Nuclear Reactors 46 - Concerns about China Reactor Building Boom
Yesterday, I posted an article about the nuclear reactor building boom going on in China. They currently have twenty seven reactors operating, twenty eight under construction, fifty more reactor projects scheduled and a hundred more being planned. This is a very ambitious program and I mentioned some concerns that I had about their reactor buildingplans.
Many different factors played into the inflating of the Chinese real estate bubble in the last decade. Banks loans became easier to get, people wanted to own homes, newly wealthy Chinese were looking for lucrative investments, and the government wanted to stimulate economic growth and pumped money into development projects. The end result was the creation of entire empty cities full of expensive condos that were mainly seen as investments by the owners. One of the big problems is that people either don’t want to move to the new cities or they cannot afford the price of the housing. The bubble has been deflating for the past year and some of the big projects were simply abandoned uncompleted. What will happen if reactors get half built and then resources dry up? Worse yet, what will happen if reactors get built and fueled but operations become too expensive? Decommissioning is very expensive and they may just have to put up fences if the money isn’t there.
China is currently ranked eightieth in Transparency international’s Corruption Perceptions Index. This index includes “graft, bribery, embezzlement, backdoor deals, nepotism, patronage, and statistical falsification.” Consider for a moment how every one of these could lead to problems with the nuclear reactor program. With the enormous amount of capital that will be expended in reactor construction, does anyone serious believe that there will not be bribes to government officials to look the other way as substandard materials are used on poorly constructed reactors. And, as the reactors are operated, does anyone believe that proper safety regulations will be followed when a bribe can get the regulators to ignore infractions? The Chinese public believes that there are more corrupt government officials than honest ones. Unprecedented levels of corruptions that came with the shift to a market economy are considered to a major threat to China’s future economic and political stability. Reactors construction sites might become a target for enraged citizens fed up the corruption.
China is faced with a mounting water crisis. Frequent and severe shortages along with disasterous flooding threaten China. Forty four percent of China’s population and fifty eight percent of its cultivated land are in the north and northeastern provinces but this area has only fourteen percent of the country’s water resources. Reactors will be built in the most populated areas and they require enormous amounts of water to cool. Operations of some reactors may be suspended because there is not enough water to cool them. In addition, global warming is increasing the temperature of rivers, lakes and the oceans. Reactors in the U.S. have had to be shut down because the water they used for cooling became too hot to use. In addition, reactors can be vulnerable to floods as has been shown at Fukushima. Water could definitely become a major problem for Chinese reactors.
China has announced that it wants to have a closed fuel cycle which means that it will be mining its own uranium. China’s record on mining toxic metals is horrible. For every one of the hundreds of thousands of tons rare earths extracted from the Bayan Obu mine near Beijing, about four hundred thousand cubic feet of waste gas (including dust, hydrofluoric acid, sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid), twenty five hundred cubic feet of acidic waste water and a ton of radioactive waste residue are also produced. Some rivers in China are so polluted with toxic chemicals from mining and industrial operations that all the fish in them have died. Is it likely that China will be any more careful with the toxic waste from uranium mining that it has been with the waste from other mining operations? I will leave aside the question of disposing of spent nuclear fuel because I think I have made my point. If all the planned reactors get built and go into operation, big areas of China will become a radioactive wasteland from uranium mining, reactor accidents and the disposal of spent nuclear fuel.
Bayan Obu open pit rare earths mine near Beijing:
