Summary
China is rapidly surpassing the U.S. in nuclear energy, building more reactors at a faster pace and developing advanced technologies like small modular reactors and high-temperature gas-cooled units.
The U.S. struggles with costly, delayed projects, while China benefits from state-backed financing and streamlined construction.
This shift could make China the leading nuclear power producer within a decade, impacting global energy and geopolitical influence.
Meanwhile, the U.S. seeks to revive its nuclear industry, but trade restrictions and outdated infrastructure hinder progress.
if you want the United States to be more like this, you can always elect someone who- yeah you know what fuck it
by building nuclear energy plants
Who knew it was that simple
God please if there’s one pissing match the Orange Terror gets into it better be nuclear energy.
I could see Trump jumping on this if the right rich friend is invested in the right nuclear energy company. It feels like it’s within the realm of possibility.
China is rapidly surpassing the U.S. in nuclear energy, building more reactors at a faster pace and developing advanced technologies like small modular reactors and high-temperature gas-cooled units.
Okay, yes, very broadly-speaking, I agree that US nuclear power generation capability relative to China is something to keep an eye on. As well as ability to construct nuclear power generation capacity. There might be a way that China could leverage that in some scenario. However.
At least some of that is tied to population; China has over four times our population. One would expect energy usage per-capita to tend to converge. And for that to happen, China pretty much has to significantly outbuild the US in generation capacity.
If we in the US constrain ourselves to outpace China in expanding generation capacity, then we’re constraining ourselves to have multiple times the per-capita energy generation capacity.
Now, okay, yes, there is usage that is decoupled from population size. AI stuff is in the news, and at least in theory – if maybe not with today’s systems, but somewhere along the road to AGI – I can imagine productivity there becoming decoupled from population size. If you have more electrical generation capacity, you can make effective use of that electricity, convert it to productive capacity.
But a lot of it is going to be tied to population. Electrical heating and cooling. EV use. You’d have to have a staggering amount of datacenter or other non-tied-to-population power use to dominate that.
These statistics aren’t from the same year, but they have a residential-industrial-commercial breakdown, and then a breakdown for each of those sectors.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-electricity.php
Commercial use, residential use, and industrial use are, on that chart, each about a third of US electrical power consumption. Of the commercial category, computers and office equipment are 11%. So you’re talking maybe 3% of total US power consumption going to the most critical thing that I can think of that represents productive capacity and is potentially decoupled from population. And that’s all computer and office equipment use, not just stuff like AI. A lot of that is going to be tied to per capita usage, too.
About half of commercial use of electricity is space cooling. Almost everything else is either cooling, lighting, or ventilation. Those are gonna be tied to population when it comes to productive capacity.
If you look at residential stuff, about half of it is cooling, heating, or lighting, and my bet is that nothing in the residential category is going to massively increase productive capacity. Up until a point, on a per-capita basis, air conditioning increases productivity. Maybe it could provide an advantage in terms of quality of life, ability to attract immigration. But I don’t think that if, tomorrow, China had twice our per-capita residential electrical power generation capacity, that it’d provide some enormous advantage. And it definitely seems like it’d all be per-capita stuff.
In industry, you have some big electricity consumers. Machinery, process heating and cooling, electrochemical processes. And with sufficient automation, the productive capacity of those can be decoupled from population size. Given enough electricity, you could run a vast array of, say, electric arc furnaces. But I think that “American industrial capacity vis-a-vis Chinese industrial capacity” is a whole different story, that it’s probably better-examined at a finer-grained level, and I think that there are plenty of eyeballs already on that. Hypothetically, you could constrain residential or other use, pour power capacity dedicated to it into industrial capacity in a national emergency, but I can’t think of any immediately-obvious area of industry where exploiting that is going to buy that much. Unless we expect some massively-important form of new heavy industry to emerge that is dependent upon massive use of electricity – like, throw enough electricity into a machine and you can get unobtanium – I’m probably not going to lose sleep over that.
If your concern is that there might be ways in which China can leverage its population and so per-capita statistics matter, then sure, I get that, but again, I think that that’s probably better considered in terms of metrics of human capital rather than in terms of just energy generation capability. And I think that the constraining factors there, if you’re talking ability to increase existing capacity in percentage terms, are probably (a) fertility rate, (b) immigration rate. I am pretty sure that if we wanted to get power capacity built and tied into the grid, it could be done on a shorter timescale than we could get people to have children and then raise those children and provide them with a necessary skillset, so I don’t think that existing electrical generation capacity or ability to increase it in the short run is the bounding factor. Maybe we could do immigration at a higher rate than we could expand generation capacity, making electrical generation capacity the bounding factor, though there are – looking at popular irritation that drove voters to support Trump – some political limitations. The last time we were seriously looking at going balls-to-the-wall against another country was World War II versus principally Germany, and war plans included, after mobilizing large portions of the American population, hiring huge chunks of population out of Latin America to fill in the now-absent farm labor need in the US to keep US productive capacity ramping up. As World War II played out, Germany ultimately didn’t conquer the UK and then initiated a fight with the Soviet Union, so a lot of the levers never needed to be pulled. We ultimately only used it in a considerably-scaled-down form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracero_Program
The Bracero Program (from the Spanish term bracero [bɾaˈse.ɾo], meaning “manual laborer” or “one who works using his arms”) was a U.S. Government-sponsored program that imported Mexican farm and railroad workers into the United States between the years 1942 and 1964.
The program, which was designed to fill agriculture shortages during World War II, offered employment contracts to 5 million braceros in 24 U.S. states. It was the largest guest worker program in U.S. history.[1]
But I think that that maybe provides insight into what the US would be willing to do in another situation where we wind up in a serious power struggle with another country. If we had to pull tens of millions of people from abroad into the US in short order in a balls-to-the-wall situation, I’m pretty sure that we would.
So, okay. Maybe, if you think that you can make use of extremely-high-rate immigration capacity, you might want to have a certain amount of electrical generation capacity available or ability to ramp it up very quickly.
However.
China could do the same to some degree. But it’s also more-difficult for China due to her larger size relative to the pools abroad from which she might draw – if she wants to scale production proportionally to her population – and I suspect what China would be able to offer in terms of environment, if a contest were predicated on our respective abilities to draw labor from abroad.
So, in summary:
I’m not sure that I’d be concerned about “what China could do in the short run in terms of dramatically increasing her capabilities in a way that threatens the US if China had large amounts of electrical generation capacity in absolute terms, and then started a massive immigration program”. I don’t expect that that sort of contest would play to China’s strengths.
In the sense that China could make use of more electricity to produce more industrial output, sure. China has significantly more steel production capacity today. That’s not really new, and I would expect that it’s been taken into account, that one doesn’t expect steel production capacity to be some sort of bounding factor that’s of special concern. Going back to World War II again, steel production over an extended period of time mattered there…but I’m skeptical that we’d find ourselves in some kind of sustained conflict with China where steel production capacity mattered. It’s too easy to knock out steel production infrastructure or the like in 2025. Maybe someone could identify some kind of concern there, but I don’t think that one would express it in terms of electricity. I don’t think that there’s some sort of way in which a country can translate steel into productivity in a peacetime environment to the degree that available steel is the limiting factor, either, where we’d say “Oh, no, China pulled ahead in steel capacity and steel is now mainly determining a country’s economic or military strength, and we cannot catch up.”
Having electrical capacity might matter if it’s the bounding factor for something like AI, which potentially has productive capacity decoupled from the size of the labor pool. I think that keeping an eye on the critical resources governing AI capacity is going to be something to do moving forward in the years and decades to come. But as things exist today, usage there is a very small portion of electricity consumption. I don’t think that we’re looking at the limits imposed by electrical generation. Maybe if technology advances and we do enough buildout of capacity, that would change. But I think that we’re also some ways away from electricity being a serious constraint there.
why the clickbait title if the original huffpost isn’t?
But at what cost 😔😔😔
actually the US is developing small sized power plants. You saw in Ukraine what can happen if you rely on large plants.
None of the US based SMRs have been successful, even with hundreds of millions of funding and regulatory approval from the DOE.
I said developing.
There is nothing wrong with trying to make this work, but a more accurate statement is that the US has failed in its initial efforts to develop SMRs, and the outlook is grim.
With the DOE being gutted and no current commercial path forward, this state is unlikely to change in the near term in the US.
So that’s a fusion reactor, not fission reactor like SMR. It’s both way, way better and way further away than SMR.
I applaud all of them making headway, but none of them are anywhere near as useful as actual solar and actual batteries that are being actually deployed in mass now.
They are very sorry and will try to get there soon. Just gang in there please.
What can happen? The plant is pretty much working and is the only reliable point of Ukrainian power generation since it can’t be targeted. Also, when is the US going to get into a land war on its own soil, and how will smaller nuclear reactors help?
The smaller reactors are fail safe so if they get blasted you’ll end up with free aluminum parts on your backyard. And if you got one near every home that means you gotta spend a lot of firepower to get them all. And if they produced as much power as needed and are safe to repair and quick to build then good luck taking them all out. Right?
Ohh, I get it. The thing with Ukrainian power generation being a military strategic thing though is not that homes can be kept warm - that is great - but that military production is powered. I don’t think you can power a munitions factory from scores of smaller reactors, since that would need insane infrastructure that is just not there, and would still be an easy target.
Also, in Ukraine, it would mean a legitimate military target in every backyard. The Russians would be back to carpet bombings already. I’m not saying it would not help, but I think it’s a dubious advantage in wartime - which by the way, the US won’t be - and even more problematic at peacetime as again, most consumption is industrial.
The thing I don’t see is how do you route power from Bob’s small reactor to Bezos’ AI farm so that Wall Street can keep pretending the American economy exists?
You saw in Ukraine what can happen if you rely on large plants.
So, I don’t disagree that, especially for some environments, bombing resistance is a legit concern.
However, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that if we find ourselves in a situation where China is bombing US power generation infrastructure, that probably means that World War III – not some kind of limited-scale fight, but a real all-in conflict – is on, and I think that the factors that determine what happens there probably aren’t mostly going to be “who has more power plants”.
World War II was a multi-year affair, but a lot of that was constrained by distance and the ability to project power. From the US’s standpoint, the Axis had extremely-limited ability to affect the US. The US started with a very small army and no weapons that could, in short order, reach across the world. That meant that, certainly from a US standpoint, there was not going to be a quick resolution one way or another. There, industrial capacity was really important.
Today’s environment is different.
I’ve not read up on what material’s out there, but I’d guess that in a World War III, one of two things probably happens:
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The war goes nuclear, in which case nuclear (weapons, not power generation) capabilities in large part determine the outcome.
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The war remains conventional. One or both sides have the ability to pretty rapidly destroy the other side’s air and/or missile defenses and subsequently destroy critical infrastructure to the degree that the other side cannot sustain the fight. My bet is on the US being in a stronger position here, but regardless, I don’t think that what happens is each side keeps churning out hardware for multiple years and slugging the other with that hardware, being able to make use of their power generation capacity. Electrical generation capacity is a particularly important part of that, sure, but it’s not the whole enchilada. Water production and distribution, electrical distribution, bridges, industrial infrastructure.
That doesn’t mean that power generation capacity doesn’t matter vis-a-vis military capacity. Like, let’s say that China has a really great way to convert electrical generation capacity into military capacity, right? Like, they have some fully automated mega-factory that churns out long range AI-powered fighter jets, has all the raw resources they need, just keeps pouring electricity into it. And China decides – in peacetime – that it wants to build an enormous fighter jet force like that. Say, I don’t know, a hundred thousand planes or something. Then the US, which in our hypothetical scenario doesn’t have such a fully-automated-mega-factory, has a hard decision: either attack China or wait and find itself in a situation where China could defeat it in conventional terms. The ability to expand military capacity does matter.
But at the point that bombing is happening and the ability of power generation to passively-resist that bombing is a factor, you’re already in a war, and then I think that a whole host of other factors start to dramatically change the environment.
OK agreed.
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Nuclear energy has a long tail of recent and less recent horrors. These horrors affect the globe in their consequences and should give great pause, despite the passive meltdown aversion systems being implemented in modern reactors. Being slow to implement nuclear energy plants is a feature, not a bug.
An important aside, humans generally have a problem with funding regulatory structures involved in keeping the public safe, constant vigilance gets an ax when budgets are manic. I certainly do not trust the US government to maintain regulatory pressure on nuclear power to keep the public safe from grave harm. Until the manic bipolarity of the current political climate subsides, this will be the case at the very least.
FWIW, if it is not clear, I see absolutely no reason to trust China on nuclear energy regulation either.
Including disasters like Chernobyl, nuclear energy causes several magnitudes less deaths than fossil fuels. It is utterly fucking insane for the concern to be “the horrors” of the three meltdowns you’re thinking of, of which the only one to kill or injure any civilians was Chernobyl. Fukushima did have some workers undergo significantly higher than usual radioactive doses - I invite you to contrast this with the mortality rate of, say, working on an oil rig.
Fossil fuels are killing this planet before your very eyes. I am thrilled by the progress renewables are making, and small scale nuclear is quite likely the only new nuclear we would benefit from constructing these days. But we could have saved an ungodly amount of fossil fuels being burned and thus lives if it wasn’t for this argument.
I completely agree on all counts except nuclear energy has one critical problem that I’ve never been able to truly get past as much as I want to get past them: the stakes are simply higher. There is no coal plant incident even remotely theoretically possible that can render massive regions inhospitable for centuries. Chernobyl was this close to poisoning the main source of water for a massive portion of Eastern Europe and nearly caused a global catastrophe. This just doesn’t happen with any other energy source.
All it takes is one key person not having their morning coffee or one unscrupulous politician loosening things a bit too much and suddenly you have a mass casualty event that lingers for God knows how long.
Even as I say all this I actually support nuclear energy. But we can’t act like that threat doesn’t exist.
Chernobyl killed around 4000 people locally and contributed to 16000 deaths on the continent. Normal coal operation has killed half a million people over the last 20 years.
All I’m saying is that accidents are possible, sure, but the laxity of regulations regarding coal has killed way more people than that towards nuclear. And it’s not about “one person not having their morning coffee”, Chernobyl was dangerous by design, modern reactors simply can’t fail that way.
You’re missing the thrust of my comment. The potential damage of a nuclear reactor is orders of magnitude higher than the potential of a coal fire plant. You are strictly measuring deaths that have happened, which is a valid metric for a lot of the discussions and why I largely agree with building more nuclear reactors. In fact I fully agree with building them, to be clear, in case that wasn’t in my previous comment. But I am not talking about number of deaths per [energy] created or something. This is way bigger than that.
You’re focusing on minutia when you need to be zooming out. True or false: a nuclear reactor failing, for any number of reasons, can do a lot more damage than a coal plant or any of the processes to gather coal can.
The answer is unequivocally yes. I do not think that we should not build them as a result, but we have to engage this question or we are ignoring reality.
True or false: a nuclear reactor failing, for any number of reasons, can do a lot more damage than a coal plant or any of the processes to gather coal can.
By that same logic, we should dismantle all our cities, since a natural catastrophe can wipe out so much more people if they are clustered up. Or drive instead of flying, because one airplane crashing is worse than one car crashing.
Nuclear reactors failing make for better headlines. You would literally have to build a reactor design that was not safe even back then - they built it to prioritize weapons grade material refinement - and would have to mismanage it systematically for decades in order to get at 5-10% of the death toll coal generation will do 100% in that timeframe.
The big picture is, if every reactor was Chernobyl, was built like Chernobyl, was operated like Chernobyl and would fail like Chernobyl, that would still cause less deaths than the equivalent coal generation. That’s the big picture. Fixating on one accident that can provably never happen again is the minutia.
It’s clear you’re not willing to engage this in good faith. You’re just going to take the least charitable interpretation of my ideas and twist them into things I am not saying or implying. The simple fact of the matter is a coal plant (which I am against and want all 100% gone) is not going to render hundreds if not thousands of miles inhospitable to human life under any conditions. Nuclear can do that. We have to consider those possibilities because they are very real, as Chernobyl showed us. We were on the brink and narrowly avoided a global catastrophe.
Have a good one dude. I’m done.
Brother, after reading this thread, you’re the one that’s intentionally missing the point and failing to engage in good faith.
there is no coal plant incident even remotely theoretically possible that can render massive regions inhospitable for centuries
If you ignore the incident we’ve all been watching slowly unfold for centuries with our thumbs up our asses, and oil spills to a lesser extent, sure
Fukushima did have some workers undergo significantly higher than usual radioactive doses - I invite you to contrast this with the mortality rate of, say, working on an oil rig.
Not injecting my own opinion in this thread of conversation, but if you’re expanding the scope to include oil rig worker adverse health effects, which introduces the fuel supply chain, then you need to also include the fuel supply chain health impacts and deaths with nuclear fuel extraction, such as the tens of thousands of uranium miners that have died digging out uranium.
I never said anything about fossil fuels, and do not wish them continued use either.
It does have some attraction over certain death of fossil fuels.
Nuclear apologists love defending this expensive, hazardous industry. In Texas, mining the uranium for these plants is ruining the water table just like fracking does.
Meanwhile solar, wind, and geothermal are cheaper and cleaner.
https://www.wired.com/story/a-uranium-mining-boom-is-sweeping-through-texas-nuclear-energy/
In St. Louis, nuclear waste in a landfill has caused cancer in north county black and brown neighborhoods for decades.
It is generally those who have not witnessed the ramifications of nuclear waste and/or disaster that are its proponents. Something that takes tens of thousands of years to decay, considering climate change, climate change catastrophe, movements in human population, and geologic change, we are full of hubris to consider it a green power option. But all the rose-tinted know-it-all tech bro will vote me down. Idgaf.
