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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.
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.
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
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.