Staying Home. Qinshan powerplant is designed by Chinese, who let later work to France’s Areva. designed and built.

A consortium led by Westinghouse Electric Co., Monroeville, Pa., that includes Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Shaw Stone & Webster Nuclear Services, submitted a proposal last February to China’s State Nuclear Power Technology Co. (SNPTC). The contract, with an estimated value of roughly $8 billion, would be to engineer, procure and construct the nuclear island portion of four powerplants, two each at Sanmen in Zhejiang province, and Yangjiang in Guangdong province. Competitors are Paris-based Areva Group and Russia-based Atomstroyexport, but several sources report that the Russian proposal has been cut from the running.

“We have not heard anything” about when a decision will be made, says Scott Shaw, a Westinghouse spokesman. The official Chinese newspaper People's Daily on Dec. 2 reported that Chen Hua, director of China National Nuclear Corp. (CNNC), said the decision most likely would be made in mid-2006.

“We don’t understand the situation very well, but there seem to be some differences getting sorted out,” says Ian Hore-Lacy, public communications director for World Nuclear Association, London. “CNNC favors indigenous technology. SNPTC is keen to import third generation plants.”

China’s nuclear-power construction program is the most ambitious in the world. Between 2002 and 2005, China’s total installed nuclear-generating capacity grew from 2,000 MW to 15,000 MW, reports the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Energy Information Administration. China’s national goal is to have up to 40,000 MW of nuclear generating capacity on line by 2020.

“They want to meet the target with Chinese technology, which was developed by France in the 1980s,” says Charles Hufnagel, Areva spokesman. The proposal includes technology transfer provisions to enable the Chinese to develop their own nuclear industry. Areva predecessor Framatome used its pressurized-water reactor technology to build China’s first two reactors 20 years ago, at Daya Bay. “We don’t know exactly how they will meet their target,” Hufnagel says.

The Chinese are using turnkey construction for the current proposal but other work is more piecemeal. For example, Areva recently won two contracts covering reactor elements and instrumentation and control systems for Chinese-designed Qinshan 1 PWR, in Zhejiang province.

Two 1,000-MW Russian VVER PWRs are under construction now at Tianwan in Jiangsu province. With both units on line next year, China’s aggregate nuclear generating capacity will be about 8,350 MW of the national total of 340,000 MW, WNA reports.

Besides the four proposed Generation III-plus pressurized-water reactors for Sanmen and Yangjiang, sized between 1,000 and 1,500 MW, construction is scheduled for 2006 on four other reactors. Chinese constructors will build two 1,000-MW PWRs at Ling’ao, in Guangdong province, and two 650-MW PWRs at Qinshan, in Zhejiang. Early phases of the complexes used foreign technology. Reactors now on order will use Chinese technology.

China decided in the 1980s to build its fleet mainly with PWRs, says Patrick Tighe, business development director at Atomic Energy of Canada, Mississauga, Ontario. But “President Hu [Jintao] said in Canada [last summer] that he would consider alternatives to PWR,” he says.