I hope China aims for energy abundance, and makes energy practically free through building 800-1000 (cheap) nuclear power plants.
currently they copy our expensive overregulated designs, and are aiming to have a similar energy mix tot the USA--> Well, that will never make them as wealthy as the USA.
If China does that, we'd have to follow, and the world would be a much better place.
PS- by the way, China's pace of nuclear plant construction entering the pipeline now seems to be 10-11 units entering the pipeline each year. Typically in projects consisting of two units at a site. In that part of the world, it's about 18 months between approval/announcement and "first-concrete" i.e. start of construction.
That's a good point. In western countries, once you have approval, you'll have to fight of several lawsuits which drag on forever. I'm exaggerating, but it's a consideration why it will take a long time for nuclear to make a larger impact.
That 800-1000 nuclear plants is about 3 years worth of current Chinese solar production (ie very roughly 1GW of new generation added each day), and this is still accelerating. Tho the nameplate capacity for solar is ofc at peak power and intermittent. Nevertheless, they're definitely on track for energy abundance.
I have looked into all of this. The narrative around all of this is incredibly stupid, here are my figures:
Unless Solar to Methane becomes cheap enough (another 10x in lower costs for solar is needed), or batteries go through a few technological revolutions (around a 50x). All solar will do is ruin the grid and make us all poor.
The former is possible, I suspect solar can get 10x more cheaper still, in that case, we can produce natural gas from the sun. Effectively storing solar energy into methane form (instead of battaries), allowing us to transport it and key it into the already existing industrial natural gas system.
The battery thing doesn't look too hopeful, but, who knows, China has a national average IQ of 104 and graduates more STEM phd's than the entire rest of the world combined.
Narrative or not, it's happening. The need to beef up the grid is real, and in fact seems to be the very next big Chinese buildout that's coming up in the coming 5 years.
Ongoing advances in transistor technology is continuing to make power conversion ever more efficient, facilitating this.
Down the road, I suspect it won't be too hard to find uses for a cheap but intermittent energy. The most obvious one is making more fresh water and pumping it thru new canals. There is potential to make huge tracts of previously uninhabitable land green.
Electric powered ammonia production in China is also in the pilot plant stage from what I read. This application displaces natural gas imports 1-for-1, but is relatively small. Electric methanol is also discussed, though I don't think is as much of a winner. Still, considering that US scaled up corn ethanol, with very modest efficiencies, just to shave like 25 cents off the production cost of a gallon of gas, it might happen anyway.
Finally, down-the-road battery tech also has potential to scale for the the overnight storage scenario, though not multi-week seasonal lulls. The Chinese answer to the seasonal lulls seems very simple actually. Just keep the coal plants (and even upgrade them) for when renewables are out of season, and don't run them at all when renewables are in-season.
That's all nice and well, there are surely limited applications of cheap solar already. But broadly speaking the energy transition isn't here yet because it isn't within the tent of capitalism. For solar + batteries the return on capital is still mostly negative, and powered by Oil/Gas. If it's not negative, it's still way below oil/gas, which is deeply problematic too.
So as things are right now. We have a choice. Do we go back to a stone-age civilization? Because that's what solar + battery will lead to at current prices. Or do we keep using oil and gas?
We can't just 'develop' in some direction; we can also dig many holes into the ground and exclaim progress. Currently solar + batteries is nothing more than digging holes into the ground and exclaiming progress.
However, as I said, perhaps the return on capital (return on energy) is good enough on solar that we'll have a great future. I think a 10x cheapening in costs of solar is possible, in which case we can make hydrogen/methane at a competitive cost to Fracking oil/gas.
But currently, it's not there.
The future we are all promised, currently, is not there. We have great phone technologies, but have had zero innovation in what matters. I.e., energy. If an abundant energy future doesn't come, we die. If it comes, we live. That's the human condition
New designs for nuke plants are fine for a 2035+ time frame. But the 2 recently completed Vogtle AP1000s in GA are proven and work NOW.
Yes, they were expensive and over budget.
Yes, they took too long.
But they will run for 60 to 90 years with 90% + uptime.
Given the (rather depressing) regulatory realities in the US, the AP1000 is the best we got for going forward. The next AP1000 build will benefit from the lessons learned at Vogtle - both the construction and regulatory eff-ups. Chris Kiefer's excellent Decouple podcast addresses this issue in be depth.
Back to Gen IV reactors... Do NOT assume that The Regulators will look kindly on any new design in the US. Their statist, enviro mindset may be on the blackfoot now, but these True Believers do not sleep.
Amazing article John. We can only hope these timelines move forward but they usually go the other way. If the demand for chips stays elevated for years. I can see a huge problem around energy developing.
That will be a major step, and there are some indications the tide is shifting. The EU, as always, is a nice example of internal division. Greens in Finland consider nuclear energy "green", and in fact the EU taxonomy as well; but in countries like Austria and Germany the Greens actually filed a lawsuit against the taxonomy.
The Finns are also the only country to have started construction on a repository for high-level nuclear waste. I have come around on nuclear fission because its problems are serious, but not existential like those of fossil fuels. Reprocessing makes waste disposal more tractable. Still, I would feel more heartened if we had more than one example over 70+ years of commercial energy production of a country making the investment in a permanent solution.
Amazing write-up. Thanks for enlightening your readers. I can specifically attest your analysis of Germany - or rather, its politicians of the past 20 years or so, in form of the Green "No Nuclear" movement mainly, who managed to complete their energy destructive working with now shutting down the last reactors as of 2024. They literally not only "dropped the ball" (or is it "the pellet"?) on this tech but effectively also cut off German citizen's access to cheap power with their hopeless move to go into "renewables" - I still hate that word from the bottom of my heart. German greens and current incumbents perfectly proof the case of: "Why use sense and rationality, when you have blind ideology?"
Liquid Salt, which you touched on, seems more complex and if this is all true and can be manufactured in size, China might be a net exporter soon, raking in Billions if they serialize the tech and sell it. Or, you know, they might keep it for themselves, too.
It may be easier to build and fuel one pebble bed reactor, but it will be much faster and cheaper to scale thorium fluoride reactors, which China is also working on (TMSR-LF1). The salt itself chemically contains nearly everything of concern, and has much better thermal properties, greatly reducing the coolant volume, reactor size, and so forth.
Thorium is a readily available waste product in China, and dissolving metal rods in salt makes refueling much easier and cheaper. TRISO in HALEU actual makes our uranium mining and enrichment problems worse, even before the high cost of precision manufacturing thousands of TRISO balls is considered. In the end, it still doesn't survive long in the reactor, and most of the uranium becomes non-recyclable waste. At least the fuel in conventional reactors is easily recycled, even if they are abysmally inefficient.
Helium cooling is just not a great idea, because gasses have low heat capacity and enormous amounts are needed, increasing the reactor size. The high pressure also complicates refueling. For niches that need really high temperature operation, thorium+HEU makes more sense, but the idea was abandoned because of proliferation concerns. Since China is also pursuing thorium reactors, thorium+U233 might still be interesting option one day. For HALEU TRISO today, it makes much more sense to use fluoride salt cooling, as in the Kairos Power FHR.
I've read a bit about the "liquid salt" (Thorium) tech as well - not that I would pretend to understand all of it. Definitely there are huge advances in nuclear that "renewable" climatologists would deny much like the flat earthers would readily deny roundtrips around the world are possible.
Now I guess it's a new dawn - the one side will be intractable: they will deny viability, cite "dangers" of nuclear outweighing everything, proving they are not scientists but ideologues. The other side will just build the tech to the first one's detriment - while they'll have stable energy, the climatologists need "energy conservation plans" - when solar, wind are not there - no power for your heavy industries, so they'll need a great weather forecast to plan for possible production. Sounds as ridiculous as it actually is.
Many thanks for your comment! Agree Germany is a special case. I wonder what will become of the recent story that they arrested a suspect in the Nord Stream sabotage.
Let's leave aside the matter of "false flags" for a minute re. Nordstream 2 - unless finding the (real) culprit will heal the exploded pipeline and replenish the lost flow of gas, nothing much will happen there.
Since this story nor my comment is not about Nordstream I'd hate to speculate on that, but it's 100% safe to say: nothing will change in terms of Germany's very bleak energy picture.
I'd more love to have them see reason and not just as of this weekend also blow up a perfectly working nuclear cooling complex:
Talk about the normative power of the factual, reinterpreted? For people who are into "renewable" stories, they sure don't seem to want to renew a perfectly good reactor once the energy drought gets too unbearable?
Chernobyl really seems to have shaped global opinions of nuclear power. I was unaware how simple the meltdown was and never knew what caused it. Really poor decision making! The advancement of cooling without requiring energy input is an incredible step forward in plant design.
China also owns fabrication rights to Westinghouse Gen III reactors which they are building for use in China. Too bad we panicked and let our nuclear industry go out of business.
Interesting article. We need more of this. We know how to make clean and affordable power. Unfortunately, bureaucracy stands in the way. Not to mention the masses have been wrongly convinced that nuclear power is dangerous.
Excellent article! Thankyou…my immediate reaction is that much like VHS vs Betamax, (marketing over quality), the US would never acknowledge any other country’s process as superior to something the US had designed, so good luck getting best of breed up and running!
I think there's strong momentum behind the development of several competing technologies, and the private sector can resolve it by itself. The power to interfere (special interest groups and government agencies) is dwindling, at least in the U.S.
Europe is much messier, but the majority of countries is pro-nuclear (only Austria and Germany strongly against it).
A dozen years from now, money and praise may be flowing to China because >=1 of their 20-some reactor designs turned out to be (one of) the one(s) that Saved The World.
Or, China may be writing off some technologically successful but economically insufficient projects that got beaten because it turned out fracking was a cheap way to create geothermal generation, and even geo-storage.
These projects are ALSO very speculative as to payback, so it's an exciting race. The nice thing is that the human race wins, as long as one of the technologies does.
I thought this was a really interesting article. Solve a lot of problems in Australia especially being able to build them on existing coal plant sites. Huge savings on transmission line costs and offset employment losses in the regions where coal plants are normally located.
Am I right in thinking that the pe ble reactor was developed in South Africa and then closed down for supposedly lack of funding? Is this the same technology the Chinese are developing?
I hope China aims for energy abundance, and makes energy practically free through building 800-1000 (cheap) nuclear power plants.
currently they copy our expensive overregulated designs, and are aiming to have a similar energy mix tot the USA--> Well, that will never make them as wealthy as the USA.
If China does that, we'd have to follow, and the world would be a much better place.
It’s still early days, but it can change China’s position in the global community massively. I’m curious how they will use it.
PS- by the way, China's pace of nuclear plant construction entering the pipeline now seems to be 10-11 units entering the pipeline each year. Typically in projects consisting of two units at a site. In that part of the world, it's about 18 months between approval/announcement and "first-concrete" i.e. start of construction.
source: https://nitter.poast.org/pretentiouswhat/status/1825953758221840682#m
That's a good point. In western countries, once you have approval, you'll have to fight of several lawsuits which drag on forever. I'm exaggerating, but it's a consideration why it will take a long time for nuclear to make a larger impact.
That 800-1000 nuclear plants is about 3 years worth of current Chinese solar production (ie very roughly 1GW of new generation added each day), and this is still accelerating. Tho the nameplate capacity for solar is ofc at peak power and intermittent. Nevertheless, they're definitely on track for energy abundance.
I have looked into all of this. The narrative around all of this is incredibly stupid, here are my figures:
Unless Solar to Methane becomes cheap enough (another 10x in lower costs for solar is needed), or batteries go through a few technological revolutions (around a 50x). All solar will do is ruin the grid and make us all poor.
The former is possible, I suspect solar can get 10x more cheaper still, in that case, we can produce natural gas from the sun. Effectively storing solar energy into methane form (instead of battaries), allowing us to transport it and key it into the already existing industrial natural gas system.
The battery thing doesn't look too hopeful, but, who knows, China has a national average IQ of 104 and graduates more STEM phd's than the entire rest of the world combined.
Narrative or not, it's happening. The need to beef up the grid is real, and in fact seems to be the very next big Chinese buildout that's coming up in the coming 5 years.
Ongoing advances in transistor technology is continuing to make power conversion ever more efficient, facilitating this.
Down the road, I suspect it won't be too hard to find uses for a cheap but intermittent energy. The most obvious one is making more fresh water and pumping it thru new canals. There is potential to make huge tracts of previously uninhabitable land green.
Electric powered ammonia production in China is also in the pilot plant stage from what I read. This application displaces natural gas imports 1-for-1, but is relatively small. Electric methanol is also discussed, though I don't think is as much of a winner. Still, considering that US scaled up corn ethanol, with very modest efficiencies, just to shave like 25 cents off the production cost of a gallon of gas, it might happen anyway.
Finally, down-the-road battery tech also has potential to scale for the the overnight storage scenario, though not multi-week seasonal lulls. The Chinese answer to the seasonal lulls seems very simple actually. Just keep the coal plants (and even upgrade them) for when renewables are out of season, and don't run them at all when renewables are in-season.
That's all nice and well, there are surely limited applications of cheap solar already. But broadly speaking the energy transition isn't here yet because it isn't within the tent of capitalism. For solar + batteries the return on capital is still mostly negative, and powered by Oil/Gas. If it's not negative, it's still way below oil/gas, which is deeply problematic too.
So as things are right now. We have a choice. Do we go back to a stone-age civilization? Because that's what solar + battery will lead to at current prices. Or do we keep using oil and gas?
We can't just 'develop' in some direction; we can also dig many holes into the ground and exclaim progress. Currently solar + batteries is nothing more than digging holes into the ground and exclaiming progress.
However, as I said, perhaps the return on capital (return on energy) is good enough on solar that we'll have a great future. I think a 10x cheapening in costs of solar is possible, in which case we can make hydrogen/methane at a competitive cost to Fracking oil/gas.
But currently, it's not there.
The future we are all promised, currently, is not there. We have great phone technologies, but have had zero innovation in what matters. I.e., energy. If an abundant energy future doesn't come, we die. If it comes, we live. That's the human condition
New designs for nuke plants are fine for a 2035+ time frame. But the 2 recently completed Vogtle AP1000s in GA are proven and work NOW.
Yes, they were expensive and over budget.
Yes, they took too long.
But they will run for 60 to 90 years with 90% + uptime.
Given the (rather depressing) regulatory realities in the US, the AP1000 is the best we got for going forward. The next AP1000 build will benefit from the lessons learned at Vogtle - both the construction and regulatory eff-ups. Chris Kiefer's excellent Decouple podcast addresses this issue in be depth.
Back to Gen IV reactors... Do NOT assume that The Regulators will look kindly on any new design in the US. Their statist, enviro mindset may be on the blackfoot now, but these True Believers do not sleep.
Amazing article John. We can only hope these timelines move forward but they usually go the other way. If the demand for chips stays elevated for years. I can see a huge problem around energy developing.
thanks again, much appreciated!
Yes, AI might ultimately be the thing that reinvigorates nuclear power.
We need to get the environmental movement back on board with nuclear as a clean energy source
That will be a major step, and there are some indications the tide is shifting. The EU, as always, is a nice example of internal division. Greens in Finland consider nuclear energy "green", and in fact the EU taxonomy as well; but in countries like Austria and Germany the Greens actually filed a lawsuit against the taxonomy.
The Finns are also the only country to have started construction on a repository for high-level nuclear waste. I have come around on nuclear fission because its problems are serious, but not existential like those of fossil fuels. Reprocessing makes waste disposal more tractable. Still, I would feel more heartened if we had more than one example over 70+ years of commercial energy production of a country making the investment in a permanent solution.
Amazing write-up. Thanks for enlightening your readers. I can specifically attest your analysis of Germany - or rather, its politicians of the past 20 years or so, in form of the Green "No Nuclear" movement mainly, who managed to complete their energy destructive working with now shutting down the last reactors as of 2024. They literally not only "dropped the ball" (or is it "the pellet"?) on this tech but effectively also cut off German citizen's access to cheap power with their hopeless move to go into "renewables" - I still hate that word from the bottom of my heart. German greens and current incumbents perfectly proof the case of: "Why use sense and rationality, when you have blind ideology?"
Liquid Salt, which you touched on, seems more complex and if this is all true and can be manufactured in size, China might be a net exporter soon, raking in Billions if they serialize the tech and sell it. Or, you know, they might keep it for themselves, too.
It may be easier to build and fuel one pebble bed reactor, but it will be much faster and cheaper to scale thorium fluoride reactors, which China is also working on (TMSR-LF1). The salt itself chemically contains nearly everything of concern, and has much better thermal properties, greatly reducing the coolant volume, reactor size, and so forth.
Thorium is a readily available waste product in China, and dissolving metal rods in salt makes refueling much easier and cheaper. TRISO in HALEU actual makes our uranium mining and enrichment problems worse, even before the high cost of precision manufacturing thousands of TRISO balls is considered. In the end, it still doesn't survive long in the reactor, and most of the uranium becomes non-recyclable waste. At least the fuel in conventional reactors is easily recycled, even if they are abysmally inefficient.
Helium cooling is just not a great idea, because gasses have low heat capacity and enormous amounts are needed, increasing the reactor size. The high pressure also complicates refueling. For niches that need really high temperature operation, thorium+HEU makes more sense, but the idea was abandoned because of proliferation concerns. Since China is also pursuing thorium reactors, thorium+U233 might still be interesting option one day. For HALEU TRISO today, it makes much more sense to use fluoride salt cooling, as in the Kairos Power FHR.
I've read a bit about the "liquid salt" (Thorium) tech as well - not that I would pretend to understand all of it. Definitely there are huge advances in nuclear that "renewable" climatologists would deny much like the flat earthers would readily deny roundtrips around the world are possible.
Now I guess it's a new dawn - the one side will be intractable: they will deny viability, cite "dangers" of nuclear outweighing everything, proving they are not scientists but ideologues. The other side will just build the tech to the first one's detriment - while they'll have stable energy, the climatologists need "energy conservation plans" - when solar, wind are not there - no power for your heavy industries, so they'll need a great weather forecast to plan for possible production. Sounds as ridiculous as it actually is.
Many thanks for your comment! Agree Germany is a special case. I wonder what will become of the recent story that they arrested a suspect in the Nord Stream sabotage.
Let's leave aside the matter of "false flags" for a minute re. Nordstream 2 - unless finding the (real) culprit will heal the exploded pipeline and replenish the lost flow of gas, nothing much will happen there.
Since this story nor my comment is not about Nordstream I'd hate to speculate on that, but it's 100% safe to say: nothing will change in terms of Germany's very bleak energy picture.
I'd more love to have them see reason and not just as of this weekend also blow up a perfectly working nuclear cooling complex:
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/08/17/germanys-grafenrheinfeld-nuclear-power-plant-demolished-after-short-delay
Talk about the normative power of the factual, reinterpreted? For people who are into "renewable" stories, they sure don't seem to want to renew a perfectly good reactor once the energy drought gets too unbearable?
... burning the ships.
Chernobyl really seems to have shaped global opinions of nuclear power. I was unaware how simple the meltdown was and never knew what caused it. Really poor decision making! The advancement of cooling without requiring energy input is an incredible step forward in plant design.
China also owns fabrication rights to Westinghouse Gen III reactors which they are building for use in China. Too bad we panicked and let our nuclear industry go out of business.
An American company, Radiant Nuclear, is working on a similar design. Lots more information here https://www.notboring.co/p/radiant
Interesting article. We need more of this. We know how to make clean and affordable power. Unfortunately, bureaucracy stands in the way. Not to mention the masses have been wrongly convinced that nuclear power is dangerous.
Excellent article! Thankyou…my immediate reaction is that much like VHS vs Betamax, (marketing over quality), the US would never acknowledge any other country’s process as superior to something the US had designed, so good luck getting best of breed up and running!
This is a great article. Thank you for flagging it.
Truly an example of requiring policy with long time frames, unfortunately not something western governments have been great at executing.
Any chance these lend themselves to public private partnership types arrangements were we keep political interference to a minimum after approval?
I think there's strong momentum behind the development of several competing technologies, and the private sector can resolve it by itself. The power to interfere (special interest groups and government agencies) is dwindling, at least in the U.S.
Europe is much messier, but the majority of countries is pro-nuclear (only Austria and Germany strongly against it).
A dozen years from now, money and praise may be flowing to China because >=1 of their 20-some reactor designs turned out to be (one of) the one(s) that Saved The World.
Or, China may be writing off some technologically successful but economically insufficient projects that got beaten because it turned out fracking was a cheap way to create geothermal generation, and even geo-storage.
These projects are ALSO very speculative as to payback, so it's an exciting race. The nice thing is that the human race wins, as long as one of the technologies does.
Very aligned with my own research. Thanks for expanding the conversation.
https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/nuclear-meltdown
Thanks for this helpful information! Seems to me these new techs techs out to be used widely. Way better than wind!
I thought this was a really interesting article. Solve a lot of problems in Australia especially being able to build them on existing coal plant sites. Huge savings on transmission line costs and offset employment losses in the regions where coal plants are normally located.
Am I right in thinking that the pe ble reactor was developed in South Africa and then closed down for supposedly lack of funding? Is this the same technology the Chinese are developing?
It's the same approach, but the South African design was based on Germany's AVR.
ah, I see, thank you for that, I had an incomplete history of this technology.