China Wants to Accelerate in Nuclear Power – Up to 10 Reactors per Year Could Be Built by 2025.
The national target was between 6 and 8, but climate change could accelerate the shift to more nuclear.
Amid the global energy crisis, China is banking on the atom.
According to the China Nuclear Energy Association, China can significantly increase its nuclear power plant construction capacity by 2025. The national target is six to eight reactors per year, but this could be increased to 10, China's leading industry body said in its annual report.
The agency also advocates bringing more nuclear power inland, especially to offset the intermittency of the huge wind and solar fields China has built in the west.
China has the third largest nuclear power plant fleet in the world behind America and France
As extreme weather conditions led to a power shortage in Sichuan province this summer, the level of concern about the country's energy security has risen sharply. This is especially true since the global energy price crisis could eventually affect China's growth. As a result, the number of nuclear reactor construction projects has increased.
As with many other countries, Beijing's interest in nuclear power slowed down sharply during the post-Fukushima decade.
Since then, China has changed its tune and now has 54 operational reactors with a power generation capacity of 52 gigawatts (GW), according to the latest report from the World Nuclear Association:
This puts the country in third place among the world's nuclear power plants, just behind the United States (92 reactors and 95 GW) and France (56 reactors and 61.3 GW).
Nevertheless, nuclear power still occupies only a relative share of China's electricity mix.
Of the 7,541 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity produced in 2019, nuclear accounted for only 5% of total production, or 348 TWh, in equal shares with wind power. This is far behind the 4,900 TWh of coal-fired generation (65%) and the 1,300 TWh of hydroelectric (17%).
China can supply 90% of the components needed for future nuclear reactors
The fact remains that in twenty years, China has increased the number of its nuclear power plants tenfold. A race dictated by the desire to turn its back on coal and to emancipate itself from the West. China was also the first country in the world to commission and connect to its electricity grid an EPR, at the end of 2018.
However, the construction of the two third-generation reactors in Taishan, whose design was conceived in France, had begun two years after the one in Flamanville, France...
China's nuclear ambitions are supported by domestic manufacturing that can provide up to 90% of the components used in the EPRs, according to the China Nuclear Energy Association. But also for locally developed models (the Hualong-One and the Guohe-One) as well as smaller modular reactors.
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