This story is the second installment in a two-part series on nuclear power in Asia.
Maani-Ana Yikpotey saw the world changing.
In his three decades of life, the rain patterns shifted dramatically in his native village in northwestern Ghana. Drought parched the land. Millet, yams and beans withered on the vine. A bag of corn that once cost 900 cedis — a little under $60 at today’s exchange rate — shot up to 1,500 cedis.
Mobile phones and the Internet might have offered Ghanians another way to make money. But sometimes, it was a challenge just to keep their devices charged. When the water ran dry, the hydropower dams that provided the region’s electricity supply faced shortfalls, making blackouts more common.
After high school, Yikpotey went to university 13 hours south in Ghana’s booming coastal capital, Accra, and ultimately graduated with a degree in applied physics. He realized that if his fast-growing West African homeland was going to modernize, he’d need to help bring it into the club of 31 countries that harvest the power of splitting uranium atoms to generate clean, reliable electricity.
He dreamed of going abroad to get real-life experience working on nuclear reactors in Europe or in the United States, which still operates the world’s largest fleet of atomic power stations. But there was a problem. Since Yikpotey had been born, few new reactors had been built on either side of the Atlantic. Competition was fierce for the few opportunities left.
So Yikpotey looked east. He applied to Tsinghua University, which boasts Beijing’s premiere nuclear research program. It had begun admitting foreigners and offering classes largely taught in English.
Before going to Tsinghua, Yikpotey had a bad impression of China.
“When I got there, I learned it was not what I was thinking. They are peaceful and clean, and their technology is so advanced,” he told me by phone from Beijing one recent morning.
“In Ghana, we have an energy crisis,” he said. “In China, I never had to go without electricity.”
China’s nuclear industry is on the leading edge, and the country has been building more reactors than any other.
The leading reactor the legendary U.S. developer Westinghouse designed in the mid-2000s to be the workhorse of a new American nuclear renaissance? China built four before the U.S. could complete its first two, and went on to reverse-engineer its own, more powerful version.
The smaller, mass-produced reactors the U.S. was banking on to bring down the cost and time it takes to construct new atomic power stations? China’s first so-called serialized small modular reactor was under development before U.S. regulators approved their first design.
The cutting-edge reactor technology meant to revolutionize nuclear power by using coolants instead of water, so promising to tech companies like Amazon and Google? China hooked its first such reactor onto the grid last December, vaulting Beijing so far ahead of the West that analysts predicted it would take at least a decade to catch up.
China is on a clear course to become the world’s first “electrostate.” The term, a new spin on “petrostate,” describes a global superpower whose geopolitical independence — or “energy dominance,” in the parlance of American lawmakers — comes not from fossil fuels, but from electricity.
On the streets of Chinese cities, electric vehicles are now everywhere. All sorts of renewable energy sources are booming. There’s the older kind, like hydropower, that Yikpotey knew well. When the Three Gorges Dam in the landlocked Hubei province opened in 2006, it was the world’s largest hydroelectric power station. Last year, Beijing announced plans to build an even bigger dam in Tibet.
Then there are newer technologies. Over the past two decades, China’s factories captured 80% of the world’s market for solar manufacturing, exporting panels at such cheap prices that American and European governments slapped tariffs on the imports to keep domestic producers from going out of business. But China is also deploying the panels and wind turbines at home at a record pace. Wind and solar today comprise at least 16% of China’s electricity output.
Nuclear power now makes up just 5%. Still, with nearly two dozen reactors under construction, and dozens more planned, China has already vaulted past France to become the world’s second largest user of atomic energy. Within a decade, U.S. government researchers predict Beijing will eclipse America to take the top spot, a pivot point that could shake up global oversight of the most powerful and efficient source of energy humanity has yet harnessed.
The U.S. is now racing to regain its edge in atomic energy, both at home and abroad. An increasingly hot world where air conditioning is necessary for survival, plus the massive power demands of, for example, the computers that drive artificial intelligence software, is driving up demand for more electricity. Countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America are looking to build their first reactors. In 2023, the Biden administration led the world in a pledge to triple the world’s production of nuclear power over the next quarter-century, and enlisted Ghana as one of the newcomer nations looking to partner with the U.S. on its debut atomic power station.
President Donald Trump is now rescinding America’s global climate promises and hacking away at international agreements, though his new administration has vowed to continue the country’s work on nuclear power and look for opportunities to sell U.S. technology overseas.
Blackouts are worsening in the U.S. as the aging grid heaves under rising demand and as old power stations shut down. The U.S. managed last year to finally finish the first two reactors it had built from scratch in decades, but only with the guidance of engineers who’d helped China complete its own reactors years earlier. It was a sign of what cooperation between the world’s two great superpowers could yield — and an omen of what will be lost going forward, thanks to sanctions both the Trump and Biden administrations maintained on Chinese nuclear companies.
To win the global competition for the nuclear future, the U.S. will need to prove it can actually build reactors again at a reasonable price and speed. It has a long way to go.
The Dawn of a Nuclear Revival
Over the past three years, I have traveled the world visiting nuclear power facilities and writing stories about different countries’ relationships to atomic energy.
It all started in 2022, in Finland. Russia had just invaded Ukraine a few months earlier. Europe was in the throes of an energy crisis, as the supply of Russian gas shipped westward to German factories and Italian furnaces dwindled. I traveled west to a tiny island called Olkiluoto where the Finns had done two remarkable things. First — and this is what initially drew me there — they had built the world’s first permanent repository for radioactive waste. But the second thing, the importance of which I only understood once I arrived, was that the government-owned utility had built the only new reactor in Western Europe in more than a decade.
The next month, I visited the Netherlands’ only nuclear power reactor. Soon after, I found myself writing about a major U.S. deal — first brokered under Trump and finalized under Biden — to fund Westinghouse’s plans to build Poland’s first nuclear power plant with American technology. The following year, I traversed the Taiwan archipelago to tell the story of why the self-governing island, which became a technological powerhouse thanks to nuclear power, was abandoning its reactors at the very moment they seemed most necessary. (My reporting there included an interview with the island’s former president from the party that supports reunification with the Chinese mainland.)
The Repository in ONKALO, a deep geological disposal underground facility, designed to safely store nuclear waste, is pictured on May 2, 2023, on the island of Eurajoki, western Finland.
During this time, the U.S. approved its first design for a small modular reactor, a shrunken-down unit that could ostensibly be mass produced to bring down costs. The federal government, as well as private companies with burgeoning data centers, such as Microsoft, pumped billions into reviving at least two shuttered nuclear stations. In Europe, France — which has generated for decades most of its electricity from atomic fission — vowed to construct new reactors. Japan promised to bring the nuclear plants it mothballed after the 2011 Fukushima accident back online. Argentina set sights on installing new reactors once again. And country after country — from Ghana and Kenya to Sri Lanka and Indonesia — laid plans to build their first nuclear stations.
The revival has partly been driven by climate change. The alternatives to fossil fuels all come with tradeoffs. Hydroelectric dams are highly destructive to nature and sensitive to changes in water patterns. Wind turbines and solar panels are cheap, but require vast areas of land, plus batteries or gas-fired plants to serve as backup when the weather isn’t optimal, and far more transmission lines to distribute electricity from where it can be generated to where it’s needed. Geothermal power — harnessing the Earth’s molten heat to make steam that spins turbines — shows promise, but has been geographically limited to volcanic hot zones. Nuclear reactors produce radioactive waste, of course, but far less than depictions of nuclear power in the media, including “The Simpsons,” would have you think.
By the time nuclear started gaining favor again in the 2020s, China’s buildout was well underway. Over the previous decade, Chinese utilities constructed more than three dozen new reactors. In 2020, Beijing set a goal of building 150 additional reactors by 2035.
Given its size and significance, no country fascinated me more than China. I had visited in 2018 on a press junket organized by the East-West Center, a Honolulu-based nonprofit that encourages intercultural dialog between the U.S. and China. Last year, the same organization awarded me a grant to report on nuclear power in China.
For months, I tried everything to get a temporary journalist visa. The country opened some of its nuclear power facilities to tours, but not to foreigners. I contacted China’s two biggest nuclear utilities, the China General Nuclear Power Group, or CGN, and the China National Nuclear Company, CNNC. Neither responded to my inquiries. I wrote letters and passed them via Western interlocutors to Chinese executives and provincial officials. No response. At one point, I arranged through one of my contacts to meet Chinese executives at a conference in London, but the officials canceled and my contact warned me that attempting to track them down at the conference would almost certainly rule out any future chances. Multiple attempts to reach academics at Tsinghua University went unanswered.
It wasn’t just me. A major U.S. media executive representing a global news organization said arranging a conference in China proved impossible last year. When I asked the U.S. State Department for advice, an official offered little guidance but asked that, on the off-chance that I was successful, I share what worked to get a temporary journalist visa. An American analyst in China later told me the problem was that the Chinese government holds companies responsible for whatever foreign journalists write about them. Sponsoring my visa and arranging a visit to a handful of nuclear energy sites posed too great a risk.
But interviews with analysts, former workers at Chinese nuclear plants and graduates from Tsinghua still paint a clear picture of how China became the emerging force in nuclear power.
