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I'm one degree removed from the industry and I'm sorry, but regulation => cost is the reason why we don't have more fission.
Then why doesn't China have more fission? Hell, since the US is so rich in fossil resources: why didn't RUSSIA ever get more fission?
Gattsuru has already answered but we've always had a bit of a head start on the technology for high-quality fission plants. Expecting mind-bogglingly corrupt communist regimes to do it well seems counterintuitive.
Come on, this is cope. The Soviets had the first nuclear power plant in the world online, and by the 60s they had a unified civil design ready (the VVER), regularly putting up new 400 MW reactors. By the early 70s, the VVER had iterated to a standard gigawatt design, and they built quite a few of those in the early 70s (most of them are online today) and then just... never stopped. There will be new gigawatt VVERs connecting to the grid in the next 2-3 years. The Soviets, of course, also got a ton of naval reactors online quite quickly, which is a far more impressive feat. We'll ignore the slight... reactor design detour they took with the RBMK, and focus on the fact that they didn't even let that shit show stop them for one second. They decommissioned some of them, kept others running, and went straight back to building more VVERs.
The Chinese had several decades where they could have bought reactors from the Soviets, licenced the Soviet design and/or straight copied that reactor. They did all of that for many other vital technology stacks.
What I'm trying to say is: even high state capacity corrupt communist regimes with access to uranium and a well-developed homegrown nuclear industry didn't build an energy abundance electro-state. No matter how thin you cut your security margins, and no matter how hard you subsidy the industry, no matter how many dozens of reactors you have your commie slaves build: it never actually gets all that cheap. If you have coal or gas, you might as well just burn that. And if you made it into the 2020s and now have terawatt solar capacity... well, you probably know how that's is going: you can just try to have your commie slaves install a nice round 600 GW (yeah, yeah, I know: peak) of new generation capacity. Per year.
I'm probably more aligned with you than you think on this. One weakness of capitalism is that it's not going to build "an energy abundance electro-state" when the demand isn't there. Especially when coal or gas is the shortest putt.
This has definitely been true for China up until very recently, and for the US as well. My point is that we've made Nuclear far more expensive than it needs to be, despite our relatively hungry first-world energy demands. In some cases, we've artificially depressed the price of fossil fuel generation and/or reduced the externalities associated with it through technology, which also hurts the case for nuclear.
I know what you mean, but right now we're seeing everywhere around the world that capitalism can also do stuff just from the supply side. Solar and batteries are getting so cheap (especially in grids that are still below 50% renewable), they are displacing almost all new generation capacity. Once that capacity is online and starting to get amortized, electricity prices should drop, which will bring up demand. It's the slow way, but it should work. Historically, cheaper energy has always resulted in people ending up spending MORE money on energy - because it gets used for so much more things.
This is certainly true, but I'm not convinced nuclear ever had a chance against the fossil capacity of the past and the renewable capacity of the future. Reactors are large and complex, and such projects often resist scaling laws (see also: housing, hospitals, dams, bridges). I'm curious to see what the Chinese manage to do with their modular reactors. I'm skeptical: nuclear reactors work better if they are large. But making them in a factory might unlock some extreme efficiency gains. We'll see.
I hate using the word "hope" for this, because I honestly just want human society in general to produce a lot of energy as efficiently as possible. But I hope that wind and solar build-outs slow down, if only for aesthetic reasons. I think they take up too much space relative to a nuclear plant's output.
I know intellectually this planet has so much space it shouldn't matter at all, and that we're generally smart about where we put these generation centers. But from an emotional standpoint, I prefer to leave even sparsely populated or classically ugly landscapes as untouched as possible. When I see massive solar or wind farms, I can't help but shrink back a little (admittedly more for the former than the latter).
I'd love it if Solar were something we could realistically just put on top of already industrialized space and be successful, and if offshore wind farms were more viable.
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Over five percent of China's power comes from fission plants, and that's underrating it since they've got very high uptime compared to on-demand plants. As for why it hasn't scale up faster, China's political classes had very obvious mixed feelings about dependence on foreign-produced infrastructure for a long time, which only went harder as western regulatory overhead killed western nuclear power. While they've theoretically had 'domestic' production of nuclear plants since the mid-90s, they didn't actually manage serious production of the CNP-600s until 2010-2012... at which point the Fukushima disaster and its political fallout lead them to go back to the drawing board and start the production cycle again.
But they've put >3 GW of fission power online just in the last year. As bad as their political situation is for power construction, it's still beating the west's.
This is... not all that much? Slightly more than necessary to keep the tech stack alive enough for a weapons program?
I've talked about that in another reply, they had multiple decades of close friendship with the soviets during which getting a licence and tech support for the VVER reactor would have been trivial. They had decades of messing with a home grown design. It never got all that cheap, which is extremely concerning, because the Chinese have world class expertise in optimizing the last cent of slack out of industrial processes.
This is impressive - for nuclear. And that summarized our sad story about the entire technology. Because they increased their coal capacity by 42 GW (they probably took old coal plants offline, which means they installed even more new coal plants than those 42 GW) and they seriously plan to make it to 600 GW (peak) of new solar and wind capacity in 2025.
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