China raises nuclear capacity target despite missing earlier goals

China is maintaining the pressure on its nuclear power giants to deliver more reactors with an ambitious new target, despite a string of misses in recent years. 

 

The government last week set a goal of 110 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2030 in its latest five-year plan draft, a 76 per cent jump from the end of last year. The new objective comes after the country fell short of reaching 58 gigawatts by 2020 and 70 gigawatts by 2025.  

 

The lofty target underscores the priority Chinese leaders have placed on the around-the-clock reliability of nuclear’s carbon-free electricity. Wind and solar are helping the country meet growing power needs without lifting emissions, but their intermittent delivery is increasingly straining the grid. 

 

 

China is set to overtake France and the US as the world’s biggest producer of atomic power by the end of the decade, with a pipeline of dozens of new reactors currently under development. The country has largely managed to maintain its construction schedules and keep a lid on costs, even as they’ve spun out of control in the US and Europe. 

 

Still, the industry’s execution has been hobbled somewhat over the past decade by disruptions following the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan and snags in the global supply chain after the Covid pandemic. 

 

The latest goal will also probably be missed, unless the government counts facilities still under construction, said Francois Morin, China director for the World Nuclear Association. The country’s reactor construction timelines have ranged from five to seven years, which means the target of 110 gigawatts is unlikely to be met until a few years after the 2030 deadline, he said.

 

Longer term, the bigger concern is that the reactor build-out is expanding more slowly than power demand, which has left nuclear’s portion of total generation mostly in decline over the last few years and lower than it was in 2021, Morin said.

 

The share was less than 5 per cent last year, which suggests it may be too ambitious to expect that nuclear can deliver 10 per cent of China’s electricity by 2035, he said. 

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