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China Slowing Nuclear Buildout In Response To Fukushima
Lasrick writes "Yun Zhou writes about the end result of China's long reconsideration of nuclear power safety in the wake of Fukushima. Important details about the decision to adopt designs created in China, and incorporate Gen III in those designs."
The short version is that they won't be building more Generation II reactors, opting instead to only build Generation III reactors (which have passive safety systems). Instead of relying entirely on the AP1000, China is speeding up the design of their own Generation III reactors. Plans are still in place for 70GW by 2020, but that date will likely slip due to regulatory delays and the temporary construction moratorium.
Yet another area that China will be ahead of the US on before long. I realize that there's still a lot that the US has going for it. But it's feeling more and more like we are just sitting on our asses and admiring past achievements. It's getting rather embarrassing. Perhaps it's time to seriously consider learning Mandarin.
Are they building their new nuclear reactors with 50 year old technology on fault lines next to an ocean with an insufficient battery back up? That would be the only reason a sensible person would look at the Fukushima and decide not to build a nuclear power plant.
Wish more stories on /. started that way. ;)
Bark less. Wag more.
Stole? They're using AP1000 reactors from westinghouse. That's not theft, that's called buying. Now to get the contract Westinghouse agreed to a join project with the chinese on a new reactor design that the chinese will own the domestic IP to, but export is still westinghouse. Which is what is otherwise called a technology transfer or sale of technology.
They're probably figuring building them in china, with corrupt chinese workers and officials is a recipe for disaster.
And maybe they won't need any street lights, too, as everything will glow anyway.
After all, there are several parts of China that are quite earthquake-prone and given what happened at Fukushima, the Chinese will definitely build reactors with passive safety features so the reactor can be safely shut down even after a strong earthquake.
That's why China is aggressively pursuing molten-salt reactor technology such as the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), which are extremely safe to run even in areas of substantial earthquake danger. (It also helps that China has a large stockpile of thorium--a side product of their aggressive rare-Earth mining program. They Chinese might as well put good use to all that thorium.)
There seems to be a strange sentiment among some that "they" (i.e. everyone they don't like) should have to reinvent the wheel for any thing they do, ignoring of course how their own countrymen came about the knowledge in question in the first place. Knowledge belongs to humanity, not to the arbitrary groupings of humans called countries and companies.
Knowledge costs money to produce. Hence we have IP laws. If you design nuclear reactors for a living giving away your work with no ownership protection will put you out of a job very quickly. Westinghouse has (correctly) figured that the reactor business is go no where in the US, so they're basically willing to cannibalize any future business they could have had to get money now from the chinese, and then it becomes chinas problem if no one will buy the reactors. All those Westinghouse workers should expect to be out of a job within the decade.
Quite a lot of people have fought, bribed and died over the borders of countries, they mean quite a lot to a lot of people. Even the company that pays me is important in that I don't have any money if they don't pay me.
Yet another area that China will be ahead of the US on before long.
China slowing nuclear buildout!
"The Chinese are ahead of the US!"
(in an alternate article)
China increasing nuclear buildout!
"The Chinese are ahead of the US!"
Some people just like to say the US is 'behind', no matter what the issue or facts are.
The deal is voluntary, if Westinghouse don't want to agree to China's terms they don't have to sell them anything.
By hard work and spending a lot of money on research?
And you think the knowledge required to perform that research came out of nowhere? It was based on a knowledge-base built and shared through thousands of years by all matter of possible nationalities, ethnicities, creeds, etc.
Built on, but wasn't. I'm a professional scientist. My job is to do something new on top of what other people did. Quite a lot of what other people did has to be paid for. In many cases that work was paid for by governments so it could be public (including my work) but there are huge volumes of knowledge owned by and produced in the private sector.
Not really. It belongs more to the people who put in the effort and money to acquire it than to those who didn't. Otherwise it is foolish to do your own research and smart to copy others' research.
"Copying" other peoples research is the very definition of how science progresses, "standing on the shoulders of giants" and whatnot. Or are you proposing that Westinghouse developed all the knowledge required to build nuclear reactors?
No, it isn't. Science progresses by adding to previous work. It isn't just collecting other peoples ideas, it's adding a new idea that adds something new or novel that no one else did before. You have to acknowledge what other people did so as to not imply their work was yours.
Obviously his 'socialism is slavery' thing is nonsense. I agree with you on that one.
they are. google it.
And that's even before the first one has fired up yet!
You expect problems with new designs, that's normal. Another problem we have here however when large numbers of a new design are committed to before the first one is even completed.
We've had a lot of people preaching about how wonderful the AP1000 is before any of them have actually existed let alone had time to shake the bugs out - salesfolk and fanboys swallowing the seed of salesfolk whole after being told how pretty and smart they are.
Sorry to be a prick and show you up as a liar here, but the closest thing to a running AP1000 reactor is the yet unfinished one in China that GE is building. It's not tried and tested by any stretch of the imagination.
India has no large deposits of uranium ore so it has gone for rather clumsy uranium-plutonium-thorium power reactor designs. It is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty so it shouldn't be getting any international help with their nuclear programme, things like uranium imports, technology transfers etc. but the US decided a couple of years back to ignore the NPT and start helping them out in that regard with a pinky swear that the Indians won't transfer the tech or materials to their weapons programme, really honest to Shiva.
Any country with a workable weapons plutonium breeding operation uses purpose-built reactors, not uranium power reactors to make their bomb material. There were a couple of clumsy dual-purpose designs early on in the history of power reactors (Magnox and the Russian RBMK-4) which allowed time-limited exposure of U-238 to neutron flux to produce marginally-pure Pu-239 but nobody builds or uses them today and few nuclear weapons were made from material produced by those reactors.
The other thing is that after having bred enough plutonium for an arsenal of weapons there's no real point making more so the idea that countries build tested and proven uranium reactor designs rather than thorium-uranium burners or complex and unproven flow-thorium reactors because of their wish for weapons-grade plutonium is kinda silly. The US for example has over 70 tonnes of weapons-grade Pu in stock, the result of stockpile reductions and better weapons design requiring smaller amounts of fissionable material. Britain has over a hundred tonnes in stock, I believe, and the old Soviet states have been selling their own surplus Pu-239 weapons pits to the West to be burned up in power reactors as Mixed-Oxide (MOX) fuel.
The LFTR designs can be easily tweaked to produce U-233 (indeed the precursors have to be actively removed from the "exhaust" to prevent it forming). U-233 works well enough as a bomb core as the US found out when it fired off a couple of test samples in the Fifties and a continuous-process system such as LFTR makes it much easier to remove U-233 during regular operations to create a stockpile of weapons-grade material.