China and India, the world’s two fastest-growing major economies, may boost their share of global nuclear power sevenfold by 2030 to meet electricity demand and emissions goals, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.
The planned increase in atomic power in the two Asian nations from the current 4 percent of the world’s total to 30 percent comes as Japan struggles to cope with radiation leaking from Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi complex, which was crippled by a tsunami after a 9.0-magnitude earthquake.
“You can see rapid growth in nuclear installed capacity in India and China, notwithstanding the events in Fukushima,” said Michael Parker, a Hong Kong-based analyst at Sanford Bernstein. “The cheapest, most easily scaled, cleanest, and most technologically mature source of electricity for these economies is nuclear.”
Companies in China and India are throwing their weight behind nuclear power even as regulators from Japan to Germany order safety checks in the wake of the worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986 in Ukraine.
Both Asian nations use mainly coal to generate electricity and bringing their power consumption up to developed-world levels would require about 22 billion metric tons of the fuel a year, or about four times what the world consumes, Sanford Bernstein said.
China will start building a fourth-generation plant next month that uses gases rather than water for cooling. NTPC Ltd. (NATP), India’s biggest generator, said the crisis triggered by the March 11 earthquake, the strongest on record in Japan, shouldn’t hinder the South Asian nation’s atomic plans.
Finite Coal
“Asian nations will be thinking about how to meet electricity demand, which is always rising,” Hiroshi Miyata, Chief Executive Officer of Marubeni Power Development Co., a builder and operator of power stations outside Japan, said in an interview in Singapore last week.
“It may slowconstruction of nuclear plants, but investments will probably continue.”
China will start building a nuclear power plant next month using new technology that may be less susceptible to a meltdown than Japan’s damaged plant, Cui Shaozhang, deputy general manager at Huaneng Nuclear Power Development Co., a unit of China Huaneng Group, the nation’s largest power group, said in an interview on March 22 in Singapore.
“There are differences between the Japanese and Chinese reactors,” Cui said. “Japan’s Fukushima plant was using old technology while Chinese reactors are more advanced.”
China Capacity
China’s nuclear power capacity may rise to 70 gigawatts by 2020, Han Wenke, head of energy research at the National Development and Reform Commission, the nation’s top economic planner, said in June. That compares with about 11 gigawatts as at the end of 2010, according to the China Electricity Council. China, with 14 reactors currently operating, got 81 percent of its power from coal in 2009, with nuclear contributing 2 percent, according to data from China Economic Information Net.
India needs nuclear energy to meet electricity demand and will stick to a plan for a 13-fold increase in atomic power capacity to 60 gigawatts by 2030, B.K. Chaturvedi, a member of the country’s Planning Commission, saidMarch 18.
“Coal will continue to be the major fuel in the next couple of decades, but the mix of nuclear will increase in Asia,” Nigam Sharma, Singapore-based head of marketing in Asia- Pacific, Emerson Process Management, said by telephone March 28. “Environment is one of the main drivers, along with demand. And this is where nuclear comes in.”
India had 4.78 gigawatts of nuclear generation, or 2.8 percent of the country’s total installed capacity, at the end of February, according to the website of the Central Electricity Authority. Japan currently has about 50 gigawatts of atomic capacity, according to the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan.
“Now is not the time to enter into a withdrawal syndrome when it comes to India’s nuclear program,” Arup Roy Choudhury, NTPC’s chairman, said by telephone from New Delhi March 22. “If we don’t continue now, we will set ourselves back and have to start all over again.”
.jpg){kind=spacer}
