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China greenlights 6 new nuclear reactors in shift away from coal

25 points by rustoo 5y ago

moomin 5y ago
I saw a chart today from someone who knows what he’s talking about of greenhouse gases emitted in the production and consumption of European fossil fuels. A couple of things stood out: 1) Coal was actually the best performer in this metric (which I found shocking but possibly this is as a consequence of emissions controls introduced for other reasons) 2) Gas used to perform much the same as oil but in the last couple of years has gone completely out of control. Said person was arguing that trying to reduce emissions is attractive in the short term where there’s lot of easy wins, but in practice no-one’s shutting down the fossil fuel industry and it would be better to mandate they move to net zero/carbon sequestration.
- hbrav 5y ago
  I'd love to see a source for this. I'm very surprised by any claim of coal having a CO2 emissions per GW hr.
fulafel 5y ago
Sounds they plan to make quite a few more: "plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by more than doubling nuclear power capacity this decade" China had ~50 GW of installed NPP capacity at the start of the decade (according to WP), so this would mean getting 50+ big new plants online this decade. They seem to plan for ~7 year construction times so these would need to be started by end of next year. Anyone know how many are currently under construction? They started the decade at about 5% nuclear energy share of total production so if they make the target, they'll be probably somewhere between 5 and 10% depending how much the total electricity production capacity increases.
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  They apparently have over 200 reactors "in development" (i.e. announced), of which 19 are under construction, and another 43 waiting for approval.[1] [1]: https://www.energymonitor.ai/sectors/power/weekly-data-chinas-nuclear-pipeline-as-big-as-the-rest-of-the-worlds-combined https://www.energymonitor.ai/sectors/power/weekly-data-china...

25 points by rustoo 5y ago

I saw a chart today from someone who knows what he’s talking about of greenhouse gases emitted in the production and consumption of European fossil fuels. A couple of things stood out: 1) Coal was actually the best performer in this metric (which I found shocking but possibly this is as a consequence of emissions controls introduced for other reasons) 2) Gas used to perform much the same as oil but in the last couple of years has gone completely out of control. Said person was arguing that trying to reduce emissions is attractive in the short term where there’s lot of easy wins, but in practice no-one’s shutting down the fossil fuel industry and it would be better to mandate they move to net zero/carbon sequestration.

hbrav 5y ago
I'd love to see a source for this. I'm very surprised by any claim of coal having a CO2 emissions per GW hr.

fulafel 5y ago

Sounds they plan to make quite a few more: "plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by more than doubling nuclear power capacity this decade" China had ~50 GW of installed NPP capacity at the start of the decade (according to WP), so this would mean getting 50+ big new plants online this decade. They seem to plan for ~7 year construction times so these would need to be started by end of next year. Anyone know how many are currently under construction? They started the decade at about 5% nuclear energy share of total production so if they make the target, they'll be probably somewhere between 5 and 10% depending how much the total electricity production capacity increases.

adhesive_wombat 5y ago
They apparently have over 200 reactors "in development" (i.e. announced), of which 19 are under construction, and another 43 waiting for approval.[1] [1]: https://www.energymonitor.ai/sectors/power/weekly-data-chinas-nuclear-pipeline-as-big-as-the-rest-of-the-worlds-combined https://www.energymonitor.ai/sectors/power/weekly-data-china...