Posted on 02/12/2016 7:12:14 AM PST by C19fan
In what would be a milestone for advanced nuclear power, China’s Nuclear Engineering Construction Corporation plans to start up a high-temperature, gas-cooled pebble-bed nuclear plant next year in Shandong province, south of Beijing. The twin 105-megawatt reactors—so-called Generation IV reactors that would be immune to meltdown—would be the first of their type built at commercial scale in the world.
(Excerpt) Read more at technologyreview.com ...
So if’n a reactor melted down in China, would it still be called the ‘China Syndrome’?
Yep. I feel the same way, and have been looking at that technology for many years, wondering if we would take global leadership.
But, no.
Wow! What a triumph of technology. Next they will be building an unsinkable ship. Oh wait...
That film destroyed nuclear power in the US.
Nothing new here.
This will be built by the people who had a hiway bridge fall over when opened for truck traffic.
Use this as a search string to see the photos
August 24th and Harbin Yangmingtan Bridge
what could possibly go wrong?
The way things are going the whole idea of a power plant will become a myth in the US ... something we will have in common with North Korea.
Lifeboats we don’t need to stinkin life boats.
It’s called “national interest” - Only stupid countries don’t follow that.
There are two real problems with basic high pressure nuclear reactors.
The major one is steam explosion.
This will meltdown any water cooled reactor independent of safeguards.
This is what ultimately destroyed Chernobyl.
Cause was a design flaw in the control rods and operator error.
The second is the High Power in most big plants.
On a SCRAM, new energy generation slows but there is still residual energy in the system.
The higher the power output at SCRAM, the longer the cooling pumps need to run to prevent a meltdown.
Usually 2-5 days depending on the power output of the plant.
This is what killed Fukushima.
The external power to the plant failed.
A modern plant requires about 20Mw just to function.
They lost lights, pumps, controls...everything
Another plant 20 miles down the coast had the same SCRAM but never lost external power.
As I recall it was the film and the Three Mile Island scare right about the same time.
Westinghouse’s design teams here in the US have proposals and plans to build these reactors here, but they can’t get approval to do so.
Back in 1972, as a new engineer, I worked for a company called General Atomic, which had built small High Temperature Gas Cooler reactors, and had over a dozen contracts for full-sized units.
All the contracts were cancelled over the course of a few years due to regulatory uncertainties. Essentially the government could change the design rules in new and extremely expensive ways on a whim.
The national security implications of these cancellations were entirely foreseeable at the time, since that was also the time of the Arab oil embargo, gas rationing, and the doubling and tripling of gas prices.
But, even then, the environmental weenies felt that nuclear was evil, the government could do no wrong, and there was no regulation which was too onerous. “Industry” must bear the cost of every new regulation. I moved on to another job in a different field...
What ultimately destroyed Chernobyl was a reactor design (RBMK) with a huge positive void coefficient and insane communists in control of it. The RBMK design could never have seen licensing in any western country.
More ChiComm propaganda.
The ChiComm apes still can’t float a second-hand carrier out of dry dock. They’ve bought four since 1985. When the 50 IQ pilots tried to land on the carrier, they crashed holes below the waterline.
As long as ChiComm apes are in control of China, the country will continue to sink into the muck.
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