How innovative is China in nuclear power? | Hacker News Reader

How innovative is China in nuclear power?

itif.org

93 pointsdefrost197 comments

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)

Yes, it's not like China doesn't already have weapons. The more we can do to help them cut carbon emissions the better.

If only we did what they're doing to cut emissions. They put up more solar every quarter than the rest of the world does every year.

They have also brought a lot of new coal power plants online in the past few decades. I'm not sure if they still are, or have shut any of that down.

Theyve lifted a billion people out of poverty in the last 80 years. You need energy to do that

Building new coal plants is bad, but it could be worse in that they seem to be running those plants less often and using them as peakers rather than baseload: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants

Agreed, this seems like a positive outcome for everyone except maybe the private equity people who own Westinghouse.

But how is the poor Westinghouse megacorp going to make more money if we're just benefitting humanity for free?!

> 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?

It's not a conspiracy, it's just an observation that the two technologies play well together. Also, natural gas is very cheap in the US. This latter fact rather than nefarious conspiracies or regulatory evil is why the "nuclear renaissance" collapsed here when the fracking revolution occurred. An efficient combined cycle gas fired power plant might cost $1/W(e), an order of magnitude lower capital cost than a nuclear plant. If the fuel for such a plant is cheap then nuclear is presented with an insuperable economic obstacle.

Combustion turbines are amazing technological achievements. It's ironic that one technology with military roots, nuclear fission, has been unseated by another technology with military roots, combustion turbines by way of jet engines.

Well, history repeats itself [1].

[1] https://apnews.com/general-news-b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88...

I wonder if the Chinese regret sharing gunpowder with the west, what do you think?

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.

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.

or paper for that matter

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?

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.

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...

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.

Tbf importing uranium is fairly easy and relatively cheap due to the high energy density.

Yeah, and it's also a great way to reduce your energy dependency on certain non-friendly countries... oh wait: https://apnews.com/article/germany-france-russia-nuclear-pow...

That company is just using russian engineers for russian-designed Reactors.

Not to mention that you don't even need to do that. Westinghouse already builds VVER fuel assemblies without Russians (they are supplying Ukraine's nuclear power plants, for example)

Importing it from where? Russia? Ukraine? China? Australia & Canada are probably viable options for Western nations, but that introduces more dependencies.

> that introduces more dependencies

Uranium does have the benefit of being very energy dense, so stockpiling it is relatively simple. Also see the IAEA Low Enriched Uranium Bank.

https://www.iaea.org/topics/iaea-low-enriched-uranium-bank

    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

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

It’s worth noting that Uranium mining uses the same nasty liquid-liquid extraction process used for rare earth metals. That’s why the mountainous locations in China suck - they have to move a lot of rock. A few countries dominate the industry because the vast majority of the world wants nothing to do with the environmental consequences of the toxic corrosive waste.

If push came to shove, many more countries would be able to spin up Uranium mining to replace any sources that fall victim to geopolitics. Since it doesn’t go bad, a relatively small stockpile goes a long way while the industry adjusts.

Uranium is mined by in-situ leaching. You don't have to move any rock (well a little, but astronomically less than for traditional mining). It's not at all similar to rare-earth mining.

That's one of many methods to mine uranium, used when the grades are low and the returns so poor that vast amounts of rock would have to be physically moved to return a kilogram of target ore. It works in particular geologic formations.

Large numbers of in-situ uranium wells were established in the US during the cold war at great expense to ensure some domestic supply, none the less the overwhelming majority of WWII and cold war uranium for weapons was sourced from outside the US and today the bulk of uranium for power is sourced outside the US.

The largest uranium mines in the world do not use in situ leaching, Olympic dam (the largest known single deposit) uses underground mining, specifically sublevel open stoping, to extract uranium, gold, copper, and silver.

Cameco's McArthur River mine is, IIRC, the largest producer (most currently extracted yearly, although not largest deposit) and also, not suprisingly, not an in-situ leach mine, it's underground tunnels with level to level rock grinding bores that drop rock to automated trucks, ground and slurried and then pumped to the surface for further processing some 80 km away at another plant. ( See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_cYEBotDBo )

The big issue with uranium hard rock mining is radium, radon, and similar daughter products. If you don’t care about, or are able to mitigate, the radioactive poisoning issues for workers, then it’s pretty straightforward mining wise.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_Canada]

The US southwest has tons of hard rock uranium mines, and they were very economic. And it’s still done that way in Canada in some places.

The US used to be a huge uranium producer [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_the_United...], and new mines are opening [https://www.mining-technology.com/news/three-new-uranium-min...] as prices improve again.

You can’t go much of anywhere in Arizona, Utah, etc. without running across old Uranium mines. There is even a big one on the Rim of the Grand Canyon within sight of the visitors center if you know where to look. This guy on YouTube is a reasonably responsible and informed explorer [https://youtube.com/@radioactivedrew]. They often look like hard tar like (dark and amorphous) deposits in the native sandstone.

Liquid extraction mines are ‘easier’ because humans don’t need to go into tunnels somewhere and hence be exposed to radon and similar contamination, but they’re a lot harder to actually extract uranium from. You can literally walk into a hard rock mine and just chip off a flake of pretty high grade ore. Lots of videos on YouTube of folks doing it. I’ve done it when out exploring. And yes, you need a Geiger counter and a good understanding of what is going on. I made a lead shielding box before finding my 5k CPM chip of ore, and validated that it worked.

I’ve heard of people finding 10k or even 15k CPM ore samples randomly lying around or exposed on walls of abandoned mines. Very few of these mines get the benefit of any signage (even a keep out sign) and I’ve never seen any with a sign warning of radiation. I just read some webpage when refreshing my memory which claimed uranium ores can have as high as 60k cpm of activity, which is nuts.

All of those are ‘Geiger counter continuously screaming at you and/or overlimit’ territory. Don’t carry them in your pants pocket or put them under your pillow and expect to have a good time. [https://youtu.be/CCrDcxz9gNk?si=rHOQKTYE4bf7raZE]

They’re mixed radionuclides, so make sure to have proper PPE, store safely, and follow decent decontamination/storage procedures. Don’t have a picnic inside or near any of these mines.

A lot of the older mines were before the actual risks were known or quantified. Naive radiation models didn’t take into account the risk from daughter products attached to dust properly - lung cancer rates were waaaay higher than expected based on raw radon or radiation measurements. like ‘5 packs a day of cigarettes smoking’ high even after just 5-10 years in the mines. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_and_the_Navaj....].

Massive numbers of locals/natives ended up dying of lung cancer because of it, as they were the ones working those early mines. Whole towns and reservations were decimated.

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.

I think it's a shame that we don't breed more fuel. The majority of mined Uranium 238 can be made fissile in a breeder reactor (fast neutrons), just like with Thorium. It does require reprocessing, which is a taboo topic due to proliferation concerns.

Plutonium doesn't build up in a breeder reactor, the fast neutrons split it. Our existing light water reactors have a build up of plutonium over time. I guess that's desirable when your objective is bombs.

A lot of the long lived radioisotopes get broken down in a breeder reactor, so the waste degrades to safe levels much quicker (a few hundred years).

The Gates backed reactor (Terrapower) in Wyoming is using fast neutrons.

There is a vast supply of thorium 232, produced as waste in rare earth mining. Why breed uranium?

"Natural thorium is usually almost pure 232-Th, which is the longest-lived and most stable isotope of thorium, having a half-life comparable to the age of the universe. Its radioactive decay is the largest single contributor to the Earth's internal heat; the other major contributors are the shorter-lived primordial radionuclides, which are 238U, 40K, and 235U in descending order of their contribution.

"[Thorium] is the 37th most abundant element in the Earth’s crust with an abundance of 12 parts per million.

"The low demand makes working mines for extraction of thorium alone not profitable, and it is almost always extracted with the rare earths, which themselves may be by-products of production of other minerals."

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

Thorium 232 is barely fissile - it has a net negative neutron balance during fission. Uranium-233 is similarly neutron absorbing (half the time).

So you can’t run a reactor with just Thorium 232, and maintaining a decent fuel balance can be tricky once you start due to odd fission neutron ratios between the parent fuels and daughter products and long time delays (half life wise) until you get Uranium-233. About 30 days half life.

Certainly not impossible, but pretty awkward compared to other options.

> 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.

Unless you're using CANDU reactors which can use unenriched uranium (the trade-off is you need heavy water (deuterium, D2O) as a moderator, and producing it is an up-front cost).

What's a fourth-generation nuclear reactor and what makes it harder to build?

Its basically just a catch all term that basically means, everything that isn't some form of a pressurized water reactor.

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

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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34603490#34604022

[1] - https://itif.org/publications/2016/12/12/itif-welcomes-annou...

[2] - 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...

I'd argue that various industry captains in Australia are going all in on hydrogen (eg: Andrew Forrest most notably and a couple of long haul fixed route trucking contractors)

(see, eg: https://reneweconomy.com.au/fortescue-green-hydrogen-goal-ne... )

and that the Liberal|National Coalition and Australian Labor Party (the two major political wings in Australian politics) are rudderless in the sense of appearing to have plans but neither are leading strongly.

I like Hydrogen|Ammonia, and the biggest drive there is from the major billion tonne per annum mining producers that are converting massive cattle stations to solar farms for 24|7 energy to use in adjacent mining operations .. but these are not Australian Government projects ... although the .gov.au spin is happy to ride along and appear to be driving.

> these are not Australian Government projects

Imo, there's no reason for them to be.

A lot of the R&D in the Hydrogen space was done by private companies like Eneos, Idemitsu Kosan, Hokkaido Electric, SK Group, Saudi Aramco, BP, GE, Siemens, Reliance, etc.

Just by supporting private sector champions through tax breaks, R&D credits, seed funding, and PLI you are building an ecosystem.

Even China does the same thing in the EV and Solar space, by supporting private sector companies like BYD, DAQI, LONGi, Jinko, Trina, and Canadian Solar.

Sure.

As said before, Australia (as in the Australian Federal Goverment) is rudderless on effective policy .. fortuneatly we have some people working in effective directions, and a number of others doing their best to upset such plans and throw anchors arrears and logs of wood in front.

Agree to disagree I guess.

Quote from your first link:

> We can use it:

* to blend with (or replace) natural gas for homes, industry and cooking

* for fuel cells to generate electricity to power cars, trucks, buses and trains

* to store energy and generate electricity for mining sites and remote communities

* as an industrial chemical feedstock for products such as ammonia, fertiliser and iron

* to trade clean energy with other countries.

Only the feedstock one really makes financial/economic/environmental/logical sense.

The unwarranted industrial and governmental enthusiasm for Hydrogen in roles it doesn't make sense for, compared with the general apathy towards clean energy and electrification is somewhat baffling, unless it's seen mostly as handouts to the existing fossil fuel industry.

> The unwarranted industrial and governmental enthusiasm for Hydrogen in roles it doesn't make sense for

-----

Edit: in process of doing napkin math

Edit 2: Dropping the initial calculation - too many confusing sources

China in 2022 produced around 9,000 tWh/yr of energy [2], of which around 30-40% is renewable (ie. 3,000-3,600 tWh/yr) [5]. China's secondary sector (entire industrial sector) uses 5,700 tWh/yr [3].

This is just China.

-----

For industrial and agricultural use cases like Steel, Casting, Chemicals, Shipbuilding, Fertilizers, Concrete, etc existing renewable sources cannot meet the energy deficit.

Greenhouse gas emissions for transportation are drastically falling globally, but for the use cases above emissions are only increasing [4] - heck, China's coal emissions have reached record highs [5]

There's a reason every country I listed AS WELL AS China are all investing heavily in Hydrogen as a fuel source.

Energy Independence =/= Carbon Zero

[0] - https://www.energy.gov/eere/amo/articles/itp-steel-energy-us...

[1] - https://gmk.center/en/news/china-reduced-steel-production-by...

[2] - https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202301/t202301...

[3] - https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...

[4] - https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

[5] - https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-may-upend-...

> The cost of steel production in China is around 540,000,000 gWh/day

If by cost you mean energy cost, this is clearly wrong. It amounts to a power flow of 22,500 TW, when total world primary energy consumption is about 20 TW.

Edited. Too many moving pieces and not one-to-one comparable. Simplified by just using Chinese govt statistics alone.

I'm confused, are you suggesting that these hydrogen programs are not going to use renewables sourced green hydrogen and that's a good thing?

Because if they use green hydrogen they need to build renewables to generate it. Most of the end goals can be achieved by directly using that clean electricity, and if you add in a hydrogen conversion then your doubling, possibly 10x-ing, the amount of generation required.

Recent lecture going over the figures and deflating the hype:

https://youtube.com/live/w0Q9cuF8zKg

Hydrogen has some uses, but for many of the things it is touted for it doesn't even come close to making sense.

> are you suggesting that these hydrogen programs are not going to use renewables sourced green hydrogen and that's a good thing

In the short term (next 10-15 years) they will not.

It's called Grey Hydrogen or Blue Hydrogen is Carbon Capture is used (basically greenwashing tbh). This is why I said Hydrogen and not Green Hydrogen (EDIT: I said green in my original post - explains the confusion), because most plans for expanded Solar and Wind capacity do not pan out until the early 2030s at the earliest.

I do not think this is a good thing, but there is no other intermediate gap if we want to maintain an industrial economy.

Industrial capacity is increasing at a faster rate than the capacity to build renewable energy alone.

> Hydrogen has some uses, but for many of the things it is touted for it doesn't even come close to making sense

It comes down to cost.

For heavy industry use cases you are competing against coal because (for example) steel costs 500 kWh/ton to produce.

This means 250-350 solar panels just for a single ton of steel. This means to scale out to meet the need of an average steel mill (around 400,000 tons of steel a year) you'd need an array of around 275,000-350,000 96-cell solar panels or around 55 Hectares of land dedicated to solar just for a single steel mill.

That is a lot of land to acquire, and most countries are not like China where zoning can be done by the central government with a drop of a hat, and anyhow global steel production is at almost 2 Billion Tons a year.

And this is just steel alone. Every other part of heavy industry (casting, fertilizers, plastics, shipbuilding, cement, mining, refining, etc) has similarly large energy needs and is growing rapidly. Yet renewables will not be able to grow fast enough.

And given that Coal is US$1-1.50/kg, heavy industry will continue to use that because it is cheap and available.

We need to de-greenhouse gas heavy industry, but renewables just are not scaling at the speed needed globally to meet that goal.

This is why hydrogen at least minimizes the carbon footprint as we transition heavy industry away from coal, because instead of both burning carbon for extraction and then energy production, we can at least minimize carbon usage at the extraction and then production step as renewable mega-projects start coming online over the next 10-20 years, and advances in PV and battery technology happen.

And this is why every industrial economy has a Hydrogen strategy and is pouring tens of billions of dollars a year in Hydrogen storage, electrolyzers, and distribution.

We as consumers probably won't be using hydrogen fuel cell cars, but our BEV cars will end up being manufactured by hydrogen-powered steel built in factories built by hydrogen-powered cement that will be shipped via hydrogen-powered trains and ships.

This transition has already started in much of Asia, but it's industrial so it's unsexy (like solar 20-25 years ago), but I absolutely stake my reputation that this change is actively happening and will be visible in 10 years at most.

And the fact that every major industrial country has a 10 year roadmap to bring Hydrogen costs to US$1/kg and is actually spending money to do this means I'm in good company.

If we're talking blue hydrogen then you'd be better just using methane for most things. At least then we're not kidding ourselves. Stick a carbon fee on it and focus the engineering and business talents on rolling out the stuff we already know works really well and can actually save money (EVs, renewables, heat pumps, batteries etc.) even faster, saving more money and buying us more time for the hard stuff.

> If we're talking blue hydrogen then you'd be better just using methane for most things

That's exactly the plan - NatGas as an intermediate step for Hydrogen production over the next 15 years as renewable capacity is built out and Hydrogen costs fall to that of coal (US$1-1.50/KG).

Every single Hydrogen National Strategy lists that out, and this is why the 7 countries I listed are working together on this.

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.

Let's wait until a few get done before we calculate how much it is.

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).

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

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.

It seems like the problem with modern capitalism is too much money and too few real jobs.

There are many jobs unfilled. The biggest problem right now is that unemployed people have the wrong skills for the jobs that need to be filled. This trend will accelerate along with technological advances, no matter which kind of economic system is involved.

They have the right skills for storming the Capitol, unfortunately. And the time to do so.

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.

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

> Waste disposal is an imaginary problem.

Ah, so the money a utility spends on its spent fuel is just imaginary? It's not actually being spent? And if more is spent (as TRISO fuel would require) that's all financial figments too? What one learns.

Are we still talking about China here?

The considerations I'm talking about are independent of location. Nor does what happened to weapons waste have any bearing on this issue.

What exactly is your point? China built 2 reactors that use TRISO fuel. Are you saying it was a bad decision? Good for you. Maybe you should write them a letter and explain to them why it was so, and what to do in the future.

I'm pointing out the downsides of TRISO fuel. There are considerable.

Not really. China is a big country that's virtually empty above its diagonal. The Nederlands on the other hand is all built up. Imagine opening a nuclear storage facility there in contrast to in some Chinese desert. For China, storage of spent nuclear fuel is a non issue.

Yes really. China might or might not be more lax in how it treats spent fuel (due to putting said fuel out near Lanzhou at the southern end of the Gobi Desert), but the larger volume of TRISO fuel means the relative cost of dealing with it will be larger than their cost of dealing with spent LWR fuel.

I will add that any graphite moderated reactor will have larger carbon-14 production than a LWR, due to neutron capture on carbon-13 (as well as (n,p) reactions on nitrogen-14 impurities in the graphite.) In the west this renders "spent" graphite into intermediate nuclear waste, even ignoring fission products in the fuel particles. It also means that one cannot just burn off the carbon and release the filtered CO2 in any process that reprocesses TRISO fuel.

On the plus side, TRISO fuel doesn't have the same issue with zirconium availability that traditional LWR fuel has.

> but the larger volume of TRISO fuel means the relative cost of dealing with it will be larger than their cost of dealing with spent LWR fuel

Yes. But the main cost of a reactor comes from the pressure vessel that the reactor is in. A LWR works at a pressure of about 160 bar (i.e. 160 times higher than the atmospheric pressure). The pressure inside a helium cooled reactor is about 50 bar. The cherry on the cake is that helium cooled reactors have much higher thermal efficiency (40% vs 30%). They can in principle even be used to produce hydrogen, in a much more efficient way than water electrolysis.

In the US there is the Xe-100 design. But I doubt it will be commercial in less than 15 years. The Kairos design also uses TRISO pebbles, it's a molten salt design. That solves the pressure vessel problem even better. Still 15 years out probably.

The pressure of a HTGR is lower, but because the temperature is higher, more expensive materials are needed. A LWR pressure vessel is within the creep limit of ordinary steel; HTGR outlet temperature is well above that limit (and I suspect in accident conditions the temperature goes even higher for passive dissipation of decay heat). This especially bites in applications proposing to use that high temperature industrially, such as in thermochemical water splitting.

Also, I understand the passive safety of HTGRs is achieved by reducing the core thermal power density (and hence power density of decay heat). So for a given power, that core and pressure vessel will be much larger than in a LWR. If I'm reading a reference properly the ratio of power densities here is more than a factor of ten, which will more than balance the lower pressure and higher thermal efficiency. Material requirements for a pressure vessel scale as pressure x volume.

> because the temperature is higher, more expensive materials are needed

Is that a fact or an educated guess? Nuclear reactors do not use ordinary steel, they use nuclear grade steel. I don't know much about steel, but with a bit of googling I found out that the 316L steel (on of the 2 most common nuclear grade steels, the other being 304L) has much higher creep temperature than ordinary steel. This is the steel used in making the pressure vessels of PWRs and BWRs.

The steel used in the HTR-10 (the precursor of the 2 HTR-PM rectors that China recently hooked to the grid) has a composition [1] that seems to me to be almost identical to the 316L [2]. The HTR-10 has an average helium temperature at the outlet of 700°C.

Do you have some more concrete sources of information that would indicate the steel in HTGR is different and significantly more expensive than the steel in PWRs?

[1] https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/te_1382_web/T...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_grade_stainless

Well, requiring a material to withstand a higher temperature is an added constraint, so of course it's going to increase cost. Otherwise, the more exotic material would have been used in the lower temperature application too.

But that's all secondary to the observation you ignored, that the apples-to-apples comparison you're trying to make ignores power density, and when that's included HTGRs require much heavier pressure vessels.

> Well, requiring a material to withstand a higher temperature is an added constraint, so of course it's going to increase cost.

This reasoning sounds good in theory, but practice and theory sometimes differ. The steel in reactors is subject to neutron embrittlement. In order to avoid that, you need special steel. Which happens to also withstand much higher temperatures. So no, it's not an additional constraint.

> that the apples-to-apples comparison you're trying to make ignores power density.

The strange thing is that the second part of your argument had nothing to do with TRISO. Not sure why you brought it up. You said that this is a tradeoff of passive safety. If you want passive safety, all things being equal, you need to accept lower power density.

However, all things are not equal. When you use TRISO as a fuel, that can withstand absolutely huge temperatures, in excess of 2000°C. Since radiative cooling is governed by the Sefen-Boltzman equation (i.e. the radiated power is proportional to the 4th power of the temperature), if the pebbles reach high temperatures, they get rid of a lot of heat by radiation, which is then absorbed by the steel pressure vessel and conducted outside.

Additionally, when you use TRISO in the form of pebbles, you recirculate the pebbles. You take them out and let them "rest", and then put them back later, so you limit the decay heat.

Anyway, enough theory, let's look at actual numbers. The American designs Xe-100 and NuScale are perfect for our comparison. They both have a thermal output of 200 MW. NuScale is a PWR and has a lower efficiency, so the electrical output is 60 MW, while the Xe-100 produces 82.5 MWe. NuScale's reactor pressure vessel has a volume of 129 m3, and Xe-100 has 390 m3, so larger by a factor of 3. If we only care about the electricity output, then Xe-100 needs 4.73 m3/MWe, while NuScale 2.15 m3/MWe, the ratio is only 2.15.

However, because the Xe-100 has to withstand much lower pressures, the mass of the pressure vessel is 274 tons, vs 260 tons for NuScale. Per MWe, the Xe-100 vessel is actually 23% lighter.

[1] https://aris.iaea.org/Publications/SMR_Book_2020.pdf

[2] https://aris.iaea.org/PDF/NuScale-NPM200_2020.pdf

I guess we shall see how China's HTR enterprise goes. The Germans had a lot of problems with the AVR and the THTR. Probably part or why they ditched nuclear altogether. They also tend to overengineer things and add too much unecessary complexity, which is exactly what they did with the THTR. I'm also quite skeptic of carbon moderated reactors, the graphite blocks tend to crack, the pebbles create dust which can block the coolant flow and the graphite reflectors also crack and get contaminated with Cs/Sr.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor

I saw the 4500 US$/kW cost figure for the HTR-PM. For the record, the AP1000 cost the Chinese around $2,000/kW in overnight capital costs (for the Sanmen and Haiyang plants). In the US the AP1000 construction costs are currently estimated around $6,800/kW and $4,500/kW for the following installed 10th unit.

https://web.mit.edu/kshirvan/www/research/ANP193%20TR%20CANE...

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 :)

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.

Solar has become a commodity technology and it largely won't matter who is manufacturing it.

Solar also is primarily replacing energy imports. So many not spend on buying gas/oil/coal is now being spend on buying solar panels. Thus the petro economies have much more to worry about that money is directed from them to China.

EU has set fairly aggressive target for battery and solar recycling. The supply chain will be far easier and cleaner when most of the materials can be gotten from recycling.

Kind of a bad deal for China in the long term if you think about it: they’re polluting themselves to refine battery and solar materials for the west, and I don’t think they’ll get much of a long term dependence/benefit from it. Renewables are not like oil where you build up a long lasting supply chain dependence.

The good thing for China is that they’re keeping a lot of batteries/solar for themselves as well and the west is helping to finance that.

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.

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...

> 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...

Total power consumption went down due to industry moving out of the country due to increasing electricity cost due the country exiting nuclear power. It's depressing.

What's depressing is how wrong your comment is. You seemingly ignored the Ukrainian war which has lead to sanctioning Russia and the end of cheap Russian oil and gas in Germany. Spot electricity prices are at pre-war levels nowadays, so whatever lack of nuclear power you are imagining is seemingly irrelevant.

Demand for electricity went down due to increasing deindustrialization, which leads to a lower price than it otherwise would be.

German machinery exports are growing, not shrinking: https://www.georesources.net/cms.php/en/news/755/Germany-Mac...

There was a dip due to COVID, and it doesn't help matters that their biggest customer is China, which locked down their population for nearly a year during the pandemic.

Sure, China makes widgets, but Germany makes the robots that make the widgets.

"Machinery exports" growing doesn't mean industry isn't moving out of the country.

So the link shows in 2001 nuclear generated 482.92 TWh; in 2022 wind plus solar generated 485.12 TWh. Granted coal was down in that time but gas was pretty much flat (except for 2022 when there were extenuating circumstances).

The claim was that Germany has now become dependent on carbon based energy sources, the link I posted shows it has always been dependent on carbon based energy sources. The dependence hasn't changed all that much in the last 20 years, it went down a bit but not much.

It probably would have gone down if nuclear energy wasn't outlawed.

It did go down, just not much. Would it have gone down more if nuclear was still on the table? Yes, that's very likely.

That is primary energy. Only one third of that can actually be turned into electricity.

Yes, I realised that while having trouble getting to sleep last night. France produces around 350-400TWh from nuclear, so that should have made me question the number I quoted.

So the graph is a bit misleading in that various qualities of energy are lumped together.

> 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!!")

Aren't they building new coal(!!!) power plants recently?

No, unless you count 2009 as "recently", which was the time when the last coal power plant construction in Germany started (GKM 9). And yes, that was a mistake. But it was certainly not "recently".

In 2020, the last coal power plant was connected to the grid (Datteln 4). It was delayed, as it wasn't clear for quite a while whether it was even legal. But the decisions that have been made to build these plants were made 15-20 years ago.

It could be recent expansion of coal mines and recommissioning old plants that you're thinking of.

Electricity costs skyrocketed and manufacturers moved to lower-cost countries. If everyone moved back to farming the land by hand and stoped using tech, they would also be less dependent on fossil fuels but I don't think many want to make that trade.

> Electricity costs skyrocketed

They are now back to the level of 2021.

> and manufacturers moved to lower-cost countries.

Some loudly talked about it in hopes of pulling in some subsidies and that got vastly overreported for propaganda reasons.

> 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.

This comment is being grayed but is it wrong? I want to believe that nuclear is just a miracle solution, but my impression was likewise that it is now even more expensive than solar/wind, at least in the Western world

> it is now even more expensive than solar/wind, at least in the Western world

Correct with that caveat.

China is able to build it cheaply enough that it rivals solar/wind + gas, which is what the West is doing. (Solar/wind + battery is cute, but it's been crowded out by the quicker-deploying gas infrastructure, as well as the higher prices EV manufacturers are willing to pay for supply. The threat to gas was nuclear baseload, which could support a smaller battery footprint, but the gas lobbyists seem to have successfully dispatched it.)

https://reneweconomy.com.au/chinas-quiet-energy-revolution-t...

Sure. They're maxing out production of renewables and supplementing with nuclear. As renewable production ramps, it displaces more nuclear. We're doing the same thing, except with natural gas. If we could deploy infinite renewable energy instantly, that would obviously be preferable. But we can't. So China gets nukes and we get gas. Almost certainly for the next 50 years. (Good luck to whoever has to fight natural gas's lobbyists in ten years when they think the brand-new LNG terminals are going to go down without a fight.)

We (and the Chinese) can deploy renewables (and storage) much faster than nuclear.

I suspect the only reason China is continuing to build NPPs is inertia, and a desire to not amputate that part of their industrial sector. The grandiose plans have been scaled way back. But that can continue for only so long before it's written off.

Nuclear doesn’t provide the kind of dispatchable power you need to supplement a renewable grid. Nuke plants of the type China is building can’t be spun up and down fast enough. China is currently planning to build a renewable grid backed by fossil fuels just like the US, except they’re using modern coal plants (and paying them not to generate) and we’re using gas. Ultimately it seems likely that coal will be replaced with pumped hydro and battery storage as prices drop, and the nuclear plants will have fewer and fewer profitable applications.

But there’s nothing wrong with all that. China conducted a natural experiment with multiple technologies and renewables and storage appear to have won big. The important thing is that those of us outside of China can learn the lessons without having to repeat the experiment.

What knifed new nuclear in the US was not natural gas lobbyists, but natural gas prices. Quote from December 2018:

https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/71/12/26/904707/US...

> “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.

(The Henry Hub natural gas price on 6/11/2024 was $2.71/MMBtu, or $2.17/MMBtu in Dec. 2018 dollars.)

Interest in the US "nuclear renaissance" evaporated once it became clear fracking would make natural gas cheap for the foreseeable future. What's interesting about renewables in the US is they are plowing ahead with large deployments even in the face of cheap natural gas.

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.

No, solar still hasn't figured out how to replace the power demands of the grid. It can only supply daytime power (if that) and makes the grid more unstable requiring fossil fuel peaker plants to supply gaps in production. Grid batteries are still insanely expensive and remain production capacity limited, not to mention all sorts of other problems that will come up installing that much battery capacity. Solar is only cheaper than Nuclear when you ignore the battery requirements to make it a more fair comparison of ability - when you include battery requirements, solar is more expensive by a fair amount which is ridiculous when you consider that Nuclear has gotten more expensive since the 1960s which doesn't happen to technologies unless you stop producing (which we did).

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.

> Nuclear can't help us because it is too slow to be built out

In the West. China can build out nuclear power plants quicker than we can lay HVDC.

But they aren’t. China is building nuclear faster than the West, but they still require seven years per new plant. Their original plan was for nuclear to be 18% of the grid by 2060, but their renewable buildouts have made that number seem much too high. The existing nuclear designs can’t really provide dispatchable power for the vast renewable grid they’re building, either.

The answer for nuclear (if there is one) is factory built SMRs. Those exist in the experimental phases. If SMRs take off, the current designs aren’t going to matter. If SMRs don’t take off, nuclear itself probably isn’t going to matter.

> they still require seven years per new plant

Three years planned for permitting [1], and that's before any ground is broken.

[1] https://www.permits.performance.gov/permitting-project/fast-...

I call them HMRs, Hail Mary Reactors. They're the last gasp before nuclear flatlines. People are proposing them not because they're likely to succeed, but because they're the only option left.

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.

> 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.

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

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?)

You don't really need to have the onsite waste storage built before the reactor goes online.

> 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?)

Depends on who 'we' is. IMHO, SMR isn't going to make large numbers of reactors nuclear viable in the US; the problem in the US isn't really the cost of construction although that's not great, it's the cost of delays from the many levels of review and regulations; that ship sailed on March 28, 1979; and I don't think nuclear be viable again in the US until the generation of environmentalists brought up in the shadow of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are gone, which is going to take quite some time; maybe renewables plus storage will be more than sufficient by the time the US is ready to consider nuclear again, at which point it will be moot.

We seem to agree on where we are at in the USA, so I am not trying to argue at all, but just to clarify what I meant here:

> You don't really need to have the onsite waste storage built before the reactor goes online.

But one would have to construct a safe and secure on-site storage facility ahead of time, is what I imagined. It's not like that's something you would add as an afterthought, is it?

You have to plan for it, but you're not going to have any waste until the first refueling, which is ~ 18-24 months after you start operations. (unless SMR have a drastically different fuel cycle than the big ones, I honestly don't know)

The only thing that I've seen on the topic is this:

> Results reveal that water-, molten salt–, and sodium-cooled SMR designs will increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal by factors of 2 to 30.

> ... In addition, SMR spent fuel will contain relatively high concentrations of fissile nuclides, which will demand novel approaches to evaluating criticality during storage and disposal.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2111833119

Ha, while discussing this with you, S3 just released their video with Radiant, an SMR startup.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40711474

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.

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.

The state gave us the internet. So I think those people are a small minority or they haven't paid attention.

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.

Government agencies like DARPA literally invented the internet, so it was definitely more than solving the tragedy of the commons, although that was important too.

DARPA is designed to limit how long they will fund any technology, and be very willing to terminate funding for any effort that isn't delivering. As I recall, even a 1% success rate is considered acceptable there.

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.

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

Maybe it depends on what the state actually does..

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

The only way to make collectivism work is being a force monopolist / military dictatorship.

If you eliminate economic gain as a motivation for doing things, what's left is to motivate through fear. You aren't working hard enough? You're a breaker; off to the gulag for you!

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.

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.

fortunately grandma is politically irrelevant in china (ayi's are worse than Mao), though the age of its leadership is showing, as they are still obsessed in trying "socialism" and see skyscrapers as the ultimate hallmark of development (they built so many cathedrals in the sky the government had to put moratoriums on financial requirements to build them)

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.

> 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.

> 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.

Protests still happen in China very often.

For example, the strike at BYD's factory due to wage cuts and silent layoffs a couple weeks ago [0] (the original QQ post was taken down under the NSL [1]), a work stoppages and strikes in Anhui [2], Guangzhou [3], and Shandong [4] a week ago, as well as Workers Call for Help (basically workers complaints to the govt that often turn into strikes if not listened to) [5]

The issue is Western reporters don't really use Chinese social media and aren't monitoring it, and in a lot of cases can't even really speak or read Mandarin.

Also, China is not that centralized. In most of these protests, the organizers take efforts to point out they are protesting against local functionaries, not Beijing - and they aren't wrong, as Deng's reforms devolved power significantly to the local and provincial level.

In China, it tends to be the working class and poor (rural and urban) that tend to protest the most as they have the least to lose and are the ones that face the brunt of economic slowdowns.

[0] - https://archive.is/dwGdd

[1] - https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/io1cSoE_i_pohJEoDOjkgw

[2] - https://v.kuaishou.com/EokPBo

[3] - https://v.kuaishou.com/CXrU74

[4] - https://v.m.chenzhongtech.com/fw/photo/3xxbacwt646zfwu?fid=3...

[5] - https://liuyan.people.com.cn/threads/mobilelist?tid=20864736...

Also people just hate China and will accept anything that confirms their preconceived beliefs.

I am no fan of the Chinese government but failing to acknowledge that they do some things right and learn from it, is how we fall behind as a people and let them take over the global world order.

If the western world wants to claim it’s better, it needs to actually be better.

> If the western world wants to claim it’s better, it needs to actually be better

It's fairly easy and we already are.

For example, free speech. I guarantee you the videos I linked will be removed from Kuaishou in a couple weeks for "unspecific legal reasons".

Or the fact that we can protest without having to put pretentions about why we protest.

Or the fact that we can have this very discussion on HN without being banned.

Or the fact that you don't have to jump through hoops to find information in almost every case.

Or the fact that if you feel your speech is being infringed upon, you can actually work with the civil society actor of your choice to litigate.

Or the fact that the poorest states of the US have a higher HDI than all of China (let alone most of China's provinces).

At the end of the day, we need to remember that civil liberties are the steroid needed for innovation.

The West's:

- free speech helped it productionize LLMs well before China

- support of a liberal democracies and alliances helped diffuse semiconductor technologies like Lithography, EDAs, and Wafers to European (ASML, STMicro, Infineon), Japanese (Tokyo Electron, Nikon), South Korean (Samsung, SK Group, LG), Taiwanese (TSMC, PSMC), and Israeli (Tower) companies and partners, building out a global supply chain

- support for social diversity allowed a naturalized Germany from Turkey and a naturalized American from Hungary to invent and productize mRNA vaccines

- concentration on mutual development that lead to ADB, WB, EU, and IMF grants that helped stabilize and develop China, India, Brazil, Turkey, Vietnam, and Indonesia economies from LDCs to Middle Income countries

Concentrating on shoring up our allies (existing and upcoming) and well as recognizing that we are the part of the same team will allow us as a whole succeed as a society. There's no reason for the "Free World" to be American run alone

- Japan+SK+Taiwan+Australia have a massive footprint in democratizing and liberalizing much of Asia

- the EU plays a massive role in democratizing much of Eastern and Southern Europe

- Countries in the Americas like Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and Argentina are still flawed, yet are much freer than they were 30 years ago after the US adopted it's change in policy

There is a gap between freedom of speech in China and the US, but the example you gave attributing it to the fruits of liberalism is not correct. The globalization of the economy and the division of labor in industry is the inevitable result of capital expansion and industrial upgrading. It is also inevitable that labor-intensive industries will move to countries with low labor costs, as will the financial flows generated by these moves, as well as development banks. It is also the fact that there is a relationship between freedom and economic base, the United States and some European countries have enough economic base to invest in freedom, which is a virtuous circle, on the contrary, excessive freedom in countries with a poor economic base will divert the inputs of economic development, and will instead produce chaos

My point is not that the western world doesn’t do good things. The parent commenter wanted to dismiss nuclear innovation in China as being the result of totalitarianism and oppression rather than ingenuity and innovation, which I think is a bad line of thinking.

It begs the question that if liberalism is incompatible with doing great things, then why commit to it? I don’t believe it is, but falling back on excuses like that just seeds doubt in our true competency.

Pretending like China can’t do good things because of some preconceived notion that they are evil, and failing to admit that China actually is outclassing us in many things and that we can do better, is a great way to let that world order crumble.

> Pretending like China can’t do good things because of some preconceived notion that they are evil, and failing to admit that China actually is outclassing us in many things and that we can do better, is a great way to let that world order crumble.

Fair enough, and it's a line of thinking I agree with you about.

I detest "othering" - be it Westerners who do it about China, or vice versa. We're all psychotic apes so there's no point having a superiority complex based on identity.

China isn't building inland nuclear reactors:

    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.

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.

TBH right now I'm wondering about the accuracy of the 2024 Wilson newsletter quote I gave (it could be true) as it stands in contrast to a 2015 Guardian article:

    Proposals to build plants inland, as China ends a moratorium on new generators imposed after the Fukushima disaster in March 2011, are particularly risky, the physicist He Zuoxiu said, because if there was an accident it could contaminate rivers that hundreds of millions of people rely on for water and taint groundwater supplies to vast swathes of important farmlands.

- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/25/china-nuclear-...

The context of "inland" here is near rivers and farmland that provide food and water for the population that live in dense urban areas nearer the coast.

Both could be true, just talking about different moratoriums, or one lifted then reimposed, both may have errors, etc.

It really needs a far better China watcher than myself to clarify.

Officials at the NEA technically removed the moratorium in 2014 [0] but it de facto still exists [1] given that they haven't been given priority in 5 Year Plans, massive inland projects like Toahuajiang have been mothballed, and the R&D has moved towards floating nuclear power plants instead.

It makes sense because the Chinese public is like any other public and very NIMBY and scared of meltdowns. The CCP is authoritarian, but they do take public sentiment into account.

Misinformation (some of which is government supported) like the Fukushima Water Discharge and the constant reporting about anti-Nuclear protests in Japan (in an attempt to bloody Japan's nose) also hurt the support of nuclear power in China [2]

[0] - https://fjb.nea.gov.cn/dtyw/jgdt/202311/t20231110_200899.htm...

[1] - https://power.m.ofweek.com/2021-04/ART-35007-8420-30494525.h...

[2] - https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/anti-japanese-feeling-rises-i...

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.

"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.

Or maybe the purpose of the system is what it does. Why assume the intended primary purpose of the planning system can't be making constituents happy by preventing construction?

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.

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.

Since the urea molecule contains a carbon atom, carbon-free urea would be a neat trick. :)

Environmentalists will kill us all in time. Probably the Western civilization's greatest present threat.

That's a good advantage to have, most fears toward nuclear energy are unfounded.

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.

No, they are not typically complementary. The optimal solutions for powering a grid tend to either be all-nuclear or all-renewable (usually the latter now), depending on cost assumptions. Optimal solutions with a mixture are uncommon.

No, nuclear wants a dispatchable generation source to provide the power. It only makes sense as a complement when the dispatchable generation is expensive to run somehow, if it's cheaper than the nuclear than you should just not bother with nuclear. The two things which complement it are gas turbine generators (cheap to build, dispatchable, expensive fuel), and storage (very expensive to build ATM, needs to buy power when there's excess, but otherwise cheap). Renewables are not this: the energy they produce is cheap but not at all dispatchable (curtailable, yes, but you can't just get more wind blowing on demand). What this means is that sometimes they fail to provide the peak and sometimes they can provide the whole peak and more, which both doesn't provide a reliable grid and eats into the economic justification for nuclear. So, you want to pair them with dispatchable generation to fill in the gaps, which sounds familiar, no? In fact the only difference is with nuclear your gaps are more periodic and there's not such a large range of the gaps.

That's why they don't complement each other: they actually want the same, different thing to complement them: something which can fill in the gaps in the power that they can economically provide. And renewables are a heck of a lot cheaper than nuclear at the moment.

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Are you a broken bot?

Maybe they're using a HN screen reader plugin?

The OP link is a nextjs-powered site, I presume they're reporting an error that came up opening the link?

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