China Slows Development of Nuclear Power Plants

[bananas]

Source: New York Times

Still responding to the partial meltdowns last year at nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan, the Chinese government lowered its target for the construction of nuclear power plants by 2015, notably by not building more nuclear reactors at inland locations.

A white paper on energy policy released after a cabinet meeting on Wednesday said that the government planned to have 40 gigawatts of nuclear power capacity installed by 2015, and pledged strict safety standards. While the white paper and state-controlled media did not describe this as a reduction in the target, the country’s current Five-Year Plan sets a target of 50 gigawatts.

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The International Atomic Energy Agency and even Chinese regulators had expressed concern more than a year before the Fukushima accident that China’s nuclear power program was expanding so fast that it lacked enough skilled personnel to run so many reactors safely.

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While China’s military nuclear facilities tend to be deep in the country’s interior, a decision by the former leader Mao Zedong to help protect them from foreign attack, China has tended to build civilian nuclear reactors at isolated coastal locations — on peninsulas, where possible. According to Chinese nuclear engineers, that has been done to minimize the number of people nearby who might need to be evacuated in case of a serious accident, and to reduce the risk of contamination to supplies of fresh water.

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Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/business/global/china-reduces-target-for-construction-nuclear-power-plants.html

[wordpix]

1. good news! Now US should get a clue

[pscot]

3. Yay! More Chinese coal fired generators

And when our new Northwest coal ports are ready we'll have coal trains running up and down the coast 24/7. Growth forever! Yay!

[madokie]

2. Fukushima last year and Chernobyl years before has confirmed my biggest fears concerning

nuclear energy and that is when things go wrong they have a tendency to go wrong in a big way and when that does happen it puts a lot of people in harms way. Every dollar spent on nuclear energy as we know it today is one less dollar going toward more benign ways to provide our electricity. Nuclear energy is not going to save us from GW as it takes so long for them to come on line that if the projections are correct it'll be way too late by then. Nuclear energy is not as clean as the nuke boys would have us believe either. Lots of green house gases are released in building the plants. For instance making cement which they use a lot of is a very dirty process, in fact the local cement plant here for the most part uses old tires to fire their Kilns and thats about as dirty as you can get as there are no scrubbers on them cleaning the exhaust. Mining the fuel for nuclear energy is also a very dirty process as tons and tons of overburden has to be stripped away and tons of the raw material has to be mined and processed to get that fuel. Its not like you drill a hole in the ground and out pours that fuel. Nuclear energy is not the savior that the nuke boys try to convince us it is. The nuclear energy industry have no idea what to do when something does go wrong as Chernobyl and Fukushima has shown and on that alone we should run away from using nuclear energy as fast as we can get our asses out of the way.