China's quiet energy revolution: the switch from nuclear to renewable energy
johnmenadue.comIt is telling that a country with basically none of the American barriers to nuclear (NiMBYism, slow construction) is also shifting focus to solar and wind. It’s just simpler. You can put up a solar panel tomorrow and start generating power.
A solar panel is a self-contained prefab power generating unit. Even with all of the advancements in nuclear, we still don’t have anything like that.
I was going to say... if a country like China, with its massive engineering/building capacity and authoritarian "efficiency" cannot hit their nuclear construction targets, it is quite telling how difficult it must be in reality to build nuclear reactors in general.
I am still very pro-nuclear but it seems PV + wind + battery storage are coming down in price much faster than people expected and it just makes sense to build more since the incremental cost is so low, especially compared to something like nuclear. That said, there's no reason to not pursue both options, which apparently China is doing but at a slower pace for nuclear.
I think the unsaid story is all the coal plants that got built at “unsustainably low levels of utilization”. For whatever reason regional governors reallly liked building coal power plants, needed or not.
And if the only factor is cost, coal is the way to go. So so cheap if the pollution is somebody else’s problem.
Article seems to suggest moderation of nuclear post Fukushima caused shift to renewables when PRC simply wants as much clean domestic energy generation as possible. No one expected renewable prices to drop this fast, or PRC to kill real estate to free up millions of construction labourers whoes skills can transfer into renewables but not nuclear.
Currently, PRC now largely hitting nuclear construction targets fine after switching to domestic nuclear. What PRC couldn't seem to do, like the west, is build _western_ nuclear tech economically, because industry seems to be a mess. 2010s nuclear ambition under 13th 5-year plan was delayed largely due Fukushima reassessement and drama over original pursuit of western nuclear tech (French EPR / US AP1000 technical and political issues like US sanctions / Westinghouse bankruptcy), adding delays, forcing PRC planners to switch to domestic tech, which is now coming online at expected pace. Current 14th 5-year plan still aiming for ~180-200 GWe by 2035 with ~150 total reactors, which is in line with mid 2010s assessments. IMO as more nuclear comes online, and associated nuclear expertise, there's likely going to be faster improvement on nuclear side. Not unlikely next gen nuclear will beat economics of renewables + storage.
Renewables plus nuclear should be the way of the future. Nuclear power when renewables are not available and some sort of storage (pumped hydro, heat in salt etc) when renewables are active.
Nuclear is great as a baseload, but as wind and solar reach overcapacity, peakers will be more useful to react to changes in weather. But by then, energy storage will be economical and scalable enough to obviate gas and coal for this purpose. Renewable takeover is a foregone conclusion at this point.
That said, from a conservation point of view, nuclear is something I’m in favor of
It’s what I was trying to get across. Use nuclear where you would use a peaked plant and then direct the nuclear entry into storage when renewables are active.
My point is that nuclear isn’t suitable for peaking, and given the lead times and capex for building new plants, and the rapidly declining price of storage, it makes them an undesirable financial investment especially when you consider that renewable overcapacity will shift the need from baseload to backup. The better bet is storage, with gas peakers tiding us over for the next 1-2 decades before they are obsolete too
It's ironic that we're only now seeing renewed pro-nuclear sentiment, as a backlash to the mistakes of the German Energiewende (and the preceding decades of stupid anti-nuclearism), just as renewables and battery tech are becoming highly affordable. They're now cheaper than nuclear in most (probably all) cases.
Hopefully we avoid trying to fix the dogmatic mistakes of the past and in so doing, make a new dogmatic mistake in the present. Anti-nuclear policies were wrong back then, but I think the time for nuclear has probably passed.
You are forgetting energy storage, the grid, the duck curve, etc.
But I don't necessarily disagree with you.
> You can put up a solar panel tomorrow and start generating power.
And you don't spend 10,000 years hoping & working to make sure nothing goes wrong with the 95% of fuel (unburned) & decommissioned reactors debris you wind up with in the end.
There are good tech answers to try to decrease these problems, but they'd involve building more advanced nuclear fuel lifecycle reactors. Which no one is going to fund. Especially since waste seems to be externalized from generation.
To this day I think that nuclear is the best way to produce clean and abundant energy. There only one problem. Only governments build nuclear reactors and if you want to innovate in this space you need to deal with these institutions which adds a lot of complexity.
Solar on the other hand appeals to the public and can be deployed in large scale facilities. Large scale economics apply directly and we can see that by looking at the historic price per kW[1].
Finally, me as a nuclear advocate own 14x550w panels + a 20 kWh battery. I’m off grid > 95% of the year. Solar is unstoppable now.
Aside from the complexity, part of the issue when comparing nuclear and solar is this: In the US we like to externalize our environmental damage as much as possible, which was one of the “benefits” of moving manufacturing to China. This has been one of the main effects of the environmental movement in the US, simply making a lot of things infeasible. As long as the US environment is clean, damage elsewhere is tolerated. (Maybe that wasn’t the intention, but it is the result.)
With solar we can externalize the environmental damage almost 100% if the panels are manufactured somewhere else. We would install them somewhere else if we could, too. With nuclear there is always some underlying amortized risk of problems, and this perceived risk is impossible to externalize. Again, what is important is the perception of damage rather than actual damage.
Of course I’m also not quantifying the actual damage from either one. I’m not sure which one is worse in terms of raw material extraction or CO2 emissions per lifetime KWh produced. I checked and it seems solar might be higher for CO2. But that difference isn’t going to matter if nuclear doesn’t get built.
Imo it just all stems from seeking maximum profits - externalizing environmental damage is just one facet of it. If China enacted strict penalties for environmental damage and it'd be cheaper to manufacture panels in Texas while polluting there, I don't have a doubt we'd build all of our panels in Texas.
Lets say I had the knowledge and engineering to make a home scale (say 0.5-1.0 KW) reactor RTG or similar that could be sold as a sealed box you attach to a wall has sensors for various safety measures and just chucks out AC power all day long. At the cost of $5-10k that makes decent economic sense if it would keep going for about 25 year life time. I think that is potentially doable fairly safely with fuels other than Uranium 235.
You can vaguely do this DIY today using the long life radioactive glow sticks and some solar panels and get a constant power device but its very inefficient and too expensive for the power it produces and its half life is too short.
There is I think no viable way to make that business reality. The government intervention would be absurdly high and it would never make it to market even if the cost of the device was economically competitive with a Solar or Wind setup. This is one of the ways Solar and Wind became dominate, they scale really well from the small to the large, especially solar which the panels on the roof of a house are the same in a multiple MW power station.
There's a lot of inconvenient truths one needs to accept if they want to advocate for widespread nuclear energy. Specifically, there are very real nuclear proliferation concerns which cannot be ignored. Alternative clean energy sources, which are safe on the global scale, can made widely available with proper investment. That should be the future.
> Specifically, there are very real nuclear proliferation concerns which cannot be ignored.
The countries with the #1 and #2 sized nuclear arsenals are currently at war. A war that, as far as I can tell, is continuing to escalate.
The countries ranked #2 and #3 (China has been busy building them) are preparing for war with each other.
We're seeing ongoing evidence around the world that nuclear weapons are the only thing that can deter a big player from launching an invasion of a country.
We could plausibly be looking at the opening stages of WWIII and while there is a lot of concern it isn't enough to jolt people out of their normal routines and the political impacts have been relatively muted. The situation is so bad right now I'm not sure what the proliferation concerns are supposed to be. It is already just a matter of time until something goes terribly wrong. How much is prosperity energy generation supposed to make the situation? If anything it might stabilise the military situation.
In the Pacific Northwest, I see rooftop solar panels half-covered with mildew. I wonder how that affects the power generation, and how often one would have to climb up on the roof to scrape them clean.
It’s like getting your gutters cleaned. You’re just going to have contractors that come by once or twice a year to clean out your panels.
More like getting the roof cleaned. It's pretty expensive to pay someone to dangle on your roof to clean it. Fortunately, it doesn't need to be done that often.
Yes, rooftop home solar doesn't make a ton of sense at this latitude and especially not adjacent to this much hydro power.
> Yes, rooftop home solar doesn't make a ton of sense at this latitude and especially not adjacent to this much hydro power.
I know people in Seattle who run their entire house off solar for 6-8 months on the year (important now that AC is increasingly needed around here...) and who don't fully deplete the credit they've saved up with the power company until January.
Also only Seattle gets the majority of their energy Hydro Power, anyone in King County but outside of Seattle is getting a mix[1] including around 46% from coal + natural gas.
> I know people in Seattle who run their entire house off solar for 6-8 months on the year (important now that AC is increasingly needed around here...) and who don't fully deplete their battery bank until January.
So what? They've invested a large amount of capital in order to avoid low $0.13/kWh residential electricity rates that come from more or less entirely carbon-free sources (mostly hydro, some nuclear/wind). You can do it, it just doesn't make any sense.
> So what? They've invested a large amount of capital in order to avoid low $0.13/kWh residential electricity rates that come from more or less entirely carbon-free sources
As per PSE (the power company for the Seattle Metro but outside of Seattle itself), only 23% of the energy sent to surrounding areas outside of Seattle city proper is from hydro. FWIW Nuclear is less than 1%. 46% is fossil fuels, natural gas and coal.
As for the payback period on solar installs, it made a lot of sense a few years ago when the state had incentives.
With the ability to bank credit, plenty of people around Seattle who have solar panels are only paying for electricity for 3 or so months of the year.
Is it a slam dunk? There is probably better ROI on an index fund, but it is not a money losing proposition by any means.
It's hard to see the ROI on rooftop solar, especially taking into account the cost of replacing the panels and the battery now and then. They're not lifetime purchases.
We're talking about Seattle residents. We get power from Seattle City Light, not PSE.
As per your original comment
> > Yes, rooftop home solar doesn't make a ton of sense at this latitude and especially not adjacent to this much hydro power.
Latitude is inclusive of the surrounding area, not just the city of Seattle.
Also in general when people refer to a city they are also referring to the metro area around it.
Yes, if you are concerned just about greenhouse gas reduction, and if you live in the Seattle city boundaries, then solar is not a meaningful way to make a reduction.
However many people who live in the Seattle Metro area, but outside the city itself, are shocked to learn how dirty PSE's power is.
For those people, getting solar installed might be meaningful.
And again counter to many people's expectations, Seattle does get enough light to make solar somewhat cost effective, especially with net metering in effect.
The article is about industrial generation, not home solar which is largely a vanity thing still. Go look for mildew on a big solar farm on the other side of the Cascades.
You'll need to dig through all the wind turbines and dams to find them though. The PNW has better choices than solar anyway.
Isn't there a dust problem east of the Cascades?
Not such that you can't clean off a solar panel with a hose, no. The point is that maintenance in industrial environments is a given and part of the cost structure. Seeing mildew on grandma's panels isn't really an indictment of the technology.
I've never successfully cleaned the dust off my car windows with a hose. It always requires a brush or sponge.
You lost me. Are you seriously staking a position on "Solar Energy Will Never Work Because Electric Companies Don't Do Windows"? Or are you just trolling. This is silly. Yes. You can clean a solar panel. Do you genuinely not believe that?
It’s very difficult to estimate the true cost of nuclear power because so many resources are spent on safety features rather than the basic stuff essential to power generation.
New construction cost per energy out can vary by 5x, even against the grain of expected purchasing power parity advantages:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-britain-is-building-...
Safety features aren't essential to power generation?
Yes, but after a certain point it becomes a matter of risk tolerance.
Apparently some radiation standards in nuclear power plants work out at millions/billions of dollars per year per life saved
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-power-is-too-saf...
Ok then let's repeal the Price-Anderson Nuclear indemninty act and make nuclear power plants liable for ALL clean up costs if something goes wrong.
For Fukushima that number is circa $800 billion.
If it is as safe as you think it is with a minimum of safety standards then the market will still provide. Sophisticated insurers will be capable of calculating the risk and shouldering all of it for a reasonable fee.
Right?
The act exists, of course, because it definitely isnt safe enough to do that and sophisticated private insurers who are capable of calculating risk better than you or I know this all too well. They won't touch nuclear power without a ludicrously low liability cap.
The ironic thing is that even with this gargantuan implicit subsidy (yes, taxpayer funded insurance that pays out $800 billion in an emergency is a big subsidy), nuclear power still isnt cost competitive with solar and wind.
But, I'm all in favor of letting nuclear plants determine their own safety levels. IF they can get the insurance to cover ALL the costs of dealing with a disaster. Free market, baby.
I know you're making a point but of course realistically, nuclear businesses would just try to structure themselves in such a way that in the event of a fallout the company can just go bankrupt without disrupting those benefitting from it majorly
What you describe is deliberate undercapitalization at the time of incorporation - this would lead to courts being able to pierce the corporate veil and hold directors personally liable for cleanup costs.
This wouldn't mean that the state would get the money back in such an eventuality, but it would mean director => prison.
What kind of person do you think you're going to get to run your nuclear plant if they know that there's a risk of prison if everything goes wrong? Either a very stupid one, a very, very risk averse one or no director at all.
This chain of thought combined with the state's strong desire to see a nuclear industry with a healthy supply chain in order to support the nuclear military is why the indemnity act exists at all. They know that nuclear power requires lavish subsidies like taxpayer backed insurance to even exist.
The natural objection is that the Fukushima response was a significant overreaction.
Counting that cost is like including Iraq war costs for oil usage (perhaps fair for the first gulf war, but the expense of the second was an independent policy mistake)
[1] (least bad Forbes article I’ve read in years) https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/11...
Destruction of property value by an accident is a real cause for legal action even if you consider it irrational.
Shellenberger is not a credible source. He's the person who assured us PV is bad because it uses rare earth elements (it does not.)
Thanks for the info about Shellenberger.
The crux of the Fukushima costing is whether damage actually occurred to property.
In much of the exclusion zone radiation levels are relatively low, and always have been.
The decision to impose the exclusion zone was deeply political.
Here’s an NYT source for better credibility.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240306192358/https://www.nytim...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/22/science/when-radiation-is...
> The crux of the Fukushima costing is whether damage actually occurred to property.
The legal requirement would be if it caused land values to decline. It doesn't matter if that decline was for a reason you'd call irrational. It wouldn't even require proof of responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt; "preponderance of evidence" would be enough in the US system.
It’s fair to debate whether the nuclear activities caused the land value to decline or whether the government policy caused the land value to decline.
A government could impose irrational exclusion zones for arbitrary events, it’s unfair to impose the cost on the event itself unless the exclusion zone policy was justified.
The decline in land value wouldn't be from government policy, it would be from people not wanting to live on land contaminated with sufficient radioactivity. If anything, government policy would be driven by this public sentiment, not the other way around.
I suggest trying to change this is not going to go well; "radiation isn't really bad, trust us, some meltdowns are ok" would be a very challenging PR move.
I would say the risk tolerance with nuclear should be very low. It’s going to take one major disaster to ruin hundreds of thousands of square miles of land for the foreseeable future if something goes wrong.
A coal power plant costs $2M - $5M per megawatt just in capital costs. A solar plant costs $1M per MW. Given a coal capacity factor of 0.9 and a solar of 0.3, they're roughly equivalent.
A coal power plant is similar to a nuclear plant -- they heat water to turn a turbine to generate water. There's no way a nuclear plant would ever be cheaper than a coal plant to build, and it would have to be to be competitive with solar in cost.
That is the true cost of nuclear, though. Costs associated with social licensing are just costs, no different from labor or materials. The safety requirements may be excessive and irrational, but they're not going away while the general public remains fearful. Any cost that can't go away in a realistic universe is ... just another cost.
Another social licensing risk is early plant closure. The levelized cost of nuclear energy is the best case scenario. This number assumes that your country won't become like Germany. What will happen to the ROI of nuclear if there's a moral panic in 15 years forcing early plant closures? Nobody can predict the irrationality of the crowd. Renewables don't face such risks to ROI.
Or, what happens if renewables fall so much in cost your nuclear plant is cash flow negative?
Following historical experience curves, when the world is solar powered energy from PV will be below $10/MWh.
It's also very difficult to estimate true cost of solar at a massive scale.
Most/all solar panels that exist currently can not be recycled in a way that makes ecological or economical sense. Their operational lifetime is NOT "sustainable", nor is their economical lifetime.
Then there's death's per kWh, required energy storage (with its own ecological and economical issues), mining, transportation, CO2 per kWh, etc etc.
IMO nuclear is a pretty clear winner (as a continious energy source), but it's a complex analysis where important details are easily missed.
It's a bit contradictory to claim there is a clear winner while also mentioning it's a complex analysis where important details are easily missed. It reads more like a bias justification, since you don't provide that analysis or sources that do.
What do you mean when you say that solar panels are not sustainable in their economical lifetime?
Can the same not be said of nuclear to a degree? My knowledge may be outdated but afaik proper, long-term nuclear waste storage is still an open question.
Nuclear waste persists and remains dangerous for a long time and it's easy to forget and just burden future generations with it.
I think most jurisdictions have settled on or are settling on long-term underground storage. Usually in areas that are geologically stable, possibly between clay layers in case of leakage.
> Then there's death's per kWh,
Given the value of a statistical life (which is something like $12.5M in the US), the value of putative lives saved from going nuclear (using motivated numbers from nuclear advocates) would provide no justification for building nuclear plants instead of renewables. The value would be utterly dwarfed by the excessive cost of the nuclear plants.
On HN, there are a lot of nuclear proponents. Any comments from them on this article? Just curiosity from me because I don't know much about this topic.
Nuclear is slower and more expensive to deploy than solar or wind. Nobody should dispute that. We should deploy the latter as quickly as possible. In addition, we should build nuclear plants, certainly until we’ve phased out coal and oil for primary generation.
The article describes China scaling back new plants at a slower pace—about 5 a year instead of ten–but that’s still a multiple of anything we’re doing.
The analysis I've seen doesn't support the position we should also be deploying nuclear. We come out ahead rolling out renewables and storage as fast as possible, driving these technologies down their experience curves. Any new nuclear added will likely close early when it can't even make an operating profit.
> We come out ahead rolling out renewables and storage as fast as possible, driving these technologies down their experience curves
We don’t have storage technology to absorb a 2% year-long grid-wide output decrease [1]. That means overbuilding or, more practically, sticking with natural gas. If we aren’t building nuclear, then continuing to build gas plants is the right move.
Sure we do. It's e-fuels like hydrogen. Yes, the round trip efficiency sucks, but for year-long storage the cost of inefficiency is very low (compared to system capital cost), because there are so few charge-discharge cycles.
A simple cycle gas turbine might be $0.6/W, vs. $10/W for a new nuclear power plant. So we can back up the grid with these turbines for a very small fraction of the cost of building nuclear power plants to power the grid.
> It's e-fuels like hydrogen. Yes, the round trip efficiency sucks, but for year-long storage the cost of inefficiency is very low
This is still pie in the sky technology. Particularly given the frequencies, magnitudes and durations we’re considering. At that point SMRs become topical.
> we can back up the grid with these turbines for a very small fraction of the cost of building nuclear power plants to power the grid
Absolutely. If we’re okay with gas being a core energy source for the foreseeable future, we shouldn’t build nuclear. (And for countries without safe access to gas, coal.)
> This is still pie in the sky technology.
4% of the hydrogen production in China is by electrolysis now. Electrolysers there are below $300/kW.
You object to this because it's not available, then you point to SMRs, which don't exist now except on slides. And given NuScale's recent disappointments one should not expect the rosy promises of their (or other) SMRs to come true or find much of a market.
> Absolutely. If we’re okay with gas being a core energy source for the foreseeable future, we shouldn’t build nuclear. (And for countries without safe access to gas, coal.)
The gas would be hydrogen. Hydrogen + batteries are nicely complementary and enable renewables to undercut new construction nuclear even for supplying baseload power.
> You object to this because it's not available, then you point to SMRs, which don't exist now except on slides
Right. Long-term large scale hydrogen manufacturing and storage (presumably as ammonia) is not a thing, not to the tune of several percentage points of primary generation. This is speculative, like SMRs.
> Hydrogen + batteries are nicely complementary and enable renewables to undercut new construction nuclear even for supplying baseload power
The math doesn’t work with current technology. Not at that scale. (The lithium alone would be orders of magnitude more than what is forecast to be needed for EVs.)
Hydrogen storage would be underground. Very cheap and more efficient than using ammonia.
If underground storage is not available (lack of proper geology), the scheme could be synthesis of methanol, with oxyfuel combustion (Allam cycle) using oxygen from electrolysis, and with the CO2 stored for recycling to produce methanol. The CO2 and oxygen would be stored as refrigerated liquids.
> (The lithium alone would be orders of magnitude more than what is forecast to be needed for EVs.)
I don't believe this is true, not even close. The US has more than a quarter of a billion motor vehicles. A Tesla has about 70 kWh of storage and about 10 kg of lithium, so that's 17 TWh of storage. An optimal "synthetic baseload" for the US from wind and solar might use 6 hours of battery storage (and e-fuels). US average power production is about 500 GW, so six hours is about 3 TWh of batteries. Even if you multiply that a bit to assume less transmission and need for peaking storage it's still not "orders of magnitude" more than for EVs.) All this is even assuming Li-ion batteries would be used for stationary storage instead of the Na-ion batteries now coming on the market.
Were you assuming many days or weeks of batteries would be needed? That's the beauty of also using e-fuels; the batteries can be reserved for the short term storage they're truly suited for.
> An optimal "synthetic baseload" for the US from wind and solar might use 6 hours of battery storage (and e-fuels)
This tempers high-frequency variation. The 2% over a full year lower-frequency variation is the problem.
You’re proposing good ideas. But they’re untested and contain fundamental engineering risk. It’s similar to when pro-nuke folk assume SMRs will happen; hence, the analogy.
> This tempers high-frequency variation. The 2% over a full year lower-frequency variation is the problem.
Right. And that's where the e-fuels come in. Using batteries for that storage problem is absurd and unnecessary. The argument that renewables can't reach 100% because batteries can't do year-scale leveling is a strawman argument. It's bad engineering to try to use batteries for that use case. And because 2% (say) is such a small fraction of the total demand the low round trip efficiency of using e-fuels for grid storage doesn't hurt much overall.
Nuclear energy is a lot more dense, therefore requiring less land, and doesn't depend on the sun or wind. It also doesn't depend on future breakthroughs in storage and transmission.
Compute please how much the land for a PV field will cost, vs. how much the PV equipment to go on it will cost. Do this for prime farmland, which might be $20K/acre, then do it for west Texas rangeland, which might be $1K/acre.
There is plenty of land. If the cost of land ever became a serious constraint on renewables, renewables will be so cheap they will have already relegated all other energy sources to museums.
As for future breakthroughs: solar and wind could be rolled out with existing storage, but of course improvements are welcome. But turn this around: investment in nuclear requires believing that such improvements won't occur. If they do, your nuclear investment is totally screwed. It won't even make back operating costs. Do you think betting the improvements won't occur is a reasonable bet? Do you think nuclear is going to get financing from hard nosed business types with that hanging over it?
Maybe you're just suggesting continued investment in nuclear R&D, in case all the renewable and storage technologies suddenly hit a brick wall. R&D has a low bar to justify it, so that's not a hard case to make.
Cost declines have made storage viable already:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/batteries-smash-more-records-as-...
Global storage production is 1TW/h per annum now and will increase to 4TW/h by 2030, while also being cheaper.
its short and mostly just a description of whats happening. Not much to comment on. Except for the last sentence that says that nuclear "can't" compete with renewables.
Firstly, it's actually competing with coal, which is what is going in instead, and secondly, any regulatory regime that slows nuclear deployment so much that you instead install coal is deeply, deeply flawed. Nuclear is orders of magnitude more safer than coal, and has been for 50+ years. They need to figure out which roadblocks are slowing it down and remove them.
Regulation is a choice. Sometimes it's a very good choice. But if your options are "highly regulated nuclear" and "coal", then you have made some poor regulatory choices.
I agree with your point but as feedback on phrasing saying
> Nuclear is orders of magnitude more safer than coal, and has been for 50+ years
might cause some skepticism as Chernobyl was in 1986. I am not saying that it is false, but I am saying that it will sound false
Searching for "coal pollution death europe" would give:
https://www.wwf.mg/?272333/Dark%2DCloud
> It reveals that in 2013 their emissions were responsible for over 22,900 premature deaths, ...
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/air-pollut...
> Pollution from Europe’s coal plants responsible for ‘up to 34,000 deaths each year’
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abecff
> The health burden of European [coal power] emission-induced PM2.5, ..., amounts to at least 16 800 (CI95 14 800–18 700) excess deaths per year over the European domain.
Chernobyl's total death toll is estimated somewhere between thousands and tens of thousands: in other words, even assuming the worst number for Chernobyl, in every year or two, coal kills the same number of Europeans as Chernobyl ever did. The number may be as low as a few months.
I am not disputing this, I am just saying that leaving the argument implicit might be confusing.
Pollution from burning coal (and other fossil fuels, but mostly coal) kills, depending on which estimate you believe, 10s of thousands, to millions of people per year, and that is completely ignoring impacts of climate change. Yes, even when you take into account accidents like Chernobyl, and even if you decide to accept the very highest of the total death estimates, it's still dramatically safer than coal.
Over-reacting to early nuclear disasters and failing to accelerate our build out and continuing with coal for the past nearly 80 years post Chernobyl is, in my opinion, one of the greatest civilizational mistakes humanity has made.
The average coal power plant kills a few dozen people a year in normal operation with first world safety standards.
It's just that these people are spread over a wide geographic area and can be blamed on things like smoking and car exhaust.
The article makes it pretty clear the shift was prompted by their ongoing failure to meet their nuclear goals as well as a dropping cost of renewables, not by a philosophical choice to embrace only renewables.
I've always found these articles about China adopting green policies and shifting its industries towards green energy sources to be suspicious. If they were true then why are China's emission ever increasing year after year: https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china
If their share of renewables / nuclear energy were increasing then there would be a decrease in C02 emissions per capita, but that has never been the case even with the increase in announcements in "green" mega projects over the years.
> If their share of renewables / nuclear energy were increasing then there would be a decrease in C02 emissions per capita
This seems a bit obvious to say, but that wouldn't be the case if the standard of living were also being raised. Also, there's a huge amount of CO2 generated by non-energy means; e.g. building with concrete.
From the article: "Previously China expected that its energy emissions would peak in 2030, but revised forecasts are now indicating that this could happen as early as 2024, 5-6 years ahead of target."
From the various graphics there is not data suggesting that. Its increase year by year is in line with previous pre-pandemic years.
is this so hard to explain?
- CO2 comes from sources other than energy (electricity) production.
- Overall energy usage is increasing, outpacing % growth of renewables.
> Overall energy usage is increasing, outpacing % growth of renewables.
This is why I pointed out per capita emissions. If renewables had a bigger proportion, then it would decrease. It didn't. In fact it accelerated.
It takes time for capacity to turn into usage. As the installation in 2023 is so large relative to the total solar capacity the time lag would have more pronounced effect. The number one issue is geographic distribution. The largest installations are in the western provinces, where land is sparsely populated with plentiful of sun and wind. But the consumers of electricity are primarily in the central and eastern provinces. It's not easy to move so much electricity over the large distance, so energy intensive industries need to move west. That will take time. Meanwhile the demands in the east keep growing. Chinese electricity usage is growing significantly faster than GDP, unlike the US.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-dominates-rene...
"There is also a caveat to China's rapid build-out of renewable capacity because at the same time it is still adding substantial coal-fired generation."
"China already accounts for 53% of the world's 2,095 GW of operating coal-fired generating capacity, a share likely to increase in coming years as more coal plants are retired in the developed world."
China is building six times more new coal plants than other countries, report finds
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...
China is building a lot of coal power plants.
https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/chinas-new-coal-po...
And industrializaing vast swaths of land by covering it with solar panels.
https://www.facebook.com/XinhuaSciTech/videos/solar-panels-o...
The undeniable fact is that humans are very electricity hungry. Cheap electricity opens up tons of downstream benefits.
I am envisioning something like an international market for clean electricity. Something like an internet for power. This would enable developing countries to leapfrog dirty methods like coal, similar to how many countries leapfrogged over credit cards and cheques we still have in the US. Of course the UHVDC technology may not be ready for it yet.
Solar panels approximate an international market for clean electricity (there's just quite some lag).
Coal has excellent politics, especially in India & China.
It’s mineable almost everywhere people live, is burdened by little international regulation (at least compared to nuclear), and is labour intensive enough to create powerful local advocates.
Quiet? No. But maybe US people who believe they are the center of the world are unaware of that