Nuclear Reactors 45 - China is Building a Lot of Reactors
I have always been fascinated by China. Their culture stretches back thousands of years. They have an amazing record of invention that was largely unknown in the West until the Twentieth Century. They also have a record of making sudden and profound changes in their society. I recently read 1421 by Gavin Menzies in which he describes two of these shifts. Around 1420, the Chinese built and dispatched thousands of ships to explore and map the entire world. When the fleet returned a few years later, the government had changed and the new Emperor order that all ships and records of the voyages be burned and forgotten. In the Twentieth Century, we had such abrupt changes as Mao’s Cultural Revolution which tore down the old government system and sent scholars to work on pig farms. Then, after Mao, the Chinese shifted again to allow more capitalist elements. Currently, they are a have a booming but overheating economy based on manufacture and international trade. They are planning another huge shift in the near future. The idea is that they need to have more consumers in China to relieve their dependence on international trade. The government has decided that they want to move two hundred million peasants from the countryside into new cities that are being built to accommodate them. This is supposed to be accomplished by 2025. All I can say to that is “good luck”.
Their economic boom and great plans require huge amounts of energy. They are building something like one new coal power plant a week over there. The air pollution in Beijing is so bad that most of the time it is like living in an airport smoking lounge. They are also working hard to pioneer solar energy and are beating us to market with new systems. And, to bring the subject back to this blog focus, they are building a lot of new nuclear power plants. They have purchased a couple of reactors from the Japanese but they are in the process of ramping up domestic production of their own nuclear industry.
Currently, Mainland China has seventeen nuclear reactors in operation and twenty eight under construction. Construction of fifty more reactors is scheduled in the near future with a hundred more being planned. They want to have four times the current nuclear power capacity by 2020 which would be about fifty eight gigawatts. Another fourfold increase to two hundred gigawatts is planned for 2030 with future doubling to four hundred gigawatts by 2040. They are purchasing nuclear technology from other countries and using it to develop their own reactors designs including some of the most advanced reactor designs in the world.
While I applaud their ambition and have no doubt that they have the engineers who can build this huge new fleet of reactors, I do have some concerns about their plans. For one thing, they are in a huge real estate bubble economically that could collapse any day and interfere with the availability of the resources including investment capital they need for their new reactor fleet. Another problem I have is that there is rampant corruption in the Chinese government and a serious lack of transparency and oversight. I remember Chinese schools that collapsed during an earthquake because they were built with substandard concrete and one fourth of the steel reinforcement that they should have had. If some of these new reactors are constructed with substandard materials and lax standards, they will be accidents just waiting to happen. A third issue is the availability of cooling water for the reactors. Major rivers in China no longer reach the sea because all the water has been drawn off for drinking water, industrial use and irrigation. China intends to have a closed fuel cycle. That means that they will be mining uranium inside China. Considering their poor environmental record to date, there could be serious environmental degradation from such mining. And finally, they will have to dispose of the waste generated from all those reactors which has many complications of its own. China may come to regret the brave new nuclear future that it has planned.
