China Restarts its Nuclear Reactor Construction Program

17 Comments on "China Restarts its Nuclear Reactor Construction Program"

JuanP on Thu, 12th Mar 2015 11:29 am 



I expect that a lot of nuclear power reactors of all types will be built all over the world as fossil fuel extraction declines in the future. We will try everything possible to avoid the inevitable. A whole lot of these reactors will be built in China, probably more than anywhere else.

Davy on Thu, 12th Mar 2015 12:34 pm 



Juan, I venture to bet a few will be completed, a few started and not completed, and a whole lot of jawboning that goes nowhere. I want to ask the corns here where are all the LNG export plants at in the US these days? The corn jawboning on the U.S. as the next energy power house got quiet real quick lately. Why? false promises and now no money. Same turd different day.

Northwest Resident on Thu, 12th Mar 2015 2:01 pm 



JuanP, Davy — It looks like China is starting, restarting and trying to start any and every project possible to delay their pending economic meltdown for just a little while longer.

Of course, needless to say, China isn’t doing anything that most if not all the other national governments are doing — that is, trying to delay economic collapse for just a little while longer. Question is, are they delaying because they have a plan in place for when the economic meltdown finally goes parabolic? Or are they delaying because they have NO PLAN and are merely clinging in desperation and illusion, knowing all the while that their gig is just about up?

Why The Dollar Is Rising As The Global Monetary Bubble Craters

“Its (China’s) massive spree of construction and fixed asset investment has created an utterly deformed economy that will literally implode unless its keeps building empty luxury apartments, phantom cities, silent shopping malls and hideously redundant roads, bridges, subways and airports. Yet whenever the short-term indicators stumble, the government finds some new, convoluted way to release more credit into the system.”

“But now things are heading into the theatre of the economic absurd. Government officials are forcing the restart of idle steel and aluminum plants so that the can produce unwanted supplies to dump on the world market in order to generate enough cash to pay interest.”

http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/why-the-dollar-is-rising-as-the-global-monetary-bubble-craters/

Speculawyer on Thu, 12th Mar 2015 2:26 pm 



I gotta admit that I’m a bit wary of a big Chinese nuclear built-out. Some contractors providing shoddy cement, substandard pipes, or faulty electrical work could cause a disaster many years down the road. You can’t just sweep a meltdown of a nuke plant under the rug the way they can when a building or bridge they build collapses.

But on the other hand, we can’t have China continually burning massive amounts of coal. That is destroying the climate and killing their people.

Northwest Resident on Thu, 12th Mar 2015 3:31 pm 



Speculawyer — Following your line of reasoning… Maybe it is better for planet earth and all living things including humanity in the long run if we just self-destruct sooner rather than later, before we can screw things up even worse. Bad idea?

templarmyst on Thu, 12th Mar 2015 7:29 pm 



NWR – My difficulty is the climate change overhang. I’m not so sure at this point if we had a collapse that’d help the rest of the planet out that much.

I think you’ve seem my perspective in the past. The thermal inertia of the oceans are masking what is gonna overwhelm the biosphere.

I’m still thinking we attack that, and the only tech I can think of is nuclear.

On the other hand, I am a fan of Stockman and think he is fundamentally on to the economic issues. At the end of the day debt is a human construct which we could deconstruct with our will and mind.

Unlike climate change, which is a human construct based in the physical reality of the planet, and will require a much greater effort to mitigate.

If we fix the debt problem, we stand an outside chance of being able to confront the damage we’ve done to the earth, air, and land.

Davy on Thu, 12th Mar 2015 7:46 pm 



TM, I am concerned we are going to trade one destroyed environment for another. The process of reducing human population to below 1BIL once FF deplete will pick clean the natural fauna for food and energy. We may lower carbon some but I am sure much carbon will be generated in a collapsing world. There is lots of salvage left to do and allot of that will be brown tech. Either way our nest is ruined.

The only hope is for a quick death of 9 out of 10 people on earth. Yea, that sounds like a winner, NOT. We will have to let nature do what she does best and that is balance. Why do you think one of the horseman carries a balance. That is how judgement is metered out.

GregT on Thu, 12th Mar 2015 8:35 pm 



templar,

We’ve helped the planet out enough already. It is time for us to stop helping, and to let the planet heal itself. If that healing process doesn’t include us, that would certainly be a real tragedy, but we had the opportunity to change our ways half a century ago, when our scientists warned us about the direction we were headed in. We didn’t listen then, and we still aren’t listening now.

It isn’t so much a debt problem, as it is a greed problem. Human beings are inherently greedy. It is in our nature. We were not satisfied with living in the confines of the natural environment, and we still aren’t. now. Even after seeing all of the destruction that human energy production and it’s associated technologies have done to the Earth, we are still looking for ways to generate more energy, and to create more technologies.

IF the definition of insanity truly is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then not only are we inherently greedy, our species is insane.

TemplarMyst on Thu, 12th Mar 2015 8:38 pm 



Davy,

I respect your perspective. Obviously I take a different tack. If we could manage to counter some of our worst influences I think we could maintain both ourselves and the biosphere.

Both would look different than they do now. But that has always been true of the biosphere. It is always changing. The question is whether we can find the means to adjust our population gradually, and thus preclude the locust syndrome.

I don’t know what the true carrying capacity of the mother earth is where humans are concerned. Might be a billion, might be higher, might be lower.

As I stated on the climate article a moment ago, I saw we move to raise living standards. Hopefull pop declines fast enough. It’s worked pretty well in Italy and Japan to date (and in the US too, if you preclude immigration).

TemplarMyst on Thu, 12th Mar 2015 8:41 pm 



Greg,

All fair enough. I’m still leaning towards energy as the key to both ourselves and the biosphere, as I mentioned in these parallel threads.

I think chances are stacked pretty heavily against us, and if we go, it’ll be a million year recovery period for the planet, minimum.

Or that’s my guess, at this point.

GregT on Thu, 12th Mar 2015 8:49 pm 



Temp,

Our biggest mistake was believing that we were capable of managing the environment. The fact of the matter is, we aren’t. It is the biosphere that manages us, as we are unfortunately about to find out.

TemplarMyst on Thu, 12th Mar 2015 8:58 pm 



Greg,

I’m not altogether sure we gave managing the environment much thought until very recently, really.

We just did what we did without giving it a second consideration. Yes there were folks pointing out we might come to regret it, but I don’t think that sank in very far. Being people and driven like all other critters, we just moved in the direction of growth.

It’s just we didn’t have much to stop us in the short term. Longer term, yeah, the biosphere will exact it’s revenge if we don’t figure things out.

But it’s going to be a Pyrrhic victory for the environment if it does wind up demanding it’s pound of flesh, I’m thinking.

Makati1 on Thu, 12th Mar 2015 9:29 pm 



World population is increasing by about 80,000,000 new humans every year, according to statistics. That adds a new US to the population every 4 years. Not going to slow or go negative in our life time barring a nuclear war. Even WW2 took six years to kill of ~65,000,000 of us. Homo sapiens is an endangered species and is not likely to see 2100 in any significant number.

At this point, we are going to leave a destroyed, radioactive planet for the next ecology to evolve on. 400+ nuclear hot spots, hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive debris spread over the world. Products of our many chemical and industrial plants fouling the land, sea, and air. A failed experiment that had such great promise. If only…

TemplarMyst on Thu, 12th Mar 2015 9:40 pm 



Makati1,

From Wikipedia:

The world population has experienced continuous growth since the end of the Great Famine and the Black Death in 1350, when it was near 370 million.[6] The highest growth rates – global population increases above 1.8% per year – occurred briefly during the 1950s, and for longer during the 1960s and 1970s. The global growth rate peaked at 2.2% in 1963, and has declined to 1.1% as of 2012. Total annual births were highest in the late 1980s at about 138 million, and are now expected to remain essentially constant at their 2011 level of 134 million, while deaths number 56 million per year, and are expected to increase to 80 million per year by 2040.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

The peak rate was in the 80s. I’m still maintaining the curve is bending.

Whether it’ll matter remains to be seen.

To the point on nuclear power plants and their potential for destruction, I’ve gone into this in detail on other threads. I think it’s fair to say we disagree on it.

Davy on Fri, 13th Mar 2015 5:07 am 



Temp, yea, the curve is bending for population and consumption but not enough and not quick enough to avoid a die off. I say die off because if the problems and predicaments across all spectrums of basic sciences are true than there is no other option. This is now baked into the cake. No amount of hopium will change this. There is no swimming out of this without pain and suffering. Reality is painfully clear on this one.

By every benchmark I can think of we are in overshoot. Not only are we in overshoot that overshoot is worsening. Both population and consumption are increasing in a dangerous fashion. The earth ecosystem is destabilizing with localized and regional ecosystem failures. The human economy which is responsible for delivering vital resources to delocalized locals from an unsustainable global is itself in a debt overshoot. Within our human social fabric we have all those deadly problems worsening. Corruption, manipulation, poverty, conflicts, violence, criminality, trade wars, cold wars, and should I keep on going with examples because I can? Got it.

Humans and our economy are incapable of degrowth. We are incapable of a steady state economy. We are unable to practice those higher human values that could save us in a global environment with 7BIL people. Sure we practice some of those values but that small amount does not scale to the challenge of sustainability and resilience need to avoid a bottleneck.

We have a oil culture supporting a car culture supporting a market culture, all supporting a growth culture. Which of those cultures is sustainable and resilient? Exactly you know the answer “Zero”. We are infatuated by technology and are opening new Pandora’s boxes routinely. Our technology and its resulting unintended consequences are the problem. We are unable to degrowth technology. We spend huge sums on technologies that have no future but offer a satisfaction of our exceptionalism of an evolutionary dead end large brain. We are stuck on ourselves like spoiled adolescents in a race among ourselves to the bottom.

We are going the wrong direction on every level even those on the local who have seen the truth of our situation cannot scale to the level to make a difference at lease with avoiding a global bottleneck. These transitional people who know we have to do a 180 degree turn will be nothing more than the seeds of a rebirth if we are lucky enough to have a rebirth.

Our only chance at this point is a crisis. Preferably a crisis initiated now by TPTB. This could be restricting oil and husbanding it for a long emergency there by lowering economic activity and population. This would be ugly but the sooner the better. This is not likely but just a suggestion. The next option is to let natural self-organizing bifurcating descent take its course. Nature will balance and we will be balanced. Our exceptionalism will be exceptionally reoriented to humility. BTW humility which all our major spiritual traditions preach. Only our de facto religion of growth, greed, and progress rejects humility.

We are going to die en mass soon. I see a 10 year (or less) when we have a shit storm brew up a laundry list of converging and reinforcing problems from predicaments. Problems from predicaments is descent. You have to react to entropic decay. There is little proactivity and problem solving. This is predicaments that cannot be solved spawning off problems that cannot be solved but can be reacted to.

This is a paradigm shift of growth to descent, entropic decay from progress, with fundamental changes to human nature. Those lifestyles and activities that are negative will be swept out with the tide of change. The rich will be poor, the mobile sedentary, the global will localize. All this with the back drop of a destabilized climate that surely will render large parts of the planet uninhabitable at least for modern agriculture and complex society. This is all the worst of the bible ahead. We will turn from exceptionalism to locust people savaging a destroyed world. This is about hospices and acceptance because that is what one does when faced with death.

Yet, there is hope for some. The strong and lucky will survive. We may yet have several years to enjoy at least some of us. If you are one of them friggen enjoy life. Say grace at every meal. Love you family like there is no tomorrow because there is likely not a tomorrow for many.

Kenz300 on Fri, 13th Mar 2015 11:45 am 



China’s environmental record is causing social unrest…… wearing a mask to breath is becoming common……..

If they can not control and clean up common pollution sources that are contaminating the air, land and water what confidence does anyone have that they can control the waste generated by nuclear energy.

It is time for the world to learn some lessons from the Fukishima clean up (OR LACK OF A CLEANUP)
A 40 year plan that admits the technology to complete the clean up does not exist.

The nuclear energy snake oil salesmen continue to go around the world selling their poison…….

I wonder how many nuclear plants are being targeted by opposing military or terrorists……….

Kenz300 on Sat, 14th Mar 2015 12:32 pm 



Investments in wind and solar will be safer, cleaner and cheaper……..

Nuclear energy is too costly and too dangerous.