Between late 2016 and August 2026, China linked 27 new nuclear reactors to its grid. In the identical interval, america linked two. As Jacopo Buongiorno—professor of nuclear science and engineering and director of the Heart for Superior Nuclear Vitality Programs on the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how—tells me, “China is the world’s chief in nuclear energy plant (NPP) building.”
It’s a formidable knowledge level by itself however when you think about the higher image, it’s much more hanging. These nuclear energy crops are solely a small fraction of China’s present energy throughput, however they’re the crux of the nation’s electrical energy technology. The reason being that Chinese language engineers have designed an influence grid that depends closely on renewables (and goals to finally be 100% inexperienced). However, since wind and photo voltaic technology fluctuate lots, they want quite a lot of nuclear technology to maintain their electrical community secure and totally operational. With out that fixed energy, the fluctuations will make the grid crash.
Beijing’s electrical energy starvation traces again to Deng Xiaoping’s “Reform and Opening-Up” insurance policies, launched in December 1978, which set China on a path of fast industrialization, market liberalization, and urbanization that has continued for practically 5 many years. That transformation drove a surge in electrification, initially fed by coal and, lately, more and more by renewable vitality.
“We’re on this unbelievable race so as to add sufficient energy technology capability in China to satisfy what’s including one further Germany of recent electrical energy consumption yearly,” David Fishman, a principal at vitality consultancy agency The Lantau Group, lately told the South China Morning Post.
The mathematics checks out: China’s energy consumption surpassed 10 trillion kilowatt-hours—10,000 terawatt-hours (TWh)—in 2025, pushed up by superior manufacturing and artificial intelligence. China’s electrical energy demand grew by 503 TWh that yr alone. Germany’s gross electrical energy consumption, from each supply mixed, was estimated at roughly 517 TWh over the identical interval—which means China added practically one Germany’s value of recent demand in a single yr.
Virtually none of that development is being met with nuclear energy. Coal nonetheless provides the most important share of China’s electrical energy, however renewables are closing the hole quick: Wind and photo voltaic rose to 22% of nationwide technology in 2025, up from 18% the yr earlier than, and by the primary half of 2026, coal’s share had fallen below 50% of whole technology for the primary time on file. Nuclear, in the meantime, holds regular at about 5% of the combination.
If the acute electrical energy build-up is sort of completely pushed by wind and photo voltaic now, why is nuclear so vital for China’s energy grid design? Designing a grid isn’t a matter of constructing energy crops and connecting them to cities and factories the identical manner you join your toaster to the wall plug. Vitality manufacturing fluctuates, and each node in a nationwide grid must be managed and balanced so the complete community doesn’t go down (see what happened during the Spanish power outage last year, the place renewables produce many of the vitality now, but it surely’s not effectively balanced).
To keep away from a disastrous Spanish scenario, China has been doing two issues for near 20 years now. First, constructing a “bullet train for power”—the world’s most in depth ultra-high-voltage grid, which carries electrical energy from wind and photo voltaic farms within the west to industrial hubs on the coast, balancing provide and demand throughout the nation in actual time. Second, constructing out a nuclear fleet that provides energy no matter climate, wind velocity, or time of day. That’s the place nuclear vitality is available in.
The atomic key
Nuclear provides one thing known as steady baseload output to the facility grid. A grid constructed overwhelmingly on intermittent technology wants a hard and fast ground below it, and nuclear is the ground Beijing has chosen in its race to zero-carbon energy.
China at present operates 64 business reactors producing 63.9 gigawatts, the second-largest fleet in the world behind the U.S. Home firms are constructing 37 extra items totaling 38.5 gigawatts. The State Council has accepted 10 or extra reactors yearly since 2022, together with eight items throughout 4 initiatives greenlit on July 31, 2026, value $25 billion, on the best way to 110 gigawatts of put in nuclear capability by 2030 and an influence combine that’s 50% non-fossil.
The astonishing nuclear reactor building velocity comes first from standardization. China builds two pressurized water reactor designs nearly solely: the home third-generation Hualong One, and the CAP1000, tailored from an American design created by Westinghouse.
“The availability chain is all constructed round this standardization,” Victor Nian of the Centre for Strategic Vitality and Sources told the South China Morning Submit. Home suppliers now manufacture practically each element a brand new reactor wants. That repetition compresses construct time to about 5 years per unit, whereas within the West we spend a decade or more.
It’s possible you’ll suppose that, maybe, China is skipping security steps, however the reality is that they aren’t, Buongiorno tells me. The nation’s present fleet, primarily all water-cooled reactors, already operates safely and reliably, he says, and, “there isn’t any motive to consider the NPPs being constructed now, that are primarily equivalent, will carry out any in another way.” He says that China, like each nation that operates nuclear energy crops, belongs to the World Affiliation of Nuclear Operators, which conducts periodic critiques and inspections of member fleets. “China doesn’t run these NPPs in isolation,” he factors out.
The opposite component behind this velocity is state financing, which compresses the price curve the identical manner standardization compresses the timeline. In keeping with the SCMP, builders borrow at rates of interest as little as 1.5%, bringing the levelized value of electrical energy for a 1-gigawatt reactor to roughly $42 per megawatt-hour, about half what a comparably financed Western venture would value.
Buongiorno frames this as a confirmed method reasonably than an improvised one. “State-backed financing and secure vitality insurance policies are a great way to make sure these capital-intensive and long-duration initiatives could be carried out to completion with minimal perturbations,” he says, pointing to France’s nuclear build-out within the Nineteen Seventies and 80s, and to India, Russia and South Korea at the moment, as prior examples of the identical mannequin.
Beijing’s mannequin has one main bodily restrict: China permits business reactors solely on the coast, the place appropriate websites cap out at roughly 163 reactors. Beijing suspended approvals for inland reactors after the 2011 Fukushima meltdown. “China will bodily run out of appropriate websites in some unspecified time in the future,” Fishman advised the SCMP. Lifting that moratorium would open 77 websites nationwide with room for 345 reactors.
Buongiorno doesn’t see the inland shift as a brand new class of threat, nevertheless. “Inland reactors are in operation in dozens of nations all over the world,” he tells me. “Their threat profile is dependent upon the specifics of the location—seismicity, water entry, inhabitants density, and so on. Nothing new right here.”
