China Seeks Nuclear Industry Domination

BNET News ^ | 3/23/2010 | Chris Morrison

[bigbob]

Around the world, there’s a new interest in nuclear power. But most developed nations still have a love - hate relationship with nuclear power, offering uneven funding and support as old enemies of nukes continue to fight against them. In China, it’s a different story: the government is going, uh, full-steam ahead with nuclear power.

China’s latest move is a promise that it will build 28 new nuclear reactors by 2020. That’s in addition to over 40 more that it already planned to build by that date, spending around $150 billion dollars in the process (that’s my back of the envelope calculation, not an official figure).

That will still leave China with fewer reactors than the United States, the world leader with 104 plants in operation. But in the U.S., the nuclear plants are old; a new one hasn’t been erected in decades. Fewer than 20 are in planning stages, and fewer than half that many new plants could be in operation by 2020.

For China, the aim isn’t just to get more nukes online. The real goal is to speed ahead of everyone else in terms of development and expertise. Earlier this month, China made a preemptive move toward industry domination by clearing more of its own native companies to work on nuclear plants, including some giants like Huaneng Power.

Foreign companies could also benefit. People’s Daily Online, a state media outlet, boasts that China plans to have “the world’s first third-generation nuclear power plant” in operation by 2013: the AP1000 reactor, by Westinghouse Electric, an American company. (It’s the one pictured at the top right.)

Nevermind that third-generation reactors are already operating in Japan and Europe; the real point is that China is building the new design before the United States, which has ignored the AP1000 and its predecessor, the AP600, for years despite Westinghouse’s claims of heightened efficiency and safety.

For now, most of the world’s nuclear power expertise is still concentrated in the West. But it takes years to train a nuclear power workers, and engineers in the US and elsewhere are aging. If it succeeds in its 2020 goals, China will have combined the West’s deep knowledge of nuclear power and combined it with its own youthful and ambitious workforce, giving the country a significant lead.

[bigbob]

Face it, the reason nuclear power fell off the radar in the US was over-hyped hysteria triggered by a 1979 movie starring none other than Hanoi Jane Fonda called "The China Syndrome". (Have you ever wondered what people in China call a core melt-down?)

Of course the accident at Three Mile Island just 12 days after the films release served to confirm all the bad science and false fears created by the movie.

Fully embracing third-generation nuclear technology (just think about the advances in computer and communication technology since the 1970s, when the last nuclear reactor in the US was ordered). China is now poised to be the nuclear power leader for the next 30-50 years.

Consider this: After the growth of nuclear power in the 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission anticipated that more than 1,000 reactors would be operating in the United States by 2000. We presently have 104 operating, with fewer than 20 on the drawing board; over 100 reactor orders were canceled in the late 1970s.