Chinese physicist says nuclear plant expansion ‘insane’
China’s plans for a rapid expansion of nuclear power plants are “insane” because the country is not investing enough in safety controls, a leading Chinese scientist has said.
Proposals to build plants inland, as China ends a moratorium on new generators imposed after the Fukushima Dai-ichi disaster in Japan in March 2011, are particularly risky, physicist He Zuoxiu said, because if there was an accident, it could contaminate rivers that hundreds of millions of people rely on for water and taint groundwater supplies to vast swathes of important farmlands.
China halted the approval of new reactors in 2011 to review its safety standards, but gave the go-ahead in March for two units, part of an attempt to surpass Japan’s nuclear-generating capacity by 2020 and become the world’s biggest user of nuclear power a decade later.
US President Barack Obama recently announced plans to renew a nuclear cooperation deal with Beijing that would allow it to buy more US-designed reactors, and potentially pursue the technology to reprocess plutonium from spent fuel.
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2015/05/27/2003619254