Nuclear Issues

5 Items

Taishan Nuclear Power Plant in Guangdong, China, in 2019.

EDF Energy via Wikimedia Commons

Book Chapter - Cambridge University Press

Enabling a Significant Nuclear Role in China’s Decarbonization

| Dec. 02, 2021

While China is building nuclear reactors faster than any other country in the world, major constraints may limit nuclear energy’s ability to grow to the scale of hundreds of gigawatts that would be required for it to play a major part in decarbonizing China’s energy system. This chapter explores the major constraints on, and risks of, large-scale nuclear energy growth in China, and how both new policies and new technologies might address them. It focuses particularly on the two biggest constraints – economics and siting. Substantial government policies to support nuclear power and advanced reactor systems designed to address some of the key constraints are both likely to be needed for nuclear to have a chance of playing a major role in decarbonizing China’s energy system; nuclear energy’s role may be bigger in the second half of this century than in the first half.

A nuclear power plant in Beijing

Bret Arnett, CC licensed

Policy Brief

China’s Nuclear Energy Industry, One Year After Fukushima

| Mar. 05, 2012

It has been one year since the disastrous nuclear accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in March 2011. Experts now view Fukushima as the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986.

In the aftermath, the Chinese government promptly reaffirmed that nation’s nuclear energy policy. Yet China also became the only nation among all major nuclear energy states that suspended its new nuclear plant project approvals. Before it would restart approvals, China said it would:

1) Conduct safety inspections at all nuclear facilities

2) Strengthen the approval process of new nuclear plant projects

3) Enact a new national nuclear safety plan

4) Adjust the medium and long-term development plan for nuclear power

Where is China on this path, and what is the future of its nuclear power industry?

Cooperative Denuclearization: From Pledges to Deeds

Book - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Cooperative Denuclearization: From Pledges to Deeds

| January 1993

"CSIA's research on cooperative denuclearization began during the August 1991 putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev. To those of us familiar with nuclear weapons, their construction, and command and control, and with the looming revolution about to sweep the then–Soviet Union, it was plain that a new and unprecedented danger to international security was emerging. An appropriate policy response to this new form of nuclear threat could not be fashioned from traditional Cold War tools of deterrence, arms control, and military preparedness alone. Safety could only be sought through new policies emphasizing cooperative engagement with the new states, new leaders, and military and industrial heirs of the former Soviet Union...."