Just the same as the technical innovation and product upgrade create new market pattern, the commercial operation of the Gen-III nuclear reactors as well as the maturity of the Gen-III nuclear technology will bring the nuclear countries into a competitive race.
China tries to combine nuclear safety and security together with a competitive price of nuclear technology as the essential prerequisite to win the nuclear market and attaining the mass production of the Gen-III nuclear reactors.
China studied the competition patterns and plans to combine the strength of each foreign actors in its sales strategy:
- Based on the original design, the operators barely add the safety margin and the preventative measurements to improve the nuclear safety by using the qualified improved techniques. In one word, it increases the capacity of each reactor (scale benefits) to improve the economy such as the French EPR.
- The other one is to do “subtraction”, which means to use the advanced passive safety measures based on verified technologies to simplify the systems and reduce the equipment cost, such as the Westinghouse’s AP1000.
On the other hand, Gen-III nuclear projects all meet the same problems such as constant delay. The extraordinary investment cost and the delay of the engineering construction are the two major challenges in front of the Gen-III nuclear project.
China is looking at Russia experience, which has a competitive construction price on the nuclear projects, and was awarded thirty-four nuclear reactors in eleven countries
Therefore, taking the market share and the potential competition into account, the higher safety and economy for project construction are the “two legs” for each nuclear country who would like to go further in the nuclear export.
