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China says its nuclear industry has made a fresh technological breakthrough, which, even if it doesn’t immediately solve the country’s energy needs, underscores Beijing’s determination to be a leading font of knowledge about the controversial power source.

The China Institute of Atomic Energy said Thursday that a small, experimental “fast breeder” reactor outside Beijing had been hooked to the grid to produce electricity. Essentially, the tiny 20 megawatt nuclear plant “863” is now helping satisfy China’s vast power needs.

To supporters of nuclear power, fast-breeding is alluring. The idea is that it produces more plutonium than the plant needs to run, providing fissionable material usable elsewhere in the nation’s nuclear program. For China, which is long on nuclear ambitions but short on uranium, it’s an especially desirable technology.

Yet the process hasn’t proved workable on a large scale elsewhere. Fast-breeder programs have been abandoned in a number of countries, including the U.S., and the plants that remain are small. To some critics, it is a nuclear version of the “perpetual motion machine,” a seemingly problem-solving theory that doesn’t work well outside the laboratory.

In a statement posted to its website (in Chinese) Thursday, China’s atomic institute said the advantages of fast-breeder reactors are that they save uranium and reduce nuclear waste. “The establishment of sustainable development of nuclear energy is important,” the statement said, noting that a number of industry dignitaries were on hand for the announcement.

China’s nuclear engineers, of course, are operating in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, a game-changing event that would seem likely to make the industry more risk averse.
In days after Japan’s March 11 earthquake-tsunami-nuclear crisis, Beijing defiantly pledged to continue with its huge nuclear rollout but quickly reversed course and said it would proceed cautiously.

In fact, the grid hook-up to the experimental fast-breeder plant may underscore that caution, as Beijing spent a year testing the plant’s operations before linking it to the grid.

Among the practical challenges associated with fast-breeders: they are potentially riskier than more conventional light-water reactors, relying on cooling of the reactor core with a potentially dangerous loop of flammable sodium, rather than water. Plus, the fuel input is essentially weapons-grade uranium, which is difficult to handle compared with the chemically stable material that powers most nuclear plants, namely uranium dioxide.

The fast-breeder process also appears for China to be a degree more tricky to develop on a commercial scale than reprocessed fuel, another controversial technology the country says it is pursuing to address its uranium needs. Fast breeding is something new for China while the country’s military has long-term experience with reprocessing.

Mark Hibbs, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says he visited China’s fast-breeder reactor in the weeks after the Fukushima disaster. He describes it as a tiny “research reactor,” and says he got the sense officials planned to proceed extremely cautiously in building an 800-megawatt plant as scientists once discussed.

Breakthroughs like fast breeder reactors might not result in commercially applicable programs any time soon, but in the age of Fukushima they may signal that China possesses world class nuclear power expertise. According to Mr. Hibbs, news of the efforts say, “Look, China is a high-technology nuclear country.”

– James T. Areddy. Follow him on Twitter @jamestareddy

Annual inflows of foreign direct investment rose to nearly $108 billion in 2008.

In 2009, the global economic downturn reduced foreign demand for Chinese exports for the first time in many years.

China has emphasized raising personal income and consumption and introducing new management systems to help increase productivity.

The restructuring of the economy and resulting efficiency gains have contributed to a more than tenfold increase in GDP since 1978.

The two most important sectors of the economy have traditionally been agriculture and industry, which together employ more than 70 percent of the labor force and produce more than 60 percent of GDP.

China has acquired some highly sophisticated production facilities through trade and also has built a number of advanced engineering plants capable of manufacturing an increasing range of sophisticated equipment, including nuclear weapons and satellites, but most of its industrial output still comes from relatively ill-equipped factories.

Over the years, large subsidies were built into the price structure, and these subsidies grew substantially in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Globally, foreign investment decreased by almost 40 percent last year amid the financial downturn and is expected to show only marginal growth this year.

“China is now the fifth largest investing nation worldwide, and the largest among the developing nations,” said Shen Danyang, vice-director of the ministry’s press department.

China is expected to have 200 million cars on the road by 2020, increasing pressure on energy security and the environment, government officials said yesterday.

Although China is still a developing country with a relatively low per capita income, it has experienced tremendous economic growth since the late 1970s.

Agriculture is by far the leading occupation, involving over 50% of the population, although extensive rough, high terrain and large arid areas – especially in the west and north – limit cultivation to only about 10% of the land surface.

China is the world’s largest producer of rice and wheat and a major producer of sweet potatoes, sorghum, millet, barley, peanuts, corn, soybeans, and potatoes.

Fish and pork supply most of the animal protein in the Chinese diet.

Coal is the most abundant mineral (China ranks first in coal production); high-quality, easily mined coal is found throughout the country, but especially in the north and northeast.

There are also deposits of vanadium, magnetite, copper, fluorite, nickel, asbestos, phosphate rock, pyrite, and sulfur.

Major industrial products are textiles, chemicals, fertilizers, machinery (especially for agriculture), processed foods, iron and steel, building materials, plastics, toys, and electronics.

In the northeast (Manchuria) are large cities and rail centers, notably Shenyang (Mukden), Harbin, and Changchun.

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China’s Nuclear Scientists Unveil Latest ‘Breakthrough’

Given its location in a region marked by repressive regimes and tight media controls, it might seem to be splitting hairs to parse media freedoms in Taiwan. According to Freedom House’s most recent Freedom of the Press report released earlier this week, Taiwan remained a ‘free’ country, rated well above fellow so-called Asian tigers South Korea, which was rated ‘partly free,’ and Singapore, rated ‘not free.’ It’s noteworthy nevertheless that Taiwan, despite doing better than its neighbors, has slid in the Freedom House rankings during each of Ma Ying-jeou’s three-years as president, falling from 32nd in 2008 to its current position at 48. Due to the relative infancy of media freedom in Taiwan, the roots of which extend to the late 1980s, and the close attention paid to the lack of those rights in China, many of the events the report calls attention to have led to widespread concern around Taiwan. Freedom House, a U.S.-based democracy advocacy group founded in the 1940s , praised Taiwan’s media environment as “one of the freest in Asia,” but noted “a growing trend of marketing disguised as news reports, a proposed legal amendment that would limit descriptions of crime and violence in the media, and licensing obstacles” as concerns that led to the lower rating. In a review of the report, Commonwealth Magazine noted that Taiwan has been hit with a “negative point” in the economic environment category each year since 2008, indicating growing concern over the effect commercial interests have had on the independence of Taiwanese media. The report cited the December resignation of a senior reporter, Dennis Huang, at the China Times following what he said was an “ invasion of regular news pages by advertorials .” The practice of placing “embedded marketing” or articles paid for by commercial interests without identifying them as advertisements within newspapers has been a concern in Taiwan for years, but Mr. Huang’s resignation catapulted it into the public spotlight. The government amended the Budget Law in January to prohibit the use public funds in paying for advertisements (something it did when promoting the Floral Expo last year), but Freedom House says concerns remain about the buying of news by the mainland Chinese government . The report also pointed to worrying signs that Taiwanese media may be subject to commercially-motivated censorship stemming from the island’s relationship with mainland China, singling out a column that ran in the China Times on June 4, the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The column listed historically important events on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, but did not bring up the crackdown. As Freedom House notes, China Times is owned by Tsai Eng-meng, a businessman with extensive interests in China. “As commercial ties between Taiwan and mainland China deepened in 2010 with the signing of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, press freedom advocates raised concerns that media owners and some journalists were whitewashing news about China to protect their own financial interests,” the report said. The report also brought up growing concerns about an increasing political polarization of Taiwan’s media sources, subjective reasoning for the repeated rejection of an application by Next Media to start a cable television channel, and a new un-passed law designed to limit depictions of violence, drug use and lewdness in media. The government may have a lot of work to do to improve Taiwan’s standing in next year’s rankings, but many of the island’s media problems come from within the journalism profession itself, says Dennis Peng, associate professor of journalism at National Taiwan University. Beyond the advertorials and limits on lewdness, Taiwanese media is plagued by exaggerated stories and rigged scenes, according to Mr. Peng. “Competition in TV news is fierce and most media have already given up their guard of ethics,” he says. “The only bottom line left is the legal one.” Mr. Peng said he had little hope this race to the bottom would end anytime soon, but a strong reaction around Taiwan to exaggerated coverage of the Japan earthquake – one local station broadcast a clip of a tsunami from Deep Impact striking New York ahead of the local news – demonstrates people in Taiwan are growing increasingly weary of the hyperbole. Whether or not the trends in Taiwanese media can be reversed remains unclear, but the action taken against the paid ads at least demonstrates that some on the island are willing to make the effort. – Paul Mozur, with contributions from Aries Poon.

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Taiwan’s Diminishing Media Freedom