Pakistan’s PM Shehbaz Sharif launches US$3.5 billion Chinese-designed nuclear energy project
- The two countries had already signed an agreement to construct a state-of-the-art Hualong One reactor
- China also gave US$5 billion loan to Pakistan to help it unlock a bailout from the IMF
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Friday launched the construction of a 1,200-megawatt Chinese-designed nuclear energy project, which will be built at a cost of US$3.5 billion as part of the government efforts to generate more clean energy in the Islamic nation.
The ceremony to mark the project’s start comes less than a month after Pakistan signed an agreement with China’s National Nuclear Corporation Overseas in the capital, Islamabad, to construct a Hualong One reactor – a third-generation nuclear reactor and is considered safer because of the latest security features.
Pakistan and China are long-time allies. Pakistan’s relations with Beijing are so close that its leadership calls China their “Iron Brother.” China is also building roads, bridges, power plants, and railways to link its far west with the Chinese-built port of Gwadar on the Indian Ocean.
The nuclear power plant known as Chashma-5 will be constructed at a site along the left embankment of the fast-flowing Indus River in Mianwali, a district in the eastern Punjab province. The site is already home to four Chinese-supplied nuclear power plants that were built in recent decades.
Sharif, in his televised remarks at a gathering of Pakistani and Chinese officials in Mianwali, said the Chashma-5 nuclear energy project by itself was a “huge milestone, a huge success story, and a wonderful symbol of the cooperation between two great friends.”
He said Pakistan will get clean, efficient and cheaper energy at the completion of the project.
Pakistan, which got its first nuclear power plant from Canada, currently generates only 8 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power plants and plans to increase that figure to 20 per cent by 2030.