China's Pebble-Bed Modular High-Temperature Reactor Now in Operation in Shandong Province

Bloomberg News reports today that China’s Huaneng Group Co.’s 200-megawatt Unit 1 reactor at Shidao Bay is now feeding power to the grid in Shandong province, according to a WeChat post by the China Nuclear Energy Association. This is the world’s first pebble-bed modular high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, which heats up helium instead of water to produce power. A so-called fourth-generation reactor, it’s designed to shut down passively should anything go wrong, unlike active systems that may not be able to trigger safety measures if power fails. This is what happened at the Fukushima Daiichi accident in Japan a decade ago. A second reactor is undergoing tests before being connected and putting the plant into full commercial operations in the middle of next year. Bloomberg points out that no country in the world is investing in nuclear power the way China is, which is expected to invest as much as $440 billion in new plants over the next decade-and-a-half, at which point it will overtake the U.S. as the top generator of nuclear power.