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 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.