Nuclear reactors Tofu dreg edition.
The problem with China is that they are okay with bad standards and bad safety. Also corruption and lies are a thing in China.
When Fukushima got the yes to put the water in ocean, China was screaming and fear mongering Even though they put tons of waste in the ocean without any precautions.
I don’t trust them to do it right way because they are short-sighted.
I see a lot of chinese made machinery that doesn’t meet Australian standards and are often built so poorly they don’t last.
I hope the people building these have better quality control.
Ahh, this old chestnut.
It’s because the people importing the cheap Chinese stuff are importing cheap stuff from China because they want to make as much profit as possible. China’s been the world’s factory for 50 years now, don’t think they haven’t figured out how to do things on their own?
FFS almost their whole population was lifted out of poverty and were racing them to have the best chip manufacturing process. They have a space station.
Turns out there is a long-term effect to giving all your factory tech and IP to another country: it becomes institutional knowledge, and eventually they start seeing improvements on their own, and they garner enough expertise to not only strike out on their own but compete.
The capitalists sold your future for yachts. Like, literally.
I mean yes, they’ve stolen a lot of IP. Much of it was not transferred legally. They have a state run industrial and commercial spying program and have for decades - just like Russia.
What OP is actually referring to is the lack of industrial oversight and the Chinese penchant for using substandard material like steel and lying about it to charge a higher price while providing an inferior good.
Look up ‘tofu dreg’ construction.
It’s not western capitalists getting rich off this, it’s unscrupulous Chinese factory owners and industry magnates.
It’s also not just an export problem.
And also corruption. It’s so rampant in China. So even if there are laws or standards, they can be ineffective due to bribery.
Chinese manufacturers are quite flexible on pricing and quality - all the stuff is not the cheapest lowest quality stuff. One big problem they have though is that a lot of companies that farm out manufacturing to china do it to lower costs - and so opt for the cheapest things they can, then wonder why what they get back is a pile of crap and sell it on anyway.
If you are willing to pay more then the quality can actually be very good. At lot of things things you think of as good quality are still made in china or at least parts of it are.
I don’t worry about Chinese manufacturing capabilities… they’re doing great.
I do worry greatly about the Chinese political system causing preventable (nuclear) accidents through lack of transparency and accountability.
If their reaction to the COVID breakout is symptomatic of systemic issues (I firmly believe it is), then I don’t see how anyone can trust the Chinese government to act in the interest of safety.Those micro-cracks and corrosion issues that caused months of downtime on Belgian and French reactors respectively, that would have caused rolling blackouts in both instances if those winters had been cold? Pretty sure in China that’d be “carry on comrade”.
EDIT: Oh and I forgot about the 3 gorges dam. In case anyone still doubts that the Chinese government does not factor in safety, at all.
Mainland China still struggles with ultra-high precision engineering to this day. They still can’t make a turbofan engine that matches the efficiency and power/weight ratio of either Russian or Western designs, despite the fact that many of their “indigenous” designs are simply reverse-engineered copies. Hell, they only recently started successfully mass-producing good-quality ballpoint pens (which are actually deceptively difficult to manufacture at scale).
Edit: Not to mention, trying to capture and use at least some of Taiwan’s semiconductor foundries is very definitely one of the unstated justifications they have for claiming sovereignty over Taiwan, and for making plans to invade and fully subjugate the island.
Considering that the CCP seems to lean HARD into the Soviet idea of saving face at all costs just to try to look good, I would not be terribly surprised if some sort of Chernobyl- thing happens at some point, because that’s the exact mentality that led to Chernobyl and the RBMK reactor design becoming a problem in the first place.
Oh but of course! What could possibly go wrong?
Even if it built with the same disregard as the Chernobyl plant, and there’s “an occasional meltdown”… it’s still actually better than building coal power plant in terms of lives lost per TWh of power generated.
Cannot read the full article due to paywall… but what is up with that tagline:
China is building (fission) nuclear reactors faster than any other country
Can its scientists solve the fusion problem?
What does the fusion problem have to do with fission reactors? They are completely opposite things and fission reactors cannot be converted to fusion ones nor any other way I can see helps with fusion at all… Like the tag line seems to be heavily implying. I don’t see how these two things are related, and I bet the article does not explain, does it?
you see, it’s newkularr
I’m pretty sure that’s as far as the writer’s physics education went.
Clicks
ITT: People who forgot China has been a nuclear power for 6 decades and has run nuclear plants fine ever since
Cant wait for the Plainly Difficult videos on those
also the only one with the balls to build a TMS prototype reactor 💪
Yeah, why won’t anybody else flush endless amounts of money down the drain for a white elephant? Must be those pesky environmentalists.
I’m sure this wont backfire in the future.
No you see, it’s backfire to the future.
Nuclear is not the future. Investment should be in green energies only, there is no point in repeating the mistakes of the past.
Nuclear is a good middle step to full renewable, it’s not the end goal. There’s not enough storage capacity right now for energy usage at night, which is where nuclear can fill the gap until efficient energy storage can be achieved.
I wonder what kind of storage solutions we could have today if we were investing as much into it as into nuclear fusion and fission…
There is a lot of investment in energy storage solutions. Everyone knows how critically important energy storage is for our climate change present and future, and whoever develops the best and most scalable solution first will make billions of dollars.
Nuclear fission doesn’t get that much investment afaik due to overblown radiation fears, while safe cold fusion is the real end goal of energy generation and deserves more investment than it gets now.
Uh I read somewhere that “cold fusion” was just an error in the simulations/calculations
Got a source? I’m genuinely curious about that, since I know cold fusion has been long considered the holy grail of energy generation. I just want to hope that it isn’t mere science fiction now :(
Mate?
Nuclear takes forever to build, we could pump out a million storage solutions before enough nuclear was built.
Nuclear is the complete opposite of a middle ground.
China built 37 of them in the last 10 years according to the article. It doesn’t take forever, it just takes foresight and planning, which most of the Western world lacks beyond the next quarter profits lol.
The baseline capacity nuclear provides can get evolving countries like China out of the fossil fuel phase, which is critically important. I don’t know what your problem is with nuclear, it’s been a relatively safe and stable form of energy generation that’s far better than any fossil fuel.
Edit: and I just read the top comment in the thread that they’re building a fuckton of coal plants too. Damn it.
Nuclear is 100% the future. It provides the highest energy density (i.e. it produces the most kwh/square mile), and is also the safest and most environmentally friendly form of power generation we have right now. The downside is the amount of time it takes to bring reactors online. Make no mistake, the time cost is a feature, not a bug. There are phenomenally stringent requirements and QC checks that must be met in order to ensure public and environmental safety. However, this also means that nuclear is not the solution right now. What we should be doing is constructing wind, solar, tidal, etc. plants to transition away from fossil fuels in the immediate future, while simultaneously beginning construction on nuclear plants, so we can eventually transition to those.
I guess i’d rather have them waste their money on low CO2 nuclear than on coal. But in reality, I would like them to not waste their money (and time) and build renewables.
