https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-taste-for-nuclear-power-thats-bad-news/
Part 1
China’s losing its taste for nuclear power. That’s bad news.
Once nuclear’s strongest booster, China is growing wary about its cost and safety.
“Most beautiful wedding photos taken at a nuclear power plant” might just be the strangest competition ever. But by inviting couples to celebrate their nuptials at the Daya Bay plant in Shenzhen and post the pictures online, China General Nuclear Power (CGN), the country’s largest nuclear power operator, got lots of favorable publicity.
A year later, the honeymoon is over.
For years, as other countries have shied away from nuclear power, China has been its strongest advocate. Of the four reactors that started up worldwide in 2017, three were in China and the fourth was built by Beijing-based China National Nuclear Corp. (CNNC) in Pakistan. China’s domestic nuclear generation capacity grew by 24% in the first 10 months of 2018.
The country has the capacity to build 10 to 12 nuclear reactors a year. But though reactors begun several years ago are still coming online, the industry has not broken ground on a new plant in China since late 2016, according to a recent World Nuclear Industry Status Report.
Officially China still sees nuclear power as a must-have. But unofficially, the technology is on a death watch. Experts, including some with links to the government, see China’s nuclear sector succumbing to the same problems affecting the West: the technology is too expensive, and the public doesn’t want it.
The 2011 meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant shocked Chinese officials and made a strong impression on many Chinese citizens. A government survey in August 2017 found that only 40% of the public supported nuclear power development.
The bigger problem is financial. Reactors built with extra safety features and more robust cooling systems to avoid a Fukushima-like disaster are expensive, while the costs of wind and solar power continue to plummet: they are now 20% cheaper than electricity from new nuclear plants in China, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Moreover, high construction costs make nuclear a risky investment.
And gone are the days when nuclear power was desperately needed to meet China’s soaring demand for electricity. In the early 2000s, power consumption was growing at more than 10% annually as the economy boomed and manufacturing, a heavy user of electricity, expanded rapidly. Over the past few years, as growth has slowed and the economy has diversified, power demand has been growing, on average, at less than 4%.
China’s disenchantment with nuclear power corresponds with an overall decline in nuclear generation elsewhere in the world. Utilities are retiring existing plants and have stopped building new ones. If China, too, gives up on nuclear, it could sound the death knell for a steady, carbon-free energy source that many see as crucial to slowing climate change.
Fukushima changed everything
China’s energy planners launched its nuclear industry in the 1980s with the construction of plants like Daya Bay. In 2005 the country began a massive building spree that was intended to solve persistent energy shortages and combat worsening air pollution from the country’s numerous coal plants. By 2009, government planners expected 2020 nuclear capacity to be 10 times what it was in 2005.
Then the Fukushima disaster happened. China’s leaders watched in shock as the biggest utility in one of the world’s most advanced industrial countries proved powerless to prevent a series of meltdowns. They knew that if a similar accident occurred in China, the damage wouldn’t be limited to the explosion and nuclear fallout. Such an event would call into question the government’s competence. “If an event like Fukushima punctures that image of competence, that’s very, very consequential,” says William Overholt, a China expert at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. “That would delegitimize the regime.”
