Did you ever notice that, when nuclear advocates give out examples of countries that are “ahead of us”, or, “moving ahead”, or “successful examples” of nuclear energy, they always cite countries with tightly controlled socialist planned economies, like Russia, China, France and Japan?
Well, not so much Russia, since Chernobyl anyway – but China, Japan, France commonly come up. Well, not so much Japan since Fukushima. And with France, well, you got yer Freedom Fries and all that. And not so much Iran and North Korea.
Well, ok. China.
But you know what I mean.
Now, news out of China shines a light on progress in that country’s all-out assault on the renewable energy revolution. Wind has surpassed nuclear in power generation.
Wind has overtaken nuclear as an electricity source in China. In 2012, wind farms generated 2 percent more electricity than nuclear power plants did, a gap that will likely widen dramatically over the next few years as wind surges ahead. Since 2007, nuclear power generation has risen by 10 percent annually, compared with wind’s explosive growth of 80 percent per year.
Before the March 2011 nuclear disaster in Japan, China had 10,200 megawatts of installed nuclear capacity. With 28,000 megawatts then under construction at 29 nuclear reactors—19 of which had begun construction since 2009—officials were confident China would reach 40,000 megawatts of nuclear power by 2015 and perhaps 100,000 megawatts by 2020. The government’s response to the Fukushima disaster, however, was to suspend new reactor approvals and conduct a safety review of plants in operation and under construction.
When authorities finally lifted the moratorium on approvals in October 2012, it was with the stipulation that going forward only “Generation-III” models that meet stricter safety standards would be approved. China has no experience in operating these more advanced models; several of the Generation-III reactors it has currently under construction are already facing delays due to post-Fukushima design changes or supply chain issues.
Over the course of 2011 and 2012, China connected four reactors with a combined 2,600 megawatts of nuclear generating capacity, bringing its total nuclear installations to 12,800 megawatts. Although officials still claim that China will reach 40,000 megawatts of nuclear capacity in 2015, the current pace of construction makes this appear increasingly unlikely. China’s inexperience with Generation-III reactors also casts doubt on its prospects for achieving what the government now sees as a more reasonable 2020 goal, some 70,000 megawatts.
The outlook for wind in China is much more promising. Wind developers connected 19,000 megawatts of wind power capacity to the grid during 2011 and 2012, and they are expected to add nearly this much in 2013 alone. An oft-cited problem for China’s wind energy sector has been the inability of the country’s underdeveloped electrical grid to fully accommodate fast-multiplying wind turbines in remote, wind-rich areas. Recent efforts to expand and upgrade the grid have improved the situation: by the end of 2012, 80 percent of China’s estimated 75,600 megawatts of wind capacity were grid-connected.
China should easily meet its official target of 100,000 megawatts of grid-connected wind capacity by 2015. Looking further ahead, the Chinese Renewable Energy Industry Association (CREIA) sees wind installations soaring to at least 200,000 megawatts by 2020. With the seven massive “Wind Base” mega-complexes now under construction in six provinces—slated to total at least 138,000 megawatts when complete in 2020—the CREIA projection seems well within reach.
There are a lot of things wrong with China and their way of doing things but when they identify something that needs to be done, they get and git ‘er done.
America used to be like that – when did that change?
So China is pursuing all avenues but I’d like to see their plan to phase out or mitigate coal use.
Re: “America used to be like that – when did that change?”
Reagan.
“America used to be like that – when did that change?”
When America became more democratic. Democracy slows things down. If the people of China had a say in what the government of China did, China would get things done much less slowly.
I hope I’m wrong, but Climate charge may well make our world more authoritarian.
Yeah, stephengn1,
It’s impossible to take you seriously.
if we had a democracy in the U.S. we’d have a universal health care system like all the other OECD countries. We do not.
If we were a democracy we’d have military budget in line with all other nations who aren’t engaged in criminal aggressions across the plaent. We do not.
If we had a democracy we’d have shot the Supreme Court justice who said that black people voting is a “racial entitlement”. We have not.
Here’s more:
Chomsky: Corporations and the Richest Americans Viscerally Oppose Common Good
http://tinyurl.com/agp6ycy
Yeah, stephengn1, it’s totally impossible to take your comment seriously.
Here’s what else would be rectified if we had a democracy:
http://www.occupybendor.org/news.php?1724
The U.S. suffers from “too much democracy”? What are you? A lobbyist? Or an idiot?
Too much demcoac
***Correction:
The last line: “Too much demcoac” should be disregarded.
While I do believe we are edging towards a one party system, I do not believe we are there yet. I agree to an extent with your “good cop, bad cop” analogy, but I don’t yet believe that the corruption of the system is total. I think political consensus is still required here to at least some respect.
I don’t know, I look at how China is raping Africa for its resources right now and throwing around her new found political weight at her neighbors and I see arrogance and realpolitik at play. China’s human rights record is truly abysmal. You’re not defending the Chinese political system, are you?
Re: “I don’t know, I look at how China is raping Africa for its resources right now,,,”
Raping? Son, you have got to stop reading the right wing media. What the Chinese are doing is developing infrastructure across the continent and asking to be able to trade their stadiums, roads, health systems, schools and pipelines for natural resources. They are a bit peckish about the locals coming onto their construction sites but other than that, they hope to engage in a fair trade with the nations they are involved with. Compare that with the record of stunning exploitation and outright thievery engaged in by the U.S. and its vassal states.
Here’s the American corporate imperial version of good business. An arms-length contractor flies into Burundi or Rwanda with a plane load of AK-47s, RPGs and ammo. They land and distribute this to nefarious contractors who haul these arms into the Democratic Republic of the Congo to continue the civil war which has cost 3 million people their lives in the last decade. The planes are then loaded with coltan and other valuable minerals purloined by illegal miners in the DRC and then sheepdipped in the other sister states. The corporations accept the false documentation on the coltan, diamonds and other mineral riches which enter the Western corporate production chain.
The Chinese then get to assemble the Apple, Android, Nokia and other products utliliizing the coltan and other minerals at a bargain basement rate. In the meantime, the Western multinational high tech manufacturers have turned a profit and a blind eye to where their inputs have come from.
And if the American corporations are not engaged in such subterfuges, they are flying drones and bombing populations from Somalia to Mali and many points in between. And if we can’t kill ’em with drones we’re using JSOC special forces to assassinate designated opponents of Western corporate interests.
Re: “and throwing around her new found political weight at her neighbors and I see arrogance and realpolitik at play.”
And I see the Chinese as being essentially benign in Africa while the U.S. is essentiall malignant.
Re: ” China’s human rights record is truly abysmal.”
How does that compare to the U.S. record of three centuries of sending pirate ships to Africa to kidnap blacks and forcing them into slavery?
Re: ” You’re not defending the Chinese political system, are you?”
No. I’m trying to make you come to grips with reality. You seem entirely devoid of the concept.
“Raping? Son, you have got to stop reading the right wing media. What the Chinese are doing is developing infrastructure across the continent and asking to be able to trade their stadiums, roads, health systems, schools and pipelines for natural resources.”
” I see the Chinese as being essentially benign in Africa while the U.S. is essentiall malignant.”
Wow, I think more than a few Africans disagree with you there.
“China deals with just about any rogue and unsavory regime in Africa that has some natural resource to exploit. It supplies jet fighters, military vehicles and guns to Zimbabwe, Sudan, Ethiopia and other repressive governments. At the U.N., China has used its veto power to block sanctions against tyrannical regimes in Sudan and Zimbabwe.”
READ MORE
http://www.africanpost.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1148:the-rape-of-africa-by-china&catid=55:individual&Itemid=150
…hardly Fox News
“China’s human rights record is truly abysmal.”
How does that compare to the U.S. record of three centuries of sending pirate ships to Africa to kidnap blacks and forcing them into slavery?
Yes, that is our past. I make no apologies. Now here’s what Amnesty International (again, hardly right wing) has to say about China’s present:
“Amnesty International has documented widespread human rights violations in China. An estimated 500,000 people are currently enduring punitive detention without charge or trial, and millions are unable to access the legal system to seek redress for their grievances. Harassment, surveillance, house arrest, and imprisonment of human rights defenders are on the rise, and censorship of the Internet and other media has grown. Repression of minority groups, including Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongolians, and of Falun Gong practitioners and Christians who practice their religion outside state-sanctioned churches continues. While the recent reinstatement of Supreme People’s Court review of death penalty cases may result in lower numbers of executions, China remains the leading executioner in the world.”
READ MORE
http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/countries/asia-and-the-pacific/china
I never said we suffer from too much democracy. (Straw man #1) I said democracy (in the case of the US, a representational democracy) slows things down. This is the truth.
I never said that the US democracy was total or that it was not dysfunctional or corrupted (Straw man #2) I said democracy (such as we have it here, warts and all, corruption and all) slows things down. This is the truth.
Do you deny that China has a one party system? Do you deny that one party systems and dictatorships can get thing done faster than democracies; even if they are bought and paid for democracies?
Instead of calling people idiots for what you are projecting that they said, you might want to try discussing what they actually did say.
Stephen,
Re: “Do you deny that China has a one party system? Do you deny that one party systems and dictatorships can get thing done faster than democracies; even if they are bought and paid for democracies?”
Do I look like an idiot? Of course China has a one party system that mimics in most respects the one party system in the United States. Here we lie to each other and do not admit that we have two wings of the Corporate Party who engage in “wink and nod” and a “good cop, bad cop” act in favor of the corporations at all times.
One thing that the Chinese have NOT done in the past decade is to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and bomb Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia at will on entirely fraudulent premises.
That takes American style fascism to pull off such arrogant aggression.
***
Back to my original disputation with you: Nothing that has occurred in the U.S. since the Supreme Court gave the Presidency to George W. Bush by fiat in 2000 can be considered have anything whatsoever to do with “democracy”.
Not the illegal wars, not the illegal wiretapping, not the illegal assassinations, not the illegal transfer of wealth from the citizenry to the corrupt financiers, not the continuing assault on the Social Security and Medicare trust funds by war profiteers. None of this is democracy impeding the will of the elites to defraud the rest of us.
You are misguided or delusional to think that “too much democracy” is what is wrong with the U.S. today.
Well, except that China is only beginning to ramp up nuclear, and nuclear power plants take a lot longer to build than wind farms.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-21/china-wants-nuclear-reactors-and-lots-of-them
China has an electric car on the boards too! Google the Chreos! Then check out the Thorium LFTR technologies on U-tube! China, Asia, moving ahead very fast now, as U.S. stagnates falls deeper in debt, and fails to innovate.
Chreos? From the Chinese colony of Malta? I’m going to play the skeptic’s card on this one. A 1000 km range at 125 km/hr? Riiiiiiigghhhhttt.
Zero to 100 km/h in <3 secs? Full charge in 10 mins? Not a chance.
I'm happy to be wrong but, to paraphrase rayduray, smelling this rose makes me think there's a corpse nearby.
http://silexpower.com/chreos
LOL! Truly Morin it does warm the cockles of my heart (albeit shriveled by cynicism) to hear a good line recycled.
I heard a good one the other day. This is for Edwin, the defender of superstitions via oblique reference….
So, Jesus Christ walks into a hotel and lays three nails down on the counter. He inquires of the clerk, “Can you put me up for the night?”
I always worry about the practical side of running any machines for years which employ molten metals or molten salts. The cracks which appear in the metal walls of 30-year old boiling water reactors is proof. Thorium is it can be burned in heavy-water CANDU reactors which China has been trialling since 2009. Just Google “candu thorium china”
It’s a pity that so few of the reactors globally are CANDU – it’s a superior design.
And I agree that the LFTR / MSR folks are too optimistic about overcoming the engineering challenges – I hope they succeed but waiting 10 – 30 yrs for them to get it working, let alone commercial scale is not an option.
On top of that, the Conservative government in Canada (who do a really good job supporting their base in oil-producing Alberta) did nothing to promote CANDU or AECL (Atomic Energy Canada Limited). Contrast this to the number of times I have heard this same government speak recently about meetings with John Kerry to promote the opening of the Keystone Pipeline.
I have always been pro-nuke but need to point out one thing no one ever mentions: TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). For example, the Quebec government shut down one reactor (Gentilly-2) on Dec-28 for political reasons. They just announced their intention to spend 1 billion dollars over the course of 50 years to decommission it. I am assuming this might be the true cost of decommissioning a reactor which makes me question the decision to closing it (almost 100% of the electricity was being exported to New York State so it was performing a useful function).
Sticking with TCO, compare this to the cost of wind generation where it takes approximately 3 months to install then commission each tower and, I am assuming, would require less time and money to decommission.
Getting back to CANDU for a moment, previous generation designs could load follow to between 94% and 100% of full output but new designs can load-follow to between 50% and 100%. This makes them ideal for use with green technologies like wind and solar (even though I think solar is impractical this far north). So Canada stops promoting CANDU just at the time the world needs it. We are an illogical species.
Canada is as far noth as Germany, which, as it happens, has lots of solar 🙂
I’m glad that both these zero-carbon sources are rising, but unfortunately all the fossil usage is rising too.
Japan, socialist? South Korea, how about that? Have you noticed Ontario in Canada phasing out coal on the basis of reinvigorated nuclear? These anti-nuclear argument are so full of BS it’s not even funny; it takes away form the good work on climate arguments.
Phasing out coal has proven more difficult than Ontario anticipated – the original target was 2007.
And I don’t think they’ve recovered from the sticker shock of what it would cost for a nuclear revamp which was 3x what they expected
http://www.thestar.com/business/2009/07/14/26b_cost_killed_nuclear_bid.html
They’ve never had a nuke project come in on budget and the utility went billions in the red with the last nuke buildout
Since ’98, a Debt Retirement Charge has been added to the consumers’ bills and the original guesstimate was that it would remain in place until 2018.
Ontario nuclear generation has nevertheless increased as previously mothballed plants are brought back into production.
From a distance, I’ve never been able to understand that $26Bn price (not a revamp, a new build). I can only guess that some onerous conditions were added to the tender, because there were a couple of bids at similar prices.
The Debt Retirement Charge doesn’t appear to be anything other than debt funding. Certainly more debt has been incurred since.
Liking wind means we are anti nuclear?
Btw, in case you missed the memo, nuclear is expensive as hell, dangerous, has not taken care of its radioactivity problem, but more importantly…
there isn’t enough nuclear reactor fuel (ore) in the Earth’s crust to run a significant number of nuclear plants for that much longer anyway.
Wind and sun – they are clean… and they ain’t going to run out. Ever.
Were you trying to argue that you’re not anti-nuclear?
Your “most important” point is wrong. There’s plenty of uranium, which is why fast breeder reactor research petered out. Very little uranium prospecting is happening, but still the known reserves are good for a longer period than most other minerals. There’s enough uranium in the sea that a 5% extraction would yield uranium for hundreds of years, or many thousands if breeding is used.
With breeder reactors and use of relatively shallow uranium deposits, fission could actually last longer than the sun.
When you say “there’s enough uranium for hundreds of years” do you mean at 2013 usage levels (which is only a few % primary energy) or at significant nuclear contribution levels? Can you provide a paper for this basis?
http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_163.shtml
I understated the potential of ocean uranium, by the look of it.
And the difficulty, too.
We need to find a better method of extraction from seawater
http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_165.shtml
Sure, but the current methods for seawater extraction are not ruinously expensive, and there is no special rush to develop them since known land-based reserves exist.
Uranium mining is restricted to a few countries, is hard on the environment and emits radon gas which has caused cancer in miners.
Seawater extraction has none of these problems and a more efficient process would lead to much lower prices with no environmental damage and would drive prices down.
Morin,
Let me ask a dumb question.
When I got to the natural food store to buy sea salt at a premium do I get trace uranium along with my trace gold, silver, lead, manganese and radium in my product?
How much sea salt do I dare consume before I start to glow in the dark?
I don’t see evidence that uranium mining is tougher than other forms of mining. Olympic Dam produces a lot of uranium, but basically as a by-product from copper mining.
In-situ extraction doesn’t need any miners in the old sense, is easy on the environment and seems to be widely feasible. Since the energy of uranium is not based on its chemistry, the in-situ process is very attractive.
Certainly, though, the possibility of seawater extraction puts a top limit on how expensive uranium can get. I’m sure someone somewhere would protest against the collector farms though.
@rayduray
No-one could accuse you of false advertising – that’s certainly a dumb question.
The only glowing you’ll do is if you’ve chosen to be cremated after you die of salt poisoning.
joffan7,
Re: “The only glowing you’ll do is if you’ve chosen to be cremated after you die of salt poisoning.”
My next perhaps not quite so dumb question. I’ve seen the Morton salt works in the tidal flats at the south end of the San Francisco Bay. Commercial salt production has been going on their for many decades. Are they extracting any metals from their salt production? I’ve never heard that to be the case. It strikes me that the trace metals are a vanishingly small proportion of the solids content of a cubic volume of ocean water.
Yes, these metals are present at very low concentrations – but present in every bucket of sea water. The research systems used ion-specific adsorbent materials that were suspended in ocean currents for weeks/months to collect uranium. I seem to recall they collected vanadium too, which might help the economics of the process.
Certainly the seawater concentrations are lower than land ores, but the nature of the sea means that huge volumes can be passed through the process.
Right. This sounds completely uneconomic.
It reminds me a bit of the actually more feasible efforts to mine methane clathrates. Which isn’t anywhere near being a commercially viable process either.
It is presently uneconomic, because land ores are cheaper. But it’s estimated at only about an factor of two worse on cost as I understand it. Note that the collectors are passive; they just are parked out in the ocean and the current flows the seawater past them.
(Note: don’t know anything about boats and ships)
I wonder how much drag the collectors have and how much they would increase the fuel use of ships?
A “suitably efficient” collection process could be attached to ships crisscrossing the oceans sopping up uranium.
The concentration of uranium in seawater is so low that using energy to move water – or move collectors through water – would struggle to be viable. Maybe coupled with breeder reactors, but not once-through.
“There’s plenty of uranium” ignores the cost of extracting it, as well as the cost of putting it to use. Cf. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3877
Not ignored; it’s part of the cost of the fuel, which itself is only a small proportion of the cost of nuclear electricity. So raw uranium price change doesn’t affect nuclear electricity price strongly.
The reality of uranium mineral concentrations is that, contrary to vanLeeuwen’s smear attempts, there is more low concentration ore than high contration ore, and there is no uranium “cliff” waiting to pushing prices or energy returns out of reach.
If the raw uranium price isn’t very significant then more effort should be put into filtering it from seawater rather than mining it from the ground.
I vaguely recall that Oak Ridge Labs had made some progress in this endeavor.
The only reports I’ve seen on uranium from seawater have been Japanese research.
Getting uranium from the ground is not an intractable problem either though. In-situ extraction does a good job of containing the effects underground without disrupting the surface biosphere.
But the groundwater contamination matters as well.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-situ_leach
(Environmental Concerns: ISL Mining of Uranium)
A study published by the U.S. Geological Survey in 2009 found that “To date, no remediation of an ISR operation in the United States has successfully returned the aquifer to baseline conditions.
The USGS were investigating that claim, not asserting it, as far as I can tell.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2009/1143/pdf/OF09-1143.pdf
Remediation is undertaken and at least largely successful, if not perfect.
Nuclear fission advocates so desperately desire a nuclear world that it sometimes leads them to truly Rube Goldberg visions of how their flawed technology might work.
I wonder if has occurred to them that if one can (as step 1 of 15) mine sea water for the minute amounts of uranium found there, that one could just as easily mine sea water for the energy found there.
Upthead here in comments I mentioned cynicism. As Lily Tomlin put it, “no matter how cynical I get, it’s hard to keep up.”
So after a really good round of campaign rhetoric, inauguration speechifying and State of the Union vituperativeness on the part of Barack, Leader of Liberals, here’s the skinny on how the Keystone XL pipeline approval is progressing. And believe me, children, we at the Church of Stop Swearing are agitated by the Good Tidings from our State Department. For the Obama State Department finds goodness in big pipes. Especially those from which flow campaign contributions.
Here it is, children, your moment of Zen: “State Department Report: Keystone XL Is Environmentally Sound”
http://tinyurl.com/bcxeuow
Now I have one word for you, children. This word is a word that is the start of a beautiful thing in Italy. Where 25% of the people who were just elected the Chamber of Deputies in the biggest upset since Mussolini was hung by his heels raised their united voice and said “Vaffanculo!” to the Establishment. For those unfamiliar with this expression and Beppe Grillo, here’s the English version which applies equally, children, to what should be your response to Barack-The-Wise(-Ass) about his State Department’s Betrayal of the People and their Future:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaffanculo
Don’t brush up your Shakespeare, learn your Italian. After all, where were Romeo, Juliet,Shylock, Portia and those Gents from Verona from? Italy. The home of the verdant vocabulary of the Vaffancuistas!
As an Italian, I am willing to give Grillo’s party the benefit of the doubt. His environmental program has at least the virtue of existing.
But I have become cynical after so many years of bad politics and I am still not convinced his is just hot air.
The US had a very good year adding over 13,000 MW and surpassing 60,000 MW total only pales in comparison to China.
That ramp-up curve in the graph above is astonishing. I hope they didn’t cut corners on building the towers and laying the foundations.
I’d love to see a graph and curve like that for solar in the USA
OK. A dose of reality on extracting uranium from seawater. There is the matter of how much energy is used up to extract it, versus how much you get back. This is the typical mistake. Cost matters, too. You have to do real calculations, not just wild guessing. There are plenty of references to peer reviewed papers showing that seawater extraction is unrealistic.
http://daryanenergyblog.wordpress.com/2011/04/02/myth-vi-–-there’s-plenty-of-fissile-material-in-the-world/
Barti 2010 discusses such EROEI implications here. He also questions the practicality of such extraction noting that “it means that we would have to appropriate the whole North Sea with adsorption structures in order to get enough uranium for just 16% of the present world’s electric power production“.
Dr Dittmar (see slide 12 here) points out that it would take capturing and filtering the flow of FIVE Rhine rivers to keep a SINGLE 1 GW reactor running.
Finally, Van Leeuwen 2008 Part D discusses Uranium resources, conventional and unconventional. Again Uranium from seawater is dismissed as technically unfeasible for numerous reasons. The report includes many references to peer reviewed journal papers that reached a similar conclusion.
Not sure why Canada would try to extract Uranium from sea water. We have plenty of uranium in Canada -and- CANDU reactors can burn natural uranium (light water reactors require refined uranium; heavy water designs, like CANDU, do not). On top of this, CANDU reactors can also burn the waste fuel discarded by light water reactors (“DUPIC” is used in CANDU reactors in South Korea). Also, CANDU reactors in China are experimenting with Thorium which is fertile but not fissile (great for power but can’t be made into a bomb)
It’s absolutely true that land-based uranium ores are economically better than seawater extraction at present.
It’s absolutely stupid to take a rather small area of ocean, or any fresh-water river, and assess that for providing the world’s electric power.
It’s completely idiotic to believe anything van Leeuwen says.
In fact, your “dose of reality” is a dose of BS, attempting to avoid the point and push your distorted view, as usual.