Climate Change and Renewable Energy News and Discussion
- Thread starter FairAndUnbiased
- Start date
Just one reactor makes little sense. You usually build them in pairs so that you still have some generation left while the other reactor is being refueled. Taking the old fuel out and putting the new one in can take several months. Particularly in large reactors.
This article from yet another pretend unbiased not CIA run news org made this report just 1DAY PRIOR to this revelation.
That article is so dumb. There's really only two real choices for nuclear. China and south korea. America and France screwed up their reputation with how disastrous their own nuclear projects are going, Hinkley Point C is going down in history as one of the most expensive and delayed nuclear build out ever, the EPR is a disaster and I don't think France will ever get another foreign order for the EPR ever. The AP1000 isn't much better, it just gets a handful foreign orders because of American influence and money, it's cost and 10 year built out is just not competitive. Russia is a decent option, were it not for the War and the mountain of sanctions.
So yeah, only SK and China. Unlike SK, China has a much better logistic network and the financing power to help out. I think the only reason why China isn't completely dominating the market and winning orders left and right is because the Hualong one is still quite new, there's only a handful of them operating right now. As more and more of them start coming online and operating for more then a decade without issue, expect China to completely dominate the nuclear market.
Hainan expanding offshore projects to 24.9GW. Huge expansion. Very high utilization. This is equivalent to like 100GW of solar (okay maybe a little less than that). But more like 12GW of Nuclear
Most of the export reactors being built in the world right now are being built by Russia. They are building four in Egypt, four in Turkey, four in India, two in Bangladesh. The Russian financing conditions and lack of red tape basically can't be beat. The conflict with Ukraine thus far hasn't delayed any ongoing projects and Rosatom as a company still is not sanctioned. Although this might change once the West gets its own alternative enriched uranium supplies. The main issue is how do you get to pay the Russians. If you don't have large enough trade relations with them. Bangladesh is supposed to be allowed to pay the Russians in Yuan, but Bangladesh don't export stuff to China either, so everyone is scratching their heads trying to figure out how they will pay for the reactors. It's not like you can pay with dollars. Bangladesh mostly exports knitted clothes to the West.
The AP1000 is a much simpler design with less parts than the EPR. The EPR is a four loop design. Which means it is pretty complicated as far as nuclear reactor designs are. The AP1000 is a two loop design. The AP1000 was also supposed to be built in blocks which could be made in factories. In practice the West spent too much time not building nuclear reactors. After several decades not building anything restarting production proved difficult. So you had tons of delays and issues. The current nuclear regulatory environment in the West is also not helpful.
SK still uses a lot of imported components. As for the Chinese reactors, the thing is don't expect the West to buy them. No one will want to be dependent on China for parts and fuel supplies. As for the third world there aren't that many countries which can afford a nuclear reactor there. In fact most countries in the third world would be much better off building coal power plants. But pressure by the West to stop building more coal capacity makes continuing to build those difficult.
I think South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia, and Vietnam are are all possible places where you could build nuclear reactors. Turkey also seems to want more of them.
Most of those deals were made before the Ukraine war. Nuclear plants are a serious investment that you can't simply ignore or shut down. They require constant maintenance and support and the current situation in Russia is currently too unstable for most countries to make long term decisions about them. There's sudden sanctions, political instability in Russia or a degradation of capabilities in Rosatom like we see in Roscomos for countries to consider.
Russia was the world's 2nd largest arms exporter too, do you think that they will ever get that title back in this century? Trust and market confidence is easily lost and hard to get back.
The West is already winding down the building of new reactors, even if they have zero issues with chinese reactors, it's unlikely that China will get much orders anyway. And coal is clearly on it's way out. Even China has stated that it would stop financing overseas coal projects. Most 3rd world countries have issues with air quality, large scale built out of coal isn't going to be a popular decision for most countries.
Is it? Rosatom has pretty solid finances. They have been financing reactor construction out of their own funds. And Russia can basically build the whole thing using Russian components if they want to.
They lost their arms export position for several reasons. China was a major importer and now it produces its own weapons. India wants to build its own weapons, and they basically have a policy where they diversify their weapons purchases. Russia is in the wrong time of the Indian weapons purchase cycle which means they are losing sales in India as well. Some of the smaller countries are being pressured into not buying Russian weapons, and have issues with payments to Russia because of CAATSA make such deals harder as well.
If BRICS gets its own payment methods and the Russians can use it, and if Russia actually achieves decent results in the Ukraine conflict, I definitively could see sales of Russian weapons spike again.
Longi continues to be profitable in 2023, doing quite well and continuing to lower cost