Chinanews, Wuhan, Sept 11 – At present, about seven Chinese provinces have applied for the right to set up the first inland nuclear power plant. They include Anhui, Jiangxi, Hubei, Hunan and Sichuan along the Yangtze River region, Jilin in the northeast, and Gansu in northwest China.All the five provinces along the Yangtze River region are grouped as provinces in the central part of China. At present, only Shanxi Province in this region has not proposed any plan for nuclear power plant construction. Compared with provinces in other regions, it is said that provinces located near the Yangtze River region have the most favorable conditions for obtaining the right to build the first inland nuclear power plant. However, so far, the State Development and Reform Commission has not approved any of the applications submitted by them.A forum on nuclear power exploitation and construction was held in Wuhan on last Sunday. At the forum, executive vice governor of Hubei Province, Zhou Jianwei, said the provincial government had attached great importance to the nuclear power construction project, that it would work hard to support its nuclear power construction project and try to win the bid to become the first inland province to build a nuclear power plant.Early in 1988, Hubei local government carried out an inspection work to choose an ideal site for the nuclear power plant. In the initial stage, the government chose 20 sites and later they reduced the potential sites to five. In June 2004, it finally chose Dafan (in Xianning city) as the site to build the nuclear power plant. In October 2004, the local government finished its nuclear research program and submitted the program proposal to the State Development and Reform Commission. Hubei thus become the first inland province to submit the nuclear power project proposal.Hubei has a relatively short supply of energy resources. Its production of primary energy is rather small and the energy it has produced can rarely meet the demand for it. There are four ways to solve the energy shortage problem in Hubei: to buy more coal resources from other provinces, to develop hydropower, to buy more power from other provinces, and to develop the nuclear power. If Hubei can build a four-million-kilowatt nuclear power plant before 2020, it will save 18 million tons of coal resources every year. Construction of the nuclear power plant can also diversify the energy resources in Hubei, said Xiao Yunbao, director of the Hubei Provincial Nuclear Power Office.