Environment & Energy

The climate intensity of Chinese electricity is well over 500 grams of CO₂/kWh compared with that of France, for instance in the 30s or 40s.

My son spent the summer in China in 2024 and remarked that electric vehicles were everywhere but again, they were thus coal powered largely if one looks behind the curtain.

China is making a serious effort to reduce its carbon intensity by building nuclear plants at a rate not seen since the 20th century in the United States and France, with 61 reactors having been completed and in operation and 39 under construction but they are also building 95 coal plants.

I expect as their experience and nuclear manufacturing infrastructure continues to advance nuclear building rates may exceed coal building rates, but they're not there yet. The intellectual human resources and material infrastructure of nuclear manufacturing takes time to build. China leads the world in this process of infrastructure building right now but they have sometime to go before they can stop building coal plants.

Nuclear power construction rates notwithstanding, as of now, only 5% of Chinese electricity is from nuclear energy at this point.

For shipping, nuclear power is low hanging fruit. Nuclear propulsion is well established, regrettably only for military purposes. That would be clean. In China, electricity is not, at least not yet.

Despite much mythology, electricity is not clean energy anywhere really except in France, Sweden, and - if one does not object to the destruction of riparian ecosystems, although I find it objectional - places like Norway. With the collapse of the planetary atmosphere, as we're seeing in the American West currently, the viability of hydroelectricity is questionable. This is clearly applicable to the dangerous Three Gorges dam in China given the threat to the Himalayan glaciers from extreme global heating. (One of the most deadly single energy disasters of all time was the Banqiao dam system collapse in 1976, although the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people was not widely reported even to this day. The only more deadly energy disaster is air pollution, which dwarfs all other energy disasters. )

Electricity is a thermodyamically degraded form of energy owing to the exergy destruction in generation. Storing electricity by any means, including in batteries, or worse, as hydrogen, degrades exergy even further.

I personally cannot applaud this ship, its admirable technical sophistication nothwithstanding.

Thanks for pointing it out though.