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: Nuclear Energy, Environment, Energy, Politics, Technology, Economics