China opens its 50th nuclear reactor. [View all]

[NNadir]

Hualong One Reactor Now Operating in China (Darrell Proctor, Power, February 1, 2021.

The first of two new reactors at a nuclear power plant in China has entered commercial operation, becoming that country’s 50th operating reactor, according to the China Nuclear Energy Association (CNEA).

Hualong One is a third-generation pressurized water reactor, developed by China National Nuclear Corp. (CNNC) and China General Nuclear Power. It is the fifth reactor now operating at Fujian Province’s Fuqing Nuclear Power Plant. It began commercial operation on Jan. 30 after being connected to the grid on Nov. 27 of last year. Construction of the reactor began in 2015...

...“This marks that China has mastered independent third-generation nuclear power technology following the United States, France, Russia and others,” CNNC said in a statement on the company’s official WeChat account. The Hualong One units are designed with power generation capacity of 1,161 MW, with a 60-year lifecycle.

CNNC has touted Hualong One as a reactor in which about 90% of the equipment used, including all elements of the core, was made in China. “We must not only export our own nuclear power but also build it according to our own standards, so that we can’t be controlled by others,” chief designer Xing Ji said in a statement...

Coal-fired power accounts for about two-thirds of the country’s generation mix. China capped total coal-fired generation at 1,100 GW last year, though the country still has hundreds of coal plants in its development pipeline.

Net-Zero Carbon Goal

...President Xi in September 2020 announced the country had a goal to cut its net carbon footprint to zero by 2060, but analysts have said coal-fired power is important to the country’s economic recovery after the coronavirus pandemic.

China has built most of its 50 reactors in the 21st century, after a "pause" for Fukushima for "safety." This is amusing: Pretty much every day in China, more people die from air pollution than have died in entirety of the 60 year history of nuclear power operations worldwide.

China's annual death toll from air pollution was reported in 2015 as being 1.6 million deaths per year:

The contribution of outdoor air pollution sources to premature mortality on a global scale (Lelieveld, J., Evans, J., Fnais, M. et al., Nature 525, 367–371 (17 September 2015)

Figure 1: Mortality linked to outdoor air pollution in 2010.
From: The contribution of outdoor air pollution sources to premature mortality on a global scale



The caption:

Units of mortality, deaths per area of 100 km × 100 km (colour coded). In the white areas, annual mean PM2.5 and O3 are below the concentration–response thresholds where no excess mortality is expected.

Despite much world wide attention, it is clear that the famous and much discussed bogeyman at the Fukushima reactors destroyed by a natural disaster did not account for 1/1,000,000th as many deaths as air pollution in China kills each year. Most of the deaths associated, in fact pretty much all of the 20,000 deaths from the earthquake that destroyed the reactors were attributable to drownings from seawater associated with the Tsunami as well as collapsing buildings, thus proving that coastal cities are "too dangerous" and need to be phased out.