China's nuclear ambition powers on

[Norm X]

From:
http://www.ctia.com.cn/TungstenNews/2011/88965.html


China's nuclear ambition powers on


In the wake of the Fukushima meltdowns, some nations are looking to move
away from nuclear power. But not China, which is proceeding with plans to
build 36 reactors over the next decade.

GIANT RINGS OF prefabricated concrete and steel lower into place at the
Sanmen Nuclear Power Station in Zhejiang, China. Inside the rising
containment building, a 340-tonne chunk of forged steel forms the nuclear
reactor's vessel, which arrived from South Korea late last month. Inside
that vessel, if all goes well, uranium fuel rods clad in zirconium alloy
will by 2013 begin to fission, heating water to create the steam that will
spin a turbine and produce electricity without the heavy greenhouse gas
emissions of burning coal.

Workers swarm over the scaffolding of the buildings surrounding this core at
the world's newest nuclear power plant - the first to use a new type of
nuclear reactor, the so-called AP 1000 from Westinghouse, though a similar
reactor at Haiyang in Shandong Province is not far behind. And those two
reactors represent only a fraction of the 20 nuclear power plants - and 36
nuclear reactors - China plans to build in the next decade. Already,
Sanmen's second AP 1000 reactor is under construction and scheduled to be
completed in 2014.

In the wake of the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in
Japan, many nuclear nations have reassessed their fission future. Japan has
cast aside plans to build more nuclear power plants, Germany plans to
abandon nuclear power by 2022, and Italy will no longer restart a long
moribund nuclear industry. Even nuclear stalwarts such as France - which
gets 80 per cent of its electricity from nuclear reactors - have begun to
analyse what eliminating nuclear might mean as part of a broader energy
strategy for 2050, although the French government remains supportive of
fission's role in the energy mix.

But for the world to have any hope of constraining greenhouse gas emissions,
nuclear power may have to play a role. The Japanese Environment Ministry
notes that shuttering the 18 nuclear power plants in the country would boost
carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by as much as 210 million metric tonnes - a
rise of nearly 17 per cent from current levels. The International Energy
Agency suggests that 30 new nuclear reactors must be built each year between
now and 2050 to cut CO2 emissions in half.

As a result of such climate change concerns, as well as the need for more
power in developing nations, more than 60 reactors are under construction
around the world today in countries like India, Russia and South Korea. Even
the US is currently building one new reactor - the second unit at Watts Bar
in Tennessee.

But no other country comes close to China, with 26 reactors now under
construction - nearly half of all the nuclear reactors being built
worldwide, according to the World Nuclear Association. That percentage only
looks set to increase as other nations call off nuclear plans. China has
also become the world's living laboratory for new nuclear reactor designs.
The country has or is building 'evolutionary' pressurised water reactors
from France, heavy water reactors from Canada, pebble-bed reactors tested in
South Africa, and even experimental reactors that use molten salt for
cooling and, potentially, thorium for fuel.

China connected its first 'fast breeder' experimental reactor on July 21 - a
reactor that theoretically produces as much nuclear fuel as it consumes and
whose development the US and other countries have abandoned. And it is novel
designs like the AP 1000, which rely on such innovations as a single-walled
containment structure to cut down on costs and improve cooling, that China
will rely on to produce the bulk of its new nuclear power.

Safety concerns

Given this spate of nuclear power plant construction, some experts are
concerned that China may be courting a nuclear disaster of its own. For
example, some nuclear engineers worry that the AP 1000 design may not be
able to contain the kinds of hydrogen explosions that ripped apart the
reactor buildings at Fukushima as a result of the interaction between the
melting nuclear fuel and the water meant to cool it.

"It all hinges on the integrity of that containment," notes a critic of the
new design, nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen of the nuclear consulting firm,
Fairewinds Associates. "In 40 years, we've seen five reactors have hydrogen
explosions... [yet] we continue to assume that the heat and pressure
generated from a hydrogen explosion are negligible... The AP 1000
containment cannot withstand a detonation."

The Chinese government acknowledged such safety concerns in a statement on
March 16. "We will temporarily suspend approval for nuclear power projects,
including those that have already begun preliminary work," the State Council
said. "We must fully grasp the importance and urgency of nuclear safety."

That safety review is now nearing completion and all 13 existing reactors -
which provide 11 gigawatts of electricity, or less than two per cent of
China's power generation - have been found safe, according to China's
Environment Ministry. Inspections of the reactors under construction,
including Sanmen, are expected to be finished by fall, and seemingly pose no
challenge to the push forward with nuclear power plant construction.

But one of the developers of China's atomic bomb, physicist He Zuoxiu, has
compared the headlong rush to build nuclear plants to Chairman Mao's Great
Leap Forward, a disastrous attempt to rapidly industrialise the agrarian
country from 1958 to 1961. "Are we really ready for this kind of giddy
speed?" he wrote in the Chinese journal Science Times in May. "We're
seriously underprepared, especially on the safety front."

After all, the first reactor ever designed and built entirely by the
Chinese - in 1990 at Qinshan - had to be torn down and rebuilt because of
faults in the foundation and the welding of the steel vessel that contained
the reactor itself. The former head of the China National Nuclear
Corporation, Kang Rixin, will now spend his remaining years in prison as a
result of corruption related to this nuclear power plant expansion, which
may call into question the safety of the materials used.

"Nuclear has very tight quality requirements," notes Westinghouse CEO Aris
Candris, and the parts for the first reactors at Sanmen and Haiyan are
coming from outside of China. But plans call for future reactors at those
sites to get components from Chinese manufacturers. Given ongoing problems
with meeting those requirements, Candris said that Westinghouse will still
supply some critical equipment like forgings, pumps, and valves.

"The open question remains how the Chinese government is going to improve
nuclear safety," wrote Qiang Wang and his colleagues from the Chinese
Academy of Sciences in Environmental Science and Technology in April. "This
country still lacks a fully independent nuclear safety regulatory agency."

On a Chinese scale

Westinghouse's AP 1000 reactor will play an important role in boosting
China's nuclear-generated electricity output to five per cent of all
electricity production in the near future. Four of these reactors are
currently under construction and should be online by 2016. The Chinese are
negotiating to build as many as 10 more.

The AP 1000 is cheap because prefabrication means it can be built in a
factory indoors, allowing greater control over the weather and the workers.
It is also designed to use less concrete and steel than earlier reactors - a
significant cost savings. And it may be safer because it employs so-called
"passive" safety features - such as a tank of water above the reactor core
and vents built into the surrounding building - that can cool a reactor
without human intervention or the need for electricity to run pumps. "We
rely on things that have worked for billions of years, namely gravity and
convection," explains Candris.

If the cost of building a nuclear reactor can be kept low, the cost of
electricity from nuclear fission will become cheap. "The relative cost of
new energy is lower and lower because fossil fuel is more and more
expensive," explains Lu Jinxiang, CEO of A-Power, a Chinese builder of power
plants, including wind turbines. "Perhaps, in the future, there will be
heavy taxation or strict limit on the combustion of coal."

In fact, China's new five-year plan requires 11.4 per cent of the country's
energy needs to come from non-fossil fuel sources - 43 gigawatts from
nuclear alone. And Chinese officials have announced plans to cap the
country's total energy use at four billion tonnes of coal-equivalent by
2015. A draft "New Energy Industry Development Plan" would invest five
trillion yuan in "new energy", which includes nuclear, in the next decade.

Nuclear power is one of the few resources that can allow China to burn less
coal. China now combusts three billion metric tonnes of coal each year,
overtaking the US as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
Several thousand miners die each year digging up the dirty black rock and
the choking air pollution caused by coal burning costs the country US$100
billion a year in medical care, according to the World Bank. "Any nuclear
power plant going up is actually displacing fossil fuels," Candris says.

That also explains the interest in nuclear power in places like the UK and
US For example, the UK hopes to build as many as eight new nuclear power
plants to supplement the nine existing ones, all part of its bid to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions. But building a nuclear reactor in the UK or US is
a slow process, taking years if not decades. In fact, the newest nuclear
reactor in the US - Watts Bar 2 in Tennessee - is simply the completion of a
reactor that began construction more than 30 years ago.