|
Hitachi Ltd., Japan's third-biggest builder of nuclear plants, and partner General Electric Co. are seeking orders for their newly developed mid-sized reactors, starting in Southeast Asia.
``The first order will likely come from one of three Southeast Asian countries, Vietnam, Indonesia or Thailand, which have unveiled plans to build nuclear power plants,'' Hitachi spokesman Masayuki Takeuchi said by telephone from Tokyo. ``Unofficially, we've been holding talks with government officials of those countries.''
The Hitachi-General Electric venture is competing with Toshiba Corp. in a global race to capture a larger share of the growing market for atomic reactors. The world needs to build 32 new nuclear power plants every year in order to halve emissions of pollution blamed for global warming by 2050, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency.
Hitachi and GE started developing the compact reactors with between 600 megawatts and 900 megawatts of capacity in the late 1990s, Takeuchi said. Each reactor costs about 300 billion yen ($2.8 billion) to construct, compared with about 400 billion yen for a large-scale reactor able to produce 1,300 megawatts.
Hitachi shares rose for a second day to close 1.7 percent higher at 779 yen on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
|
