Nuclear power not the solution for China: official - AFP

[Eugene]

Source: Agence France-Presse

Nuclear power not the solution for China: official

Mon Apr 23, 1:34 AM ET

BEIJING (AFP) - Nuclear power is not the long-term answer to
China's energy needs due to limited global uranium supplies and
problems with nuclear waste disposal, state media on Monday
quoted a top official as saying.

"Nuclear power cannot save us because the world's supply
of uranium and other radioactive minerals needed to generate
nuclear power are very limited," Chen Mingde, vice chairman
of the National Development and Reform Commission, said in
comments quoted by the China Daily newspaper.

-snip-

But Chen called the expansion of China's nuclear power
capacity a "transitional replacement" of the country's heavy
reliance on coal and oil.

He said the future for China lies in more efficient use of such
fossil fuels and expanded consumption of renewable energy
sources like wind, solar, and hydro-power.

-snip-

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070423/sc_afp/chinaenergynuclearoilenvironment_070423053440

[ixion]

1. that's a very intelligent descision

I wonder if we'll ever get that smart over here in the US. My dad still thinks nuclear power is the answer to all our troubles.

[TheMadMonk]

2. Bullshit. There is enough material which can be made fissile...

...to power the Earth for centuries if not millenia. All it requires is the willingness to allow total oversight of the process on a single closed site. Breeder reactors can produce fuel by the ton or "burn" nuclear waste in like amounts. And the whole deal can be confined to a single site with just a small trickle of source material (Thorium or depleted uranium) going in and non radioactive materials leaving.

Reprocessing of "spent" fuel would feed such a power plant for years, all whilst "burning" existing nuclear waste stockpiles.

Another tech on the horizon is tunable neutron beams which can be used to build a table top reactor/nuclear incinerator that turns on and off at the flick of a switch.

What will be a stopgap is the construction of reactors essentially similar to today's designs.

[Dead_Parrot]

3. Assuming they're talking about Chen Deming...

...(who is the VC of the NDRC), he has an interesting bio:

As the governor of Shaanxi, a poorer, coal-rich inland province, he reorganized the local oil and gas industry, merging 21 private and collectively-run oil and gas companies into the Shaanxi Yanchang Petroleum Holding Co., Ltd. In 2004, when a blast at a coalmine in Shaanxi killed 166 miners, he proposed a monument to mark the contributions they had made to the local coal industry. (Ooh look, a monument. That's nice.)
http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=456

So, a sort of West Virginian republican, only Chinese. Colour me stunned.

[NNadir]

4. This would seem to conflict with the decision last week to build 54 new reactors.

Chinese intentions to develop HTGC (they have the most advanced in the world), and the signing of long term uranium contracts in Australia and Kazakhstan would also seem to conflict.

Basically, I think this representation is pure bullshit.

Everybody on earth who can count knows that nuclear fission is the only option that will work and is the only option which is safe.

[Dogmudgeon]

5. We already know what China's energy plans are

COAL.

They don't want to have nucular waste in storage lockers where it can spawn atomic monsters for six skadillion years (or is that Japan?) ... nope, China has gone GREEN with clean-burning COAL, Nature's Own Perfect Energy Source.

--p!

[BeFree]

6. Bad news

For Nuke Firsters

"Nuclear power cannot save us ...."

&

Efficient use in the same report.

Bad news. Why? The profit margin in efficiency goes way down. Just ask Cheney, he knows about that.

You watch, the Chinese will develop the world's first mass produced 100mpg auto and will lead the way in efficient uses of other fuels thereby ending up ruling what's left of the humanly habitable world. Or maybe not.

Whatever, we need the Cheney's of the world removed from power ASAP.

[NickB79]

7. Bad news for the world: more coal burning

Efficiently using fossil fuels will still kill us, because even if they cut their CO2 emissions in half, they are still producing millions of tons more CO2 than nature can absorb every year. Then you also run into Jovan's Paradox, which could unravel the whole thing.

[BeFree]

9. Jovan's Paradox? Wazzat?

Finally most of us know that more CO2 emissions will cause big changes, so the question is: what will we do?

[Dogmudgeon]

13. Nuke Firsters! Cheney! FEAR! Nuke Firsters! Cheney! FEAR! Nuke Firsters! Cheney! FEAR!

China might just engineer cars that are four times as efficient. As might Detroit. But don't bet on either.

There are also four times as many Chinese as Americans. If their cars are four times as efficient, 1.3 billion people depending on four times as many cars as Americans will have the same carbon footprint. And that doesn't consider the environmental cost of building the cars, or developing the new oil fields.

And I seriously doubt that Chinese autos will so much as break the equivalent of 40 MPG without a technical breakthrough -- what you have referred to jeeringly as a "tech fix". There is no financial benefit to it. The Chinese ruling party is all about money and power, and their idea of green is the color of the US currency they covet.

The modern motorcar must simply be replaced -- entirely. Even if the alt-energy of the future is a big-assed rubber band. And the idea that all growth must follow the example of the USA is likewise doomed to fail. The Chinese powers-that-be are committed to this vision, right down to cigarette marketing, and they will choke on it, taking as many of their billion-plus vassals with them as they can.

The Chinese have also been building huge coal-fired generators at a rate of about one a week. And they've also begun building dozens of nuclear reactors. Maybe that article was yet another effort to blow green smoke up our gullible asses.

Coal emits HUGE amounts of radioactive waste as microscopic "fly ash". The amount of radioactive coal waste dwarfs nuclear "waste" by several orders of magnitude, and it's almost all airborne, unlike "spent" reactor fuel. This is why chanting "Nuke Firsters! Cheney! FEAR! Nuke Firsters! Cheney! FEAR!" gets less traction around here than you'd like. Better a few hundred well-contained cubic feet of spent (and reusable) reactor fuel we can keep an eye on, than millions of tons of radioactive dust ejected into the atmosphere.

With or without nukes, the American car-and-mass-marketing model is a malignancy. And China is following in our fateful footsteps, coal and all. Nuclear power is the very least of our worries.

--p!

[BeFree]

14. Touche

I've always said the current way of life has to change. And you've just elucidated the idea fairly well.

Its just to bad you feel you have to take it out on me, personally. But that is to be expected... I expect it, but I don't have to like it.

[eppur_se_muova]

8. Talk about a dilemma ... do we want China burning more coal ...

or do we want China, with the worst industrial safety environment of just about any country in the world, running lots more nuclear reactors?

I just hope they send their nuclear engineers overseas for training.

[NNadir]

10. Chinese students dominate US nuclear engineering schools.

In fact, Chinese students dominate many scientific fields in Western universities. The West is fortunate inasmuch as some Chinese scientists choose to stay, since most American students are interesting in getting useless degrees like MBA's.

If one reads the American Chemical Society Journal Energy and Fuels, Chinese researchers are prominently represented, both among graduate students and as primary research groups working in China.

In the nuclear field, China is leading the world in research into thermochemical hydrogen from nuclear power. I have no doubt that they will have the first such reactor to operate commercially.

They lead the world in the development of DME fuel, regrettably for now coal sourced, but they <em>have</em> and operate the plants relying on this chemistry.

Most of China's current reactors have been ordered from Western manufacturers and all of the reactors they have ordered recently have been Western designs. In this sense, they are following France, who built their reactors on a Westinghouse design.

But make no mistake, the Chinese are going to lead the world in nuclear energy technology. No one is more aware of the environmental catastrophe in China than the Chinese. Unlike the US, they do not have their head in the sand. They have a huge commitment to nuclear energy.

The worst polluter on the planet is still the United States, by the way. We still pollute more than China although we have 1/4th the population.

[eppur_se_muova]

11. My grad school had about 60% Chinese students, so, yes, I've seen that.

Unfortunately, many of them didn't seem to have learned much about safety at any particular point in their lives. (I'm referring *specifically* to students from the PRC, those from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc. were much better trained.) And the regular reports of industrial accidents in China aren't encouraging. I just hope only the best of the best are allowed near those plants. Since the best of the best have already put a man into orbit, perhaps we have good reason to be hopeful.

(Of course, every year that passes since the end of the Cultural Revolution should mean a further increase in the quality of PRC schools, until that generation has died off.)

I've said before that PRC leaders are facing the facts much more squarely than our own ... um, well whatever we have instead of leadership. But the implementation aspect worries me.

[NNadir]

12. I can't see why the nuclear case is very special.

The danger from coal is a certainty. It is already happening on an extremely dangerous scale, already killing.

The danger from nuclear is just a probability and wholly theoretical.

Note that coal kills in normal operations. Nuclear rarely kills and then, only in accidental situations. China has been operating nuclear plants for almost 2 decades without incident.

The world must hope that China goes nuclear. The world must hope that everyone who burns coal goes nuclear.