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YUMEN,
China—Not far from the old Silk Road, Chinese government
scientists have begun boring holes deep into granite in
the first steps toward building what could become the
world’s largest tomb for nuclear waste.
As
governments worldwide look at nuclear power as a
possible answer to global warming,
China
has embarked on a nuclear-plant construction binge that
eventually could exceed the one the United States
undertook during the technology’s heyday in the 1960s.
Under
plans already announced, China intends to spend $50
billion to build 32 nuclear plants by 2020. Some
analysts say the country will build 300 more by the
middle of the century. That’s not much less than the
generating power of all the nuclear plants in the world
today.
By that
point, the Chinese economy is expected to be the world’s
largest, and the idea that it may get most of its
electricity from nuclear fission is being met with both
optimism and concern.
Nuclear
power plants, unlike those that run on fossil fuels,
release few greenhouse gases. But they produce waste
that can be dangerously radioactive for thousands of
years.
China’s
plans already have been felt in world markets. Chinese
Premier Wen Jiabao has been traveling the world to
secure contracts for the uranium needed to power nuclear
reactors, striking deals recently with Australia and
Niger.
Higher
worldwide demand and a fear of future shortages have
driven the price of processed uranium ore from $10 a
pound in 2003 to $120 last month.
A big
reason Toshiba of Japan spent $5.4 billion last year to
acquire Westinghouse Electric of Pennsylvania is
expectations that China will buy into the company’s
nuclear technology in a big way over the next 20 to 30
years.
Even by
the standards of
China,
where economic growth has been running at blistering
double-digit-percentage rates for four years, the
nuclear plans are ambitious. The country derives only
2.3 percent of its electricity from nuclear power,
compared with about 20 percent in the United States and
nearly 80 percent in France. Nine countries get 40
percent or more of their electricity from nuclear power,
but worldwide, it supplies only 17 percent of the total.
To
satisfy exploding demand for electricity, Chinese local
governments and entrepreneurs have for years been
throwing up rattletrap coal-fired power plants. They are
so inefficient and dirty—spewing greenhouse gases, soot
and toxins, including mercury into the air— that the
central government has been trying to slow construction
of new ones, with limited success.
“Our
irrational energy structure is causing serious pollution
and greenhouse problems,” said Gu Zhongmao, a professor
at the China Institute of Atomic Energy, a
government-affiliated research center. The situation
provoked years of internal debate about nuclear power as
an answer, he said, before the country’s leaders finally
came to a consensus.
In the
Chinese context, he said, “nuclear power is regarded as
a clean energy.”
Yet,
environmental advocacy groups and outside safety experts
are less than sanguine about the idea of hundreds of new
nuclear plants being constructed by a secretive
Communist government. The Chinese government has a poor
public-safety record on issues far simpler than nuclear
power, such as food and drug purity.
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 a US nuclear waste panel,
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.
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.”
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