime.

Then there's death's per kWh, required energy storage (with its own ecological and economical issues), mining, transportation, CO2 per kWh, etc etc.

IMO nuclear is a pretty clear winner (as a continious energy source), but it's a complex analysis where important details are easily missed.

Another social licensing risk is early plant closure. The levelized cost of nuclear energy is the best case scenario. This number assumes that your country won't become like Germany. What will happen to the ROI of nuclear if there's a moral panic in 15 years forcing early plant closures? Nobody can predict the irrationality of the crowd. Renewables don't face such risks to ROI.

A coal power plant is similar to a nuclear plant -- they heat water to turn a turbine to generate water. There's no way a nuclear plant would ever be cheaper than a coal plant to build, and it would have to be to be competitive with solar in cost.

The article describes China scaling back new plants at a slower pace—about 5 a year instead of ten–but that’s still a multiple of anything we’re doing.

Firstly, it's actually competing with coal, which is what is going in instead, and secondly, any regulatory regime that slows nuclear deployment so much that you instead install coal is deeply, deeply flawed. Nuclear is orders of magnitude more safer than coal, and has been for 50+ years. They need to figure out which roadblocks are slowing it down and remove them.

Regulation is a choice. Sometimes it's a very good choice. But if your options are "highly regulated nuclear" and "coal", then you have made some poor regulatory choices.

- CO2 comes from sources other than energy (electricity) production.

- Overall energy usage is increasing, outpacing % growth of renewables.

This seems a bit obvious to say, but that wouldn't be the case if the standard of living were also being raised. Also, there's a huge amount of CO2 generated by non-energy means; e.g. building with concrete.

"There is also a caveat to China's rapid build-out of renewable capacity because at the same time it is still adding substantial coal-fired generation."

"China already accounts for 53% of the world's 2,095 GW of operating coal-fired generating capacity, a share likely to increase in coming years as more coal plants are retired in the developed world."

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...

It’s mineable almost everywhere people live, is burdened by little international regulation (at least compared to nuclear), and is labour intensive enough to create powerful local advocates.

I am envisioning something like an international market for clean electricity. Something like an internet for power. This would enable developing countries to leapfrog dirty methods like coal, similar to how many countries leapfrogged over credit cards and cheques we still have in the US. Of course the UHVDC technology may not be ready for it yet.