supercat
Colonel
China is number one if you count units under construction.
Nuclear Energy
- Thread starter Strangelove
- Start date
CNNC developed China's first 10MeV ultra-compact medical cyclotron. Capable of producing variety of commonly used short-lived medical isotopes, including Fluorine-18, Gallium-68, and Carbon-11. When utilized as imaging agents in nuclear medicine diagnostics, these isotopes enable the precise identification and early-stage diagnosis of tumor lesions.
Approved and under construction is not the same as under construction.
You're misconstruing an already terribly misleading article, containing blatant falsehoods like: With this robust pipeline, China's operational nuclear capacity is expected to surpass that of the United States before 2030, making it the world's largest
Which we know isn't true because there's no reactor design that is built in less than 4 years, meaning no reactors not currently under construction will be completed by 2030...
Taipingling-1 is now officially in operation after 168 hours of stable operation.
This may seem like a high number but considering it takes 5 years to build a nuclear power plant
this comes out to on average 50 / 5 = 10 nuclear reactors per year
at 1.2GW each x 10 = 12 GW per year
at this rate it's going to take 100 years to replace China's coal power plants with nuclear.
This is too long.
Granted China deserves credit for building greater nuclear capacity compared to the rest of the world combined.....but this is not enough. More needs to be done. One may ask why should China carry this burden? The simple answer is because the rest of the world cannot. Only China can do this. I predict China will eventually increase it's capacity from building "50 nuclear reactors simultaneously" .....to 200.
Maybe there is no need to replace the coal power plants?
As terrible as this sounds for the environment I have to agree with you, from an energy security standpoint coal is indispensable, China has massive reserves (170 billion tons) and even in the unlikely scenario that they start dwindling Russia has even larger coal reserves (178 billion tons). And even in the worst case scenario where new deposits do not become viable and coal use remains at the current levels (4-5 billion tones per year) the reserves won't be depleted until the 60's. Until Fast Breeder Reactors, Thorium reactors and reprocessing facilities can be built at scale there is little incentive to fully phase out coal from the energy security standpoint.
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