China Blazing Trail in Thorium Reactors
THE Chinese are running away with thorium energy, sharpening a global race for the prize of clean, cheap, and safe nuclear power.
Jiang Mianheng, son of former leader Jiang Zemin, is spearheading a project for China’s National Academy of Sciences with a start-up budget of $350m. He has already recruited 140 PhD scientists, working full-time on thorium power at the Shanghai Institute of Nuclear and Applied Physics. He will have 750 staff by 2015.
The aim is to break free of the archaic pressurized-water reactors fueled by uranium — originally designed for US submarines in the 1950s — opting instead for new generation of thorium reactors that produce far less toxic waste and cannot blow their top like Fukushima.
“China is the country to watch,” said Baroness Bryony Worthington, head of the All-Parliamentary Group on Thorium Energy, who visited the Shanghai operations recently with a team from Britain’s National Nuclear Laboratory. “They are really going for it, and have talented researchers. This could lead to a massive break-through.”
The thorium story is by now well-known. Enthusiasts think it could be the transforming technology needed to drive the industrial revolutions of Asia — and to avoid an almighty energy crunch as an extra two billion people climb the ladder to western lifestyles. At the least, it could do for nuclear power what shale fracking has done for natural gas — but on a bigger scale, for much longer, perhaps more cheaply, and with near zero CO2 emissions.
The Chinese are leading the charge, but they are not alone. Norway’s Thor Energy began a four-year test last month with Japan’s Toshiba-Westinghouse to see whether they could use thorium at Norway’s conventional Halden reactor in Oslo. The Japanese are keen to go further, knowing they have to come up with something radically new to regain public trust and save their nuclear industry. Japan’s International Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS) — now led by thorium enthusiast Takashi Kamei — is researching molten salt reactors that use liquid fuel.
The Chinese aim to beat them to it. Technology for the molten salt process already exists. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee built such a reactor in the 1960s. It was shelved by the Nixon Administration. The Pentagon needed plutonium residue from uranium to build nuclear bombs. The imperatives of the Cold War prevailed.
The thorium blueprints gathered dust in the archives until retrieved and published by former Nasa engineer Kirk Sorensen. The US largely ignored him: China did not. Mr Jiang visited the Oak Ridge labs and obtained the designs after reading an article in the American Scientist two years ago extolling thorium. His team concluded that a molten salt reactor — if done the right way — may answer China’s prayers. Mr Jiang says China’s energy shortage is becoming “scary” and will soon pose a threat to national security.
His mission is to do something about China’s Achilles Heel very fast. The Shanghai team plans to build a tiny 2 MW plant using liquid flouride fuel by the end of the decade, before scaling up to commercially viable size over the 2020s. It is also working on a pebble-back reactor. He estimates that China has enough thorium to power its electricity needs for “20,000 years”. So does the world. The radioactive mineral is scattered across Britain. The Americans have buried tonnes of it, a hazardous by-product of rare earth metal mining. China is already building 26 conventional reactors by 2015, with a further 51 planned, and 120 in the pipeline, but these have all the known drawbacks, and rely on imported uranium.
The beauty of thorium is that you cannot have a Fukushima disaster. Professor Robert Cywinksi from Huddersfield University, who anchor’s the UK’s thorium research network ThorEA, said the metal must be bombarded with neutrons to drive the process. “There is no chain reaction. Fission dies the moment you switch off the photon beam,” he said. His team is working on an accelerator driven subcritical reactor. “Peope are beginning to realize that uranium isn’t sustainable. We’re going to have to breed new nuclear fuel. If we are going to the trouble of breeding, we could start to use thorium instead, without introducing plutonium into the cycle,” he said.
Thorium has its flaws. The metallurgy is complex. It is “fertile” but not fissile, and has to be converted in Uranium 233. Claims by the International Atomic Energy Institute in 2005 that it has “intrinsic resistance” to proliferation but have since been qualified. It could be used as feedstock for bombs, though not easily. Yet it leaves far less toxic residue. Most of the mineral is used up in the fission process, while uranium reactors use up just 0.7pc. It can even burn up existing stockpiles of plutonium and hazardous waste.
– The Telegraph
BC High School Student Math Skills in Trouble: Group
BC schools are not teaching students proper math and science to meet the challenges of the 21st Century, claims the Educational Quest Society of Canada (EQSC), a group of Chinese-educated tutors at public and private institutions who recently published a report on the deteriorating state of K-12 education, particularly math, in the province. They suggest that BC should be looking to China for possible remedies where greater emphasis is placed on basic concepts, rigor in teaching and homework assignment, and employment of teachers with specialized math credentials.
Proof of the decline in BC students’ math performance, they say, can be readily found in the 2010 Pan-Canadian Assessment program that tested the math abilities of 32,000 Grade 8 students across Canada. BC students scored 481, well below the national average of 500 and considerably lower than the top three provinces Quebec (515), Ontario (507), and Alberta (495).
The results were basically consistent with the well-known Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) 2010 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey. The results for 15-year old math skills showed that while Canada’s 527 score was much higher than the OECD average (496), Canada still ranked 10th among 70 countries, down three places since an earlier survey in 2006. Shanghai topped the world with a score of 600, followed by Singapore (a country with a mostly ethnic Chinese population), and Hong Kong. The US faired much worse, scoring a full 40 points below Canada and 9 points below the OECD average.
Within Canada, BC scored four points below the national average and 11 points below its score in 2000. Some critics attribute the drop to the BC Liberal government’s decision to halt reevaluation of the math curriculum in the early 2000s. The Minister of Education at the time was Christy Clark, now BC Premier, who changed the ministry’s priorities from curriculum reform to overall educator accountability.
Interviewed by straight.com, John (Pi) Yuan, a member of EQSC, drew a laundry list of concerns including the elimination of calculus from Grade 12 math requirements which he said diminishes the value of BC diplomas. The recent Ministry of Education decision to do away with all Grade 12 provincial exams except English 12 or its equivalent, according to the EQSC, will be most harmful to educational standards, student motivation, teacher enthusiasm, and public accountability.
“If you compare the math textbooks the students are using now and textbooks that were used 10 or 20 years ago, you can see that the content is getting less and less (difficult)”, Mr Yuan told the news portal. Speaking to the Vancouver Sun, Sharon Shen, another EQSC member who had owned and operated the Elite Education Center private tutoring schools in Burnaby and Richmond agreed: “It’s weak and getting weaker. We feel there is a crisis.”
Arvind Gupta, a UBC math professor and CEO of Mitacs Inc., a national non-profit organization that puts graduate students in many disciplines together with companies to help solve their problems, emphasized that math knowledge is increasingly important on the job market. Nowadays, Professor Gupta points out, all sorts of occupations require significant math skills. The genomic revolution, for example, involves the heavy application of mathematics to life sciences. Math is essential for engineering, architecture, medicine, and other sectors, not to mention of growing importance in the social sciences, he explained to straight.com.
Over the past three years, the BC Ministry of Education has instituted a revised math curriculum for grades 10 through 12 that reduces repetition while emphasizing apprenticeship and workplace application, basic foundations, and pre-calculus. Although the EQSC acknowledges that Chinese methods should not be mechanically transplanted to Canada, it maintains that BC math teaching and curriculum must return to basics.
“We agree that an education system ignoring students’ differences should be changed. But, if differences were over emphasized to negate regularity, and if traditional classroom lectures were replaced with ‘personalized teaching’, the consequences on fundamental knowledge and skills would be disastrous”, EQSC’s report stated. For these reasons, the advocacy group puts “top priority” on restoring the Grade 12 provincial examinations, especially mathematics.
China’s Rise to IT Technological Preeminence
According to the 12-year cycle of the Chinese zodiac, those born in the year of the Dragon are blessed with power and good fortune. 2012 was certainly an auspicious year for the country’s technology industry, as China’s rise to become the planet’s preëminent technology producer and consumer continued apace.
The past 12 months saw China reach and surpass milestones across the technology firmament. For example, by most reckonings, it has already overtaken the United States as the world’s biggest smartphone market. China also passed the magic figure of one billion mobile subscribers early in the year. The country now has over 500 million Internet users, according to the government-affiliated China Internet Network Information Center.
So what can we expect from China and its growing rank of world-class technology companies in 2013, as it enters the year of the Snake?
Needless to say, the Chinese government is keen to keep pushing growth forward, and it has a plan to increase the country’s online population to 800 million by 2015, and to expand Web sales to reach to 18 trillion yuan ($2.9 trillion) by 2015—taking the top spot in global e-commerce.
Gartner is predicting enterprise IT spending alone in China will grow from $117.8 billion in 2013 to $172.4 billion by 2016, representing a compound annual growth rate of 8 percent, compared to a global growth rate of just 3 percent over the same period. As elsewhere in the world, cloud, mobile, and hardware and software virtualization will be the main spurs to growth…
– MIT Technology Review
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/509426/chinas-computing-giants-eye-overseas-growth-in-2013/
Li Yifu: Reform Can Help China Maintain 8% Growth Over Next Two Decades
Even if the reforms that he’s calling for bear out, think the former WB lead economist is a bit optimistic. A more realistic scenario would be GDP dropping to 7% by the end of the decade and even further in the 2020s. ———————
Xinhua to List IPO in Shanghai
The online portal of China’s state-run Xinhua news agency has applied for a Shanghai initial public offering, the securities regulator said, in what would be the second listing of a government website in a year.
Xinhuanet.com’s planned IPO is likely to attract strong interest from investors. Once listed, Xinhuanet would become China’s second publicly-traded media company backed by the central government, after People.cn Co Ltd (603000.SS), the online portal of People’s Daily that went public last April.
Xinhuanet’s IPO application is being vetted by the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), the regulator said on its website on Saturday, without indicating when the IPO would happen.
“Xinhuanet and People.cn are comparable in their business model and political status,” said Zhang Zejing, a Beijing-based analyst at Hongyuan Securities. “If you look at People.cn’s debut, you would have an idea how hot Xinhuanet’s IPO could be.”
People.cn attracted pre-IPO investments from state-owned giants including China Mobile Ltd (0941.HK), China Unicom (0762.HK) and China Telecom Corp Ltd (0728.HK) and its shares opened 55 percent higher on the first day of trading.
With reporters based in more than 100 countries and regions, the news portal is the authorized agency to announce appointments of government officials. It publishes news around the clock, in six languages, and generates income from advertising.
More than 800 Chinese companies are queuing to be listed, with some companies having to wait for several years, but Xinhuanet may receive special approval for an IPO due to its political status, analysts said.
Beijing has been encouraging state media to raise funds to allow them to more effectively compete against new media giants such as Sina Corp (SINA.O) and Sohu.com Inc (SOHU.O).
– Reuters