Star One Smart Blog's

That's 6 new nuclear reactors a year for 10 years, increasing their nuclear power capacity to 70 gigawatts by 2020...

With an eye on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, China plans to boost its reliance on non-fossil fuel energy sources to 15 percent of total supply. Currently nuclear power generation accounts for about 1 percent of overall electricity supply, so there is plenty of room for growth in this field.

While we, here in the USA, are still set back by the left lib envirowhacks.
The last newly-built commercial reactor to go on line in the US was in 1996. The construction permits were issued in January 1973. That's ONE REACTOR in 23 years. You listening to this, Barack Hussein Obama?

With two years of preparation we can construct the facilities so that they can be commercially operable within five years. Unlike in Japan [OR THE USA], we do not encounter opposition from local communities.

With thermal power generation that uses coal still the main source of power in the country, nuclear energy tends to be seen as a clean form of energy.

A set of four generators costs about 50 billion yuan (about 600 billion yen or $7.25 billion) to build, meaning that local communities will benefit from new jobs and the tax income that is generated. [AND GUESS WHAT? THE STUPID AMERICANS ARE PAYING FOR IT! BWAHAHAHAHA1111!!!!1!!!!1!]

I want to remind you of the importance of nuclear power, vs. wind, solar, and other 'alternative energy' sources...

In order for "alternate energy" to become feasible, it has to satisfy all of the following criteria:

1. It has to be huge (in terms of both energy and power)
2. It has to be reliable (not intermittent or unschedulable)
3. It has to be concentrated (not diffuse)
4. It has to be possible to utilize it efficiently
5. The capital investment and operating cost to utilize it has to be comparable to existing energy sources (per gigawatt, and per terajoule).

If it fails to satisfy any of those, then it can't scale enough to make any difference. Solar power fails #3, and currently it also fails #5. (It also partially fails #2, but there are ways to work around that.)

The only sources of energy available to us now that satisfy all five are petroleum, coal, hydro, and nuclear.

My rule of thumb is that I'm not interested in any "alternate energy" until someone shows me how to scale it to produce at least 1% of our current energy usage. America right now uses about 3.6 terawatts average, so 1% of that is about 36 gigawatts average.

Show me a plan to produce 36 gigawatts (average, not peak) using solar power, at a price no more than 30% greater than coal generation of comparable capacity, which can be implemented at that scale in 10-15 years. Then I'll pay attention.

Since solar power installations can only produce power for about 10 hours per day on average, that means that peak power production would need to be in the range of about 85 gigawatts to reach that 1%.

Without that, it's just religion, like all the people fascinated with wind and with biomass. And even if it did reach 1%, that still leaves the other 99% of our energy production to petroleum, coal, hydro, and nuclear.

The problems facing "alternate energy" are fundamental, deep, and are show-stoppers. They are not things that will be surmounted by one lone incremental improvement in one small area, announced breathlessly by a startup which is trying to drum up funding.

The way you can tell that a fan of "alternate energy" is a religious cultist is to ask them this question: If your preferred alternate source of energy is practical, why isn't it already in use?

China: Winning the Future. And the present.

USA: Totally and unmercifully fucked by the controlling leftist elements of the Democratic Party.

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