Source: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Foundation-in-place-for-first-mega-cooling-tower-a
The foundation for the world’s first nuclear power ultra-large high-level seawater cooling tower has been laid at unit 1 of the Lianjiang plant in China’s Guangdong province, State Power Investment Corp (SPIC) announced.
The final concrete for the circular foundation of the tower was poured on 12 November. The foundation is more than 10 metres wide and more than 2 metres thick. A total volume of about 15,900 cubic metres of concrete was used to form the foundation.
Once completed, the cooling tower will have a height of 218.7 metres and a diameter at its base of about 175 metres. The water spraying area of the tower is 20,000 square metres. It mainly consists of a foundation, inclined pillars, tower tube, and inlet. It consists of a central water shaft, water distribution system, heat exchange filler, water collection system, main water collection tank, and water eliminator.
“The application of seawater secondary circulation cooling technology in the Lianjiang nuclear power project will further enhance the environmental friendliness of nuclear power projects, broaden the layout and space for the development of nuclear power plant sites in China, and provide important demonstrations and reference for the development and construction of nuclear power plant sites in China,” SPIC said.
The first phase of the Lianjiang nuclear power plant project - the first coastal nuclear power project developed and constructed by SPIC in Guangdong - will comprise two CAP1000 units. The site is eventually expected to house six such reactors. It is the first nuclear power plant in China to adopt seawater secondary circulation cooling technology, and is the first to develop and use a super-large cooling tower.
The construction of the first two 1250 MWe CAP1000 reactors - the Chinese version of the Westinghouse AP1000 - at the Lianjiang site was approved by China’s State Council in September 2022. Excavation works for the units began in the same month. The first safety-related concrete for the nuclear island of unit 1 was poured last month.
Lianjiang unit 1 is expected to be completed and put into operation in 2028.
Definitely not the whole country, but they would - if all completed - make a moderate impact.
You’re generally looking at 1-3kW of average load per household, so a 1250MWe plant is good for about 1-4 million households depending on assumptions about demand.
Geez, so they’d only have to build as few as several hundred plants at current technological fission reactor levels to be independently energy secure indefinitely?
And that isn’t taking into account the obvious leaps and bounds we’re going to make in technology in the future.
That’s amazing.
Eh. Nuclear plants have been plateaued at ~1GW per reactor since about 1970. There is no indication that per-reactor outputs are expected to increase past 2GW; the small modular/meme reactor (SMR) people want them to decrease for better economies of scale. (also, these are fission reactors; I assume fusion is a typo)
Note that that’s residential demand; industrial demand is on top of that, and those figures assume energy is fungible - the cost delta between peaking power and off-peak power is rapidly increasing, with power prices occasionally going negative in some areas (Aus) due to the massive influx of solar. That means you need storage (batteries or pumped hydro) if you want continuous base load like nuclear to take more than a small piece of the pie.
Wikipedia says China presently has 57GW capacity in service, providing about 5% of total annual demand.
Okay, thanks for going into more detail.
That’s a very good point about industrial demand as well, I was just thinking about residential energy.
I swype a lot and fission fusion is one of those pairs, fixed it. Thanks.
So according to 57 gigawatts they’d need closer to 1,000 nuclear plants, they have 55 what there building 21. I know they won’t be purely using fission results for energy, i just like the thought experiment.