It's easy to build NPPs if you have no greenpeace and no Austrians. West is getting bogged down because that is a favorable state for for-profit suppliers.
Every change request is good for supplier. But very bad for purchaser.
The Clean Air Alliance is a group of Canadian morons who advertise against nuclear. I guess they’re bored since we shut down all coal in Ontario 10 years ago.
Double lobbying groups. NG and solar/wind industries really don't want to see sustainable nuclear reform.
If we're going to switch the bulk of transportation workload to electric we need a HELL of a lot more capacity. Certain groups want to ensure they get a biggest slice of the pie. Regardless of the cost to anyone else. It's just public narrative astroturfing. Hate it.
Think bigger; most of the propaganda is coming from nation-states that are heavily dependent on fossil fuel exports. Russia for example is a major culprit of this in Europe (Germany in particular).
Ironically the anti-nuclear eco movement’s most generous benefactors are often some of the least Eco friendly entities on the planet.
> It's easy to build NPPs if you have no greenpeace and no Austrians.
Governments have murdered people for less. Let's not pretend that they are actually scared of Greenpeace and Austria's shilling.
>But it’s waning now that the 100% RE idea is in doubt.
It's not in doubt.
It's technically almost infeasible and crazy talk economically.
That does not matter however.
The people understand fuck all about the electric grid.
Batteries and solar panels sounds and feels feasible to them on first hearing and is therefore the thing politicians will push to no end.
Invest in LNG I'd say. The whole green hydrogen hype will collapse on economics and gas will remain the cheapest option for poisoned grids.
It's rough to say but you need an exceptional leadership and/or good education to enact and convey the need for sensible energy policies.
Those don't exist in internet age democracy.
It does exist.
[https://www.krqe.com/news/technology/ap-us-energy-secretary-calls-for-more-nuclear-power-while-celebrating-35-billion-georgia-reactors/](https://www.krqe.com/news/technology/ap-us-energy-secretary-calls-for-more-nuclear-power-while-celebrating-35-billion-georgia-reactors/)
[https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/05/29/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-new-steps-to-bolster-domestic-nuclear-industry-and-advance-americas-clean-energy-future/](https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/05/29/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-new-steps-to-bolster-domestic-nuclear-industry-and-advance-americas-clean-energy-future/)
Scared no, affected yes. It provides great cover for the fact that natural gas is one of the largest industries in the US which is the main reason for why the energy mix is what it is.
The 1970s oil crisis and the more recent gas crisis have shown that fossil fuel prices are too volatile for something that the entire economy relies on, especially since alternatives have existed for 50 years. Governments have spent tons of money on nuclear weapons, even after the USSR fell.
You can lose the forest for the trees, though. Sure, you know it's bad for the country. But you can't authorise nuclear projects in your state, you know they'll take their refinery elsewhere for that and you'll be responsible for driving jobs away. The oil worker vote is quite significant it lots of states and cares quite a bit about being able to feed their kids in the future. Soon enough that national forest of economic resiliency and defense concerns disappears in the face of your imminent re-election and the short-term economic prosperity of your state. And that's not assuming corruption. In truth, there's way, way more factors.
Several petrostates have built nuclear power stations explicitly to save oil for other uses, including export. Re-election is a valid point because building a fleet of nuclear power stations is a long-term program, but France managed it, while nuclear weapons states kept maintaining and upgrading their nuclear weapons for decades after the USSR fell.
Sure, it's not like it's impossible. The US has nuclear reactors too! And those were built in a time when oil was even more important. "Oil baron" was a reasonable description for a lot of people. Perhaps notable was that the oil industry was very large and very important, but very fragmented due to the breaking up of Standard Oil. Now each fragment of Standard Oil has become larger than what Rockefeller ever had, so that probably complicates things. Petrostates are not usually complex democracies subject to these kinds of trees-for-the-forest effects. Saudi Arabia is a good example — it liberalised recently by allowing women to drive but just a week before people were getting arrested for proposing far less impressive advances in women's rights. It's a very top-down system, and so the main beneficiary of oil extraction and the person mostly responsible for guiding the state are both the crown prince. That makes doing things like this really simple and easy. Exports are, once again, a nation-level concept whereas companies only care about selling, whether it's to your own people or to others generally doesn't matter. Having both oil and the state under one roof allows for these more rational decisions to be made. If the US was running state oil companies, I'm sure that they'd be enthusiastically building reactors for petrol export too.
Way further behind than that. US citizens are so incredibly uneducated about nuclear power that it would take at least 15 years to get their heads out of their asses enough to even begin to consider that nuclear power isn't inherently evil. Then, it would take another 50 years to make any sort of reasonable political and regulatory changes needed to build a useful plant.
The US is a republic that frequently takes no input from its citizens when doing anything. Make it a national security issue and it’s gets done by one stroke of a pen.
That is how France did it. The people were never pro-nuclear (until today).
But the government doesn't consult the general population about most other energy issues, they just do what is necessary to keep things going. After all the people would be really upset if electricity stopped coming out of the wall.
Yep. Theres no society “educated” on this topic, except for the few like France. Even an “educated” society like Germany axed their nuclear due to bad nuclear pr. Nuclear is just broadly unpopular because of high profile disasters and a misunderstanding of nuclear waste management. Theres a stigma pretty much globally, it’s up to governments to understand that nuclear is going to be a must have moving forward and need to just build it anyways. Sooner the better.
The US has almost double the nuclear energy output China has in 2024. The first ever nuclear fusion replication happened in California last year. This article literally makes no sense.
The Chinese plants are using 70 year old technology but yes they are building a lot of them. The US has a fundamentally different strategy that uses new tech for smaller modular nuclear reactors. The best nuclear fusion research is being done in California as well.
The logic of this article would be like saying a country is building more landline telephones than the US so they must be 10-15 years ahead of the US in telecoms.
Look up modular nuclear reactors. It’s a new tech that the US has begun exporting and building in the states.
Generation 4 nuke reactors by definition means it’s a nuclear plant with atleast one piece of technology built after the year 2000. It’s a term used in the media, it has no applicable scientific or engineering meaning whatsoever.
High temperature gas cooled reactors were literally theorized in the 40s and then invented in the 60s in the United States.
Molten salt reactors were theorized in the 50s and then invented in practice in the 60s in the United States.
You’re reading Chinese propaganda man.
This is ignorant of the full picture - both of these technologies were pretty much shelved until nowadays. At the time the existing already working technology developed and employed by the US navy was adopted as standard because developing these technologies to be commercially feasible was not worth the upfront R&D costs (or at least that was the logic employed back then).
> The US has a fundamentally different strategy that uses new tech for smaller modular nuclear reactors.
That, to be clear, have never been deployed commercially anywhere. Like it'd be nice if the SMR developers figure their stuff out on costs but right now? The US doesn't have a strategy that "uses" new tech. It has a strategy that "hopes to someday use" new tech.
To be fair, SMR’s are brand fucking new. Your argument is equivalent to 10 years ago saying Tesla has untested electric cars that have never been commercially viable
Certainly, and I really hope they figure it out. I just think it's important to also plan for the possibility they're never commercially viable. It certainly feels like a lot of SMR companies might be closer to a tech startup trying to get acquired at a high valuation than they are infrastructure companies looking to pump out megawatts.
> Look up modular nuclear reactors.
Oh, you mean like the one China already has in operation?
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinese-HTR-PM-Demo-begins-commercial-operation
Or the other one they're building at a great pace?
https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Outer-dome-installed-on-Chinese-small-modular-nucl
And yes, one's an HTGR and the other one's a LWR. Just like the SMR designs that are anywhere close to regulatory approval in the USA.
What are their reactor containment buildings like? Are they in the US style or are they following the Russian method? I will never forget growing up near three mile island, getting to tour it (just before 9/11) and they walked up through how strong the containment buildings were. Especially since there was an airport just up river. The building could take a direct hit from a 757 and be fine. I remember that was also big reason that despite partial meltdown, TMI wasnt really bad environmentally.
I wonder how much of the general public in China is educated about nuclear power vs the government officials who frequently have science and engineering educations.
In 15 years of our current projected path, fission will be permanently off the table. Might as well go over to Commonwealth Fusion and pray they can get SPARC working faster.
Renewables and batteries are getting cheaper year over year while new nuclear is getting more expensive.
Ooof. This article makes a good attempt at being well-researched and covering multiple angles of each nation's advantages and disadvantages, but it is marred by a rather nationalist and US-centric slant further into the article.
>"This reflected incredible naïveté by U.S. officials, who argued that transferring to the Chinese, for free, incredibly valuable U.S. technology made sense because it would help mitigate global warming. One almost cannot make this up."
Non-academic phrasing aside, the author seems to have a rather entrenched viewpoint that technology sharing with China is a very bad idea, and that Westinghouse winning the bid to build AP-1000 reactors in China and agreeing to transfer technology (no coercion here btw) is the single worst mistake the US could make.
Interestingly, he seems to omit the fact that his claim of "incredible naïveté by U.S. officials" is in fact, proven true with the same statistics he includes earlier:
>China’s plans to produce 200 GW of nuclear energy by 2025 “could prevent about 1.5 billion tons of annual carbon emissions, more than what’s generated by the U.K., Spain, France, and Germany combined.” The country seeks to replace all 2,990 of its coal-fired generators with clean energy solutions by 2060.
I think most of the scientific community would see this as a resounding success for humanity as a whole if China achieves this, in fact it would literally change the course of humanity towards actually achieving global sustainability goals and solving energy crisis, moreso if this can be exported.
But no, humanity's progress be damned. The author goes on to state that "China has become America’s leading geostrategic competitor, and America needs to completely cease any sharing of its nuclear technologies with the country." Nevermind that he himself concedes that “China is years ahead of the United States in even deploying our country’s own technologies.”. I read statements like this and it kills me to see how shortsighted and regressive politics are towards scientific progress.
In fact, the entire "What should America Do?" section is laughable. Almost every single suggestion feels like repeating talking points while being extremely lacking in actual substance. It boils down to "the government needs to get their shit together and... do stuff! Don't ask me how though! P.S. Fuck China". Perhaps I'm a bit too harsh on this, but I'm just annoyed with reading so many articles rehashing the same "advice" with none really looking into the "how's" - I think what the US really needs is a close look at the internal challenges involved and think about actual formative solutions - which may very well involve working *with* China in a (*gasp*) collaborative relationship. Mind-blowing, I know.
This is what great power competition looks and smells like. I think you just need to get used to it. This “new Cold War” will be continually fought primarily economically and diplomatically. If deterrent measures cannot prevent military conflict it will be exceedingly bad for the entire world.
There is such a thing as naivety to China, the is such a thing as a healthy dose of skepticism to China, and then there is this
warmongering nationalism
>Oh my god China is making so many nuclear plants
>China is so stupid and a danger :<
the correct reaction should be to improve the USA itself than try to put another country down.
That is how I felt about Huawei. I wanted the rise of Huawei to push the Western world to another level. Instead, the US tried to break it's legs and leave it dead in the back alley.
America can only build a reactor if its on a carrier or submarine. Until a city can deliver freedom and geopolitical softpower anywhere in the world in 7 days, it doesn't get a reactor.
"America can only build a reactor if its on a carrier or submarine."
The US has the most civilian nuclear capacity of any country. More than France and more than China.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear\_power\_by\_country](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country)
It’s being resurrected. We lacked organizational capacity for awhile. As in “there weren’t many large engineering firms willing to take on work within a nuclear power plant” due to extremely strict regulations and plenty of better paying work with less business risk.
The government started paying for liability insurance and that was that.
If economically viable fusion arrived it would probably displace most current generating technologies eventually, particularly as a buildout accelerated and construction costs began to fall. That being said, many current forms of energy would persist it the mix for at least a while, some would probably survive forever. It probably wouldn’t make much sense to shutter fission plants in good condition before the end of their lifetimes as the cost of constructing them is already sunk, so fission would persist for a number of decades until the plants aged out of service. I doubt many new fission reactors would be built (at least for commercial electric generation, most major powers would probably have a small number of reactors operating to generate fissile material for nuclear weapons and to generate various heavy isotopes of use). Another concern is size. From what we know now, bigger is generally better for fusion plants at least with our current/near future technology, so you could see fission persist at least for a while where size is a concern. This could mean fission reactors remain in use aboard submarines, ships, and possibly in spacecraft until fusion technology advances enough to be miniaturized. I see solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro power sticking around for a long time as they’re pretty cheap.
So many questions about what China is building. Do they write FSARs? Do they have component traceability? NSSS part qualifications? Or are they just taking the same designs with whatever is handy to build with?
>Do they write FSARs?
[Yes.](https://www.google.com/search?q=fsar%2Bnuclear%2Bchina&oq=fsar%2Bnuclear%2Bchina&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIKCAEQABiABBiiBDIKCAIQABiABBiiBDIKCAMQABiABBiiBDIKCAQQABiABBiiBDIKCAUQABiABBiiBDIGCAYQRRg80gEJMTk1MGowajE1qAIIsAIB&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)
>Do they have component traceability?
[Yes.](https://canteach.candu.org/Content%20Library/20031701.pdf)
>NSSS part qualifications?
[Well they call it a different name, but yes.](https://www.iterchina.cn/upload/2bd9769b-aa91-41b8-945a-dcd2fb6c1515/ad98021a-4e8c-4a9f-adf6-ed9c0b69a7e3.pdf)
>Or are they just taking the same designs with whatever is handy to build with?
Considering they've built just about every single commercially available reactor type, like the article states, they have a significant amount of learning-by-doing expertise, which other nations sorely lack.
[edit] turns out lmgtfy no longer works, edited links.
This is hilarious because every thing you said was false and linked to a Google query but you were upvoted because Reddit likes the idea of sources more than they like checking them lmao
Lmao the fsar you linked is for a 10MW experimental reactor you fucking moron. Not even clicking on the remaining links
Edit: it’s not even an FSAR is a letter that could be phony saying it’s a cover page for an FSAR
EDIT: have you ever read a real FSAR?
This is utter bollocks now, in these specialist industries they have been working for decades now and the expertise is now there.
Our countries are asleep.
Yes, and we have been helping China get there; that's the worst part. The Western centers have been sleeping for so long, and now it's starting to bite us.
Cherylnoble and Three Mile Island made everyone stop and ask if we were really capable of doing this.
There are still problems with the issue of high level waste.
I think you also have to tool the reactors to make use of reprocessed fuel.
There’s also differences between reprocessing fuel with the plutonium separated, and another process that doesn’t separate plutonium (but makes for more complications when using reprocessed fuel?). The PUREX process versus the UREX process.
It’s political, because nuclear power fuel reprocessing could be used to harvest plutonium for weapons. And if the US does it, then so will many other nations with nuclear power but no weapons. And then what do with plutonium?
The nuclear engineering here is beyond me. At a high level I know France reprocesses their uranium fuel rods, but IIRC every French reactor is set up to make use of that specific fuel. It still results in nuclear waste, but benefits with significant reductions in the amount of high level nuclear waste.
To be clear, I wholeheartedly support reprocessing US used nuclear fuel. I’m just not pretending it some quick n easy “sign the bill and we fixed it!” It may be that new reactors would have to be built to use said fuel.
I really believe that smaller modular nuclear reactors are the future. As it stands today, each US nuclear power plant is one of a kind. Modular reactors could be safer, easier to expand existing plants, as well as beginning nlconstructiln
I have a wild theory, hear me out.
I believe that Russia and China have weaponized the Green parties in the West, Russia started with Germany's Green parties, lobbying them to get rid of nuclear when they knew fully well that the only option for nuclear energy was Natural Gas from, yeah, Russia.
China is doing it now with EV's, solar, and wind power, helping the Green movement in the US and EU, and as payback, the Green movement works against nuclear energy.
Like Russia, China has virtually locked in the alternative energy from nuclear, right now, they build about 80% of renewables and are moving towards that goal with automobiles.
I see the environmental movement as probably one of the most self-destructive movements of all.
Yes, but doing so by eliminating European automakers which are electrifying anyway. The auto worker will lose in the long run. The environmental movement will not let new nuclear power plants get built.
China being 15 years ahead of the US in nuclear power makes sense because China has a working molten salt reactor and a gas cooled reactor...which the US had and abandoned before I was born.
Shocking, considering it’s failing basic infrastructure. I guess we shouldn’t have spent $20T on pointless campaigns in Afghanistan & Iraq for the last 20 years.
Not surprising if true. We've spent the entire time I've been alive making stupid decisions based on fear rather than facts. Climate change wouldn't even be a thing on the map if the anti-nuclear nutjobs had been told to shut up and sit in the corner while the adults were talking.
We don’t really know how safe or more to the point, unsafe Chinese nuclear power plants are. They had American engineers working for them on some plants which I think it’s up to the safety standards. But the ones they didn’t… I have no confidence.
One thing I know for sure is though China complains a lot about Fukushima waste water. They actually emit more harmful water into the ocean.
As far as we can tell, the Chinese are taking safety quite seriously, even if the economic impact is significant. After Fukushima, they pivoted their entire nuclear program, with massive effect on the industry even now. Their indigenous Hualong One design received certification in Europe/UK.
At this rate China will beat us back to the moon, claim and mine all the helium 3 and develop nuclear reactors that use it giving themselves essentially endless energy. While the west has Musk & Bezos fumbling around and extracting as much taxpayer dollars as possible in the short term while the Artimus mission fumbles off into nothingness like the nonsense it is.
The US has been quietly building large numbers of gas turbine plants. Low build time and low build cost compared to nuclear, but not 50+ year power solution.
We have to remember, China has an overbuilt infrastructure not because they need for future population growth, it’s to keep people employed. China has a shrinking population (began to shrink in 2022) and ghost cities. These CCP subsidized construction companies keep employment levels steady and food on the table. I wouldn’t be surprised if a large percentage of the new Chinese nuclear plants sit idle after the construction stage is completed.
Remember the videos out of China during the 2022 covid lockdowns? Drones were flying around telling people to stay calm. Shit can get of out hand quickly if citizens are stuck in their tiny apartments without work.
> I wouldn’t be surprised if a large percentage of the new Chinese nuclear plants sit idle after the construction stage is completed.
Gee, if only a UN agency corroborated and compiled the production of every active nuclear reactor on Earth
https://pris.iaea.org/pris/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=CN
TL;DR Chinese reactors operate at completely normal load factors from the moment they're connected to the grid. Shocking, I know. It's almost like they're trying to decarbonise and the country's electricity consumption is increasing, or something.
When I receive a sarcastic, argumentative reply, I always check comment history. You find joy arguing on Reddit, but I don’t.
I stated my opinion on what could happen next. I could be wrong, time will tell.
To address your comment on China’s de carbonization efforts: In 2023, China accounted for 95% of the world's new coal power construction, adding almost 50 gigawatts (GW) of capacity. This was a four-fold increase from 2019, and more than the rest of the world combined. China's coal use accounts for around 60% of the world's total.
I don’t want to spend my day writing on Reddit, so I’ll summarize my opinion. China is overbuilding to keep people employed. China does not care about the environment, but they do want you to by their government subsidized solar panels and batteries. Energy infrastructure is one of the sectors being overbuilt. Feel free to comment back, but I will not respond. I’m not doing the back and forth thing on Reddit.
https://preview.redd.it/p8csa6e9ad7d1.jpeg?width=770&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b0ff0c87b70d86b5b379ed032ba325a8be2378ac
The thing is, you will be wrong. Coal is expensive to *operate*. Nuclear isn't. You don't get the money back from building if you idle either, so if you build "too many" power plants, you turn off the coal. In Chinas case, you turn off the older coal plants.. because China has a whole bunch of coal plants with essentially zero pollution controls and air quality is a major political problem for them. Yes. They're authoritarian. Party Cadre breathe the same air as everyone else, so they care.
So I'm currently in China, and its super super normal - feels like America should feel almost, ya know, clean, safe and cheap. I think that therefore based on my experience that China will be fine for a while yet. Given the parlous state of American urban governance, honestly I wouldn't trust the gov to build nuclear plants.
The marginal cost of operating a reactor is lower than just about anything, and it's not like China has any shortage of older unabated coal plants they can blow up. They wont sit idle.
“China Intends..”.,,,,”China Plans..”. China has planned a lot of things that failed miserably. Here is what I know: the US generates 2x more nuclear energy than China and 30% of Global Nuclear Energy output. That’s reality. This article is a fluff piece for China.
And, you know, a mistake that will be reversed.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear/comments/1d55xk4/us\_energy\_secretary\_calls\_for\_more\_nuclear\_power/](https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear/comments/1d55xk4/us_energy_secretary_calls_for_more_nuclear_power/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear/comments/1d3l74h/fact\_sheet\_bidenharris\_administration\_announces/](https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear/comments/1d3l74h/fact_sheet_bidenharris_administration_announces/)
"e US generates 2x more nuclear energy than China and 30% of Global Nuclear Energy output. That’s reality. "
This is correct. I have no idea why you got downvoted for stating the actual facts. Chinese trolls maybe?
I think it’s because it’s burying the head in the sand when it comes to what deployment and capacity factor between here and China will be like in less than a decade.
I don't trust US and European corporations to hold the radioactive spent rods for the ten thousand years required until they are no longer lethal. China is on another level of lies and subterfuge. This article scares the shit out of me and should scare anyone that reads it. I suppose people making their living with nukes might disagree though.
Could be worse.could be like Australia and be 70 years behind.
Most in Australia don’t give a fuck about it apart from the balded head dog Dutton
Upvote for voldemort reference
Or NZ and have no interest in ever not being behind
It's easy to build NPPs if you have no greenpeace and no Austrians. West is getting bogged down because that is a favorable state for for-profit suppliers. Every change request is good for supplier. But very bad for purchaser.
I’m convinced anti-nuclear is stoked by well meaning idiots influenced by coal or other dirty companies. It’s unbelievably frustrating.
The Clean Air Alliance is a group of Canadian morons who advertise against nuclear. I guess they’re bored since we shut down all coal in Ontario 10 years ago.
Double lobbying groups. NG and solar/wind industries really don't want to see sustainable nuclear reform. If we're going to switch the bulk of transportation workload to electric we need a HELL of a lot more capacity. Certain groups want to ensure they get a biggest slice of the pie. Regardless of the cost to anyone else. It's just public narrative astroturfing. Hate it.
Few can deal damage like well meaning ignorant people can.
Think bigger; most of the propaganda is coming from nation-states that are heavily dependent on fossil fuel exports. Russia for example is a major culprit of this in Europe (Germany in particular). Ironically the anti-nuclear eco movement’s most generous benefactors are often some of the least Eco friendly entities on the planet.
Austria isnt the problem here. They are radiophobes but cant actually do anything to prevent builds in the EU.
They can try blocking legislation in favor of nuclear.
> It's easy to build NPPs if you have no greenpeace and no Austrians. Governments have murdered people for less. Let's not pretend that they are actually scared of Greenpeace and Austria's shilling.
I wouldn’t say “scared” but their influence has been pervasive. But it’s waning now that the 100% RE idea is in doubt. (As it should be.)
>But it’s waning now that the 100% RE idea is in doubt. It's not in doubt. It's technically almost infeasible and crazy talk economically. That does not matter however. The people understand fuck all about the electric grid. Batteries and solar panels sounds and feels feasible to them on first hearing and is therefore the thing politicians will push to no end. Invest in LNG I'd say. The whole green hydrogen hype will collapse on economics and gas will remain the cheapest option for poisoned grids. It's rough to say but you need an exceptional leadership and/or good education to enact and convey the need for sensible energy policies. Those don't exist in internet age democracy.
It does exist. [https://www.krqe.com/news/technology/ap-us-energy-secretary-calls-for-more-nuclear-power-while-celebrating-35-billion-georgia-reactors/](https://www.krqe.com/news/technology/ap-us-energy-secretary-calls-for-more-nuclear-power-while-celebrating-35-billion-georgia-reactors/) [https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/05/29/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-new-steps-to-bolster-domestic-nuclear-industry-and-advance-americas-clean-energy-future/](https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/05/29/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-new-steps-to-bolster-domestic-nuclear-industry-and-advance-americas-clean-energy-future/)
It isn't influence, but rather corruption and/or a simple lack of political will.
Wasn’t. We now have the will.
Scared no, affected yes. It provides great cover for the fact that natural gas is one of the largest industries in the US which is the main reason for why the energy mix is what it is.
The 1970s oil crisis and the more recent gas crisis have shown that fossil fuel prices are too volatile for something that the entire economy relies on, especially since alternatives have existed for 50 years. Governments have spent tons of money on nuclear weapons, even after the USSR fell.
You can lose the forest for the trees, though. Sure, you know it's bad for the country. But you can't authorise nuclear projects in your state, you know they'll take their refinery elsewhere for that and you'll be responsible for driving jobs away. The oil worker vote is quite significant it lots of states and cares quite a bit about being able to feed their kids in the future. Soon enough that national forest of economic resiliency and defense concerns disappears in the face of your imminent re-election and the short-term economic prosperity of your state. And that's not assuming corruption. In truth, there's way, way more factors.
Several petrostates have built nuclear power stations explicitly to save oil for other uses, including export. Re-election is a valid point because building a fleet of nuclear power stations is a long-term program, but France managed it, while nuclear weapons states kept maintaining and upgrading their nuclear weapons for decades after the USSR fell.
Sure, it's not like it's impossible. The US has nuclear reactors too! And those were built in a time when oil was even more important. "Oil baron" was a reasonable description for a lot of people. Perhaps notable was that the oil industry was very large and very important, but very fragmented due to the breaking up of Standard Oil. Now each fragment of Standard Oil has become larger than what Rockefeller ever had, so that probably complicates things. Petrostates are not usually complex democracies subject to these kinds of trees-for-the-forest effects. Saudi Arabia is a good example — it liberalised recently by allowing women to drive but just a week before people were getting arrested for proposing far less impressive advances in women's rights. It's a very top-down system, and so the main beneficiary of oil extraction and the person mostly responsible for guiding the state are both the crown prince. That makes doing things like this really simple and easy. Exports are, once again, a nation-level concept whereas companies only care about selling, whether it's to your own people or to others generally doesn't matter. Having both oil and the state under one roof allows for these more rational decisions to be made. If the US was running state oil companies, I'm sure that they'd be enthusiastically building reactors for petrol export too.
Way further behind than that. US citizens are so incredibly uneducated about nuclear power that it would take at least 15 years to get their heads out of their asses enough to even begin to consider that nuclear power isn't inherently evil. Then, it would take another 50 years to make any sort of reasonable political and regulatory changes needed to build a useful plant.
The US is a republic that frequently takes no input from its citizens when doing anything. Make it a national security issue and it’s gets done by one stroke of a pen.
That is how France did it. The people were never pro-nuclear (until today). But the government doesn't consult the general population about most other energy issues, they just do what is necessary to keep things going. After all the people would be really upset if electricity stopped coming out of the wall.
Yep. Theres no society “educated” on this topic, except for the few like France. Even an “educated” society like Germany axed their nuclear due to bad nuclear pr. Nuclear is just broadly unpopular because of high profile disasters and a misunderstanding of nuclear waste management. Theres a stigma pretty much globally, it’s up to governments to understand that nuclear is going to be a must have moving forward and need to just build it anyways. Sooner the better.
You are still being too optimistic
The US has almost double the nuclear energy output China has in 2024. The first ever nuclear fusion replication happened in California last year. This article literally makes no sense.
China is building 5 a year and approving 10 a year
The Chinese plants are using 70 year old technology but yes they are building a lot of them. The US has a fundamentally different strategy that uses new tech for smaller modular nuclear reactors. The best nuclear fusion research is being done in California as well. The logic of this article would be like saying a country is building more landline telephones than the US so they must be 10-15 years ahead of the US in telecoms. Look up modular nuclear reactors. It’s a new tech that the US has begun exporting and building in the states.
Isn't China also pushing forward with 4th gen designs?
The article says they have or are building one of each of the 4 major types of gen IV.
Generation 4 nuke reactors by definition means it’s a nuclear plant with atleast one piece of technology built after the year 2000. It’s a term used in the media, it has no applicable scientific or engineering meaning whatsoever.
So how would we define things like Molten Salt Reactors or High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactors?
High temperature gas cooled reactors were literally theorized in the 40s and then invented in the 60s in the United States. Molten salt reactors were theorized in the 50s and then invented in practice in the 60s in the United States. You’re reading Chinese propaganda man.
They are building prototypes, the fact they are basing that on older tech that wasn't followed up on doesn't make it propaganda.
They asked how to define them, you answered with dates and started to claim they are reading propaganda for asking fucking question. Come on?
He is clearly trying to indicate they are a new technology. He can simply look up what they are. The more important point is that it’s old tech.
This is ignorant of the full picture - both of these technologies were pretty much shelved until nowadays. At the time the existing already working technology developed and employed by the US navy was adopted as standard because developing these technologies to be commercially feasible was not worth the upfront R&D costs (or at least that was the logic employed back then).
> The US has a fundamentally different strategy that uses new tech for smaller modular nuclear reactors. That, to be clear, have never been deployed commercially anywhere. Like it'd be nice if the SMR developers figure their stuff out on costs but right now? The US doesn't have a strategy that "uses" new tech. It has a strategy that "hopes to someday use" new tech.
To be fair, SMR’s are brand fucking new. Your argument is equivalent to 10 years ago saying Tesla has untested electric cars that have never been commercially viable
Certainly, and I really hope they figure it out. I just think it's important to also plan for the possibility they're never commercially viable. It certainly feels like a lot of SMR companies might be closer to a tech startup trying to get acquired at a high valuation than they are infrastructure companies looking to pump out megawatts.
> Look up modular nuclear reactors. Oh, you mean like the one China already has in operation? https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinese-HTR-PM-Demo-begins-commercial-operation Or the other one they're building at a great pace? https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Outer-dome-installed-on-Chinese-small-modular-nucl And yes, one's an HTGR and the other one's a LWR. Just like the SMR designs that are anywhere close to regulatory approval in the USA.
I know what small modular reactors are and so does China
What are their reactor containment buildings like? Are they in the US style or are they following the Russian method? I will never forget growing up near three mile island, getting to tour it (just before 9/11) and they walked up through how strong the containment buildings were. Especially since there was an airport just up river. The building could take a direct hit from a 757 and be fine. I remember that was also big reason that despite partial meltdown, TMI wasnt really bad environmentally.
I wonder how much of the general public in China is educated about nuclear power vs the government officials who frequently have science and engineering educations.
In 15 years of our current projected path, fission will be permanently off the table. Might as well go over to Commonwealth Fusion and pray they can get SPARC working faster. Renewables and batteries are getting cheaper year over year while new nuclear is getting more expensive.
Ooof. This article makes a good attempt at being well-researched and covering multiple angles of each nation's advantages and disadvantages, but it is marred by a rather nationalist and US-centric slant further into the article. >"This reflected incredible naïveté by U.S. officials, who argued that transferring to the Chinese, for free, incredibly valuable U.S. technology made sense because it would help mitigate global warming. One almost cannot make this up." Non-academic phrasing aside, the author seems to have a rather entrenched viewpoint that technology sharing with China is a very bad idea, and that Westinghouse winning the bid to build AP-1000 reactors in China and agreeing to transfer technology (no coercion here btw) is the single worst mistake the US could make. Interestingly, he seems to omit the fact that his claim of "incredible naïveté by U.S. officials" is in fact, proven true with the same statistics he includes earlier: >China’s plans to produce 200 GW of nuclear energy by 2025 “could prevent about 1.5 billion tons of annual carbon emissions, more than what’s generated by the U.K., Spain, France, and Germany combined.” The country seeks to replace all 2,990 of its coal-fired generators with clean energy solutions by 2060. I think most of the scientific community would see this as a resounding success for humanity as a whole if China achieves this, in fact it would literally change the course of humanity towards actually achieving global sustainability goals and solving energy crisis, moreso if this can be exported. But no, humanity's progress be damned. The author goes on to state that "China has become America’s leading geostrategic competitor, and America needs to completely cease any sharing of its nuclear technologies with the country." Nevermind that he himself concedes that “China is years ahead of the United States in even deploying our country’s own technologies.”. I read statements like this and it kills me to see how shortsighted and regressive politics are towards scientific progress. In fact, the entire "What should America Do?" section is laughable. Almost every single suggestion feels like repeating talking points while being extremely lacking in actual substance. It boils down to "the government needs to get their shit together and... do stuff! Don't ask me how though! P.S. Fuck China". Perhaps I'm a bit too harsh on this, but I'm just annoyed with reading so many articles rehashing the same "advice" with none really looking into the "how's" - I think what the US really needs is a close look at the internal challenges involved and think about actual formative solutions - which may very well involve working *with* China in a (*gasp*) collaborative relationship. Mind-blowing, I know.
This is what great power competition looks and smells like. I think you just need to get used to it. This “new Cold War” will be continually fought primarily economically and diplomatically. If deterrent measures cannot prevent military conflict it will be exceedingly bad for the entire world.
There is such a thing as naivety to China, the is such a thing as a healthy dose of skepticism to China, and then there is this warmongering nationalism
>Oh my god China is making so many nuclear plants >China is so stupid and a danger :< the correct reaction should be to improve the USA itself than try to put another country down.
That is how I felt about Huawei. I wanted the rise of Huawei to push the Western world to another level. Instead, the US tried to break it's legs and leave it dead in the back alley.
That's Un-american!
America can only build a reactor if its on a carrier or submarine. Until a city can deliver freedom and geopolitical softpower anywhere in the world in 7 days, it doesn't get a reactor.
"America can only build a reactor if its on a carrier or submarine." The US has the most civilian nuclear capacity of any country. More than France and more than China. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear\_power\_by\_country](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country)
For now. We largely stopped building plants by the 90s.
This is true, but the US has still completed a couple of civilian reactors since then and just broke ground on the new nuclear plant in Wyoming.
It’s being resurrected. We lacked organizational capacity for awhile. As in “there weren’t many large engineering firms willing to take on work within a nuclear power plant” due to extremely strict regulations and plenty of better paying work with less business risk. The government started paying for liability insurance and that was that.
Sorry dumb question. Will fusion reactors (when they finally get here!) obsolete nuclear or just become part of the mix?
That would depend on how much net positive power they produce. Currently it is not enough to even begin a conversation.
If economically viable fusion arrived it would probably displace most current generating technologies eventually, particularly as a buildout accelerated and construction costs began to fall. That being said, many current forms of energy would persist it the mix for at least a while, some would probably survive forever. It probably wouldn’t make much sense to shutter fission plants in good condition before the end of their lifetimes as the cost of constructing them is already sunk, so fission would persist for a number of decades until the plants aged out of service. I doubt many new fission reactors would be built (at least for commercial electric generation, most major powers would probably have a small number of reactors operating to generate fissile material for nuclear weapons and to generate various heavy isotopes of use). Another concern is size. From what we know now, bigger is generally better for fusion plants at least with our current/near future technology, so you could see fission persist at least for a while where size is a concern. This could mean fission reactors remain in use aboard submarines, ships, and possibly in spacecraft until fusion technology advances enough to be miniaturized. I see solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro power sticking around for a long time as they’re pretty cheap.
So many questions about what China is building. Do they write FSARs? Do they have component traceability? NSSS part qualifications? Or are they just taking the same designs with whatever is handy to build with?
>Do they write FSARs? [Yes.](https://www.google.com/search?q=fsar%2Bnuclear%2Bchina&oq=fsar%2Bnuclear%2Bchina&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIKCAEQABiABBiiBDIKCAIQABiABBiiBDIKCAMQABiABBiiBDIKCAQQABiABBiiBDIKCAUQABiABBiiBDIGCAYQRRg80gEJMTk1MGowajE1qAIIsAIB&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) >Do they have component traceability? [Yes.](https://canteach.candu.org/Content%20Library/20031701.pdf) >NSSS part qualifications? [Well they call it a different name, but yes.](https://www.iterchina.cn/upload/2bd9769b-aa91-41b8-945a-dcd2fb6c1515/ad98021a-4e8c-4a9f-adf6-ed9c0b69a7e3.pdf) >Or are they just taking the same designs with whatever is handy to build with? Considering they've built just about every single commercially available reactor type, like the article states, they have a significant amount of learning-by-doing expertise, which other nations sorely lack. [edit] turns out lmgtfy no longer works, edited links.
This is hilarious because every thing you said was false and linked to a Google query but you were upvoted because Reddit likes the idea of sources more than they like checking them lmao
Didn't do my due diligence checking those links, my bad. Edited.
None of those google queries provide supporting evidence for what you’re claiming. Just link whatever information you found.
That would be more effective if those Let Me Google It for you queries actually returned valid links.
Ah, didn't know lmgtfy was broken. Edited!
Lmao the fsar you linked is for a 10MW experimental reactor you fucking moron. Not even clicking on the remaining links Edit: it’s not even an FSAR is a letter that could be phony saying it’s a cover page for an FSAR EDIT: have you ever read a real FSAR?
[удалено]
This is utter bollocks now, in these specialist industries they have been working for decades now and the expertise is now there. Our countries are asleep.
Yes, and we have been helping China get there; that's the worst part. The Western centers have been sleeping for so long, and now it's starting to bite us.
>and now it's starting to bite us You went from "their constructions suck" to this really fast. Do downvotes really mindbreak a redditor this easily
So that means there’s lots of opportunity for work in the US nuclear industry for a few generations? Sweet.
Time to switch my career to the energy field!
We can collectively think every administration since Carter, as well as fossil fuel lobbyists and the congressmen and senators they’ve paid for.
Cherylnoble and Three Mile Island made everyone stop and ask if we were really capable of doing this. There are still problems with the issue of high level waste.
The only real problem with waste is a policy problem. If they undo the ban on reprocessing, that problem goes away.
I think you also have to tool the reactors to make use of reprocessed fuel. There’s also differences between reprocessing fuel with the plutonium separated, and another process that doesn’t separate plutonium (but makes for more complications when using reprocessed fuel?). The PUREX process versus the UREX process. It’s political, because nuclear power fuel reprocessing could be used to harvest plutonium for weapons. And if the US does it, then so will many other nations with nuclear power but no weapons. And then what do with plutonium? The nuclear engineering here is beyond me. At a high level I know France reprocesses their uranium fuel rods, but IIRC every French reactor is set up to make use of that specific fuel. It still results in nuclear waste, but benefits with significant reductions in the amount of high level nuclear waste. To be clear, I wholeheartedly support reprocessing US used nuclear fuel. I’m just not pretending it some quick n easy “sign the bill and we fixed it!” It may be that new reactors would have to be built to use said fuel. I really believe that smaller modular nuclear reactors are the future. As it stands today, each US nuclear power plant is one of a kind. Modular reactors could be safer, easier to expand existing plants, as well as beginning nlconstructiln
Okay, is that going to matter long term?
Yes but don’t we have a lot more progress on fusion reactors that will potentially run the nation?
Yeah, they're only 20 years away.
Too many people will miss the subtext.
Unlike the fallout lore, it will be China that eventually unlocks Fusion power before America.
Only if they steal the research from us.
Seeing how it is going, it is us that will be stealing from them.
I have a wild theory, hear me out. I believe that Russia and China have weaponized the Green parties in the West, Russia started with Germany's Green parties, lobbying them to get rid of nuclear when they knew fully well that the only option for nuclear energy was Natural Gas from, yeah, Russia. China is doing it now with EV's, solar, and wind power, helping the Green movement in the US and EU, and as payback, the Green movement works against nuclear energy. Like Russia, China has virtually locked in the alternative energy from nuclear, right now, they build about 80% of renewables and are moving towards that goal with automobiles. I see the environmental movement as probably one of the most self-destructive movements of all.
Yes, but doing so by eliminating European automakers which are electrifying anyway. The auto worker will lose in the long run. The environmental movement will not let new nuclear power plants get built.
Don’t they only have like one more power plant than us? Google says We have 54 and they have 55, so🤷♂️
China being 15 years ahead of the US in nuclear power makes sense because China has a working molten salt reactor and a gas cooled reactor...which the US had and abandoned before I was born.
Shocking, considering it’s failing basic infrastructure. I guess we shouldn’t have spent $20T on pointless campaigns in Afghanistan & Iraq for the last 20 years.
This is what happens when you send money overseas to political laundering operations and don't invest in infrastructure. Go Team America! F' yeah!
Not surprising if true. We've spent the entire time I've been alive making stupid decisions based on fear rather than facts. Climate change wouldn't even be a thing on the map if the anti-nuclear nutjobs had been told to shut up and sit in the corner while the adults were talking.
And the world is about 50 years behind collectively!
We don’t really know how safe or more to the point, unsafe Chinese nuclear power plants are. They had American engineers working for them on some plants which I think it’s up to the safety standards. But the ones they didn’t… I have no confidence. One thing I know for sure is though China complains a lot about Fukushima waste water. They actually emit more harmful water into the ocean.
As far as we can tell, the Chinese are taking safety quite seriously, even if the economic impact is significant. After Fukushima, they pivoted their entire nuclear program, with massive effect on the industry even now. Their indigenous Hualong One design received certification in Europe/UK.
Well that makes sense considering we haven’t built a new nuclear facility in decades.
Eco warriors proudly exclaim "We did that"!
Someone should tell “report” to suck it. China is centuries behind the west in human rights, dignity, and freedom.
At this rate China will beat us back to the moon, claim and mine all the helium 3 and develop nuclear reactors that use it giving themselves essentially endless energy. While the west has Musk & Bezos fumbling around and extracting as much taxpayer dollars as possible in the short term while the Artimus mission fumbles off into nothingness like the nonsense it is.
China is mostly coal powered, not sure if that's the future of nuclear?
The US has been quietly building large numbers of gas turbine plants. Low build time and low build cost compared to nuclear, but not 50+ year power solution. We have to remember, China has an overbuilt infrastructure not because they need for future population growth, it’s to keep people employed. China has a shrinking population (began to shrink in 2022) and ghost cities. These CCP subsidized construction companies keep employment levels steady and food on the table. I wouldn’t be surprised if a large percentage of the new Chinese nuclear plants sit idle after the construction stage is completed. Remember the videos out of China during the 2022 covid lockdowns? Drones were flying around telling people to stay calm. Shit can get of out hand quickly if citizens are stuck in their tiny apartments without work.
> I wouldn’t be surprised if a large percentage of the new Chinese nuclear plants sit idle after the construction stage is completed. Gee, if only a UN agency corroborated and compiled the production of every active nuclear reactor on Earth https://pris.iaea.org/pris/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=CN TL;DR Chinese reactors operate at completely normal load factors from the moment they're connected to the grid. Shocking, I know. It's almost like they're trying to decarbonise and the country's electricity consumption is increasing, or something.
When I receive a sarcastic, argumentative reply, I always check comment history. You find joy arguing on Reddit, but I don’t. I stated my opinion on what could happen next. I could be wrong, time will tell. To address your comment on China’s de carbonization efforts: In 2023, China accounted for 95% of the world's new coal power construction, adding almost 50 gigawatts (GW) of capacity. This was a four-fold increase from 2019, and more than the rest of the world combined. China's coal use accounts for around 60% of the world's total. I don’t want to spend my day writing on Reddit, so I’ll summarize my opinion. China is overbuilding to keep people employed. China does not care about the environment, but they do want you to by their government subsidized solar panels and batteries. Energy infrastructure is one of the sectors being overbuilt. Feel free to comment back, but I will not respond. I’m not doing the back and forth thing on Reddit. https://preview.redd.it/p8csa6e9ad7d1.jpeg?width=770&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b0ff0c87b70d86b5b379ed032ba325a8be2378ac
The thing is, you will be wrong. Coal is expensive to *operate*. Nuclear isn't. You don't get the money back from building if you idle either, so if you build "too many" power plants, you turn off the coal. In Chinas case, you turn off the older coal plants.. because China has a whole bunch of coal plants with essentially zero pollution controls and air quality is a major political problem for them. Yes. They're authoritarian. Party Cadre breathe the same air as everyone else, so they care.
So I'm currently in China, and its super super normal - feels like America should feel almost, ya know, clean, safe and cheap. I think that therefore based on my experience that China will be fine for a while yet. Given the parlous state of American urban governance, honestly I wouldn't trust the gov to build nuclear plants.
I dare you to say something negative about President Xi.
And I dare you to associate your name publically with one of the many taboo opinions on race in the US.
The marginal cost of operating a reactor is lower than just about anything, and it's not like China has any shortage of older unabated coal plants they can blow up. They wont sit idle.
“China Intends..”.,,,,”China Plans..”. China has planned a lot of things that failed miserably. Here is what I know: the US generates 2x more nuclear energy than China and 30% of Global Nuclear Energy output. That’s reality. This article is a fluff piece for China.
China is building nuclear power plants, the US is not. Which is a mistake in the US side of cause.
And, you know, a mistake that will be reversed. [https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear/comments/1d55xk4/us\_energy\_secretary\_calls\_for\_more\_nuclear\_power/](https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear/comments/1d55xk4/us_energy_secretary_calls_for_more_nuclear_power/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear/comments/1d3l74h/fact\_sheet\_bidenharris\_administration\_announces/](https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear/comments/1d3l74h/fact_sheet_bidenharris_administration_announces/)
"e US generates 2x more nuclear energy than China and 30% of Global Nuclear Energy output. That’s reality. " This is correct. I have no idea why you got downvoted for stating the actual facts. Chinese trolls maybe?
I think it’s because it’s burying the head in the sand when it comes to what deployment and capacity factor between here and China will be like in less than a decade.
I don't trust US and European corporations to hold the radioactive spent rods for the ten thousand years required until they are no longer lethal. China is on another level of lies and subterfuge. This article scares the shit out of me and should scare anyone that reads it. I suppose people making their living with nukes might disagree though.
The CCP is a Goliath but no Goliath is invincible. It will fall eventually and catastrophically.