I agree that the piece sounds as if it's trying not to mention renewables.
> To wean their country off imported oil and gas, and in the hope of retiring dirty coal-fired power stations, China’s leaders have poured money into wind and solar energy.
Its silly that an article about nuclear can't just exist. Even though it does discuss renewables, all the comments here are just "wut about solar"
There's definately some degree of framing going on here that you'd perhaps not expect from a magazine except in advertorial content.
Nuclear probably won’t be the main source but it will be a necessary mow part of the solution.
But even that 18% is already starting to look like it's out of date. Energy generation, battery storage and renewable generation are all growing exponentially and well beyond the government's targets. I think it's much more likely that renewables and storage will vastly outpace nuclear generation, and that 18% estimate will prove to be absurdly high. Once you've got a grid that's 90+% renewables and storage, a few nuclear plants aren't going to make much of a difference.
Can you give any arguments for that surprising statement?
I hope we can agree that solar energy will dry up across all of China on a nightly basis.
Wind strength is also often strongly correlated over large areas. Sweden has learned this the hard way in recent winters.
This is a solved problem through various forms of storage (synthetic gas, pumped hydro, batteries etc).
Nuclear is a solid baseline for sure but I don't think there is a way around the security requirements, which means it will become too expensive to keep around when free energy from the sun can be stored cheaply.