BEIJING (Commodity Online) : Four months after China suspended approval for new nuclear projects, country uranium import dropped by nearly 13 percent.
According to country’s General Administration of Customs, China imported 5,356 tons of uranium in the first half of this year.
The slowdown may result from uncertainty about the nuclear power industry's prospects ahead of the government's release of a revised development plans for the industry, a local newspaper reported, citing an industry analyst.
China suspended approval of new nuclear projects following the nuclear incident in Japan's Fukushima in March.
In the first half of 2010, China imported 6,065 tons of uranium, 2.5 times the amount from a year earlier.
Last year, China's annual uranium imports tripled compared with that in 2009.
China will overtake the U.S. as the world's largest consumer of uranium by 2030, due to the large increase in imports to meet the increasingly growing nuclear industry, said Qian Zhimin, deputy director of the National Energy Administration.
The country imported 17,136 tons of uranium last year, reflecting an increase of three folds year on year, according to the statistics from the country's customs, according to an earlier report from China Knowledge.
