As of November 2022, China held a total of 2,510 GW of installed capacity, 44% of which is coal, 16.3% hydro, 14.7% solar, 13.9% wind, 4.5% natural gas, and 18.4% other fuels. Nuclear only accounted for 2.2% of the total domestic capacity, the least of all sources. Nuclear has a higher capacity factor and delived 5% of the total actual power generation. China’s fossil-fuel-fired fleets (coal, natural gas, and petroleum) supplied almost 70% of the country’s electricity in 2022.
As of Feb 2023, China has 55 nuclear units are operating, with 22 currently under construction (24GW) and 70 plus (88+ GW) planned.
China’s latest Five Year Plan sets the 2025 targets of 70GW of nuclear capacity as well as 3,000GW total power generating capacity from all fuels. In addition, Beijing’s nuclear expansion is part of the nation’s official efforts to achieve its energy transition targets, such as emissions peak by 2030 and reaching carbon neutrality by 2060.
The Chinese Nuclear Society expects China’s nuclear capacity to reach 150 GW and to generate 10% of domestic demand by 2035.
IF China was able to add 80 GW nuclear energy every ten years then in
2045 there would be 230 GW
2055 there would be 310 GW
and there would be 670 GW in 2100.
China has talked about 1200 GW of nuclear in 2100.
This would require increasing the build rate of nuclear to about 150 GW every ten years.
China is looking to make 600 MW high temperature nuclear pebble bed reactors. This could be a drop in replacement for each of the roughly 3000 coal power plants. The electrical grid and chemical heat processes using coal heat would not have to change.
2000 coal plant replacements would be 1200 GW.
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It takes a bit of digging to find out, but that 100,000 years is the time taken for spent fuel to decay to the same level of oral biotoxicity as unused reactor fuel. (See e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Fig-112-Radiotoxicity-of-LWR-spent-fuel-30_fig7_267955274). The time taken for spent fuel to decay to an equivalent external radiation field as natural uranium is 600 – 1000 years. I’ve been in pubs older than that.
The rapid construction of coal and gas plants makes it clear that the power production and interconnection aren’t the problem. The nuclear island is the slow part.
The nuclear industry must focus on reactors and heat transferring systems that can be built faster. A la the Natrium reactor or Copenhagen Atomics.
Make a nuclear island that is fast to construct and highly replicable to enable scale. Let existing solutions deal with the non nuclear stuff.
Not sure why it is always insisted to be “drop in replacement”… The AGRs kinda were, in that they could use the ‘same’ turbomachinery as the fossil burners, supposedly. Did that really happen though? Even so, assuming 600MWt was the sweet spot, it’s not like “woo boy, just drop it in” like some kind of hotrod motor swap.
My main takeaway from the article is nuclear supplying 2% of Chinese demand.
These pebble beds kinda suck man. They have a huge throughput making lots and lots of voluminous high level waste. The pebbles break too. How ’bout a deep dive on the AVR, which still has pellets stuck in cracked reflectors IIRC.
The fuel is expensive too. Pebble beds have the Pros of high temperature and very safe in extreme accident scenarios. Cons are very expensive fuel, high volume of waste fuel, etc.
I don’t see China replacing much coal with these reactors.
“very safe in accident scenarios” by virtue of PBMR being kept small and tall/narrow, at significant economic penalties. It is similar to NuScale’s grand idea to divide a big reactor into 12 little ones that don’t burn the fuel as well, although, it is worse for the PBMRs since graphite takes 50cm to slow a neutron on average (2.5 cm in H2O). High neutron leakage in PBMR is compensated for by using HALEU – increase the target atom density to compensate for neutrons leaving the show… Note that large graphite cores with larger aspect ratio (compared to the 50 cm diffusion length) can be made to work with natural enrichment (fermi pile). So, PBMR throw away the one good feature of using carbon (low absorption relative to H2O) with a tremendous amount of leakage in a tall aspect ratio to support radial heat conduction to the vessel walls in an accident. Any concept besides LWR is chock full of design compromises like this…
The US alone burns 32 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in 2022 with 55 grams of CO2 per cubic foot of natural gas burned. That’s 1.76 billion metric tons of CO2 produced from the US burning just natural gas alone and that’s not counting coal, gasoline, and Diesel. The amount of nuclear waste generated in the entire history of the United States since the first nuclear power plant is 90 thousand metric ton. That’s 20,000 times more and when time is factored in, the amount goes up another order of magnitude with another order of magnitude when CO2 emissions from all fossil fuels are included. No matter how inefficient NuScale or any other SMR is, it’s over a hundred thousand times worse with fossil fuels, especially when the fact that the nuclear waste is solid material that can be stored away allowed to decay.
What’s that you say, it takes a 100,000 years for it to decay into non-radioactive material. As opposed to the chemicals used to make wind turbine generators and photovoltaics, which are dangerous due to chemical toxicity and are stable. Which means they have an infinite half-life.
Nuclear
Hazardous duration of time for nuclear: 100,000 years
Solar
Hazardous duration of time for cadmium telluride: FOREVER
Hazardous duration of time for copper indium selenide: FOREVER
Hazardous duration of time for cadmium gallium (di)selenide: FOREVER
Hazardous duration of time for copper indium gallium (di)selenide: FOREVER
Hazardous duration of time for hexafluoroethane: FOREVER
Hazardous duration of time for polyvinyl fluoride: FOREVER
Hazardous duration of time for lead: FOREVER
And yes, a lot of nuclear waste will decay into lead but in 2018 alone, 4400 tons of lead was used in the production of solar panels. And solar only generates a fraction of the annual energy output of nuclear. Replace all nuclear facilities with solar and the amount of lead generated from solar alone will outpace the total mass of nuclear waste generated.
And the toxic lakes in China in rare earth element extraction, a sizable portion goes into manufacturing wind turbine generators is the ultimate example of green washing since all of the pollution is kept hidden from the public. It’s estimated that one ton of radioactive waste is generated for each ton of rare earth elements produced and 4.9 million lbs of rare earths went into producing wind turbine generators, which means 4.9 million lbs of radioactive waste was produced for wind power. This is about the same as the 5 million lbs of nuclear waste created by nuclear power. Yet nuclear power makes up 1/5th of annual energy production while wind only produces 3.5%.
There is no large scale energy production that doesn’t carry with it some form of environmental impact, but it’s dishonest to demand a level of perfection from nuclear power that is not required from solar and wind power which are objectively just as dirty if not dirtier than nuclear.
The uranium density in a PBMR is like 0.05gU/cc and the uranium density in a LWR is like 2.3gU/cc, so PBMR fuel is 46x more bulky than LWR fuel.
Perhaps achieving double the LWR burnup, PBMR waste throughput is 23x more volume than LWR fuel. It’s not double or triple, it is 23x.
Perhaps achieving double the LWR burnup at double the enrichment, the PBMR sort of breaks even on uranium utilization.
feed to product ratio for 5% enrichment (LWR) is 10:1
feed to product ratio for 10% enrichment (PBMR) is 21:1
Making arguments about how spent fuel is tightly packaged waste is valid, but the PBMR makes more than an order of magnitude more waste than the LWR. Like it or not, this is a basic parameter in a study of figures of merit when comparing designs. The PBMR fuel is expensive (made using PVD), bulky, and has a very large throughput. I don’t like PBMR. Consensus doesn’t like PBMR. Investor doesn’t like PBMR. This tech has been on the shelf for decades and only the Chinese have a pilot plant.