“China shows the way to build nuclear reactors fast and cheap.” That was the bullish headline in a Forbes magazine article last week.
It went on to praise the scale of the planned nuclear investment in China’s new Five-Year Plan that runs from 2016 to 2020. Under the plan the government is to invest over US$100 billion to build seven new reactors a year until 2030.
“By 2050”, James Conca wrote for Forbes, “nuclear power should exceed 350 GW in that country, include about 400 new nuclear reactors, and have resulted in over a trillion dollars in nuclear investment.”
Now Conca is pretty enthusiastic about this. But the reality is a potential nuclear nightmare in the making. Experience to date shows that we should, on average, expect a major nuclear accident to take place for every 3,000 to 4,000 years of reactor operation. And with over 400 reactors running at once, it doesn’t take long to clock up those 3,000 years.
In fact, you could reasonably expect a major Chernobyl or Fukushima level accident every seven to ten years – in China alone, if it pursues nuclear build on that scale.
Just how safe is China anyway
Now if China had a fantastic record of safety in its construction and other industries, maybe the odds should be made a bit longer. Swiss-style reactors might come in at only one big foulup every 10,000 years, for example.
But that’s not China. This August past we had the massive fire and multiple explosions at the Port of Tianjin, that killed almost 200 people and devastated several square kilometres of the industrial zone.
It later transpired that over 7,000 tonnes of hazardous chemicals were stored there, among them sodium cyanide, calcium carbide and ammonium and potassium nitrate, many of them kept in breach of regulations. The owners had links to the highest echelons of the Chinese state – something that may have ensured very light touch regulation.
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