China mostly builds nuclear reactors to retain the required industrial base to maintain a military nuclear program. Nuclear power is heavily subsidized in China, as it is everywhere in the world. It might be cheaper than in the US or Europe, but its not "cheap".
The Chinese have built a small thorium reactor for research and development, and they went on to build a much larger Thorium reactor which they have refueled on the fly without taking it out of service.
I am still surprised that America hasn’t it treated it like a Sputnik moment, but we live in different times than the mid late 1950s. I think we’re waiting for the Chinese to ship it around the world like EV cars. Imagine a Thorium reactor that can be put into the bowels of a Hospital or an office building basement and supply electrical power.
The Chinese demonstration plant is only 2MW thermal / 300KW electrical with the one currently under construction expecting to up that to 60MW thermal / 10MW electrical.
The difficulty with molten salt reactors is that molten salt is highly corrosive. It will be interesting to see if they are able to make them cost effective.
Please read Directive (EU) 2022/2557 and then tell me how a disgruntled office worker is supposed to do anything they aren't supposed to, given full compliance with the directive. I've seen some preliminary national implementation efforts and it's really serious stuff physical security wise.
I don't think I've ever seen a place fully compliant with all regulations down to the last letter. Somebody inevitably takes a shortcut somewhere. All you can do is push those shortcuts into places they don't matter.
Certainly not the times and culture we live in, but the "test" they tried running at Chornobyl violated their own regulations too…
>>highly radioactive material is within reach of any disgruntled office worker.
Like, how would that disgruntled office worker even reach that highly radioactive material? Especially without killing themselves in the process. Hospitals already have extremely radioactive cobalt sources on premises, and they are 1) impossible to get to by a normal employee 2) would kill said employee if they ever did get to them somehow.
There can be a good bit of time between receiving a lethal dose of radiation, and dying (or incapacitated) from that.
Also sources tend to come with shielding. Some portable, some less-portable. Oh and.. use machinery / robots / whatever, with operator outside the danger zone.
Your "impossible" does a lot of heavy lifting here.
No, it's the normal that does the heavy lifting. A radiation therapy machine does not allow for an easy removal of the source, not without hours of work with specialized machinery. Again, how does a disgruntled office worker do this without immediate attention of security?
>>There can be a good bit of time between receiving a lethal dose of radiation, and dying (or incapacitated) from that
Well, it's really unfortunate, but we have multiple reports from people who have accidentally walked into a room with an open Cesium source at various irradiation facilities - they all reported that they felt incredibly sick in less than a minute. And that's "just" an irradiation source, not an active nuclear reactor. Again, I'm struggling to imagine how a "disgruntled worker" gets anywhere near the actual radiactive material within it.
Thorium-based nuclear research was practically shut down during the Cold War precisely because they realized that you can't make nuclear weaponry out of it. It would have been a very different world otherwise.
Thorium-based nuclear research was practically shut down because:
1. General decline of nuclear power plant building after 1970s in U.S. Why financing research for Thorium-based reactor, when even PWRs and BWRs are not build anymore. The shutdown of sodium-based reactor research is another example.
2. Handling of highly radioactive corrosive molten salts in Molten-salt reactor designs is a big issue. Materials resistant to both intensive chemical corrosion and neutron irradiation were open research problem.
3. Online reprocessing of nuclear fuel necessary for some thorium fuel cycle designs (inside the nuclear power plant) could increase the risk of nuclear proliferation. U.S. government, as a general policy, doesn't like when non-weapon states do nuclear reprocessing.
4. Thorium-based reactor could be used to produce weapon usable Uranium-233. But this production was not necessary, as military Plutonium production reactors were already build.
no, weapons production is unrealated anyway - it's cheaper to do it in special facilities. Thorium was just too late to the party when most units were classic PWR's and BWR's without complicated handling
"Unlike natural uranium, natural thorium contains only trace amounts of fissile material (such as Th-231), which are insufficient to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. Additional fissile material or another neutron source is necessary to initiate the fuel cycle. In a thorium-fuelled reactor, Th-232 absorbs neutrons to produce U-233. Depending on the design of the reactor and fuel cycle, the generated U-233 either fissions in situ or is chemically separated from the used nuclear fuel and formed into new nuclear fuel."
Many of specific issue around design nuclear weapons based on U-233 are classified. But:
"A declassified 1966 memo from the US nuclear program stated that uranium-233 has been shown to be highly satisfactory as a weapons material, though it was only superior to plutonium in rare circumstances. It was claimed that if the existing weapons were based on uranium-233 instead of plutonium-239, Livermore would not be interested in switching to plutonium.
The co-presence of uranium-232 can complicate the manufacture and use of uranium-233, though the Livermore memo indicates a likelihood that this complication can be worked around."
I think the larger concern is containment breach via sabotage and the resulting material release, definitely less than ideal if these things are put under random buildings where you have little perimeter control.
Indeed we live in very different times. If a challenger appears whose success threatens certain aspects of one's worldview rather than compete and improve oneself people figured out that it is much lower effort to adopt a partisan mindset and deny reality. Modern American politics in a nutshell.
They don't need to build reactors just to retain a military nuclear program. They specifically maintain a nuclear deterrent by policy, they don't need an excuse. They build reactors because they need more power. They have 60+ reactors and will have more nuclear the US by the end of the decade. They're also heavily investing in next-gen reactors which they wouldn't need to do if they just wanted a weapons program.
Yes it's subsidized, everything in China is subsidized, that's the best part of a planned-capitalist economy. But it's actually becoming more market driven so they can reduce financial pressure and force efficiency from competition. In 10 years those subsidies are gonna be a lot smaller
it is worth noting that if you were to measure by degree of subsidy, the planned output for nuclear has not really budged, but wind and solar are exploding in China in comparison.
> Even in China, nuclear power is little more than an afterthought. Nuclear’s share of total electricity generation in China fell for the third year in a row in 2024, to 4.5 percent. Nuclear capacity grew by 3.5 GW, while solar capacity grew by 278 GW. Solar and wind together generated about four times more electricity than nuclear reactors.
> Since 2010, the output of solar increased by a factor of over 800, wind by a factor of 20, and nuclear by a factor of six. Renewables, including hydro, increased from 18.7 percent of China’s electricity generation in 2010 to 33.7 percent in 2024 (7.5 times higher than nuclear’s share), while coal peaked in 2007 at 81 percent and declined to 57.8 percent in 2024.
no they dont. For military nuclear program you don't need power plants at all. You either have enrichment for uranium based warheads or a facility dedicated specifically to breed plutonium. Classic PWRs are unsuitable for that. There are ways - but it's so expensive that it's better to do it the proper way
military is unrealated to plants. You are ill informed.
The statement about subsidies is false too for existing plants. IPEX data is public. There are more subsidies for new units because the west is bad at construction but the amount is still not that great. Heck, biomass in EU gets 2x the CFD's vs min profitability limit of french Flamanville...
> China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.
Considering the Europeans are currently hollowing out their industrial base by importing Chinese EVs instead of building their own, I don't see a nuclear reactor being a bridge too far.
European car manufacturers have been given every opportunity and encouragement to build EVs and the phrase "dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century" springs to mind.
People are buying BYD because they're better cars, not because they're forced to.
Honestly, VW spent years developing the ID line which was just too expensive, buggy, and constanly positioned as an alternative to much cheaper and better equipped Golf/Polo lines - it's like they were afraid to canibalize their own products. I don't know a single person who owned an ID.3 and was actually happy with it.
Or Mercedes, where they decided to build extremely expensive EVs that departed from their core design so much their core audience didn't want to buy them, then they were surprised EVs don't sell.
Or Audi who were probably a masterclass in offering the worst possible value for money you could imagine with their EVs - £50k Q4 that still had manual seats, like what are you competing with exactly?
Only Skoda could really kinda buck the trend with the Enyaq, which proves that VW could be competive if they wanted to, but they actively decided not to.
And don't start me on the Peugeot/Renault/Opel cars, which initially looked incredibly interesting and actually competitive, but I can only guess that Stellantis told them to tone it down because again - have to protect their core business of ICE cars, can't be too good.
And then MG came in with very well specced working EVs, and then other Chinese brands moved in, and big european manufacturers are crying that they are eating their lunch. Like, you guys had literally years to address this, but you decided to protect your legacy product over investing in the future = you're reaping the results now.
It might very well be a case of trying to maximize the return on the investment that they already made with the old vehicles.
Building out a new production line for vehicles is insanely expensive. Billions upon billions of dollars. You need the old cars to sell well enough to pay for this and all of your other expenses.
China got to get into the EV space with a mostly-clean slate. Their domestic manufacturers made absolutely horrid products at the turn of the century. They did what they do best: copy successful people with investment from the successful people.
They only let Western manufacturers sell in China with the cooperation of a local vehicle manufacturer. That necessitated a bunch of investment and IP transfers to Chinese manufacturers who didn't have to shell out themselves, and when they did, it was with the complete backing of the state.
When EV technology really became something viable in the last 10-15 years, they just used that capacity, lower wages, and lax environmental regulations around mining, to undercut the rest of the world on EVs.
It's easy to act like the rest of the world just isn't competent enough, but there are layers to this.
Developing software that doesn't constantly bug out for the ID line doesn't require billions of investment though. The car itself, the technology behind the motors and batteries was very good. It's the interior design and software that held it back.
Just a small nitpick: Renault isn't Stellantis and have been quite competitive (if a bit timid) in the EV space. First with the Zoe and now with the Renault 5.
BYDs are certainly better than VWs, Fiats, Citroens and Renaults. The only problem is getting parts - you'll have to wait at least a month or so for the part to arrive from China if it isn't locally available (which often is the case).
I mean, it's their industrial base. They can do what they want with it.
I can just tell you as a person from the Midwestern US that the whole "we'll get lower prices that justify unemploying a bunch of people" doesn't work out like they said it would, and that empowering a potential geopolitical rival doesn't really help either.
It was good... for a while. And it was a "small amount of directly affected people". I mean, so long as you ignore places like St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Camden, etc., and the powers-that-be seemed to be okay with doing that. It's a major part of why the center of the country turned out the way it did politically, but whatever. What's done is done.
But then China expanded outside of cheap low-value-add goods and started to get into higher-value-add goods, and started directly competing with our industries in those spaces. They could source stuff cheaper and put major chunks of industry out of business. Now the US is a service economy, has major problems with cranking out large quantities of high-quality goods, and the Chinese are starting to look at Taiwan with even more malicious intent.
Now Europe seems to want to sign up for the same package, because of supposed American political and diplomatic instability, even though the instability is the US government acting at home more and more like the Chinese government does (censorship, thin-skinned leadership, excessive exercise of the state's monopoly on violence, etc.).
Nothing to be done about it. The continent will have to learn the hard way, as we did.
The four APRs built in Abu Dhabi cost $32 billion in total and the two they've contracted to build in Czechia is projected to cost $18 billion in total.
solar and wind is only cheaper up to a certain percentage of total power due to its unreliability. Every watt of wind and solar is subsidized by another dispatchable source. As a sysadmin it seems very comparable to the need to essentially buy 2x and only run things at 50% capacity.
This is what the oil and nuclear industry propaganda says.
The reality is that solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think, demand shifting (e.g. charging the car when it's sunny) is easier than you think, batteries and pumped storage and power2gas are cheaper than you think and nuclear power is way, way, way, way more expensive than you think.
> solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think
They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun. We also get persistent stationary anticyclones. That means potentially over a month of temps in the -30°C region, and zero wind.
Australia is extremely sunny. California is even better, they are modeling that assuming they keep their current hydro capacity, they only need to add ~3h in batteries. Hot places also do better than cold places, because the usage peaks track the sun.
> In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+.
How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000.
Renewables are great in some situations. There are places in the world that should go for 100% renewables as quickly as possible. It also makes sense to locate a lot of the high-consuming industry in such places. But before you hawk your solution everywhere, you need to actually study the local conditions, and not try to extrapolate anything from Australia.
Finland is the definition of an outlier, and folks in similar situations make up a tiny percentage of the world population. They can burn gas for the next 50 years, and we can still be good.
> Finland is also unusually blessed with tons and tons of hydropower potential which functions both as a battery as well as power generation.
Where did you get that idea from? This isn't Norway; we don't have any mountains. The country is mostly flat and most of the suitable locations already have a hydropower plant since the 1970s.
And at high latitudes, the night can be very long. And even when the sun does appear for a bit, it doesn't provide a lot of energy.
And you might want to ask the Fins how they feel about nuclear power: around two thirds of the population are for it as well as pretty much the entire political establishment, including the Green Party.
I think it also depends on other stuff. Spain gets bunch of sun even when there's the deepest winter in Finland but even if they are technically part of the same grid, the challenge is getting the energy there.
Being part of the same grid doesn't matter so much as the amount of interconnection available. Finland has a higher proportion than Spain since France has stalled on building more interconnection capacity as this will likely reduce the amount they can sell their excess nuclear generation to Germany.
> How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000.
2.000 hours of storage would equate to 83 full days of electricity demand. That's on its face absurd. Most models assume that a "Dunkelflaute" (span of time with significantly reduced solar and wind output) will last at most 10 days. Add a few days as a safety margin. And that is all of Europe becalmed and dark, as the entire European electricity net is synchronized and transfer capacity between various regional grids is continuously expanded.
Power transmission is a thing. And where you can't lay down a transmission line, you can convert electricity into h2 or methane and put it on ships, just like we do with dino juice.
> Most models assume that a "Dunkelflaute" (span of time with significantly reduced solar and wind output) will last at most 10 days.
The longest recorded in Finland is 90 days. More than two weeks of it continuously happens nearly every winter.
> as the entire European electricity net is synchronized
It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.
> Power transmission is a thing.
It is not a thing you can trust. We have only just gotten a very sharp reminder of that. We have a neighbor that likes to cut sea cables as a fun past-time activity.
> you can convert electricity into h2 or methane
I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.
Not trying to diss Finnland, but the country requires less than 1,000,000 Terrajoulehours of energy per year. That's like a few percent of Germany's usage. I'm sure Europe could cover you.
> It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.
You are correct. But transmission lines do exist and synchronization would be possible. The baltic countries have done so in 2025 to get away from the Russian grid.
>> Power transmission is a thing.
> It is not a thing you can trust.
You trust it now. My guess would be that most fossil fuels in Finnland are imported and that the country is already deeply dependent on cross-border electricity transmission (as basically every other country in Europe)?
For most countries, energy independence is no realistic option and never has been since serious expansion of industry. It's something you factor into hardening your infrastructure and Finnland can hedge against this with land-based transmission lines to Sweden and building out capacity for h2/methane imports.
> I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.
Longer than the presumed 20+ years to build even a single nuclear reactor?
> You are correct. But transmission lines do exist and synchronization would be possible. The baltic countries have done so in 2025 to get away from the Russian grid.
There's no point in synchronizing the Nordics / Britain / Ireland with CESA grids since they are interconnected with HVDC rather than AC.
It doesn’t take 20 years to build a nuclear power plant or Thorium reactor, which is coming online soon in China, it also doesn’t take that long to build high speed rail system either.
Germany will need a total of 1,867 TWh per year in 2030, so an average of 155 TWh/month.
fossil fuels are very inefficient when used in most applications (especially ICE and oil for heating). As countries use more and more electricity instead of fossil fuels to generate motion and heat, total energy demand will decrease accordingly.
Currently, Germany imports almost all of its fossil fuel from abroad. Mainly Norway, USA, Gulf countries, etc. Russia used to play an important role and we paid dearly for that. As we are for the reliance on the US, I guess.
We could actually bring our energy dependence closer to home and make it cheaper by substituting fossil fuel imports with solar + battery with the PV part being distributed across northern African countries. But most likely it will be more convenient (if less efficient) and politically desirable to create a mix of domestic and souther European sources, with specialized stuff like H2/Green NG imports from Iceland and other energy rich places being mixed in.
Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement not from solar, but from wind. Already, renewable energy has very much softened the effects of the Iran war on electricity prices. They never exceeded the highest levels of 2025, while fossil fuels jumped to levels last seen immediately after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and are still elevated over 2025 levels.
And if you had invested in Drake Landing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community solar setup instead of PV, then neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor Hormuz blockade would have been a huge deal. The cost of energy is destroying your industrial base.
> Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement ... from wind
15TWh in January 2025. Again, you burned about 230 TWh of fossil fuels. Nearly every heating system is over 80%, electricity closer to 50%, so lets say 150TWh. Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on? And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?
> Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on?
Actually yes. We currently use less than 0.5% of our agricultural land for PV (and some agricultural use is technically possible below PV). We could of course dedicate 5% or even 10% of land use to PV, if we really needed to (which we don't). We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the like).
And Wind turbines actually don't need much space at all, the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.
> And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?
I think there is an interesting discussion to be had. If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?
We actually did so in the first winter after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because energy prices rose dramatically and people and businesses reacted accordingly. That was painful (and had no upside whatsoever), but I think if it didn't come completely by surprise but would be a designed part of the system, it might be worth it.
> We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the like).
That doesn't solve your problems in the slightest. You get less than half the return on investment for PV that most other countries in the world get, and does nothing for when your peak energy load is. Every dollar spent on PV requires another dollar on natural gas for the winter and locks you into fossil fuel dependency. Spend the money on something which gives you winter power!
> the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.
That's exactly what I mean. Where can you actually build it? And is that enough? And why spend a dime on solar until you've maximized wind?
> If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?
See, exactly, that's the kind of national conversation you (and here in the USA) should be having. But we don't do that kind of thing any more. The politicians make money lying about the costs of things -- Gerhard Schröder being, I guess, a Russian stooge at best, a great example of downplaying the full costs.
First, you can trivially store years of nuclear fuel, which you can't with fossil fuels.
Maybe this is already complete, but at one point of lot of it was from decommissioning nuclear weapons, so it wasn't "we need them for fuel", it was "lets make use of this waste material and provide a financial disincentive for nuclear proliferation".
Finally, the West has plenty of sources for Uranium, and given plants already have years of fuel onsite, it is never a pressing problem.
The US uses ~0.5 TW of electricity on average but to go 100% solar you would need ~3 TW of solar capacity (6X average usage) and ~30 TWh of battery storage, maybe lots more, plus a massive upgrade to the grid.
Solar and batteries will be extremely expensive if you have no other backup but you could probably get to 80% quite cheaply with solar and around 12h of storage.
Geography absolutely matters since seasonal dips in solar generation is basically impossible to fix cost effectively with storage at more northerly latitudes as storage only makes financial sense when you can cycle it daily rather than yearly.
The contiguous US is much further south than Northern Europe so it has an easier time of it. But you ideally want wind too since it is anti-correlated with solar.
The article is quite full of the classic nuclear fear mongering. Like:
"Most significant was the decision to abandon adding an extra wall in the reactor containment building—a feature designed to increase protection against radiation in the event of an accident."
Most reactors currently in operation have a single wall containment building.
The EPR has double layer containment, but the new EPR2 reactor will have single-wall prestressed concrete containment structure with a metal liner.
Considering the crazy amount of software and hardware backdoors built-in in buses, inverters, phones, routers, firewalls and mobile carrier devices it would be crazy to allow China to build the critical energy infrastructure.
