First ACPR-1000 Nuclear Unit Begins Commercial Operation in China [View all]

[NNadir]

China’s first reactor adopting its domestically developed evolutionary third-generation ACPR-1000 design has wrapped up trial operation and begun commercial operation.

CGN Power, a subsidiary of China General Nuclear Power Corp., announced that the 1000-MW Unit 5 of the Yangjiang Nuclear Power Plant in Guangdong province completed a 168-hour period of trial operation on July 12. Construction of the unit began in September 2013, and it was connected to the grid on May 23, 2018.

The ACPR-1000 design is based on China’s CPR-1000 technology, which is in turn a “significantly upgraded version” of the 900-MW French M310 three-loop technology imported for the Daya Bay nuclear power plant in the 1980s—one of China’s first nuclear plants built on the mainland, according to the World Nuclear Association. Today, mainland China has more than 40 nuclear power reactors in operation, and about 20 under construction. The technologies stem from China’s drive to domestically fabricate and supply nuclear fuel assemblies and plant equipment.

But compared to the CPR-1000, for which Framatome, a company majority owned by the French government, retains intellectual property, the ACPR-1000 has full Chinese intellectual property rights. The three-loop ACPR-1000 reactor design with double containment and a core-catcher was intended to be demonstrated at Fangchenggang 3 and 4, which began construction at the end of 2014. At Yangjiang, where Units 1 and 2 feature a CPR-1000 design, and Units 3 and 4 use CPR-1000+ technology, Units 5 and 6 evolved to be ACPR-1000s, CGN said. Yangjiang Unit 5, specifically, “achieved technical improvements on 31 items based on previous reactor designs, and meets up-to-date technical safety standards,” the company noted.

Unit 6 is expected to be operational in 2019. ACPR-1000s are also under construction at Hongyanhe Units 5 and 6, and Tianwan Units 5 and 6, all of which are scheduled to come online between 2019 and 2021.

First ACPR-1000 Nuclear Reactor Begins Commercial Operation.

The reactor, built in less than 5 years, will provide, in a single building, more than half the energy produced by more than 6,000 Danish wind turbines built and still operating over the last 40 years of wild cheering and more than 3000 of which have been decommissioned.

The six Chinese reactors to come on line before or during 2021 will produce more energy in six buildings than the entire State of California produces in all of its ballyhooed solar cells - many of which involved mining toxic metals in China - and all of its wind turbines combined.

California Energy Commission: Electrical Generation Statistics

In 2017, all of the wind turbines, and all of the solar energy units in California, including the disastrous Ivanpah solar thermal/natural gas plant, produced 37,190 GWh of electricity combined, or 12.7% of the States electricity. This means by pure subtraction, that 87.3% of California's electricity was not produced by wind and solar energy, this after half a century of cheering for both.

The amount of energy that solar and wind combined produced in the entire State of California is 0.173 exajoules on a planet which consumes (as of 2016) 576 exajoules of energy.

In 2017, after the El Nino rains, California produced 43,333 GWh of electricity from hydroelectricity, with the obviously long overlooked cost of the complete and total destruction of the Colorado Delta ecosystem. This was 14.8% of California's electricity. This contrasts with the drought year of 2015, when all of the hydroelectric plants produced 13,393 GWh of electricity or 4% of it's electricity generation in that year.

Don't look for 2018 to be too pretty.

Still, in California, it remains popular to make energy production dependent on the weather, weather destabilization by climate change be damned.

Shades of the 18th century!

Apparently China doesn't plan to depend on the weather.

When the 20 reactors under construction are completed, bringing the total to 60 nuclear reactors completed, China will displace France as the world's second largest producer of nuclear energy. As the United States shuts its historically built nuclear plants and begins dumping gas waste directly into the planetary atmosphere, and flow back water into its rivers and land, China will be the world's largest producer of nuclear energy.

This, by the way, is a good idea. Dangerous fossil fuel waste kills more than 1 million Chinese per year, not that anyone gives a crap about how many people die from dumped dangerous fossil fuel waste.

The Chinese nuclear power program, to all appearances, is dynamic, and from what I see of the research efforts there, innovative.

Say what you will about China - a lot of what happens there is no prettier than running out of water in Lake Mead - they don't hate engineering and science there.

One often hears that building nuclear power plants "takes too long" even though the United States historically built more than 110 reactors in about 25 years in the third quarter of the 20th century, many of which still operate, still producing more energy than all the wind and solar facilities in the entire country. Most of the engineers who built these nuclear power plants are either dead or retired.

Nuclear power plants though, are often reported to "take too long to build."

Not in China. Not in China. In China, "nuclear takes too long" is a Trumpian scale lie, as it was, by the way, in the period between 1960 and 1980 in the United States. Of course, today, in similar Trumpian scale distortions, people confidently assert that what has already happened is impossible.

We may add to this complaint about "taking too long" the complaint that "nuclear is not competitive" made by the kind of asshole who thinks, say, for instance, that the collapse of a tunnel at the Hanford Nuclear Weapons plant was a world class disaster while climate change, um, isn't. This kind of asshole can't figure out that if it takes two systems to do what one system can do alone, the cost of both needs to be included in the overall cost. This kind of asshole is also the kind of asshole who pays no attention whatsoever to external costs, the costs of the destruction of human flesh, animal flesh, the environment at large, and all future generations of human beings.

Apparently, in China, nuclear is cost competitive, probably since nuclear energy saves lives that would otherwise be lost to "traditional" air pollution, and "modern" air pollution, climate change.

Have a nice evening and a wonderful day tomorrow.