China's State Nuclear Power Technology Corporation (SNPTC) and the country's famed Tsinghua University have jointly set up a research center in suburban Beijing to speed up the development of domestic nuclear power technology, the state-owned company announced in an online poster on Monday.

With the aim of becoming the country's top engineering institute, the center will be focused on the research and development of key technologies applied to advanced pressurized water reactor nuclear power station.

Several generations of reactors have been developed worldwide for nuclear power stations since the 1950s. The third generation nuclear power technology, also known as the advanced reactor, is the latest design. China now has 11 nuclear power reactors in operation. Among them, three use domestic technologies, two are equipped with Russian technology and four with French technologies, and two are Canadian designed. All the 11 reactors employ second-generation nuclear power technologies.

Earlier in September, SNPTC announced the country's plan to begin construction of the world's first nuclear plant using the AP1000 technologies, a type of third generation nuclear power reactor introduced by America's Westinghouse company, at Sanmen Nuclear Power Project in Zhejiang Province in March 2009.

The establishment of the State Nuclear Technology Research and Development Center came in accordance with a national energy strategy to promote nuclear power construction.

"With international pressure to cut greenhouse gas emission, as well as domestic energy restructure underway, it's of great importance to obtain the capacity to build nuclear power stations equipped with self-developed advanced reactors," the country's top energy official Sun Qin said while congratulating on the center's establishment.

At present, more than 70 percent of China's electricity supply comes from thermal power stations. Coal burning has already become a major source of carbon dioxide emission.

The country planned to have 40-million-kilowatt installed capacity of nuclear power by 2020, accounting for 4 percent of the total power capacity. However, the current installed capacity of nuclear power is only about eight million kilowatts

(Xinhua News Agency October 28, 2008)