Great article on CNN Money recently – an interview with Andrew Brandler of CLP Group on why China has such an aggressive nuclear build program. Well worth reading the full article but if you don’t have the time, I’ve pasted some of the more interesting bits below. I particularly like the way Brandler addresses the capital costs of nuclear program and how these can be reduced by implementing a full program (like the French did) rather than doing things piecemeal.
Here are a couple of quotes:
I suspect China will standardize the design and they will localize the fabrication and get the whole supply chain geared up and they will mass-produce to get the cost down. This is what the French did in the '70s and '80s with their nuclear program. There's no fundamental reason why you can't implement an aggressive build-out of nuclear power at reasonable cost. If you're doing a one-off project, like in the United States, with all the regulatory issues and design issues, the costs just balloon. But if you can spread all those upfront costs over a whole program, it's not so burdensome. And if you can get the supply-chain working -- which China is very good at -- you can bring those costs down dramatically.
Without nuclear it's hard to see how the world will continue to meet energy demand growth without catastrophic risk to the climate. Nuclear is the only technology that exists today that can provide base-load power at a reasonable cost -- if you get the program right -- with zero carbon emissions.
Dev Randhawa
