China will award a contract to build two nuclear reactors in its southeast to France's Areva SA, a Chinese official said according to reports in China Daily and other publications.
The deal, covering two reactors for Yangjiang in Guangdong Province, had originally been awarded to Toshiba Corp.'s Westinghouse Electric Co., which will get an agreement for two other reactors in Shandong Province. The sources said that China needs to add two reactors a year to meet a 2020 target of increasing the share of nuclear in total power from 2.3 percent to 4 percent. Areva and Westinghouse are competing to build as many as 26 more reactors by 2020 as China turns to atomic energy to cut pollution and carbon emissions and reduce its reliance on oil.
ChristinaMac posted in a January 2007 thread about nuclear power that:
Up until now, I've been thinking that the Chinese are just going to be conned into nuclear power by greedy uranium and nuclear technology corporations. Now I see that there's a chance that they might wake up to this. I can't help noticing that wherever "first and second world countries" have had experience of nuclear power -- people don't want it.
As OhmExcited pointed out in that same thread, France gets 80 percent of its electric power from nuclear, and the French people that I know seem very happy about it, merci beaucoup. Which "first and second world countries" with "experience of nuclear power" is ChristinaMac talking about?
China's current plan to boost nuclear generation to a mere 4 percent of total power by 2020 is simply a matter of way too little, way too late.
Now here's a question for the rapidly thinning ranks of the reality-based. Got your spreadsheets ready?
Assuming North America and Europe actually manage to stabilize their carbon emissions by 2010 (and I realize that on current performance that may be a ridiculous assumption), and assuming average annual GDP growth of around 7 percent (well below recent levels) in China and India over the next 13 years, how much of their total energy would China and India have to get from nuclear by 2020 for there to be a snowball's chance in hell (and I don't mean that as a literary figure) for the planet to be on track to hold global carbon emissions constant at 2010 levels into the mid-21st century?
Extra credit: If you believe your answer to the first question, what should we do about it? (Other than look for soon-to-be beachfront real estate opportunities in the Rockies, I mean.)
Comments
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GRLCowan Posted 5:21 am
06 Mar 2007
Also assuming a constant proportionality between energy use and GDP, that's a doubling of energy use in those countries between 2010 and 2020.
Assuming North America and Europe actually manage to stabilize their carbon emissions by 2010 ...
Stabilize as in plateau, or stabilize as in peak? In either case the curve is level for a moment at the beginning of 2010. But it is not reasonable to assume our net carbon emissions will just level off; they're likely to drop.
... how much of their total energy would China and India have to get from nuclear by 2020 ... to hold global carbon emissions constant at 2010 levels into the mid-21st century?
Approximating their 2010 nuclear fraction as zero, and assuming nothing changes elsewhere, all the increase after 2010 would have to be nuclear or other low-carbon, and their power supply in 2020 would be half nuclear.
India, at least, seems to have discovered that heavy water reactors can be built quickly and cheaply, so this is certainly possible, but it's not reasonable to assume we in North America and Europe will keep our 2010 net CO2 emission level up through the following decade and decades. We'll nuclearize and maybe we'll pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.
--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes
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Nucbuddy Posted 7:50 am
06 Mar 2007
That depends on the goal. If the goal is civilization risk-reduction, continuous exponential power-growth has been objectively established as the most-effective strategy. Any power source is fine, as long as it can keep up.
No solar-related (wind; hydro; solar PV; solar thermal; etc.) power source can keep up, of course (a modest 20-fold per century growth rate would eclipse practical geo-surface solar-power potential in less than two centuries, and eclipse absolute geo-surface solar-power potential in only three centuries), and therefore they are inherently unsustainable. Coal and heavy-metal fission can serve for a century or so, and then heavy-metal fission by itself can serve for the next several centuries. In the neighborhood of one millennium from now, when our power consumption is on the order of 10 trillion times that of the present, light-gas fusion can be phased in and ultimately take over. The four gas-giant planets can supply fusion fuel until we are mature enough to siphon fuel out of the sun.
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Biodiversivist Posted 11:46 am
06 Mar 2007
I built a spread sheet.
year Unit %
2007 1.07
2008 1.1449
2009 1.225043
2010 1.31079601
2011 1.402551731
2012 1.500730352
2013 1.605781476
2014 1.71818618
2015 1.838459212
2016 1.967151357
2017 2.104851952
2018 2.252191589
2019 2.409845
2020 2.57853415
2021 2.759031541
2022 2.952163749
2023 3.158815211
2024 3.379932276
2025 3.616527535
2026 3.869684462
2027 4.140562375
2028 4.430401741
2029 4.740529863
2030 5.072366953
2031 5.42743264
2032 5.807352925
2033 6.21386763
2034 6.648838364
2035 7.114257049
2036 7.612255043
2037 8.145112896
2038 8.715270798
2039 9.325339754
2040 9.978113537
2041 10.67658148
2042 11.42394219
2043 12.22361814
2044 13.07927141
2045 13.99482041
2046 14.97445784
2047 16.02266989
2048 17.14425678
2049 18.34435475
2050 19.62845959
2.57853415/1.31079601=1.97
Power needs will double (1.97) between 2010 and 2020 assuming 7% growth of economy is proportional to energy use.
Now get this. If it takes 26 nuclear reactors to meet 4% of the power used in 2020, you will need 650 of them to meet all needs. You will need half that many to hold emissions at 2010 levels, or 325 reactors, about 23 per year.
What the spread sheet shows me is that something is going to break in the next 13 years. To continue these trends to 2050 (mid-21st century) is not possible. China would need many thousands of nuclear reactors by 2050.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Biodiversivist Posted 12:11 pm
06 Mar 2007
A) Develop the TIFIC.
B) Work real hard to find ways for the poor to migrate to and work in urban settings where the jobs are going to be, reducing poverty and creating more problem solvers.
C) Find ways to preserve what remains of the planet's biodiversity and the carbon sinks it survives live in until the human tsunami passes.
I would do all this in parallel.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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GRLCowan Posted 1:08 pm
06 Mar 2007
They include your unwritten assumption that reactor scale cannot change. Reactors covering half of China's and India's power needs would have to give some power in chemical, not electrical, form, and in that case the sensible scale for them equals or exceeds the tens-of-GW that is typical of modern oil refineries. Liquid lead moving by natural convection at 5 m/s through a cylindrical core that is 15 m in diameter, 5 m in axial extent, and being heated from 800 K to 1,400 K takes off 777 thermal GW.
--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes
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