Innovation in China ­– Part 2/2

February 13, 2012

Two examples of Chinese innovation in its private sector were reported by the UN Chronicle.

The title of the UN report was “Industrial And Rural Energy In China: Innovative Private-Sector Initiatives Lead The Way”

The report said, “Entrepreneurs in the energy-related sectors, especially in thermal energy, are pushing for groundbreaking and profitable innovations that promise to help control the country’s ravenous industrial energy consumption while maintaining, or even increasing, high levels of output.”


“Encouraging Innovation in China” – Thoughtful China

The UN Chronicle said, “Beijing Shenwu Thermal Energy Technology Company, founded in 1999 by Wu Dao Hong, is a prominent example of the success entrepreneurs are finding in implementing business models that combine environmental and economic goals. It manufactures equipment that reduces industrial fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions.”

The second example mentioned in the UN report was Hao Zheng Yi. “More than 25 years ago he had the foresight to recognize the formation of a large untapped market for clean-energy services in rural China…

“Mr. Hao’s pioneering design for a sustainable heating and cooking stove, based on cleaner and more effective technology, shows how vital private-sector solutions are in supplementing government efforts to address environmental and social challenges…”

In addition, China is planning to generate electricity using nuclear power.

“A 2009 assessment by the IAEA under its Innovative Nuclear Power Reactors & Fuel Cycle (INPRO) program concluded that there could be 96 small modular reactors (SMRs) in operation around the world by 2030 in its ‘high’ case, and 43 units in the ‘low’ case, none of them in the USA.”


Global Competitiveness Report 2010-2011

However, “The most advanced modular project is in China, where Chinergy is starting to build the 210 MWe HTR-PM, which consists of twin 250 MWt reactors.” Source: World Nuclear Association

China’s critics may cry that nuclear power is not safe. In fact, safe nuclear does exist and China is leading the way with thorium with the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR).

The UK’s Telegraph reported, “A few weeks before the tsunami struck Fukushima’s uranium reactors and shattered public faith in nuclear power, China revealed that it was launching a rival technology to build a safer, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper network of reactors based on thorium.”

Victor Stenger (Physicist, PhD) writing for The Huffington Post says, “The U.S. may end up buying LFTRs from China. Perhaps WalMart will sell them cheap.”

Return to Innovation in China – Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Doing Mankind a Favor – Part 2/2

August 24, 2011

Some critics say the reason the US government and a few European countries such as Germany stopped developing Thorium as a source of power was because it is thought to be almost impossible to use thorium to make nuclear bombs.

China, on the other hand, has more than 1.3 billion people expecting a better lifestyle and to deliver that modern lifestyle takes electricity, which means China cannot afford to ignore safer and cheaper sources of energy.

Currently, the Chinese are building two radically different uranium power plants (in addition to the thorium research) called “pebble-bed reactors“, which use hundreds of thousands of uranium billiard-ball sized elements cloaked in a protective layer of graphite that will be cooled by non-explosive helium gas instead of water.

Unlike power plants such as Japan’s Fukushima Daiichy power plant, these new Chinese “pebble-bed reactors” are designed to gradually dissipate heat on their own — even if the coolant is lost as it was in Japan.

If the first “pebble-bed reactors” work, China will build dozen more.


Vortex Hydro Energy – Open Water Test

While the United States is falling behind in the race to develop alternative and safer, cleaner energy sources, a new method is being explored to capture the energy potential of our oceans.

While other countries have already deployed viable, operating, power generating projects using the emission-free power of ocean waves, currents, and tidal forces, the U.S. is only beginning to acknowledge the importance of these technologies.

A system conceived by scientists at the University of Michigan, is called VIVACE, or “vortex-induced vibrations for aquatic clean energy”.

In fact, scientists claim slow moving river and ocean currents using this revolutionary VIVACE device can easily provide enough power for more than 15 billion people, which might leave the coal, oil and uranium industry with shrinking profits and many lost jobs.

I have two questions.

Does America and the West hold on to the status quo or move forward allowing cleaner, cheaper, safer energy sources to develop and replace the old, expensive dirty energy we rely on today?

Why is it that China seems to be doing more for the future of its people than the US is?

Return to or start with Doing Mankind a Favor – Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Doing Mankind a Favor – Part 1/2

August 23, 2011

Recently, I learned something new from a comment left by Xiaohu Liu for a post called China’s Goals for going Green.

Liu wrote, “More likely China will go more nuclear before it goes green … (there are) two types of nuclear technology that could revolutionized the world as much as the steam power or petrol power did in the 19th and 20th century.”

Until Liu left that comment, I was unaware of the types of nuclear power China is developing.

The (UK) Telegraph says, “Safe nuclear does exist, and China is leading the way with thorium.”

I discovered the Chinese are investing millions in research into reactors powered by thorium, a metal, supporters say, that is as common as lead (which means it would be cheap and easy to find), and one, which, despite some concerns, would lead to power plants with fewer safety issues as well as other benefits.

“Thorium-based reactors certainly have advantages,” says Wang Kan, leader of the Tsinghua University Thorium Research Team. “The energy release from Thorium is greater than from Uranium, the by-products from using Thorium are less toxic than from Uranium, and it’s much harder to make weapons from those by-products.”

However, China was not the first nation to research the use of Thorium. In the late 1940s, US physicists were exploring the use of thorium as fuel to generate power but dangerous and dirty uranium won since the US and the USSR were fighting the Cold War and building thousands of nuclear weapons.

Continued on August 24, 2011 in Doing Mankind a Favor – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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Turning on the Lights in China – Part 2/2

July 20, 2011

In American, Thomas Edison designed and built the first direct current (DC) power plant in 1882.

Then the first alternating current (AC) power plant opened in 1885 and transmitted power 200 miles from the plant.

By 1927, forty-five years later, the first power grid was established in Pennsylvania.

However, it wasn’t until 1933 that Congress passed legislation establishing the Tennessee Valley Authority, which now produces 125 billion kilowatt hours of electricity a year.

Then in 1935, FDR issued an executive order to create the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) to bring electricity to millions of rural Americans.

It took six years after the REA was launched in 1941 to help 800 rural electric cooperatives to string 350,000 miles of power lines.

Click on the link for America’s electrical grid and learn more about what it took to build the most extensive electric transmission system in the world— that is until China completes construction of its electrical transmission grid.

The biggest difference between modern China and America in the 1950s is the size of the population.

America electrified a nation with a population of about 160 million people.

China has 1.3 billion, which is a daunting task.

Start with Turning on the Lights in China – Part 1 or discover Electricity is the Key

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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China’s Goals for Going Green

July 18, 2011

Until recently, the United States was the largest consumer of energy in the world.

To put that in perspective, Americans make up only 5% of the world’s population and yet consumed 20% of the energy the last year the US was number one.

Now, China, with about 20% of the world’s population, consumes more energy than the US.

In 2010, China consumed 4,190,000,000-megawatt hours of electricity to serve 1.3 billion people, while in 2009, the US consumed 3,741,485,000-megawatt hours of electricity for 310,880,317 people. Source: Wikipedia’s List of countries by electric energy consumption

A better idea might be to compare India to China since these countries have similar sized populations. Nation Master’s energy consumption chart shows India in 6th place with 568,000,000-megawatt hours consumed, while China used more than 7 times that number.

China’s goal is to have a middle class equal to America, which may reach as high as 66% of households.

Do a little math and you soon discover how much energy China may have to produce to support a middle class of about 858 million people, which is 66% of 1.3 billion.

In fact, China may need to produce about 16 billion-megawatt hours of electricity to achieve that goal.

Along with those numbers comes another staggering headache — pollution and a potential environmental disaster of epic proportions.

However, China is struggling to deal with this challenge by going green.

The June 2011, National Geographic Magazine (NGM) asked this question — Can China Go Green? Then attempted to answer it.

NGM said, “No other country is investing so heavily in clean energy. But no other country burns as much coal to fuel its economy.”

One unidentified Beijing-based official said, “China seeks every drop of fuel—every kilowatt and every kilojoule it can get a hold of — for growth.”

“That Chinese consumer revolution has barely begun,” NGM said. “As of 2007, China had 22 cars for every 1,000 people, compared with 451 in the U.S.”

Discover more at China’s Middle Class Expanding, China’s Middle Class Defined, Copy Cat Middle Class in China and The Middle Class Bulge.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

#1 - Joanna Daneman review posted June 19 2014

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