Get Me Rewrite: China Currently Building 25 Nuclear Plants

Despite assurances from authorities that they plan to 'learn from the Japanese experience,' China is building or has plans in the works to build 25 nuclear plants. One would do well to remember the Szechuan earthquake of two years ago in which thousands died, many of them school children, due to shoddy construction. Question of the day; will this affect Chinese real estate values?

James Areddy and Brian Spegele report in the Wall Street Journal:

"Japan's nuclear crisis is likely to lead to greater scrutiny of the ambitious nuclear-energy plans in China, which is also prone to earthquakes and has had issues with safety and transparency in the past.

In the days since Friday's earthquake and tsunami initiated the crisis at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi power complex, Chinese officials have staunchly reaffirmed their commitment to nuclear power. They've said they plan to learn from Japan's experience, but also that China's modern program doesn't face the same risks as those unfolding in Japan.

"There is a higher standard in China than the world's average" for building nuclear power plants, Xu Mi, an official at China National Nuclear Corp., said in a statement issued by the state-owned company Tuesday.

.But Japan's problems have triggered new attention within China on the risks of nuclear energy. Fear of the possible spread of radiation from Japan's leaks caused anxiety in some coastal Chinese cities Tuesday despite assurances from Chinese authorities—delivered via text messages and on the evening news broadcast on state television—that the leaks in Japan are unlikely to affect China. Some residents reported keeping children indoors, traveling by bus instead of walking and in some cases even leaving the country.

Sina Weibo, the most active of China's Twitter-like microblog services, blocked searches of the Chinese characters for "nuclear leak," apparently to help contain the spread of concern.

China is in the midst of a nuclear-power building binge, with 25 plants under construction in addition to the 13 now in operation. The plan is to expand China's current installed production capacity by nearly seven times—to 86 gigawatts in 2020 from 10.8 gigawatts now—and increase nuclear power to 5% of China's energy output, from around 1%.

Nuclear power is a core element of Beijing's commitment to reduce emissions from burning coal and other fossil fuels, much of which China has to import. Its expansion is part of five-year plan for 2011 through 2015 formally adopted by China's legislature, the National People's Congress, on Monday.

Some governments, including those of Germany and Switzerland, have said they are reassessing nuclear programs because of Japan's crisis. On Tuesday, Hsu Ming-te , deputy director of the nuclear-regulation department at Taiwan's Atomic Energy Council, said Taiwan plans to do a "special assessment on risks" of its three nuclear plants, although officials have said they don't plan to scale back the island's use of nuclear power. India's Environment and Forests Minister Jairam Ramesh said Tuesday that India won't alter its nuclear-power expansion plans either, but it may implement "additional safeguards" at its plants.

China has many fault lines, and has suffered several major earthquakes in recent decades. Most of China's existing or planned nuclear plants are along its coast in the east, while most of the recent seismic activity has been in the country's western provinces.

But China National Nuclear, the country's top nuclear-power developer, said this week it plans to build a new nuclear plant in the southwestern metropolis of Chongqing, which is around 480 kilometers from the epicenter of a 7.9-magnitude earthquake in 2008 that left nearly 90,000 people dead or missing in neighboring Sichuan province. The company said it wants to build the plant in the next five years, although the plant doesn't appear to be among the more than 70 planned units that have already been approved by regulators.

And major quakes have hit the coast, too. A 7.5 magnitude earthquake in 1976, thought to have killed at least a quarter of a million people, destroyed the city of Tangshan, which sits near China's northeast coast about 300 kilometers across the Bohai Sea from the Hongyanhe nuclear power plant under construction in the city of Dalian.

Mr. Xu, the China National Nuclear official, said in his statement that China's plants are all far from geological fracture zones and are built on stable bedrock. "The antiseismic standard and flood control standard are set up in a higher level and are strictly supervised by the state nuclear safety bureau."

Experts say Chinese officials are correct that their plants systems are unlikely to face the same problems unfolding in northeastern Japan. For many of the 25 plants under construction now, China is expected to roll out Toshiba Corp. Westinghouse "third-generation" AP1000 model reactors, which feature passive safety systems that flush cooling water into the system instead of the kind of pumps that failed in Japanese plants.

Still, analysts at Nomura, the Japanese financial firm, estimated in a research note Tuesday that 41% of China's nuclear plants planned or under construction uses slightly older technology. "If safety concerns push for a quicker transition to [third-generation technology], delay in plants commission is possible in the near-term," they said.

Installing the right equipment isn't China's only challenge. Critics allege that operators of existing Chinese nuclear-power plants have sometimes been reluctant to disclose problems. Operators at the Daya Bay nuclear plant, about 80 kilometers from Hong Kong, denied Hong Kong media reports of a radiation leak last May. Several weeks later the provincial government acknowledged an increase in radioactivity but said it wasn't up to levels deemed a "nuclear incident."

Aspects of the industry are also cloaked in secrecy, including the handling of uranium and radioactive waste, and links to the weapons-development side of China's nuclear equation.

Nuclear experts who deal with the industry say there are divisions in China's government about how fast the program should be rolled out, despite the plan's high-level backing. One said he expects to see more emphasis on safety and less on speed. Beijing's State Council Research Office in a January report "cautioned concerning provincial and corporate enthusiasm" for the rapid expansion that could require $150 billion in spending before 2020, according to a summary published by the London-based World Nuclear Association.

China Daily, a state-run newspaper, recently cited figures suggesting the government was spending only about $500,000 annually on safety per existing plant, against around $7 million per plant in the U.S. "The country needs to make improvements both in investment plans and personnel development," the report said, quoting Yu Zusheng, a member of the expert committee for the State Nuclear Power Technology Corp.

Beijing's public resolve to continue with its nuclear-power program now is reminiscent of its position almost 25 years ago, when its first nuclear plant was scheduled to open. Less than two weeks after the April 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident, a senior State Bureau of Nuclear Safety official declared the disaster "will not affect" plans to open the Daya Bay plant.

In fact, it was another eight years before Daya Bay began producing power.