Challenges and countermeasures of high-quality development of nuclear energy under the background of "dual carbon"

From the perspective of the past development experience and future development strategies of the world, especially developed countries, energy and power systems will present a situation of coexistence of various forms of energy, renewable energy, nuclear energy, energy storage and other new forms of energy coexist and complement each other with different energy sources such as necessary fossil energy, each giving play to its own advantages. To provide sufficient energy and electricity for global and national economic and social development.

At present, the world's top 15 GDP countries have basically made it clear that the goal of "carbon neutrality" before and after 2050, except Italy and Australia, nuclear energy occupies a certain proportion in their energy and power systems [6] (see Figure 7), among the top 10 GDP countries, especially among the five permanent members of the United Nations, China's nuclear power occupies a relatively low proportion.

In view of its characteristics of clean and low carbon, output stability, low marginal cost, and development of coastal nuclear power deployment and the depth of the economic layout of our country, nuclear power is the most expected to give consideration to the triangle of "low carbon, economy, safety" in the energy supply side of our country, especially in the new non-fossil energy, nuclear energy can be large-scale development to replace the fossil energy around the coastal load center of our country. The technical characteristics of nuclear power and renewable energy correspond to and complement each other, which can achieve complementary development with higher spatio-temporal matching degree of power consumption, and jointly become an important part of non-fossil energy in the future energy and power system.

Third, the challenges facing the high-quality development of China's nuclear energy industry under the "dual carbon" goal

(1) Nuclear energy should meet the competitive challenges of the marketization of energy and electricity and the establishment of a future "carbon market"

In recent years, China's energy and electricity market reform has been actively promoted, regional electricity markets have been established, and the proportion of market-oriented electricity sales has increased rapidly. According to the website of the China Electricity Council, the proportion of market transactions in the electricity consumption of the whole society is increasing year by year, and the proportion of market transactions in the national online electricity in 2020 has exceeded 40%. In 2020, the marketization rate of nuclear power on-grid electricity will be about 33%, which will continue to increase by 2 percentage points compared with 2019, and increase by about 8 percentage points and 15 percentage points compared with 2018 and 2017 respectively. With the in-depth promotion of wind power and photovoltaic parity online work, as well as the continuous deepening of electricity market reform, nuclear power needs to do more work in terms of cost control and adaptation to the needs of the power system to face the challenges of market competition. In the future, with the establishment of China's "carbon market", the nuclear energy industry needs to further think about how to play its own advantages to meet the clean energy price competition and challenges brought by the establishment of "carbon market", and fully absorb the dividends of low-carbon development of energy and power industry.

(2) The imperfect relevant legal system is not enough to support the development of new nuclear energy industry

All types of projects at all stages of nuclear energy development have the characteristics of large capital investment, long construction cycle, and long preparatory work. From universal suffrage to preliminary feasibility study, feasibility study, approval and construction, it often takes several years, and dozens of government supporting documents need to be obtained. Although the nuclear energy industry practitioners after years of experience and running-in, has initially formed a set of experience and methods, and better applied in the nuclear energy industry practice. However, from the completion of the nuclear power planning goals at the end of the "13th Five-Year Plan", there are still phenomena such as failure to fully adapt to the overall development requirements of energy and electricity in the new era, so that the planning goals can not be fully realized (the "13th Five-Year Plan" nuclear power installed capacity target achieved 96%, only about 40% of the installed capacity target achieved). In the field of new nuclear energy industries other than nuclear power, such as the comprehensive utilization of nuclear energy, due to the lack of a perfect and guiding relevant standard system, the development of the industry is slow, and even there is an upside down problem between nuclear energy projects and energy use units in the progress target, that is, "when nuclear energy is needed, it cannot be reached" and "nuclear energy projects can only be built after the regional energy demand shrinks."