About Shanghai Nuclear Engineering Research and Design Institute

Shanghai Nuclear Engineering Research and Design Institute

The Shanghai Nuclear Engineering Research and Design Institute, known by the abbreviation SNERDI, is the design institute that created China's indigenous nuclear power industry. Founded on 8 February 1970 as the "728 Institute," it was the organisation charged with designing the country's first nuclear power plant after Premier Zhou Enlai declared that nuclear power was the long-term answer to the electricity shortage of Shanghai and east China. The plant it designed, the 300 MWe pressurised water reactor at Qinshan in Zhejiang Province, was connected to the grid on 15 December 1991 and made China one of the few countries able to design, build and operate a nuclear power plant on its own. SNERDI went on to design the scaled-up CNP-600 units of Qinshan Phase II, work with Canada's AECL on the CANDU reactors of Qinshan Phase III, and, after its transfer in 2007 from the China National Nuclear Corporation to the State Nuclear Power Technology Corporation, lead the localisation of the Westinghouse AP1000 and the development of the larger CAP1400, marketed as Guohe One. It is headquartered on Hongcao Road in Shanghai and today sits within the nuclear sector of the State Power Investment Corporation (SPIC).

The 728 Project and the founding of the institute

SNERDI's founding is precisely dated because it was a political act. On 8 February 1970, hearing a report on the shortage of electricity in Shanghai, Premier Zhou Enlai remarked that, from a long-term point of view, nuclear power was the only solution for the shortage of electricity in Shanghai and east China. China issued its first nuclear power plan the same day, and the institute created to carry it out took its name from the date of that decision: the 728 Institute, "728" standing for 8 February in the Chinese date convention used by the project. The institute was formed with the objective of research and development in high-technology nuclear engineering, at a time when China had no civilian nuclear power plant, no commercial reactor design organisation and only limited access to foreign technology. For more than a decade the 728 Project proceeded through design studies and site selection — the Qinshan site in Haiyan County, Zhejiang, on the northern shore of Hangzhou Bay, was approved in 1982 — before construction of the plant itself began in the mid-1980s.

Qinshan Phase I: China's first self-designed plant

The institute's defining achievement is Qinshan Phase I. The plant was a single-loop pressurised water reactor of about 300 MWe (966 MW thermal), designed by SNERDI as China's first self-designed and self-constructed nuclear power plant. Construction began in March 1985; the reactor achieved first criticality on 31 October 1991 and was connected to the grid on 15 December 1991, with commercial operation following in April 1994. The significance of the project was national as much as technical: it ended the history of mainland China without nuclear power and made China the seventh country in the world able to design, build, operate and manage nuclear power plants by itself. A 1985 paper by the institute in the Transactions of the American Nuclear Society described the design while construction was under way: a two-coolant-loop primary circuit with sixteen auxiliary systems, a thermal power of 966 MW and safety as the stated priority in design. The unit's original design life was thirty years; a major upgrade in 2007-2008 replaced the entire instrumentation and control system and the reactor pressure vessel head, and the plant received a twenty-year life extension in 2021.

Qinshan Phase II and the CNP-600

Having proven the 300 MWe design, the institute scaled it up. Qinshan Phase II consisted of two-loop pressurised water reactors of about 600-650 MWe, designated CNP-600, developed by SNERDI by enlarging the Qinshan I design; preliminary design review was completed in November 1992. The first Phase II unit entered commercial operation in April 2002 and the second in 2004, and two further CNP-600 units were added in the second stage of Phase II, with construction beginning in 2006-2007 and local content above seventy per cent. The CNP line that began with SNERDI's CNP-300 thus became the standard indigenous reactor family of the China National Nuclear Corporation: the institute also worked with Westinghouse and Framatome from the early 1990s on developing the larger three-loop CNP-1000 standard design, and in 1997 the Nuclear Power Institute of China at Chengdu joined that design work. The CNP-600 units at Qinshan were later exported in variant form: the SNP350/CNP-300 design lineage underlies the reactors supplied to Pakistan at Chashma, making the institute's first design an export product as well as a domestic prototype.

The CANDU work and the AECL engineering centre

Qinshan Phase III took a different technology: two CANDU 6 pressurised heavy water reactors of about 728 MWe each, supplied by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) as main contractor. SNERDI's role was on the Chinese side of that project: the Shanghai institute managed balance-of-plant construction on subcontract to the owner, the Third Qinshan Nuclear Power Company, and worked closely with AECL on reactor engineering for the two units. Construction began in 1997-1998; Unit 1 entered commercial operation at the end of 2002 and Unit 2 in July 2003, on what was recorded as the shortest construction schedule of any nuclear plant built in China to that date. In 2003, formalising the relationship, SNERDI and AECL established a joint CANDU Engineering Center. The CANDU episode matters in the institute's history because it gave its engineers direct experience of a second, entirely different reactor technology and of Canadian project and quality practices, complementing the pressurised water reactor line it had developed on its own.

Transfer to SNPTC and the AP1000 programme

In 2007 the institute's institutional home changed. SNERDI had been founded within what became the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), but on 25 June 2007 it joined the newly formed State Nuclear Power Technology Corporation (SNPTC) as one of that company's core business units. SNPTC had been created by the State Council in May 2007 as the vehicle for importing third-generation nuclear technology: it signed the contract with Westinghouse for the AP1000, and was entrusted with digesting, localising and re-innovating that design into Chinese plants. SNERDI was accordingly reassigned to concentrate on the AP1000 programme, working with the Beijing Institute of Nuclear Engineering and the Nuclear Power Institute of China on detailed design for the first AP1000 projects at Sanmen and Haiyang. The transfer separated the institute from the CNP line it had created — which remained with CNNC — and reoriented it toward the American-derived passive-safety technology that the state had chosen as the other main line of China's third-generation programme.

CAP1400 and Guohe One

The largest task of the institute's SNPTC period is the CAP1400. Under agreements made in 2008 and 2009, Westinghouse worked with SNPTC and other Chinese institutes to develop a larger version of the AP1000 of about 1,400 MWe, with China owning the intellectual property in the enlarged design. SNERDI, as the design institute of the programme, led the CAP1400 design effort in a team that also included the State Nuclear Power Engineering Company, the Shandong Electric Power Engineering Consulting Institute and the component manufacturers. A joint venture, State Nuclear Demonstration Co, was set up in December 2009 by SNPTC and China Huaneng Group to build the demonstration plant at Shidaowan, near Rongcheng in Shandong. The design passed its national safety review in 2014 after a seventeen-month examination and an IAEA Generic Reactor Safety Review in 2015. In September 2020, with construction design of the demonstration units more than ninety-nine per cent complete, SPIC — into which SNPTC had been merged in 2015 — formally launched the design for wider deployment under the name Guohe One, "National Harmony One," presenting it as China's self-owned third-generation reactor brand.

Small reactors, thorium and other programmes

Beyond the large pressurised water reactors, the World Nuclear Association records that SNERDI is developing different small modular reactor projects, and that it works with the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics and the Nuclear Power Institute of China on engineering for China's thorium molten salt reactor programme. That breadth is characteristic of the institute's position in the later phase of its history: no longer the sole designer of a single prototype, it became one of the principal engineering houses of the SPIC nuclear sector, contributing to whichever reactor lines the group pursued. Its work also continued in services to operating plants, including the operation support and technical services for the plants it had designed. The institute's address and identity, however, remained those fixed in 1970: a Shanghai institute, headquartered at 29 Hongcao Road in the city's Xuhui District, whose institutional memory runs unbroken from the 728 Project to Guohe One.

People and human resources

The scale of the institute's programmes made it one of the largest employers of nuclear engineers in China, and its own published analyses discuss the human-resource challenge of staffing the AP1000, CAP1400 and prospective CAP1700 designs simultaneously. An IAEA conference paper co-authored by the institute's M. Zheng examined precisely that challenge: how SNPTC and SNERDI could recruit, train and retain enough qualified engineers for the third-generation programme. The institute's senior figures have included designers who spent entire careers on the Qinshan line. Its adjunct links with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, one of China's principal nuclear engineering universities, reflect the pipeline through which it recruits. The same paper records the institutional facts on which this profile's account of the institute rests: SNERDI formed on 8 February 1970 for research and development of high-technology nuclear engineering, the leader in China in nuclear engineering design, and a core business unit of SNPTC from 25 June 2007.

Place in China's nuclear industry

SNERDI's historical position is singular. Other Chinese institutes design reactors — the Nuclear Power Institute of China in Chengdu and the China Institute of Atomic Energy in Beijing among them — but SNERDI is the institute that designed the first Chinese nuclear power plant, and its subsequent history traces the whole arc of the industry: indigenous design under conditions of isolation in the 1970s and 1980s, first power in 1991, scaling and export of the CNP line, a foreign-technology project with Canada, then absorption of American third-generation technology and its redevelopment into the Chinese-owned CAP1400. The World Nuclear Association describes it as the original nuclear design institute of China. From the 728 Institute of February 1970 to the Guohe One design organisation of the SPIC era, the institute's work has supplied Shanghai and east China — the region whose electricity shortage called it into being — with the technology that now provides a substantial share of its power.