11 responses to “7 Technologies where China leads the world”

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  Daniel Owen January 4th, 2011 at 17:19

  China ‘in nuclear power advance’
  Chinese scientists have made a technological breakthrough in the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, and the efforts could potentially solve the country’s uranium-supply problem, state television reported Monday.

  The technology, developed and tested at the No. 404 Factory of the China National Nuclear Corp (CNNC) in the Gobi Desert, Gansu Province, enables the re-use of irradiated fuel and is able to boost the usage rate of uranium materials at nuclear plants by 60-fold.

  “With the new technology, China’s existing detected uranium resources can be used for 3,000 years,” China Central Television (CCTV) reported.

  China is planning a massive push into nuclear power in an effort to wean itself off coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. It now has 12 working reactors with 10.15 gigawatts of total generating capacity.

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  GTCTech January 12th, 2011 at 10:03

  China Now the World Leader in Wind Power

  According to a report from the American Superconductor Corporation, China has now installed more wind power capacity than the United States. Wind installation surged in China last year, far outpacing the US, and now China has an estimated base of 40,000 MW of wind power installed. The US, which was the previous leader, ended the year with just shy of that.

  In 2010 China installed about 16,000 megawatts, versus 5,000 in the United States; in 2009 it installed 13,000 megawatts versus 10,000 in the United States, according to American Superconductor.

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  Josh Sainz February 13th, 2011 at 15:54

  This is a extremely compelling read. I have worked in the solar field for over 11 years and it is absolutely amazing how quickly the game is changing. For a lot of us this is a absolutely exhilarating chapter of history so let’s try to keep up the pace.

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  JND11093 March 26th, 2011 at 08:37

  China to Build Nuclear Plant Using Fourth-Generation Technology in April

  While countries around the world are scrambling for a major rethink of their nuclear power strategy, and in some cases shutting down their existing nuclear plants, China is bulldozing its way ahead with new nuke plants, the first of which is coming to Shandong, China this April!

  China will start building a nuclear power plant next month using fourth-generation technology that may be less susceptible to meltdown than Japan’s damaged Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant.

  The “world’s first high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor” will be installed at Rongcheng in Shandong province. The Rongcheng plant will use helium, an inert gas, in its cooling system, and reactor cores will be able to withstand temperatures exceeding 1,600 degrees Celsius (2,912 degrees Fahrenheit) for several hundred hours without melting down, China Business News said this week.

  China started operating its first commercial nuclear station in 1994. It currently has 14 reactors in operation, 26 under construction and 28 planned, according to data on the World Nuclear Association’s website.

  China’s fourth-generation helium gas-cooled reactor was designed and constructed by Tsinghua University of China.

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  Sunny G. April 2nd, 2011 at 11:52

  China is winning the Clean Energy Race
  

  Add renewable energy to the list of industries in which China is now coming out on top of the U.S. According to The Pew Charitable Trusts’ just-released 2010 report “Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race”, China has solidified its position as the world’s clean energy powerhouse in two short years. China attracted a record $54.4 billion in private sector clean energy investments in 2010 — a 39 percent increase over 2009 and equal to total global investment in 2004. That made it the world’s largest manufacturer of wind turbines and solar modules, and helped it to overtake the U.S. in terms of installed renewable energy capacity.

  Germany overtook the U.S. to become the second-largest market for clean technologies including solar, wind and biomass generators. Germany has had a long history of using feed-in tariffs to spur solar power and other alternative energy. Last year the prospect of reductions in the tariffs, under which renewable-power generators are paid a premium price for the electricity they produce, helped spur dramatic growth in solar, especially in small-scale rooftop projects.

  The United States slipped one spot to third place in clean-energy investment last year despite President Obama’s push to promote non-polluting sources of power. A comprehensive energy bill died in the Senate last July. Washington also has failed to pass national mandates for utilities to produce minimum amounts of clean power that environmentalists and some analysts say would boost confidence for alternative energy companies to invest in the country.

  China’s national action plan is helping the country use more hydro, wind, and solar power. The country has goals of 150 gigawatts of wind capacity by 2020 (it looks like they’re going to meet this goal five years early) and 20 gigawatts of solar by 2020. For comparison, the U.S. currently has .6 gigawatts of solar and 33 gigawatts of wind.

  The Pew report tallies all investment, public and private, including research and development, and ranks the G-20 group of industrialized nations. In 2010, more than 90 percent of all clean energy investments were directed to companies and projects in the G-20, the report finds.

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  DVJ11211 September 13th, 2011 at 17:22

  China’s solar rise as US firms Evergreen Solar and Solyndra collapse

  The bankruptcies of three American solar power companies in the last month, including the biggest star in the Obama firmament of green-jobs companies – Solyndra of California, have left China’s industry with a dominant sales position — almost three-fifths of the world’s production capacity — and rapidly declining costs.

  Besides Solyndra, the other two American manufacturers that filed for bankruptcy in August were Evergreen Solar, of Massachusetts, and SpectraWatt, a New York company. Another company, BP Solar, halted manufacturing at its complex in Frederick, Md., last spring.

  Those bankruptcies and closings represent almost one-fifth of the solar panel manufacturing capacity in the United States, according to GTM Research.

  Solyndra and Evergreen in particular suffered because they pursued unusual technologies whose competitiveness depended on their using less polysilicon, the main material for solar panels. That has become less important because polysilicon prices have tumbled more than 80 percent in the last three years as output has caught up with demand.

  Two American companies remain strongly placed. One is First Solar, the largest American manufacturer, which uses a different technology but has its biggest factory in Malaysia. The other, SunPower, is much smaller but is an industry leader in the efficiency with which its panels convert sunlight into electricity, so that they sell at a premium to Chinese panels.

  With Beijing heavily supporting its industry, the Chinese companies are forging ahead.China’s three biggest solar power companies — Suntech Power, Yingli Green Energy and Trina Solar — have all in the last two weeks announced second-quarter sales increases of 33 to 63 percent from a year earlier.

  Solar panel prices have plunged by 30 to 42 percent per kilowatt-hour in the last year as manufacturers have sharply increased capacity, particularly in China. Meanwhile, demand has been somewhat weak in the main markets in the United States and Europe.

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  Sekita J September 18th, 2011 at 07:53

  California Turns To China For New Bay Bridge
  The new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge will have a distinctive design to rival its more famous cousin, the Golden Gate Bridge.
  California is spending more than $7 billion building what it says will be an architectural marvel: the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The new eastern span of the Bay Bridge will have a distinctive design to rival its more famous cousin, the Golden Gate Bridge.

  A typical suspension bridge is held up by cables strung between two towers like a hammock. This bridge features a single tower and a single mile-long cable that drapes up and over the tower and supports the deck like a sling.

  The cable is made up of 137 strands of steel. This assembly will be performed early next year by American labor. But the massive cable, key sections of the iconic tower and deck were all made in China, which is emerging as an infrastructure powerhouse in more places than San Francisco. For example, Chinese companies have contracted with New York City for a bridge, the subway system and a commuter train platform.

  The steel contract went to a state-owned Chinese company, Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries, which had several advantages: modern production facilities, ships to deliver the steel and, of course, low-cost labor.

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  Sky Trekker October 11th, 2011 at 18:35

  How China is wining the Star Wars
  Quietly and efficiently, China is working towards catching up with the US in the exploration of the final frontier — space.

  Indeed, after space shuttle Atlantis made its final touchdown at the Kennedy Space Center for the last time in July, the US has been left without a manned space vehicle for the first time in five decades. And with the budgetary support to the Chinese space program continuing to be steady and robust, it stands to reason that China would join the ranks of the advanced space-faring nations.

  In 2003 China became the third country — after USA and Russia — to send an astronaut into space. In 2005, China repeated this feat by launching two astronauts into orbit onboard its Shenzhou spaceship. In 2007, China stunned the world by successfully destroying its aging weather satellite, located 537 miles above the earth by making use of a ground-based medium range ballistic missile. In 2008 it successfully performed a space walking feat. The successful completion of the human space flight and space walking exercise have given impetus to the Chinese plan to build and launch an orbital complex. An orbital complex, besides helping China undertake cutting edge research, could also serve as a strategic platform in space to bolster its space war efforts.

  Confirming its growing prowess in space, China on September 29 successfully launched its unmanned Tiangong-1 (Heavenly Palace) space laboratory module as a stepping stone to its ambitious plan of eventually setting up a permanent orbiting complex in space in 2020.

  Tiangong 1 is expected to be joined soon by three separate unmanned Chinese spacecraft — Shenzhou 8, Shenzhou 9 and Shenzhou 10 — that will mark China’s first attempt at docking maneuvers in space.

  Shenzhou 8 is expected to be launched on a 12-day mission in November, while Shenzhou 9 and Shenzhou 10 are scheduled to lift off during 2012. One or both of these latter missions may carry the first astronauts to Tiangong 1.

  The space station, which is yet to be formally named, is the most ambitious project in China’s exploration of space, which also calls for landing on the moon, possibly with astronauts.

  At about 60 tons when completed, the Chinese station will be considerably smaller than the 16-nation International Space Station (ISS), which is expected to continue operating through 2028.

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  Titan Gene October 29th, 2011 at 17:02

  China Deploys First Petaflop Supercomputer with Native Chips
  Surprise! China has built a supercomputer using homegrown chips, an unexpected announcement this past week that showcases the country’s determination toward lessening its dependence on foreign-grown CPUs.

  The Sunway BlueLight MPP supercomputer resides in the National Supercomputer Center in eastern China. Installed this past September, the system houses a total of 8,700 ShenWei SW1600 processors that feature 16 cores apiece. Combined with an advanced water-cooling system – the specific details of which are currently unknown – the supercomputer is expected to reach a total processing power of around one petaflop. But more importantly, it can allegedly do so using only a megawatt of power.

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  Promodule BD121 November 2nd, 2011 at 19:34

  
  China Spacecraft Make First Successful Docking

  Two unmanned spacecraft successfully docked in what many Chinese call their space program’s first “space kiss” early Thursday morning, Beijing time.

  The docking about 340 km (211 miles) above Earth between a prototype space-station module, Tiangong 1 (launched from Jiuquan on Sept. 29 in northwest China), and the unmanned 17,800-pound Shenzhou capsule (launched Monday from the Jiuquan space base) heralds another significant step forward for China’s human-spaceflight program. The next stage will be two similar docking exercises in 2012, with at least one carrying astronauts.

  Rendezvous and docking while circling the globe once every 90 minutes is a challenging feat, even though over the past 40 years the US, Russia, and more recently Europe and Japan have made it look routine.

  The Shenzhou docking collar is similar to the Russian-designed APAS system, which was used in the joint U.S.-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the assembly of the Russian space station Mir and by space shuttles visiting the International Space Station.

  Russia, the United States and other countries jointly operate the 400 ton International Space Station, to which China does not belong. But the United States will not test a new rocket to take people into space until 2017, and Russia has said manned missions are no longer a priority.

  China launched its first manned space mission in 2003 when astronaut Yang Liwei orbited Earth 14 times. It launched its second moon orbiter last year after becoming only the third country to send its astronauts walking in space outside their orbiting craft in 2008.

  Beijing also plans an unmanned moon landing and deployment of a moon rover in 2012. Scientists have raised the possibility of sending a man to the moon after 2020.

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  SuperDumper November 14th, 2011 at 18:57

  China surges up Top500 supercomputer rankings

  Ten years ago, a ranking of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers included precisely three entries from China. The most powerful of these — a system used to run credit management software at the Agricultural Bank of China — was ranked number 150.

  The latest version of the Top500 list — published on Monday at the SC11 conference by the group of high performance computing enthusiasts who maintain it — contains 74 Chinese computers, including the second most powerful supercomputer in the world, the Tianhe 1-A.

  Japan widened its lead at the top with the Fujitsu-designed K Computer at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Sciences attaining an Rmax score of 10.5 petaflops, according to the Linpack benchmark, versus the 2.5 petaflops of the Chinese Tianhe-1a. America’s fastest supercomputer (and former number one), Oak Ridge National Labs’ Jaguar, keeps the number three spot.

  China continues its technical ascendancy with 74 systems in the Top500, putting it second overall after the US’s 263. This is up from 61 systems in June, 41 in November 2010, 25 In June 2010 and 21 in November 2009.

  More and more Chinese systems use domestically developed processors or interconnect technologies. China’s most powerful computer, the Tianhe-1a, gets the bulk of its processing power from 7,168 Nvidia Tesla GPUs and 14,336 Intel CPUs, but it also gets some of its technical prowess from 2,048 FT1000 heterogeneous processors developed by the country’s National University for Defence Technology (NUDT).

  China took the world by surprise last month when it unveiled a supercomputer based on a previously unknown home-grown RISC-based microprocessor, called the ShenWei SW1600. That system, called the Sunway BlueLight MPP supercomputer, is now ranked number 14. The Sunway BlueLight can perform one quadrillion mathematical calculations per second (1 petaflop). That seems like a lot, until you consider that the top-ranked computer on the Top500 list, Japan’s K Computer, is 10 times as powerful, and the first computer ever to break the 10 petaflop barrier. More and more Chinese systems built with domestic technology seem set to appear in the list. The country is developing a petaflop supercomputer named the Dawning 6000 that will get its processing power from Chinese Loongson processors. In a wider sense, the country has vowed to develop an exascale computer — a system at least 100 times more powerful than the K Computer — by the end of the decade and hopes to use many of its own technologies in the system, weaning it from dependence on companies like Nvidia and Intel.

  ORNL’s Jaguar is currently undergoing an upgrade that should lift it to 10 to 20 petaflops late next year or early in 2013, which – all other things remaining equal – will push it past both Tinahe-1A and K to become the fastest computer in the world once more. The upgrade will bestow upon Jaguar a new name – Titan – as well as an emerging kind of technological edge in the form of graphics processing units, or GPUs.

  GPUs are a relatively cheap and simple means of boosting the speed of conventional processors by adding a parallel computing aspect that can juggle more than one task simultaneously. Where a traditional CPU can have up to 16 computing cores, a GPU can have hundreds. That means that for certain kinds of calculations a GPU can divide and conquer in ways that CPUs cannot, pushing GPU-augmented systems to blistering speeds. GPUs as supercomputer accelerators have really only been around for a few years, but according to the team over at NVIDIA they have now found their way into 35 systems on the TOP500, three of which are in the top 5. At the beginning of last year, there were less than 10 systems taking advantage of GPU acceleration. As the world’s biggest computers continue to incorporate them, we will likely see more existing systems take big leaps forward in terms of speed – and perhaps see more volatility at the top of the list.