AREVA SA, the world's largest builder of atomic power stations, started initial talks with China National Nuclear Corp to build a nuclear waste treatment plant in the country.

The Paris-based company wants to tap rising demand for nuclear fuel in China, Marc Anniel, Asia sales director of Areva NC, a unit of Areva, said in an interview in Shanghai yesterday.

"We aim to build a spent-fuel reprocessing and waste treatment plant for the Chinese company," Anniel said. "China's nuclear waste treatment market is very huge and could be as huge as that of France's."

China needs to add two reactors a year to meet a target of generating four percent of power from nuclear energy by 2020, up from 2.3 percent currently. Areva and U.S.-based Westinghouse Electric Co are competing to build as many as 26 more reactors within 13 years as China turns to atomic energy to cut pollution and reliance on oil, Bloomberg News said.

The two governments haven't started formal talks on the nuclear waste treatment plant, Anniel said, declining to reveal the potential contract value.

China will start building two nuclear waste processing plants in the eastern and southwestern regions of the country by 2010, the Commission of Science and Technology and Industry for National Defense said on April 18.

China National Nuclear may start operating by 2020 a test storage and treatment facility for nuclear waste, Shen Wenquan, vice-chairman of the company's science and technology division, said in February last year.

Source:佚名