How did they get the know how to modernize their industry in only 7 years. This is likely another example of Chinese industrial wholesale theft of whole industries.
I work in this business. They sign on with USA companies, ignore copyrights, ignore patents, copy everything they can get their hands on, break contracts and go off on their own with our technology.
Anyone thinking this good for the long term is dreaming.
China has deployed almost no new commercial nuclear reactor in the last ten years despite all the talk of nuclear energy. The real bottleneck is a lack of trained , experienced personnel to safely operate new plants.
Who else here knows a little about these things?
I think they push these reactors to the point of being too dangerous.
A reaction takes place when you have a significant amount of this nuclear material close to ANOTHER significant amount.
That’s it.
They just put fuel rods next to each other and they heat up.
The temperature is kept in balance by coolant that then gets super-heated and generates steam in water in a different set of pipes, and this steam is used to run good old-fashioned steam turbines (electric generators)
The two sets of fuel rod water and steam generating water are never mixed.
(I am calling it ‘water’ for simplicity)
A ‘meltdown’ occurs when the fuel rods are so close to each other for too long that they heat up too much and begin to melt. Once they melt, they can actually melt into a pile of material that all by itself has enough critical mass to generate more reactions and heat up more and more.
This can theoretically melt through the bottoms of the reactor core, and down through the earth (to “china” - therefore the name “China Syndrome” from that idiotic movie)
In an emergency they ‘scramble’ which simply means drop down the one set of fuel rods to separate them and stop the critical reaction, and flood the coolant)
It would seem to me that simple gravity and a push button would drop one set of rods away from the other.
So.. to my original question. Is this ‘critical mass’ point so close to the catastrophic melting point that it can happen too fast for the separation to occur?
why don’t they just operate these things a little LESS efficiently, but far more safely? (i.e. NEVER put two masses so close that they can ever melt)
I know the closer together they are, the more heat generated- but the cost of a meltdown is far more than the electricity generated.
Fukishima would have gone down in history as a stunning success- if not for a lack of... BATTERIES to back it up.
They should have had at the very top of their list backup batteries and a helicopter to go get some.
If we won’t pursue thorium nuclear reactors, I at least hope the Chinese do it and show the way.
Genral Tsao’s Glow in the Dark Spicey Chicken?
Why not. They have a huge population. Disposing of part of it won’t even be a bump in the road for Red China.
Should be “Nucreal Leactol”. Fixed.
Nothing new; globalist financial elites have a long history of transferring technology.
China would not be any sort of manufacturing economy if over the last 40-50 years TONS and TONS and TONS of technology were not transferred to them via US and Western consultants working on projects that came into being because Western elite financiers started them.
I’m talking metal stamping, plastic molding, machining, steel-making, the chemical industry, etc., etc., etc.
All the knowledge about those processes. Have you ever designed and built a metal stamping die ? That’s how parts are made that are made from sheet metal. The punches, forming blocks, and dies have to be quite precisly made, and there’s a lot of experience to be gained before one can avoid the sheet metal cracking, crinkling, tearing, stressing, etc., punches breaking, prematurely wearing, etc., during the stamping process.
Back in 1970, the Chinese were in the technological dark ages. The only way they got where they are today is whole manufacturing operations were picked up from the US and moved to China, and came with engineers, tool & die makers, consultants, etc., to teach the locals how to do everything.
Now, after a couple generations, they have their own internal expertise starting to develop.
The elites have always dealt in slaves.
The elites vision since China opened up at their behest was to bring the manufacturing work to the slaves in China instead of bringing the Chinese slaves to the work.
Now they’re technically not slaves, but if you were to have a slave in the US - your costs in providing food, shelter, etc., would be higher than the cost of “hiring a Chinese worker”.
So, it’s not “slavery”, per se. It’s just labor at cheaper-than-slavery prices. Cool beans, eh, if you’re making money off the deal. What an investment. Getting around the whole “slavery” thing, and getting the labor so cheap.
American and UK financial elites go WAY WAY WAY back in China. It really goes back to the spice trade; many centuries, back to the international banking/trade of Venice, etc.
In Nuclear Reactors or Christmas Lights China doesn’t have the environmental restrictions or labor costs that the civilized world does so they can produce things cheaper. At least their quality seems to be getting better. I don’t think they are as smart as others put they do know how to copy things.
Contrary to what the article is trying to portray,
the Chinese are not close to becoming a top supplier of nuclear plants.
They screwed up the steam generators at Yangjiang Unit 2 (a take off of an Areva design) pretty bad because they lack an understanding of the importance foreign object control. They lack any kind of QA program, which means that they are a long way from selling nuke plants outside of China.