Skip to main content

China Pledges $48 Billion for New Reactors

From the Red Herring:
Beijing has pledged over $48 billion toward the construction of new nuclear reactors by the year 2020, the state-run China Daily reported on Tuesday.

Kang Rixin, president of China National Nuclear, announced plans to quadruple the country'’s nuclear capacity to 16 gigawatts (GW) from the current 4 GW.

But even this represents just a small fraction of energy-hungry China's appetite. Sixteen gigawatts comes to only 4 percent of China'’s total electrical demand. "“Four per cent is not an ultimate goal, it is a temporary goal," the China Daily quoted Kang as saying.

Estimates are that China intends to build as many as 30 nuclear reactors within the next 15 years, but energy analysts say that total will be a mere drop in the bucket. "China would need to build one new 1 gigawatt reactor every week in order to keep pace just with current energy demand growth," said Jiang Lin, an energy researcher at Lawrence Berkeley Labs in Berkeley, California.
With energy demand rising 14 percent in 2003 and 16 percent in 2004, China has been doing all it can to keep up:
China currently has between 130 GW and 160 GW of electrical generating capacity either already approved or under construction. Close to 80 percent of that new capacity, however, will be in coal-fired plants.
That's not exactly good news if you're concerned about CO2 emissions -- which is why China's nuclear energy industry will become all the more vital.

Technorati tags: , , , , ,

Comments

Anonymous said…
Sir:
Eighty percent of electricity plants to-be-built are from coal?
One can understand why pres Bush is pushng for nuclear power not only in the USA and China, but just now, India
Vern Cornell

Popular posts from this blog

An Ohio School Board Is Working to Save Nuclear Plants

Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu

Why Ex-Im Bank Board Nominations Will Turn the Page on a Dysfunctional Chapter in Washington

In our present era of political discord, could Washington agree to support an agency that creates thousands of American jobs by enabling U.S. companies of all sizes to compete in foreign markets? What if that agency generated nearly billions of dollars more in revenue than the cost of its operations and returned that money – $7 billion over the past two decades – to U.S. taxpayers? In fact, that agency, the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank), was reauthorized by a large majority of Congress in 2015. To be sure, the matter was not without controversy. A bipartisan House coalition resorted to a rarely-used parliamentary maneuver in order to force a vote. But when Congress voted, Ex-Im Bank won a supermajority in the House and a large majority in the Senate. For almost two years, however, Ex-Im Bank has been unable to function fully because a single Senate committee chairman prevented the confirmation of nominees to its Board of Directors. Without a quorum

NEI Praises Connecticut Action in Support of Nuclear Energy

Earlier this week, Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed SB-1501 into law, legislation that puts nuclear energy on an equal footing with other non-emitting sources of energy in the state’s electricity marketplace. “Gov. Malloy and the state legislature deserve praise for their decision to support Dominion’s Millstone Power Station and the 1,500 Connecticut residents who work there," said NEI President and CEO Maria Korsnick. "By opening the door to Millstone having equal access to auctions open to other non-emitting sources of electricity, the state will help preserve $1.5 billion in economic activity, grid resiliency and reliability, and clean air that all residents of the state can enjoy," Korsnick said. Millstone Power Station Korsnick continued, "Connecticut is the third state to re-balance its electricity marketplace, joining New York and Illinois, which took their own legislative paths to preserving nuclear power plants in 2016. Now attention should