China has announced that it’ll be bringing a nuclear power plant online in 2017 that’s immune to meltdown. Consisting of next-generation, twin 105-megawatt reactors, the plant doesn’t rely on complex, external systems to regulate its temperature – such as the kind that failed at Fukushima – and, in theory, it shouldn’t ever overheat.
While the technology behind the reactor originated in Germany decades ago, this is the first time the design will be built on a commercial scale anywhere in the world, and it’s a pretty big deal. If China pulls this off, it’ll take away one of the biggest concerns about nuclear power, and suggests that the technology could be used to safely provide energy, with far less greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuels.
The reactor is being built in the Shandong province, south of Beijing, and construction is almost complete, according to Zhang Zuoyi, director of China’s Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology. The next step involves 18 months of testing and fuel-loading, before the reactors finally go critical in November 2017.
If it’s successful, the new plant will generate 210 megawatts of energy, and China is ready to go all in on the technology, with a 600-megawatt facility already planned in the Jiangxi province. China has also announced plans to sell the reactors internationally, with an agreement in place to construct a reactor in Saudi Arabia.
“This technology is going to be on the world market within the next five years,” Zhang told MIT Technology Review. “We are developing these reactors to belong to the world.”
Nuclear reactors work by sustaining a reaction known as nuclear fission, where atoms are split into smaller neutrons and nuclei. It’s an incredibly efficient process – millions of times more efficient per mass than coal – but it also produces dangerous radioactive nuclear waste, and poses the risk of catastrophic meltdown.
When a meltdown happens, nuclear waste leaks out into the environment, making the surrounding area unliveable for decades to come, which is what happened at both Chernobyl and Fukushima. This risk is the main reason many countries are now moving away from nuclear and towards safe renewable energy, such as wind and solar.
But the new reactor is what’s known as a high-temperature, gas-cooled, pebbled-bed reactor, and it prevents meltdown from happening in two ways. Firstly, the uranium fuel is encased in graphite spheres, roughly the size of tennis balls – these are the pebbles – which means the fuel can’t break down, even if the temperature does pass a certain threshold.
But more importantly, the reactor is constantly blasted with helium gas to keep the system running at 950 degrees Celsius.