China has enormous internal demand for energy so of course they are going to be building a lot of reactors, the way they do things I rather suspect they probably bought the technology from Russia in the first place, Russia is not the country trying to limit or control or contain China, quite the opposite.... they are even helping them with a early warning air defence system to make them less vulnerable to surprise strategic attacks.
They have already traded rocket engine design for micro electronics technology, so cooperation in nuclear reactors and EMALS cats makes sense too...
While not individually as powerful as the US carriers it'll only take a couple of sister ships or larger cousins (& associated escorts) to make it very difficult for US to achieve even a temporary local superiority anywhere near the Chinese coast.
Considering Chinas situation and interests some MiG-31Ks plus Kinzhal missiles will sink any US ships within a 2,750km radius of any airfields they are based at.... and with inflight refuelling that could be extended even further... a response much faster and much cheaper than any carrier could manage.
China does not need carriers to sink US carriers, China needs carriers to protect Chinese surface ships away from Chinese airspace... especially landing ships and other vessels.
hoom wrote:This is shaping up pretty intriguing: The deck details look US style but the hull details are clearly based off the Soviet style & bear remarkable similarity to Ulyanovsk.
Seems like rumors that China bought the Ulyanovsk plans back in the 90s are pretty much confirmed.
But thats just the structure, a lot of the details will be independent Chinese developments: electronics, weapons, internal fitout, a conventional powerplant, conversion to EMALS CATOBAR & Chinese planes.
While not individually as powerful as the US carriers it'll only take a couple of sister ships or larger cousins (& associated escorts) to make it very difficult for US to achieve even a temporary local superiority anywhere near the Chinese coast.
The Chinese are basing the hull from what they know, and that is the Kuznetsov class. Of course it will have some Russian style, doesnt mean they bought any Ulyanovsk plans.
Not sure the Russians kept the plans... plus they would be paper plans and would need to be digitised anyway... a big job in itself.
They didn't have the plans for Antonov aircraft, so they probably didn't have the plans for ships they couldn't build in their own shipyards till very recently.
"The Liaoning aircraft carrier group of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy has reportedly returned to the East China Sea from its far sea training, and with over 300 aircraft sorties in some 20 days, the mission marked the longest and most sortie-intensive exercise by the Chinese carrier in the West Pacific"
Arrow wrote:And not Russia? They are building a lot of NPP in the world.They have NPP based on fast reactors. BN 800 and soon BN 1200 reactors. They are developing many modern concepts of a fast neutron reactor. They have perfectly developed VVER standard reactors.
Russia is still the world leader in nuclear reactor technology, but they severely lag behind China in new reactor construction. Russia had an ambitious reactor construction program a decade ago, supposedly one new reactor was to be activated per year, but it has been severely scaled back. Russia is building more export reactors than reactors in Russia if you look at it. Turkey, Egypt, China, India, Bangladesh, etc. The major project in Russia right now is Kursk II 1-2. China has had way less success in exporting their reactors but they are building a couple of them in Pakistan. Where they are building massively is in China proper and the program was recently scaled up with vast budget increase.
According to Michael Shellenberger, an American pro nuclear scientist , there's a lot of questionable investment going into new styles of reactors and all of these new ideas have problems.
He said that the world has to stop trying to reinvent nuclear power and just build and refine the existing designs. And he said himself that Russia was furthest ahead in this regard.
Backman wrote:According to Michael Shellenberger, an American pro nuclear scientist , there's a lot of questionable investment going into new styles of reactors and all of these new ideas have problems.
He said that the world has to stop trying to reinvent nuclear power and just build and refine the existing designs. And he said himself that Russia was furthest ahead in this regard.
That is mostly a US phenomenon. The private sector, well more like a bunch of startups, are trying to sell a bunch of different nuclear reactor designs. Maybe one or two will actually be built and generate power.
China is for the most part building technology which has already been proven to work and tinkering to improve its economics much like they did with high speed rail. They bought almost every conventional nuclear reactor design. Canadian reactors, French reactors, US reactors, Russian reactors. And now they build their own reactors i.e. Hualong One and maybe soon CAP1400. These are wholly conventional LWR designs. They also have a fast reactor program, CFR-600, but the technology is a liquid sodium fast reactor similar to technology the French, Japanese, and Russia built. So.
Russia has its own innovative reactor design programs. They are building the BREST-300 reactor in Seversk. This is a lead cooled fast reactor.
Russia also has an iterative roadmap to improving the conventional VVER nuclear reactor designs, first with a low speed steam turbine, as in the Kursk II 1-2 reactors, to improve efficiency in converting heat to electricity, and plans to build a supercritical water reactor version later.
Backman wrote:According to Michael Shellenberger, an American pro nuclear scientist , there's a lot of questionable investment going into new styles of reactors and all of these new ideas have problems.
He said that the world has to stop trying to reinvent nuclear power and just build and refine the existing designs. And he said himself that Russia was furthest ahead in this regard.
That is mostly a US phenomenon. The private sector, well more like a bunch of startups, are trying to sell a bunch of different nuclear reactor designs. Maybe one or two will actually be built and generate power.
China is for the most part building technology which has already been proven to work and tinkering to improve its economics much like they did with high speed rail. They bought almost every conventional nuclear reactor design. Canadian reactors, French reactors, US reactors, Russian reactors. And now they build their own reactors i.e. Hualong One and maybe soon CAP1400. These are wholly conventional LWR designs. They also have a fast reactor program, CFR-600, but the technology is a liquid sodium fast reactor similar to technology the French, Japanese, and Russia built. So.
Russia has its own innovative reactor design programs. They are building the BREST-300 reactor in Seversk. This is a lead cooled fast reactor.
Russia also has an iterative roadmap to improving the conventional VVER nuclear reactor designs, first with a low speed steam turbine, as in the Kursk II 1-2 reactors, to improve efficiency in converting heat to electricity, and plans to build a supercritical water reactor version later.
You say a mostly US phenomenon. Do you think the private sector is holding back nuclear reactor design? Americans worship private free market so can you please explain?
andalusia wrote:You say a mostly US phenomenon. Do you think the private sector is holding back nuclear reactor design? Americans worship private free market so can you please explain?
I would not say they are holding back nuclear reactor design. It is just that a lot of these US nuclear startups are just a bunch of Power Point slides and vaporware. The US government and energy companies are counting on them delivering a working product and in the meantime investments into known to work nuclear reactor designs are stalled or outright cancelled. Kind of similar problem to US counting on Hyperloop and not building high speed rail. Or two decades ago cancelling production of electric cars to focus on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.
The US has that tendency of always focusing on the next big thing and never building what actually makes sense and works. Sometimes it eventually pays out, like what happened with SpaceX, but they quite often nothing shows up, or what shows up ends up as a niche technology no one outside the US wants to use.
There are a bunch of companies which claim to be making fusion reactors for example. You have seen a lot of press releases of them achieving fusion and it being corroborated by independent tests, but the devil is in the details. Making fusion reactions isn't particularly hard, high school students have done it at home, the problem is scaling it to commercial energy production in a cost effective manner.
Then you have a bunch of companies working on fission reactors which they claim are modular, can be built at the factory, and be cheaper because you can make a small installation and scale it up with mass production. There are at least half a dozen designs like this from Terrapower to NuScale and other companies. Maybe one of two of those designs will actually become commercialized and be used. But I doubt most of it will ever amount to anything.
The author was probably talking about research into so called 4th generation reactors. I actually think some of those are viable like the BREST-3000 I talked about before. The Soviets had lots of experience with lead reactors on the Alfa submarine and they worked out most of the issues back then. So I think there is a good likelihood this program will work.
Or maybe they know the US will be desperate to see what their solution looks like and want to keep it hidden for as long as possible... a bit like the Russians with the Zircon missiles... the US would love a nice close look at the shape they chose.
In the case of EMALS they will have lots of questions and having a nice very close look will provide some answers.... answers that might help their own attempts at solutions to the same problems...
June 17, 2022 at Jiangnan Shipbuilding (Group) Co., Ltd. (as part of the Chinese state-owned shipbuilding corporation China State Shipbuilding Corporation - CSSC) on Changxing Island in Shanghai, a launching ceremony (in fact, the withdrawal from the dry construction dock) of the third Chinese aircraft carrier under construction, which received the name "Fujian" (Fujian / 福建, tail number " 18") in honor of the eastern province of the PRC of the same name. The aircraft carrier "Fujian", designated as project 003, will become the largest warship of the PLA Navy.
Colonel-General Xu Qiliang, member of the Politburo of the CPC Central Committee, Vice Chairman of the Central Military Council, attended the ship's launching ceremony.
The construction of the Fujian aircraft carrier was started at the Jiangnan Shipbuilding enterprise, as it is believed in February 2016. The commissioning of the ship by the PLA Navy is tentatively expected in 2024.
The new Chinese aircraft carrier is a capital ship comparable to US Navy aircraft carriers and, with a non-nuclear power plant, should become the world's largest non-nuclear aircraft carrier and the largest non-nuclear warship in history. The total displacement of the ship is estimated at 80-85 thousand tons, the length along the waterline is 300 m, the length between perpendiculars is 320 m, the width along the waterline is 39.5 m, the maximum width is 78 m.
The ship's four-shaft main power plant is non-nuclear, but details are unknown. Apparently, it is based on the Soviet-style steam turbine power plant of the Chinese aircraft carriers Liaoning (former Project 11436 Varyag ) and Shandong, but apparently uses more powerful main turbo-gear units. According to some statements, the power plant of the Fujian aircraft carrier is turboelectric, with propeller shafts driven by electric motors.
The architecture of the ship is a classic aircraft carrier with one island superstructure and an angled flight deck, and the layout is a slightly enlarged version of the Liaoning and Shandong aircraft carriers .for the first time in the Chinese fleet, it should use the catapule method of taking off aircraft, for which it is equipped with three Chinese-designed electromagnetic catapults, landing with the help of arresters. There are only two aircraft lifts.
Recall that the first Chinese aircraft carrier was the former Soviet heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser "Varyag" of project 11436, built at the Black Sea shipyard in Nikolaev, where it was laid down in December 1985 (first as "Riga" ) and launched on November 25, 1988. Due to the collapse of the USSR, its construction was suspended at the beginning of January 1992, with a completed readiness of 67.77%. In May 1998, the unfinished Varyag was purchased byfrom Ukraine for 26 million PRC dollars through a shell company in Hong Kong and towed to China in 2000, and in March 2002 was put into dry dock in Dalian by the Chinese shipyard Dalian Shipyard of the Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Company (Group) (DSIC), part of the composition of the then Chinese state-owned shipbuilding corporation China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation (CSIC). In addition to acquiring the unfinished Varyag and its construction documentation at the Nikolaev Black Sea Shipyard, the Chinese side in the 1990s purchased from the designer of this ship JSC Nevskoye PKB (St. Petersburg) for only 840 thousand dollars a complete set of documentation for technical project 11436.
All this made it possible for the Chinese side to complete the completion of this ship at the Dalian Shipyard from 2004 to 2012, which eventually became the first Chinese aircraft carrier "Liaoning" ( Liaoning, tail number "16") of project 001 and was commissioned into the PLA Navy on September 25, 2012 of the year.
The second Chinese aircraft carrier "Shandong" ( Shandong / 山东舰, tail number "17") was already completely built according to the Chinese project 002 in Dalian at the same Dalian Shipyard of the Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Company (Group) (DSIC) and structurally sufficient differed little from the Liaoning aircraft carrier of project 001, since, in fact, apparently, it was designed and built on the basis of the sets of technical project 11436 and its construction documentation available to the Chinese side. "Shandong" was started by the actual construction in Dalian on November 19, 2013, the withdrawal of the ship from the dry dock (launching) was carried out on April 26, 2017. "Shandong"for factory sea trials from Dalian on May 13, 2018 and was officially commissioned into the PLA Navy on December 17, 2019.
Both of the first Chinese aircraft carriers Liaoning and Shandong use the Soviet scheme of springboard takeoff and arrest landing. Subsequently, the PLA Navy switched to the construction of more full-fledged aircraft carriers with an ejection launch. the first of which was the Project 003 Fujian launched in Shanghai.
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