KVIG Informative

China just approved more nuclear reactor capacity in a single day than the United States has under construction anywhere in the country.

China’s State Council, chaired by Premier Li Qiang, approved four nuclear power projects on July 31 carrying a combined investment above 170 billion yuan, or roughly $25 billion. The approvals cover eight new reactor units across Zhejiang, Guangdong, Liaoning and Shandong provinces: three pairs of Hualong One reactors at the Jinqimen, Taipingling and Zhuanghe sites, plus two Guohe One reactors at the Laiyang site.

The Laiyang plant alone carries an estimated $18 billion price tag and is set to become China’s largest nuclear station by installed capacity once all six of its planned units are complete. It also marks the start of standardized, large-scale construction of the Guohe One design, a third-generation reactor China developed domestically. The Taipingling project will deploy an upgraded Hualong One Version 2.0 design, according to state media.

China’s nuclear fleet generated approximately 467 billion kilowatt-hours in 2025, according to the National Energy Administration. By the end of that year, the country had 59 commercial reactors operating with 62.52 gigawatts of installed capacity, plus another 35 units totaling 41.9 gigawatts under construction, a total that has kept China in the top global spot for under-construction nuclear capacity for 19 straight years. The country is targeting 110 gigawatts of operational capacity by 2030.

Beijing has approved 10 or more reactor units annually every year from 2022 through 2025. This year’s opening batch, part of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan running from 2026 to 2030, sets the tone for what officials are calling the decisive sprint toward peaking the country’s carbon emissions before 2030. Li Jinkai, a professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology’s School of Economics, said the pace signals that Chinese nuclear construction has firmly entered a stage of large-scale, batched, normalized development.

The Statistical Review of World Energy reported that global nuclear power generation hit a record 2,845 terawatt-hours in 2025, up 1.3% from the prior year, and that China alone accounted for the entire increase, adding more than 34 terawatt-hours of new capacity. Without China’s buildout, global nuclear output would have fallen year over year. Even so, nuclear power supplies only about 3.3% of China’s total electricity, compared with roughly 47% in France and 9.6% in the United States, leaving enormous room for the country’s nuclear share to grow before it approaches what other industrial nations already rely on.

Five of the newly approved projects this year include private capital participation, according to the China Nuclear Energy Association’s 2026 blue book, a small but deliberate opening of a sector Beijing has kept almost entirely state-run. China is not simply building reactors. It is building the industrial capacity to keep building them faster than anyone else, for decades, on a schedule the rest of the world is not currently matching.