The Shidaowan nuclear power plant, which features the world’s first fourth-generation reactor, started commercial operations on December 6, China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), one of the project’s developers, said.
“China’s independently developed high-temperature gas-cooled reactor demonstrator commenced commercial operation,” CNNC said in a statement.
“It signifies that China has completed the world’s first commercially operational modular nuclear power plant with fourth-generation nuclear technology, marking the transition of fourth-generation nuclear technology from experiments to the commercial market.”
Generation IV reactors are considered safer and more efficient.
“The tests confirmed that commercial-scale reactors could be cooled down naturally without emergency core cooling systems for the first time in the world. It is the so-called inherently safe reactor,” Tsinghua University, one of the joint developers of the reactor, said.
Such reactors can produce heat, electricity, and hydrogen and would help China and the world “become carbon neutral,” Zhang Zuoyi, dean of the Tsinghua University Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology and chief designer of the Shidaowan reactor project, told South China Morning Post.
The fourth-generation reactor in operation now puts China “ahead of other countries in terms of nuclear technology research and development,” Francois Morin, China director of industry group World Nuclear Association, told The Wall Street Journal.
According to Morin, Western countries are set to launch their fourth-generation nuclear reactors only in the early 2030s.
David Fishman, a China-based senior manager at energy consulting firm Lantau Group, told the Journal that “China is arguably peerless in actually building and commercializing next-generation nuclear power technology.”
Many countries in the West, with the notable exception of Germany, have recognized that nuclear power generation would help them achieve net-zero emission goals.
At the COP28 climate summit currently underway in Dubai, the United States and 21 other countries pledged to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050, saying incorporating more nuclear power in their energy mix is critical for achieving their net zero goals in the coming decades.
The United States, alongside Britain, France, Canada, Sweden, South Korea, Ghana, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), among others, signed the declaration at the COP28 climate summit.
“The Declaration recognizes the key role of nuclear energy in achieving global net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and keeping the 1.5-degree Celsius goal within reach,” the U.S. Department of State said.
China is not a signatory to that declaration, but it aims to develop more nuclear energy capacities to reduce emissions as its demand for electricity rises. 
As of 2020, nuclear energy accounted for 5% of China’s generation mix, which continued to be dominated by coal, per data from the World Nuclear Association.
By 2035, nuclear energy is expected to make up 10% of the electricity generation mix and 18% by 2060, Chinese media quoted the China Nuclear Energy Association (CNEA) as saying earlier this year.
As of September 2023, China had 55 nuclear power units in operation with a combined installed capacity of 57 GW, and 24 units under construction with a total installed capacity of 27.8 GW, Xinhua quoted CNEA official Wang Binghua as saying. By 2060, that capacity is expected to jump to 400 GW, the official said.
China is also expected to approve six to eight nuclear power units each year “within the foreseeable future.”
I worked on nuke reactors. I left it after I saw the carelessness and mountains of bullshit in the community. There is no such thing as a safe nuke reactor. I don’t care how many times they claim to have redesigned the unsinkable Titanic and THIS time, surely they worked out all the kinks. Fukushima was supposed to have been the anti Chernobyl with the nEgAtIvE coefficent of reactivity. How’d that work out? Be it nature, human error, or something out of their control that they thought would never happen. All it takes is one.
Every nuke reactor built is rolling the dice. Go put he money in fusion. At least when that blows it’s not going to be a multi generational exclusion zone or needing to irradiate the ocean where your food supply grows.
Wasn’t China one of the more vocal, and rightfully so, critics of dumping all that radioactive slop where their waterways were?
But I know I’m talking to a
but I get upset with the arrogance of thinking adding more of those loaded guns is some sort of celebration.
Every energy source comes with deaths. Nuclear ends up being on the safer end of the scale despite all the hype they get when something goes wrong.
I’m pretty sure solar kills more people than nuclear. There’s been a grand total of 10k deaths from nuclear energy in 70 years despite hundreds of commercial reactors being built and operated, it’s the definition of a rounding error.
Of directly provable deaths, yes. In terms of casualties / long-term illness caused, not even close.
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If you’re talking about the (heavily-diluted) water tanks from Fukushima being dumped into the ocean, the levels were safe and imo China was wrong.
Don’t worry guys, I’ll dilute all that poison I’m putting in the environment!
Nuclear nerds really going off
Have you read anything about the numbers? And what the material was? Hardly the “nuclear slop” mentioned above. It’s a lower concentration than was discharged during the plant’s decades long operation, lower than other places in the world, and much lower than the IAEA’s limit. You can say the danger isn’t fully known, but it’s likely more dangerous in high concentration sitting in a tank waiting for an accident. Also, as silly as it sounds, dilution is the solution to (some) pollution.
You can’t treat all sources of radiation as interchangeable. In normal operation, coolant water is made radioactive via conversion of hydrogen to tritium, which has a low half life and won’t bioaccumulate. The radioactive heavy metal isotopes released after the disaster has a long half-life and is known to bioaccumulate in fish. There’s already been Japanese studies showing bioaccumulation in fresh water fish[1]. If you dump it in the ocean there’s no guarantee that the heavy metals will disperse evenly instead of just sinking in the immediate area surrounding your coast.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4159481/
That’s fine. They say the stuff they’re releasing contains only tritium though, not the heavier stuff.
They also said that those seawalls would hold.
Yes, predictions about something, especially what intensity of natural disaster something can withstand, are more likely to be wrong than a current measurement of something verifiable (and under scrutiny) by others. That’s the nature of predictions. That the weather service can’t give the precise path of the hurricane (even if they’ve claimed to) doesn’t mean I need doubt the current wind speed they report. Believe what you like about this situation. I find it more likely the IAEA has it right.
Do you wear a hazmat suit when passing by the bananas at the grocery store?
It’s not like seafood is known to accumulate heavy minerals in the ocean or anything. There’s no way any of those radioactive heavy minerals would accumulate in the fish we eat.
yeah that comment makes sense and totally justifies dumping tons of diluted poison in the environment, you win bro
Didn’t expect to see stray weeb wastewater apologia here.
All these Reddit “science understanders” can’t comprehend nuclear by-products aren’t just tritium alone. FFS, criticism denouncing TEPCO’s discharge plan was literally published in Nikkei Japan and yet this is just apparently a “China beefing” thing.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/It-is-not-too-late-for-Japan-to-change-course-on-Fukushima-water
I won’t argue the technical aspects (because I don’t know them offhand) but Fukushima was built and commissioned before Chernobyl. The way you talk about it above seems to imply Fukushima was designed in a way that corrects some design flaw of Chernobyl.
Sadly, the reaction chamber of fusion reactors is radioactive. There isn’t really any design that doesn’t either produce radioactive material from reactions in the containment chamber or require radioactive intermediates to sustain the fusion reaction
Aneutronic fusion is a thing and a great alternative if we invent a time machine to the 23rd century
So are you saying that in your opinion, all nuclear reactors, which includes this one developed by this team of researchers and engineers, are unsafe because you’ve seen the careless disposition of other people in the workplace(s) that you worked in? What exactly about this qualifies you to make all the other claims you’re making?
But, why has no one pointed out the obvious chauvinism or overt racism in your comment? You are saying that no nuclear reactor designed thus far has been safe, and therefore this one made in China must also be unsafe, or that these scientists and engineers in China must be lying or over hyping the claims they are making. Concerning the technical limitations you are trying to gesture at, you can only come to the conclusion you are coming to if you think that there is something about China, or Chinese people, that forbids it from doing science and engineering better than wherever you come from. Concerning the only thing of substance you make a claim of knowledge for, you are saying that there is something about China or Chinese workers that forbids them from actually giving a fuck about their jobs as nuclear reactor technicians, scientists, and engineers, such that they strictly could not design safer processes or conduct themselves in an appropriately professional way better than wherever you come from.
Moreover, I don’t really understand why you think other people should listen to your perspective on the matter when you have put basically 0 effort within your comment to give any real justification. Essentially you are saying “I worked with these things, so just simply trust me.”
I reject that framing. What I said was pointing out China’s legitimate concern for nuclear contamination in their waters, near waters, and the waters of the world which effect us all - namely the Pacific ocean. They clearly understand the risks associated with these plants, and they still build them. This is not racism, or jealousy, or some form of pvert nationalsim. This is critism of a risk assesment.
I don’t want
or anyone else building these roulette machines either. This has nothing to do with “China bad.” No nation, engineering firm, or corporation is going to book smart out Murphy’s Law. They rolled that dice with Fukushima thinking what happened would never happen or the risks were too remote. It is simply a risk calculation that has played out multiple times in my life already, and even working / operating the reactors only made me see those risks more clearly to the point I switched careers. The industry itself is poisioned and deluded. Humans should move on from these devices. That is my random internet person assement.
There is no need to get into a personal accusatory slander or sea lioning troll fest over this.
I mean you can reject it all you want, it doesn’t change anything about what you actually said. I believe you when you say that you are “legitimately concerned about nuclear contamination…” in waterways and that you believe they are making a wrong risk assessment. But what you have done is lumped all nuclear fission energy sources into one category and then went “well all those scientists and engineers think this thing is safe, but I’m built different and I know they’re wrong.” You should seriously investigate why you think this is a rational method of analysis, or from what place this superior understanding you have comes from.
Things don’t just randomly happen and it is simply not materialist, in the mechanical materialist sense, to discuss these events in this way, moreover it is just not productive. You have a N = 0 sample size for this reactor, which makes this statement even more absurd. Furthermore, I shouldn’t have to tell you how unrigorous or unscientific lumping in things in some general and vague way to attack them is. This is a specific reactor with a specific design, iterating on other designs. You don’t need to be on the R&D team for this reactor to be able to say “well from what we have today, these reactors would need to be improved in such and such way if we want to deem them safe…”. I’m not even an expert in my academic field and even I do this sort of thing when reading papers in my field.
Another absurd statement is this next one:
Murphy’s Law states that if anything can happen it will happen. It doesn’t work in the converse direction. So if it is simply not possible for this reactor to melt down then Murphy’s Law doesn’t magically make this happen. You don’t weigh up ways in which any of the modern reactors can fail and this is the crux of why I’m frustrated about reading your post.
Essentially I want you to justify these things your saying both because I don’t know how nuclear reactors work, and you seemingly want us to believe that you do, since you start off the original post trying to build your credibility. So use that to talk about this reactor from the perspective of how it is engineered or the theory surrounding this reactor and/or other designs similar to it or in the modern era. Otherwise you are using this simply as a cudgel to attack the work these people have done, and I cannot understand why you’d do this unless you think think that you simply just know better than these people, which I’m sorry to have to explain, is the criterion for what defines chauvinist thinking.
I have nothing against you personally. Calling out liberalism and reactionary thought is important to me, so I spend the time doing it when [I think] I see it and have the time to talk. I don’t really appreciate the attempt to belittle my concern over the reactionary content of your post as “accusatory slander” or a “sea lioning troll fest” and I think that speaks more to your sense of self-importance to think that you cannot be prone to reactionary thinking. For what it’s worth, I hope you’d call me out if I was being chauvinist or reactionary and I’d hope I have the perspective needed to learn from it.
I mean the alternative is the literal and guaranteed disruption of the planet’s ability to sustain human civilization. It would be nice if we could magic up enough energy to meet society’s demands or return to monke without hundreds of millions starving to death, but that’s not a real option.
If there’s arguments that solar is better, sure, I’m sympathetic to those. I can understand if nuclear technology is not safe enough yet for widespread use. I think that arguments about nuclear being inherently unsafe are not convincing, though. As long as each reactor is safer than the last, we can minimize that inherent unsafeness. To take an example from programming: the only bug-free program you’ll ever write is a hello world program. Introducing complexity naturally increases the amount of unaccounted for states. Cutting-edge medical technology is invariably going to have an astronomical amount of unaccounted for states and the bugs that come with them. That doesn’t mean computing has nothing to offer medicine, only that its use must be weighed against alternatives. Fusion might be less inherently unsafe but AFAIK it’s not on the table right now, and we need energy today. China’s investing in nuclear technology, but it hasn’t been neglecting wind and solar, either. Putting feelers around each solution just seems like the no-brainer thing to do.
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I agree with most of your points but I have to ask. Were you operating reactors in an organization known for crashing said reactors into underwater mountains in the SCS.
I agree. Given the waste, issues of radioactivity, relying on limited resource, real dangers of meltdown and long time to build, I still question why any nation is pursuing nuclear energy anyway.
Solar power, even with energy storage costs, matches or exceeds nuclear in most cases, is significantly easier to build and is improving in efficiency yearly. I’m confused what the advantages of nuclear are these days.
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