This Chinese apparently have recognized that they will have to curtail there equally ambitious coal power generation plans. Anticipated world pressure to curb their CO2 emissions plus the local pollution problems are probably the drivers here.
My hat is off to the Chinese if they can pull this plan off without compromising safety.

You can do base load with wind power if you have the right grid for it, a grid that is much more capable than the standard grid is today but that does not need to be prohibitively expensive. You can do it by 1) expanding capacity to import and export electricity from other regions and by 2) metering use and price simultaneously at the end users. The latter does not cost much and it can do miracles to level peak load in a system with wind power as base load where the kWh prices will fluctuate from 2 to 20 c per kWh on an almost daily basis. Consumers can start heating water and do extra cooling when the price is low and stop it when the price is high. Plus 3) in the not so distant future grid connected EVs and PHEV will be able to perform the function of peak loading the grid. That could do away with natural gas for that function.

We should go for wind power because it is on track to be cheaper than both fossils and nuclear power. The EPRI journal 2006 summer issue (a goldmine of reliable information that reviews the cost of all of the important energy sources) say the levelized cost of nuclear power is 4.7c/ kWh assuming $1700/kW of construction costs (way too low in the US but perhaps not for China).

Furthermore, the levelized cost of wind energy is 7.5 c / kWh using the cost of the current fleet of the 11600MW of US wind turbines with an average capacity factor of 29%. The best US onshore locations do 5 c / kWh as a result of a 43% capacity factor. Interesting the newest offshore turbines from Vestas (V90) will do a 54% capacity factor at an average offshore location but offshore construction is costly.
Note: It should be noted that thanks to continued effort by California, Denmark, Germany and Spain the now global wind industry has managed to reduce the cost of wind power from approximately 25 c / kWh in 1986 to 5 c / kWh in 2006 at the best locations. For the more relevant average wind location this compares to a cost reduction from 37,5 c /kWh in 1986 to 7,5 c/ kWh in 2006. This trend is very likely to continue the next two decades so that the cost of wind power drops to c 1,5 / kWh in 2026 for the average wind location. This will be accomplished through further increases in turbine size and through mass production. Previously costs have foremost been cut by increasing turbine size but scales of economics to mass production will be the key to future efficiency gains since mass production has not really taken of in this industry.

To conclude, China or any other country will do better economically speaking if they go for a future with wind power for base load. This must, of cause, be accompanied by a much more capable grid and starting some ten years from now also accompanied with peak load services from grid capable EV and PHEV.

nuclear to get water to produce biomass?

what bu**s*it

same b**s*it that getting a battery for 30000$ to move 150miles

So, what are they going to do with the waste?

Nick,

On waste: The Chinese have a small prototype reprocessing plant coming on line in 2008 using the PUREX process (ugh!). They are also planning another reprocessing plant based on an undescribed indigenous process. They have a reactor fleet of mixed LWRs and PHWRs - they could pursue the Canadian/Korean DUPIC process which is much cleaner than PUREX.

Their planning at this time is primarily for additional light water reactors. (They have a few other experimental units). If they stick with light water technology, they will develop a growing inventory of transuranic wastes, dominated by Pu-240 and its daughter products.

By reprocessing, however, they can limit the volume of very long term wastes to just the transuranics. They are planning a deep geologic repository analogous to Yucca Mountain but have not selected a site.

Pu-240 with its daughter products is a very long term storage problem with a lot of heat generated and hard gamma radiation. This isotope of Plutonium is not a serious explosive weapons risk however. If you want to get rid of Pu-240, it will require a reactor (or accellerator)with a higher neutron energy than water based coolants; either epithermal or fast spectrum such as those proposed for testing in some of the Generation IV experiments.

Juha,

I would agree that nuclear is a very poor choice for peaking power. Why would you take a power plant with a lower fuel cost than any fossil plant and keep it idle?

The French do some load following with nuclear power but that is because they have almost no fossil fuel power generation.

I would also agree that, within the bounds of uncertainty, nuclear and wind have the same capital cost for a given capacity. The wind plant will then, however, have a capacity utilization between 25 and 35% versus a nuclear plant with a capacity utilization of approximately 90%. The nuclear plant down time is largely predictable (i.e. refueling).

It is true that, over a large enough area, wind is more available. That means the 25 to 35% utilization has less fluctuation. What are your transmission losses going to be over your decentralized wind field?

Where is all the uranium going to come from? Currently it is only cheap because they're using up the warheads. Supply from the current level of uranium mining cannot support this kind of expansion.

We all know that fossils have no future because of GW. Therefore, the case is between nuclear or wind for future base load of the grid. You can judge for yourself but consider these facts:

1) Economy: It takes 5 to 7 years to finish a nuclear power plant. Start now and you start producing electricity in 2012-2014. At that time electricity from wind will be a little cheaper than nuclear. And after that time nuclear electricity production will be increasingly expensive compared to producing electricity by wind.
2) Security: No nuclear facility anywhere on the planet is ensured on market term for liability. The government is covering this insurance by guaranteeing the pay for the unforeseen. It is illusionary to believe that nuclear is safe and have no serious problems with handling radioactive waste. The day that nuclear pay for their own liability insurance using a private insurance company is the day I believe they have fixed all issues regarding security.
3) Nuclear proliferation: Expanding the nuclear power industry worldwide would create an enormous global market for people who could be bought by countries all over the planet to help them build nuclear weapons. 50 years down the road there will not be a single dictatorship left that doesn’t possess nuclear weapons. In such a world including the ever present terrorism it is unavoidable, to repeat unavoidable, that a nuke in a backpack eradicates a major city or several large cities simultaneously to do more harm killing 100 million people in a second. The only way that we can be sure that this scenario is not going to happen is to abandon nuclear power altogether all over the planet. Sweden and Germany are doing it now. Others will follow including France, the US and China.

To conclude, wind power is far superior to nuclear power both with regard to 1) the economic aspect, 2) the security aspect and 3) the proliferation of doomsday technology.

To be sure, I am not against nuclear energy if a case can be made to support it. Nuclear fusion power may be just that case and we should research it vigorously.

Otherwise I might agree with Henrik about fusion, but I think it's currently wrong investment of R&D and talent. We got to do something about global warming in near future and the promise of fusion is somewhere beyond 2050 even in the best case. Fusion research is still getting way more public money than wind and PV R&D combined, even though situation has gotten bit 'better' of late (energy R&D cutbacks have bitten fossils and nuclear more than renewables). Furthermore, there is no guarantee that the cost of fusion electricity will be competitive if the formidable technological challenges are solved. It is going to be a very complex water boiler.

Cold fusion might be a different story, but I haven't read anything that would make me believe that it's something tangible. On the other hand, I haven't seen a completely persuasive rebuttal either. Maybe somebody could point me to better sources of information.

PV PV PV. We need a Manhattan-type project to reduce the cost of photovoltaic. Solar energy potential of the US Southwest is vast. With cheap enough PV, you could generate H2 from H2O for nighttime generation. Take some of the billions spent on fusion toys and figure out how to make PV cells for 1/10 the cost. Or stop pouring billions in the the Iraq blood/money pit. Jeeze.

I see no reason to limit ourselves to any one power source. There's more around than just fossil, nuke and wind. My personal favourite is wave. But lets not forget geothermal, solar and garbage. We'll just have to use whatever works for any given location.

If wind is so good, how come no-one has gone much above 20%
Because commerial windpower didn't start until around 1980.
Nuclear was/is heavily subsidizes since 1950 because of it's
military importance.

The price of wind generation must multiplied by the peak power of the machine divided by the actual yearly output. To this must be added the price of the power lines to take the power to its use and the price of the power lines that take substitute power to the use when the turbines are not operating. Also the price of the substitute generators must be considered and the cost of their use and the CO2 released. The number of wind turbines in most countries is so low that their failure to produce can be masked by existing generators and power lines. Transporting power is not free and also causes as much as a ten percent loss. Denmark has had to pay people to take their wind power at times whilst the coal fired plants must be kept running for reliability.

Coal mines in China are far more of a disaster every year than Chernobyl ever could have been. BHOPAL was far more of a disaster.

Plutonium is not a problem for countries that wish to conserve their uranium and do not throw it away like the US does. Plutonium is just put back into reactors after reprocessing along with new and old uranium and it goes away gradually. The amount of plutonium will stabilize at a certain level where some is made and the same amount is destroyed. Such plutonium is a mix of isotopes that will physically be to hot to make a bomb and is already fissioning too fast to allow a bomb to be made to explode.

The Rubbia Energy-Amplifier can use uranium or thorium fuel and can burn up most plutonium quickly.

People are protected from nuclear rays by barriers just as they are protected from the heat of a blast furnace. If the heat of a blast furnace is diluted by being far away or behind a thick wall the same is done to nuclear rays.

There is an assumed but mostly unspoken falsehood that any nuclear rays are too dangerous. Those that argue against nuclear energy do not tell you that all living things have always had built in radio-activity since the beginning of life. All nutrients ingested by plants and animals are radio-active and the best nutrients are more radioactive.

Nuclear fission products can be diluted by a great deal of sea bottom clay and mud and injected underneath a few feet of such mud. No plutonium could then be extracted nor radioactive materials of any kind recovered in quantity. Not many gamma rays would escape the mud and more would come from natural uranium already present. The clay bottom would prevent deadly exposure to anything on the top of the clay. We accept adequate protection from the dangers of stairways to say nothing about the dangers of cars. We must therefore accept adequate protection from nuclear materials use by man because we accept adequate, not perfect protection from nuclear materials that are omnipresent in the earths soils including the ones that are associateed with important nutrients. It would take many millions of dollars to grow a single non-radioactive-banana, and you, radio-active from conception, would have no advantage. Just sleeping near a person or a log causes more exposure.

Dilute and cover are the answer to the adequately safe storage of radio-active materials of all kinds. Marie Curie injured her self by concentrating radio-active materials but lived until 66, longer than many people at that time in France. Her husband was killed at a much younger age about thirty years earlier by a horse drawn vehicle.

Nuclear power plants do not need to do load following as any extra power produced could be used for electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen which can be combined with CO2 to make methanol for sale.

Nuclear energy is cheaper than solar energy because the equipment to collect it is cheaper. Converting any kind of heat, even coal, into electricity is very expensive and represents the major part of the production cost.

The raw uranium or thorium costs for operating a Rubbia Reactor almost vanishes and is less than ZERO if depleted uranium or used fuel rods are used for fuel for the next fifty years. A kilogram of any kind of uranium, plutonium or thorium can produce 20,000,000 Kwh thermal in such a reactor. That is about 3000 Tonnes of coal. Weapons grade uranium or plutonium can do it in any existing reactor.

Instead of wasting the heat into the air from the steam out of the turbine, it can be used for extracting salt free water fram the ocean.

Methanol can be made from water and CO2 at a nuclear powered factory at less cost per unit energy than oil at $150.

CANDU reactors can be built and have been built in China by mostly local industries in less than four years. The used rods from other light water reactors can be used in the previous mentioned DUPIC cycle with little modification and no chemical processing. ..HG..