China’s Plan To Develop Totally New Nuclear Fuel Speeds Up

[FBaggins]

China needs energy just about any way they can get it — coal, gas, solar, wind, biomass, nuclear — they’ll take it. However the country’s heavy reliance on coal is is becoming a heavy liability. Coal-fired power plants and other industrial outlets that ring China’s growing urban hubs are creating near-permanent smog centers that choke out the sun and leave residents and visitors alike engulfed in a debilitating hazy mess. China’s top-down government is addressing this issue ever more urgently, extending influence into pollution monitoring, new regulations and most of all, new power sources. Renewables and natural gas are at the top of the list, but nuclear is also a cornerstone of China’s energy future.

With only 20 nuclear plants currently operating, China already has 28 under construction, according to the World Nuclear Association — about 40 percent of the total global number being built. Last year China expected to add nearly 9 gigawatts to nuclear capability to its grid. Even with that additional amount, nuclear still provides less than two percent of the country’s electricity (with around 70 percent still coming from coal). However, in China, plans matter. And China has big plans for nuclear, hoping to generate almost 60 gigawatts of nuclear energy by 2020 and 150 gigawatts by 2050. By 2020, Hong Kong plans to get half of its power from mainland nuclear plants.

...snip...

China is currently an importer of the uranium it uses for its nuclear power plants. China has big plans for this too, as authorities recently set a 10-year deadline to develop a totally different kind of nuclear power plant not dependent on uranium. In January, Jiang Mianheng, son of former leader Jiang Zemin, launched China’s push to develop thorium nuclear energy, which uses the radioactive element thorium instead of uranium as the primary element of production. The Chinese National Academy of Sciences has a start-up budget of $350 million, according to The Telegraph, with 140 scientists at the Shanghai Institute of Nuclear and Applied Physics already working on the project — and a plan to staff-up to 750 by next year.

The scientists had a 25-year timeline to build their first fully-functioning thorium reactor until this week when it got moved up 15 years.


http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/03/20/3416936/chinas-nuclear-thorium-development/

[phantom power]

1. wow. "you now have 40% of the time you thought"

Get busy.

[FBaggins]

2. One of the downsides of centralized planning.

The people making the decisions aren't really in a position to know what can and can't be delivered... they just demand.

Can they really start construction of 6-8 reactors every year starting just a year or two from now? Maybe. Maybe not.