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Meanwhile, the U.S. seeks to revive its nuclear industry, but trade restrictions and outdated infrastructure hinder progress.
if you want the United States to be more like this, you can always elect someone who- yeah you know what fuck it
by building nuclear energy plants
Who knew it was that simple
God please if there’s one pissing match the Orange Terror gets into it better be nuclear energy.
But at what cost 😔😔😔
Paid for by Wumaoski Media Group
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.
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.
why the clickbait title if the original huffpost isn’t?
actually the US is developing small sized power plants. You saw in Ukraine what can happen if you rely on large plants.
You saw in Ukraine what can happen if you rely on large plants.
So, I don’t disagree that, especially for some environments, bombing resistance is a legit concern.
However, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that if we find ourselves in a situation where China is bombing US power generation infrastructure, that probably means that World War III – not some kind of limited-scale fight, but a real all-in conflict – is on, and I think that the factors that determine what happens there probably aren’t mostly going to be “who has more power plants”.
World War II was a multi-year affair, but a lot of that was constrained by distance and the ability to project power. From the US’s standpoint, the Axis had extremely-limited ability to affect the US. The US started with a very small army and no weapons that could, in short order, reach across the world. That meant that, certainly from a US standpoint, there was not going to be a quick resolution one way or another.
Today’s environment is different.
I’ve not read up on what material’s out there, but I’d guess that a World War III, one of two things probably happens:
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The war goes nuclear, in which case nuclear (weapons, not power generation) capabilities in large part determine the outcome.
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The war remains conventional. One or both sides have the ability to pretty rapidly destroy the other side’s air and/or missile defenses and subsequently destroy critical infrastructure to the degree that the other side cannot sustain the fight. My bet is on the US being in a stronger position here, but regardless, I don’t think that what happens is each side keeps churning out hardware for multiple years and slugging the other with that hardware, being able to make use of their power generation capacity.
That doesn’t mean that power generation capacity doesn’t matter vis-a-vis military capacity. Like, let’s say that China has a really great way to convert electrical generation capacity into military capacity, right? Like, they have some fully automated mega-factory that churns out long range AI-powered fighter jets, has all the raw resources they need, just keeps pouring electricity into it. And China decides – in peacetime – that it wants to build an enormous fighter jet force like that. Say, I don’t know, a hundred thousand planes or something. Then the US, which in our hypothetical scenario doesn’t have such a fully-automated-mega-factory, has a hard decision: either attack China or wait and find itself in a situation where China could defeat it in conventional terms. The ability to expand military capacity does matter.
But at the point that bombing is happening and the ability of power generation to passively-resist that bombing is a factor, you’re already in a war, and then I think that a whole host of other factors start to dramatically change the environment.
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What can happen? The plant is pretty much working and is the only reliable point of Ukrainian power generation since it can’t be targeted. Also, when is the US going to get into a land war on its own soil, and how will smaller nuclear reactors help?
The smaller reactors are fail safe so if they get blasted you’ll end up with free aluminum parts on your backyard. And if you got one near every home that means you gotta spend a lot of firepower to get them all. And if they produced as much power as needed and are safe to repair and quick to build then good luck taking them all out. Right?
None of the US based SMRs have been successful, even with hundreds of millions of funding and regulatory approval from the DOE.
I said developing.
There is nothing wrong with trying to make this work, but a more accurate statement is that the US has failed in its initial efforts to develop SMRs, and the outlook is grim.
With the DOE being gutted and no current commercial path forward, this state is unlikely to change in the near term in the US.
So that’s a fusion reactor, not fission reactor like SMR. It’s both way, way better and way further away than SMR.
I applaud all of them making headway, but none of them are anywhere near as useful as actual solar and actual batteries that are being actually deployed in mass now.
Nuclear energy has a long tail of recent and less recent horrors. These horrors affect the globe in their consequences and should give great pause, despite the passive meltdown aversion systems being implemented in modern reactors. Being slow to implement nuclear energy plants is a feature, not a bug.
An important aside, humans generally have a problem with funding regulatory structures involved in keeping the public safe, constant vigilance gets an ax when budgets are manic. I certainly do not trust the US government to maintain regulatory pressure on nuclear power to keep the public safe from grave harm. Until the manic bipolarity of the current political climate subsides, at the very least.
Nuclear apologists love defending this expensive, hazardous industry. In Texas, mining the uranium for these plants is ruining the water table just like fracking does.
Meanwhile solar, wind, and geothermal are cheaper and cleaner.
https://www.wired.com/story/a-uranium-mining-boom-is-sweeping-through-texas-nuclear-energy/
In St. Louis, nuclear waste in a landfill has caused cancer in north county black and brown neighborhoods for decades.
It is generally those who have not witnessed the ramifications of nuclear waste and/or disaster that are its proponents. Something that takes tens of thousands of years to decay, considering climate change, climate change catastrophe, movements in human population, and geologic change, we are full of hubris to consider it a green power option. But all the rose-tinted know-it-all tech bro will vote me down. Idgaf.
Including disasters like Chernobyl, nuclear energy causes several magnitudes less deaths than fossil fuels. It is utterly fucking insane for the concern to be “the horrors” of the three meltdowns you’re thinking of, of which the only one to kill or injure any civilians was Chernobyl. Fukushima did have some workers undergo significantly higher than usual radioactive doses - I invite you to contrast this with the mortality rate of, say, working on an oil rig.
Fossil fuels are killing this planet before your very eyes. I am thrilled by the progress renewables are making, and small scale nuclear is quite likely the only new nuclear we would benefit from constructing these days. But we could have saved an ungodly amount of fossil fuels being burned and thus lives if it wasn’t for this argument.
Fukushima did have some workers undergo significantly higher than usual radioactive doses - I invite you to contrast this with the mortality rate of, say, working on an oil rig.
Not injecting my own opinion in this thread of conversation, but if you’re expanding the scope to include oil rig worker adverse health effects, which introduces the fuel supply chain, then you need to also include the fuel supply chain health impacts and deaths with nuclear fuel extraction, such as the tens of thousands of uranium miners that have died digging out uranium.
I never said anything about fossil fuels, and do not wish them continued use either.
Fossil fuels are killing this planet before your very eyes.
And the only way to save it is nuclear power? Every thread about this topic makes it look this way.
Thing is: Fossil fuels are killing our planet NOW. Spending 10+ years to build a new state-of-the-art nuclear power plant is simply too slow. Just take the money and dump it into technology that’s already available at short notice: Solar, wind, geothermal and tons and tons of battery storage. I’m not sure about the situation in other countries, but here in Germany there isn’t even a permanent storage site for the nuclear waste we ALREADY produced let alone one for which we’d produce in the future.
Additional factor for not going nuclear in Europe: Do you know which country exports the most fissile material around us? It starts with an R and ends with ussia.
And the only way to save it is nuclear power?
Not sure where you got this from what’s written there
Not sure, maybe from the posts where everybody argues that Nuclear is so much better than coal but totally missing the point that yes, it’s better than coal, but so much worse than renewables.
- Huge upfront costs
- Long build time (We need to get CO2 down now!)
- Waste disposal time measured in aeons.
- Risk of contamination (again for aeons)
- Yes, coal kills more people, but
- Scale our usage of nuclear power by 100 and watch the casualties scale as well.
- That’s not the frigging point. We want to get rid of coal ANYWAY. The question is which one is better: Fossil nuclear or renewables.
- Yes, coal kills more people, but
The question is which one is better: Fossil nuclear or renewables.
Both, whatever we can build faster, whatever makes it easier to reduce coal and oil. It shouldn’t be an either-or decision. Also, nuclear is not a fossil fuel, you can debate if it is renewable or not, but nuclear fuel is not made from compressed organic matter.
Both, whatever we can build faster, whatever makes it easier to reduce coal and oil. It shouldn’t be an either-or decision.
You are kind of contradicting yourself. Because in both aspects nuclear energy looses to renewables: They are faster and less complex to build. Easier to maintain and dispose of if necessary.
Also, nuclear is not a fossil fuel, you can debate if it is renewable or not, but nuclear fuel is not made from compressed organic matter.
Ok, if you want to split hairs, yes nuclear energy is not fossil but also then there are also no renewables because the energy in the universe is for all we know finite.
I completely agree on all counts except nuclear energy has one critical problem that I’ve never been able to truly get past as much as I want to get past them: the stakes are simply higher. There is no coal plant incident even remotely theoretically possible that can render massive regions inhospitable for centuries. Chernobyl was this close to poisoning the main source of water for a massive portion of Eastern Europe and nearly caused a global catastrophe. This just doesn’t happen with any other energy source.
All it takes is one key person not having their morning coffee or one unscrupulous politician loosening things a bit too much and suddenly you have a mass casualty event that lingers for God knows how long.
Even as I say all this I actually support nuclear energy. But we can’t act like that threat doesn’t exist.
there is no coal plant incident even remotely theoretically possible that can render massive regions inhospitable for centuries
If you ignore the incident we’ve all been watching slowly unfold for centuries with our thumbs up our asses, and oil spills to a lesser extent, sure
Chernobyl killed around 4000 people locally and contributed to 16000 deaths on the continent. Normal coal operation has killed half a million people over the last 20 years.
All I’m saying is that accidents are possible, sure, but the laxity of regulations regarding coal has killed way more people than that towards nuclear. And it’s not about “one person not having their morning coffee”, Chernobyl was dangerous by design, modern reactors simply can’t fail that way.
You’re missing the thrust of my comment. The potential damage of a nuclear reactor is orders of magnitude higher than the potential of a coal fire plant. You are strictly measuring deaths that have happened, which is a valid metric for a lot of the discussions and why I largely agree with building more nuclear reactors. In fact I fully agree with building them, to be clear, in case that wasn’t in my previous comment. But I am not talking about number of deaths per [energy] created or something. This is way bigger than that.
You’re focusing on minutia when you need to be zooming out. True or false: a nuclear reactor failing, for any number of reasons, can do a lot more damage than a coal plant or any of the processes to gather coal can.
The answer is unequivocally yes. I do not think that we should not build them as a result, but we have to engage this question or we are ignoring reality.
True or false: a nuclear reactor failing, for any number of reasons, can do a lot more damage than a coal plant or any of the processes to gather coal can.
By that same logic, we should dismantle all our cities, since a natural catastrophe can wipe out so much more people if they are clustered up. Or drive instead of flying, because one airplane crashing is worse than one car crashing.
Nuclear reactors failing make for better headlines. You would literally have to build a reactor design that was not safe even back then - they built it to prioritize weapons grade material refinement - and would have to mismanage it systematically for decades in order to get at 5-10% of the death toll coal generation will do 100% in that timeframe.
The big picture is, if every reactor was Chernobyl, was built like Chernobyl, was operated like Chernobyl and would fail like Chernobyl, that would still cause less deaths than the equivalent coal generation. That’s the big picture. Fixating on one accident that can provably never happen again is the minutia.
It’s clear you’re not willing to engage this in good faith. You’re just going to take the least charitable interpretation of my ideas and twist them into things I am not saying or implying. The simple fact of the matter is a coal plant (which I am against and want all 100% gone) is not going to render hundreds if not thousands of miles inhospitable to human life under any conditions. Nuclear can do that. We have to consider those possibilities because they are very real, as Chernobyl showed us. We were on the brink and narrowly avoided a global catastrophe.
Have a good one dude. I’m done.
Brother, after reading this thread, you’re the one that’s intentionally missing the point and failing to engage in good faith.
It does have some attraction over certain death of fossil fuels.
