China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) recently announced that 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 more than 35 million tons of industrial steam annually upon completion. The project will provide the Lianyungang Petrochemical Industrial Base with high-quality, low-carbon steam, offering a scalable "Chinese solution" for decarbonizing energy-intensive industries worldwide.

The base combines the Xuwei Nuclear Heating and Power Plant and the CNNC Heqi-1 steam supply system. Designed to serve the Lianyungang Petrochemical Industrial Base, one of China's seven major petrochemical industrial bases, this project marks a new stage in the standardization and scaling of China's comprehensive nuclear energy utilization. By integrating the clean advantages of nuclear energy with the energy demands of the petrochemical industry, the project supports the green transition of energy-intensive industries.

The Xuwei Nuclear Heating and Power Plant is a nuclear facility 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, to meet the industrial steam needs of the petrochemical park. Upon completion, it will be capable of supplying high-quality steam and electricity under designed conditions.

Meanwhile, the Heqi-1 project uses steam from the secondary circuit of the Jiangsu Nuclear Power Units 3 and 4 as a heat source, employing a multi-stage heat exchange system, to deliver steam through independent isolated pipelines to the Lianyungang Petrochemical Industrial Base, 23.36 kilometers away. As the world's first large-scale industrial steam supply project based on pressurized water reactors, with no established standards or engineering precedents to follow, it pioneers key technologies for 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 more than 4.8 million tons of green steam to the Lianyungang Petrochemical Industrial Base, supporting the green development of the petrochemical industry.