China Slows Nuclear Expansion 78
An anonymous reader writes "Hui Zhang and Shangui Zhao describe China's decision to move ahead with nuclear power. Following the Fukushima Daiichi accident, China slowed its rapid expansion of nuclear power and undertook a major reevaluation of safety practices. The government has now resumed approval of new nuclear power projects, and is cautiously moving forward. Good description of safety issues that remain."
They are suspending in-land construction, and are aiming at 58GWe instead of 80GWe of generation capacity by 2020. It's still more than the 40GWe they planned to build under their 2007 plans.
NIMBY are the sole reason (Score:1)
why American civilian infrastructure is like the 3rd world comparing to China and Japan.
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Totally False.
The real reason is lack of interest. No nuclear power plant has been built without government funds or loans. The payback time is long and the returns relatively low. There really has no been a big commercial push for building these power plants. Natural gas on the other hand has seen lots of private growth.
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Totally False.
There is plenty of interest. The legal hurdles are the real issue. Most of the nuclear industry is now focused on expansion and improvement of existing plants because it's a lot harder for Greenpeace and the like to get people worked up over something that's already been running without a problem in their back yard for several decades.
Nuclear does have a high up-front cost, but it is the only truly viable solution t
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Interest doesn't equal intent. The financial situation just doesn't make sense for nuclear (at present). Given the (artificially, temporary) low prices of natural gas and the relatively inexpensive and rapid timeline of a natural gas fired electrical generation plant AND the increasingly favorable costs for wind / solar conventional nucs just aren't a hot item. Especially since the 'new and improved' Gen III plants don't exist in the US just yet so it's a bit of a stretch to call up Westinghouse and ask
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Why would you call the low price of natural gas "artificial"? The supply recently went up hugely, and demand has been flat at best through the economic downturn. Temporary, sure - all commodity prices are temporary.
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Westinghouse could show you the subscale prototype they build in the US the AP600. But if you want to see the larger models yeah you will probably have to go to China since the US reactors are taking forever to get approved in order to get built. The problem is not necessarily the Federal government. Usually it is local politics which get in the way.
China so far does not have a whole lot of natural gas capacity. Most of it is dirty coal. This is getting to be a problem in the major cities, with people using
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Other countries that switch to wind and solar disproove your argument ...
Everything that does not emmit CO2 is an alternative.
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Those countries have had as a result increased electricity costs. Energy intensive businesses leaving. In the case of Germany they put a tax on the nuclear reactors to fund the windmills and then they claim nuclear isn't competitive. Hah.
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There is no tax on nuclear reactors.
There is a tax on nuclear fuel elements. Which is used to pay for the storsge of used elements and for decommisioning old plants.
Wind energy is funded by fixed feed in rates into the grid, not by taxes or subsidies.
Energy costs increased slightly but will drop again when the switch is finished.
As germans use only a quarter of the energy an american is using, no one really cares about the price increase. For me it was recent years about 10â per year in total, less tha
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You may call it whatever you want it is still a tax [euobserver.com]. Germany is facing a "bright" future burning low quality brown coal. I would rather have nuclear and improved air quality thank you. If they had the same criteria of zero emissions for coal power plants they wouldn't be competitive either.
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You are very missinformed.
It is very bad to draw conclusions from wrong assumptions.
Why do you think brown coal pollutes the air? Because you don't know anything about how german coal plants work :) However, you can google for it I believe ... good luck!
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I know one person who grew up next to one of your clean power generators and got respiratory problems as a result. You are the one who needs to get informed about brown coal. Even with scrubbers installed in the plant the air quality is still going to be low. The fact is even when you are burning decent quality coal, like in the US, so called clean coal technologies are more expensive than nuclear. Brown coal does not even qualify for that.
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In germany the exhaust of a coal plant is cleaner than the air it takes in ... thechnically it is no difference for the scrubbers if you buen black coal or brown coal :)
Re: Costs (Score:1)
The payback isn't that small, actually. The famous example in Canada is Darlington for incredible cost overruns (from incredibly bad financing) of 14.4 Billion in the early 90s has more than made up for it, and the profit it generates yearly is enormous. The problem is that 90% of the costs are all upfront and pre-power generation, the inverse of fossil-fuel methods. If you are a Keynes follower, you should build these in recessions, since as infrastructure investment there is a large payback, and in pro
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If you are a Keynes follower, you should build these in recessions
The problem is that for economic stimulus you want to start spending serious money as soon as possible, and not wait years for the planning of a plant. Of course, considering how long the economy has been in the toilet, that might not be an issue nowadays.
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Totally False.
The strict regulations put in place in the late 70's-early 80's right after the Three Mile Island incident made it practically impossible to build new nuclear power plants. The regulations dealt with more than just structural and engineering requirements. There were also societal requirements like having comprehensive evacuation plans for all nearby populated areas.
The reason those strict regulations were put in place were because of state and local governments freaking out about having a nucl
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There were also societal requirements like having comprehensive evacuation plans for all nearby populated areas.
How ridiculous. No one has ever needed to evacuate from around a nuclear power plant, right?
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Nor from a fertilizer plant using ammonia right? Or from a natural gas pipeline blowing up for that matter.
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It's the size of peoples' back yards in the case of nukes that make it not work. "Storing nuclear waste? Not in my entire state!!!" goes a little far.
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Just relocate the residents, give them fair market price for their property.
What do you think the fair market price is for the homes and businesses of say, one million people, in an expensive part of the country? There's an outside chance that it might be cheaper to put the nuke elsewhere. And my point was that anything within a few hundred miles (if not further) works just fine.
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"Fair Market Price" is not a concern for the federal government.
This is why:
*************
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5112 [cornell.edu]
31 USC Â 5112 - Denominations, specifications, and design of coins
(k) The Secretary may mint and issue platinum bullion coins and proof platinum coins in accordance with such specifications, designs, varieties, quantities, denominations, and inscriptions as the Secretary, in the Secretaryâ(TM)s discretion, may prescribe from time to time.
***************
So let say t
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Why is it off-topic to mention the US? I thought that's always on topic.
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I also read that and was worried North Korea (*) had attacked them... but thought the wording was a bit weird.
* Maybe they feel like China backstabbed them for not supporting them in the recent "confrontation".
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Please reply with further geopolitical analysis regarding whatever topic you feel appropriate.
All your base belong to us!
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Please reply with further geopolitical analysis regarding whatever topic you feel appropriate.
All your base belong to us!
No, no. To be on topic you have to say:
"All your base load belong to us!"
That works, scarily enough.
Once we get the first real AP1000 (Score:2, Interesting)
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I would say that the AP1000 is really a G3.5 reactor, not G4. It's a pretty incremental development over existing ones.
That said, the existing ones are proven and well tested designs, and it does seem to fix the more major flaws.
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The major flaw in China is of course greed and corruption. Taking insane short cuts to inflate profits and paying of officials meant to be checking work is the norm. You only have to look at high speed rail failures in China to have proof of corruption in spite of definitive consequences of failure. So it will be interesting to see how the government of China will contract out Nuclear power station construction. There are a huge number of alternative designs from low power turbine reactors to high power bl
Seismic Engineers Wanted (Score:2)
the containment vessel is designed to withstand a 9.5 earthquake (Fukushima was a 9.1)
I wonder what that means in engineering terms. The Richter (actually moment magnitude scale) measures the total energy released in the quake, but what matters for structural design is the peak ground acceleration [wikipedia.org] and the peak ground velocity [wikipedia.org]. The chart on the PGA page shows a remarkable lack of correlation between MMS and PGA. The highest energy quake ever recorded (9.5 Chile 1960) had a PGA of only 0.3g, where the 2011 Thoku earthquake that caused the Fukushima accident was 2.7g. The 2008 Iwate-Miyagi Nair
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Ground roll can be huge - in the San Francisco quake witnesses saw the street rising up in waves that they could see coming a dozen blocks away. The amplitude must have been several metres for that to happen - it's not just acceleration to worry about but displacement as well, and that's hard to design for (it's done for oil pipelines, for instance the S bend in an Alaskan pipeline over the Denali fault, but harder for more complex things
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The Fukushima quake (wrong choosen name imho) was not 9.1.
It was 9.1 or 9.2 at the point where the quake happend. And that was about 400 miles out in the sea to the north east.
At Fukushima, the town, or the reactor if you want to call it so, the quake was perhaps 4 or 5. (Perhaps. you recall that the town was not harmed at all by the quake, and perhaps you know that nuclear reactors are only considere 'quake resilent' to roughly 6.5. It pisses me pretty off thatpeople think/repeat the myth a reactor can wit
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I agree, the fall out (no pun intended) of such an explosion in China will be felt the world over. The deaths alone from a failure will be astronomical. While I'm not opposed to nuclear power, I'm opposed to people doing it wrong.
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Is it me or the TFA encouraging them to fuck up?
For the new safety standards to be effective, China should streamline the regulatory and legal framework governing nuclear power.
So to make it safer they should... get rid of safety standards and checks? Um...
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But, But ...
They said they were going to do it right
The second plan approved by the State Council, the Twelfth Five-Year Plan and the 2020 Vision of Nuclear Safety and Radioactive Pollution Prevention -- the Nuclear Safety Plan, for short -- goes farther. It requires that all operating reactors maintain good safety records and avoid accidents. New reactors must put in place prevention and mitigation measures for severe accidents.
The wrote it down. They put it on the Internet. What else could they need to do?
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Safety-first was on [China's] mind when they built train lines and then when they derailed, buried the train, corpses and all.
Cite?
Re:Safety-first? (Score:5, Informative)
No source for burying with corpses inside, but the wreckage was buried:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenzhou_train_collision#Reaction [wikipedia.org]
Good (Score:1)
According to TFA the 80GW number was ''expected'' by experts and officials. Only 40GW was written into the plans. Now the plans have 58GW. The planned capacity has increased, contrary to the summary.
Much more important thing is that Chinese are actually looking seriously into safety. Another fuck-up after the Fukushima disaster would seal the fate of nuclear electricity generation, and consequently, the last hopes that we'd do something substantial with regards to climate change. The outcome would not be pr
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Yeah, as usual the titles on Slashdot suck.
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and soon: http://imgur.com/a/CnXGL [imgur.com]
Thorium? (Score:2)
Do any of their new reactors use thorium?
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AFAIK the Chinese MSR test reactor is still going forward. No recent news to the contrary.
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go to the last video here:
http://thoriumremix.com/2012/ [thoriumremix.com]
There is some thorium mentioned but I could not stand to watch the whole presentation.
So, pile on the coal then? (Score:2)
Good job that's not in the slightest bit radioactive then [google.com].
If nuclear adopted the same attitude that coal has always had, then reactor leaks would be result in a shrug and a response of "So what, you can't see it, so it can't hurt you."
How I Interpreted the Headline... (Score:1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNhD7OtgBI8&feature=player_detailpage#t=189s [youtube.com]
Stop asking accountants and ask mining engineers, (Score:5, Interesting)
stop building nuclear power plants out in the open air and bury the damn things half a kilometer underground.
Takes care of explosions. (Even if it blows up, get your people out before it blows, seal the shaft and who cares?)
Takes care of terrorist attacks. (The terrorists are NOT going to dig half kilometer long tunnels to get to your fissiles.)
Takes care of leakage. (Its half a kilometer down so its not going in your water table.)
Takes care of waste disposal. (You just dig a bunch of side chambers.)
Takes care of expansion. (You just dig a bunch of side chambers.)
Takes care of exposure. (It never sees the light of day, it never gets above ground.)
You can build the cooling towers, the power distribution towers and the offices above ground but BURY all the rest way down deep.
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This has actually already been considered, but was shot down due to possible ground water contamination and steam explosions. That and the sheer complexity of analyzing ground structure as far as would be necessary for the NRC's satisfaction.
It is MUCH easier to build a practically impenetrable containment dome with defense in depth than it is to bury a reactor in a shaft. However, for small modular reactors, underground is totally the way to go. Can't do it with current commercial sized reactors as they
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lol.
slashdot reporting any story regarding engineering brings out the most inane drivel. a failure in the tertiary pressure boundary would result in a severe casualty, not to mention the absolutely bizarre and needless expense of such an undertaking. the expense of creating the largest deeply buried structure ever created as a housing for a device designed to provide cheap power, and already costs several billion dollars... simply moronic.
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Industrial scale geothermal works fine where the crust is thin. (Hawaii, Iceland, Japan, Yellowstone etc.)
Solar would be used in places where there is lots of sun to melt salt. (Like death valley, Saskatchewan, the Sahara desert, most of the middle east, the Gobi desert, the Atacama desert.)
Nuclear could/should/would be only used where the crust is too thick or where a source of water is problematic.
Totally biased source (Score:3, Informative)
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists [wikipedia.org] is anti-nuclear.
Read about the plans for new nuclear reactors [world-nuclear.org] worldwide.
Over 60 power reactors are currently being constructed in 14 countries including China, South Korea and Russia.
Mainland China [world-nuclear.org] has 17 nuclear power reactors in operation, 28 under construction, and more about to start construction. Additional reactors are planned, including some of the world's most advanced, to give a five- or six-fold increase in nuclear capacity to at least 58 GWe by 2020, then possibly 200 GWe by 2030, and 400 GWe by 2050.
If China doesn't build nukes... (Score:5, Interesting)
58GWe? (Score:2)
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GWe is GW electrical, (not GWh electrical)
58GW x 24h/d x 365d = 508080GWh = 500 TWh
But French 400TWh is high considering the population size.