But now the Federal Atomic Energy Agency is planning a highly ambitious project, to build 40 new reactors by the year 2030.
Tokyo does plan to restart at least six reactors within the next year, and plans to restart all reactors that post-date the Fukushima-type GE Mark I and II reactors.
Oil-rich regions like the United Arab Emirates and smaller nations like Vietnam announced plans to build nuclear reactors in the past year.
Gov. Cuomo has campaigned relentlessly to shut down the reactors, which are capable of producing 2, 060 megawatts of electric power, regardless of whether the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission grants the reactors 20-year extensions in 2014 and 2016.
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Executives have been pressing officials in China to include GE's advanced boiling-water reactors in their next five-year economic plan (China uses the pressurized reactors championed by perennial GE rival Westinghouse, now part of British Nuclear Fuels Ltd.).
Meanwhile, a 20-year agreement to decommission old Soviet warheads and convert the uranium for use in reactors is due to expire this year.
Over the next decade, the country built nearly two reactors a year.
The government has a target of the end of the year to bring the plant to a cold shutdown, when the reactors are stable and the water inside them is no longer boiling.
The new reactors will use a more modern and safer design, developed after the 40-year-old Fukushima plant was built.
The Horizon joint venture was set up in 2009 to build new nuclear plants to replace the 40-year old Magnox reactors at Wylfa and Oldbury.
The NRC determined that the design-basis tornado wind speeds for new reactors should correspond to the exceedance frequency of one-in-ten-million per year.
Earlier this year, the NRC approved "early site permits" for new reactors at an Exelon site in Illinois and an Entergy site in Mississippi.
Last year the current, centre-right lot extended the lives of seven ageing reactors by eight years.
Later this year, NRC expects the deluge of applications to actually build and operate new reactors to begin.
Fifty-eight new reactors are under construction, up from 52 a year ago, and 148 reactors are planned, including 110 that will come onstream in the next 10 years.
The West has proposed a deal whereby Iran would send uranium abroad for further enrichment to feed some reactors for medical purposes in the country, but the government is nigh-certain to miss the end-of-year deadline for progress.
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