China Starts Up World's First Fourth-Generation Reactor, Readying Giant Nuclear Ship (reuters.com) 177
hackingbear writes: China has started commercial operations at a new generation nuclear reactor that is the first of its kind in the world, state media said on Dec 5. Compared with previous reactors, the fourth generation Shidaowan plant, a modular 200 megawatt (MW) high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor (HTGCR) plant developed jointly by state-run utility Huaneng, Tsinghua University and China National Nuclear Corporation, is designed to use fuel more efficiently and improve its economics, safety and environmental footprint as China turns to nuclear power to try to meet carbon emissions goals.
In a related development, Shanghai-based Jiangnan Shipyard has unveiled a design for an innovative new giant container ship -- with a load capacity starting at 24,000 standard containers -- powered by a thorium molten-salt nuclear reactor, an alternative 4th gen design. "The new ship model uses nuclear energy as a clean energy source and adopts an internationally advanced fourth-generation molten salt reactor solution. The proposed design of super-large nuclear container ships will truly achieve 'zero emissions' during the operation cycle of this type of ship," the journal Marine Time China said in its official WeChat account.
Shipbuilders from Japan, the United States, South Korea, and Europe have come up with similar designs but none of these countries has a modern and reliable operating reactor to make the design a reality. But China has carried on and, earlier this year, got the first thorium-based molten salt reactor, which needs little amount of water to cool down, making it safer and more efficient, up and running in the Gobi desert. Further reading: China is Building Nuclear Reactors Faster Than Any Other Country
In a related development, Shanghai-based Jiangnan Shipyard has unveiled a design for an innovative new giant container ship -- with a load capacity starting at 24,000 standard containers -- powered by a thorium molten-salt nuclear reactor, an alternative 4th gen design. "The new ship model uses nuclear energy as a clean energy source and adopts an internationally advanced fourth-generation molten salt reactor solution. The proposed design of super-large nuclear container ships will truly achieve 'zero emissions' during the operation cycle of this type of ship," the journal Marine Time China said in its official WeChat account.
Shipbuilders from Japan, the United States, South Korea, and Europe have come up with similar designs but none of these countries has a modern and reliable operating reactor to make the design a reality. But China has carried on and, earlier this year, got the first thorium-based molten salt reactor, which needs little amount of water to cool down, making it safer and more efficient, up and running in the Gobi desert. Further reading: China is Building Nuclear Reactors Faster Than Any Other Country
I remember (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I remember (Score:5, Funny)
oh good, someone with a dungeons and dragons name is remembering when the us used to be able to do something it did two years ago
Re:I remember (Score:5, Interesting)
Funny as your comment is no the USA did not fire up an experimental GenIV reactor two years ago. They fired up a GenIII+ reactor which itself was only a minor iterative improvement on the GenIII reactor design from 1999.
The USA is very much behind when it comes to cutting edge reactor development, and that GenIII+ reactor resulted in the sale of Westinghouse's nuclear division, to Toshiba who itself now on-sold it to a finance company.
There are zero good things to say about what the USA did two years ago.
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there is no such thing as a gen 4 reactor
the us spun up a regular reactor a couple years ago, and the thing i'm responding to is talking about that .
yeah you sound like you know anything at all about this
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Sorry but the IAEA considers this Gen IV. Unlike your knowledge of basic grammar this is real. Learn how to form a proper sentence like you get taught in grade school. This is a site for adults.
Re:I remember (Score:4, Interesting)
oh good, someone with a dungeons and dragons name is remembering when the us used to be able to do something it did two years ago
You conveniently overlooked the 20 years of red-tape profiteering and corruption. It's practically a patented American budget-destroying process when it comes to building these things.
We'll see how much longer we continue to shoot ourselves in the foot when it comes to this actual solution for clean energy.
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That's probably because those things aren't real. I also ignored the vampire squad .
I don't suppose you have a single specific real world example of this moaning you're doing that you're able to give evidence of?
One man's red tape (Score:2)
Americans have a nasty habit of privatizing things that should not be privatized and of allowing regulatory capture to compromise safety. If you do that with a nuclear power plant you end up with a meltdown.
What you're seeing in America is two cultures that are incompatible butting heads. The American culture to see how much you can get away with and the very real need for safety that comes with the culture of a nuclear engineer. It's no surprise that an impasse fo
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When will we be able to get a nuclear reactor on Amazon? Although I ordered a book and it hasn't arrived yet --- might be bad for a reactor
Re: I remember (Score:2)
Re: I remember (Score:2)
When will we be able to get a nuclear reactor on Amazon?
While the water flow from the huge river will help in cooling the reactor, Brazil's petroleum industry might feel threatened.
Re: I remember (Score:2, Insightful)
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The USA is too busy working out someones pronouns wasting time in diversity hires rather than encouraging the best and brightest to create
Or... some people are too busy whinging about simply referring to people as they would like and treating people with respect to realize that they're the ones actually causing the problems in society. Stop being a baby and learn to get along with people unlike yourself. Seriously, is that too difficult?
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With the anger and outright hate that can be directed your way if you didn't magically know in advance what someone wants to be called, ...
I haven't really experienced any of that, but perhaps YMMV ...
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I am happy for you in that case. Honestly and without the sarcasm that could be in such a reply; I really am.
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Let's be blunt, you haven't experienced it either, unless you went out of your way to be a fucking asshole.
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Thank you for informing me about the things I have experienced. I'm glad you were there to take notes when I wasn't.
Re: I remember (Score:4, Insightful)
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The US struggles with nuclear because only a limited number of companies are able to find the right back rooms to grease the right palms to build such devices. And frankly, those companies lack the technical skills to do such things. And worse, they want the government to pay for them to lobby for more money to maybe someday build outdated and unsafe reactors
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Isn't that were China stole the technology and just copied this from? Since China is incapable of creating anything new.
Read the headline again, it says "Fourth-Generation". Later on it uses words like "Thorium".
How many 4th-gen Thorium reactors does the USA have?
Re: I remember (Score:3)
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Isn't that were China stole the technology and just copied this from? Since China is incapable of creating anything new.
China did not steal it; the US DOE gave it away and even allowed them to tour the MSRE facilities at ORNL. Meanwhile, incentives for "advanced" reactors here explicitly exclude the thorium fuel cycle and reactors that produce medical radioisotopes, almost as if the rules were specifically targeting exclusion of LFTR [flibe.com]. Incidentally, it is the one reactor design needing no uranium mining or enrichment, aiming to source fissile from converted spent fuel. The economic case is so compelling, it shouldn't need any
Re: I remember (Score:3)
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In reality... everyone is stealing from each other. The US had a time where they ignored IP laws. China grew by "borrowing" IP. Even Rome used a lot of the Greek concepts. This is just civilization.
Nuclear reactor development, the more research, the better. This research, especially what an AC mentions above about breeder reactor technology and reprocessing spent fuel so the need for a long term, high level, waste site is minimized, is critical.
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The US wanted to build nuclear reactors. Then it grew up.
Grew up and did what? Work hard to scrub that expiration date off all the failing windmills in order to sell it as a viable long-term solution to the masses that's somehow more efficient?
Only thing that grew when it came to building US nuclear reactors was the number of decades of red-tape corruption in front of breaking ground. That greedy behavior tends to destroy the project before it even gets started.
Let's hope privately-owned solar stands a better chance. Lobbying greed from the Electrical Industri
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And now it's prohibitively expensive to do so. Okay, I'm glad that your memory works, but that's not an actual point.
That expense is a matter of policy than technology.
If the technology were prohibitively expensive then we would not be seeing 4th generation nuclear power in China, or every 3rd generation nuclear in UAE. Its been the policy of the US federal government to make nuclear power prohibitively expensive since the Carter administration. Well, it's been half of the government that's been making nuclear power prohibitively expensive, mostly Democrats. From when Carter decided to drive a stake through the heart o
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Media is too effective at spreading negative news. This includes both traditional and social media. You usually hear bad things about someone long before you hear any good things.
Case in point, the only things I heard about Ron DeSantis is an attempt to ban books, prosecuting people publishing real Covid statistics and fighting with Disney over... not exactly sure what. Generally, I feel he has a heavy handed authoritarian approach to doing things. What I haven't heard is any of the good things he's done. H
"zero emmissions"? (Score:2)
The ship uses Thorium to operate, which needs to be mined. Unless mining operations are fully electric, powered by renewables, there are emissions involved. So the claim of "zero emissions" for operating the ship are dubious.
Also, what happens to the used up Thorium? Is it similar to uranium that still needs to be stored safely due to remaining radioactivity? Neither article mentioned it.
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uranium doesn't actually need to be stored safely for more than a couple of weeks; we just do that to mollify the idiots.
thorium's decay chain is so tame that you can drink it.
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Depends what we are talking about. But he is right that Yellowcake [wikipedia.org] for instance is not actually dangerous (except when inhaled). Yellowcake is as radiologically harmless as natural potassium-carrying minerals or thorium-oxide mantles used in paraffin fuel lanterns.
Re: "zero emmissions"? (Score:2)
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Neither. You can handle yellowcake with your bare hands safely. They wear gloves to protect the fuel, not the person.
You know your relatives are eating off of uranium plates, right? It's called "fiestaware," and they're eating trace amounts with every forkfull of ceramic dust
It's unfortunate that slashdot has fallen so far that any time someone with no experience in a field doubts something, they say something sanctimonious like "can't tell if trolling or wrong"
that sort of behavior will severely limit y
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No worries about heavy metal poisoning?
Re:"zero emmissions"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Thorium reactors are breeder reactors so they produce hundreds of times less waste than uranium reactors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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In theory. In practice there are zero (0) "thorium reactors", because among other nasty isotopes evenly spread in the nuclear waste that is their main output, they tend to produce the "wrong" uranium ones (bathing in the process everything in high-energy gamma rays) and anyway to get the fissile uranium out of the waste requires extensive reprocessing, which also isn't available.
But one can dream.
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In theory. In practice there are zero (0) "thorium reactors", because among other nasty isotopes evenly spread in the nuclear waste that is their main output, they tend to produce the "wrong" uranium ones (bathing in the process everything in high-energy gamma rays) and anyway to get the fissile uranium out of the waste requires extensive reprocessing, which also isn't available.
But one can dream.
Why would anyone reprocess the fuel to get the fissile uranium out? Separating the fissile material from the fertile material defeats the purpose of a breeder reactor. Maybe someone might try that to get some weapon grade material but there's far easier ways to do that, such as take natural uranium and run it through some centrifuges like was done for "Little Boy". I'll see many times a concern about how a breeder reactor is some weapon proliferation concern when the first nuclear weapons were not made w
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Why would anyone reprocess the fuel to get the fissile uranium out?
Indeed, why would someone need fuel with known characteristics carefully placed to optimize a burn campaign, instead of a slab of radioactive material shoveled in like coal.
Slashdot is worse than tiktok these day.
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Possibly because they started with fuel with known characteristics, including the breeding stuff, that isn't "carefully placed" because in operation it's a liquid anyways, and thus not "a slab of radioactive material" that you could shovel in like coal.
Basically, if it works without removing shit, why remove shit?
Most LFTR proposals I've seen involve basically taking a fraction of the reactor's mass occasionally and processing it to remove things like spent fuel, then putting it and some fresh fuel back in.
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to get the fissile uranium out of the waste requires extensive reprocessing, which also isn't available.
That's usually seen as an advantage...
Thorium mining (Score:5, Informative)
Okay, I've researched this stuff a bit.
Right now, thorium is considered mostly a waste material in other mines. Some mining sites are avoided because there's too much thorium there. We actually have an excess of production of it because of this. It's been mostly phased out of what industrial uses it had.
Unlike video games, most mining isn't actually for a single metal/element, in a lot of cases there's secondary elements in the mined material that is economically feasible to also recover. So, given that Thorium has an energy density similar to Uranium, we'd need to have a lot of power plants before we really need to go mining specifically for it.
As for zero emissions, well, you're basically trying to redefine the definition of "zero emission" then. Which is normally used for the system's emission level in operation. You're committing something of a nirvana fallacy - by making this, maybe not zero emissions, but "near zero emissions", we're making progress against global warming (and other pollution types).
Not only does the Thorium create emissions, but so doesn't everything else in the ship - the steel, the copper/aluminum for the wiring, etc... But we have development work going on to make steel without using coke (refined coal), new techniques for copper/aluminum, and such.
It's going to be a while before we go after mining equipment for decarbonization, even though I'd imagine that cutting down on combustion in deep mines would be really handy - it's hard to ship a lot of air down that far, and combustion systems like to release carbon monoxide when restrained, air wise, and carbon monoxide likes to kill people.
Also, what happens to the used up Thorium? Is it similar to uranium that still needs to be stored safely due to remaining radioactivity? Neither article mentioned it.
Okay, as part of the chain for nuclear power, Thorium isn't directly useful. First you bombard it with radiation, which turns it into Uranium-232 and U-233. 232 emits lots of gamma rays, which makes it pretty unsuitable for nuclear bombs, but 233 can be used as such, and if you're really on the ball*, you can theoretically separate it out before it becomes uranium (while it is still protactinium**), but, well, it gets complex.
However, on average, despite being transformed into uranium, it's radioactive products are on average shorter lived, so things should be quickly easier to handle.
But then, I've always been of the mind that nuclear waste storage is something of an artificial problem - sure, it needs to be taken care of, but we have ways to permanently dispose of the stuff, like reprocessing it and putting it back into reactors. The stuff remaining after that tends to be very, very hot stuff - which means it doesn't stick around for long, and some deep storage pools followed up by concrete casks works. Not to mention that the volume is actually very very small. There are permanent solutions, the politicians and people without much sense of risk just aren't willing to use them.
We're going to have to worry about the waste from coal operations a lot longer - that stuff is actually stable in its hazards.
But TLDR: it's about the same as traditional reactors. Probably a bit less, because you can basically burn the thorium completely, where with Uranium you still have like 90% of the fuel remaining when you pull it out as waste.
*Edging into "traditional nuclear enrichment is easier", at which point we shouldn't worry about it.
** In terms of separating stuff, sorting elements out is magnitudes easier than sorting isotopes out. The prior you can do with chemistry - dissolve 1 element using chemicals that leave the other element behind, take advantage of different melting/vaporization temperatures, etc... The latter you're pretty much stuck gasifying it and spinning it in a very big very sensitive centrifuge.
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Thorium oxide is found in the same deposits as the rare earth oxides, so it's not surprising that China has lots.
Re:Thorium mining (Score:5, Informative)
Mostly I'm on board with your excellent comment. A few things though.
It's not clear why you believe this. This is not correct. Uranium decays the same way regardless of how it was created.
The LFTR advantage isn't a real thing. It's a youtube myth.
There's no real problems with class 3 PWR in an engineering sense. It's safe, it's reliable, it's well understood. America has had more than half of the world's meltdowns - over 100 - and a reactor has never killed a person here. There's a good argument that nuclear power is not just the safest power technology, but indeed the safest technology of any kind, ever invented.
LFTR claims four advantages:
1. Safer. Horseshit. We've never run one and we have no idea what its safety characteristics are. Back in the 1950s we thought PWR couldn't melt down, too. Lars and Ed are just unimaginative; it's not very difficult to think of serious problems beginning with the infiltration tank cracking. Go ask Cavan; he can go on for ages about unconsidered risks.
2. Cheaper. Again, horseshit. We had built 20 nuclear plants for the price we've spent researching this one. Nuclear plants have been made by individual teenagers. You might as well spend ten billion dollars inventing a cheaper $5 watch. You will never build enough of them to pay the delta off.
3. Small modular scale. ***Horseshit***. Nothing in engineering stops anyone from building PWRs at that scale. The reason we don't do it is economic: the structure of the legal overhead from auditing and validating a plant makes them not cost effective. That's why France and South Korea regularly build smaller plants than anyone else - they have advanced auditing schemes that do not require anywhere near as much pointless overhead.
4. Factory buildable. Well, this would be a nice advantage, except y'know, I've been hearing Lars talk about converting a shipyard for more than 20 years, and work hasn't begun, yet. A factory to build regular PWR could be built much faster than that, including replacing Japan Steelworks, if anyone actually wanted to.
They solved a bunch of problems that aren't the problems the industry faces; they built a device that needs a legal and regulatory regieme that doesn't exist; and now they can't figure out why they can't get customers.
And you think those deep brains are going to solve this?
You seem to be forgetting about breeder reactors.
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"It's not clear why you believe this. This is not correct. Uranium decays the same way regardless of how it was created.)
Not true. The U-233 from breeding the Thorium 232 does not have the same decay chain as U-235 which is also different than U-238.
Isotopes matter.
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As Mspangler mentions, isotopes matter.
It gets complicated, so I'd recommend reading the wiki page [wikipedia.org] and such on it.
Basically, since a thorium reactor can process the actinide wastes (mostly), while a PWR cannot, you end up with a lot less waste, and the paths to stable elements are much faster - IE shorter halflifes, the waste is considered less of a problem.
Note: These sorts of analysis gets to be very complcated because not only do you have natural decay paths, but anything in the reactor is subject to ne
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That's the thing, we aren't claiming otherwise.
We're measuring something different than 'tons in/tons out', which isn't actually all that useful.
Think more kilograms of waste per GWh produced. Because a LFTR reactor would theoretically have near 100% burn up, it needs around 1/10th the fuel, ergo 1/10th the waste for a given amount of energy.
Then, add in something like higher temperatures enabling better efficiency. If you go from 33% efficient to 50% efficient at converting the heat to electricity, you
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The ship uses Thorium to operate, which needs to be mined.
Plenty of thorium is produced as a byproduct of other mining.
Thorium is four times as abundant as uranium. Only 0.7% of uranium is fissile U235, but 100% of thorium can be burned in a reactor. So far less thorium needs to be mined.
So the claim of "zero emissions" for operating the ship are dubious.
Only for pedants.
Is it similar to uranium that still needs to be stored safely due to remaining radioactivity?
Thorium MSRs produce far less waste than uranium PWRs.
There are even proposals to dump waste from PWRs into thorium MSRs to burn it up.
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The ship uses Thorium to operate, which needs to be mined.
Thorium is actually a huge byproduct of current mining.
Unless mining operations are fully electric, powered by renewables, there are emissions involved.
Yes, that is accurate. The largest machinery actually are electric because electric motors handle high-torque loads nicely where ICE requires a lot of additional gearing.
the claim of "zero emissions" for operating the ship are dubious.
Not at all. There are no polluting emissions from the reactor. Furthermore, there is nothing intrinsic about the fuel system that requires emissions.
Also, what happens to the used up Thorium?
Thorium reactors radically reduce the amount of waste produced (we're talking multiple orders of magnitude) and the waste it does produce
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One ton of fuel? It's very clear you have no idea how energy dense nuclear fuel is.
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And what has that to do with the problem/previous statement?
Hu?
One ton in, one ton out.
1) One ton of spent nuclear fuel would take decades to amass.
2) Since the elements are literally being changed, no, one ton in does not become one ton out.
A trap for moronic investors (Score:2)
Duh. This is a variant of a typical "Nigerian prince" scam. The completely unreasonable proposition is a feature to filter out everyone, but the most moronic investors.
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They actually made the ship. It's a running nuclear reactor that delivers power in the real world. No Nigerian Prince scam has ever built a working nuclear reactor, little buddy.
Uh. The Chinese government is doing this, and isn't taking investors. Be less paranoid.
What's unreasonable about putting a nuclear reactor on a ship? Amer
Re: A trap for moronic investors (Score:2)
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And yep, it's a scam. I bet you $10k on that. It's not even the first one, http://thorenergy.no/ [thorenergy.no] is another example.
Operators learned from Chernobyl and Fukushima (Score:2, Funny)
Don't build reactors on land: when they go boom, it makes you look bad and costs billions for decades.
Instead, float your reactors on boats: when they go bad, sink the boat and then you can just lazily monitor if the seawater on the surface tickles the Geiger counter and claim the environmental impact is limited.
Re: Operators learned from Chernobyl and Fukushima (Score:3)
How many people died from radiation due to both accidents you mentioned. Itâ(TM)s less than 10 in the first, primarily because they were a military experiment by a dictatorship forcing people into the reactor to clean up the mess before the media showed up and zero in the latter because everything worked as designed, hell, Fukushima is releasing the waste people thought was so dangerous because it is completely inert.
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We've got at least one nuclear powered vessel sunk, sitting on the ocean floor. Monitoring reveals that it's impact is zero.
Water is an excellent radiation shield [xkcd.com]. Swimming in a spent nuclear fuel storage pool will not kill you. Even if the NRC security force does.
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Water is an excellent radiation shield [xkcd.com]. Swimming in a spent nuclear fuel storage pool will not kill you. Even if the NRC security force does.
Water isn't just an excellent radiation shield, it's also an excellent heat sink and transfer system as well. Having all the spaces stuffed with water at pressures roughly equal to that of BWR/PWR reactors means that even a reactor that wasn't SCRAMed won't melt down(further).
Worst case, the water might boil a bit, setting up a convection current and increasing cooling capabilities even more.
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TLDR
Only if your attention span is limited to episodes of Ow! My Balls!
Re: Operators learned from Chernobyl and Fukushima (Score:2)
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Don't build reactors on land: when they go boom. Instead, float your reactors on boats,
sail them to 'friendly' harbors then say sorry, shit happens.
Oh yeah. Like THAT won't rile the international NIMBY crowd.
Aren't their supercharriers already falling apart? (Score:2)
And rotting because they're built out of chinesium?
I really don't think it's a good idea to have China build nuclear fission powerplants. Whether on land or for floating on the sea.
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So you're suggesting someone partner with them to have them built out of Americanesium instead, for the safety of a planet?
I mean it's not like you're going to wag your finger in China's face and they'll give a shit about your concerns.
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There's no such thing as "americanesium."
"But but I just took the"
nobody cares. Your comment doesn't make sense, and theirs does.
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There's no such thing as "americanesium."
If there were it would either be high-carbon mild steel, or hardened titanium... depending on whether you're taking your inspiration from a Bel-Air or an Abrams.
no one will let them in their ports (Score:5, Informative)
The main reason there are no commercial nuclear ships is not lack of tech but huge uncertainty around where will they even be able to go. People are scared of nuclear and many countries/ports will likely forbid them from entering making them extremely undependable ships. In worst case permission can even be cancelled after some anti-nuclear protests. For civilian transport companies that's just an unnecessary risk.
A story of nuclear powered civilian ship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Transfer-at-sea is a viable solution for a large enough ship. Swing off the coast of a few destinations in a round-about trip and offload a few dozen to a few thousand containers onto another ship which sails into port.
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The Savannah was hardly a good demonstration of the technology. The ship was some kind of odd mix of a passenger liner and cargo ship, so not suited to serve either purpose. I can only guess what they were thinking in building a ship like that. Perhaps they thought they needed spacious and luxurious accommodations for the crew to get anyone to consider working on a prototype nuclear powered ship. Perhaps they expected people to want to take tours of a working cargo ship, this would be a first of a kind
Re:no one will let them in their ports (Score:4, Interesting)
This is true. Right up to the point at which your countries food imports arrive by nuclear cargo ships. Want to eat? Here's your shipment.
No, this is not why (Score:5, Informative)
"....China turns to nuclear power to try to meet carbon emissions goals....."
No, this is not why. They are not trying to meet any carbon emission goals. They have no goals, other than growing the economy and making it sanction proof.
Where does this crazy idea come from, that the Chinese are fully sold on the climate emergency and are leading the world in emission reduction? The truth is exactly the opposite. In the first six months of this year they approved more coal generation than the total capacity of the UK or Germany or France. And that was just additional.
They mine and burn more coal than the rest of the world put together. They are on track to be emitting 15+ billion tons of CO2 in the next ten or 15 years.
Where do people get this wishful thinking about China from?
Re:No, this is not why (Score:4, Insightful)
Where do people get this wishful thinking about China from?
Probably stems from all those flying around the world in private jets being paid to corruptly extract billions from taxpayers to fund climate "emergencies" while offshoring all manufacturing to China, because profits above all.
Also helps to keep people from talking about the 1% and the pollution they are directly responsible for, because lifestyles.
Re:No, you aren't giving the full story. (Score:2, Informative)
What you are saying doesn't tell the whole story.
How many of China's old coal plants that are dirty and inefficient, are closing down and being replaced by newer ones that will include scrubbing and more CO2 abating measures?
E.g. A recent Reuters article talks about the Yushen Yuheng coal power plant. That plant has 1.2gw of capacity. It uses the newest coal technology using ultra super critical technology which is 46% efficient. It's replacing 702MW of presumably subcritical coal power plants, which hav
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Where do people get this wishful thinking about China from?
A) Optimism bias [wikipedia.org]
B) Consistently bad news doesn't sell.
C) Corporations operate in China and know that bad mouthing China will hurt product sales.
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Most American military believes that China's air quality has gotten so bad that the Chinese government is afraid of creating the first air quality government overthrow.
They are trying to control carbon emissions to keep from being defenestrated.
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They are trying to control carbon emissions to keep from being defenestrated.
I'd argue that in that case the carbon emissions being controlled are a side effect, what would get them defenestrated would be NOx, SO2, particulates(PM2.5 stuff), mercury, and other shit that does things like create smog.
Basically, the stuff along with rivers catching fire that caused the USA to create and empower the EPA back in the day.
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The new coal plants are mostly to replace older ones that are being decommissioned. People made the same mistake about Germany building new plants a few years ago, when in fact they were closing more than they were opening.
China did start building some new capacity because they had some problems a couple of years ago, but by the time it came online, wind was already there and cheaper.
The coal lobby in China is powerful, but they are also inevitably going to lose. China is still on target to hit emissions pe
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CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a greenhouse gas but that is distinct from pollution. China has an air pollution problem, it is so bad that they fear public revolts over it. They are seeking nuclear power to clean the air, the lower CO2 emissions is a nice side benefit that they can bring to events like COP28 to show how good they are to the rest of the world about global warming.
Nuclear power also means China can use domestically sourced thorium for energy than imported petroleum and coal. They have ple
This is amazing! (if true) (Score:2)
Look, I'm ask skeptical of China as the next guy but all indication point to China having have already build a functional a thorium molten-salt nuclear reactor. It could be a ruse but to what end? The necessary components to build one exist, it's a matter of investing in research which they have made no secret of. In all cases, it's nuclear power which is a good thing.
I'm no fan of China but if they can help push the world toward a completely nuclear powered fleet of container ships, I'm 100% in favor of it
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I recall hearing that the air on the deck of most every cruise ship is just horrible from the diesel exhaust. A nuclear powered cruise ship would be a considerable improvement. I expect that like with anything nuclear there will be the usual "out of an abundance of caution" measures that will prevent that from happening any time soon. With aircraft the newest models often come out as military and/or cargo versions first to test everything out before being allowed to carry passengers, I expect that to hap
Trust China to lie and BS (Score:2)
Wiki on Colorado’s 1 Ft. St. Vrain nuclear power plant.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [slashdot.org]“> It was one of two high temperature gas cooled (HTGR) power reactors in the United States. The primary coolant helium transferred heat to a water secondary coolant system to drive steam generators. The reactor fuel was a combination of fissile uranium and fertile thorium microspheres disper
We got Zero Emissions here! (Score:2)
You misspelled nucular (Score:2)
According to Dubya, at least. :D
Re:christ, are we really doing this again? (Score:5, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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It's because they aren't ready to rush into production of an experimental design, which has failed badly every other time it's been tried.
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There's no such thing as a 4th generation reactor.
I dunno, I heard AT&T is working on a 9th gen reactor ... :-)
Re:Are we sure? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yeah?
Well I just ordered one from alibaba.
Mine goes to 11.
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Yeah, just like the japs couldn't design and manufacture planes in 1940s. Remember the Zero?
Re: Are we sure? (Score:2)
Re:With a nuclear safety record that is an unknown (Score:5, Insightful)
We'll hear a lot more about these developments shortly, but in a bit different context. Let's hope the Chinese who live near them have enough salt.
No you won't hear about them shortly for two reasons. 1. This reactor has been in operation for 2 years already, the news here is that it is in "commercial operation", i.e. making money rather than just in testing. And 2. It's a pebble bed reactor. Pebble bed reactors are passively safe.
I'd sooner live next to a Chinese built pebble bed reactor than any of the west's decaying crap.
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The one that interests me is the Thorium Molten Salt Reactor. TMSRs have a lot of good points being promoted, but I'm no idea how accurate those promotions are.
Re: Contradictions (Score:2)
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No, because people don't like naval vessels with nuclear reactors on board. Even the US Navy cannot dock in many places because of "no nukes here" FUD from Greenpeace and co.
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