How China Became The World’s New Nuclear Energy Superstar

Maani-Ana Yikpotey saw the world changing.

In his three decades of life, the rain patterns shifted dramatically in his native village in northwestern Ghana. Drought parched the land. Millet, yams and beans withered on the vine. A bag of corn that once cost 900 cedis — a little under $60 at today’s exchange rate — shot up to 1,500 cedis.

Mobile phones and the Internet might have offered Ghanians another way to make money. But sometimes, it was a challenge just to keep their devices charged. When the water ran dry, the hydropower dams that provided the region’s electricity supply faced shortfalls, making blackouts more common.

After high school, Yikpotey went to university 13 hours south in Ghana’s booming coastal capital, Accra, and ultimately graduated with a degree in applied physics. He realized that if his fast-growing West African homeland was going to modernize, he’d need to help bring it into the club of 31 countries that harvest the power of splitting uranium atoms to generate clean, reliable electricity.

He dreamed of going abroad to get real-life experience working on nuclear reactors in Europe or in the United States, which still operates the world’s largest fleet of atomic power stations. But there was a problem. Since Yikpotey had been born, few new reactors had been built on either side of the Atlantic. Competition was fierce for the few opportunities left.

So Yikpotey looked east. He applied to Tsinghua University, which boasts Beijing’s premiere nuclear research program. It had begun admitting foreigners and offering classes largely taught in English.

Before going to Tsinghua, Yikpotey had a bad impression of China.

“When I got there, I learned it was not what I was thinking. They are peaceful and clean, and their technology is so advanced,” he told me by phone from Beijing one recent morning.

“In Ghana, we have an energy crisis,” he said. “In China, I never had to go without electricity.”

China’s nuclear industry is on the leading edge, and the country has been building more reactors than any other.

The leading reactor the legendary U.S. developer Westinghouse designed in the mid-2000s to be the workhorse of a new American nuclear renaissance? China built four before the U.S. could complete its first two, and went on to reverse-engineer its own, more powerful version.

The smaller, mass-produced reactors the U.S. was banking on to bring down the cost and time it takes to construct new atomic power stations? China’s first so-called serialized small modular reactor was under development before U.S. regulators approved their first design.

The cutting-edge reactor technology meant to revolutionize nuclear power by using coolants instead of water, so promising to tech companies like Amazon and Google? China hooked its first such reactor onto the grid last December, vaulting Beijing so far ahead of the West that analysts predicted it would take at least a decade to catch up.

China is on a clear course to become the world’s first “electrostate.” The term, a new spin on “petrostate,” describes a global superpower whose geopolitical independence — or “energy dominance,” in the parlance of American lawmakers — comes not from fossil fuels, but from electricity.

On the streets of Chinese cities, electric vehicles are now everywhere. All sorts of renewable energy sources are booming. There’s the older kind, like hydropower, that Yikpotey knew well. When the Three Gorges Dam in the landlocked Hubei province opened in 2006, it was the world’s largest hydroelectric power station. Last year, Beijing announced plans to build an even bigger dam in Tibet.

Then there are newer technologies. Over the past two decades, China’s factories captured 80% of the world’s market for solar manufacturing, exporting panels at such cheap prices that American and European governments slapped tariffs on the imports to keep domestic producers from going out of business. But China is also deploying the panels and wind turbines at home at a record pace. Wind and solar today comprise at least 16% of China’s electricity output.

Nuclear power now makes up just 5%. Still, with nearly two dozen reactors under construction, and dozens more planned, China has already vaulted past France to become the world’s second largest user of atomic energy. Within a decade, U.S. government researchers predict Beijing will eclipse America to take the top spot, a pivot point that could shake up global oversight of the most powerful and efficient source of energy humanity has yet harnessed.

The U.S. is now racing to regain its edge in atomic energy, both at home and abroad. An increasingly hot world where air conditioning is necessary for survival, plus the massive power demands of, for example, the computers that drive artificial intelligence software, is driving up demand for more electricity. Countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America are looking to build their first reactors. In 2023, the Biden administration led the world in a pledge to triple the world’s production of nuclear power over the next quarter-century, and enlisted Ghana as one of the newcomer nations looking to partner with the U.S. on its debut atomic power station.

President Donald Trump is now rescinding America’s global climate promises and hacking away at international agreements, though his new administration has vowed to continue the country’s work on nuclear power and look for opportunities to sell U.S. technology overseas.

Blackouts are worsening in the U.S. as the aging grid heaves under rising demand and as old power stations shut down. The U.S. managed last year to finally finish the first two reactors it had built from scratch in decades, but only with the guidance of engineers who’d helped China complete its own reactors years earlier. It was a sign of what cooperation between the world’s two great superpowers could yield — and an omen of what will be lost going forward, thanks to sanctions both the Trump and Biden administrations maintained on Chinese nuclear companies.

To win the global competition for the nuclear future, the U.S. will need to prove it can actually build reactors again at a reasonable price and speed. It has a long way to go.

The Dawn of a Nuclear Revival

Over the past three years, I have traveled the world visiting nuclear power facilities and writing stories about different countries’ relationships to atomic energy.

It all started in 2022, in Finland. Russia had just invaded Ukraine a few months earlier. Europe was in the throes of an energy crisis, as the supply of Russian gas shipped westward to German factories and Italian furnaces dwindled. I traveled west to a tiny island called Olkiluoto where the Finns had done two remarkable things. First — and this is what initially drew me there — they had built the world’s first permanent repository for radioactive waste. But the second thing, the importance of which I only understood once I arrived, was that the government-owned utility had built the only new reactor in Western Europe in more than a decade.

The next month, I visited the Netherlands’ only nuclear power reactor. Soon after, I found myself writing about a major U.S. deal — first brokered under Trump and finalized under Biden — to fund Westinghouse’s plans to build Poland’s first nuclear power plant with American technology. The following year, I traversed the Taiwan archipelago to tell the story of why the self-governing island, which became a technological powerhouse thanks to nuclear power, was abandoning its reactors at the very moment they seemed most necessary. (My reporting there included an interview with the island’s former president from the party that supports reunification with the Chinese mainland.)

During this time, the U.S. approved its first design for a small modular reactor, a shrunken-down unit that could ostensibly be mass produced to bring down costs. The federal government, as well as private companies with burgeoning data centers, such as Microsoft, pumped billions into reviving at least two shuttered nuclear stations. In Europe, France — which has generated for decades most of its electricity from atomic fission — vowed to construct new reactors. Japan promised to bring the nuclear plants it mothballed after the 2011 Fukushima accident back online. Argentina set sights on installing new reactors once again. And country after country — from Ghana and Kenya to Sri Lanka and Indonesia — laid plans to build their first nuclear stations.

The revival has partly been driven by climate change. The alternatives to fossil fuels all come with tradeoffs. Hydroelectric dams are highly destructive to nature and sensitive to changes in water patterns. Wind turbines and solar panels are cheap, but require vast areas of land, plus batteries or gas-fired plants to serve as backup when the weather isn’t optimal, and far more transmission lines to distribute electricity from where it can be generated to where it’s needed. Geothermal power — harnessing the Earth’s molten heat to make steam that spins turbines — shows promise, but has been geographically limited to volcanic hot zones. Nuclear reactors produce radioactive waste, of course, but far less than depictions of nuclear power in the media, including “The Simpsons,” would have you think.

By the time nuclear started gaining favor again in the 2020s, China’s buildout was well underway. Over the previous decade, Chinese utilities constructed more than three dozen new reactors. In 2020, Beijing set a goal of building 150 additional reactors by 2035.

Given its size and significance, no country fascinated me more than China. I had visited in 2018 on a press junket organized by the East-West Center, a Honolulu-based nonprofit that encourages intercultural dialog between the U.S. and China. Last year, the same organization awarded me a grant to report on nuclear power in China.

For months, I tried everything to get a temporary journalist visa. The country opened some of its nuclear power facilities to tours, but not to foreigners. I contacted China’s two biggest nuclear utilities, the China General Nuclear Power Group, or CGN, and the China National Nuclear Company, CNNC. Neither responded to my inquiries. I wrote letters and passed them via Western interlocutors to Chinese executives and provincial officials. No response. At one point, I arranged through one of my contacts to meet Chinese executives at a conference in London, but the officials canceled and my contact warned me that attempting to track them down at the conference would almost certainly rule out any future chances. Multiple attempts to reach academics at Tsinghua University went unanswered.

It wasn’t just me. A major U.S. media executive representing a global news organization said arranging a conference in China proved impossible last year. When I asked the U.S. State Department for advice, an official offered little guidance but asked that, on the off-chance that I was successful, I share what worked to get a temporary journalist visa. An American analyst in China later told me the problem was that the Chinese government holds companies responsible for whatever foreign journalists write about them. Sponsoring my visa and arranging a visit to a handful of nuclear energy sites posed too great a risk.

But interviews with analysts, former workers at Chinese nuclear plants and graduates from Tsinghua still paint a clear picture of how China became the emerging force in nuclear power.

Building The Nuclear Future, No CAP

In 2005, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved a new Westinghouse reactor, the AP-1000. The machine — equipped with passive safety features designed to make a meltdown virtually impossible — was meant to be the workhorse for what was then expected to be a new era of atomic power station construction in America. But it wasn’t until 2011 that the agency gave the green light to begin work on the first AP-1000s in the U.S., at power plants in Georgia and South Carolina.

China was already three years ahead. Work had started in 2008 at the Sanmen Nuclear Power Station, roughly four hours’ drive south of the bustling commercial capital of Shanghai. A decade later, China’s first AP-1000 came online.

By the time the U.S. finished its first pair of AP-1000s in Georgia last year, China had completed all four of its own units and placed an order with Westinghouse for another four. The South Carolina project was abandoned completely in 2017.

Soon, not only had China built more American-made nuclear reactors than the U.S. had — Chinese engineers knew more about building them than their U.S. counterparts did.

The crews in Georgia, the first Americans to build an AP-1000, kept making revisions, requiring lengthy new approvals from regulators that added to delays. American engineers at Westinghouse who’d overseen construction in China returned to the U.S. and applied what had worked to actually finish the Georgia plant.

Speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly, one American expert described lines of Chinese workers milling about outside the construction site in hopes of getting a chance to work on the project.

Indeed, the round-the-clock workdays were one of the first things Yikpotey noticed on his post-graduate internships with CGN and CNNC.

“The way they work continuously throughout the whole project,” he said, trailing off in amazement. “I was so impressed.”

The Chinese had learned lessons from the Americans, too. Westinghouse had pioneered plans for “modularizing” the construction process — manufacturing parts of the reactor, then using the world’s largest crane to lift the giant pieces of machinery into place. But while the Pennsylvania-based company never quite got around to making the idea work, China — drawing on its industrial clusters and experience building behemoth infrastructure — actually pulled it off.

China eventually set about making the Hualong One, its own version of the AP-1000 reactor. It mirrored the Westinghouse design, but was all-Chinese, giving China control over the supply chain. The first Hualong One reactor came online in 2021.

Soon after, European Union and British regulators certified the design, opening the door to what CNNC chairman Yu Jianfeng described in a state press release as “a bid to promote the Hualong One to export and achieve the target of carbon neutrality.”

As the U.S. slapped trade restrictions on American companies working in China, officials in Beijing needed “something they [could] control,” said David Fishman, a Shanghai-based analyst and expert in the Chinese power sector at the Lantau Group consultancy.

“The workhorse is now going to a Chinese indigenous design,” he told me. “No exposure to tariffs or export controls.”

That wasn’t China’s only design. In fact, China appears to be gaining momentum on a number of different units.

While U.S. developers struggled to gain regulatory approval for so-called SMR designs, China charged ahead. The world’s first terrestrial small modular reactor, the Linglong One, neared completion on the island province of Hainan as of last September. (Russia had built the world’s first SMR on a floating barge.)

In November, China started up its first CAP-1400, an even bigger and more powerful reactor based on the AP-1000 design.

Many U.S. designs for SMRs rely on using liquid metal or high-temperature gases like helium as coolants instead of water, making it possible for them to safely reach higher temperatures — and potentially supplant fossil fuels in more industrial processes. In the U.S., none have yet won regulators’ approval.

In December, China’s prototype competitor, a high-temperature gas-cooled unit at the Shidao Bay Nuclear Power Plant on the northeast coast, entered into commercial use.

Even more experimental designs are under consideration, including reactors that use thorium instead of uranium as a fuel. Another Chinese project is proposing to power the world’s largest shipping barge with a thorium reactor.

Billion-Dollar Differences

Local industrial clusters that can forge the equipment needed for reactors and an eager workforce with experience building giant infrastructure aren’t China’s only advantages in the nuclear industry.

The country’s reactor developers are state-owned enterprises, and receive preferential loans with low interest rates.

That’s a stark contrast from U.S. and European projects, which can overrun their budgets by billions of dollars each time a regulatory delay holds them up, sending interest on their loans soaring.

China’s electricity markets are also structured differently than broad parts of the U.S. Whereas CGN and CNNC can count on steady electricity rates from industrial buyers to help pay off the cost of a multibillion-dollar investment in new reactors, much of the U.S. system is divvied up into markets, where nuclear plants are forced to compete against other energy sources, like natural gas, to see who can deliver the least expensive electrons to the grid.

The U.S.′ various experiments with investing in different types of reactors hasn’t done much to make them less expensive to build. The first AP-1000, at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia was billions of dollars more expensive than the second, for example, but the U.S. canceled plans for a third, fourth or fifth beyond that. Now U.S. regulators and companies are angling to construct reactors that haven’t yet been built anywhere, guaranteeing higher costs. Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimates that the cheapest reactor to build next in the U.S. would still be an AP-1000.

While some companies are now considering building a third AP-1000 in the U.S., China is already onto its fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth, in addition to the Hualong One.

If the U.S. is to slash its planet-heating emissions, it could take a big step by installing quartets of giant, 1,100-megawatt reactors — enough to power over 1 million homes each — in some markets. But the U.S.′ aging and disconnected grid system can only handle so much power at once. China, on the other hand, has a newer, more nationally-connected grid — allowing a giant nuclear plant in one place to ship power to cities and factories hours away.

It’s proven popular, too.

For a second year in a row, international polling by the nuclear consultancy Radiant Energy found China had the highest net support for building new reactors of all 32 countries surveyed. The results, shared exclusively with HuffPost and set to publish in the coming weeks, showed five times more support than opposition to new nuclear plants in China.

The International Footprint

For now, China has proven it can build reactors faster and more efficiently at home than any other country. The big test of the Chinese industry’s future going forward will be exports.

China recently built its first overseas reactors — a pair of Hualong Ones — at Pakistan’s Karachi Nuclear Power Plant. Another CNNC official, Lu Tiezhong, told the nationalist Global Times newspaper last year that China could export its next reactors to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kazakhstan or Turkey.

“We continue to advance comprehensive cooperation with ‘old friends’ such as Russia and France, expand in-depth cooperation with ‘new partners’ such as other key European countries,” Lu said.

“We plan to establish a research and development center in Eastern Europe, seize the opportunity of accelerated global innovation resource flow and reshuffling, continuously increase the participation of international scientific and technological talents in CNNC’s scientific research tasks and engineering implementation, coordinate with international development strategies, expand international influence, open up international markets and help CNNC’s full industry chain ‘go global.’”

Russia still dominates nuclear exports. While countries such as Poland have opted for American reactor technology out of a desire to strengthen ties to the U.S., Washington and Brussels don’t offer state-backed financing packages that can compete with Russian or Chinese government-funded deals.

One idea to bridge this gap was to establish a new global bank to fund nuclear infrastructure, which would pool resources from nations like the U.S., Canada, South Korea, France and the United Arab Emirates to fund overseas projects. But getting funding for such an idea from the U.S. Congress seemed unlikely even under former President Joe Biden. With Trump starting trade wars with allies and withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accords, the prospects for a nuclear lending group seem dimmer now.

Foreign students returning home from studying at Tsinghua could give Chinese companies a leg up when trying to sell nuclear technology abroad.

But not everyone who values their education in China comes away convinced Beijing is a trustworthy partner for a giant infrastructure project like a nuclear plant.

Nethmi Godawattha, from Sri Lanka, studied alongside Yikpotey and interned at CGN last year. Her experience impressed her. But she’s wary of Chinese investment: China once seized a key port in her home country when Sri Lankan officials couldn’t pay their debts to Beijing back.

“Technology-wise, China would be capable of” building Sri Lanka’s first nuclear plant, she told me. “But in the past, Sri Lanka could not pay back loans, and we had to give control of our ports and other projects to the Chinese. It was more like invading a country. We had no idea.”

She said Japan or Russia, which is building many of the nuclear plants under construction in neighboring India, might be better partners.

If Trump continues to pillory global allies, the U.S. could become a less attractive partner, too. But there are other pro-Western options. South Korea is an industry leader lauded for its successful construction of the UAE’s first nuclear plant. France’s state-owned EDF utility, despite recent struggles, has projects underway in neighboring European countries. Canada’s homegrown CANDU reactor technology is considered a breakthrough innovation that could be exported.

For now, Yikpotey said he’s focused on shoring up Ghana’s grid and finding a solution that can curb the world’s appetite for fossil fuels better than solar and wind.

“Climate change is real, even though there’s some people who say climate change is some kind of ideology,” he said.

Source: Huffington Post