The first phase of the world’s largest nuclear energy and petrochemical industry large-scale coupling demonstration base, located in Lianyungang, East China’s Jiangsu Province, will supply over 35 million tons of industrial steam annually upon completion. Its outcomes will be replicated and promoted to industrial clusters in the Yangtze River Delta and Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, offering a replicable China’s solution for low-carbon transformation of global energy-intensive industries, China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) said on Tuesday.
The base, jointly composed of the Xuwei Nuclear Heating and Power Plant and the CNNC Heqi-1 steam supply project, is primarily designed to supply the Lianyungang Petrochemical Industrial Base, one of China’s seven major petrochemical bases. This marks China’s nuclear energy comprehensive utilization moving from technical demonstration into a new phase of standardization and large-scale application, said CNNC.
Advancing carbon peaking and carbon neutrality is a solemn commitment China has made to the international community and an inherent requirement for achieving sustainable development.
The green and low-carbon transformation of the energy structure is key to achieving carbon peaking and carbon neutrality. In 2025, China released a white paper titled Carbon Peaking and Carbon Neutrality China’s Plans and Solutions, which states that nuclear power is an efficient and high-quality clean energy source. China is committed to developing nuclear power with the absolute requirement that safety is guaranteed, and to promoting the use of nuclear energy in clean heating, industrial heating, and seawater desalination.
The petrochemical and chemical industries, as foundational sectors, bear the important responsibility of supporting national economic development. For the petrochemical industry, carbon reduction transformation under the dual carbon goals is imperative.
The “nuclear plus chemical” approach targets a critical need in the green transformation of the chemical industry: industrial steam, said the CNNC.
Chemical production requires large volumes of steam with high quality standards, and production facilities need long-term, continuous and stable operation. How to ensure large-scale, high-quality and continuous steam supply while effectively reducing carbon emissions has become a real challenge that industrial transformation must address.
Nuclear steam supply, using heat from nuclear power plants to supply industrial steam, is a new pathway that meets the steam demands of the petrochemical industry, reduces overall energy consumption and alleviates environmental pollution.
CNNC’s active promotion of the “nuclear plus petrochemical” coupled development deeply integrates nuclear energy’s clean advantages with the energy needs of the petrochemical industry, offering new ideas for the green transformation of traditional energy-intensive sectors.
The Xuwei Nuclear Heating and Power Plant is the world’s first large-scale nuclear-petrochemical coupled project, the world’s first project coupling pressurized water reactors and high-temperature gas-cooled reactors, the world’s first application of a “reactor-turbine-heat” coordinated control model, and the world’s first commercial application of a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor.
The project is a nuclear power plant primarily focused on industrial heating while also supplying electricity. It employs China’s Hualong One – a third-generation nuclear power technology with full independent intellectual property rights – combined with the high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, a fourth-generation nuclear technology.
The first phase of the project plans to build two Hualong One units and one high-temperature gas-cooled reactor unit. The project has conducted over 70 research topics, with more than 40 scientific and technological innovations already applied. It has pioneered integrated technologies including dual-main-pipe continuous heating, low-temperature-difference large-scale heat exchange, and reactor-turbine-heat integrated intelligent regulation, while simultaneously overcoming construction challenges such as undersea tunneling and modular construction. Multiple innovations have filled global technological gaps in nuclear industrial heating.
The Heqi-1 project uses steam from the secondary circuit of the Jiangsu Nuclear Power Units 3 and 4 as a heat source, employing multi-stage heat exchange technology to deliver steam at 1.8 megapascals and 248 degrees Celsius through independent isolated pipelines to the Lianyungang Petrochemical Industrial Base, 23.36 kilometers away.
This project represents the world’s first large-scale industrial steam production and supply from pressurized water reactor nuclear power units, with no established standards or engineering precedents to follow. Its key innovation lies in achieving real-time, precise matching of reactor core power, steam supply heat power and grid power. Through the development of large-scale steam supply unit reactor-turbine-heat matching technology, it has successfully addressed the problem of slow automatic reactor power response when steam supply equipment failures cause sudden significant drops in industrial steam flow.
To date, Heqi-1 has supplied over 4.8 million tons of green steam to the Lianyungang petrochemical base, injecting strong green momentum into the development of the petrochemical industry.
Moreover, CNNC has established China’s first carbon footprint factor calculation system for nuclear industrial steam supply, effectively giving each kilogram of nuclear steam a “green ID card” that precisely calculates its carbon emissions throughout the entire lifecycle and production process – from seawater to industrial steam – filling a gap both domestically and internationally. This helps enhance the green competitiveness of Chinese products.
