China Promotes Another Boom: Nuclear Power

From: Tom Simonds (tsimonds_at_theworld.com)
Date: 01/15/05 

Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 07:16:04 -0500

January 15, 2005
China Promotes Another Boom: Nuclear Power
By HOWARD W. FRENCH

new york times
AYA BAY, China - The view from this remote point by the sea, with lines
of misty mountains stretching into the distance, is worthy of a
classical Chinese painting. In the foreground, though, sits a less
obvious attraction: one of China's first nuclear power reactors, and
just behind it, another being rushed toward completion.

There are countless ways to show how China is climbing the world's
economic ladder, hurdling developed countries in its path, but few are
more pronounced than the country's rush into nuclear energy - a
technology that for environmental, safety and economic reasons most of
the world has put on hold.

In its anxiety to satisfy its seemingly bottomless demand for
electricity, China plans to build reactors on a scale and pace
comparable to the most ambitious nuclear energy programs the world has
ever seen.

Current plans - conservative ones, in the estimation of some people
involved in China's nuclear energy program - call for new reactors to be
commissioned at a rate of nearly two a year between now and 2020, a pace
that experts say is comparable to the peak of the United States' nuclear
energy push in the 1970's.

"We will certainly build more than one reactor per year," said Zhou
Dadi, director of the central government's Energy Research Institute,
which has strongly supported the country's nuclear program. "The
challenge is not the technology. The barriers for China are mostly
institutional arrangements, because reactors are big projects. What we
need most is better operation, financing and management."

By 2010, planners predict a quadrupling of nuclear output to 16 billion
kilowatt-hours and a doubling of that figure by 2015. And with
commercial nuclear energy programs dead or stagnant in the United States
and most of Europe, Western and other developers of nuclear plant
technology are lining up to sell reactors and other equipment to the
Chinese, whose purchasing decisions alone will determine in many
instances who survives in the business.

France, which derives about a third of its energy from nuclear power, is
the only Western country committed to a large-scale nuclear energy
program. It is in a building lull now, but will need to begin replacing
aging reactors within a decade or so.

Japan derives about 10 percent of its energy from nuclear sources and
was once among the most favorably disposed toward nuclear energy. But a
string of scandals involving comically shoddy practices, like mixing
radioactive materials in a bucket, and near accidents have turned public
opinion in many areas strongly antinuclear.

That leaves China as the only potential growth area for nuclear energy.
And for China, which still derives as much as 80 percent of its
electricity from burning coal, the lure of nuclear energy is as obvious
as the thick, acrid, choking haze that hangs over virtually all the
country's cities.

The problem with nuclear power, some experts say, is that China's energy
needs are so immense - each year, by some estimates, the country plans
to add generating capacity from all sources equivalent to the entire
current energy consumption of Britain - that even the enormous expansion
program will do little to offset the skyrocketing power demand.

China's eight nuclear reactors in operation today supply less than 2
percent of current demand. By 2020, assuming the national plan is
fulfilled, nuclear energy would still constitute under 4 percent of
demand.

There has been almost no public discussion of the merits and risks of
nuclear energy here, as the government strictly censors news coverage of
such issues. But critics question whether such a small payoff warrants
exposure to the risk of catastrophic failures, nuclear proliferation,
terrorism and the still unresolved problems of radioactive waste
disposal.

"We don't have a very good plan for dealing with spent fuel, and we
don't have very good emergency plans for dealing with catastrophe," said
Wang Yi, a nuclear energy expert at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in
Beijing. "The nuclear interest group wants to push this technology, but
they don't understand the risks for the future. They want to make money.
But we scientists, we want to take a very comprehensive approach,
including safety, environment, dealing with waste and other factors, and
not rush into anything."

Chinese nuclear operators, like the people who run the Daya Bay plants
here, scoff at such concerns.

"In China we have state-owned power companies, whereas abroad they have
private companies," said Yu Jiechun, a senior engineer at the China
Guangdong Nuclear Power Holding Company. "It's not a matter of someone's
profit here, whether we do something one way or another. The government
decides, and they have spent huge amounts of money on safety."

The government is also looking into a new generation of "pebble bed"
reactors that some scientists say are far safer than traditional
designs, though these are not a part of its immediate plans.

One sure sign of the Chinese industry's self-assuredness is the
promotion of the Daya Bay plants as a tourist attraction. For now - in a
country where surging power demand has led major cities like Shanghai to
force companies to stagger working hours, shut down during the week and
operate on weekends - the public is likely to support anything that
promises more electricity.

American experts, mindful of the destructive consequences of the near
catastrophic accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in 1979,
warn against overconfidence.

"In 1970 we had a net capability of 7 million kilowatt hours, and by
1981 we had reached 56 million kilowatt hours," said John Moens, a
nuclear analyst at the United States Department of Energy. "So the rate
of growth they propose is not only conceivable, it has been done before.
The problem is, can you regulate it? Can you deal with the environmental
problems? Can you deal with the hundred different things that creep up,
as the Japanese found when they expanded their industry, just as we
found when we expanded ours?"

Reinforcing this point, David Lochbaum, a nuclear energy expert at the
Union of Concerned Scientists, a private, nonprofit group based in
Cambridge, Mass., said that of the 103 reactors in operation in the
United States, 27 have been shut down for at least a year since
September 1984.

Daya Bay's location less than 50 miles from Hong Kong, where the
proximity has become a political issue, only reinforces the
environmental and safety concerns. That may sound like ample space, but
it is not much different from the distance from New York City to the
Indian Point nuclear plant in Buchanan, N.Y., which has become an issue
since the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Of the technologies that exist today, you have to look at what can
happen on the worst day," Mr. Lochbaum said. "With wind power, you can
go bankrupt. With a dam burst, lives can and have been lost, but it's
fairly localized. The cost of cleaning up after Chernobyl, though, is
greater than all of the benefits of the entire Soviet nuclear power
industry combined, and it could have been worse."

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