Fascinating in the Extreme: How American Capitalists Industrialized China Without Tariffs.

[NNadir]

Chris Keefer is a Canadian Physician who has become famous for his advocacy of nuclear energy, but beyond that he's an intellectual powerhouse par excellence.

He runs a podcast called Decouple, which usually has guests discussing nuclear energy.

However, disturbed as he is by the unnecessary and stupid trade war undertaken as a prelude to the collapse of the United States, he hosted a very interesting economist, who as part of his talk, describes visiting China in the 1980's, and seeing how American capitalists, interested in screwing American Labor, created the rust belt, and built a capitalist class in China that is now home to the strongest industrial base in the world.

The comment on having a conference in the US on machine tool manufacture with only American experts, vs having one in China with only Chinese Experts is worth it alone. Some fun comments on the Eloon are therein.

The Industrialization Playbook

Enjoy.

(Dr. Keefer wants no part of American Nuclear Technology; he wants pure Canadian nuclear supply chains, pure Canadian built reactors and pure Canadian technology. I, for one, can't blame him; they make some of the most important reactors in the world, the CANDU.)

[cachukis]

1. We sold our soul to China for a few dollars more.

[John ONeill]

2. BWRX10

GE Hitachi claim their small modular reactor is the apotheosis of ten generations of boiling water reactors. That's a stretch. The last GE design actually built was the Advanced Boiling Water Reactor, of which only four made it into use. Three more, one in Japan and a pair in Taiwan, were suspended part way through construction, while other projects in the USA and the UK were cancelled before construction started. The plants that were operating have all been put on hold now, as Japan gets over the political shock of the Fukushima Daichi meltdowns. Even before that, their uptime was well below that of most modern reactors, some below 50%, others about 70%, compared to 93% fleet average in the USA.
Successor to the ABWR was the Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor, which was supposed to be cheaper to build and to run. Power output was raised to 1500MW, and it was designed to use natural convection instead of internal pumps. The disadvantage is that the pressure vessel has to be taller, for convection to do the work normally done by pumps. How it would work in practice has yet to be shown.
The BWRX10 takes most elements of the ESBWR and shrinks the power output 5x. This was supposed to make a lot of the safety systems mandated for larger reactors redundant. In the end, though, the Nuclear Regulatory Agency ruled that they were still required. The original design called for the whole pressure vessel to be underground, because of the rule to be impervious to a large aircraft strike. Excavation was to use a vertical tunnel boring machine. Now the volume of the below ground works is about 5x more, and they have to dig down to 24 metres below grade to accommodate the tall pressure vessel (slightly taller than that of the Westinghouse AP1000, which makes 4x as much power - and of which six are already operating very well, in China and in the US.)
Canada is building an untried reactor, unlikely to ever make cheaper power than a gigawatt scale one, for which they will have to import the enriched fuel, and probably the specialist refuelling crews, from the US. Instead they could export their own design - and possibly team up with India, whose 220 MW version of the heavy water reactor could be used for grids too small for the the larger Candus.

[NNadir]

3. Thanks for that account. I'm not a BWR kind of guy, or for that matter a PWR kind of guy in terms of deep analysis...

...and can only say that even the worst nuclear reactor - and I'm even including the RBMK - is better than any kind of dangerous fossil fuel plant, particularly if one counts external costs, only one of which is extreme global heating.

I was amused by the underground reactor, because when I first changed my mind from being a badly educated antinuke - to an increasingly (self) educated nuclear supporter, I considered the idea of underground reactors, because, like many people, I had a poor understanding of the risks associated with the release of radioactive materials. Fukushima and Chernobyl helped me to understand that the risks, while real, are relatively trivial in comparison to the observed risks of not using nuclear power.

The LNT, I'm increasingly convinced, is garbage science, if not - as some contend, notably Ed Calabrese - fraudulent science.

I don't think - I 100% agree with Chris Keefer on this - that Canada should build any kind of thermal reactor other than the CANDU. They certainly do not need American technology, particularly as the United States is disintegrating.

The future is looking bleak, more than ever, with an obviously insane person running the United States, but any hope of human survival will depend on access to fissionable nucleic, which the CANDU is particularly capable of producing, particularly with the development of ternary fuels.

I am intrigued, however, by the MOLTEX technology, to which you directed my attention. I have for many years been intrigued by ZrF₄ based molten salts, especially because they are an ideal fit for reprocessing from the fluoride volatility issue, and because they can put ⁹³Zr to use. The more I look into it, the more interested I am. If my son does not achieve his goal of becoming an academic, it would be an outstanding company for him to join.

I note you also directed, initially, my attention to Chris Keefer. He's a real force for good in the world, and I admire his insights, and his defense of the Canadian nuclear technology. I'm a fast spectrum kind of guy, a plutonium and transplutonium fuel kind of guy, but clearly, among thermal reactors, the heavy water reactors are the best. I don't like them running on natural uranium, but if they do, while it's less than ideal, it's better than relying on enrichment. They are machines limited to making electricity, but as power plants for merely producing electricity, they are wonderful tools for a sustainable future, in the increasingly unlikely that a sustainable future is ever attained.