Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

You can paste full URL like: https://x.com/threadreaderapp/status/1644127596119195649
or just the ID like: 1644127596119195649

How to get URL link on X (Twitter) App

  1. On the Twitter thread, click on or icon on the bottom
  2. Click again on or Share Via icon
  3. Click on Copy Link to Tweet
  4. Paste it above and click "Unroll Thread"!
  5. More info at Twitter Help
David Fishman Profile picture
@pretentiouswhat
Dec 3, 2024 • 31 tweets • 16 min read • Read on X
Scrolly
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
Image
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with David Fishman

David Fishman Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @pretentiouswhat

David Fishman Profile picture
Oct 15
I've just wrapped a 10 days on the North Yunnan loop route, hitting Dali, Lijiang, Diqing/Shangri-la, and Nujiang. Some of the most beautiful places I've seen in China.

Lots of essay content from the trip coming soon, but here's a summary of the route first, 1 tweet per city.🧵 Image
...oh, and I'm writing this partly as a travel report/guide for others who might like to do a similar tour in the future, and partly as a foundation for the essay content that's coming next.

So I'll try to provide both travel details and some background info for each spot... Image
Dali: Dali was the only city on this trip that I'd visited before. It was the last stop on my loop tour but it could have been the first too, as it has many flights from everywhere and high-speed rail from Kunming.

Dali City has just 660k people (versus the greater Dali Prefecture with 3.2m). Like most Chinese cities of its size, it has both a busy, loud, crowded old city section, but also a clean, tidy, comfortable modern city section. The modern city has skyscrapers, shopping malls, a university, some manufacturing industry, AND a flourishing tourism sector based around Erhai Lake with its great views of Cangshan and Jizushan (mountains). It also boasts several train stations, an airport, and good highway connectivity.

Dali is a T4 city in Yicai's city rankings, coming in at #179, which is actually very close to the median (169). If it werent for the lake and the tourism, it would be just another moderately-developed medium-sized city. But it has that lake...

I feel like I'm supposed to be a snob and say I don't like Dali because it's too touristy, but I actually think it's still a good vibe, especially in the evenings when the tourists go back to their hotels and stop clogging up the roads with their rented convertibles. It IS very commercialized, and I don't recommend staying near the ancient city or even on that side of Erhai Lake (the west side), but I'd still love to own a vacation home here someday, halfway up one of the mountains with a view of the lake and the rolling hills.Image
Image
Read 10 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Sep 26
I've already seen many helpful summaries of Xi's announcements at the UN Climate Summit regarding China's new emissions goals, so I won't repeat them here. Go read them!

I will focus my analysis on the power item specifically; namely: 3600 GW of wind and solar by 2035. 🧵
This was described as a 6x escalation over the 2020 numbers. This is basically correct.

China had roughly 535 GW of wind and solar at the end of 2020 so 6x would be 3210. So actually, 3600 GW is 6.7x the 2020 numbers.

China today has roughly 1600 GW of wind and solar.
To get from 1600 to 3600 over 10 years implies average capacity growth of 200 GW per year.

At first blush, this indeed seems very conservative. After all, China added 360 GW of wind and solar in 2024 and should be somewhere in that neighborhood (maybe slightly less) this year.
Read 13 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Sep 22
A fun thing about Chinese rivers I learned from my research last week:

This map shows the ancient courses of the Yellow River (in blue) and the now-disappeared Ji River (in red). The upper blue line the Yellow route during the Western Han. The lower is its modern path. 🧵 Image
Actually, the Western Han route of the Yellow is one of the MANY known routes it has taken over the last 2000 years, as you can see from this image.

From 1128-1855, the Yellow spent 700+ years flowing in an entirely different direction - southeast. During that period, it merged with the Huai River near modern-day Huai'an in Jiangsu, and then traveled northeast again to dump into the ocean. The silt deposits around its estuary pushed the coastline out dozens of kilometers over those 700 years.Image
That lake system you can see at the bottom of the map above didn't exist at the time. That's Hongze Lake 洪泽湖 (literally: "flood marsh lake") which formed because after the Yellow River's course changed in 1855, the Huai River, lacking the volume of water the Yellow had previously provided, silted up itself, lost its exit to the ocean, formed Hongze Lake, and ended up finding a new outlet connecting south to the Yangtze near Yangzhou, turning the Huai River into a Yangtze tributary, rather then a Yellow tributary.

The Huai only regained its outlet to the ocean in the 1950s when the PRC built the North Jiangsu Main Irrigation Canal.Image
Read 13 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
Sep 20
Involution 内卷 or 卷 doesn't have to be a hard word, but I keep seeing it misused in China commentary, e.g. this article, which I also have mixed feedback on.

Simply: Involution is the state of intense competition AND the symptoms of that competition.🧵
csis.org/blogs/trustee-…
Quick history lesson:

内卷 (nei juan) is the original word for involution used today to describe a state of intense and fruitless competition. It literally translates as "inward coiling" and was borrowed from the anthropology field.

It began to see its new use in China around 2019-2020, initially as a noun. Students and young people feeling exhausted by intense competition in school, for jobs, and society in general described those environments as having 内卷.
The key point is the competition. So in 2020 you'd see usages like "job market involution" (职场内卷)" society involution" (社会内卷).

But the full word is less common these days vs. the slangier word for involution, which sees the "内” portion dropped in favor of just "卷". Image
Read 13 tweets
David Fishman Profile picture
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.🧵 Image
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 Profile picture
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).Image
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

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

Send Email!

:(