Abstract: China is the largest developing country with its energy consumption ranks first in the world. In order to achieve the sustainable development of society and economy, ensure the security of energy supply and reduce the pressure of environment, it is an inevitable choice of energy development strategy to vigorously develop clean energy including nuclear energy. At present, China’s nuclear energy has made great progress after nearly 30 years of development, but it still accounts for a small proportion in the energy system. In view of China’s limited overall uranium reserves, it is difficult to develop nuclear energy with thermal reactors as the main energy source. Fast reactor has the advantages of high resource utilization rate, good inherent safety and so on, and equipped with advanced nuclear fuel cycle system, the large-scale, sustainable and environmentally friendly development of nuclear energy can be achieved. Among them, the development of fast reactor should follow the route of first proliferation and then transmutation, and the fuel should be transferred to metal fuel as soon as possible after passing through oxide ceramic fuel. In terms of post-treatment, the spent fuel of PWR is mainly treated by aqueous reprocessing method in the early stage to provide the initial loading for fast reactor. In the subsequent stage, dry reprocessing should be implemented as soon as possible to shorten the doubling time of proliferating fuel and improve the economy of the whole fuel cycle system. At the same time, it is also necessary to develop the treatment and disposal technology of high-level radioactive waste. With the support of fast reactor and advanced nuclear fuel cycle system, China’s nuclear energy can be developed as the main energy source in a thousand-year scale.