时间：2022-06-01 10:56:08
As Japan’s Kansai Electric brought the Ohi nuclear plant back online on July 1, ending a 14-month government-imposed suspension in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in March 2011, China also began to edge towards terminating its own ban.
On May 31, the State Council approved its Security Report on China’s civilian nuclear projects along with its 12th Five-year Plan(2011-2015) for the Nuclear Industry, with the latter setting “security and quality” as top priorities for the country’s nuclear engineers.
“The approval of these two documents has set the foundation for restarting nuclear power projects,” Zhao Chengkun, deputy chairman of the China Nuclear Energy Association (CNEA) and also the former director of the National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA), told NewsChina. “But we’re waiting on a final document to push the door wide open,” he added.
The document Zhao was referring to was the State Council’s medium-and-long-term nuclear development plan (2010-2020). The government’s failure to release all three documents allowing the nuclear industry to resume normal operations is, in Zhao’s eyes, an indication of the residual climate of fear following the Fukushima meltdown.
“Fukushima made nuclear development a sensitive topic. The development plan cannot be made available before we obtain consensus on some issues,” an anonymous insider at the State Council explained to NewsChina.
Suspension
When the tsunami unleashed by the magnitude-9 Tohoku earthquake hit the Fukushima nuclear plant on March 11, 2011, causing a meltdown and leading to the irradiation of a large rural area, world leaders were quick to curtail what had been a global expansion of the nuclear power industry.
On March 16, 2011, five days after the disaster, China’s State Council held a regular meeting at which Premier Wen Jiabao ordered the suspension of existing nuclear power projects in all stages of development pending a comprehensive security investigation, as well as postponing the construction of new reactors until the country’s entire nuclear administration could be overhauled.
As the nine-month investigation came to an end, however, calls grew to restart civilian nuclear development. “China has both the ability and technology to continue to build nuclear reactors,” claimed Wang Binghua, chairman of the State Nuclear Power Technology Corporation of China (SNPTC), at a nuclear forum in May. “Our 13 reactors have a 30-year 100 percent operational safety record and have proven the security of China’s nuclear power plants.”
On June 5, five days after the approval of the State Council’s nuclear security white paper, the Ministry of Environmental Protection approved a preliminary appraisal of China’s National Nuclear Corporation, which reportedly plans to invest over 170 billion yuan (US$25bn) in five new or expanded nuclear projects.
Even the country’s first three inland reactors, which had drawn considerable fire from the public and environmental pressure groups, were believed to get approval soon, which resulted in several listed companies increasing their investment in these projects.
“China’s nuclear development lives off the profits of existing nuclear power plants. To halt new projects is to waste huge preliminary investments and to bankrupt at least half the country’s nuclear power equipment suppliers, causing unemployment in the hundreds of thousands,” said a report from a July edition of the Century Weekly.
Demand
China’s rapid advancement of nuclear power sector began with the State Council’s 11th Five-year Plan (2006-2010), in which the government pledged to “actively develop nuclear power” as a policy objective. According to the CNEA, China’s leaders have approved the construction of 34 new nuclear reactors since 2005, of which 28 are already under construction, 40 percent of the global total.
Yu Zusheng, a nuclear power expert from the Ministry of Environmental Protection, attributed the rapid development of the nuclear industry to China’s high reliance on fossil fuels, particularly coal. In 2011, according to Yu, nuclear, wind and hydropower only provided for eight percent of China’s total power needs, far lower than the average 20 percent recorded in developed countries.
“At present, China’s electricity is mostly generated by combustion, which quickens the consumption of coal and causes huge environmental impact,” said Yu.
At the UN Climate Summit held in September 2009, China’s President Hu Jintao described nuclear power development as“one of China’s foremost measures to reduce carbon emissions,” adding that the government intended for 15 percent of the national power supply to come from non-fossil fuel sources by 2020. Observers expect the lion’s share of this percentage to come from the nuclear industry.
Given that China is expected to consume 1.6 billion kW of power annually by 2020, insiders estimate that nuclear power will need to provide at least five percent of this total, some 80 million kW, effectively doubling targets set by the country’s first mediumand-long-term nuclear power development plan issued in 2007. Some believe that such a commitment could prove disastrous if China’s nuclear industry is building reactors faster than refining its technology and operational practices.
“Due to the considerable economic benefits of nuclear power, it is necessary for China to restart its nuclear program, but we have to strike a balance between speed and quality,” He Zuoxiu, a nuclear academic with the China Academy of Sciences, wrote on his blog in February. “The Fukushima disaster has warned us against a ‘Great Leap Forward’in nuclear development,” he said.
Controversy
According to He Zuoxiu, China’s nuclear technology lags way behind those of developed countries, despite Chinese reactors generating 40 percent of the world’s nuclear power capacity. A report by the Ministry of Environmental Protection shows that of China’s 34 already-approved power sets, 28 have adopted second-generation technology, the same level blamed for the severity of the Fukushima meltdown.
He Zuoxiu believes the causal factors behind the Fukushima disaster, such as the plant’s relative vulnerability to the known local hazard of tsunamis, as well as obsolete technology, should spur China to redesign its nuclear security standards to “take causal factors into consideration.”
Chinese officials have refuted claims that China’s nuclear reactors are, like Fukushima, disasters waiting to happen. “China’s nuclear power stations are built on stable bedrock far from earthquake fault zones, and tsunamis rarely hit our coastline,” claimed Zhao Chengkun. “It is unlikely a nuclear accident similar to Fukushima could happen in China.”
“Chinese power plants were all built after the 1990s, 20 years after the Fukushima plant, meaning that even though they use the same basic technologies, they have adopted more advanced security,” Yu Zusheng told our reporter.
“Fukushima was the result of the earthquake and tsunami, factors the plant’s original engineers failed to take into account,” he added. “After the Fukushima accident, we invited our US partners to test whether the Fukushima plant could have borne the accident if it adopted AP1000 (third generation) technology, and the answer was yes.”
AP1000 remains controversial technology, however. At present, only four of China’s reactors have adopted it, all of them under construction and none of which will come online prior to 2013. Even Yu admits that it will take a long time, and, likely, a lot of trial and error before China can fully absorb, standardize and domesticate AP1000 technology. “Although the government would prefer to use AP1000 technology, they did not mandate its use in the new white papers. That is why experts are still arguing about it,” he said.
A shortage of engineering talent is also a cause for concern. According to Zhao Chengkun, of 23 recorded nuclear accidents in human history, 17 could be at least partly attributed to human error. The breakdown of a generator at Fukushima, caused by worker oversight, ultimately led to the failure of the cooling system, triggering a meltdown.
“No matter how advanced a technology is, human error can always override it,” Zhao said.
According to Yu Zusheng, it generally takes eight to 10 years to produce a qualified Chinese nuclear technician, 1,000 of which are required to operate a plant with a capacity above 1 million kW. Of the country’s 40 educational establishments with disciplines involving nuclear technology, operations, construction and management are often neglected in favor of design.
Indeed, the recent government investigation into nuclear safety described a “lack of scientific management” as the main problem in Chinese nuclear power plants, revealing that China’s first nuclear reactor, built at Qinshan in 1991, still has no contingency plan for catastrophic accidents, with the country’s other three major plants only pre-empting a certain range of potential problems and setting protocols in place to deal with them.
At the national nuclear power forum on May 10, Zhang Baoguo, the former director of the State Energy Administration, hinted at a reduction in nuclear output targets to a more manageable 60-70 million kW, but nothing concrete has been revealed by the State Council.
“Given that plants with a total output of 40 million kW are built or are being built, the country still has to build 20-30 nuclear power units of 1 million kW capacity apiece in the next three and a half years just to meet its targets,”Yu Zusheng told our reporter. “That is between six and nine units per year in a country with the capability of building only four to five units.”
He Zuoxiu is even more pessimistic. “Given China’s weak nuclear technology and meager experience in plant operation, I think the threshold should be limited to the current 40 million kW,” he told Beijing Business.