If it gets them to shut down their coal plants, great. And I think that actually is the primary motivation. They need lots of power and they need to stop killing their citizens with smog from coal (as well as our planet).
I think it will cost them financially though. This won't come cheap. Half a trillion for about 1200 GW of capacity is a lot and not necessarily the best value for money. However, they have about that amount of coal to replace as well. The issue with wind and solar is that we're only adding in the order of a few hundred GW per year. China needs an order of magnitude more just to get rid of coal.
The interesting thing will be if production capacity for wind turbines and solar panels will grow quickly enough to make this investment unnecessary. One order of magnitude increase in production capacity would do the trick. Not trivial; and China is already going as fast as it can with this. But also not impossible. It's going to be a close race.
China might simply be betting on multiple horses here; which is the smart thing to do. I don't think they are picking winners here; just losers. Which would be coal. It needs to go, hence the need to fix 1000+ GW of power demand while also accounting for continued economic growth. They aren't ready to commit to that at COP 26 just yet. But the timing of this announcement is no coincidence either.
Another horse in the race would be fusion. Apparently there is some serious money flowing into some companies now. Helion just did a 500M series E: https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/05/helion-energy-will-use-500.... That may or may not work but it's kind of a really big deal if that hits commercial viability this decade rather than in 2050. And as the US has less of a coal problem at this point (most of it will be gone by the middle of this decade), nuclear is less urgent as a solution. And unlike nuclear, fusion actually might have a shot at being cost competitive with other renewables. Helion is pitching 0.01$/kwh. That's the right level of ambition here.
The cost picture is complex. Using nuclear they can build the plants next to the industry centers, replacing existing coal plans. They don't need to build batteries to address the intermittency of renewables. In addition 150 power plants being built at the same time might gain some benefit of scale, and might attract other countries to follow suit.
We need to compare the cost to what other countries are doing to achieve similar goals. Countries like Germany is planning to create green hydrogen in order to replace the current natural gas plants, and we don't know the price tag for that. Europe is currently also seeing the consequences of relying on natural gas and energy trading, with record high energy costs for the end consumer, despite building a lot of solar and wind farms. The high demand for natural gas is also creating additional problems for industries that depend on that limited resource, like agriculture. With uranium there isn't many other industries that compete for that resource.
High gas prices are short term very disruptive but actually speed up the agenda of relying less on it. Which is why it is a good thing IMHO with some bad/unfortunate impact on people with lower incomes, You can bet, a lot of home owners that haven't already are now considering heat exchanges, solar, and batteries as ways to have less exposure to high energy prices. Additionally, high gas prices push gas power plants towards being less profitable. Most European energy companies are already investing heavily in wind (particularly) and solar. So, you could argue that investing in gas plants just got a lot less attractive than it already was.
High cost would actually still be manageable if it was predictable. However, that is becoming exactly the issue. It swings between too low for exploitation to be even profitable due to over supply and then too high because of Russian and OPEC policy resulting in supply disruption. Kind of a bad situation to be in if you are dependent on that. The smart move would be to eliminate such dependencies as soon as possible. Energy companies are going bankrupt right now because they are locked into contracts with consumers they no longer can afford.
The reason why it got so expensive is because we fell down the curve. Intentionally. So that we could fill our atmosphere with CO2 while we waited 40 years for wind and solar to become viable. The mind boggles.
He means when you stop building reactors, you lose the tribal knowledge to build reactors. No different than when folks try to reproduce WWII vehicles and discover the plans don’t actually reflect the real build process because things were adapted on the fly and never written down because everyone “just knew”. Oh that weld? We actually need plates and bolts to reinforce it due to stress cracks in the field.
When you are building one offs, and something goes wrong and you redo it, you don't gain benefit from knowledge of not making same mistake again. As there isn't next time. Now when you have done same mistake before you won't repeat it. And these mistakes are the reason behind delays and part of cost over runs.
> Helion is pitching 0.01$/kwh. That's the right level of ambition here.
Does Helion have a demonstrator plant or a pilot? Or even a prototype? All I see is ... nothing.
It is impossible for them to be in commercial operation in nine years even if they did have a working demonstrator. NIMBYism, fear of H-bombs, and the slow speed of regulation guarantee it.
They're a company that's showed nothing so far and claims to know how to do something that's apparently eluded a dozen other fusion power projects with quite literally 1000 times more funding. The likes of ITER and Wendelstein, or the NIF.
Helion's only got about 80M of venture investments, which in the field of energy innovation is basically chump change.
I mean call me a sceptic, but I have a feeling they may not be able to completely deliver on their promise hah.
Well I sure hope that ends up being the case, but unfortunately history is also teeming with startups promising the world, getting funding and then collapsing while getting nothing done.
ITER is commonly cited as the most expensive science project of all time. I just don't believe a start up is on the forefront of research that even everyone involved with ITER is behind.
If they had something substantial it would make sense to patent it, instead of keeping it hidden and the potential for it to be stolen as an option. Either the principle their reactor will work on isn't conceptually done yet or they're being seriously irresponsible with their achievements.
I think it's a reasonable assumption that US fusion companies would have the same patent policy as SpaceX.
Elon is quoted in HBR, “We have essentially no patents. Our primary long-term competition is China. If we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book."
The deal is that you provide the recipe book in exchange for legal protection and a short-term legal monopoly. The other side of that deal is not honored by China, which is Elon's point.
The legal monopoly (which is the same thing as the legal protection) has always been geographically limited, and has always existed at the pleasure of the government granting it.
They have serious funding, so they have more than nothing. Given the investors don't seem to be naive idiots, I'd say they are making a calculated bet and there might be more to this than wishful thinking.
You see nothing, they see opportunity. You can't both be right.
They have built several prototypes, but none of the size necessary for useful energy production. Their prototype planned for 2024 is apparently also just supposed to be useful He3 production, but not useful energy production (though they do want it to produce more energy than it consumes).
They also have the local mayor and governor saying good things about them, and given that they're aiming for aneutronic fusion I wouldn't expect regulation to be a huge hurtle, it's a very safe scheme with very minimal waste.
(Just based on googling them a lot yesterday, and mostly from comments on /r/fusion)
An optimistic take is they may be keeping a bit quiet on the details to avoid competition? Some results "first private fusion company to heat a fusion plasma to 100 million degrees Celsius" from their Trenta prototype and Altman says "...they and their team have built a generator that produces electricity. Helion has a clear path to net electricity by 2024..."
The design is quite interesting - twin electromagnets shove plasma at a million miles an hour into the middle chamber and then hopefully fusion flings it out again pushing back on the currents in the electromagnets and producing electrical output directly. Bit like a petrol engine where the piston / crank compress the mix and then after ignition it shoves back harder adding energy to the crankshaft.
China absolutely does need to replace its coal-powered electricity plants.
But it also needs a great deal more electricity, for a few reasons.
Away from the coast and the mega cities, there is still a lot of energy poverty.
If China is going to replace coal in iron smelting and steelmaking, it needs to electrolyze a lot of hydrogen.
It also needs electrolyzed hydrogen to replace fossil methane for making ammonia for fertilizer, and for wintertime peak electricity plants (and possibly for engines for ocean-going ships, if it can't use nuclear for them).
If it's going to capture the carbon from its cement plants, it needs power to do that.
Electrolyzed hydrogen and captured CO2 will have to be the new feedstocks for many industrial chemicals and plastics.
I don't think it's either-or with nuclear and wind/PV, it's not hedging bets, it's whatever works locally, ASAP and AMAP.
> The interesting thing will be if production capacity for wind turbines and solar panels will grow quickly enough to make this investment unnecessary. One order of magnitude increase in production capacity would do the trick.
This assumes massive advances in battery tech to support seasonal and week-to-week weather changes. Even the new iron-air tech is still very expensive - $300 million for enough capacity to power 50,000 homes for just one day.[0] By my rough calculations that's 28 trillion dollars to buy enough batteries for all homes in China, assuming 600 million homes, and 7 days of capacity.
But that's quite optimistic, because it's not that hard to get more than a week of unfavourable weather, and you don't want your country to shut down every time that happens.
I think if you install 28 trillion dollars worth of batteries you're going to have a waste problem that will dwarf storing the waste from fission plants.
On that scale you might have both. In the case of the Fukushima tsunami, how much environmental damage was caused by e.g. the (lead) batteries in the cars which were trashed? Sure, lithium isn’t lead, but that (along with arson and crashes) are important to plan for at this scale, not just the ideal product end-of-life.
Probably no damage was done by lead electrodes in Fukushima. Lots was probably done by dry-cleaning establishments, hardware stores, machine shops, pesticide inventories (in factories, stores, and farms), paint factories and stores, etc., but metallic lead? Lead is so stable that even bullets inside people's bodies, where they're constantly exposed to hot, salty, corrosive bodily fluids, usually don't cause any toxicity. Even lead sulfate (the mineral anglesite) is somewhat challenging to get a toxic dose of.
Lithium is a relatively abundant element in Earth's crust, about the same abundance as nitrogen, and more abundant than boron, tin, tungsten, or iodine. It's fairly nontoxic: the lethal dose of lithium salts for a person is measured in tens of grams, and it doesn't bioaccumulate. There are a few lithium minerals that can form (lepidolite is a lithium phyllosilicate, spodumene is a lithium aluminum silicate) but probably most lithium ions released would remain soluble, spreading into the environment. But it would take an enormous lithium release to cause problems: there's 230 billion tonnes of it in the sea without causing any toxicity. In the USA, the EPA hasn't established any limit on lithium in drinking water. The usual therapeutic dose of lithium is about a gram a day, a few times lower than the usual intake of sodium or potassium. 7-Up used to be full of lithium.
I don't think you need to worry about arson in China.
There are a lot of ways for me to be wrong given I’m not a chemist; the point, to misuse a famous quote, is that safety requires me to be wrong about every concern and danger only needs you to be wrong once. So far we’ve not got enough stuff for any hazards in any of the components to rise to the level of significance, and indeed they may just be fine even at the level we need to use them; but in the 1930s I think I could say the same of CFCs?
Scale matters, and while I’m optimistic about batteries etc., I want us to solve problems rather than ignore them — we can only do that by being open about them, and I’ve seen enough occasions where others have claimed risks “don’t exist at all” to be more comfortable with a claim of “1% risk” than of “0% risk”.
> I don't think you need to worry about arson in China.
> This assumes massive advances in battery tech to support seasonal and week-to-week weather changes.
This is bad engineering. One would not use batteries for that sort of long timescale storage, one would use something like hydrogen. The round trip efficiency is much lower, but with the much smaller number of charge/discharge cycles that doesn't matter. The effect of efficiency on the cost of storage scales inversely with the average storage time; it's important for diurnal storage, not important for seasonal storage. The energy capacity cost of hydrogen storage could be maybe $1/kWh of capacity.
For a timescale of a week, thermal storage is an option, with sand heated to 1200 C. Round trip efficiency would be 53%.
28 trillion? A 3000 km long by 1m^2 cross section solid aluminium conductor would only cost 22-ish billion, and that lets you put the PV in Gobi desert with minimal losses.
But overproduction and diversity of the type of renewable is probably even cheaper.
For China (and quite a lot of other places, including the UK) the alternative to building a battery supply chain is to build a supply chain for something else, not to keep the existing and increasingly pointless coal-based supply chains.
It is a pity that nuclear power is such an emotive subject. Nuclear energy has killed a lot less people than dams or coal mines (possibly even if you include the 2 nuclear bombs dropped on Japan, I haven't done the sums).
Excuse my ignorance, but where did you get the 500 billion price tag? And why do you say it's expensive? It's rather cheap.
People keep saying how solar is the cheapest capacity to install, at 1 dollar per Watt. 1200 GW would be 1.2 trillions, and only offering around 240GW "constant" production, whereas nuclear is half the price to build but more like 1000 GW constant production
Not OP, but you're wrong about cost. Nuclear is more than twice as expensive as photovoltaics [1], so it's not cheap at all. And that doesn't include dealing with risks like proliferation and extremely hazardous waste for hundreds of years.
the half trillion comment came from the original article, that stated an estimated cost of 440 billion.
Reading that link, levelized solar plus battery storage is twice the cost of nuclear. It is cheap to generate the electricity, but only when backed by natural gas or hydro.
This misses the point. You cannot compare solar and nuclear directly, because they serve different needs.
Without battery or natural gas, solar and wind are not useful. You have to have some sort of backup, sufficient to avoid brownouts or blackouts, and so you end up with the full capitalization and maintenance cost of not-solar anyway.
To properly compare solar with nuclear, you must add on the cost of battery and / or natural gas (or equivalent fast backup), at which point nuclear is cheaper.
your link does not include nuclear, it only includes an elusive "advanced nuclear". This is not for China, which I have the feeling has a different take on "advanced". In the US, existing plants have much lower costs, around the same as cheap coal and gas.
PV capacity costs about 1 dollars per Watt and achieves a 20-25% capacity factor. In the article they say less than 0.5 dollars per watt of nuclear. If they can achieve that, it's obviously cheaper to go nuclear than PV. Nuclear has higher operating costs, true, but also a 90% capacity factor, meaning you need 5 times less capacity installed than PV. 1200 GW of nuclear for 440 billions is the equivalent of 5000GW of PV for 5000 billions. This is just to produce the same amount of energy, at any time during the day/year, before considering the cost of storage or intermittent power on the grid.
I truly hope China can pull this off at the advertised price. Because of the sheer size of the initiative they might be able to just do it using the economy of scale. France did it in 10 years in the 70s-80s, no reason China can't do it today.
We need all the energy sources, being PV+wind+battery purists won't be enough.
Apparently France managed to build it's nuclear plants at a cost of 1 dollar per Watt. Going to 0.5 dollars today might be a challenge for China, even with economies of scale. The article estimated 2.5 per Watt.
Even at 2.5 USD per Watt installed, that would still be about the same price as PV installed. But you gain stability in the grid for a slighter higher operating cost.
That PV cost of $1/watt is the levelized cost. In other words, it already includes the cost of batteries and the capacity factor adjustment. So 1200GW of nuclear for $440B with a capacity factor of 0.9 is equivalent to 1080GW of levelized solar at $1T. But solar+batteries is halving in cost every 4 years or so, whereas economies of scale / learning effect doesn't appear to apply to nuclear, or at least it didn't for the French. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...)
You're confusing Watts, which is power, with levelised cost, which is price of energy over the lifetime of the plant.
It costs 1 dollar to install 1 W of solar PV with no batteries. To include a 2-4 hour battery it's double that. Long term storage for day to day or seasonal is much much more, and likely impossible to do with the current tech.
And in regards to France, compare France's electricity cost with Germany's, Nuclear clearly beats PV and wind on cost. People will say that wholesale prices are the same, and Germany pays such a huge price solely because of taxes. But the point is...those taxes are so high in order to support renewables subsidies.
This being China, all comparisons are moot. They can reduce costs significantly, like they showed with the PV modules. They are the ones that truly commoditized the modules.
It costs $20 to install 1 MWh of solar PV[1]. That's 18 cents per watt averaged over the 8760 hours per year. And since the sun doesn't shine at night, that's 18 cents for at least 2 watts, probably 3-5.
It costs $40/MWh to install solar with batteries[2]. That's 35 cents per watt.
Again, you're confusing MWh with MW. MWh is not something you can install, it's something you produce over time. Also, I don't know how but you end up with the ridiculous number of 18 cents per 2 Watts? That is crazy, the module alone is 20 cents per Watt.
I think you should understand first what MW and MWh mean. One costs 1 million dollars to install, and then will proceed to produce 8000 hours per year divided by the capacity factor. So about 2000 hours * 1 MW = 2000 MWh per year. At a price of 5 cents per KWh, you can sell that for 100k dollars.
I figured out my mistake, I was assuming that MWh is an annual figure.
MWh is a much better figure than W when comparing disparate technologies because it takes into account capacity factor, operating costs and disposal costs as well as installation costs. It also relates directly to the price consumer pays. It's also why all the links are pricing in MWh.
So 1 watt of PV with a capacity factor of 33% and 30 years of lifetime would generate 86.7KWh. $20/MWh is thus $1.80/W total for installation, operating and decomissioning costs.
If China can build 150 reactors for $500 billion when it costs the west over $20B to build a single one, then yes nuclear is cheaper than solar.
Currently the West has massively inflated prices because there is no economy of scale. A planned economy + economies of scale might just pull it off. Especially if they're going to build the nuclear plants in factories, like the west is trying to do now. We'll see.
I'm personally rooting for all the technologies, except coal. Even gas is good as a temporary measure - it allows us to get off coal faster.
My main objection against nuclear is the time scale. I'll happily endorse any nuclear project that comes online before 2030. Even if solar/wind is more expensive than nuclear (and I don't believe they are unless the 150 plants for $500B number is achievable), it's still better simply because they can come online quickly.
People significantly overestimate the amount of batteries that a solar+battery project requires. All you need is enough batteries to handle a single night (and demand is low at night), and enough overcapacity to handle a moderately cloudy day. That'll get you above nuclear's 90% capacity factor.
China's economics on solar might also be a lot different, but given that it doesn't publish these numbers all we have to reason about are the US and maybe Europe.
Btw, ask France about cost of nuclear, I've heard their new reactors are absolutely in time and budget ;)
The other thing that might need to grow is multiple supply chains into specialized nuclear components by an order of magnitude. My gut says it’s actually easier to scale solar and renewables by an order of magnitude than those items.
Of course China might have the same motivations of many nuclear powers have - which is a desire to also maintain a baseline manufacturing capacity for nuclear technologies in general.
China shuts down lots of coal plants all the time; it's just that they're also building them. In 02020 they built more than they shut down. I'll be surprised if that's the case in 02021.
I don't get the hope for ramping up production capacity for wind turbines and solar panels 'fast enough'.
Supposedly this is all about climate change and limiting or even stopping emissions, to counter climate change, yes?
While these emissions can be especially annoying when they are near you, they work globally because they give a shit about borders. Supposedly, Yes?
So, from a global ecosystem point of view, considering 'cradle
to cradle' without any externalizations, what exactly is won by that, considering the emissions from producing and transporting all that stuff?
Wind turbines require large concrete foundations, you can't put them into the ground like a toothpick into a piece of cheese.
If not in some flat desert, stable roads for the construction and transport, requiring cutting down parts of the forest.
Same for the cables, no matter if over land, or underground transmission.
At Sea it's even more complicated and material intensive.
Solar is requiring large areas to be effective, similar considerations apply.
The production and transport of all that stuff, and the mining and refining of the necessary raw materials is causing emissions.
While of intermittent use, without storage, which again requires mining, refining, transport, production, transport, construction, maintenance, causing more emissions again.
Whose intermittency could be lessened by large HVDC super smart grid, but again, 'this doesn't grow on trees'!
One order of magnitude increase in production capacity would do the trick. At which magnitude of more emissions, counted over the whole lifecycle from mining raw materials, refining, producing, transporting, constructing, decommissioning?
Compared to a few 100(0) reactors, be they modular/small/gen-whatever/fast breeder/liquid salt/traveling wave/fusion/I don't care.
If the goal is to reduce emissions globally, nuclear it is!
If need be maybe implemented in a Hyman Rickover way, not some crazy lowest bidder contractors. That worked for the US-Navy, so far. Why shouldn't it for the world?
If this is The Emergency as it's supposed to be, it needs an emergency answer.
Solar is cheap. Wind is cheap. They're cheap like cheaper than continuing to run existing coal plants, even without subsidies. And the costs are dropping rapidly, especially for solar. Meanwhile, nuclear is expensive. Like $6B to $8B per GW capacity.
If we throw a big pile of money at the problem, we get more bang for our buck from renewables. And, since wind and solar are on cost learning curves such that the more we build the cheaper it gets, the money we throw at wine and solar gets multiplied in the future by private industry.
Wind construction is fast. Solar construction is incredibly fast. Nuclear construction takes 8-15 years.
Renewables also require batteries and transmission. Batteries are getting cheap too, having dropped 89% in price since 2010. Transmission is a bit more politically tricky, but I think it's doable.
We might be able to get the US grid to 40% renewables by 2030. I doubt we'll have more than 5 GW of additional nuclear capacity in the US by 2030. The revolution will be well underway before nuclear can get its boots on.
Yes. But the farts emitted by the revolutionary masses, aggregated over all affected sectors(cradle 2 cradle, remember?) will counteract the stated goal of reducing emissions.
Make work! Make more work! Make more workers make more work, so that even more workers can make even more work!
I suppose another geopolitical aspect of this is that China doesn't want to be dependent on other nations for fuel. If they became involved in a war or even just anger their trading partners in some way, the rest of the world can shut off their energy supply.
For that matter, even if they're on great terms with all their trading partners, those trading partners might ask themselves "why are we selling coal to some other country so they can get the benefit when we have to live with the CO2 emissions as if we had burned it ourselves?" To be honest, I don't understand why the U.S. exports coal at all; it just doesn't seem worth it. (Though I can see where the coal lobby might have something to say about it if such legislation was proposed.)
Given how dependable and safe nuclear is combined with the reduction in carbon it is well worth it. This move is much more sensible than expanding wind and solar on the same scale, and also much more predictable.
I think you answered your own question: energy policy is a multi-layered approach. There's no one silver-bullet, at least this century. It will take a lot of small steps. This is one of those instances where authoritarian governments can move faster.
Although that is a LOT of nuclear waste they will be creating. Hopefully the also advance waste storage technology in parallel.
"In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards."
I understand what you're saying, especially when compared to trillions and trillions (quadrillions?) of tons of CO2 and particulate pollution of coal and oil burning.
OTOH, It would be nice if the nuclear waste could be stored that way. But that concentrated football field can be used for all sorts of nefarious purposes. Ultimately it requires a large amount of infrastructure to prevent leakage, exposure, theft, explosion, degradation of infrastructure, terrorism, etc. So maybe the football field turns into a billion-dollar-a-year "small-town-sized" facility that has to be maintained for as long as humanity exists (10,000 years?). Now it seems much bigger.
Not really. Almost all current nuclear waste is stored on site in casks and does fine.
Fly ash produced by coal just in the US dwarfs it in both volume, total toxicity AND total radioactivity, and is in the 30+ millions of tons a YEAR. And that is only the tip of the iceberg. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash#Disposal_and_market_...]
Thankfully a lot of it is used in cement and similar that entrains it decently safely (dilution is the solution), but just the portion that doesn’t on any given year outweighs all nuclear waste ever produced
That pollution is to make the stuff you buy in Walmart. As long as you as a consumer do not demand a label such as "made with green energy" and prefer those products, the polluting manufacturers will prevail.
That's definitely part of it. But the flip side of that is that as the U.S. tightens emissions, production outsources elsewhere, possibly where emissions standards and many other environmental standards are much lower, which could lead to an overall net harm.
Thus if you have 3 countries, it may be worse for just one of the countries to pass environmental constraints on the production of tradeables. Either all three countries do it, or none do it, or you don't trade at all with those that don't do it.
Why people don't take these arguments to their logical conclusion is beyond me.
A label would help. It transfers the responsibility to the consumer.
If you have a dozen of regular eggs, a dozen of cage-free eggs, and a dozen of pasture-raised eggs... If you pick the regular choice you know you are contributing to less humane conditions for chickens. Now it is your choice.
To a point - if you're going to have labeling you'll already need some kind of regulation and enforcement. Seems to me like if you're going to set that up, you could just turn the knobs a little farther and make the 'bad' choices cost 20% more than the 'good', for example.
1. very easy to cheat. E.g. during Trump's tariffs on China, there was mass cheating as goods were imported into Vietnam, relabelled as made in Vietnam, and exported to the U.S. When there is big money at stake, the incentive to cheat goes way up. Trying to audit every exporter's Asian supply chain in search of Chinese inputs is tough.
2. Imposing a country-wide tariff does not incentivize any producer to adopt more efficient processes. Imagine if the EU decided the US gas taxes were too low, and so they slapped a tariff on American cars. Would that incentivize Americans to use less gas? Would it make Americans favor an increase in gas taxes?
3. They lead to retaliatory tariffs by the other side. There's no such thing as pure one way punishment, no matter how justified you think you are. The other side will punish you by the same amount, if they can, in order to punish what they view as your bad behavior in trying to punish them.
Now I'm a big fan of trade reductions, but that's because it's part of my personal war on globalism. But make sure you are signing up for the same mass trade restrictions - e.g. blanket bans on certain products coming from all of East Asia - because that's what this is. Don't think you can wage a war against CO2 without also waging a war against globalism. International conferences are fun, but they have no teeth and don't get the job done.
I don't disagree about encouraging onshoring for example (much easier to make those regulations stick that way). But I was mostly responding to the parent's idea that shifting the burden/choice to the consumer was a positive thing. My instinct is that, if we're talking about humane treatment of chickens, it would be best to impose regulations so that all the eggs met a minimum requirement - so consumers couldn't "choose wrong". But of course that makes them all cost more...
Yes, I know the point you were making and it's a fair one. I was just elaborating. It's unfortunate that your post was downvoted, there is nothing wrong with it, IMO. I was taking this as a discussion.
If they do thorium then I am all for it. If not (so can feed their nuclear weaponizations) we all pray for the people over there. Their track records of industry accidents aren't that proud of.
I think it will cost them financially though. This won't come cheap. Half a trillion for about 1200 GW of capacity is a lot and not necessarily the best value for money. However, they have about that amount of coal to replace as well. The issue with wind and solar is that we're only adding in the order of a few hundred GW per year. China needs an order of magnitude more just to get rid of coal.
The interesting thing will be if production capacity for wind turbines and solar panels will grow quickly enough to make this investment unnecessary. One order of magnitude increase in production capacity would do the trick. Not trivial; and China is already going as fast as it can with this. But also not impossible. It's going to be a close race.
China might simply be betting on multiple horses here; which is the smart thing to do. I don't think they are picking winners here; just losers. Which would be coal. It needs to go, hence the need to fix 1000+ GW of power demand while also accounting for continued economic growth. They aren't ready to commit to that at COP 26 just yet. But the timing of this announcement is no coincidence either.
Another horse in the race would be fusion. Apparently there is some serious money flowing into some companies now. Helion just did a 500M series E: https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/05/helion-energy-will-use-500.... That may or may not work but it's kind of a really big deal if that hits commercial viability this decade rather than in 2050. And as the US has less of a coal problem at this point (most of it will be gone by the middle of this decade), nuclear is less urgent as a solution. And unlike nuclear, fusion actually might have a shot at being cost competitive with other renewables. Helion is pitching 0.01$/kwh. That's the right level of ambition here.