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Next-Gen Nuclear Power Plant Breaks Ground In China
An anonymous reader writes "The construction of first next-generation Westinghouse nuclear power reactor breaks ground in Sanmen, China. The reactor, expected to generate 12.7 Megawatts by 2013, costs 40 billion Yuan (~US$6 billion; that's a lot of iPods.) According to Westinghouse, 'The AP1000 is the safest and most economical nuclear power plant available in the worldwide commercial marketplace, and is the only Generation III+ reactor to receive Design Certification from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.' However, Chinese netizens suspect China is being used as a white rat to test unproven nuclear technologies (comments in Chinese)." Update: 04/20 07:28 GMT by T : As several readers have pointed out, this plant will generate much more than 12.7 Megawatts -- more like 1100 MWe.
It's a 1.2GW plant. The current order is for four reactors, for 8 billion dollars. The price is expected to fall to about 1 billion per reactor. China has a goal of building 100 reactors by 2020. IF the USA built that many, it would cut power plant greenhouse gas emissions by 30%, or the equivalent of nearly a million windmills.
This is my sig.
Three Mile Island. Three Mile Island. Three Mile Island. That's the only one you have to know, because it's the name that's been repeating in the minds of potential private investors in US nuclear power for over 30 years. Investors don't give a crap about cost savings or net power generation - at least directly, what they want to know first and foremost is what their chances are of making guaranteed bank over the life of the plant are. Investing in coal and oil is a sure-fire 100% money maker. Nuclear might be an even bigger money maker, 99% of the time, but... Three Mile Island, Three Mile Island, Three Mile Island...
I'm in the process of installing a 4kw grid of solar panels on my own roof for a cost (after subsidies/rebates) of $17k, so $4.25 / watt. For greener energy, I think the premium is worth it.
$4.25/Watt-peak, not Watt. It's not the same.
Also, the Nuke power plant gives 1.2gW constant. Day and night. Sunny or rainy.
Not quite a good comparison.
Three Mile Island. Three Mile Island. Three Mile Island. That's the only one you have to know
TMI's operator's insurance company payed out US$40M in lawsuits. Not much, even in 1980 dollars.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I just gave a briefing to one of the engineers at this power plant a few weeks ago. Interesting place! It's sort of out in the middle of nowhere, at least as a far as coastal China goes. It's about an hour and a half from here, and the place would never have been built anywhere in the West. There is a Western psuedo-religion that automatically opposes anything with the word "atoms" in the name...it really retards progress. It's the sort of thing that really stands out in relief after you've been out of America for a while and gotten used to the sanity of daily Chinese life. It's really cool when you have a relationship with the guy who grows your vegetables, AND he's just a regular guy, not some psuedo-religious neogardener.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Who cares about Chernobyl? No one is building new RBMK-1000/1500 reactors these days. Since the USSR is no more, no one is stupid enough to perform a breathtakingly stupid experiment on a hot reactor that wasn't particularly stable by design in the first place.
Anyone who invokes Chernobyl as an argument against modern nuclear power had better have a good grasp of what actually happened at Chernobyl and why it isn't applicable outside of Chernobyl.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Let's look at two numbers here:
8.9 billion kWh per year
and
153 million kWh per year.
And - oh wait, there's just the trivial need to have them...
combined with solar, geothermal and other renewable resources, they will provide a fairly stable power supply
A nuclear power plant needs none of this to provide a *very* stable power supply, and is neatly placed in one spot, with a much smaller overall infrastructure build than a miscellaneous hodge-podge of various power sources scattered wherever the environment is suitable for them. It's also proven to work very well at base load generation.
So, which would you rather spend $0.049/kWh on -- a nuclear plant that might go over budget, might leak radiation at some point during its life, whose waste will need to be carefully controlled and permanently stored somewhere that hasn't yet been identified; or a wind farm whose costs are much more certain and which comes without all those ancillary risks?
I would prefer to spend my 4.9cents per kWh on something that will reliably produce base load power 24/7 thanks. Come back in 20 years when some other sucker^W fearless forward-thinker has lost a pile of cash getting the tech tamed and into the markeplace.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
First of all, Chernobyl was largely not caused by human error. It was due to pure bloody mindedness inherent in the USSR and a dangerous reactor design that made even more dangerous by disabling critical safety systems.
Everyone likes to paint TMI as a huge disaster that should be ranked with Chernobyl, yet TMI was no more serious than a small, controlled release of radioactive gas which quickly dispersed into the atmosphere. Which funnily enough is the exact sort of thing that coal plants do all the time yet nobody appears to live in mortal terror of them. TMI is only considered major because the danger was inflated and the government instilled panic by evacuating large numbers of people. Combine that with a little lobbying from coal and oil companies and you get the current disaster that is US policy on nuclear energy.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Yet despite all of this, it didn't go "bang" and it hasn't happened before or after. I'm not arguing that accidents can't happen, or that reactor design is perfect and can never go wrong, but what TMI shows is that even when things do go wrong, they can be managed.
On a scale of 1-10 there is still a huge, huge gap between TMI and Chernobyl. The two can't be compared at all.
When the prevailing opinion on a subject matter is contrary to your own, the onus is on you to demonstrate the facts and "win hearts and minds."
Getting e-angry and insulting your detractors isn't going to help change popular perception of nuclear safety in the slightest.
TIn both cases, better training and adhering to safety protocols would have saved lives
Saved lives at Three Miles Island? Who died?