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David Fishman

Aug 28, 2023 • 27 tweets • 10 min read • Read on X

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I've gotten a few questions about this page - the Friends of the Earth (FoE) Japan fact page about the Fukushima water release. I've also seem a few people sharing links to it.

I gave it an read and spotted some concerning statements. Let's review:

foejapan.org/en/issue/20230…

First, the FoE page was updated in August, but does not incorporate or reference any of the important lab testing verification work conducted by the IAEA and its third-party laboratories on the contents of the water.

Here's what it has to say about the IAEA report:

The FoE statement on the nature the IAEA's review is inaccurate. The IAEA's role is to assess, oversee, and review the accuracy of TEPCO's measurements and other work.

To do this, samples were gathered, on-site, under observation, and sent to different labs for testing.

The results from the IAEA lab testing answer one thing very specifically: If we gather water the same way TEPCO did, and test for the same things TEPCO did, do we get the same results?

We need to know if those lab results show good statistical alignment with TEPCO's results.

Thus, the role of the IAEA is not to endorse, but to VERIFY & VALIDATE (V&V).

They are checking TEPCO's results by verifying that the filtration results claimed by TEPCO, for the same tank, under the same conditions, are reproduced via testing in other labs.

Next, the FoE page mentions that the testing data being verified only covers 3% of the tank groups.

This is accurate. But, it targets the K4-B tank group, because that's the tank group that will be discharged first (is being discharged now). This is the key point.

The IAEA testing plan covers each tank group in turn, according to the schedule that they will be released.

This is a 30 year discharge, and the IAEA testing will be verifying TEPCO's test results the entire time, for each tank group.

Page 114:
iaea.org/sites/default/…

Finally, the FoE claims that the IAEA is not a neutral third party, as its role is to promote nuclear power.

This is where the flimsiness of their position really becomes apparent, that they must adopt this approach.

Let's take a look at the IAEA mandate and mission statement:

The IAEA is a UN support, oversight, & watchdog organization, not a lobbyist/advocacy group.

Friends of the Earth is an anti-nuclear lobbyist/advocacy group.

I don't think much of ad hominem reasoning, but if anyone is vulnerable to it here, it's certainly not IAEA, but FoE.

In summary, we have three big problems with the FoE's statement on the IAEA lab report.

Why are they so determined to discredit and disregard the IAEA's lab testing verification results?

Most likely because these testing results invalidate many of their other arguments.

For instance, in this section, they a cite 2018 news report that a 2014 test result for I-129 was still above regulatory limits.

But now that we have the verified IAEA test results from 2022, so why would we look at 2014 test results from TEPCO?

The IAEA labs all tested for I-129 in 2022, and all returned satisfactory results (except Los Alamos, which used a testing method with rougher results, and thus was excluded from the statistical analysis).

Korea's results (KINS) were low enough to be potentially discrepant.

It's not hard to see why FoE wouldn't want to engage with the IAEA lab results, and seek to discredit or mischaracterize them - they completely invalidate this entire "we don't really know what's in the water" line of reasoning.

We DO in fact know what's in the water.

Lets take another FoE argument, that TEPCO is only testing the water in 3% of the tanks.

This is a dishonest argument, that they have repeated in several places.

The testing so far has focused on one tank group, the K4-B, because this is the first tank group to be released (right now).

Per TEPCO, K4 tanks underwent ALPS treatment back in 2016.

Recall they were also the subject of the IAEA sampling for verification.

In the future, each subsequent tank group will have its own round of testing and verification before release, with the IAEA monitoring onsite.

So the "3%" figure is irrelevant.

I will repeat the same screenshot from above, because the statement applies again:

I can't speculate to the motivation for FoE to post misleading commentary and refusing to engage currently-existing reports that address these concerns.

I will only summarize: It's confused/misinformed at best, intentionally dishonest at worst.

Next, this FoE point about tritium concentration is also misinformed.

Their complaint is that the tritium being diluted to "1/40th" of the regulated standard is misleading, because the water contains things other than tritium.

However, their objection is what's misleading.

The verified lab testing results show clearly that the ALPS filtration process is effective in reducing the levels of other radionuclides, but NOT the tritium.

The testing results show tritium concentration of around 150,000 Bq/L (see reference value in the final column).

As the regulatory limit is 60,000 Bq/L, to get to 1/40th of the regulatory limit (which is 1,500 Bq/L) we need to reduce the dilution by ~100 times.

This means mixing the ALPS-treated water with a LOT of fresh seawater, before the final discharge, to dilute the tritium.

Meanwhile, what was the total radioactivity contribution of the other radioisotopes? Well, let's add up...

C-14: 14.01 Bq/L
Co-60: 0.3764 Bq/L
Ni-63: 2.57 Bq/L
...and so on...

The non-tritium total is barely 20 Bq/L.

Before 100x dilution!

So after water has been diluted ~100x, to get tritium concentration to 1/40th of the regulatory limit, what's the total activity level in one liter of the water?

Tritium: 1500 Bq/L
All the other stuff: 0.2 Bq/L

FoE's concern is exaggerated and misleading.

Per IAEA: During discharge, the water is tested for other radionuclides after leaving the K4-B tanks (keep in mind, this is a verification of IAEA's verification of TEPCO's previous test results).

And then in the dilution facility, it is mixed with ~100x volume of seawater.

That's why the very last test on the discharge is the tritium monitor.

Every single other thing has been tested and verified multiple times by now.

The final FINAL check is whether the 100x dilution of fresh seawater has succeeded in getting tritium down to 1,500 Bq/L.

So, that's my summary of the main issues I found on the Friends of the Earth website.

They offer misleading, dishonest, and outdated commentary, while ignoring relevant, recent, detailed materials that directly address their concerns. It's not a quality source.

are you fucking kidding me I spent hours on this so I could write

"I gave it an read"

IN THE VERY FIRST TWEET asdfasdfkajsdf;lkasdfj

@Buki_YGV For example, I laughed out loud when I read this in an IAEA report.

How did they not anticipate that doing this without a broad explanation would make people even more concerned/confused?

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More from @pretentiouswhat

David Fishman

@pretentiouswhat

Sep 9

China's National Computing+Energy Strategy:

This is the layout for China's national computing strategy. Under the "East Data, West-Computer" 东数西算 slogan, high-priority tasks are handled by local clusters, while lower-priority tasks are outsourced to the energy-rich west.🧵

According to China's renewable consumption quota policy, all new data centers in these hub regions must buy at least 80% of their power from renewable sources.

This should be no problem for the blue hubs, located in renewables-rich regions. Might be trickier for red hubs.

Local municipalities might have their own, even more stringent requirements. Ningxia, for instance, requires new data centers be 100% green.

Good news for wind and solar developers, looking for a new offtake channel now that the FiTs are gone. No relief for coal power.

Read 6 tweets

David Fishman

@pretentiouswhat

Sep 5

Oh no...🤦‍♂️

This op-ed on Chinese cleantech overcapacity and competition was in The Wire China a few days ago. Unfortunately it contains many huge errors about Chinese cleantech sectors I can't ignore.

Paywalled. I'll provide screenshots and comment. 🧵
thewirechina.com/2025/08/31/bei…

[Oh, and this will be another long thread. It probably should have been a long-form essay instead, but I already wrote more than half of it before I realized how long it had gotten. Sorry in advance.]

This piece has problems immediately in the second paragraph, starting with:

"China's domestic demand for green tech has also peaked given the massive frontloading of installed capacity during the last few years, fueled by subsidies."

This has two big errors:

1. Chinese demand for green tech has not peaked, as evidenced by the steadily rising annual installed capacity figures for wind and solar. In fact, the installed capacity isn't just rising each year, but even the volume of new installs in a single year has grown every year from 2020-2024. Last year saw 277 GW of solar PV and 80 GW of wind.

Even now in 2025, with the offtake policy reforms starting from 1 June, it looks like solar is going to at least match the capacity growth from last year, while wind is actually going to EXCEED the capacity figures from last year. Domestic demand is strong. As for next year, we'll see what the market reforms bring.

2. Chinese newbuild solar and wind farms have not been subsidised for several years already now (since 2021). Over the past few years (until 1 June 2025) they were built on a feed-in-tariff (FiT) basis, which means they earn a fixed on-grid price from the gridco, independent of what's happening in power markets.

If market prices are high, the FiT may be less than the market rate. If market prices are low, the FiT may be more than the market rate. In a power market context, this is very different from a subsidy (although it could be construed as/look like a subsidy if market prices end up lower than the FiT rate for long periods).

Same second paragraph, continued:

"plummeting external and domestic demand have forced Chinese tech companies to compete aggressively to gain market share by cutting prices"

This is wrong on both the domestic and international counts. We already know from the last post domestic demand for wind and solar installs is still rising.

Meanwhile, in the international space, Chinese solar panel exports totaled 236 GW in 2024, rising 13% YoY. Wind turbine exports were 5.2 GW, rising 42% YoY.

In 2025 to date, completed *panel* exports have fallen 5%, but cell and wafer exports are rising dramatically, up 73% and 26% YTD, respectively. Exports to some countries are down, but they have been more than offset by rising exports to other countries and regions. Unfortunately, I don't have a source on YTD wind turbine exports for 2025 so can't comment there.

The point I'm trying to make here is that while there's oversupply relative to demand, it's not reasonable to attribute much - if any - of this supply-demand mismatch to the demand side. Demand is fine. The primary driver of the supply-demand mismatch is coming from the supply side.

Read 15 tweets

David Fishman

@pretentiouswhat

Sep 3

https://twitter.com/SecretaryWright/status/1962861731174097195

This is funny and sad. Secretary Wright's post is so silly and unsophisticated, and yet Twitter's Community Noters managed to find a way to miss the argument entirely and "rebut" with an even more unsophisticated response. It's just all so tiresome. 😞

But let's break it down🧵

https://twitter.com/SecretaryWright/status/1962861731174097195

First, this this broader idea about not conflating energy with electricity is fine, even good and necessary. 💯

Electricity is what's called "secondary energy", a specific kind of energy that has been transformed from "primary energy" sources like coal, oil, sunlight, etc.

In 2024, about 21% of global energy consumption was electricity. This is called "share of electricity in final energy consumption".

China's electricity share is ~28% and rising rapidly, among the top 10 worldwide.

#1 in the world is Norway, at ~47%.

yearbook.enerdata.net/electricity/sh…

Read 15 tweets

David Fishman

@pretentiouswhat

Aug 30

Okay. Here we have a boldly stated series of ideas about Chinese solar. They are unsupported and wrong.

But it's a good opportunity to talk through some issues re: how we integrate solar, and some of the important and hotly-debated considerations. So I'll try to make this educational, not merely critical.

Let's dig in...

1.
"local solar prodution numbers are based on models, not measurements"

No. Models are typically forward-looking, used for forecasting, not describing the past. No matter whether the solar generator is offtaking to a power user, a power retailer, or the gridco itself, there's a business transaction going on there. The generator is being compensated based on how much electricity they generate, so you need measurement (i.e. metering). Without metering each kWh of power, how could you run a power business? 🤨

In China, the grid companies (e.g. State Grid and Southern Grid) and their subsidiaries have a monopoly over installation, maintenance, and reading of metering infrastructure. They report monthly, quarterly, and annual data to the NEA/NBS (or to the China Electricity Council, which compiles data on behalf of the NEA and NBS). That's the source of the generation stats. You could find always find a way to criticize the measuring and reporting methodology I suppose, but it's definitely a measurement approach, not a modeling approach.

2.
"Industrial solar production numbers aren’t backed by enough batteries to match consumption curves..."

The claim I think being made here is China's daily power consumption demand curves are not matched to the generation profile of solar, thus solar production would need to be time-shifted to a different time of the day with batteries for those production numbers to be realistic. But since China doesn't have "enough batteries" to do this, then the solar production data must be fraudulent.

This is speculative nonsense. I know OP pulled this argument out of thin air, because it's a fairly complex argument that would necessitate validation via datasets, models, or market access he doesn't have. Are China's 95 GW/222GWh of batteries installed nationwide "enough"? How would anyone besides a Chinese power trader, regulator, or market dispatch modeler know? You need to have a robust, data-backed argument here, because you're seeking to overturn/debunk reported data from State Grid.

But even without a quant-based argument, it's just a weird argument for solar.

Solar produces power during the day, aligning with human activity, as we are generally diurnal creatures. So solar already produces when humans tend to consume power. At low penetration levels for solar (say, <10%) you hardly even need batteries to time-shift solar to another part of the day because solar's production can be fully absorbed by the typical daytime rise in power usage.

At higher penetration rates for solar, you actually will get to the point where production can't be absorbed by the daytime consumption spike and thus storage becomes not just "nice-to-have" but necessary to avoid wastage - unless you have very flexible generators that can easily ramp up and down (more on this later). This issue can arrive earlier for wind than for solar, because wind tends to produce more when humans are asleep and power loads are lower, but we're talking about solar here.

There are a few provinces where daytime overproduction of solar is a real problem, like Shandong...and they are indeed installing storage rapidly, as you would expect from what I have just described. But Shandong is a frontrunner. Nationwide, solar provided just 8% of China's generation mix last year, so its ability to be disuptive is muted, paradoxically both massive, but also mostly absorbed with only a few ripples by the overall vastness of the Chinese power sector.

3.
"...but solar producers don’t pay for increased costs and waste induced in competing sources."

In China, this is broadly true, but not true everywhere, as it depends entirely on local market design. China's design has evolved over time but remains reasonable for China.

Non-flexible power sources are typically forced to try to "get out of the way" in spot markets when variable generators are producing, to their disadvantage. They incur losses caused by the existence of the variable generator. Coal generators in particular suffer from very low annual operating hours in China, although this was historically mostly because the coal generation sector is overbuilt and cannibalizes itself, with the "shouldering-out" effect from renewables starting to play a material role only since ~2021.

Generally speaking, generators being pushed out by renewables will usually have the opportunity to make up the losses on power sales by serving as load-following generators or suppliers of capacity, earning revenues in the ancillary services market or capacity market, respectively. Gas-fired power plants and battery farms are very well suited to play this role. Coal-fired power and nuclear can do it as well, although they are less well-suited and may need retrofits to perform in this way. This is how we keep these generators whole and happy and prevent them from exiting the market - assuming we felt we needed them to stick around.

Of course, these ancillary services fees or capacity fees have to come from somewhere, which brings us back to the original issue - whether solar producers are paying for it or not. Broadly, there are two competing philosophies here: "causer pays" and "beneficiary pays". Sometimes it makes sense to force the renewables generators to pay, as their existence necessitated the load-following service ("causer pays"), and sometimes it makes more sense to socialize those costs to everyone who benefitted from the service provided ("beneficiary pays").

The question of how to allocate these costs is a major point of contention in power market and power system design all around the world right now, and there is no "right answer"; it really depends on your country's economic and energy priorities and the ability of each of the stakeholders to pay. Someone who tries to force a one-size-fits-all to this question is not going to make a very good analyst or advisor!

China deals with these costs in a China-specific way that makes sense for its needs in this moment: Capacity charges for backup coal, batteries, gas, are mostly socialized to end-users (i.e., beneficiary pays). Ancillary services are broadly socialized too. Wind and solar generators are mostly exempt and hardly held financially responsible for any of the losses they cause for other generators in the market. They command a low-carbon privilege and the "victims" are primarily coal-fired generators, as China is trying to peak emissions, so this shouldn't be surprising.

Passing charges to end users is a more socially acceptable approach when you've already been highly effective in keeping power rates low. It also helps to have a huge base of power customers to share the burden. Another benefit of China's scale.

Nuclear generators are basically shielded from this mess, since they sell almost all their power via annual contracts to either the grid or large end-users, guaranteeing their dispatch and sidestepping the gladiator arena of the short-term markets. Even if they have to compete in spot markets someday though, they'll likely be fine, since they should be able to handily out-compete coal-fired generators and consistently earn dispatch. Chinese nuclear is cheap.

Read 5 tweets

David Fishman

@pretentiouswhat

Aug 26

Translation of key portions of the public statement from China's National Energy Administration (NEA) July press conference re: power supply and demand during the 2025 summer peak.

I'll add comments inline [like this] and after.
Translation next post. 🧵
nea.gov.cn/20250731/d34b8…

These comments were from Deputy Director Liu Mingyang of the NEA's Electric Power Department:

"Friends from the media, good morning. Next, I will introduce the power supply situation during this summer's peak demand period.

First, power loads during the summer peak repeatedly set new record highs. In July, peak temperatures were seen, with most provinces experiencing average temperatures 1-2 degrees C higher than the same period in the past. Together with the end of the rainy season in the south, the weather has been hot and humid.

GDP grew by 5.3% YoY in the first half of the year, rapidly driving power loads higher, increasing by over 200 GW versus the end of June. The national peak power load successively saw new records on July 4th, 7th, 16th, and 17th, exceeding 1500 GW and finally reaching a peak of 1508 GW, which is 57 GW higher than the peak load record last year. To date, 19 provinces have seen record-high peak loads, including Jiangsu, Shandong, and Guangdong, breaking records 46 times."

"Second, power supply across the country has been stable overall. In the first half of the year, over 200 GW of new generating capacity was brought online, including 30 GW of supporting and regulating power sources [DF: here, this means dispatchable capacity] including hydropower, gas-fired power, and coal-fired power. Three new cross-region transmission corridors were brought online, increasing cross-region transmission capacity by 16 GW. [DF: this means new UHV lines]

In July, another 10 GW of additional dispatchable capacity was connected to the grid, further strengthening the power supply guarantee. Since summer's start, all kinds of supporting and regulating power have been fully operating. Primary fuels including thermal coal and natural gas have been amply supplied, ensuring stable and orderly national power supply, with only Sichuan needing to implement demand response measures on the evening of the 17th. This demonstrates the system has withstood its first round of high-temperature, high-load challenges this summer."

[DF: This is the first I hear of this, but if Sichuan was truly the only province to use its demand response mechanism during the July peak, then it's quite impressive. I'm quite curious how August has been so far...I have heard some buzz that we might have set ANOTHER new peak a few days ago. Guess we'll find out in the August press conference later this week.]

Read 7 tweets

David Fishman

@pretentiouswhat

Aug 25

⚡️China Power Consumption Update July 2025 ⚡️

Wow.

Chinese power consumption soared to a staggering all-time high of 1,023 TWh (or over 1 petawatt hour) in July 2025.

This blows the previous one-month consumption record out of the water. 🧵

Industrial power consumption was up 4.7% YoY, rising to almost 600 TWh in the monthly of July.

Industrial sector performance continues to strengthen after weaker growth in previous months due to the tariff threat, but still a touch sluggish. Movement in the right direction tho.

Meanwhile, power consumption in the services sector was up a very strong 10.7% YoY in July to 208 TWh. I had to revise my chart's y-axis, as one-month power consumption cracked 200 TWh for the first time.

That's more than 2x the services power consumption of July 2019.

Read 10 tweets

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