Construction Start of First Hualong One Generation III Reactor at Fuqing, China

Construction Start of First Hualong One Generation III Reactor at Fuqing, China

Construction began 7 May 2015 with the start of the pouring of basemat concrete for the 1100 MW Fuqing unit 6 nuclear reactor in Fujian province in south east China. Approval for the start of construction of the reactor, an ACP-1000 design, also known as the Hualong One, was granted in April 2015 by the China National Energy Administration. This brings to five the number of nuclear reactors under construction at the Fuqing site. The China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) is working in a 50:50 partnership with China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN) on development of the ACP-1000. The design is based on CGN’s ACPR-1000, a more advanced version of CGN’s Generation II CPR-1000 and CNNC’s ACP-1000 designs.
The ACP-1000 is a 1,100 megawatt, three-loop pressurized water reactor.

Construction of the ACP-1000 is expected to form a major part of future domestic construction as well as forming the basis for Chinese nuclear export projects, including to Pakistan, the UK and Argentina. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Generic Reactor Safety Review (GRSR) completed its review of the ACP-1000 in December 2014, the first Chinese reactor design to undertake such a process. The ACP-1000 is derived from the 900 MWe reactors that China imported from France in the 1990s. The first two ACP-1000 units had been planned for units 5 and 6 of the Fuqing nuclear power plant in Fujian province.