China connected its first small modular nuclear reactor to its power grid, making it the first country in the world to draw power from such a machine. Its small size allows for greater scalability as well as reduced operations and deployment costs.
The new modular nuclear reactor is the world's first pebble-bed modular high-temperature gas-cooled reactor. Instead of heating up water, it heats helium to produce energy. The machine is designed to quickly shut down if an error occurs.
Western Country: Announces thing
China: Does thing first
Name a more iconic duo.
Western Country: "Actually the thing is communist and we're better off without it."
fun fact china has the highest nuclear budget of any country :some-controversy:
they also plan to have 100 more reactors by 2030. usa will have like 95 total and france has like 70 total (theyre almost all nuclear powered in france). china will be at something like 150 with plans to keep scaling
meanwhile the UK is getting fucking rolls royce to do their nuclear research
A nuclear engineer Mark Nelson claims almost reactor designs even including Soviet RBMKs can be maintained indefinitely through good management and retrofits EXCEPT British reactor designs. Hope Rolls Royce don't repeat that fuck up.
Imagine building hundreds of nuclear plants that your descendants will probably run on thorium and plutonium.
What is so important about these high temperature reactors is that they will be replacing coal and gas boilers in all sorts of manufacturing processes and to produce hydrogen for ammonia fertilizer and fuel.
The machine is designed to quickly shut down if an error occurs.
But the HBO special Chernobyl told me that fail-safes don't work!
I like how that line had to even be included pre-emptively.
The problem of turning off a nuclear reactor once it has been turned on is the biggest hurdle to small-scale deployment.
"China is the world's largest investor in nuclear power, with estimations suggesting it will pay up to 440 billion dollars towards building new nuclear power plants over the next 15 years, allowing it to overtake the U.S. as the world's top generator of nuclear electricity" make that China will overtake the U.S. on all fronts in 15 years :sicko-hair:
Now just need to strap this to the back of an exoskeleton so we can have space marines.
but if we use all the helium, what will be left for my party balloons??
IIRC there is actually a concern about running out of helium, sort of like we're running out of sand for concrete.
yeah. it's a serious problem. and one of the reasons it pisses me off that we waste helium on stupid shit when it's such a useful and scarce resource.
Helium is obtained from natural gas extraction. Most helium is left to float into space because it's not very profitable to build the infrastructure to capture it.
Would this tech be good for the third world?
China impowering Africa with cheap green energy seems like it could be a game changer
Absolutely. Big, centralized power requires a grid to deliver it. Grids are not only expensive, but subject to issues in regions lacking “stability” Also consider improved energy storage options that might allow grid less distribution: a battery rail car, or maybe methanol created with carbon capture.
This seems pretty big — 200 MW. I think individual windmills are roughly 2-5 MW for the smaller ones, don’t know much about solar
Here’s a map of power plants in the US https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-how-the-us-generates-electricity
(probably not exhaustive?) with generation capacities listed. I’m seeing 131 MW oil/gas plants run by my local power monopoly near Lake Erie, which powers some fairly high-density US lifestyles (in addition to a 1312 MW nuclear plant nearby lol).
So honestly only an order of magnitude smaller than extremely costly US nuclear, capacity-wise
I like the empiricism. You’re right, but it’s still a promising trend toward smaller reactors. I wonder if they have an estimate for how much more they could scale it down.
:expert-shapiro: $440 billion over 15 years (56% of U.S annual military budget) :yea:
