Fuel Loading Begins At New Chinese Nuclear Reactor.

[NNadir]

The initial loading of fuel into the reactor core has begun at unit 1 of the second phase of the Ling Ao nuclear power plant in Guangdong province, China.

The first fuel assembly was loaded into the reactor of the new CPR-1000 unit on 21 April after state approval for the operation to begin, China Guangdong Nuclear Power Company (CGNPC) announced. A total of 157 fuel assemblies will be loaded into the reactor core in an operation expected to take five days to complete. The unit is scheduled to begin commercial operation by the end of 2010.

The main structural work on Phase II of the Ling Ao plant started in December 2005.

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-Fuel_loading_starts_at_new_Chinese_reactor-2204104.html">Fuel loading starts at new Chinese reactor

Next year, this reactor, which took 5 years to build, will almost certainly produce more electricity than the entire nation of Denmark can produce in all of it's wind installations, which took three decades to build.

http://www.ens.dk/en-US/Info/FactsAndFigures/Energy_statistics_and_indicators/Annual%20Statistics/Documents/BasicData2008.xls">Danish Energy Agency Figures: 24,940 TJ of wind energy.

If you can do math - which assumes you haven't joined Greenpeace - and figure out how many seconds are in a year, you can calculate that 24,940 TJ of energy is the equivalent of a continuous average power of 790 MW operating for a year. (However wind is not reliable and the wind power comes in bursts, often when the electricity is NOT required by anyone at all.)

The reactors - another is also under construction - are rated at 1080 MWe each. Thus to produce as much energy in one building as all the wind turbines in Denmark can produce in a whole nation strewn with whirling metal that will soon enough be junk, just one of the reactors would need to operate at 100*790/1080 = 73.1% capacity utilization, something it is relatively easy for a nuclear reactor to do. Most reactors around the world operate at close to 90% capacity utilization.

Have a nice evening.