The Chernobyl and Fukushima incidents occurred when the reactor core melted down due to a failure in the active cooling system. When the temperature rises the nuclear reaction can no longer be controlled causing an explosion and the nuclear core of the reactor melts. As a result of Chernobyl, parts of Ukraine can no longer be safely occupied by humans for thousands of years. To prevent this kind of tragedy from happening, China announced the successful construction of the first meltdown-proof nuclear reactor.
The reactor was built in Shidao Bay, Shandong province using fuel technology in the form of pebbles and it was developed by Tsinghua University. Through this design uranium fuel in the form of small pebbles will be put into the high pressure reactor chamber and interact with the carbon moderator. The temperature of the reactor will not rise above 1600 Celsius which is below the melting temperature of 2000 Celsius that occurred in Chernobyl. There are two gravel reactors at Shidao Bao each capable of producing 200MWt of power.
The heat from the reactor will heat the hydrogen gas used for cooling using a pump. This hydrogen gas then heats the pipe containing the water to become steam that drives the generator turbine.
If the coolant pump fails, the hydrogen will still convectively cool the fuel. The surface area of the gravel causes the rate of cooling to be faster than the rate of heat production. In the tests carried out, the temperature and nuclear reaction in the reactor returned to stability 35 hours after the active cooling system was turned off. Pebble reactor technology was invented in Germany in 1960 and operated until 1988. It was just a test reactor that did not generate electricity commercially.
What is happening in China at this time is the increasing construction of electric power stations that do not use fossil fuels. Every week new solar and wind power stations start operating in China equivalent to the power generated by nuclear reactors. They have also built a Thorium reactor that is seen to be cleaner than existing reactors. These are all China's efforts to clean up its image as the world's most polluted country.