| ▲ | golem14 3 days ago | |
I found an interesting set of charts + explanation for China: https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/1ijcocq/chine... It would really be great to understand (rather than me guessing) China's rationale to build these plants, and also their safety. They generate about 5% of their electricity with nuclear. That's a lot, but is it enough to power the country if other alternatives stop being viable (war, shortages, ...?) Maybe it's OK for them that in such a situation, they just turn off enough residential power to last through the night with nuclear and storage. z Do they see the nuclear research as dual use? My understanding is that nuclear subs and ships do use entirely different nuclear plants. Maybe research into small modular reactors is more dual use. There's also use for those reactors if they really want to build moon bases. Maybe at their cost of the plans (I heard ≈3B for a 1+GW plant), this is actually competitive with solar+storage. It's definitely competitive with western nuclear power plants, if they want to export in other developing markets. | ||
| ▲ | laurencerowe 3 days ago | parent [-] | |
Rather than being dual use I think it’s more that countries want to keep their strategic industrial capacity around in terms of the nuclear engineering expertise in firms and universities that can potentially be redirected if needed. | ||