Chinese don't compromise on safety. Their Gen 4 reactor designs are probably some of the safest to be built. They actually bought said design from Germany when they abandoned their nuclear aspirations.
Instead it mostly comes down to:
a) China being a frankly fucking massive place so land is already much cheaper than the US/EU/etc.
b) More realistic regulations on waste processing/storage etc. China isn't scared of nuclear waste because it's not stigmatized as it is in the West and they are able to handle transportation/storage/plan for reprocessing with logic rather than emotion.
c) CCP having a simple and importantly efficient system of requisitioning land from citizens (essentially they buy them out for above market and set them up somewhere new).
The latter one is the big thing that really sets them apart when it comes to infrastructure projects. Yes building a huge dam displaces like 250k people but they do it anyway and move everyone to new homes.
There also isn't a process for saying no or negotiating so said process doesn't get dragged out. In practice that isn't usually a huge problem because in China it's considered like a lottery win if the government decides to build a highway/railway through your house because they will pay much more than the house is worth on the open market.
Obviously such a system would never fly in the West though.
b) is also pretty important. If you keep hand wringing about waste even when the amounts really are inconsequential then you are going to make things really expensive for no real reason.
China also has a huge desert they can use to store waste essentially indefinitely if they really can't find a way to reprocess it. Though that seems pretty damn unlikely.
Safe design doesn't mean safely built or operated. I don't doubt they are technically capable of doing it, I'm not convinced they will. They aren't really known for not compromising on safety. And seeing the direction they are going to I think that's not going to improve.
>China being a frankly fucking massive place so land is already much cheaper than the US/EU/etc.
China is virtually the same size as the US with 4x the population and more unhabitable land.
Didn't China build a huge hydropower dam because the government dictated it would happen ? Even over the people that had to move and the changes to their environment?
Nuclear power is expensive in the US because of stringent regulations, most of which should be kept. However there are lessons from existing installations, newer designs, and better technology to help design things now, than in the 50s and 60s.
That dam was necessary primarily to stabilise the path of a historically very destructive river. Many of the people that moved had suffered through floods in the past.
China builds nuclear power not because it is cheap but because it shares a lot of the costs and skills base of their nuclear military.
Iran builds it because it wants the option of having a bomb.
Take out military concerns and it is economic for neither of them.
Every country who builds nuclear power stations is either a nuclear power sharing military costs (France, UK, China...) or is taking out an option on quickly developing a bomb (Sweden, Iran, Japan, South Korea) against geopolitical concerns that are glaringly obvious.
>>China builds nuclear power not because it is cheap but because it shares a lot of the costs and skills base of their nuclear military.
One of the previous commenters above mentioned that China abandoned their own plans bought their design from Germany, so it's conceivable that if China had no military nuclear program they could have still built a reactor. (That's of course if the western world allowed it)
Nonetheless, the cost to the constructor is such that without a military reason it doesn't make any sense to build one.
I expect North Korea will turn its attention to civilian nuclear power fairly soon now that the race to become a fully fledged nuclear power is complete. It would make economic sense to them given the industrial capacity, skills and resource base it has accumulated in the process of building the bomb. For most other countries? Not so much.
