The report, titled “Are China's nuclear power plans achievable?”, concludes that while nuclear capacity will increasing from 14.6 GW in 2013 to 175 GW by 2030 it will still fall short of China’s growing hunger for energy.

The report highlights that although coal’s share will decline from 75% in 2013, due to the rapid growth in natural gas and renewables capacity, coal will still see net volume growth.

Additionally, a 1% upside for coal from nuclear not meeting targets will translate to an additional coal demand of 63 million tonnes per year by 2025 and 55Mtpa by 2030.

Head of Asia Pacific gas and power research for Wood Mackenzie, Gavin Thompson said: “Our nuclear outlook for China reinforces Wood Mackenzie’s view that coal will continue to play a dominant role in power generation in the foreseeable future, even with the successful implementation of new environmental measures.

“While nuclear will moderate the growth in coal-fired generation, China's coal story is far from over.”

Wood Mackenzie's nuclear-generation forecast reveals a 200 terawatt-hours gap of base-load electricity supply. Coal is expected to meet 125TWh of the gap while natural gas and renewables accounts for the remainder. Though natural gas production and imports will significantly increase, it will be insufficient to prevent coal from accounting for 64% of the power-generation mix by 2030.

“Our expectations for a lower level of installed nuclear capacity compared to the government's target are based on a number of factors: operational and siting challenges; constraints on the pace of local nuclear technology development; lack of skilled and trained personnel; lack of supporting infrastructure for uranium fuel fabrication and disposal; and a lack of full support by the public in building inland plants,” Thompson said.

“As such, it’s likely that some of the planned and proposed capacity build will be delayed or cancelled.”