Completion of the first ACPR1000 reactor at Yangjiang 5 within a mere 58 months marks a major achievement for China’s lengthy efforts to commercialize the first-of-its-kind 1,000-MW evolutionary third-generation nuclear reactor.

In the 25 years since China imported 944-MWe M310 nuclear reactor technology from France for its first mainland nuclear units at Daya Bay in Guangdong province, the country has installed a stunning 47 nuclear power reactors. CGN Power, a subsidiary of China General Nuclear Power Corp. (CGN), has been on the leading edge of China’s efforts to rapidly expand its nuclear sector for environmental and economic reasons. When it was incorporated in 1994 to manage Daya Bay, CGN was held equally in majority by Guangdong’s provincial government and state-owned China National Nuclear Corp. It has since morphed into a massive publicly offered entity that is manned by 39,000 employees. Today CGN says it is both China’s largest nuclear power operator and the largest builder of nuclear power plants worldwide.

On July 12, 2018, the company marked an achievement that crowned its 30-year experience in nuclear research, development, and operation: It wrapped up the 168-hour trial operation of the world’s first ACPR1000 at Unit 5 of the Yangjiang Nuclear Power Plant, and deemed it commercially operational.

But Yangjiang, in particular, has since evolved into a major nuclear showcase for CGN. According to Yangjiang Nuclear Power Co., a CGN subsidiary that built and manages the 6-GWe plant, while the Yangjiang 1 and 2 CPR1000s were being completed (they came online in March 2014 and June 2015), CGN made 28 additional safety and technical modifications to the CPR1000 reactor design, and implemented a new model, the “CPR1000+,” at Units 3 and 4. The improvements allowed Yangjiang to build the new reactors more speedily: The first CPR1000 Unit 1, for example, took 63 months to complete, while the first CPR1000+ Unit 3, which came online in January 2016, took 61 months.