Another communist state, the Soviet Union, seized on nuclear power in the
1970s and '80s as an answer to its energy problems, putting up about a dozen
poorly designed plants. That culminated in the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, which
spread radiation across Europe in the world's worst nuclear accident.
"The safety issue is simply not something the Chinese government can afford
to overlook," said Ailun Yang, climate and energy campaign manager for
Greenpeace China. "The situation in China is that there will be huge
populations around. What will happen if there is a Chernobyl in China?"
The Chinese government has emphasized a commitment to safety and is relying
heavily on Western contractors such as Westinghouse to teach its engineers to
build and operate plants.
China has nine working nuclear power plants, most on the coast. Two other plants
were recently completed and will be hooked up to the electricity grid later this
year. Dozens more are in the planning stage.
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology report said China may have to add as
many as 200 nuclear power plants by 2050 to meet its needs. Academics from
China's leading technical university, Tsinghua University, said the country
might need more, equivalent to the output of 300 plants.
In comparison, the United States has just more than 100 operating nuclear
plants. Nuclear power has effectively been on hold in the United States since
the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, but, with encouragement
from the Bush administration, companies are thinking about ordering new plants.
Leon Reiter, a former member of the U.S. Nuclear, said countries are converging
on the same conclusion as the world's supply of energy resources such as coal
and oil grow scarcer and costlier.
"It is hard to imagine any way for us to come up with the energy we need
without nuclear power," Reiter said.
China is talking about addressing the safety issue with a cookie-cutter plant of
its own design that would be built in dozens of places. As in the United States,
engineers in China want to build a plant whose fuel core cannot melt down and
release radioactivity into the environment. Groundbreaking for an experimental
$416 million Chinese plant is scheduled for 2009.
Even if the safety issue in China is solved, the country will confront a problem
that has bedeviled nuclear power everywhere: what to do with the radioactive
waste.
In a conventional power plant, fossil fuels that have been trapped underground
for millions of years are burned, generating heat that can be used to run
electricity-generating turbines. The burning releases carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere. Scientists have concluded that the gas, by trapping extra heat from
the sun, is warming the Earth and is likely to create severe environmental
problems.
Nuclear plants generate heat by splitting atoms of uranium. They give off no
greenhouse gases, but as the nuclear reaction proceeds, the uranium is
transformed into other elements, some of which remain radioactive for many
centuries.
As a rule, the spent fuel is stored temporarily in water-filled tanks near
nuclear plants. In democratic countries, the question of final disposal has
provoked huge, seemingly endless fights, including one in the United States over
whether to dispose of the spent fuel at an underground site at Yucca Mountain in
Nevada.
The idea behind a disposal site is simple: Stick the waste in a sealed
container, place it deep underground, and leave it there until the radiation
goes away. But in practice, finding appropriate sites has been difficult because
of worries about earthquakes or ground water spreading the radiation.
In the desert of Central Asia, China is planning its own version of Yucca
Mountain, albeit without serious opposition. Some local leaders have protested
the Beishan Mountain disposal project, but their concerns have been muted.
The Beishan Mountains are a lonely outpost, with the closest permanent residents
more than 60 miles away. The only people who venture here are nomadic Mongolian
herdsmen with goats and camels. They move from one small oasis to another in
what is otherwise a desolate, gray desert for hundreds of miles around. The only
signs of the nuclear waste site to come are the dark tents that scientists put
up and take down as they test rock layers to find the best place for disposal.
Chinese officials have not announced specifics of the Beishan waste disposal
site, but Wang Ju, head of the waste repository project for the Beijing Research
Institute of Uranium Geology of the state-run China National Nuclear Corp., said
the schedule for construction had been sped up to match the country's increasing
use of nuclear power.
Xu Mingqi, deputy director of the Institute of World Economy at the Shanghai
Academy of Social Sciences, who researches energy issues, said the Chinese
government is well aware of the stakes.
"If we do not bury it properly," Xu said, " it could be an even
bigger problem than the pollution problem we have now." NEXT