China’s Energy Future

[CardSharp]

I’ve only been nominally keeping up with the news lately but a couple things converged lately to paint a picture of China’s energy future that I think everyone in the subforum should appreciate. (It’s going to be a long read so grab a cup of tea.)



Development number one

A Radical Kind of Reactor (Pressing Ahead Where Others Have Failed)

SHIDAO, China — While engineers at Japan’s stricken nuclear power plant struggle to keep its uranium fuel rods from melting down, engineers in China are building a radically different type of reactor that some experts say offers a safer nuclear alternative.

The technology will be used in two reactors here on a peninsula jutting into the Yellow Sea, where the Chinese government is expected to let construction proceed even as the world debates the wisdom of nuclear power.
Rather than using conventional fuel rod assemblies of the sort leaking radiation in Japan, each packed with nearly 400 pounds of uranium, the Chinese reactors will use hundreds of thousands of billiard-ball-size fuel elements, each cloaked in its own protective layer of graphite.

The coating moderates the pace of nuclear reactions and is meant to ensure that if the plant had to be shut down in an emergency, the reaction would slowly stop on its own and not lead to a meltdown.

The reactors will also be cooled by nonexplosive helium gas instead of depending on a steady source of water — a critical problem with the damaged reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant. And unlike those reactors, the Chinese reactors are designed to gradually dissipate heat on their own, even if coolant is lost.

If the new plants here prove viable, China plans to build dozens more of them in coming years.

The technology under construction here, known as a pebble-bed reactor, is not new. Germany, South Africa and the United States have all experimented with it, before abandoning it over technical problems or a lack of financing.

But as in many other areas of alternative energy, including solar panels and wind turbines, China is now taking the lead in actually building the next-generation technology. The government has paid for all of the research and development costs for the two pebble-bed reactors being built here, and will cover 30 percent of the construction costs.
Despite Japan’s crisis, China still plans to build as many as 50 nuclear reactors over the next five years — more than the rest of the world combined. Most of this next wave will be of more conventional designs.
But if the pebble-bed approach works as advertised, and proves cost effective, China hopes it can eventually adopt the technology on a broad scale to make nuclear power safer and more feasible as it deals with the world’s fastest growing economy and the material expectations of its 1.3 billion people.

Western environmentalists are divided on the safety of pebble-bed nuclear technology.

Thomas B. Cochran, the senior scientist on nuclear power for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an American group, said that such reactors would probably be less dangerous than current nuclear plants, and might be better for the environment than coal-fired plants.

“Over all, in terms of design,” he said, “it would appear to be safer, with the following caveat: the safety of any nuclear plant is not just a function of the design but also of the safety culture of the plant.”

The executives overseeing construction of the new Chinese reactors say that engineers are already being trained to oversee the extensively computerized controls for the plant, using a simulator at a test reactor that has been operating for a decade near Beijing, apparently without mishap.

Engineers have been trained to oversee the controls on a test pebble-bed reactor that has been operating for a decade near Beijing.


But Greenpeace, the international environmentalist group, opposes pebble-bed nuclear reactors, questioning whether any nuclear technology can be truly safe. Wrapping the uranium fuel in graphite greatly increases the volume of radioactive waste eventually requiring disposal, said Heinz Smital, a Greenpeace nuclear technology specialist in Germany.

But he said the waste is far less radioactive per ton than spent uranium fuel rods — one of the big sources of trouble at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

China is building a repository for high-level nuclear waste, like conventional fuel rods, in the country’s arid west. But the far less radioactive spheres, or pebbles, like those from the Shidao reactors will not require such specialized storage; China plans to store the used pebbles initially at the power plants, and later at lower-level radioactive waste disposal sites near the reactors.

Whatever fears the rest of the world may have about China’s nuclear ambitions, the environmental cost-benefit analysis contains at least one potential positive: More nukes would let China reduce the heavy reliance on coal and other fossil fuels that now make it the world’s biggest emitter of global-warming gases.

“China epitomizes the stark choices that we face globally in moving away from current forms of coal-based electricity,” said Jonathan Sinton, the top China specialist at the International Energy Agency in Paris. “Nuclear is an essential alternative” to coal, he said. “It’s the only one that can provide the same quality of electricity at a similar scale in the medium and long term.”

Chinese leaders have been largely unwilling to engage in the global debate on climate change. But they have made a priority of reducing urban air pollution — which kills thousands of people every year and is largely caused by burning coal — and of improving mine safety. Coal mining accidents killed more than 2,400 people in China last year alone.
China’s biggest electric company, the state-owned Huaneng Group, now aims to prove that the technology can work on a commercial scale by building the two pebble-bed reactors — each capable of meeting the residential power needs of an American city of 75,000 to 100,000 people. The reactors are expected to go into operation in about four years.

The plants’ foundations have already been laid, their steel reinforcing bars pointing skyward, on a desolate landscape dominated by thatch-roofed huts and last season’s cornfields. Chinese safety regulations require that all nuclear plants be located at least 30 miles from the nearest city, in this case Rongcheng, which has a population of one million.

It was only three days after a tsunami swamped Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant that China’s legislature approved its five-year plan calling for dozens of new nuclear reactors. As the severity of that crisis became evident, Beijing said it would “temporarily suspend“ the approval of new nuclear reactors, but would allow construction to proceed at more than two dozen other nuclear projects already under way.

By coincidence, China’s cabinet and its national energy bureau had both given final approval for the pebble-bed reactors here in Shidao in the two weeks before the earthquake, said Xu Yuanhui, the father of China’s pebble-bed nuclear program.

China’s nuclear safety agency has met since the Japanese earthquake and reviewed the Shidao’s project plans and site preparation, and has indicated it will be the next project to receive safety clearance.
“The conclusion is clear that it is all ready to start to pour concrete,” said Dr. Xu, a former Tsinghua University professor who is now the vice general manager of Chinergy, the contractor building the reactors here.
Germany led the initial research into pebble-bed nuclear reactors and built its own research version in the 1960s. That reactor closed after an accident, caused by a jammed fuel pebble that released traces of radiation — coincidentally nine days after the Chernobyl accident in 1986, at a time of greatly increased worry about nuclear safety. Dr. Xu said that China, learning from the German mishap, had designed its reactors to keep the pebbles from jamming.

South Africa tried hard until last summer to build a pebble-bed reactor but ran into serious cost overruns.

In the United States, the federal government and companies have spent heavily on pebble-bed research. But there has been little appetite for actually building new nuclear reactors — of any sort — since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.

“The Chinese had a determination to build, to show the technology to work, and a commitment to get it done,” said Andrew Kadak, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology nuclear engineer specializing in pebble-bed reactors. “In the U.S. we didn’t have, and still don’t have, the commitment.”

Source
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/energy-environment/25chinanuke.html

Additional reading

A more technical view
China 210 MWe pebble bed reactor starts construction April, 2011

Australian Broadcasting news report from a few years back (real player format)http://www.abc.net.au/science/broadband/catalyst/asx/chinaNuclear_hi.asx
Shows an actual safety demonstration of the Chinese reactor completely powered down and still safe.






Development number two



I think China’s current research on the thorium fuel cycle is better known, but still it is important to emphasize how dramatically this technology can alter the global energy balance/situation. Especially considering that China has being stockpiling Thorium as it a by-product of the rare earth extraction process and has enough right now alone to theoretically power China for 100+ years. (also to note that the pebble-bed reactor design may be compatible with Thorium fuel)

Safe nuclear does exist, and China is leading the way with thorium

A few weeks before the tsunami struck Fukushima’s uranium reactors and shattered public faith in nuclear power, China revealed that it was launching a rival technology to build a safer, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper network of reactors based on thorium.


This passed unnoticed –except by a small of band of thorium enthusiasts – but it may mark the passage of strategic leadership in energy policy from an inert and status-quo West to a rising technological power willing to break the mould.

If China’s dash for thorium power succeeds, it will vastly alter the global energy landscape and may avert a calamitous conflict over resources as Asia’s industrial revolutions clash head-on with the West’s entrenched consumption.

China’s Academy of Sciences said it had chosen a “thorium-based molten salt reactor system”. The liquid fuel idea was pioneered by US physicists at Oak Ridge National Lab in the 1960s, but the US has long since dropped the ball. Further evidence of Barack `Obama’s “Sputnik moment”, you could say.

Chinese scientists claim that hazardous waste will be a thousand times less than with uranium. The system is inherently less prone to disaster.

“The reactor has an amazing safety feature,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA engineer at Teledyne Brown and a thorium expert.

“If it begins to overheat, a little plug melts and the salts drain into a pan. There is no need for computers, or the sort of electrical pumps that were crippled by the tsunami. The reactor saves itself,” he said.

“They operate at atmospheric pressure so you don’t have the sort of hydrogen explosions we’ve seen in Japan. One of these reactors would have come through the tsunami just fine. There would have been no radiation release.”

Thorium is a silvery metal named after the Norse god of thunder. The metal has its own “issues” but no thorium reactor could easily spin out of control in the manner of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or now Fukushima.

Professor Robert Cywinksi from Huddersfield University said thorium must be bombarded with neutrons to drive the fission process. “There is no chain reaction. Fission dies the moment you switch off the photon beam. There are not enough neutrons for it continue of its own accord,” he said.

Dr Cywinski, who anchors a UK-wide thorium team, said the residual heat left behind in a crisis would be “orders of magnitude less” than in a uranium reactor.

The earth’s crust holds 80 years of uranium at expected usage rates, he said. Thorium is as common as lead. America has buried tons as a by-product of rare earth metals mining. Norway has so much that Oslo is planning a post-oil era where thorium might drive the country’s next great phase of wealth. Even Britain has seams in Wales and in the granite cliffs of Cornwall. Almost all the mineral is usable as fuel, compared to 0.7pc of uranium. There is enough to power civilization for thousands of years.

I write before knowing the outcome of the Fukushima drama, but as yet none of 15,000 deaths are linked to nuclear failure. Indeed, there has never been a verified death from nuclear power in the West in half a century. Perspective is in order.

We cannot avoid the fact that two to three billion extra people now expect – and will obtain – a western lifestyle. China alone plans to produce 100m cars and buses every year by 2020.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said the world currently has 442 nuclear reactors. They generate 372 gigawatts of power, providing 14pc of global electricity. Nuclear output must double over twenty years just to keep pace with the rise of the China and India.

If a string of countries cancel or cut back future reactors, let alone follow Germany’s Angela Merkel in shutting some down, they shift the strain onto gas, oil, and coal. Since the West is also cutting solar subsidies, they can hardly expect the solar industry to plug the gap.

BP’s disaster at Macondo should teach us not to expect too much from oil reserves deep below the oceans, beneath layers of blinding salt. Meanwhile, we rely uneasily on Wahabi repression to crush dissent in the Gulf and keep Arabian crude flowing our way. So where can we turn, unless we revert to coal and give up on the ice caps altogether? That would be courting fate.

US physicists in the late 1940s explored thorium fuel for power. It has a higher neutron yield than uranium, a better fission rating, longer fuel cycles, and does not require the extra cost of isotope separation.

The plans were shelved because thorium does not produce plutonium for bombs. As a happy bonus, it can burn up plutonium and toxic waste from old reactors, reducing radio-toxicity and acting as an eco-cleaner.
Dr Cywinski is developing an accelerator driven sub-critical reactor for thorium, a cutting-edge project worldwide. It needs to £300m of public money for the next phase, and £1.5bn of commercial investment to produce the first working plant. Thereafter, economies of scale kick in fast. The idea is to make pint-size 600MW reactors.

Yet any hope of state support seems to have died with the Coalition budget cuts, and with it hopes that Britain could take a lead in the energy revolution. It is understandable, of course. Funds are scarce. The UK has already put its efforts into the next generation of uranium reactors. Yet critics say vested interests with sunk costs in uranium technology succeeded in chilling enthusiasm.

The same happened a decade ago to a parallel project by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). France’s nuclear industry killed proposals for funding from Brussels, though a French group is now working on thorium in Grenoble.
Norway’s Aker Solution has bought Professor Rubbia’s patent. It had hoped to build the first sub-critical reactor in the UK, but seems to be giving up on Britain and locking up a deal to build it in China instead, where minds and wallets are more open.

So the Chinese will soon lead on this thorium technology as well as molten-salts. Good luck to them. They are doing Mankind a favour. We may get through the century without tearing each other apart over scarce energy and wrecking the planet.

Source

Safe nuclear does exist, and China is leading the way with thorium - Telegraph


A talk on Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors

for more info you can look at the various results you get back with a google news search. There’s been a lot of attention and headlines about China and Thorium.
thorium china - Google Search







Development number three

The shale gas revolution is changing the world we live in, and the power structures of the past. It is also quickly changing the politics of future energy relationships. Nations that had to be nice to an exporter, due to energy supplies, will be freed of their need for discretion.

Shale gas is quite simply changing the whole energy paradigm in real time. The unlocking of source rock, has altered the future history of mankind. The world has discovered and unlocked its newest true world changing source of stored energy.

Exerpt from Shale Gas Revolution is Changing the Politics of Energy


The American Government's EIA(Energy Information Administration) recently did a estimate of recoverable Shale gas reserves, China it turns out has the largest reserves in the world by far, with the US in second place with about 2/3 of what China has.


Ranking by reserves

http://blogs.worldwatch.org/revolt/eia-report-identifies-massive-shale-gas-resources-worldwide/


About the EIA report

Perhaps the biggest surprise is China—a country whose suspected shale gas resource is large enough for the National Energy Administration to announce that it is drafting a Shale Gas Development Plan. The EIA’s estimate for China of 1,275 Tcf of technically recoverable shale gas is a third higher than the estimate for the United States, the current world leader in shale gas production. The China National Petroleum Company completed the first horizontal shale gas test well on March 25 and is moving quickly to explore China’s shale reserves in partnership with international gas producers such as Royal Dutch Shell and Chevron. Energy-hungry China is unlikely to hesitate to develop what now seems to be a truly staggering domestic unconventional gas resource.

http://blogs.worldwatch.org/revolt/eia-report-identifies-massive-shale-gas-resources-worldwide/



More from China Energy Forum

According to a recent report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) there is an estimated 5,760 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable gas located in shale rock formations within 32 countries around the world.

China has the largest reserves of countries examined in the study. It is estimated that China holds 1,275 Tcf. in shale based natural gas reserves.

China is gaining experience in shale gas production through operations in the United States. The Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) has recently acquired U.S. shale gas reserves. CNOOC has purchased interest in the shale gas operations in Colorado, Wyoming, and the Eagle Ford shale in Texas from Chesapeake Energy.

In addition to China, the report concludes the existence of large shale gas reserves in Argentina, Mexico, South Africa, France, Poland, and Canada.

China Holds Massive Natural Gas Shale Reserves - ECF Your Window On China Energy Market


and

Hat tip to the Americans for cooperating on this initiative and tech sharing with China over Shale Gas extraction.

The US and China: Towards a Clean Energy Economy | The White House






In Conclusion



All in all, there is good reason to be optimistic about China’s energy future/security. If the need to protect faraway shipping lanes to the oil countries disappeared, the geopolitical burden on China and the PLAN would be lightened considerably, harbingering more stable future. And lest we forget the importance of energy, it is Britain’s exploitation of steam power in the 19th century (read industrial revolution) that launched a previous tiny insignificant island country to superpowerdom. And it was America’s wildcat oil wells and the oil that they produce which launched megacompanies like Standard Oil (later Exxon-mobile, Chevron, Taxaco), Ford, GM etc. etc. which become the foundations of American power in the 20th century.

 

[Akasa]

China is currently investing massive amounts into renewable and clean energy resources.

These include maglev wind turbines, solar power, nuclear power, and more.

Even though China is the world's largest producer of wind turbines, solar cells, and about to build the world's most nuclear reactors, two thirds of China's energy will still depend on coal.

We should continue with pursuing renewable energy resources as well as nuclear power. How much would it take to install maglev wind turbines in neighborhoods? These are an innovation of China and they are 1000 times as efficient as conventional wind turbines. These have already been exported to the US, so I don't see why China can't use them up.

 

[no_name]

This link talks about the new reactor designs currently under development (three pages can pics can be enlarged):

Nuclear Reactor Renaissance - IEEE Spectrum