China May Resume Nuclear Plant Construction by end of 2011

Bloomberg – China may resume some nuclear reactor construction that was stopped earlier this year while continuing a halt on approvals of new projects amid a nationwide safety check following Japan’s Fukushima crisis, said Xu Yuming, vice secretary-general of the China Nuclear Energy Association.

Some construction may restart by the end of the year, Xu said in an interview today at a conference in Beijing. The country won’t be able to maintain its previous pace of nuclear- plant building because of the disruption.

“We were building new reactors more and more quickly from 2008 to 2010, and then suddenly this year there were none,” Xu said. “It’s not quite possible for us to start building at the average of eight reactors a year we saw in the last three years” during China’s 12th five-year development plan, which ends in 2015, he said.

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