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David Fishman Profile picture
@pretentiouswhat
Dec 3, 2024 • 31 tweets • 16 min read • Read on X
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On the morning of November 28, China's newest nuclear power plant, a Hualong One reactor at Zhangzhou in Fujian, connected to the grid just just 61 months after construction.

How does China build these so fast? Let's review the timeline. 🧵 Image
The first thing to know about Zhangzhou NPP is it's NOT a new reactor. Actually this thing has been planned for AGES.

The first mention I can find of it goes back to 2007, when Guodian (one of the plant owners) set up a Project Office in Zhangzhou.

We learn from this very early notice that the site plans to use AP1000 reactors imported from Westinghouse. Keep in mind, the Westinghouse AP1000 export deal had basically JUST been signed at this point. The first unit at Sanmen wasn't even under construction yet. This was a wild time...there were dozens of AP1000s sites all across China being planned all at once.

sxb.nea.gov.cn/dtyw/hyxx/2023…Image
In March 2009, the Guodian Zhangzhou Project Office publishes its first public consultation notice. It has contracted the Shanghai Nuclear Engineering Research and Design Institute (SNERDI) to do an environmental impact assessment report for the site selection phase.

We learn that they plan to pour concrete in August 2011 on the first of six reactors, across two phases, with grid connection targeted for August 2016.
hbj.zhangzhou.gov.cn/cms/siteresour…Image
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By August 2009, the second public consultation letter is issued, summarizing the results from the environmental impact assessment and feasibility report, which both point to the site's suitability for a nuclear power plant with at least 4 AP1000 reactors.
hbj.zhangzhou.gov.cn/cms/siteresour…Image
Following a Project Site Suitability Assessment Meeting in December 2010, China's Nuclear Energy Association announces that the site selection phase is "basically complete", and Guodian will now proceed to pre-construction work (site leveling, connecting utilities, etc.)

china-nea.cn/site/content/2…
china-nea.cn/site/content/8…Image
In March, 2011, the earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan derail everything. All site approvals are frozen and construction work at all Chinese sites is halted. Incidentally, I have just arrived in Beijing for my study abroad in college. I see the accident on the news.

At the end of 2011, the CNNP Guodian Zhangzhou Energy Company is formally established, with Guodian as the minority shareholder (49%) to CNNC (51%). Clearly they are expecting to move ahead with this project, even if things are stalled for the moment.
tianyancha.com/company/274659…Image
Everything stays frozen in place for about 2 years, across most the industry. The NEA/NNSA are trying to figure out how to proceed. Nobody is building anything.

Nothing nuclear anyway. In 2013, CNNP Guodian Zhangzhou Energy Company, perhaps out of pure boredom, goes ahead and builds the 20 MW Qingjing offshore wind farm, just off the coast of their stalled nuclear power plant.Image
Things start moving again at the end of the year though. In November 2013, the NEA gives Zhangzhou approval to go ahead with preliminary site work. In August 2014, a new environmental impact report is released for public comment (I suppose the report was redone following Fukushima).

Also in August 2014, the Ministry of Land and Natural Resources grants formal approval for the land to be used for a nuclear power plant.
cnnp.com.cn/cnnp/cydwzd62/…
news.ijjnews.com/system/2014/08…
cnnp.com.cn/cnnp/zyyw73/yw…
Not much news in 2015 - China Energy Net reports that the project is now in its "initiation stage" and the project owner submits its Phase 1 Facilities Safety Analysis Report to the national regulator for review.

At this point, the site is STILL supposed to be 6 AP1000s.
A bombshell arrives in January 2016, when CNNC, Guodian, and the Fujian Development and Reform Commission formally petition the NEA to allow them to change their site to use domestic Hualong One reactor technology, instead of the long-planned AP1000s.

At this point, the Hualong One is under construction at two sites in Fujian and Guangxi, respectively, with no operating reference reactor. The AP1000 is under construction at two sites in Zhejiang and Shandong, respectively, also with no operating reference reactor.

The reactor change application is approved in October 2016, when Zhangzhou Units 1 and 2 are formally cleared by the NEA and NDRC to move ahead building Hualong One reactors. A construction date is not set.
Chinese media The Paper summarizes the situation:

"Zhangzhou was originally planning to build AP1000 PWRs imported from the United States. The AP1000 is an advanced, passively safe PWR technology imported from the USA's Westinghouse, with the construction of the world's first plant at Sanmen in Zhejiang Province beginning in March 2009. The project has been delayed due to a series of difficulties in design, manufacturing, and construction that arose in the course of this first-of-a-kind reactor. This poor progress has also blocked the approval of subsequent AP1000 projects, of which the Zhangzhou project was one. In January 2016, CNNC, Guodian, and the Fujian DRC jointly submitted a letter to the NEA to change the plant to the Hualong One technology path."

m.thepaper.cn/kuaibao_detail…
Things go quiet again for 2 years. No new reactors can begin construction until it looks like their reference plants are completed. Zhangzhou Units 1 and 2 are considered the demonstration units for "Hualong One batch construction".

In October 2018, they are given a construction start date of October 2019, with planned grid connection in June 2024.

cnnp.com.cn/cnnp/zyyw73/yw…Image
On October 17, 2019, Zhangzhou Unit 1 pours its first barrel of safety-related concrete (First Concrete Date, or FCD). Construction!

It has taken nearly 10 years to get to this point, although to be fair, a lot of time was spent waiting and duplicating work previously completed...Image
From this point on, China demonstrates what it does better than anyone else: building really big, really expensive, really complex infrastructure, really goddamn fast.

One year later (November 3, 2020) all sub-surface work is completed.

cnnc.com.cn/eportal/ui?pag…Image
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The Zhangzhou company chairman is quoted in local news saying that most of his 10,000 construction employees opted to remain on the site and work through the early stages of the pandemic, rather than go home for the Chinese New Year in spring 2020. That's...a lot of people.
In April 2021, The Paper does a feature on Zhangzhou's metalworking team leader, Mr. Zhang Guobin, a 37-year construction veteran with 13 years of nuclear metalworking experience across 3 sites. He manages of an onsite team of 80 people who do nothing but bend and shape metal for Zhangzhou.

He says at the start of the project, he had just 12 guys, so they had to work 12-hour relay shifts to keep production going 24/7, but things are a little more relaxed now as the team has grown.
m.thepaper.cn/baijiahao_1243…Image
By August 201, the concrete pours for the internal structure of Unit 1 are complete. From the outside, the progress is rapid and visible. Unit 1 is on the left. The containment steel liner is being assembled nearby. Image
On October 27, 2021, the steel containment liner is lifted and installed into place.

baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=171477488…Image
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No major milestones are achieved for a while (although may smaller ones are hit).

The next big news comes in June 2022, when the containment shell steel pre-tensioning work is completed. Image
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On February 17, 2023, the containment building is "capped off" with the top module lifted and dropped into place. At this point, the NSSS equipment has already been dropped in and civil construction is mostly finished.

We are now into the installation and testing/inspection phase, and most of the work is internal. From the outside, the plant looks mostly complete.

news.cn/fortune/2023-0…Image
In November 2023, the "cold testing" at Zhangzhou 1 is complete and the plant is considered to have exited the installation phase and now entered the "comissioning" phase.

caea.gov.cn/n6760338/n6760…Image
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The next big task/milestone was "hot testing", which took about 6 months and finished in May 2024.

sthjt.fujian.gov.cn/zwgk/ywxx/hyj/…Image
...and that cleared the way for the first loading of uranium fuel. The regulator approved Zhangzhou's first fuel load on October 13, 2024.

This is basically them saying "load your fuel and proceed as you like". It's an operations permit.

finance.people.com.cn/n1/2024/1013/c…Image
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Following that, the plant smoothly moved to first criticality, first power output, and grid connection by the end of November 2024.

After 168 hours (7 days) it will be declared "fully commercially operational".

Zhangzhou 2 (on the right) is about 6-12 months behind. Image
So what's the secret? Clearly China doesn't have a shorter pre-construction cycle compared to other countries around the world.

If anything, it's longer, more tedious, and even MORE bureaucratic than its peers. Hopefully Zhangzhou is an outlier, because 10 years is brutal!
Even if you don't understand nuclear development at all, you should be able to identify the Construction and Installation phases of Zhangzhou 1 as Extremely Goddamn Fast.

They went from a leveled site to a complete shell in less than 36 months, with the major work in 24.
When you borrow USD 5B to build these things. the interest is insane. Time is literally money. Even at very favorable interest rates, every single day over the construction schedule is a million dollars of interest...and a million dollars of lost power sales.
China builds these things by throwing 10,000 people at the program, like ants coming together to move an elephant. There probably a dozen different construction companies onsite at any single time (often sister companies or subsidiaries of the project owner).
Every skilled laborer onsite has been doing this job, and just this job, for years, maybe decades. And yeah, they'll do a 12-hour 2-man relay to ensure 24h production of metal parts...

Every team leader, every shift boss, is a veteran of multiple recent reactor builds...
If there are issues during installation or comissioning...the manufacturer is in the indutrial park down the street, or in the neighboring province. They'll prototype a new part, iterate it a few times, and get you the fixed piece shipped to the site within weeks, or days...
You can blame the NRC for hamstringing the US industry, and demand they streamline your regulatory processes and approvals, speed up permitting, remove red tape...all you like...China also has these headaches.

It'll help. But unless also you have workers and producers and team leaders able to do all of what I just described, you aren't going to build nuclear power plants in 62 months like China is, and will continue to do.

At a pace of 8-10 per year. For the next 3 decades.

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More from @pretentiouswhat

David Fishman Profile picture
May 5
This post got me thinking about the interesting way small Chinese cities self-identify vs. the city that governs them.

The Yangtze River Delta is full of small cities with strong cultural and economic identities that have weak or zero feeling of kinship with their parent... 🧵
I've mentioned before in other essays how discussions of Chinese cities are usually focused on prefecture-level cities (地级市).

There are 337 prefecture-level cities in China, but IMO it's more appropriate to mentally organize them as "prefectures" in English (that is, an administrative tier smaller than a province and larger than a city).

For ease of governance purposes, many cities and counties in China are grouped together into "prefectures" in ways that aren't linguistically, historically, or culturally coherent; often they are simply geographically adjacent.

In this example, Robert was visiting Fenghua, which until 2016 was a county-level city governed by Ningbo (it is now a full district of Ningbo).

If we look at the administrative map below, we can see the denser urban area of what most people would recognize as "downtown Ningbo" (Jiangbei and Zhenhai) along with a large halo of suburban and exurban regions also governed by Ningbo. This is why I prefer a word like "prefecture" to translate 地级市. These areas not continuous urban agglomerations.

This thread is a deliberately nerdy look at Chinese administrative geography, but I think the outcome is helpful for understanding why people from small cities like Yuyao might not answer a simple question the way outsiders expect, and how we can think about these cities from a development perspective when we visit.Image
The small city of Yuyao (population ~1.3 million) in the northern part of Ningbo prefecture, is a particularly vivid example of strong place-identity. Just south across Hangzhou Bay from Shanghai, Yuyao's downtown is physically separated from Ningbo proper by about 70 kilometers. So...it is "part of" Ningbo?

*deep breath*

The modern-day prefecture-level city immediately west of Ningbo is Shaoxing (best known today for Shaoxing cooking wine). In pre-modern times, Yuyao (余姚) was governed as a county under Shaoxing - whether as Shaoxing Prefecture or the Shaoxing Circuit, depending on the era - during the Song, Ming and Qing Dynasties. During the Republican era (1911-1949) it belonged to various Zhejiang provincial offices, but *never* to one headquartered in Ningbo.

After the Communist victory in 1949, Yuyao became part of Zhejiang’s Second Special District, which had its administrative seat in Ningbo. It held that status from 1949 to 1964, before once again being reassigned to Shaoxing, this time under the Shaoxing Special District. When modern administrative reform began in 1983, Yuyao was transferred to the newly established prefecture‑level city of Ningbo, arguably the first time in its history that it was formally "part of" Ningbo (or perhaps the second, if one counts 1949–1964).

Following the sustained economic growth in the area (Yuyao is one of the ten richest county-level cities in China) the county was upgraded in 1985 to county-level status, This concluded Yuyao's long historical evolution to its current position: a county-level city administered by Ningbo.

Compared to Ningbo, Yuyao maintains a distinct history, economy, culture, and even dialectal markers. Yuyao and Ningbo speak mutually intelligible varieties of Taihu Wu, but Yuyao's speech is considered by locals as being closer to Shaoxing than Ningbo.

All of that makes the answer to the next question more obvious: If you ask someone from Yuyao "are you from Ningbo?" what answer do you think you're going to get...?
Read 9 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Apr 25
I rented a place for 5 days in this lovely seaside apartment complex in Bo'ao, Qionghai City, Hainan.

The same housing complex also had 12 lovely, unsold luxury villas, facing the ocean.

They were obviously abandoned and unlocked, so I gave myself a tour...😁

A fun thread. 🧵
As you can see, these units were designed to be quite fancy, with 4-5 bedrooms, pools, balconies facing every direction, a vaulted ceiling in the living room, even an elevator...

This complex was completed in 2013. The apartments all sold alright. But not a single villa... Image
Image
After my self-guided tour, I walked back into the inhabited part of the complex and bumped into an middle-aged man from Beijing (maybe 65ish), energetically doing his morning stretches while listening to a program on a portable radio at roughly 1000 decibels. I decided to ask if he knew what's up.

"HELLO SIR GOOD MORNING!"
"GOOD MORNING!"

"CAN I ASK YOU SOME QUESTIONS?"
He blessedly turned down the radio to a more humane level. "Sure. What about?"

"You live here, right? Do you know what's the deal with these villas? Are they all empty?"
"Yes, they're all empty. No one lives there. I've stayed here the last few weeks. We are traveling up the coast from Sanya, trying out the different areas to see where we would like to buy a property"

Image: Beijing uncle in his natural element (calisthenics and deafening radio)Image
Read 8 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Apr 5
Just back from 10 days in Hainan. A few practical observations on transportation to/around the island - this seems as good a place as any to start a place review. Hope it's helpful to anyone planning a trip.

There are currently three commercial airports in Hainan: Sanya, Haikou, and Qionghai.

The first two have daily connections to pretty much any large city in China, plus a handful of international flights. Qionghai (琼海) is much smaller, with only a few flights each day, built primarily to serve visitors to the Bo'ao Forum ("Asia's Davos") which just wrapped up last week.

There is also a new commercial airport under construction in Danzhou (儋州), an industrial hub on the northwest coast, scheduled for completion by ~2030.

Bonus: If you fly to Hainan, there's a good chance you'll get to try Hainan Airlines, widely considered China's best airline.Image
I flew in and out of Sanya Phoenix Airport, which is a rare example of an airport in China that feels undersized for its passenger load (most airports feel...very overbuilt).

There’s a brand-new Terminal 3 (opened Feb 2026) meant to ease perssure on Terminal 2 (2018) and Terminal 1 (built 1994, expanded 2011). But when I passed through, Terminal 1 still felt overloaded and disorganized - and this wasn't even peak season. March is a shoulder season before the summer lull (rain and typhoons).

But even the creaky old Sanya Terminal 1 still had better dining options than Shanghai’s Pudong, which remains an utter disgrace of a flagship international airport no matter how shiny it looks, and I will never stop hating on it until it does better.

Image: Sanya Airport Terminal 1Image
While trying to understand why the Sanya airport feels so congested, I went down a rabbit hold and found some fascinating backstory:

The core issue is actually simple: Sanya is a single-runway airport. No matter how many terminals it has, it will always be bottlenecked by this. At 22 million annual passengers, is already the third-busiest single-runway airport in China, behind only Xiamen and Urumqi (both much larger cities than Sanya btw).

The long-term plan has always been for Sanya to build a new airport with multiple runways and and greatly expanded capacity. The new Terminal 3 is mostly about buying time to do this. This wasn't supposed to still be a problem in 2026. There was a scandal...

See, last decade, there WAS a plan to build a massive new airport on an offshore man-made island in Hongtang Bay, with 3-4 runways and long-term capacity of 50-60m passengers. It required enormous land reclamation. Eager to move fast, reclamation began in 2016, before the final environmental approvals were granted. This classic 先建后批 model used to be very standard. Until one day it wasn't.

In 2017, during the first round of Central Environmental Inspections, the project was publicly identified as an illegal, unapproved reclamation project, with construction ordered to stop. Further inspection found the project interfered with habitats of protected ecosystems and species, including coral reefs and the migration path for endangered Chinese white dolphins (which environmental NGO groups had been complaining about for several years already as well). The Hongtang Bay airport project eventually ended up being canceled entirely.

Hongtang Bay became a symbol of a broader shift in attitude towards and environmental governance on large-scale land reclamation projects. Many similar projects in Hainan (though none this large) were affected by the 2016-2018 nationwide environmental crackdowns from. We would see a few more of them later on the trip.

It's worth noting that although Hongtang Bay airport was formally owned by Sanya government-backed companies, it was widely considered to be strategically controlled by HNA Group (owner of Hainan Airlines) executing a province-level airport and industrial zone plan.

HNA Group was NOT an SOE at any government level. But as a quasi-national champion, it often behaved like one, with deep local governance alignment and extensive state bank support.

In the end, all formal enforcement actions were directed only at the project SPVs, with mostly implicit reputational damage to HNA. But this is considered one of the major events that contributed to HNA Group's fall from grace, and eventual collapse and bankruptcy restructuring in 2020-21.

Image 1: Artist's rendering of Hongtang Bay Airport
Image 2: Satellite view of Hongtang Bay Airport site construction 2015-2019
Image 3: Drone footage of reclaimed land effortsImage
Image
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Read 10 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Mar 12
For my own education, I've been trying to make sense of China's industry exposure to the Iran conflict and Hormuz closure. I wanted to share what I have now:

My Level-1 taxonomy includes 5 buckets of products that are one conversion step away from crude oil or natural gas:🧵 Image
Bucket 1: Refinery‑derived, petroleum‑based finished products (both fuels + non‑fuels)

I defined "finished refinery products" as mostly a pricing channel here. This includes the fuels: gasoline, diesel/gasoil, jet fuel/kerosene, fuel oil/bunker, and petroleum coke as well as non-fuels: bitumen/asphalt and base oils/lubes/solvents.

China refines most of its gasoline/diesel/jet fuel domestically, and has substantial policy levers (large strategic crude reserves and commercial inventories, export quotas) to stabilize local availability. The short-/midterm effect is more likely to be moderately higher costs, rather than shortages, as long as the reserves hold out (and they should be good for quite a few months). Anode-grade petcoke for aluminum smelting is a potential niche outlier here, as there is more import exposure, but that's really it.

Meanwhile, markets for non‑fuel refinery outputs like bitumen are slower‑moving and simpler to buffer via demand rescheduling and/or substitution, with moderate risk mainly via general price levels.

This is the least-concern bucket overall IMO.
Bucket 2: Refinery‑derived, petroleum‑based industrial feedstocks (not fuels)

This is where it seems the petroleum side of things gets trickier. The main products here are naphtha, condensate, and reformate. If crude gets expensive and/or scarce, these feedstocks get expensive and/or scarce. The most critical one right now is naphtha.

Natural gas cracking involves heating an appropriate feedstock (usually naphtha, LPG, or ethane) until it thermally breaks down into the desired olefins (propylene, ethylene) which are themselves feedstocks for a huge range of things, most notably plastics. Asia's cracker system is heavily reliant on naphtha as a feedstock and the current disruption to naphtha supply out of the Persian Gulf has already prompted declarations of force majeure at crackers across the region. Like all of Asia, China is currently facing considerable physical supply risk AND price risk for naphtha.

China is not as fragile of a market as ASEAN, but it’s not immune either. Roughly half of China’s naphtha consumption is imported (15-17 million mt last year), and about 40% of those imports are Middle East–sourced. That implies ~20% of total naphtha supply is structurally exposed to a prolonged Hormuz disruption, forcing either expensive replacements or reduced cracker runs (demand destruction).
Read 7 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Feb 10
China’s coal economics are shifting from "generate electricity → get paid" to a messy stack of flexibility revenues, grid services, and capacity payments.

The age of simple coal baseload cash cows is already over. But that doesn't mean it's easy to kick out coal. 🧵
In a increasingly variable renewables-heavy system, only the coal plants that can ramp, cycle, and stay available on demand will survive. And the plants China's building these days are *tricked out*.

I'm talking lower minimum stable load (20-30%), faster ramping capability (in MW/minute), reduced hot/warm/cold start times, reduced start-up fuel burn, world-class fuel efficiency (<250g of coal/kWh), better thermal cycle stress management, modern DCS for better turbine/governor control and AGC tracking for ancillary revenues, ultra-supercritical heat rates...the works.

Older subcritical coal plants weren’t built for this new world. Those that can retrofit affordably will. But many can’t retrofit cheaply. They’ll be pushed out as the system prioritizes flexible, fast-response assets.
Ironically, building a new coal plant in 2026 gives you a competitive edge.

You'll enjoy higher efficiency, lower minimum load, better ramping, better grid-service revenue...printing a license to outlive the older fleet.

Unless there's an outright ban, building will continue.
Read 5 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Feb 9
Some wonky add-on thoughts about this China green electricity/decarbonization of aluminum FT story:

1. Electrolytic aluminum smelting is one of the most energy-intensive processes in the world.

There's a joke that aluminum is "solidified electricity", and it's kinda true. 🧵
2. For this reason, globally, about half of all primary aluminum is produced using captive onsite power plants, and roughly two‑thirds of that captive capacity is subcritical coal.

This is the core reason aluminum has such a stubborn emissions profile.

nature.com/articles/s4155…Image
3. China has imposed a renewable portfolio standard (RPS) on electrolytic aluminum since 2024. This is a minimum renewable power consumption quota.

Here's my thread on RPS from last year as a refresher if you forgot.

Read 11 tweets

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