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China which cares little about what people think and has huge air quality problems. Yet it is still building a lot of coal plants instead of nuclear. Which might suggest there not the ideal solution you think they might be. France was actually the most reliant on Fission of any country and even they are stalling far back from there peak despite having few actual problems of any kind.


There are 72 nuclear reactors being built around the world right now. 29 of them are in China. They're building more reactors than the next four builders combined. That is, more than Russia, India, Korea and the United States put together. [1]

The Chinese government has stated that they want to decrease their reliance on coal by building more natural gas, nuclear and solar power capacity. [2]

Aside from a few regions, I don't think they've stopped building coal plants entirely, but the Chinese government pretty clearly likes nuclear power.

[1] http://www.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/UnderConstructionRe...

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2013/09/12/the...


Of course they want to divirsify 77% of the total electrical capacity is coal. More importantly they had to shut down 2.5% of the nation's coal plants (58 units or 14,020 MW of capacity) in 2008 due to coal shortages.

However, in the end these charts says more than I can:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#med...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China#mediaviewer/File:...

PS: Of total annual production: Hydroelectric = 20.7% in 2006, Coal = 68.7% in 2006. = 89.4% Compared to France which get's 75+% of it's power from nuclear and has little in the way of coal reserves. http://our-future.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/coal_reserve...

Edit: To be clear, even after that construction is over Nuclear is still going to be a small fraction of overall capacity.




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