As countries continue to strive for increasingly clean, pollution-free sources of energy, China’s plan to transition away from coal is a unique one.
According to Interesting Engineering, it is looking into converting coal power plants into nuclear plants. This would involve compact, “meltdown-proof” reactors and use infrastructure already in place at the plants to link them to the grid.
The move would serve multiple purposes: It would shut down the vast majority of China’s coal-powered energy plants, which account for 30% of the country’s energy, and exponentially increase the country’s clean energy output.
As far as energy sources go, coal is as dirty as it gets when it comes to environmental impact. Apart from pumping carbon dioxide into the air, coal plants also produce sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, small particulate matter, and heavy metals, according to Global Energy Monitor.
The key to the plan is China’s unique reactor technology, which includes high-temperature gas reactors and molten salt thorium reactors. These reactors require less land than traditional nuclear plants thanks to their meltdown protections and produce the kind of heat necessary to operate massive coal plant turbines and generate power.
The plan also incorporates flexibility. As one official put it, the coal-to-nuclear change enables a pivot to different types of plants as technology advances.
“Given China’s vast coal-fired power capacity and the long construction timeline for nuclear plants, the C2N transition could span several decades,” the project team wrote. “During this period, if breakthroughs occur in nuclear fusion technology, the future transformation of coal plants might shift from converting them into fission reactors to repurposing them for fusion power plants.”
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, fusion energy occurs when two nuclei merge (or are fused) to create a new nucleus, releasing harnessable energy. Fusion “offers a potential long-term energy source that uses abundant fuel supplies and does not produce greenhouse gases or long-lived radioactive waste,” the DoE added.
China has been betting big on a variety of cleaner energy sources, not just nuclear power. It is also one of the world’s leaders in solar energy, having opened the world’s largest solar farm in the Gobi and built a dual-tower solar mirror array that can produce 2 billion kilowatt-hours of power annually.
However, the country continues to innovate on the frontiers of nuclear fusion and fission as well, developing a new metal that will aid in the construction of fusion reactors, for example.
China’s plan is to achieve net-zero pollution in its energy output by 2060.
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