The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Is Chinese Nuclear Tech Better Than the US? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: July 30, 2024

*This video was recorded in mid-July, prior to Peter departing on his backpacking trip. I've been asked to address the claim that China has surpassed the US as a nuclear power. On paper, China might have the upper hand, but that doesn't always translate to real life. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/is-chinese-nuclear-tech-better-than-the-us

Hey everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from a stormy day in Colorado. Hopefully, we don't have a lightning strike that's, you know, close enough to get exciting. Anyway, we're taking an entry from the Ask Peter Forum today. Specifically, there have been reports recently that the United States is falling behind China when it comes to nuclear technology, and what are my general thoughts on that? This is one of those very yes and no, requires a lot of breakdown. So, first of all, let's start about the places where the Chinese are doing very well. primarily has to do with nuclear power generation and especially the deployment of new nuclear power

facilities. Since 1973 with the Three Mile Island plant, the United States has really only built one nuclear facility. That's the local plant was built by a southern company. And one of the ongoing issues that they faced was talent and labor. When you don't build a new nuclear power facility for, you know, 50 years, not a lot of people go into that business. And after 50 years, for everyone who was in it has pretty much retired. So they're having to reinvent a few skill sets and go after former Navy nuclear engineers, people who worked on submarines, for example, in order to fill out the ranks. And that is very, very expensive.

Compare that to China, which is in the process of building out what will be easily the world's largest nuclear fleet. And so there's a whole generation of nuclear engineers and construction folks in China who can do that stuff. So it's not that Americans can't do it or that we've lost the technology. but we've lost the labor force. And so from a practical point of view, that's almost as bad. But do please keep in mind that the type of nuclear reactors that are being used in both places

are typically light water reactors. And the technology behind those digs back literally to the 1950s. So yes, the Chinese now are developing a much more robust and redundant labor force than the United States has for a 1950s and 1960s technology. But that's not the same to say that they're getting ahead. that's a different topic. If, if the United States decides to get back into nuclear generated power, the way to do it is probably going to be something called small modular reactors.

Now, the upside of a large nuclear facility is it can generate more than a gigawatt in a single place, which is enough to power a lot of cities, for example. The problem is, of course, with the light water reactor technology, you can have a meltdown. That's basically a light version of what, happened at Three Mile Island. Chernobyl, of course, is the more infamous familiar or Fukushima and Japan. And so people generally don't like to have those things near their cities. That's the primary reason why the United States hasn't built any in so long. With China, where public support is less of a concern and public safety is even less, you know, they're building them like Matt.

The advantage of a small modular reactor is that it basically fits on the back of a truck and you can plug it into an existing system like, say, at a decommission coal plant, and you can move them around, they're mobile, to wherever they needed. So they are potentially a really good partner for things like wind and solar power with their intermittency, or if you just want to decarbonize, you take it to one of those decommissioned coal plants that has all the wires, all the connections, all the transformers, and you just basically park it in a parking lot and run it. It's potentially a real game changer.

The problem is building the problem. prototype. There was a company a year or two ago that I was watching pretty closely that was trying to get into that space, but last November, the contracts fell apart, and it's basically back to the drawing board in many ways. There are some other companies that are working on it, but none of them, I think, are in a position where they might have a working prototype within the next three to five years. And if that's the situation, you're not going to have mass manufacture of the technology within a decade. So it's interesting, but it's not really going anywhere. And to my knowledge, the Chinese aren't pushing in that direction because they are perfectly capable of ignoring safety

constraints and public relations constraints and just proceeding with the big stuff. There's also the possibility of going with what's called a fourth generation reactor that uses a pebble bed. The French are working on that. But again, we're not to the point yet where we have a functional prototype. So it's too soon to draw any conclusions there. And even if the prototype's perfect, you're talking about 2035 to 2040 before any real construction gets going. And then there's weapons. Obviously, nuclear material is used for more than just electricity. You can also make really nice fancy mushroom clouds out of it.

This is an issue where there's a security component, obviously, but this is also an issue where the United States isn't going anywhere. The United States was not simply the first country to build and use an atomic weapon. We were also the first one to do a hydrogen weapon. And American weapons are probably, I say probably, because we haven't used one in a while, just hunky-dory. We've just figured out how to use things like computer testing to do all the important work to make sure that the arsenal is good. And when it comes to spinning down

the reactor cores every once in a while to make sure that the fuel hasn't degraded, the United States remains the top on the world there. Now, the only way to know for sure is to get involved in a broad scale, international, intercontinental nuclear missile exchange. So, you know, that is a test that we really don't want to do. But when it comes to security issues, I have no doubt that American weapons remain the best in the world. From the last time we got to peek under the hood of the Russians who used to be number two. They've probably slipped from number two to something like number nine. They still have a lot of warheads.

The question is whether the warheads have degraded and considering how everything else in the Russian arsenal is doing very badly in the Ukraine war, would be really surprised if this was like the one thing that still worked well in the Russian military. That doesn't mean we should bait the Russians into a nuclear war. However, it does mean if one were to happen, the blast radiuses of those bombs would probably be significantly less than nameplate. it would still be a bad day.

As for China, the Chinese only have a couple hundred deliverable nuclear weapons. They're in the process of building that force out, and their goal is to reach some form of at least numerical parity over the course of the next 15 years. There are a lot of hoops they have to jump through on that, most of which have to do with precision manufacturing. When you have a plutonium bomb, you have to build what's called an implosive core,

if you want a really good one. And that means you have to have a series of explosions that go on around the core all at the same time, pressing all in the same direction towards the center with the same amount of force that forces the core to collapse in on itself and then forces the various plutonium atoms into each other's faces to trigger a reaction. The Chinese can do this, but they're having problems doing it at scale. And even if you can achieve that, you then need to put it onto a miniaturized system, can launch it and a ruggedized system so it can survive launch and re-entry. It's not that the

Chinese are slackers on any of these categories, but doing all of it together and the same thing is literally rocket science. And the Chinese have never been involved in a military conflict with anyone where their rockets have really been tested in anger. So we just don't know. But if they do fail, it won't be from a lack of trying.