This piece, based on a text dated April 19, 2019, examines the reality of the growing struggle between China and the United States for leadership in nuclear power, using a Yomiuri Shimbun article titled “U.S.-China Confrontation” as its point of departure.
China’s domestically developed reactor, Hualong One, is not only a symbol of advanced technology for the Xi Jinping administration, but also a core export strategy item tied to the Belt and Road Initiative.
Meanwhile, the United States is attempting a comeback through small modular reactors, and once one looks squarely at this global reality, the true nature of the anti-nuclear movement repeatedly seen within Japan also comes into view.

2019-04-19
For the Xi Jinping administration, which aims to become a “nuclear power superpower,” Hualong One is not only a symbol of advanced technology, but also a strategic export product tied to the China-led vast economic sphere initiative known as the Belt and Road.
The following is from an article published the other day in the Yomiuri Shimbun under the title “U.S.-China Confrontation.”
The true nature of the anti-nuclear movement carried out by the Asahi, NHK, leftist infantile ideologues, people whose GHQ brainwashing has not been lifted, and people operating under the influence of China and the Korean Peninsula while calling themselves “citizen groups,” becomes clear at a glance.
The day when the “leader of nuclear power” changes.
“The United States has remained the leader in nuclear power generation for sixty years, but at this rate it will likely be overtaken by China within ten years.”
At the February 28 hearing of the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, International Energy Agency Executive Director Fatih Birol said this.
The United States and China are increasingly competing in the field of nuclear power as well.
At the Fuqing Nuclear Power Plant in Fujian Province, China, where a sign proclaiming “nuclear power superpower” stands, construction is advancing on two units of China’s domestically developed reactor, “Hualong One.”
Its output is 1.15 million kilowatts.
For the Xi Jinping administration, which aims to become a “nuclear power superpower,” Hualong One is not only a symbol of advanced technology, but also a strategic export product tied to the China-led vast economic sphere initiative known as the Belt and Road.
Meanwhile, U.S. President Trump has set as a policy goal the “revival and expansion of nuclear power.”
The “Small Modular Reactor,” or SMR, being developed by the startup company NuScale Power in the U.S. state of Oregon, is a new kind of reactor that uses multiple small reactors, each with an output of 60,000 kilowatts, in combination.
Despite not yet being built, it is already highly popular overseas.
After the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident, new nuclear construction in the United States stagnated, but the world is now watching to see how far it will be able to stage a comeback.
(Washington Bureau, Sho Funakoshi.
Shenyang Bureau, Keiichiro Azuma.)