Posted on 12/17/2014 5:23:52 AM PST by thackney
When a unit of North Carolina’s Curtiss-Wright Corp. won a roughly $300 million deal in 2007 to supply components for new reactors in China, industry officials trumpeted China’s nuclear boom as good for U.S. business.
Today, Chinese companies are competing for that business—and foreign companies risk getting left out. Meanwhile, Curtiss-Wright’s contract is caught up in a legal dispute, while Chinese authorities blame the company in part for the delay of a landmark nuclear project.
U.S. and other foreign companies are now struggling to keep their hold in China, the industry’s biggest growth market and a rare bright spot more than three years after the Fukushima disaster in Japan put many of the world’s nuclear projects on hold. Yet China is increasingly turning to local companies to build crucial parts for multibillion-dollar nuclear projects, a result of Chinese industrial nationalism and frustration over U.S. supplier problems.
With the global nuclear industry focused on China, the Chinese government has used the heft of its huge market to secure transfers of key technology and gradually localize production. In the process, China is achieving a political aim to source sensitive manufacturing at home and satisfying a practical need to avoid complications posed by faraway suppliers.
One of those supplier issues has surfaced in eastern China’s Zhejiang province, where Pennsylvania’s Westinghouse Electric Co. is building the first of four of its most advanced, commercially available reactor, the AP1000, in China. Local authorities blame two-year delays in part on quality problems related to Curtiss-Wright. In a written statement, Curtiss-Wright said it has “refined and improved our design processes” as a result.
“This sort of thing has damaged U.S. companies’ reputations here,” said Li Ning, a nuclear-industry expert at China’s Xiamen University. “Chinese companies are really growing and basically squeezing out the international suppliers.”
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
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.
The turnabout illustrates how China is moving swiftly to build a nuclear industry. Already, Westinghouse has provided details of the AP1000 as part of a technology-sharing deal. China plans to use that to build its own reactors that experts say it could sell abroad.
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.
I’ve been saying the same thing since the 1970’s. Nobody appears to be listening, especially those nimrod MBA’s and accountants who worship the quarterly bottom line and don’t look to the future five or more years down the road.
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.
http://www.eia.gov/countries/cab.cfm?fips=CH
Mainland China has 22 nuclear power reactors in operation, 26 under construction, and more about to start construction.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/country-profiles/countries-a-f/china—nuclear-power/
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.
In China, they call the “China Syndrome”, the “American Syndrome”.
Do you actually believe people that get degrees in nuclear engineering are not smart enough to understand basics and safety?
You grossly over simplify and then criticize those that do the actual work.
It was not a lack of batteries that caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
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.
Plus you must understand both of you, that under totalitarian government, science does not trump politics...ever.
Science will not be the driving factor on production of these reactors. The politics, the patronage , and the corruption associated with communist hierarchy will be driving the construction planning.Therefore the fact that nuclear engineers know about safety is a moot point.And it is how substandard materials get into such facilities.
It was politics and the failure of government that exacerbated Fukushima into the disaster it eventually became.They would not even allow unfettered extra national assitance from anyone.It will be the same for China.
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.
Already, Westinghouse has provided details of the AP1000 as part of a technology-sharing deal. China plans to use that to build its own reactors that experts say it could sell abroad.
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I don’t get it. Why do these companies do these kinds of deals?
Probably because they believe someone will eventually.
If the future market is going to be smaller due to China picking up some of the business anyways, better to get some business now, and have some limited control over what information gets shared.
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.
Respectfully, your response is riddled with errors.
First, there’s a lot more to reactor design than “just putting fuel rods next to each other and they heat up.” The fuel rods are inserted into fuel assemblies which contain somewhere between about 60 and about 200 individual fuel rods. The fuel assemblies are then inserted into the reactor when it is shutdown (the Canadian CANDU reactor can be refueled while producing power). A reactor core will contain between about 120 to more than 800 fuel assemblies.
Postulated accident scenarios are analyzed prior to insertion of the fuel assemblies.
The temperature is not kept in balance by a super-heated coolant. In a pressurized water reactor (such as is being constructed in China, South Carolina, and Georgia), the water is pressurized to 2250 psi and is kept in a liquid state. The heat in the coolant is transferred, as you write, to water in a separate circuit at lower pressure where it does boil to steam which then powers the turbine-generator.
In a boiling water reactor (such as that used at Fukashima), the system is pressurized to about 1000 psi and the coolant boils at saturation temperature in the core and goes directly to the turbine-generator.
A meltdown does not occur when the fuel rods are so close together for too long. The fuel rods are fastened in the fuel assemblies and do not move. A meltdown occurs when the coolant is lost. The reactor is already shutdown, and the fission chain reaction has been shutdown.
While recriticality can in principle occur if a core melts, I don’t think that we have actually seen one.
In an emergency, the reactor is “scrammed”, which means that the control rods are inserted. No fuel rods are dropped. I have no idea what “flood the coolant” means? If certain sets of instrumentation responses are received, then a “safety injection” is triggered in which the reactor vessel is flooded with additional coolant due the instrumentation response indicating that the coolant system has a leak.
A reactor scram can be automatic or can be manually actuated. If it is a manual scram, then you are correct - a button (large red) is pushed and the control rods (in a pressurized water reactor) dropped in due to gravity. (The control rods are inserted from the bottom of the core in a boiling water reactor and are hydraulically driven).
Your final question is based on a misunderstanding of how a reactor operates.
When the uranium or plutonium fissions, it typically splits into two isotopes, both of which are radioactive. Their radioactive decay produces heat, which must be removed. When a reactor is shutdown, the fission chain reaction is immediately stopped, but this decay heat contiunes - when the reactor shuts down, the decay heat is about 7% of the power immediately before the shutdown. The amount of decay heat decreases with time. A meltdown occurs when this decay heat cannot be removed.
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