Summary
China is rapidly surpassing the U.S. in nuclear energy, building more reactors at a faster pace and developing advanced technologies like small modular reactors and high-temperature gas-cooled units.
The U.S. struggles with costly, delayed projects, while China benefits from state-backed financing and streamlined construction.
This shift could make China the leading nuclear power producer within a decade, impacting global energy and geopolitical influence.
Meanwhile, the U.S. seeks to revive its nuclear industry, but trade restrictions and outdated infrastructure hinder progress.
Okay, yes, very broadly-speaking, I agree that US nuclear power generation capability relative to China is something to keep an eye on. There might be a way that China could leverage that in some scenario. However.
At least some of that is tied to population; China has over four times our population. One would expect energy usage per-capita to tend to converge. And for that to happen, China pretty much has to significantly outbuild the US in generation capacity.
If we in the US constrain ourselves to outpace China in expanding generation capacity, then we’re constraining ourselves to have multiple times the per-capita energy generation capacity.
Now, okay, yes, there is usage that is decoupled from population size. AI stuff is in the news, and at least in theory – if maybe not with today’s systems, but somewhere along the road to AGI – I can imagine productivity there becoming decoupled from population size. If you have more generation capacity, you can make effective use of it.
But a lot of it is going to be tied to population. Electrical heating and cooling. EV use. You’d have to have a staggering amount of datacenter or other non-tied-to-population power use to dominate that.
These statistics aren’t from the same year, but they have a residential-industrial-commercial breakdown, and then a breakdown for each of those sectors.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-electricity.php
Commercial use, residential use, and industrial use are, on that chart, each about a third of US electrical power consumption. Of the commercial category, computers and office equipment are 11%. So you’re talking maybe 3% of total US power consumption going to the most critical thing that I can think of that represents productive capacity and is potentially decoupled from population.
About half of commercial use of electricity is space cooling. Almost everything else is either cooling, lighting, or ventilation. Those are gonna be tied to population when it comes to productive capacity.
If you look at residential stuff, about half of it is cooling, heating, or lighting, and my bet is that nothing in the residential category is going to massively increase productive capacity. Up until a point, on a per-capita basis, air conditioning increases productivity. Maybe it could provide an advantage in terms of quality of life, ability to attract immigration. But I don’t think that if, tomorrow, China had twice our per-capita residential electrical power generation capacity, that it’d provide some enormous advantage. And it definitely seems like it’d all be per-capita stuff.
In industry, you have some big electricity consumers. Machinery, process heating and cooling, electrochemical processes. And with sufficient automation, the productive capacity of those can be decoupled from population size. Given enough electricity, you could run a vast array of, say, electric arc furnaces. But I think that “American industrial capacity vis-a-vis Chinese industrial capacity” is a whole different story, that it’s probably better-examined at a finer-grained level, and I think that there are plenty of eyeballs already on that. Hypothetically, you could constrain residential or other use, pour power capacity dedicated to it into industrial capacity in a national emergency, but I can’t think of any immediately-obvious area of industry where that’s going to be true. Unless we expect some massively-important form of new heavy industry to emerge that is dependent upon massive use of electricity – like, throw enough electricity into a machine and you can get unobtanium – I’m probably not going to lose sleep over that.
If your concern is that there might be ways in which China can leverage its population and so per-capita statistics matter, then sure, I get that, but again, I think that that’s probably better considered in terms of metrics of human capital rather than in terms of just energy generation capability.