32 MARCH-APRIL 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL For all the talk in America about advanced and small modular reactors, China is ahead in actually building them. export controls. In 1981 the United States began helping China build up its civilian nuclear safety regulatory capacity nearly from scratch. At the same time, diplomats began negotiating a bilateral agreement on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Paving the Way for Business To satisfy U.S. conditions on a peaceful use agreement and on civil nuclear commerce, senior Chinese leaders committed their country to nonproliferation in principle. In 1984 China became a member of the IAEA. That same year, the DOE, with State Department support, began extending assistance to China in nuclear security and nonproliferation safeguards. By the late 1980s, Chinese safety and security specialists were spending months, if not years, on training and research assignments at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and national laboratories. When they returned and took up senior posts in China’s civil nuclear establishment, they brought back and implemented U.S. nuclear safety, security, and safeguards practices. It was with U.S. inducement and assistance that China implemented voluntary safeguards arrangements with the IAEA, acceded to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), ceased its unsafeguarded nuclear transfers, and became a member of multilateral export control regimes. In 1996, when information surfaced about China National Nuclear Corporation’s unauthorized sale of ring magnets to Pakistan, Washington insisted that Beijing implement more robust export controls on nuclear and dual-use items as a precondition for allowing U.S. companies to engage in civil nuclear commerce with China. In the years that followed, U.S. experts advised China on its nuclear and dual-use export control regulations and offered enforcement training. Nonproliferation diplomacy opened the door to civil nuclear commerce. In the decades following the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, U.S. civil nuclear construction all but ground to a halt amid market and regulatory challenges. As legal barriers to civil nuclear commerce with China were lifted, U.S.-based Westinghouse rushed to secure Chinese orders for its first-of-a-kind AP1000 reactor, which it had not had success marketing elsewhere. In 2006 the U.S. government endorsed the reactor sale and technology transfer deal, thus making China the first country to construct the AP1000. Lessons learned from Chinese licensing and construction of the AP1000 informed the U.S. project at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Burke County, Georgia. The two units that were completed there in 2024, 15 years after their construction was approved and with tens of billions of dollars in cost overruns, remain the only AP1000 units to operate outside China. Today, China operates more units of the U.S. AP1000 than any other country in the world—including the United States. There has also been cooperation in advanced reactors. After the resolution of lingering export control issues in the early 2000s, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the first U.S. entity to receive DOE authorization to collaborate with China over nuclear technology—specifically, the technology of high-temperature gas-cooled reactors. When the George W. Bush administration announced its Global Nuclear Energy Partnership in 2006, China became one of the most eager participants. Its Institute of Atomic Energy, which had been conducting civilian research since the 1970s, engaged national laboratories under the U.S. DOE within a bilateral action plan to advance fast reactor and fuel cycle technologies. Cooperation extended far beyond the Bush administration. In 2014 the Chinese institute made its experimental fast reactor available to DOE for joint material testing. Meanwhile, the Chinese Academy of Sciences conducted joint research with Oak Ridge National Laboratory in molten-salt reactors and with Idaho National Laboratory in hybrid energy systems. In 2015 Bill Gates’ advanced reactor company, TerraPower, signed an agreement with China National Nuclear Corporation to construct its first traveling wave reactor in China. That, however, was not meant to be. In just three years, the U.S. government’s restrictions on civil nuclear cooperation with China terminated this partnership and others like it. The Relationship Today In 2018 the U.S. administration heavily restricted civil nuclear exports to China, citing technology theft and military diversion concerns and channeling a new strategic outlook of “great-power rivalry.” According to the U.S. Justice Department, Chinese hackers had gained illegal access to Westinghouse technology and inside information in parallel with the negotiation of legal technology transfer. In 2016 China General Nuclear, a Chinese state-owned nuclear company, was indicted for acquiring U.S. nuclear know-how outside U.S. law and the U.S.-China civil nuclear cooperation framework.
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