[Marxism] China Promotes Another Boom: Nuclear Power

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

China Promotes Another Boom: Nuclear Power
    By Howard W. French
    The New York Times

    Saturday 15 January 2005

    Daya 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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