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If it gets them to shut down their coal plants, great. And I think that actually is the primary motivation. They need lots of power and they need to stop killin

If it gets them to shut down their coal plants, great. And I think that actually is the primary motivation. They need lots of power and they need to stop killing their citizens with smog from coal (as well as our planet). I think it will cost them financially though. This won't come cheap. Half a trillion for about 1200 GW of capacity is a lot and not necessarily the best value for money. However, they have about that amount of coal to replace as well. The issue with wind and solar is that we're only adding in the order of a few hundred GW per year. China needs an order of magnitude more just to get rid of coal. The interesting thing will be if production capacity for wind turbines and solar panels will grow quickly enough to make this investment unnecessary. One order of magnitude increase in production capacity would do the trick. Not trivial; and China is already going as fast as it can with this. But also not impossible. It's going to be a close race. China might simply be betting on multiple horses here; which is the smart thing to do. I don't think they are picking winners here; just losers. Which would be coal. It needs to go, hence the need to fix 1000+ GW of power demand while also accounting for continued economic growth. They aren't ready to commit to that at COP 26 just yet. But the timing of this announcement is no coincidence either. Another horse in the race would be fusion. Apparently there is some serious money flowing into some companies now. Helion just did a 500M series E: https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/05/helion-energy-will-use-500m-series-e-to-power-up-its-fusion-energy-efforts/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/05/helion-energy-will-use-500.... That may or may not work but it's kind of a really big deal if that hits commercial viability this decade rather than in 2050. And as the US has less of a coal problem at this point (most of it will be gone by the middle of this decade), nuclear is less urgent as a solution. And unlike nuclear, fusion actually might have a shot at being cost competitive with other renewables. Helion is pitching 0.01$/kwh. That's the right level of ambition here.

flavius29663 5y ago
Excuse my ignorance, but where did you get the 500 billion price tag? And why do you say it's expensive? It's rather cheap. People keep saying how solar is the cheapest capacity to install, at 1 dollar per Watt. 1200 GW would be 1.2 trillions, and only offering around 240GW "constant" production, whereas nuclear is half the price to build but more like 1000 GW constant production
- driest 5y ago
  Not OP, but you're wrong about cost. Nuclear is more than twice as expensive as photovoltaics [1], so it's not cheap at all. And that doesn't include dealing with risks like proliferation and extremely hazardous waste for hundreds of years. the half trillion comment came from the original article, that stated an estimated cost of 440 billion. [1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    Reading that link, levelized solar plus battery storage is twice the cost of nuclear. It is cheap to generate the electricity, but only when backed by natural gas or hydro.
    - driest 5y ago
      yes, solar and wind energy generation is intermittent, that's no surprise to anyone. but it is much much cheaper than nuclear energy.
      - zdragnar 5y ago
        This misses the point. You cannot compare solar and nuclear directly, because they serve different needs. Without battery or natural gas, solar and wind are not useful. You have to have some sort of backup, sufficient to avoid brownouts or blackouts, and so you end up with the full capitalization and maintenance cost of not-solar anyway. To properly compare solar with nuclear, you must add on the cost of battery and / or natural gas (or equivalent fast backup), at which point nuclear is cheaper.
        bryanlarsen 5y ago
        Here's solar+battery for $40/MWh. https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-than-24gwh-of-batteries-included-in-its-us-solar-plus-storage-pipeline/ https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-... That's at least half the cost of nuclear, maybe as much as a fifth.
Jansen312 5y ago
If they do thorium then I am all for it. If not (so can feed their nuclear weaponizations) we all pray for the people over there. Their track records of industry accidents aren't that proud of.
29athrowaway 5y ago
That pollution is to make the stuff you buy in Walmart. As long as you as a consumer do not demand a label such as "made with green energy" and prefer those products, the polluting manufacturers will prevail.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  That's definitely part of it. But the flip side of that is that as the U.S. tightens emissions, production outsources elsewhere, possibly where emissions standards and many other environmental standards are much lower, which could lead to an overall net harm. Thus if you have 3 countries, it may be worse for just one of the countries to pass environmental constraints on the production of tradeables. Either all three countries do it, or none do it, or you don't trade at all with those that don't do it. Why people don't take these arguments to their logical conclusion is beyond me.
  - 29athrowaway 5y ago
    A label would help. It transfers the responsibility to the consumer. If you have a dozen of regular eggs, a dozen of cage-free eggs, and a dozen of pasture-raised eggs... If you pick the regular choice you know you are contributing to less humane conditions for chickens. Now it is your choice.
    - blacksmith_tb 5y ago
      To a point - if you're going to have labeling you'll already need some kind of regulation and enforcement. Seems to me like if you're going to set that up, you could just turn the knobs a little farther and make the 'bad' choices cost 20% more than the 'good', for example.
      - rsj_hn 5y ago
        Adding a tariff to goods has three drawbacks 1. very easy to cheat. E.g. during Trump's tariffs on China, there was mass cheating as goods were imported into Vietnam, relabelled as made in Vietnam, and exported to the U.S. When there is big money at stake, the incentive to cheat goes way up. Trying to audit every exporter's Asian supply chain in search of Chinese inputs is tough. 2. Imposing a country-wide tariff does not incentivize any producer to adopt more efficient processes. Imagine if the EU decided the US gas taxes were too low, and so they slapped a tariff on American cars. Would that incentivize Americans to use less gas? Would it make Americans favor an increase in gas taxes? 3. They lead to retaliatory tariffs by the other side. There's no such thing as pure one way punishment, no matter how justified you think you are. The other side will punish you by the same amount, if they can, in order to punish what they view as your bad behavior in trying to punish them. Now I'm a big fan of trade reductions, but that's because it's part of my personal war on globalism. But make sure you are signing up for the same mass trade restrictions - e.g. blanket bans on certain products coming from all of East Asia - because that's what this is. Don't think you can wage a war against CO2 without also waging a war against globalism. International conferences are fun, but they have no teeth and don't get the job done.
jjoonathan 5y ago
Nuclear follows a learning curve too. The reason why it got so expensive is because we fell down the curve. Intentionally. So that we could fill our atmosphere with CO2 while we waited 40 years for wind and solar to become viable. The mind boggles.
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  Do you mean we lowered the scale of nuclear after accidents, thus increased cost/Kw generated?
  - tw04 5y ago
    He means when you stop building reactors, you lose the tribal knowledge to build reactors. No different than when folks try to reproduce WWII vehicles and discover the plans don’t actually reflect the real build process because things were adapted on the fly and never written down because everyone “just knew”. Oh that weld? We actually need plates and bolts to reinforce it due to stress cracks in the field.
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      Exactly. When you are building one offs, and something goes wrong and you redo it, you don't gain benefit from knowledge of not making same mistake again. As there isn't next time. Now when you have done same mistake before you won't repeat it. And these mistakes are the reason behind delays and part of cost over runs.
- Gwypaas 5y ago
  Not really, nuclear power is one of those things which has had a negative learning curve. The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421510003526 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
tuatoru 5y ago
China absolutely does need to replace its coal-powered electricity plants. But it also needs a great deal more electricity, for a few reasons. Away from the coast and the mega cities, there is still a lot of energy poverty. If China is going to replace coal in iron smelting and steelmaking, it needs to electrolyze a lot of hydrogen. It also needs electrolyzed hydrogen to replace fossil methane for making ammonia for fertilizer, and for wintertime peak electricity plants (and possibly for engines for ocean-going ships, if it can't use nuclear for them). If it's going to capture the carbon from its cement plants, it needs power to do that. Electrolyzed hydrogen and captured CO2 will have to be the new feedstocks for many industrial chemicals and plastics. I don't think it's either-or with nuclear and wind/PV, it's not hedging bets, it's whatever works locally, ASAP and AMAP.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
I think you answered your own question: energy policy is a multi-layered approach. There's no one silver-bullet, at least this century. It will take a lot of small steps. This is one of those instances where authoritarian governments can move faster. Although that is a LOT of nuclear waste they will be creating. Hopefully the also advance waste storage technology in parallel.
- gambiting 5y ago
  The thing about nuclear waste is that even a lot of it is not a lot in absolute terms. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... "In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards."
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    ...and that's from generating 20% of the US's energy the whole time.
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    I understand what you're saying, especially when compared to trillions and trillions (quadrillions?) of tons of CO2 and particulate pollution of coal and oil burning. OTOH, It would be nice if the nuclear waste could be stored that way. But that concentrated football field can be used for all sorts of nefarious purposes. Ultimately it requires a large amount of infrastructure to prevent leakage, exposure, theft, explosion, degradation of infrastructure, terrorism, etc. So maybe the football field turns into a billion-dollar-a-year "small-town-sized" facility that has to be maintained for as long as humanity exists (10,000 years?). Now it seems much bigger.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - lazide 5y ago
riazrizvi 5y ago
Yes a loaded headline. It could have read “China pivots to carbon clean nuclear power”.
- moffkalast 5y ago
  What would the world be like without the media scaremongering every headline eh? Shame we'll never find out.
  - hermitcrab 5y ago
    It is a pity that nuclear power is such an emotive subject. Nuclear energy has killed a lot less people than dams or coal mines (possibly even if you include the 2 nuclear bombs dropped on Japan, I haven't done the sums).
    - noja 5y ago
      The forever cost of a failed nuclear plant is a heavy burden.
tuatoru 5y ago
> Helion is pitching 0.01$/kwh. That's the right level of ambition here. Does Helion have a demonstrator plant or a pilot? Or even a prototype? All I see is ... nothing. It is impossible for them to be in commercial operation in nine years even if they did have a working demonstrator. NIMBYism, fear of H-bombs, and the slow speed of regulation guarantee it.
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  They have serious funding, so they have more than nothing. Given the investors don't seem to be naive idiots, I'd say they are making a calculated bet and there might be more to this than wishful thinking. You see nothing, they see opportunity. You can't both be right.
  - tuatoru 5y ago
    Heard of Theranos?
- moffkalast 5y ago
  They're a company that's showed nothing so far and claims to know how to do something that's apparently eluded a dozen other fusion power projects with quite literally 1000 times more funding. The likes of ITER and Wendelstein, or the NIF. Helion's only got about 80M of venture investments, which in the field of energy innovation is basically chump change. I mean call me a sceptic, but I have a feeling they may not be able to completely deliver on their promise hah.
  - threeseed 5y ago
    They’ve shown nothing to you. That doesn’t mean investors haven’t seen prototypes.
    - moffkalast 5y ago
      If they had something substantial it would make sense to patent it, instead of keeping it hidden and the potential for it to be stolen as an option. Either the principle their reactor will work on isn't conceptually done yet or they're being seriously irresponsible with their achievements.
rewq4321 5y ago
> The interesting thing will be if production capacity for wind turbines and solar panels will grow quickly enough to make this investment unnecessary. One order of magnitude increase in production capacity would do the trick. This assumes massive advances in battery tech to support seasonal and week-to-week weather changes. Even the new iron-air tech is still very expensive - $300 million for enough capacity to power 50,000 homes for just one day.[0] By my rough calculations that's 28 trillion dollars to buy enough batteries for all homes in China, assuming 600 million homes, and 7 days of capacity. But that's quite optimistic, because it's not that hard to get more than a week of unfavourable weather, and you don't want your country to shut down every time that happens. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-30/iron-battery-breakthrough-could-eat-lithium-s-lunch https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-30/iron-batt...
- andi999 5y ago
  Things get cheaper if you order for a trillion.
  - seabrookmx 5y ago
    This logic only works if the production capacity is available. If you have to rebuild your entire supply chain to handle that kind of demand you're prices will start to go back up again.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      For China (and quite a lot of other places, including the UK) the alternative to building a battery supply chain is to build a supply chain for something else, not to keep the existing and increasingly pointless coal-based supply chains. (That “something else” can be nuclear).
- spfzero 5y ago
  I think if you install 28 trillion dollars worth of batteries you're going to have a waste problem that will dwarf storing the waste from fission plants.
belorn 5y ago
The cost picture is complex. Using nuclear they can build the plants next to the industry centers, replacing existing coal plans. They don't need to build batteries to address the intermittency of renewables. In addition 150 power plants being built at the same time might gain some benefit of scale, and might attract other countries to follow suit. We need to compare the cost to what other countries are doing to achieve similar goals. Countries like Germany is planning to create green hydrogen in order to replace the current natural gas plants, and we don't know the price tag for that. Europe is currently also seeing the consequences of relying on natural gas and energy trading, with record high energy costs for the end consumer, despite building a lot of solar and wind farms. The high demand for natural gas is also creating additional problems for industries that depend on that limited resource, like agriculture. With uranium there isn't many other industries that compete for that resource.
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  High gas prices are short term very disruptive but actually speed up the agenda of relying less on it. Which is why it is a good thing IMHO with some bad/unfortunate impact on people with lower incomes, You can bet, a lot of home owners that haven't already are now considering heat exchanges, solar, and batteries as ways to have less exposure to high energy prices. Additionally, high gas prices push gas power plants towards being less profitable. Most European energy companies are already investing heavily in wind (particularly) and solar. So, you could argue that investing in gas plants just got a lot less attractive than it already was. High cost would actually still be manageable if it was predictable. However, that is becoming exactly the issue. It swings between too low for exploitation to be even profitable due to over supply and then too high because of Russian and OPEC policy resulting in supply disruption. Kind of a bad situation to be in if you are dependent on that. The smart move would be to eliminate such dependencies as soon as possible. Energy companies are going bankrupt right now because they are locked into contracts with consumers they no longer can afford.
johnchristopher 5y ago
> And as the US has less of a coal problem at this point (most of it will be gone by the middle of this decade), Am I reading that right that the US has less then 4 years of coal output ?
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Given how dependable and safe nuclear is combined with the reduction in carbon it is well worth it. This move is much more sensible than expanding wind and solar on the same scale, and also much more predictable.
BurningFrog 5y ago
> If it gets them to shut down their coal plants, great. China is set to build 43 new coal plants in 2021, and they have a big power supply problem. So shutting any plants down is not happening anytime soon. https://time.com/6090732/china-coal-power-plants-emissions/ https://time.com/6090732/china-coal-power-plants-emissions/
- kragen 5y ago
  China shuts down lots of coal plants all the time; it's just that they're also building them. In 02020 they built more than they shut down. I'll be surprised if that's the case in 02021.
elihu 5y ago
I suppose another geopolitical aspect of this is that China doesn't want to be dependent on other nations for fuel. If they became involved in a war or even just anger their trading partners in some way, the rest of the world can shut off their energy supply. For that matter, even if they're on great terms with all their trading partners, those trading partners might ask themselves "why are we selling coal to some other country so they can get the benefit when we have to live with the CO2 emissions as if we had burned it ourselves?" To be honest, I don't understand why the U.S. exports coal at all; it just doesn't seem worth it. (Though I can see where the coal lobby might have something to say about it if such legislation was proposed.)
dv_dt 5y ago
The other thing that might need to grow is multiple supply chains into specialized nuclear components by an order of magnitude. My gut says it’s actually easier to scale solar and renewables by an order of magnitude than those items. Of course China might have the same motivations of many nuclear powers have - which is a desire to also maintain a baseline manufacturing capacity for nuclear technologies in general.
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
I don't get the hope for ramping up production capacity for wind turbines and solar panels 'fast enough'. Supposedly this is all about climate change and limiting or even stopping emissions, to counter climate change, yes? While these emissions can be especially annoying when they are near you, they work globally because they give a shit about borders. Supposedly, Yes? So, from a global ecosystem point of view, considering 'cradle to cradle' without any externalizations, what exactly is won by that, considering the emissions from producing and transporting all that stuff? Wind turbines require large concrete foundations, you can't put them into the ground like a toothpick into a piece of cheese. If not in some flat desert, stable roads for the construction and transport, requiring cutting down parts of the forest. Same for the cables, no matter if over land, or underground transmission. At Sea it's even more complicated and material intensive. Solar is requiring large areas to be effective, similar considerations apply. The production and transport of all that stuff, and the mining and refining of the necessary raw materials is causing emissions. While of intermittent use, without storage, which again requires mining, refining, transport, production, transport, construction, maintenance, causing more emissions again. Whose intermittency could be lessened by large HVDC super smart grid, but again, 'this doesn't grow on trees'! One order of magnitude increase in production capacity would do the trick. At which magnitude of more emissions, counted over the whole lifecycle from mining raw materials, refining, producing, transporting, constructing, decommissioning? Compared to a few 100(0) reactors, be they modular/small/gen-whatever/fast breeder/liquid salt/traveling wave/fusion/I don't care. If the goal is to reduce emissions globally, nuclear it is! If need be maybe implemented in a Hyman Rickover way, not some crazy lowest bidder contractors. That worked for the US-Navy, so far. Why shouldn't it for the world? If this is The Emergency as it's supposed to be, it needs an emergency answer. Solar/Wind it isn't.
- VintageCool 5y ago
  Solar is cheap. Wind is cheap. They're cheap like cheaper than continuing to run existing coal plants, even without subsidies. And the costs are dropping rapidly, especially for solar. Meanwhile, nuclear is expensive. Like $6B to $8B per GW capacity. If we throw a big pile of money at the problem, we get more bang for our buck from renewables. And, since wind and solar are on cost learning curves such that the more we build the cheaper it gets, the money we throw at wine and solar gets multiplied in the future by private industry. Wind construction is fast. Solar construction is incredibly fast. Nuclear construction takes 8-15 years. Renewables also require batteries and transmission. Batteries are getting cheap too, having dropped 89% in price since 2010. Transmission is a bit more politically tricky, but I think it's doable. We might be able to get the US grid to 40% renewables by 2030. I doubt we'll have more than 5 GW of additional nuclear capacity in the US by 2030. The revolution will be well underway before nuclear can get its boots on.
throwaway210222 5y ago
> about 1200 GW of capacity Since 1GWa* ≈ 8 million tonnes of CO₂ †, this is about a billion tonnes saved every year. Sadly, we're about 3,000 Gt of CO₂ in excess in the atmosphere. *: GWa: 1 GW 24h/d, every day, for a year †: or about 1 Giza pyramid

flavius29663 5y ago

Excuse my ignorance, but where did you get the 500 billion price tag? And why do you say it's expensive? It's rather cheap. People keep saying how solar is the cheapest capacity to install, at 1 dollar per Watt. 1200 GW would be 1.2 trillions, and only offering around 240GW "constant" production, whereas nuclear is half the price to build but more like 1000 GW constant production

driest 5y ago
Not OP, but you're wrong about cost. Nuclear is more than twice as expensive as photovoltaics [1], so it's not cheap at all. And that doesn't include dealing with risks like proliferation and extremely hazardous waste for hundreds of years. the half trillion comment came from the original article, that stated an estimated cost of 440 billion. [1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
- zdragnar 5y ago
  Reading that link, levelized solar plus battery storage is twice the cost of nuclear. It is cheap to generate the electricity, but only when backed by natural gas or hydro.
  - driest 5y ago
    yes, solar and wind energy generation is intermittent, that's no surprise to anyone. but it is much much cheaper than nuclear energy.
    - zdragnar 5y ago
      This misses the point. You cannot compare solar and nuclear directly, because they serve different needs. Without battery or natural gas, solar and wind are not useful. You have to have some sort of backup, sufficient to avoid brownouts or blackouts, and so you end up with the full capitalization and maintenance cost of not-solar anyway. To properly compare solar with nuclear, you must add on the cost of battery and / or natural gas (or equivalent fast backup), at which point nuclear is cheaper.
      - bryanlarsen 5y ago
        Here's solar+battery for $40/MWh. https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-than-24gwh-of-batteries-included-in-its-us-solar-plus-storage-pipeline/ https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-... That's at least half the cost of nuclear, maybe as much as a fifth.

Jansen312 5y ago

If they do thorium then I am all for it. If not (so can feed their nuclear weaponizations) we all pray for the people over there. Their track records of industry accidents aren't that proud of.

29athrowaway 5y ago

That pollution is to make the stuff you buy in Walmart. As long as you as a consumer do not demand a label such as "made with green energy" and prefer those products, the polluting manufacturers will prevail.

rsj_hn 5y ago
That's definitely part of it. But the flip side of that is that as the U.S. tightens emissions, production outsources elsewhere, possibly where emissions standards and many other environmental standards are much lower, which could lead to an overall net harm. Thus if you have 3 countries, it may be worse for just one of the countries to pass environmental constraints on the production of tradeables. Either all three countries do it, or none do it, or you don't trade at all with those that don't do it. Why people don't take these arguments to their logical conclusion is beyond me.
- 29athrowaway 5y ago
  A label would help. It transfers the responsibility to the consumer. If you have a dozen of regular eggs, a dozen of cage-free eggs, and a dozen of pasture-raised eggs... If you pick the regular choice you know you are contributing to less humane conditions for chickens. Now it is your choice.
  - blacksmith_tb 5y ago
    To a point - if you're going to have labeling you'll already need some kind of regulation and enforcement. Seems to me like if you're going to set that up, you could just turn the knobs a little farther and make the 'bad' choices cost 20% more than the 'good', for example.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      Adding a tariff to goods has three drawbacks 1. very easy to cheat. E.g. during Trump's tariffs on China, there was mass cheating as goods were imported into Vietnam, relabelled as made in Vietnam, and exported to the U.S. When there is big money at stake, the incentive to cheat goes way up. Trying to audit every exporter's Asian supply chain in search of Chinese inputs is tough. 2. Imposing a country-wide tariff does not incentivize any producer to adopt more efficient processes. Imagine if the EU decided the US gas taxes were too low, and so they slapped a tariff on American cars. Would that incentivize Americans to use less gas? Would it make Americans favor an increase in gas taxes? 3. They lead to retaliatory tariffs by the other side. There's no such thing as pure one way punishment, no matter how justified you think you are. The other side will punish you by the same amount, if they can, in order to punish what they view as your bad behavior in trying to punish them. Now I'm a big fan of trade reductions, but that's because it's part of my personal war on globalism. But make sure you are signing up for the same mass trade restrictions - e.g. blanket bans on certain products coming from all of East Asia - because that's what this is. Don't think you can wage a war against CO2 without also waging a war against globalism. International conferences are fun, but they have no teeth and don't get the job done.

jjoonathan 5y ago

Nuclear follows a learning curve too. The reason why it got so expensive is because we fell down the curve. Intentionally. So that we could fill our atmosphere with CO2 while we waited 40 years for wind and solar to become viable. The mind boggles.

rmbyrro 5y ago
Do you mean we lowered the scale of nuclear after accidents, thus increased cost/Kw generated?
- tw04 5y ago
  He means when you stop building reactors, you lose the tribal knowledge to build reactors. No different than when folks try to reproduce WWII vehicles and discover the plans don’t actually reflect the real build process because things were adapted on the fly and never written down because everyone “just knew”. Oh that weld? We actually need plates and bolts to reinforce it due to stress cracks in the field.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Exactly. When you are building one offs, and something goes wrong and you redo it, you don't gain benefit from knowledge of not making same mistake again. As there isn't next time. Now when you have done same mistake before you won't repeat it. And these mistakes are the reason behind delays and part of cost over runs.
Gwypaas 5y ago
Not really, nuclear power is one of those things which has had a negative learning curve. The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421510003526 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

tuatoru 5y ago

China absolutely does need to replace its coal-powered electricity plants. But it also needs a great deal more electricity, for a few reasons. Away from the coast and the mega cities, there is still a lot of energy poverty. If China is going to replace coal in iron smelting and steelmaking, it needs to electrolyze a lot of hydrogen. It also needs electrolyzed hydrogen to replace fossil methane for making ammonia for fertilizer, and for wintertime peak electricity plants (and possibly for engines for ocean-going ships, if it can't use nuclear for them). If it's going to capture the carbon from its cement plants, it needs power to do that. Electrolyzed hydrogen and captured CO2 will have to be the new feedstocks for many industrial chemicals and plastics. I don't think it's either-or with nuclear and wind/PV, it's not hedging bets, it's whatever works locally, ASAP and AMAP.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

I think you answered your own question: energy policy is a multi-layered approach. There's no one silver-bullet, at least this century. It will take a lot of small steps. This is one of those instances where authoritarian governments can move faster. Although that is a LOT of nuclear waste they will be creating. Hopefully the also advance waste storage technology in parallel.

gambiting 5y ago
The thing about nuclear waste is that even a lot of it is not a lot in absolute terms. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... "In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards."
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  ...and that's from generating 20% of the US's energy the whole time.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  I understand what you're saying, especially when compared to trillions and trillions (quadrillions?) of tons of CO2 and particulate pollution of coal and oil burning. OTOH, It would be nice if the nuclear waste could be stored that way. But that concentrated football field can be used for all sorts of nefarious purposes. Ultimately it requires a large amount of infrastructure to prevent leakage, exposure, theft, explosion, degradation of infrastructure, terrorism, etc. So maybe the football field turns into a billion-dollar-a-year "small-town-sized" facility that has to be maintained for as long as humanity exists (10,000 years?). Now it seems much bigger.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - lazide 5y ago

riazrizvi 5y ago

Yes a loaded headline. It could have read “China pivots to carbon clean nuclear power”.

moffkalast 5y ago
What would the world be like without the media scaremongering every headline eh? Shame we'll never find out.
- hermitcrab 5y ago
  It is a pity that nuclear power is such an emotive subject. Nuclear energy has killed a lot less people than dams or coal mines (possibly even if you include the 2 nuclear bombs dropped on Japan, I haven't done the sums).
  - noja 5y ago
    The forever cost of a failed nuclear plant is a heavy burden.

tuatoru 5y ago

> Helion is pitching 0.01$/kwh. That's the right level of ambition here. Does Helion have a demonstrator plant or a pilot? Or even a prototype? All I see is ... nothing. It is impossible for them to be in commercial operation in nine years even if they did have a working demonstrator. NIMBYism, fear of H-bombs, and the slow speed of regulation guarantee it.

jillesvangurp 5y ago
They have serious funding, so they have more than nothing. Given the investors don't seem to be naive idiots, I'd say they are making a calculated bet and there might be more to this than wishful thinking. You see nothing, they see opportunity. You can't both be right.
- tuatoru 5y ago
  Heard of Theranos?
moffkalast 5y ago
They're a company that's showed nothing so far and claims to know how to do something that's apparently eluded a dozen other fusion power projects with quite literally 1000 times more funding. The likes of ITER and Wendelstein, or the NIF. Helion's only got about 80M of venture investments, which in the field of energy innovation is basically chump change. I mean call me a sceptic, but I have a feeling they may not be able to completely deliver on their promise hah.
- threeseed 5y ago
  They’ve shown nothing to you. That doesn’t mean investors haven’t seen prototypes.
  - moffkalast 5y ago
    If they had something substantial it would make sense to patent it, instead of keeping it hidden and the potential for it to be stolen as an option. Either the principle their reactor will work on isn't conceptually done yet or they're being seriously irresponsible with their achievements.

rewq4321 5y ago

> The interesting thing will be if production capacity for wind turbines and solar panels will grow quickly enough to make this investment unnecessary. One order of magnitude increase in production capacity would do the trick. This assumes massive advances in battery tech to support seasonal and week-to-week weather changes. Even the new iron-air tech is still very expensive - $300 million for enough capacity to power 50,000 homes for just one day.[0] By my rough calculations that's 28 trillion dollars to buy enough batteries for all homes in China, assuming 600 million homes, and 7 days of capacity. But that's quite optimistic, because it's not that hard to get more than a week of unfavourable weather, and you don't want your country to shut down every time that happens. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-30/iron-battery-breakthrough-could-eat-lithium-s-lunch https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-30/iron-batt...

andi999 5y ago
Things get cheaper if you order for a trillion.
- seabrookmx 5y ago
  This logic only works if the production capacity is available. If you have to rebuild your entire supply chain to handle that kind of demand you're prices will start to go back up again.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    For China (and quite a lot of other places, including the UK) the alternative to building a battery supply chain is to build a supply chain for something else, not to keep the existing and increasingly pointless coal-based supply chains. (That “something else” can be nuclear).
spfzero 5y ago
I think if you install 28 trillion dollars worth of batteries you're going to have a waste problem that will dwarf storing the waste from fission plants.

belorn 5y ago

The cost picture is complex. Using nuclear they can build the plants next to the industry centers, replacing existing coal plans. They don't need to build batteries to address the intermittency of renewables. In addition 150 power plants being built at the same time might gain some benefit of scale, and might attract other countries to follow suit. We need to compare the cost to what other countries are doing to achieve similar goals. Countries like Germany is planning to create green hydrogen in order to replace the current natural gas plants, and we don't know the price tag for that. Europe is currently also seeing the consequences of relying on natural gas and energy trading, with record high energy costs for the end consumer, despite building a lot of solar and wind farms. The high demand for natural gas is also creating additional problems for industries that depend on that limited resource, like agriculture. With uranium there isn't many other industries that compete for that resource.

jillesvangurp 5y ago
High gas prices are short term very disruptive but actually speed up the agenda of relying less on it. Which is why it is a good thing IMHO with some bad/unfortunate impact on people with lower incomes, You can bet, a lot of home owners that haven't already are now considering heat exchanges, solar, and batteries as ways to have less exposure to high energy prices. Additionally, high gas prices push gas power plants towards being less profitable. Most European energy companies are already investing heavily in wind (particularly) and solar. So, you could argue that investing in gas plants just got a lot less attractive than it already was. High cost would actually still be manageable if it was predictable. However, that is becoming exactly the issue. It swings between too low for exploitation to be even profitable due to over supply and then too high because of Russian and OPEC policy resulting in supply disruption. Kind of a bad situation to be in if you are dependent on that. The smart move would be to eliminate such dependencies as soon as possible. Energy companies are going bankrupt right now because they are locked into contracts with consumers they no longer can afford.

johnchristopher 5y ago

> And as the US has less of a coal problem at this point (most of it will be gone by the middle of this decade), Am I reading that right that the US has less then 4 years of coal output ?

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Given how dependable and safe nuclear is combined with the reduction in carbon it is well worth it. This move is much more sensible than expanding wind and solar on the same scale, and also much more predictable.

BurningFrog 5y ago

> If it gets them to shut down their coal plants, great. China is set to build 43 new coal plants in 2021, and they have a big power supply problem. So shutting any plants down is not happening anytime soon. https://time.com/6090732/china-coal-power-plants-emissions/ https://time.com/6090732/china-coal-power-plants-emissions/

kragen 5y ago
China shuts down lots of coal plants all the time; it's just that they're also building them. In 02020 they built more than they shut down. I'll be surprised if that's the case in 02021.

elihu 5y ago

I suppose another geopolitical aspect of this is that China doesn't want to be dependent on other nations for fuel. If they became involved in a war or even just anger their trading partners in some way, the rest of the world can shut off their energy supply. For that matter, even if they're on great terms with all their trading partners, those trading partners might ask themselves "why are we selling coal to some other country so they can get the benefit when we have to live with the CO2 emissions as if we had burned it ourselves?" To be honest, I don't understand why the U.S. exports coal at all; it just doesn't seem worth it. (Though I can see where the coal lobby might have something to say about it if such legislation was proposed.)

dv_dt 5y ago

The other thing that might need to grow is multiple supply chains into specialized nuclear components by an order of magnitude. My gut says it’s actually easier to scale solar and renewables by an order of magnitude than those items. Of course China might have the same motivations of many nuclear powers have - which is a desire to also maintain a baseline manufacturing capacity for nuclear technologies in general.

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago

I don't get the hope for ramping up production capacity for wind turbines and solar panels 'fast enough'. Supposedly this is all about climate change and limiting or even stopping emissions, to counter climate change, yes? While these emissions can be especially annoying when they are near you, they work globally because they give a shit about borders. Supposedly, Yes? So, from a global ecosystem point of view, considering 'cradle to cradle' without any externalizations, what exactly is won by that, considering the emissions from producing and transporting all that stuff? Wind turbines require large concrete foundations, you can't put them into the ground like a toothpick into a piece of cheese. If not in some flat desert, stable roads for the construction and transport, requiring cutting down parts of the forest. Same for the cables, no matter if over land, or underground transmission. At Sea it's even more complicated and material intensive. Solar is requiring large areas to be effective, similar considerations apply. The production and transport of all that stuff, and the mining and refining of the necessary raw materials is causing emissions. While of intermittent use, without storage, which again requires mining, refining, transport, production, transport, construction, maintenance, causing more emissions again. Whose intermittency could be lessened by large HVDC super smart grid, but again, 'this doesn't grow on trees'! One order of magnitude increase in production capacity would do the trick. At which magnitude of more emissions, counted over the whole lifecycle from mining raw materials, refining, producing, transporting, constructing, decommissioning? Compared to a few 100(0) reactors, be they modular/small/gen-whatever/fast breeder/liquid salt/traveling wave/fusion/I don't care. If the goal is to reduce emissions globally, nuclear it is! If need be maybe implemented in a Hyman Rickover way, not some crazy lowest bidder contractors. That worked for the US-Navy, so far. Why shouldn't it for the world? If this is The Emergency as it's supposed to be, it needs an emergency answer. Solar/Wind it isn't.

VintageCool 5y ago
Solar is cheap. Wind is cheap. They're cheap like cheaper than continuing to run existing coal plants, even without subsidies. And the costs are dropping rapidly, especially for solar. Meanwhile, nuclear is expensive. Like $6B to $8B per GW capacity. If we throw a big pile of money at the problem, we get more bang for our buck from renewables. And, since wind and solar are on cost learning curves such that the more we build the cheaper it gets, the money we throw at wine and solar gets multiplied in the future by private industry. Wind construction is fast. Solar construction is incredibly fast. Nuclear construction takes 8-15 years. Renewables also require batteries and transmission. Batteries are getting cheap too, having dropped 89% in price since 2010. Transmission is a bit more politically tricky, but I think it's doable. We might be able to get the US grid to 40% renewables by 2030. I doubt we'll have more than 5 GW of additional nuclear capacity in the US by 2030. The revolution will be well underway before nuclear can get its boots on.

throwaway210222 5y ago

> about 1200 GW of capacity Since 1GWa* ≈ 8 million tonnes of CO₂ †, this is about a billion tonnes saved every year. Sadly, we're about 3,000 Gt of CO₂ in excess in the atmosphere. *: GWa: 1 GW 24h/d, every day, for a year †: or about 1 Giza pyramid